BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:

As someone who grows trees as a hobby, I'll say that growing from seed isn't really worth it on a production basis. It's Immensely satisfying when it pans out but it can take 1-2 years to really get going and it's probably 4-5 years before you can relax and say "it's gonna make it ". Just so much that can go wrong at the early stages, can be very discouraging to see months or years of work fail.

quote:

that said, there's NOTHING like the pleasure of having a big mature tree that you grew from seed. Absolutely nothing.

Rime posted:

Quitting my job has only given me infinite free time


to think

That Spooky Witch posted:

thos fuckin ducks are rapists

Stevie Lee posted:

are there microplastics in my fresh maple syrup? there loving are, aren't there

http://www.sci-news.com/biology/birch-tree-microplastic-10574.html posted:

New research led by the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries shows that individual microplastic particles with diameters between 5 and 10 μm can enter the root system of the silver birch (Betula pendula), a species of tree native to Europe and parts of Asia, from the surrounding soil.

mahershalalhashbaz posted:

bless you. do the children survive in their new homes?

i'm currently forbidden to plant seeds for the next few months for personal reasons, so i'm living vicariously through everybody else

Rime posted:

Been trying for days to write a big long classic style post about how and why I'm so depressed, largely by having to continue existing in this interminably liminal state of affairs and society, that I was seriously considering just calling it quits and killing myself last week - but I can't even manage to scrape together a shitpost longer than this bland one-liner anymore.

Cletus Van Damme posted:

I almost never post, but I have been reading your posts for years, you would be missed by more people than you realize.

Stevie Lee posted:

are there microplastics in my fresh maple syrup? there loving are, aren't there

Cabbages and Kings posted:

I was thinking of this thread when I was doing a lot of my maple syrup stuff this year just because of how much loving plastic is involved. Plastic taps, plastic drop lines, plastic main lines -- none of this stuff is intended to last especially long (1 / 5 / 15 year, respectively). I would assume a lot of the filter media used now is woven plastic poo poo.

Regardless of how much leeches into the syrup, that's just a lot of landfill poo poo.

Cletus Van Damme posted:

I have been reading your posts for years, you would be missed by more people than you realize.

LionArcher posted:

co signed this Rime. you more than just about anyone made me realize how bad things are actually getting/are. you really have helped. please stick around. we gotta post through it. I was feeling particularly down last night and then I got really high and read this thread and it helped.

IAMKOREA posted:

This thread owns because you can just scream into the void when you need to about how loving stupid everything is and no one will try to tell you that actually Iceland just opened the world's largest atmospheric carbon capture plant and

Communist Thoughts posted:

whats so stupid about the carbon capture plant?

Rectal Death Adept posted:

i get real sad sometimes but then i think about how geese will get hosed up by climate change too and those smug pricks kind of deserve it when you really think about it

Communist Thoughts posted:

whats so stupid about the carbon capture plant?

Trabisnikof posted:

yeah the issue isn’t DAC as a concept the issue is using DAC as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels.

if we waved a magic wand and replaced our society and economy with one that actually addresses climate change, first we’d stop using fossil fuels etc and then we’d end up doing DAC just to reduce the extant CO2.

Trabisnikof posted:

yeah the issue isn’t DAC as a concept the issue is using DAC as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels.

if we waved a magic wand and replaced our society and economy with one that actually addresses climate change, first we’d stop using fossil fuels etc and then we’d end up doing DAC just to reduce the extant CO2.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

DAC as a concept is not exactly great either - the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that. Most of the atmosphere isn't carbon, it's like searching a swimming pool full of marbles for the green ones.

Trabisnikof posted:

Yeah but the energy cost of not going carbon negative is almost certainly higher. That’s just how hosed we are.


Of course instead we’re going to remain carbon positive and just claim on paper we aren’t

Communist Thoughts posted:

whats so stupid about the carbon capture plant?

mahershalalhashbaz posted:

yes! science is only just really figuring out how a forest works, there's a complex mechanism involved with evaporation and temperature control and water cycling where the aquifers only function properly if there are plenty of trees over them

TeenageArchipelago posted:

I saw someone point out that if we could run everything in reverse, i.e. having cars that sucked CO2 out of the air, dropping it off at gas stations, where it was mixed with other materials and pumped into the ground, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would be a problem of such immense scale that it would still take decades to fix

They wrote it better, but still

TeenageArchipelago posted:

I saw someone point out that if we could run everything in reverse, i.e. having cars that sucked CO2 out of the air, dropping it off at gas stations, where it was mixed with other materials and pumped into the ground, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would be a problem of such immense scale that it would still take decades to fix

They wrote it better, but still

A Russian troll farm posted:

Viewed in reverse, a billion and a half cars are all driving backwards, sucking in dirty air through the tailpipe, compressing all of the pollution into the densest possible form and storing it, and pushing out clean air from a vent in the front. When the tank is full, they back up into a station which sucks up the compressed pollution and stores it. A truck regularly comes to bring it to a plant where it is combined with other pollutants being sucked out of the air, and a series of pipes brings it far away to remote places, where it is pumped deep underground and safely hidden away. With this unprecedented collective effort, this dead world will one day be teeming with life

God Hole posted:

birch trees have been observed absorbing microplastics up through their roots

Marenghi posted:

If carbon capture worked so well, why did none of those clean coal power plants succeed?

That seemed like a perfect use of carbon capture technology, capture the emissions as they are produced by a dirty power plant. I know they tried carbon capture but we can see they didn't succeed by the fact clean coal is no longer talked about

mark immune posted:

the biosphere's epitaph will read: "drive it like u stole it lol"

gently caress COREY PERRY posted:

Rime posted:

No, I'm not seriously considering suicide today.

Doing a big long road trip down the west side of the island to look at big old growth, and seeing everything from Port Renfrew to Jordan River (70+km of old-old and century old growth) flagged for the saw, did not improve my mood. Followed by crawling through endless shitbox urban sprawl and traffic and trash development once I hit Victoria.

Quitting my job has only given me infinite free time to think about how beyond finished I am with being forced to live an intensely hypocritical life in a society I despise, surrounded by the willfully (and increasingly violently so!) ignorant. Going to the beach, all I can see is the trash and lack of biodiversity in the tide pools and extrapolate that. Going to the forest, all I see is how sterile they are and think about how second growth coastal rainforest is not supposed to be full of random swamps but we hosed the hydrology so badly and it will take centuries to repair if ever. Except it won't because the conditions for those forests to regenerate are going away forever. Come back to civilization and just spend my time listening to crabs in a bucket talking about what they want to buy and where they want to vacation and how to gently caress over someone else for money or lol's and then they get all uppity when you call them out on their bullshit.

It's all just loving exhausting. There's no way to get away from it. Every day is a waking hell where I am either confront by the multifaceted orthagonal systemic breakdown of nature itself, with every outcome that implies, or having to interact with braindead shitheads. I don't know which grinds me down more. Coming home was a mistake, Vancouver has to be ground zero for the lotus eaters.

There's no escape route in this dying era, I have nowhere to run, nowhere on the planet is untouched by this unfolding ecological nightmare and the claws of capital-puppeteered governments are desperately closing the cage ever tighter as things decline, so I just have to sit here and twiddle my thumbs and flip a coin as to what snaps first: my sanity or this horrifying liminal state of utterly insulated-from-reality existence within a crumbling imperial core on a dying planet. Maybe I get lucky and choke to death on bits of my own lungs from plasto-mesothelioma sooner than later or get really lucky and die as a skyrocketing asscancer statistic. That would be a relief.

I look at the road ahead with everything we know now, both about human nature and the forces we've set loose, and if it's going to be another +/- twenty-odd years of this bullshit (watching us willfully and aggressively destroy the biosphere) and then keeling over dead in a ditch at some point from a variety of potential causes, what even is the point? How the gently caress do I muster up the motivation to do anything when the wall the writing has been on is now slowly keeling over onto us like the slab on a tomb? It's not about the killing myself, it's about the what the gently caress am I supposed to loving do when there's no way out and every system on the planet, human or biological, is quite permanently falling apart.

I don't wish I was dead, I just wish I was stupid. This would be a whole lot easier to manage if I was just as witless as everyone else right up to the bitter end.