I appreciate this comment so much. Praise the Sun!

That is a fun fact. Thank you!

I saw the bigger ones from far away, but when I got close and the babies were sunbathing too, I went into full swoon.

Luckily all my neighbors and I seem to be very good about giving the wildlife space, so they’re not too afraid to be out in the open.

It’s always fun taking a walk into the park and running into a few cute little babies.

Not-so-fun fact: Surveillance drones, that we know of, go back as far as the Vietnam War.

The first UAV attacks date back to the middle of the 1800’s.

I’m pointing to observable cause-and-effect.

I don’t buy it.

In 2008 when the travel industry crashed in the wake of the market crash, and again in 2020 after COVID lockdowns started, we saw significant decreases in pollution.

Meat isn’t the problem. Fossil fuels are.

Went to turn it off.

Apparently I already did. Marvelous.

Hello friend.

This point has been discussed elsewhere in the thread. I hope you have a nice afternoon.

I dunno, H.

I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.

As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.

I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)

I hope you’re right.

That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.

Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.

America, baby. Dig it.

Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.

We’re already there. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn’t been affected much.

But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it’s hard to argue we aren’t already largely ‘crashed’.

Gaming in the 90’s was so glorious.

They do indeed.

My parents are deeply religious, but have never figured out that it’s my siblings and I who actually answer their prayers.

Only when taken out of context.

I know it doesn’t matter, but after all I’ve read about Nintendo and the Switch 2 in the last year?

Fuck 'em. I’m going to get a Steam Deck or a Lenovo handheld, and I’ll just enjoy the Nintendo products I already have. I’m not spending a small fortune on a console that they can brick remotely, or force me to buy a $50 proprietary charger for, or a “virtual game cartridge”.

Fuck all of that bullshit.

This app sounds exceedingly useful to me.