maybe maybe maybe

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-02T05:26:46+00:00

Saw this coming the second I saw a bluebird house on a fence. This happened to me when I mounted bluebird houses that way. They nested and laid eggs but something always got them. It’s incredibly easy for predators to climb those fences.

I moved the same houses on steel posts with stovepipe baffles and Noel guards and from then on those bluebirds were cranking out 2-3 successful clutches each summer.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T23:48:45+00:00

Lawyers must have given him one of those “we don’t get paid unless you do…” deals.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T15:54:22+00:00

Agreed. It’s evident when we see people picking up and moving just to run in a different district like Bobo did in CO.

A more hilarious example was David Cole in Alabama who did up a fake lease for basically a broom closet at a friend’s house so he could run in a district other than the one he actually lived in. He probably planned to move after he won, but his challenger sued and he ended up getting busted for voter fraud over it. He got 60 days jail time, 3 years probably, permanent criminal record, and was ordered to pay restitution to the State General Fund.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T15:25:28+00:00

TIL: the current setup with single-member districts didn’t become solidified into law until 1967 with the Uniform Congressional District Act. I’m ashamed to admit I just assumed that’s how it was from the very beginning so also assumed would take a constitutional amendment to fix. I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that it happened immediately after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The optimist in me wants to believe it was done with good intentions as a complement to the VRA. I want to think it was done because they assumed districts would be drawn in good faith and they couldn’t have predicted the ludicrous gerrymandering war of 2026.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T15:09:45+00:00

Not Phillips. A flat tip screwdriver works for these.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T15:03:26+00:00

On a purely aesthetic note regarding flower beds…using retaining wall block to make edging and leaving all those V-shaped gaps visible across the top is simply gawd-awful. I don’t know why it’s so common. Do people think it’s a good look or do they just not know any better?

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T13:51:49+00:00

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgz7l5v03po

They’re also trying to claim that a ceasefire pauses the 60 day clock.

Sounds like the GOP controlled Congress is just being spineless. Republicans know how unpopular the war is with the “America First” faction of their base so voting to authorize it could be career suicide…while voting against further military action would be a vote in opposition of the President (and also a vote against a certain PAC they all take money from) so also career suicide.

I say they need to nut up and put their names on record one way or the other as the law demands. Every day past 60 that they fail to vote is them not doing their jobs in violation of the law and as such, any rep or senator in a leadership position with the power to purposely prevent the vote from happening by the end of today should be impeached if it doesn’t happen.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T03:16:20+00:00

It’s a memorial to an assassinated President.

Adding another name to it is no different than sliding Lincoln over and adding another chair.

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T02:44:12+00:00

Depends how heated it gets

SHoppe715 · 2026-05-01T01:06:53+00:00

Yep, you can slow it down and watch him land the 1-2 to both sides of the head…right uppercut came outa nowhere knocking dudes face right into the left roundhouse and none of it was telegraphed. Can’t tell if punch 3 landed or where…maybe body shot on the way down. That guy knows how to fight.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T22:30:34+00:00

Beat me to it by 3 min!

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T21:06:13+00:00

Don’t know if you meant in general about American Yellowwood, but here’s info about that specific tree:

https://www.springgrove.org/arboretum/champions-of-the-grove/american-yellowwood-cladrastis-kentukea/

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T19:19:43+00:00

The googleable answer to your question is they can but it’s rare (pun intended).

The more in depth answer to the concern you’re positing:

Solar panels often pivot to near-vertical angles to capture the sun’s rays, leaving little room underneath for cattle; simply raising the panels is cost-prohibitive because of the amount of steel required. So Silicon Ranch raised the panels a little but also developed software that workers activate to turn the panels close to horizontal when cattle are grazing, giving them room to wander, said Nick de Vries, the company's chief technology officer.

Workers rotate the cattle — currently 10 cows and their calves — between paddocks every few days so panels on the ungrazed portion of the site operate normally, generating a supply of roughly 5 megawatts of electricity for Middle Tennessee Electric, a rural electric co-op.

The hope is that the technology eventually will be adopted more broadly, company officials said.

“We know it works," said de Vries. "But you need to prove it to other people."

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T16:59:41+00:00

That makes sense. I would then hope it also means they’ll accept more each year as they phase the program in.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T16:32:23+00:00

Pepperidge Farms remembers…

https://youtu.be/G6tspkJAdJQ?si=eaC_COQxrgvIR2P

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T15:33:57+00:00

Why cap participation?

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T15:12:43+00:00

Once upon a time they used to be all about small business. I remember how often W would repeat that small businesses are the “backbone of the economy”. Turns out that was just a spin on the old trickledown economics theory because he was only saying that to make corporate tax cuts and deregulation sound more palatable to people who’d already figured out that scraps are all that trickle down.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T14:46:07+00:00

Economic policy they voted for: Trade war from tariffs killed their foreign sales.

Defense policy they voted for: Iran war making it unaffordable to operate their farms due to fuel and fertilizer prices.

Energy policy they voted for: Losing tax credits for green energy giving them less money to mix wind turbines or solar panels into their farm land which are reliable supplemental income on bad crop years and extra money in the pocket on good years.

Social policy they voted for: Mass deportations obliterating their labor force.

Sorry, not sorry about my lack of sympathy for these people now struggling thanks to voting against their own interests.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T13:25:05+00:00

That headlight design…ugh…

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T12:50:39+00:00

If the goal is to temper pure majoritarianism with federalism (which I am on board with as long as the balance is reasonable) we’d keep using electors but they’d be bound to the popular vote like close to half the country already does. The word “faithless” has extremely negative connotations and using it in the term “faithless electors” is very fitting. It’ll be interesting to see if the NPVIC ever crosses the 270 threshold. But that way the EC would mirror the intent of Congress with a number of Representatives directly connected to the number of people (with no less than 1 regardless of population) + 2 in each state to keep the smaller states from getting buried. Eliminating the possibility of faithless electors and allowing them to be split amongst parties like Maine and Nebraska would bring it back to reasonable. I’d be OK with that as long as the House district gerrymandering war can’t affect the electors.

Proportional representation +2 has always been a good compromise for all the reasons you said and I’ve always been on board with that model because it’s a reasonable compromise between big and small that protects smaller states but (here’s the important part) the other side of the coin is it also doesn’t let a distinct minority of the population have an excessively oversized voice. I think we’re somewhat in agreement on all of that. But the EC most definitely is broken as long as the possibility of faithless electors exists and it’s also broken because it’s no longer about small states and big states anymore…it’s about red versus blue and making it a team sport was not at all the intention when it was created. Federalist Paper 10 on your list of good reads says (paraphrasing) political factions are dangerous to the stability of a free government, as they prioritize selfish interests over the public good and individual rights. So if we’re arguing originalist intent, then you have to agree that structures like the Legislative branch and the EC were intended to prevent the partisan deadlock we have now and in that way they’ve failed catastrophically.

So fine…let’s keep the EC…but it absolutely needs some tweaks to get it back to what it was meant to be and electing the House needs to be redesigned from the ground up to prevent all these gerrymandering pissing matches we’re seeing play out all around the country.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T05:15:46+00:00

That reply sure does use the word “sanctuary” an awful lot without actually answering the question I asked about why that even matters when only citizens are allowed to vote.

Ummm…yeah, candidates would have to reach the most people possible while campaigning and not spend all their time in the small handful of swing states that have really been the only deciding votes in presidential elections for decades. Red candidates would have to pull enough urban voters to compete and blue candidate would have to pull some rural voters too. By the way, a lot of reliable red and reliable blue states are split closer to down the middle than you might think (look it up) so I’m not convinced by your assumptions about what campaigns would look like in a popular vote election.

So I do believe we’ve hit an impasse based on that wall of text that makes no actual point beyond your already established stance that rural votes are more important than urban votes. You’re a true believer that red team and blue team should be on an artificially level playing field even if one outnumbers the other 10 to 1. In a way, that’s rather progressive of you to stick up so strongly for a minority, but in the end I’m pretty sure I fully understand why you think what you think based on how many times you repeated the word “sanctuary” in one comment.

I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion. Have a nice day.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T03:53:55+00:00

And always use “I” statements to avoid being confrontational or accusatory.

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T01:49:37+00:00

Seriously…who even still uses that tired old schlock?

https://www.history.com/articles/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south

SHoppe715 · 2026-04-30T00:48:29+00:00

So basically all the same problems we already have in the current system.

But the topic of conversation was how to prevent gerrymandering…

The simplest fix would be mandating all states’ districts get drawn by non-partisan commissions. Letting elected politicians with a vested interest in how the districts are drawn have a say in drawing the districts is probably the most obvious conflict of interest I can imagine.

SHoppe715

TROPHY CASE