It’s less than that, even. People under 18 are included in the total population numbers, but aren’t eligible to vote yet, so you need to knock around a third (maybe more?) of your total off just for that.
I did voter registration drives in my area for a few pre-election years, and it’s really staggering the number of minority people who “don’t do politics”. As though that somehow helps them or is something to wear as a badge of honor. Not that they tune it out, but they actively avoid it at all costs.
I convinced a few of them to change their tune and got them set up with absentee ballots to reduce the friction in voting, but man a lot of people genuinely want to avoid any mention of the government. I don’t really get it, but I don’t live their lives either. I haven’t seen how poorly the system treats them, and I don’t know what anxieties they might have about participating in the system.
I think, overall, people are rational actors using whatever information they have available to them (even if that information is dis/mis-information). So there’s some set of reasons these people feel so thoroughly disenfranchised that they don’t even bother trying to participate. It’s probably not a very good reason, in reality, but it’s good enough for them to act on. idk how to fix that, but we probably should figure it out.
I think baby primates of nearly all varieties are adorable, personally. I got to hold a baby spider monkey at an animal sanctuary nearby and omg, it was the best! I just like primates in general. They are a fascinating glimpse of close but not quite familiar.
I wonder if dogs see other dog breeds that way, or if they are just used to the diversity.
Have to be pianos. If you use a safe they just open the door and walk out.
I won’t tell you what to stock up on because other than food items that are difficult to grow in large enough quantities for yourself, I’m not sure that’s the right question for someone with access to a bit of land. What I would want to do in your position is start setting up systems for reusing what you have efficiently, and cutting down on future costs, since that’s where you’ll make the biggest impact. I’ve been on the brink of unstable for a very long time, and I’ve become very good at not falling over the edge, so this advice comes from there. Nothing you can stock up on will last long enough in useable condition to make a really substantial difference long term. Except maybe cinder blocks and bricks if you are handy enough to build stuff, and canning jar lids. Maybe a nice set of rechargeable tools, a bunch of fasteners, stuff like that.
Instead of buying fertilizer, chickens or quail and various kinds of compost are great options. You can make a couple different compost containers/piles using things birds can’t eat for worms and soldier fly larva, the birds love them and they are super healthy foods. Add the dirty bird bedding to the compost once you’ve let the birds eat the larva, let sit for a bit so it’s not so “hot” and till into garden soil. The bird-poo-rich compost is just amazing for plants. Worm compost runoff liquid (because it is done in containers typically), aka worm tea, is more of a potent liquid fertilizer you can use throughout the season as needed, so they work well together, and reduce your waste. Worm castings are a super great soil addition when you till or top-dress. Then you can supply eggs and fishing worms to people for income if you want. Plus chickens can eat most garden scraps, like leaves and spent flowers, so literally free food!
Look into permaculture plants that you can plant once and harvest for years to come with no effort, and give them the absolute best planting conditions you can manage based on whatever they need. Fruit trees, shrubs, vines, and bushes are great, but if you are willing to expand your horizons and plan ahead for maintaining them, there are plants that can be eaten in a variety of ways including as salad greens, and will come back for 2-20+ years. I would suggest to focus your efforts very heavily on stuff that will continue to bear food long term because it’s no effort for all that stuff, so you can put that effort into a garden of single season crops that round out your needs rather than struggling at addressing all of them. Plus you can plant smaller things like rhubarb, mint, chives, asparagus, strawberries, etc. around the footprint of the bigger stuff and everything is happier with the reduced direct sun (“full sun” doesn’t mean all day). A big key here is variety. You want as many different permaculture plants as possible growing (tho keep in mind cross-pollination requirements for things like apples and plums that need a bloom buddy) because if the local climate shifts and something fails, you are more likely to have things that survive and are already producing, no down time while you replace what failed, and that’s huge if you are relying on it for sustenance or income. You’d probably be really surprised at the sheer variety of things you can get to grow even in the frigid north. That’s what you want to stock up on now: permaculture plants. Seeds or cuttings or grafts, whatever you need get those going.
Set up rain barrels or create a pond that you can use for watering. Maybe set up an automatic drip irrigation system from it to reduce your effort and ensure consistency. If you want you can grow aquatic foods in a small pond or rain barrel, and/or raise fish if you have enough space. If you do rain barrels and they aren’t huge, you can put guppies in them seasonally, which will reduce mosquitos and produce a lot of guppies (they typically do not eat their own young) which can be harvested to feed to chickens or fish (like perch) as well.
Consider building a well-vented greenhouse to extend your growing window and help prevent weather related growing problems with more sensitive plants. If you live somewhere with cold winters, and you can source large used barrels (and if you live rural you probably can), you can fill them with water, paint them black and place them somewhere in the greenhouse that gets sun, and use them as freeze-resistance for your plants. Sometimes this is enough, if you build it right, to keep plants growing year round even up in Canada.
If you can, build a root cellar somewhere to store whatever you manage to grow, and learn how, and how long, to store each crop. It doesn’t have to be huge, but if you lose electric, it’ll still work when a fridge won’t. This doesn’t have to be a new space if you don’t want to build something and bury it, so if you have a weird empty basement room you can convert, or a crawl space or something, that might be plenty. I use a weird big cabinet the stairs down to my basement are built around and part of, because it’s otherwise a huge empty cold waste of space that’s inconvenient to access, with the door being on the stairs. A dark place that stays consistently cool and humid, but not stagnant, will keep produce good for considerably longer than refrigeration or sitting at room temp. If you commit enough space to it, you can use it to store home-canned goods (like in jars) in the dark to prevent light-related degradation.
If you don’t have one, invest in a large pressure canner, and as many jars as you can get your grubby mitts on for cheap (or free if you know people who throw out canning jars), and learn to use it. Find approved canning recipes, and save them somewhere offline. (the USDA actually has a ton of tested and safety-approved recipes for home canning, or you might be able to find books at local thrift shops. It’s wild what you can preserve with a bit of forethought!).
If you don’t already have solar, consider looking into it. It’s an upfront cost, yes, but it will save you down the line, especially if the grid, or the value of money, goes wonky. You can buy everything used from solar farms for well cheaper than new retail prices, and have someone install them or do it yourself if you feel comfortable, but then have it inspected and hooked up by a professional. The panels and stuff coming from solar farms still have most of their effective life left, they just cycle them out on a schedule to produce peak energy. If you go this route, make sure you have a way to disconnect from the grid if it goes down so you can continue using your solar. That might be standard, I’m not really sure. If you think inflation will make your savings worth less than not paying for that ongoing bill, it might be worth it. Keep in mind that you can always add more later if you need to, so don’t think you need a $20k system upfront. You might be good with $5-10k, which buys you a LOT of used solar capacity if you have space for it.
I went to a taphouse like this. You were issued a lanyard with an rfid chip in it that was linked to your tab. You’d scan the chip on the tap you wanted, and pour as much or little as you like into your glassware of choice. It had the price listed on the description screen for each tap, and would charge according to what you poured, down to a pretty small amount, because you control the tap handle. Want to try a small splash for a quarter? You can!
So yes it absolutely can scale larger. This place has I think 50+ taps, and because they only needed a few people for staff for dozens of tables (they had a limited cold food menu or it could have been one person easily), the overhead seemed like it was pretty low.
We went at an off-time, but they said they stay pretty busy on weekends and stuff.
I haven’t played pikmin but this sounds a lot like tinykin (which is a super cute exploration game that I highly recommend)
Just to be in Mamdani's location, as a bullying snipe.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I’m not sure I understand how this is anything to do with Mamdani.
This is the trouble I’ve got. Deep red rural area that’s very clearly deep red. I don’t like going out around here because everyone supports Trump, and I have zero interest in supporting or interacting with people or businesses like that. Sure there are good people around, but finding them is incredibly difficult because they mostly keep to themselves because gestures at the entire area being regressive
I’d love to be able to actually find people to work with directly, but they would be very very very unlikely to actually be neighbors or even particularly local.. so instead I’m focused on my diaspora. People I already know and care about, who are unfortunately not local to me anymore (1-5 hrs away), but who have less regressive communities, and more chance to extend the network themselves, and who I can help support in some way. I’m also working on some things that I hope will be able to help support people more widely. It’s not the community network I’d like, but maybe it’ll help. We can only do what we can do.
Have you seen the Mice Templar series? It looks kinda similar. I haven’t actually read it all the way through yet because I only have books 2 and 3. It’s gorgeous, and what I have read is amazing which is why I picked up book 2-3 without 1 or 4-5. As soon as I find a copy of those kicking around, I’m very excited to explore the whole story!
Weirdly, this post made me realize that not a single one of my siblings or cousins has reproduced, and that’s 7 on one side and 12 or so on the other, plus 3 for myself and siblings. And we are mostly mid 30s to early 50s.
I hatched some quail and made sure they imprinted on me (why not, I was thrilled to watch anyway!) but my cats were also there and the brooder is a 55 gallon aquarium on my living room floor, so I think it’s safe to say my birds see them as the adults of the covey because they do this leg splay thing a lot, and lay on their backs all comfy-like.
I’ve seen owl babies lay down on their tummies but never rolling over like this. And they are a bit over 2 weeks in age, but they’ve been doing it for well over a week already.
I’m super pumped for this behavior, I hope it lasts. I can’t wait to see what weird shit the next generation I hatch picks up!
(Sorry for potato quality, I actually took this with an iPhone… really hard to capture this from across the room without disturbing them..)
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True, we do need some labor to keep things functional.
However, I can confidently state that at absolutely no point in my life have I ever worked for an employer in which my labor was an even a tiny net benefit to society. All of my jobs have been to further the profits of some rich fucks. I’m fairly certain a sizable chunk of the population is in the same boat.
Tap for spoiler
With very few exceptions, my labor has gone toward things that don’t actually need to be done at all, like support for a tax company that wouldn’t exist if the IRS worked the way it should. The closest I’ve come to being actually useful in 40 years of life was working document compliance for a food production company. A job which could easily be automated through keyword searches, and probably has by now. Or maybe working at the chicken hatchery back in high school would count if you really stretch. Tho since we supplied newborn slaves to egg farms, I think it’s not a net benefit. I’d rather see local production for communities than big inter-state inhumane operations like that one. You don’t need a hatchery capable of putting out 80k birds every 2 days to ship around the country if you just let chickens have somewhat normal lives within the communities they support like we’ve done for all of human history until very recently…
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve applied for all sorts of public welfare jobs. DNR, fisheries, environmental outreach, museum work, etc. there just simply aren’t that many jobs with tangible benefits to society that I’m qualified for and interested in doing. And if that’s the case for someone with a STEM degree and great interest in making a positive impact, I can’t imagine someone not actively aiming for that would do much better.
I would gladly put a portion of my time and energy toward supporting the social fabric if that was actually an option that replaced bullshit jobs one does just to survive. I’ll even gladly do my time in sewage/waste disposal. Idgf, if it matters and isn’t forever, I’ll do my share no matter how unpleasant. A rotating schedule of people who opt-in locally to do needed labor would keep people connected and engaged with community efforts, and teach them about what it takes to keep their little bubble running smoothly. And that sounds pretty great. Sure sure volunteering exists and could fill that need to contribute, but I don’t think, in this current environment, that that’s really a viable option for most people. Working for free in what should be down time in a capitalist dystopia that caused the problems you are volunteering to try to mitigate is… not something most people can justify the time on or afford to do, you know?