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Where have all the insects gone?

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Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#291

Post by datameta »

thisiscorrect wrote: post #82
papito wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like we were all driving in Chevrolet Bel Airs in the 90s and now switched to Lamborghinis.

My intuition for aerodynamics must not be as good as yours. But looking at https://caradvise.com/blog/2019/08/17/most-popular-cars-in-t... and https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g36005989/best-selling-car... is interesting. In particular, the way the headlights sit on the front of the car seems to have changed a lot. Cars in the 90s look to have lights that pointed straight ahead. That seems to have evolved over time…

It's mind-boggling how many trucks and SUVs this country owns...

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#292

Post by trutannus »

rsj_hn wrote: post #290
trutannus wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reply is oddly presumptuous for no good reason.

I would think praising democide would be the presumptuous part of that exchange.

And where in my derision and mockery of the idea of democide, and folks who support it, as glib and thoughtless do you see me praise it? Looks like you've misread, or misconstrued, my comment as the exact opposite of what I had written.

With respect to changing what I read, I like being exposed to opinions I disagree with, even ones I find abhorrent like this. It's useful to survey the opinions out there, even the nonsense ones.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#293

Post by papito »

LanceH wrote: post #75
papito wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like we were all driving in Chevrolet Bel Airs in the 90s and now switched to Lamborghinis.

It is an variable that very obviously needs to be controlled and is worth mentioning.

The studies for this are scarce, but this is curious and counterintuitive:

"The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old."

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

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#294

Post by SuoDuanDao »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #271
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insects getting better at avoiding cars in a much shorter time than we'd expect would certainly be a prediction of Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' theory.

The comment above yours was not saying what you're saying. They were saying, IIUC, that it could be that the same amount of bugs are splattered across a larger number of cars, so that if you look at any one car, then it looks like less bugs.

That was my understanding as well, I was proposing an alternative theory.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#295

Post by Auracle »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #248
lotsofpulp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible for there to be so many more vehicles than decades before that the number of insects hitting each car is much less?

Insects getting better at avoiding cars in a much shorter time than we'd expect would certainly be a prediction of Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' theory.

There’s a road in my area (rural MN) where I don’t slow down if there are deer on the side of the road. It’s a curvy road with a ton of deer, and back when I was a teenager the deer would do the normal deer thing of potentially getting spooked and run across the road…or directly in to your stopped car.

15 years later they no longer do that, just on that road in particular. I don’t know if it’s evolved behavior or learned, but they absolutely changed.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#296

Post by TaylorAlexander »

saberdancer wrote: post #281
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is the single largest owner of farmland in the US. There are many ways to profit from this, with some options being to rent it or sell it. I don't really know why billionaires do what they do, but he is investing in all that land for some reason.

If I was one of the richest man on the planet, I would also invest in various fields, which would probably mean I end up one of the single largest owners in that field (through sheer fact I am one of the richest people on the planet).

In general I have a lot of issues with the way the worlds richest people wield power over society through ownership of everything we depend upon.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#297

Post by Isinlor »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #196
Isinlor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can reach collectivism only trough authoritarianism.

Do you know any collectivist society above 1 million people that was not authoritarian?

Even China learned from the mistakes of collectivist ideas and moved towards socialist market economy which lead to the greatest uplifting of people from the extreme poverty in the whole history of human species.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#298

Post by kesselvon »

stacks_on_stack wrote: post #46
kesselvon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we life under a system that demands endless growth on a finite plane. It's pretty clear that the human population has grown beyond the ability of the planet to sustain a progression towards universal industrialization. Humans have nowhere else to live and we're eroding what underpins our ability to survive. We more than tripled the human population in the last 100 years. In my own lifetime, the hu…

I've read studies that show human population peaking around 2100 and slowly lessening until it finds a happy medium. This is due to increased access to birth control in developing nations as well as people simply having less children because automation on the farm replaces the need to have several workers (the kids) around to help with the harvest, etc. Link to article: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/1…

That means 70 years of population growth and then a plateau on consumption levels that are still insane.
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