Alan Dershowitz has turned into a right-wing hack, making ridiculous legal arguments to defend untenable positions.

Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.

Under that criteria, there are a grand total of zero areas that can accommodate them. Same goes for dogs.

But that’s a stupid criteria, because cats are tamed, and thrive indoors.

Hope that helps.

If someone intentionally caused harm to any of my cats, I live near a large national forest, and once you get a few hundred yards off a trail, no one is going to find a body.

Who tf gets a pet cat and doesn’t let it outside?

People that love their cats and don’t want them to die young. Outdoor cats live an average of 2-5 years, indoor-only cats live an average of 10-15 years. By allowing cats outside, they’re exposed to pathogens, parasites, and dangers that they wouldn’t otherwise experience. In my area, there are coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and owls, all of which will quite happily make a meal of a cat. There are also cars; they don’t tend to be able to stop on a dime.

fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis

Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren’t making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.

Use some Rokset on all your fasteners; the only way to break the threadlocker is with heat, and heat would also destroy the bodywork. So you could still replace damaged panels, but you couldn’t steal them.

I used to have a fairly large collection of skulls that I’d found while walking around in the woods.

Not sure what ever happened to them… Probably lost them in one of my many moves.

I dunno, bourbon is nice too. And it has the benefit of usually being a lot less expensive than a Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Ardbeg, or Lagavulin. Rye whiskey is another one.

But Jack Daniels can fuck right off.

As for the suicide attempt, that’s something incredibly heavy for anyone.

The irony is that some of the people I had mistakenly believed were friends were (are, I believe) in an anti-suicide advocacy group. I guess it was easier for them to say the right things than to do the right things. 🤷 Lessons learned, etc.

I wonder where the cool emotionally available people all are?

I met some when I was a member of The Satanic Temple. And then Lucien Greaves/Doug Mesner went full-on authoritarian, I bailed because I’d already escaped from one cult, and the people I knew stayed. Now I’m the out-group, rather than a friend, because group/social identity is harder to let go of than individual friendships. I met some when I was in art school; hopefully the world hasn’t beaten that tendency out of them yet.

I suck at making friends

I hear you. It’s hard to make plans with anyone now; no one seems to follow through. And without spending time with people, you can’t build those bonds of friendship.

My divorce was nine years ago. I got remarried a whopping five days after my divorce (…because that was the statutory minimum time; my ex-spouse had dragged their feet so long with a divorce they initiated that I’d had three serious relationships, met someone, gotten proposed to, and was ready to get married before the divorce was complete). I can say without reservation that my current partner is leaps and bounds better than my ex-partner. I’ve long ago accepted that many people that said they were friends were not friends, even if it still sticks in my throat. In the time since my divorce, I’ve lost an average of 1.1 cats per year, and it never gets easy to hold someone that’s been a friend and companion for over a decade as they take their last breath.

Am I okay? I’m as okay as I ever get. I’ve been through therapy multiple times, and I’d probably still go to therapy if insurance was affordable.

Do I have friends? Not really. If I make plans with people too far in advance, they forget and make other commitments. If I try to make plans too late, they’re already booked. It’s possible that I’m simply unlikeable; I tend to lean that way.

My only point was that, anecdotally, this is the experience that a lot of men have when they try to be emotionally vulnerable and honest with their male friends. Perhaps Gen Z isn’t getting this kind of shit; maybe they’re able to be more emotional. I kind of doubt it though, because young Gen Z men are trending far more conservative than Millennials, and conservatism isn’t friendly towards emotional intimacy among men. I hope that they do better than my generation did.

It also opens buds to help you if they’re up for it.

My experience has been that being emotionally open tends to make people withdraw. Should it be that way? Of course not. Should I get better friends? Yeah, that would be cool, and I wish that was as easy to do as it is to say. I’ve found that many relationships and friendships end up being somewhat transactional; people are there for the good times, but aren’t interested in the emotional labor when shit gets real. I try to be there for people when they’re going through shit, but that doesn’t seem to be reciprocated.

If I sound bitter, well, I am. And cynical.

A lot of people I had thought were friends ghosted me when I failed to complete suicide and had a 72 hour hold. My ex-spouse held me in utter contempt because I was struggling emotionally. A lot of people I had known for a decade or more ghosted me when my ex-spouse and I were getting divorced; in fact, I only got to keep one friend in that divorce.

I suspect that this is part of the experience of being on the autism spectrum.

Just ask him what he’s doing when she makes those noises, because you want to try it out on your girlfriend (or have your boyfriend do it to you, either/or, I ain’t gonna judge).

What am I supposed to do? “Oh, hey, yeah, so, I just held my cat in my arms as he died. I had to euthanize him because he was had congestive heart failure, and was slowly drowning from pulmonary edema. I miss him so much, and I want to believe that he’s in a better place, but he’s just dead and gone, and I’m never gonna see him again. All I’ve got are memories, and they’re going to fade with time until one day I realize that I haven’t thought about him in years. But yo, how are you doin’? Any big plans for the weekend?”

You get up, and keep doing the shit you have to do, because it needs to get done. Telling people you’re really depressed tends to make them feel really awkward, they don’t know what to say, and then they gradually start ghosting you. Shit sucks, but you put a happy face on because no one wants to know that you aren’t happy.

Here’s one source on immigrations, although the numbers are slipping as the cases of illegal and wrongful deportations continue to make headlines. Even with that, Americans are fairly even split. Here’s a solid source on transgender policy; while some things that are positive for transgender people have broad support, some things that are unequivocally bad–like preventing minors from accessing gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, bathroom bills, etc.–have net +10 and greater support. (+31 on only allowing people to play sports that correspond to the gender they were assigned to at birth means that it’s about a 65/35 split, with 65% in favor of preventing transwomen from participating in womens’ sports.)

I’m really tired of voting for better candidates that are in favor of reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, that want religion out of politics, that support genuinely free speech, and then also want to eliminate 2A rights. We’re already seeing what 75 years of libs and progressives working to disarm themselves has done, and the result is that ICE agents aren’t getting gunned down in the streets when they’re kidnapping people, and the fash are free to do whatever the fuck they want with zero fear of consequences.

Most people are for gun control

There’s a big problem with that.

Right now, the majority of people in the US are in favor of deporting all undocumented immigrants. Right now, the overwhelming majority of people are opposed to transgender rights (e.g., using bathrooms that correspond to their gender, participating in sports, having access to gender-affirming care, and so on). Going back to the late 80s/early 90s, most people would not have believed that Satanists had the right to free exercise of their religion (and many people still don’t today). If you go back 75 years, the majority of the country believed that ‘separate but equal’ was entirely reasonable; sure, let those negroes have rights, but letting them live in our neighborhoods, go to our schools, get married to our women…? Absolutely not!

This is what is referred to as “the tyranny of the majority”.

The whole purpose of the bill of rights is that they are RIGHTS, and not intended to be something that is up for a popular vote. All gun control is intended to prevent people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

I agree with the older Dems, but not for their reasons.

No, we should not support the candidates that Hogg supports. Because Hogg is very opposed to 2A rights, and ipso facto any candidate that he supports will also be opposed to 2A rights. And if you think that we’re gonna just vote our way out of this, I’ve got some very, very bad news for you.

Primary the old fucks with young leftists (hopefully ones that actually understand economics and tax policy)? Absolutely! Primary them with ones that ideologically aligned with Hogg? No.

A coworker that got pissed when things didn’t work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company–hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss–was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just… Didn’t show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a ‘bad attitude’ because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn’t work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

…But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.