came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]

the “mushroom” is not the organism, it’s the fruiting body of some fungi, basically a reproductive appendage. it’s like saying “a butt isn’t an animal.” they’re all fungi, but there are so many types and forms of fungi with different reproductive strategies and forms/structures, even within a single species.

the average manager/boss is so inculcated with “job creator” brain worms in the US, they believe they, as benevolent nobles, are the ones generating value in the organization while their underlings extract value as salary/wages. it leads to shit like this where bosses are baffled they can’t actually get everything they want by snapping their fingers, even though they control the immediate material access to housing, healthcare, etc.

as it turns out, workers are the critical resource because they make it all go. the execs are the ones extracting massive value as salary/benefits or stock manipulation, while realistically only going to meetings to strategize ways to get more value out of workers without sharing any increases. workers are paying managers to boss them around all day and act important.

if i wanted to be upvoted more, i would simply post incredible things.

he’s also done nothing

that’s not true. he bargained away the student loan pause during the Deal of the Century, flubbed the perennially shrinking student loan forgiveness order, and interest rates went up 7200% kicking the tech platform enshittification cycle into overdrive & injecting superglue into the lock protecting the housing market from normal humans.

as usual it’s the DNC’s race to lose, and i have no doubt they are going to have some real doozies for us this time.

honestly, a combat liberalism bot that responds to comments with “lib”, “liberalism” or the lib emoji with a randomly selected description of one of the types of liberalism and maybe one of the mao emojis could be so simple and elegant.

the economist? a reliable source of anything but anglo billionaire propaganda, let alone factual material analysis… surely not.

• the largest US pork producer, Smithfield, was purchased by a Chinese firm in the 2013. the largest feedlot on the planet, in Tar Heel NC has been owned and operated by the WH Group since then (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WH_Group). any “IP”, trade secrets and material (semen, records, maternal lines) are owned by them. but all of that is besides the point: chinese capitalists already own US pork production systems and facilities. the pork americans eat here was produced by their firms, with much of it exported to china. this is a good arrangement for them, because 1.) the mountain of feed is already here and owning a channel for adding value (converting grain into meat) is a way to engage in arbitrage when commodity markets get unstable 2.) the environmental destruction of this production system stays in the US 3.) worker rights and pay in US slaughter houses are the worst of the worst, unions are killed in the crib, child labor is rampant, etc. why would china want to bring any of these costs, which the US has externalized to broke rural communities, back home to china? not just the processing facilities, but the CAFO systems themselves are increasingly owned by foreign nationals (JBS Brazil, various Dutch psychos, etc), because worker and environmental protections in the US are a joke.

• animal breeds are a constantly changing artifact. pigs were domesticated in the near east and far east long before being brought to europe. the commercial breeds used today for CAFOs are wildly different in appearance and conformation to those of the exact same name 100 years ago. today, the industrial ag system optimizes for a single breed characteristic: feed to muscle gain ratio, based on a tweaked feed ration made primarily of the cheapest grain components. traits like “environmental hardiness”, “mothering ability”, “disease susceptibility”, “fat production” etc are all ignored under the CAFO system. the point being, what defines an “elite” line is the system it is bred to inhabit, and generally the defenders of that system (which is 100% where the minds that wrote that article are coming from… “the west has magic animals, they need our magic animals, our system is super relevant!”). meanwhile, the most expensive pork on the planet comes from one place in southern japan. “kagoshima kurobuta”. the black pig. though japan already raised pigs for thousands of years, in the 1800s a diplomatic mission brought Berkshire pigs (from Berkshire england). on the generally rural southern island of Kyushu, the community developed a production system around the breed (similar to the Kobe place / Waygu breed assocation) with the understanding that spent mash (high protein) from making a sweet potato based alcohol would be constantly available in the area. what i mean by this is, aside from some wack ass outlier, any community with reasonable access to resources and in contact with the outside world can take a handful of animals and make whatever they’re looking to make happen.

• all industrial firms seeking to maximize production maintain at least two breed lines, which they cross to generate an F1 hybrid and that animal is raised for animal products. hybrid vigor has been the move in commercial agriculture (plant and animal) since commercial agriculture was a thing. a herd of a breed can be closed at a surprisingly small population, though the smaller the size the closer it must be monitored for undesirable recessive traits. it also takes very little outside influence to overcome issues associated with line breeding. but the main point is this… in industrial agricultural systems (plant and animal) there are plants/animals grown for products, and plants/animals grown for genetics. the plants/animals grown for products aren’t bred back into the production system, because the first generation vigor is gone and the offspring are going to have a mix that would be difficult to manage genetically. and this is really only for very energy intensive production systems where they are pulling out all the stops to maximize the amount of animal product (or plant product) coming from an individual animal, which is the mindset of industrial systems.

I have formal education in domestic animal genetics and broad experience in animal husbandry. that is not a real thing you are talking about. you absolutely need to bring a source to this discussion for that kind of assertion, because what you are talking about is biologically impossible.

breeders close herds all the time and breeds are maintained by breeding organizations. the commercial F1 hybridization lines are controlled, but there is no “self terminate” gene.

pick almost any vegetable and china grows near to or more than the next 9 nations combined.

their agricultural system is far more diverse and resilient than the US. they had their own agricultural revolution during the so-called green revolution financed by Western capital, and while it doesn’t grow a mountain of soy/corn like the settler colonial states, it feeds healthy food to a lot of healthy people.

in secondary school (ages 14-18) it was highly encouraged to take at least 2 years of a foreign language, though american sign language counted. and kids on the “not college” pipeline didn’t have to do that. j’ai trois ans de les cours de francais, but i haven’t had much opportunity to practice or use it conversationally in like the 25 years since.

edit: secondary school offered french, spanish, german or ASL. the private $$$ schools offered mandarin and others.

where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists–who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other–got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.

i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to “press ocho for espanol”. he said that our company even offering the option to “those people” was wrong… in FLORIDA… the state with the name that means “land of flowers” in spanish.

i joined chacha as a lifeboat years ago when the CTH reddit got banned and stayed as it became Ursus hexagonalis. the lack of ads, the memes, irreverence for institutions combined with respect for humans, and the absolute god-tier emoji selection is what keeps me here.

also, the megathread topics are very interesting/informative as a People’s History, since many of the stories come from the “periphery” for all my world systems nerds out there. living in the imperial core, the constant cacophony of cultural outputs and hegemonic discourses, i appreciate any channel that connects me with post-colonial narratives, critical theory, etc.

a man marrying a woman is probably the gayest thing a guy could do, tbh

I can’t wrap my head around

my conservative friends watched media I explicitly instructed them not to watch. betrayal!

either this is a bit, or this guy is the among the most insufferably swollen assholes of the world.

the lamey.world “pre-emptive/last resort” defederation drama has been the funniest thing imo. i imagined federation with such a big-tent instance would involve wreckers and some crafted-over-time pre-text for shutting us out.

instead, they push the button before we even connect, call out our mod message of “be polite in other instances” and “NATO is shitty, actually”, creating a struggle session amongst their own users, locking their own post, and banning complainers as hex-alts like some Q-brain trying to huff the Smell of Freedom while standing in the Cavortex.

their deranged leadership outed their instance as the vanity project of some reactionary autocratic westoid chauvinist. straight up own-goal from midfield.