This is Ramsey. He is a mail delivery dog. Shipping is free, and while packages might not be handled with care, they are handled with enthusiasm. 14/10
The Pease Park troll cost about $300,000 to build, funded by private donors who wanted to create something magical for Austin.
And now it sits burned down. A pile of ashes surrounded by caution tape.
A giant wooden troll where kids laughed, families took photos, and people stopped for a moment to enjoy something whimsical in the middle of the city… gone.
It’s hard not to feel like this is symbolic of something bigger. We build beautiful things in Austin, and somehow we keep finding them destroyed.
Sometimes it really feels like we just can’t have nice things anymore. #atxcouncil
My spousal unit and I date nights range from candlelight dinners to arguing over who forgot the coupons at aisle seven.
We've tried dancing in the kitchen, midnight milkshake runs, and one questionable "DIY spa night." Moral of the story: try the crazy ideas-worst case, you laugh... best case, you make a memory. 😂
It's finally ELECTION DAY! 🗳️
And there are over 405 Election Day Vote Centers across Dallas County.
📍Vote Center Finder: https://t.co/0720BYOLoZ
📄 Sample Ballot: https://t.co/vfSmsd5mFx
💻 More Information: https://t.co/M9VEb8beCu
#DallasCountyVotes#LocalElections
Vulture populations in India collapsed. 500,000 people died as a result.
In the 1990s, Indian farmers started using a cheap painkiller called diclofenac on their cattle. When vultures ate the carcasses, the drug destroyed their kidneys.
Without vultures, cattle carcasses rotted in fields instead of being stripped clean in 45 minutes. Feral dog populations exploded by five million. Rabies cases surged. Pathogens spread through water supplies.
University of Chicago economists compared death rates in districts that used to have vultures to districts that never did. Human mortality rose more than 4% after the collapse. Over 100,000 extra deaths a year. Half a million in five years.
India banned the drug in 2006. The vultures still haven't recovered.
This is what a keystone species is to us. This is why we protect the animals nobody finds cute.
🚨 Do you understand what Oracle just did..
they fired 30,000 people.. via 6 AM email.. while reporting a 95% increase in net income last quarter..
Oracle isn't a struggling company .. Oracle made MORE money than ever.. and still fired 30,000 people because they're spending $156 billion on AI data centres instead..
and Larry Ellison.. the guy who just fired 30,000 families.. is worth $200 billion.. the 3rd richest person on earth.. he owns an entire Hawaiian island.. Lanai.. 98% of it.. bought it for $300 million like it was a vacation home..
this is the same playbook every single time..
IBM fired 7,800 and replaced them with AI in 2023.. Amazon cut 27,000 the same year while reporting record revenue.. Atlassian cut thousands while profits climbed.. Google laid off 12,000 while sitting on $100 billion in cash..
they told you to learn to code.. you learned to code.. they told you to upskill.. you upskilled.. and then they replaced you with the thing you helped build and sent the termination letter before you woke up..
the company made record profits and decided the reward for that was firing the people who made it happen.
In 2003, a German film crew followed a nomadic family in Mongolia's Gobi Desert. The film, The Story of the Weeping Camel, was nominated for an Oscar.
A mother camel had rejected her newborn after a brutal two-day labour. Without her milk, the calf would die.
The family knew one option. They sent their two young sons on a journey across the desert to find a musician who could perform a ritual called Hoos, a chanting ceremony passed down for centuries specifically for this moment.
The musician came. The ritual was performed. The mother camel wept real tears and turned to her calf for the first time.
The film crew had gone to document a way of life. They had no idea they would capture that.
UNESCO added the Hoos ritual to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2015, alongside flamenco, the Mediterranean diet, and the art of Neapolitan pizza making.
Just learned that I work less than a mile from the longest-running stone weathering experiment: NIST's stone wall test.
Built in 1948, it includes 2352 samples of stone from 47 US states and 16 countries, and uses two types of mortar.