The Underused Subjects

Cnetizens: Why the thousand-year-old stone statues at the Northern Song Mausoleums aren’t covered with glass enclosures.

The director of the Cultural Relics Bureau replies: "They’ve stood here largely intact for over a millennium. Why add extra barriers?"

Visitors worry wind, rain and sunlight in the farmland will wear them down. The director explains:

Glass covers speed up decay—it’s like locking the statues in a sauna. Trapped heat and moisture create sharp temperature shifts. Salt crystals inside the stone expand and crack the carvings far faster than open-air exposure.

These statues blend naturally with the farmland landscape. Glass barriers would destroy the sense of scale and historical atmosphere.

When first built, the mausoleum complex was a restricted royal compound ringed by walls, palaces and pine trees—no farmland at all. After the Song fell, protection systems collapsed. Wars and weather destroyed buildings. Local residents gradually dismantled the abandoned structures, reusing timber and bricks in nearby villages.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, villagers turned the empty grounds into farmland, leaving stone figures scattered amid crops.

Few people damaged the statues for three reasons: each weighs several tons and is impossible to move; folk belief held that anyone who damaged the guardian statues would be cursed with misfortune; every later dynasty passed laws punishing those who vandalized former imperial mausoleums.

Once an exclusive imperial burial ground, now ordinary farmland—this shift tells the story of history. Glass covers would only be unnecessary. As an old Chinese poem puts it: 旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家

The swallows that were wont to grace the halls of Wang and Xie, Now seek the humble roofs of common men.

(cr 大鹅呀eyaeyaeya，陈帆fotochen，摄色📸，腾腾兔兔🐰)

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

This is because topless equality has been a basic push from feminists for literally decades, until Radfems and NeoCons bonded over wanting a trans genocide less than a decade ago.

It's literally why the "no tits on tumblr" and other lesser SESTA/FOSTA consequences* like it were so jarring. It set back FORTY. YEARS. OF PROGRESS in the rights of people with breasts or perceived as women to wear the same clothes as people without.

Do not let conservatives lie to you about this. The majority of people in the us and the VAST majority of States recognize the right of people to not wear a damn shirt. It isn't obscenity, it isn't even nudity, it's just something pericis men are allowed that everyone else isn't.

Y'know.

Basic sexual discrimination.

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.

So 

I suspect this was meant as a visual pun because this server is rated for 733 watts, almost exactly one metric horsepower

Ao3 does not need a 1-5 star rating system, you just want to bring down authors writing for FREE

Ao3 does not need automatic censorship, it is an archive, therefore anything can be posted

Writing or reading about something illegal does not mean the author nor the reader condones it, if that were true, you could never read a story involving anything negative

I've discussed this before, but the issue with limited resources isn't that we have too many people overall, but that certain people use way more of the resources than others. "overpopulation" fears tend to be directed at countries with large populations like india and china, but per capita, those people use very few resources. americans use much, much more resources (not just per capita, but overall) despite having a fraction of the population that other countries have. not just “undeveloped” countries; americans use twice as much energy per capita as the british despite both countries having high standards of living. what this tells us is that the number of people doesn't matter so much as the distribution does. it's blaming poor nonwhite people for a crisis that a tiny percentage of people are actually responsible for.

fears of "low birth rates," on the other hand, are never actually about low birth rates in general, because overall there isn't a drop in birth rate: the global population continues to grow, not shrink. it's about too few of the "right" kind of people being born: white people (if you’re a white nationalist), Christians (if you’re a Christian nationalist), intelligent people (if you buy into Idiocracy-style eugenics), etc.

I would further argue that the fear of low birth rates from a practical/economical standpoint ("who will care for our aging population?" "what happens if there are more people drawing from social security than are contributing?" etc., etc.) is falling victim to the classic blunder of assuming that the 1950s were normal and how things had always been, and not the convergence of a bunch of different factors that are unlikely to be repeated. the baby boom was not normal. we are never going to have enough people to replace every boomer unless we get them from other countries through immigration.

(Just to be clear: we're at like 9b right now.)

They didn't bother doing the math for if we do make those changes, because at that point there are too many variables (what if we get twice as good at water conservation? What if we all get as good at it as Las Vegas? What if we manage to engineer our crops to grow three times as much? Ten times? What would growing on satellites do to food production?), but the math for just the solid numbers we have right now made it very clear:

We are at less than 1/3 of what we can support with our current food and water technology, and our food and water technologies are improving all the time. As long as we don't hit some kind of global dark age that zips us all back to 1200s-level technology--which is possible but so unlikely as to basically be a rounding error--there is no reason our technology shouldn't continue to far outstrip our population. And even if we did get smacked with a significant asteroid or Carrington Event or a chain reaction of supervolcano eruptions, we know more about how agriculture works than we did in the 1200s. You can still sow modern high-yield wheat with a hand plow. You can still preserve food by canning over an open fire, as long as you have a big enough pot and a way to mark time (which can be as simple as counting and making tally marks or measuring time by song! It doesn't have to be complicated!). It would hurt, but we'd still be able to support more people than we could have in the actual 1200s, and we'd be much closer to getting back to modern production abilities because that research has already been done.