Enough people start watching real birds and the billionaires will buy the Audubon society and start charging you a monthly fee to look out your windows

That fruitlessness was supposed to make them sterile but, as Jeff Goldblum would say, life will find a way. Now you'll find Bradford Pears in a lot of our forests competing with native trees and spreading year after year.

What is it with corrupt politicians and Florida? This dude down there with Jair Bolsonaro and Trump just pretending like Florida is its own country with no extradition treaties.

Dam, I missed the word "in"

Where the hell are you getting beavers for only $1?! Have I been getting ripped off paying $12 per beaver this while time?

If your permit gets approved you should get a small (like 4"x6") signed and dated form from the inspector that you can post on your electrical box. I've only gotten these from inspectors who physically visited the property so I think your suspicions that the work isn't actually permitted are valid.

That being said, it's not the end of the world if the work wasn't permitted and it was done competently and isn't a very visible change (like a fence or deck). Code enforcement is fairly lax here.

No idea how it's calculating a 3% difference when the average single family home sold in Denver is over twice the price of that in Baltimore. I've been looking at housing there (not apartments so not much insight there) for a while and it's ridiculous. Housing is most people's largest monthly expense, so while you can probably get your groceries for around the same price, it's not nearly as livable.

I always gripe about how it's 2+ hours to mountains and 2+ hours to the ocean from Baltimore, but even Denver is an hour from the mountains, and our cost of living is infinitely lower and they don't have an ocean. I still wouldn't say that Baltimore has very good access to the outdoors, but you can make it work if you don't mind some driving.

Liberal brainwashing aka having any critical thinking skills

Pretty wild how that the crazy shithead of a dad was able to get custody of the kids. Hope that the judge who made that decision feels bad.

Lake Roland?

It's been a few years but I got rejected multiple times from the Sisson St dropoff for all of the "construction material" in a few black bags in my sedan. They had me pop the trunk and felt them/looked in them and then handed me a flyer about going to Quarantine Rd.

Quarantine Rd has been pretty great in my limited experience, though. If you're not driving a truck they don't seem to care about doing weigh-in/weigh-out and charging per weight, and you can take concrete and everything.

Seems like a benefit for the daycare as kids flippin love cranes and watching construction.

Make sure you warn anybody who is touching that laundry if any of it has vomit on it - norovirus can live outside the body for up to 2 weeks and it's crazy infectious.

I used less gas this December billing period vs December 2021 and yet my bill was $100 higher. The natural gas rate went from 64 cents per therm to 95 cents during that time, so there's the problem.

The global NG market was tight for the fall and early winter as Europe disengaged from Russian gas and replaced with other sources, but the market price of NG is back down now. Not sure if the rate we pay will go down at all in January or if BGE will keep pocketing the difference as long as it can.

If it's just a broken igniter you can probably replace it yourself today. It's a little piece of ceramic that heats up enough to light the gas, and mine broke last year from wear. I was able to get a new one same day at an HVAC supply store up in Timonium and it was an extremely easy job to replace it. Just pull out your old one and look for a part number. Might be a different story with something from 1976 though.

That a good or a bad thing?

Man than tree is a crime in itself. Random 3D printed crap just thrown on there, tacky AF.

It's a bit different. Humans can contract toxo directly from contaminated soil or unwashed vegetables like e. coli, but when a meat animal is infected the parasite actually takes residence in its muscle tissue (where e coli only gets into meat via external contamination). Toxoplasmosis cysts are also very persistent in soil, remaining viable for over a year.

Also toxo's effect on the human body is longer and potentially more severe as the parasite lives on in your body and brain for the rest of your life with neurological consequences, and it's potentially fatal or disfiguring for fetuses if a mother is infected with toxoplasmosis while pregnant. Neurological consequences of toxoplasmosis infection aren't particularly well studied but may include mental illness and reduced motor response times. A study of vehicle accidents suggests that people with toxo in their brains are more likely to die in a car accident.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19356869/

This is also why "working cats" on farms, as encouraged by this article, are a fucking terrible idea. Not only do they attract toxo-infected rodents, the cats then poop toxoplasmosis cysts into the soil. This is why they tell pregnant people to not change litter boxes or eat undercooked meat - cows, goats, etc can pick up toxoplasmosis from the soil and pass it to you, where it will forever live in your brain and potentially deform your newborn. The only vector for toxoplasmosis reproduction is outdoor cats.

This article is super disappointing in that, despite the headline, they didn't manage to talk to a single person who isn't pro-TNR, or an ecologist, or anyone who has studied TNR scientifically.

TNR is becoming more popular not because it actually solves the problem with feral cats, but because it is easy and cheap for local governments and looks good to voters. Euthanasia programs are political suicide. But now with TNR, if you've got feral cats on your property, pooping toxoplasmosis into your vegetables, they are officially now your problem. SPCA/BARCS won't take them, they will only spay/neuter/vacc them and dump them back outside. And that's if you trap them and bring them in yourself.

TNR relies on volunteer labor, so of course it's going to fail, but even in studies of managed colonies it didn't result in population decline because there are too many cats roaming around and getting dumped. Allowing and tacitly encouraging feral cat colonies encourages shitheads to dump their cats because they can assume it will survive like all of the other ferals.

Euthanasia is more humane than TNR. TNR is catch->anaesthetize->neuter->dump immediately back into the world with minimal or no post-surgical care->die horribly (generally very young). Euthanasia is just trap->anaesthetize->euthanize. Less stress for the animal and much less stress on wildlife populations whose lives also need to be considered.

I use an ad blocker, but they must know that because I got a piece of physical junk mail from them yesterday, wtf

Paradiso in Hampden isn't that dissimilar from Trohv, just smaller

This guy's face screams "Good Old Boy" at aircraft engine volume.

Pretty sure there's no reputable ranking of this but on these we're nowhere close

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ranking-the-states-from-most-to-least-corrupt/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/19/the-most-corrupt-states-in-america-infographic/