Same story in Canada. A big decline in total farmland (decline of 13.1 million acres or 7.9%) but an increase of 3.6 million acres in crop land. This represents an increase in intensity and density of farmland and a decrease in farmland used for non productive applications.

One of the big differences recorded in this report is a 62% decrease in the number of people living on farms from 1971-2021. A decrease in the amount of farmland used for living spaces (farmhouse, garden, garage) may be a big factor in the above crop:farmland ratio changes, as would a consolidation of farms (total number of farms decreased from 246K to 189K from 2001-2021).

What this all says to me is that economies of scale play a huge role in North American farming, and that our subsidy structures do not favour small farms.

How deep is that pot? To me it looks way too large for a tiny plant. I assume by first time grower you mean you’ve never grown any plants, cannabis or otherwise.

The worst thing you can do to any plant is to overwater it. When a plant is in a pot full of soil and its root system is very small it cannot absorb water quickly enough from the soil to prevent anaerobic conditions developing in the root zone. Anaerobic conditions cause root rot which will stunt and eventually kill a plant.

It’s much better to have a small plant in a tiny pot than a small plant in a giant pot. A plant that has overgrown its pot will demand more frequent watering but is not in danger of root rot. Plus it’s much easier to transplant a plant with a dense root ball than one with a ton of soil but sparse roots.

Anyway you should check the bottom of the pot to see if the soil is waterlogged. If there are any bad smells emanating from the soil at the bottom then you might need to do an emergency transplant into fresh soil in a smaller container, ideally with lots of perlite in the mix to promote drainage and aeration. During the transplant you’d want to remove all the soil from the roots and even rinse them off to get them relatively clean. Any roots that feel soft, dark brown and slimy should be pruned off so that only firm, light/white roots remain.

Yeah so the feature actually sounds completely useless against a determined adversarytiser. At the very least, apps should have no way of knowing whether notifications are turned on, including no means of knowing whether a notification was displayed or not.

App stores should also make a policy of banning apps that don’t explicitly keep all their ads in an advertising channel.

These people have a mental illness. They’re being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies. They’re in exactly the same boat as people with gambling addictions. We should feel bad for them, but not (always*) as bad as homeless folks, who are still worse off.

*One of my elementary school teachers was married to a gambling addict. The guy was secretly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy construction equipment to pay off some of his loans. The guy ended up in a police chase and took his own life before he could be arrested. His wife, the teacher, was left massively in debt (he had secretly remortgaged the family house to pay for gambling debts) and grieving the loss of her husband but also in shock at discovering the extent of his crimes and debts. Really awful situation and nothing but profits for the casinos!

Are apps able to lie though? Say, by putting ads into the same channel as essential notifications?

They get more viewers when they do. Streamers do exist who don’t use a webcam, don’t talk to viewers at all, and only show gameplay. They get some viewers but not nearly as many as they would otherwise.

People like interacting with streamers. They especially like seeing the streamer get excited when they donate a bunch of subscriptions or send a bunch of money. Popular streamers will even have animations and sound to make a big deal out of this.

The truth is that full time streamers are supported by a small minority of viewers who donate large amounts of money. This makes streaming somewhat akin to prostitution in my view. But there you have it!

The worst is when an otherwise great app does that! And they also send really important notifications too, so you can’t just disable notifications!

And I’m sure the discount varies based on how much of a risk there is with each work environment. Low risk workplaces like software companies are going to have much less of a difference in risk between drug-using and non.

The thing is, it’s almost never going to be zero. And if employers and insurance companies can save a few bucks by getting everyone to pee in a cup, they will!

Personally, I don’t have an issue with cannabis use. It’s legal here in Canada and I’ve even grown it myself. But I don’t think people should be getting high at work, just as I don’t think people should drink at work (despite how amusing it is on Mad Men).

Having said that, I’ve never had a drug test in my life. Maybe it’s not a thing for most jobs in Canada.

I for one wouldn’t want to shop at a Home Depot with employees operating tow motors and other heavy equipment while high. If a customer gets killed by falling equipment while shopping then the lawsuit would be enormous. It would make the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit look like chump change.

When insurance companies aren’t allowed to mandate drug tests then they’re going to charge the store premiums commensurate with the assumption that all employees are on drugs. This would make it extremely expensive to run these stores and they’d pass the costs on to employees. This would paradoxically create an incentive for only drug-test-positive (drug using) people to work there! This phenomenon is known as adverse selection.

Really cool! I won’t be able to tune in live but I’m looking forward to watching the talks on VOD afterwards.

I really enjoyed your talks in prior years, Evan! I don’t know the speakers this year, apart from John Harris (from Roguelike Radio). Should be great though!

I wonder if they’re afraid of Eternal September’ing the service. A lot of people on Lemmy were upset when a bunch of people on Reddit joined. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have millions join in one day. I doubt it would be good for the culture of the community!

What city do you live in? That makes a big difference in terms of overhead.

Another ugly game for the Saints. I hope they give Haener the start next week. He played well with his garbage minutes. He deserves a shot!

It’s not like they’ve got anything to lose at this point anyway.

I think the problem is much deeper than media literacy. It’s social stratification and bubbles. There are so many people who will say that almost all of their friends and family are in one party. Heck there are even people who don’t even know people of races other than their own.

It’s also an issue of education and brain drain. Suppose you’re born in a rural community in the Deep South and you decide to go to medical school. You get accepted to a school in another state and move away to study. After graduation you go into residence in a hospital and eventually you become a fully licensed doctor, ready to start practicing.

Where do you go? It’s possible for you to go back home to your rural community but in all likelihood there’s no room for you there (not enough patients) and besides all that you likely don’t relate very well to everyone else. So you leave. You move away to the big city in another state.

This is happening on a massive scale in the US. Brain drain from red states and rural areas to blue states and big cities. It’s hard to have critical thinking and media literacy in an area if all the educated people are leaving!

Right, but now we need to ask ourselves how a person could get to the point where they don’t believe the media reporting all of this and instead they choose to believe Trump.

It starts with their community and it ends with a total collapse in their trust in public institutions, including the media. Then, if they and all their friends and family have begun to believe that the media (what they might call “left wing media”) are engaged in a conspiracy to disenfranchise themselves and their community (by trying to disqualify their chosen candidate through alternative means) it becomes easier to see why they would reject the facts.

It’s really a serious problem for democracy in the U.S. (but also in other western countries) and it didn’t begin nor doesn’t end with Trump. It’s a sign of major fault lines through society.

Perhaps I was being too vague but the key to my point is this:

Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand

What I’m talking about is facts about people’s situation in life. Their friends, their family, their community. It’s well-known that many people will believe the medical advice of a close family member over that of a doctor. Does this mean that they (through family connections) have access to some secret medical knowledge?

No.

What it means is that a person’s instincts to trust their family and close friends — members of their tribe — make it difficult for them to accept contradictory information from their doctor (a stranger). You can extend this issue to almost any domain of expertise (apart from those in which the person in question has had formal training). This is why conspiracies, myths, and other falsehoods can be so difficult to dispel from the outside of communities: the people who believe these things are not going to take the word of strangers who try to contradict their friends and family.

And so what I mean about people having different facts is this: their relationships and communities are different. Their whole worldview depends on their ability to trust the people they’re closest to. So when it comes to the question of whether to believe a falsehood (myth/conspiracy/scandal) or to reject it and in so doing reject their own community (with catastrophic results for their life), it should not be a surprise that they choose to believe a falsehood.

Oh but this is special! I’ve never seen one with partial melanism like this before! They’re usually all black or they’re the standard colouring with grey belly and brown back and tail!

You must be new here!

Everyone has their own set of facts. That’s the basis for their world view. Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand but upsetting their entire worldview is not something people allow easily.

And that’s human nature. We’re a social species. We belong to tribes and depend on our tribe for survival. If we could drop our worldview like a load of dirty laundry then we’d be walking away from our tribes and dying.

Ask anyone who has had profound political disagreements with their family. It’s enormously painful. While you can drop a position here or there in an election, it’s not at easy to drop your family.

You can fault the Right for a lot of things but they got there first on this one. They have a story for why things suck and they’re pounding the drum on it relentlessly. It doesn’t matter that this story is full of holes when the alternative is not compelling.