I think this kid's mom was mentioned in the Atlantic article [1] the link in the post is based on.
> Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.
Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
Not at all. I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. Throughout my career (2 decades) I was very often the guy who did the troubleshooting. I still am, and I'm quite good at it.
But I don't want to be known as the great troubleshooter in my team. I want to be known (and I am) as the guy who builds stuff.
You even say this in reference to Eagles, which are a migratory species whose range crosses hemispheres, as if the contiguous United States is some small aside on that path.
“Don’t worry about the regional extinction of a migratory apex predator because they’re conveniently thriving in dumpsters behind the McDonalds in a town in Alaska.”
My parents lived in a small village in Alaska in the 1990s. Much too small to have a McDonalds or even dumpsters. They had resident bald eagles in the same way many cities have pigeons. That entire region of North America has always been like this. They’ve culled hundreds of thousands of the birds over the last century because they can become a nuisance, particularly if over-populated. They’ll eat anything that looks like meat.
In the same way, the brown bear is almost non-existent in its native range in the contiguous US, but abundant further north. The bald eagle gets somewhat special treatment because it is a national symbol.
In North Dakota there are a fair number of actively used (bald) eagle nests, including in the largest city of Fargo. We have videos of them eating fish, competing over a dropped carcass, as you can imagine. There is plenty of prey in the fields, dumps, riverbanks, etc.
Yeah, there are only a few pockets of grizzlies left in the lower 48, and one of them connects to their larger territory in Canada. They used to roam throughout Washington's Cascades but are completely gone, so much so that there are efforts to reintroduce them in the NCNP soon.
Reintroduce.... grizzlies? I know the wolf reintroduction was beneficial, but wolves have killed a grand total of 2 humans in north america in the 21st century. Grizzlies, in contrast, have 11 kills in half a decade (2020- 2025). That's an order of magnitude higher of the danger each one poses, so I'm curious if the grizzly reintroduction yaysayer arguments are using wolve reintroduction as a positive example.
such a reddit comment, ugh. and I got downvoted for asking a question that you didnt like... another reddit trait. Please read the hackernews forum rules.
>You even say this in reference to the Eagles, which are a migratory species whose range crosses hemispheres, as if the contiguous United States is some small aside on that path.
And yet, according to Wikipedia...
>In the late 20th century it was on the brink of extirpation in the contiguous United States, but measures such as banning the practice of hunting bald eagles and banning the use of the harmful pesticide DDT slowed the decline of their population. Populations have since recovered, and the species' status was upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened" in 1995 and removed from the list altogether in 2007.
The irony of calling someone "unbelievably lazy" without maybe checking to see if there was some accuracy to what they were saying is... lol.
Again, Eagles are a migratory species, that they subsisted by eating garbage in small town Alaska having been hunted and DDT’d to extinction in the lower 48 isn’t the feather in your cap you think it is. The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.
>... that they're thriving eating garbage in small town Alaska...
This is an "unbelievably lazy" and fundamental misunderstanding of how vast and unpopulated Alaska is. I mean you've even got someone else[1] in this thread with experience highlighting that your assertion is inaccurate.
>... and DDT'd to extinction in the lower 48...
You completely missed the part of the quote, in my comment, that very clearly states they were never extinct, and were upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened", and then removed from the list entirely in 2007.
>The point is that we killed all of the eagles in the lower 48 - a huge swath of territory.
It was never true that we killed all of them in the lower 48. Please go read the previously linked Wiki article.
We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.
I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread. Living in Europe this flow of thoughs it's been heard so much.
>We don't fully know (and probably never will) how many genetic diversity has been lost in USA population, subspecies, etc.
I completely agree with this statement.
>I know you won't but It feels you are about to thank us humans to make bald eagle population lower so their diseases didn't spread.
What does this even mean? I simply want an accurate picture of things. Someone made a statement, someone else attacked them for it and insisted they were wrong, yet in point of fact, the initial statement was accurate. More falsehoods were then spread, and I corrected those, too.
That's 'bout it. To imply that I feel some certain way about bald eagles or species loss because I just asked for an accurate understanding around what actually happened is a bit of a stretch.
only if you extend the definition of "endangered" , this argument/position hinges on the definition of a single word. the far left wants to extend the definition of that word to mean the most devastating, irreversible, "give-us-money-or-the-bird-gets-it" definition possible. The GP however, explains that the dire extreme doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
Its always word games. The word games only work for so long before people realize they're being tricked. Environmentalists that were honest rather than sensational would probably be better for the environment in the long run.
It does not matter, conservatives will willify them all. And will lie about nature and about what environmentalists say. Stop this nonsense where republicans and their donors damage things, lie and then blame their opposition for not being perfect.
> “We’re used to seeing America’s national bird depicted as a majestic hero plucking wild salmon from pristine streams. But here you can see eagles for what they really are: scrappy, opportunistic feeders. If fresh fish isn’t available, the birds will eat seagulls, ducks, squirrels, mice, the occasional raven, bits of rotten meat dug out of the trash—or, in one case, a piece of pepperoni pizza snatched out of a teenager’s hand. Like us, eagles are adaptable. We should be proud.” [1]
America’s national symbol reduced to dumpster diving and fast food. It scans.
I live pretty close to a couple of bald eagles in central Denver. I have seen one of them mixing it up with the other birds to get table scraps left behind by people using the park. I have no idea what they are eating generally but sometimes they are pretty happy to just grab some bread on the ground or whatever.
I used to think this was crazy, but after I met a few turkeys and bald eagles I concluded he was right (and further, that it would have made a great national bird0.
Reminds me of that joke about the guy who is on trial for killing a bald eagle, and he tells the judge that it was a life-or-death situation: He was lost in the woods, and after several weeks without food he luckily happened upon a bald eagle that he managed to trap and eat to avoid starvation. The judge says, “Well, in that case, we can let you go. But tell me, what does a bald eagle taste like?”
“Oh, sort of a cross between a spotted owl and a California condor.”
"There is something kind of wrong about watching a bald eagle eat a road kill raccoon."
Why? The bald eagle is a ... bird wot eats meat. If the meat dies by other means and involves no effort then cool - dive in and tuck in. I'll grant you - its not for me!
Look at the constraints and restrictions and opportunities for birds. Yes they can fly (why do they fly). Flying requires huge amounts of energy. It needs the body to be "light" which isn't helpful for a predator that might encounter resistance - feathers turn out to be quite a good armour, along with some fancy footwork and some very fancy bone structures help with the weight issue.
The talons and beak are superb adaptations too. Horrid to watch in action but that's what they do.
Try and imagine yourself in the place of your hero bird. It has a sodding hard and quite short life. Now try and imagine how it strives to stay alive and be that symbol you love to think of - it does not care what you think about its diet! It strives to stay alive and that is really hard - even for an apex predator.
I don’t really think it is ‘wrong,’ or even really unexpected. In the winter, fish may not a viable food option for the eagles due to ice or fish lifecycle. Birds of prey have to keep their weight low, and they don’t have the option to gorge themselves on a kill like a wolf or a lion can. Most birds of prey are only a few missed meals away from death by starvation.
Winter’s scarcity is deadly for predators, and nature doesn’t care about maintaining nobility or the optics of a dead raccoon lunch.
>... bits of rotten meat dug out of the trash-or, in one case, a piece of pepperoni pizza snatched out of a teenager's hand.
The article makes it clear that they're inherently "scrappy and opportunistic". You can change the items to match any time period - what about snatching food from a settler's hand, or sneaking a bite of rotten meat a native might have lying around? That's fundamentally the same thing as grabbing food out of a dumpster.
For as much shit as I talk about the state of this country, I'm struggling to use what is, ostensibly, just a bird eating food out of a dumpster as some kind of example of our decline.
The technical term for the number of times a dollar is spent in a given time period is the velocity of money [1]. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped sharply over the past 30 years [2] as inflation on inelastic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and food have far outstripped the consumer price index and people opt to spend their money buying things from large corporations instead of small businesses in their communities.
The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit).
“Velocity of money” is an abstract theoretical concept from the monetarist book which is defined tautologically and has nothing to do with what it claims to be (which is annoyingly common in economics, “productivity” is the same)
Without a mechanism to detect output from LLMs, we’re essentially facing an eternal model collapse with each new ingestion of information from academic journals, to blogs, to art. [1][2]
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