Hey me too, birthday buddy.

It’s all about profits. Seedless watermelons usually sell better with American consumers.

In order to produce fruit on triploid watermelons there has to be regular seeded (diploid) varieties in the field. Traditionally they would use a large oblong traditional seeded (allsweet types). Mainly because there was a market for them and they looked different than the seedless varieties.

The growers had to dedicate 1/5th of their acres to growing a seeded melons which they could sell at 50% or less than seedless varieties.

That’s when seed companies introduced dedicated pollinators (non-harvested). These untilized several different dwarf genes and could be interplanted with seedless varities with no loss of space.

With the exception of the big party markets like the 4th of July, most fields utilize the dedicated pollinators in the U.S. now. For production in Latin America, they export the seedless ones to the U.S. and sell the seeded ones l ones domestically.

Bottom line, today you only occasionally seeded watermelons in grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada.

They are not all bad. In the early 2000’s a breeder created a logistical method create tetraploids in 6 years (5 generations every 2 years). He used 3 countries to do it in if I recall correctly.

He integrated some of the small seeded deep red fleshed Chinese germplasm combined with the old flavorful allsweet types to make dramatically improved tetraploids.

Other companies have followed suit and the average quality of the fruit has improved. Some of the newer ones have really excellent flavor.

Also a bit of trivia I had to double check.

The seedless watermelon against Catholics image.

The original picture is one I took.

A. They have no significant difference in nutrition than non-GMO. In fact many GMO’s have been created to improve nutrition but sadly not used because of dumbfucks like Greenpeace who would rather have people go blind or die than accept GMO food. For example, rice that produces vitamin A and folic acid have been created but never used.

B. The “Terminator” GMO gene was created by the USDA-ARS and was NEVER released. No seed on the market has ever had a GMO sterility gene. Contrary to public opinion, it was designed to be integrated with other GMO genes to prevent the outcrossing and spread into the environment, not as an IP control mechanism.

Now why seedless watermelons suck is an interesting story.

The first intentional creation of a seedless watermelon was done in 1939 in Japan. University breeding programs in the southern U.S. after WWII began using the technology to create the first hybrids. In the early '50’s and '60’s multiple tetraploids were created by the university programs and released to private companies to produce seed with.

These tetraploid lines were “greys”. “Greys” were selected to have a thick hard rind for long distance shipping. They were barely red on the inside and tasted slightly bitter. They all sucked for flavor.

A seedless watermelon hybrid is made by crossing a tetraploid female by a diploid male. The resulting hybrid (triploid) has 3 copies of every chromosome and is sterile.

Fertile stable tetraploids take a long time to create - around 15 generations of you are lucky. Seedless watermelons also took a long time to gain popularity in the market. So nobody put significant money or time into creating more tetraploid inbreds for over 40 years.

From the 1980’s when seedless watermelons were introduced until around 2010, everyone used those shitty old tetraploids as 2/3rds of the hybrid. Since 2010 companies have created new tetraploid to use, but a significant portion still use 70 year old shitty ones.

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Genetically the cross is theoretically possible. The difference in size of the individuals, especially the reproductive organs creates a barrier that prevents crossing.

If the differences had been created via natural selection not artificial selection, a great Dane and Chihuahua would likely be listed as different species or subspecies for the same reasons.

Had two ponies growing up and 15-18 horses on the ranch.

The two ponies were absolute assholes. Vicious aggressive beast who hated people. The farrier charged double for them.

The 17 hand paint was a big puppy. He’d follow us around looking for loves and your sandwich. He would beg for a PB&J.

As a highly paid professional this is bullshit. Most insurance plans in the u.s. are costing more and covering less every year. They have introduced all sorts of fun things make it more brutal. Evaluating a companies insurance plan has become a critical exercise in evaluating any job offer. Some major companies offer shit benefits packages.

Things they have done:

Raised deductables: The insurance basically pays nothing until the deductible is met. In many plans, this is $4,000+. I have seen them as high as $10,000.

Increased out-of-pocket maximums. This is the maximum amount a person can pay in a year. These are important for chronic illnesses or serious accidents etc. it used to be $4000 in a year for a family. Now I see plans that have $8,000. as the maximum.

Decreases the percentage they pay. When I started working a most “good” insurance plans would pay 90% of the bill. Now 80% is the standard with many “bad” plans only offering to pay 50 or 60%.

Limit medical networks that they do business with. You want to see a Dr or specialist who is not in your network. You are fucked.

What has the government done? Introduced the HSA plan. Basically you can save money out of you paycheck tax free to pay for all these ballooning costs. The plan just happens to be an investment plan in the stock market with high fees and lots of money for Wall Street.

Insurance and medical care for my wife with another autoimmune disease has been as high as 30% of our income.

She started a union job with better negotiated insurance. It’s down to 10% of our income now.

This is referred to as hollow heart.

It usually indicates as shortage of available calcium in the plant as the tuber grows. Basically the same thing as blossom end rot in tomatoes, peppers etc.

Some varieties are more prone to developing this than others.

It’s just a bottle of ink that you pour into the tank. You can find generic ones for $7-8.

My wife prints 1-2 boxes of paper per year in color. About 10% of those are photograph quality. A laser printer wouldn’t cut it for the photographs so I got her an ecotank.

The tanks hold 130ml of ink so they last a long time. The largest HP cartridge held like 49ml of ink of I recall correctly. Most of them had under 10ml.

If you print infrequently or an absolute ton (like an office) a laser printer is better. If you print a case or two of paper per year and photographs, the inkjet is better.

I have a strict, “do I give a fuck” policy when it comes to security.

I keep the harder to crack passwords for critical things like banking, etc… since there’s only a few I can remember them. I also always use MFA.

For all the other shit that I don’t give a fuck if it’s hacked it’s the good old *Banana$1234" type password that I reuse for decades and save to firefox’s password manager.

Legalization with regulation, education, and free accessible healthcare including mental health.

It decreases overall usage of all drugs and the decreases the crime rate. Addressing the reason people take drugs seems to work better than punishing them for using them. Go figure.

Most people never use all the specs. If all you are doing is browsing the Internet, watching videos, or playing some simple games, you don’t need much.

I have purchased unlocked mid-range phones for for a while now. Expensive enough to have decent specs but not so cheap that the build quality suffers. When the teenager is dropping the phone 3-4 times per day, a good case and a good build quality is required. 3 years with that type of abuse is about all you’ll get out of it.

I run two phones. For work I get one of the flagship phones. I only pull out my laptop in my office. Most of the time I am using the phone in all weather conditions. I use those specs for thousands of hi-res pictures, data entry etc… all day long. At the end of 3 years it’s toast.

Why 5-6 years, that’s about when I start seeing the cascade of little things. Weird transitory bugs when rebooting. Speed issues and compatibility issues with bloated new software etc. After that amount of time, I start to spend way too much time maintaining them.

I could tinker with them and keep them going. Its what I used to do when my kids were small. Install a Linux distro on an old computer, load a bunch of educational games and set the browser homepage to PBSkids.

However I have 5 computers to maintain now and my teenagers need compatible fast systems for college and school. My wife works from home at times and needs something that reliably works.

I have everything on a upgrade list depending on how much we use it and how fast the technology is changing.

Phones: 3 years. Thinking of moving this to 4 or 5 years with the industry’s stagnation. Starting to see some companies offering updates for longer times.

Laptops/desktops: 5-6 years.

Wifi/modem/router: 10 years.

Palatability is not related to the GMO. It’s genetics type that are used in the production.

Organically produced seed historically has been straight dent corn (older genetics in the public domain). These are softer kernals that are easier for he animals to chew. The don’t need to be ground as fine.

GMO hybrids are mostly dent x flint crosses. These have a harder shell around the outside of the kernals. It needs to be ground up finer for the animals to digest it.

This is changing recently as Bayer and Corteva are licensing out their dent x flint varieties to the organic companies.

Before you can use land to raise organic products, you must stop applying inputs like fertilizers and pesticides that are prohibited in organic production and handling.

To complete your transition to organic, your farm or ranch cannot have used any of these substances in the last three years.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/transitioning-to-organic

Doesn’t matter what crop it is. Organic certification is 3 years.

Monsanto doesn’t exist anymore. It was purchased by Bayer in an all cash deal

Bayer of course is worse