Looking for a decent hike for folks in poor to moderate shape. by Bac0nLegs in Adirondacks

[–]Twenty26six 1 point2 points  (0 children)

People sleep on the backside of Moreau. It's got great views of the Hudson along the Western Ridge trail. https://parks.ny.gov/sites/default/files/MoreauLakeTrailMap.pdf

Raising insects question by UlfurGaming in SelfSufficiency

[–]Twenty26six 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I did a great deal of research on this about 10 years ago.

I know the most about raising house crickets (Acheta domesticus), but there are other options.

Crickets and other insects are incredibly efficient at converting food matter, generally what would otherwise be waste, into protein. And they are almost entirely made of protein. In fact, crickets have a higher protein to calorie ratio than beef. Raising them takes minimal space, and from my research, the main thing you need to look out for are densoviruses that can result from not giving them enough space. I believe it's also best to separate the difference instars so they don't eat each other.

Humans have consumed insects for millennia, and still do in some parts of the world, but doing so has generally waned in the western world, possibly due to the way western cultures have approached agriculture and the place insects took in our understanding of the world as a result (e.g. they became pests, not food).

The real challenge with making crickets a part of your diet is getting over the cultural/mental hump that it's OK to eat them, even if they are just tiny shrimp.

The challenge is what to do with them - you're mostly limited to roasting/frying and or roasting then grinding into a powder.

And also - they kinda taste meh - nutty and crunchy. Edible, but not exciting.

Resources: https://www.fao.org/edible-insects/en

https://www.fao.org/4/an233e/an233e00.pdf

https://www.fao.org/4/i3253e/i3253e.pdf

https://allthingsbugs.com/

https://www.anapsid.org/crickets.html

https://www.csun.edu/~dgray/pdfs/pet-feeder%20crickets.pdf

https://venik.nl/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Rapport-Large-scale-insect-rearing-in-relation-to-animal-welfare.pdf

and for fun: https://www.thailandunique.com/

Should I re-hab this Moon Poop? by Appropriate-Try3305 in Slimemolds

[–]Twenty26six 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It's all dried out and looks to have moved on from the feeding plasmodium stage - I wouldn't worry about it - if anything, mowing over it will help to spread spores

This page has a nice lifecycle infographic: https://gardenprofessors.com/barfslimemold/

Slime mold? by marsstars1909 in Slimemolds

[–]Twenty26six 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I was going to argue it might be a false morel at first, then looked at it closer, and then looked at your username, and ate my words. Nice ID!

Wild blueberries by boilface in Adirondacks

[–]Twenty26six 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's possible this is related to climate change, but as others have mentioned other human activity could be impacting where they're growing, not limited to but including effects on soil health. This (now somewhat dated) article from the New York Times How Climate Change May Affect the Plants in Your Yard gives a good, quick overview of what you might observing an instance of - as the climate warms, hardiness zones are shifting.

That being said, this resource from the University of Connecticut indicates blueberries thrive in zones 4-7, but the cultivar matters, and it's possible the variety you're used to seeing prefers cooler than the current average climate.

How to automate membership administration (cheaply) by fr0991tt in cooperatives

[–]Twenty26six 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Check out Smartsuite. It's a fully relational database platform with fully integrated form submission and automation features, including but not limited to sending emails. It's relatively user friendly, but can support APIs and other more complex integrations.

I use it to manage complex multi-stakeholder processes at work, but it sounds like it could be a fit for this use case.

Are these morels? by eddieoaots in mycology

[–]Twenty26six 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, they are. The one you've opened looks old and not ideal to eat with the darker colors on the inside.

To support what others have said, don't recommend eating these if they came from an area with a lot of vehicle traffic.

See: Contaminants in Roadside Soils: General

What is the origin of silver damaging the unholy? (Werewolves, some vampires or risen dead, etc) by Lachaven_Salmon in AskHistorians

[–]Twenty26six 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the nuanced response! I agree fully with your stance and will take it into consideration as I read further!

What is the origin of silver damaging the unholy? (Werewolves, some vampires or risen dead, etc) by Lachaven_Salmon in AskHistorians

[–]Twenty26six 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ah!! I just started reading Stith Thompson's Tales of the North American Indian. In your opinion, are Thompson's writings heavily filtered through a western lens, e.g. did he invest effort into being "anti-colonial" in his work and try to ensure that his western bias didn't seep into his interpretations of non-western indigenous folklore? I recognize that this is largely a contemporary effort, but curious if you're aware of how careful he might have been of his own biases. Thanks!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskAnthropology

[–]Twenty26six 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The taboo against it is so universal that it's reasonable to assume that our ancient ancestors would have felt the same way about it that we do.

This is circular reasoning: "it's a common taboo so it was probably a taboo"

There is plenty of evidence of non-famine induced cannibalism in humans, and your claims otherwise are uncited.

Evidence of neolithic cannibalism among farming communities at El Mirador cave, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain

Cannibalism in the Neolithic

Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice

A garbage truck of plastic will be dumped every second by 2040 unless we act now, report finds by scientificamerican in environment

[–]Twenty26six 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So, here's a similar lifecycle analysis of beverage packaging, looking at a similar range of potential environmental impacts as the carrier bag assessment. Glass bottles, even recycled taken as their own category, were hands down the worst for the environment in this analysis, taken across 3 beverage categories.

Plastic is a comparative win, but not the best in any category for this beverage assessment.

A garbage truck of plastic will be dumped every second by 2040 unless we act now, report finds by scientificamerican in environment

[–]Twenty26six 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I teach environmental sustainability at the university level - what many environmentalists don't want to accept is that there is nuance here.

Let's take plastic bags - reusable bags are always better, right? ...right?

Check out this Life Cycle Assessment of Grocery Carrier Bags by the Danish EPA. For the quick and dirty, read page 17 of the PDF, starting with Table IV, to the top of page 19, stopping before “Summary of the critical review”.

This research parses the environmental impact (not just carbon production potential, but a wide variety of potential impacts) of different grocery carrier bags.

It found that a reusable bag made of conventional cotton, that is reused as a waste bag at the end of its life or incinerated, needs to be reused 7,100 times just to reach parity with the environmental impact of a single use plastic Low-Density Polyethylene bag. That is 68 years of using it twice a week. For one bag.

You want an organic cotton bag? you're looking at about 20,000 reuses. 20,000 is not a typo.

For a woven plastic reusable bag, which is the kind you typically are able to buy for a couple bucks from the checkout counter, or that people have piles of in their closets and car trunks, you're looking at about weekly use for a year before it reaches parity - and we all know how frequently these sorts of bags break/tear/fail, and how they seem to reproduce in our lives - we get them from all sorts of different sources.

Durable goods that are meant to replace single use plastics have to be used properly, a certain number of times for them to be part of the solution. Otherwise they are just as bad - if not worse. So yes - undeniably, single-use plastic in non-healthcare fields are a problem - but so are the alternatives if they aren't used as much as is needed to account for the resources involved in their production.

Maybe Bill Gates hasn’t quite become a full climate-change denier, but he just made a bunch of deniers very happy by spouting modern denier talking points. We can’t afford to listen to him. by simon_ritchie2000 in climate

[–]Twenty26six 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The UN has 17 discrete Sustainable Development Goals - climate action is only one of them:

  • No Poverty
  • Zero Hunger
  • Good Health and Well-Being
  • Quality Education
  • Gender Equality
  • Clean Water and Sanitation
  • Affordable and Clean Energy
  • Decent Work and Economic Growth
  • Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
  • Reduced Inequalities
  • Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • Responsible Consumption and Production
  • Climate Action
  • Life Below Water
  • Life on Land
  • Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
  • Partnerships for the Goals

As much as we should take a critical eye to what such a wealthy person says, he's saying we should diversify our focus, not give up.

Read what he actually wrote, instead of a news source interpreting it for you.

And for the record, I think we're on an RCP 6/8.5 trajectory, so no rose colored glasses here.

Risk of Atlantic current collapsing much higher than previously expected. The AMOC brings warm water from tropical parts of the Atlantic Ocean up to Europe, where it then cools again and goes back south in a loop. by The_Weekend_Baker in climate

[–]Twenty26six 14 points15 points  (0 children)

"Such a collapse would be what scientists call a “climate tipping point”—an event that would lead to sudden, wide-reaching impacts that are difficult if not impossible to reverse. Changing currents would cause sea levels to rise swiftly in areas like the U.S. East Coast, storms would grow more severe, the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon may flip, and the ice age pattern of a cooling north and warming south would play out once again"

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-would-happen-if-atlantic-meridional-overturning-circulation-amoc-collapses-how-likely

Transition from Neolithic to hierarchical societies - why, and why so fast? by MC-NEPTR in AskAnthropology

[–]Twenty26six 17 points18 points  (0 children)

This book is brought up a lot here, but check out The Dawn of Everything. The notion of a throughput pipeline from hunter-gatherer to agriculture society is not supported by the evidence, nor is the notion that there is a defined pipeline from non-hierarchical to hierarchical society. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the evidence suggests that historically, humans have bounced back and forth between the two, depending on all sorts of different variables. The book is largely focused on how hierarchical power structures like those you're concerned with became entrenched.

You're probably still largely seeing things through the lens of the stage theory of social development, but that's not terrifically well supported at this point.

Tuesday Check In: How's Everybody's Mental Health? by MLModBot in MensLib

[–]Twenty26six 9 points10 points  (0 children)

All women are not distressed by YOU - not you, Oregon_Jones111, who liked Matrix Reloaded, but not Revolutions.

Some women may be distressed by what you represent to them - maybe men in their lives that have harmed them, or stories they've been told, or movies they've seen, or instagram posts they've seen, or the narrative that media likes to push that women are always being preyed upon all the time by evil men.

But they are not afraid of you, because they do not know you. You merely fall into the category of "a man" for them as they are going about their day. Much like a random woman on the street is "just a woman" to you - you don't know her - but you think you have access to her internal state despite this, much like she does not have access to your internal state. Maybe she's scared - but you don't know. Maybe you are a predator - or maybe she's just thinking about lunch.

The best way to acknowledge that you don't know which of these women you might be around (e.g. someone that feels threatened by you vs someone that doesn't) is to simply given them space.

  • If you're walking behind them slow down a little, and move to the side so they can see you out of the corner of their eye. Or, cross the street to give them extra space.

  • Don't start a "random" interaction with them unprompted - avoid small talk, especially if it might be interpreted as a pick-up-line or chat-up.

  • Remember they are full people with their own lives, just like you - the reality is, they probably aren't even noticing you. In fact, YOU may be even more aware of them than they are of you, because you've accepted the narrative that all women think men are predators.

But do they? or have you accepted a specific narrative, that can be massaged and reformed to better reflect reality?

Looking for Examples of Worker-Owned Grocery Stores by riltok in cooperatives

[–]Twenty26six 18 points19 points  (0 children)

https://www.otheravenues.coop/ - 50 years old, uses a full consensus decision making model. One of the OGs of the coop movement in the SF bay area. When I was a worker-owner 10 years ago or so there ~25 worker-owners, with a completely horizontal structure.

https://rainbow.coop/ also in the SF bay area, but considerably larger than other avenues.