This is a great take on the subject. In my area the Jerusalem artichoke would mostly be competing with Asian honeysuckle and Bradford pear trees which have already escaped captivity and killed everything else, but I completely agree that releasing virulent species into any kind of intact ecosystem can be very damaging.
While studying permaculture and regenerative agriculture I came across this thread on native species and it stuck with me. I’m now in the camp of, “the world is changing and what grew in an area before night not be the right thing to grow there now”.
Typically wildflowers in an area are synonymous with weeds. They shouldn’t have any trouble growing if you break the current grass monopoly even a little. Most people have a hard time getting them to NOT grow in their yard. I had good luck including Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) in my yard. They are HUGE when fully grown and you will basically need a flame thrower to get rid of them but the birds and bees love them. They also spread risomatically by sending out root runners, so they break up compacted soil. A combination of those and sunflowers would basically be a 2 meter tall flower bed. I don’t think you would even need the cardboard.
I’m going to recommend, in addition to meditation, that you look into IFS Therapy. You can see an actual therapist about it, but you can also just read a book on the subject and do it yourself unless you have really deep trauma or addictions to deal with. The guy who invented it has several books, but I recommend Self Therapy by Jay Earley as it is based around working on your own and is basically like meditation with the purpose of resolving your inner issues. My ADHD brain has improved a ton since I started doing it. Feel free to message me if you have any questions. This is my current Hyperfocus, so I’m already way down the rabbit hole on research. 😁
And a very happy Void-Scream to you as well!
You had a moment of clarity where your true Self was able to be present and witness the good in the world. This is huge and you should know that a random internet stranger is proud of you for noticing. It is the first step to starting to heal your own inner parts who are still carrying that trauma from decades ago. The next step is to try to bring that enlightenment and understanding inside yourself. Congratulations on your new wisdom!
This is true, but on a personal level I have no idea how to do the calculus for, “My work is killing people, but it would have been worse if it hadn’t.” I think the show “The Good Place” got it right and it is just too interconnected and complicated to actually derive an answer as to whether an action is net negative or positive. That said, if I had to place money on a given action being negative, working for an arms manufacturer would be one I’d be fairly comfortable betting on.
I think this question boils down to this: Do your actions have a net positive or a net negative affect on the world? Does working at this company in some way offset the harm that the company is doing downstream? In this case I have a hard time coming up with a reasonable way in which this might be the case. Paying you and your family to have stuff doesn’t offset causing actual death and physical harm.
Astrill is the only consistent one and I have to server hop at times.
For commercial offerings this is probably true for at least some of them, but creating your own VPN isn’t terribly difficult if you are serious about your privacy. I typically just use them when I travel to countries like China where I can’t get to a bunch of necessary services, so I don’t mind if they route my YouTube traffic through CIA headquarters, but if I was doing anything more than that I would just set up my own.
Allegorical humor is the best humor!
-Plato, probably.
Weirdly, the only parts of the Internet that I’m really liking these days are Hacker News, Lemmy and the one part that I do pay for, which is Kagi Ultimate. It is very refreshing not to be the product and I do occasionally need to use a search engine for something.
Total Waffle!
Internal Family Systems therapy and meditation.