ArchaeoGyrl

1. Do you have control over how much money you make, not including taking more jobs/hours? (Ex: being able to charge a higher rate for your work) If not, you're an employee!

2. Can you make investments to grow your business, not merely maintain it? (Ex: a photographer buying a new camera) If not, you're an employee!

3. Is the work indefinite or continuous, i.e. not a specific time based engagement? You're an employee!

4. If someone else has control over your work - sets your schedule, dictates your prices, supervises your work (including through electronic tracking), is able to discipline you - you're an employee!

Here's a helpful little explainer graphic from the Dept of Labor. Let me tell you, my job duties all firmly place me on the blue side of the line, not the yellow one.

This is a rule that pertains to a lot of us out there. It's worth contacting your local state labor department and asking them questions. Remember, government agencies don't get funding unless they can argue that they're being useful: using their services gives them ammunition to do that kind of thing.

Disclaimer: I am not an immunologist or any kind of expert but I do stay up to date on the science. This is me presenting to you what I understand.

Disclaimer 2: This post assumes that you agree with me that COVID is still a relevant threat to personal & public health, and that measures must be taken. If you disagree with that, I'm not going to try to convince you on this post. I also won't cover vaccines, because I assume you're staying up to date with boosters.

Table of contents:

How to know how prevalent COVID is in your area

How COVID spreads from person to person (in order to better understand what precautions to take and why)

Respirators: what's good and bad with them, and where to find good ones

Air safety: ventilation, filtration, far-UV, and all that good stuff

Helpful pharmacy finds: nasal sprays, mouthwash, rapid antigen tests, Paxlovid, and more

My personal risk assessment guidelines

Okay, with that out of the way, let's begin!

like, there are SO MANY plants that are tiny herbs without conspicuous flowers that are really hard to notice. And the most visually dominant/striking plants aren't actually the only ecologically important things, it would be hard to find an ecosystem with ONLY the showy plants that are intentionally planted in pollinator gardens, in fact maybe some random tiny weed is supporting the most insects

In a natural ecosystem spaces between larger plants are filled in by smaller plants all the way down to the tiniest mosses

It makes sense to include small, "uncharismatic plants" in a pollinator garden because it would be a kind of green mulch that lowers maintenance. The classic wood chip mulch doesn't provide the kind of habitat characteristics that are similar to a meadow

There's so many small details that it's like people can't notice because of the level of smallness. But think of how small many of the bugs are. Even the smallest characteristics of the organic matter on the ground could make it a totally different habitat for them, a leaf from one species vs. another could be like the difference between an abandoned parking lot and a luxury hotel

These things are ugly. Grey ragwort is a sufficient descriptor and popcorn flowers at their prettiest look like this:

The real experience with a popcorn flower? They look like an offbrand tumbleweed that's starting to die:

You can fit four flowers on your pinky nail and have room left over. They're covered in prickly hairs that make them irritating to touch with anything less than feathertip pressure.

I love them so, so much. <3

In my neck of the woods (northern CA - think oak woodlands and the southern reaches of the redwood forest ecosystem) there are a lot of un-showy and rarely-propagated plants that seem to dominate in the forest understory, including:

American Trail Plant

Pacific Sanicle

and Sweet Cicely

These aren't big, showy plants, and but they're important members of the ecosystem. That doesn't even get into the many, many small 'weedy' annuals that are often left out even from restoration plantings, due to how easily they get overrun by invasive species. Popcornflower are some of these (there are over 100 species of popcornflower), but there are many more.

So you'd better stop thinking about activism as Crunch Time where if you can just work a little harder until $X point, you can pause and rest. There will always be another $X point. You need to build a way of volunteering and speaking and stepping up that incorporates rest and joy into your life: bread, so you have the strength to continue stepping up, and roses, so you remember why you did it in the first place.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are still making it mandatory to mask when interacting with them.

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS get PCR tested and make it mandatory for everyone to do the same before interacting with them.

Rich people and government officials like the PotUS are making it mandatory to make sure everywhere they go has filtered, clean air.

They are protecting themselves and still taking precautions during this on-going pandemic while lying to our faces that the pandemic is over. They may be maskless on camera, but they're sure as fuck rushing to get tested after the fact.

From Men at Arms: The Play, 15th book of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example.

“He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.

“Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years.

This person writes fanfic about real life musicians from the 60s, including mpreg. They’re also openly homophobic. Someone made a post joking about Davy Jones from the band The Monkees being gay and OP went off on them about how disrespectful it is to headcanon real life people who are still alive as being gay. OP’s inbox got flooded by people pointing out that they themselves write fic about actual real life people who are still alive being mpreg’d but they insist it’s totally different you guys I swear and had a meltdown.