The obvious question to me is, what did he do with his money?

He sold his house for $300k when he moved into the governor’s mansion four yars ago, but he didn’t keep the money from the sale? He has an upper middle class salary, but no savings?

Either he’s got a bunch of credit card debt to pay off or a drug habit, or he keeps his savings in cash under his mattress. But money doesn’t just vanish like that.

In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?

English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.

American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.

The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.

But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?

In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.

Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.

And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.

Food Not Bombs has a cookbook with a similar style of “protest food” recipes.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)

The thing about invasive species is that they’re invasive. If you want to fill your yard with native species, you have to keep protecting those native species and removing invasive species before they get a foothold, for years, until the invasive weed seeds in the soil bank have run out and the native species are big and healthy enough to outcompete whatever invasive seeds blow in.

Any other advice people would give you depends on where your yard is. In desert climates sand or stone can be low maintenance. In wetter climates, there are low and slow growing native ground covers that can replace grass (I’ve heard good things about clover). In prairie states, seed your yard with prairie grasses and put up a fence with a sign saying “rewilded prairie do not mow” 😆

I like to imagine that most intelligent species of the universe evolved from eusocial insect analogues or herd animals or solitary predators, and our weird tribal ape habit of domesticating and pack bonding with various predator species - and our general attitude that large predators are cool and exciting to be around because as we evolved domestication we modified our own brains to have positive associations with potentially domesticatible species - freaks them the fuck out.

It’s like every other alien species is the Utah Conservation Department’s Twitter page warning people not to pet mountain lions and we’re all yelling “but if not friend, why friend shaped” at the whole universe.

iOS devs on the other hand often only support the newest version of iOS, so if your device doesn’t get new OS updates any more, you can toss it.

And the newest versions of iOS only run smoothly on the newest iPhone hardware, so if you want your phone to keep running quickly and smoothly you have to keep updating to the newest hardware. Planned obsolescence in action.

There’s a Sea Shepherd ship captain, Pia Klemp, facing twenty years in an Italian prison because she rescued drowning migrants. Because, in government terms, by bringing them to safety on land she smuggled aliens into Italy.

And she’s just one of the most well known cases in the West. A fisherman in Greece got 280 years in prison for piloting a single ship of migrants to shore after the actual smugglers fled the ship.

Saying the governments of Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc, don’t care about migrant lives understates the situation. They want migrants to die at sea, and they punish people who bring them to land.

Remember the old saying: if a company is giving you something for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

Subreddits are Reddit’s product. Reddit makes money by selling subreddits to advertisers. If moderators damage that product, Reddit takes action. End of story.

But look on the bright side: when/if the no lawn movement gains momentum those same people will jump on the bandwagon to conform with their neighbors.

Public shame is a much stronger motivator than personal morality. Especially for limousine liberals. Once we get to the point where rich suburbanites replace grass with native plants or xeriscapes to look good for their neighbors, we’ve won.