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This article from the Verge about a "nightmare roomate" seems to be a little smug about how unrealistic and naive progressive policies are, but it's mostly a tale about a very rich and privileged person who is themselves unrealistic and naive, and seems to have never learned about how people like her ex-roommate operate.

You should "believe women" but people in law enforcement shouldn't take sides without ample evidence. However, they will, because taking sides is what people do. The law definitely shouldn't "believe women" in court; evidence is required. I can't say if progressives are generally more naive than people on any other end of a political spectrum. But the saying "trust, but verify" comes to mind. Her mistake was not making this woman sign a lease and also not doing a background check. Her next mistake was not trusting her gut.

Abusers will figure out how to use any law no matter who it is supposed to protect. I've seen it before, and I'm sure I'll see it again, but this woman is a classic case of somebody who is probably a narcissist, and who is incapable of meeting her own basic needs (partly because she's an alcoholic), so she cons people into meeting them for her. She was likely abused as a child, learning from a parent how to find conflict-avoidant, easily manipulated bleeding hearts that can be bullied (or seduced) into providing the shelter, food, clothing, and probably money that she is basically incapable of securing for herself. The law simply is not set up to uncover liars, and I think that when laws are enacted, recourse is almost an afterthought if it's there at all. What is needed is harsh, or harsher punishment for this type of fraud, and the punishment should parallel the level of problems that your lie got the other person into.

Even better, we need to be better at recognizing the signs of, and stopping child abuse and neglect. This woman didn't turn out awful all by herself and what she needs - once she's been stopped from perpetrating her abuse cycle on others - is addiction treatment and mental health care.

Edit: After I posted this, it occurred to me, given what Mollisson's boyfriend said "she's going to be here a long time," how the boyfriend seemed to be enabling her behavior, and also how Mollisson spent a lot of time drunk and doing drugs, I think it is quite possible that this "boyfriend" might have gotten her addicted and may even have been pimping her. I wish they would have investigated Mollisson's story more, or reported more on the relationship between her and the boyfriend.

Lots of people wind up with shitty, shitty tenants who have become experts in exploiting the law to their own advantage, no matter what political atmosphere it was passed in. My father, a good Christian veteran who lives in a rural town in a red state, had tenants who destroyed his rental house so bad he had to take it down to the framing to get it rentable again. These tenants were literally on an episode of Jerry Springer. They didn't pay rent for months. He had to get the sheriff to kick them out. He didn't question his Christian faith or politics because he had shitty tenants though.

As part of my divorce from giant corporations that aren't treating people well and are selling your personal infoes and charging sellers through the nose, I am no longer using PayPal.  I have been using Privacy.com for temporary/masked credit cards for about a month and just upgraded to their lowest paid tier. They have a free tier so you can just try it out as long as you want, but the next tier is only $5 a month, which doubles the number of cards you can use per month, and you can put spending limits on any card, or have it be 1-time only, or vendor-only, or starting with the first paid tier, it cat be tied to specific categories.

The other thing I really love, which I have installed and been using for a few months, is a Jellyfin server.  We have one computer that pretty much stays on all the time anyway, so I've moved all my non-DRM music to one folder and left the DRM (boo!) music in the Apple Music media folder.  I don't have to stream it through the internet and Apple doesn't need to know what my listening habits are.  I disliked the DRM model of digital music from the beginning, and Amazon Digital Music (formerly known as Amazon MP3) has proven that it's not needed.  Also, unlike iTunes I mean Apple Music, Jellyfin will never destroy my carefully curated ID3 tags of all my obscure genres from 7th century to the 21st, and around the world ranging from America to Armenia.

I should mention that MP3 is actually a crappy CODEC standard but it's not going away, and I don't feel like transcoding 50+ GB of music to something else, like FLAC or Ogg/Vorbis.

A list of things that I do which give me a noticeable amount of anxiety but which I do anyway

* post literally anything online [Edit: look, I even made this private when I originally posted it]
* set firm boundaries
* be responsible for other humans (e.g. babysitting, managing people at work)
* my job...

That last one, we have done a pivot which is literally keeping me awake at night occasionally - last night was pretty bad - because of the possibilities for it going horribly wrong, like, causing or enabling a lot of harm to people, or not preventing said harm.  Part of me wants to run screaming and get another job. There are more reasons to stay, some are selfish and some aren't. Like, maybe I need to stick around and do my best to prevent said harms. I don't get the impression anyone is concerned.  Maybe they are, but they aren't showing it.  I don't relish the possibility of being a Cassandra in the workplace though.

This reminds me of when I was a physics major, and Carl Sagan gave a talk at a locally held physics conference.  The year was about 1989, and  the topic was science and government working together.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but he might even have been talking about global warming. I pointed out an instance where scientists had been ringing alarm bells to legislators about some specific thing in the 1970s or early 80s. Congress and the President ignored it, so why, as he was urging, should we expect them to listen now?  If not what could we do to improve this?  He mocked me, in essence saying it wasn't really a problem, the US government does tend to respect scientific consensus and advice, but then there are "people like [me]" who point out what he clearly thought were rare exceptions.

I think about this exchange occasionally, and up until Sagan died, I wondered if he ever remembered being such a smart ass to a young physics student gravely concenred about the inability of scientists to convince lawmakers to address real problems.  Obviously I still think about it, and I'm sad about how right I was.

No matter how much it scares me though, what upsets me more is allowing ignorance and lies to go unanswered.

 I love bredliks.  I save the best ones on Pinterest.

Although I have seen Strange Planet by Nathan Pyle, I never really paid much attention to it until it started cropping up in Pinterest, and now I think I've read them all in the space of about a week.  Very my style.

I'd like to invite people to have a look at Pleistocene Park and consider supporting them on their Patreon Page. I've been a donor for many years and this is one of the few projects where I am making a direct contribution toward addressing climate change. The project is attempting to return herds of large grazing animals to the Siberian Tundra, to confirm (or deny) the theory that their activity contributes to carbon capture and revitalization of Arctic tundra. The early results look promising, but it's extremely hard work under very tough conditions. They just completed transporting about 15 musk oxen to the Park. So far they have camels, bison, musk ox, and some horses from the herd of the Yakut people near the Park.

The problem is they are in survival mode right now because much of their funding got canceled.

Here's an excerpt from today's message, reporting on the musk ox transport

"Dear all,

After many years of planning and unsuccessful attempts we finally managed to make a coastal musk ox expedition.

As many of you know expedition started last year and we hoped to bring animals in 2024, but with me stuck in ice near Bering straight for a month while transporting our "musk ox carrier", we had to postpone expedition to this year.
[...snip..]

Overall I am happy about the expedition. First of all it went well, and secondly it showed that it is possible to make such animal transportations in the future. maybe we will make deal with ministry of Nature to get animals from somewhere closer than 2000km.

Plus realisitically it was the most complicated expedition I ever organized. If we are not taking any animals from Mars I have no idea how to organize anything more complicated for the Park than what we did now. So I am quiet proud of myself.

From the bad side this successful expedition is great, but overall situation for the Park is not that bright. We are pretty much in survival mode. Our incomes from international science station is now equal to zero, there haven't been any sponsors for a year and a half, and overall it doesn't look that the world really care about climate change or ecosystem restorations. At least that how it looks from this part of the globe.

So thanks to all of you who still continue to support us.
"