Ive one of these- they were selling them at the Sams Club and I have a lot of fun with it. Definitely recommend using Morton kosher salt with it. Seems to strike the right balance between mass and aerodynamics...
Why in the holy hell is this getting downvoted[0]? Advice on what kind of ammunition to use during the endless war on bugs that we humans have perpetrated for our own comfort[1] is without a doubt invaluable information.
[0] This is not snark.
[1] Snark aside, I for real do not want roaches etc. in my house, and appreciate non-poisonous methods of dealing... while at the same time struggling with the fact that the insect population in my state, which is KNOWN for bugs, has visibly plummeted within my lifetime.
(edit: refs. Also context: at the time of my comment, the parent was getting greyed out for some reason.)
was surprising to me that this got downvoted, but looks like that trend has reversed. I can only add that I would much rather use this to kill flies and mosquitos in my house than a chemical spray. It sort of works on wasps, but mainly just knocks them down and disorients them. This can be enough sometimes to get a shoe or something else to crush them. The fact that its a 'gun' can add some sport to it, but at the end of the day I use this thing when there is a pest in my house/porch that I dont want. I dont see anything wrong with that.
Because it doesn't require multiple Kubernetes clusters spun up on 5 different geographical regions for fault tolerance with 3 different vendors to run.
It works too well so people would rather downvote the advice for which kind of salt to use.
That's actually a great idea ... I'm going to create clusters of Bug-a-Salts on PTZ platforms, write a custom Kubernetes operator and then use Kubernetes to orchestrate their target acquisition and elimination.
you might run into latency issues while using existing cloud platforms to run the AI stack for image recognition via the 50 webcams you need to set up to provide coverage around the house.
It's better to build a hybrid cloud whereby the image recognition code runs on tensorflow locally on 10 x RTX 2080 super's (for low latency inference) and then go on to issue commands via the kubernetes cluster for elimination.
Why is the post about the morality of killing for fun getting up-voted? This community, at this instance in time seems to be against it.
A funny story from when I was younger ... there was a candidate running for County Commissioner who lived in my neighborhood and had a local auto-parts store. County Commissioners are paper pusher yet for some reason, as if his position mattered, someone asked whether he was for or against the death penalty. His answer was "regular or extra crispy". This was when the electric chair was still in use ... and there was one about 10 miles from where I'm sitting. I already knew he was a little "out-there" but this statement alone kept him from being elected. While we'd had three horrible commissioners, this statement made him seem "more horrible".
It's interesting in thinking about it that I've found this story more and more disturbing as I've gotten older. Being an introvert and being raised as a stoic german (by descent at least) meant that I've had to grow my ability to empathize through experience. My son was opposed to the death penalty before I was. I might even still have caveats.
Yes ... I have no qualms about killing flies either. All I was getting at is that a) even back then there was a line you could cross as shown by this candidate and b) that my personal views on killing have changed.
Does it leave a bunch of salt on your floor? Stuff like grainy sand on my hardwood floors is one of my pet peeves... does this not create that feeling?
I have a similar item in my backlog, a drone mounted salt gun to terminate slugs in the garden. Engaging them in first person or just sitting back and let the skynet do its thing.
Will probably never have the time to work on it, but if something like this is available to buy I would be interested.
I think that may be a really good project. I’m pretty sure if you could make it work properly, a lot of organic farmers would invest into such a solution.
Having to rig that up sounds too labor intensive for widespread adoption.
Flying sounds like a battery hog / needs to report home.
But if you out it on treads, it can leisurely roll around your garden / any sized plot and blast slugs as it sees them. Put some solar panels on it and it could possibly stay out all day.
FYI, Kevin Kelly's "Cool Tools" is a solid, and useful coffee table book. Some things from 2013 don't age well, but for it is useful for lots of items. A quick skim of my copy didn't find the bug salt shotgun, but there is a water-based bug sprayer for the garden on pp. 214.
A tablespoon in the hopper will last for a couple dozen shots. It's a very small amount per shot. Its a functional novelty though and not meant to be your primary means of pest control. For a one or two flies a week you're probably not going to notice the salt and its actually pretty nice for killing flies in hard to reach places like high ceilings or corners, or "zoomers" who barely sit still long enough to be swatted.
Hate to be a spoilsport but I wonder what their safety record is like. The shots where the camera was pointed up the barrel made me cringe. "Treat like a loaded weapon at all times" indeed! Of all things to get in your eye high-velocity salt seems like it would be pretty bad.
I've had one for a while. Cocking it automatically engages a safety that you have to disengage in order to fire. I've invited guests to try it, and even fumbling with it, no one has fired it accidentally.
If, however, one is beset by insects and doesn't have many child visitors, the safety can be disabled by moving the switch to the unsafe position and putting a screw into the plastic next to it so it can't re-engage.
I got mine as a gift and my 6 year old thought it was the coolest thing in the world. He begged me to let him use it. I immediately felt a since of dread, as the last thing I wanted was him using it to shoot his little sister and maybe get her in the eye. It's now hidden in the truck of my car. It's a neat gadget, but definitely not a toy.
What's wrong with pointing a camera up the barrel? As long as nobody's behind it, the worst case scenario is you break your camera (and given the video quality, I'd say that'd be a good motivator to upgrade, haha).
Does it really kill them though?
I'm a fan of my electric swatter (because I can catch them in-flight with it) but I have to keep it buzzing for a bit to make sure they're really dead, and then it smells slightly burnt.
Amazon reviewers claim the 'Bug-A-Salt 2.0 Lawn & Garden Model' works well on palmetto bugs, which I think it just what they call giant roaches in Florida?
I disposed of 63 wasps over a period of about 3 weeks with it. Can confirm that it kills at a range of 6 inches by blowing the body apart. So, usually it was two shots, one to immobilize and another to kill. Vastly prefer this to spraying chemicals around or having a dirty fly swat
hanging around.
With age I came to conclusion that anything making killing of any kind even remotely fun is utterly wrong. It might be necessary with dangerous insects, but it should not be fun or recreational.
Back in my day we bought our morality in books that we'd have to hand-transcribe into our moral compasses. One typo, and whoops, now you're a sociopath.
I'm curious if you grew up and/or ever lived in an environment with a serious insect problem. Even the common housefly is just a "mere annoyance" one at a time... but dozens or hundreds can have significant effects on physical and mental health. I'm a huge softie about mammals, birds, reptiles... but I am OK with the complete and total extermination of all insect life inside my domicile.
I can see how this would be more effective in some areas of my home than a fly swatter, where you can't wind up easily. Fly swatter work because their arc surprises flies (in my experience).
If you find it fun to use or repugnant that's a personal thing.
Flies are yucky pests that I don't want to have around.
I think also the flyswatter works because it does not displace air the same way that your hand does when you're trying to smack a fly with it. Flies can tell when something is headed their way because they feel the air move.
This is a really interesting position, I'm interested in how you arrived at it. Do you think that if killing something is fun it will result in more things being killed, or is your issue more fundamentally with the idea of killing being fun?
Not OP, but I share his / her perspective. My reasoning is that the act of killing is a serious and irreversible decision that should not in any way be trivialized. Furthermore, a full evaluation of the consequences of killing should not be deflected, distorted, or colored by something like amusement. Since killing is a necessary part of life (others mentioned vaccines, food production, and gardening below) it seems important to foster a sober and cautious attitude toward the act so as to prevent unnecessary loss of life; the "gamification" of death, even in trivial cases such as with the salt gun, does not appear to promote a sober attitude toward killing.
Essentially, my stance is that there is a difference between accepting an action as necessary and engaging with it as needed and making said action fun / associating it with enjoyment. I don't count video games as part of the issue for the moment since, at least currently, it does not seem like the characters and units that populate video games are in any sense alive. This may change, however, and if it does then I expect radical consequences will unfold.
My own answer is through rational empathy. You might not think much of small annoying insect, but it is still orders of magnitude more complex than anything humanity has ever built. Destroying such marvelous system just for target practice feels like being a dick, and I refrain from it.
It is a hard ethical dilemma and any line you draw will be arbitrary. Some people hunt rhinos, some catch fish or shoot birds as past-time, while others get sense of satisfaction from gunning down insects. I still condone pest control, but I draw the line at reasons like "for fun", or "because I'm bored", or "to feel more powerful". The intention/reason is important, because it affects the future. If you do it for fun, you have no reason to ever stop or to consider alternatives once they are made possible.
To answer another post, I think killing in video games is completely OK and something I often enjoy doing.
I'm also enjoying the tone you've set for discussion and I'd like to hear your personal views.
It is a question of scale. Vaccination is usually a light, kind, touching moment between a nurse and a patient; vaccines have been behind the attempted eradication of several species. Gardening is often seen as a quiet, pastoral, contemplative practice; crop selection has permanently altered the global climate (via disruption of water and nitrogen cycles) and invasive species have permanently altered local habitats.
I have yet to meet the Jain who has studied cellular biology.
Unlike a vast majority of other animals, studies seem to indicate that insects are not capable of feeling pain and suffering. Killing insects is effectively just killing robots.
> studies seem to indicate that insects are not capable of feeling pain and suffering
All of the articles (e.g. [0]) I found in a quick search in response to this citation-free assertion suggested that the answer is more nuanced that that. I'd also observe that higher primates (e.g. chimps) that have pain mechanisms that are biologically very similar to ours can have a very different response to us. If you watch film of social interactions of chimps, e.g. [1], it's a fairly routine occurrence for an individual to apparently ignore injuries that would have a human screaming (e.g. a finger partially severed in a fight with a rival), especially if it would affect their hierarchical status to run away. So I wouldn't read too much into observed behaviour as an indicator of what is actually going on, at least for primates.
> It is possible to shoot flies out of the air. There is nothing else like it.
I mean, personally, I just spray them with Windex. (Which doesn’t so much kill them as stop them from being able to fly temporarily, at which point you can find them on the ground trying to slowly walk away, and do as you will with them.) And it has the convenient property that you already probably have a sprayer-bottle of it in your house. If you don’t, a spray bottle of {vinegar, soapy water, alcohol} works, too.
Also, these droplets of light solvents just dry cleanly off of whatever surface the droplets land on, without creating a scratch or a stain. I can’t imagine what spraying salt everywhere would do to my painted walls and (hardwood) floors.
I met the inventor at a party once as we had a mutual friend in common. He's a really interesting guy! Very low key. I wasn't sure that there would be an audience for it, but apparently there's a big one. Good for him!
Has anyone modified these things to give them a little more power? I have a "gen 1" Bug-a-Salt and it doesn't have enough grunt to kill a fly. I suspect that a stronger spring would do the trick, but haven't seen any tear-downs or mods online.
I have seen "bug killer" add-ons for air-powered pellet guns, but they seem kind of iffy for indoor use.
I have two of these in my closet, still in the box (meant to keep one and give the other to my Dad for a Christmas gag gift, but got him something else instead). I live in a desert and haven't needed to open one, though it's dawning on me now that we get scorpions here...
89 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] thread[0] This is not snark.
[1] Snark aside, I for real do not want roaches etc. in my house, and appreciate non-poisonous methods of dealing... while at the same time struggling with the fact that the insect population in my state, which is KNOWN for bugs, has visibly plummeted within my lifetime.
(edit: refs. Also context: at the time of my comment, the parent was getting greyed out for some reason.)
It works too well so people would rather downvote the advice for which kind of salt to use.
It's better to build a hybrid cloud whereby the image recognition code runs on tensorflow locally on 10 x RTX 2080 super's (for low latency inference) and then go on to issue commands via the kubernetes cluster for elimination.
A funny story from when I was younger ... there was a candidate running for County Commissioner who lived in my neighborhood and had a local auto-parts store. County Commissioners are paper pusher yet for some reason, as if his position mattered, someone asked whether he was for or against the death penalty. His answer was "regular or extra crispy". This was when the electric chair was still in use ... and there was one about 10 miles from where I'm sitting. I already knew he was a little "out-there" but this statement alone kept him from being elected. While we'd had three horrible commissioners, this statement made him seem "more horrible".
It's interesting in thinking about it that I've found this story more and more disturbing as I've gotten older. Being an introvert and being raised as a stoic german (by descent at least) meant that I've had to grow my ability to empathize through experience. My son was opposed to the death penalty before I was. I might even still have caveats.
Will probably never have the time to work on it, but if something like this is available to buy I would be interested.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skycam
Flying sounds like a battery hog / needs to report home.
But if you out it on treads, it can leisurely roll around your garden / any sized plot and blast slugs as it sees them. Put some solar panels on it and it could possibly stay out all day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGjP9SE7tsM
If you find it fun to use or repugnant that's a personal thing.
Flies are yucky pests that I don't want to have around.
Essentially, my stance is that there is a difference between accepting an action as necessary and engaging with it as needed and making said action fun / associating it with enjoyment. I don't count video games as part of the issue for the moment since, at least currently, it does not seem like the characters and units that populate video games are in any sense alive. This may change, however, and if it does then I expect radical consequences will unfold.
It is a hard ethical dilemma and any line you draw will be arbitrary. Some people hunt rhinos, some catch fish or shoot birds as past-time, while others get sense of satisfaction from gunning down insects. I still condone pest control, but I draw the line at reasons like "for fun", or "because I'm bored", or "to feel more powerful". The intention/reason is important, because it affects the future. If you do it for fun, you have no reason to ever stop or to consider alternatives once they are made possible.
To answer another post, I think killing in video games is completely OK and something I often enjoy doing.
I'm also enjoying the tone you've set for discussion and I'd like to hear your personal views.
I have yet to meet the Jain who has studied cellular biology.
All of the articles (e.g. [0]) I found in a quick search in response to this citation-free assertion suggested that the answer is more nuanced that that. I'd also observe that higher primates (e.g. chimps) that have pain mechanisms that are biologically very similar to ours can have a very different response to us. If you watch film of social interactions of chimps, e.g. [1], it's a fairly routine occurrence for an individual to apparently ignore injuries that would have a human screaming (e.g. a finger partially severed in a fight with a rival), especially if it would affect their hierarchical status to run away. So I wouldn't read too much into observed behaviour as an indicator of what is actually going on, at least for primates.
[0] https://reducing-suffering.org/do-bugs-feel-pain/
[1] https://monkeyworld.org/monkey-life/
I mean, personally, I just spray them with Windex. (Which doesn’t so much kill them as stop them from being able to fly temporarily, at which point you can find them on the ground trying to slowly walk away, and do as you will with them.) And it has the convenient property that you already probably have a sprayer-bottle of it in your house. If you don’t, a spray bottle of {vinegar, soapy water, alcohol} works, too.
Also, these droplets of light solvents just dry cleanly off of whatever surface the droplets land on, without creating a scratch or a stain. I can’t imagine what spraying salt everywhere would do to my painted walls and (hardwood) floors.
Bug Assault => bug-a-salt
That took too long, I need my morning coffee
I have seen "bug killer" add-ons for air-powered pellet guns, but they seem kind of iffy for indoor use.
[edit: grammar and spelling]