There are a few pollination events that draw hives in from the entire US; bees are loaded on semi trucks from all over the country and sent to california for the almond pollination. The almond crop represents a very large part of all commercial bee keepers revenue from the year. but this also exposes billions of bees to billions to other bees, so if there is a parasite, bacteria, virus or anything else that can be transmitted from hive to hive it's a huge exposure event for virtually the nations entire bee swarm. this is exacerbated by "package" sales, where bees are vacuumed up in 3 or 4lb packages, an unrelated queen is put into the package, and the whole thing is sold to bee keepers all over the country to start new hives with. We have similar issues with all of our domestic livestock; pigs, chickens, cows, sheep - biosecurity is a thing for bees, too.

5 tb hard drives retail for around USD $250. Breakeven in what, 18 months?

Government officials love this sort of bust because it gets rid of a thorn in their side and allows them to claim it was to "save the children" simultaneously. Julian Assuange comes to mind as another example of somone accused of sex crimes but his real crime was he was considered a threat to governments. Anytime I hear "save the children" it almost always sounds like "lose free speech and civil rights"

It was great for prosecutions. each ad had to be tied to a credit card, so when police found an underage sex worker they'd contact backpage or whereever the ad they located the worker with was published, get the credit card number, and they'd have the pimp or pimp-adjacent person identified. the thing about police is that they used to love prosecuting these crimes - it was easy, they got good press, they had a villian, and it was cheap. perfect police activity. when the online advertising shut down the sites that remained moved offshore and the prosecution became much more difficult. SESTA/FOSTA is the legislation that resulted in places like craigslist getting out of the personals business and there was a simultaneous increase (at least in seattle) of street sex workers because there wasn't any easy way to advertise, which also increased violence, shootings and pimp activity. We did all of this to "save the children" but the net result is that more children are trafficked now and harder to catch than before.

intel stock plumbing new depths today.

57,000 searches with only 700 of them having probable cause for the search. That's a lot of civil right loss for a lot of innocent people.

This whole vertical farm concept seems to be a way to raise sometimes very large sums of money, do some stuff, and then go bankrupt. Everyone involved gets paid a salary or consulting fees, and there's some fun stuff, but at the end the investors get slaughtered to pay for it. Here's the headline to a recent article about this: "As indoor farming startups with hundreds of millions in funding head to bankruptcy, critic says: ‘Boy, this is a dumb idea’"

for-profit vaccines seem like a bad idea after this.

massive hit on the bottom of the food chain, will affect everything in the region.

that produced and presented the courseware for the first certifications. We had long discussions at the time about whether or not people would "fail" certification - that is, if they didn't exhibit a certain level of competence and understanding, would we issue them a certificate anyway? At the time, this was in 1989 and 1990, the consensus in our team was "no, if they don't get it they can retake the course for free or try again later, but we're not going to certify folks that cannot pass the test". How times change. Shout out to all of the other former microsoft university folks.

Now Trump

Kinda like th at pocket knife I lost when haying. "well, I know where it is to within a half-acre". People go on these trips for a sense of adventure and danger; much in the same way that I don't shed tears over folks who die on everest, I'm not going to here, either.

At least the majority of the folks who died from covid are anti-vaxxers and republicans. Going forward our public discourse is different. Local elections "turning blue" are an indicator that encouraging your political base to die of a preventable disease is bad for your election outcomes.

Manure is a fertilizer, an organic fertilizer, that is commonly used on crops, either directly or after composting. these digesters remove most of the fertilizer value from the manure as part of the process. if it's taken out of the loop we replace it with fossil fertilizers. the economics of these digesters is questionable without substantial subsidies, including paying the entire multi-million dollar construction cost of these digesters, and the continuing operating costs. We already have a recycling path for this particular waste product that we have used for thousands of years.

"you haven't paid your 'use the burners' subscription fee for this month, please bring your account current for heating accessory'