QuackGrass.... Invasive unless you wanna grow cattle. And guess what causes it's rhizomes to spread? Biotic soil disturbances (by worms?).
https://newfarmerproject.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/outsmarting-quackgrass/

This stuff is all connected.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam 😦

"Looking at these land, water, fertilizer and soil costs together, you could argue that the corn system uses more natural resources than any other agricultural system in America, while providing only modest benefits in food. It’s a dubious trade-off—depleting natural resources to deliver relatively little food and nutrition to the world. But it doesn’t need to be that way."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/

"Furthermore, it would include conservation tillage and organic farming practices that improve soil conditions by restoring soil structure, organic content and water holding capacity, making farming landscapes much more resilient to floods and droughts. The overall result would be a landscape better prepared to weather the next drought, flood, disease or pest."

"Sheep were brought to graze in the White House lawns in order to save the manpower required to mow the expansive grounds. Wool from the sheep was sold as a fundraiser for the Red Cross."
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/sheep-graze-on-the-white-house-lawn

"President Wilson is having no end of trouble with the flock of sheep he purchased recently to graze on the White House lawn," a May 12, 1918, Washington Post article reported. The problem: The sheep were scared of the cars that had started to appear across the District of Columbia in increasing numbers."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/white-house-sheep-a-history/453405/

"But corn—with all the fertilizers and pesticides it takes to produce—is an exceptional burden on waterways. Unlike pasture, which keeps ground covered in grass year-round and the soil intact, corn requires plowing and added nutrients to pump up yields. [...] Through the winter snow and spring rains, fields are kept bare—meaning that the exposed soil can wash away."
https://thefern.org/2017/06/troubled-waters/

"Every system, whether it is a single mind, a family, a business, or a country, develops a hegemony of powerful interests that first promulgates rules and policies for the good of the system and eventually promulgates them for the good of the hegemony."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-our-way/201507/the-tendency-smugness-in-the-culture-psychology

"In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West. Today the word “decline” is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favour of “challenges,” while our economists talk of “secular stagnation.” The language changes, but the belief that western civilisation is living on borrowed time (and money) is the same."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/17/is-western-civilisation-in-terminal-decline

"The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system"
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/

"the watershed has retained and even bettered its purifying capacities over the last century.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is 91 percent of that land is privately owned, meaning it could be converted to nonforest uses whenever the owners make that decision. It’s their land,” he says."
http://digital.vpr.net/post/study-new-england-loses-65-acres-forest-day-development

"Removing lawns may sound like a small, wonky step, compared to building dams. But the green turf in American yards actually stands as a worthy target for water savings, a public enemy in the eyes of many during a drought such as California's five-year-old one."
https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2016-10-31/in-california-a-350-million-social-experiment-over-lawns

"But once again things get conflated – the critique of Capitalism and the call for its downfall is not one and the same as Tyler’s offered model of masculinity/nihilism. Tyler’s masochistic ideology is not feasible – he gets fucked in the end because he is just another damaging ideology that traps you in a sick cycle. So in this manner, Tyler isn’t always an opposition to capitalism, but a parallel to it."
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/08/23/were-the-all-singing-all-dancing-crap-of-the-world-or-youre-doing-it-wrong-the-fight-club-identity-crisis-by-brianna-berbenuik/

"It is extremely difficult to demonstrate to the average person the reality and value, and especially the money value of an intangible thing. The motion model makes this value apparent and impressive. It makes tangible the fact that time is money and that an unnecessary motion is money lost forever."
http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/153913/simfactory/

“The person who’s out-innovated loses. The winning innovation brings more value to society. It’s destructive when someone competes but doesn’t out-innovate, or they undermine and destroy the existing marketplace; they just steal the technology and produce it in a developing country without regard to human, civil, or property rights, because of safety and environmental precautions.”
https://www.manufacturing.net/article/2012/12/david-vs-goliath-%E2%80%93-stealing-innovation

"Fundamentally, the problem with the web ecosystem is that consumer choice is limited. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants "own" a large part of the social graph that both powers the core digital connection goodness and sustains the momentum that they will keep owning it, due to something called Metcalfe's law. If you want to connect to people on the internet, you have to play by their rules
[...]
The Metcalfe momentum has become a gravity black hole."
http://clutchofthedeadhand.com/decentralization/

I just realized that all my clothing is dead plant material picked by slaves in India and made by machines and sold to line the pockets of unidentifiable corporate shareholders. https://aeon.co/essays/this-is-what-slavery-looks-like-today-in-the-eyes-of-slavers

This seems to be a system stemming from the 1800's industrial revolution - slaves pick cotton and then ship it to the mills where energy is cheap to run the machines. Now with more global shipping to hide the commodity fetishism.

I guess I have capitalism to thank for these cheap clothes.

"Buy Local!" you scream at me!

Sorry, but the only sustainable clothing I can find near me is bearly able to support selling to the declining middle-class because of artisian bullshit. To paraphrase all the local businesses involved in sustainable clothing: "we cater to the bourgeois and as such we can afford Vermont's high energy cost and make you feel good about it in the process"

And the sustainable stuff is all wool - which leads to large scale pasteurization.
http://digital.vpr.net/post/19th-century-vermont-merino-sheep-bred-controversy-australia

Brb, CRISPRing myself to have my skin flake off in sheets so I can make clothing during the warm months. Also I'll be bleaching my hair so that I get more split ends. I'm hoping it can act as insulation.

I'm going to live in the woods and live off of the sap of trees... oh wait that's what we already do in Vermont. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z07EhM8cC-g

Earlier I said "this seems to be a system stemming from the 1800's industrial revolution..."

As far as I can tell, this might actually be what's happening in a way. It seems we are watching India's industrial revolution -> young workers from poor impoverished farmer villages are migrating en-masse to work at the clothing factories in Bangladesh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T1MvHyUic

Parallels even include insane amounts of pollution
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/world/asia/bangladesh-pollution-told-in-colors-and-smells.html

Is happening in China too? https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/6283-The-denim-capital-of-the-world-so-polluted-you-can-t-give-the-houses-away

"What's behind a t-shirt.
It's a world.

A world.

A person with dreams and hopes, who wants to get ahead.

People with many needs, humble, but also with many dreams."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Amsk9_dJc

My T-shirt was made by Gildan somewhere in South America, likely out of cotton grown in Arizona or Texas.

The basic T-shirt was sold to "Comfort Colors by Chouinard" in Honduras. Comfort Colors then used a special dyeing process that also softens the clothes.

It was then shipped to a network of resellers where it was eventually sold to 'Birth of the Blues' in West Lebanon, NH.

In 2015 I bought it on clearance partly with money I was given by VocRehab for < $5/shirt. I bought 12.

Thank you 🙏

"Now the idea was: you made him pay for fishing lessons, offering student loans if necessary, and failed to mention that you had already depleted the pool. In a late capitalist society with dwindling opportunities for cash-poor workers and few checks on entrepreneurial conduct, what could be better to sell than false hope? This was a smart business."
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/17/get-rich-quick-silicon-valley-startup-billionaire-techie

"Here we document predatory cannibalism on larger conspecifics in Drosophila melanogaster larvae and address its evolutionary significance. We found that under crowded laboratory conditions younger larvae regularly attack and consume ‘wandering-stage’ conspecifics, forming aggregations mediated by chemical cues from the attacked victim."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2744

"Figuratively speaking, different gene expression means that that in the genetic material of the three ant species, certain buttons are pressed at different levels of intensity – yet, ultimately, this leads to the same result in all species: a successful raid. The team was surprised..."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-unique-gene-patterns-underlying-ant.html

"Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. This caterpillar is a head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it."
https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_yong_suicidal_wasps_zombie_roaches_and_other_tales_of_parasites/

"The defining innovation of the animal kingdom is not the stone tool of the ape nor the flight-capable feather of the bird, nor the hive mind of the ant, but the egg-laying stinger of the parasitic wasp."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/parasitic-wasps-dominate-the-animal-kingdom/557348/

I want a robot dog so I don't have to worry about poop or be haunted by the ever present feeling that I am perpetuating the systematic slavery of another lifeform.

I've been thinking a lot about how humans seem to almost instinctually extract labor out of anything that moves, from farm animals, to plants, to their own children.

If an alien were studying our planet, we'd be called the slave making ape.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-cur

This train of thought combines interestingly with my thoughts on jainism and principles of least harm.

I want to build robots to replace our need for labor extraction. But I am also unsure if that will actually solve the problem. If technology is a force amplifier, this might lead to accelerating what has been framed as the consumerist desire for more.

Life feeds on life as we extract rent (negentropy) from the noise floor.

I smile at the dog whom I live with, wondering about the nature of my own agency and contemplating her freedoms. She seems happy, mostly. But what of her exstance in the larger schema of things? Is she content? Does she long to run as her breed is wont to do? Does her fear over the lawn mowers and desiel trucks stress her as much as they stress me?

Alas, right now I am a parasite, she is just the local symbiote.

http://www.pbs.org/video/natures-cutest-symbiosis-the-bobtail-squid-4bhtmo/

Then a pull back in scope and question the moral framing themselves and contemplate their relative meaningness. How many ways can I contort this situation in my head to match all the models of 'good' I have in my head.

What if that's bad?

Rats in cages, running on treadmills until they exhaust themselves. Dogs chasing balls shot from machines until they collapse.

Ants running in circles.
Euphemisms about death spirals.
"Depression you can dance to"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZvPSpLxCg

How odd.

"Intrigued, Professor Meijer and Mr Robbers decided to follow up on this observation by going one step further: they asked whether free-living animals that had never before seen an activity wheel would voluntarily use one if it was accessible to them."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2014/may/21/wild-mice-exercise-wheels-behaviour-stereotypy-neurosis

The dog looks at me and smiles back, as if trained on cue.

But I am also being trained.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-013-1898-4

Wireheading our dogs to make us happy, breeding them to perform their slavery with a smile. Like the meat at the end of the universe who swooned over being eaten.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/animals-dogs-therapy-health-pets/

That turnspit dog was probably anxious all the time if it wasn't running. Who's to say the therapy dogs are simply bread to be anxious when they are alone? Weaponized separation anxiety.

Lap dogs are anxious because it makes them stick near their owners and it has a side effect of keeping them safe.

hack your dogs behavior today!

The dog sitting next to me is afraid of squirrels just like she's afraid of loud sounds and other creatures. She is a running hunting dog.

And we keep her locked up inside, scared of the world. Smiling at us like the smile of the handmaiden' tale. A slave of society.

Of course mice run on treadmills went out in the wilderness. It's not because they like them it's that they are afraid.

When mice make trails to forage Their fear biases them to follow the scent trails that they lay literally peeing as they go. What do you think they're doing the entire time on that treadmill? Of course they like the only place that smells safe.

Taking the dog for a walk: it smells something unfamiliar and pees on the side of the road.