Move slow and repair things

The depressed teen that hates their parents has been a trope for years. Saying someone has daddy issues or that their behavior is fatherless is an insult. People call kids “ipad babies” and make fun of their short attention span.

correct

Magnifies a display beyond standard options with keyboard / mouse movement inputs or voice commands,

Can read text on the screen,

Has different color filter options for text / background distinction,

Can change and magnify the cursor beyond standard amounts,

Works on Windows or more than just Windows,

Has a keyboard echo (says the character you've pressed on the keyboard out loud)

there are multiple ways for a tree to die, each with their own impacts on the ecosystem. Many trees die standing, becoming starkly bare pillars of standing deadwood with increasingly fewer branches and more sharply whitened surfaces as the bark falls off and the branches break, the smaller branches first and then the larger ones. Standing deadwood is vital for housing lots and lots of bird species and it also has an undeniable sexiness and charisma

Trees broken by wind, snapping off at some point up the trunk, are often hollow in the middle from heart rot fungi. I don't think the fungi actually kill the tree, since the center of the tree (the heartwood) is dead anyways, but they do structurally weaken it.

One of the most dramatic tree deaths is windthrow. This happens to large trees that are solid all the way through and not easily broken by the forces of wind; instead, the roots are wrenched violently out of the ground, creating a bowl-shaped hole in the ground with a huge mound of twisted tree roots standing 5 or 6 feet tall next to it.

The death of a tree by windthrow feels very sad, because the tree seemed to be thriving up until that point, but the effect on the ecosystem is very fascinating. The hole in the ground where the root ball was torn up creates a shaded, sheltered area, sometimes filling with water to become a small pool. The root ball itself, right next to it, becomes a tall pile of soil and decomposing wood.

When walking in the forest, I often notice strange mounds rising from the layer of leaf litter, covered in lush carpets of moss, like bustling moss metropolises rising out of lowlands that only have scattered moss towns. Elevated from the forest floor, the moss-hills do not become covered with leaf litter. In some cases, these distinctive moss-hills are still visibly connected to the fallen trunk of a windthrown tree; in other cases, the tree trunk has almost completely decayed, and only the mound created by the root ball remains.

I read once in an article that the creation of humps and valleys by the windthrown tree roots is characteristic of old growth forests. That is, the forest has existed so long, with trees living majestically and dying violently in it, that the ground is no longer a smooth plane, but humpy and bumpy and pitted and pooled from centuries of trees dying by windthrow.

My observations seem to agree that these windthrown-tree-humps have unique ecology, particularly in terms of their thriving moss colonies that remain even after the tree that originally died has rotted away. They would create a million little variations on light and moisture level, gathering leaf litter in some places and keeping it away from others. Variations create multiplying amounts of biodiversity due to the increased amount of niches to fill.

In my area, one of the first tall trees to shoot up after land is disturbed is the water oak (Quercus nigra. They get 50-70ft tall and 3 feet in diameter in about 50 years. They often have very, very shallow root systems. Because of this, they fall over faster than other trees. They are also more prone to disease, and hollow out from the center faster and more often, and are likely to have dead sections on loving trees, providing even more unique habitat.

So some of our forests that are only 50 years old have old-growth-characteristics because of these trees. And then they fall, or otherwise die, leaving room for our true old growth species to rise up. But the pits and mounds of these fallen early-risers are also shaped differently than those of more deeprooted species. They are shallower pools or valleys, and sometimes form a wall that is perpendicular to the forest floor - completely vertical to the ground.

This is just one example, but understanding it, we can see that the predominance of different species in a forest can drastically change its microclimates and topography! Different species rot in different ways, hollow in different ways, and form different shapes on the landscape. If there are lots of different tree species in your area, then the different proportions they grow in, die in, fall in, and the different timings at which they do so, offer an endless aboundment of variety.

This is why no two forests are the same, and no single wild area is ever truly replaceable, or interchangeable. Because each has developed entirely differently, with so many little factors playing in.

Intensive farming has all but destroyed England’s ancient woodlands and freshwater wetlands. On a farm in Lincolnshire a radical aristocrat hopes to show there’s money in protecting nature.

In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire but across Britain and beyond...

"Something I've learned while in law school is about the social construction of crime. I work in a legal clinic on wage theft cases, where employers have "improperly paid" workers by not paying, paying below min wage, withholding overtime, paid sick time, etc.

Most theft is wage theft. Meaning, the dollar value of stolen wages is greater than the value, each year, of all burglaries + robberies, shoplifting, auto theft, combined. Yet, wage theft is not a crime."

Below this tweet is an image comparing the cost of robbery, auto theft, burglary, larceny and wage theft in billions. Robbery only hits 0.34 billion, auto theft 3.8 billion, burglary 4.1 billion, larceny 5.3 billion, and wage theft accounts for greater than 19 billion dollars. The data is sourced from the FBI and EPF.

"If you steal $100 from your employer, you will get arrested. If you call the police because your paycheck is $100 light, the police will tell you to file a complaint with the AG, and the AG will settle the case for between $50 and $200.

(That's actually not true, because AG's only take on big cases where thousands of dollars are at stake, but they will settle big cases by typically requiring the employer to properly pay what is owed. No jail, no criminal record.)

If the AG doesn't want to take the case, it will give you a Private Right of Action to sue the employer in civil court for what you are owed, plus damages. It can take a 6 to 18 months to win at trial, and months or years to collect on the judgement if you win.

This is what we mean when we say crime is socially constructed. Not all social harms are criminalized. Not all actors committing social harm are criminalized.

I settled a case for $27k for three clients last year. We spent a MONTH negotiating the non-disclosure agreement because the employer stated if all his employees sued him and settled like this, he would go BANKRUPT. His business model DEPENDED on wage theft.

These employers go on to hold elected office. 45 famously used wage theft to improve his finances on construction projects, leaving a trail of victims in his wake. Some sued and he had to pay them. Others didn't have resources to pursue multi-year litigation + got nothing."

Then the user responds to someone else asking a question.

The question:

"Can you explain this reasoning? Why expanding criminal liability is a bad idea? For whom?"

The user replies:

"What should we do about it? Criminalize employers or decriminalize theft or something else?

Wage theft shows that we believe restitution is important. Giving the money back is important. Currently, AG keeps track of bad actors and will increase future penalties for bad actors.

It also shows when harm is committed, we don't have to lock someone in a cage or label them a felon, both of which destroy years of life even after the sentence is over. We can demand restitution instead of punishment.

It also shows how ridiculous the label "high crime neighborhood" is. And the arbitrary and racist response of police surveillance in HCN. Because we defined it that way.

Consider the social construction of murder:

The people committing the most harm aren't in jail, don't live in high crime neighborhoods. And "black people commit more crime" is true only because of how we have defined crimes, and how we then surveil their community in response to find more crimes.

There are so many orgs trying to address harm and create accountability within community + without incarceration. We call ourselves prison abolitionists.

Just a few: @ byp100, @ survivepunishNY, @ justicehealing, @ DeeperThanWater, @ BlackAndPinkBos and @ BlmBoston"

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

tech news today is that Mullvad VPN has gone mask-off about being the major funding source for the Swedish Orebro party, who are racist nationalists. unfortunately all discussion of this is occurring on fucking Mastodon instances i can barely load

if you are a mullvad customer (as i am) and want to get out, here is guidance from this guy