Could This Be the End of Frankincense? | Hacker News Reader

Could This Be the End of Frankincense?

nytimes.com

24 pointspseudolus19 comments

The Nature article the NYTimes is reporting on:

Frankincense in peril https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0322-2

And the data and R script here: https://github.com/groenendijk/Frankincense-demography

It seems crazy to me that this is happening.

Why does the farmer not realise his crop isnt being replaced, or the Frankincense distributors, or governments? I'm not pointing the finger at any group, but you would have though someone would be on the ball.

It isn't like global warming where there isn't a profit motive and the effect is far removed from the act.

I've no insight beyond the article, but short termism + a long problem horizon could explain it.

Farmers with annual crops will notice a problem quickly. But these farmers all have thriving crops. It's just they don't have replacements.

It would be interesting to see if a lot of these are newish farmers vs. multigenerational farms that actually had to develop a practice of fostering a new generation.

It's also possible that new generations used to be automatic, whereas the stresses have arrived suddenly and are a novel threat.

I think the basic problem is that if problems aren't hurting today then humans generally are bad at noticing and dealing with them, if the threat is long term and needs preventative action well in advance.

None of the countries described in the survey are politically stable, and all of them have experienced population explosions.

If you don’t know how to feed your family today are you going to notice things that may only affect you in a decade or a few?

Can we get an option to filter stories from certain domains? I can't read stories from nytimes.com, so I'd just rather not have them listed on the front page.

"You've read your three this month." "You're in private mode, please log in."

Hey, I'm just curious why someone thought this was worthy of HN. (Maybe submitters could start commenting on their own posts about the content of their link?) If you don't let me read the article, that's OK - you've saved me from procrastination.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you're using Chrome 74+, you can set a flag that prevents sites from detecting that you're using Incognito mode.

Go to chrome://flags and enable "Filesystem API in Incognito". That's it! Sites won't know you're in Incognito anymore (until they find a new sneaky way).

I have to use a specific web browser, and know to set a random flag, to enable a specific feature (which isn't part of any web specification yet), so that websites will know a lie about the local state of my web browser, and agree to serve me content?

This is worse than the "Best viewed in ___" days. This is not the web that I signed up to help develop.

Some psywalls will accept you if you mimic Google bot's UA.

(Accidental typo left in because it seems appropriate)

That worked for me! Thanks!

You can always delete their cookies. In Chrome click the little padlock to the left of 'https://www.nytimes' then 'cookies' then click the remove button twice.

or this https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

I hear you, as a frequent poster of nytimes/wsj etc. stories that are paywalled. On the other hand — in the case of nytimes — if you haven't read your monthly three, they are there.... I'm always hoping some clever HN reader will post an unblocked version on archive.org or some other workaround. Sometimes Outline works on blocked articles.

On iOS Safari, click the readability icon in the url bar. Usually works (not always).

Agreed. I’ve started flagging all this garbage that doesn’t allow people to read it without being stalked.

If you do that you will lose flagging rights on HN. The policy about paywalls has been established the years: (1) if there's a workaround it's ok; (2) complaints about it are off topic because they make every thread the same.

Yes, paywalls suck and this is annoying. But it sucks less than the available alternatives. HN would be worse off without NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Can we have an exception for malicious behaviour like in this particular link?

As far as I know this isn’t a standard paywall where you either agree to ads (whose tracking you can kinda mitigate using private browsing) or pay - this is a “pay” wall where you have no choice but to get tracked (since the explicitly block private browsing) or login and thus get tracked even more.

In fact I’m also critical of the Washington Post’s paywall/GDPR-wall which offers a more expensive EU-only (thus aimed at GDPR compliance) subscription promising ad-free content after having already loaded trackers on the paywall page itself.

I don't think the NYT paywall is malicious. Publications like that decide how high to build the wall and what workarounds to leave open. They're in a difficult position.

The paywalls suck and it sucks to have to play these games, but until there's a whole-market solution such as the one that finally emerged for music, it's going to continue.

We really shouldn't encourage the whole paywalled 'articles about articles' phenomenon, especially when said paywalls harm our political discourse in other places by being dishonest about their sources.

https://fair.org/home/sidney-embers-secret-sources/

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