And generally just tear through native populations of birds and small mammals. I honestly think it's irresponsible to have outdoor cats in places where they're not native (which is effectively everywhere).
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
> My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.
Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.
And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.
The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.
Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.
Cats have completely deleted the rabbit populations in a lot of suburbia. I feel like it got worse around 2020 for some reason. I had to move to the middle of the woods to start seeing them again.
That tracks for sika deer. Those are the "sacred deer" that used to be venerated in Nara, and are still protected under Japanese national treasure laws. They are allowed to roam free throughout Nara, and you face big penalties for hurting or messing with them. You are allowed to feed them special deer crackers which local shopkeepers sell, but woe betide you if a deer sees or smells deer crackers on your person! You will be followed or chased, and may be at risk of being gored on a buck's antlers, until you give up the goods. They're attitude on four cloven hooves, those deer.
That's an Iberian lynx. They were nearly extinct around the year 2000, but since then they've been reintroduced and relocated and nurtured with rabbits until the population grew 20 times bigger. Cuteness is not irrelevant to that in my opinion, but anyway it exists because humans decided it should, because it fits our idea of what nature would have done if we hadn't already interfered. Therefore ... it's OK that we arranged for it to be there torturing a rat, I guess. But it takes the edge off the guilt about domestic cats somewhat. The whole thing ends up being a battle about taste and aesthetics in the giant wildlife park we've inadvertantly created.
Toll roads are profitable. They are basically money-printers in fact. More/all of our expressways should be toll roads IMO. Then the people who use them will pay for them, and there will be money to keep them in good repair without needing appropriations from the general fund.
Small thing - I generally haven't seen tolled motorways called Freeways - but I haven't lived in the US in a long time. I'm familiar with turnpikes of course, and a tolled motorway in Orange County, CA.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
For what it's worth, I love trains, and the romance of them, but I ALSO love taking it from Oakland or Richmond to Sacramento and sipping a beer while I look through the window at all the poor saps stuck on I-80. I've had that drive take 4+ hours before on a Friday, especially when people are headed to Tahoe.
It would be on the top of banned books in Texas schools.
That being said, the first few pages of "The Ministry for the future" will make a great first episode for an HBO show, someday... (or whatever network is not own by an oil company, eventually.)
:-( I'm sitting here looking at huge wind turbines out my front window and I absolutely LOVE them. I get to live in a solarpunk future where I can get where I need to without a car, my kids run out the door and play without getting run over, and I can see clean energy being made for my home (and that of my neighbours).
I'm sure a lot of the cranky old people near me don't like them, but they hate everything and go out of their way to find things to complain about, to be honest.
Frankly I feel the same as you. I saw my first wind turbine in Newcastle Australia and was completely blown away & wanted to work in wind energy. I've been to Denmark and seen the Vestas V-164 offshore turbine at the on-shore test facility. The rotor area on the V-164 seems as big as a football field - it's the largest rotating object I've ever seen and my mind could barely understand the scale of it. For me, wind turbines are beautiful. I was called crazy a lot in the Netherlands ;-)
If you look at the config it's based on karma, comments, submission rate, comment rate (optional), and account age (that is, if you trust it actually uses the config how it says)
There are some high karma accounts which make a great contribution, and others which ... don't. I'm doubtful whether karma or account age has a significant signal beyond anti-spam.
But it would be useful to know if I had up/down voted them significantly in the past.
The only thing karma reliably indicates is participation over time, the signal is too noisy for anything else. If anything high karma should be a red flag. The very best contributors here rarely comment because they have better things to do. It shows an 8/8 score for me and I doubt anyone would consider me a top tier high quality contributor.
A plugin like HN Comments Owl would be more useful IMHO.
As if to demonstrate my point, two high karma accounts have down voted my suggestion that karma is meaningful. Naturally they are too craven to enter the field.
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