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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

#371

Post by davexunit »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #166
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 (…

> 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.

This is backwards. Nature is incredibly fault tolerant, it's our systems that are disconnected from nature that are incredibly fragile.

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

#372

Post by toss1 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #196
s3graham wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.

Yup, with one addition

>> It'll still be running some code...

until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

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

#373

Post by willturman »

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.

It's longer than 5 minutes, but David Attenborough's new film: A Life On Our Planet [1] presents the issues were facing from unsustainable growth and offers solutions in maintaining robust biodiversity on our planet.

[1] https://www.attenboroughfilm.com/

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

#374

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #241
api wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bingo, this is exactly what I was going to say. The Earth sure is fault-tolerant, we just might not enjoy what PIDs get the kill signal to repair the system.

Over a geological timescale, the Earth will cease to exist once consumed by the Sun.

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

#375

Post by ARandomerDude »

samcheng wrote: post #5

I've never had to deal with a murder hornet infestation, but I can approve of their 'vacuum' method for clearing yellowjacket nests in high-traffic areas. Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of s…

> No fancy beekeeper suit necessary

Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.

For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).

The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.

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

#376

Post by yakz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #334
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 are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims. On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the respons…

If we're going with anecdotes, my SO's parents both had it with her mother spending 10 days in hospital during which they started her on dialysis, which she will need for the rest of her life.

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

#377

Post by bryanrasmussen »

lpolovets wrote: post #193
s3graham wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.

there must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!

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

#378

Post by ska »

Supermancho wrote: post #239
hellotomyrars wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet. We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.

> Extinction events don't happen that often. That's a matter of perspective. I would say they happen all the time.

Individual extinctions and extinction events are usual considered as different things. The former is commonplace, the latter rare and results in massive shifts.

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

#379

Post by Mc_Big_G »

davexunit wrote: post #371
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.

This is backwards. Nature is incredibly fault tolerant, it's our systems that are disconnected from nature that are incredibly fragile.

Nature will be fine. It's us that won't be. Let's stop pretending that it's the same thing.

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

#380

Post by specialist »

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 (…

"anti-environmentalist position that pops up"

Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.

"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."

Yup.

In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.

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