141–150 of 194 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you'd like to talk about the glaring hole I pointed out in your argument instead of clutching your pearls, I'd be happy to change topic! :)
I am convinced you don't understand my argument and have substituted for it the most immediately available outrageous argument. Please don't do that.
How did you come to the conclusion that neonicotinoids have an overall net positive effect on agriculture?
Buying more and more bees is a very expensive solution. Perhaps I'm just a poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping. For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfr…
Win-win for them really.
There's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just spending more to hide it. > "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years." So the absolute num…
I don't understand how this would work. You can't turn money into bees. You can turn bees into more bees, and money can be used to persuade people to put in more effort to make this happen, but at some point the bees themselves have to be reproducing. I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, may…
The problem is that building up a new hive is a lot of work for the bees themselves. A new hive needs to collect its own store of honey, raise the new comb to put this new honey in, and raise a lot of new bees to collect the honey, raise the comb, and tend the bee larva. All of this takes a lot of time and energy, and the bees will not be able to collect pollen and nectar as fast while under-beed, so the bees will produce a lot less extra honey for the beekeepers to harvest.
From a survival-of-bees perspective, the critical point is the point at which you can no longer split the surviving hives enough times each year to replace the ones lost overwintering; we're still probably a long ways off from that point.
From a beekeeping and honey perspective, the problem is that you essentially can't count on hives that are new or were split to generate any extra honey for harvest. This means that you need to increase the total number of hives being kept to harvest the same amount of honey. If you want to be able to harvest honey from 100 hives each year, you may need to keep 400 hives around -- 200 will die in the winter, 100 will be used to generate 200 new hives to replace the ones lost overwintering, and the last 100 you can actually take honey off of, which was your goal all along.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance" , because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the po…
You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be. That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my po…
Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here.
1) Everything is made of chemicals, and
2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose.
The idea that we can live in a world in which humans do no harm is untenable. Almost every single action we perform does some harm to some thing, and picking and choosing which things we can harm and which we cannot is rather arbitrary. Further, the idea that proving that "my chemical" does no harm is quite an impossible task, no matter how noble the chemical. H2O is responsible for innumerable floods, drownings, mudslides, erosion, etc. If your test fails for water, I think it's safe to say that your test is broken.
[1] - http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/05/27/5-simple-chemistry-f...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition. If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and l…
The bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the planetary biome. The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times. So take any posit…
> irrevocable damage That seems a bit hyperbolic to me. The damage seems revocable if actual effort were put into it instead of just papering over the symptoms. Of course such things often require policy change, change that some people might oppose. But that does not make the damage itself irrevocable. It just means that people are prioritizing other goals over it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be. That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my po…
"PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others" Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here. 1) Everything is made of chemicals, and 2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are t…
If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for!
Because both our points are that you gotta know how much radiation he is getting, and not according to some chart generated by someone who is benefitting from the labor from a distance, but actually what the effect of the dose is over the course of the guy's life.
We agreed about dose, but you don't tell me that I'm in the wrong for saying "halt work", by saying " but it's a question of dosage " and let the guy keep working while you do a 20 year study! You protect him first!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am convinced you don't understand my argument and have substituted for it the most immediately available outrageous argument. Please don't do that.
Then please, correct me! How did you come to the conclusion that neonicotinoids have an overall net positive effect on agriculture?
I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile, but whatever the reason, let me promise that it doesn't make you more persuasive.
From Wikipedia: The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has been heavily affected by c…
the beekeepers are what migrate
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others" Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here. 1) Everything is made of chemicals, and 2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are t…
The argument is duplicitous! :} If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for! Because both our points are that you gotta kn…
"So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance."
That is an impossible task. Water is not safe. Oxygen is flammable. The number of things we can do that are not harmful to anyone or anything is closer to zero than you think.
If you set the bar at impossible, and I lower it to something achievable, it is bad form to evaluate my reasonableness as duplicitous.