Anticensorship. Antifascism.
Fandom, queerness, and politics.
I don't believe in thought crimes, I do believe in eating the rich.
Ask to tag. Triggering stuff often tossed under "to tag". Not spoiler free. Occasional spicy content.
People seem to think that the Yugioh fandom is incredibly small, but I’m not so sure. So if you would be so kind, could you reblog if you are in the Yugioh fandom?
I know Ruby. She's a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don't they know how lovely she is?
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!
Hey hey this is *SUPER* illegal in the United States holy cow.
If you are in this country and took the job, which I hope you didn't, now is definitely the time to look into a pro-bono labour rights lawyer. You're definitely eligible for back pay of any tips withheld and probably more. If you're in any progressive state there's a good chance your rights go beyond this. Regardless, federal regulations:
most smart nonprimate animals seem like evolutionary dead ends? For like, culture and civilization at least. Like, corvids and parrots have these crazy miniaturized neurons that enable them to be really smart for their size, but their size is limited by evolutionary pressure to maintain flight. Dolphins have no hands. Elephants... I don't know, I think elephants could do it. It's hard for me to see what, if anything, they're missing that chimps have. A fitness gradient towards tool use maybe? I hope it doesn't come to this but maybe if humans go extinct we'd have elephant astronauts in ten million years
yeah but since the current smart birds are flyers we'd need them to become flightless and large (like how our lemurlike ancestor went non-arboreal and large to become us), may take more like a hundred million years than ten but can't rule it out
I think we could do it to them on purpose pretty quickly, but we don’t tend to maintain a niche for a bird like that except for contextually especially unethical reasons (farming them).
Too bad a parrot is already more or less useless to humans, and a great big flightless one even moreso. :/
Maybe we should shift our focus to psittification of geese? Maybe they could be bred to have brains which superficially resemble a parrot’s in structure, and then gene-modified to soak themselves in plexin. (And then get the fantastically wealthy and evil to prefer to eat birds that speak…?)
iirc geese are already relatively social and intelligent too. not starting from scratch. Decent lifespans as well(?)
Nothing's an "evolutionary dead end", evolution's always at play, it's just a question of whether a particular animal's suite of adaptations can see them through a particular calamity or not, and that's a particularly contingent question(the chokepoint in human prehistory where, even with all their social and tool using adaptations, a single massive eruption almost extincted them is a good example of this).
I think it's misleading to focus on civilization so much. That large settlements played a role in the development of a widespread technical culture for humans doesn't mean they're necessary for that, only that they're sufficient. Corvids and parrots use tools, alter their environment, maintain large social organizations built on communication, share information, and educate their young; maybe the reason they don't have what humans would classify as a "culture" or "civilization" isn't because they're locked away from it, but because they don't need it(or maybe it's humans who are failing to see what they have as these things).
Same with Elephants. Like: to begin with you're never going to have an elephant-based "civilization" because their food-requirements are too demanding. What looks like nomadic behavior to humans is actl just elephants living on the geographic footprint able to produce enough food and water for them to survive, in the nature which allows them to maintain that productivity(all that pushing over trees, that's agriculture. That's altering the environment to fit their needs. Kinda mysterious to me that ppl dont see elephants maintaining and spreading the savanna for what it clearly is). So any sort of civilization Elephants build wouldnt include CITIES, it'd be focused on, like, common meeting ground and crossroads. It'd be a civilization of biker conventions. And allot of the tools humans create, elephants would never need in the first place. Why don't Elephants make axes? Cuz they can push over trees. Why dont they make spears? Theyve got tusks. Why don't they make ranged weapons? Their food stands still. Why don't they make pottery? What would they use pottery FOR? Similar deal with whales: why would they need "civilization" when they can communicate at radiological distances just fine with songs in an aquatic environment? What problem would "civilization", as you're conceiving of it, be their solution to?
Like: looking at evolution as steps towards a specific level of "development" or "progress" gets it all wrong. Humans made this stuff cuz humans needed it. Other animals also make the things they need, and don't make the things they dont. There's no grand mystery or tragedy in the lack of "civilization" among other species; those species get by just fine without it, so they don't do it.
Anyway, if humans die out Raccoons are taking over u_u
Love this explanation @zenosanalytic. Also like, evolution isn’t some coherent process, it’s not a set path determined by some Destiny. Our understanding of evolution is just based on our ability to recognize patterns and make connections between certain genetic and epigenetic changes and the environments they were likely responding to.
So if we’re going to try to predict anything, like @zenosanalytic was saying, you have to think about not just what the animal’s makeup or “potential” is, but what their needs are, which are shaped by their environment. What is going to drive an animal to develop culture and civilization? Well first we’d need to define what culture and civilization are, because I’d argue elephants and other animals that have strong memories and pass down information across generations may well have a lot of culture, and they live in pretty sophisticated social groups.
Also, and this is tangential, but highly intelligent birds could actually get much bigger and continue to fly. Parrots could become the size of geese, and also, if you look at the history of flying birds that are now extinct, they can actually get VERY large. The Heast’s Eagle of New Zealand comes to mind, which weighed about 40 lbs. And that’s not even getting into non-avian dinosaurs that could fly. I think the theory as to why flying animals don’t get so big anymore is that the niche of large predators is taken over by mammals (like big cats) pretty much everywhere in the world), but animals certainly can be large and still fly, that just seems to not be the most convenient body plan in today’s world.
Anyway, I love thinking about this stuff, very fun conversation here 👌
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
On a more serious note: lacking hands or trunks certainly doesn’t preclude tool use.
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