Highly recommend using a certified arborist instead of a tree lopper. Tree loppers have exactly zero training and are usually just some guy who bought a chansaw. Arborists have training to know which branches can stay or go and give good advice about which trees will even drop branches, and which ones you neednt worry about. If you want to prune a branch that's protecting other branches from wind for example, they'll say that's a bad idea. Tree loppers just cut everything off without a thought.

• a person who has seen many mature trees in his neighborhood killed by tree loppers.

Oh yeah my bad, i meant rutorrent. The site is in Russian but easy enough to navigate as it uses the same forum template as a lot of sites, band names are all in original language so searching is simple enough. I sometimes use a translation browser extension to help.

Friend it's cat heaven, and the cats don't want you there.

The pre-smartphone years. Where we could just be bored, and let our boredom drive creative thought

Another perspective:

1. You can own your own music in many more formats than just vinyl.
2. CDs are still being made, and cheap. Second hand CD trade is huge, and they are always cheaper than vinyl to buy and ship. Digital ownership is even cheaper (eg Bandcamp), and the same or higher quality.
3. RuTracker has an enormous collection of FLAC well-seeded, as do other sites (but they require invites). Soulseek has an enormous collection and requires no account.

Regarding equipment just get some good speakers and an amp, you'll need that regardless of what format you end up getting your music in.

Vinyl is often a trap. Expensive, fragile, degrades, difficult to resell unless you live in a big city (postage & packing), and the quality is ultra subjective and varies wildly between pressings. Just look up a couple of popular albums you know on Discogs or rateyourmusic and browse the comments see what they cost and how many people bring up complaints on pressings.

I'm all CD and FLAC and loving it. Bandcamp is my first port of call, then CD (new or second-hand), torrent if rare or OOP or unavailable anywhere I frequent.

Something else that may help - if you really think vinyl will sound better, enormous FLAC rips (2GB+) of popular high quality pressings in 192kHz/24-48bit rips are not uncommon on torrent and Slsk - vinyl enthusiasts often make a high quality digital capture of their purchases while the vinyl is new, so that they have a near-new copy in case their vinyl ever degrades with wear - or simply so they can use digital for convenience, but keep the analog hiss and increased frequency range of vinyl pressings. Best of both worlds.

(Edit: rutracker, not rutorrent)

Anyone that can't see the line connecting the demonising, vilification and persecution of trans people and the demonising, vilification and persecution of immigrants is a moron.

We provide equal legal protections to all, or we recieve legal protections for none (bar the billionaires).

"He's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting 😡"

Guarantee the lady that said that in 2019 voted for him again. Twice.

The Nobel Fell For It Again Prize would have just.. so many contenders with red hats.

Thanks for the mental eyebleach

Yep, the "strapped the head of a whale he chainsawed off to the roof of his car to drive it home as a souvenir" guy.

I still cannot get over Kathleen Kennedy (his daughter) recounting her vivid memories of this from when she was six.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kathleen Kennedy recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Sounds like a very fucked environment for a child to grow up in.

Its chin all the way down, baby.

The fries are vegan in Australia ever since they stopped cooking them in beef tallow - around early 2000s iirc.

However, their own website says they offer no menu options certified as vegan or vegetarian, due to cross-contamination being something they don't wish to deal with.

Understandable as additional prep areas would be quite expensive, but also it's a pretty weak copout when they could go to the effort of labelling their vegan/vegetarian items (with the asterisked proviso that they may have cross-contam).. I suspect it's really to allow them to change up menu item suppliers to cheaper alternatives whenever they like, because they also do not bother to label any menu items with allergen info - and that's very standard across even small cafes nowadays. To find allegen info you have to dig through a PDF that they update every few months.

My thoughts are that the USA is in a far worse position now to shoulder and recover from the coming bubble pop, crash, and financial crisis that the mass implementation of AI is about to cause than they were in 2008-2009 when the last crash hit.

Could be wrong though. Maybe all the datacenters will get built on time, and be powered by a sudden breakthrough in nuclear fission, and maybe ~44% of people on the earth will sign up to paid plans with OpenAI so that they can become profitable.