We're undoubtedly in the midst of another mass extinction, caused by human activity. Here's another one that will freak you out:
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Here's a fun one about the fish:
That is not fun. That is the opposite of fun 🤕
😢
You can see where they decided "Profit, with no consideration of anything else!" was the answer
I'm going to guess it wasn't a decision, so much as tech availability and pricing. radar, sonar, more powerful boats with bigger trawl nets.
If they'd had that stuff earlier it'd be the same tragedy of the same commons.
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This is kind of misleading since they closed the fishery (I think in the 90s), so the amount of cod catch would naturally plummet. The fishery did, however, need to be closed due to overfishing.
Not exactly; it collapsed, then they closed it once it was too late, and now it's still fucked, 30 years later.
In the early-1990s, the industry collapsed entirely.
In 1992, John Crosbie, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, set the quota for cod at 187,969 tonnes, even though only 129,033 tonnes had been caught the previous year.
In 1992 the government announced a moratorium on cod fishing.[12] The moratorium was at first meant to last two years, hoping that the northern cod population would recover and the fishery. However, catches were still low,[16] and thus the cod fishery remained closed.
By 1993 six cod populations had collapsed, forcing a belated moratorium on fishing.[14] Spawning biomass had decreased by at least 75% in all stocks, by 90% in three of the six stocks, and by 99% in the case of "northern" cod, previously the largest cod fishery in the world.[14] The previous increases in catches were wrongly thought to be due to "the stock growing" but were caused by new technologies such as trawlers.[13]
That's a fair point. It still is a misleading plot since it isn't an estimate cod population, and isn't representative of population after 1992. As you said the numbers are still bleak. I found this plot
, Source , which does tell a similar story around the early 90s but indicates greater recovery in more recent years.
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Dude. This is loaded as fuck misinformation and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Cod fishing on Canada's eastern coastal area has been banned since 1992. That's why it's flattened out to nothing all of a sudden. They stopped Cod fishing there.
Cod fishing on Canada's eastern coastal waters was halted in 1992 for two years, with the plan being that the population would recover and they could start fishing again. Did you think the population recovered and they just decided not to start fishing again because they forgot? Or that they just had woken up one day and decided to take the drastic step of banning fishing and throwing 30,000 people out of work and destroying one of their thriving industries because nothing had happened to the fish?
The collapse happened before the ban, not after. And they took long enough to notice and implement it that the fishery was driven to total, semi-permanent collapse before the ban, to an extent that they didn't fully realize until several years had gone by and the fish still hadn't recovered.
Here's a pretty detailed summary of the before and after. In 2005, after 13 years of the ban, the cod biomass off Canada's coast was still about 3% of its pre-industrial-fishing levels. That's why there's still a ban: Not that they just hate sending out boats and bringing in fish, but that the population's still fucked and not really recovering, and so any fishing would be simply giving some additional cleaver-whacks to the already dead golden goose. I don't know what the numbers are now, but I would be surprised if they are dramatically better, and I think the chart I cited is an extremely honest and vivid picture of the results of overfishing, and not loaded or anything else as-fuck.
There's something wrong with this data.
The fraction of asses should be way higher.
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Oh, my. I hadn't even noticed how much less I've had to clean my Windshield lately. That is a very bad sign...
It’s been a couple years since I’ve had to scrape the bugs from my windows.
I had to last week. It was the first time in years.
In Sacramento I clean mine almost daily. Just depends where you are really. Lots of farm land will always have lots of bugs.
Let me give another example:
Traveling from Central Europe to Southern Europe to spend your holiday. In 1980/1990 you had to clean your windshield a couple of times when driving there.
Not any more.
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Couldn't that also be new improvements in car aerodynamics where bugs simply glide off instead of getting squished?
Apparently, it's the other way around, presumably because unaerodynamic cars pushed around a big air cone, which deflected the insects.
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I'm 51, I spent the 90's in Louisiana, and since my wife doesn't fly, we have driven across the USA more times than we can count. In the 90's, if you didn't have a bug screen on your grill, the LoveBugs would clog your radiator and you would over heat. You also needed the windshield scrib and squeegee to scrub off the bug splatter every time you filled up. Now, you don't need either of them.
I have been thinking about this recently. How much of this is lack of bugs vs aerodynamics. I mean back in the day we all drove big rectangles. I'm not denying the fact that it could be a mass extinction of bugs. Just curious.
Nope, seems to purely be the mass extinction thing. In fact:
modern cars hit more bugs, perhaps because older models push a bigger layer of air – and insects – over the vehicle.
Same in Europe.
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This has bothered me for years. It's a really strange thing to be telling younger relatives about how you legitimately could not drive any substantial distance without windshield cleaner at certain times of year. I remember them being plastered across the front edge of the hood and against the radiator after a long trip.
It's one of the most visibly different things about the world today, IMO, and it's a little eerie.
The sounds, too.
I was talking with my dad walking near to a place that had frogs croaking, and he got a little emotional and excited to hear them over the phone. Normally it's just traffic noises now, and silence.
I remember the wasps always buzzing around the vehicle grills munching on all the dead bugs too. Now it's just shiny and chrome.
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When I was a kid, there used to be hundreds of fireflies in my backyard in the summer. Now, I get excited to see even two or three.
I blame the anti-mosquito pesticide services half my neighbors seem to hire.
Where I grew up, the city wanted to hire a bunch of trucks to drive around spraying malathion into the air. They had a vote, and the town voted overwhelmingly that, fuck no they did not want that, please don't do that, that sounds awful. Then they did it anyway.
Same thing; now there are pretty much 0 fireflies.
Why did they even have a vote then? They just hoped everyone would say yes?
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Not quite correct. The 2020 image should have a car completely covered in a dust of green pollen because city planners only planted male trees for decades because female trees would produce fruit or seed and be a "nuisance" and/or create trash/animal bait etc...
But if they only planted female trees, they would never get fertilized, so they wouldn't produce fruit anyway... Or pollen.
Worst case scenario, they would produce fruit, and cities would still smell bad and have rodent problems. But without the allergies.
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I'm so dopey. I thought this was suggesting that we'd invented some clever formulation to stop dead bugs sticking to windshields in 2020 and that we'd all have fully autonomous cars by 2050.
There ARE fewer bugs, and that's a problem, but also cars are more aerodynamic and would kill fewer bugs these days regardless.
Hmmm... This article suggests the opposite.
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Whoa, this is disconcerting. My folks used to run a rental car agency and I helped out every now and then by cleaning cars. I remember cleaning so many bugs off of cars 20ish years ago, and now on my own car - barely nothing. :(
Idk but I’m reminded of the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine. One of the great achievements of our civilization was an advanced AI with all of our collective knowledge that you could converse with. Feels like our AI tech is on track to get there by the time we start dying off en mass lol
There are quite a few wonderful stories about the AIs continuing after humans are gone. "For a Breath I Tarry" by Roger Zelazny, and the whole of the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, are some great ones.
That being said one of the critical points of "For a Breath I Tarry" is that the machines are just doing what they're programmed to do, maintaining the infrastructure for no one and just sitting in their orbits keeping the power grid going and all, and are actively hostile to any effort to bring the humans back because that would make things complicated and isn't in their programming (since although superficially they can converse and act "intelligently," more so than humans, they can't really grasp the purpose of things.) Also, "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson is another perfectly realistic one.
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I'm [emotionally*] ready for the hyper-industrialized moon-scape our planet will become once our environment completely collapses. I think there will be a point past which any environmental protection measures will be useless because there's nothing left to protect so industrial landscapes will become the norm.
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My parents never gave me money unless I worked for it and washing their cars was one of those few things they did pay me to do. I remember always having to scrub bugs off the front, it was the hardest part. I've literally never washed my road cars because its just dust.
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Last panel should have one of those stock scanning robots behind the wheel.
With a human body on the windshield?
And a tesla logo on the bonnet for absolutely no reason at all wink wink
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Stop cutting your lawns and dig a pond. It's not going to stop industrial scale destruction, but it's something actionable that you can do yourself and see the positive impact right at home. If enough homes do it, a network of gardens can become a macro system.
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