Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true.
I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact.
Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on.
Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts.
But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).
Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world.
Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there).
When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.
Okay, so not to detract too much from this tiny handful of refurbs - where the assessment, design, build etc were already done, and target state was well understood (it was to get back to whatever parameters and specs they had previously built at the same location), are there any contra-examples of Canadian hubris around budget and schedule on large projects where things might go wrong?
Eglington Crossing light rail - 6 year delay (to 15 year total) with a tripling in cost to $15B - so about $1b per kilometre of light rail.
Peace River hydroelectric - costing double ($16B) original budget.
Vancouver wastewater - a 4x budget creep (to $4B) and a 10y delay so far - it hasn't opened yet.
My point is that it's not only nuclear fission power plants that are grossly underestimated in terms of cost and complexity, but rather, all large infrastructure projects.
Just happens that on top of all that, the estimated numbers for LCoE, payback, clean-up, opex, etc for nuclear fission are also misrepresented (or misunderstood, depending how cynical you are).
Your first link to OPG - suggests, when looking at https://www.opg.com/about-us/ - that they have TWO nuclear power stations in their fold, and it's not clear how many of them were refurbished over what time period.
Your second link suggests a refurbishment of ONE power station.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.
Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.
Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.
Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.
Does that '100s of billions' come from a big bucket somewhere called 'spare cash', or does it correlate to a commensurate reduction in the 'around $500 billion in ad revenue' that Google and Meta are extracting?
Do your assumptions - " if you look at the trajectory " - factor in a slowing economy, a slowing growth in quality improvements in the tech, and/or the asymptote of market saturation for punters happy to stump up more than $50 a month?
Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
Couple of Australians have been doing this since the 90's - I think they coined the term 'pooktre' to describe the form - https://www.pooktre.com/
Searching `Peter Cook Becky Northey tree furniture` gets you some nice pictures of their work, as they don't just 'do chair' -- though I suspect plenty of people have been doing this in various forms for centuries.
I read through TFA and was impressed at the number of citations they offered. I had assumed (but not strongly) that there'd be a correlation, so this was enlightening.
Do you have any citations apart from your own experience?
I had to look up black grass, as we don't have that particular weed in AU. I don't have any answers, of course, but a search on 'permaculture response in europe to black grass' gives some fairly unsurprising responses.
Broadscale monoculture invites its own range of problems, and herbicide-resistant highly-competitive (when in a single-other-species ecosystem) weeds are one such.
If the starting position is 'we must grow the same variety of wheat in the same field every year', then indeed, you're going to have some challenges.
> But how do you kill the cover crop so you can grow wheat again? How do you kill the weeds? ... The only viable answer today is...Roundup (glyphosate).
I don't agree, and I note that you also answered your question differently later in your post with the note about 'mixed farming' (grazing it off).
There are, of course, other answers than herbicides. Seasonal crops, harvesting and then seed-sowing amongst the stubble (provides some mulch & eroson protection), intensive strip-grazing (bovine, ovine, caprine, or fowl, all effective options), or even a cycle or two of fallow.
1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file.
Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )
> US is because it's functionally illegal for it to exist.
This feels like one of those 'burying the lede' situations.
Can you explain what's functionally illegal (and I admit that I'm mildly curious about the distinction of functional illegality and non-functional illegality) about this existing?
I'm as breathless as you are, after reading that second paragraph, but I nonetheless remain ignorant about the nuances of the legality of this situation.