Carpenter bees are awesome, they pollinate flowers (so we can have fruits in our backyard) and have an awesome short life of minding their own business.
They also have a voracious appetite for Georgia Pine which happens to be the material my inlaws summer home is made from. Not to be outdone, woodpeckers also enjoy eating a carpenter bee and their babies, so we end up with holes from the carpenter bees along with a string of holes made by woodpeckers in search of said bees.
Im not really too worried about being stung by them, and I agree they generally dont want to mess with you unless you are actively messing with their burrow. I have taken to putting out sacrificial 2x4s each season that I pre-drill(3/4" holes seem to do the trick) to attract the bees to easier pickings. This helps quite a bit, but I still have to end up spraying a few holes in our siding and deck each year as it will soon be swiss cheese if I do not...
A couple years ago I relocated a piece of driftwood from my small backyard to the front yard because a carpenter bee couple had taken up residence in it and the male was routinely dive-bombing us in the backyard (they don't sting, but are just aggressive).
I was amazed to see that the male kept returning to the same spot for what seemed like weeks looking for its partner in the now relocated piece of driftwood. I naively had expected it to track down the piece of driftwood just 40 ft away in the front yard, and it was kind of heartbreaking to see it searching for it in desperation.
I myself don't like to be cheered on by others. I get upset when people simply tell me keep on trying. When someone is trying to do something, I think the best thing to do is to help lower the bar for them by staying at their side," he explains...
This resonates with me a lot. Every time someone cheers me on, I try to meet their expectations but after wards I feel extremely burnt out.
Am I insane for thinking permaculture? Get out of the city lifestyle mindset and turn more people into rob greenfield style mindset. Everybody’s already thinking it, people are starting to do it, and it could just be the next big thing that does wonders for people happiness and healing the environment.
Feedback: When I first went to the site I thought it wasn’t working. It was only after I created an account (which I was hesitant to do) that I was able to view the Postgres and Elasticsearch tutorial.
I went through the Postgres tutorial and it worked well, good job. I’ve never created a usable database so quickly before, this is cool.
We didn't think about signup being a barrier, I'll bring this up in our next sprint at the possibility of removing signup / signin altogether. Thank you for the feedback!
It is a barrier, you can probably see it in your page analytics. A good way to implement is to let me play with the database a little, and then if I want to save or something ask me to make an account.
My high school chemistry teacher simplified it down to the greater "rate of change" of temperature dropping, for the hot water, causes it to end up freezing faster than the cold water.
If you increase production, wouldn’t that produce more air pollution?
If we scale up this mind set and suddenly produce 100x Increase in electric cars and nuclear plants, wouldn’t we see a massive spike in air pollution much more than if we simply had 0 production of these?
I’ve been very skeptical of “produce more green energy” solution because they seem to pile on more problems under the guise that it is better in the long run.
Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less? Fewer cars, fewer things.
Consuming less is definitely a big part of climate plans I've seen. Consuming less doesn't have to mean a reduced standard of living. This article mentions heat pumps for example, which consume much less energy. Other plans I've seen also include supporting dense development (=consuming less land/resources for housing), supporting public transit (=consuming less energy for transportation), and upgrading efficiency in homes (=consuming less energy for housing). I think longer term, the cuts will have to be deeper due to population growth, but there is so much low-hanging fruit.
I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity. Most people don't like being told their lives have to get worse for a benefit that's difficult to see. It needs to paint a positive vision of the future that people can get excited about.
I think anyone supportive of consuming less is including less individual travel and proximity trade/consumption as a fundamental part of the decrease. Other popular issues nowadays seem to be meat consumption and human breeding, but the key importance of transportation seems to be still more generally acknowledged by everyone I know with an outspoken opinion on the matter or a corporate agenda.
Air conditioning as a luxury to rethink, OTOH, rarely if ever comes into discussion around here (I'm writing from a Mediterranean perspective, obviously AC can quickly become a necessity elsewhere).
Air conditioning will become much less of a luxury as the climate warms. Even in the past decade, summer temperatures high enough (especially indoors) to pose a health threat have become an increasingly regular occurrence in many parts of the world. Worse, some places are approaching the point where the confluence of air temperature, humidity, wind, and sun intensity will raise temperatures above the 35 degrees C wet bulb limit for human survival. In these conditions, air conditioning will not be a luxury but rather an essential life support system. Plans for climate-compatible energy use will need to take increasing needs for AC into account.
It actually costs way less energy to cool a house than it does to heat one so the net migration to the south from the US northeast has and will continue to actually lower US per capita use and as the US uses circa 24% of the worlds energy this will have an effect.
Almost all of our problems are energy-cost constrained. If power were 100x+ less costly per kWh, for example, we'd be able to pull all the uranium, lithium, or any of a dozen other metals we need straight from the ocean, without having to run polluting, damaging mines. There are significant benefits to increases in production, if reasonably possible.
Well sure, production of anything takes energy. Question is if 5% of the cars need replaced a year (20 years average age seems about right) are you better off replacing 5% of cars with electric or gas? The studies I've seen show that gas cars are so inefficient (often 15-20%) that even natural gas produced electricity is better in an electric car than a gas car.
The story gets even better if any solar, wind, or hydro is used. Sure nuclear helps as well. Seems obvious to me that we should push on all green energies.
We're already consuming less. In California for example despite the growing population our electricity demand peaked in 2006. But we still need to replace our fossil inputs. After we have abundant peak generating capacity, we can use the excess to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which needs a large energy input.
> Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less?
How can we do that when overall population is still growing (even if the rate of growth is slowing). I mean, even if I cut my consumption by 25%, there are so many new people that it doesn’t seem like it would matter much?
Thought I’ll leave some of my feedback in case it helps:
1. I had to lookup what Monday.com is. I didn’t know what it was and it Monday didn’t seem like a Kanban board.
2. Our company already uses Jira, I probably cant get my company to switch.
3. Maybe I can use kanception for my side projects. But I’ve been burned by too many products that started off as free and then I had to migrate away once they put in a pricing model (I usually work on projects with a few friends and /user billing on most products didn’t make sense to us)
I like to try out new products and ideas, but for the reasons above I usually stick to open source products unless the idea is extremely compelling.
1. Monday.com does have a kanban board. It also has the "list view" that they show on the landing page. These same items can be viewed either as a kanban board or as a list.
2. Yeah, this is very true.
3. It will eventually have a pricing model (if I can get any customers) but there will remain a free version with all of the features available now. Things that will cost money are features like: spreadsheet / document attachment, linked accounts, and other business class features. If it fails completely, it will end up open source.
Anyone watch the documentary planet of the humans on YouTube? After watching that, I’m no longer sure what renewable energy even means anymore, which no longer gives these accomplishments any meaning. Can someone help with my disillusionment?
I just watched this and was left feeling rather disillusioned. I’ve not yet found any credible counter arguments to the case the documentary presents against biofuels.
For those that haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch[0]. The side story of YouTube taking it down because it contained 4 seconds worth of supposed copyright infringement is silly. It had roughly 8,000,000 views before this take down happened.
In order to solve climate change, we need to decarbonize all of our primary energy sources by shifting from fossil fuels to zero carbon sources (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear). Biomass (wood pellets) should not be treated as 'renewable' when looked at the lens of solving climate change.
I am optimistic because the costs of solar, wind, and energy storage are decreasing rapidly (between 15%-30%+ cost declines PER YEAR). And, in many markets today - these offer the cheapest form of new energy to put online.
Given the 0 marginal cost nature of generation for wind and solar, these sites can generate power without any 'fuel' or other input cost.
While many calculations are available, the EROI (energy return on investment) of these sources is usually ~10+ [1]. This concept was not mentioned in the film, and simply asserted 'coal is used to make solar panels'->'therefore they are not renewable'. An EROI of over 10 means, that by inserting 1 unit of (lets say 100% coal) energy into solar, you get 10 units of solar energy back in the lifetime of the project. This doesn't account for various methods of extending the longevity of solar/wind sites. On an 'energy returned' basis - renewables are a viable solution to decarbonizing the economy.
And circling back to the article - while electricity demand has been impacted by the current economic situation - given the UK's history of coal use (they were the largest coal user historically through the industrial revolution), the fact that this milestone has been reached should not be underestimated and be viewed as an indicator for where the rest of the world is currently heading.
I think the only decent criticisms had to do with incremental technological process, i.e. solar panels are marginally more efficient than they were when the film was made. On the balance though, I don't think this negates the points the film made - the amount of mining, manufacturing and transportation balanced against the in-service life and the energy actually produced make for a very bad story. Burning biomass is also not good for the planet for the reasons outlined in that film and in this comment thread.
I'm a Vaclav Smil fanboy, so I get repetitive, but he has criticized the renewables industry pretty consistently and long before Michael Moore's film, so his material may be worth a look for those that want a stronger critique that doesn't have Moore's name in the sentence. "Energy and Civilization: A History" is a great book of his, and was relatively recently updated.
Solar panels are much cheaper than when the film was made. It's this reduction in cost that's driving the energy disruption, not increase in efficiency (although that helps).
Smil's critique seems off base to me. Yes, replacements of energy infrastructure take a long time if the replacing technology is developing slowly. But the cost of PV crashed by a factor of 5 in a decade. This rapid change will lead to existing infrastructure being ripped out before its normal lifespan.
(The next cost crash appears to be in electrolyzers, which will be the final coffin nail for nuclear.)
> Solar panels are much cheaper than when the film was made. It's this reduction in cost that's driving the energy disruption, not increase in efficiency (although that helps).
Solar is a nonfactor in energy. It counts for absolutely nothing.
And what reference did you provide? Other than your supposed ability to predict the future?
> Four years is FOREVER in the energy business now.
It isn't. Also, considering solar subsidies have collapsed throughout the world, especially since 2016, it's far more likely solar has lost ground. Going from insignificant to worthless. But that's probably why you haven't posted any sources right? So you should be thanking me for using 2016 data because solar has taken a beating since 2016.
> PV costs fell by a factor of 5 in the last decade, you know.
5 times nothing is still nothing. You know.
Solar was a nonfactor in 2016. Solar is a nonfactor today. Solar will be a nonfactor in the future. Mindless zealotry won't change the facts on the ground.
Global installed PV capacity has more than doubled since 2016, and now accounts for 3% of total electricity consumption.
> It isn't
It obviously is. PV costs fell by a factor of 5 in a decade; that's about a factor of 2 in four years. You would have us believe that dropping the cost of PV by a factor of ~2 would make no difference. But this is clearly not true. We are seeing record low PV bids from all over the world. The most recent eye opener was from Abu Dhabi, where are 22 km^2 project was bid to deliver unsubsidized energy at $0.0135/kWh. This is many times cheaper than the power from the new nuclear plants being constructed in the Gulf region, and is perhaps the cheapest source of electrical energy on the planet.
You seem to be another person who doesn't understand how exponential growth works. Solar is 3% of world electric consumption now; we are just 5 doubling times away from dominance. That's 20 years at the current rate of doubling. With demonstrated experience curves that will drive the cost of PV energy below $0.01/kWh in much of the world.
Ultimately, to legitimately gaslight you, your cognitive failure is to assume that things can't change quickly, and that your prejudices from a few years ago remain valid, even as the facts that underpinned them have vanished.
I wonder if you constantly challenged yourself to see and feel from others perspectives, all the time. Perhaps one day you may understand what it’s like to have that kind of mind. At that point, would your IQ also be around 230?
I think challenging yourself to see from other people's perspectives is probably a great thing to do. But no, it's not going to somehow increase your innate intelligence to super-genius level.
I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.
I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into the following problem:
If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere.
If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins"
Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you, with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else you'd accept).
How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of your time.
Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude.
If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home.
On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.
