Mountain lion only describes one type of habitat cougars live in, they have the widest distribution of all the big cats and live in a variety of habitats, including the Everglades swamp in Florida, in canyons, and in areas with a lot of scrubby brush they can ambush from.

A lot of the trees being cut down are old growth forests, there are nearly no old growth forests left on the whole continent and some animals specifically need old forests with their diversity of species and with different ages of trees throughout. Things grow back differently when you clear cut a section than when an old tree died and falls here and there or is harvested sparingly without destroying the surrounding trees and underbrush, so the lack of selectivity when harvesting is also harmful. Cutting down everything and replanting one species that grows ok in a clear cut area doesn’t restore the forest. Look at longleaf pine forests, for example. Nearly the entire southern US used to be longleaf pine and now it only exists in 3% of its former range. The southern US is still covered in pine, but it mostly got replaced with loblolly pines. You can replant some trees, but you can’t replant a whole complex forest ecosystem, and many of the trees people replant are ones they think they can personally profit from like the fast growing loblolly pines rather than slow growing species that need special care and land management practices to maintain good growing conditions.

These polygamist Mormon cults have a long history of child abuse. It is relevant that they continue to arrange child marriages and facilitate child abuse even as their previous leader is spending the rest of his life in prison for the exact same thing.

It is the same group, Warren Jeffs is technically still that group’s leader from prison, but Samuel Bateman started telling followers that Jeffs died in prison to convince them he is their new prophet and they need to give up their minor daughters to him as wives.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/25/53-felonies-polygamist-leader/

The CEO of the streaming platform was participating in the stream, I think this visit was meant to be a publicity stunt to drum up more interest in the platform which is trying to become an alternative to Twitch. It’s investor money that was lost here, not the streamer’s money.

Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

I don’t know if something like this is available where you are, but in the US there is a brand of milk owned by Coca-Cola where they filter out the sugars (lactose is a sugar), it is called Fairlife and is marketed as high protein milk. It still retains the fats and proteins and flavor of ordinary milk. It comes in a variety of fat percentages like ordinary milk for people with different dietary preferences.

My favorite plant milk is soy milk, but that isn’t as readily available out here as it used to be since conservatives decided drinking it would turn men into girls. I find oat and almond milks too watery and unsatisfying in drinks.

My boyfriend’s nephew calls me buddy and I am a woman about ten years older than him, we are both adults so he isn’t a confused toddler either. It might vary regionally. It simply means friend in our case. I don’t think he is trying to make me out to be younger than him. Maybe it is his way of declaring I am “one of the guys”, however.

If everyone starts using it, it won’t sound southern any more. C’mon, you know you want to.

The term upstate has no relation to the capital city, that was a mistaken assertion. It isn’t used very widely at all, it’s just a local term in a couple of states for their northern portions. Most states don’t have an area that is referred to as upstate.

Ok now I am curious where you live that you have to provide ID to shop. Here in the US we scan the items and then swipe our payment card, the ID is only used to check your age for tobacco and alcohol purchases which can’t be sold to minors. An employee has to come look at the ID to make sure a minor hasn’t borrowed someone else’s, so it doesn’t even get scanned. Employees just swipe their work badge and confirm that they checked your age.

As for the pain, a lot of self checkout systems have very limited space and can be awkward to run all your items through. Manned stations have the conveyor so you can unload multiple items from your cart at a time to be scanned. They also have more end space so you can have room to bag everything if you are doing a big shopping trip.

I don’t check Reddit much, but I have been using Dystopia lately if I need to check a niche community. I have a different VPN so no idea if browsing Reddit through that app works with Mullvad, but it does let me browse without an account.

I used RiF as well so I didn’t see the ads first hand, but I definitely came across multiple posts complaining about the Jesus ads. They were apparently pretty bizarre and it was a large ad campaign partly funded by the founder of Hobby Lobby. Even NPR (US National Public Radio) did a story on them: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154880673/jesus-commercial-super-bowl-billboard-he-gets-us-hobby-lobby-evangelical-billion

If there wasn’t a weird monster, backpack, or out of place alarm clock in the middle right one, that would’ve been my favorite. The alarm clock isn’t even within reach of a bed to snooze it or turn it off. The backpack makes it too cluttered. The view through the window and the colors are my favorite, however.

As-is, the bottom two are the ones I like most. I love the color of the bottom left and I like the nature of the bottom right though I am not a fan of so much orange.

That’s my kid’s primary way of communicating with friends. It’s popular among high school students, or at least the band nerd subset of high school students.

This email icon is a symmetrical blue/purple multicolor gradient with a shaded top. ProtonMail is an asymmetrical design in one color with varying levels of brightness and a blank top. The two look pretty distinct to me. Even without the different colors, the change in symmetry is quite obvious.

I do agree these don’t have unity in their design though as a set, they look pretty generic.

Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can’t follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.

There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.