First job out of college was as a statistician. I couldn’t lie that much.

Then I worked as a microbiologist. It stunk.

Then I worked as a plant breeder, it was fun but the pay sucked without a Ph.D.

Took a job as and international marketing and product manager (paid the same as the PhD). Traveled all over the world. It was brutal but fun. Jetlag and stress started destroy my health.

Took a job as a consultant to farmers. It wasn’t bad until a new CEO decided to change things and lose a ton of money.

Currently working for a smaller company that basically doesn’t care what I do as long as it’s profitable. Contracting research, selling seeds & beneficial insects, etc to farmers. Set my own schedule and do my own thing. I let the CEO know what I am up too once a year or so. Spent most of the last month playing PlayStation after doing way too much this spring. Gotta pace myself after all.

Well they rise up until they mysteriously fall out of a window.

You want to really get worried?

Everything we produce in agriculture is constantly fighting off plagues. From insects, bacterial, fungal and virus infections. It is constantly under attack.

In crops on average farmers have to change to new varieties every 10 years. In some species it’s every 3-4.

Global warming is also making it much harder for agriculture. Higher temps = diseases come earlier in the season and last longer. Pest populations are not reduced as much over the winter.

We have also reached the limits of traditional breeding in many species for disease/pest resistances.

There is ways we can prevent the pending collapse but not without some massive investments, a complete overhaul of the laws, and fundamental changes in how we do agriculture.

A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.

I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.

They were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.

The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.

Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.

Go back and check again. They are actively restoring deleted comments. About once a month I log back on and delete another round. Usually another 10-15 “mysteriously” pop back up again.

I haven’t spoken to my parents in over a decade. They are really shitty people.

I have entertained myself reviewed nursing homes looking for the one with the absolute worst reviews for them to finish their lives at.

Look up the published ranges of the shahed drones from Iran (2,500km or around 1,600 miles). Even if the Irainians are lying about it’s effective range it’s still possible for Ukraine to have copied and improved on the design.

Of course the drones are not that large and there’s a few fishing boats in the artic.

No the soils in the Midwest are not good.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7e1766e613384ea59aef9ff17ccbdc9c

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816224002716?via%3Dihub

Erosion and soil profile degradation from poor farming practices are a huge issue.

No it’s not what happened to North Korea at all. I have no clue where you got that from.

The collapse of the Soviet Union cutting off food, fuel, fertilizer, and technology support started it.

Then torrential rainfall and flooding destroyed that years crop and food storage in the main production regions. It also destroyed many of their hydroelectric dams and irrigation systems. Without support from the soviets they had no way to repair them.

However the main reason hundreds of thousands of not millions died was because of the governments unwillingness to open their borders for international aide/trade. The government deliberately starved their population.

This sounds like a government program with good intentions but no actual understanding of what needed to be done.

First off both organic and conventional farming methods do acidify the soil. Contrary to what these farmers think organic/traditional farming does it much more rapidly.

Higher rainfall zones also naturally have more acidic soils. Traditionally cultures have temporarily overcome this by burning the vegetation (slash and burn).

If 70% of the soil in the country is acidic the government program should have been to subsidize lime application and soil testing first. Lime is much cheaper than fertilizer anyways and balancing out the pH makes all nutrients more available.

They could have then subsidized the appropriate usage of fertilizer based upon the test results. Blindly applying any type of fertilizer is a recipe for disaster. Fertilizers must be applied in balance for the crop, soil type, pH, and the nutrients.

Moved out at 17. Haven’t spoken to my parents in over a decade. The only interaction I plan on having with them in the future is pissing on their graves.

They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.

They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.

I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.

It’s sort of their pattern.

1. Introduce new changes.

2. Screw it up royalty.

3. Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.

4. Rinse and Repeat

Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

Random sampling has a significant effect when the population size is smaller. Say less than 10,000 individuals.

It has very little effect as the population size increases to say something a little more than 8,000,000,000 individuals.

“boy do I have thrips” triggered a funny memory.

When I worked in Ag. Research we had a big international field day. People from 50+ countries visiting in. I got the wonderful job of doing presentations in the field all day long. This was in late summer on a bad thrip year.

Well, one of the office goons decided that they would order all the staff polo shirts for the three day event. We were all supposed to wear the same color on the specified day.

They ordered in a light blue, yellow, and green polos. The first day was to be light blue. I “accidentally” wore the green one instead and had a few very irate office goons on my back first off that morning. Strangely enough all of the experienced outdoor staff “accidently” wore the green shirt as well.

For those that don’t know, thrips are highly attracted to light blue and they bite. I laughed my ass off most of the day.

The following two days everyone wore green. Except for the one determined office goon who wore the yellow shirt. In a field full of honeybee hives…

Swirski mites are my favorite in the greenhouse or nethouse. They work better than any pesticide I have ever seen.

You seem to be lost in the weeds a bit. Of course hardy-weinberg is a model that never exists in reality. It’s a good method to explain the importance of selection pressure on populations.

Without an active selection agent on the allele, it’s frequency in the population remains the same.

Now in reality there is no such thing as zero selection pressure on any allele. Having a deleterious or advantageous allele 49.99cM away exerts selection pressure.

However allelic frequencies without a strong selection acting on them remain relatively stable.