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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is surprised that high explosives are available has not had to deal with a bunch of large stumps. -- they're a nightmare even with a large excavator, explosives are a life saver.

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Yup. I was surprised when my cousin showed me my uncle’s TNT stash, but then explained how they cleared stumps off the family farm.

One of my rural buddies told me how he spent a summer mixing diesel and fertilizer to clear fields, approaching it like a lab experiment and keeping detailed notes.

Honestly, both sounded like a lot of fun.

Or a beaver dam. Imagine a bunch of those stumps all concreted together with mud.

Twenty-plus years ago I hiked the Appalachian Trail. Back then, it was common practice to hitch a ride into town for resupply. One time when my partner and I were hiking in Virginia, we got picked up by a state department of conservation employee. During the ride I asked him what he did and he said “I destroy beaver dams.” When I asked him how he did it he said “with dynamite.” I laughed—how ridiculous, right?—and he looked at me very seriously and said “it’s not funny; beaver dams are difficult to remove.” For years I thought that this was some dumb redneck thing until I met another former DCR employee back home who told me the same story.

I dunno, the image of some beaver watching a guy in green and brown blow up its hard work with dynamite is pretty damned funny. His little face all surprised and angry.

I read a book a while back about the founder of San Juan Airlines, a local commuter airline, in the Puget Sound area. There was an entire chapter that described the process of the founder clearing the Friday Harbor runway on San Juan island of trees, mostly working alone, using TNT and heavy equipment.

https://www.amazon.com/Island-Bush-Pilot-Founder-Airlines/dp...

Or you can use stump remover (Potassium nitrate) which allows to use fire to destroy them safely.

It doesn’t work very well, and it can cause underground fires which pop up a year+ later.

It works well enough to be the only legal way of dealing with them in most of EU, and the consequences of mishandling are no doubt more severe with high explosive than simply “can cause underground fire”.

Uh, the EU has plenty of bans of very useful things. I know of at least one 500+ acre wildfire in California that was caused by burning roots.

As to how much it matters or not? No clue.

> Uh, the EU has plenty of bans of very useful things.

Yeah, like AR-15 and high explosives, surprisingly violent death rate is much lower here…

Like speech, equity compensation...

AR-15s are actually not banned in many parts of the EU.

> Like speech

Speech, in both the EU and the US is free under the limits set by law, the US isn't an “absolute free speech land”, you will definitely be jailed for speech that goes against the law (for instance death threats, see [1]).

> equity compensation...

What are you talking about, I've been given equity more than once…

[1]: https://nypost.com/2024/12/12/us-news/florida-mom-arrested-f...

Iv got a photo from an unnamed image board.

The dude showed of this EU compliant collection.

Multiple pistols and rifles, and what some state would classify as weapons of war, an SBR, or a assault weapon.

All obtained legally via permits and a local cop signing off on the paperwork.

Yeah, they have a different system. In broad outline, there are classes of weapons (generally four -- classes A, B, C and D -- with subclasses within them) and then courses and certificates required for each class of weapon. For example, an AR-15 might be class C2 -- so it does requires a lot of course work -- but usually it's not banned.

It's actually interesting to met that, in the American discourse, we never discourse an EU-style classification system. Whenever people in the US propose new gun regulation, it always a maximalist approach -- banning the AR-15 completely.

Not true - various states have banned (and currently do ban) all sorts of variants/classifications, the Fed gov’t has several classifications, etc.

I'm not aware of any US states that have a graded A, B, C, D system with courses and qualifications -- instead, they just ban everything that might be in a European B or C classification. This is how the old federal AWB worked, as well -- it didn't say, you can purchase an AR-15 if you take certain classes, it said you just can't buy it at all.

The European system, broadly speaking, is not like that.

There are federal classes for dealers and manufacturers -- manufacturers of silencers, of automatic weapons, of missiles and rockets, &c, and dealers of these articles -- but that also is not like the European classification system I am talking about, which is for end users.

The NFA, which does apply special regulation to silencers, short-barreled rifles and some other items, which allows them to be owned by end users, and that is kind of similar but there is a real difference: you file for a tax stamp and wait for a background check to complete, without having to worry about taking a particular course and getting a certain grade.

And a whole slew of common chemicals used in harmless synthesis, and in many countries even things like common knives.

> And a whole slew of common chemicals used in harmless synthesis

The US also regulate chemicals, and knives are free to sell everywhere, it's just forbidden to be carried in public.

You can buy this knife, but you can't carry it home.

Many things which were common in my youth are vanishing forever.

> You can buy this knife, but you can't carry it home.

How can otherwise reasonable people come to believe nonsense like this just because it fits their worldviews will always remain a mystery for me.

Not in the EU anymore, but this was a consistent issue in the UK - at least in London with kitchen knives.

Of course you can carry it home…

"Works well" may also depend on the species and sizes of the trees in an area as well as the soil composition.

Are you familiar with Centralia?

...sure, maybe don't use this technique if you live on top of a large amount of abandoned coal mines.

AKA Saltpeter. I've heard that you can just dig the stump out after a few months, in addition to using fire. I bought some to remove a stump a few years ago, but when I went to drill the stump I found it had already rotted enough that I didn't need it. This was a small, maybe 10" diameter, stump that had sat for a couple years.

Going to see how well it works soon though; a few weeks ago had a ~2ft diameter stump left when my 65ft spruce snapped in a wind storm. Turns out about halfway up it had branched off into two trunks, and that junction was rotting, the wind storm caused that junction to snap half way up. In looking, my neighbor has a tree with the same dual-trunk situation, though hers is more likely to land on her house.

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