Scaring immigrants and reducing both legal and illegal immigration is the stupidest thing any country with a declining birth rate and an increase in elderly population can do.

Who’s going to provide elder care? Who’s going to pay taxes to maintain the country?

The majority of legal and illegal immigrants are often skilled workers with foresight and drive to work to improve their lives. They are often escaping persecution corruption and criminal behavior and looking for peace and prosperity.

They regularly take the worst type of jobs, at low pay rates, even though many of them are highly skilled and educated. These are jobs many citizens do not want, harvesting crops, cleaning, landscaping.

Anyone white who doesn’t realize their ancestors were literally in the same boat and behaved like actual criminals , stealing land from native Americans and killing them with violence and disease, and/or owning slaves, is an idiot.

Many of the people who worry about immigrants are looking for someone to blame for their unhappiness, when the real problem is the rich (or themselves) .

Native people are the only non immigrants in this country.

And county, and cities

A few sources of free supplies for those who want to grow with less.

1. Free seeds - look for a seed library- check with family owned nurseries at end of season, they have to toss expired seed, they still germinate. Save seed from food - tomato, potato, pepper, squash
2. Free containers. Know anyone in a landscape installation company? Ask them to save you 5 and 15gallon pots. Make newspaper pots, sew felt bags ( get felt at a craft thrift store . )
3. free fertilizer: coffee grounds from neighbors, guinea pig litter or rabbit litter if you know people with pets, bean soaking liquid,

I’ve been off it for over a month and I suddenly got an advertisement for Reddit in my weather app. They are thirsty

Is that a chickakey?

Exactly what I would do. Build tiny house communities for low income housing that sustain themselves.

They would have some community features like a tool library and food garden and a dog area, and individual indoor and outdoor spaces for everyone.

A portion of either the rent or sale price would be set aside for each person for financial advice or mental health support annually.

Ideally built by a combination of master craftspeople and trainees from at risk youth.

Any recommendations would be appreciated

Ugh I really want to do this but it’s totally outside my skill set

There is plenty of evidence that the full chemical formulation in roundup is toxic - which is why they try to focus on the “active ingredient” glyphosate.
Plus it’s already been linked to fatty liver disease.

I totally agree with you-. It’s one of the reasons why I quit - I just couldn’t make things safer or change the attitude of leadership.

I spent a ton of time trying to get the police to help protect my team. Or to get leadership to redirect the police. The police answer was, they didn’t want to enter the parks because it was too dangerous for police because there were plants and trees that made it harder to see danger. Yet They still expected the lowest paid workers to go there and work. I had a day when they basically ignored one of my employees who was getting racist threats as he was picking up trash and accused him of wasting police resources - this was the kindest hardest working 65 year old guy, who wouldn’t have called the police unless he was truly scared for his life.

I basically realized one of my team would have to be killed for anything to really change. Unfortunately it almost happened to another team that handled janitorial services- guy got stabbed. They did start a special team to deal with encampments after that, but there was still no changes in the issues at the parks.

It’s hard to stay empathetic about homeless when you deal with the worst of them on a daily basis. I worked in parks and my team was constantly getting attacked and cleaning up their urine and feces, blood and needles. There were people offering them access to services every week and the worst ones always refuse. Most people who work in parks are kind introverted people who love plants, and want people to enjoy green space . just seeing my team get punched in the face or their arm broken made it really hard to feel any empathy towards homeless. I really had to work at it.

I mean most people don’t have empathy for the opposite political party, imagine trying to empathize with someone who shits on your desk every day.

Some of them are obviously mentally ill, a few are just down on their luck, but also some of them are violent criminals who carry weapons. It was pretty typical to find some that had open warrants for arrest in other states.

I hear the accident was avoidable, if only the truck had been able to turn on a dime.

It’s also improving sales of used and handmade items from small businesses and craftspeople. My eBay sales are up 10% and I expect even more in the next few months.

Hopefully it will also alienate his big business cronies or accelerate the demise of their businesses I’m up for either.

Look for bareroot trees if you want a better deal.

I’ve been preparing for some kind of problem with produce for a few years, I just had a gut feeling so I built a vegetable garden 3 years ago. Also have been planting fruit trees everywhere.

My advice is if you need something electronic or mechanical and it’s expensive buy it now. I just replaced my hvac last month because I know this summer will be a mess. Most air conditioners are made in Asia. You want an e-bike, buy it now.

The more parts something has the more likely it’s going to be affected by tariffs.

Start growing some food if you can it’s a great way to be more resilient. I’d recommend buying things like coffee and tea and chocolate that are not easily grown in the US. There’s actually a pretty bad chocolate shortage right now I believe.

Also for other stuff, buy used, in thrifts or on eBay. Not only are you recycling, most sellers are individuals rather than big corps. Also, if you have old stuff you are not using, it’s a great time to sell. My eBay sales are up 10% this year.

It’s worse with instagram. I debated switching to Pixelfed at first because no one I know is on it. But then I realized I barely see friends content on insta, so it’s not really different, at least on Pixelfed I don’t see adds and only see posts from people I follow.

I was the first of my siblings to cut contact with my dad and stepmom. I had to really consider how I would feel when my dad died, if I cut contact, I didn’t want to regret it.
My stepmom was abusive and my dad always chose her over our safety.
Now all but one of my siblings have cut contact.
They tell people we ghosted them. They reach out regularly to try to contact us. I’ve realized it’s because they feel bad about themselves and it’s never about knowing us or caring about us. Half the messages they send us say stuff about how we are going to hell and we need to find Jesus.

The hardest part is explaining to people with normal families, they never understand that parents who can’t love you exist, and that a big happy reconciliation wouldn’t be a good thing.

Our library loans out state parks passes for a month so you can go to parks for free. It also loans out hiking gear, provides immigration resources, and oddly, a ukulele.

Let’s not assume every garden has the same Eurocentric seasonal variation on lemmy.

I’m mid season right now. Planting usually starts in October but our rain was super late this year.

Lots of weeding and trying to get my summer veggies started. I usually stop planting anything by June.

Gophers decimated most of my greens and peas, so I’m basically turning my vegetable garden into plant jail. Still have potatoes going they should be ready soon.

I also have friendly raccoons who love digging up my plants, tossing them aside to look for insects. They got so mad about my plant protectors last week I heard them fighting trying to break in.