different strokes for different folks i guess, but that is absolutely something i would do. or would have done if they'd arrived in may, planting in august is kinda pointless where i live.
My seeds arrived about 2 years ago, from China, entirely unannounced, and directed to my address in London, but with no name.
They turned out to be strawberries. Nothing unusual about them as far as I can taste...
They inspired me to make a service for other people to get random gifts from China... [1]
So far, the only gross error I've had was a getting sent hairclippers instead of a Dreamcast controller. Could've used the clippers, but wrong voltage :(
The examples you give like a bike repair kit are not really enticing.
I only need that from spring to summer. My greenhouse isn't setup yet.
From googling there appears to be quite a few, both curated and otherwise, what I saw ranged from $3 per shipment to $15+
Oops!
Keen to try it though.
> A gum can be produced from the bark which reportedly treats edema, while the dried fruits have been used as a diuretic.
You keep it inside and take a picture and you will know if you will get nice flowers, or vegetables, or...nothing. Just leaves.
As a kid I loved to plant seeds in plastic cups and see what grew out of it, and trying additives to see if they could help the plant grow. Once I grew a little tomato, and ate it. I didn't drop dead from tomato consumption.
It's innocent and safe. The government should have no business regulating what people do with seeds.
Your passion for experimentation and cultivation is awesome. I get that you don’t want the government telling you what you can and can’t do. So, instead, what if you look at it as a fellow citizen asking you to please not plant random seeds from China in the ground outside, unattended.
Still, I fail to see the harm of growing the seed inside to identify the plant. People here have reported receiving cucumbers and strawberries. No one has reported receiving vines or anything else.
I am very surprised by the level of fear and paranoia regarding everything and especially China: we are looking at horse gift in the mouth, then saying it is a bioterrorism plot. Unbelievable!! When I was a kid, that would have been the best mail-order present ever!
Also, regarding kudzu and the like, I fail to see the harm. The environment changes. We may not like that, but that's how life is. Instead of trying to undo changes, maybe we should adapt to them.
Kudzu seems good for livestock, rich in protein and isoflavones. Trying to burn it seems to be due to a distinct lack of imagination and profit motive. It's a free input!!! Find new ways to chop it down to feed it to livestock. Make it into a food supplement.
Anything looks better than just destruction and nostalgia for the time it wasn't here. It's here now. Adapt!
If I ran things, I’d develop an avena-specific herbicide, and drop it from helicopters every spring.
Replacing it with natives would lower the fire risk substantially, and probably also cool the hills off a bit during the summer.
I feel like that boat has flown, or whatever. It's kind of like saying the government should have no business checking passports or levying an income tax or something.
But I have read about the old time hackers, who yearned freedom and experimentation. It seemed to have been widespread: I have seen movies from the 1980s, and noticed the same thing: people seem less fearful, more open and ready to experiment.
It may sound silly to you, but I was awestruck by "Bill and Ted excellent adventure"!
Even with all the modern technology we have, I wish I had been born 20 or 30 years earlier, when freedom was still a thing and innocent fun was deemed innocent by default.
If you want to smuggle bird flu into USA, are you really going to do it in a bag of whole dead birds, and not some processed form that is more convenient and less suspicious?
Authorities get really uptight about invasive species and whatnot. Maybe groundless talk of biowarfare is "hysteria" but regulating biological materials going across borders is the norm as far as I know.
Perhaps eating certain animals should be curtailed (I'm no expert) as long as it doesn't result in low protein intake. But, the anti-China sentiment is xenophobic.
Interesting. Source?
Pretty much all serious pandemics started in some other species of mammals, and then transferred to humans. Examples: SARS, bird flu, ebola, hiv, spanish flu.
(I agree that blaming Chinese culture for the problem is xenophobic nonsense though.)
It's bizarre to Americans that _some_ Chinese are eating bats[1] and snakes[2]. It's bizarre to Chinese that _some_ Americans are eating alligators[3][4], bears and frogs.
It is human nature to explore and try new things including animals for food. If one has known better, maybe it's better to educate others what are good/bad food sources, with proofs.
Mutual discrimination based on sensational news and locally-biased "common sense" are not making the world a better place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_soup [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_meat [4] https://youtu.be/V-mJ0UWfxno?t=266
Implying there are 'correct' animals to consume
[1] https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/why-manage...
Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.
If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".
"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB
Kinda like the swine flu?
The only position you can safely hold is to not eat meat. A weaker position could be around the sanitation and care of stock and its preparation. But what you eat doesn’t matter, be it pig or dog or squirrel or bat.
And I'm not trying to make an argument about "the west", it's just about specific animals and ways to get them.
If the threshold is: has caused pandemic, then swine is off the table, pun intended.
Now, that statement assumes that some animals have higher risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans than others, and if you disagree with that then you'll disagree with the statement, but the statement itself was not an argument about that point. Subsequently we have further argued about that specific point. I don't believe that decisions about which animals to consume should be based on cultural factors as you assume, but rather I believe that it should be based on relevant science (not simply "has this specific animal caused a global pandemic in recent history"). I believe that science does not support the idea that all animals or animal procurement practices have identical risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans. Therefore I support the idea of restricting consumption of some animals, especially wild ones (including some currently consumed in the US), and reject the idea that this is simply "closed minded".
Unfortunately the inclusion of the single word "Chinese" in my original comment has blinded everyone to the argument I was making, despite the fact that it was simply a response to the parent comment. It would have been a better comment, and made the same point, without the word "Chinese" in it. Please strike that word from my original comment and read it again.
This is disingenuous. That was nothing like this pandemic.
Don’t say seat belts don’t matter for us because the other car was a hatchback instead of a pickup. They were both still car accidents.
> Um... China... what’s the deal?
China's a country of over a billion people.
Let's not attribute the actions of individuals to sinister top-down plot from the CCO politboru until there's actual evidence.
This type of behavior is endemic with poverty and can be seen with Nigerian princes, Indian call center scams, or just your friendly San Francisco neighborhood bike thief.
This behavior has more to do with poverty and income inequality than Chinese people (or people of any country or race for that matter).
I seriously doubt that. It's a police state, but let's not exaggerate, eh?
The other common name ("water caltrop") is illuminating.
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/kudzu-entanglement-...
Is that just because of the fear you might spread an invasive species, or is there some other risk trying to grow an unknown plant entails?
Also I can’t imagine getting a box of seeds in the mail (unsolicited) and thinking to myself, “I should plant these and see what comes up!”
Edit, found more about this here: https://www.wusa9.com/mobile/article/news/local/virginia/vir...
Along with a story of a Chinese National attempting to transport birds into Virginia which are known to be transmitters of Avian flu.