> 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.
But how do you kill the black grass before you plant wheat again. Grazing it will just keep it down until you plant wheat again. Then it will grow up through the wheat
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.
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. : )
Fun fact: "/dev/nul" (with only one L) would have worked, even if there is no directory with that name.
That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").
Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
I've already created a 'NULL' file, but it was not a Unix thing... It was just because I got confused if it was NULL as in the programming languages I usually use.
Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.
> 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.
Basically every diesel engine after the early 2010s needed to have several emissions systems (EGR, DPF + DEF). You can do some reading on them if you're curious, but they basically all reduce reliability, efficiency (DPFs choke exhaust, and airflow is critical to a diesel running well), and power from the same engine without them.
In terms of legality, it means manufactures need to include all of those systems and their associated complexity, but the way that this startup is getting around it is using engines that were built before those requirements and are thus grandfathered into not needing them.
Also on the legal side, there's a thriving black market of mechanics who are willing to rip all those systems out of diesel engines. It's not uncommon to see double-digit percent increases in both power and fuel economy after it's done. The EPA has prosecuted a few cases against shops and parts suppliers for those "diesel deletes"
> Basically every diesel engine after the early 2010s needed to have several emissions systems (EGR, DPF + DEF)
Not true at all.
Every diesel engine sold after the early 2010s is not permitted to emit a certain amount of soot particles of certain sizes, and not permitted to emit certain concentrations of certain gases.
Manufacturers don’t have to use a DPF or EGR or DEF to achieve that. They can do it however they want.
Having lived around Africa for three years and in Latin America for two, I’m extremely happy the EPA doesn’t let vehicles belch black smoke into the air.
FWIW I’m a car nut, currently own a diesel with all those systems. Have also owned a 6BT 12 and 24 valve. I do not want to stand, or have my kid stand near the exhaust.
I don’t recall exactly wha the Trump admin has changed but I know there have been changes on emission requirements. The way I understood this is historically all equipment with diesel motors have had pretty strict requirements for emissions and an engine like this would simply not be possible.
My take on this is you are throwing all the good things away about modern engines. You could easily make a right to repair tractor with low tech but still enjoy modern improvements.
Which is extremely practical for French, where the colon comes after a space. So if you want to write an actual colon to introduce a list on the following line, you’ll just input whatever the default smiley is.
> Disabled people are allowed to call ourselves by the correct labels without apologising that our suffering is less severe or less obvious than someone else sharing the same label.
I think you guys are perhaps talking past each other.
The fact you acknowledge and recognise 'less severe' (a significant understatement when comparing ASD to Downs) suggests that you do understand parent's point.
Parent, I also note, was not seeking or implying an apology was sought from people with less severe genetic conditions. Rather, that the implications on QoL, lifespan, social / familial imposition etc of Downs, is nothing at all like so called high-functioning ASD.
The parent comment was specifically and exclusively talking about autism, not Down's syndrome. I'm addressing their claim that it is "ridiculous" for an autistic person to "claim" to be autistic when other autistic people have worse outcomes.
I'm not interested in litigating the fairly obvious point that Down's syndrome is a much worse prognosis than ASD, and the comment to which I responded says nothing about it either.
It's a source of minor, but persistent, annoyance that security people have tried to abscond with the prefix cyber, morphing it into a synonym for security.
Having grown up reading cyberpunk novels about life in cyberspace, a passing interest in cybernetics (though not of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation variety), it's frustrating to lose a 'this means computer or internet related' prefix.
Without consequences for illegal behaviour, there's no incentive for bad actors to not continue acting bad. This, in no small part, explains why we are where we are today - a misplaced attempt to 'move forward' by ignoring illegal actions.
Without holding those who do wrong to account, positive movement will always be dogged or straight-up negated by those who do wrong without facing justice.
That'll only work here if there are reforms to the pardon power while we're at it. Any convictions a Democratic administration manages to obtain will be pardoned the next time a Republican gets in.
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
Pure solar is indeed to much of a constraint, it make it more challenging than propelling humans over roads in an enclosure needs to be.
A big problem is sharing the road with conventional vehicles. Many could probably drive straight though it, a Tesla could probably drive straight though it.
If the car must be a strong metal container the choices quickly reduce to the things on the market right now.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
It was the fact you started using units the world knows - albeit misspelling metre - but in the next sentence, comparing that same dimension, you used an apostrophe to allude to a unit that only 5% of the planet uses.
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.
reply