Pica is eating things that are not food, but as pointed out in the article I linked, eating dog poo is providing a significant source of nutrition for foxes. In those circumstances, it by definition is not pica.

Pet dogs also eat poo on occasion, also without any underlying problem, so I really don’t think there’s any reason to think that far less domesticated species where it is well established would just stop. I’m sure you can reduce it, especially if it has a nicer food source, but still, an animal with far less history of domestication seems like a recipe for amplification of all the potential issues you don’t want to deal with.

To the “they smell bad” bit, I’ll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I’ll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we’re not talking pebbles, we’re talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing… I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes’ diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won’t make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

Reggie is great. Very chill. Just wish it wasn’t so shy. I’ve only been allowed to briefly pet Reggie on a couple of occasions over several years.

I have a suspicion she’s the timeshare cat for half the neighbourhood. One of my neighbours previous cats used to have at least half a dozen houses he’d go to where he’d come in if the garden door was open and go upstairs and go to bed in our beds…

Took this in London the other day.

It’s too common a symbol for X.org to have much of a shot because they’re not competitors. This “X Social Media” might have a stronger claim if they’ve actually used and defended a trademark specifically in the social space.

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.

I prefer to hope the person who made this is just a crappy writer who desperately tried to find a way to make us think they were talking to a girl first and couldn’t think of another way of describing rejection. (I fear that’s not the reason, and that you’re right, but I live in hope)

Average life expectancy in the US is ca 80, a few years above that in most of Europe, and highest in Japan, Macau, Hong Kong, at 84-85 years (this is across everyone - typically there’s a 3-4 year spread between men and women, so e.g. Hong Kong is 83.2 for men and 87.9 for women)

That sounds like it’ll be more than solid enough.

Reasonably so. I had to bolt down my gazebo and attach sandbags to the legs because it’d have blown away, metal frame and all, if I didn’t.

Note that a couple of decent sized hooks bolted to the wall can hold a lot compared to trying to weight something down to the ground without firmly attaching it. If you need to attach it to a pole or a post, then you probably want to make sure that side is weighed down quite a bit.

The wind is also the main reason why I have the carabiner hooks so that it’s reasonably easy to unhook and fold it up when it gets extra windy without having to try to untie ropes etc…

In large part because at least some portion of California lawmakers knows their history well enough to be aware that all of Silicon Valley is a thing in the first place because people were able to leave and take their ideas with them and start something new.

A huge portion of the value of Silicon Valley today can still be traced back to when the “Traitorous Eight” left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild in 1957, and build tech based on what they’d learnt at Shockley, with many of them then going on to leave Fairchild and found further new companies. The outcome of that among many others resulted in both Intel and AMD, and the same pattern has repeated many times.

Depends on jurisdiction. Worth checking before taking any chances. Also worth considering that an employer willing to put that in the contract may well try to fire you and/or sue you if you come up with something valuable and they decide they want it, so even when you’re in the right it’s often not worth working for a company like that.

If my own experience had been unique, or been contradicted by the data, you’d have a point, but it’s an experience shared by almost everyone I follow, many of whom have abandoned larger followings on Twitter for the same reason, and it’s an experience where the only thing in question given the data is how rapid the decline is, not whether the decline is happening.

It’s tied to carabiners / snap hooks attached to hooks mounted on my outside wall, and then tied to the frame of my gazebo on the other side. Depending on what you have to attach it to it can be very easy or a bit of a hassle. If you don’t have anything to attach the other side to, you can drive down a tent pole or a post, but it needs to be pretty solid to handle the wind.

She’s a fairly regular visitor, and she demands regular cuddles. Usually by pretend “falling” over right in front of me, and if I ignore it she’ll do it again until I take the hint.

By fully funding them. The return from a lifetime annuity bought at 65 is just marginally higher than a reasonable expected safe return from the same investment. (A lifetime annuity pays out on the basis that the provider needs to guarantee an income until you die, so if it returns so much that it eats too much into the capital, it’ll be unprofitable for the provider). At the margins, the expected remaining life years of someone at 65 in a developed country is long enough that you can’t safely offer that much more without eating away too much at the capital too quickly.

I’m mostly shocked they’ve not lost more and faster. I get more engagement on my ~500 follower Mastodon account than my ~50k follower twitter account these days (sure, I could paid the manchild for more exposure, and if he wasn’t so insufferable and had actually made the service better, I might’ve considered that)