Lord of the Fries

"Not really, it's more like a structure that spontaneously grows a dick and balls when it comes into contact with the 'female' part of the plant"

"it's a Plant Crotch"

"if your crotch was also your child that was parasitically attached to you than yes"

In seed plants, the haploid second organism is very small and totally dependent on the parent plant (just a few cells inside the parent plant for the 'female' side, and pollen grains for the 'male' side) which gives the illusion that they are one organism

However.

In mosses, it's backwards.

The plant we recognize as "moss" is the haploid (one set of chromosomes) reproductive-cell-producing phase. 

The whole plant known as moss is equivalent to pollen, and the diploid phase (with two sets of chromosomes, like you!) is small and dependent on it.

iNaturalist recognizes gray wolf, "eastern wolf" and red wolf as three different species, though from wikipedia it seems like all three have hybridized like crazy with each other and with coyotes and domestic dogs for their whole evolutionary history, and they all split apart very recently.

Also African wolves are hybrids of gray wolves and Ethiopian wolves, but Himalayan and Indian wolves are more closely related to African wolves, and golden jackals are nested within the same genus.

But the African wolf is more closely related to gray wolves and coyotes than it is to golden jackals. (????)

I don't know. I'm not sure if any of that is even correct. There are a gazillion genetic studies trying to figure out how all of these species are related and how they hybridized with each other, and it's all over the place.

ANYWAY the reason this is so weird is that in the USA we have coyotes, which are abundant, viewed as vermin, and can be hunted year round without limits, and wolves, which are extremely protected and endangered and vital to ecosystems. A lot of people LOVE wolves, but they have much more negative or indifferent feelings toward coyotes.

Here, coyotes are thought of as so strongly and sharply different from wolves, TOTALLY different things. The main distinction being size; wolves are huge and gigantic and coyotes are small.

But now I'm learning that many of the animals called "wolves" in other parts of the world are much more similar to our coyotes, both in size and social behaviors. And furthermore, it seems like size and social behaviors convergently evolved in different species or populations of wolves, rather than the "small, more socially flexible" wolves and the "big, tight-knit social structure" wolves forming two separate branches of the family tree

So like, it's undeniable, whether you go by genetics or by appearances or by behavior, that coyotes are just a type of wolf, they're one of the several wolf species that exist.

And then you get to the fact that basically all of the coyotes in the Eastern USA are actually verified to be hybrids between coyotes and gray wolves, and that the endangered red wolves, which used to inhabit the area where these new coyotes live, were threatened by hybridization with coyotes, and that the extant red wolves were selected out of a pool of red wolf-coyote hybrids. But actually, red wolves were thought to be themselves hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes, but actually actually, the species have been all hybridizing for their whole evolutionary history, so what does that even mean?

The red wolf reintroduction program has been struggling because people keep shooting and killing the animals. They wear bright orange collars, but people shoot them anyway. The enemies of red wolf conservation say they are not genuine wolves and are "just coyotes."

The wolves don't know what a species is, but the law is called the Endangered SPECIES act, so red wolves have to be a "species," or it is legal to slaughter them all. Species is fake, but we need it to be real to justify the value of certain populations of animals.

I don't know, like. I'm not an expert on this stuff! I'm just having a lot of thoughts on...the strong cultural distinction between coyotes and wolves? Like the cultural difference is SO much stronger than the biological difference. Wolf conservation is forced to prove that wolves are Totally Different than coyotes, and to decide that mixes between coyotes and wolves are automatically coyotes.

And I'm always seeing this common idea that reintroducing wolves will totally transform the ecosystem and fix what's wrong with it, because wolves fulfill the role of large predators. But if there's coyote-wolf hybrids already here, what are they doing to the ecosystem? And if they're behaving in the ecosystem more like omnivorous scavengers than large predators, is that because of what they are genetically, or is it because of the environment they have to survive in?

Yellowstone wolves were so impactful because of how they interacted with large herbivores, but if you introduced wolves into much of the eastern USA, where elk and bison have been wiped out, what would that even do? Would the wolves be able to thrive at all? Would they stay wolves, or would they breed with coyotes and make coyote-wolves again? Coyotes have thrived in the ecosystem humans have built over the past 100 years, becoming ever more successful and numerous. How could wolf genes take the place of coyote genes in an ecosystem that is so coyotegenic?

What about areas where the elk have been reintroduced? Do the coyote-wolves stay coyote-like, or do they start to wolf-ify because of different genes being selected?

Why's everybody swear up and down that somebody they know owns a wolfdog, but nobody ever has a coyotedog, even though contact between coyotes and dogs seems way more likely?

Kit fox, red fox, fennec fox, arctic fox, bat-eared fox, and some others are actually related and in a group together, but everything in South America including bush dogs, maned wolves and crab-eating foxes are in a different group together, and gray foxes are their own thing completely different from all the other canines.

First we have this very nice coyote

This one has the same colors and markings, but it is a more slender and smaller-bodied version, with the narrow snout clearly shown

This one on the other hand has much broader face and jaws

Very interesting variation in color! Brindle, with no white parts on the face or chest.

This one is a pale, sandy orange shade with extraordinarily tall, straight ears.

Dog-like, reminds me of a dingo, with wide set ears and orange fur.

Narrow snout, tall legs, and sandy red fur again, with darker shading on the back and face. The ears are tall, and more pointed than we saw before.

WHAT IS THAT

This is one of the smaller-bodied and mischief-adapted types.

The tall ears are extremely round instead of pointed, and the jaws are wide. It has a heavier body. (I believe this was in the East Texas area known to have high rates of Red Wolf hybridization.)

This one has a black coat and extremely wide set ears on a broad head.

Its head appears large compared to the rest of its body, and very broad and heavy-jawed, with a noticeable forehead wrinkle. (I believe this was also in the East Texas area known to have high rates of Red Wolf hybridization.)

This one has enormous, very round ears, paired with a narrower, more lightweight snout and jaws. It has a long body and long legs.

This one has a very heavy and robust body and large, triangular ears, with much more gray toned fur and a fully white patch covering its snout

It has a very striking square muzzle and head.

Looks quite large and more wolf shaped, but still with large, coyote-style ears.

I have shown this one on here before...this was the inspiration for the collection. It looks pretty big, still with a long, narrow snout, but the ears are small.

Those are some truly fascinating markings--seems to have a uniform creamy-orange coat with black extremities, and the ears are so big and close-set there is almost no space between them.

Another black coyote, this gives you a good look at how long the snout is. Again, on the larger side for coyotes.

This is another example of a black coyote, but a smaller-bodied and more compact version.

ohh good idea good idea,,, lets hear what he has to say 🎧

give it up for this iconic wad shaped bird!!!!

I'D NEVER SEEN A SCALED PIGEON BEFORE. this thing rules so much

Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia), family Strigidae, order Strigiformes, Southern CA, USA

Two Women Teaching a Child to walk by Rembrandt.

Circa 1640, sketch

The one below is from the Met and is from the early 19th century. As you can see in the drawing, the design didn’t change much from Rembrandt’s time. According to the Met, they were called bumpers or pudding caps.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

vancouver coastal “sea” wolves