Wordle for bird ID!
A daily game where you get a series of tightly cropped images of a North American bird. You have six guesses before the full image is revealed.
oh ive been in these archives for way too long….
The union busting firms are scared
As a fine dining cook, I found work in a union workplace around a year ago.
My 40 hours a week are guaranteed except for Jan/feb/mar when there’s not enough customers, I get paid almost twice what I did at any other restaurant, if I work overtime, (more than 8 hours in one day, or more than 40 in a week), I actually get overtime pay, (and it’s 1.5x my normal rate!).
I get holiday pay, and in addition I get to either bank or pay out my holidays if I work those days, (either a paid day off when I want it, in addition to the holiday pay, or I get paid an add’l 8 hours at 1.5x that week). I also get two floating holidays, 4 paid random sick days, 2 paid family sick days, and 4 paid “doctor’s note” sick days, (paid out by our health insurance), as well as general allowance to take as many unpaid sick days as I want without worrying for my job security. (I’ve been told that taking multiple months off is where we start to be concerned about abuse, so if I want to do that, I can go through our leave of absence procedures instead, where I’m allowed three 2-week periods a year generally for whatever reason I want, (If my manager wants to disagree, he has to get the union president’s approval), and after that it’s up to my manager to decide if he’ll accept them).
I get two weeks of paid vacation time a year, and an add’l week per year for every 5 years I work there.
We get our legally mandated breaks, which, I know that sounds like a low bar, but taking anything other than a smoke break in a kitchen?!?! Unheard of! I get two 15′s and a lunch every shift! I get to sitdown and rest my legs and not get flak for it!
I get a bonus at the end of the year, there’s official procedures for if my manager isn’t happy with me or wants to get rid of me, (three meetings, during which my union representative has to be present), (and getting rid of my classification doesn’t work, there’s rules for how someone ‘bumps’ other people if classifications are gotten rid of), and severance pay for when full-time employees that are downsized out of the company, there’s a pension plan, like . . .
Guys, I have a 40-page handbook which details all of the rights my union has won me, and believe me, I’ve never had any of these at any prior workplace.
And you know what my union dues are? $4 a paycheck.
Of course I’m going to pay my union dues for all of those benefits.
Reblogging for this incredibly thorough explanation of what it's like to actually have a contract in place at a union workplace. I reblog a fair number of posts about how people should organize, but if you're like me, you might not know exactly what that can get you until you've actually gone through the process. Every contract is different because you bargain for what makes sense for your particular workplace, and every few years you re-negotiate with the employer to improve things in the next contract, but some things (like the right to have union representation when you talk to your boss about leave or discipline) are universal.
It's worth every penny of your dues, I promise.
Osprey in the lower Chesapeake Bay have been experiencing nest failure, leading to a reproductive rate comparable to during the DDT crisis. But unlike during DDT, reproductive failure occurs not at hatching but while young are in the nest.
The culprit? Overfishing of menhaden (a fish species), which Osprey depend on in the lower, more saline portion of the Bay.
"The current fish availability is not high enough to allow osprey to reproduce sustainably. Their young are starving in the nest – most within the first week after hatching."
The menhaden fishery is controversial. A popular bait fish for striped bass and other sportfishing, it is also crucial to many birds of prey along the coast.
In contrast to the lower Bay, Osprey in the upper bay rely on a mix of catfish, shad, and other species. These Osprey are experiencing stable population growth rates.
Bald Eagles, which often kleptoparasitize Ospreys, are also doing well. They are at total capacity in the region: essentially every possible territory is occupied.
Check out the linked article by the Center for Conservation Biology for more information.
The post @staff is directed to investors. It can be translated roughly as "Tumblr management thinks there are different, better users out there, and if they see a chance at drawing them in, they don't care if the people using the site right now all leave."
Managment does not care about feedback from current users. The staff members you can reach via the site itself have no real control over the situation.
Back up your stuff and add links to your other accounts to your profile.
So we cannot in good faith insult these pigeons without taking accountability for how we shaped their current existence. We domesticated them for our own purposes, raising them for meat and messaging, and when they escaped or when they no longer served us, we abandoned them and called them rats with wings. They are, whether we like it or not, some of our longest-running companions.
reading this article someone sent me about why pigeons make nests Like That and im getting emotional about pigeons again
How to Get a Chronological Dash as a New Blog
I've been working on a Tumblr Roleplaying 101 guide, and in doing so wound up making a brand new Tumblr account for some screenshots. And this process made me realize how weirdly complicated Tumblr has made it for new accounts to get a chronological dash. So if you just want to see posts from people you follow, in the order that they made them, this what you have to do.
First, go to your settings, go under Dashboard, and scroll down to Preferences. Toggle off Best Stuff First. This switches your dash from an algorithm feed to a chronological one.
If you have an older blog, that's all you have to do. But if your blog was created more recently, you have an extra step.
The Tumblr dashboard has different tabs, which you can see across the top of your feed. Most older users have completed tuned these out, because we don't care about anything other than the basic feed. There is a Following tab, which shows posts from users you follow, and a For you tab, which shows recommend posts Tumblr thinks you'll like.
On blogs created before May 8, 2023, the Following tab is the default view. However, blogs created after this date have the For you tab as the default view. (This is an intentional change by Tumblr.)
This means if you are a newer blog and want to see posts from people you follow, you'll need to manually switch to the Following tab every time you open the dashboard.
If you do not like this change, consider contacting Tumblr staff. Submit a form under the Feedback category and explain that you'd like the option to make the Following tab the default for new blogs. And please, be polite! There is a person on the other side of the screen who likely had no say in this change, and even if they did, they don't deserve to be yelled at.
today we are going to learn about horses
horse fact 1: horses are partially exoskeletal
ALThorse fact 2: horses are partially trees
ALThorse fact 3: got frogs in em
ALTthese are all the facts we have about horses.
online is real
everything online is real. there have been decades of cultural mythologizing about the internet that place it in contrast to reality--the internet is framed as immaterial, as ephemeral. the internet is 'just data', it's weightless and abstract. things taking place on the internet are 'just online', they're not 'really' happening. this isn't true.
of course, there's the elementary fact that many things that are immaterial with no physical form are still real. monetary value is real, even if you cannot find me an atom of it. the german border is real even where it is not physically demarcated. they are real and physical in that they shape real and physical human interactions. but the internet is in fact far more real than that: every single piece of data on the internet exists physically on a disk somewhere as a pattern of magnetic charges. 'the cloud' sounds like it's a weightless and fluffy thing, but 'the cloud' is this:
this is the cloud--a google data center, to be exact. amazon web services is not an immaterial or abstract thing; it is over 26 million square feet of data centers, of physical computers inside physical buildings where data is physically recorded. access to the internet is provided by cables, including the thousands of miles of undersea infrastructure which make the global internet possible. 4G, 5G, wifi, these are all made possible by physical apparatuses sending out radio waves.
all computer infrastructure everywhere is made possible by cobalt and lithium and gallium and so on--mined out of the ground, by an extractive mining industry which exploits the people and resources of the global south. estimates for how much electricity 'the internet' uses vary wildly, but it's at minimum measured in gigawatts--and so coal and nuclear power plants and wind farms and hydroelectric dams and the coal and uranium and bauxite mining which builds them are inseparable from 'the internet'. google programmers do not live in the astral plane, they work from buildings (and outsource work to india) which need to be cleaned and maintained and worked in and driven back and forth from.
youtube videos are 'online' but of course if you film something happening and upload it that thing still really happened. if a physical action, whether that be a terrorist attack or a protest or a sexual hookup or an act of ethic violence, is mediated and planned online, that thing really happens in the real world. the idea of 'just online', this platonic real divorced from a cleanly delineated 'outside' or 'real world' is just wrong. it is wrong in more or less every single way. every program or function your computer has or video or picture or word you see on the computer is the result of people doing actual physical things. you are seeing it by grace of miles of cable and tons and tons of machinery and power plants and the guy who sweeps the floors at the indian IT firm facebook outsources. online is real.
Saw a really weird owl the other day
IT'S NOT A OWL
(but it is cool)
That's a common misconception! The Tawny Frogmouth is actually a really weird type of owl:
The following text, apparently one of a long series by the same author, was recovered off the coast of Cuba by cephalopod research group divers in local year 120 and was one of the earliest documents to be translated following the excavation of cetacean archives at the Rashid Site in 146 that allowed us to decrypt cephalopod. It remains essential to our understanding of cephalopod infrastructure capabilities and policy.
The chief monobrain is at it again. Evol Nrol has introduced his next grand new vision for the sea and beyond, to great acclaim from his various suckers and the media outlets he just happens to own. 55% of the planet just isn't enough apparently, our lords and masters are still looking for more untouched wilderness to pointlessly ruin. One begins to suspect that they just want somewhere to run away to, and one begins to wonder why. Just like last time, he wants to colonize Lake Baikal, because bad ideas never die, they just camouflage. In case it's not obvious, this will never work, and if it did it would still not work. Let's just glide over the 10 most obvious reasons this is impossible and insane from last time.
1) Lake Baikal is very far away.
2) Lake Baikal is very cold.
3) The water in Lake Baikal is basically poison. Life inside seapods would always be one breach away from rapid deionisation.
4) Lake Baikal either has scientific value, or it has octopus habitation. It can't have both.
5) Lake Baikal has nothing we need. As far as we know the thermal vents in Baikal have nothing we can't get much easier from existing vents, or even by creating synthentic vents.
6) Lake Baikal has too much water to salinify.
This is the one they really haven't thought about. We don't have the minerals we would need. The quantity of sodium chloride alone would make a pile the size of Moai mount. Our best way to get the minerals is by evaporating the sea and moving the evaporate over, but at that point we could just as well build the evaporation pool, not build the levees, and just live there. On that note:
7) Clearly nobody's calculated the logistics on moving that much mineral. Have you tried lugging a mountain over land?
10) Lake Baikal is constantly being drained by a river and replenished by other rivers.
It takes around 512 years to replace the entire volume of the lake. That's a long time, even by lake standards, at least. Still, anything you put in the water will dissipate at a rate of 1/512 per year at least. And at the scale of the initial investment, the maintenance cost in minerals alone would be unaffordable.
If you really wanted to go with the monumentally stupid idea of filling a lake with minerals to make more sea, there's a much better choice, of course. Lake Tanganyika is more accessible, warmer, smaller, still has thermal vents, and drains slower. In every respect it would be an easier choice, though still entirely impossible of course. But Evol couldn't go with that, because he's tying his consultants in knots attempting to salvage his whole "dredge the Yenisey 1km deep" idea from three years ago, which wouldn't have made sense with Tanganyika, and he's too arrogant to pick a new target to go with the new manateeshit plan. As always, impossible plans like these just vent ink over the infrastructure and housing investment we desperately need and already know how to do.