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Where have all the insects gone?

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Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#191

Post by revolvingocelot »

Jensson wrote: post #183
revolvingocelot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, I had updated my comment to list a few of the dozen-and-a-half industrial Crown corporations that Canadian governments have sold off to already-wealthy people. I'll continue: Victory Aircraft, Orion Bus Industries, Canadian Vickers, Canadair... It's a historical fact that the government did operate industrial Crown corporations, and they operated them "better", as viewed from the embarrassingly non-fiducia…

Still see no evidence among those. Victory aircraft was a WW2 wartime aircraft manufacturer, not sure how that is relevant for anything. Wartime economics is very different from peacetime economics. Orion Bus Industries is and was always a private company. It was owner by a government entity for an extremely short period. Canadian Vickers is a private company. Canadair was a private company, then nationalized for a d…

>Still see no evidence among those.

"Evidence"? You said there aren't any industrial Crown corporations. In fact, you said that

>>>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though

and

>>Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.

But I listed a whole bunch of former industrial Crown corporations. Just because you don't like the idea that your baseless assertions were proven wrong by the facts doesn't detract from their facticity.

Canadian Vickers isn't a private company, they don't exist. When they did exist, they were heavily subsidized by the government and then nationalised into Canadair, which then privatized after the war and got thrown around as a subsidiary of various aerospace corps until '76 when the government bought it from General Dynamics. Then it actually did quite well until the Challenger business jet, then the Mulroney government -- one of those right-wing, fast-buck governments I mentioned earlier -- sold it in '86. And that's a great example, because that's just a straight-up loss. If a private company makes a crazily-bad investment, it's going to go under and get bought for pennies on the dollar by another private company. A Crown corporation, theoretically, can take less "sensible" business risks without that fear, because of government support. Unless the government decides it's not worth it and sells it for pennies on the dollar by another private company.

>Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.

The "Crown" doesn't "lead" a Crown corporation. They don't make business decisions for them, they just provide a mandate (in this case, "design aircraft in Canada"), a financial backstop, and, yes, allow much more efficient internal meddling than normal regulatory schemes if need be.

To be honest, I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Your assertions are mostly false, and the suggestion that my argument is leading up to the idea that "government agencies" could "take over the entire private sector" is absolutely bonkers. Again, I suggest you go read up on what, exactly, a Crown corporation is and does. You're clearly under a number of incredible misapprehensions.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#192

Post by TaylorAlexander »

pengaru wrote: post #129

Last year I had a jarring experience driving through some of the agricultural land near the Salton Sea en route to Bombay Beach coming down from JTNP, taking back roads. The general region is desert, water and food is scarce, but through this agricultural zone there's this dense pocket of food and water on the surface. I was in a Miata with the top down, and the amount of chemicals they were using to keep the pests/i…

Yes it’s very bad and it doesn’t have to be that way. The mass chemical use must be profitable but there is a great cost to the land and the environment to do so.

This is why it is so upsetting that Bill Gates is pushing this kind of chemical intensive farming all over Africa and positioning himself to profit off the transition too. Once again harming the continent and its people for profit while telling them it’s good for them.

EDIT: He's also buying up all the farm land with water rights in the USA. He is the single largest holder of US farmland. So when drought inevitably comes and swaths of farmland become too dry to use, he will profit. If you apply to one of their foundation grants for agriculture, you will see a big emphasis on "bundled services", so they seem to want to build a "farm as a service" system where farmers don't own anything. It's a new enclosure movement where the lords own everything and everyone else pays them to use the land. We have enough in this world we can live pretty cheaply if we work together and share in the right ways. But control of the land is vital or we will all die in poverty from rents.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#193

Post by lrem »

skinkestek wrote: post #182
jerry1979 wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.

I didn't drive to much until 20 or so years ago but I think I saw a lot more of ot back in the day. In according to the more usual explanations I've been working if lights along the road might be part of the problem.

I drive long distances through Europe every now and then since 2009-ish. That's only 12 years and much of my drive is through farmland and forests, no lights other than the cars for at least 1000km in aggregate. In 2009 the windshield and lights would need a solid scrub every couple hundred km. Now I don't bother cleaning when refuelling.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#194

Post by ashtonkem »

nickff wrote: post #167
ashtonkem wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples? This is genuinely quite baffling to me. Ignoring the fact that de-regulation has been an explicit plank of the GOP for my entire life, the US deregulated a ton of stuff since the Reagan era. Airlines, trucking, labor, and the fi…

I would agree that many specific regulations in the USA have been reduced/eliminated, but overall regulations have steadily increased throughout the last 90+ years. You may be able to pick out one year that they decreased overall (though I can't), but I doubt you can find a 5-year period over which they've decreased (by any measure).

Sigh

I gave tons of examples and an entire decade with bipartisan deregulation as the norm. It seems that you're ignoring what I actually wrote, all while demanding more evidence I already gave and offering none of your own. I'm forced to conclude that you're not really acting in good faith, and that there's no point in continuing.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#195

Post by pengaru »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #181
pengaru wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it, but being Texas I imagine you drove through a much larger area. The distance I traveled through this poison was relatively little: https://goo.gl/maps/v7MQNgpffP2wNCrc7 It was Box Canyon S down to 111E, stair stepping a bit through the fields...

The name of that road is extraordinary appropriate, though, so I imagine under the right conditions it could trap and concentrate quite a lot of the aerosolized chemicals from the croplands it opens onto just south. While on the twisties through the namesake canyon you could have been blasted with several times the concentration found in the open air above the fields themselves.

The canyon road snaking up through the mountains was odorless, only the roads immediately through the fields were noxious... but it wasn't a windy day.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#196

Post by revolvingocelot »

Isinlor wrote: post #92
farias0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, probably? If we had elected good officials at least. I'm not defending socialism at all, but if you accept the fact that this kind of thing happens because there's no monetary incentive for the industry to avoid it, then the logical conclusion is that under a system not motivated by profit this would be less likely to happen. But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument again…

You should read about the Great Leap Forward and The Four Pests campaign that lead to the greatest famine in human history with up to 55 million people dead from starvation and bodies piling up on sides of roads. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply gr…

"Better red than expert" is not a prerequisite for socialist thought. For what it's worth, putting totally unqualified ideologues in positions of real temporal power over the economy and health of the nation and watching them fuck everything up is something we do in modern capitalism, too. Our tools are different; political power grows not out of the barrel of a gun but a barrel full of money with a dollar sign on it.

I find it bafflingly common to encounter the conflation of authoritarianism with collectivism.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#197

Post by BayAreaEscapee »

jerry1979 wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.

Everytime this "the insects are dying" thread comes up, people come out of the woodwork with anecdotes like this.

But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.

Now I barely even notice them.

Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#198

Post by akeck »

thrownaway561 wrote: post #72

https://www.firefly.org/ i remember an article about how fireflies are dying out

Habitat is definitely a factor with fireflies. For years we had none. Then we let some of the landscaping and trees grow out so parts of our yard became more forest-like. 2-3 years ago we started seeing fireflies for the first time.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#199

Post by brandon272 »

Jensson wrote: post #174
revolvingocelot wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc. An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction…

> An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? No, they aren't manufacturing anything. Managing natural resources is a reasonable thing for a government to do. > Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would…

> Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services

Incorrect.

> But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did.

See: SaskTel[1], SaskPower[2], SaskEnergy[3], Saskatchewan Government Insurance[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskTel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskPower

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskEnergy

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_Government_Insura...

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#200

Post by amriksohata »

Albert Howard an English botanist observed Hindu / Indian farmers using Cow pat to fertilise their land. He dubbed this the Indore process, there was no need for toxic pesticides or fertilisers. All this modern science that at the time that was supposed to improve farming actually destroyed our biodiversity and insects.
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