elago

"* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species."

So the orchards that cultivate a healthy ecosystem through a diversity of species, and care given to soil health, which grow, produce, and sell fruit for only slightly above factory farming rates aren't part of the food supply?

If you only define food supply = factory farming monoculture, then absolutely the "least bad herbicides and pesticides" are the best thing possible.

Eating almost entirely locally costs far less per year than the difference between and entry level vs top of the line laptop. Eating from nearby food producers who take care of the land is not very expensive relative to other luxuries people invest in. Habitat loss may be inevitable, but factory scale, chemical based monoculture does not implicate all of us, and personal action is quite reasonable.

It's probably less effort than changing your diet for other reasons, but people seem to be more motivated to change their diet for body image reasons, or the soylent-esque lifestyle optimization, etc.

It baffles me that more people aren't raging environmentalist lunatics as I am.

FYI if you think this is bullshit, here's a public demonstration of an alternative to factory farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riW_yiCN5E There's a free hour long video that's more in depth but I realize even expecting 10 more minutes of anyone's attention is asking a lot.

Okay, if that was your point all along then I understand.

Not to move the goalposts, just to share some food for thought. Making a distinction between native and invasive species implies there is some particular snapshot in time when things were "right", when evolution was "done", when new species stopped being introduced into ecosystem by various means and competing with each other.

I think we're concerned with different points. You're saying the pollinator services business is fine and profitable despite the use of insecticides.

I'm saying it's sad that a diverse ecosystem consisting of many pollinators which allowed trees and bushes to bear fruits and berries without paying for a company to truck in a bunch of bees has been replaced by something more profitable, but less resilient and healthy.

In my strange corner of the world that hasn't been "agronomically optimized", there aren't giant monoculture farms spraying insecticides, and there are dozens of species acting as pollinators.

No one pays for "pollinator services".

I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.

Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.

Referring to "price of pollination services" means the natural ecosystem has failed.

Most programmers/coders/software engineers could easily be considered capitalists by this quote from your article:

"X-ray techs can't take X-rays without access to expensive X-ray machines in the hospital, owned by the hospital's shareholders. Cement masons can't lay the foundations for houses without access to expensive concrete mixing trucks. Those of us who don't have property we can make money from are forced to sell our ability to work to a capitalist--we become wage workers. "

Even when I was the most de-humanized corporate drone at the largest company I've ever worked for, all I did was type on a keyboard. And I can easily afford those means of production.

I liked that article, it had great info on the workings of the construction industry, but I can't say I understand what, if any, action it was suggesting as a better alternative to build shelter?

"and can grow indefinitely" It's accurate only given this flawed assumption.

The site of every airplane crash doesn't become an inhabitable danger lasting for multiple lifetimes.

What is your justification? You already know JSON and you don't wanna learn another notation? You know XML but the use of "<>" are too offensive?

If you're such a hacker why not just write a script for yourself that convert javascript to xml instead of making a new standard and fracturing things even more :P

Or would you care to share a hack you've done with jsonfeed that I can't do with my RSS reader?

Cool tech, scary direction for a business model. Don't like the idea of only being able to compile code as long as I'm paying rent for the compiler.

At least with the web hellscape you can download the ridiculously-large-number of js libraries and be able to deploy your app to any server whenever you want.

I will happily pay for tools but I won't rent tools.

But the dangerous tables saws were still used to build things by lots of people before 2009 when riving knifes were mandated.

I don't see why it's a crime to build a battery pack if you aren't working for Tesla.

I still don't get how you can bring up mis-wired inverter as anything related to a DIY battery pack. Without using any batteries, I can go take a wire strippers and 2 extension cords, make a male-male 120VAC cable, plug it into the gas generator in my shed and plug it into an outlet in my house when the powers out and shock a lineman.

In the country I live in we have building codes that describe how the work must be done. An owner without a license is allowed to perform that work and have it inspected and permitted. Screwdrivers aren't like lightsabers that can only work if you're a jedi (or have a college degree or certification).

I disagree with lumping every form of DIY together. Incompetent DIY projects are dangerous therefore all DIY projects are dangerous?

If that's your interpretation then we fundamentally disagree.

"Random guy on Youtube" happened to be an intelligent and capable human being who learned all the relevant techniques and principles from available information without paying for "credentials".

Go watch the technique used for testing, evaluating, sorting, and re-using batteries used and tell me specifically what is unsafe rather than trying to spread fear because there's no college degree/certification/other form of economic gate keeping.

I'm not attacking people with credentials, only the type of people who vaguely threaten people not to twist 120VAC wires together in a wirenut unless they understand Maxwell's Equations.

All the table saws I've ever used have been super dangerous. Car crashes are a leading cause of death for young people. I could go on, these sorts of things can't be made safe while still being useful. Beyond a point, it's up to the user to understand the danger, learn behavior that minimizes risk, and pay attention when using the tool.

With all of those things, like batteries, it's not good to assume the general public can use them, so they shouldn't be as common as elevators, shopping carts, and other ubiquitous tools/machines. But it's very dis-empowering to claim only elites can use these tools.

Your final comment regarding lineman safety is completely decoupled from DIY battery pack with re-used cells. That would be a failure of the inverter in a grid-tied system. You could have an unsafe grid-tied inverter with a 100% functional battery pack with every certification in the universe and backfeed the utility lines, or I could connect a faulty battery to a proper grid-tied inverter and it would not cause the utility lines to be energized by my house when the utility shuts off the power upstream.

Additionally, you can use a home storage battery without a grid-tie inverter at all.

As a counterpoint to the hysteria expressed in most of these comments, a few years ago I was watching a youtube series by "Rinoa Super Genius" where a similar project was undertaken to create an e-bike battery from disassembled laptop batteries.

The videos are done by an interested amateur with basically a pocket knife and a large soldering iron. I'd highly recommend it if you want practical and confidence building knowledge on the actual behavior and safety of batteries, rather than this comment section which is filled with outrage and "experts" referencing their credentials and years of experience.

I'm an experimenter not an entrepreneur so I'll never claim I can produce battery packs in my basement safe enough to sell to grandma, but I've had no problem ripping apart broken electronics, charging old cells with a DIY dc power supply, and using cells in all kinds of 'dangerous' manners.

Personally I think chance of injury is far higher with dozens of other technologies used every day by non professionals: chainsaws, cars, and many other types of motorized or heavy equipment.

This comment thread is taking place on site with no (obvious or well known) google or facebook integrations.

Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?

Any comment pointing out hypocrisy is valuable and interesting in my opinion. I prefer to disregard the opinions of hypocrites.

If only there were some sort of free non-democracy-eroding microblogging platform the author could have used instead.

Could you please name the technology? I work with renewable energy and I have no idea.

Are you talking about nuclear?

"Local storage" is the name of something most web browsers implement https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_webstorage.asp

That's confusing. I'm a G Suite customer and it comes with either huge or unlimited amount of google drive storage. I can access that storage either through a browser, or with a program from google called "drive file stream" which creates a 'fake' local file system interface to online storage. Isn't that the same as dropbox? Where would dropbox fit in for a G Suite customer?

>But nobody wants that.

Oh, that's exactly what I want, and have been researching for myself. I'm taking it even further and planning on being able to switch individual circuits between battery and grid.

If that idea is dumb somehow I'd love to know more resources about why. From my perspective it's a better solution than grid tie, but I value resiliency and reliability as well as pure cost alone. If I still lived in a city where the power literally never went out for years at a time, then having a local backup would not be really attractive.

And considering the regulations, it seems like the system I'm considering would also be able to basically satisfy the desire for "i'll make the first 5khw". Select a circuit that draws at least 5 kwh/day, run it off batteries until the battery bank voltage drops below a threshold, and then switch over to the grid.

Dang, okay, that was a stupid analogy I made. It should have been something like "If you're obese and sickly, should you spend your time evangelizing the importance of diet and exercise to other unhealthy people instead of eating right and exercising yourself?" I don't think its even a good analogy anymore though.

I get that 'what-aboutism' is a logical fallacy in general, and it can prevent beneficial action from taking place. Isn't it a special case when the 'other party' is yourself? (obviously this is a US centric comment).

Wait what? How? Is this a Tennessee specific thing? This seems absurd and impossible to enforce.

If I hypothetically spend a couple hundred bucks on a solar panel, 12v lead acid battery, and basic 12VDC -> 120VAC inverter, put those items on a wagon, and drag it across my yard to use power tools where an extension cord won't reach is the power company going to arrest/fine me? Is it only illegal once I use the batteries/inverter under my own roof?

As a US citizen it is a valid argument because those "other guys" is our own country.

It's not "don't go after those guys", but "take care of our own problems first". This way, when offering solutions to other oppressive countries we wouldn't look like hypocrites.

Would you believe a massively obese and sickly person telling you the importance of diet and exercise?

What data have you found regarding superiority of the Tesla Model 3 battery pack vs the Bolt.

From my research, the Leaf is far behind, but the Bolt and Model 3 seem very similar almost to the point where I'd guess driving style and heater usage would make up the difference.

How is it crooked? The utility company pays to builds and maintains the grid infrastructure with the expectation they can use the infrastructure to sell power to consumers.

One person selling back some unspecified amount of solar with questionable reliability, without the utility company having any say when the power is provided, isn't exactly a very useful thing for a utility company, so it's surprising they even pay the same wholesale rate.

Why not get a basic battery system and use that to power some loads in your house, instead of buying power from the utility company for those loads?

How has it ever been a problem? Create a new account on a new server, post a message on your old account "hey I'm moving to <url of new account>". Conversations are usually only a day or two old before going stale, who cares whether or not toots from a year ago are linked to your account. What I gain over facebook: no ads, not being tracked across the internet via 'like' buttons, not contributing to a massive dataset exclusively available to potentially evil corporation, and interacting with interesting strangers.

In theory I agree, but in my experience the 'IoT' bits are less reliable than the underlying physical component that's being monitored.

What's more likely? A brushless motor fails, or my wifi password changes when I replace my router, I move my router and its out of range for the pool pump, the pool pump pushes out a bad update, the pool pump company goes out of business, some IoT specific electrical component fails before the actual pump fails, or something of that nature.

"It's going to end with cereal crop farmers committing suicide"

Do you think cereal crop farmers are paying migrant workers with scythe's to harvest their grain?

"Or they can start building the robots."

What do you think a combine is?

"well-capitalized startup "

Is an angel investor going to compete with government subsidies?

Hopefully this isn't too off topic, but could you explain how to even start approaching this from a RE/malware analysis perspective? I'm guessing there's no drag-and-drop de-obfuscate tool like there is for some of the common .NET obfuscators. Do you just rely on behavioral/dynamic methods?

Maybe I'm missing your point a little, however for me today Starbucks is not like McDonalds when I was a kid.

Starbucks is interchangeable with any of the many coffee chains. The service is fast, prices won't be insanely high, yet it won't be stale coffee sitting for days in a warmer.

So I'll choose Starbucks over a boutique artisan coffee house and over a gas station. But Starbucks vs Other_Coffee_Chain means nothing to me. EDIT: What I mean is I don't "decide to get my coffee at Starbucks". I decide I want to go for a walk and get coffee and I'll probably stop at the closest coffee chain.

Anyways, to bring this analogy back, what is the Spotify value add? The technical competence to host files on the internet? Putting a front end on CDN hosted media?

How is that either childish or pedantic. It just took you 7 lines to describe your interpretation of the definition of product in this case.

I think it's a reasonable point to discuss. The author's example was good: when at Starbucks, people are ordering a coffee, not a starbucks.

To me, this was an interesting point, not pedantic, because it's not true for all businesses. Unlike Starbucks, when I was a kid, McDonalds wasn't just french fries and a milkshake, the playstructures and happy meal toys made it seem like more than a place for food.

That distinction seems quite relevant to a discussion about how much 'value' Spotify (company) is adding when they take media created by artists and put it on their computers for users/listeners to download/love.