A better title would've been: Breaking Hacker News: Building defect detected at Fortune 500 marketing firm.
212 karma · joined February 18, 2010
Since neonicotinoid pesticides were introduced in 1992, 10 million honey-bee colonies have died globally.
Bumblebee and bird populations have crashed in every country where "neonics" are used. Researchers at Stirling University fed bumblebees minute doses of neonicotinoids. The colonies produced 85% fewer queens than usual. Professor Dave Goulson said: " Only queens survive the winter, so reducing their number by 85% means far fewer colonies next year - the long-term effects are likely to be profound."
The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust recently appointed Professor Michael Usher as its chairman. Horticulture Week reported: "Professor Usher said that neonicotinoids, implicated in bee deaths, should continue to be used as insecticides. The former SNH chief scientist argued that neonicotinoids have a place in crop protection, despite damning research released this spring from Stirling University."
Prof Usher was quoted as saying: "We need pollinators but we need our crops too."
The Trust itself seems confused; the pesticide issue is not mentioned on its website, even though Prof Goulson was the trust's founder. The impact of neonicotinoids on bees, birds and wildlife is catastrophic; we are facing ecological Armageddon. Usher must resign, or be sacked; if not, the Trust will be dismissed as mere "greenwash". The trustees must encourage staff to actively campaign against these pesticides. If they don't, the Trust may find its membership sliding to extinction faster than the bumblebees.
Graham White, Friends of the Bees
Philip Chandler, Friends of the Bees
Dr Rosemary Mason, life member, BBCT
Palle Uhd Jepsen, past adviser on nature conservation to the Danish Government and life member, BBCT
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/stinging-rebuk...
Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
Jim Wilson/The New York Times A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year was particularly bad. By MICHAEL WINES Published: March 28, 2013 101 Comments FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS
¶ BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times Beekeepers with Big Sky Honey worked with hives used to pollinate almond groves in Bakersfield, Calif. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » ¶ A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
¶ The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.
¶ “They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”
¶ In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.
¶ In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.
¶ The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”
¶ Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.
¶ Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.
¶ “We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week.
¶ “They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.”
¶ Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.
¶ Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.
¶ Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.
¶ Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.
¶ This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.
¶ “But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.
Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses. Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bees on a honeycomb pulled from a hive at Big Sky Honey.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times Bill Dahle, the owner, described a startling loss of honeybees last year. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (101) » But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.
While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.
The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.
Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.
Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.
“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”
Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.
He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.
A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife.
The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France.
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
The decline of honey bee since 1947 has nothing to do with the top two points this guys claims. (Removable frames and opening the top)
After WWII, there was a drop off of number of beekeepers. This was due to changing agriculture and the dynamics of the family farm, with a huge surge towards cities and jobs. I will not even try to guess about the down fall of beekeeping due to removable tops, except to say that this is a key point in the narrow minded approach of the Warre hive crowd.
Up till the mid 1980's, beekeeping was healthy and productive. Losing 10% of your hives were considered a bad year. The worst thing that could of happened was getting AFB. (Which by the way was controlled by the removable frame Langstroth hive. AFB prior to removable frames were as high as 50% in some areas, and the basis of most inspection programs years ago. It was a serious matter destroying beekeeping back in it's day. The removable frame (and being able to inspect hives) was why AFB is controlled...even to this day.)
Then we had the introduction of varroa mites, trachea mites, various viral and bacterial issues associated with mites, a new nosema, and now small hive beetle. That does not even scratch the surface in regards to pesticides and the new classes of chemicals out there.
But the Warre crowd sprinkles the conversation with all the key words and talking points, to bash anyone not using a Warre hive, and tailors, or better yet,,,"warps" all information to best fit their ideology.
But how can you claim that the downfall of beekeeping is caused by the Langstroth hive with removable frames and a removable top, and yet claim the root of CCD is chemicals and farming practices. I guess the Warre hive is immune to chemicals. ;)
Anyhow...read the above post. And you can get a sense of the agenda and the promotion of the Warre hive.
I never understood that logic. If you don't enjoy a website then you shouldn't visit it. That way you will only visit websites that you do enjoy, so you have no reason to use ad block.
If you're browsing websites that you've never visited before then you shouldn't be using ad block at all until you've decided if you enjoy it or not. If you do then you should make a list of each website you visit with ad block enabled and send each of them compensation for the costs they made for your free entertainment.
If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!
The main problem we have here is that debit cards are a preferred payment method and each country has it's own system. From my experience and other reports I've seen up to 30% of the customers will use a debit card if that option is given. I don't know how many of them would cancel the sale if debit payment isn't possible.
Unless I'm mistaken only WorldPay offers some of the local debit cards, such as Carte Bleue in France, Bancontact in Belgium and iDeal in The Netherlands. Paymill seems to be the only one to offer ELV in Germany.
When I made the decision to switch I planned 3 years but life got in the way and eventually it took me 5 years before I was there. People sometimes comment 5 years is a long time to achieve your goals and I always answer that doing something you don't enjoy for 40 years is a lot longer.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/23/patent-office-agrees-to-fac...
[2] http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/159628/teachbo...
That's what the German government is saying. They're not outlawing the use of real names.
This was two years ago since I last tried the plugin so I don't know how support is now, but the way it's written is unsuitable as a reliable ecommerce platform. I tried to set up a jewelry shop for a client who had bracelets in different colors and designs. It wasn't until the website slowed down to a crawl that I found that the system created 30 bracelets x 8 colors x 15 designs = 3600 records in the database. Every time you tried to update a price all 3600 records needed to be updated. And as most people know doing anything 3600 times in WordPress is a pain.
Woo-commerce and MarketPress are much better, but at the moment there are no good e-commerce solutions for WordPress. WordPress has become decent for use as a CMS but if you're looking for an e-commerce solution your best bet would be a stand-alone system like OpenCart or managed like Shopify or Magento Go.
This is the difference, or the similarity however you look at it, between Google and Microsoft. You claim that the barriers Microsoft put up to prevent users from switching were significant, but Google's aren't. I disagree. In the literal sense no one was locked in with Windows and users were free to install other browsers or even switch to Linux or Mac.
The complaint was that Microsoft was making it difficult for the average user to do so. That's the same complaint these companies have about Google. For you it might be an easy task to download your data from Gmail or Chrome but I'm sure for the majority of users switching search engines is just as obscure as switching browsers.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats---Individual-Statistica...
Just as Hollywood could only have become what it is in the US because it fits the (West Coast) American mentality, so too could a Facebook or Twitter or Instagram only come out of the American way of doing business. I don't see anything wrong with that and I've been able to do business here for almost 20 years. The trick is to not treat the environment here as something it's not and has no intention to become.
Never mind having had a clean track record for years, your reputation, credit history, no chargebacks, no disputes, you will still be held to the same scrutiny until you start performing "outstanding".
Your experience only shows they've always made exceptions and the email they sent out is just to make that fact public which doesn't change a single thing.
The way it's described now is a weakness in their infrastructure of which I wonder if it's possible to prevent this from happening again.
The shortage of resources that comes from overpopulation is a problem which needs to be solved in the long term. However it wouldn't be a problem just yet if it weren't for a handful of people hording the majority of the world's wealth. The problem at the moment isn't a lack of resources, but rising prices due to a shortage of resources. If income for middle and lower class families hadn't been stagnant for the past decades then those rising prices wouldn't have been a problem. That's what people are protesting. It's not a class warfare, it's not a hatred towards people who are well off (like myself). It's about needless suffering.
It has three main types of information:
* text content explaining regulations and other areas of business [...]
* directory content
* interactive tools
£35m is still a lot for a portal but I wouldn't call it "a website".