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@sarahtaber
In Missouri once I had a guy farming a plot do everything he could to make life difficult, including showing up with a gun to intimidate my crew. He already had turbines on his own land, so why? He was leasing that property from absentees and if turbines went up he would need to pay more to buy it! At best get less yield. Smart! That jerk.

@sarahtaber Dad knew dairy was coming under increased regulation. He taught biology, botany, and ecology. He said, after he saw raw milk under a microscope in college, he never wanted to drink it again. He always ordered meat well done for much the same reason.

@sarahtaber In the last few years of his life, my dad surprised me by telling me he wanted to keep working his family farm. I always thought he wanted out of farming, which is why he became a college professor. I guess grandpa wasn't very good at the business side, so dad was usually making money decisions. Sometime before 1960 when dad was in college, grandpa increased the dairy herd without consulting Dad and put the farm in bad financial state. Neither blamed the government.

@sarahtaber That is the thing about these folks I honestly don't understand. They're basically standing up in the biggest forum they can find and are screaming "I AM DESPERATELY INCOMPETENT AT MY JOB, COME SAVE ME SO I CAN KEEP BEING INCOMPETENT". It's impressive, really. Appalling, but impressive.

To wrap it up, here's some important info on US farmers & wealth.

Most US farmers today are millionaires- yes, small family farms too. They make way more take-home pay, AFTER farm debts & expenses, than non-farmers.

It's been like that since 1998.

ps. The $1.2M median net worth for US small family farms? Yeah that puts you in the top 10% of Americans for wealth.

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"85% of what happens on a farm is up to God" I'm sorry, no.

YOU own the land. YOU decide what you plant.

When YOU choose to keep raising things like cattle & tobacco, that have been known for decades now for unreliable income even in a good year- you can't blame God for that!

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And here we see the result: People who get born into wealth that was built on the taxpayer dime.

They never develop the entrepreneurship skills needed to survive on their own.

Of course they're begging for handouts. It's the only life they've ever known.

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By the way this conversation happened in a large arena/convention hall with her family's name on it.

"Poor salt of the earth" these folks are not.

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To understand US agriculture right now, you have to start with their wealth situation.

Most of US farmers today are quite well off financially, thanks to inherited wealth. And a lot of them are way more skilled at complaining on TV than they are at running the farm they inherited.

I don't know Batten, but Kim Kornegay in particular is one of the least reliable narrators you could hope to find on agriculture.

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@GuerillaOntologist Looking at the Mastodon API, it might be possible with an advanced search that lets you choose status attributes, but I haven't seen that yet.

Now that there's a bit more breathing room for this whole CVE mess, it's important to keep a few things in mind

The people who got us here by definition can't fix the problem. If they could, they would have a long time ago

There was no reason for this emergency. The people in charge knew this was coming and decided to say nothing. That's how you erode trust. We should treat anything the CVE program says with extreme caution

Beware anything that has popped up as a "solution" in the last 24 hours. These are hard problems, anyone ambulance chasing almost certainly can't create a sustainable solution

We have an opportunity to have a proper discussion now before this happens again (and it will happen again). Let's hope we don't squander this opportunity

While we have already restored the server from a hardware failure, we're having struggle reconnecting the node to our Galera (MariaDB database) cluster. The issue seems to be independent.

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Everyone should be able to travel without the fear of surveillance and retaliation. States like California, Illinois, and Massachusetts are taking steps to protect location data privacy and defend our right to move freely without fear. More states must join. eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/priv

Hackers, educators, tinkerers:
The 2025 Hacker Initiative grant cycle is open. Apply here 👉 hackerinitiative.org/apply-now/ Signal boost appreciated.

Today is an unlucky day for Codeberg, we're having a little bit of trouble with various systems.

We're working on restoring service availability ASAP. Thank you for your patience.

@GuerillaOntologist You might want to mention what client app you are using.

Uncle Sam abruptly turns off funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Because vulnerability management has nothing to do with national security, right? US government funding for the world's CVE program – the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws – ends Wednesday.…
#theregister #IT
go.theregister.com/feed/www.th

Is there any confirmation that Bluesky has obeyed Turkish government order to shut down accounts or access there? I've seen purported screenshots but I haven't seen anything that looks "official" --

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