the mellow tigger's musings

If you're near Oxford in England, there's a study commencing for #LongCovid fatigue.  If they solve this particular mitochondrial problem, it could also greatly benefit people with chronic fatigue syndrome.  They're looking for more volunteers.

If you're in Washington State of the USA, someone is looking for volunteers for outdoors nature work.  You get to work with adorable pygmy rabbits.  :)

If you're into feminism, I ran across the website FeralFeminisms.com recently.  I've only skimmed a few of their Anthropocene topics.  I can't tell yet whether it's brilliant future systems thinking or just pointless navel gazing.  Maybe, like Post-Autistic Economics (which I recommend), it's a bit of both simultaneously?

I mentioned potato skins earlier, and now they're making news in relation to prebiotics.

I wish that government tax bills were required to tell you where they spent that money.  My county is raising my taxes from $762 to $1,029.  I wish I knew why.  It seems to be simply that they're assessing the value of my house about 20% higher than last year.

The truth is a casualty in tough times. I thought I might subscribe to a newspaper, but both local outlets are more expensive than I realized ($200 for Star Tribune and $150 for Pioneer Press), even for online-only subscriptions.

For money like that, I'd rather have access to the USA website where I most often read news articles, the Washington Post. They're within that critical "Most Reliable" section of news trustworthiness.  Their left-center rating also suits my typical reading habits.  Everybody reviews their sources of news for fact-based reporting, right?  Anyway, I lucked out, and they had a special for only $39 instead of $100 for a digital-only subscription. Why is local news so much more expensive? Is it just a matter of scale, so that fewer subscribers means higher cost per subscriber?

In addition, I spent some more of my COVID relief check by donating to local news outlets, MinnPost and North News.  I would've donated to Insight News too, but I couldn't figure out how.  Still, though, I hope I helped my neighborhood at least a little bit by supporting local journalism.

I know, having enough spare money to contribute any amount to journalism is disgustingly elitist these days.  How did we get so bad off that me earning $37K/year puts me better off than 33% of Americans (even before 2020 happened, now is it 50%, or even higher)?  Something has gone very, very wrong.

I also want to know how the problem houses on this block always have cars and trucks outside that are so much nicer than my rust bucket?  Oh, yeah, it's probably because they're operating tax-free businesses like all the best companies do.