This will help transit agencies and state and local governments buy 1,700 U.S.-built buses; nearly half must be zero carbon emissions.
![The U.S. Government is Awarding $1.7 Billion to Buy Electric and Low-Emission Buses](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/e1843bb3-5397-4353-871f-e1753ec37283.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Note: U.S.-built buses at that.
[Image description: A Lion electric school bus is seen on display in Austin, Texas, Feb. 22, 2023.]
Former President Trump railed against the electric vehicle industry during a speech to Michigan Republicans on Sunday, warning them that the state’s auto industry is at risk under President B…
![Trump takes aim at EV industry during speech to Michigan Republicans](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/bae83d1f-f31f-466f-a028-de76439f4c64.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
A sad reminder that the MAGA wing of the Republican party continues to be against most anything that can actually help turn around climate change.
[Image description: former President Trump]
Young Montanans put their state on trial for its contributions to climate change. Here are five takeaways from the proceedings as we await the judge’s ruling
![5 Takeaways from the Montana Climate Trial as We Await a Historic Ruling](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/9b7becc7-9cc6-4459-baee-7105b1da04cb.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
[Image description: Lead claimant Rikki Held, 22, confers with members of Our Children's Trust legal team before the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana]
When I feel like bringing a luxury item, it's my Helinox Chair Zero. Every pound counts, but at my age being able to sit for a few hours without my back hurting too much helps a lot.
Snapshots of the End of Travel: On Trying to Enter a Personal No-Fly Zone
A longish essay, but it does a great job of capturing the conflicted feelings that I share about giving up air travel.
[Image description: a jet plane in a forest of evergreen trees]
Hiking Mogan Ridge West Trail
![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/69a29818-9dbb-4f36-a19e-63cf3af9fe6f.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/69a29818-9dbb-4f36-a19e-63cf3af9fe6f.jpeg?format=webp)
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/748817
> I spent most of the morning at Mogan Ridge West, putting in about 12 miles in all. Basically, I hiked the outer loop, though I did bushwhack about a mile and a half for variety. > > We're definitely into summer hiking weather here, with high humidity, spider webs, gnats, and ticks. This trail also hasn't seen much use lately, so it's overgrown in grass in many areas. About half of it is gravel road, so you can combine unpleasant walking surface with increased ticks and chiggers. > > Still, it was a pleasant walk in the woods and decent exercise. I met one other hiker about halfway and we swapped notes on which local trails were worth revisiting. Fortunately we were hiking in opposite directions so we didn't have to have the awkward conversation about whether to hike together. > > More pictures on imgur. > > [Image description: trail marker post with area map and arrows pointing in many different directions]
Chris Hemsworth dangles from skyscrapers, dodges a fiery helicopter and survives several bludgeons to the head as former black ops mercenary Tyler Rake in Netflix’s blockbuster sequel “…
Personally, I don't really want to interact with the sweat of a giant Chris Hemsworth on a ground-level billboard, but perhaps I am just out of touch with the culture.
[Image description: Chris Hemsworth looking studly with a gun and a crashed small plane in the background]
Multnomah County is seeking nearly $52 billion in damages and future costs for climate adaptation in a lawsuit that filed Thursday against more than a dozen fossil fuel companies to hold them accountable for the unprecedented heat dome event in 2021.
![Multnomah County sues fossil fuel companies for nearly $52 billion over heat dome](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/3bc8f43f-c8d7-4a1a-944b-cb49cc537bff.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
I suspect this lawsuit doesn't have much chance of winning. But:
- the attorneys are apparently taking it on contingency, so no cost to taxpayers
- the more lawsuits against big oil, the better the chance that one will eventually win
- just rolling over for the people destroying the planet doesn't seem like a winning strategy either
[Image description: Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson speaks at a press conference June 22, 2023, announcing the county's lawsuit against fossil fuel companies in Portland, Oregon.]
Trail runners for me as well. Mostly I wear Hoka Hoka One Speedgoats (though I think the 5 is unfortunately worse than the 4) in dry weather, Topo Ultraventure Pro for wet weather when I need more traction. Gaiters are a must - check out Dirty Girl Gaiters to up your style.
2022 saw the second highest honeybee death rate on record—but with a lot of hard work, beekeepers kept populations "relatively stable."
![Beekeepers Working Harder Than Ever As Nearly Half of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Year](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/e420adde-d98e-4ccb-b3da-1cc85f35c1b5.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Well at least:
“The situation is not really getting worse, but it’s also not really getting better,” Steinhauer said. “It is not a bee apocalypse.”
[Image description: honeybee on honeycomb in a hive]
An average American income isn’t enough for a comfortable living in 2023, according to two recent reports. The typical U.S. family earns about $71,000 per year, according to the Census. Yet, …
Sadly I suspect this will do nothing to push the average American closer to revolution.
[Image description: stock photo of hands with calculator, pencil, and computer keyboard]
Golden Circle to Pounds Hollow
![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/64f06d65-61db-4038-9a8c-64f2283f423f.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/64f06d65-61db-4038-9a8c-64f2283f423f.jpeg?format=webp)
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/675946
> I spent the day yesterday wandering around some trails in the Shawnee National Forest (southern Illinois) from the Golden Circle trailhead to Pounds Hollow and back. I didn't keep super good track of my route, but it was something like (trail numbers): 1440 to 154 to 001 to 155 to 001 to 137A to 165 to 166 to 164 to 001 to 180 to 185 to 184 to 183 to 006, bushwhack to 134 to 006A to 006B to 109, roadwalk Karbers Ridge to 001 to 010A. Whew! The River to River Trail Society has some excellent brochures with georeferenced PDFs that cover trails in this area. > > The weather was a bit sticky, but not too bad - high temps in the lower 80s. Between some recent rain and increased horse traffic for the summer, low spots in the trails are getting pretty torn up in places, particularly as you get closer to the various horse camps. Poison ivy is out in force, ticks are too so take reasonable precautions. > > The area is a mix of pleasant forests, clifftop vistas, and streambeds (almost all dry at the moment). Pounds Hollow Lake is one of the ones in the area created by the CCC building a dam in the 1930s and has a reasonably popular swimming beach, as well as rest rooms and potable water. > > I had planned to camp at Pounds Hollow, but I stupidly forgot to pack cash to pay for the $10 fee, so what was planned as a 20 mile day turned into a 29 miler when I took the most direct route back to the trailhead where I started. There are a couple of other good spots along that route back, but all the water sources were dry or stagnant, and I didn't have enough water along for dinner & breakfast so I said the heck with it and came home. All told, 29.2 miles in just a shade over 12 hours. The last 4 or so were pretty tough, but I made it. > > [Image description: southern Illinois forested hills receding into the distance, framed by trees and viewed from the top of Buzzard Roost] > > More pictures at imgur.
I'd join you, except I'm still showing "subscribe pending" after a couple of days.
Edit: this seems to have been federation teething pains, resolved after a week. Probably due to te sudden influx of users everywhere. Now that it's reliably showing in my subscribed list, see you there!
There's a lemmy bug on this (or something closely related): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1385
DPReview will live
Gear Patrol has saved the beloved website from being shut down.
Good news for photographers
Golden Circle to Pounds Hollow
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/5c1a46df-b85f-4e54-8294-1b3a92aa9b6e.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/5c1a46df-b85f-4e54-8294-1b3a92aa9b6e.jpeg?format=webp)
I spent the day yesterday wandering around some trails in the Shawnee National Forest (southern Illinois) from the Golden Circle trailhead to Pounds Hollow and back. I didn't keep super good track of my route, but it was something like (trail numbers): 1440 to 154 to 001 to 155 to 001 to 137A to 165 to 166 to 164 to 001 to 180 to 185 to 184 to 183 to 006, bushwhack to 134 to 006A to 006B to 109, roadwalk Karbers Ridge to 001 to 010A. Whew! The River to River Trail Society has some excellent brochures with georeferenced PDFs that cover trails in this area.
The weather was a bit sticky, but not too bad - high temps in the lower 80s. Between some recent rain and increased horse traffic for the summer, low spots in the trails are getting pretty torn up in places, particularly as you get closer to the various horse camps. Poison ivy is out in force, ticks are too so take reasonable precautions.
The area is a mix of pleasant forests, clifftop vistas, and streambeds (almost all dry at the moment). Pounds Hollow Lake is one of the ones in the area created by the CCC building a dam in the 1930s and has a reasonably popular swimming beach, as well as rest rooms and potable water.
I had planned to camp at Pounds Hollow, but I stupidly forgot to pack cash to pay for the $10 fee, so what was planned as a 20 mile day turned into a 29 miler when I took the most direct route back to the trailhead where I started. There are a couple of other good spots along that route back, but all the water sources were dry or stagnant, and I didn't have enough water along for dinner & breakfast so I said the heck with it and came home. All told, 29.2 miles in just a shade over 12 hours. The last 4 or so were pretty tough, but I made it.
Most days I'd be posting a nature shot in response to that prompt. But my most recent hike was a few days ago at Patoka Lake, a heavily-used state park in our area. This combo of signs made me wonder when they legalized hunting disc golfers...
Rebuilding the reefs
I'd much rather this wasn't necessary, but all things considered I guess I'm glad people are doing what they can.
Patoka Lake
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/517933a3-59d3-4599-b28b-674077a444c4.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/517933a3-59d3-4599-b28b-674077a444c4.jpeg?format=webp)
We spent a chunk of the weekend at Patoka Lake, which is an Indiana State Park that has a private marina nestled inside. While my wife was off fishing and boating, I got in ten miles or so of hiking. Honestly I'm not sure I'd come back here; getting from the Marina to the actual hiking trails is about four miles of bike path, i.e., concrete and asphalt. Most of the trails themselves are through areas that have had controlled burned in the last few years. In addition to being less green, this also means that the trails bear only the vaguest resemblance to what the official trail map shows; many of the branch trails don't seem to have been reconstructed yet.
But still, a bad day in the woods beats a good day at my desk any time! More photos on imgur.
On June 11, a huge chunk of the summit of Fluchthorn (also known as Piz Fenga) collapsed. The 3,399m mountain is in the Silvretta Alps.
![Apocalypse in the Alps: Major Summit Collapses » Explorersweb](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f9f124aa-51da-4bf1-a117-30901850f47e.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Sometimes nature is not our friend. Click through to the video, it's pretty amazing.
Looks like Lemmy automatically mislinked the URL in your intro. Here's a fixed version: woodgrainterrain.com .
Neat idea. I wonder if you could use fudge as a medium? Seems maybe workable with cold conditions and a hard fudge recipe, though I dunno how fast the CNC tool bit might clog.
Fun times. I miss growing them. Maybe we'll get out of this darned suburb next year...
I'd say go ahead and post more here - this community is currently a pretty big tent, and if you've got plants or animals or outdoors you want to post about this is good place for them. If we get overwhelmed down the line we can always fission off more communities but I personally don't think we're near to that point yet.
Right on the edge of the range (at least according to https://www.fs.usda.gov/database/feis/plants/tree/araspi/all.html) but you may well be right. Preference for moist soils fits the distribution I was seeing. I'll believe this until proven otherwise. Thanks!
There are plenty of nice sections of the R2R. The area around Lusk Creek is nice, and there are enough trails there to spend a few days exploring if you're not just taking the thru hike. Fern Clyffe is also neat although there's no dispersed camping there.
My R2R Trail Story is online if you want a sense of what it was like for me.
I hiked the whole R2R last year. The road walk through Herod wasn't my favorite part, but it's way better than some of the chunks further west.
Seconding pothos and snake plants. I started with a single 4" pot of pothos a few years ago and through sticking cuttings in dirt I've got about 10 or 12 pots now. One of them extends across the windows in 3 rooms and is threatening to eat the entire downstairs.
Snake plants are apparently impossible to kill, even if you forget to water them for weeks.
If you eat avocados you can just start burying all the pits in a pot of dirt, keep it watered, and some of them will sprout. Or the next time you have a carrot or potato or onion start to sprout, bury is and you will have free greenery for a while.
Temperate Woodlands for me as well. Hoping to move to Temperate Rainforest though :)
I was thinking maybe some kind of locust tree sapling but I think the leaf shape is wrong. I'm surprised no one has recognized it; it was all over the place. Then again if Beehaw is like most online communities most users are from the coasts rather than the midwest.
Hopefully not repeating things others have said...
- Thanks for taking the time to write long thoughtful posts explaining the admin thinking, rather than just "we have decided X, live with it" posts.
- It seems entirely appropriate to me for the admins to set the tone of this instance, through explicit rules, through deciding who to add as a user and who to make a mod, and through deciding which other instances to federate with. Anybody who disagrees can always start their own instance. That you're opening a coffee shop doesn't mean anyone can come in without shirt and shoes (bad analogy like all analogies).
- It's entirely possible that I (older white male with plenty of income raised in a homegeneous white suburb) have some opinions that would be appropriate on one of those defederated instances but not here. I can always make an account over there if I feel the need to post those opinions. Likewise, if someone on a defederated instance wants to post here and can behave themselves according to the house rules, they can create an account here. This doesn't seem like a huge burden to impose on anyone.
- During a long career as a software developers, just about every successful fork I can recall came about because a majority of a project's developers (not its users!) decided they had to leave a dysfunctional project. Until/unless Lemmy gets to that point it seems pretty silly to me to talk about forking the codebase.
I wasn't packed super light - around 17 pounds including consumables. So base weight was somewhere around 12, I guess.
As far as favorite gear, that's a tough one. How about three that I appreciated this trip?
- The Osprey Levity 60 pack is very comfortable for me - they're not making it any more, though. I guess the Exos Pro might be the closest equivalent in their current lineup. (Not that I always use this pack - I've got about six in rotation. Yeah, it's an addiction).
- The Helinox Chair Zero is totally worth carrying an extra pound on any trip where I'm going to have hours sitting around camp (like this one).
- The Katabatic Gear Bristlecone Bivy keeps the bugs off at night and adds a few degrees to my sleep system.
Love the new icons, and love love the fact that Beehaw is treating the creator right. That makes this site's team better than AMPTP!
Backpacking at One Horse Gap
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f1d1d067-c7fd-47a9-9b18-59ab38f34242.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f1d1d067-c7fd-47a9-9b18-59ab38f34242.jpeg?format=webp)
I spent a day and a half backpacking the trails in the One Horse Gap area in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. I ended up hiking about 28 miles, which puts me at just over 550 for the year. Yes, I'm goal-oriented sometimes.
I mostly followed the loop suggested by the River to River Trail Society, but also made a few extra loops. Some of the trails are not much used and overgrown, but that's balanced out by a large number of user trails that don't show on the map at all.
Conditions were near ideal: highs around 80, lows about 50. Not much bug pressure, though the ticks are out in force. The whole area is overrun with poison ivy, so everything I was wearing went straight into the laundry when I got home.
We've had just enough rain in the area lately to soften the trails up, but not so much as to turn them into mudpits (well, except in a few areas - the whole area gets heavy horse traffic). Sadly this meant that waterfalls and cascades were mostly dry too.
I camped next to One Horse Gap Lake - a very nice spot, but there's an access road which means there is far too much trash strewn around. At least the motorcyclists who showed up late Monday night opted to ride back out again rather than partying. Not that I have anything against people partying, but I like my sleep.
I put a few more photos at Imgur in the interest of not hammering the Beehaw servers too hard.
Thank you to everyone :
- Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
- Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
- Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
- Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit
There's this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate "person who volunteers their own time" with "person who has to do anything I want them to do". When stated that baldly it's easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won't fall into that trap.
I would add The Abolition of Work though that might be a controversial choice. Did a lot to get me thinking back in the day, though.
Who is this thorny plant friend?
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/05206a9b-5739-4cab-ac11-b99da6dc89d6.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/05206a9b-5739-4cab-ac11-b99da6dc89d6.jpeg?format=webp)
I thought I knew all the plants that would attack me in southern Illinois...then I headed off trail to find a good spot for a cathole and started to push through a shoulder-high thicket of these guys:
This proved to be a mistake, due to the hitherto-unnoticed-by-me spiky thorns all over their stems. I found another spot, so now I'm just left with small punctures & curiosity.
I'm usually of the school that says "there is no bad weather to be outside, just wrong clothing choices"...but it certainly gets much more challenging in extreme heat or cold! Whereabouts did you end up, if you don't mind me asking? Any trails you've got an eye on?