And Gen X gets completely forgotten, as usual.

Have you eaten any fruit off your yuzu yet? It’s about the only edible citrus I can grow outdoors in my area. I’ve thought about giving it a shot, but I’m also not psyched about the idea of spending years growing a tree just to realize I don’t like the fruit! I used to live in Japan, really should have tried it while I was there. Much harder to find in America I think.

I also have an Apple TV and like it a lot. It’s the only Apple device I use regularly, I’m definitely not an Apple fanboy, just heard that run well and there was a specific app they support that I wanted so I went with that. Only thing I dislike is the remote. God that touch pad thing is awful. My wife says she thinks it’s because my hands are big, but idk. But other than that, great experiences with it overall.

And do what exactly? Having militaries intervene on political processes doesn’t have the best history of turning out well.

China ranks second in the world in human population, too.

Unless I misinterpreted your argument, it seemed like you were justifying this practice based on the fact that other animals besides us inflict pain and suffering on other animals. If that is the core argument, then to be logically consistent, you’d have to also be ok with us doing everything else I mentioned.

Animals also rape each other (and sometimes other species), kill the children of other fathers, urinate and shit wherever they want… To be logically consistent, you’re also arguing that all of those things are fine for us to do too.

Relevant link:

https://youtu.be/vWA2aQYXDbo

Being able to grow mushrooms legally would be fucking sick and would make the next four years a bit less shitty.

Requiring students to cite work is pretty common in academic writing after middle school.

Most species of wasp are not aggressive towards humans. I work out in my garden a lot and almost never have encounters with aggressive wasps–the only time I really do is when yellow jackets create a nest in an area that I haven’t been to in a while.

https://xerces.org/blog/wasp-world

I’m having a hard time actually finding a source for this. Just a few poorly written articles that basically cite this video as a source. Something this potentially impactful seems like it would make the rounds more, so I’m very skeptical.

I’m working on converting my entire yard to natives eventually, so I’ll make sure to get a bunch of seeds or plugs for it when I do. Joe pye is so awesome. Absolute butterfly/bee magnet.

Have any of you seen hollow joe pye (Eutrochium fistulosum) in the wild? It gets absolutely enormous, I’ve seen it 8-9’ tall and supposedly it can exceed 11’ in height. I want to get some for my garden but I suspect unless I really crowd it like it would be in its native environment, it’ll get really tall and get knocked over by the wind.

I remember wanting to be a forum mod when I was like 15 and thought that it would make me cool on the forum. As a grown adult… no way. I am so busy between work, grad school, and my personal life, I have no time for such silliness. I have a lot of respect for mods that donate their own time to run communities.

There are native mice all over the place. Yes, some are introduced/invasive, but there are also plenty of native ones too. If you live in the Americas, here’s the subfamilies they make up:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_rats_and_mice

Mice serve as food for animals like owls, hawks, falcons, snakes, skunks, etc. Cats killing these animals’ prey makes it harder for them to find food.

Humans are not an invasive species. We migrated to everywhere we currently live. Invasive species are usually defined something along the lines of being a species that was introduced somewhere (by people) where it didn’t previously exist and is harmful to its new environment. We meet the harmfulness part of the definition but not the introduction part of it.

What’ve persimmons got to do with it though?

As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.

As a teacher, I’m not going to write a student up for disagreeing with me. I’m sure that there are some who do (and it would be warranted if the kid started name calling, yelling, refusing to let it go if the teacher said they wanted to look into it more after class to double-check etc), but in the years I’ve been working in schools, I have yet to see it happen. Here’s an example of what I mean:

A few weeks ago, I was talking with the class about how I study Spanish on Duolingo to help do a job of teaching my kids. One of my students spoke up and said that Duolingo sucks and won’t help you learn language. He actually said it sucks, not exaggerating there. I chose to ignore the wording and just talked about how it wouldn’t be good to use it in isolation, but I also study with a flash card app for vocab, read in Spanish, listen to podcasts in Spanish, and talk with native speakers in Spanish all the time. He still disagreed with me and said so, I told him it is my specific area of professional expertise to know how language learning works, he still disagreed but we moved on.

When a student disagrees with me and I’m not sure I’m right, I try to look it up then and there or consult with a colleague if it’s possible to. If not I make a note (like literally write out a note then and there, I keep sticky notes around at all times) to check on it, and I’m pretty good about getting back to them. Being able to admit you were wrong is extremely important as a teacher, and it can actually help your kids grow as people because you’re modeling how you want them to behave as an adult–owning up and admitting it when you make mistakes. Seeing authority figures do it is powerful!