a little bit of everything

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

i say ban oil pipelines, period.

they will just be dirty poisonous empty pipes in 20 years when oil inevitably becomes a stranded asset.

and the straw ban isn't the worst idea in the world. it's just pretty obviously not as consequential to the overall problem as fucking OIL.

but i do think single use plastic needs to go. if we had a different attitude about this shit, like, if we reused plastic straws instead of throwing them in the garbage, they wouldn't be so bad.

we don't really have plastic straws where i live anymore but any time we come across one we rinse it and hold onto it to be used again instead of landfilling it. not just cuz of plastic waste but because they've become rare lol. it'll usually be a vietnamese restaurant that's still using them and its a bit like finding gold.

the alternative to plastic straws of course is to make the straws out of the many types of bioplastic being developed that are compostable and often made from recycled organics. but that's more expensive and no (large) company wants to pay for that.

all single use plastic is bad though. not just straws. focusing only on straws is silly. i think if the plastic isn't or can't or is unlikely to be reused it should be banned unless there are very specific reasons not to. like sanitation or medical uses or whatever. we shouldn't be throwing plastic out after one use out of convenience. that's boomer age shit we need to get out of.

and we need to ban petroleum. leave the oil in the ground. leave the methane in the ground. transition society away from using this shit as inefficient fuel. (more boomer age shit to get out of.)

Being supportive of binary people is relatively simple, they have decided to sort themselves into one of the boxes that we have lots of experience interacting with. Being supportive of nonbinary people can be comparatively tricky, because you have to resist the urge to create box C and drop them all there. That's how we end up with various prejudices like "woman lite". Humans really, really like to categorize things. It helps us think. Unfortunately, sometimes it helps us think wrong.

A Nova Scotia charity focused on making legal information more accessible has launched a new digital library offering resources, guides and videos that have been translated into nine languages. The hope is that it will help newcomers to Canada navigate the legal system. “The Legal Information Society of Nova Scotia worked with HRM to create a suite of legal information resources for newcomers to Canada, and in particular youth and their families, about the criminal justice system,” said Nicole Slaunwhite, a legal information counsellor with the group. The society was formed in 1982 to help people understand their rights and make informed choices.

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GEN DAN CAINE: I'm not aware of those being particular targets, nor am I aware of those reports

HEGSETH: Ultimately Iran will never have a nuclear weapon

Steph and Damian have the relationship in comics that people believe Tim and Damian have.

Steph is probably one of the first in the bat-family to actually treat Damian as what he is: a ten year old boy. Not as a weapon or as a danger to everyone around him.

Look how she reacts when she realizes Damian doesn’t know how to be a child!

She goes out of her way, post mission, to set up a bouncy castle playdate for Damian.

> “It’s called a moon bounce.”

Grooming involves someone deliberately trying to gain a minor's trust and open them up for sexual abuse. The intent is important here, because a lot of the actions that can constitute grooming are superficially completely benign.

For example, being kind, listening to a child when they talk about their problems or giving them gifts can be grooming if the person doing it intends to abuse the child, but otherwise it is just being a decent person.

That's developmentally normal - there are always edgy teenagers - and it's something kids have been doing for as long as kids have had widespread access to recorded media.

I know a lot of abuse survivors - people who experienced serious harm and lasting trauma from things other human beings did to them. It's not the same as just being weirded out because you played a game or read a book or watched a movie that was a little too graphic for you.

VS