The author lost me at the end when they said to stop pulling up dandelions. Dandelions are not a native species (at least in North America) and are not a good food source for native pollinators.
I think someone else has already pointed out that the author is writing from a non US perspective.
But at the risk of being patronising, I wanted to say that we should all try to resist the "the author lost me when" reaction. I catch myself doing this too, but I don't think it's useful.
Reading an article isn't a competition where you win if you don't get your mind changed. Someone might have valid thoughts and opinions even if there are details of the article you disagree with.
Especially in the current climate, I feel like we could benefit from being a little more charitable.
Thank you for saying this. It’s hard, but I’ve learned it’s a lot better to approach new information (and thus, articles) with curiosity, rather than skepticism.
Hey, I'm the author. I'm indeed writing from Hungary, Europe, and here dandelions are native, and they are one of the main sources of early food, especially for the bumblebee queens and the mining bees. My lawn is littered with dandelions and there is so much activity on them. The other main food source at this moment is plum blossoms, but those are a favorite of the honey bees and they often aggressively chase away the native bees. So most of the native bees are therefore forced to keep lower to the ground and make use of the dandelions, daisies and violets. I see all my neighbors pulling out the dandelions, and thereby removing the only really abundant food source the native bees have left. That's why I said to stop pulling up dandelions.
does this apply in the UK as well? I'm a fan of dandelions but everyone is determined to pull them out of our lawn but me!
but then I've also been told by a local bee keeper that the whole plant flowers for the bees policy isn't a good idea since that's how mites and other nasties can be transferred between hives?
Yes, there are about 250 native species of dandelions in the UK.
That is how the mites are transferred. They hitch a ride when a bee leaves the hive, drop off at a flower and wait for another bee to be taken to that hive. But the thing is, there are about a 1000 different kinds of mites (that we know off) and most of them are beneficial to the bees, not harmful. There are 3 big groups. The ones like the Varroa who will feed on the bees, there is a group that will neither harm nor help the bees, and is only after stealing the food the bees bring in, and there is a group who will clean the hives, eating the waste and harmful organisms. A healthy nest of bees isn't really at risk of the harmful mites. It's only when they get stressed or sick that there is the risk of the Varroa mites to wipe out the colony.
So it comes down to human intervention for the most part. When a bee-keeper sees a Varroa mite, he will treat the hive, and by doing so, also kills off the mites that keep the hive healthy and disturbing the balance. As a result, the bees, who are already living in an unnatural population density, get even more weak, since there is nothing left to keep the nest clean. The Varroa mites, if they find their way into the hive again, have now an easy prey and can easily wipe out an entire hive.
For overcoming pitchiness, the "one weird trick" I learned from a singing teacher is to imagine you are moving in the opposite direction from the actual pitch. If you're going higher, imagine you're going lower and vice versa.
This helped me overcome the tendency to constrict the throat when reaching for a higher note or to go flat when heading lower.
No, DHS did not "steal" your boat. They confiscated it and you'll get it back by following some lengthy and convoluted appeal process.
But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.
They absolutely did "steal" his boat, for some definition of the word "steal."
The DHS agent will not be charged with theft or larceny. But he was in lawful possession of a boat, someone with a gun ordered him off the boat, and he is no longer in possession of a boat.
You raise an interesting point, by the way. America is partly founded on the idea that laws do not create rights, but instead recognize natural rights. If this story is accurate and the DHS agent did not recognize his natural rights, that is an offense. But if the law did not recognize his natural rights, that is an even greater offense.
I'm not sure - I think this is 'need a lawyer' territory.
But I would put forth the point that it's possible for an item to not be formally owned by anyone. Control is a kind of ownership, but it's not necessarily lawful ownership, otherwise a thief would lawfully own your car once he's driven off in it.
Perhaps it might be that he lawfully owns it, but can't lawfully control it until he gets the customs sign-off? But if he lawfully owned it while it's impounded, would that not mean he would have to pay licensing/registration for it while it sat there?
I frequently travel across the border in both directions between BC & Washington. To be honest I believe that your experience often comes down to the particular agent you have to deal with in your crossing & how they feel that day. I've had US CBP agents question me at length for a simple crossing ("Are you sure you have never been arrested? Really sure? ") and Canadian CBSA agents pat me down and search every square inch of my car.
Crossing the border is a bit easier with a Nexus card, but again your experience really depends upon the agent you come upon any given day.
Some people just shouldn't be working in positions of 'authority'.
When CBSA searched your car were they doing it as a power trip or were they doing it for some unexplained reason? The latter is just part of the job. I travel quite often to the states and find that the CBSA agents are almost uniformly polite and often friendly. Going the other way, I find CBP agents are generally surly and aggressive.
These guys are claiming 4 to 8 hours, 4,000 feet etc. http://www.uniteddrones.com/aether-aero/
Heck even 10 minutes flying and one day solar recharge would be awesome in an urban area for stealthy long term observation.
It's important to distinguish two, seemingly contradictory positions:
1 People won't love me for who I am. In fact, it's the job of the rest of the world to show me where I need to improve. But, on the other hand ...
2 I should love people for who they are. It's not my business to make people over. My job is to make myself over. There's more than enough work to be done there. Working on other people's supposed failings is just a distraction from my real business.
That's a rough paraphrase of Byron Katie's "Work", an approach that has helped me tremendously for the last dozen years or so. Whenever I get miserable it's usually a clue that I'm working on someone else's 'business'.
1. I believe that was addressed in the video. These are very short range devices that can be recharged by solar energy or by sitting on power lines.
2. See the video.
3. You might be able to deny access to buildings with mosquito nets but you're not going to stop close range surveillance, painting targets and other uses. Mosquito nets themselves would be relatively trivial to dismantle with a swarm of these (you'd only need to land one with explosives on the net).
1. The short range is a killer. You already need to know where the bad guys are, within an area of a few blocks. And solar panels with such small form factor are a joke in comparison with the energy demands of powered flight. (Sure, there are solar powered drones, but they need huge wings, perfect weather, and are little more than powered gliders.)
2. I didn't see any good counter-arguments there. Care to detail.
3. Explosions will alert the building's occupants, and you just sacrificed a complex, expensive device for a $0.50 mosquito net.
but those problems were just talked about, not solved. This is the US government we're talking about, so I bet they will never get far, and by the time they have something operational, you'll be able to but something 10x better on Amazon.
The US government also envisioned and funded the development of computer networking (though the actual work was done by companies), so it's ironic for someone to imply the government can't innovate on an internet forum.
I say this as someone who's basically libertarian.
But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."
Exactly. My mom is dying from terminal breast cancer and she avoided going to the doctor for more than a year for chest pains because she had anxiety issues and was too worried about the financial aspects to confirm whether it was anxiety issues or something more serious. It had to turn from chest pains to shortness of breath before she finally set aside the cash to get it checked out. Turns out the breast cancer had metastasized and ended up in her lung, bones and liver by the time they diagnosed the cause. By that point the cancer in her lung was the size of an orange.
Similar case with my uncle and colon cancer. The anxiety of knowing made the situation worse.
For most of us, the money can be attained, as evident by the electronic devices littering our homes and offices.
Related, I've found that many young people don't want to know what their credit card or bank balance is, for fear of seeing how little money they have left (or saved).
Everyone requires food, clothing and shelter, and yet we use other mechanisms to insure that our citizens don't go hungry. While not necessary for survival, education is guaranteed by the states, and we use a different model for its delivery.
Neither of those is to say that necessarily Obamacare is the wrong solution but its certainly not the only path.
Food insecurity is not the same thing as going hungry. Changing your food buying patterns, ie foregoing a purchase you might have otherwise made, to buy food is not pleasant, but it is not hunger.
When I was a kid, I used to read paper books in bed, at the dinner table, relaxing on the couch, sitting on the toilet, riding the bus, in my room when I was supposed to be doing my homework etc. Apparently that wasn't a problem but now if I use a digital device in much the same way, it's an ominous sign of the collapse of society and the coming apocalypse. Damn those corrosive pixels!
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