are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

“We are done accepting apologies in place of action. If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people,” the GOP lawmakers wrote. “That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity. It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year,” they warned.

there's no way they aren't aware of each other. these spiders sense by vibration, you can't share a web with a pholcid and have them just not know about it, and they routinely swap positions in the web (ms. missing leg is often on the opposite side of ms. 8 legs that she was when last observed).

obviously i'm not mad about this, it's fascinating behavior and i feel so privileged to get to see it, but i have absolutely zero explanation for it. in my investigation so far i haven't been able to find any documented association between pholcids that isn't mating or motherhood or cannibalism. they're sedentary web hunters, they can't afford to share a capture web with another conspecific, and there are almost no flying insects in our bathroom (their web is in the corner of the ceiling out in the open, which is also kind of unusual for pholcids, they tend to prefer going below overhangs, and i suspect they'd actually have more success with a web on the floor bc we Do get crawlers like millipedes and carpet beetle larvae pretty frequently, but also we keep the bathroom dark 100% of the time even when in use bc of my photosensitivity so perhaps they've been tricked into thinking this is more secure than it is based on the light levels?), so i have no idea how they're getting enough prey for the both of them. surely they can't be sharing?? i haven't actually seen them capture anything in this web so far but obviously it's possible i've missed something, i only watch them when i'm in the bathroom.

i can't help but think eventually one of them is going to eat the other, which will be sad for me personally because i've grown quite fond of them but i do want at least one of them to live. and i just can't imagine they're getting much prey. should we try to capture a fly or something and tenderly feed it to them. well, 2 flies, i guess. i don't think pholcids would make ideal pets just bc they're relatively skittish and not very visual compared to salticids. but i do love them both and i want them to eat well.

ms 8 legs is still very skinny. i fear she hasn't had a meal in a while bc she's been skinny the whole time i've seen her. she's also attempting active hunting throughout the bathroom which pholcids (and other web hunters) usually don't do unless they're very hungry. i don't know why this is the case when she could just eat ms missing leg... surely it must be love? or some kind of judgment call based on their relative strength, they are araneophagous (even invading other webs to eat their owners!) so they definitely have the cognitive skills to make that call, but idk why ms missing leg would not simply eat the weaker pholcid! strongly considering bringing ms 8 legs some food by hand because i feel so bad for her and her stick-thin opisthosoma... she's so small! i don't know how long she can go without prey... looks like at least a week but many sedentary spiders can go much longer, it's just so odd to leave their web at all that i'm quite concerned given the frequency of the behavior, i have no idea how long it's been since her last meal

here is a lower quality picture from a couple days ago as proof of their relationship. they are so elegant, i love watching them move. the rotary probing in particular is really beautiful (lifting the long front legs above the silk, making little looping movements, coming to rest again when they hit a thread). their movement and exploration as tactile creatures is very familiar to me as a tactile creature myself

it's all desperation. i do really believe ed zitron's rot economy idea, that the tech sector has been searching for a new internet or iphone or whatever that blows up and changes the world and they get to keep the profits so they'll uplift any garbage (hence nfts and the metaverse) to try and astroturf that. and relatedly, i think nvidia and the cloud compute companies and the ai companies are just passing the same dollar back and forth to create big numbers that paper over how bad the economy really is. it's all an attempt to keep the infinite growth hack going.

The level of missiles in the US air defense stockpile is critical, so Trump may soon call Iran and ask them for a deal (while claiming that Iran called him)