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Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

theguardian.com

201–210 of 236 posts

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in NL, we dont wear masks. and we are totally fine. ofc you dont get people to wear masks if its not necessary at all.

Interesting, looking at the data you're back at the same peak as in April.

dont lie. we have nearly 0 people.in the hospitals. close to 0 daily deads.

yes, we have a lot of confirmed infections but that doesnt mean shit. its a vanity metric that you a) can easily game and b) shouldnt matter as long as icus and death dont go up

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would have to shut down 90% of the pollutants world wide to do anything. Will make the Covid shutdowns look like a long weekend. And even then it might not make a difference if climate change is out of our control. You willing to do that?

"We would have to shut down 90% of the pollutants world wide to do anything." This is vastly overestimated and straight up poorly informed statistics. There are dozens of solutions for pollution that involve energy efficiency, which doesn't require a single shut down and merely uses what we're already consuming more efficiently (think gasoline standards, heating, A/C, LEDs, insulation, weatherization, etc). Alongside…

Making them sufficiently efficient to solve the problem WILL NECCESSARILY involve a tear down and rebuild with the efficient replacement. There are millions of small cook fires that aggregate to a large part of the problem. House insulation, electrify cooking, heating, transportation of all kinds will take 50-100 years to fully implement - We have to do all these things ASAP.

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#203

It was the massive surge of cold air that spewed into Colorado last week. The same surge that caused the massive winds in CA / OR / WA to churn up small fires. Those birds left CO for the South - probably don't normally get that in the middle of summer. There's very little smoke in NM. Some but not enough to kill the birds or cause them to fly a billion miles. That was the summer cold snap that did it. This is a clas…

I’d need to see evidence of this, there’s a lot of propaganda about climate change causing things “on both sides” so I would like to see a reference to this effect before I believe it!

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#204

I feel like this story gets repeated every few years on HN. Checking one was 10 year ago. I think it's funny people think you can have a collective oral history that's factual. Yet even with computers and internet we get the apocalyptical death cult going on and on about the end of the world and the mysticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079371 "Dead Bird Panic", I like that comment.

"Everything is fine. This is all normal." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-...

> "Everything is fine. This is all normal."

Thanks. I knew it was a repetitive moral panic.

Definitely every few years in western media we get a cycle of hysteria. Over the world I'd say yearly about the "birds falling dead from the sky" as we are all smitten :)

You can spell it out, but it's all repeated.

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#205

So far food scarcity looks like the most plausible explanation. Someone needs to get a massive campaign together in flyover zones to get people to scatter food for them. Assuming appropriate feed for these species is even widely available in those areas. Probably too little too late in this case though... I guess we just update the wildfire documents to include care for migratory species and hope there's a next time

I want to point out the issues of 1) commenting on areas where one doesn't have expertise 2) not recognizing that and find credible sources of information. No offense, but even though you projected confidence I doubted you had any ornithology background. Since I didn't either, I recognized my lack of expertise and did some good faith basic research, informally speaking, to see if I could find out what the most likely…

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. HN is only an internet forum. If you have better information to contribute, that's wonderful, but there's no requirement for other commenters to be specialists, or to quote specialists. Human conversation is far broader than that, and needs to be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to point out the issues of 1) commenting on areas where one doesn't have expertise 2) not recognizing that and find credible sources of information. No offense, but even though you projected confidence I doubted you had any ornithology background. Since I didn't either, I recognized my lack of expertise and did some good faith basic research, informally speaking, to see if I could find out what the most likely…

I will project confidence while stating that you can go fuck yourself. In the ass. With a rake. dick face

Obviously posting like this is a bannable offense on HN. I'm not going to ban you for this because your previous comments look fine. But please don't do it again, regardless of how provoked you are or feel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-mask folks have chosen self-actualization over survival. Like the stages of grief, the hierarchy is not necessarily chronological.

I'm really not sure if this is meant as an insult or not, but I'll take it as respectful. Wearing my high-bypass N95 mask, or a sloppy ill-fitting "surgical" mask or an un-rated cloth mask around a vulnerable person with multiple comorbidities is a dangerous show of virtue-signalling: it does essentially nothing to protect that individual. Encouraging vulnerable people to wear a powered HEPA ventilator on their hip,…

I can never be certain whether someone is arguing in bad faith on purpose, or as a consequence of letting the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good.

Do you think refusing to visit grandma because you don't think your face mask will protect her is a self-actualization need? Sounds like a group safety need to me. Your choice of examples reads more like equivocation (conflating two things with similar features) which is generally a no-no in public debate circles.

The evidence still supports the idea that prophylaxis at the point source is an order more effective than prophylaxis at the sink, and they are not mutually exclusive. The Precautionary Principle means you do cheap things that may not work or even be necessary, but the cost of being wrong is so high that it doesn't matter how low the probability is. It's not a waste of resources. It's hedging.

If I had to be in a room with her and there was only one mask, I'd wear it instead of giving it to grandma. But why the hell am I in this situation to begin with?

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#208

On the topic of seeing across many fields, it's occurred to me there is a common theme across the crises of 2020 (particularly as seen through the lens of the US): "I can't breathe". Covid: check George Floyd's murder which sparked worldwide protests: check Smoke covering half the US: check Not that I'm a polymath or have any answers. My approach to these problems is to leave the fate of the world to those who hold t…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494075.

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure if this is meant as an insult or not, but I'll take it as respectful. Wearing my high-bypass N95 mask, or a sloppy ill-fitting "surgical" mask or an un-rated cloth mask around a vulnerable person with multiple comorbidities is a dangerous show of virtue-signalling: it does essentially nothing to protect that individual. Encouraging vulnerable people to wear a powered HEPA ventilator on their hip,…

[flagged]

You can't attack another user like this regardless of how wrong they are or how strongly you disagree. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. Please also stop using HN for ideological battle, as it makes the threads predictable and nasty. That's in the site guidelines.

You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. However, you've also posted some good comments, so I'm not going to ban you—but if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US

#210
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the internal instability within western nations has reached the point that our national psyche has regressed to the lower levels of maslow's hierarchy we've regressed from self-actualization and are now focused on issues of survival

The anti-mask folks have chosen self-actualization over survival. Like the stages of grief, the hierarchy is not necessarily chronological.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, especially not on classic flamewar topics. Regardless of how wrong other people are, doing this only makes things worse (as indeed it made things worse below).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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