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There are many, many programs - sometimes as simple as a one-form rebate - available to help with and often completely cover costs related with:

• replacing grass lawns with native plants, drought resistant plants and food gardens
• adding cisterns, rain barrels and grey water systems
• replacing with or adding new “smart” sprinkler controllers that check weather forecasts to plan irrigation around the rain
• ordering and planting trees, including fruit trees
• compost barrels, compost and mulch, drip irrigation hoses, pool covers, and more

Some of my favorites include programs where you can get trees delivered and sometimes even planted for free, programs to help restore local parks and buisness landscaping to native flora, volunteer programs to remove invasive species from local parks, and money for replacing turf lawns with plants, bushes and trees that help bird and beneficial insect populations. Sometimes lanscaping companies and volunteers can even do the work utilizing the grants and rebates with little or no cost to you! Shoutout to the arbor day foundation that provides native trees, delivered to your door.

Here is a list (not just the US) of programs, and another here. Your local water utility likely has a list of rebates and such available in your area, as well as your county extension office if youre in the US, and any government office from city up to the federal level, especially if you live in a drought prone area like the southwestern US. You can also search for “xeniscaping” to find more, or talk to your local hardware store or nursery.

FYI it does work, but be aware youll need (sandboxed) google play services installed on at least one profile of your phone to connect a wearOS device

my favorite thought exercise about advertising:

“without it, we would have to pay out of pocket for ad supported services!”

ok but when a company pays for advertising, where are they getting that money from? an added cost on the products we’re buying! so we’re paying for product A, we’re paying extra for product A to pay for product B with advertising spending AND we’re funding product A’s marketing department to make the ads on top of that

remove the advertising and we would pay less for product A, we could then afford to pay for B directly AND we would all pay less overall because we take ad department employees and costs out of the equation. we’re literally all paying more for everything overall by having some things “free with ads” than if we just paid for everything in the first place with no ads

Sometimes its the only option for a supermarket in a small community (see: Alaska). Smithers has 5300 people, I doubt there’s anything but the Safeway.

Oh, it’s not the same Safeway anymore. wikipedia says: Safeway (also referred to as Canada Safeway) is a Canadian supermarket chain that operates 135 full-service locations, mostly in the country’s Western provinces. It was established in 1929 as a subsidiary of the American Safeway chain before being sold in 2013 to Sobeys, a division of the conglomerate Empire Company and Canada’s second-largest supermarket chain.

ed: you asked and I answered before scrolling to see the other “safeway, the american grocery chain?” thread lol

Have you ever worked at a small bakery or cafe? It’s basically impossible to know exactly how many customers youre going to have on any given day.

They could always underproduce, sure, but my guess is that then businesses that care about cutting down on waste would lose business to places that regularly overproduce, when customers started choosing the place that was never out of stock of their favorites, or was always offering a wider selection. Underproduction by companies trying to responsibly reduce waste would probably benefit the largest corporations, with their better magins due to economy of scale, who are also more able to lose money in some areas just to drive business to other departments. Maybe that’s partially on the customers and their choices, but I think the idea behind this app is a good way to encourage competition, and benefits smaller, more local businesses.

Also this allows places to experiment more. Not sure everyone will enjoy your new recipe? Here’s an established way to recoup costs at the end of the day, to at least break even. Bakeries for as long as I can remember have been discounting “day old” product - this app creates a handy centralized maketplace for it. While I’m all for more responsible consumption, what you’re advocating for requires not just more responsible businesses, but more responsible consumers to make sacrifices to support them, enough to make up the difference in potential lost business. How many people are going to add an extra stop in their errands to visit a business they know is often or even occassionally out of the product they want, when they know another, more wasteful business always has it available?

I guess I disagree that this app helps businesses “do nothing” about food waste- I see it as a way to help (especially small) businesses throw away less food. Can it be abused; can businesses still wildly overproduce? sure, but many were already doing so before this, and will continue to do so as a matter of caring about maximizing profit. that doesn’t take away from the waste the app does help reduce, and the help driving customers to, and breaking even on unsold product it provides small businesses - businesses who are imho more likely than large conglomorates and chains to care about being socially and enviornmentally responsible in other ways, too, not just reducing food waste.

You can get a line of credit from your local bank, tranfser the available funds into your checking account on demand, then use your Interac card. The amount and rates are variable, so you can start with a small amount with a high rate (like starter credit cards), and as you build a reputation, you can be loaned larger amounts at a better rate. No third party credit card company required.

TIL people still run eggdrop bots. I don’t think Ive touched one since maybe 2003. was probably the last time I messed with tcl

FYI Spotify says their recommendations take into account how much money they make from you listening to a particular song, and if they make any at all. It may recommend songs based on your listening history, but that’s not the only thing picking the songs and deciding what order to suggest them. Their playlists and recommendations are a pay to play system, like commercial radio stations.

great, lmk when that rage does literally anything productive

they already know youre mad at them. fun fact: it makes some of them even happier to vote the way they did. but, sure, be angry! oh those damn, foolish, selfish people! …

ok, yes, welcome to the last 40 years. hi!

now what?

after she refused to pledge that she wouldn’t break a national railway strike

JUST LIE my god youll already be in office and can make up some nonsense why you had to break the strike (Im not antiunion, Im just saying)

JUST FUCKING LIE or were all the existential threats you wouldnt shut the fuck up about (instead of actually having a platform) not worth doing whatever you needed to get into power!?

… sigh

the best thing Ive seen created wth word2vec is semantle/pimantle

“bombshell”

shut the fuck up already.

oh how nice it would be to see the world unite as one just to take us (the USA) down a peg. I feel like russia and china are really dropping the ball lately

oh, wait lol theyre also run by egomaniacal baffoons :shrug:

because workers don’t collectively own the means of production.

not to be like that, but once some new hotness graduates from 2 people in a garage, the controlling interest is never the workers who have a vested interest in products, daily work (and a brand) they can be proud of, but investors with only short term profit on their mind. innovators- and inventors-turned-C suite executives jump ship when bought out, leaving the real meat and potatoes, the real work behind the brand, to be offshored, profit prioritized and picked clean.

buy from worker-owned co-ops. buy from local crafters and people deserving of the label ‘artisan’. flat out refuse to buy from brands that are a sad, hollowed out husk of their former selves. more importantly - most importantly - do what you can to keep your retirement investments away from quartly-profit mills who couldnt care less about workers or customers beyond raw sales numbers. and definitely, definitely never agree to work for them.

This is similar to to how the two major US political parties fail at effectively creating constant, essential evolution of laws in the name of representing ideals.

Candidates that can not, by the very foundational nature of their stated goals and beliefs, form coalitions with other candidates in order to ensure constant progress, create disfunctional governments that fail their citizens. Systems of choice should tend towards the choices that best represent the most widely agreed upon ideas. If those systems are in place, citizens who willingly choose extreme idelogical candidates that denounce compromise and coalitions are getting exactly what they voted for- a government that is doomed to fail.

We need moderate candidates focused on representing the majority of their constituents, and we need voting systems in place that favor moderate candidates. Any system that favors moderate candidates - say candidates that, while maybe not any majority’s first choice, but the second choice of a majority of the same people - is favorable to first-past-the-post, which has allowed exteremism and obstructionism to thrive in our legislative bodies.

The question becomes, do the citizens have that system in place, a system where moderate voices can thrive? If they do, are there those in positions of extreme wealth and power who would benefit from convincing the rest of us that voting for extreme, obstructionist candidates is best? Are those people possibly exploiting the system to create disfuntional governments that protect their wealth and power?

That’s whats happening in the US. Regulatory capture and mass media control, for example, are tools used to convince citizens the war is between us, distracting us from their benefitting from our disfunctional government. These few push the idea that obstructionism and extremism is our only choice, lest you be seen as the enemy. The true enemy is clearly those that care more about themselves and/or their espoused ideals than society at large, a society doomed without a constantly evolving goverment keeping corruption and consolodation of wealth and power in check.

can’t labels and artists pay for some kind of premium placement in discover weekly, release radar, and playlist recs?

ok, after some research, found this:

In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active (Discovery Mode is not active in our editorial playlists). This signal increases the likelihood of the selected songs being recommended, but does not guarantee it.

so, at the very least, the recs you get are definitely not organic, and favor major labels, rich folks, and if Spotify can make any money off streaming the track in the first place

not saying the algorithm doesn’t get it right most of the time (they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if it was all sponsored), but if it’s favoring big labels and drowning out everyone else in the name of revenue for Spotify, I prefer to choose other ways to find new stuff. if Spotify needs more money to pay the bills, imho they should plainly be asking the consumers up front

not to say thats not happening as well, but iirc the CA legislature historically has a big cram to pass most of their bills at the end of the session in september. Ive noticed the flood, too, but this happens every year, all the signing and vetoing lumped together