Take some Yin Yoga classes. It’s a much slower pace than other yoga (holding poses for 3-5 minutes each), and a proper Yin class also focuses on mindfulness during the activity. The goal is to clear your thoughts and bring your focus only to your body and your breath. Different instructors will approach it differently, of course, and not all studios even offer Yin. Forgive yourself for a wandering mind, just observe it when it happens and then recenter your focus on your breath.

It’s also probably the best stretching you’ll ever do.

Ever since I first saw it, this one has given me a feeling of ye olde Burning Man. I think it does have to do with the human form broken down into blocky robot shapes iterating across the page, but also the fire ring rollercoaster of Sauron in the desert with mountain backdrop. I don’t know, I just like it.

We should all strive to move in that direction, but acknowledge that there’s no ethical consumption within capitalism and our false choices are often differently bad in subtle ways. I forgive you for not making perfect choices.

A few examples: I live in Southern California and have Colorado River water piped to my house. Should I really wash out plastic peanut butter containers so that I can put them into the plastic recycling stream which is mostly made out of lies anyway? It seems to me that’s likely a waste of water and the plastic is going to end up in a landfill anyway, so it’s better to throw them away directly.

I drive a 15+ year old inefficient gasoline-powered SUV. I love it, aside from the emissions. I could buy a new EV or hybrid and reduce my personal emissions in exchange for the spyware/adware of modern vehicles, but I still wouldn’t send my current vehicle straight to a landfill. It would be sold and either driven by someone else or parted out to further extend the life of other inefficient gas vehicles. Someone is going to drive the vehicle more, so it might as well be me. By not buying a new car, I increase the cost of used cars, and reduce the demand to produce new cars (including lithium mining), albeit both infinitesimally. I believe that’s actually more responsible than upgrading just to feel better about my personal emissions.

“It turns out that moving your investments to a climate-friendly investment option is the single most impactful thing that the average American can do for climate change,” said Alex Wright-Gladstein, founder and CEO of Sphere, which offers a fossil fuel-free index fund. “It’s more impactful than the combination of going vegan, never flying again, driving an electric car, putting solar on your house.”

Although it’s likely that the greenest thing you can do for the planet is to eat the rich.

It was also relatively narrow, applying solely to California. The administration is expected to appeal, and the judge placed his injunction on hold for 10 days.

The Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in the lawsuit, is expected to appeal the decision and could receive more favorable consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The judge also found that the 300 remaining troops on the federalized deployment could stay in Los Angeles, but essentially limited them to guarding federal property.

The flyer I got says it was paid for by “Protect Voters First, sponsored by Hold Politicians Accountable” and that the top funder was Republican Charles T. Munger, Jr. He’s the son of Warren Buffett’s (late) billionaire right-hand man, and he was one of the top donors for the 2008 prop 11 which created the California citizens’ redistricting commission for the state legislative districts. He was also the principal behind 2010 prop 20 which made the commission also be in charge of California’s federal congressional districts.

So he’s understandably mad that Gavin Newsom is trying to override everything to mess with Texas.

“From the moment we submitted our bid, LA28 committed to reimagining what’s possible for the Games,” Wasserman said. “These groundbreaking partnerships with Comcast and Honda, along with additional partners to come, will not only generate critical revenue for LA28 but will introduce a new commercial model to benefit the entire Movement. We’re grateful to the IOC for making this transformation possible.”

Imagine if it was possible not to have embedded advertising crammed up your eyeballs at every turn. This is a tradition that doesn’t need to be “reimagined”. I doubt that much if any of that revenue will go towards the chronic funding gap that exists for most US Olympic athletes.

What terrible framing by MendoFever. Dam removal is great news.

That’s great in the summer when you want to be cooling the air inside your house, but not so great in the winter when you want you want to be heating it. I’m hoping some water heater manufacturer figures this out someday and builds a unit capable of switching air sources for the heat, such that the cold output air could be circulated directly into the living space or ducted in a loop to the outside (or attic).

Federal law currently requires (nearly) every individual to file a tax return with the IRS, and it requires every business to withhold money from payroll and remit to IRS with appropriate bookkeeping.

Even if California decreed all of that money should be paid to its new agency instead of to the feds, anyone doing so would be individually breaking federal law, and the gestapo would be sent after them. It’s a nice idea but I don’t see how it could work, short of secession (which has its own problems).

Would you like to suggest a mechanism to achieve that? Since every business and taxpayer sends money directly to the federal government, the state isn’t in a position to impede it. Unless you want to start talking about secession, and maybe that would be a good discussion.

Thanks! Mine is still a work in progress.

That’s really poor of State Farm, though unsurprising. And yet I’m still glad that they haven’t dropped my wildfire-adjacent home. The FAIR plan would be far more expensive, and no other insurer will write a policy that satisfies my mortgage company. FAIR is also underpriced at that, having already gone bankrupt once.

It’s kind of a disgusting capitalism-bootlicking for me to be grateful to State Farm, but they’re my least-bad option at the moment. I expect the private insurers as a group to convince Ricardo Lara that rates need to go way up, or the state will end up being the only insurer in an abandoned market. There’s no other way with the climate change reality and atrocious political conditions for action. The potential mortgage failures if the insurance market fails will threaten a financial crisis on top of whatever other government financial havoc has been wreaked by then.

It’s lovely! Can you describe a bit about technical aspects of building and maintaining it? How often do you replenish evaporation, and do you do anything to balance the water?

This is the only California-specific native plant community I found in this part of the fediverse, and out of the others (non-geographically-specific), only [email protected] seems to have regular traffic.

I will be sad for this community to go away when lemm.ee shuts down. I would join you if you or someone else created another one somewhere, but I’m not planning to create one myself and/or be a mod.

When I last bought Freerider Pros directly from Adidas in October 2023, they had a list price of $88 but were on sale for $62. Now Adidas is asking $160 for them, which sounds like a combination of inflation and tariffs. They’re great shoes, but not $160 great, and I don’t expect you’ll find a good enough sale any time soon. I think you’d get more bang for your buck by ensuring you have great pedals with great pins. My favorite is the Stamp 1 Gen 2 by Crankbrothers. I love them whether I’m wearing FiveTens or hiking boots, because of the really meaty pins and large platform.

That’s great to hear. I only have experience with a few finishes, but a little reading tells me your combo is popular for wooden food contact surfaces. What else do you like about it?

It’s oak (Q. agrifolia), pruned from an old tree on private land in a mature forest. It’s a struggle to find branches of an appropriate thickness and length that are generally straight enough, at least when considering only what actually needs pruning. So that one isn’t the best shape for a walking stick, but I had slim pickings and was motivated to find a piece to work with. It’s strong enough to be a serviceable walking stick and hold weight while flexing only slightly.

I like the look of keeping most of the bark on, though I hit all the smaller branch points with the belt sander. I only stripped bark in the area where it’s likely to be held, and sanded only lightly. The apparent striations aren’t perceivable by touch as grooves - they’re filled with inner bark that was incompletely scraped, and the color contrast is accentuated by the finish. I put multiple coats of tung oil over the entire stick, including saturating some moss on the outer bark. It cures to a nice finish, although I’ve never seen any instructions that suggest using it on rough bark.

I might see shrinkage and bark separation from the wood over time, but I’m hopeful it will last several years without substantial deterioration. I think the stick dried for over a year before I finished it.

It’s the most curved but it’s oak and so far it has been strong enough for my hiking use.

Only one of them features a piece of quartz at the top to concentrate the wielder’s magical energy.

I, however, have no such power, so it’s functionally just a stick.

Thanks, that one is my favorite! It does have some curve to it, but only in one dimension so it hides when leaning against a wall like this. But it does feel like the heftiest choice to fight off a coyote that wants my little dog for a snack.