Domain: agclassroom.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to agclassroom.org.
Comments · 12
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Re: Occam's Razor
Here you go
https://www.agclassroom.org/ga...P.S. Milwaukee was a great city same for Chicago, can't say much about them lately apparently their democrat governments have been doing damage to them. G
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Re:A little short-sighted
Machinery, robots, and automation have been taking over jobs for hundreds of years. Humans have been resisting those automation takeovers for just as long. The earliest of these are Luddites. they smashed up weaving machinery because it was taking over their jobs. Below is the link, very interesting read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, despite all the automation and machinery over the centuries, the number of jobs available have continued to increase. Rather than completely replacing jobs, automation shifted jobs to new positions or industries that may require more thinking that automation is not capable of doing. As a result, productivity has skyrocketed, giving us the amazing quality of life compared to quality of life centuries ago.
For example, in 1880 50% of Americans worked on farms. Today, 1% of Americans work on farms. That's a 49% job loss. However, we don't see a 49% unemployment. Those jobs have shifted to other industries, while we still get amazing food production.
There's no indication that this automation increase, productivity increase, and job type shift will change. There's also no indication that Luddites will stop resisting the change. However, there no reason to start taxing robots. People still have jobs, jobs availability is still increasing, still paying income tax, and it's an incredible complication to the tax code. There already exists job training federal aid for those put out of work by outsourcing. A possible solution to automation job shifting is to expand that for job loss caused by automation to help people learn to new job types.
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Re:A little short-sighted
Machinery, robots, and automation have been taking over jobs for hundreds of years. Humans have been resisting those automation takeovers for just as long. The earliest of these are Luddites. they smashed up weaving machinery because it was taking over their jobs. Below is the link, very interesting read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, despite all the automation and machinery over the centuries, the number of jobs available have continued to increase. Rather than completely replacing jobs, automation shifted jobs to new positions or industries that may require more thinking that automation is not capable of doing. As a result, productivity has skyrocketed, giving us the amazing quality of life compared to quality of life centuries ago.
For example, in 1880 50% of Americans worked on farms. Today, 1% of Americans work on farms. That's a 49% job loss. However, we don't see a 49% unemployment. Those jobs have shifted to other industries, while we still get amazing food production.
There's no indication that this automation increase, productivity increase, and job type shift will change. There's also no indication that Luddites will stop resisting the change. However, there no reason to start taxing robots. People still have jobs, jobs availability is still increasing, still paying income tax, and it's an incredible complication to the tax code. There already exists job training federal aid for those put out of work by outsourcing. A possible solution to automation job shifting is to expand that for job loss caused by automation to help people learn to new job types.
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Re:WTF?
The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.
In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).
So which is it? Can a single person, making it their full-time job, grow enough to feed 1.1 people or 150 people?
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WTF?
The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them. A family of 4 needs about 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of land to grow the food needed to sustain them. Cities leveraged advances in transportation tech and a trade economy to decouple the food production from living spaces. The maximum size of a city is basically determined by the efficiency of the food transport and distribution network - the better those are, the larger the radius of land surrounding the city that can be used to feed its occupants.
Backyard and rooftop gardens are a good (and fun) way to supplement your diet with a few items which might be difficult or expensive to obtain at the grocery store. But they don't come anywhere close to putting a dent in self-sustainability. Given the premium that is placed on space is in cities, there's probably a much better use for that land area than for growing crops. The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.
In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).
Some of the things described in TFA are just plain stupid. Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane? Cannabis grow labs have to do this to evade law enforcement (in places where it's illegal), but there is no logical reason to do this for food crops. -
Re:Wait.... Again?!
Technology advances. Older technology is flaky, unreliable, labor-intensive, and so forth; newer technology is cheap. For example: farmers have been growing wheat in the US since as far back as the 1790s, but they've since obsoleted 97% of the direct farming workforce and, since as recently as 1900, have removed 75% of the workers from the front-to-back production chain (that includes all workers--right down to the oil prospectors finding crude feed stock to make fuel to power tractors). No doubt the combine was a break-through even though we've been harvesting soy beans for thousands of years.
Currently, we can manufacture a 60-inch OLED panel with scattered defects, and salvage most of it for cell phone screens. That's about labor-equivalent to LCD screens, so AMOLED cell phones are cheap. We can use a different process which requires roughly 8 times the total invested labor to carefully produce a perfect 60-inch OLED panel, hence why an LCD 60-inch TV costs $500 and an OLED 60-inch TV costs $4,000. One day we'll announce a new breakthrough manufacturing
... the same fucking panels made of the same OLED we were making back in 2002.We've got a new type of E-Ink now on a new manufacture process. It's cheap and efficient compared to old color E-Ink.
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Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if
Isn't it terrible? Since 1790, we've unemployed 82% of the workforce. Looking at the history of American agriculture, 90% of the labor force was farmers in 1790; by 1850, evil technical progress developing new farm techniques and diesel hardware dropped that to only 58%. In 1900, just 38% of Americans still had good, wholesome farm jobs; and by 1950 it was a staggeringly-low 12.2%. By 2000, farm workers only made up 1.9% of America's workforce, and today it's even lower.
Is it any wonder we now suffer from unemployment as high as 95% in many areas, with a national unemployment rate of 82% among the labor force? Only 41 million Americans have jobs, and their taxes support 300 million Americans on welfare. Our economy has collapsed due to the constant reduction of the workforce as farm jobs have been eliminated by newer technology, disenfranchising the worker with a long and constant stream of lay-offs.
But hey, at least the few of us with jobs are rich fat cats. Rather than spending 43% of the household money on food as in 1900, we only spent 30% in 1950, and 13% in 2000; today we spend under 11.5% of our income on food, and the rich among us can have things like smart phones and XBox video game consoles. Too bad about 89% of Americans being homeless and jobless and hungry.
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Re:Here's a better idea
:) I live in Colorado, and we have our own water problems. (Though less of them, of late, but it's always been really dry out here.) Our snowpack fills a bunch of rivers. At the same time, our glaciers and year-round snowpack are fading, and that takes a lot of elasticity out of the supply. It'll be dry times up here, too, before long (again?), and there's nobody around to pump water to us.
There's a lot of agriculture out here, too, but it's nowhere near the scale or variety of California. I suspect that this is why New York isn't, for example, a big producer of almonds. It's dead last, in fact. So yeah, you can grow "food crops" in the northeast, but not nearly as many different ones, and not nearly as productively/cheaply.
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Re:Dutch disease
And in the 1800s it took 45 years of constant warfare to defeat 10-12,000 armed Plains Indians.
The Colonial and Regular Armies didn't have JDAMs, Hellfires, Reapers, F-22s, Abrams and Strykers.
Funny you should mention Wyoming as a place with nothing to eat. It and all the Great Plains and western states in the lower 48 are net exporters of food.
http://www.smallgrains.org/WHFACTS/growreg.htm
http://www.agclassroom.org/kids/stats/wyoming.pdf -
Re:That's the problem, in my uninformed opinion.
On the other hand, that's exactly how America was 200 years ago. We undercut everyone with cheap, crappy goods thanks to our abundant workforce and raw supplies, and we built quality goods much later.
I'd like to see some support for that argument. What sort of cheap, junky trinkets were we shipping out 200 years ago?
It certainly wasn't DVD players.
I really have to wonder where on earth you got this idea, 200 years ago 75% of America's exports were agricultural.
Japan might have been the example you were looking for, but Japan's gov't was and is signficantly different than China's. One might even suggest that China is in the same boat that Russia was was in 30 years ago. Sure, the wall fell, but how many Russian cars do you see rolling around the streets of the US?
My point is, it should not be treated as a forgone conclusion that China will eventually start producing product on a par with the rest of the world. I'm reminded of an Onion article: " India's Top Physicists Develop Plan To Get The Hell Out Of India."
The point is, it's perfectly conceivable that China could remain a cheap forced labor camp for the rest of the world indefinately. Hopefully, that won't be the case, but it is possible. -
High HorseBefore you climb up on the "Eurpoe does it better" high horse please remember that:
- The likely scenario for a natural catastrophe in the Netherlands is much less than that for New Orleans due to historical hurricanes and tropical storm patterns. Protecting agaisnt a CAT4 or CAT5 hurricane is cost prohibitive in many instances.
- The Netherlands have four times the population of Lousisana (16.4 mil vs 4 mil) and a fraction of coastal area to protect (451KM compared to Louisiana's 15000 miles).
- The Netherlands has only recently had to deal as a Federal member in the EU. Give it 200 years and see where your tax dollars are being routed to.
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Re:How do you keep microorganisms...
After 3 weeks, the beef is now very tender from having been pre-chewed by micoorganisms.
Err, no... the beef tenderizes due to the action of an enzyme called calpain which breaks down the tissue during the aging process. See here for more details.