Venus flytraps are great plants to keep, but they’re not effective for pest control, especially against tiny gnats. The gnats you have are probably fungus gnats and your houseplants’ soil is infested with their larvae. To get them under control you have to innoculate the soil with nematodes that eat the larvae. The particular brand I got on Amazon aren’t available anymore, but the species was s. feltiae and they worked really well. There might be other good or better nematodes, but that’s how you get rid of the gnats.

Where? I’m not a fan of her, but Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal is just a way to capture some more revenue (to do the things I mentioned) on a more progressive basis. There aren’t really any claims here about fixing inequality.

Take another shower. Taxes aren’t used to fix inequality. They’re used to fund infrastructure and services that we all need. They’re also used sometimes to redistribute income, but the idea isn’t to solve inequality. The idea is to get some income, in one form or another, to people who cannot or should not work, like the sick, children, the elderly, and anyone else excluded from the workforce. This non-working population needs income as much as the working population does and it doesn’t make sense to force them to get it in inefficient and harmful ways. Taxation to solve inequality is a myth that isn’t happening.

Well, I’d definitely get the lawyers and CPAs to make sure that bag is secure and protect my family’s privacy as much as possible. After that…

• I’d hire a high-end architect to renovate my home.
• I’d hire a personal trainer to help my family get really fit.
• I’d buy a big vacation for our extended families.
• Buy a less family-friendly vacation for our friends.
• Hire a therapist so I don’t go insane.
• There’s a small, vacant movie theater in my town. I’d buy it and get it up and running again.

This is great!

Blame!

Ugh I’ve never encountered a black widow, but I just felt that sentence.

You’re kind of talking about different things. Copyright should of course be abolished along with all private property. I don’t rule out compensation to your estate for organs harvested after death and there should definitely be a public bounty/reward system to encourage the living to donate.

You shouldn’t be able to opt out, or at least it should be very difficult to do so, because when you are dead what you have a say in that affects the living should be very limited, because those organs won’t matter to you anymore, and because those organs might matter very much to living people. Whether you trust society or not doesn’t matter anymore when you are dead.

I think recluses and widows do sometimes live around here in NJ, but I haven’t seen any yet. Regardless, I’m ready for them.

Because living people who are sick might need those organs, which would otherwise just go to waste in your corpse. Also, it good to have a steady supply of organs from the deceased in order to avoid perverse and exploitative market situations.

The only spiders I kill are the yellow sac spiders because they will bite you in your sleep and cause a nasty infection. It happened to me once.

Hmmm okay, but it has to be difficult to opt-out, kind of like how conscientious objectors have to go through a whole process to get out of military service.

No. Organ “donation” after death should be compulsory. For living donors there should be a publicly funded bounty system where you either take the money or not. Donors and recipients don’t get to be picky.

Unlikely. Too lonely out there.

Really? I’ve only seen good reviews of the stuff as served by restaurants.

It was Eva Saxl. She had fled the Nazis from Czechoslovakia only to find herself under Japanese occupation in Shanghai. From the Wikipedia article, it seems like she extracted the insulin from water buffalo pancreas. I’m not sure if that counts as homebrewing. When I think of homebrew insulin, I think of actually manufacturing it by fermenting specialized yeast as opposed to harvesting it from animals. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it isn’t really the same.

Oh that sounds fascinating. I’ll have to search for that.

There’s not really a problem with meat either. You don’t have to eat it and if you do, you don’t have to feel bad about eating animals.

That said, there is kind of a problem with insulin manufacturing in that it’s kind of centralized and distribution can be difficult, especially in remote areas with unreliable electricity. If insulin manufacturing could be done at the garage or shipping container scale in the places where it’s needed, it would help a lot of people.

Calling the relationship between those countries an alliance is a big stretch. For all its leniency towards Germany during the interwar period, you’d have to call the US an ally to Germany as well, nevermind its infamously conciliatory treatment of the Nazis after the war (ie Operation Paperclip and the relatively rapid abandonment of denazification in West Germany). Furthermore, the US did not begin actually fighting the Nazis until after the USSR, and not until they were compelled by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Regardless, we know what the Nazis did while they were in power and, as I previously cited, we know what they were going to do if they had prevailed. The fact is that after about four decades of Soviet rule, the Poles and other Eastern European peoples still exist and have thrived in comparison to the ethnic cleansing and extermination they would have faced under a victorious Nazi regime. Anyone whose family actually had an unfairly difficult time under the USSR has my condolences, but at least you’re still around to express your resentment!

You’re the one discounting lives. The murder rate for the Holocaust was at least 1.25 million per year and they had plans to keep going. The dubious allegations in the Black Book of Communism don’t even come close to that kind of efficiency and completely discount the lives saved by having defeated the Nazis, which would not have been possible without the USSR’s incredible sacrifice. It’s one thing to have resentment for communism. It’s just incredibly messed up to say that it’s as bad or worse than Nazism.