It’s often framed as a system of moral philosophies and the way the impact our behavior and interactions with the world and society. So yes, in many ways, veganism is a religion, or at the very least religion adjacent. Religions aren’t limited to belief in a magical sky daddy.

To be clear, it is clearly bigotry to use “religion” as a label in an effort to be dismissive of anyone’s personal moral belief system or philosophy.

AI engagement bots like OP.

Do don’t do this. You’re just a few lines of code.

You’re not not pushing 30. You’re a bot.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

The article is saying that these sharks aren’t really sharking though. The sharks behavior has been changed by environmental factors (regular human feeding and humans raising the local sea temperature by dumping warm water from the desalination plant).

1. Sharks are attracted by usually warm water from desalination plant.
2. Tourist guide boats start chumming the waters to keep the sharks around for tourists.
3. The attraction of so many mostly harmless sharks changes their feeding dynamic. Ever tried eating an ice cream cone near a small child? Ever tried pushing an ice cream cart through a crowd of small kids? Way different dynamic as supply and demand changes as the crowd grows.
4. Formerly mostly harmless and “shy around humans” sharks start directly approaching humans as a source of food.
5. Sharks investigate human, beg for food. How do sharks investigate? By biting, nibbles really, or bumping into people swimming.
6. The first bite generates a predictably violent reaction from the humans, which triggers a feeding frenzy response. Humans aren’t equipped to defend or escape this.

The point is that at every step of the way, these sharks are acting in a very strange way (for them) as a direct result of human action. We’ve seen this kind of thing before when people feed wild animals, strange and dangerous human seeking behaviors develop: alligators, bears, moose, etc. Dangerous animals? Yes, but the behaviors that result in human deaths are in no way natural.

I think it’s more like this…

Angel: “Push it over the edge and watch it fall.”

Devil: “Drink from it after giving yourself a thorough self cleaning and leave the area before they notice.”

Either way, you can put passengers in the back of an SUV, but not in the bed of a truck (without breaking laws or being totally unsafe).

You are already capable of communicating to your cat that you are in pain. Be honest. Make sounds of pain when they hurt you, the same way you would train a kitten not to bite or claw with malice. Your cat will understand. Just don’t get angry. It’s easy for cats to forget about empathy in the face of anger.

There is a reason that I have fallen asleep during the extended 3rd act fight scene in every single god damn marvel movie since Mark Ruffalo became the Hulk.

They all turn into the same movie, with the same fight. And these super long fights all seem to be surprisingly light on showing any of the actual real world impacts of such violence. Nobody ever gets seriously hurt unless the plot needs more sacrifice. But even when they do, the injuries mostly happen off camera and the blood never flows or spurts, it just instantly appears as makeup. It’s really giving people a deep rooted and totally unfounded sense that violence both solves every problem (it doesn’t) and does so bloodlessly (it doesn’t). At least Batman knows he’s not a hero.

But really, the DC universe isn’t much better. Think about how shocking a little bit of blood at the beginning of the new Superman movie was, before they basically destroy metropolis (which was rather expected and mundane). And then they only show the tiny fraction of people personally saved by Superman, not the countless mangled corpses buried under rubble. This may be why the public has trouble confronting the realities of war and violence.

Don’t sleep on that toothache if it is due to an infection. Tooth infections can kind of fast track to the sinuses and then the brain and go real bad real quick. Also there’s the pain. I don’t know how you can survive with that pain AND a tiny human. Probably best not to die on them because of a dumb thing like a toothache.

I guess they couldn’t get it suspended long enough to get a measurement from the crane itself?

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

To a gator you are only easy food, troublesome food, or not food. (Momma gators may make the additional distinction between “threat to my brood” and “not a threat to my brood”.) They are opportunistic feeders, so them seem chill. They are NOT chilling, they are patiently waiting, conserving energy, for an opportunity for troublesome food to make itself easy food. A relatively fast moving and agile human feeding a gator is troublesome food dispensing easy food. Either way, to a gator fed by people, you (and by association any other humans) are just food that hasn’t become easy food, yet. They aren’t chilling, they are waiting for an opportunity.

It seems likely that this guy is keeping this gator in a climate a little cooler than what the gator is used to. Cold gators don’t just slow their movement. Their entire metabolism slows down. Cool enough (and I’m talking mild Florida winter cool here) and the gator may stop eating for a few weeks or even months. It may not even bother going after easy food if it’s cool enough because it’s body may not be able to digest it even if it did. That’s probably when photos like this would be taken. A zonked out cold gator with a belly full of rotten meat that it can’t digest until the temperature rises.

The whole scene here looks like that girl from the walking dead with zombie pet. It’s all going to end very badly one day.

I’d ask a couple thousand people to guess in private. So the most popular answer would probably be either surprisingly close to correct or Cuppy McHazelnutface.

Wait till they hear about the people farming, harvesting, and shipping the vegetables.