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Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

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Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#301

Post by Santosh83 »

honkycat wrote: post #156

I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey (…

Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#302

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

dotancohen wrote: post #279
immmmmm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would. We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned. This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now. And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.…

> And no one says a world. No one even dare spending > 5 minute reading the material. No one cares. Recommend something that I can give to people that they can read in 5 minutes and be convinced.

We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience of their favorite bars being closed or having to wear a mask. There is no document in the universe of any length that will convince them.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#303

Post by freewilly1040 »

kortilla wrote: post #204
honkycat wrote: post #156

I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey (…

What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?

The early comments on this thread were skeptical of the value of using government dollars to remove murder hornets

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#304

Post by saalweachter »

nend wrote: post #295
giantDinosaur wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not possible to domesticate other bee species? Surely a x200 increase in efficiency would be a major reason to domesticate orchard bees, right?

Orchard bees are domesticated and used as pollinators. They're solitary bees, which I'm guessing prevents usage for mass pollination of crops. That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.

Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.

Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#305

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #303
kortilla wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?

The early comments on this thread were skeptical of the value of using government dollars to remove murder hornets

To me, this seems like similar thinking that we should just go for herd immunity - possibly even more ill contrived.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#306

Post by ogre_codes »

saalweachter wrote: post #245
chmod775 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat. Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.

It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance. The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the h…

I suspect this is moving around the issue at hand here because it's likely the murder hornets will target orchard bees as well. They just aren't conveniently located in giant boxes by the hundreds.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#307

Post by evan_ »

canada_dry wrote: post #143
TomK32 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a simple strip of plastics to isolate the battery a common "power switch"?

> isolate the battery I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device. Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.

That would likely weigh a lot more- the overlapping plastic plus the closure plus the gasket

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#308

Post by evan_ »

derefr wrote: post #25
Johnny555 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they use a socket that would allow the battery to be isolated, it's probably directly soldered in for weight and reliability. Otherwise they could just ship the battery uninstalled and let the user plug it in when he gets it. A weight of 0.15g doesn't give a lot of room for extra components like a battery socket.

Perhaps they could put a tiny antifuse in circuit with the battery inside the IC package. Supply external "programming" current to the IC, and it would melt the antifuse and get the battery going.

Maybe there’s a way to tie that in to the transmit coil so you could blow it and activate the circuit by inducing a current wirelessly.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#309

Post by rurp »

api wrote: post #199
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.

It is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us. As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves. Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is…

I've always thought of "saving the earth" as referring to the millions of intelligent and sensitive non-human lifeforms that we are currently obliterating. But I agree, the earth will continue to have life regardless of what humans do, it just won't include anything we currently know and cherish at the rate we're going.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#310

Post by milchek »

honkycat wrote: post #156

I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey (…

I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said:

> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."

I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).

We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.

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