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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • So we did exactly this when we dropped our Prime membership a few years ago as part of working against Amazon building a massive warehouse in our fully residential borough (we won if anyone was wondering, they chose not to continue fighting it in court). We shop mostly in store at Target and other brick and mortar stores. We will also shop online still, but almost always directly from the manufacturer. This usually means paying shipping, but I figure our UPS driver and mail person need a paycheck too so we are fine with that. We will occasionally use Amazon for things that are just hard to find elsewhere but only order once our cart is in the free shipping price range. It turns out, Amazon is not only a shit company the uses dark patterns to push a mostly superfluous subscription, most things we buy are cheaper elsewhere. Combined with not buying nearly as much random crap, we have saved a butt load since quitting Amazon.


  • The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.


  • That story (and narrative) is somewhat disingenuous though. The official vote, and thus the will of the British people, was to leave. To say that’s wrong because people didn’t understand what their vote meant or weren’t shown how they should register really speaks more to how poorly the remain campaigns communicated the seriousness of the referendum and what it would mean to cast a leave vote or to not vote at all.

    Look, I think it was a poor choice for the UK to leave the EU. And as an American I get how frustrating it is when electoral systems mask what polling shows for a verity of reasons. But official elections are the source of truth in the democratic processes we have and to claim the results are false is dangerous whether it’s for brexit in the UK or for a president in the US.





  • No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.