Is it Thursday yet?

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
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headspace-hotel

Observations have led me to conclude that dandelions are beneficial, vital, and should not be considered invasive species.

The designation of "invasiveness" assumes that a non-native species displaces native ones that provide more and better ecosystem services, or alters the ecosystem in a way that makes it worse for other inhabitants. This is very true of Lonicera maackii and many other nasty invasive species I am familiar with in the southeastern USA

Dandelions, however, almost exclusively establish in areas where other plants can't even survive. They don't bother established ecosystems with biodiversity, but they are super aggressive in heavily manicured areas like lawns.

When I pass through areas of town where there are open spaces and roadsides covered in turfgrass, they are empty and barren, but there are always dandelions. Crack in the pavement? Dandelions. Gravel? Dandelions. Manicured front lawn? Dandelions. Mostly empty flower bed with landscape fabric and that ugly black mulch? DANDELIONS.

Without dandelions, there would be acres and acres and acres of space with no food plants for pollinating insects at all. If dandelions filled a niche that native plants would otherwise fill, the designation as invasive would be legitimate, but instead, they're providing vital essentials for survival in places where no native species can do the job.

They start growing and blooming as soon as the temperature gets above freezing. They penetrate compacted soil up to 20 inches deep and let water and nutrients soak in. Bumble bees, mason bees, and longhorn bees all will visit them. this is a pro-dandelion blog

zooophagous

Anonymous asked:

So why do you hate the advertising industry?

zooophagous answered:

Hokay so.

Let me preface this with some personal history. It’s not relevant to the sins of the advertising industry perse but it illustrates how I started to grow to hate it.

I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up, but to be a vet you basically have to be good enough to get into medical school. I do not have the math chops or discipline to make it in medical school. I went into art instead, and in a desperate attempt to find some commercial viability that didn’t involve moving to California, I went into graphic design.

I’ve been a graphic designer for about seven or eight years now and I’ve worn a lot of hats. One of them was working in a print shop. Now, the print shop had a lot of corporate customers who had various ad campaigns. One of them was Gate City Bank, which had a bigass stack of postcards ordered every couple months to mail to their customers.

Now, paper comes from Dakota Paper, and they make their paper the usual way. Somewhere far, far from our treeless plain there is a forest of tall trees. These trees are cut down and put on big fossil fuel burning trucks and hauled to a paper mill that turns them into pulp while spewing the most fowl odors imaginable over the neighboring town and loads the pulp up with bleach to give it a nice white color.

Then the paper is put on yet another big truck and hauled off to the local paper depot, then put on another big truck and delivered to my print shop, where I turned the paper into postcards telling people to go even deeper into debt to buy a boat because it’s almost summer. The inks used are a type of nasty heat sensitive plastic that is melted to the surface of the paper with heat. Then the postcards are put on yet ANOTHER truck and sent to the bank, which puts them on ANOTHER truck and finally into the hands of their customers, who open their mail and take one look at the post card and immediately discard it.

Heaps and heaps and literal hundreds of pounds of literal garbage created at the whim of the marketing team several times a year. And thats just one bank in one city.

I came to realize very quickly that graphic design was the delicate art of turning trees into junk mail.

And wouldn’t you know it there are a TON of companies that basically only do junk mail. Many of them operate under the guise of a “charity,” sending you pictures of suffering children or animals and begging for handouts and when they get those handouts the executives take a nice fat cut, give some small token amount to whatever cause they pay lip service to, and then put the rest of the cash right back into making more mailers. “Direct mail marketing” they call it.

Oh but maybe it’s not so bad, you can advertise online after all. Now that there’s decent ad blocker out there and better anti-virus ads usually don’t destroy your computer anymore just by existing.

Except now when I search for the exact business I want on Google it’s buried under three or four different “promoted search items” tricking me into clicking on them only to shoot themselves in the foot because I searched for the specific result I wanted for a reason and couldn’t use those other websites even if I felt like it.

And now we have advertising on YouTube and on every streaming service, forcing more and more eyes onto the ad for the brand new Buick Envision that parks itself because you’re too stupid to do it on your own.

Oh thats ok maybe I’ll get Spotify premium and go ad free and listen to some podcasts- SIKE we have the hosts of your show doing the song and dance now. Are you depressed and paranoid from listening to my true crime podcast about murdered and mutilated teenagers? That’s ok, my sponsor Better Help can keep you sane enough to stay alive and spend more money.

It’s gotten so terrible that now you have content farms, huge hubs of shell companies that crank out video after video to get more and more precious clicks. Which if the videos were innocuous maybe that wouldn’t be so awful except now you have cooking hacks that can actually burn your house down and craft hacks that can electrocute you being flung into your eyes at the speed of mach fuck so some slimy internet clickbait jockey doesn’t need to get a real job.

It of course goes without saying that animals are also relentlessly exploited by clickbait companies that will put them in compromising situations on purpose to create a fake fishing hack video or even just straight up killing them for sport by feeding small animals to a pufferfish that rips them apart for the camera.

And all of this, ALL of this doesn’t even touch how adveritising is the death of art in general. Queer topics, any kind of interesting art, any kind of sex or substance use topics are scrubbed clean and hidden at the behest of advertisers.

Sex education, a nude statue, topics such as racism or sexism or bigotry in general have tags purged or hidden from search, even life saving information about SDTs or drug use, because if someone saw that and complained then Verizon might sell fewer tablets and we can’t fucking have that.

Conservative talking heads often bitch and moan that they’re being censored on social media. The stupid part is, they’re right! They are being censored! But it’s not by a woke mob, it’s by ATT and Coca Cola not wanting their adspace sharing screen time with their stupid fucking opinions.

However, they won’t ever figure that out, because the talking heads they get their marching orders from like Tucker and Jones ALSO rely on the sweet milk flowing from the sponsorship teat and they aren’t about to turn on their meal ticket so they have to come up with even stupider shit to say for the train to continue rolling.

I managed to rant this far without even getting into the ads I see for the beauty industry. The other day a botox ad described wrinkles as “moderate to severe crows feet” as if wrinkles are a symptom of a fucking serious disease! Like having a flaw in your skin is a medical problem that you need thousands of dollars of literal botulism toxin to fix! I was incandescent with anger.

Advertising is a polluting, censoring, anti educational and anti art industry at it’s very core. It destroys human connections, suppresses human thought and makes us hate our own bodies. It ads no value, actively detracts from value, and serves no real purpose and I believe it should be almost if not entirely banned.

ifvckinghatefruitcake
bodhisattvawithoutorgans

This post about how wasteful the advertising industry is really highlights something I think a lot of people don't realise, which is that industry is not only incredibly, unfathomably inefficient but it's also run by idiots and it's a miracle that anything functions at all

Huge swathes of employees aren't producing anything and are completely redundant while the process to grow and prepare your food is often so precarious it almost doesn't happen; just look up all the recent recalls in your area to see what I mean.

My bf operates the machines that make milk bottles for a company that stocks not only supermarkets but fast food restaurants like McDonald's and they have only three of these bottle making machines, one for each quantity. There's one guy who has to fly in from out of state if the operators can't figure out a fix when one breaks down, which they do almost daily. Each machine is meant to have 3 people working it but more than once my bf has been the only person there, meaning he was running three machines single handedly. That's one person doing the work of nine people.

The whole operation is run on spit and hope, meanwhile offices are full of people whose jobs are just e-mailing each other back and forth. And this isn't a white collar vs blue collar thing either; the quantity of fresh produce that's just thrown away before it even makes it to processing is unreal. Animals too are slaughtered if there's a risk of disease outbreak and destroyed en masse. Cars are left to rust. And this isn't obscure knowledge! It's one of the contradictions of capitalism that we have to produce to excess but then destroy what can't be used

Like I think people just assume that there's some degree of proficiency, of efficiency, that there are systems in place to keep things running smoothly, and it's completely untrue. You know I'm very critical of the idea of supplanting capitalism for some other economic system which is still going to centre production above sustainability and human life but it's also true that simply cutting the superfluous work would decrease fossil fuel consumption by a lot