paving over huge areas of the earth with concrete and forgetting how to grow your own food creates bad situations. every community/neighborhood should by law have a green/garden area of a certain size that is capable of growing most of the food required to sustain the local residents.
That’s not at all feasible for places with long, cold winters, or southwest areas without enough water, among others.
And before you say “well people shouldn’t live there then”, they live in those places because of the other resources. For example, let’s say logging in Montana, or oil fields in Texas. You’re not going to get the world to stop needing those resources any time soon.
and yet people in all of those places manage to grow their own food. humans are a resilient and adaptable species. but anyway, this is a tangent. even if the land has a playground on it, it doesn’t matter. people can decide how to use a blank space in a neighborhood. if food grows well there, then grow food. if not, make it a farmers market and people can bring the food there. the point is…we shouldn’t pave over the earth and then complain about food deserts.
if not, make it a farmers market and people can bring the food there.
The suggestion is that this is essentially what is happening. The exact real estate that these buildings will occupy are not likely to be greatly fertile lands. They might not be farmers markets, but it’s the same point you’re making here.
Dear fuck youre stupid. The problem isnt fucking growing the food not existing it aint a fucking famine or blight. Its logistics you dumb motherfucker. The Central Valley here in California could probably grow enough food for most of the US by itself, but doing so requires a large logistics network. This has always been the rule since the first cities, even if back then it was jusy getting it from the fields to inside the city walls. It is exceptionally rare for a city to grow food within itself.
Yes. Dude ive been a raging asshole since I was fucking eight or so, if anything ive mellowed out since then. Its just I fucking loathe abject stupidity, especially from those who seem to think food desert = no food grown rather than the much simplier answer that is nowhere to buy food. Ah thats no fair I loathe the seventh day adventists, mormons, nazis, and authoritarians far more than I dislike you. Its just something about your dumbshit comment struck a nerve. So in summary piss off dipshit.
fair. and i will piss off…to my garden to harvest my roma tomatoes because the ones at the local store, are shittier and super expensive! co-located food/housing is common all across the world and is super awesome. :D
because the mega-corp owned agricultural industry is so great…all city dwellers should just forget how to grow food because “someone has it covered”. i mean its working so well. people are healthier and happier than ever…certainly aren’t any “food deserts” because the corps got it covered man! just wait for the monsanto truck to show up and feed everyone. or…dare to think out side the box and see that solving “food deserts” might just include tearing up some concrete and planting a few food plants instead of bazillions of square kilometers of manicured grass and generi-bushes.
Doesnt need to be corps, its just a matter of not breathing in fertilizer and pesticides. Agriculture is dirty and will spread disease, namely through the water table. Also if you want any even vaguely efficient harvest of crops it has to be done industrially not just random shitty plots of land.
hmm. it appears your actually just don’t know. small scale agriculture is actually much more efficient. you should look this stuff up before talking about this you don’t know about!
Are we talking garden foods (Tamato, zucchini, peppers) or are we talking staple crops (Wheat, Maize, Potatoes) cause I can see why garden foods would be more efficient, but if we’re talking staple crops then absolutely fucking not. We can harvest corn by the literal tonnes using modern machinery.
good question, im not an industrial farming expert, but i definitely grow a shit ton of food on my own 1 acre property, using only hand tools. One reason small scale farming is more efficient is that the areas planted do not have to adhere to dimensions that will fit industrial farm equipment. For example, think about a grape plantation on a rough hillside. its simply not possible to use industrial harvesting equipment there, so it must be done by hand, yet still produces massive amounts of nutrition/calories off rough land. This applies to individual/family plots too–they aren’t all just flat farmland, they are on hillsides, uneven terrain, etc. An example would be in the third world like in south africa, there are vast neighborhoods of small two-room family shacks, with a bit of land to the side. Each family there produces an unexpectedly large amount of corn, sugar-cane, root veggies, etc on very tiny plots. No industrial equipment could ever fit there or farm there. They produce a large amt of food right next to their shack, and virtually everyone does it because its cheaper and more efficient than walking (yes, walking, they don’t own cars) to the store a few miles away. And another reason, kind of hard to explain, but individual people doing individual farming on their own land tend to take better care of their plants. Pests have a much more difficult time in situations like this, because where they really thrive are gigantic fields of monoculture crops. for example, corn. An industrial corn field often allows weeds and pests to take over the undergrowth around the corn, which significantly limits crop returns, but there are just so many damn corn stalks that can be harvested industrially, that it doesnt’ matter and the end result is still a huge amount. But in relative terms, growing your own corn next to your own house, and paying more individual attention to each plant, results in better actual yields.
Industrial farming relies on complex equipment, and the fact that there is just so much flat land available, that they don’t “need” to be efficient. Take a look at how much diesel is used on industrial farms, and it kind of shows the point. It’s a lot. In general, human bodies doing manual labor are extremely efficient compared to other forms of work, provided they have the knowledge and appropriate context. It takes 3-4 miles of walking to burn off the calories in two slices of bread. Humans are very efficient when working with their hands.
I mean, you’re right. We can grow a shit ton of potatoes on flat land with modern methods. And we do. But that absolutely does not mean individual/small scale urban farming couldn’t do just as well. This year I grew 8 roma tomato plants in a 4ft by 10ft garden. They provided enough tomatoes (400-500) to make over 50 jars of tomato sauce, enough to supply our household for a year. I don’t live on flat or even fertile farm land. My terrain is rocky sandstone, uneven. No mechanized farming could ever be done here. Yes I had to work and amend the soil. Yes it’s hard work for several days of the year. But I need exercise anyway. I don’t buy a gym membership because of the garden work I do. The seeds and plants were free because I save seeds. The total cost of the tomatoes was just my own labor, the water (around $10 worth), and misc costs. The sauce is far cheaper than anything I could buy at the store, since I supplied all of the raw material.
The point is, anyone with even a small plot of land is able to grow large amounts of food, probably a lot more than they think. And most of those places are places that without small-scale/individual gardening, would never see any food production. The issue is, it takes time, knowledge, and special care, and many people aren’t able to pull that off. I realize that, and it’s fine. That’s why big farms exist. But the truth is that there are a large number of people out there who have the time, and ability to do it, but they just don’t know how, or even believe it’s possible. Even just one apple tree can provide a huge amount of nutrition and calories if well cared for and placed correctly.
Wheat and rice? Yea, those don’t lend themselves well to small scale farming. For those things, you are absolutely correct. However, don’t assume those things are necessary. It’s just carbs. I have beets growing in my back yard (enough to last an entire year) that contain more carbs, and more importantly, vastly more nutrients, than a much larger field of wheat or rice. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some pizza and bread, and I buy lots of wheat flour from local farms around me. But those types of crops are NOT necessary for people to eat. They’re luxuries. The proof? Africa and other arid zones. People subsist on small scale farming (and foraging) of root vegetables (casava is the most well known), not vast plantations of rice and wheat. and they do just fine. Root vegetables are often a lot more nutritious than grass seed (which is what rice and wheat are). You just can’t make pizza out of it due to no gluten :(
I think we’re using two different ideas of agricultural efficiency, you seem to be using the idea of most amount of gain from x amount of area while im using the idea of most amount of gain from least amount of manpower.
Also I feel like comparing African subsistance farmers to say urbanized European factory workers is a bit unfair.
Also im aware of how good groves of apples, oranges, and pomegranates can be. My family grew oranges up until the early 80s, its just that historically theyve kinda been luxury foods and still are a pain in the ass to harvest. The only reason they are cheap is cause of cheap labor and subsidies. Sure on the small scale their fine but once ypu get more than three it becomes a pain in the ass and the crows get drunk.
They always had some kind of food importation. Unless you want to go all the way back to the first few people in the area who did subsistence hunting and gathering. But that’s also not feasible for more than a few people.
Eventually one of these antivax fuckers is going to get rabies from an unvaccinated pet or something and then when they start having symptoms they’ll change their tune and beg to be saved but it’ll be far too late.
They also had to define what woke was in court. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. They would happily join a cult and kill their first born if it meant owning the libs. It’s really sad as well as a sign of the mental health and education issues in this country.
I assume the doctor is still not able to visit those states (or another state without this law) without the fear of being arrested? Such a shitty country we live in.
Literally every republican woman I know is a single mom to a deadbeat dad.
Crazy how their rhetoric has been flipped on them. These would be nice people otherwise, but they’re surrounded by shitbags so they feel they also need to be shitty in order to fit in.
Idk about getting struck down, but it seems like laws inside your jurisdiction are going to stand in a way laws outside don’t really. Where it gets tricky is going to be swaths of the country where certain people can’t go for fear of being arrested. Feels like a loosening of federalism to me and more like different countries in a way.
“…an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.”
Yea… now that you mention it, that does sound kinda like us.
Dumbledore is a decent mind reader iirc but Snape was the OG. He didn’t need to read Harry’s mind, he cast the spells on the cup and knew Harry wouldn’t have been able to get his name in there and that someone else had to do it.
As I recall (it’s been a while) you have that backwards, Snape was the OG at blocking mind reading, but only reasonably proficient at doing it himself, whereas Dumbledore was able to weedle memories out of people that they didn’t even know they had
I mean imo JKR is a bad author for about a dozen reasons but that line in particular is not me of them.
Tbh the entire plot hinging on the idea that it is unthinkable to every single person in the Wizarding world that someone would prank the most famous kid in school by putting his name in the cup without his knowledge is a way worse writing decision. Given that’s exactly what happens though Dumbledore acting calmly and implying he knows Harry didn’t actually do it is the most reasonable thing to come out of that book.
Yeah JKR is just immensely bad at world building and macro level details - how, in the hundreds or however many years the Triwizard Tournament has been going on, has no one thought to enter someone else’s name? Why didn’t any of the spells on the cup detect that sort of fraudulent entry, but it could detect magic that physically ages a person? Those kinds of logical holes and inconsistencies are everywhere in her writing. The thing she usually gets right though are the micro details - she’s decently good at character building, character interaction, and keeping characters true to their… Well, character, throughout the books.
It’s literally a core facet of dumbledores character that he’s always genial and calm, even in the face of total disaster. It’s part of what made him an intimidating wizard.
Even besides that though, why wouldn’t he ask calmly? One of two things are true
Harry did put his name in the goblet and is lying about it, in which case going full on “DIDYOUPUTYOURNAMEINTHEGOBLETOFFIRE!?!?” is only likely to put Harry on the defensive and make him less likely to own up.
Harry didnt put his name in the goblet and is being setup by voldy or his buddies. In which case Harry is a victim and should be handled as such. At this point Dumbledore had very good reasons to think this was the more likely of the two.
Dont get me wrong, if you wanna talk about JKRs shitty writing, I’ll happily join you, but this is actually an example of good writing on her part, given that the character in question is supposed to be the smartest wizard alive, it makes perfect sense that he’d react rationally instead of lashing out emotionally
Harry’s reaction alone is probably enough for Dumbledore to know something’s wrong, and asking Harry is just confirmation. Like you said, no reason to be aggressive to him.
I think Dumbledore overall is a brilliantly written character. His calmness portrays a deep wisdom and vast knowledge. The only time we’ve ever seen him outright angry is when Umbridge began to manhandle the student who sold out Dumbledore’s Army. He instantly touched upon a fury that made Umbridge and the Ministry realize they needed to calm down.
He really hasn’t expressed anger otherwise. He was calm facing off against Voldemort in Book 5. He was disappointed in the Dursleys for abusing Harry. He was apologetic when Harry lost control while grieving for Sirius.
Don’t blame her or Gambon either. The director is the one who would be responsible for that scene. He’s the one who decided that Dumbledore should freak the fuck out. Don’t let him off the hook just because of your personal biases against Rowling.
I am still amazed every business seems to think Microsoft cloud would be a good idea for security, availability or just stability. Nothing in the history of Microsoft bears this out. I really don’t get it. For just about everything else at work, there’s a company standard set by business needs.
No one takes you seriously if you bitch about the brand of pen or paper or stapler the office buys. You get the company brand of computer, chair, desk, phone, phone service, etc. But if the company tried to tell you to not use Windows and Outlook everyone believes there would be a catastrophic rebellion or failure of all staff to send and receive email or something.
This has always seemed absurd to me, but worse in government that supposedly needs security and privacy.
Microsoft has service contracts with the DOD which to my knowledge have not been compromised.
I think there are some completely valid reasons for businesses to use Microsoft cloud services:
Shift some of the burden of responsibility to a third party. Organizations love this shit
Microsoft has some of the best paid security analysts and engineers in the industry. Chances are they’d be able to detect and mitigate attacks attacks better than a small local team of not highly paid sysadmins.
Microsoft is large enough to get some assistance from 3 letter agencies. That’s almost never going to happen with smaller companies.
Yeah. Exchange in 365 is, in almost every scenario, the far better option than running it on-prem. No more worries about installing the latest CU before attackers get in.
The only scenario where on-prem makes sense is a totally offline environment.
Shift some of the burden of responsibility to a third party. Organizations love this shit This is the only valid suggestion I’ve seen. And I get it - I just think there’s probably better third parties. Microsoft has some of the best paid security analysts and engineers in the industry. Chances are they’d be able to detect and mitigate attacks attacks better than a small local team of not highly paid sysadmins.
I hear this a lot about cloud companies, but see little evidence of it. People post frequently about leaving big cloud companies because of all sorts of reasons, one of which might well be pay. But even if they did have some of the best paid people - they’re not all highly paid people, and I doubt operations support are those people. (Have you ever tried to talk to Microsoft support?)
As I remember and understood it (I’m not doing a deep dive to refresh my memory for a lemmy post, but the overall point I think stands) the recent hack of Microsoft was because of accepting a home end user certificate to authenticate to a business / corporate (and apparently government) accounts. From what has been released, this happened due to a mix of (IMO) questionable design and lack of documentation or knowledge of how the authentication flows worked. These security engineers should have caught this before it landed in operations - because you have to catch these things in design, not rely on everyone using an authentication framework to sort of “cover for accepting multiple trust centers” that should not overlap. The reason this is a design issue is actually because it seems like it came about because of a new feature or function that wanted to allow lower confidence credentials to migrate to higher confidence or something like that.
If the security engineers missed that - they’re not that great. If they were overruled by management, well, that’s actually likely, but doesn’t change the facts that you as a subscriber didn’t OK that (frankly crazy) design change - you weren’t even informed. This is always an issue with the Cloud services, and I don’t see a way around it. Even people with contractual agreements got screwed here.
Microsoft is large enough to get some assistance from 3 letter agencies. That’s almost never going to happen with smaller companies.
I don’t see how that actually helps though. Most of our 3 letter agencies provide public guidance about defensive security recommendations and have for over a decade. There’s plenty of consultants if you can’t hire internally that can guide you through that stuff. The TLAs are not magical - I guess they might tell you you’ve been hacked or may tell you they know you’ve been targetted - but honestly - OF COURSE Microsoft Azure is a target, and we know it’s been hacked. This hack wasn’t revealed by a TLA, or by the “super duper security analysts” - it was a customer going over logs (that are so in the weeds most people didn’t pay for access to these logs at all) who informed Microsoft.
And this is my main counterpoint - when you have a “Fort Knox” you need really really good guards and can never make a mistake. I’m not sure it’s possible to have sufficient defenses when you’re running the e-mail for most businesses and the US government. We need to stop just assuming the Cloud providers have better {insert thing here} because of scale or money. I’d argue it’s pretty obvious they don’t - because they make more money if they don’t have the top end employees and can sell more features if they don’t lock stuff down and actually test before release. I’m going to argue that there’s every reason to believe that most Microsoft employees or contractors doing all functions are more like their support people than some better than you can hire super IT person.
I work at a community mental health center in a major urban area and this affords me a lot of contact with the lower-SES people in my area. While not many, I do know of some of our clientele who engage in this sort of “flash robbery”-style theft, wherein they’ll go into a store with a group of people (while the store is open) and just start walking out with merchandise, not even bothering to hide it. The stores security personnel are under strict orders to not physically intervene, due to the potential for lawsuits against either the store or its security company, and so all they can do is call the police. These sorts of operations are always done in mere minutes, so the police never get there in time, and they’re often not even called. The stores have policies that essentially require them to eat the loss and just try to make it up, which obviously they’re failing at as these kinds of burglaries become more common.
I’m sure it’s not just poor people doing this crap, but the ones in my community that are definitely are not doing it out of need. From what I’ve seen, these are also the type of people that everyone in their community tends to hate, the “trashy” people that make neighborhoods bad places to live. They have poor emotional control, get into arguments easily, pick unnecessary fights, etc. Also worth noting, although I’m sure this isn’t representative of the overall trend: all of the people I know of in my clinic’s population that do this are women.
It’s a very serious problem, because it’s obviously much more economical for these companies to simply close down the burgled stores and open up new ones in areas with lower crime and lower rent, which ultimately just harms the poor communities they move out of, making them poorer and less attractive to other retailers. So, a very tiny group of thieves can harm their entire community in some pretty severe and systemic ways. Sadly, i think the best solution would be for cities to increase police presence in major shopping areas, which will cost taxpayers rather than corporations, but it’s ultimately for the good of the affected communities and the cities as a whole.
Certain items are being stolen to be resold. This isn’t about someone stealing food to feed their kids or unable to afford tampons or pads. Name brand dish detergent and other stuff gets stolen and then resold as the “fell off a truck” at a discount. There are also people who steal on demand, basically personal shoppers but they don’t pay for it.
I have no idea what the answer is but the comments here that say they hope everything is stolen from wmt, tgt, etc shows unfathomable ignorance as to what happens when stores close and not only do people lose their jobs, the area becomes a food desert if that was the only place to shop for those without reliable transportation.
I’ve noticed the downvotes too and I suspect there’s a sizable number of lemmings here who are so anti-capitalist/anti-corporation that they think flash-thefts and smash-and-grab raids are good things, don’t understand how these crimes harm the communities they take place in way more than they harm the companies being burgled, and downvote anything that pokes a hole in their tiny worldview. It’s one of the shittier parts of the Lemmy community that I’ve been putting up with so far.
Anybody who is not a simpleton with zero life experience is aware that being an “underdog in society” doesn’t mean somebody is inherently a good or bad as a person: plenty of powerless people out there when given a little power are revealed to be complete total shits.
It’s perfectly compatible to be anti-capitalist/anti-corporation (well, most corporations) whilst thinking theft without need is also morally wrong. Assuming the corporations involved are exploitative and use lobbying and other forms of political corruption to gain unfairly advantage positions and these people are not stealing due to need, that would just mean that what we have here is two wrongs, and those don’t make a right.
The article this thread is about is talking about Target losing 2% of their $27 billion annual PROFIT (as in the money the shareholders keep after they pay their employees) to theft. And here you are blaming poor people for the state of their communities.
"The fantastic journalists at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis and found that this single video spawned 309 separate articles about the Walgreens incident in the 28 days after it was posted. The researchers found that there was not a single article about a multi-million dollar wage theft settlement paid out by Walgreens to its California employees. (On January 5, 2023, after I wrote this essay, a Walgreens executive admitted publicly that the company had overblown their claims about retail theft.)"
And here you are blaming poor people for the state of their communities.
That was absolutely NOT what I was doing, but I get the impression you’re just here to start a fight, so I’m not going to bother with you further except to point out that
You are the lemming, buddy.
“Lemming” is a term used to refer to Lemmy users, which is how I meant it, not as an insult.
I don't know, man. The comment that is getting downvoted proposes a narrative where people steal things from Target and then Target has no choice but to move out of the poor neighborhood to open up stores in a nice neighborhood, and therefore the people stealing are responsible for that harm to their communities. I'm downvoting that because it's wrong in like a thousand ways, some evidence for which is illustrated by the quote and article I linked to.
My bad on the "lemming" thing. I'm reading this on kbin so that's not in my vernacular, and the patronizing "tiny worldview" insult had me reading your comment in a certain tone.
You say people are stealing to resale these items like that is just a normal job prospect. People don’t steal unless in a serious situation or mental illness period, full stop.
What would it take for you to wake up in the morning and decide to steal a bunch of stuff and try to resell it? How desperate would you have to be? What makes you think these people are any different?
When people are safe, comfortable, happy, healthy, all needs are met, and some of their wants they don’t resort to desperate measures. The theft is merely a symptom of the bigger issue.
Because I’ve done it. Usually the ones stealing the stuff aren’t even the ones selling it. But, when you don’t have money and the only way to get your fix is to steal a list of stuff, you’ll do it.
No sane person wakes up and says “I have everything I need, and I feel safe and comfortable. So, time to go risk my freedom and future to start the day!” It just doesn’t happen.
Sure you have those outliers. You know, the house wife with plenty, but she steals for a thrill, but those aren’t the people stealing to sell either.
Damn son. That’s not how that works and not what I am talking about.
It’s not the theft for need that is shutting these stores down. It’s the theft rings that pay people pennies on the dollar to steal shit because that is easier than getting a real job. These goods are then resold on the “black market” or used to make drugs like meth.
You claim you did it to survive. I don’t actually believe that you stole anything more than someones hat and you are definitely extremely naive to the world around you.
Check my history, you’ll see that I make no secret about having been a homeless heroin addict for over a decade. I went through over 5 years of methadone treatment, but I finally weaned myself off of that too by slowly decreasing my dose over time.
I’ve been completely sober now for about 2 years. Don’t clap it sucks, and it’s not by choice. I can’t find anything that makes me feel good except heroin, and I’m not doing that again.
Hell, it’s 5:14 am as I’m typing this, and the only reason I’m awake is because my partner still goes to the clinic, and I have to drive them every morning, 7 days a week, because they won’t stop smoking weed.
My best friend from the age of 6 died from an overdose 8 years ago, and I’m now raising his kid as well as my own, and if you do the math that means I was still an addict when I came into their life, but got in treatment soon after. But nah. I’m just full of shit. I don’t know anything about that. The scars that trace the veins in the backs of my hands must be my imagination.
I joke around about a lot of things, but desperation, and the stories about people I’ve known are all true.
Edit: Stealing wasn’t my main go to. I made it a point to look super respectable, and would beg. I used to could look like a very nice guy. But I absolutely have done it when I was at my worst.
I agree wholeheartedly. The opiate epidemic is insane in America. Rather than treat our addicts. We’ve chosen as a society (in America) to demonize them and let them die out.
That to me seems like it would turn it to vigilantism fast, and that’s exactly what maga wants though… thats why they walk around with their open carry, intimidate people they don’t THINK belong and feel like a slippery slope…
I don’t think that’s what they are talking about. Police forces used to have walking beats and the officers on those beats knew the entire neighborhood. The presence of authority tends to slow down some forms of crime.
Yeah the people who are responding to this saying “who cares, it’s just corporations being harmed” are thinking too small picture. The corporations aren’t going even harmed that much by this, not on a global scale, they’ll just shut down the most affected stores. Then who suffers? All the residents of those communities.
Look, I don’t like big mega corps like Target and Walmart, but the fact is that they can afford to sell goods to people at way lower prices than small retailers. Don’t misunderstand me, I know that’s because they’ve put a stranglehold around suppliers and built giant monopolies, but the effect is the same. The world would be a much better place if giant retail monopolies all disappeared, but it would have terrible consequences for them to only dissappear from the poorest and most crime laden communities
news
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.