F
There are not people who are "150 years old collecting social security checks"
But, this effort by a billionaire to generate resentment against imaginary people getting a few hundred measly bucks is transparent. Trying to make all people who use the social security checks they EARNED and paid for out to be moochers
Why are some people so foolish to hate an (imaginary) ordinary person for having a little? This is welfare queens with Cadillacs all over again.
This photo makes it look like you're in the backrooms.
Maybe we all are, I think sometimes.
I've spent a little time learning the theremin... but this would be a way to make music without needing a battery or outlet to plug in.
Do any of you play the waterphone? Is it difficult to learn how to play for someone who has never done much with musical instruments? Can you play songs on it?
Can you bring it on a camping trip for a more creepy version of the camefire sing-along?
I have a vision... you see...
Slime mold will sometimes avoid high sugar foods because in processing the food it can lead to an osmotic imbalance in their habitat, but these "intelligent" monkeys can't figure out how to stop burning coal.
The most successful phylum of animals are the arthropods. Meaning when you think of a "generic animal" you should think of an arthropod. They dominate the kingdom.
And you should think of an ant in particular because ants are the cutest and most beautiful arthropods.
(Last sentence may be more propaganda than fact. Propaganta, if you will.)
Limnognathia maerski is the only species that belongs to the Micrognathozoa, a new *phylum* of animals that was only described in 2000.
We found a whole new phylum in 2000!
Phylum is the division just below "kingdom" so the kingdoms of living things are things like: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Protists (like kelp and algae) and Monera (like bacteria)
Then among the Animals (of which you are one) you have the phylums. There are 39 phylums of animals and Limnognathia has one all to itself.
My husband is unreasonably excited by any example of putting one form of transportation on another form of transportation. This reached perfection in his eyes when we went on a journey with folding kayaks and folding bikes each could be carried on the other.
"We are unstoppable! We could circle the earth!"
The folding kayaks were a cool idea but VERY heavy and needed a bike trailer to tow them. So... I was not as excited... but it still was a lot of fun.
Anyway he loves this photo.
Some context: "leanbacks" were a short lived youTube format where you could create a playlist of other people's videos and intersperse your own short videos between them. YouTube facilitated this by making the whole thing play like one long video. The views of the clips you showed went to the people who posted those videos!
But, they discontinued it for some reason and of course now they are all just scattered heaps of videos that make no sense.
But for a moment I thought it could work.
We have the worst of all possible outcomes. Creation rights are abused and defended with zeal to the point that people avoid making possible excellent content (ask any music educator how they feel about making content for youTube, they get dinged for humming tunes)
Meanwhile these rules don't serve the function of protecting small creators who get their stuff stolen relentlessly. It's very bad.
Maybe when youTube becomes unusable, which it will some day, we can do better.
The alternate timeline where youTube focused on "leanbacks" and methods to have better attribution for content and ways to ethically facilitate content such as "watch videos"
There is value added by commentary, it ought to be possible for such content to be created all benefit.
youTube never cared about this, they are fine with stealing unless you steal from people with expensive lawyers, in that case they instantly take the side of the expensive lawyers and "fair use" be dammed.
Here is an excellent high quality and factual *new* video on the evolution of ants from the generically named "Ants Documentary" channel.
I was worried it'd be AI slop, but it's not. although they could do better image and video attribution IMO. But, it's just some ant fan going off so I'm not mad. #antvideos #ants #youTube #Hymenoptera
A student wrote a story where one of the plot points was that "it was long ago so they didn't have a phone on them" but explained in the most laborious way.
It was both delightful and distressing to read.
The world's worst scavenger hunt.
But also ever since my students have found they can annoy me by calling the 90s "the olden days" I'm a little suspicious when they start asking about something like it's ancient history.
They make sense for one time payments between parties that won't do future payments.
One thing that can be hard to convey about alternate social media is that 10k users is literally just about ten thousand human people, many active, with opinions and neat stuff to share. We just don't have the traditional user number inflation expected in "the industry" ...
I haven't touched a paper check since this child was born... so I shouldn't be surprised.
