First of all, your ideas about an eagle and wolf are pretty far-fetched

Unless you’re raising it from a puppy, at best what you’re realistically gonna find with a wolf is one (or more realistically a pack) that tolerates your presence and doesn’t actively view you as a threat or prey and sort of provides passive security by chasing things out of what it views as its own territory. The amount of time, effort, and resources (giving it food and such) to get much beyond that just isn’t going to be feasible in any kind of apocalypse scenario. If food gets scarce, you, your pets, and your livestock are absolutely going to be on its menu, and it’s probably not gonna be communicating with your dogs in any meaningful way beyond “I’m in heat, wanna fuck?”

Nor is an eagle going to be acting as a scout. You can probably watch its behavior for signs of threats that you didn’t notice, and maybe it will see you and your home as a source of safety and come back to you and refuse to leave if it sees a threat, but it’s not really gonna go out on patrol and actively warn you about what’s out there. They can be useful for hunting, but pretty much anyone who actually does any sort of falconry will tell you that every time they let their bird go, they’re really just hoping that it actually comes back and doesn’t just fuck off and they get to watch as all that time and effort they spent training it fly off into the sunset.

Dogs- absolutely, there’s good reason that we’ve been keeping dogs around since time immemorial.

Malinois is a solid breed, smart, strong, motivated, reasonably healthy and free of major health issues compared to a lot of breeds (like German shepherds,) smaller than some similar breeds so a bit easier to feed, and very trainable if you have the time and know-how. I have one myself, she’s a rare lazy malinois (which still makes her smarter and more energetic than most other dogs you’ve probably ever met) and she’s definitely got very strong herding, guardian, and protection instincts, they can also be serviceable tracking/detection dogs (police and such use them extensively for that,) my girl has even shown some rudimentary pointing instincts, and for not being a breed known for having a soft mouth (quite the opposite) she can be remarkably gentle and has carried some delicate objects around with her without breaking them, so she could do retrieving work as well.

So a pretty solid pick for a do-it-all breed if you can only pick one.

Ideally you probably would have multiple dogs to fill different roles, there’s a reason we have bred so many different types of dogs- livestock guardians, herding dogs, sight hounds, scent hounds, retrievers, etc. they all excel at different things.

And ideally you’d want enough to have stable breeding pools without too much inbreeding. This would be a lot to manage, especially if you’re also trying to train them to be useful, a large pack of untrained dogs is more of a liability than anything.

Your relationship with them is also going to be different than with a normal family pet, most of them aren’t going to be coming inside to sleep in bed with you at night, they’re going to be outside working, and in apocalypse scenario, probably turned loose to forage for themselves since you can’t just go to Walmart for a bag of kibble, and they’re probably going to be bonding more strongly with the other dogs than with you.

Cats are useful for pest control. Again, this isn’t gonna be your spoiled housecat who sleeps on your keyboard all day, this is gonna be more of an outdoor barn cat that probably wants little to nothing to do with you most of the time, but it’s gonna keep rodents and such in check.

Chickens, turkeys, etc. are a solid homesteading option, eggs, meat, feathers you could probably use for pillows, mattresses, insulation in clothing and quilts, possibly for arrow fletching if you have or can make a bow and arrows.

Goats and/or sheep for meat, milk, and wool, smaller and easier to care for than cows, and in many cases will do just fine foraging for food.

Probably worth throwing a couple donkeys in as well. They make decent livestock guardians and can be put to work as pack or draft animals if needed.

Rabbits are also a solid, fairly low-effort meat animal and of course have nice fur.

Beyond that, I can’t think of many other animals that would be particularly useful, desirable, or realistic to keep in a survival situation.

Pumpkin does have some flavor, and it’s a pretty nice one IMO, sort of sweet and earthy

But it’s pretty mild, it doesn’t bring a whole lot to the party compared to a lot of things you might add it to like coffee. It would probably come through a little more in something more mild like oatmeal.

In most grocery stores (at least in the US) carry cans of pumpkin puree (not to be confused with pumpkin pie filling which is usually right next to it on the shelf which has added sugar and spices) if you want to get a sense of what just straight pumpkin tastes like, or mix it into something else (it’s an ok source of fiber and some vitamins, and like I said, it’s tasty, just kind of mild)

FYI Pumpkin spice is pumpkin pie spice.

Most “pumpkin spice” flavored things contain 0 pumpkin. And pumpkin doesn’t exactly have a particularly strong flavor on its own. The flavor people tend to associate with pumpkin are the spices you typically add to pumpkin pie.

And it’s basically just a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger, and sometimes allspice.

Just kind of flipping that script a little, I work in 911 dispatch, and we get a lot of calls from Spanish speakers.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a Spanish speaking dispatcher on duty, so if they’re not on another call, I can transfer them over, and almost without fail the conversation goes like this

Me (English): 911, where is your emergency?

Caller (broken English): uh… Speak Spanish?

Me (broken Spanglish): ok, let me get you a Spanish speaker, un momento Transfers caller

Spanish Dispatcher (in Spanish): 911 where is your emergency?

Caller: Ok

Spanish Dispatcher: repeats in Spanish

Caller: uh… Speak Spanish?

Spanish Dispatcher (in Spanish): Yes sir (or ma’am,) I’m speaking to you in Spanish, where is your emergency?

Caller: oh! continues in Spanish

I registered Republican to vote in their primaries

It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in the generals

But I’m hopeful that I can try to head off the worst of the crazies in the primaries before it gets to the general

I mean, Erasmus is a pretty well-known historical figure (and where, I assume, that programme gets its name)

That’s where my mind went first.

Turns out we’re both wrong and it’s just OP’s name like he said in the other comment, but I’m curious how you made that connection? Not passing any judgement on it, just curious since your brain reached a different conclusion than mine and I’m curious how you got there.

Going back a couple generations of this tech, I was a little excited about Google glass back in the day.

And to be clear, I don’t have, want, or like meta glasses or any of the other products out there right now. I don’t trust the companies behind them, I don’t like the people who have them, there’s enormous privacy issues with them, and they’re pretty much totally tied to AI at this point and I don’t think I need to get up on a soap box to explain why that’s a problem on Lemmy.

But if all of those issues were somehow solved, I could see them being pretty damn useful.

Part of what I liked about them was that they were obviously not just regular glasses. Not that every passerby is scrutinizing what the people around them are wearing on their face, but they weren’t pretending to be anything they weren’t.

I think they could be useful for capturing pictures and video of things in the moment. I recently went on a trip to Iceland and saw some geysers. I wanted to get a picture of them erupting but that meant I had to stand around holding up my phone for like 5 minutes because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to erupt, and that did take me out of the moment a bit. Would’ve been kind of nice to just set my glasses to record as I stood there watching and waiting.

When I can, I try to get around on foot. Having some sort of HUD to display directions and such would be pretty nice for that instead of constantly having to pull out my phone. Having directions in your earbuds works pretty well in most cases, but does somewhat impair your ability to hear what’s going on around you. Also, in cases like when I was in Iceland, my ears aren’t exactly used to hearing icelandic words, and it kind of seemed like Google’s text to speech isn’t quite up to it either, because it seemed to skip a lot of street names and just said “turn left” making me have to look at my phone to see which specific road I was supposed to be turning at. But even when it did attempt to pronounce the names, most of them sound like gobbledegook to me, and I wouldn’t necessarily be able to match what I heard up to a street sign.

Similarly, I had to pull out my phone to translate more than a few signs, menus, etc. while I was there. Being able to just look at the sign and have a translation pop up in the corner of my vision or overlaid on top of the icelandic words would have been nice.

There is no way to do this in a way that wouldn’t be horrifyingly invasive and disrespectful of other people’s privacy, but if there were, I’m pretty terrible with names, and being able to have a pop-up with name tags or something would be nice in a lot of social situations.

I have a pretty small house where storage and workspace is at a premium, and I can be a bit scatterbrained and disorganized. I often find myself working on my hobbies at a small, cluttered workbench with several in-progress projects scattered about. Having the camera rolling while I do that might be useful for me, so I can rewind and see where the hell I put that screwdriver down, I just had it 2 minutes ago and now it’s vanished into thin air.

Similarly, I like to cook, and I tend to wing it a lot, I’m not following recipes too closely, I taste, adjust and improvise as I go, and I’m certainly not writing my recipes down while I’m doing it. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good cook, people tend to really like what I make and often ask me for recipes. Being able to go back and review the video of what I did would be pretty handy for when I actually do want to write one of those recipes down, and I could share some of the video to show exactly what I did for some more complicated steps.

And in cases where I am referencing a recipe or tutorial or whatever while I’m working on something, again, workspace is a valuable commodity in my house. I would rather not have some of it taken up by my phone if I can avoid it. If I’m moving between different areas, like from the counter to the stove, or from the bathroom where I’m working on something to the basement where the water shut off and circuit breaker is, or maybe I have my hands full, or I’m up on a ladder, or maybe my hands are dirty and I don’t want to touch my phone, or maybe I don’t want to be touching my phone while I’m cooking because phones are pretty gross, etc. it could be nice to just have the instructions or or video right there in my glasses.

If the cameras are good enough, they might also be able to take the place of the head mounted magnifier I sometimes use while working on small things, I could just zoom in with the camera.

I used to work in a warehouse, we had rows and rows of racks full of pallets with boxes on them. When we were filling orders, we sometimes only needed one or two things out of a box, and so every time we pulled something out we’d have to print out a new label so we could tell at a glance how many things were in a box. With some sort of smart glasses we could have just had maybe a unique QR code on each box, and the inventory count just got updated. It may have saved us a bit of time and definitely would have saved a ton of labels, and we wouldn’t have needed the portable label printers we had which would have saved a bit of money as well.

Depending on how we’re defining “seen” I’m betting it’s some guy running a hot dog cart or sweeping up trash or something in a busy intersection like Times Square or Shibuya Crossing

Sure, if you’re a performer like Taylor Swift who’s filling giant stadiums or what-have you, you might see 100k people a night.

But you’ll probably see at least that many people passing by if your job is to stand around in Times Square all day too.

And Taylor probably doesn’t have a gig every night, while the dude with a hot dog cart might actually be out there 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

And on his days off, there’s a decent chance he’s probably gonna be out and about seeing faces too. He doesn’t have a private shopper to go do his grocery shopping and bring it to his mansion on a few acres of land in some rich neighborhood, he lives somewhere in or near NYC, probably commutes on the subway, seeing untold hundreds of more faces, and honestly probably sees about 100 faces anytime he walks out his front door and walks to the corner store to grab a snack.

I will admit that I’m simplifying leather quality terminology quite a lot with that.

Really that’s only part of the grading. There’s different layers to leather like there is to our skin

Full grain leather is basically what you probably think leather is- a slab of animal hide with flesh removed that’s been tanned

Top grain leather has basically had the very top layer sanded down to remove any imperfections.

Split gain leather has had ever more of the top layers removed (suede is a type of split grain) to

And genuine leather has had even more layers removed and usually needs a lot of processing done to it to make it look decent

The topmost layers are the most durable, and so genuine leather tends to not hold up as well as other grades, but it does have some valid uses, full grain leather can be stiff, and genuine leather tends to be pretty soft and flexible, and the other layers in between have their own properties that may or may not be desirable to preserve depending on the intended use.

And within those categories there are still other ways of grading quality- the quality of the hide you started with, different types of treatments and processing, etc. so there is genuine leather out there that is pretty nice, and trash full grain leather.

But as a genuine rule of thumb, if you’re looking for a sturdy leather thing, genuine leather usually isn’t the way to go

And then a step down you have stuff like bonded leather which is basically shredded up leather that’s been mixed with rubber and such and formed into a sheet.

For solid recommendations you’ll probably need to give some additional details about what kind of wallet you prefer, how many cards and such you carry in it, and which pocket you carry it in.

Bifold vs trifold vs zipper vs money clip etc, front or back pocket, etc.

In general, if you’re looking for leather goods, try to avoid “genuine leather” that’s basically the lowest grade, and about the only nice thing that can be said about it is that it’s not fake.

Basically all leather goods benefit from a bit of care now and then, like cleaning with some saddle soap and some sort of leather conditioner. Over time all leather goods will tend to develop some creases and wear. In some cases that just adds to the character, in other cases it might look kind of grungy, and that’s kind of up to personal taste.

Personally I’m a back pocket wallet guy, and after using thicker leather wallets for most of my life that started to give me a little bit of back pain from sitting on it, so I switched to a thinner nylon wallet (I use a Chums surf short wall for my EDC) and that’s held up probably as well as any leather wallet I’ve personally used (not that I bought particularly great leather wallets) and a simple metal money clip for dressier occasions

But I also don’t carry very much with me. ID, a couple cards, and maybe a little bit of cash.

I usually cheat a bit and make the sauce separately in a small pot on low heat. Still using just the traditional ingredients - cheese, butter, pasta water and then toss the pasta in the sauce. Not as showy as tossing all the ingredients together directly with the pasta, but I’m not trying to impress anyone and it’s a little less picky about technique and needing to work quickly while the pasta is hot enough to melt it all together.

I answered a similar question a few weeks back so I’m mostly just gonna copy/paste that

But TL;DR- Yes, we’d still have radiometric dating, arguably it would be less complicated since we wouldn’t need to account for nuclear testing and the bombs dropped on Japan messing with the ratio of different isotopes found in nature, but it does also offer some new opportunities for dating certain things. For example, since we started setting off nuclear bombs basically all steel we’ve made has been a tiny bit radioactive, so you can pretty reliably date steel to being from before or after WWII based on the presence of radioactive contaminants. (Those traces of radioactive material are pretty harmless and don’t affect things for most applications, but there are certain cases where it is actually very important so there’s a market for recycling WWII battle ships and such to get steel that’s free of radioactive contaminants)

There are 3 naturally occuring types of carbon, called isotopes, ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C. These are all basically the same except for the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Living things can use all 3 types to build sugars and proteins and all those other organic molecules needed for life. Animals get it from the food they eat, plants get it from the air. These 3 isotopes all exist in nature in a pretty consistent ratio

¹⁴C, however, is unstable (radioactive) and over time decays into more stable elements.

But it also is constantly getting replenished from cosmic rays interacting with other gases in the atmosphere making more, so as long as something is alive the ratio of carbon 14 in that plant or animal to the other types of carbon stays pretty consistent. It breathes/poops out carbon and takes more in, keeping that ratio pretty consistent.

But once it dies, it’s not taking any new carbon in, so what was there when it died is all it’s ever going to have until it decomposes away entirely or gets eaten by scavengers or whatever. The ¹²C and ¹³C are basically going to stay put, while the ¹⁴C slowly decays.

So to date something you just need to look at the ratio of the different types of carbon and you can figure out how old it is.

Let’s say ¹⁴C has a half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) of 1 year (its actually something like 5 or 6 thousand years but this makes the math easy with smaller, easier to digest numbers)

And let’s say the ratio is 1:1, ¹²C+¹³C to ¹⁴C (again, it’s more like 1% carbon 14 IRL)

So after a year, half of the ¹⁴C will be gone, and the ratio will be 2:1

After another year half of that remaining ¹⁴C will be gone and it’ll be a 4:1 ratio, another year and it’s 8:1, etc.

This of course has limitations. After a long enough time basically all of the carbon 14 will be gone and you can’t really date things that way anymore. I think the limit is something like 50,000 years.

It’s also only really useful for plants, animals, and stuff made from them (leather, textiles, the straw in mud brick buildings, food, etc.) so not particularly useful for dating inorganic matter.

There’s also a few things that can cause more ¹⁴C to form than normal, humans caused one with our nuclear testing, there was another event around the 8th century that we’ve discovered from measuring the carbon 14 in tree rings from that time that we think may have been caused by a supernova sending more cosmic rays our way than usual. So those events also need to be accounted for.

But there’s other similar techniques using elements with longer half lives that we can use to date older or inorganic materials.

For example uranium-lead dating. When the mineral Zircon forms, it tends to include uranium but exclude lead. But over time uranium decays into lead, so if you have a sample of zircon, you can measure how much lead is in it and figure out how long ago it must have formed because that lead must have once been uranium that has decayed at a steady pace over the centuries.

I have a relative with a phone by his pool

He uses an old rotary phone for it, because it’s all pretty basic electromechanical stuff that can’t really get messed up from it being out in the rain or whatever. It can’t make outgoing calls because modern phone systems don’t work with rotary phones, but it receives incoming calls just fine

It should maybe be noted that he’s an old school telephone lineman who really knows his stuff, so I don’t know if there were any other adapters or anything needed to make his setup work.

I got a few stories

If we want to count “smoke” as weather, wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada was pretty crazy

I work in 911 dispatch and was working the night in first started hitting our area. We got a couple calls about smoke, which didn’t immediately seem like anything too unusual. We sent the police and fire department out to look for where it was coming from and they confirmed that yeah, there was smoke, but no obvious source. It of course didn’t blanket our whole county at once, and as I recall the weather was fairly nice and at first we were kind of writing it off as a couple people having big bonfires somewhere.

But as the night went on we kept getting more calls. Eventually we were somehow alerted about the wildfire situation. When someone called about smoke we still sent someone to check in case there was actually a fire somewhere, but we also advised our callers about the wildfire smoke, and basically everyone I told was brown away by that.

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Hurricane Ida hit my area pretty hard. It hit on my day off. About a year before my area had gotten hit pretty hard by another storm and we had historic flooding, power was out for a good chunk of the day, and with that in mind I ran out to get a battery backup for our sump pump the morning before it hit. My wife wasn’t sure if that was necessary, but we again lost power for like 16 hours so we were glad to have it.

Once the storm was well underway, of course I got the page from work that anyone able to come in was needed to handle the call volume. I made an attempt to get in, but every direction I went I encountered flooding, I don’t think I made it a half mile from home in any direction before needing to turn around.

The storm the year prior was the worst flooding in our area since they started keeping records, and it was by a pretty solid margin. Ida demolished that record. It took them a week or so to figure out how much it broke that record by because it totally swamped the gauge at the river where they measured it.

Like I said, we lost power for about 16 hours, I have some friends nearby who are on a well for their water. They have a generator to keep their fridge and freezer running but it’s not enough to also run their well pump. We’re on city water but have no generator, so after the storm passed we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge, and they came to our house to take a shower and fill some jugs with water.

Before that, I had tried to go out to try to grab some ice for our cooler. Without power, the one store I could get to of course wasn’t open. I tried to get to somewhere else, and at that point I couldn’t make it much further than the night before. In some places it was because of downed trees and wires and such, but in others it was because some roads and bridges were just totally washed out.

Also, the main reason we lost power was because the substation that provides power to our area ended up underwater.

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If we want to count solar weather, seeing the northern lights from my home in 2024 was wild.

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Back when I was in scouts, I went out to Philmont, which is a big property in New Mexico for scouts to go backpacking.

I don’t think that area is technically considered a desert, but it was certainly a lot drier than what I’m used to at home.

At least it usually is.

We got to basecamp, everything was pretty dry and dusty. We do all of our orientation and checking in and such, and settle in for the night before starting our trek the next day. At Basecamp they have you in canvas wall tents on a wooden platform (if you search for something like “scout summer camp tents” you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about)

It downpoured that night, apparently the most rain they’d gotten in a single night in the last 10 years.

Coincidentally 10 years prior was the last time my troop sent a group to Philmont, and they also got rained on pretty hard.

I think because it was usually so dry they got a little lax in waterproofing their tents. It was blowing sideways and kind of worked its way through the seams of the tent. So if you were on one side you were fine, but on the other side of the tent you got wet.

I was on the wet side. Luckily the first couple drops hit my face and woke me up. I checked with my tent mate and he was fine. I packed up my sleeping bag so it wouldn’t get wet, pulled on some warm clothes and my rain gear and crawled under my cot, and that did a pretty solid job of keeping me dry. A lot of people ended up needing to dry out their gear the next morning before starting their trek.

Again, I don’t know if that area is technically a desert, but you hear about how the desert comes alive after the rain, plants bloom really quickly and all of that, and we did see a little bit of that happening, things were definitely greener the next day than when we arrived.

We also ended up having to hike an extra couple miles the first day that we planned because the bus that was supposed to drop us off at the trailhead wouldn’t be able to make it through some of the mud.

A few days into our trek, our itinerary had us camping near the top of a mountain. It would be a dry campsite with no potable water available, so we made the call to have our dinner for that day for lunch, since it was freeze dried stuff that needed water to cook, so we could refill our water when we had the chance to last us through the next day.

As we start up the mountain, a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made it to the top we were all pretty cold, damp and miserable and didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. We pretty much set up our tents and went to bed.

The next morning we woke up to a clear, beautiful day. We go to the top of the mountain to appreciate the view, and look down into the valley below and see… Clouds. Just a couple of them drifting by. And we realized that the fog we hiked through and camped in the day before had been a cloud.

If a mattress salesman ever tells you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” - run. Clouds suck for sleeping.

We had two crews doing different trucks that took us through different parts of Philmont. The other crew at some point got caught in a thunderstorm where lightning was striking way too close for comfort and had to spend some time crouched down in the lightning position while it passed.

I remember when my wife and I watched Morbius, we were pretty impressed with the sound mixing. We could hear what everyone was saying without our ears getting blown out by the explosions and such.

I feel like the effects and such were all petty solid too, but there’s no saving the fact that the story, writing, and acting were just trash.

Yeah I did get that from the article, I was more building on the comment I replied to.

But I do appreciate it, those little dialect differences can trip people up, like I’ve talked to a surprising amount of British/Australian/etc. people seem to think that when Americans talk about peanut butter and jelly, that we’re talking about putting a gelatine dessert (like Jell-O) on our sandwiches, because that’s what they call “jelly” (for anyone just now learning that’s not what we mean, what we call “jelly” is sort of like a pulp-less jam)

I think my impact on the world is a nut positive. I make it a point to help other people when I can, I’ve given a bunch of strangers a jumpstart in the parking lot, helped them change a tire, gave a stranded bicyclist a lift home when his pedal broke, clear my schedule to help my friends move, put my shopping cart back the right way and even sometimes straighten out the ones that were carelessly pushed in the general direction of the cart corral by some degenerate, and generally try not to be a bother to others.

As for whether that makes me a good person, I think that’s kind of up for debate. At my core, my motivations tend to be pretty selfish. I do those good deeds because I want others to do the same kinds of things for me. If I need help moving, I can count on a small army of friends and acquaintances showing up to help me because I’ve always made time for them. I want to live in a world where other people treat me the right way, and if I’m not even willing to do that, why should I count on others to do that? Not that it’s all a 1:1 transactional thing, I don’t expect every good deed I do to directly come back around to benefit me, but I do kind of hope that I’m sort of kicking off a chain of “paying it forward” that maybe inspires even more people to do the same and eventually I get to be the recipient of some random acts of kindness.

So a lot of the time it’s not really some sort of selfless altruism that drives me to do the right thing, which is a big part of what people imagine when they think of a “good” person.

I work in 911 dispatch, I’m always a little amazed at how many calls I get for lift assists. Not for a patient that fell and hurt themselves, not for someone who weighs 300+lbs, it’s just that no one there can apparently help an uninjured, 100lb old lady up off the floor or to stand up from the chair she’s sitting in.

Now granted, sometimes it’s another 100lb old lady calling, or someone with other disabilities, and they genuinely can’t do it. But just as often it’s a reasonably young and apparently healthy, able-bodied person, and most shocking to me it’s sometimes a nursing home or other facility like that where you’d really think they’d be prepared to handle something like that in-house.

I know there’s proper technique and equipment involved, and in some cases theres a lot of liability issues at play, but man It’s pretty wild to me that so many people and facilities are either unable or unwilling to just pick someone up.

Also, from all of the calls for falls and lift assists I’ve taken, I’ve started telling my wife that if I ever fall and can’t get up to just leave me on the floor. Gravity has spoken, I’m to be a floor-person from then on. Just slide a skateboard under me and let me scoot around on it. I have some people who call almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day because they’ve fallen and can’t get up, and I really don’t want that for myself.

But what were talking about isn’t implemented a flawed system, it’s improving one that’s already flawed, and the result still wouldn’t be perfect but it’s better than what currently exists

And it doesn’t prevent passing even better laws further down the line, but I think you know that creating new more comprehensive survivor benefits that would cover everyone is a much harder sell than a comparatively small tweak to copyright laws.

And if we remove those copyright benefits before those new systems are ready, you’re leaving people in the lurch without any safety net until those new systems can be created (if in fact they ever are)

And? Doesn’t everyone deserve that kind of safety net? Should we take away people’s 401ks, pensions, life insurance, etc. because other people don’t have them?

I think I’d rather focus my energy on making sure that more people can make sure their families are secure if something should happen to them, not less