1,045 karma · joined November 30, 2016
The crops with the most pests (in my experience) are brassicas (white butterfly), tomatoes (everything seems to attack tomatoes!), and beets (slugs).
Nasturtiums as a trap crop supposedly can draw away aphids. But remember that nasturtiums attract aphids. So it's a gamble. I guess just don't plant them too close. I've never tried.
Horseradish grows like a weed here, rhubarb also does great, you are spot on with that advice.
Zucchini is easy and you'll be amazed how fast they grow. So is squash (same family).
Tomatoes, peppers and cilantro don't grow well where I live. They like the heat.
When adding something, it adds more CEC attachment points, but also more cations and more hydrogen.
Within just the coffee grounds, many of the CEC points are occupied by hydrogen, so it is acidic. But when you compare the number of CEC points to that in the soil, the amount in your soil overwhelms. The good cations in your soil wont be affected much until you have enormous levels of coffee grounds (like >10% or something, I'd have to calculate it and I haven't).
And of course you can always just measure the pH and add cations which will displace the hydrogen (it will bond with the anion). Calcium is cheapest which is why people use agricultural lime. Dolomite will give you some magnesium which will probably produce healthier veggies. Potassium is important but too much will just bulk up the veggies rather than letting them develop more healthfully. Sodium is almost never useful.
Many people get confused about pH. Coffee grounds are acidic. But it will have negligable effect on soil pH. Something about buffering capacity (I'm sure I'll be corrected by someone). Same thing with pine needles. They are acidic but will not change soil pH.
They won't make much difference right away, but adding organic matter improves the soil over time.
In times like these I'd highly recommend getting starter from someone who already has some. Starting your own won't always yield a high-powered reliable one. I've started many over the years, but never realized that all of them were weak until I got some starter from a cafe in town. I cannot recommend enough using an established proven starter.
The bullet point about this topic was the final bullet point, and I put a clear warning in place on the bullet point (originally too, not as an edit). I did not pass off my opinion as if it were fact, nor did I claim to be an expert. I questioned why we still don't have better data on this, given how strong the coorelation is in people who have conditions that are treated with these medicines.
But I will concede one point: The list about the WHO was not the right place for me to bring up this topic, and putting it there was misleading.
The best way to boost your immune function is to be exposed to a pathogen. Then you will develop antibodies. Those antibodies boost your ability to avoid that pathogen. Vaccines work in a similar way. Of course this advice is currently useless in the context of COVID-19.
Specific foods and supplements might help here and there, but most of the evidence is that they are antimicrobial (antibiotic/antiviral/antifungal) in vitro. There's much less research in vivo. That's not to say that some foods won't help, but just not to rely on them having a significant effect in your body. The effect, if any, is probably very slight.
There is stronger evidence for a healthy lifestyle: regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, getting adequate sleep, avoiding infection, not smoking, minimizing stress. Some good evidence for sun exposure too.
Back on the foods though, you didn't mention black elderberry syrup (sambucus nigra). A 2004 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showed efficacy against influenza.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15080016 and a 2016 study (randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled) showing it reduced the duration of the common cold (often a coronavirus): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848651/ And it's quite safe -- Europeans traditionally use it for pancake syrup.
Other links I have on this topic that might be relevant:
https://www.healio.com/cardiology/vascular-medicine/news/onl...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-0147-1
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m810/rr-2
https://www.eshonline.org/spotlights/esh-statement-on-covid-...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468 A woman from Shanghai traveled to Germany for a business trip between January 19 and January 22. She had no symptoms of coronavirus during this time and only became sick on her flight back to China. She was diagnosed with COVID-19 on January 26. But on January 24, a businessman who met with the woman on January 20 and 21 developed symptoms of coronavirus. He went back to work on January 27 and later tested positive for COVID-19. “We discovered that shedding of potentially infectious virus may occur in persons who have no fever and no signs or only minor signs of infection,” the report’s authors concluded.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001899 two individuals who had recently returned to Germany from Wuhan, China, appeared to be asymptomatic, but tested positive for COVID-19 when they were given a throat swab. "We discovered that shedding of potentially infectious virus may occur in persons who have no fever and no signs or only minor signs of infection,"
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie... A majority of cases in China were transmitted by “undocumented infections” in the period before the country placed travel restrictions on Hubei province on January 23. “This high proportion of undocumented infections, many of whom were likely not severely symptomatic, appears to have facilitated the rapid spread of the virus throughout China"
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v... a significant number of infections can be attributed to people who had not yet developed symptoms
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2003762 Bill Gates "COVID-19 is transmitted quite efficiently," he wrote. "There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even pre-symptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people."
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/28/823292062/who-reviews-availab...
I don't think the WHO is trying to get people sick, or that China is doing this to the USA, or anything like that. I do think that something doesn't smell right, but I'm unwilling to make any kind of conclusion on what it might be.
As for the person-to-person thing, I lived through the storm of data and information and distinctly remember them claiming there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission after I had seen multiple bits of evidence out of China. To prove that, I'd have to do a lot of wayback machine work.
People have been contagious before symptoms and also without showing any symptoms. I thought this knowledge was widespread at this point. The 3rd case and 5th case in NZ were a couple where the 5th case (wife) travelled to Iran. The man got sick after she returned. She was not sick. They tested her and she was positive and became the 5th case. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object... https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object... Probably sexual transmission, so not too suprising. But there are many other reports which the CDC acknowledges on this page: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
The question on ACE/ACE2 has references itself: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
1. In one experiment in a hospital room detected virus on surfaces but not in the air, but it did so many (I vaguely recall it was 4) hours after the patient was in the room. I think I heard this in answer to a press question during a New Zealand official 1pm broadcast on COVID-19. They didn't categorically claim it can't be atomized, but suggested strongly that this wasn't expected to be a significant vector for transmission.
2. The other source was a paper someone linked to on Twitter. And I neglected to download it. But someone physically atomized material with the virus and then after some time period was able to detect the virus still atomized in the air. This proved it was possible to remain atomized, but not that sick people actually atomize the virus well. Again, perhaps not a significant mode of transmission.
I'll keep looking. I'll temporarily retract that bullet point.
The amount of misinformation coming out of the WHO has been staggering and hard to account for, but I will stop short of suggesting any conspiracy.
* They held that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission for far too long in the face of evidence out of China.
* They claimed for far to long that if you weren't showing symptoms you weren't contagious. This advice has been very widely used to not quarantine people who were exposed to a person who got sick shortly after interactions... to devastating effect around the world.
* They claimed it does not spread through atomized particles, only droplets. This has been demonstrated to be false by experiment.
* They said masks are not effective.
* They said you didn't need to cover your eyes. Medical staff now wear full face shields.
* They said travel bans don't work. This defies basic logic.
* They delayed declaraing the pandemic to be a pandemic.
* They've been completely silent about ACE inhibitors and ARBs upregulating the expression of ACE2 receptors, and that available evidence strongly suggests that people on these medicines have much more severe reactions to the disease. WARNING: I cannot say whether these drugs are the cause -- it may well not be the case -- but shoudn't this have been seriously investigated by now?
"Upregulation of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) 2 in hepatic fibrosis by ACE inhibitors"
This comment is however NOT a defense of bots. I think bot detection and deletion of bot accounts would be a good thing.
But the concern seems out of proportion.
Society is full of disingenuous message amplification systems: a large subset of advertising (TV, magazine, billboards, direct marketing, etc), biased news media, spam, and now twitter bots.
Twitter bots are a bit worse than the others because we can no longer tell what opinions are actually popular and which ones are manipulated... via Twitter. But the ability to make such judgements via Twitter has only been with us since 2006. The basic problem is not a novel one.
The bot problem cuts both ways because people will overly compensate. I've been accused of being a bot, signalling to everyone that it's perfectly OK to ignore the content of my argument. I fear many other right-leaning people are getting the same treatment. This treatment further divides society (actual bots do too, which I am NOT defending; I'm just showing that the issue cuts both ways). Other commenters in this thread have been flagged and their comments are dead apparently because (if you believe surrounding comments) they are seen as a bot.
The day that Twitter becomes a voting platform, or voting platforms allow bots... that is the day that I will panic about bots.
All that being said, carry on. Let's squash the bot problem. Let's also fix advertising. Let's also fix news media bias. And spam.
When I read articles about species dying, ice melting, etc, I think to myself "what would it be like to travel to and live on that strange new world, with less ice, different species, wild weather?"
At the same time I've converted pasture into hedgerow and I plan to bury the wood in trenches.
You should be concerned about the fraction of land area on which you are at high risk. If 100 people have it, and each person creates a high risk across A area (and the areas don't overlap), that is 100*A / country-area. Which is proportional to cases/area (presuming A is constant) the first statistic he used.
EDIT: if you know you are going to interact with N people, the cases per population figure is relevant again.
You have to know what the servers public key is in a reliable way. That doesn't necessarily mean a third party has to be involved. Maybe you call them on the phone and check the fingerprint. Maybe it's your server and you sneakernet the key to your client. And to appease the dumb protocol you wrap it up as a certificate (self-signed) and accept yourself as trustworthy (what a concept!).
Even if you use a third party, it doesn't have to be some big company that everybody is functionally obligated to trust. It could be a mutual friend making an introduction.
And certificates are not the only or necessarily the right solution to this problem in all domains. For example, if you have to go and check OCSP every time to see if the certificate might have been revoked, then you are relying on an online trusted source; but if you have an online trusted source, why don't they just tell you the current key and dispense with the certificate mechanism altogether?
X.509 was designed for X.500 and concepts that were relevant for X.500 continue to plague us all. I deployed corporate PKIs back in the 1990s for Sun and Pfizer and worked with other clients. What I remember best from those times was how ridiculous the whole thing is, over-engineered by parties who clearly didn't keep focus on the fundemental problem that public key cryptography is meant to solve.
Nobody is seriously considering simply removing section 230; that would be devastating to the economy and to free speech both. Any such assertions are no more than sword rattling and idle threats.
Neither is anybody seriously talking about ceasing all moderation entirely. Platforms would become flooded with spam, among other things making them virtually unusable.
Where this all gets very complicated very fast, IMHO, is in how you define political neutrality. And I'll stop here because that's much too long of a discussion to have in a HN comment.
The way to reduce bad beliefs is to, IMHO:
1. Ingratiate and investigate. Respect the people, become their friend, listen to their full arguments (don't imagine straw men), understand their motivations. You might even discover the belief isn't so bad. If you don't, continue on to:
2. Suggest alternate ways of viewing the situation. People will always argue their point and appear to not accept your view. But I've found they almost always actually move slightly towards your point, oftentimes after the conversation, even if they won't admit it. It takes time for a worldview to shift.
Arguing makes no sense prior to ingratiating yourself, because if you are an enemy your view will not be appreciated.
In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.