171–180 of 184 posts
Um, "bee"? What's that? Seriously, I used to see MANY more bees than I have in the past two years, so any conclusion that the bees (or other insects) are OK, is anecdotally wrong.
These days, driving even for a couple of hours will at most leave a couple of dead insects on the windshield, so it's not just the bees.
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Why does everyone assume when you say "traditional" you mean go back to the horse and cart. Is this an American thing? I... Progress has been made on improving the efficiency of small farms of diversified crop types. It's what most of farming in Europe was until the 90s and we didn't have "slaves". I get it your past is coloured by greed and hubris but please don't let it be clouding common sense. Unfortunately the l…
> Why does everyone assume when you say "traditional" you mean go back to the horse and cart. Because that's basically what "traditional" means? If "progress has been made on improving the efficiency", then it's not "traditional". By definition. Did you look at the chart I posted above?
`existing in or as part of a tradition; long-established.`
Long-estabished by 1980 is still long established, the rest of the world is traditionally not under the influence of the US economic super-power, I feel I needn't go on...
Traditionally farmers have been breeding cattle, traditionally we like to eat. You're being deliberately argumentative in assuming that traditional means luddite vs something that has been tried and tested and known not to be destructive. Progress needn't mean obliteration of resources, but then given the "traditional" view from the US of demanding growth and domination to sustain high pricing against the all-mighty petro-dollar, you clearly don't have a better system.
Did you read the rest of my comments. Producing copious amounts of excess corn is _not_ a good thing. Especially when it's produced in a long-term damaging way. Good progress is not the complete obliteration of tradition, those who say it is are fools.
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In this cas it does not. The insects as a whole are in decline.
I've not heard insects like ants, beetles or flies being in decline. I've heard of bee colony collapse and declines in grasshoppers and monarch butterflies. But there are tons of other insects, some of which seem to do quite well around humans, whether we like it or not.
This is caused by the insect apocalypse.
It's because the harm caused to the bees is from factors that strike as well other insects: mainly pesticides, and global warming.
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The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality). When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too. The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude wors…
I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters. These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a…
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High fructose corn syrup and sucrose (table sugar, which is a combination of fructose and glucose) have roughly the same amount of fructose- 50%. Also, what Lustig says is nonsense and isn't backed by any plausible mechanism or observational evidence. Alcohol and fructose aren't metabolized very similarly at all. He points out that if liver glycogen is constantly full, the liver has to convert extra fructose to fat (…
Please stop defending HFCS. If you've ever lived outside of the US for more than a week you'll realise what an offence to the pallet it is, let alone what it must be doing to your body. Plus didn't we recently realise that fructose genuinely causes the gut to stop digesting good properly?... Overly processed sugar is also bad yes, but govt subsidised HFCS and corn bio-fuel are an affront to common sense.
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Agreed, but we didn’t used to shove sugar in literally everything. Corn syrup mixes well into solution, it’s pretty damn stable, cheap, easy to store and measure, won’t clump… and yea people used to like x product fine, but really prefer it sweeter. It’s not that corn syrup is bad, it’s too good which is bad.
Yet it is still to take off in Europe and people pay a lot of money to import European food worldwide... Strange...
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Yet it is still to take off in Europe and people pay a lot of money to import European food worldwide... Strange...
Europe isn't the world and neither is the USA, there is very little difference to the human body between HFCS and cane sugar. They are chemically very similar. Just don't eat so much of them and you'll be fine. The people of the USA eat far too much of both, and neither is good for you in the quatanties we have them in. I'm not sure about Europe, but I know for a fact that Americans eat far too much sugar.
They are too. It's a global obesity crisis. The stereotype of the fat American isn't as unique as it was 20 years ago. I was in Germany and France recently, and while not "as bad" as a county fair in Oklahoma, it was obvious.
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I don't understand how you can parse my sentence and think that the object being demonized is either me or farmers. Yes, neonics are being demonized.
They don't think that. They're saying that your use of the term 'demonization' is over-dramatic and unhelpful.
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Densely populated city in Bulgaria. I tried searching for the thing but aside from "$some_kind_of_asian_wasp taking over easter Europe", I've got nothing. I don't think it was the same species.
Not the Japanese one, but there is an invasive Asian hornet in Europe since 15 years ago or so https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_hornet
* Not yet, and hopefully I won't have to
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I've not heard insects like ants, beetles or flies being in decline. I've heard of bee colony collapse and declines in grasshoppers and monarch butterflies. But there are tons of other insects, some of which seem to do quite well around humans, whether we like it or not.
Maybe you've heard of the "car windshield observation": we used to find so many dead insects on windshields some decades ago, and now it is obvious that there are way fewer. This is caused by the insect apocalypse. It's because the harm caused to the bees is from factors that strike as well other insects: mainly pesticides, and global warming.
Honestly it's such a dirty metric with so many compounding variables I'm shocked that anybody is seriously considering it as a meaningful data point beyond the most basic, surface-level understanding of the issue. To be honest the whole thing reeks of the usual hacker-news crowd issue where people want to pretend they know about a topic (e.g. systemic issues in pollinator/agricultural pest population management in high-intensity modern industrial agriculture) but are underestimating the complexity of the issues by a huge magnitude.