The Waimakariri River flows for 94 miles (151 km) across the South Island of New Zealand, beginning in the Southern Alps and emptying into the Pacific Ocean. In the mid-19th century, it was briefly named the Courtenay River before reverting back to its traditional Maori name, which means “river of cold rushing water.”
-43.433760°, 172.575434°
Source imagery: Nearmap
Everyone please behold this baby tree:
It's so much smaller than the support posts, they had to secure it with caution tape.
Caution: baby!
One day (but not this day)!
Update:
Thriving!
In case you were wondering!
Update:
Filling out, and up!
Clearwing tussock moth, Carriola ecnomoda, Lymantriinae
Found in Southeast Asia
Photo 1 by leptonia, 2 by rejoicegassah, 3 by dhfischer, 4 by antoniogiudici, 5 by mark027, 6-8 by ivijayanand, and 9 for scale by soooonchye
Casual reminder that The Washington Post is owned by Nash Holdings, which is controlled by good ol’ Jeffery Bezos.
Was going to keep this in the tags BUT I think it’s important people understand that sturgeon caviar is only a luxury in the first place because of colonization. Anishanabae and other Great Lakes area tribes (and I’m sure more I’m just speaking where I am from) have been fishing Sturgeon for literally thousands of years. Besides consuming the fish eggs and meat we also made glue from its bladder, bags from its skin and used the oil from the fish as well. Sturgeon is important to many of our tribes traditionally and spiritually. So much so we even have Clans in honor of the Sturgeon. Than European settler-colonizers showed up and like they decimated Buffalo populations to starve Natives they did similarly with Sturgeon. When they pushed our people onto reservations they also created laws and legislation to keep us from fishing and hunting in our own ancestral lands. Than they built fisheries and Damns, destroying habitats and overfishing sturgeon to near extinction.
a lot of people in the notes are saying “this is the opposite of what happened with Lobster” so I wanted to point out that no it is actually exactly what happened to lobster.
Stories from salting’s previous peak, circa the Great Depression, have been a touchstone of Inside Organizer School workshops since a pair of longtime organizers, Richard Bensinger and Chris Townsend, began holding them in 2018. Those tales, like one salt’s account of swapping names and haircuts to keep getting hired at the same 1930s stockyard, have remained a fixture now that Bensinger’s protégé, 25-year-old Workers United organizer Jaz Brisack, is largely spearheading the trainings.
Brisack, who spent their home-schooled teenage years in Tennessee working at Panera Bread, had been waiting a long time to salt somewhere. They’d defied their Christian fundamentalist parents by renouncing religion, and the labor movement offered an outlet for rebellion and a stand-in for the sense of community and greater purpose that faith used to provide. While they were studying public policy at the University of Mississippi, a professor introduced them to Bensinger. Brisack began assisting Bensinger’s efforts to organize a nearby Nissan Motor Co. plant and then, during breaks from their Rhodes scholarship in 2019, at a series of coffee shops in upstate New York.
The first Starbucks employee Brisack met with about gauging support for a union quickly got fired. After that, Brisack says, “I had a grudge.” When they returned to the US from the UK in 2020, the upstate New York chapter of Workers United hired Brisack as its organizing director. That December, Starbucks, none the wiser, brought Brisack on as a barista. Their union office in Rochester sat mostly empty for the following year, the nameplate on the door reversed to hide their name. After a couple of months picking up shifts at Starbucks around Buffalo along with another salt, Brisack was confident that the stores could be organized and that the task would require more backup. The union recruited Starbucks salts through the Inside Organizer School, friends of friends and a cryptic online job posting for “Project Germinal,” named for Emile Zola’s novel about labor strife in French coal mines.
When applying for jobs at Starbucks, the salts would lay it on thick. “When she wasn’t at work, my mother was running down Franklin Street in Syracuse to get a grande iced coffee, no sugar, and one-inch room for cream,” Westlake wrote in his cover letter. “She taught me that the efficiency and quality that Starbucks offers is unlike any other cafe.” (This was a half-truth, he says: “My mom hated Starbucks, but she did really love coffee.”) He also told his interviewer that he would report any colleague he heard complaining about working conditions and that he hoped eventually to ascend to management. Another Starbucks salt, Arjae Rebmann, spent their job interview with their arms crossed or at their side, so the manager wouldn’t notice the hammer-and-sickle tattoo on their left wrist.
With Covid raging, Brisack convened salt training sessions over Zoom, discussing how to get hired and how to make friends. Starbucks salts hosted brunches, gave thoughtful birthday gifts and boned up on their co-workers’ favorite TV shows. Westlake says he changed his look partly to make it more obvious he wasn’t a straight dude and to help his mostly female co-workers feel more comfortable around him. Another salt, Zachary Field, dug into astrology because it was popular with his fellow baristas. When he told them he was a Scorpio, more than one said that was weird—he didn’t seem like the secretive type.
Field and Westlake lived in a group house with a couple more salts. That crew avoided hosting co-workers or even bringing home dates. Instead, some of them hung up pictures of Karl Marx and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, and the group used flashcards to quiz each other on Starbucks recipes and compared notes with other salts on which co-workers could be key to a successful union drive.
Note the building of solidarity around gender issues. This is the economic side of the coin to right wingers screaming about woke capital. They’re terrified that social solidarity is going to break out among workers. Definitely click through and read the whole thing.
(unpaywalled: https://archive.is/hst2x)
With the knowledge that Vulcan has regularly high winds & subsequent sandstorms I propose a type of guy: midwestern dads watching tornadoes but for Vulcans. Somebody's uncle Sovar standing outside with his hands on his hips watching a massive cloud roll closer. Unconcerned because this happens, like, every couple of weeks. He's like "this one is large, is it not" yes it is go back inside Sovar
The one Vulcan aspect Kirk can excel at.
Kirk: “Oh yeah I’m from Iowa. It’s part of something called tornado alley.”
Spock: “Where’s the captain? The storm is getting worse.”
Crewman: “He’s out there with the other Vulcans. He told us to wait in the shuttle.”
