How is America Better Than Australia?

@lseeber Deadlier than an American with a gun and an inferiority complex? I doubt it.

@Nuurgle You always walk into a room and suck all the fun out of it? Geez.

@lseeber Spiders! Really big, hairy, ugly, venomous spiders <shudder>.

@magic_cave

Calling @Eluno?

/image Australian spider

@f00l Ewww! When I was in high school I used to organize moonlight horseback rides for some friends. The primary dirt-road path was bordered on each side by tall, swaying Australian pines. The guides always warned us that there were spiders in the trees. The pines are very tall and the path was very wide, so I didn’t worry too much, at least until the weekend we did a daylight ride. The spiders are often referred to as orange grove spiders or banana spiders, but they’re really golden orb weaver spiders. They make some of the largest webs known, about a yard wide and very sticky, and the females grow to about 6" including leg span. From horseback looking up at them, they looked dinner-plate size, and they were only 3’ or so above our heads. That was the last of the moonlight horseback events.

Check this source https://owlcation.com/stem/Facts-about-Banana-Spiders-Golden-Orb-Spiders . There are a couple of short videos and static images taken in Gainesville, FL, about 90 miles form where I am. They’re actually rather pretty, although I’d prefer not to handle one. The hairs on my neck are standing up as I type this, even though the last time I saw these things in the trees over my head was more than 50 years ago.

@magic_cave OMG banana spiders are something else. When I was working with adjudicated youth canoeing across the state of FL (and through the Okefenokee swamp) and those suckers were everywhere on the rivers. And you are right - huge webs. We’d paddle some places where we’d have someone in the canoe hold up the paddle to clear the path of the webs. Soft fluffy legs and body and on more than one occasion they’d land on my head and walk across and be on my face with such a soft touch. They’d hang out where there was another, much smaller but an iridescent and colorful spider, although I forget what they were called.

@f00l
/giphy lovely

@f00l Isn’t that a black widow? The spooky Aussie spider is the funnel web, esp. The Sydney funnel web.

@moondrake

I don’t know much about spiders, except that I like daddy longlegs spiders, and avoid the rest.

It could be a black widow.

I suppose I should have put quotes on my image search.

/image “Australian spider”

Well it seems using quotes made no difference.

Try again

/image “Australian spider” 3

@f00l Black widow is just such a recognizable spider, black with a red hourglass on her back. Had to exterminate widows and brown recluses (our scariest local spider) out of the basement one year so the furnace could be worked on. I generally employ a live and let live philosophy with predatory insects, but the ones that can cause real harm to people and pets must go.

@moondrake

I have never, to my knowledge, seen one in person. I thought it was a white hourglass, for some reason.

Seems my memory sucks.

K then.

@f00l Widows have a dangerous bite but they aren’t aggressive toward humans and are a comparatively large, recognizable spider so so you aren’t likely to run afoul of them by accident. Recluses are tiny, camo colored, look like a lot of harmless spiders, and hide in obscure places like shoes or shelves, so getting a very ugly bite from one is pretty easy. Their venom is necrotic, the bite may not even bother you at first, but do a lot of tissue damage and scarring later. Fortunately they aren’t populous.

@RedOak Apparently not by the reply I got. One in every crowd.

@f00l Inventing SUVs was a crime against the planet, not a good thing.

@Pantheist

I know SUV’s have profoundly serious environmental drawbacks.

Esp as commuter vehicles. But in the West and other empty places, vehicles like that can be important to have around.

I am thinking/hoping that the environmental factors of our transportation will improve markedly. (Yeah. I know that’s iffy.)

SUV’s - either used as designed, or as suburban commuter vanity vehicles - are a small business compared to the full weight of many other current and historical shortcomings.

Let’s just keep getting better. If we can.
Let’s keep on the side of facts. Traditional ones. The non-alt kind.

There is plenty of darkness in the path ahead. We just gotta keep going.

@f00l They were made specifically to get around environmental regulations.

SUV’s and trucks made up 60% of all car sales in the US last year.

Here’s a population density map of the US:

How many of those 60% do you think are getting any practical value from an SUV?

They’re also stupidly unsafe for other people on the road who are driving more practical vehicles, which of course gives a lot of people another reason to buy one- best way to survive an accident with an SUV is to be in one. On the topic of accidents- they’re also too wide for many roads and clearly too ungainly for many of the people driving them.

@Pantheist

SUVs were the thing here locally a decade or two ago. Now not so much.
People tend to have either sedans/wagons/smallest SUV’s or pickups. And the pickups (those that I see anyway) get used as pickups. They are pretty justifiable at least some of the time. I see people having one small sedan per adult driver, plus sometimes a family pickup, a lot of the time.

Suburbans and Navigators have gotten scarce by comparison.

Yes SUVs and pickups and other large vehicles present a risk to other smaller vehicles. But they are not too large for the roads (at least not the roads around here). They prob do very badly in the crowded NE with much older and narrower roadways.
Our local roads are full of large work pickups every day (including plenty of duallys). Carrying and hauling machines, in visible work use. And our roads are full - I mean full of 18 wheelers every day.

Yes, it needs to change. Transportation needs to change. There are lots of things we might like that are bad for us.

In my original post, I was trying to keep it light-hearted. (I celebrated junk food, which may well be far more long-term dangerous and expensive to us as a nation than large SUV’s and pickups are.)

So I was trying to refer to the positive qualities and joy of stuff, and, yes, some of the stuff is questionable, and other of that stuff comes with very dark sides. I get that.

But I were going to lay in on the negatives about the US (which I’m not, at the moment, that would tend toward a contentious direction), SUV’s would be way down the list of a long list of serious problems.

We enjoy many things that are bad for us. Or very bad for us. And very bad for future generations.

Let’s just keep working to do better.

@f00l actually we have ZERO native breeds of horses. there were no horses in the Americas until the Spanish arrived and introduced them. (OK, They technically re-introduced them, but North American Equines had been extinct for at least a millennium…)

@earlyre

Yeah I know all that. I grew up living and breathing the world of horses.

Yes our native wild herds were originally from Spanish escapees, and to some small extent, Portuguese, French, and English similar. Spanish breeds of the time used in the New World are believed to be largely of the Barb/N African stock, with heavy amounts of Arabian heritage (based on historical records and genetic evaluation.)

And settlers and traders imported other animals, usually the more common riding breeds from Western Europe, esp Throughbreds, hunters, warmbloods, and hacks.

And here, farmers, ranchers, and breeders and the great wild of the 1500’s-1800’s made a mix of them, resulting, over time, in new breeds, among them the Quarter Horse, Appaloosa, Morgan, Standardbred, Kentucky Saddlebred, Tennessee Walking Horse, and other “typed” non-breeds such as the paint, cow pony, palomino, etc.

A list is here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Horse_breeds_originating_in_the_United_States

I kinda wish we imported more horses from the Caucasus.

@Pantheist : I understand the points you’re rather ham-handedly trying to make, but there are a few that you’re missing. Let me give you another person’s viewpoint. Long ago I bought a Honda Civic hatchback. I drove a lot for business, and I needed to cart a lot of stuff with me on those trips. I loved my Civic. It was 13 years old when a guy in a old pick-up truck rear-ended me at a stop light and totaled it. I went back to the same dealer and bought another Civic, and I loved it just as much as I’d loved the first one. It was 8 years old when a young man ran a red light and managed to total all three cars, including mine, that were crossing the intersection. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. Back I went to the same Honda dealer. By this time, though, The Spouse and I had both developed significant arthritis in our hips, and both my shoulders and my right elbow were painful as well. It was hard to fold ourselves up into Civic-sized cars and harder still to get out of them. It hurt to shift gears. And a lot of cars on the road were taller than had been the norm 8 years earlier. So we bought a Honda CR-V. It was a small SUV with great mileage and lots of cargo space, and we loved it.

We still love it, even though it’s now rather elderly, just like us. It’s a 2003 model year, but it still gets fairly good mileage (25 mph around town, 29-30 on longer trips) and it fits our bodies and our travel needs well. We’re now retired, so money is a bit tighter than it was in the past, and we hope we don’t have to replace it for a few more years. Since my son and his family moved about 450 miles away last year, we’re now driving about 10,500 miles a year.

The only “road” we’ve found a little narrow for our CR-V is a leaf covered, two-rut US Forestry Service maintenance road in the deep backwoods of North Carolina that we enjoy driving along on vacation. Most passenger vehicles on highways and local roads here in north Florida are about the size of our CR-V or larger; there seem to be more semis and double-trailer trucks on the interstates these days, which can be seriously intimidating.

I’ve always tried to find a good balance between environmental issues and my driving needs. In all likelihood, since I’m 70 and The Spouse is a few years younger, our next car will be our last car, and we’ll still look for that balance in what we buy.

@f00l tried harder to be reasonable with you than I’m interested in. I’m only sharing with you my reasons for buying a small SUV, and I’m not at all interested in a debate.

I have no idea how old you are, what part of the country you live and drive in, or how long you’ve been driving, but you seem to be a one-trick pony on the issue of SUVs. I just thought you should be more aware of the variety of reasons people buy SUVs.

@magic_cave

I’m not at all interested in a debate.

That’s good, because I don’t know why I should care about your reason, particularly when you begin your elegant argument with an insult. People do selfish things all the time, myself included. No need to be so defensive about it.

@Pantheist Either way, I’m done hijacking the thread.

@heartny Oh yeah, I had forgotten. Aussie food was healthy and fresh, but bland to our palates.

@Kidsandliz Rabbit Proof Fence, yes? They had these burgers where there was a hole in the middle and an egg cooked inside. I don’t eat ground beef so I didn’t have any but my friend liked them. They have these big crawfish called “Balmain bugs”. They put the meat on various things, so we saw many signs like “chicken breast with bug meat”.

@daveinwarsh

Yeah. I’ve had that confirmed fire me by Aussie natives.
Must be weird walking around that way.

/giphy spock fascinating

@f00l Playing this Friday at 3:30am on TCM.