The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
i get a lot of asks like this and there’s something the botany community refers to as ‘plant blindness’ where before u start learning about plants u just grow up not really thinking about them and letting them fade into the background and stuff and then when you start learning about them you start losing the blindness and being like ‘wait whomst the fuck’ because all the preconceived notions and assumptions about plants that u didnt even know you had start being systematically broken and proved wrong and its very overwhelming and deadass changes how u see ur environment. like being Fucked Up after learning about plants is totally a phenomenon
examples! fuck me up!
what got me Fucked Up for the first time was an internship at a local greenhouse where i learned that the retail plant industry is some Jurassic Park Ass Bull Shit. the science involved in making a pretty plant for sale is fucking incredible, and the fact that it’s a living thing makes the marketing kind of eerie.
-a lot of companies are based in california, where they have huge ass industrial greenhouses that grow shit en masse. these facilities are HUGE. plants are sold to retail greenhouses in one of two ways: 1. seed, sometimes coated in wax so electric planting machines can pick them up, or 2. ‘plugs’, where it’s a sheet of pre-planted dirt cubes that sprout into the plants. these are sold to retailers through local salespeople, conventions where u can go see all the Hot New Plants For This Season (seriously), or through giant spiral show books that get sent out to retailers.
-one of my fave memories from that internship was my mentor taking me into the lower greenhouse and being like ‘want to see what $1,000 worth of seeds looks like?’ and i was like ‘yea’ and he took out a tupperware container with test tubes covered in codes and shit and i was Shook and he popped one open and knocked out one single wax-coated seed and was like ‘this seed can grow a pot of three different kinds of lettuce’ (because it’s three seeds pressed together with wax) and anyway i was fucked up
-those pretty hanging flower arrangements? some of them are pre-planned by the company. like, they have a maps for the pot that shows where to put in the shit and how much shit to put in. here’s an example from Proven Winners, one of the biggest greenhouse corporate giants out there (note the ‘coming to garden centers next year!’ thing. there are trends in this industry, shit gets specially made and rolled out and discontinued just like any other product, but the products are alive):
-some of the products are popular and have been around for years. some are unpopular and dont sell well and get discontinued. retailers will have a good handle on what their consumer base wants and will reorder things that sell well. idk why this didnt occur to me before but yeah
-trees and woody plants? if youve ever bought one from a garden center you’ll know that that shit is expensive and goes up in price the bigger/older the plant is, and that’s true both on the consumer end and the retailer end. companies will often take some plants and overwinter them to get them bigger and older, then sell them for a higher profit. i was once told by my mentor that a few companies have caves that they bought out and converted for the very purpose of overwintering woody plants for sale and i think about that a lot. also when you order trees and woody plants, they get shipped out in semis and its a Whole Ass Ordeal.
-in 2017 30+ varieties of orange petunia were recalled by the USDA APHIS for breaking laws on GMOs (although petunias aren’t really a ‘high-risk’ plant even in the terms of GMOs (they arent being eaten or anything), the companies had added genes and were selling the plants without going through the proper government certifications and channels. GMO plants need through assessment and testing before they can be sold in many countries, including europe and the US). you can read the REALLY fucking wild government order here (pdf), which includes such varieties as ‘BigDeal Freaky Fuchsia’, ‘Crazytunia Cherry Cheesecake’, and ‘KaBloom!’ among others. all retailers were allowed to keep and sell what they’d purchased, but all seed and plant matter being produced for sale en masse in those big greenhouses i was talking about earlier were ordered to be disposed of in a variety of interesting ways. ‘double-bagged incineration’ is probably my fave listed here
-plants are released in like…collections. as in like ‘over here we have the proven winners spark 2019 collection with our patented supertunias! heres a sneak peek’. i mentioned earlier here that plants are showcased to retailers in giant spiral books; when i was at the greenhouse, i asked if i could keep some. theyre absolutely fascinating in a way i cant really describe, like…I Do Not Know How To Describe How Weirdly Jurassic Parky This Feels So Here Are Some Pages
anyway so that was my first plant experience that fucked me up
I feel like I have found either My People or the gates of Hell and I have no idea how to tell which.
Kortzite 