just-shower-thoughts

Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”

mojave-wasteland-official

“Friend”

Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.

theun--sj

Plants don’t wage war

mojave-wasteland-official

Ever heard of blackberries?

Yes, plants do wage war

kasaron

Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else. 

systlin

I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.

It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.

Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.

And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.

moirakatson

This post did not go where I expected it to.

deathbeforednf

Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.

Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.

norseminuteman

Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed. 

breadgunner

Can second the comments of Kudzu.

I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.

booksandwildthings

I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:

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See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.

zachsanomaiy

Kudzu is an apocalyptic nightmare

They smother every other living plant to death

Those trees under there are dead, they can’t get sunlight. Kudzu takes over and steals everything from these trees, and becomes them. It’s creepy as hell. These plants are basically straight out of a horror novelist’s wet dream tbh.

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The bodies of everything the kudzu has slain.

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What used to be a house

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Someone attempting to drive a four wheeler through it, to give you scale

It’s an ornamental plant kept in check in china, but was introduced to north america where it immediately went rampant and began to spread incredibly fast like a disease, destroying everything in its wake

The ONLY thing that has stopped this curse from engulfing the united states is goats. Apparently goats love this stuff like no tomorrow. Everywhere we find it now, we just bring a horde of goats to cut it down. Everything is fine…. for now.

zachsanomaiy

Kudzu is on time magazine’s top 10 invasive species to look out for.

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This little buddy doing his part

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zachsanomaiy

Not to keep spamming this post but 

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“the growth of kudzu as it became a “structural parasite” of the South,[7] enveloping entire structures when untreated[11] and often referred to as “the vine that ate the South”.[13]”

“It has been spreading rapidly in the southern U.S., “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually”.[2]

yall it’s been estimated this plant consumes 600 kilometers of the united states every year

it’s been suggested that we just start eating it to make it go away

nixieseal

Adding to the spam: yes, kudzu IS edible. In fact, all parts of it but the vine are edible. The leaves are supposedly great in salads or baked into quiche. The flowers supposedly are great in jam. The roots… Well, if you know how to cook other root vegetables, you know what to do with kudzu root. Feed this stuff to your livestock and cook it.

Eat it before it eats your house.

vagaybond

@solarpunkcast @solarpunkactionweek @solarpunkinspo @enviropunk feels relevant

3-ducks-in-a-trenchcoat

In this world it’s eat or be eaten

gamebird

Thread starts with the existential angst of building a treehouse. Ends with recipes on how to eat kudzu.

Posts that make you go ‘hm.’

gnabrie

it’s for science; what’s your age and do u know how to burn CDs?

queensparklekitten

16, uh throw it in a fire i guess? why would you do that though it seems like it would cause problems

applebutterbabie

Sparkle this is a bit, right?

queensparklekitten

what

an-anticlimactic-bass-drop

I’m 21 and I know it has something to do with putting it in a computer but idk how to actually do it

xelamanrique318

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ladyknightthebrave

30 And I feel my bones crumble to dust as I say Yes I know how to burn CDs

fieldbears

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Originally posted by corredordelaberintos

guerrillatech

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annoyingalchemist

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

commiemartyrshighschool

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

brokenmachine3553

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

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See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

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So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

white-throated-packrat

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

ralfmaximus

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

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Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

smute

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was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

hotvampireadjacent

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

commiemartyrshighschool

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

goldhornsandblackwool

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

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These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

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These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

penpolyon

So Iain up Earth’s rarest reasorces to make nerd horoscopes, got it.

destroyerofprivateschools

This educated the fuck out of me. Thank you

o-ceti

do non americans know that sometimes you’ll just see lifelike human testicles hanging off the back of peoples trucks

prrb

non american here! i wish i didnt learn english

tzadikim-art

I’ve been feeling fairly low and isolated recently. Around the time that these feelings began intensifying, one of my old posts of two queer Jewish couples began picking up notes again. My first reaction was bemused surprise–it’s several months old, and I assumed it had run its course by this point. But after seeing how much people were connecting with it and finding meaning in it, whether that be leaving a message in the tags or taking the time to write an image ID for it, I felt a little less alone. I love drawing, and I would obviously do it even if there was no one to look at it, but to know that I created something that makes people happy is incredibly special. Thank you all for giving me that, and happy pride.