flora_explora @ flora_explora @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing :)

I get your point. But isn't it in the interest of large tech companies that their users stay as unknowing and uninformed as possible? They don't want you to know how to actually tinker with their systems, how to change stuff yourself or have any control over technology at all. The more docile people are, the better they can sell their products (both the actual product to the people and the people's data to their consumers). And so there are those people who are not OK with being on a dumbed-down system because they want to know how it works and have control over it, so they go over to Linux.

This is not too different from modern cars that no one can really repair on their own. Consumers are totally dependent on the company producing the car. And planned obsolescence can be implemented even better in a system that is out of the control of the user.

Another point is that huge tech companies often have the most comfort and ease in their products. Yeah sure, they have the means to make it so. But this automatically makes leaving these platforms/products so much more uncomfortable. Consumers are already so uninformed but dependent on tech that they would obviously stir towards the more comfortable situation.

Using tools (be it digital or manual) you can actually control sure is more work and has a certain learning curve. No one denies this. But from a political standpoint I think it is important for people to have control over the tools they use, over their own life. Let's not allow capitalism to take away even more freedom and control from us as it already took.

All I found about that gitlab incidence sounded like it was one single event and more importantly that they've learned from it. So I don't get the critique there. But yeah, apparently they've had a security hole a few days ago.

While I agree with the acronym, I have to disagree with the statement. I really dislike the look of most Brassicaceae. Especially Brassica oleracea :(

Wtf is wrong with you?

Wow there, you assume I was arguing in bad faith but I was just genuinely curious to discuss this. No need in being so rude.

I think you still got a lot mixed up here. When I was talking about GMO plants I didn't talk about all the awful practices of today's capitalist corporations. But GMO in itself could be great for feeding many people in a world after capitalism. Glyphosat and other pesticides are really not the same as GMO. Do you actually know what GMO means and how it works? I'm not necessarily a fan of GMO and think we should be very cautious with it. But just dismissing it as obviously evil without understanding what it means is wrong imo.

Similarly I think it is not really clear what we discuss when er talk about industrial agriculture. In my mind it is solely the production of agricultural crops at a large scale and by means of employing machines. It seems like you think of it like our modern capitalist agriculture. This thread was originally about how to feed huge populations of people and I think we will need industrial agriculture. However, what we understand today under industrial agriculture is just one way of doing it. I obviously know that today's conventionally farmed crops and monocultures are really bad for biodiversity and the environment. And I sure want to see then gone just like you. But even organic farming relies a lot on industrial agriculture. And I don't think it is really true that homegrown crops in small community gardens are necessarily more nutritious or delicious than organically+industrially farmed crops.

And this was my overall point. Just because you feel like something tastes/looks better doesn't mean it is actually better. That's what I mean by idealization. I don't think we get that far just claiming some practices are evil and others are good.

I'm gardening myself and sure it does help me with my mental health. But that is because I can choose to work in the garden whenever I feel like it. But if I had to work on a farm because we need all the people working the fields, it would certainly not improve but rather deteriorate my mental and physical health. But still, this has nothing to do with your claim that soil bacteria actually function as natural antidepressants.

And please seek help with your anger issues if you haven't already. It is totally off to call someone "disingenuous bastard" if they just try to start a debate. (Just to be sure: I don't mean this in a passive-aggressive way.)

I've never said that any museum is strictly run by cis white men. My point is that the patriarchy and racism are real and lead to unconscious biases that we should be cautious of. Many museums have not done enough in being reflective of their own history and the history of the material they present (e.g. museums that present stolen artifacts from former colonies). I've never talked about censorship either, but rather getting a dialogue going between museums and their community. You projected a lot onto my comment there. Maybe you should think about what you're defensive about here.

Related (pun intended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNQPQkV3nhw

Not only that. But our agriculture is so centered around animals that we also have a huge surplus of manure (the animals' feces, horn shavings, basically anything left of them) that we then use on all kinds of plant crops. It is so baked into the system that it will be a long way before we can really get a animal-free agriculture...

This is certainly true for our modern agriculture today. But is this really true for any possible industrial agriculture? Couldn't we also have a plant based industrial agriculture leaving domesticated animals out of the equation altogether? Sure, we are a far way off from that. But I think it would be achievable and that we should aim for it.

I would be cautious of statements like these. Because this way it is easy to get lost in your own idealization of community gardening. I mean, I agree that we should do more community gardening and that it would probably benefit most people.

But how do you know that industrial farming won't ever be as nutritious/delicious as homegrown? How would you fall back on your own garden in case of a nuclear catastrophe? Wouldn't your soil just be as contaminated? What are your arguments against GMO crops apart from all the obvious economic reasons? Wouldn't be some genetic mutations be really good actually? I mean the food we eat is already heavily bred and mutated, even most homegrown stuff. Try eating a wild carrot or wild apple. Also, the article you shared regarding the antidepressant properties of soil makes some same mistakes. It is overly idealistic. The actual underlying study is much less ambitious and I'm not sure you can really claim that "working with soil has natural antidepressant properties ".

I love cooking and don't really like eating out. But if a canteen/cafeteria is run well, it can sure cook much larger quantities of food that are just as delicious and nutritious. It just scales better. I would argue the same is true for agriculture. (Although we definitely would need to change agriculture by a lot!)

Wow, thanks! What an interesting read :O (But also really sad to watch the video on the templeos site)

Well, not really. One are insects the other crustaceans. Woodlice would probably be a better comparison?

To add to this, I think it is important to keep in mind that what a museum or anybody else sees as a worthwhile message is very subjective. And through society's biased lens this is often art by white cis men. Many of whom are seen as geniuses while being discriminatory or abusive to others, even in their message. But since the dominant culture is to only see these men as geniuses, their problematic behavior usually gets ignored. On the flipside, a lot of geniuses that aren't white cis men are often completely left out and ignored. And this although their message is probably even more worthy of our attention because they actually experienced hardships that many white cis men never would have.

I don't think it is a necessarily good idea to let museums have the choice alone what is a worthwhile message just because I don't trust them to be reflective of the above. Museums should also be in dialogue with their community and what they deem worthwhile to present. (However this also opens the door to conservative bigots trying to prohibit anything remotely progressive.)

Well, sweet tomato marmalade is actually quite tasty ;)

Great video, thanks! Regarding the over representation of certain concepts/things I have been disappointed from day one by generative AI. If you want it to draw you something obscure it miserably fails and tries to fall back on stuff it knows. Also all the discriminatory biases generative AI has about different people because of lacking data sets. It is very obvious that it cannot "outperform" its own data input (like the exciting curve in the video) but that it will rather stagnate.

The one I was always certain about is that biology should be green. Chlorophyll and the photosynthesis based on it are just so important for nearly all life forms that green is very much deserved by biology only.

Well, if humans were a homogeneous population maybe that could work. But just imagine the huge number of factors at play here. Like, demographics, cultural background (different exposures & different allergy rates in general I would guess), genetic susceptibilities, individual lifestyles (e.g smoking) and probably a lot more! Even a sample size of 1000 seems pretty small to test for general human allergy rates to moon dust. If you were talking about just one population of humans, e.g. the US, you would certainly need more than 30 but maybe not 1000.

Depends what you mean by cockroach. I haven't seen the pests around. But there are some smaller ones that are sometimes also found inside the house. I frequently find this one in my home for example, which is really cute <3

Not only the first paper but it apparently was published in nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-020-0214-z#citeas