PowerPollen’s ‘on-demand’ pollination tech could make bees’ lives easier | Hacker News Reader

PowerPollen’s ‘on-demand’ pollination tech could make bees’ lives easier

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21 pointsadrian_mrd15 comments

Or we could maintain islands and corridors of habitat among our farm fields so we don’t have to import bees all the time.

But that would mean we have to stop spraying pesticides and broadleaf herbicides like it’s Axe Body Spray.

It will be interesting to see if we can use genetic engineering to knock out specific pest species so that we don’t need broad pesticides anymore.

It's a constant weapons race - no matter how many pests you destroy a vast amount of available biomass would attract new ones.

The vast amounts of available, homogenous biomass would attract new ones. And there is nothing to eat hem because you just murdered everything that moves under its own power.

Insect populations react to their food supply, hey don’t predict it. Even if you found a way to make a pesticide that only killed the herbivores, the predators would starve without other food sources. Many predator species including ladybugs, lacewings, and predatory wasps feed on and/or shelter under umbel flowers. Especially in their adult form. Ladybugs don’t actually eat many aphids. They leave that to their children.

So you kill every insect, and then the pest species come back in numbers before their natural enemies even get their pants on.

This presents less of a problem if you can borrow them from nearby healthy ecosystems, where the pests are under control. See that long enough and you start to wonder if you can just put away the pesticides and grow different plants instead.

One step closer to massive sky rise arcologies.

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

It's fascinating how the farmer by products from an industry, see it causes terrible problems, and then by more products from the same industry to solve the problem it caused in the first place.

At that point, it reads like Stockholm syndrome.

That's mostly because you shouldn't be treating an industry as if it's a single monolith.

But I'm interested, could you elaborate on what you find fascinating?

To start with, it seems pretty reasonable that someone would buy a product that has enormous positive effects but also causes a big problem.

Then, for someone who is willing to buy the original product, why would it be fascinating for them to buy a product that mitigates the problem? Assuming the mitigation actually works, I can only think of two reasons not to buy it. One is spite. The other is the idea that because you played a big role in causing the problem you deserve to suffer and aren't allowed to use mitigations. Both of those are clearly bad reasons.

I guess I could see farmers demanding that the mitigation product be merged into the original product, now that the technology exists? But these two products are so different that I don't see how you could actually do that.

To me it's like buying a google product, complaining it secretly attacks your privacy, then buy a subscription from google that mitigates that.

Or to buy drinkable water in bottle from the same company that polluted your river.

> To me it's like buy google product, complaining it secretly attacks your privacy, then buy a subscription from google that mitigate that.

In that case the mitigations could be merged into the product. And it's not about "secretly" attacking your privacy; to make the analogy work you're someone that chooses to keep buying even though it's open knowledge that it attacks your privacy.

> Or to buy drinkable water in bottle from the same company that polluted your river.

Are you buying the pollution in the first place because it benefits you even more in some other way? If not then it's a completely different scenario.

Ok, then buy insulin shots from the same company that sold you ice cream and soda.

It creates all the wrong incentives and a dangerous positive feedback loop.

> Ok, then buy insulin shots from the same company that sold you ice cream and soda.

> It creates all the wrong incentives and a dangerous positive feedback loop.

It does create some bad incentives for that company.

(While creating really good incentives for other companies to come along and offer their own insulin, or ice cream that doesn't make you need insulin.)

But I don't find it strange that the customer decides they'd rather buy insulin than not have insulin! That's not stockholm syndrome!

(And don't say "stop buying ice cream", for the analogy to work the original product has to benefit the buyer even with full knowledge of the consequences.)

Not only bees are hurt by pesticides, now we will steal their work and they will degenerate.

Humans are short sighted and ignoring the holistic picture, thus the doomsday is getting closer.

Is the bee angle here just to draw more clicks?

> Crops like corn, wheat, and rice rely on wind to bring pollen to the field.

Or stop dousing everything in herbicides and pesticides, that would be more helpful

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