Oh no, i got to see them. This was a decade ago, and I was told even then that there used to be many more. I was happy to see any at all though, I had only ever seen them in movies and they almost seemed mythical. They are pretty magical, it’s very sad to hear they’re almost gone.

Seeing a chipmunk was the same for me. And goddamn are they cute, I had no idea they were so small and precious. Alvin and the chipmunks are monstrosities by comparison.

The bin chickens are my kin, I’m in the small minority here who appreciate them.

And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They’re also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they’re just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It’s a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they’re not dangerous.

People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It’s understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you’re someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.

If you want to see a croc, just go walking near the shallow water of the top half of the country’s coast. You won’t see the croc for long, and it will be the last thing you ever see, but it will be up close and very personal.

Seriously though, you don’t go to see salt water crocodiles in the wild or even go near any body of water on the northern coast. If you can see one with the naked eye in the wild, you’re already too close. They’re extremely fast, extremely aggressive, and the males get up to 6m / 20ft long and 1000kg / 2200lb. They are very much a zoo only thing.

I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.

When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You’ll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.

But if you’re headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you’ll spot the almighty and much maligned “bin chicken”, our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you’ll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that’s not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.

If you want your funeral to properly represent you, write your own eulogy.

Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino African child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They’re truly awful and Tokkie’s documentary is worth watching.

Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can’t listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there’s plenty more musicians out there worth my time.

Go with the standard politician non-answer: “to spend more time with family”. I have no idea if German politicians give the same stock response though!

Oh it’s less a fixation and more an interest in scale of impact. There’s a lot of people out there who talk a big game but when you look at the results, they’re clearly underwhelming. The blood donor in this thread is a great example of oversized impact, but that’s difficult to replicate. It does give good food for thought in terms of things to look for that could use more support.

The multidimensionality is why I didn’t provide any opening suggestions; I didn’t want to guide the answers. This was so that I might find some dimensions I had not previously considered, and I was curious about what metrics others use to measure “good” in the first place. Unfortunately Elon Musk as always proved to be a topic that generates more opinions.

Thanks for the support though. Honestly, there are a huge number of good choices already, more than I could ever dedicate enough to. I’m hopeful there are some gems out there that have potential to really offset some the vast quantity of suffering the world has to offer, this was just a small experiment in looking outside my own bubble of experience for them.

Ehhhh, I’m going to have to disagree on this. She’s obviously better than her ex-husband, but when you have that much money, the amount of interest/dividends it generates would likely offset her tax-deductible donations.

Also, if she has US$36.2 billion and has donated US$3.8 billion in 9 months, that would be like someone who has $100,000 donating $10500. Except you can’t generate much money from interest on $100,000. The average person donating 10.5% of their assets is praise-worthy, but there are millions of people who do that without CNN articles praising their philanthropy.

I’m looking for the people who are really helping, not dodging taxes and generating publicity for themselves.

I had this one the other day, and it was even political

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9636567

Can we… see them?

Edit: some quick math, the minimum recommended space between trees is 3m, 200 million of those is 600km² / 148k ac , which would make the space required bigger than 17 countries (larger than Andorra but very slightly smaller than Saint Lucia). They have a blog with their tree planting updates but I wish there were more photos.

It’s a reference to one of the most culturally important stories in Buddhist countries. Not knowing about it is like consuming English media without knowing anything about Shakespeare’s plays.

The English name is Journey to the West and the monkey is Sun Wukong in Chinese or Son Goku in Japanese. You might notice the main character in Dragon Ball Z has the same name, but the monkey king is referenced constantly in all sorts of Eastern media. The synopsis and main characters sections in that Wikipedia link will give you the general idea, but I would recommend reading or watching any of the versions to get a better understanding of the vibe.

Your metaphor is basically just calling them arrogant and reckless, lacking a good strategy and rushing in to things.

You can’t just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii’s case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we’ve found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It’s not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.

Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.

Legal advice given to me by an employer treated all citizens as eligible. Their advice tends to err on the side of caution at the best of times, but I have no reason to disagree that it’s at the very least legally contentious even if not yet officially contested.

Tl;dr I wouldn’t want to rely on it in court, whether everyone else is happy to risk that is whatever.

Climate change was still a “this will be a big problem and we need to do something about it sooner rather than later” issue instead of “actively experiencing and watching the damage and misery on a near daily basis and knowing it will be getting much much worse” reality.

No amount of Captain Planet telling me to separate my recyclables is going to fix this shit.

Copying and pasting my answer from the same question just 2 weeks ago:

How do you know they all weren’t wearing it?

There are a lot of people who do wear it but continue to smell because of underlying medical conditions. For example, fruity smelling body odor can indicate diabetes. People with a rare genetic condition called Trimethylaminuria can smell strongly of fish. It all depends on what bacteria (which outnumber your own body cells by 10 to 1 even though they are only 2% of your body mass) and what balance of enzymes you may or may not have.

Reducing perspiration can and often does help, concealing the odor with different ones can help, but sometimes people’s bodies just aren’t right for whatever mass produced product they have bought. Sometimes that can be fixed with medication. Sometimes it can’t.

https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/638513/-/comment/3647566

One time I went to this Afghani (Hazaragi) restaurant with friends in another city. Most of us were vegetarian, and they had heard this place had good vegetarian food, so that’s what we ordered.

There was this simple garlic dal that I still think about. It was so perfectly flavored and balanced and seasoned, with a depth of flavour that surprised the hell out of me. I suspect the vegetable stock they used was cooked long and slow for a very long time, but I’ll never know its secrets for sure.

Everything else we ordered was tasty enough, but this was next level. And it wasn’t just me, everyone at the table agreed. And it was just a bowl of lentils! It’s not like we hadn’t had dal before.

They’ve since changed chefs/owners. The closest sounding recipe I’ve found is this one from a thankfully decent UX site (ignore the coconut milk in the url, there is none) but using stock instead of water and probably much less ginger. I still mean to try this recipe but with more fried garlic… perhaps I have underestimated the masala.

I rent in a medium-high-density non-US housing complex. It’s obviously necessary after you live like this for a few years that there needs to be an organisational body to deal with building and land issues, especially when there are hundreds of people who occupy a shared structure that needs to be maintained and repaired. For example, if the water goes out for me, it could also be out for hundreds of other people, which makes it a more expensive and higher stakes problem than a single detached house with one family, and more than one person will need to make the decision on how it is repaired and by whom.

Local governing bodies are not necessarily based in racism or hyper-control motives either, even if American (and other country) housing organisations regularly use it for those purposes even today. These organisations are borne from the complex needs of living in a peaceful community of different people with different desires and needs.

But experience has also told me that this works better when the overarching legal systems are more accessible and corruption-resistant. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to evaluate what patch of land (or walls and floor) has the best longitude and latitude to provide a decent probability of not being exploited for someone else’s gain or suffering from someone else’s bad decisions. It’s a constant global issue, and the consistent theme is that most places favour the wealthiest human in housing or other legal disputes.

I’d die pretty quickly without modern medicine, so I might choose the era with the easiest access to strong opiates to make the process less painful.