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China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

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Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#91

Ah yes, Bayer Crop Science. The science division of a company that likes Monsanto's business model so much, they bought Monsanto. Good to see they found a fresh market for releasing "low-toxicity insecticide" into the food chain.

In case you don't know, company executives make merger decisions and nobody else knows about it until it's done. So anyone at working level in Bayer Crop Science has pretty much nothing to do with the Monsanto deal.

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#92

Ah yes, Bayer Crop Science. The science division of a company that likes Monsanto's business model so much, they bought Monsanto. Good to see they found a fresh market for releasing "low-toxicity insecticide" into the food chain.

> Bayer Crop Science. The science division

No, the agriculture division. The pharma parts of Bayer are as much science as the Crop Science part, they differ in product domain not “science”.

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#93
post #90
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be simple to solve that with a breeding population kept isolated. If the genetic modification wipes out the wild population, you reintroduce it. For species that reproduce quickly, such as insects, this is reasonable. That said the mosquito trick is that we can produce drones whose babies are also only drones with the same genetic malfunction. The number of drone-only mosquitoes expands exponentially until t…

This is also balanced by the fact that as far as we know, most any mosquito can fill most of the same roles in the food chains. We're mostly concerned with wiping out the few species that feed on humans and our pets/livestock. We could eradicate two or three species which carry West Nile, Malaria, Zika, Chickungunya, and a few other really bad diseases of humans, dogs, cats, songbirds, horses, and cattle that are spr…

Also note that despite the technique being proven in the lab, and the fact that mosquitoes kill a half-million people per year, we have not yet pulled the trigger and done it. Exactly for fear of the potential ecological consequences.

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some percentage are mixed in with the government pretty tightly, though, and the ones who aren't can effectively be assumed to pass any kind of data to them, or be forced to do their bidding if the occasion ever arises. That's true in the US, too, of course, but at least in the US the companies can (secretly) fight it out in court, and actually sometimes win.

> That's true in the US, too, of course, Do people really believe still this, or is this something everyone says reflexively to avoid committing the faux pas of coming across as believing that the U.S. is better than a communist country? Trump should have exploded this idea. He can't even get his own executive bureaucracy, which he is theoretically in charge of, to do his bidding, much less random U.S. companies.

False equation. It is silly to compare the operation of the entire US government to a small special ops team from a 3-letter agency using a small special ops court to compel a small special ops team within a corporation to do something.

The teams that do that kind of thing are very intentionally separate from the bureaucracy.

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#95
post #40
post #3

This is pretty interesting to read... I think our media normally ignores North American pests travelling to other parts of the world. Around here we have a lot of talk about pests that have arrived from China that affect our local plants but not many that talk about our pests that have invaded China. Locally I've had to deal with the Asian Winter Moth decimating trees in my yard and throughout the area I live in. Tha…

Invasive species and their impact are relative to your area, of course. Of equal interest is the use of non-native species to provide more genetic diversity. In Canada, we are using lots of 'Amur' trees and bushes from Russian and Northern China to increase diversity of our treestock after the huge diebacks caused by Dutch Elm, Emerald Ash Borer and other imported pests.

It wasn't that long ago when rich dudes used import species to North America to show off their love of Shakespeare.

See flock of starlings? Thank Eugene Schieffelin and his American Acclimatization Society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Acclimatization_Socie...

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#96
post #70

I'm a bit disappointed that there's no mention of mini laser cannons strapped to these drones. That would be way cooler, especially at night, and much more environmentally friendly compared to pesticides.

Would the equipment and batteries required work with drones?

Maybe a spike on one side of the drone, and it flies into the target. Or a spike shoots out one side, along with a counterweight motion, and then retracts.

Edit: on second thought, it’s likely less practical to impale the things than to inject a small dose of poison or electrocute them or something, and it’s probably easier to use a ground-based robot for such precision tasks, with less energy and mass constraints.

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#98

Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?

“China drone attack” gets more attention than “random Company inc uses drones to spray pesticides”

Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

#99

Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?

This is a really common thing with articles about Chinese companies. People seem to collectively equate them to the government. Perhaps it’s a holdover from communism? For example, people will say things like “Reddit is controlled by China” when in reality Reddit has an investment from Tencent, not China.

It's not just online that this happens. I was listening to some people talk on DMR ham radio last night, on Talkgroup 91 Worldwide. (DMR is a digital voice mode used in commercial and amateur radio, and talkgroups let you talk with people who are on the same talkgroup, roughly akin to tuning into a common frequency.)

John Miklor jumped into the conversation; he has a website [1] where he reviews various handheld and mobile radios.

Someone else jumped in and started thanking John for the good work he does "reviewing ChiCom radios." He kept saying ChiCom over and over again and I started wondering what he was talking about. I thought he must mean radios made by Chinese Companies like Baofeng, AnyTone, or Wouxun.

It slowly dawned on me that this was not what he meant at all. He was talking about Chinese Communist radios!

I guess I'm writing this on my Chinese Communist ThinkPad!

[1] http://www.miklor.com

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