171–180 of 342 posts
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What happens if I need my money back?
What do you mean “my” money? When you spend it, it’s no longer yours. You have land now in this line of reasoning.
If I ever get rich enough to do so, I'm going to buy some land somewhere - perhaps old farming land that's no longer profitable, and just let it return to nature. Let the trees and bushes grow, let the insects, birds and whatever else breed there. I'm beginning to think that's one of the best things one could do for the planet right now.
The healthy middle ground is something like the native Americans maintained - a kind of “gardened wild”. It requires active management to nudge nature towards a healthy, sustainable state. Pragmatic, spot treatments of chemicals can be useful in this scenario — it’s the endless acres of monuculutes, airdropped with chemicals, that cause the kinds of problems we’re seeing from agricultural chemicals.
If this is something anyone is interested in pursuing — buying land to “re-wild” it — check out your local natural resource conservation program.
There’s no surprise here is there? We, as a society, poison pretty much everything as a standard part of the agricultural process. The outcome -the goal - of that is of course, death of vast numbers of insects. Mission accomplished. It’s a success story, strangely. The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs u…
From what I can gather (anecdotally) is most of them would rather trust the system, or blame the system, than confront the fact they are undermining their children's future. Stormy Daniel's is a concern. The shite passing for food on the kitchen table is not nearly as important.
I'm not joking when I say, we are in The Matrix - just batteries for the machine.
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What potential risks can you think of for this approach?
The active ingredient is double-stranded RNA, which we all consume every day (from viruses in fruit and veges), so no issues for human health via ingestion pathway. A poorly designed dsRNA that has too much homology to a gene of a related beneficial species could impact it if it took up the dsRNA. dsRNA doesn't hang around in the environment, so the beneficial organism would have to be there at the time of spraying.…
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Yeah but when faced with the choice between the tomatoes that were $8.50/kg and really nice but would go off in 2 days, vs. the tomatoes that were $4.50/kg and still nice and red and lasted a whole week but were pretty tasteless, you bought the latter, didn't you? Customers demand things by paying money for them.
Red isn’t a flavor and nice isn’t a texture though. Those $4.50 tomatoes are light red, mealy and flavorless. They’re the Red Delicious of the tomato world. If you haven’t tried California dry farm tomatoes do yourself a favor, they’re worlds apart and worth every penny.
I see comments below like "pesticides are bitter and that's why vegetables grown with pesticides are bitter". That's a pretty odd conclusion, given that many vegetables contain bitter compounds already...
Please try to use actual logic, data, and science, not trivially disprovable claims.
Not to jump slightly off topic, but it boggles my mind how this topic (i.e., toxins) has not been included in the (cost of) healthcare "debate" in the USA. How did health of the individual - which is a function of lifestyle and environment - become completely disconnected from the cost of trying to maintain that individual as a productive member of society? Obesity gets a free pass. Sedentary gets a free pass. Toxins…
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Customers in many cases don't have the information to know the potential long term damages of buying the $4.50/kg tomatoes. It's insane to put that burden on the end user as opposed to the tomato grower. How in the world is the customer supposed to know what pesticides are used and what the damages could be? Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates…
You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just s…
There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.
The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.
There’s no surprise here is there? We, as a society, poison pretty much everything as a standard part of the agricultural process. The outcome -the goal - of that is of course, death of vast numbers of insects. Mission accomplished. It’s a success story, strangely. The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs u…
It's probably more a "tragedy of the commons" type of thing.
If X is detrimental to society but necessary for big players to make more money, then you can bet X will happen. Especially if society doesn't find out immediately about the bad aspects.
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1000 days in circulation means we'll have to wait at least 4 summers to start seeing a change, I'd wager. Also, it might depend on where there are different types of insects currently, and how successful they happen to be in reproduction and spreading over time.
Since neonics have a half-life of ~30 days when exposed to sunlight (unclear if that’s continuous exposure or what), it could be that we see some statistically significant improvements sooner than the 1000 days.
Also, I’d imagine it will take ecosystems multiple seasons (so years) to rebound and reach equilibrium.