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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

#351

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#352

Post by croon »

ganafagol wrote: post #339
api wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homo Sapiens would almost surely survive as a species. Humans are like cockroaches. It might be horribly nasty though, and definitely not something we should invite. I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?

If that's Elon's position then he must have a huge load of cognitive dissonance if he still thinks prioritizing colonization of Mars is a worthwile contribution.

I'm rarely one to defend Elon, but that isn't cognitive dissonance, it's trying to have a plan B in face of reality.

He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.

Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.

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

#353

Post by nix23 »

lostlogin wrote: post #273
nix23 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct. In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.

The number of hives in New Zealand has roughly doubled in 5 years - so much so that overstocking is a huge problem. One small data point, but too many and too few are both bad. https://www.airborne.co.nz/pages/bee-keeping-statistics-new-...

Again it's NOT about just Honeybees:

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

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

#354

Post by gremlinsinc »

coliveira wrote: post #211
gremlinsinc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this viewpoint. A more non-statist communism (re: unions and local area orgs that manage 90% of all needs), worker coops, less power for D.C. more for states and local municipalities. healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union th…

Exactly. Extremes of capitalism and communism are bound to lead to conflict and destruction because there is no way to convince everyone of something. But a well balanced society should be able to combine market based solutions with community based solutions where it makes sense.

yeah, I'm also a bit anti-authoritarian, so I feel smaller community initiatives shares power more, with less of it concentrated in power brokers who's only goal is money and power, and thus gives a little boost to more people willing to work for it as volunteers, or coop members, or part of the local community efforts.

A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.

Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.

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

#356

Post by vmchale »

sokoloff wrote: post #7

> trapping and using dental floss to tie tracking devices to the hornets What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.

Murder hornets are a little bigger than conventional hornets.

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

#357

Post by giantg2 »

lostlogin wrote: post #314
giantg2 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. I do everything really cheap - foundationless, treatment-free, no excluders, etc.

How do you manage varroa? My method has got pretty cheap - oxalic acid is about as cheap as it gets for treatments.

I don't. The ones with the strong genetics survive and the weak die off. I try to buy bees with good genetics.

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

#358

Post by giantg2 »

giantg2 wrote: post #250
yawz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Varroa is and has been my #1 problem for a while. I hate it. But I can't agree with this statement: "If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe." It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets. Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignif…

We can't find a way to stop them + huge insects = unsolved problem This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets. On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather tha…

Why is this downvoted?

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

#359

Post by dotancohen »

sjy wrote: post #323
dotancohen wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I recommend Steffen et al, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (2018) [1]. You can’t read the whole thing in 5 minutes, but you can read the three figures and their captions, which say a lot, and it’s open access, peer reviewed and recent. Maybe your point is that the Earth system is too complicated to explain in 5 minutes, and that’s fair enough, but I do think the climate change policy debate would…

Thank you, but this is not for the layman. I have no problem recommending something that takes longer than 5 minutes to read, but it does have to be readable.

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

#360

Post by wongarsu »

chrisco255 wrote: post #340
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're living in an age where people deny the existence of jurisdictions that have gone without arbitrary closings and they're doing just fine, if not better than many jurisdictions that have had harsh lockdowns. But no document in the universe of any length will convince them that population control is not the answer.

Harsh lockdowns are the last-ditch effort when everything is out of control. The places that didn't do them didn't need them because they had a good initial response or have very favorable demographics or culture
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