The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators.
Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today.
You know what they say: ship a village 1000 bicycles and they ride for a day. Teach a village to make bicycles and they ride for the rest of their lives.
The counterargument is, of course, "but what's in it for me?"
"Lymne" refers to an infection by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacteria closely related to syphillis. There are plenty of other tick-borne diseases (including localized staph infections at bite sites that can lead to necrotizing fasciitis)
Just like with syphillis, there is a cheap and simple cure that is more effective than any known vaccine. If it's caught in time. Prevention is even cheaper.
The standard treatment for Lyme also just happens to be the standard treatment for many of the other tick-borne diseases, so you're still better-off taking a course of doxycycline after a tick byte than getting a vaccination against Lyme.
The black-legged tick season in Ottawa is March through June and again September through November. Summer (deerfly season) is just too hot for them and they go to ground.
We do all the best camping in January and February. Why, you might ask, when it's usually colder than -20 C? No ticks. Also no mosquitos, blackflies, or deerflies but mostly no ticks.
Is there a similar site to report mosquito bites? They also carry many debilitation or fatal diseases.
I live in prime tick country. During peak season (March through June and again September through November) I can get 3 or 4 tick bites a day. I don't always get them all because they're completely painless while they're embedded (although I react strongly after they've been removed) and I've been diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease twice after developing all the classic symptoms. I am not alone in my area. If there was a site where you report tick bites here it would need to be pretty robust to handle the load and it would serve no purpose.
The local authorities have acknowledged the rampant outbreak of Lyme in the region. You do not need to provide the tick to authorities for identification. All you need to do is go to any pharmacy and tell them you've been bitten by a tick and they'll write you a prescription for Doxycycline on the spot.
We have a few sewing machines that are finicky. Tension goes off rapidly, binds a lot, lint buildup constantly has to be cleaned, clunks mysteriously sometimes. We also have a Singer manufactured in 1899 that just does what it's supposed to reliably (and you can still get parts for it!). Now mind you, it doesn't do fancy stitches or buttonholing or anything but straight stitching and a basic zigzag and you do have to keep the treadle properly lubricated but it even works during a power failure.
Sewing machines, like stand mixers and vacuum cleaners, in the end are power tools as much as radial arm saws, hammer drills, and routers are. It's great to have all the fancy features, but sometimes lowest tech is the best.
> I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.
It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.
It is my experience that it's the opposite. LLMs are very very precise but wildly inaccurate. They might give you 17 significant digits but be off by 10 orders of magnitude, to use a metaphor.
My experience is it takes 100 hours to buck, split, haul, and stack the 7 or so cords of wood it takes to heat my house. A cord is 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. The total time includes time it takes to sharpen the saw, and time it takes for trips to the gas station for gas for the saw and the splitter. Time for replacing the handle on the maul or the oil in the splitter is extra.
But that 100 hours is using a hydraulic splitter. Hand-splitting using a maul takes several hours longer. But it keeps you twice as warm: it heats you once when you split it and once when you burn it.