the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/creepy-eyeball-creatures-washing-texas-215939965.html[/URL]

Unusual “eyeball” creatures are washing up along a Texas beach, perplexing wildlife experts, officials say.

[SIZE=7]:alien:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=4][COLOR=rgb(97, 189, 109)]Where is Ed when you need him, he knows what that is.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
[SIZE=7][/SIZE]

[HEADING=2]Darius, ‘World’s Longest Rabbit,’ Is Missing[/HEADING]
Measuring more than four feet, the furry giant should be easy to spot. But he vanished from an English garden last weekend, and the police are treating his disappearance as an abduction.

[IMG alt="Annette Edwards and Darius, her giant rabbit."]
Annette Edwards and Darius, her giant rabbit. Credit...Damien McFadden/ANL, via Shutterstock

LONDON — Have you seen Darius, the world’s longest rabbit?

Four feet long and weighing 50 pounds, the heavyweight bunny should be easy to spot. But he went missing this past weekend, and now the police are involved, appealing for information about his apparent abduction from his home in a small English village.

Darius’s owner, Annette Edwards, has offered a reward of 2,000 pounds, about $2,745, for his safe return, no questions asked. She detailed his disappearance on Sunday from her home in Stoulton, England, in [a post on Twitter]('https://twitter.com/maycats56/status/1381361639556005893'), calling it a “very sad day.” She added that the rabbit was too old to breed now, “So please bring him back.”

A former model turned rabbit breeder who has held four world-record titles for the size of her animals, Ms. Edwards has previously sold Darius’s offspring for as much as £250 each.

“It’s just so upsetting because he is such a lovable character,” she [told the British newspaper The Telegraph]('https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/12/1000-bring-back-darius-reward-offered-worlds-biggest-rabbit/'), adding that Darius, who is largely retired from public appearances, was on a special diet for his age and would die without it.

Ms. Edwards did not immediately respond on Tuesday to a request for comment. But the police responsible for the area have, ahem, hopped on the case, [appealing for those with information]('https://www.westmercia.police.uk/news/west-mercia/news/2021/april/appeal-following-theft-of-award-winning-rabbit/') about the theft to come forward. The police say that they believe the rabbit was stolen from an enclosure in Ms. Edwards’s garden on Saturday.

Darius was crowned the world’s longest rabbit by the [Guinness World Records]('https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/210091-longest-rabbit') in 2010. In a 2019 interview with the Canadian broadcaster CBC, Ms. Edwards described Darius, a type of domestic rabbit known as [a Continental Giant]('https://rabbitwelfare.co.uk/rabbit-care-advice/maintenance-handling/caring-giant-rabbits/') that was historically bred for its meat and fur, as “an old man” who “can be a bit grumpy.” Still, she added, “he hasn’t lost his sparkle.”

Darius drew attention online and traveled across the country for events alongside Ms. Edwards, who often appeared with him dressed as the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit. Darius was insured for $1.6 million and traveled with a bodyguard, according to [NBC’s Today show]('https://www.today.com/pets/meet-darius-worlds-biggest-rabbit-2d80555483') in a 2010 article.

But his reign as the world’s longest rabbit was already under threat from his own offspring, some of whom also measure over four feet long.

“They’re very special, they’re different,” Ms. Edwards [said of her pets in the CBC interview]('

[SIZE=7]:alien:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=4][COLOR=rgb(97, 189, 109)]Where is Ed when you need him, he knows what that is.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

I'd love to see Ed's comments on that story.
I miss Steady Eddie...

this just doesn't seem right............

Not really.

Remember, everything causes cancer in sufficient quantities.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Nice work!

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-fleeing-police-crashes-wedges-213137411.html[/URL]

Only in New Jersey...

[New Jersey police dismantle homemade "UFO detector," sealing the grim fate of humankind (msn.com)]('https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-jersey-police-dismantle-homemade-ufo-detector-sealing-the-grim-fate-of-humankind/ar-BB1fEvNd?ocid=msedgntp')

The New Jersey State Park Police (NJSPP) reported last Friday that their officers had identified and “disarmed” a UFO detecting device found in Wharton State Forest. The foolish people behind this decision took responsibility for their short-sighted action [in a Facebook post]('https://www.facebook.com/NewJerseyStateParkPolice/photos/a.466917073395025/3880236485396383') that, if we’re lucky enough to survive the next few years, will one day be included in museums as an important document from the early stages of the Great War For Earth.

Only in New Jersey...

[New Jersey police dismantle homemade "UFO detector," sealing the grim fate of humankind (msn.com)]('https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-jersey-police-dismantle-homemade-ufo-detector-sealing-the-grim-fate-of-humankind/ar-BB1fEvNd?ocid=msedgntp')

The New Jersey State Park Police (NJSPP) reported last Friday that their officers had identified and “disarmed” a UFO detecting device found in Wharton State Forest. The foolish people behind this decision took responsibility for their short-sighted action [in a Facebook post]('https://www.facebook.com/NewJerseyStateParkPolice/photos/a.466917073395025/3880236485396383') that, if we’re lucky enough to survive the next few years, will one day be included in museums as an important document from the early stages of the Great War For Earth.

*
“After examination by members of the NJSPP Detective Unit and NJSPP K-9 Unit, our Explosive Detecting K-9 ‘Prime’ was deployed,” the post states. “Prime determined the UFO Detecting Device was safe.” It continues by describing exactly how such a strange piece of technology is taken apart. “The device was carefully ‘disarmed’ by NJ State Park Police personnel,” we learn, “by unplugging the headphone wire from the block of wood and the soup can it was plugged into.”

:LOL: :LOL: :LOL: *

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-goat-appears-death-valley-194225235.html[/URL]

I like the title of this OpEd, we usually say, "The OTHER Portland". What do you think [USER=90]@Old Mud[/USER] , should we start calling the West Coast Portland, "The WEIRD Portland"??

[HEADING=2]Lessons for America From a Weird Portland[/HEADING]

And I thought Mothra was the biggest thing to fly...

[HEADING=2]How the Largest Animals That Could Ever Fly Supported Giraffe-Like Necks[/HEADING]
These pterosaurs had wingspans as long as 33 feet, and scans of fossilized remains reveal a surprise in their anatomy.

If you were to gaze skyward in the late Cretaceous, you might catch a glimpse of surreal flying giants with wingspans that rival small planes. This supersized group of pterosaurs, known as azhdarchids, included species that measured 33 feet between wingtips, which made them the largest animals that ever took to the air.

The extreme dimensions of azhdarchids raise tantalizing questions, such as how they carried large prey without breaking their long necks, or how animals the size of giraffes effortlessly soared above their dinosaur relatives on the ground.

Cariad Williams, a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was hoping to shed some light on these questions with the help of an azhdarchid specimen from the Kem Kem fossil beds of Morocco. She used a CT scan to study fossils from the animal’s neck.

“We just couldn’t believe the structure that we found inside,” Ms. Williams said.

The results, [published on Wednesday]('https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)00306-0') in the journal iScience, stunned Ms. Williams and her colleagues. The animal’s neck was revealed to be scaffolded by a unique and complex network of helical struts connecting a central neural tube to the vertebra wall like the spokes of a bicycle. It was a structure that has no parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

This unprecedented peek into an azhdarchid neck helps to fill some of the persistent gaps in our knowledge of their anatomy and behavior. Pterosaurs, like birds, evolved extremely fragile and lightweight skeletons to optimize their flight abilities; these qualities also cause them to be underrepresented in the fossil record because their bones easily break apart.

[IMG alt="An artist’s rendering of a pterosaur, whose complex neck structure has no parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom."]
An artist’s rendering of a pterosaur, whose complex neck structure has no parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Credit...Williams et al., iScience

The Kem Kem site is among the few places in the world where relatively intact azhdarchid fossils can be found. The Moroccan fossil beds preserve a lush river system that existed about 100 million years ago, attracting Cretaceous sharks, large predatory dinosaurs like [Spinosaurus]('https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/science/spinosaurus-underwater-dinosaur.html') and Carcharodontosaurus, as well as azhdarchids.

Ms. Williams and her colleagues tentatively identified their specimen as an Alanqa pterosaur. While it’s difficult to estimate its exact dimensions, the azhdarchid probably had a five-foot-long neck and a wingspan that measured between 20 to 26 feet.

A biomechanical analysis of the intricate structure of the neck revealed that the spokelike filaments bolstered the vertebrae against the pressures of catching and carrying heavy prey. According to the team’s calculations, the addition of only 50 struts increased by 90 percent the weight that they could bear without buckling, enabling this particular specimen to carry loads of up to 24 pounds, which Ms. Williams called “really impressive.”

“They were using less energy to optimize their strength in their neck to be able to lift the prey,” she said.

The unusual adaptation may have functions beyond hunting and feeding, such as “neck ‘bashing,’ an intermale rivalry behavior seen in giraffes” or as a way to deal with the “shearing forces associated with large skulls being buffeted by strong winds during flight or while on the ground,” according to the study. Ms. Williams and her colleagues plan to follow up on their findings by scanning other azhdarchid vertebrae to assess whether the spoke structure is widespread.

David Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary, University of London, who was not involved in the study, said the new research provides a “nice confirmation” of the mechanical soundness of azhdarchid vertebrae.

“It’s a very neat finding that there is this weird arrangement of struts and that this is about the minimum possible to strengthen the bone,” he said. “But it’s also not much of a surprise as we know azhdarchids had incredibly reduced bones and were extraordinarily light for their size.”

“What we really need for azhdarchids is a well-preserved 3-D skeleton,” Dr. Hone concluded. “We are working from either flattened fossils or very incomplete specimens, which makes it hard to work out even a lot of basics.”

Florida Man!

[URL unfurl="true"]https://notthebee.com/article/watch-this-florida-driver-blast-through-a-gate-and-successfully-jump-an-opening-drawbridge[/URL]

I guess we're witnessing the Paleontologists' equivalent debate to philosophers' "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin"...

[HEADING=2]How Many Tyrannosaurus Rexes Ever Lived on Earth? Here’s a New Clue.[/HEADING]
An estimation of the iconic predator’s total population can teach us things about dinosaurs that fossils cannot.

[IMG alt="Computer simulations indicated, with 97.5 percent probability, that there were at least 1,300 adult tyrannosauruses at any given time but not more than 328,000."]
Computer simulations indicated, with 97.5 percent probability, that there were at least 1,300 adult tyrannosauruses at any given time but not more than 328,000. Credit...Science Photo Library/Science Source

Before they were [killed off by a meteor that hit Earth 66 million years ago]('https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/science/dinosaurs-extinction-asteroid.html'), some 20,000 adults of the iconic ferocious dinosaur predator — Tyrannosaur rex — roamed North America at any given time, researchers have calculated.

That’s not a precise number, and the correct total could be far lower or higher because of uncertainties like how long they lived, how quickly they grew and matured and the rate of their metabolisms. Still, the research, [published on Thursday by the journal Science]('https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abc8300'), opens doors in studying long-extinct dinosaurs beyond what can be gleaned from individual fossils.

Skeletal features can tell a lot about an animal. For example, someone looking at a human tooth could infer that it is suited for chewing both plants and meat, and the shape of the skeleton could yield an estimate of how fast a person can run. But the physical attributes cannot tell you how many people live in New York City.

“Studies like this are the first step in recreating ancient ecosystems,” said Felisa A. Smith, a biology professor at the University of New Mexico who was not involved with the research. “We need to move beyond what fossils were found and where to the larger picture: how the ecosystem functioned.”

Charles R. Marshall, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley who led the research, said the work started with him wondering, when he held a T. rex fossil, how rare was that?

“Were there are a million, a billion, a trillion T. rexes?” he said. “Is this one in a million, one in a billion, one in a trillion? How on earth could we know that number? We all know fossils are rare, but how rare are they? And so it really started with that question.”

So he and students in his research group started using tools that biologists use for modern animals and applied them to the dinosaur era. The crux of their calculations hinges on an observation that there are many more small animals than big ones, that rats far outnumber elephants.

For living species, John Damuth, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came up with [a mathematical relationship, now known as Damuth’s law]('https://www.nature.com/articles/290699a0'), between the average body mass of an animal and its expected population density.

The relationship is not universal but generally holds for large classes of animals like lizards or meat-eating mammals. So, for Tyrannosaurus rex, they had to not only plug in the weight of the dinosaur — about six tons, give or take a few — but also derive other numbers in the law.

That includes the metabolism. Dinosaurs are no longer thought to be coldblooded like modern-day lizards, but they were probably not as warm-blooded as mammals. So Dr. Marshall’s team assumed a physiology in between that of meat-eating mammals and [Komodo dragons]('https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/science/komodo-dragons.html'). They also had to account for some uncertainty about where the dinosaurs lived in North America. Paleontologists don’t know whether the range of T. rex was limited to where fossils have been found in the western United States and Canada, or if it stretched to other places with similar climates back then, from Alaska to the East Coast.

Because so much is unknown about dinosaurs, the scientists were not looking to come up with a single definitive answer, but to provide limits on what they thought a plausible number might have been. “For most of the paleontological data, I don’t know how to guess a number,” Dr. Marshall said. “But I can tell you what a good minimum is, and what a good maximum is.”

The calculations yielded a most likely standing population of 20,000 Tyrannosaurus rex adults. That would indicate a sparse distribution equivalent to two adults in an area the size of Washington, D.C.

But the uncertainty around that estimate was very broad. The same computer simulations indicated, with 97.5 percent probability, that there were at least 1,300 adults but not more than 328,000.

Dr. Damuth described the new paper as a “fine contribution.”

He added: “In spite of the uncertainties associated with most of the model parameters the paper comes up with a solid qualitative result.”

If the 20,000 number is correct, over the 2.4 million years that T. rex walked the Earth, there would have been a total of some 2.5 billion adults that ever lived.

But even Dr. Marshall thinks the 20,000 number is likely low. “It just seems inconceivable you can last a couple of million years with those few individuals,” he said. “You just need some horrible plague or something and you’re gone.”

He said he thought the population could have been tens of thousands or maybe 100,000 or 200,000. A large part of the uncertainty is that Damuth’s law is not absolute. [Jaguars]('https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/jaguars-poaching-china.html') and spotted hyenas are both meat-eating mammals of similar size, but the population density of hyenas is some 50 times higher.

“Using these methods is really the exciting part,” said Peter Makovicky, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved with the research. “I don’t think many of us who are sort of the, let’s say, skeletally focused paleontologists have thought this would be possible, but I think it’s really eye-opening in that sense.”

Dr. Makovicky said when he read the paper, he started searching for populations of large predatory animals today to compare with the estimate of 20,000 T. rexes. “There are less than 4,000 tigers left in the wild, some more lions,” he said. “It didn’t sound like a big number, but it actually isn’t that small.”

The study did not try to count younger T. rexes. In recent years, research suggests that [juveniles were almost like a different species]('https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/science/tyrannosaurus-rex-teenager.html'). Although they may have been more numerous than adults, few fossils have been found, indicating that most survived this period of life or that the bones of juveniles were less likely to be preserved.

For Dr. Marshall, he was also able to get an answer to the question he started with: Only about one out of every 80 million T. rexes that ever existed was fossilized, although, in the most populous regions, the number may be as high as 1 in 16,000.

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/ufo-uap-navy-pentagon-confirmed-111558647.html[/URL]

:oops:

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/sympathy-for-the-devil-the-many-loves-of-mick-jagger-36663793.html[/URL]

*What other stories could be buried in Jagger's memoirs?

His conquests – more than 4,000 of them, according to his biographer Christopher Anderson – [are legendary]('https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/sympathy-for-the-devil-the-many-loves-of-mick-jagger-36663793.html'). Among those who have been snared by his craggily angelic looks and richly timbred voice are Carla Bruni. The model and wife of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy had a long affair with Jagger in the Nineties, meeting him when she was still with Eric Clapton. (Anderson claims that Clapton had begged Jagger not to seduce her.) But even when the pair broke it off, it seemed Jagger’s aura was hard to shake – he and Bruni carried on behind the back of her new beau, Donald Trump, for a while afterwards.

Jagger had a penchant for jaw-dropping, traffic-stopping and often youthful beauties - Uma Thurman, Madonna, Sophie Dahl, Minnie Driver, Carly Simon, even Princess Margaret, allegedly, among them - as well as a well-earned reputation for being a tomcatting ladies' man.*
====================

and the list goes on & on - I got exhausted just reading it........

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/368943?fbclid=IwAR3v_Hzb5zdGhzjSVEA9ETiE5jsYUU3R4-OOuucT_FvTDvVn-wKfOM9ma_U[/URL]

:oops:

you reading this Mojo?

LOL, I especially love the price of lobster salad in the Hamptons (I highlighted it), and where, pray tell, do NYC residents expect all that money is going to come to keep the city running????

[HEADING=2]Some New Yorkers Don’t Want the Superrich to Return[/HEADING]
Sure, the tax revenue is nice. But ….

Even without final data from New York City about how many people remained in the city during the pandemic, an abundance of anecdotal evidence exists about the exodus of its wealthiest residents.

At the writer Molly Jong-Fast’s Upper East Side apartment building, less than half a dozen of the 47 units were occupied in April 2020, she said. Mark Armstrong Peddigrew, a personal trainer in Lower Manhattan, said that roughly 85 percent of his clients left town.

At Loaves & Fishes Foodstore, a grocer in the Hamptons where lobster salad costs more than $100 a pound, there were 30-minute lines on Thursday mornings during the off season.

Now, as the rate of vaccinations increases, the blooming bulbs around the city feel like a metaphor for more than just spring.

New restaurants are opening, stores are filling up, comedians are again getting heckled at the Comedy Cellar.

Rationally, most New Yorkers know these are good things. They want to conquer the pandemic, and that involves saving the economy as well as lives.

But the pride they take in their own toughness is superseded only by their propensity to complain. And these days, a lot of gripes are aimed at those who left.

Not the ones who departed because of lost jobs, underlying illnesses or the need to take care of aging parents, said [Jeremiah Moss]('https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/books/review/vanishing-new-york-jeremiah-moss.html'), 50, who in 2007 started “Vanishing New York,” a blog that chronicled the businesses that closed because of rising rents and gentrification.

Instead, Mr. Moss said that the resentments harbored by him and his friends relate to the “large group of people who left because they didn’t know how to be in New York without consuming, without being in bars and restaurants and stores.”

“Now they are flooding back and don’t understand that among those of us who stayed, there’s a real sense of being invaded, or re-invaded,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Who the hell are you? You don’t just get to pick up where you left off.’”

James Dorje Halpern, 30, an owner of Ponyboy, a bar in Brooklyn, said he lost around a million dollars in revenue during the pandemic. Yet he called 2020 “the best year of my life.”

He attributed part of this to time taken off, which became a springboard for “personal growth.” But he also took great joy in seeing fewer Wall Street types and so-called digital nomads, the sort who’d worked near the meatless meatpacking district for Google or similar.

“They were gone,” he said. “And you know what? Good.”

Kim Hastreiter, the former editor of Paper Magazine, who lives by Washington Square Park, saw her apartment building empty out. Not running into some of her neighbors was sad. But the lack of New York University students? “Heaven,” she said.

“The people I knew who left were all horrible people to begin with,” said Edoarda Schoch, a 26-year-old graduate student at Columbia University. “A former boss of mine left for his house in Mattituck. I was like, ‘Good riddance!’”

[HEADING=1]Oh Hello, Finance Bros[/HEADING]
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Schoch was at the Tompkins Square Park dog run. Even with her toy poodle, she looked with her motorcycle jacket and pixie haircut like an East Villager in the mold of Kim Gordon.
Nearby Brooke Lima, 27, was watching one of her two rescue dogs cavort with a Welsh corgi while the other begged for treats.

Ms. Lima had grievances of her own, namely the return of the golden doodles and “other dogs who look like they were grown in a lab.”

Some of the precious pooches arrive with “finance bros,” she said, who pace the run conducting business deals over AirPods. Others are tended to by young women with Gucci disco bags, an accessory that in her estimation is the only version “of haute couture or status that can be bought by a person who makes $50,000 a year and has six roommates,” she said. Usually, she added, these are the sorts of people who “get possessive about their dogs’ tennis balls.”

The writer Sloane Crosley, 41, speaking a few days later, was more measured about the millennials she knew who fled New York City.

“I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of these people that blames an entire generation of millennials for things, but I do think there was a group of them who came to New York expecting a certain level of comfort and then, at the first whiff of Covid, upped and left.”

Then she would see their social media posts, which she said reeked of privilege.

“You have these people posting one slide of their beautiful country house — that’s what we’ll call them, slides — and then the next one up would be an image of them crowded into some restaurant for someone’s birthday party the year prior with the hashtag ‘missthis,’” Ms. Crosley said. “I just thought, ‘I don’t doubt that you miss this, but you know what else I miss? My neighbor, who was carted out on a stretcher.’”

New Yorkers who hung around found transcendent moments even among widespread tragedy.

For Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, one of the biggest was watching people of all shades and stripes take to the streets in droves, having finally woken up to the horrors of police brutality that had been known to her and so many other Black people for centuries.

The subway, with plummeting ridership, ran with greater efficiency.

Yes, Ms. Wattleton, 77, had spotted a woman on the car the day before, ranting at her fellow riders with a ferocity that recalled the nadir of the crack epidemic. But Ms. Wattleton said, “the trains now are spotless.”

“And there’s almost always a seat,” said Heath McBride, 51, a [photographer]('https://www.instagram.com/heathmcbride/?hl=en') who on a recent Monday was riding the L train from Manhattan back home to his apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Less traffic also meant that taxi fares were often half of what they were a year ago.

Along with lower gas emissions, there was less horn-honking.

Trellised sheds and sparkling yurts became part of the cityscape, as New Yorkers dined outside in restaurants they might never have gotten a reservation at otherwise. What else was there to do?
[HEADING=1]‘We’re Not Tourists’[/HEADING]
Invariably, there are going to be complaints about the return of those who bring an end to all of that.

Cheryl Dunn, 60, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, described the Lower East Side as having been transformed by a sense of community. “You go in a shop and people have time to have a conversation,” she said. “Maybe they’re starving for it, but it feels like a little village in a way it never did a year ago. There’s an energy. ‘I’m here, you’re here, we’re not tourists, we’re part of this community.’”

Mr. Moss of Vanishing New York had a similar experience. Somehow, he said, amid social distancing, he’d felt closer to his fellow New Yorkers than he had in years.

The nightlife promoter Ladyfag, 44, lost a year of income and Ben Maisani, 48, lost his bar, Bedlam, at the start of the pandemic. But the drag queens they knew were once again getting $2,500-a-month apartments in the West Village.

Last August, Samara Bliss, 30, and her partner Graham Fortgang, 29, were able to lease a 2,500-square-foot storefront in South Williamsburg, which they turned into an artist gallery and recording studio called the Locker Room. They got the former dentist’s office after the rent was slashed by thousands of dollars.
In January, the gallery put up a billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that read, “New York is dead, don’t come back.” They also hired a prop plane to fly a similar banner along South Beach.

The advert was meant to be humorous, Mr. Fortgang said, but it was also a throwing down of the gentrification gauntlet, rooted in anxiety about whether this new bohemia could survive the lights coming back on.

Ms. Bliss is now planning to install mock tollbooths in Williamsburg and SoHo that read: “Welcome back to New York to those who fled. The readmittance fee is patronage of your local businesses.”

[HEADING=1]‘Make New York Human Again’[/HEADING]
The plutocrats of Park Avenue were already receiving pleas in Palm Beach, Aspen and elsewhere to go back whence they came.

The argument that without their dollars, New York City could not thrive had echoes of 2001, when, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the city’s business and fashion elite rebranded shopping as a civic duty.

A recent entreaty arrived in late March [on Facebook]('https://www.facebook.com/brian.ellner/posts/10165170331810217'), courtesy of Brian Ellner, a former consultant to Michael Bloomberg.

In it, Mr. Ellner, 51, described the opening of Sona, a fancy Indian restaurant in the Flatiron district as “a rebirth, a comeback.” He used it as a rallying cry to implore fellow New Yorkers to come home. “Return from Miami,” he wrote. “Give up the organic mushroom farm upstate. Yeah it was fun for a minute but this is New York City!”

Some agree with his basic argument.

Eric Kober, 66, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who specializes in housing policy, said that without the taxes from the rich, the city would likely have to slash social programs and lay off thousands of employees. That, he noted, was what happened in the 1970s, when the city faced a financial crisis and the population dwindled.

But Ms. Hastreiter argued that a downturn creates its own opportunities: the city turned downtown lofts over to artists at rock bottom prices. SoHo and TriBeCa began to thrive. Then, everyone else rushed in. That was why she disliked Mr. Ellner’s post.

“It makes me want to puke,” Ms. Hastreiter said. “I hate when I hear that. Come eat in the restaurants. Go shopping. It’s upside down and backwards. Make New York human again. Make it creative again. That’s what I want. ”

Kailee Scales, the fortysomething former managing director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, shared some misgivings with the “elite argument” Mr. Ellner put forth. But she agreed with him that the city’s various classes must unite to rebuild successfully.

“In order to dismantle oppressive, exclusive systems, we require the participation of those who have traditionally benefited from the most oppressive practices,” she said. “We don’t need the privileged elite to disappear and spread economic disparity to other markets. We need people to roll up their sleeves and help transform.”

Moreover, there’s a reason that those lamenting about a lost bohemia are less likely to be home care workers in housing projects than college graduates in creative industries. It’s easier to talk about a city losing its soul when your first worry isn’t winding up in its streets.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University, offered something else. “Wealthy people have long convinced themselves that without them, all the wonderful things in civilization and society wouldn’t exist,” he said. “This was Andrew Carnegie’s argument. This was the argument of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. But no one has ever proved it correct.”

Still, Mr. Muhammad, 48, thought there was no sense in panicking about whether the one percent would return.

“Because I have no doubt they will,” he said. “My best guess is that many of them are bored to tears. They’re going to want the playground they’re used to and the prestige that comes along with it. All the galas. The corridors of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue in Midtown are a glorified version of high school for people. It’s the quad, the place to be seen.”

Eh, the Hosers are not Stoners, eh???

[HEADING=2]After ‘Green Rush,’ Canada’s Legal Pot Suppliers Are Stumbling[/HEADING]
Most marijuana producers in Canada are still reporting staggering losses two and a half years after legalization.

EXETER, Ontario — The mayor of the largely rural community of South Huron, Ontario, was looking forward to an employment boom when a marijuana producer used its soaring stock value to buy an enormous greenhouse on the edge of the municipality’s largest town.

The purchase three years ago, in Exeter, promised to make his sprawling community a major hub for what seemed like Canada’s next big growth industry: legal pot and the high-paying jobs it would bring.
But before any of the 200 or so anticipated jobs in the greenhouse were filled — or before a single marijuana seed was even sown there — it became apparent that Canada was already growing far more marijuana than the market wanted.

After sitting idle for two years, the one-million-square-foot greenhouse was sold last year for about one-third of its original purchase price of 26 million Canadian dollars, or $20.75 million.

Exeter’s experience with the greenhouse — high hopes, followed by disappointment — mirrors the broader Canadian story with the business side of legal pot.

Analysts say one reason the sunny projections have failed to materialize is the tightly regulated distribution system introduced by Canada, which largely bans advertising and marketing. The halting roll out of stores in some provinces — particularly Ontario — is also a factor. Plus, surveys have suggested that many Canadians are simply not interested in adopting a new vice.

“We were looking forward to it,” said the mayor, George Finch, standing outside Exeter’s 19th-century Town Hall. “Sounded too good almost, eh? It’s too bad. So it may well revert to vegetables again.”

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s [legalized marijuana in 2018]('https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/world/canada/marijuana-pot-cannabis-legalization.html'), a primary goal was to [create a more equitable justice system]('https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/world/canada/marijuana-legalization-promises-made.html') — not a major new business sector.

Investors, however, thought otherwise, and in the time leading up to legalization, a “green rush” swept the Toronto Stock Exchange. Money poured into companies starting up to service not only the Canadian market, but also eyeing other opportunities, particularly the U.S. market, where more states were embracing legalization.

Long dormant greenhouses were renovated and sold for record prices like the one in Exeter, and new indoor growing facilities popped up across the nation. Newspapers that had been cutting back on staff hired journalists to cover new marijuana beats. [Like plastics]('

The investment craze produced a strong echo of the dot-com stock boom of the late 1990s. And it ended with the same collapse.

Even with a slight recovery propelled by the spreading legalization in the United States — New York legalized marijuana last month, and [voters in four states]('https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/ballot-measures-propositions-2020.html') backed legalization in November — one marijuana stock index is still down about 70 percent from its peak in 2018.

Two and a half years after legalization, most marijuana producers in Canada are still reporting staggering losses.

And a major new competitor is looming: [Mexico’s lawmakers legalized recreational pot use]('https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/americas/mexico-cannabis-bill.html') last month. So the business climate for Canada’s growers could become even more challenging.

“There’s probably going to be a series of shakeouts,” said Kyle B. Murray, the vice dean at the University of Alberta School of Business in Edmonton. “Things were way overblown. It’s very similar to the dot-com boom and then bust.”

Canopy Growth, the country’s largest producer, lost 1.2 billion Canadian dollars, or about $950 million, in the first nine months of its current operating year. Layoffs have swept the industry. Large producers have merged in a bid to find strength in size. The lights have been permanently switched off in many greenhouses in several provinces.

The big bets on marijuana, analysts said, were made on the assumption that marijuana sales in Canada would mirror the sharp spike in liquor sales that occurred in the United States after the end of Prohibition.

“Everyone thought that in Canada the industry was going to move further, faster, and that hasn’t happened,” said Brendan Kennedy, the chief executive of Tilray, a major grower based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, that lost $272 million last year. “One of the challenges around competing with the illicit market is that the regulations are so stringent.”

Mr. Kennedy is among the few leaders in Canada’s marijuana industry still standing. As losses piled higher and stocks tumbled, most pioneers were shown the door. When a planned merger between Tilray and Ontario-based Aphria goes through this year, creating what is likely to be the world’s biggest cannabis company, Mr. Kennedy will remain as a director although he will no longer be at the helm.

In Ontario, the plan at first was to handle sales through a branch of the government-owned liquor store system, the way it is done in Quebec. But when a new Conservative government came to power in 2018, it swiftly canceled those plans, which left only online sales through a provincial website.

Since then, the province’s plans have changed two more times, making for an uneven introduction of privately owned shops. Even after a recent increase in licensing, Ontario still has approved only 575 shops. By comparison, Alberta, which has about a third of Ontario’s population, has 583 shops.

While initial hopes for marijuana wealth were overly optimistic, Professor Murray said he was confident that a viable business will emerge, with the rising number of Ontario shops one sign of that. That prices have dropped closer to parity with street prices should also help legal sales.

“None of this means that it’s a bad market,” Professor Murray said of the poor start. “Too much money and too many companies were involved initially. Eventually there will be some companies that are very successful for a long period of time. And if we’re lucky they become global leaders.”

One comparative bright spot has been British Columbia, [previously the heart of Canada’s illegal marijuana industry]('https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/world/americas/canada-legal-marijuana-justin-trudeau.html'). There, sales in legal stores grew 24 percent from June to October 2020.

And in Quebec, while the government-owned cannabis store operator, Société Québécoise du Cannabis, [lost nearly 5 million Canadian dollars ]('http://www.fil-information.gouv.qc.ca/Pages/Article.aspx?lang=en&idArticle=2706126231')during its first fiscal year, it has since become profitable.

Largely disappointed at home, some of the larger growers in Canada have pointed to foreign markets, particularly for medical marijuana, as their next great hope. But many analysts are skeptical.

Mexico’s recent move toward creating the world’s largest legal market could doom most marijuana growing in Canada, said Brent McKnight, a professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Trade agreements will likely make it impossible for Canada to stop imports from Mexico while Mexico’s significantly lower labor costs and warmer climate potentially give it a competitive advantage.

“That would certainly put some downward pricing pressure on local growers,” he said.

And as Canada’s industry is forced to consolidate to survive, some worry about who will lose out as large, publicly traded companies come to dominate the space.

Long before legalization, many of the first shops to defy Canadian marijuana laws were nonprofit “compassion clubs” selling to people who used cannabis for medicinal purposes.

The current system’s emphasis on large corporate growers and profits has squeezed many people from minority communities out of the business, said Dr. Daniel Werb, an epidemiologist and drug policy analyst at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Werb is part of a research group whose preliminary findings have shown that “there is a marked lack of diversity” in the leadership of the new, legal suppliers, he said.

Sellers in Indigenous communities, too, have been left in limbo, generally not subjected to police raids but also outside the legal system, although Ontario has began licensing shops in some of those communities.

“I get more and more concerned about, on the one hand, the lack of ethno-racial diversity and, on the other hand, a lack of imagination around the fact that this didn’t have to be a wholly for-profit industry,” Dr. Werb said. “It seems like there was a missed opportunity to think creatively.”

So really,... these potheads and ideologues couldn't figure out the supply and demand market economics,....?

I'm shocked!

SHOCKED, I tell you!...

SHOCKED! :eek:

So really,... these potheads and ideologues couldn't figure out the supply and demand market economics,....?

I'm shocked!

SHOCKED, I tell you!...

SHOCKED! :eek:

Surprised there wasn't collateral damage to Munchies manufacturers...