Tough to say. Not all countries have total bans on DDT, and even the Stockholm Convention exempted vector control from the ban on certain organochlorine compounds. In any case, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were already starting to occur in the 1960s due to the unrestricted spraying. Spraying has mostly continued as indoor residual spraying, which still seems to be quite effective.
Loud minorities can form a market, if they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. But too often they don’t (cf. the “brown manual diesel wagon” from the car world. Enthusiasts say they want one, but when a manufacturer puts one out, they don’t buy enough of them).
I’m curious to hear about what you did with the house (I’m thinking about building/renovating a house in a few years). Did you go DIY or hire a contractor? What were some of your replacements for plastics?
A note on the contractor question: The basic construction of the house is quite simple (post and beam not too dissimilar to the German "Fachwerk") and given the right tools and location could be done completely DIY. Check out this YouTube channel for traditional wood framing techniques: https://www.youtube.com/@KrisHarbour Our contractors used a more modern design approach and metal fasteners but it is basically the same basic construction.
Professional contractors have professional equipment for this type of construction, though and can put it together really quickly. The basic framing of the house was constructed over a couple of months or so off site (with mostly two guys being involved, I think), transported in pieces to the build site and put together over the span of five days, including the roof construction. The insulation and OSB were added over the span of a few weeks.
We basically built an all-wooden house: Timber posts and beams (not the flimsy sticks that are used commonly in construction in the US but solid 8" posts), interlocking OSB-boards on the inside for air tightness (this can also be achieved with other wood-based techniques, my house has an air tightness comparable to passive house construction), wood fibre insulation material (15+ inches on all sides and the roof), clay plastering on the inside (great for thermal mass).
The house is really air tight but moisture can get out through the walls easily without causing rot. There are thermal bridges. Window frames are from oak. We have a bit of plastics-based insulation around the foundation and the roof is covered with an oil-based-rubber, but that's about it except for smaller items like cable insulations, switches, etc.
We did some of the interior stuff DIY but the major parts of the construction were done by various contractors.
We chose wood fibre because we wanted the house's CO2 footprint to be as low as possible. We are slightly above passive house levels in terms of ongoing energy use (mostly because the house has an inefficient shape = not a cube) and we produce more kw/h from solar power each year than we use despite having a relatively inefficient electricity-based heating system. But we also wanted to reduce the CO2 emitted during construction and cement/concrete is really bad in that regard.
The wood fibre insulation has a fraction of the embodied energy/CO2 emissions of concrete and fossil fuel based insulation and it is fully compostable. I could theoretically also be reused if the house is demolished at some point, as it doesn't deteriorate if it stays dry (or is allowed to dry quickly after getting wet), though I think that would be unlikely to happen. Also, wood fibre is an excellent insulator against heat, which is nice given that our summers can get quite hot.
The wood-only construction also eliminates all thermal bridges, as wood is itself an insulator and the required fasteners are small diameter and do not reach through the entire wall.
I work at a Department of Energy facility as a contractor. Our DOE facility rep was a Navy Nuke, and gave me a copy of this book. I agree that it is fantastic. And it’s written in a gripping narrative style, so it reads more like a novel and less like conventional non-fiction.
The novelesque style of writing was a real turn-off for me and I returned the book. The authors attempted to dramatise every event as if they were there on the bridge at the time, even for events 60 years previous.
I've been trying to find a less breathless, more academic treatment of the subject but haven't had any success.
Because we don’t want the site to be completely overwhelmed and turned into Reddit 2.0. Currently, invites are turned off, but are likely to be turned back on in the next week or so. Normally, they are pretty easy to get (asking for one in the r/tildes invite thread).
I've seen a few Tildes threads that I want to interact with, but I can't because I don't have an account
At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
Hey! Sorry to drop in like this, but could you spare one invite for me too please? The community looks interesting and I'd also like to participate in some discussions but I haven't had any luck finding an invite (I missed the last reddit thread by a few hours)
Can drop it to vildravn@gmail.com, don't think HN has DMs.
Hi, been a read-only lurker on Tildes posts for sometime now & liked it. Would be much interested in an invite. If you still have invites left, please shoot me one on mailto<username> @ gmail dot com (bWFpbHRvdGh1cnV2QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ==)
It might turn out to be one of the largest protests, but it's also one where there's a large gap between how passionate your average mod feels about the issues here vs. your average Reddit users.
spez's recent comments have served to lower this gap, but probably not by that much. My guess is that if a lot of mods end up getting replaced over this, they won't be missed.
FWIW, in almost every subreddit where I've seen an announcement that they're doing dark, user sentiment has been overwhelmingly on the mods' side. In fact, in a number of cases, when the mods have said they're shutting down for 48 hours, there have been highly-upvoted comments from users saying that's not long enough.
As a counterpoint, the users that don't care about the changes simply...don't care. There is no impetus to come out in force and massively upvote or downvote anything about the protests, they're simply getting on with their days and will be back to business as usual when the subs come back, filling the time during the protest with other subs that aren't going dark. How efficacious this all proves to be will be interesting to discover.
Mods are going dark... So who says they have not been moderating views opposing this? They have the tools and they probably have the will? Also we need to remember that in general they support authoritarianism and are against free speech...
The contribution of content is very lopsided. I remember about 10% of the users writing at all and maybe 2% writing prolifically. You don’t need much to move the content somewhere else.
Sure, but since these changes aren't affecting many users I'm not sure why this would happen. It seems to mostly be wishful thinking on the hopes of activists that this will cause some sort of massive brand damage, or even the sort of advertiser revolt that Twitter has faced. But that would require a lot more mismanagement from spez, I'd guess.
For a long time, Apple kept the option to receive plain text emails when almost everyone else had moved to HTML.
Why? Because there was a crucial slice of unix-y developers who liked it that way, who were an important segment.
Even though third party apps might be 3% of users, I'm guessing that the users that are passionate enough about Reddit to find/seek out the best app/pay for app subscriptions/etc are much more likely to be those critical 2% of prolific contributors.
> Sure, but since these changes aren't affecting many users I'm not sure why this would happen.
I'm curious about how you count the number of users affected. 3rd party apps users are at a first order, but as those also included mod tools, any subs that had admins relying on these tools are also affected.
And sure reddit is promising adjustments, but at this points those are just vague promise, and looking at the CEO you wouldn't trust these promises much. Then as those subs go dark, if the mods are replaced, you also potentially get way worse moderation all around.
From that POV, the number of affected users feels pretty huge to me...
This is hopefully and likely going to be the biggest user revolt in the history of the internet. I'm sincerely hoping the cowards back down or my last favorite big place on the internet is also going to disappear.
Reddit is full of easily mobilized young people looking for a 'cause'.
It's funny and hypocritical because not one of those Reddit users would ever run their own company in a way that allowed third parties to freely redistribute and profit off their data, but it's wrong for Reddit to somehow.
It's like they have no idea how businesses stay in business.. not surprising really. They're going to burn down Reddit to defend someone who was asking for a $10 million buy out to screw them over and shut down the Apollo app anyways.
Reddit’s value these days is as a super-forum. Instead of needing five logins and five accounts for separate hobbies, you can have one login, one account, and if you occasionally want to comment or ask questions about something else, you can do so without having to create another account. Doesn’t hurt that Reddit has a very good network effect.
That's how you use it, but I'd argue that 90% of Reddit's users don't operate the same way, considering they don't even have accounts to begin with.
In fact, I would even argue that Reddit is actively trying to push users who use Reddit this way off of the platform, as they're not as easily monetized. Reddit is notorious for having low conversion rates on its ads and extremely high ad blocking rates.
I'm definitely a push-away user. I'll never pay them money to use their site and I rarely comment in the ten years or so I've had an account. Same goes for HN; I would never pay money to use this site - I would just find a new site to frequent. I understand this is unfortunate for the website operator but I consider operating a web server at this point a labor of love, not a business model.
I wonder what the other three places are that store nitrate film? I would guess the National Archives and some facility in Southern California. Where else though?
PRO-TEK’s nitrate film services, "PRO-TEK is one of the few places left in the world that manages nitrate film vaults for clients. The nitrate vaults are located several miles away from our Burbank campus." - https://protekvaults.com/blog/nitrate-film-preservation/
> Putting this festival on requires a great deal of inter-archival cooperation--prints were sourced from across the United States (the Big Five archives for nitrate are the Academy, UCLA, MoMa, the Library of Congress, and the Eastman itself) and from international archives, notably the Swedish Film Institute (supplied Strandhugg), KAVI in Helsinki (supplied Ihmiset suviyössä), and the Austrian Film Museum (supplied The Nevadan)
Using those as search terms:
The Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center at Wright-Patterson AFB. "Today, under the stewardship of M/B/RS, the nitrate film holdings, dating from the 1890's through 1950, exceed 100 million feet." - https://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/mpcc.html
> There are only a few film archives in the country that store nitrate film, and they include the major film archives in the nation: the two Packard archives (Culpeper, Virginia, and Santa Clarita, California); the George Eastman House’s Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center in Chili, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive, in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. MoMA’s collection is the largest private film collection in the world. Most of it is located in this purpose built 33,000 square foot, two-building, partially underground compound on 37 acres of woodland and meadows in the Pocono Mountains. Also known as the Cesleste Bartos Film Preservation Center.
