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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.


  • There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

    The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.



  • Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.

    That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.









  • You went out of your way just to tell everyone that you think former drug addicts aren’t deserving of medical care? Not even people who currently do drugs (who are also all 100% deserving of medical treatment btw), anyone who used to do drugs is disqualified, too? It’s an absolutely insane take to say “they used to do drugs, so they don’t deserve to have teeth.” And what of all those people who didn’t do drugs, but still need and can’t afford dentures or implants? If you can’t afford reliable access to dental care from the start, you’ll likely be stuck with preventable problems down the line that then become even more expensive to fix. The situations of these people aren’t different from former addicts in any meaningful way; they need dental work, but can’t afford it. You’re ignoring the core issue that important and completely necessary dental work (and medical treatment of all kinds) is too expensive for almost everyone, not just current or former addicts. As a result, many are forced to go without that treatment. That’s a bad thing. You saw someone complaining that dental work is unaffordable, and all you could think to say was “Yeah, but they’re druggies, so there’s no problem here.” You’ve justified a terrible system to yourself because you view the people who were quoted as being beneath you. What’s truly dystopian is both that medical care would be out of reach of so many, but also that people would be ok with that as long as it means the “undesirables” don’t get to have any. The societal disdain for marginalized human life and the moral superiority complex that fuels it are both absolutely appalling.






  • 260 beds isn’t anywhere near enough to shelter every homeless person on the streets, whether in Grants Pass or Portland, which aren’t the same place, by the way. The mention of this is especially disgusting when you consider that 260 beds is clearly not nearly enough to solve a homelessness issue for a city and it only serves to falsely lay blame on the homeless. Even if you’re staying in a shelter, you’re still homeless; they aren’t a solution in themselves. Shelters are generally poorly maintained, unhygienic, and unsafe. They’re a good place to get all your shit stolen, too. Have you ever been to a homeless shelter? They aren’t nice places to be, plus they have all sorts of ridiculous and overly-restrictive rules and policies that have to be followed. Given Portland’s homeless population, 260 beds is a total drop in the bucket anyway, so treating that as an available solution that people aren’t using is incredibly disingenuous because most of them are being used and there still aren’t nearly enough to shelter everyone, even if they were actually worth staying in. Since you brought up Portland, I’ll talk a bit about Portland, but don’t forget that this story is about Grants Pass, where about a third of all residents pay more than half of their incomes on rent, making Grants Pass one of the most rent-burdened towns in Oregon.

    KGW, like most MSMs, tends to have a slant against homeless people, loyally parroting whatever the police and mayor, Ted Wheeler, tell them without a lick of journalistic analysis. They love whining about the homeless at every opportunity they can, but I never see them report on those killed by hypothermia as a direct result of frequent and brutal police sweeps, or when the homeless are often outright murdered by class terrorists.

    Instead of doing anything meaningful about the homelessness crisis, Portland invests all of its money into increasing the police budget and putting up anti-homeless architecture instead of tackling rampant rent inflation, or lack of access to mental health treatment, or developers only building luxury apartments, etc. They’ve experimented with some alternatives, such as little clusters of tiny, one-room shelters, but not in sufficient amounts to make any meaningful difference. Their policies don’t actually reduce homelessness at all, it just squeezes those in a tough situation even harder and criminalizes the poorest among us.

    You also left out the main fact of the matter that Grants Pass literally outlawed being homeless. Down on your luck and living on the streets? Congratulations, you’re also a criminal now. That’s outrageous. It is now illegal to be too poor. How this could be justifiable in anyone’s mind is shocking to me.


  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlSociety
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    11 months ago

    This chart really makes no sense at all. How does Lord of the Flies lie at the intersection of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451?

    One’s about an ultra-conservative theocracy, one’s about government surveillance and propaganda, and one’s about destroying books because people’s attention spans have reduced past the ability to read and they’re too long/confusing/depressing. I guess authoritarianism might lie at the heart of all these? Meanwhile, though, Lord of the Flies is more about the dangers of unchecked groupthink and how it can lead to violence and cruelty.