Germany Plans To Dim Lights At Night To Save Insects 117
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: In a draft law seen by AFP, the country's environment ministry has drawn up a number of new measures to protect insects, ranging from partially outlawing spotlights to increased protection of natural habitats. "Insects play an important role in the ecosystem...but in Germany, their numbers and their diversity has severely declined in recent years," reads the draft law, for which the ministry hopes to get cabinet approval by October. The changes put forward in the law include stricter controls on both lighting and the use of insecticides.
Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year. The draft also demands that any new streetlights and other outdoor lights be installed in such a way as to minimize the effect on plants, insects and other animals. The use of weed-killers and insecticides would also be banned in national parks and within five to ten meters of major bodies of water, while orchards and dry-stone walls are to be protected as natural habitats for insects. The proposed reforms are part of the German government's more general "insect protection action plan," which was announced last September under growing pressure from environmental and conservation activists.
Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year. The draft also demands that any new streetlights and other outdoor lights be installed in such a way as to minimize the effect on plants, insects and other animals. The use of weed-killers and insecticides would also be banned in national parks and within five to ten meters of major bodies of water, while orchards and dry-stone walls are to be protected as natural habitats for insects. The proposed reforms are part of the German government's more general "insect protection action plan," which was announced last September under growing pressure from environmental and conservation activists.
Ecosystem (Score:5, Funny)
My porch light is part of the local ecosystem. I have Mediterranean house geckos living behind the siding on my house. They come out at night to feed under the porch light. If I get rid of the light, who will feed the poor starving lizards? Won't someone think of the lizards?
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Re:Ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't you love it when legislation bends over backwards to favour special interest groups nobody's ever heard of?
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You are confusing cause and effect.
Floodlights outside were created to keep insects out of houses.
Effect of the above: Insects kept dying and dying and dying.
Result: insects are endangered as a whole in certain parts of the world.
Effect of the above: legislation enacted to stop the destructive effect of light pollution to insects
Side effect: insects are more attracted to houses.
Efficient solution to the side effect: anti insect nets, don't light the inside of your house like a fucking Christmas tree, use Ba
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That's the thing...
YOU are not concerned about species A, B, C, D dying out.
Another guy is not concerned about species E through H dying out.
Someone else is definitely not concerned about species I through M, etc., etc.
Personal preferences aside, when certain species disappear, others will invade the niche, and others still will die too because their food source dwindled and disappeared. And so on, and so forth.
Humankind has a very narrow and self-centered view of seeing things. "It stings ME so let's kill
Re: Ecosystem (Score:2)
There's a high tech invention called "mosquito net" which you can put in front of your windows. Just sayin'.
Re:Ecosystem (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you love it when legislation bends over backwards to favour special interest groups nobody's ever heard of?
Just because you haven't heard of a group doesn't mean that they aren't vital to the function of society and may even be directly responsible for maintaining your way of life.
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Actually night sky ordinances are more about pointing nights downwards (like its done in some towns of Arizona and Idaho) as opposed to getting rid of them completely.
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How about increased disease and death from these not-dying, house-invading masses?
Re: Ecosystem (Score:2, Insightful)
If there were enough insects, they wouldn't need a damn liggt to not starve!
Keeo signaling "conservative" virtue!
(Note how nowadays, "conservatives" seem to be more about being destructive and selfish, rather than conserving. Aka psycho-libertarianism.)
Yellow lights (Score:2)
I've seen people getting yellow-tinted porch lights lately that are advertised as being less attractive to bugs. No idea how well it works... but they also tend to be dimmer overall, that's got to help with light pollution at least a little.
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Re: Yellow lights (Score:2)
Well, I remember all street lights being very orange. Was cheaper than white incandescents.
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Not just cheaper, but technically usable (incandescent lights with that brightness tend to have very short life expectancies).
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I'm seeing the orange ones get replaced with vividly blue LEDs at a fast clip. It's actually possible to make it out in the sky here when there's cloud cover. Look toward the newly-developed areas and the sky is blue, look to the older areas with lights installed 20+ years ago and there's more of an orange tone.
Attention bug-loving Germans (Score:4, Funny)
Please come to Florida and remove all the bugs you'd like from my yard. You're welcome.
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I've never picked up bed bugs there. I don't think the filthy Europeans that bring them over stay there.
Re: Attention bug-loving Germans (Score:3)
Wrong type of bugs. We don't want to end up like Australia. Tanks. ;)
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They've got tank-bugs in Oz? What a weird place it is. Instead of getting your house eaten by termites you get it flattened by tank bugs.
This should also benefit sleep. (Score:5, Interesting)
And astronomers.
Too bad we can't just dim the existing street lights too.
Including annoying lights put up by store owners to advertise their store at night. For the five damn people a decade, who pass by there and don't know that that store is there, and care too.
BTW: Anyone else can't stand those bright white LED street lights. They are the epitome of uncomfortable lighting, and feel like being cut in the eye.
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Agree with you here. I live in a country next to Germany, and in the last 30 years light pollution has become a huge issue. So huge, that i barely can see stars at night even when unclouded, only the brightest can be spotted.
I discussed this with people before. Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer. If i suggest to turn them off around midnight, a bunch of excuses come not to do so. And i never really understood why, except this perceived safety.
On top of tha
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Agree with you here. I live in a country next to Germany, and in the last 30 years light pollution has become a huge issue. So huge, that i barely can see stars at night even when unclouded, only the brightest can be spotted.
I discussed this with people before. Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer. If i suggest to turn them off around midnight, a bunch of excuses come not to do so. And i never really understood why, except this perceived safety.
On top of tha
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A railway station just up the road has lots of lights (as you'd expect). They dim when there's no one around and brighten when someone (or something) moves beneath them. I wouldn't credit our train companies with much, but they did this really well - you can still see everything when dimmed, but when you need the light to be brighter, it comes on (and goes dim again when you don't).
Why our local councils just changed a load of orange bulbs for bright white LEDs without adding this feature is a bit beyond me
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Most people seem to think that having street lights on all night makes them feel safer.
Many studies have shown night lighting decreases crime.
Light pollution is mostly caused by poor engineering. Many many lights shine not just as the ground, where we need the illumination, but at the sky, where we don't need the illumination. Pay attention the next time you're landing in a plane at night. All those lights you can see shining at you- those are all designed incorrectly. Lights that are covered towards the sky and only point at the ground do not cause nearly as much light pollution.
Technology C
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As an amateur astronomer I'm totally with you.
Street lights are unnecessarily tall (10 to 15 meters, that's 33 to 50 feet tall), very bright and too close from each other. Most streets are lit like it's daylight, many of them with those cold white LEDs which scream "artificial". Of course, in many areas there's a mix of sodium lights (which are OK), bright cold white LEDs and the occasional greenish-tinted street lights which give out this spectral protoplasmic type light, spooky as hell (I like them though
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A big disadvantage of making lampposts shorter is that you're now looking directly into the light, which makes visibility a lot worse. Ideally you shouldn't be able to see the bulb at all, but that requires reducing the width of the light cone, which means you need higher lampposts.
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I don't know how tall are you, but 18 feet high diffuse lights are not making visibility worse.
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Apparently you don't drive at night. A 18ft high diffuse light will blind the driver in a car or truck as they drive towards it at a wider angle and as they pass under it. You can see this with the high reflectivity-high diffuse LED lamps mounted at 30ft compared to the low or high pressure sodium lighting that was used(these had their own issues with fog and snow). The 36"x3bulb fluorescent light arrays used in some cities for street lighting suffered from the same problem.
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If they're diffuse the problem isn't as bad, and height makes a difference too. Where I live, the 12ft high diffuse streetlights have just been replaced with 12ft high non-diffuse "look at me, I'm a LED lamp" streetlights that are incredibly annoying to walk or drive towards.
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If you make them shorter, you need more of them to cover the same surface area (unless you want to change the angles of visibility which is a bad thing to do on roads, etc.).
Bigger question:
Why do you need road lights at all on motorways, there are thousands of miles of cats-eye / reflective paint motorway in the world, and cars have headlights.
Why are we mandating compulsory headlights on cars if the roads are illuminated, and why we are illuminating the roads if cars have headlights?
Pedestrian paths need
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Why can't there be PIR based motion detection street lights, 12 to 18 feet tall, I have no idea.
Presumably because having them on permanently is the lesser evil by far. Compared to them coming on at random intervals as cars drive by or pedestrians trigger the PIR detectors.
I know for certain that that would drive me absolutely bananas.
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I guess there's no universal solution.
But here's this specific issue: I live on a side, dead-end street which has one car passing through maybe once every half an hour at the busiest time, and a couple cars throughout the night. Yet, the administration installed these huge streetlight pillars, most of their lights flooding people's courtyards and the rest illuminating a mostly empty street. All night long.
My front windows are flooded by 6 or 7 different streetlights, not counting those further than 300 feet
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I live on the second floor in an apartment, and the street lights are pretty much level with our windows. Meaning they shine directly into our bedroom, and blackout curtains only do so much. That in itself is very annoying.
But it would make matters a hell of a lot worse if they kept going on and off in unpredictable patterns.
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Those extra white LEDs have the super harsh blue spectrums in spades. I'm a permanent glasses wearer (contacts don't work with my astigmatism, they just float around on my eye) so I've taken to wearing blue light filtering glasses if I need to go anywhere at night. They also help when driving to filter out the extra bright headlamps some cars are using now.
If you're not a glasses wearer, it may be a pain to obtain them, but it's no more expensive than a decent pair of sunglasses and it helps tremendously.
Is this even possable (Score:1)
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They do mostly have timers.
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With current infrastructure? I don't think so... Its not like all streetlights have dimmers.
My Canadian province has basically replaced all streetlights with LED versions over the last 10 years. These include dimmers. So it may be that they’ve done something similar and the infrastructure is indeed already there in Germany. Or if not, now there’s a double incentive to upgrade streetlights (energy savings + ability to comply with insect directive).
Company signs (Score:2)
So what about company signs along the highways for example?
Re:Company signs (Score:4, Informative)
I believe you will already find these much more regulated in Germany and many other European countries than in the USA (we don't have them in Denmark for example).
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Like everything with the US, it depends on the state. Some have absolutely no regulation at all it seems, and others have near complete bans.
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Why have outside lights at night all the time? (Score:2)
Light pollution is horrible (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you start to be aware of it, light pollution is really horrible. Also almost completely unnecessary.
We're building a new house. The electrician wanted to install the typical outdoor lights that light up the whole fricking neighborhood. We told him to find models that pointed their light downwards, and only downwards. That's what you need, in order to find your keys, open the door, or whatever. There's no need to shine in the neighbor's windows or light up the sky.
Stand somewhere, where you can look across your neighborhood or city. Every light that you can directly see, should not be visible. At most, you should see indirect light reflecting off of whatever is supposed to be illuminated.
Dimming lights is all well and good. Prohibiting polluting light fixtures would be even better.
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I thought insects were attracted to IR, not... (Score:2)
I thought they were attracted to Infrared light, not human-visible light. Hence, why LED lights don't attract insects (or at least, not nearly as much as other light sources.) Couldn't they just switch to LED's, which they should probably do anyway for a lot of other reasons?
That said, visible light pollution is a problem in general, not just for insects. I suspect it affects humans in ways we don't yet understand. There's nothing quite like a clear night sky when out in the middle of nowhere with littl
Germany has too little widerness (Score:2)
Re: Banning Teslas will also save insects (Score:2, Insightful)
There's barely any insects ending up in grills anymore, because we already murdered most of them for literally no damn reason but our convenient selfish willful ignorance.
That's the point.
Also, we're not a car nation, like you in the US. In cities, public transport is so good, you literally don't need a car anymore. 90% of the people at my job don't own one. The tram on my street comes every 5 minutes. A station is usually not more than 250m away.
Of course nobody's radical about it. That would be silly. E.g
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And if you realize just how car-crazy the Germans were not even 2 decades ago, you'd be as astonished as anyone else in Europe.
speaking for a whole country (Score:5, Informative)
It is interesting that all your development applies to "In cities".
Not to countryside, not to small town either. It happens that I actually went into a german town of around 100 000 citizens the other days. Except in the very small center, there was no public transport or else that you could rely on.
So what, germany is not a car-nation due to a few berliners? You mean the nation of Porsche, VW, Audi, Mercedes is not a car-nation. Ahem.
Probably as much as France, of Citroen, Peugeot, Renault, Delayahe, Simca, etc is not, from the point of view of the few parisians whose life is neither related to the lives of many other french, neither wanted by those.
Re: speaking for a whole country (Score:5, Informative)
It is interesting that all your development applies to "In cities".
I'm not even prepared to give OP that much credit. I spent an obscene amount of time eg in Berlin. If your living place and work place don't magically align on a transportation line, you're fucked without a car. And recently you're also fucked with a car because they essentially reduce the streets to single lane everywhere they can.
Re: speaking for a whole country (Score:4, Interesting)
But thanks. If I ever go to Berlin, I will check out public transportation first. Should my departure or destination not align on the magical transportation line (rephrasing) I will try to walk, then look into acquiring some kind of bike.
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I can see how I could be wrong about the following assumption, but I think that you probably just wanted to drive your own car.
Is that somehow an issue ? Last time I checked, wanting to drive a car is not really a crime (yet).
Besides, maybe Germany should focus on how to produce clean electricity, instead of using coal.
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As a jelly donut:
Where the f*ck did you spend that obscene amount of time in Berlin? Kladow?
Point of comparison (Score:3)
It is interesting that all your development applies to "In cities". Not to countryside, not to small town either.
Germany is peculiar in that it is among the less "centralized" countries in Europe.
It is partially due to its federalism (and thus other similarly organized countries like Switzerland show this characteristic), which in turn is probably due to the fact it organized as a single unified country much later in European history.
There are a lot more cities vs countryside.
It happens that I actually went into a german town of around 100 000 citizens the other days. Except in the very small center, there was no public transport or else that you could rely on.
Still compared to other countries:
- it is very well-connected with the rest of the country by rail. If you want to travel to any other c
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I'm inclined to believe the statement that public transport is decent enough in Germany unless you have to travel a great distance to your work place which happens to be in an exotic location. Because in that case having to wait for buses and trains makes a 20 minute car trip into perhaps a 2 hour trip using public transport.
Anyway I'm inclined to believe the statement because in my state you get villages with fewer t
What town was that ? (Score:2)
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They don't just depend economically on their auto industry as in, "they're major employers and taxpayers"; they literally own large amounts of stock in the companies. If I remember the numbers right, Lower Saxony for example owns 12% of the shares (20% of the voting shares) in VW.
It's part of why it was so hard for the government to face up to Dieselgate, and so easy for it to look the other way; exposing them meant harming their own assets.
Re: Banning Teslas will also save insects (Score:2)
Except none of the proposed fixes affect insects in the middle of the rainforests except maybe the restriction on pesticides but probably not, which have also seen similar declines. Which means the proposed solutions will do exactly bupkis.
Re: Banning Teslas will also save insects (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never seen a country that's as hardcore about insect protection as Germany. When Tesla was building their factory, they had to send people out to search for, mark, and cordon off anthills, and they couldn't start construction in those areas until the anthills had been relocated (what a job - ant relocator!). And no, the ants (F. rufa) are not endangered; as far as I can tell, the law is simply protective of the ants because they eat pests.
They also had to search every tree in the plantation for bats and cordon them off until the bats left of their own accord; complete tree removal before birds began building nests in the spring (and build birdhouses for them); and even chase out lizards and build a double-layered "lizard fence" around the property. Germany doesn't mess around when it comes to animal protection...
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Maybe it's your car. I own a 1950s airplane and I'm picking up just as many as I've always picked up. Even when it was still cold out I'd have to do bug clean up before closing the hanger. I'm also not spending much time low. I'm picking them up even at 5000'. Why there's insects up that high is a mystery to me unless maybe mother nature gave them a big lift.
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Image how many insects will be saved from being splattered on windscreens of teslas now that they are illegal to drive in Germany.
They're not illegal to drive. Where did you read that nonsense?
What's illegal is using the touch screen if that requires you to take your eyes of the road more than briefly. In other words, you must not crash because you look at the touch screen for too long.
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The actual ruling was (translated):
Re:Orchards (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to re-read the summary - especially those parts you seemingly think refer to a total ban on pesticides and weed killers everywhere.
Re: Orchards (Score:3)
You might want to turn on your brain.
And think about how to actually work with insects to your advantage, instead of being a walking, talking apocalypse. Bow about being less short-sighted than a newborn baby?
I work at a protected nature reserve and we got insects up the wazoo compared to the rest of the lands.
And we got meadow orchards too. And lots of fruits.
And they are mostly perfectly fine.
All you get, is a somewhat lower yield to feed you fuckin greedy pig, and some fruits that don't look like Pixar d
I grow my own fruit (Score:5, Interesting)
and you don't know what you are talking about. It is not a question of a somewhat lower yield or slightly blemished fruit; it can be a question of having any fruit at all.
I tried a pesticide-free practice, picking up all of the spoiled fruit that dropped off the tree to break the propagation cycle of the insects doing the spoiling that are native in my region, and year-after-year, I was throwing away 80% of the harvest in the form of rotting fruit that dropped to the ground. I ate the remaining 20% . One of our pests is the apple maggot fly, and I gladly ate fruit with tiny apple-fly maggots in them. That's what we pigs do. The fruit looks fine when picked, but it rots in storage.
Nicotine is produced by some plants, and creatures ranging from insects to humans have a nicotine receptor. Is Germany banning smoking? Vaping?
Acetamiprid is a synthetic modification to nicotine that is much less toxic to humans than nicotine. My orchard can grow 500 kilograms of apples, pears and plums using as much of this substance as the amount of nicotine in a carton of cigarettes. Such neonicotinoid insecticides are banned in Europe because of unproven speculation about its effect on honey bees.
Pyrethrin is derived from a substance in chrysanthemums and the family of pyrethroid insecticides are related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Pyrethrin is allowed in organic practice and is poisonous to bees whereas acetamiprid is not -- see https://entomologytoday.org/20... [entomologytoday.org]. The pyrethroid insecticides are also broad spectrum whereas acetamiprid is not, hence pyrethroids are much more dangerous to the beneficial, predatory insects. Thanks to "pressure from environmental and conservation activists", I may end of having to switch to these substances.
Like antibiotics, pesticides can be overused and misused. People have lived for millennia without the benefit of antibiotics, but I choose not to live that way. I follow doctor's orders on the safe and effective use of antibiotic medicine, and I follow the labeled directions on the safe and effective use of insecticides in my orchard.
Yes, Germany. This pig's ancestors are from Vojvodina, some of the smartest farmers on the planet, you have a law where you had to let many of us Auslandisch greedy pigs into your fine country. You are eating food grown by these pigs.
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Addendum: Don't forget that Pyrethrin (organic pesticide) is also toxic to mammals. People have died from Pyrethrin poisoning.
Pyrethroids (synthetic) are not toxic to mammals.
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Got too many humans to feed? I've got an idea: Don't make so many goddamn humans!
Unfortunately developed countries are already taking your advice when it comes to this with unsustainably low birthrates which will come back to haunt us in 30+ years.
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That depends. COVID has certainly exposed that contemporary economic models are highly vulnerable. I suspect there'll be some re-jigging going on for long term stability, part of which will serve to cope with a falling population.
In a way, this is fairly predictable as a strategy. When you're in a low tech environment, there are a significant amount of exposed vulnerabilities (predation, disease etc.). About the only successful strategy against this is to reproduce as much as possible, so your numbers o
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TBH, I don't think that your common moron born after WWII cared much at all about privacy/anonymity. These retards are products of the public "education" system where critical thinking is verboten, and those who bring up life's uncomfortable truths are ostracized and led to the stockades. Cruel and unusual punishment by the communists now taking over the west.
I don't think he actually reads any responses to that spam, or at least has never responded to me. It's probably just a bot.
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Re: Remember when it was possible to do things onl (Score:1)
I would, but I gotta ask first:
Is it with more MOLECULES?
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It's got ELECTROLYTES!
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Last I checked rape was already illegal in German, independent of who does it and whether they do it as a group activity.
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Now i'm curious. You have the case numbers to that claim?