Notices by quixote (quixote@mastodon.nz)

@ptoothfish That company with their "de-extincting" shtick is so full of it their eyes are brown.

Their so-call "dire wolf" is just a wolf with dire wolf coloration and some unusual alleles. It's less similar to an actual dire wolf than I am to a neanderthal.

The moa is a much harder task. It evolved away from currently living relatives tens of millions of years ago. The closest extant relative is the South American tinamou, the largest of which is a bit bigger than a hen.

They'll havea hard time making a moa-sized tinamou and pretending they're done.

(I'm an evolutionary biologist by trade, so this nonsense really gets to me!)

Plus the nonsense of zero habitat for the poor critters.

@Lurkle exactly. They've been abducted. Kidnapped in a crime of state.

I know going all persnickety language nerd right now is that last thing anyone needs, but, guess what, I'm going to do it anyway.

DOGE.

It's as bad an acronym as it is a rampaging wrecking ball.

I looked it up. It supposed to be pronounced like dog, but with a long o because of the final e. D'oh-g.

Sorry, no. E after g makes the g into a zh sound. D'oh-zh.

If you wanted D'ohg, you have to spell it DOGUE.

Dept of Gov Unbridled Excess?

Come up with something felonmusk can use, please?

@inthehands Well, women aren't exactly a minority group, but I know what you mean. Misogyny is the leading indicator. The practice ground for inflicting humiliation. (The current crew aren't slackers in this. At all.) It's the easiest place, right at home, right where you work, right on the streets you use every day, to implement your longing for might to make right.

@inthehands And like any dog, has no idea what he's barking about.

@pluralistic "eliminate all the beltway bandits" (which of course includes all the techbro billionaires)

God, yes. That answer is sitting right out there, with a giant "Over here!" flag on it, which is probably why the various billionaires went so hard for installing The Orange Inadequate. Prevention, they heard somewhere, is better than cure.

@dalias Less can be more. Utah in the US has more than its fair share of, um, eccentrics. 20-30 years ago, when people still took public health seriously, the authorities were trying to get everyone vaxed.

It being the US, the vaccines cost $25. You could fill out a piece of paper for a religious exemption. Heaps of people did that.

Someone had the bright idea: hey! make the exemption cost $25 and make the vax free.

Solved it. Vax rates shot up. Religions apparently stopped caring overnight.

@sjvn 😂 What year was that?

I think it's important to see that it's not about punishing. Or about hating women.

It's worse than that.

It's about not seeing women as real human beings at all. It's about using women as a useful caste of breeders and servicers. It's about using pain, all kinds of pain, to keep them there.

We have a word for forcing people to provide unpaid service or else suffer pain.

Like the last time this was tried, they're also trying to stop women from crossing state lines to escape.

#WomensRights

Mastodon netiquette question: I thought you were supposed to include all "@" mentioned in a post to which you're replying. Sometimes that's a paragraph's worth (and on my instance they all seem to count toward the 500 char limit).

Recently I saw a comment that implied doing that was a cousin of an email "reply all" and you should only include the @ you're actually replying to.

Which is it? Polite or stupid?? 😬

@admin@mastodon.nz ?

@GreenFire When he was a senator, I didn't pay much attention and in general Biden just seemed like your usual useless good ole boy.

Watchin him operate as Prez has been a real eyeopener. Without any fuss or muss or noise, he just runs rings around Repubs in Congress, now MBS, he's managed to keep the Middle East from going straight to WWIII in spite of the wishes of all the loonies there. (Bibi def included.) The Repubs allowed the IRA to pass before they knew what hit them. It's been amazing.

Finally found it. The cartoon I saw that summarizes my feeling about the Hamas-Netanyahu disaster:

@abolisyonista Plus: if injection of SO2 aerosols work AS EXPECTED, there will be forest-killing levels of acid rain. It's not so good for plenty of crops, too. Or corals and ocean life.

There would be plenty of unforeseen consequences, but acid rain is a _known_ effect.