“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump’s presidential bid.
CBS and corporate media have been giving Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of free advertisement, not because his every utterance is newsworthy or in the public interest, but solely for their bottom line. Greed. If you ever needed proof that huge swaths of our corporately controlled media doesn’t care about actually informing the public, then here it is.
At best, mainstream media is biased infotainment and our 4th estate is swiftly becoming a bigger joke than it already is.
i was about to joke about how my political stance is “end lawnmower culture” but then it occurred to me that i actually Am against lawns as suburban status symbols and wastes of land that Could be used to sustain native flora & fauna and grow food for people, but no, instead they are these huge useless swaths of land that need Constant maintenance, the process of which is not only destructive, but Incredibly Loud
You know that actually is the purpose of a lawn? They started as a trend of the French monarchy – the ones revolutionaries beheaded for being self indulgent assholes.
It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”
Lawns offend me.
Why have that stunted golf course in front of your suburban house if you can’t even water it? Get one of these instead.
Unite Against the Lawn
Pro tiny house, anti grass lawn. Prioritize practicality.
This is actually really interesting because back in the 1950s and 60s in Australia when we started getting large waves of Southern European migrants one thing the Italians and others would often so is buy a little suburban home, then tear out the ornamental flower beds and lawn and useless trees and plant fruits, vegetables, grapes and even olives. It was considered completely scandalous by their Anglo-Saxon neighbours because lawn was considered an aspirational thing and the ideal was to go from not needing a kitchen garden and having an ornamental garden to show how well you were doing.
This is great. All of it. Not to derail this too much, but “Lawnmower” culture also reminds me of aggressively heterosexual men. Men ALWAYS will use mowing the lawn as a way to get out of doing all the other household chores – having a lawn that a man mows somehow makes maintaining everything else inside a house the women’s responsibility. Down with lawnmower culture.
i’ve actually read a whole book on lawns and lawn culture (yes, really) it’s called lawn people by paul robbins check it out and let’s all boycott lawn culture together!!!
Never thought of this and wow. It’s really an eye opener
Wow. This is really useful info !!
There’s a house on the corner (I would get a picture if it weren’t creepy as fuck) whose lawn is filled with trees, flowers and plants. You can barley see the house. Everyone in the development gossips about how it’s an eyesore. & I image how much the owners had to fight with the homeowners association for approval.
The City of Olympia has a grant for homeowners who want to turn their lawns/properties into Food Forests. It pays for some materials and all of the labor. The homeowners pay for the plants.
There is also a local organization called GRuB that provides FREE raised beds and container gardens to Thurston County residents. Folks qualify for free raised beds, container gardens, AND free plants based on financial need.
If you are a low income person who is unsure you can afford plants/seeds to start a garden: You can buy plant starts and vegetable seeds with your EBT benefits!
GRuB IS AWESOME. And yay Oly for cool grants (sadly I’m in Tumwater).
As xmagnet-o mentions, Lawnmower Culture is so entrenched that some developments have rules against anything but well-manicured lawns. There are places with lawn awards. This is not only awful for the environment (lawns are a monoculture, usually maintained to high standards only with fertilizers and herbicides, usually mowed with highly inefficient gas-engines, and can be as bad for run-off as a packed gravel driveway), but it’s basically designed to separate the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ – because if you’re a have-not, or even a have-less, wasting time and money primping your useless lawn is NOT going to be a priority.
When a woman gives birth, she is usually allowed to take 12 weeks of
unpaid leave. But many women can’t afford to take that much time off
work. Now North Dakota State employees have a progressive new benefit
that’s become a popular addition to the workplace.
Rikki Roehrich
gave birth to her son Eli about 4 months ago. She says she didn’t know
what to expect participating in the new program, “I was kind of worried
at first that he might cry a lot or something. But I think if anything,
he loves coming here and seeing everyone on a daily basis"
Fortunately
for Roehrich with the ‘Infant at Work’ benefit at the Department of
Commerce, she was able to return to work earlier and still spend time
with baby Eli. She says, “The first couple of months of life with babies
is so crucial to be there to bond with them, I really think a lot of
parents are torn and feel guilty because they can’t give 100 percent to
both work and their new child and so with this program you don’t have to
choose.”
Amanda Remynse is expecting a child soon and hopes to
use the program as well. Until then though she says she can learn by
observing and asking questions, using it as a helping hand into
motherhood.
She says, “I’m able to see what other mothers are
doing, what products they’re using. You know it’s a really great support
network that probably wouldn’t have been identified if a baby wouldn’t
have been in the office.”
Roehrich recommends the program to all
businesses, “I came back after six week’s full-time and I had no problem
doing that. I would have taken longer without the program.“
The
program allows newborn babies the ability to stay in the workplace up
until six-months-old. Workers who don’t have a baby in the office say
they enjoy having the babies around.
Copyright 2016 KING
Funny that King5 (Seattle station) is reporting on this in North Dakota, when Washington State’s Department of Health has been doing this, too (It may be broader; I only know about DoH). My parents both work there – they’re thrilled, say it’s been great for morale, and always tell me about the new ‘office baby.’ Dad was a bit sad when the last one in his office aged out at 6 months. (There’re guidelines – if a baby is routinely disruptive, then they can’t come, but it hasn’t been a problem thus far.)
Still not as good as paid leave, but it’s nice to see options.
Broad demographic shifts in marital status, educational attainment and employment have transformed the way young adults in the U.S. are living, and a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data highlights the implications of these changes for the most basic element of their lives – where they call home. In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.
C-3PO to Han Solo in Empire: Sir, I don’t know where your ship learned to communicate, but it has the most peculiar dialect.
this isn’t gone into at all but I like the idea that the Falcon, bashed together from illegal aftermarket parts, familiar with all corners of the galaxy but with no real home, speaks her own patois that works reasonably well everywhere rather than learning several formal machine languages (I imagine there are relatively few of those compared to the range of lifeforms’ languages, but still)
3PO is fluent in over six million forms of communication, so he’s surely familiar with various pidgins, creoles, and so on, but if the Falcon’s sort of created one for herself then obviously translating it will be a more involved job
protocol droids probably have algorithms for parsing pidgins and creoles by identifying the parent languages and predicting how the language will behave based on the parents’ vocabulary/grammar and the general processes of creole formation
I like the idea of the Falcon getting impatient with 3PO because he keeps asking her to repeat herself and she’s like who the hell are you and why can’t you understand plain talk when you hear it
revisiting this thought: imagine Rey, who has met about a thousand different droids and computers and learned to speak whatever language they speak
she starts talking to the Falcon’s computer because something is broken, again, and it takes her all of five minutes to pick up the peculiar dialect because it’s similar to one common among smugglers’ ships she’s repaired, though it has a few idiosyncracies that are new to her (in part because it’s honestly just older than most things she’s run into)
soon enough instead of plugging in a droid to find out what’s wrong she’s just yelling at the Falcon from upside down in a compartment full of sparks and the Falcon is insulting her repair skills and insinuating some really unpleasant things about her parentage and Rey’s like JUST TELL ME WHERE THE SHORT IS ALREADY YOU CAN TRASH-TALK ME WHEN YOUR CIRCUITRY’S NOT SETTING ME ON FIRE
Ever needed to hear about mad dad birds with enormous feet? Try THESE on for size:
What’s that you say? These are clearly the feet of a dinosaur, not a bird? WHY NOT BOTH?
This is Australia’s very own dinosaur, the second-largest bird in the world, the emu. Say hi!
They roam around Australia making ‘wonk-wonk’ noises under their breath and glaring at everything. And the dads take care of the babies! They sit on the eggs…
They look after the tiny stripey adorable things….
They look after the less tiny less adorable things…
And they even look after the great big menacing things that are almost as big as they are.
But here’s the catch. All emus look pretty much alike. Especially when you are a tiny stripey adorable thing. All you can see of your dad is is great big dinosaur feet (see picture #1). So there is one very unrealistic thing about all the adorable terrifying dinosaur family photos above:
I have never seen an emu family in the wild where all the babies are the same size.
Here is the reason!
Emu dad and his emu babies are roaming about wonking and glaring at everyone. Suddenly emu dad sees another emu dad! A threat!
Emu dads do some display threats with dancing and bouncing and fluffing and… look, it’s very serious business, okay?
If this does not work to see off one emu they might progress to actual fighting.
Oops, sorry, you wanted the dignified version. Here, have some ART:
MAGNIFICENT.
Either way, this encounter will end up with one or both adult emus zooming away as fast as he can run. This is very fast.
This is the other thing they do besides wonking and glaring, by the way. They run. Fear the running emu.
Anyway, this leaves all the tiny and medium-sized and semi-large stripey things milling around making confused tiny “cheep? wonk?” noises and basically just following whichever pair of large feet they can find.
HI DAD
And so mostly when you see a male emu with a gaggle of youngsters at heel, they are all different sizes. Who knows whose they are? Not him! But he’s going to look after them anyway.
*evo-psych voice* and this, you see, is why men are particularly suited to nursing and childcare work. As we see in the wild, for instance with emus, paternal instincts run deep and often over-ride blood ties and competitive instinct!
The most magical thing about dinosaurs really is when you imagine them doing ridiculous mating/threat/freaking out displays like emus or other dinobirds do. Just imagine it. Try it. It’ll change your life. Our ideas about dinosaurs are all like swelling soundtracks and giraffe-style majesty but I bet you anything they were more like these vaguely terrifying knuckleheads.
