A lot of the problem is people who don't study or keep bees offering completely baseless opinions.
I do keep bees, asshat. I also make my own equipment, and do cutouts. I am not a professional, but I also don't lose anywhere near 25% of my bees! Let's just say I'm always learning, but I know a thing or two.
I'll make this real simple:
1) Spray insecticide on bees; they die. 2) Place bees near commercial agriculture where: 3) Farmers spray insecticides. 4) Bees die.
I'm sorry to you and the other nitwit AC, but this is fall-off-log-backwards dead simple fucking obvious even to morons.
It's real simple: monoculture and chemicals -- agricultural chemical warfare.
Hobby beekeepers are not having this problem in the cities. It's the commercial guys out where the spray'n'pray farms are who are losing bees.
The only reason that *everyone* doesn't know this yet -- is because the makers of said chemicals (cough Monsanto cough and others) have heavily invested in creating confusion around the issue to hide the fact that it's THEIR PRODUCTS killing the bees.
There is nothing further to investigate. We don't need any goddamn sensors in the beehives. We don't need to spend any more tax dollars or time researching this. We need to start banning some shit. Now. Yesterday.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed.
What would we do with a million unemployed truck drivers? I don't know if you actually know any truck drivers, but I do... and there aren't a lot of them who are PhD material if you catch my drift. "Learn more and get a better education and a better job" isn't an option.
Let me also point out that if there were better jobs that truck drivers *could* be doing, they'd be doing them already and we'd have a shortage of truck drivers. But we don't have a shortage of truck drivers.
It's already past the point in our modern society that we have to invent jobs for people to do. We invent crap people don't need, and advertise to sell it to people who don't want it.
The biggest reason we don't bring our military home is because it's *jobs* for millions of people who would otherwise be unemployed. That simple. It's the same reason we keep building and filling new prisons.
There simply aren't enough jobs for everyone, even when we work overtime imagining new ones. And now you'll lay off all the truck drivers. At some point, who's gonna be left with a job? How do you imagine a society to work when half the people are redundant? Sure, robotic trucks are cool, but you have to think about some consequences.
This isn't a "buggy whip" argument, either, so don't even try. That argument looks at a time in history when there actually were jobs for everyone and then some. Maybe it's more of an overpopulation discussion.
This is absurd. Do you not value music? Maybe you don't listen to music. How is an artist supposed to go on about creating music and making a living with no financial support.
Try local music for a change. Really local. Like those guys you never heard of down at the corner pub on Friday night. They're not U2 or Garth Brooks, but hey, for a $5 cover charge and $3 beers, who's complaining?
Those guys aren't in it for the money. They have real day jobs (mostly) and play on weekends because they love music. They know they are never going to play to a stadium, and they don't care.
Do you get what you pay for? Maybe. Can you have a beer with the band after the gig? Yep! Try that with the stars.
Thing is, people who really love to play music don't care about money for it. Sure, it's nice to keep them in beer and guitar strings, and they get that. But I just don't go along with your premise that good music can only come from people who are *lucky* enough to make a living at it.
Yeah, well I find all the politically correct New Language offensive. (Okay, not so much offensive as stupid and infantile.)
I am a tranny, thank you very much. I have tranny friends who are just fine with 'tranny'. However, if someone I know doesn't like it, I will call them something else, because I was raised with some manners, after all. Just don't run around making assumptions about what other people will find offensive. I'm not going to remove useful words from my vocabulary because a few people don't like them.
Ever heard something about how it takes two to tango? In order for someone to give offense, someone else must *take* offense. That requires effort.
Lady parts = female. Male parts = male. This doesn't have anything to do with social constructs; it's reproductive biology, aka science.
Yes, there is a spectrum of intersex possibilities. That does not require us to do away with the notion of male and female. Personally, I'd like to see an option of "Other" along with "M" and "F" for IDs & such. Give everyone something to pick.
But to suggest that we need to tear down all of human society because of a few outliers is absurd.
you're effectively saying "My freedom to be stupid is worth more than the safety of others!".
I'll go along with that, because the opposite is "my safety is more important than your liberty," isn't it?
Guess what? Your safety is not more important than my liberty. The idea is flat out ridiculous on its face, and it's something the Founders warned us to watch out for. When we allow government to take liberties away from us in the name of safety, there is absolutely NO END to how far down that slope we can go.
Maybe you wouldn't allow me to cook my own food in my own home, because I might someday accidentally give someone gas at a potluck. Maybe you don't allow kids who need glasses to get them, because some other kid killed himself after being called "four-eyes". When it's about safety safety safety, ANYTHING can be pushed in the name of safety.
Oh, you say, but reasonable people know where to draw the line? How many of those are there in government?
I'm not some crazy person here. I wear my seat belt. I wear a helmet -- on motorcycles, but not bicycles. I wear safety glasses, dust masks, and ear plugs when I do my woodworking. No one forces me to do those things (except the seat belt, which I'd do even if there wasn't a law, because I can read...), but I do them because they're good ideas, and they protect *me*.
Requiring me to have traction control and ABS and 53 air bags (aka things I don't need because I can actually drive), or gods forbid 10 years down the road, an entirely self-driving car? Just because it theoretically makes *you* safer? No. A thousand times no.
You look out for your safety if you want. Buy your bubble car with all the risk programmed out of its computer. You are responsible for your vehicle's safety -- I am not. I am responsible for my safety.
If we collide, it's called an "accident", and you can't make enough laws to prevent all accidents. The only way to make sure no one faces risk in life... is to wrap everyone in a pod when they're born and never let them out.
So yeah. My freedom to "be stupid" is far more important than your safety. Screw your safety. Wear a goddamn helmet. Live in your bubble, get all your flu shots, hide behind the government,... and stay out of my way.
I am so sick of mewling little invertebrates who think they're entitled to a life without risk.
The saga, therefore, put scientists on high alert to the possibility that pesticides might play a role in developing Parkinson's.
I'm sure we'll see, as usual, comments from the Big Ag shills telling us there's nothing wrong with pesticides, and that organic is a waste of money, etc etc etc.
The thing to remember is that all of these studies only study the effect of one or two pesticides at a time. What about cumulative effects of many dozens of different chemicals? The government can say something like "20 ppm of this chemical is safe" and "3ppb of that chemical is safe" but it is rather doubtful that exposure to "safe" levels of 20 different pesticides, cumulatively, is safe.
70 years into the so-called "Green Revolution" and it's still fraught with safety problems. All we've really managed to do is poison the environment, and cause a population explosion that is going to take some serious dealing with.
Speaking of monarchy, I laugh at the Tea Party's claim that this country was founded on Conservative Principles. Back then, a true Conservative (Tory) knew that only (Christian) God could ensure good governance and His divinely-appointed King was the only one who could do it properly.
Tories and Kings were the stuff of "conservatism" prior to the founding of the country, something most of us would agree happened following the war with England and the creation of the Constitution. So, you're not really on the right page here.
The notion is nevertheless silly. The US of A was, at the time, a radical experiment in liberalism -- according to the proper definition of the word 'liberal'. The words have gotten quite mixed up since. Today, were Thomas Jefferson (one of the most liberal) to return, and see what we call a liberal today (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid) I'm sure he'd be quite confused.
But then again, the original Tea Party wasn't about dodging taxes, either. Just about who got a say in assessing and spending them.
The difference between wanting to "dodge" taxes, and wanting to have a say in how they're spent, seems to me nothing more than a difference in who's looking at it.
I suspect we all -- not just today's Tea Party folk -- can agree that many of our tax dollars are wasted or otherwise misspent. I don't believe *anyone* could, with a straight face, argue the opposite.
You make it sound as if the deaths of those seals was deliberate. It appears it was not.
Unless it was a deliberate effort to prevent said SEAL team from telling a different story than the official one. There could have been a different story considering that some pretty knowledgeable sources have been saying for years that bin Laden died years before the incident.
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it's happened before enough times to think it an odd coincidence.
I always figured the GOP should throw its weight behind solar power, as it leads to increased energy independence -- which used to be one of its platforms.
It still amazes me that *anyone* could think electricity from sunlight is a bad thing. It shouldn't even be political.
Anyone can own rural land. That doesn't mean you know your adze from your elbow. Just sayin'.
And no, haying is nowhere near as fuel hungry (nor water, nor petro-chemical) as row cropping. Ask any farmer who does both. Go on, do it. Go learn something instead of spouting off nonsense.
With hay, there is no plowing, no drilling, no fertilizing, and no combines. Swathers & mowers aren't doing a lot of work compared to disking, or gods forbid, moldboard plowing. You'd have two passes of raking a few days apart, then bale & load. For an equivalent acreage, the tractors used for haying are smaller and use less fuel than row cropping, because they don't work as hard. More work = more fuel. Do I need to make this simpler?
I think I've spent enough time staring through the windshield of ol' Johnny Popper to know what I'm talking about.
There is more than enough land to graze every cow we eat. You say you own land in WV... have you ever been out here in the West? Hell, I think my cousins own a chunk of Montana bigger than your state.
There is only ONE reason we don't -- only one reason that cattle are fed grain in feedlots: the grain is subsidized by tax revenue. The corn and soybeans fed to cattle are overproduced and underpriced to benefit the ag giants like ADM. It's enshrined in the Farm Bill, and has been a part of official USDA policy since the Nixon administration. That's the only reason feedlots are economically viable in the first place. Otherwise, all our beef would be grass-fed.
Grass fed beef takes a few more months to market weight, but there wouldn't be any less of it. People might eat less, because it would be a bit more expensive than it is now -- primarily because the price would not be hidden by the subsidized cheap feed. Just as gasoline would cost $7+ a gallon if we factored in the cost of using the military to protect our oil supply.
Really... I'm not sure what your "beef" is. (:-D ) I'm not telling you anything that you can't verify if you put half an ounce of effort into learning something.
Being more efficient, it allows to feed more people with the same land. Alternatively, one could feed the same number of people with less land.
That sounds nice, but it's nonsense. Feeding people with plant crops requires good soil, climate, and irrigation, not to mention considerably more human labor. The majority of the world's land used for agriculture is only suited to grazing -- that is to say, the only way to get food from this land is with animals.
Grazing also uses less fossil fuel than row crops, and keeps the carbon cycle close to the land. Also, moving x number of calories from farm to city is accomplished in fewer truck loads with the more nutrionally-dense meat.
Sorry, but facts kinda get in the way of the vegetarian propaganda.
Grass-fed beef is, in point of fact, less carbon-intensive than vegetarian fare. And when grazing is managed well, it's net-negative as good management sequesters MORE carbon in the soil, even when some fuel use for hay harvest is factored in.
...knowing where the fuck you're going, before you head out?
I remember back in the Stone Age, we had these things called "maps" that we could use to determine a route to take, and then we could write down or memorize the turns to make. Believe it or not, we still have this technology.
People are seriously getting waaaaaay too dependent on their little gadgets. I have this friend who puts his phone in a windshield bracket and turns on the GPS nav to get 3 blocks from his house to the supermarket. It's fuckin' pathetic.
Me, give me two major cross streets and I can get to anywhere in my metro area, and a good part of the rest of my state, without looking at a map. Call me old-fashioned, but it works.
Really, if you are riding a bike watching a screen, you deserve your lacerations.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think that'd be obvious enough even for /.ers who are usually "too smart" for the obvious.
A lot of the problem is people who don't study or keep bees offering completely baseless opinions.
I do keep bees, asshat. I also make my own equipment, and do cutouts. I am not a professional, but I also don't lose anywhere near 25% of my bees! Let's just say I'm always learning, but I know a thing or two.
I'll make this real simple:
1) Spray insecticide on bees; they die.
2) Place bees near commercial agriculture where:
3) Farmers spray insecticides.
4) Bees die.
I'm sorry to you and the other nitwit AC, but this is fall-off-log-backwards dead simple fucking obvious even to morons.
It's real simple: monoculture and chemicals -- agricultural chemical warfare.
Hobby beekeepers are not having this problem in the cities. It's the commercial guys out where the spray'n'pray farms are who are losing bees.
The only reason that *everyone* doesn't know this yet -- is because the makers of said chemicals (cough Monsanto cough and others) have heavily invested in creating confusion around the issue to hide the fact that it's THEIR PRODUCTS killing the bees.
There is nothing further to investigate. We don't need any goddamn sensors in the beehives. We don't need to spend any more tax dollars or time researching this. We need to start banning some shit. Now. Yesterday.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed.
What would we do with a million unemployed truck drivers? I don't know if you actually know any truck drivers, but I do... and there aren't a lot of them who are PhD material if you catch my drift. "Learn more and get a better education and a better job" isn't an option.
Let me also point out that if there were better jobs that truck drivers *could* be doing, they'd be doing them already and we'd have a shortage of truck drivers. But we don't have a shortage of truck drivers.
It's already past the point in our modern society that we have to invent jobs for people to do. We invent crap people don't need, and advertise to sell it to people who don't want it.
The biggest reason we don't bring our military home is because it's *jobs* for millions of people who would otherwise be unemployed. That simple. It's the same reason we keep building and filling new prisons.
There simply aren't enough jobs for everyone, even when we work overtime imagining new ones. And now you'll lay off all the truck drivers. At some point, who's gonna be left with a job? How do you imagine a society to work when half the people are redundant? Sure, robotic trucks are cool, but you have to think about some consequences.
This isn't a "buggy whip" argument, either, so don't even try. That argument looks at a time in history when there actually were jobs for everyone and then some. Maybe it's more of an overpopulation discussion.
This is absurd. Do you not value music? Maybe you don't listen to music. How is an artist supposed to go on about creating music and making a living with no financial support.
Try local music for a change. Really local. Like those guys you never heard of down at the corner pub on Friday night. They're not U2 or Garth Brooks, but hey, for a $5 cover charge and $3 beers, who's complaining?
Those guys aren't in it for the money. They have real day jobs (mostly) and play on weekends because they love music. They know they are never going to play to a stadium, and they don't care.
Do you get what you pay for? Maybe. Can you have a beer with the band after the gig? Yep! Try that with the stars.
Thing is, people who really love to play music don't care about money for it. Sure, it's nice to keep them in beer and guitar strings, and they get that. But I just don't go along with your premise that good music can only come from people who are *lucky* enough to make a living at it.
Yeah, well I find all the politically correct New Language offensive. (Okay, not so much offensive as stupid and infantile.)
I am a tranny, thank you very much. I have tranny friends who are just fine with 'tranny'. However, if someone I know doesn't like it, I will call them something else, because I was raised with some manners, after all. Just don't run around making assumptions about what other people will find offensive. I'm not going to remove useful words from my vocabulary because a few people don't like them.
Ever heard something about how it takes two to tango? In order for someone to give offense, someone else must *take* offense. That requires effort.
Lady parts = female. Male parts = male. This doesn't have anything to do with social constructs; it's reproductive biology, aka science.
Yes, there is a spectrum of intersex possibilities. That does not require us to do away with the notion of male and female. Personally, I'd like to see an option of "Other" along with "M" and "F" for IDs & such. Give everyone something to pick.
But to suggest that we need to tear down all of human society because of a few outliers is absurd.
you're effectively saying "My freedom to be stupid is worth more than the safety of others!".
I'll go along with that, because the opposite is "my safety is more important than your liberty," isn't it?
Guess what? Your safety is not more important than my liberty. The idea is flat out ridiculous on its face, and it's something the Founders warned us to watch out for. When we allow government to take liberties away from us in the name of safety, there is absolutely NO END to how far down that slope we can go.
Maybe you wouldn't allow me to cook my own food in my own home, because I might someday accidentally give someone gas at a potluck. Maybe you don't allow kids who need glasses to get them, because some other kid killed himself after being called "four-eyes". When it's about safety safety safety, ANYTHING can be pushed in the name of safety.
Oh, you say, but reasonable people know where to draw the line? How many of those are there in government?
I'm not some crazy person here. I wear my seat belt. I wear a helmet -- on motorcycles, but not bicycles. I wear safety glasses, dust masks, and ear plugs when I do my woodworking. No one forces me to do those things (except the seat belt, which I'd do even if there wasn't a law, because I can read...), but I do them because they're good ideas, and they protect *me*.
Requiring me to have traction control and ABS and 53 air bags (aka things I don't need because I can actually drive), or gods forbid 10 years down the road, an entirely self-driving car? Just because it theoretically makes *you* safer? No. A thousand times no.
You look out for your safety if you want. Buy your bubble car with all the risk programmed out of its computer. You are responsible for your vehicle's safety -- I am not. I am responsible for my safety.
If we collide, it's called an "accident", and you can't make enough laws to prevent all accidents. The only way to make sure no one faces risk in life... is to wrap everyone in a pod when they're born and never let them out.
So yeah. My freedom to "be stupid" is far more important than your safety. Screw your safety. Wear a goddamn helmet. Live in your bubble, get all your flu shots, hide behind the government, ... and stay out of my way.
I am so sick of mewling little invertebrates who think they're entitled to a life without risk.
The saga, therefore, put scientists on high alert to the possibility that pesticides might play a role in developing Parkinson's.
I'm sure we'll see, as usual, comments from the Big Ag shills telling us there's nothing wrong with pesticides, and that organic is a waste of money, etc etc etc.
The thing to remember is that all of these studies only study the effect of one or two pesticides at a time. What about cumulative effects of many dozens of different chemicals? The government can say something like "20 ppm of this chemical is safe" and "3ppb of that chemical is safe" but it is rather doubtful that exposure to "safe" levels of 20 different pesticides, cumulatively, is safe.
70 years into the so-called "Green Revolution" and it's still fraught with safety problems. All we've really managed to do is poison the environment, and cause a population explosion that is going to take some serious dealing with.
they selected themselves by taking the throne, either by force, or by treachery. That doesn't make a good or accountable leader.
But it does make a strong leader... just sayin'.
Speaking of monarchy, I laugh at the Tea Party's claim that this country was founded on Conservative Principles. Back then, a true Conservative (Tory) knew that only (Christian) God could ensure good governance and His divinely-appointed King was the only one who could do it properly.
Tories and Kings were the stuff of "conservatism" prior to the founding of the country, something most of us would agree happened following the war with England and the creation of the Constitution. So, you're not really on the right page here.
The notion is nevertheless silly. The US of A was, at the time, a radical experiment in liberalism -- according to the proper definition of the word 'liberal'. The words have gotten quite mixed up since. Today, were Thomas Jefferson (one of the most liberal) to return, and see what we call a liberal today (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid) I'm sure he'd be quite confused.
But then again, the original Tea Party wasn't about dodging taxes, either. Just about who got a say in assessing and spending them.
The difference between wanting to "dodge" taxes, and wanting to have a say in how they're spent, seems to me nothing more than a difference in who's looking at it.
I suspect we all -- not just today's Tea Party folk -- can agree that many of our tax dollars are wasted or otherwise misspent. I don't believe *anyone* could, with a straight face, argue the opposite.
Now why didn't we learn about that in college?!
Mixing metaphors is like beating dead horses into plowshares. Don't do it.
You make it sound as if the deaths of those seals was deliberate. It appears it was not.
Unless it was a deliberate effort to prevent said SEAL team from telling a different story than the official one. There could have been a different story considering that some pretty knowledgeable sources have been saying for years that bin Laden died years before the incident.
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it's happened before enough times to think it an odd coincidence.
I always figured the GOP should throw its weight behind solar power, as it leads to increased energy independence -- which used to be one of its platforms.
It still amazes me that *anyone* could think electricity from sunlight is a bad thing. It shouldn't even be political.
Anyone can own rural land. That doesn't mean you know your adze from your elbow. Just sayin'.
And no, haying is nowhere near as fuel hungry (nor water, nor petro-chemical) as row cropping. Ask any farmer who does both. Go on, do it. Go learn something instead of spouting off nonsense.
With hay, there is no plowing, no drilling, no fertilizing, and no combines. Swathers & mowers aren't doing a lot of work compared to disking, or gods forbid, moldboard plowing. You'd have two passes of raking a few days apart, then bale & load. For an equivalent acreage, the tractors used for haying are smaller and use less fuel than row cropping, because they don't work as hard. More work = more fuel. Do I need to make this simpler?
I think I've spent enough time staring through the windshield of ol' Johnny Popper to know what I'm talking about.
There is more than enough land to graze every cow we eat. You say you own land in WV... have you ever been out here in the West? Hell, I think my cousins own a chunk of Montana bigger than your state.
There is only ONE reason we don't -- only one reason that cattle are fed grain in feedlots: the grain is subsidized by tax revenue. The corn and soybeans fed to cattle are overproduced and underpriced to benefit the ag giants like ADM. It's enshrined in the Farm Bill, and has been a part of official USDA policy since the Nixon administration. That's the only reason feedlots are economically viable in the first place. Otherwise, all our beef would be grass-fed.
Grass fed beef takes a few more months to market weight, but there wouldn't be any less of it. People might eat less, because it would be a bit more expensive than it is now -- primarily because the price would not be hidden by the subsidized cheap feed. Just as gasoline would cost $7+ a gallon if we factored in the cost of using the military to protect our oil supply.
Really... I'm not sure what your "beef" is. ( :-D ) I'm not telling you anything that you can't verify if you put half an ounce of effort into learning something.
Being more efficient, it allows to feed more people with the same land. Alternatively, one could feed the same number of people with less land.
That sounds nice, but it's nonsense. Feeding people with plant crops requires good soil, climate, and irrigation, not to mention considerably more human labor. The majority of the world's land used for agriculture is only suited to grazing -- that is to say, the only way to get food from this land is with animals.
Grazing also uses less fossil fuel than row crops, and keeps the carbon cycle close to the land. Also, moving x number of calories from farm to city is accomplished in fewer truck loads with the more nutrionally-dense meat.
Sorry, but facts kinda get in the way of the vegetarian propaganda.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html
...fight with transvestite warlords who go on killing sprees for a few tanks of gas. Now THAT IS HYPERBOLE!
You mean my hard work storing underground caches of ammunition and pantyhose will all be for naught?
Grass-fed beef is, in point of fact, less carbon-intensive than vegetarian fare. And when grazing is managed well, it's net-negative as good management sequesters MORE carbon in the soil, even when some fuel use for hay harvest is factored in.
Hay and silage are two different things, city boy.
And no, putting up hay does not require "substantial" fuel amounts compared to other crops.
...knowing where the fuck you're going, before you head out?
I remember back in the Stone Age, we had these things called "maps" that we could use to determine a route to take, and then we could write down or memorize the turns to make. Believe it or not, we still have this technology.
People are seriously getting waaaaaay too dependent on their little gadgets. I have this friend who puts his phone in a windshield bracket and turns on the GPS nav to get 3 blocks from his house to the supermarket. It's fuckin' pathetic.
Me, give me two major cross streets and I can get to anywhere in my metro area, and a good part of the rest of my state, without looking at a map. Call me old-fashioned, but it works.
Really, if you are riding a bike watching a screen, you deserve your lacerations.
Windows is finally usable at last.
And then came Windows 8....
good news! all users that dont use Netflix will be unaffected.
Good thinking! My Linux box is so secure it won't even run Netflix!
That's ridiculous. How would it automatically update itself? Windows doesn't even have the basic tools for it, like apt and cron!