That would be great IF you could convince the city that thoroughly-entrenched tools like leaf blowers and lawn mowers and motorized vehicles fell under nuisance laws. Chances are the mayor and most of city council use these things (or pay someone who uses them). The problem is that most people either love these things or don’t find them obnoxious enough to warrant action. Even if you somehow could get them to fall under nuisance laws, enforcement would be complaint-based, and who’s going to risk pissing off their neighbor for being a snitch Karen?

I know everyone hates HOAs because they’re usually petty and dumb, but this is where I think they’d actually be helpful. Designate certain neighborhoods as “quiet zones” where similarly obnoxious activities (that have reasonable, quiet alternatives) are banned: no motorized leaf blowers, lawn mowers, souped-up motorcycles or muscle cars. If you want to own one of those things, don’t move into that neighborhood.

I’ve come to realize many people feel “forced” to move to incredibly space- and resource-inefficient (and thereby ecologically-damaging) places like suburbs and exurbs for basically two reasons: better schools, and in an attempt to escape asshole neighbors. Sometimes it’s so that they can themselves be the asshole neighbors, but generally people are trying to live in a “nice” neighborhood not over usual HOA things like house siding color and properly-concealed trash cans, but rather for a general desire for peace and quiet. I know I dream about living on 40 acres not so I can start a dairy farm, but to escape the various forms of pollution (primarily noise, air, and light) emitted by my current neighbors. But I wouldn’t feel the need to do that if my neighbors had similar desires as I and limited things like car idling, porch lights, and landscape-related noise. Meanwhile the neighbors upset at me for keeping my yard wild to support wildlife could have a neighbor with similarly bland yard maintenance standards.

Fukisima

I’ve heard two good explanations as to why she’d publicize such a story:

1. She botched a common Republican technique by choosing the wrong victim to villainize (full explanation here)

2. There are witnesses to the puppy murder (construction crew) so this is her way of getting ahead of the story before someone else tells it (AFAIK so far we’ve only heard her version; maybe reality is even worse)

This was cross-posted to “usauthoritarianism”

Otherwise I wouldn’t really care, but like wtf. Of all examples of authoritarianism/fighting the system, feeding a parking meter? What is this, anarchy for infants?

I assume it’s shorthand for “pays for”

My understanding is most shorthand/euphemisms nowadays seem to originate from tiktok’s strict and sometimes inscrutable censorship rules. Maybe this is one of them?

Edit: apparently this was a case of text-to-speech gone away. I prefer my head cannon of tiktok trying to censor conversations about anyone who “pays for” an elicit service.

Eh, I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Parking is a huge thorn in the side of transportation reform, and ensuring parking turnover is actually pretty crucial to a functional transportation system. On-street parking is public right-of-way that could be a bike lane, enhanced bus stop, street seating for restaurants/cafes, parklets, drainage swales, large medians for trees, wider sidewalks, the list goes on. However we don’t get these nice things because “wE NeEd ThE pArKiNg SuPpLy.” Except often you’ll find that there would be sufficient supply to remove the parking on even just one side of the street if turnover were higher, and turnover is not higher because people are abusing the parking. Things like store employees parking all day in spots meant for customers, people using on-street parking to avoid more expensive lots at the destinations they’re actually visiting (like entertainment venues), etc. Have you ever encountered a parking meter that would only let you put in 2 hours of money even though you need the spot for much longer, and you had to run out mid-way through whatever you were doing to feed the meter? That means you were probably not the intended user for that space and you should have found longer-term parking elsewhere. Maybe that store manager that runs outside every other hour to feed the meter rather than use an all-day parking lot (but that’s a three-block walk away and this parking is right here!!1) or taking public transportation (because that’s beneath them) would rethink this behavior after an expensive ticket. Point is, I’m not sure helping people skirt parking regulations is fighting the system or standing up for the little guy.

Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with reading it quickly and fluently compared to hiragana (although that’s often because the words are clunky af loanwords), but I’d still much rather it exist than not. かれはぼうなすをもらったらおうすとらりあに行くつもり is a bugger to read without katakana.

I leaned Japanese in a mixed-nationality school where I was one of the only English-native students. I did not envy their struggles with katakana, as I’m sure the Chinese-native students did not envy my struggles with kanji! (Meanwhile everyone else just struggled lol.)

As a Japanese learner, katakana is a godsend. It’s like reading a scientific paper in English and having all the Latin in italics, as an indicator that “don’t worry this is a foreign word, you’re not an idiot for not recognizing it.” Especially because most katakana words are derived from English (or words you’d recognize as an English speaker) so it’s just a matter of saying it over and over until the pieces click into place. Example: オーストラリア = Oosutoraria = Oh-s-t-rah-ree-uh = Australia.

Also outside of picture books for young children, Japanese doesn’t use spaces and has way fewer sounds than most languages which results in a LOT of homonyms and similar words that all blends together (see other comment YouTube link). So having three writing systems in one really helps convey meaning and makes reading much faster.

This little bit of news has been hitting the media circuit this week: Americans are eating a meal’s worth of calories in snack foods every day

…the average American had between 400 and 500 calories worth of snacks a day, which is typically more than what they ate at breakfast. Even worse, the snacks usually carried little to no nutritional value

All food has gotten expensive due to inflation/greedflation, but (at least in my area) snacks, desserts, and some sugary drinks got hit especially hard. Except maybe for people living in food deserts, snacks are way more of a luxury good than “whole” foods are nowadays.

The researchers found that 20.94% of the adult population in Michigan identify as childfree, meaning they do not have and do not want biological, step, or adopted children.

I skimmed the study and it looks like they did not differentiate between types of children (i.e. biological or not). One example question from the study: “Do you plan to have any biological or adopted children in the future?”

While not the point of the study, I wonder if there is a significant population that is interested only in adopted (or maybe step-)children. Especially given the recently reported rise in couples forgoing procreation for climate and/or “why would I bring a child into this shitty world” reasons, it would be interesting to learn if this population would be interested in raising non-biological children instead (the idea being they are not increasing the number of children in the world, but rather helping to care for the ones already here). Similarly not included in this study: people only interested in fostering children but not adopting (this can get murky however as sometimes fostering does lead to adoption, but usually not).

You’re still making this out like it’s an individual problem and not a genuine (and major) gender difference.

From a BBC article on office temperature wars:

Boris Kingma from Maastricht University Medical Center decided to take a closer look. He found that women have significantly lower metabolic rates than men and need their offices 3°C (5.4F) warmer.

That’s a huge discrepancy! Obviously not something you can chalk up to individual factors like exercise rates or medical disorders.

Women are biologically more susceptible to getting cold than men are (or conversely, men are more susceptible to getting hot than women are). Also most people in America need more cardio; it’s not a gender thing.

Meanwhile I’m over here amazed that if you replaced the ¢ with $, the menu would be instantly updated to current restaurant prices.

Then the years go on, the kid becomes an adult and begins cooking for themselves. The first meal they make for someone else they realize (1) how difficult it is to estimate when a meal will be done (2) how much work goes into cooking, especially for a whole family and (3) how hurtful and disruptive it is when the person you’re cooking for decides they’d rather eat your food when it’s cold and gross and everyone else has already finished eating and are trying to clean up. And that’s not even incorporating the social elements of family dinner time the kid is eschewing. I didn’t understand as a kid why my parents were so adamant about family dinner, but as an adult it’s something I’m really glad they enforced.

For some inexplicable reason, Japan produces a lot of anti-war art. It seems the trend started sometime around the mid-20th century. Even one of Japan’s biggest war franchises, Gundam, features a surprising number of anti-war themes. No explanation has been provided to date to explain why.

• Philomena Cunk, probably

My understanding is sugar water is fine for hummingbirds, but the red dye often added to it is not.

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If it’s a joke about Japanese conjugation, but that’s not how Japanese conjugation works, is it actually a joke about Japanese conjugation?

If someone tried to make a joke about English conjugation that hinged on the past-tense of “to run” being “ron” instead of “ran,” would that even qualify as a joke? “He has such a sweet tooth, the moment his diet ended he didn’t ‘ron’ to the store, he ‘macaron’ to the store!” makes no sense. That’s what the tiramisu meme reads like, except it also misspells tiramisu, so the English joke would actually be more like, “he has such a sweet tooth, the moment his diet ended he didn’t ‘ron’ to the store, he ‘ice cron’ [misspelling of ice cream] to the store!” which makes even less sense.