It wasn’t about the expense as the church was incredibly wealthy. It was about power.

Much of the clergy was younger sons/daughters of aristocratic families. The church wanted to maintain their political power and property. They had an issue with the priests creating dynasties in regions and the central church losing power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_celibacy_in_the_Catholic_Church

“Teacher numbers are falling”

Teacher’s leave because of lack of pay and a bad working environments. Then schools decided to save money by not backfilling the position.

“provisions and resources seem to be”

cutting teacher resources = more money out of pocket for most teachers for their students. Another reason teacher numbers are falling.

“widespread delinquent behaviour has been reported to be on the rise,”

When parents lose hope and are struggling to survive what’s the point of pushing education? When a teacher loses parental support, student behavior is one of the first things to get bad.

"and it seems like they’re refusing more and more to enforce the rules on such behaviour, but if you turn up with the wrong haircut or wearing trainers, all hell breaks loose. "

Admin and teachers are at a loss on how to reverse the student behavior trend. Without widespread parental support their hands are tied. So they find often focus on “coming down hard” on negative external trends they can identify, the so-called “gang-related” activities.

Been decades since I quit a job. When I was first starting out I quit a job every year or so for pay raises etc. I ran through like 5 jobs in 6 years.

Then I started to get somewhere professionally and layoffs became more normal. I have been laid off 3 times over the past 20 years.

First time because my new boss was making a run for CEO and I knew all his dirty laundry. So I got laid off with a massive severance package that gave me most of a year vacation + benefits. The NDA that came with it was hilarious given that they were illegal in the location. The in-house lawyer was my lunch buddy for years and had a bit of fun with it.

Second time a new CEO decided to do a massive reorganization to “improve efficiency.” The company started hemorrhaging money immediately and I was on the first wave of layoffs with most of the rest of my department. It didn’t help that a year before in an all company meeting my boss decided to call me out for my lack of enthusiasm in front of everyone. Since he pressed after I suggested it was not a good idea to ask and he would regret it, I told him the strategic error of the major decision he had just announced in a short concise argument. He was not amused, but he couldn’t do anything then because he had pressed me for my opinion. Needless to say, I was on the short list for layoffs after the company got totally fucked over by his decisions.

The last one was a panic when a massive recession hit their industry (totally predictable). They laid me off and essentially handed me my own fully established business. 2 weeks later my company was legal and I had a sit down meeting with them to discuss their “inventory issue”. Aka I cut a deal burn through their inventory so they wouldn’t firesale it and dump it on my customers. They essentially paid for my startup costs then bailed when I was just starting to make money. I still have a bit of a soft spot for them and their extremely well-timed stupidity.

Take the blade off the mower, hold it in a vice and run a file over it. It takes a bit of time depending on how dinged up it is.

I have been thinking about getting a bench grinder for a few years but I like using hand tools.

Been using them since the developer of classic shell abandoned it with W10. Open shell isn’t bad but it had a rough w11 conversion.

It also brings back the ability to add a folder as a toolbar. A feature that has been available since W98 they decided to discountinue in W11.

This makes most of the annoying windows shit disappear. It’s a cheap one-time fee llicense for a highly useful tool.

It’s not that bad if you know what you are doing.

A mower bag is for collecting leaves not grass clippings. If you are not picking up the clippings it’s a ton lighter and easier.

Mow at the correct height of the grass species. My lawn is PRG and TTTF. So I put the deck as high as it goes. This makes it a ton easier to push.

Sharpen your mower blades at least yearly. It doesn’t take long and really makes things easier.

Mow more frequently if possible. When the grass grows faster in the spring and fall, I often mow twice a week. During the heat of the summer I might only mow every 2-3 weeks as the grass grows slower. Not pushing the mower through thick overgrown grass cuts down on the work.

If you get behind and the grass is tall (like after a couple weeks vacation), walk really slow, and only take half swipes. This lets the blades do their thing without overloading them.

Fertilize only in the spring. If you don’t pickup your clippings this is enough the the entire year.

My kids were taught how to mow the lawn. However since I have a small push mower with no power assist, I consider it my biweekly workout. It helps keep the weight off. So they don’t touch it.

It’s not that much when you consider the same production in the open field environment would take 10x the land area.

I have been in a bunch of those greenhouses. It looks almost like snow when you get up on the hills.

Have you been to Utah. They started out as a totalitarian state, were forced to integrate, but long to return to their roots.

BULLSHIT!

That about sums up that article.

But that wouldn’t answer the OP’s questions about their existing population.

Also…

Have you ever worked with EMS? It’s the last resort of the desperate. You burn money and time searching for a needle in a haystack.

It’s useful for creating variations for narrowly targeted objectives with easy phenotyping. Say a color variation in a flower or a herbicide resistance in grain.

Ploidy also matters a ton for if the mutations will be able express at all. Saffron for example is a sterile triploid. J. Artichoke is a hexaploid- double the number chromosomal copies.

Side note: For Saffron the outlook for breeding looks to be very good. They have identified the parent species Crocus cartwrightianus. It’s also in a 2n diploid state. Converting the 2n to a 4n and then crossing to make new 3n cultivars is theoretically possible.

Garlic is a bulb that spreads by generating bulbets (cloves).

What would happen if you planted a clove of garlic and then just left it there for 3-4 years?

It would slowly spread outwards over time with a mass of plants all clustered together. Just like daffodils etc.

It will grow based upon the environmental conditions. It’s literally one of the easiest crops to grow because of it. You can plant it in July and if it’s hot it will remain dormant for a month until cooler temps.

Determining causation is often stymied by little things like ethics. This is where correlation becomes the “best guess” to avoid ethical quagmires.

For example much of our medical science often starts out based upon correlation studies. Eventually indirect evidence can be used to confirm partial causation.

It’s theoretically achievable but would be extremely expensive and time consuming.

Hmmm… Here a quick stab at methodology to achieve your aims.

To start if you have the funds, a full sequence of several lines of J. Artichoke and maybe a few accessions of diplod wild types that can make a viable cross. Then create an extremely high density SNP marker profile of the individuals.

Next generate 6n x 2n crosses to initiate the breeding project. The resulting 4n progeny could be further reduced to 2n via haploid creation techniques. Irradiated pollen parthenogenesis works in the genus. So there’s a possibility it will work.

Once you have it in a 2n state it’s time to figure out the self-incompatability mechanism. With the mechanisms defined, a introgression strategy is possible to get the original 6n genome into three 2n lines using the SNP markers.

From there you can do all of the gene discovery and breeding much easier. You can identify genes of interest and manipulate them by breeding the 2n lines. Seed production should be around 1,000x better than the original.

You can always recreated a 6n line by doubling a 2n plant with colchicine to 4n. Then crossing the 4n x 2n plant to generated a 3n plant. Doubling the 3n plant with colchine creates 6n again.

All together it would cost around $3-5 million USD per year and take around 15 years to accomplish if everything went smoothly.

Another difficult feature to breed J. artichoke is that it is hexaploid carrying 3 times more chromosomes than sunflower [34]. It has been shown that J. artichoke is probably auto-polyploid carrying 3 different elementary genomes named H, C and P [35], as other polyploid species, H. tuberosus displays any regular meiosis et is partially female fertile. Moreover, J. artichoke displays a strong self-incompatibility system that prevents a plant to produce seeds after self-pollination. Because S-alleles in J. artichoke have not been identified success or failure of crosses between clones cannot be predicted and several crosses have to be done to ensure some will succeed.

https://www.agrobiology.ru/articles/5-2017kiru.pdf

Translation:

Hexaploidy = produces very little seed on a good day.

Self-sterility = it will not produce seed without a different genetically distinct variety. It is unable to pollinate within the clone.

Most breeding work has been crossing the 6N sun root with 2N sunflowers. This produces a 4N offspring that does produce tubers.

Time + motivation + money can overcome a lot of obstacles. It also helps that template of what is needed already exists in Active Directory. This changes the project from “innovating something new” to “a slightly better copy” and is usually a lot faster and easier.

All copyright/patents are also void because of the sanctions at least in practice.

“Every rose has its thorn”

Sort of a weird kink if you ask me.

Which is why after 25 years of using outlook, I am figuring out how to make thunderbird my maine driver.

Foremost expert is pretty vague. Here’s a couple of the more unusual and rare things I’m an expert in. I’m going to define it as less than 10 people globally know more than I do. Less than 100,000 people know anything beyond the absolute basics.

Applied plant breeding of cucurbits.

International marketing and sales of agricultural seed.

Map modding of ThinkTanks a 2004 game by Bravetree.
https://www.planetthinktanks2.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5544

I had a coworker once that would do that to grab some breakfast and coffee. As long as he only hit the same hotel every 6 months or so, nobody noticed.