#Famous Converter

[roman-o-cheese]

Lil Jason doodle :)⚡️

[somewhereincairparavel]

if you are ever upset about Jason Grace slander, remember that the more people don't like him, the more we truthers can gatekeep his awesomeness to ourselves, so one day if the fandom might change their opinion about him for the better, we can claim our "always been a fan" ticket 😤💅

[pyechmushy]

Hyperfixation so bad I spent two hours on tumblr looking at any post about it while listening to the character's playlist because I got so excited thinking about that I physically couldn't take it

[anawkwardlady]

the youtube rules of who gets cancelled are so crazy, it's like the moon moving the waves of the sea. Nothing on earth will take you down until an occult force one day shifts the public opinion and by snowball effect every one hates you and then it's too late, you're marked forever even if you managed to recover your reputation. But before that happen you could kill a puppy on camera if you're not already considered bad it's fine. Meanwhile some people can't breath a certain way without being called out from the start. thats so crazy.

[yuri-luver69]

thereʻs definitely been someone who clicked on my blog thinking itʻd be more gomens/hannibal whatever and then getting jumpscared with heathers. didnʻt think youʻd see that did you

[angelstalkshit]

The paparazzi got me guys 🙄🤫

[phildendron]

pomegranate

Pomegranate

The pomegranate is famously known as the fruit of heaven belongs to the berry family. Pomegranate fruit is a delicious fruit and has juicy grains inside. Grow pomegranates as large, shrub or small trees.

Types 

There are 1200 different varieties of pomegranate which have unique tastes and various colours. There are purple hearts, Eversweet, wonderful, kazake, red silk, texas pink.

Purple heart

Purple heart varieties are large with dark red. Fruits begin to produce at about 3 years old. Pick fruit off a tree when it is mature. These pomegranate plants grow 12-30 feet tall and wide. Provide lots of health benefits. They are the best immune boosters and good healers.

Eversweet

The color of the pomegranate is pinkish-pale red. Eversweet seeds are a little hard in texture and are highly nutritious containing vitamins A, C and E. Pomegranate trees are glossy, narrow leathery leaves which are lance-shaped. These varieties are self-pollinated. This is a national fruit of Iran.

Kazake

Kazake varieties produce medium to large size fruit. This is the most dwarfing species. This pomegranate plant is fast-growing with drought tolerant. This is a seeded fruit and it has a thick reddish outer covering. These flowers often fall off the branches rather than converting into fruit.

Red silk

Red silk is the best pot-growing variety, which is a semi-dwarf growth habit. It has dark red flesh and red arils. Grows trees in hot and dry climatic conditions. Its contain fibre which keeps our digestive system healthy.

Texas pink

Texas pink pomegranate plant produces attractive blooming which converts pink fruits. This variety is a famous ornamental fruit plant. Texas pink is a self-fertile plant. It has large edible seeds.

Wonderful

Wonderful pomegranate plant is the most common variety grown in the low desert of Arizona. Mix a teaspoon of natural honey in half a liter of water and spray directly on the flower with the help of a spray bottle. This will attract honey bees for pollination. This tip helps to increase the yield. This fruit is too sweet and highly beneficial.

Seed

In this Punica granatum fruit plant seeds are also edible. It contains vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. In average one fruits can hold 1000 seeds. Seeds are covered with glowing red skin.

Soil

For better growth and development prefers to grow in well-drained loamy soil. Soil mix with 80% bone meal and 20% neem cake.

Water

For mature pomegranate tree, adequate irrigation especially during the dry periods is very important to improve growth, fruit set, yield and fruit size. 

Sunlight

Select the location to keep the pomegranate plant with plenty of sunlight. In cooler climates, plant pome tree with western exposure. Requires 6 hours’ of direct sunlight.

Fertilizer

Good organic mulch and cow manure can improve plant growth and soil fertility. Application of vermicompost at monthly intervals.

Repotting 

Repot the plant into a new pot when the root bound occurs. Normally repot the plant for two to three years. 

Pruning

The best time for pome tree pruning is late winter, after harvesting the fruits. Branch pruning can increase fruit production. Pruning the roots will help to reduce root bound. Pruned the tree before repotting.

Benefits

Daily consumption of pome gives us strength and energy

Its contain fibre which keeps our digestive system healthy.

Punica granatum helps to increase appetite.

Punica granatum is highly beneficial for pregnant women.

Reduces pain in joints and arthritis.

Keep your earth clean and green...!

[styrien]

t-minus five-ish hours until i see nosferatu and i have been thinking about my one oc ( 50s/60s era b-movie actress famous for starring in mid vampire movies, gets turned into vampire )

[radiaking]

This specific cover of ‘who did that to you’

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[rainbowgod666]

("Lethal hit serious series serious punch"es the 2023 button)

I want a fucking refund.

sorry to make you acknowledge that 2013 was 11 years ago

[philodendronleaves]

pomegranate

Pomegranate

The pomegranate is famously known as the fruit of heaven belongs to the berry family. Pomegranate fruit is a delicious fruit and has juicy grains inside. Grow pomegranates as large, shrub or small trees.

Types 

There are 1200 different varieties of pomegranate which have unique tastes and various colours. There are purple hearts, Eversweet, wonderful, kazake, red silk, texas pink.

Purple heart

Purple heart varieties are large with dark red. Fruits begin to produce at about 3 years old. Pick fruit off a tree when it is mature. These pomegranate plants grow 12-30 feet tall and wide. Provide lots of health benefits. They are the best immune boosters and good healers.

Eversweet

The color of the pomegranate is pinkish-pale red. Eversweet seeds are a little hard in texture and are highly nutritious containing vitamins A, C and E. Pomegranate trees are glossy, narrow leathery leaves which are lance-shaped. These varieties are self-pollinated. This is a national fruit of Iran.

Kazake

Kazake varieties produce medium to large size fruit. This is the most dwarfing species. This pomegranate plant is fast-growing with drought tolerant. This is a seeded fruit and it has a thick reddish outer covering. These flowers often fall off the branches rather than converting into fruit.

Red silk

Red silk is the best pot-growing variety, which is a semi-dwarf growth habit. It has dark red flesh and red arils. Grows trees in hot and dry climatic conditions. Its contain fibre which keeps our digestive system healthy.

Texas pink

Texas pink pomegranate plant produces attractive blooming which converts pink fruits. This variety is a famous ornamental fruit plant. Texas pink is a self-fertile plant. It has large edible seeds.

Wonderful

Wonderful pomegranate plant is the most common variety grown in the low desert of Arizona. Mix a teaspoon of natural honey in half a liter of water and spray directly on the flower with the help of a spray bottle. This will attract honey bees for pollination. This tip helps to increase the yield. This fruit is too sweet and highly beneficial.

Seed

In this Punica granatum fruit plant seeds are also edible. It contains vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. In average one fruits can hold 1000 seeds. Seeds are covered with glowing red skin.

Soil

For better growth and development prefers to grow in well-drained loamy soil. Soil mix with 80% bone meal and 20% neem cake.

Water

For mature pomegranate tree, adequate irrigation especially during the dry periods is very important to improve growth, fruit set, yield and fruit size. 

Sunlight

Select the location to keep the pomegranate plant with plenty of sunlight. In cooler climates, plant pome tree with western exposure. Requires 6 hours’ of direct sunlight.

Fertilizer

Good organic mulch and cow manure can improve plant growth and soil fertility. Application of vermicompost at monthly intervals.

Repotting 

Repot the plant into a new pot when the root bound occurs. Normally repot the plant for two to three years. 

Pruning

The best time for pome tree pruning is late winter, after harvesting the fruits. Branch pruning can increase fruit production. Pruning the roots will help to reduce root bound. Pruned the tree before repotting.

Benefits

Daily consumption of pome gives us strength and energy

Its contain fibre which keeps our digestive system healthy.

Punica granatum helps to increase appetite.

Punica granatum is highly beneficial for pregnant women.

Reduces pain in joints and arthritis.

Keep your earth clean and green...!

[alien-in-the-mirror]

catholic converts are so funny, the pope himself was a collaborator of the argentinian genocide, personally turned in priests to the junta, demanded a holy war against the lgbt community, paid for the lawyers and printed four books defending the most famous child rapist priest of argentina, and many other things, and he still isn't right wing enough for them

[reasonsforhope]

"Amsterdam’s roofs have just been converted into a giant sponge that will make the city more climate resilient.

The Dutch have always been famous for their ability to control water, born out of the necessity of their homeland, much of which is below sea level.

Now, their expert water management skills are transforming the city skyline in the capital city of Amsterdam from one of terracotta tile, concrete, and shingles into green grass and brown earth.

It’s part of a new climate-resiliency trend in architecture and civic planning known as the ‘sponge city concept,’ in which a garden of water-loving plants, mosses, and soil absorbs excess rainwater before feeding it into the building for use in flushing toilets or watering plants on the ground.

If heavy rains are predicted, a smart valve system empties the stored rainwater into the municipal storm drains and sewers in advance of the weather, allowing the roof to soak up water and reduce flooding in the city.

In this way, the rooftops of buildings can be wrung out and filled up just like a sponge.

In Amsterdam, 45,000 square meters, or 11 acres of flat metropolitan rooftops have already been fitted with these systems, and the contracting firms behind the technology say they make sense in dry climates like Spain just as much as in wet climates like Amsterdam...

A 4-year project of different firms and organizations called Resilio, the resilient network for smart climate adaptive rooftops, rolled out thousands of square meters of sponge city technology into new buildings. As with many climate technologies, the costs are high upfront but tend to result in savings from several expenditures like water utilities and water damage, over a long-enough time horizon...

All together, Amsterdam’s sponge capacity is over 120,000 gallons.

“We think the concept is applicable to many urban areas around the world,” Kasper Spaan from Waternet, Amsterdam’s public water management organization, told Wired Magazine. “In the south of Europe–Italy and Spain–where there are really drought-stressed areas, there’s new attention for rainwater catchment.”

Indeed the sponge city concept comes into a different shade when installed in drought-prone regions. Waters absorbed by rooftops during heavy rains can be used for municipal purposes to reduce pressure on underground aquifers or rivers, or be sweated out under the Sun’s rays which cools the interior of the building naturally.

Additionally, if solar panels were added on top of the rooftop garden, the evaporation would keep the panels cooler, which has been shown in other projects to improve their energy generation.

“Our philosophy in the end is not that on every roof, everything is possible,” says Spaan, “but that on every roof, something is possible.”

Matt Simon, reporting on the Resilio project for Wired, said succinctly that perhaps science fiction authors have missed the mark when it came to envisioning the city of the future, and that rather than being a glittering metropolis of glass, metal, and marble as smooth as a pannacotta, it will look an awful lot more like an enormous sculpture garden."

-via Good News Network, May 15, 2024

[lilliaace]

I'm going to put this as nicely as possible.

You're fifteen, according to your bio/pinned post. I'm 30. I have been alive literally twice the time you've been alive in this world. You are a baby queer. I don't mean that demeaningly. I mean this as to say this - you don't know smack about the LGBTQ world beyond the walls of the internet, maybe a queer club at your local school (high school if you're in the USA).

The online and club spaces for the LGBTQ world are so incredibly sanitized, period.

No, bi lesbians and their sister labels (pan lesbians, omni lesbians, polysexual lesbians, straightbians, fagdykes, lesboys, asexual lesbians, aromantic lesbians, etc.) ARE NOT putting their lesbian/dyke sisters in danger, period.

Pushing that the idea of "m spec lesbian" is somehow damaging...

victim blaming for ladies attempted to be 'forced converted' by straight men

Xenophobic towards MANY global gender IDs that are specific to certain cultures (2-spirit for indigenous USA tribes, Hijra in India, etc.)

Shifts the blame from the rapist to the victim, regardless of circumstances

Also minimizes the fact that asshole men are going to be asshole men, regardless of whoever they're being a jerk to. A jerk is going to be an asshole, regardless.

The idea of a "m spec lesbian" has been around FOR YEARS. Documented since at LEAST the 1950s.

I strongly recommend reading "Stone Butch Blues" and "The Stonewall Generation" as well as "PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality"

You might get lucky and find them at your local library. There's a free PDF floating around of Stone Butch Blues. I got Stonewall Generation by going to a LIVE PRIDE event that was local. You should be able to find them on Google Shopping, Amazon, Ebay, and/or Mercari.

Human sexuality is complicated, period. Many women who were exclusively (or almost exclusively) attracted to other women often paired up with men for the sake of affection, protection, and companionship rather than genuine attraction (Elenor Roosevelt and Virginia Woolf are the first two famous people who come to mind). Also, Kristen Stewart recently came out as a bi lesbian in a recent interview.

We exist, period. NO ONE is helping by LGBTQ identity policing. Y'all are only hurting yourself. PLEASE talk to real life queer people face to face, beyond the safety net of social media and school clubs. You will learn so much.

[spacetwinks]

been playing a game called Ishin No Arashi, which was am ambitious Koei sim for the famicom where you play a dignitary of your choice during the Bakumatsu era and try to convert others to your ideology. here's me playing as famous samurai Ryoma Sakamoto doing a dogshit job of winning others over by having an incredibly awkward conversation