This is a very tenuous alliance.
At the capitalist bug farm, mice were always getting into our waxworms, because they buildings were poorly built, they used poorly-sealed kitty litter boxes to grow the waxworms in, and the racks easily allowed the mice to climb up (partly because of escaped-worm cocoons on them).
We'd see them running across the main floor all the time. It was very common to open up a box after 6 weeks and see a litter of baby mice inside, and barely any waxworms. Maybe one out of every 50 was like that.
All the commercial ear drops are based on either vinegar, alcohol, or hydrogen peroxide. And a list of antibiotics that steadily gets longer as resistance disseminates.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/24654-ear-drops
I was reading a scientific article a few days ago about mealworms (of course), and the process by which they extract water from the air. Turns out it more than doubles their metabolic rate just to do that.
So even the biomimetics isn't going to get us very far on this one.
The kind of solution you're looking for involves moist soils with high levels of organic matter. That, and using less water for economic activity.
I went by the farmers' market the other day and a stall had duck eggs for $8-10 a dozen. Buying 36-packs from Walmart is maybe about $1 a dozen. I don't see it going much lower than that, or higher than $20, though.
For a while now I've been fairly convinced that everyday expenditures scale logarithmically with income. The increase is pretty smooth, and tapers off pretty smoothly too.
Back in the day, before we invented hollow walls, you could do a whole bunch of effective home DIY with just a shovel, a hatchet, and a bucket or two. Forget commodities, retvrn to straw that you cut yourself.
A hot mess. I expect people to still be holding on to coastal real estate that floods regularly but they still do financial black magic with it. Already tens of millions of climate refugees, most western economies in a persistent state of managed collapse, lots of countries have a federal government that only exists on paper, social ties and norms have eroded on a scale we can't comprehend due to capitalism and AI. The world order has already ended and capitalism is in the process of degenerating into techno-feudalism, yet most people are in denial about it.
Still, many constellations of safe havens exist. At least two of which I have built, mostly with my own labor and that of my accomplices. The bug farm stands as one of the enterprises that supports a commune, another is fermented foods, another is either plastic or textile reprocessing. I live in a mud hut, it's warm as hell, we've got rocket stoves and like fifty blankets.
The maple trees where I live are all dead or moribund. But I do have a microclimate on one side of a hill where a yaupon holly I planted is growing.
What I probably regret is trusting people too much, letting them make rash anti-social choices rather than being assertive and proverbially kicking their asses into cooperating with each other.
Buddy, do I have just the financial instrument for you!
Physically quite dirty but ethically clean.
trying not to get bugs in my rug as i count them to track the survivability of my starter mealworm population
Couldn't be me, I would have sent you the ants in cardboard boxes.
I spend all day in a conference room with Satan, telling him what good ideas he has and how epic his memes are.
So you know how insects have no lungs, just a series of tubes throughout their body that let oxygen in as they enlarge their body cavity?
It's a similar thing in the taint, the piss just diffuses through.
Piss is smart, it knows where to go.
Almost done building a rack to keep da bugz in, this will allow me to keep up to 400,000 mealworms at once (about 50x what I have right now), in half the floor space.
I had been hoping to have this done 6 months ago but a bunch of surprisingly cool events got in the way. And also procrastination. But it feels like I have the upper hand on procrastination.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Even though we didn't get the full month of neurodiversity spotlight memes that @LegaliiizeIt was pushing for, I was planning on quitting my job anyway. And taking my skills and going into business for myself. And establishing a workers' co-op structure as soon as it becomes bigger than myself and I hire people.
A business plan is maybe about halfway drafted; I'm several months along in the process that started a year ago by cautiously asking around, as many places as I could, about what I should do. In addition to people in my municipality, I want to thank @JoeByeThen and @hexaflexagonbear and numerous others who responded to my post and helped convince me to go for it, that developing the means of production was a better idea than haggling with Porky for more crumbs. Porky still struggles to get his production up and stable, in many ways, and engages in elaborate stunts to make it look like his ideas have any utility at all.
I put in 3 weeks notice to drive home the point that they were losing one of their most valuable employees. Told them good luck, didn't tell them why they'd need it. Wore some commie gear to work for the final weeks. My last day was this past week. Today, instead of carpooling at 6 AM, I am laying in bed til 9, enjoying a long holiday break.
I'm sitting on enough savings to survive for 2 years without working a single hour, but I also have a lead on some potential funding specific for workers' co-ops. So far my bug survival metrics are already far ahead of my (now former) employer, and that's just doing stuff by hand cuz my first batch of equipment ($750 worth) hasn't even come in yet. One that and the second batch of buggy buddies come in, we'll really be rolling.
Worst case scenario, I fail to clear the hurdles of getting packaging (super easy) or a dedicated facility (a bit harder) or developing a consistent customer base (idk but probably not too hard); then I have to go scrounge full-time jobs for a few more years. Best case scenario, by 2026 I end up with a business with tens of millions in revenue, that puts 10% of profits towards radical projects and all the rest back to employees as bonuses. Is it Dubious that I could do this in a few years from scratch as just one person? Maybe, maybe not.
While @Sbebg is telling you to short TSLA (or maybe that we all should have done it last week?), I am now telling you to buy mealworm futures! I'm gonna take low-impact, well-kept, humanely-treated, ecologically-balanced live feed TO THE MOON!
:bug-facts: :comrade-fly: :stonks-up: :porky-scared:
bees teach us that communism will win