buttloads of honeybees everywhere around here. Hate em. Eating bumble and carpenter foods, boo. Leave my white sage alone. https://bugguide.net/node/view/7698

Depends on the location. Many times they do not compete for food as the tongues of the bumble and carpenter bees are able to reach nectar sources the honeybees cannot. Also many of the native bees will work the flowers earlier in the day, giving them a headstart on the honeybees.

I'm a fan of the honeybees, except they keep invading my house. Currently addressing a nest in our attic... Thats the 5th incident in 3 years in this house, 3 of which were hives being built in the home...

You like carpenter bees? They're a pain in the ass

I have a very large garden area near my patio with plants that flower from Spring through Fall. I bump into the full assortment of bees going for the flowers and wasps for my food, but the main harassers in my yard are male carpenter bees that dive bomb me and the occasional female coming out of nowhere to sting me.

dunno! it's gonna be rich in iron and magnesium, which you need to grow plants anyway. I would think transportation cost would be the dominant factor but olivine is common everywhere

Yep nope. Play crazy games win crazy prizes. Every one of these cases is the church’s fault to begin with for encouraging their followers to believe in superstitious nonsense. Causes psychogenic diseases in your population every time. Keeping a bunch of dead popes on display and other premodern necrophiliac bullshit, what do you expect? Totally irresponsible use of their authority. Thank Christ for the reformation.. at the very least an opportunity to make the same mistakes over again.

Again: if your religion has demons, you might want to check and see if it’s a bit evil actually. And if you hear a catholic try to talk out of the other side of their mouth about how modern and progressive their religion is, don’t forget to nail them to the wall about this one. And the communion of saints. Bunch of gross Pauline bullshit. Actually if you hear a new testament verse and it sounds stupid as hell you can bet it's Paul talking. But hey a roman military/corporate man can win a lot of souls, right?

Too many honeybees! Was hoping this would be about bumbles and carpenters

Was this written by chatgpt?

always have been

The species that replaces us as the penultimate will appreciate our efforts as we have appreciated previous terraformers like first organism that polluted this world with oxygen.

Those ingrates!

Could we please stop doing gain of function research in mammal/bird viruses anyway? That'd be great.

Or require much more stringent BSL with actual auditing

Which technology have we ever successfully stopped?

nuclear fission. note all the folks complaining on this site about how there ought to have been much more of it but muh regulations.

oh also decentralized file transfer.

The trick is you don't need to make it go away you just need to prevent wide-enough-use-to-cause-destabilization-of-the-thing-you-like.

The thing with viruses is that usually they are helpful inasmuch as they prevent clones with correlated weaknesses from taking over the biosphere (that's why they exist imo), but since the clones is US now, viruses is bad, and advancing their evolution on purpose is like simulating a world where our population is x times larger in order to get what a little more information about how viruses is bad for us?

idk seems like simple stuff.. govt should not be paying money for things that are bad for humans. voters are all humans after all.

That's why any hint of scientists suppressing or discounting evidence for a covid lab leak is absolutely devastating for science in the long wrong btw.. imagine the worst case scenario: scientists scrambling to hide the fact that they accidentally leaked a horrible virus into the world; hiding it so that they can continue creating pandemic-worthy viruses for a few paltry research dollars. essentially putting a 2nd mortgage on the house to buy baseball cards and then losing all the paperwork till the bank shows up.

and it's exactly as embarrassingly immature as the above, because the question we really need to focus on is: can a lab leak of a GoF virus happen, what will the consequences be if it does, and should we be paying money to support that risk/reward profile?

kinda like AI; when we're doing the P(x)*v calculation, all we need to know is that v is negative big and that the number of plays is large; at some point P(x) stops mattering.

The basic idea is that a rogue superintelligence could turn us all into paper clips. After all it only takes one.

Throughout history, intelligences that transcend humanity have been bad news for us. Even when they don't exist.

Here's one good place to start:

https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

Well, I don't think you could make many paperclips out of me (please don't try though).

In this extreme scenario, I suppose I would just have to be a net-paperclip producer at work for a hyperintelligent AI, instead of a net dollar producer for a human organization.

Part of me wonders if that would even change much in my daily life.

Based on how things are going going, I'd expect the bots to turn us all into shareholder value instead.

this is true but for companies instead of people, and it'll be worth 100B+ in 10 years