Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.
lets burn everything, then spend all our time working on synthesizing nutrients and give ourselves nobel prizes for saving the world
What do you propose we do? Are you going to give up the phone or PC you used to make your comment? Are you gonna stop using electricity? How about your car? Are you going to stop consuming products that come in boxes and plastics? What about your family, going to convince them to do the same? Or is it just enough to leave edgy comments slagging the scientists who did solve a problem created by modern life?
Fucking consumer brain. Buy local, go nuclear. It’s that easy. Maybe you’ve already forgotten how much the air quality around the globe improved when covid hit.
God knows you can’t image a world without your drop shipped temu shit.
“Scientists synthesize nutrients Bees no longer get because humans destroyed all the flowers, and we think this is a net good.”
Don’t be unnecessarily negative about this. The people trying to figure this out want to make things good again. Destroying the planet is easy. Fixing it is alot harder!
Yeah. That’s unfortunate. An absolute travesty. But we’ve found a way to fix what we have fucked up. And that’s good. Don’t minimalize it.
We’ve broken the system. That sucks. But we’ve found a way to fix it for now. Not as good, but we are trying to do something.
Give some credit to the folks that are trying to fix our fuck ups. God damn it some people have realized what a mess we’ve made and are trying to do something to fix it. Small wins may just save our asses if we let them stack up enough.
Spouse and I work every year to add native plants and flowers back around our host to give the bees a place to go. Anything to save these amazing, little polinaters.
Humans: oh sure, let’s not change our insane agricultural system that is the major killer of biodiversity but instead create yet another technonfix by now in 2026™ fiddeling with the genes of another species.
When will we finally learn: there are no technological solutions to ‘manage’ the living. The living is not ‘manageable’./We’ve tried this approach pretty much since 100 years and every one ‘solution’ created two new problems. Look where we are guys, our planet is FUCKED. 50 years ago it was DDT, now it’s Crispr-CAS9…
1000 likes for this celebration of technical human dominance, we’re doing quite right, do we? Not our ‘dysfunctional’ ecosystem is the problem, but our approach to it that is based on control and (technoligical) dominance, instead of humility and respect.
Get rid of the large swaths of green fucking grass, which completely useless when one cuts it down. Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe and plant more native flowers too.
Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe
No, Dandy Lions crowd out native North American species and result in less diverse ecosystems, which is bad.
I have a native meadow lawn and it’s awesome. Zero maintenance, barely any watering (just peak dry season) and incredibly beautiful. The ecosystem takes care of itself as long as you don’t buff one side by accident.
Clover. Clover is great:
- Lush and green
- Holds down soil we
- Soft to walk on
- Needs less water than grass
- Needs less mowing
- Bees love it
+1 for clover. I “accidentally” spilled some clover seed outside our place (bugger off HOA), and it’s slowly overtaking the grass they planted.
I spread a bunch of clover seed around my yard, and where the grass was struggling (I don’t water or fertilize at all) the clover took over, and where the grass was doing ok naturally the clover sort of let the grass have that space mostly. Now the whole yard looks nice, and the clover is just fucking loaded with bees all day. It’s great. My dog just lies in the lush clover and watches the bees buzz around.
+ a chance at 4-leaf
My yard was infested with bur clover, horrible stuff when you have pets. Worse when your pets are poodle mixes.
Other clover yeah they chill.
If and when I ever get a home first thing I’m doing is planting clover.
It’s also way less ugly than dandelions that have finished blooming and started spreading seeds, as a bonus. In fact, it looks pleasing to the eye.
IIRC it also grows really easily, you can guerilla plant clover seeds around town at night if you really want to.
Question from a yank: Is it ‘dandy lion’ or ‘dents-de-leon’?
He wrote it wrong. Its dandelion, and its pronounced in English just like you do, but dependent on the country, we have different words for it. In danish its “mælkebøtte”. Which means “milk bucket”. I think because of the white liquid they have inside. Its good for mosquito bites.
The whole plant is edible too but gets more bitter the older it gets. Especially delicious as a spring salad mix in.
So they’re feeding bees Vegemite now.
Several bee factions see this as a vaccine and are opting out. /s
Bee Joe Rogan is going hard on ivermectin
Bee do our own rezzearch
hivemind at work.
This method is surprisingly effective at bringing back our god damn honey. We may not have to kill Nicolas Cage after all.
He’s going to steal the Declaration of Inbeependence
Soo, beekeepers thought for generations that bees (a animal too) only need sugar to live?
Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.
No, but they do replace the honey with sugar syrup
Only during specific times of the year, it’s a supplement not a main diet. If you notice your colony doesn’t have enough honey for the winter, or it’s a new colony, or needs medicated, then yes. Otherwise they should be eating their own stored honey made the way they like it.
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Why can’t they just be easy to exploit gosh darn it
And so the house of cards grows by another level. We’ll just modify this to add this missing thing. Never mind why it is missing. 10 years later we are 9 layers deep on plugging holes we’ve created that technological advancements got us out if until they don’t and whoosh the cards come crashing down. The hardiness of nature replaced by the frivolity of man.
I really wouldn’t call nature “hardy” when an entire ecosystem can collapse when you can take one single species out of it
Let’s remember that nature is what produced pandas
Though I still agree
What ecosystem collapses when removing a single creature? Are you talking about pre-holoscene extinction ecosystems? Or are you talking about modern ecosystems (after most of the original biodiversity has already been obliterated, and “removing one species” is actually thousands down on the list of removals)?
Nature is extremely resilient and adaptable. Life has survived entire mass extinctions and come back flourishing
Sure, nature writ large is resilient and adaptable.
Individual species die off all the time. Sometimes for stupid reasons.
Fair enough. It was meant yo contrast with man’s obviously fragile solutioning on the fly.
Couldn’t agree more
Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.
By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.
I’m not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it’s possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.
Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I don’t have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else
Perennial plants don’t provide the same nutritional yields. Annuals put all their energy into making fruits/seeds that can be harvested. Things like potatoes or onions don’t put all their energy into seeds, but they do put a lot into their roots and that’s what’s harvested.
We need more biodiversity, but we can start by not having brain dead landscaping dictated by office suits.
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I think it probably has something to do with this:
(Source for the drawing: my ass)
As plants reach maturity, there’s less additional biomass accumulated year after year. At least that’s how i imagine it, based on animal growth. Like for cattle that’s true. They grow and after 6 months i think they already have like 50% of the weight of a grown-up animal? And if you let them grow for 10 years, they would only have twice the weight than after 6 months but you pay 20x the cost to keep them alive so it doesn’t pay off at all (20x the cost for 2x the yield means only 10% of efficiency). That’s why they’re slaughtered early. I suspect a similar reason applies to plants and why they are eaten early.
Edit: i looked up the numbers for cow and calf (child cow) weights (here and here):
- At birth: 30 kg
- After 2 months: 100 kg
- After 6 months: 200 kg
- After 12 months: 400 kg
- Mature: 600 kg
I understand the sentiment and don’t generally disagree… But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don’t really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don’t have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn’t evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don’t have to compete for resources with honeybees, that’s a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.
In general we have a pretty misguided view of bees. In reality, very few bee species are social animals, despite popular belief. The idea of queen bees and beehives is so embedded in our culture.
When people talk about saving the bees, the discussion almost never turns to native pollinators, including native bees.
Thanks for contributing that.
Really? Because any time I see a post about bees, there’s someone saying that honeybees are an invasive species.
Maybe on Lemmy, but we represent a minority in social media. You’ll tend to see more counter popular opinions on Lemmy for that reason.
Either way, saving the bees should be about saving native bees where industrial has destroyed native habitat.
Throughout history the human population has only been able to increase thanks to innovation. Irrigation, the wheel, alternating crops, crop distance, keeping disease in check, genetic engineering to increase resistance and crop yields, and this is another innovation in that line. If you want to go back to nature, by all means do.
I believe the only way forward is through science and innovation and if that means genetically altered food for the bees, then so be it. This with the in combination with limiting roundup should bring the global bee populations back from the brink.
Shortsighted reductionist viewpoint. Not science but philodophy will get us (all living beings!) out of the mess our global ecosystem is in. I do get the desire to ‘fix’ stuff, though. But it’s the wrong approach imho.
You’re quickly glossing over all the issues.
“human population has only been able to increase thanks to innovation”: and that’s a good thing? What would be wrong with a more manageable human population?
“If you want to go back to nature, by all means do.”: how? The world has advanced beyond that, it’s clearly not an option.
“the only way forward is through science and innovation”: if science & innovation is what you call forward, then obviously yes, but that’s just a tautology. What is your measure of “forward”? If it’s power over nature, advancements, … then for sure. If it’s respecting this earth and not long term ruining the entire planet… how sure are you about that?
“limiting roundup”: ah, an innovation that should be limited. What went wrong that it was globally used before we were sure enough about its side effects? How sure are you about all the current innovations that they don’t have similar issues? How sure are you about this bee superfood not having disastrous long term effects?
If you ignore all the issues with it though, innovation is incredible for sure!
I would argue the right direction to go forward in is the direction where Billions of People dont starve. Innovation and sustainabillity are not mutually exclusive.
Current agricultural progress is mostly about needing as few people as possible for farming, not making enough food for everyone. It’s widely known there is plenty of food, the issues are social as to why some are still hungry, not technological.
And in the end, we’re on a finite planet, so whichever way you look at it, keeping increasing population numbers has to end somewhere, so the question is not does enough humans exist, but what is enough, and i think there are plenty of arguments thaht we’re overpopulating the earth already.
“Overpopulation” is fascist dogshit
Can you agree we can’t put an infinite amount of people on a finite planet?
So that by default the discussion is not if overpopulation can exist, but when we reached it? If you don’t feel we reached it yet, i can imagine that. It’s a very tough topic. But just the very basic facts of existing on a planet of finite size means that there can only be so many of us before everything collapses.
And which fascist things do you associate with the “overpopulation” topic (i imagine for example the one child policy in china?). It’s not because something has been used by fascism, that it’s inherently fascist.
Just to give you some numbers:
World population 10k years ago (prehistoric times) was said to be around 10 million, then it increased 30x to 300 million by 1000 AD (medieval age) and then it increased 30x again during the modern age.
About that last increase during the modern age: a 3x increase in food production is due to the use in fertilizer (Haber-Bosch-process) and a 10x increase in food production is simply due to more land area being used for farming. Which was possible because a lot of deforestation projects, wood was cut down and wheat planted, and draining of swamps and such. Also modern agriculture to america.
So it’s not just innovation (new fertilizer) but also quantitative scaling (more land areas used)
I’m all for this innovation if it means commercial bee farmers use the supplement and it helps native bees compete for natural pollen. People get very sentimental about honeybees, but honestly even as a hobbyist with just a few colonies I feel like a “baddie”. There are 200+ species of bees in the UK, most living in tiny colonies. At the moment bumblebee queens are out foraging for pollen and nectar, enough so they can start laying (only the queens live through winter). In my hives the overwintered workers are also out foraging, thousands of them. Multiply that by the hundreds of hives in a commercial operation and you can see the issue.
Also, managed woods.
Welcome to 8 billion people and growing.
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I’m interested in your opinion, but can you like maybe not just post a personal attack, and explain why you think what the guy you replied to is stupid?
From my experience, what he describes really reflects what we see happening in the world all the time. layers of layers of us causing issues, and then solving them with more technologies, creating new problems, etc… etc… etc…
And the big bet is that we’re not digging ourselves into a very deep hole. In the end, the existential threat of global warming is one of the examples. We kept solving problems with burning more & more burning of fossil fuels, and then suddenly “o crap”.
dude… no
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Here in Germany farmers are payed for a strip of each field to be planted with wild flowers instead. They don’t lose money at all and nature keeps a bit of land. Simple and cheap.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
Bees
That’s the tradeoff, it’s bees /s
Soylent bee.
Bees all the way down.
Under rated comment.
It’s been 37 mins and it’s only like 8am
In his defense, it is a pretty good comment (there’s multiple layers going on) while being a bit of a sleeper at the same time. And given the size of the Lemmy audience, it’s not likely to ever get the number of votes it deserves.
And in your defense, I doubt he really thought it through that deeply, and instead just posted the first idiotic thought that came to mind.
I stand by it.
The solution is so simple. Crop/pollen diversity. Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation. Or the bee keepers themselves that sell the services of their bees, could ensure diverse flower and pollen options when their bees aren’t traveling.
Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)
Seems easier than engineering edible yeast to get them the sterols they need.
But you see they can sell this! Can’t sell “fallow fields”…
Yes well known fact we shouldn’t research any technology to reverse the collapse of our biosphere or to alleviate climate change. Wouldn’t want anyone being able to sell that tech. Best we just turn off the lights and plant some flowers.
I love planting some flowers, but we’re going to need technology to undo the mess we created.
Fellows can sell seeds for fallow fields, my friend. never fear for they will forage, and be fine.
Didn’t use fertile or follow or falter. Fine folly.
Frankly, foul folly feels fitter.
V, is that you?
“They” being the University of Oxford?
Plenty of companies have been founded by former university researchers based on discoveries they’ve made while at said universities. Seems like nothing prevents those folks from patenting the newfound methods for themselves.
Or, they will license the technology to a big manufacturer. Seeing as the University of Oxford is probably ill-equipped to produce industrial amounts of yeast.
You would be surprised, yeast vats and breweries have a ton of overlap, IE pretty cheap tanks and reasonably standard infrastructure. Most universities with a biology research wing are going to have a few bio-reactors, and while they may not be able to produce the feed itself industrially, they can easily breed starters to sell to places like breweries and companies that already produce yeast at massive scale.
That’s it! I’m calling my beer brewing vessels ‘bio-reactors’! No more carboys for me!
But Brawndo has the electrolites that plants crave!
Just in case the joke is too far of a stretch to make the connection, what I’m saying is the obvious simple solution isn’t profitable.
They’d rather sell you a solution that doesn’t actually work, then give you a solution that works that they can’t make profit on.
So Brawndo for bees too? Done!
Who is “they” in this case
It also doesn’t degrade ecosystems further.
Bees aren’t just the domesticated honey bees.
In the end, it probably isn’t easier at all. Once the yeast is created, yeast is dirt cheap and easy as hell to grow, and wouldn’t require managing a field of wildflowers that are going to drop seeds for the following year when you intend to plant crops there. I’m not saying it’s a good or ethical choice, but the yeast definitely has the potential to be easier and cheaper
Yeah, I found that pretty weird, too. Not only that, but you can’t get that yeast for the next two years. Your method works yesterday haha.
Note for those passing through and not reading articles:
This is not a summary of the article, but OP’s suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that’s lacking in bees’ diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.
OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.
I re call watching Clarkson’s Farm and he was paid to grow wildflowers in one of the fields for these very reasons.
Yeah, the government subsidy for that was so high that it was more profitable than growing grain on the field (which is admittedly not hard, since he made a loss on his grain fields)
Don’t worry. Dust bowl 2 comming in hot to teach this lesson the hard way.
Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation.
I can see a potential problem with this suggestion. How many of those wildflowers are net nitrogen fixers? If they are net-negative this approach could be draining all the nitrogen out of the soil during off-rotation years meaning large amounts of petrochemical fertilizer would have to be used to make the field productive again for nitrogen consuming crops (like wheat and corn).
Key Native Nitrogen-Fixing Wildflowers:
- Lupines (Lupinus spp.): Includes Texas Bluebonnet and various perennial species; they thrive in poor soil and are loved by pollinators.
- Prairie Clover (Dalea spp.): Purple (Dalea purpurea) and White (Dalea candida) are drought-tolerant perennials that fix high levels of nitrogen.
- False Indigo (Baptisia spp.): Sturdy perennials with showy, pea-like flower spikes (e.g., Blue False Indigo).
- Partridge Pea (Chamaecrista fasciculata): An annual that grows rapidly, making it excellent for disturbed soils.
- Wild Senna (Senna hebecarpa): A tall perennial that produces yellow flowers.
- Canada Milkvetch (Astragalus canadensis): A hardy, native perennial.
- Groundnut (Apios americana): A vine-like wildflower with edible tubers.
https://edgeofthewoodsnursery.com/wp-content/uploads/Native-Plants-for-Nitrogen-Fixation.pdf
Cheers
Several of those are going to be perennial and end up competing with mono-culture crops the following year(s) (not that I’m trying to defend mono-culture crops, but that’s what they’re planting). It’s a good idea, but not necessarily as simple as you’re implying. Still it’s an idea that’s not without some merit. The biggest obstacle to adoption is no one is making a significant profit off of it, so it’s unlikely to see much uptake.
You aren’t wrong, but soil can be turned over, and the wildflowers can be removed.
What about the seeds they dropped the year prior
Bees went fucking nuts for my lupine, even while living in an urban environment. Only problem was that the aphids did too. So many that it was revolting. I had to aggressively remove them every single day of the colonies would explode and destroy my lupine within a very short time. They’d suck it dry.
I don’t mean to argue against flowers, but why specifically Pennsylvania? What about everywhere else?
the thing with diverse flowers approach is that they don’t grow everywhere … some places you will naturally only have like 1-2 types of flowers because certain flowers prefer a certain soil and some soil is maybe too meager or sth to support a wild diversity of flowers.
Works for me. I only mow early spring and early autumn. During spring and summer the yard runs on it’s own. Every year is different. Each year it looks different. Every year honey tast little different. But … that is how it’s supposed to be!
“brands” hate that, taste must be 100% predictable year to year. Just like wine. Grapes are different each year too. Imagine the amount of additives required to adjust (read that as ruin) the original flavor.
Do farmers still do crop rotation? Here in the Netherlands they pump the ground full of the appropriate chemicals so they can grow the same crop in the same place every year.
As for your plan, the fact that bees are getting essential nutrients from those flowers proves a fallow field with wildflowers isn’t being fallow; it’s extracting resources from the soil which may have needed replenishment for crop rotation to work. You can sacrifice productivity for wildflowers, but at that point you’re just designating a space to be a meadow.
The solution is complicated and requires society to step away from the industrial model of agriculture entirely. Food forests are diverse and resilient permaculture, where a farmer does the labor of monitoring nutrient flows through the ecosystem so that a large population of humans can be part of that balanced ecosystem (possibly at a distance, with food being exported and feces imported). Bees are a natural part of such an ecosystem.
I learned during COVID about planting diverse local wildflowers to help with pollination in my small little garden I used to have. I ended up dedicating like an 8x6 planter just for wildflowers every year. Always had tons of bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. I honestly never realized how many species of bees there were. The first year I did it I tripled my veggie yield, never looked back.
I’m sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I’m from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.
The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.
Bee extinction means no polination, no polination means no crops; penny wise and pound foolish.
Bee extinction means drastically fewer crops and less pollination, but not no crops. It would be devastating, but there would still be agriculture. Lots of staple crops are wind pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. But for the rest of our food, that would all become very expensive and widely unavailable.
True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it’s a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.
So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.
In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.
So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.
nah man. bees just crave brawndo.
That is awesome news BUT
The real reason is humanity being a bunch of irresponsible greedy fuckwads, and I fear that this will be used not in the “let’s be less greedy, let’s fix the problems and let’s use this to help the bees” but more as a “woohoo, bee factory farming!” and “W00T, this means we can fuck over bees even more, let’s go!”
Can we please stop it with the greed?
Exact same thing I thought. Honey bees are actively harmful for the environment because they outcompete wild bees who are less efficient at pollination whilst being actively exploited for their honey. While improving their diet is certainly a net benefit for the bees, at the end of the day it just reads to me like farmers have more efficient workers to harvest more honey and exploit even more.
Greed is incentivized both neurologically and economically. You cannot count on all of humanity rewiring their brain. We must destroy the economic incentives and then work on countering the neurological component.
I dont think this is very true. How do you explain that 99.99% of people are super happy living their lives with just enough money to have somewhere to live and pay for food and some vehicle?
To me it seems that we have like 0.0001% of the population being super greedy and mentally ill, and they are the ones being talked about in the media and the ones turning Earth into a shitty place because of their enormous greed and lust for power.
How do you explain that 99.99% of people are super happy living their lives with just enough money to have somewhere to live and pay for food and some vehicle?
Further, how do you explain that, for most of human history, we haven’t lived in economic systems that reward greed in the way Capitalism does? Saying human beings are neurologically wired to behave in an especially greedy way, under Capitalism, is just recency bias.
Is that urge extent in people? Sure, but so are kindness, generosity, and plenty of other traits that run counter to greed and selfishness. To say that the negative ones incentivized by the economic system we live in are somehow more natural than those others, is nonsense.
100% agree, and its sad that we never get encouraged to think about all the good qualities people actually have also. Almost every single human being here, from 8 billion or so, are happily living in peace with other humans.
People who dont, are world “leaders” , or in prison.
Two issues:
- Most of history isn’t written, and when it has been, it was the ruling class that wrote it.
- Most of, if not all, the world has been under a ruler of some form for the vast majority of it’s history
Don’t start thinking that Capitalism started with The Wealth of Nations. Greed has always been there, and it has always been rewarded.
I doubt we can remove the neurological component, let alone without it fucking up. Greed is an abstraction of our old survival instincts since as a general rule the tribe, clan, village or whatever would counter the worst effects. The end goal should be to reimplement those social control mechanisms, what that looks like is probably regulation’s and maybe beating some folks over the head with a 2x4.
Maybe we can steer the neurological component to focus on activity that offers positive benefits to society, like art. Substitute something good for something bad. It just takes a bit of time for the brain to find the satisfaction it used to get from greed in a different behavior, like music, or exercise.
We can always gun for glory through selfless action, still selfish reasons but good results.
Our technology is great, but our policy is horrendous. We need to change our politics to change the world for the better
explain how one would we or us stop it with the greed
It’s a bit extreme, but I say we kill all billionaires and then fairly redistribute their cash and see what happens.
If there’s no real change in greed then kill the top 0.1% of wealth hoarders and see what happens.At some point the greed will have to stop.
Bioengineer some humans to not be greedy.
Some humans because you can opt out, or you can choose it for your designer baby. Then there is a control and an experimental group.
The mad scientist in me is dying to see whether behaviors with moral connotations (greed) confer an advantage for survival.
Eugenics, btw
Funny thing, seems like all the billionaires are all for eugenics.
In fact they are pro anything that brings them more wealth and power whether it be destroying the planet or destroying the human race (Thiel) or destroying the night sky (Musk)
licks fingers and wets eyebrows
Hahah! An unethical study to quantify the survival value of ethics! Isaac Newton would agree that experiments are a necessity!
An economst’s natural experiment, hehe! oh Adam Smith, when does self interest become greed?
Are you okay?
waow
So they solved a problem we create ourselves, by destroying nature, by making a product that now increases the cost of food and makes farmers even more dependent on corporate chemical companies to grow it.
Yep, you can’t charge money in perpetuity if you solve the actual problem. Not only that, but bees will eventually become reliant on the product. This is how the US Healthcare system works as well.
Thats also how fertillizer works. Honey Bees are domestic Animals and require care to be usefull to us.
Hell they might even genetically engineer them to be dependent on it.
Jem’Hadar bees, wonderful /s
I bet the bastards have already wondered
"Hmm, if this works maybe we can do all life on earth next . . ?
“We’ll make all the money!”
The GOOD news is that yeast doesn’t really respect property lines. Or quarantines. Or much of anything. That shit will spread organically easily enough. It will be a while, but now that the strain exists (and is being constantly refreshed with the corpro product) it should help all bees everywhere. Maybe bees will start farming it like ants do. Would be fun
So does Monsanto with their GMO crops and they successfully sue farmers for having it, whose farms were invaded by it. I don’t see it as good news when a company can’t control their IP. They’ll criminalize possession and use that to drive weak competitors out all together. These people are psychopaths.
Forgive me, it’s not good news that a company has it. That’s evil and they will destroy people lives. BUT the yeast exists now. When we die out because we are unimaginably stupid, that yeast is likely to live on and help the bees to do so as well. The bees i more worried about because they don’t love heat
That’s a lot easier to do with plants than single celled organisms.
Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland will be demanding a percentage of the farmer’s crop because they saved the bees that pollinated it.
It’s exactly the way they said drug dealers would work
Yes but you see, now the solution is a product, and shareholders shall profit from its sale. Value where no value was before. Blessed be the capitalists.
