Fun fact, hammering metal spikes into tree trunks is a federal crime in the US because environmental activists used to do it in the 80s to fuck up chainsaws and logging equipment.
So you should never use this effective strategy for disrupting logging operations because it is illegal.
Okay, but a laborer working a shit job for a shit logging company doesn’t deserve a chainsaw chain snapping in their face. Like most agriculture jobs in the US, logging labor is dominated by undocumented immigrants, paid far too little cash under the table, and who most certainly don’t have benefits like medical or workplace injury coverage for when a 2000 rpm chainsaw blade snaps and whips them in the face.
How about we instead find another way to disrupt logging operations that don’t put incredibly vulnerable laborers at risk? By all means, tear down the system, but don’t hurt the very people you’re supposed to be helping.
^^^ this and driving spikes through trees can severely harm the tree and even kill it. Copper spikes will kill trees, and putting holes in trees can open them up to fungi and other things that feed on the cambium and destroy the tree.
Logging is literally the #1 most dangerous industry in North America, with the highest rate of professional fatalities per year. Laborers themselves are already calculated as rather expendable and replacing parts is… not difficult.
Trees can easily heal from branches being pruned, but breaking the bark on the trunk, even just to carve your initials, can seriously injure a tree even without leaving potentially toxic metal in the wood.
why would you sabotage logging in 2017 anyway
in the 1980′s lumber companies would clear-cut pristine old-growth forest on land they didn’t even own, and laugh at the resulting hellscape
thanks to environmentalists being politically effective and enacting legislation with the support of responsible civil servants – as well as the development of lighter, more all-terrain logging machinery – that changed, and is no longer the case. (despite overexcited assholes spiking trees so working-class joes would get killed by their own chainsaws, thus giving anti-environmentalists plenty of propaganda fuel)
now logging companies selectively cut only the trees they want, from land they specifically maintain as tree farms, and replant if natural reseeding isn’t doing the trick.
logging in the 80′s:
logging in 2016:
note how they harvest the trees that are a useful size, but still much smaller than old style logging operations took; trees this size are easier to transport, and with modern all-terrain equipment, can be carried out over rough ground fairly easily, so they can leave the younger trees to grow.
this practice is also safer for the workers – getting hit with a telephone pole sized tree is still pretty dangerous, but it’s less guaranteed to kill you than a tree the size of a church steeple, and also less likely to break free of the equipment and go bouncing down the hill at you like a trap from indiana jones.
a recently harvested tree farm looks a little sparse, but it’s still got plenty of roots holding the soil against erosion, plenty of plant life to shelter birds and insects, and it’ll be left undisturbed for a decade or so to regrow.
in conclusion: since trying to murder workers is terrible, isn’t it nice there’s no reason to spike trees anyhow?
the facts are, GMOs are the future and the key to increasing crop production for our increasing population if your goal is to keep up food production for more people. remember, the goal right now in agriculture- the key goal that we’re throwing everything into because big yikes fam- is to produce more food off less. so like, vertical farming? good, saves space. smaller plants with bigger yield? great, saves space, can plant more and get more food. plants that are resistant to drought? to high temps? to low fertilizer? amazing, it means you have hardier plants that you can put in places that regular plants wouldn’t be able to stand.
so are they agriculturally efficient? hell yeah, because remember, it takes about 10 years for a crop in testing- GMO or not- to reach a point in development where it can be submitted for approval by the USDA for the market (something I’ve learned in my current job). imagine doing all breeding without GMOs. you would literally be able to do one cross a year, maybe two if you’re in a warmer area (this is why a lot of soybean breeding has been moved to South America, where they can do twice as much breeding). with GMOs, you can develop and test stuff faster, so by a monetary standpoint it’s awesome.
lets not forget that GMO crops can withstand more because of the pure amount of precision put into them. like, lets say your corn breaks a lot. you can spend 3-4 years meticulously cross breeding your developing strain with a break-resistant variety to get that trait in, or you can just cut and paste in the gene. and get this: it doesn’t even have to be from the break resistant variety. you can pull it from another plant that might be better at not breaking, and get an even better resulting variety.
another thing that we can’t forget about is that new GMO tech helps us keep up with pests and diseases. at work, i’ve seen experiments involving root pests; plants infected had root systems destroyed down to a single tap root. imagine that happening to a farmer’s field. like, all of it. that’s the kind of thing we’re up against here; to stop infestations and to solve new challenges quickly by developing technology quickly, while still improving the plant to commercial level.
when talking to the breeders at work, they told me that the industry as a whole recently upped its goal from creating a crop that would give each farmer a 200 bushel harvest (200 bushels has been the goal for the past 30 years; they’ve recently reached it and exceeded it) to 300 bushels per harvest. they have to do this just by modifying the plants. they have no control over how much the farmer plants and/or how many fields they have.
to give some perspective here, one bushel is 60 pounds of grain. they’re aiming to have each farmer that buys their products be able to reliably harvest and sell 18,000 pounds of grain per year.
the moral of the story is that the breeding and agri industries are under a lot of pressure here, and they have to work fast, because the population is rising.
knock knock
whos there?
dwindling nitrogen supplies in farmland and unsustainable farming practices but im gonna save that for another time
are they healthier? it depends on what you believe. like, what we’ve found so far is that GMOs don’t hurt you. some of them have added vitamins that can help you (lets not forget the famous GMO golden rice, which uses a daffodil gene coupled with a soil bacterium gene to make a rice variety produce a huuuuuge amount of vitamin A. this has been so effective in solving vitamin deficiencies and health problems in 3rd world countries since it was introduced in 2005 that its won awards and been used as a universal case study for the whole “GMO plants” thing) but most are just like. idk. kind of there? they help the health of the plant and help the farmer bring in income, so???? idk???
are they better for the environment? i have no idea. i suppose indirectly, because like. if you have a heartier plant you have to clear less land for agriculture?? (can anyone weigh in here?). But if these got out into the wild, the effects could be DEVASTATING, which is why the USDA and related government organizations (depending on where you live) make it so you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what you’re putting out into production won’t be crazy damaging if it magically gets out somehow.
ethically: i have no idea man. like im still super split on it. my scientist self says “you can literally buy everything to do it and modify plants to produce heat right in your own home right now” but then im like……………..idk man we just dont know. i dont want to hurt my plant friends. if this hurts our plant friends. idk
(hears the siren song, waddles into the fray)
Re: health – the only GMO plant bred for health so far (that I know of) has been the Golden Rice. and know that Golden Rice also faced a HUGE backlash from anti-GMO activists.
Golden Rice is just rice + beta carotene, that stuff that makes your carrots orange. Your body converts beta carotene into Vitamin A, which allows you to live and not be blind. People in developing countries with poor diets, especially children and pregnant women, can have huge difficulties getting access to enough Beta Carotene so scientists thought it would be super helpful to add it to a dietary staple – rice. Even Bill and Melinda Gates think that this is a great idea.
Wikipedia: “The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[24] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[25] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk.“
Anti-GMO activists HATE it though, so there’s currently a lot of difficulties for farmers in developing countries to get access to Golden Rice. They tend to prefer having people take supplements, which they can’t always get (they are provided – sometimes – by charities), and can’t make on their own (which leaves them dependent on others), instead of letting local farmers help solve this problem.
There are also projects to increase the amount of zinc in various cereal crops and increase the protein in sorghum and cassava. These are all called Biofortification, in case you want to research it more.
Something of a holy grail for agriculture would be to transfer the nitrogen fixing relationship/ability of Fabacea to say, corn. This means that you could enable the corn plant to do what Fabacea does – they make friends with things in the soil, are and able to use the Nitrogen which makes up 78% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen-fixing corn would be a world-changing nobel-prize winning kind of achievement. This would dramatically improve soil health and substantially decrease the amount of fertilizers needed.
Some plant scientists in the UK are working on this. It’s incredibly technically difficult.
Better for the environment: GMOs are used to do different things, so it’s hard to talk broadly. The plants that have Bt (Bacillus thurengenisis, a naturally occurring organism and is widely used in organic agriculture) with them ARE better for the environment, in that farmers use way fewer pesticides since they effectively produce their own. I read a study awhile back that certain water ways in China are cleaner thanks to Bt GMOs. There have been some concerns that this will end up with overuse of Bt, pests will evolve past it, and we’re back at the same problem of pests destroying the things we want to eat (or, more likely, animal feed… so much of what we grow is animal feed it’s pretty insane). The thing is, there’s lots of different strains of Bt, scientists keep running across new ones. But we’ll never get away from the arms race that is humans vs pests when it comes to this, it’s as old as agriculture itself.
Papaya ringspot virus – driving Papayas in Hawai’i to extinction
Ethically: People were upset that the terminator gene existed, the public threw such a shitfit that no plants were ever released with them. So now instead everyone freaks out that genes from the GMO plants could end up in the wild. Sometimes, you can’t win.
Scientists were able to save the Papaya trees in Hawai’i thanks to GMO technology. The Papaya Ringspot Virus came through that was wiping out the Papaya trees there to and destroying the livelihoods of many farmers. It was so bad that it was thought that Papaya trees might go extinct, until a few genes were inserted to make them resistant to the virus. There are still anti-GMO activists upset about this for some reason.
Cheese – cheese is made using a a coagulant called rennet. The main enzyme in rennet is chymosin. The old, traditional way of accessing chymosin was from the stomach lining of baby cows. Rennet was/is a byproduct of the veal industry. A combination of people starting to give a shit about animals, increased human population, and increased demands for cheese, meant that rennet prices were all over the place. Scientists managed to create a microbe that could produce chymosin by implanting certain bovine cells, and ended up with a purer product, at a cheaper price, with no baby cows slaughtered in the process. 90% of cheese in the US is made using GMO chymosin aka fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC). Vermont made all dairy products exempt from their non-GMO labeling. However, if you want dead baby cows (or dead unborn baby cows) as part of your cheese making process, insist on buying USDA-organic cheese.
There are tons of non-plant uses for GMOs. We have been using GMOs in healthcare since the 1980s, which has made things safer – no longer using dead animals and human cadavers to harvest certain things. The cadavers in particular were a problem, they were spreading
Creutzfelt-Jacob syndrome, which destroys your brain and takes your life, usually in the span of a year. Prions are a nasty business. Children needing human growth hormones were the ones acquiring and dying from it. Now we make hyper-specialized GMO bacteria and yeast to crank out things like insulin, human growth hormone (without prions), and antibodies to diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer, among other helpful things.
GMOs are also used extensively in science, from breeding special mice to experiment on to creating special fish that will glow in the presence of certain pollutants. There’s new developments every day.
Could there be bad things done with GMOs? Yes, as with every technology, there can be bad decisions or unforeseen consequences and ethical conundrums. These are important conversations.
As I mentioned, I recently read Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” and thought it made some very compelling points on the renaissance of public shaming in the age of social media. I was going to post my highlights, but then I realized I’d highlighted about 30% of the book, so instead:
I wrote down what I thought were some of the key, take-home points the book made, and pulled quotes from the book in no particular order for each of them. It’s still a wall of text, but feel free to wade in if you’re interested.
Again, I strongly recommend giving this book a read.
Public shaming is often motivated by a belief that one is Doing Good
Public shaming is about social conformity
Public shaming can make us LESS aware of viewpoints different that our own
Shame works because we are all afraid
Shaming others can bring out our own brutality
Shame leads to dehumanization and “death of the soul”
Shame leads to violence
Technology has strange warping effects on how public shaming
affects us (and social media shaming can have longer impacts than we
expect)
There is evidence that “De-shaming” may have more positive outcomes than shaming
quotes from the book supporting each point under the cut. (bolding mine, quotes by paragraph and in no particular order)
This is some incredible stuff. Worth reading all the comments.
And… yeah, actually, I have absolutely defaulted to shaming responses to shaming behavior, and been confused that it wasn’t working, so that seems to be an actual bug in how brains work.
Loved this book. Looking at shame as a sort of an emotional violence completely recontextualizes the Internet.
Fantasy RPG worldbuilding tip #137: mess with what counts as magic.
I don’t mean replicating modern technology with magical analogues – that stuff’s common as dirt. What I mean is taking a step back from the conventional paradigm of starting with a world that fundamentally resembles our own and layering magic on top of it, and asking yourself: what if this obviously non-magical thing is a form of magic in this world?
History furnishes numerous examples. It’s well-known, for example, that the Ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between pharmacology and sorcery – but did you know that the Vikings considered picking locks to be a form of magic? That it’s demonstrably a mechanical skill that can be learned by anyone is beside the point; that a person was able to learn that skill in the first place was, itself, seen as evidence of consorting with evil spirits!
So run with that: pick a perfectly ordinary skill or pursuit, one that’s integral to our everyday life, and suppose that in your world, it’s a mystical practice that transgresses against the natural order. What does your world look like then?
To pose a common example: literacy. Treating literacy as a form of magic isn’t historically uncommon; the modern word “grimoire” – a book of spells – ultimately derives from the same root as “grammar”. So let’s run with that. The process and mechanics of learning to read are the same as they are in our world, but the implications may be very different. Perhaps knowing how to read books automatically confers the ability to read minds. Perhaps literacy grants the ability to understand the speech of beasts. There’s all sorts of directions you could go with it.
It’s critical to resist the urge to fall back on describing our world with magic laid on top. If you’re doing the literacy-as-magic thing, then you are not describing a world in which a reading-based school of magic exists; you are describing a world in which the acts of reading and writing are and always have been mystical practices, with all the societal weirdness that implies – and further, the mechanics of reading and writing do not materially differ from those of their real-world counterparts, though the outcomes may vary wildly.
The other major trap to watch out for is picking something too esoteric to really dig into. You’ll find plenty of fantasy settings where, say, clockworking or steam engineering is a form of magic – but clockworking isn’t something that ordinary people do in their daily lives. This sort of worldbuilding is much more effective when the practice in question is ubiquitous.
Other everyday activities that might make good candidates for converting into mystical practices:
Cooking or baking
Dressing (i.e., the act of putting on clothing)
Farming or gardening
Keeping pets
Lighting fires
Makeup (i.e., facial cosmetics)
Personal hygiene (bathing, grooming, etc.)
Representational art (that is, drawing pictures of things)
Rhyming (even unintentionally!)
Again, no wimping out; to pick a faintly ridiculous example from the preceding list, if you’ve decided that bathing is magic in your setting, that doesn’t mean that there’s a magical way to take a bath – it means that taking a bath is an inherently mystical process, and there’s no non-magical way to go about it. Similarly, if you went with cooking, what you’ve got is a world in which all prepared food is, in some sense, also a magic potion.
Stasis is death. A type of death, but it is still a death.
Change is also death. A different type of death, but it too is death.
The only choice you have is how to die.
Choose well and follow through.
Consider this long and hard. Eventually you will discover the secret of the Living Dead, and that the Dead are all alive, in their own way.
I have spent the last three days on a rewatch of The Borgias, and am hesitating at the last episodes. I’m not sure if I’m hesitating because then I’ll have watched the whole thing (which I never managed to do the first time) or because I’m worried about my favorite co-dependent siblings (thank you @anghraine for that phrase for them) and their pet assassin.
I think I may wait on the last episodes until later, and either figure out more for the one AU with Cesare and Lucrezia, or do an AU of that AU because that one just has them, and lacks their pet assassin. (Shadows and Shades – which was started before season 2, and owes quite a bit to what I looked up about history and those particular Borgias.) If only because it means I don’t have to worry about which reason I’m not watching the last three episodes yet.
Damar actually realized that he was wrong and that Cardassia needed to change. He put aside his alcoholism, he realized that he needed to listen to Kira and take direction from her, which was a BIG FUCKING DEAL for any Cardassian to do. He stood up to his Cardassian men and told them to listen to her–specifically his best friend, too. He realized that his prejudices were damaging and that just following along was not the right thing to do or the correct way to serve the state nor was it what Cardassia needed. He became greater than the stereotypical Cardassian that is churned out by State propaganda and began to think for himself and learn how to change his thinking–something that is very important. Does any of this forgive his previous ‘crimes’? Of course it doesn’t.
But a majority of fandom seems to still think he’s the biggest piece of shit who has ever existed while some of the same people easily forgive Garak or Dukat their crimes. It’s pretty wild. Garak was willing to commit genocide, but he’s okay. He’s murdered countless people for the Order–eh. Dukat raped Bajoran women, oh well. A non Cardassian person… Quark. He threatened to fire an employee if she didn’t do sexual favors for him. He tried to also put something like that in work contracts. He thinks women should be servile and naked and men should be above all. Oh well, he’s gross-cute. Damar is forever an unforgivable asshole because he killed Ziyal.
????
#Garak killed people too but he’s a fluffy fandom bunny
If you want to understand Humanity, take a good look at our planet. Bit of headcanon I wrote a little while ago from a trekkie perspective but would apply generally.
Vulcans disregarded
Earth (Sol 3) as a potential sentient life supporting planet because
of it’s tumultuous origins, erratic axis and rapid spin (extreme weather, extreme environments, unstable planetary atmosphere, unstable planetary surface, unstable planetary aquatic systems, unstable magnetic core etc.). The system, only having one remaining naturally M class planet as well as a relatively
bright star and an asteroid belt which made navigation complicated
was generally left alone until some Vulcans visited Earth
investigating the plant and animal life that had manage to evolve there and were astonished to find a
bipedal species thriving across the planet with clear evidence of
tool making.
So the planet is quarantined for twenty thousand years to
allow their uninterrupted development but four thousand years later
they make it into space, and less than two hundred years after that
to warp.
Vulcans are stumped as it took them much longer, and they
have better logical thinking conducive to undertaking such a task;
less/no wars or conflicts and longer lives that allows better
development of experience.
Humans have short lives, high reproduction
rates, emotions, wild imaginations and an alarming capacity to
disregard their own safety. In short they behave as erratically as
their planet.
I believe that there are people who truly dislike romantic gestures, in the same way that there are people who truly dislike sweets. And it’s certainly true that a lot of what passes for “romance” in our broad cultural definition—the Jumbotron proposal, the bed covered in rose petals—has been neatly split from genuine emotion, like a painted eggshell blown clear of its guts. It’s a charade of romance, a mask we give straight men to wear when they’re frightened or confused by showing their naked face. I truly did not want that, and I still don’t, and I never will. Being dragooned into acting as a partner in these romantic pageants is like having one of those dreams where you’re hauled up unprepared on stage.
But attentiveness, consideration, compliments, small and large kindnesses, feeling truly loved, having someone put you first while you put them first because you’re in cahoots to make each other’s lives easier and better: most people do like that, when it’s thoughtful and sincere. It’s here, more than in the big gestures, that romance lives: in being actively caring and thoughtful, in a way that is reciprocal but not transactional.
And yet, for most of my life, I never would have asked for or expected such a thing. Many women wouldn’t, even the ones who secretly or not-so-secretly pine to be treated like a princess. It’s one thing to fantasize about a perfect proposal or an expensive gift; that’s high-maintenance, sure, but it’s also par for the course. It’s asking something from a man, but primarily it’s asking him to step into an already-choreographed mating dance. But asking to be thought of, understood, prioritized: this is a request so deep it is almost unfathomable. It’s a voracious request, the demand of the attention whore.
Women talk ourselves into needing less, because we’re not supposed to want more—or because we know we won’t get more, and we don’t want to feel unsatisfied. We reduce our needs for food, for space, for respect, for help, for love and affection, for being noticed, according to what we think we’re allowed to have. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we can live without it, even that we don’t want it. But it’s not that we don’t want more. It’s that we don’t want to be seen asking for it. And when it comes to romance, women always, always need to ask.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 