Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?

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.

Did you intend to link to an explicitly pro-Western, Zionist, neoconservative magazine? Not sure if I fully trust their framing, especially when it comes to someone so consistently critical of Western policy. The article is just the author (not even a member of the staff, it appears to be a letter to the editor) whining that Chomsky said the author couldn’t find certain quotes and that his stance on Vietnam was hawkish, not a whole lot mentioned on anything else. I’m aware of some of Chomsky’s more problematic positions, but how does this back that up what you’re saying? Sounds more like a petty personal spat between a couple academics.

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“‘By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight.’”

Billionaires already own the police, which number over 700,000 in the US alone and the national police budget would be equivalent to the third most expensive army in the world. If this is already the state of things, how could we blame that on the anarchists? This argument effectively boils down to “we shouldn’t have a revolution because the rich would have a monopoly on violence”, which we already know to be the case in our current society. So in this way, nothing at all is holding us back. The worst case scenario would be a preservation of the status quo. Even if the Proud Boys, III%ers, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, etc. all combined into a giant mercenary group, it wouldn’t be even close to how the cops already are. They’re one of the most militarized police forces in the world with access to heavy equipment such as assault rifles, chemical weapons, acoustic weaponry, MRAPs, and much more.

If the revolution ever comes, we’ll just have to take all the billionaires to the Ipatiev House. A revolution would already have no recourse but to defeat any police opposition anyway, so there really is no difference whether the billionaires are around or not. Those billionaires, if they have any sense of self-preservation, would be smarter to take their money and simply flee abroad.

Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1000% 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 and was also complaining 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 too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of people 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.

Don’t the lyrics in “In the Flesh” indicate that the nazis are actually a different band that had to be called in as substitutes because the lead singer of the band that was supposed to play is currently going through a mental breakdown in his hotel room (i.e. stuck behind the wall)? The main figure of the album might’ve just imagined the whole thing, though.

The government predicts a 70 to 80 percent probability of a magnitude 8 to 9 quake occurring along the Nankai Trough within the next 30 years.

Damn, and I thought we had it bad in the PNW with a 37% chance of a 7.1+ (possibly up to and beyond 9.0) in the next 50 years.

You’re right, my bad. My comment was directed at the actual OP, though, so you can rest assured the comment wasn’t for you

“You see them everywhere.” That’s it? This opinion feels way too specific for that to be the only thing on your mind lol. Maybe at least some context? Are you from somewhere where people are less tall on average? Is there something you don’t like about tall people? Like the other guy said, give us a rant! Let’s hear where this is going.

For real though, could you elaborate? Give us a few reasons why. Also, probably would have been a better post for the unpopular opinion community

Workers are now paid 20+ bucks an hour for fast food

In California, maybe. Everywhere else wages aren’t even near that much for fast food. Fast food establishments aren’t even really part of the tipping discussion, which may be why California raised the minimum wage only for fast food workers. Having worked those jobs before, I can say that no one there expects a tip and likewise, tips are uncommon. Restaurant workers still have the same minimum wage as before, though. For fast food, don’t worry about tipping. If you want to go to a sit-down place, though, don’t go if you aren’t prepared to tip. It’s not like you can’t figure out approximately what the tip would be before you go. Don’t forget that federal law says food service workers only have to get paid $2.13 an hour of actual wages as long as tips can make up the difference to the national minimum wage of $7.25. It makes a lot of people unhappy when they have to tip, but that’s how it is and they knew it before they went out to eat. If you don’t like it, don’t reward those businesses with your patronage in the first place. Not tipping only results in your wait staff getting stiffed, the boss doesn’t care whether you tip or not.

Didn’t Netanyahu say just the other day that there’d be no ceasefire until his war goals in Palestine had been achieved?

Aw man, it came and I missed it? I need more details. About what time? Where at? Facing which direction? I kept an eye out last night but didn’t see anything before bed.

It sucks that they turned this into a story about how great mass surveillance is

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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.

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.

Whenever I get a capcha of anyone on a vehicle, I always make it a point to highlight the entirety of the driver too because I’m not going to just let Google train its self-driving vehicles to just ignore that every motorcycle has a rider on it.