#combine harvester for sale

[myfieldking]

Combine Harvesting Machine Price: Fieldking

To harvest crops, we need a combine harvester, but in modern agriculture, we need more and more multifunctional machinery for different tasks. It can harvest more than 82 different kinds of crops, including rice, wheat, corn, sunflowers, barley, clover, etc.

If you're interested in the harvester machine price, contact our dealers today. A harvester is referred to as a combine harvester because it can complete the three stages of the harvesting process—reaping, threshing, and winnowing—in one go. Visit our website: https://www.fieldking.com/product-portfolio/combine-harvester

[jctracks]

The Evolution and Advantages of Rubber Crawler Tracks

In the ever-evolving world of heavy machinery and construction equipment, rubber crawler tracks have emerged as a versatile and advantageous solution. From their humble beginnings as a means to reduce ground pressure, they have evolved into a cornerstone technology that offers benefits across various industries.

[machinerys-stuff]

Why you need a combine harvester?

A combine harvester is an unique heavy machinery to grain different grain crops. this allows farmers to acquire best quality grains at a time. one can perform four different harvesting operations like reaping, threshing, gathering and winnowing with this type of harvesters as they are called combine harvester. a new combine harvester usually comes between $100,000 and $500,000. though a used combine harvester for sale is quite affordable ( around $20.000 - $50.000). you can go for used combine harvesters as they are very effective in comparison to new ones. so if you are a farmer or manage a crop farm a combine harvester is worth buying!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a ��protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

[vamp1r1cjuggalo]

Enough ranting have some epic Manager Origins headcanonss

I’m still trying to work on ones for Brian and Mary

Buck was made as a casino mascot, the casino shut down after a while but Buck was still left standing!

Misty was built to kinda predict the weather if that makes sense, a combination of different weather tools built to give accurate estimates

Holly was built specifically as a knight, a gatekeeper as you will, basically meant to keep her city safe

Prester was built as a haunt animatronic in Salem with the popularity of witches and witch hunters due to that being the home of yknow the Salem witch trials, because he was based off that time period thats why his speech is all old timey

Ben was built as a bellboy, he was specifically built for the Golden Rose Resort

Cathal was originally just built to raise sales, but Allan got incredibly attached to the idea of being a parent to this cog, and so yeah

Belle was built specifically as a telephone operator, built by Axel Hander Glad Bell CO. Basically at the inception of it

Dave was built as a musical entertainment animatronic, built for older audiences and was built in an older generation.

Flint is a furnace. Wow.

Ok in all seriousness they were straight up built as a furnace, technically originally as a firefighter but they kinda immediately realized how stupid that was, that would explain the firefighter esc appearance though. Fun fact they eat coal and wood.

Cosmo was built specifically for COGS.inc. I don’t have much to put here

Spruce and Chip were both built for the purpose of harvesting wood, and were built around the same time.

Tawney was built as a children’s story time animatronic, who would read coglings books at libraries.

Graham was an entertainment animatronic built for racing and music, unlike Dave he was built for younger audiences, and was built in a newer generation, being built in the 80’s

Also bonus doodle with tawney!

[prof-peach]

Hi professor peach. My comfey wants to be more festive for the holidays. How can i change the flowers on them to fit the holiday theme?

Just...offer them different flowers?? They regulalry give those wreaths up to those they love and trust, and constantly assemble new ones when provided enough floral material, can be tough this time of year for them to find any though.

While the vine they produce from their heads are replacable, and they will grow without issue if the pokemon is healthy, the flowers they must find themselves. While attached, flowers will survive for many months thanks to the pokemons sticky nourishing sap (given off via the vines).

Poinsettia is a common flower for the festive season, might be worth buying one and seeing if your pokemon likes it. They'll detach the old wreath, and grow a new vine, sticking their new flower choice to it. they can also sustain leaves and berries on this vine too, so you could try holly for the tyical festive season theme.

Plenty of places have different plants on sale this time of year, maybe take a trip to a florists and get a feel for what your pokemon would like? Often a colour combination is festive alone, which opens up options for flowers youd not assume are very holiday associated.

It can be a lot of fun to see them use a bunch of different flowers so mix it up, let them try a bunch! it does not cause any stress or harm to the pokemon. Comfey are wonderfully adaptive, some like to even make moss ball wreaths, some ivy and creepers like honeysuckle, some succulent flowers that are far smaller and delicate for hotter climates, the tropical orchid veriety are really unique, definetly hold a special place in my heart for those ones. Some even collect up fruit and vegetables for a more harvest festival theme, though the weight can slow them down a bit, not great for battlers.

Get creative, i'm sure you'll find something they like.

[verdemoun]

Don't know if you've already talked about bill but how is he coping with modern times? I always imagined a modern bill becoming a car mechanic, or something adjacent, maybe even becoming a small influencer where he posts abt trucks and such (and also his dog. I just know that man gets a dog in any type of modern au)

i have not spoken about bill because bill as a character just makes me so sad fam like was he doomed to be the power hungry bastard of toxic masculinity we see in rdr1 or did the events of rdr2 actively make him that way why was everyone so mean to him like you can see the way people treats him chipping away at him it makes me want to scream but back to timewarp au

therapy. my otp is bill and therapy. man needs anger management and to unpack that emotional baggage. it would take a while but once bill made the connection sometimes when he feels angry and acts out he's actually feeling sad/upset he'd start to develop as a person really quickly.

he would be so conflicted about seeing the gang again. why does no one talk about what happened to bill in the gap between rdr1 and 2?? dutch fucking left him behind bill would've followed dutch to the ends of the earth and been the perfect obedient loyal son he always wanted and dutch just threw him away because hunting down arthur and john for betraying him was more important!!

the new main gang would've picked him up because they knew he was going to be timewarped but it would be so uncomfortable.

poor kieran would've been so terrified he had to stay with annabelle and grimshaw until bill left. he usually regresses a little whenever someone timewarps because he has obvious reason to be nervous about the gang but it would've been a full breakdown just knowing bill was coming back. bill would've felt bad about it too because he never made the connection between how the gang's teasing made him feel vs what his bullying was doing to kieran.

the rest of the gang would've gone straight back to teasing bill because that was the dynamic last time they were all together. he would've hated it and lashed out a lot. he became something after they died they better respect it but of course they just don't. bill would've barely understood modern era before he bounced.

happy stuff now i promise. he ended up hitchhiking for a bit and learning about the modern world from truckers. he would love going to bars and truck stops and dodgy mom and pop diners along the highway.

he ends up getting a job on a ranch (ironically the modern day MacFarlane which became a massive multimillion dollar operation) and still gets to ride horses almost every day. he picks up herding super quickly and gets all the validation and care he deserves. the owners love him and are really supportive and patient when it comes to dealing with his temper.

he gets a little power trip out of learning to drive the semi-truck and unlike most of the hands is always super excited and happy to go on cross-country road trips delivering things to processing facilities. his favorite thing though would be the combine harvester he will work 14 hour shifts without complaint harvesting grain.

bill loves dogs almost more than he loves his horses he cannot drive past a sign that says puppies for sale without at least stopping to look. this habit has resulted in him having five dogs and they are his new gang. his first dog was a stray he picked up on the side of the road it's a wire-haired gundog mutt just called Mutt. he also has two cattle dogs (Clem and Roanoke), a long hair shepherd called Mercer and finally a catahoula called Abel. they are all working dogs and he does not go anywhere without all of them. they all sleep on his bed and are just as happy to go on cross country road trips in the semi as he is.

he can control all of them with a whistle or non verbal commands and they are insanely well trained. Micah fucking hates him sure Baymax can bark and growl and look scary on command but the second one of Bill's dogs curls up its lips Baymax is hiding behind Micah terrified and Bill is so fucking smug about it.

through therapy and having his ideals challenged bill starts making an effort to be less racist and sexist and actually confronting some of the gang about the way they treated him in 1899 and mending those relationships because look yeah he went off the deep end after the VDLs but he does still care about them and wants to have good relationships with them he's just got to work through a lot of issues go bill i believe in you

and most importantly he finally got over the internalized homophobia and admitted to himself he's a bit/lot gay. he's not wearing beads at pride levels of comfortable with it yet but he is a classic bear who will protect the gaybies from violence with violence.

it's like a many, many years slow burn but him and alden get together because charlybird's art is one of the only reasons i gave bill a chance as a character and i am a better person for it

[galeriacontici]

Pre-Columbian civilizations across the Americas developed various adhesives used in everyday applications and ceremonial contexts. These adhesives were crafted from natural materials, such as plant resins, tree gums, and animal-based glues, with their use spanning numerous cultural groups, including the Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Moche. By understanding the properties of their surrounding environment, these cultures could create adhesives suitable for tool-making, repairing objects, crafting jewelry, and producing artwork.

This article will focus on the adhesives used by these ancient cultures, how they were made, and the specific applications seen in archaeological findings.

Moche Wood Scepter c. 400-800 AD. closeup view

Moche wood scepter w/ inlaid Shell and Stones

Materials Used in Pre-Columbian Adhesives

Pre-Columbian adhesives were primarily sourced from plant resins, tree gums, and animal derivatives. Each civilization developed unique techniques to harvest and process these natural materials to suit their environmental and cultural needs.

Plant Resins and Tree Gums

Plant resin was one of pre-Columbian cultures’ most widely used adhesive materials. Resins such as copal, commonly used by the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations, were derived from trees in the Burseraceae family. The Maya used copal resin for both ritual and practical purposes. It was often burned as incense in religious ceremonies, but in a solid form, it was an adhesive for binding materials such as stone and wood.

The Aztecs also exploited natural resins, particularly pine resin. Pine resin was commonly mixed with natural powders like ash or powdered stone to enhance its adhesive properties. This combination was often applied to tools, pottery repairs, or affixing feathers and stones to wooden or clay artifacts.

Animal-Based Adhesives

In some pre-Columbian cultures, animal-based adhesives were also used, although these were less documented than plant resins. These adhesives were typically made by boiling animal hides, bones, or tendons to produce gelatinous substances that, when cooled, formed a strong bond. Andean civilizations, such as the Inca, likely employed these adhesives, though less direct evidence survives than their Mesoamerican counterparts.

For example, animal-based glues may have been used in textile production to attach decorative elements such as feathers to ceremonial garments or headpieces. However, animal-based adhesives’ exact prevalence and variety are not as well-documented as resin-based adhesives.

Methods of Production and Application

The production of adhesives in the pre-Columbian Americas required an understanding of local materials and their properties. Though methods varied between cultures, specific techniques were standard across regions.

Resin Extraction and Processing

Plant resins like copal were often harvested by cutting into the bark of resin-producing trees. The resin would ooze out and harden upon exposure to air, after which it could be collected and stored. When needed, the hardened resin was heated over a fire or other heat source until it became a thick liquid. Once liquefied, it could be applied to objects as an adhesive.

For specific applications, additives like powdered stone or pigments were mixed into the resin to adjust its texture or increase its durability. For example, this practice was common in affixing decorative stones to jewelry or securing blade heads to wooden shafts for tools and weapons.

Paracas Wood, Stone and Feather Club for Sale

Paracas wooden club w/inlaid Stone

Application Techniques

Adhesives were applied directly to the surfaces that needed bonding, often in thin layers. When used to repair pottery, artisans would apply the glue to the broken edges and carefully press the pieces together, holding them in place until the resin hardened. In some cases, additional adhesive was applied over the joints to reinforce the bond.

For weaponry and tools, adhesives were often used with other fastening techniques. For example, in Mesoamerican cultures, resin might have been used to help secure stone blades to wooden handles, followed by wrapping the joint with plant fibers for additional strength.

Cultural Examples of Adhesive Use

Several archaeological findings highlight the importance of adhesives in pre-Columbian material culture. Below are examples of how various civilizations across the Americas used adhesives.

Maya Copal Resin

The Maya extensively used copal resin for ceremonial incense and as an adhesive for repairing ceramics and affixing small decorative stones or shells to larger objects. For instance, archaeologists have found examples of jade and shell inlays on wooden objects in Maya tombs held in place by hardened copal resin.

Aztec Featherwork

Featherwork, a vital art form in Aztec and Maya civilizations, required adhesives to attach vibrant bird feathers to textiles, shields, and headdresses. In Aztec society, feather artisans, known as amantecas, used a combination of plant-based resins, such as pine resin, to bind the feathers in place. The featherwork pieces served decorative and religious purposes, demonstrating the adhesive’s role in crafting items of cultural significance.

Inca Wood and Stone Artifacts

In the Andean regions, particularly within the Inca Empire, adhesives were employed in various woodworking and stone-carving techniques. For example, adhesives were used to fasten metal or stone inlays into wooden objects, such as ceremonial staffs or chicha cups. Additionally, using resin-based adhesives for pottery repair has been suggested by analyzing broken and mended artifacts found in Inca archaeological sites.

Moche Metalworking

The Moche civilization of northern Peru is known for its advanced metallurgy and intricate artwork. Moche artisans likely used plant-based adhesives in their fine metalworking to affix precious stones or inlays into metal pieces. Some surviving Moche metal objects, such as ornamental plaques and jewelry, show evidence of adhered stone inlays using organic adhesives.

Moche Pututu Trumpet Shell Horn front side view

Moche Pututu Shell – Waylla Kepa w/ inlaid Silver Mouth Piece

Wari Mask Product for Sale

Wari False Head w/inlaid Shells

Conclusion

Pre-Columbian adhesives played a crucial role in the daily and ceremonial lives of the Maya, Aztecs, Inca, and other ancient civilizations. By utilizing plant resins like copal and pine and possibly animal-derived glues, these cultures produced durable and versatile adhesives for repairing ceramics, crafting tools, and creating intricate works of art. The widespread use of these adhesives, as demonstrated by surviving artifacts, provides insight into the technological sophistication of these pre-Columbian societies. Their understanding of natural resources allowed them to create functional and integral materials for their cultural and artistic practices, ensuring that these innovations would endure through the ages.

How to Determine Cotton Fabric from Camelid Fibers Accurately?

Research Academic Papers and News Articles

[ensnapemysenses]

If Only for a Moment Longer

Pairing: Snape x Reader

Warnings: None

Genre: Fluff

A/N: This idea came about from an ask I received from an anon with a list of holiday fic prompts! I combined two of them and came up with this! I also think it is very fitting with the prompts 'fireside' and 'snuggles' from week one of Snolidays 2022! Hope you enjoy it!

Word count: 888

Masterlist

Severus stands in the castle's entrance, shivering, his robes covered in the powder of freshly fallen snow and his sack of harvested herbs slung over his shoulder like Saint Nicholas. He shimmies off his snowshoes followed by his damp outer robes and gloves, scowling at the thought of a student seeing him in his current state but knowing he must remove the soiled clothing immediately or he will be facing a rather nasty bout of hypothermia.

As excellent an excuse that would be to miss teaching these dunderheads on their last class before winter break, he would rather eat his own crusty, decade-old shoes and do a funny dance in front of the whole school than allow another professor into his classroom to cover for him. He can’t stand the thought of someone going into his classroom, teaching the students wrong, and silently judging him for the things he keeps in there.

He drifts down to the dungeons, which are slightly warmer than the freezing temperatures outside the castle, and drops the herbs off in his potion storeroom to dry out for the night. These things are best stored completely dry in order for them to retain their freshness and quality longer. 

Upon entering his chambers, Severus throws his damp clothing by the fireplace to dry, then he takes a scalding hot shower. The water effectively warms him up in no time but for safe measure he wraps himself tightly in his warmest robe and settles down on the couch with a mug of hot chocolate, propping his feet up by the fire. He’s soon finding himself lost in the catalog showcasing all the spring seeds that will be for sale at his favorite shop in Hogsmeade and making mental notes for what he will use his school allowance to buy for his classroom when the time comes. 

His quiet time is cut short quickly by a rather loud knock on his door. He groans, not wanting to get up he yells across the room at the perpetrator. 

“Whoever you are, go away! I have no business with anyone tonight.”

“You missed the feast tonight, Severus,” the voice says. “I brought you a plate. May I come in?”

He recognizes that voice and his ears perk up at the sound. 

He calls out their name. “I am in no state for visitors tonight. I am recovering from a cold.”

A lie? Not really, he is recovering from the harsh icy blizzard he just went out in for hours to forage potion ingredients. It’s only a different meaning of the word, there’s no harm done in stretching the truth. Especially in circumstances that would lead to someone laying their eyes upon him in his current vulnerable state — only his bathrobe covering him. 

“Severus, I saw you outside rummaging around in the snow for merlin knows what! I know you aren’t sick yet, but you will be if you don’t eat a warm meal and get your strength up!”

Snape sighs. If that idiotic professor wants to lay their eyes upon the scene of him relaxing in front of the fireplace half naked then so be it. He’s sure it will cause them to scurry away from embarrassment and get them out of his hair quicker.

“Fine, come in.”

Waving his wand, Severus unlocks the door and it slowly creaks open. The professor slips in and almost drops the plate of steaming food on the floor.

“Never seen a grown man lounging in his own chambers before? Pick your jaw up off the floor and have a seat.” Severus gestures toward the empty space on the couch next to him.

“I - I think I should go,” they blush. 

“How absurd! After all, you said it yourself, I’m about to freeze to death. Be a dear and get over here. I could use a good snuggle.” 

The thing that happens next surprises Severus. He fully expected to be left alone after a few muttered apologies and embarrassed glances, but before he knows it, he is not alone on the couch anymore and the space between the two of them is no more than mere centimeters. 

The plate of food remains forgotten on the entryway table as their bodies move together subconsciously to melt into one seamlessly. Severus feels every cell in his body lighting up and sending tingles down his spine, warming him in a way that the fireplace cannot. It seeps through to his very soul, bringing a new feeling of contentment and belonging to his heart. How long has it been since he’s been in such close proximity to another human? He isn’t sure.

He sighs and snuggles down deeper, closing his eyes. His hand decides to take a bold step before his mind can stop him and it delicately traces circles on their thigh as they both sit in silence. 

He could get used to this – comfortable silence spent in the presence of another with the warmth of their body next to his.

The only thing that warns him of the time passing is the crackling of the fireplace and their deep slowing breaths as they both become heavy with sleep.

“It’s getting late,” he mumbles, his eyes slowly opening. 

“I could stay,” they hesitantly suggest. 

“Please,” Severus whispers. “If only for a moment longer.”

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Natural pesticides gain ground in 'agri-tox' capital Brazil

Inspecting a thriving green field, Brazilian farmer Adriano Cruvinel is beaming: Using a fraction of the chemical products he used to, he is growing even more soy, thanks to natural pesticides.

Agricultural powerhouse Brazil may be the world leader in chemical pesticide use, but Cruvinel is part of a growing trend of farmers turning to natural products known as "biopesticides."

"Our soy is doing great," says the 36-year-old agricultural engineer, giving a tour of his 1,400-hectare (nearly 3,500-acre) farm in the central-western county of Montividiu, as combine harvesters work their way across a field.

"Thanks to the microorganisms we apply to the crop, it's a lot more resistant to pests and disease."

Brazil, the world's biggest exporter of soy, corn and cotton, is also the top consumer of chemical pesticides: nearly 720,000 metric tons in 2021, or one-fifth of global sales, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Seeking to improve his profits, in 2016 Cruvinel started transitioning toward so-called "regenerative" agriculture.

The technique seeks to restore the soil's biodiversity, replacing chemical fertilizers and pesticides with natural alternatives.

Continue reading.

[myfieldking]

Why is a harvester machine necessary?

A harvester machine is important for farming because it combines several jobs—cutting, threshing, and cleaning grain—into one machine. This saves a lot of time and labor during the harvest. Combine harvester machines help reduce grain loss and increase productivity, making it easier to get the most from your crops.

They work well with different crops and field conditions, offering flexibility and reliability. Using a harvester machine makes farming more efficient, cost-effective, and productive. Visit our website for more: https://www.fieldking.com/product-portfolio/combine-harvester

[tractorspk]

[jctracks]

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[lucie-newman]

TASK #21 LET’S GO TO WORK

What does your character do for a living?

Lucie works full time as the lead sales representative for the Vinyl Hub.

How long have they been doing that job?

She started working there just about eight months ago after interviewing at the end of last year.

What made them decide to go into that career / job?

Realizing she was unemployed and about to become a mother. Her passion for music made it less of a burden to undertake then working sales at the cafe or clothing store. At least at the Hub she can blast her favorite bands without complaint and keep up to date on new and upcoming artists.

What is their favorite thing about their job?

Anytime the door is locked.

What is their least favorite thing about their job?

Anytime there is a customer that tries to explain to her what a 'good taste in music' is.

What was the first job that they ever had?

Her first official job was over the summer as a waitress at Pizza Thyme. She got fired within two weeks for cursing at a rude tourist. Before that though she often worked on the family farm helping with harvests and sales when it was blueberry season.

What jobs have they worked since then?

After Pizza Thyme, Lou worked part time at the Vinyl Hub throughout her senior year of high school. She managed to hold it down until graduation. In New York, she worked for some time in various roles as a bartender, dog walker, street performer, and freelance photographer. She never lasted more than three months in any position. 5555555555555

What was their favorite job that they’ve ever had?

Concert photographer. It afforded her the opportunity to travel and to combine her two passions. Her venues and bands were often small or up and coming. Her work would get tossed around social media for the benefit of the artists and was occasionally used on album covers.

What was their least favorite job that they’ve ever had?

Waitress. (see above)

Growing up, what was their dream job?

Photographer

What is their dream job now?

She's not certain. Something that allows her to continue to work in a creative space. Something collaborative. Discovering what the new dream is has been put on the back burner. She's focused for now on figuring out how to balance motherhood and a career.

Be honest – does your character enjoy their job?

Nope

Does your character plan on retiring as soon as they can, or will they continue working?

Lou has no designs on retirement. She enjoys being busy and, if she found something sustainable that she loved, she would never quit.

Have they ever been fired from a job?

Oh yes. Multiple times.

Do they think that their job is rewarding?

Not particularly. She has moments where she has fun but she's never excited to wake up and go back in.

[tea-withnofixinsplease]

As a resident brown thumb, and beginner gardener I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to invest in perennials.

Yes it takes longer for a perennial plant to mature, (about 2 to 3 years if it's in a pot) but you can definitely grow annuals while you wait and won't even notice, I am TELLING you it is so so worth it guys trust me.

You'll have Fruits/nuts/berries/herbs/leafy greens for years to come after one install and very minimal upkeep.

Perennials also tend to be hardier and more forgiving when it comes to beginner gardener's in my experience as well.

My method is to always purchase 1-2 perennial plants On Sale for every 5-8 annuals i plan on growing that year. It may be a little expensive if ur just starting out, so 1 perennial + 3-ish annuals would suffice.

Plants do well when they're companion planted so it saves u time, energy, and pesticides to get recommended combinations.

My first year didnt count, I only planted a solid block of irish potatoes of the same variety. It was a plague of bugs and disease. Don't do that, always get Companion Plant combos.

So let's go over a 4 year garden plan to get an idea, when you know what you're doing.

The 1st year I started with: a blackberry bush kit. The kit had 2 blackberry plants in it, I got it from Sams Club. I planted them in cheap plastic pots.

-a grapevine kit (Red seedless and Concord pair I also from the same Sams club). I didn't know what a mycellium network was so I thought the roots molded and threw them away, I still feel the sting from that waste but i was able to buy a Disease resistant grape variety online and plant it in the same pot. But dont be like me.

-And for my annuals that year I went with a salsa garden combo kit (peppers, cilantro, tomatoes, basil) that I got from Lowes. I harvested the salsa ingredients that whole summer.

-The second year

i bought an Italian plum tree, and for my annuals, I planted a Salad kit.

By that time, the Blackberries were mature and I was able to harvest blackberries for the first time.

This year, the 3rd year I've expanded my kitchen garden to include a salsa garden, and the 3 sisters combo (squash, beans and corn planted in the same place).

The grapevine I planted is now mature and will give me grapes in the late summer.

I'm on my second year of blackberries.

The Plum tree will be ready next year. And I haven't decided on what to plant yet.

The fourth year It will probably be a greek salad combo kit (tomatoes, red onion, basil, parsley, garlic) with a tea garden kit (rosemary, lemon balm, chamomile, lavender, mint). By this time My plum tree will be mature and I will harvest my first year of plums, my third year of blackberries, and my second year of grapes. And for my two new perennials, I will go with two apple trees for $10 each online.

By That Time I will harvest my 3rd year of blackberries, my 2nd year of grapes and my 1st year of italian plums.

So that's how it works!

Grapes, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries are cheap and widely available from big box stores during planting season, whereas fruit trees are cheaper and healthier when ordered online outside of planting season but pre-ordered for the next year, in my experience.

(this could be berry bushes, a fruit tree, a nut tree, a fruit vine, or a perennial herb you just have to shop around) They mature faster when you plant it in a pot, and you grow however many annuals you want that growing season.

I'm so focused on the routine spring radishes and summer tomatoes, that two adhd business days (seasons) later and boom

"now I have fresh blackberries this season too."

"Oh what's this? Now I have grapes to go along with this year's harvest"

COCAINE can't beat that high, check your growing zone and buy that f*cking dwarf tree.