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this is so sweet 🥺🥺🥺

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watched high school musical and played disco elysium in the same week

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Next person to fearmonger about how A.I. is ruining academia without acknowledging the role the global fucking pandemic has played in the degredation of academic institutions and the reality that more and more jobs that cover basic amenities require degrees is gonna get mauled to death like a bear. Maybe the problem is not that Those Goshdarned Kids Are Too Lazy These Days, Nobody Has Work Ethic Anymore but actually that we have created a situation where higher education has increasingly become a requirement just to have a nice place to live and maybe the ability to go on holiday every once in a while, and the global pandemic seriously hindered and damaged people's relationships with institutions and relationship to learning, and many people are disillusioned with what they are doing because the academic system many Western institutions have is a deeply flawed one. I don't think using A.I. to write your thesis is Good, or anything, but people don't do that just because they're Lazy, there are so many tangible socio-economic factors in the way in which students are approaching their learning.

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But first they must catch you 🏳️‍⚧️

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Is there beef with the Holstein cows and you or what was that joke lol

It's kind of wild It's just never come up on this blog before, but I HATE holsteins. Bottom 10 cow breeds for me. I hate how they're so common they account for the majority of milk produced. I hate that they're the "default" cow to the point where some don't even know cattle HAVE other colors. I hate their tiny horns (IF THEY EVEN HAVE THAT. LOSER ASS HORNLESS COW) and their painfully massive udders.

Legit I'm trying so hard to not launch into a No Mouth Must Scream style AM speech-- shoot my hand slipped.

(AM speech about why i dont like holsteins below the cut)

For starters, I have to give a brief lesson on what these terms mean; the "Holstein" is the American strain of the "Frisian" breed. Frisians are an ancient breed from Frisia, in the north of what we now consider the Netherlands. Crosses between the breeds are "Holstein-Frisians."

(There’s even more to this but im keeping it as simple as possible. Also one of my friends is Frisian and she is probably going to kill me for describing it like that.)

Historically, livestock was adapted to the environment they lived in. Frisians were bred by the Frisii people for hundreds of years in extremely grass-rich, lush, flat environments. The "polders" of the northern parts of the Netherlands. They're huge and eat a LOT of food.

Traditional Frisians were developed to produce as much meat and milk from a single individual as possible, without compromising the health of the cattle with constant inbreeding to get quick gains. We are talking about a breed that is over 2000 years old. They had the perfect environment to make The Ultimate Food Cow and by god they did it. I can respect that.

So, take that, drag it across an ocean to a place that does NOT have polders, and add the rapid enshittification of capitalism to it. BAM you've got a fucking holstein.

There is ONE goal for "improving" the holstein. Make More Milk. As long as the black and white milkbag leaks enough, nothing else matters. Health? Fertility? Feed ratio? Ability to not die of infection? WHO CARES. MILK LINE GO UP.

Over 90% of holsteins are inbred to start with, because Milk Line Go Up. To the tune of having an average COI of 8%-- where extreme negative effects (think Hapsburgs) start to crop up around 10%

Holstein bulls are aggressive bastards (many dairy bulls are), so no one wants to keep intact males in their herds, meaning most cows are artificially inseminated

Not being limited by the natural lifespan of a living bull means that the same stud can keep having direct offspring for decades after his death

Toystory the bull had 500,000 calves before he died, and hit over 1 million offspring in 2015. That's ONE animal and to put this in perspective, there are 9 million holsteins in the US.

DON'T WORRY IT GETS WORSE

Not only can 99% of holsteins be traced back to just two bulls-- 99% of male holsteins share one of two exact Y chromosomes with those two bulls.

The gene pool is so small that it's equivalent to about 60 individuals. Warrior Cat allegiances are larger than that. That's barely bigger than modern ThunderClan.

"Massive lack of genetic diversity" does not begin to capture the existential dread of this situation. Mark my words, WATCH, when the Bird Flu finally mutates a strain that rips through a mammalian population, it's gonna be in the USA and it's going to be through our dairy cattle.

This is not prophecy or me laying a curse on the land, this is the natural consequence of basing the stability of US milk production on the equivalent of 9 million clones of two classrooms worth of individuals, and then packing them in close quarters

And we don't have to wait for doomsday for the impacts to be apparent on the cattle themelves

Holstein fertility has also dropped by half since the 1960s when the intensive inbreeding really kicked into high gear

Because their whole body is dedicating all of their resources to milk production, they have a notoriously "bony" frame.

Show judges, however, like this because they think that's a very "feminine" look for a 1600 pound ruminant. Very normal thing to think.

Like. I don't know if i can communicate this to people who don't look at cows a lot (it's not quite as obviously dramatic as a pug skull) but here is a comparison of an "ideal" show holstein and an "unselected" holstein from a herd that's been established as a sort of "control group" for what they looked like back in the 1960s;

The way that the artery on the "modern" cow's belly runs to the udder like a big pink worm freaks me out the most ngl

The udder also bulges out from between the back legs

The show cow is so thin

And then compare these both to a Holstein-Frisian cross who leans more on the Frisian side;

Proper weight, developed legs. Its biggest "problem" is actually just the udder shape-- deep udders, which "hang" low like that, aren't optimal for milk-focused breeds because the higher away from the ground the less chance there is of infection. In that department, the "unselected" holstein clearly outclasses the holstein-frisian.

But it probably won't be surprising to hear that the "show holstein," with its massive, swollen udder, is SUPER prone to infections such as mastitis.

But it is also just more prone to getting sick generally

And, to keep up with these insane demands, holsteins need a TON of food. You aren't going to just turn these things out into a pasture and be done with it. Even its ancestor the Frisian needed premium Dutch polder grass to be such a good cow-- crank that up to 11 with these Monuments to Humanity's Hubrice

The Texas Longhorn developed in semi-feral conditions and can eat a bush to become the best thing in a 10 mile radius. The Scottish Highland was iron-forged in upland moors with a steady diet of turf and rain.

Meanwhile if a Holstein has less than 5 homemade meals a day without poland spring bottled water it will die to death.

And the WORST part? You have to use these if you want to make money in dairy farming. It's WAAY too expensive to just run a suboptimal farm. Their milk isn't great, but they sure do make a lot of it.

...so Holsteins and Holstein-Frisians (and other "super efficient" breeds) have absolutely decimated heritage cattle. The American Milking Devon is a deep reddish brown with gorgeous horns and low maintenance; rare. Randall Linebacks are painted with lines of white speckles down the back and can be used for any purpose; critically endangered. The Niata was a pug-faced cow who could fight jaguars; extinct.

And THAT'S what makes me hate them most of all. I LOVE cows, but whenever I see a reference to one, it's a holstein. It's always boring black and white splotches with big pink udders. They're practically synonymous with "cow" when their homogeniety is actually hiding much cooler breeds from you.

Did you know cows can be tiger-striped?

And that England has its own type of longhorn?

Or that cow horns can twist upwards like an antelope?

And that they can have REALLY LONG ears?

And that they can be blue?

And that's not even getting into some of the cows that have gotten a small crumb of attention lately, such as Highlands, Ankole-Watusi, and Texas Longhorns. There's so many cool cows out there! And they're all really different from holsteins! MOST of them are also a lot healthier and produce tastier milk and meat!

TL;DR yeah i don't like holsteins and I like sniping at them. For reasons both legit and petty.

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THE ORIGIN OF THIS IMAGE:

So in my etsy I sell a pin of some isopods having at a bag of doritos based on this photo. Today I was contacted by the person who took it.

I asked to share this info and he gave permission!

Here’s the picture of him working with isopods and here’s a link to their published research!

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On this day twenty years ago, Rose Tyler tried to find out more about the mysterious man known as the Doctor by googling "doctor". Iconic shit.

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you need to be tolerancemaxxing. you need to be smoking addy and popping weed. you need to be drinking coffee before you go to bed. no substance in the universe should be able to affect you. you need to be taking two breaths for the price of one just to oxygenate your blood because it's so tolerant to the stuff. you need to be impervious to chemicals. you need to be completely inert

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it's very disheartening to see people posting men they like from whatever stories they're into and being like he's like a woman to me BUT theyre not headcanoning this character as a trans woman theyre saying this character is similar to a woman in that he is bad at stuff maybe or isn't really where he wants to be in life but not in a gender sense like specifically in the sense of being pathetic and bad at things. like maybe he's in between jobs right now or maybe one time he cried. and this is womanesque behavior for a man to exhibit. and the people who say this? pronouns. sometimes even several. it really does boggle the mind.

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Everyone is gathered together to play this Beatles dating Sim hannah told me I should post about it to give OP the visibility they deserve but I don't know what it's called so I can't do any more promotion than that.

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Nintendogs Golden Retriever + Ants

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Do you guys have like. AMVs of the mind. Like fanvideos that you have edited in your head for specific media to certain songs and every time you hear the song (or at least sometimes) you think about this nonexistent fanvideo. Used to happen to me a lot in high school and now I still do it sometimes just for fun

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really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

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middle aged, gay and married. who does it like them?

MEANWHILE JACK:

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This YouTube comment had me leaning hands braced on knees like that person who had to take their shirt off to process Destiel becoming canon.

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