
Could This Be the End of Frankincense? - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/science/frankincense-trees-collapse.html
======
CapitalistCartr
The _Nature_ article the NYTimes is reporting on:

Frankincense in peril
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0322-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0322-2)

~~~
adolph
And the data and R script here: [https://github.com/groenendijk/Frankincense-
demography](https://github.com/groenendijk/Frankincense-demography)

------
benj111
It seems crazy to me that this is happening.

Why does the farmer not realise his crop isnt being replaced, or the
Frankincense distributors, or governments? I'm not pointing the finger at any
group, but you would have though someone would be on the ball.

It isn't like global warming where there isn't a profit motive and the effect
is far removed from the act.

~~~
graeme
I've no insight beyond the article, but short termism + a long problem horizon
could explain it.

Farmers with annual crops will notice a problem quickly. But these farmers all
have thriving crops. It's just they don't have replacements.

It would be interesting to see if a lot of these are newish farmers vs.
multigenerational farms that actually had to develop a practice of fostering a
new generation.

It's also possible that new generations used to be automatic, whereas the
stresses have arrived suddenly and are a novel threat.

I think the basic problem is that if problems aren't hurting _today_ then
humans generally are bad at noticing and dealing with them, if the threat is
long term and needs preventative action well in advance.

------
delinka
Can we get an option to filter stories from certain domains? I can't read
stories from nytimes.com, so I'd just rather not have them listed on the front
page.

"You've read your three this month." "You're in private mode, please log in."

Hey, I'm just curious why someone thought this was worthy of HN. (Maybe
submitters could start commenting on their own posts about the content of
their link?) If you don't let me read the article, that's OK - you've saved me
from procrastination.

~~~
gundmc
If you're using Chrome 74+, you can set a flag that prevents sites from
detecting that you're using Incognito mode.

Go to chrome://flags and enable "Filesystem API in Incognito". That's it!
Sites won't know you're in Incognito anymore (until they find a new sneaky
way).

~~~
ken
I have to use a specific web browser, and know to set a random flag, to enable
a specific feature (which isn't part of any web specification yet), so that
websites will know a lie about the local state of my web browser, and agree to
serve me content?

This is worse than the "Best viewed in ___" days. This is not the web that I
signed up to help develop.

~~~
cmroanirgo
Some psywalls will accept you if you mimic Google bot's UA.

(Accidental typo left in because it seems appropriate)

