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Tux Can Even Milk Cows!
GuitarNeophyte writes "If you're a cow, you want to get milked when you want to get milked. And if you were a dairy farmer, you want to make your cow happy. So what do you do? Set up a machine that gives the cow control of its milking schedule. Oh yeah, of course, it runs on Linux. It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go."
If you're going to use only 1% of a 40GB harddrive, why not just use a tiny bit of onboard memory and remove the entire harddrive from the equation?
schild
editor, f13.net
I think some of the point of this (apart from making Linux do something pretty cool :) was that by milking the cows when they are ready to be milked, they are happier and maybe (i don't think the article mentioned it) have a higher milk output. Remember that a cows milk is normally there to feed baby cows, which feed throughout the day, not once in the morning and once at night.
:)
This couldn't easily be done with a casual workforce - cows are normally on farms which tend to be some distance from population centers. Nobody will want to get woken up at 3 in the morning just because a cow suddenly feels like getting milked.
Also, more technology like this means more jobs for us nerds
Personally, I find the idea of an adult human drinking milk from another mammal pretty odd, but according to the size of the dairy industy, i'm in the minority.
Apparently the cows actually like this because it is voluntary ("V") and they choose to get milked 6 times a day rather than just twice. I say if the cows didn't like it, they'd stay away as long as possible.
What would you rather do, hire milk maids to sit around waiting for the cows to come home?
And did you ever consider that maybe people would rather not spend all day milking cows? That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?
You remind me so much of all the Marxists I have known who never worked a day in their lives, who came from rich families and felt guilty about it, who decided they had to atone for that by helping the downtrodden masses, whether or not those downtrodden masses wanted their help, indeed in spite of the fact that many of them were told countless times to piss off and mind their own business. I am not saying you are one of them, but the feeling is the same, that is what you remind me of.
Who the heck left you in charge of reviving Lenin and Stalin?
Personally I hope that boring repetitive jobs become less and less available, and relish the day when no one has to do any of them to earn a living. I rejoice in progress eliminating as many of those deadend jobs as possible, so more human brains are freed for thinking work, to increase the rate of progress. I rejoice in progress itself, even tho it gives luddites like yourself more freedom to retreat into socialist realism fantasies.
Infuriate left and right
"At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical? ...By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things?"
You'd prefer a step above slave labor to this device?
My experience is with my relatives and a few people my parents have as friends, but:
"but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just 1 day old and fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that humans can have the milk instead.(1,2)"
None I know do this, though I am sure you can find people that do anything. Cows are VERY expensive and the above is not a real good plan. The little bit of cows milk lost is MUCH more than made up in living, breathing, healthy, cows producing milk. Common sense would tell you that.
"Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.(3) After giving birth, they lactate for 10 months, then they are re-inseminated, and the cycle starts again. Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are crammed into massive mud lots. Cows have a lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory-farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse.(4,5)"
Again - I know of maybe 15 fairly large dairy farms - none whatsoever does this. I'm sure there are some that do, I suspect you can even find some that do even worse (you can still find meat processing facilities that beat the cows to death), but that is an exception not the rule. Dairy cattle last until they quit producing milk, then they go for dog food and other low grade products (dairy cattle generally taste bad and are tough). They are generally farly old - if you want to get up in a bunch about cattle being killed young go to the beef industry. Hell, the guy who used to work for my parents (land surveyors) kept two or three cattle, never bred them, and milked them daily. They have been bred to do this and if they are not milked they devolop infections.
"Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day)."
Cows were bred to do this long ago - you can purchase organic milk that is made in nearly those quantities that do not use them. Though I do not like the use of the hormones and chemicals (I ingest them also), a little bit of education instead of propaganda would be useful.
"(8,9) Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets, which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals, because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients necessary for them to produce the massive amounts of milk required by the industry.(10)"
Not any longer, illegal in most industrialised countries since tha mad cow disease was discovered in the early to mid 90's. Hopefully PETA is a little more up to date than that...
"Clearly if the cows natural breeding life is cut from 8-9 years to half that, then the cow is undergoing some very extraordinary stress and adverse conditions. "
Clearly so, if it were true. However, should you simply go tour a local diary farm (many will allow it, in fact encourage it) you will see that most of what you quoted is totally incorrect for the vast majority of dairy farms. It's like accusing the entire computer industry of stuff because SGI did some crappy stuff 15 years ago.
And, lastly, one of the points I was thinking is that the system being hawked in the post *precludes* nearly all of this type of treatment. Thus, how do they cope with it - apparently put on blinders and keep on keeping on is the answer.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
As opposed to those skilled, thinking jobs that are being outsourced.
Thank you. The right-wingers always have an answer as to why it's good to take away someone's job. But it all boils down to their blind worship of big business and a lack of empathy for those who find themselves unemployed or underemployed.
The parent to your post wrote:
"That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?"
That ignores the fact that 25% of the population have IQ scores below 89. For someone with an IQ of 75, farm work may be very fulfilling. Take that away from them and they may be unable to find other work.
Not everyone has a high enough IQ to excel, or even function, in a job which requires intelligence, logic, and analytical skills. Not every person you meet on the street could be taught to do electronic design, software development, bio-medical research, or astrophysics. In order for our economy to thrive, we need jobs suitable for everyone in the work force -- including the mildly retarded who hold jobs as janitors, sanitation workers, laborers, assemblers, and President of the United States.
The problem is that PETA (like most people and organisations today) is unable to see the shades of grey in the world. According to their vision, everything that is done by the industry is eeeevil. I don't see anything wrong with feeding dead chickens to cows. Heck, I eat dead chickens myself!
Another example: I don't see how the data (I call it data, but it sounds more like empty claims) above shows that the breeding life is cut to half of the natural. They say that cows are rendered worthless to the dairy industry. Perhaps it means that instead of making 8 tons of milk each year they only make 5 tons. At that point it would become more profitable for the farm to slaughter the cow. As long as we are not against cowslaighter per se, I don't see what's wrong with that.
If PETA actually targeted their attacks somewhat instead of proclaiming that anyone who as much as looks at a cow the wrong way is a monster, they would get much more respect. I concede that the profit-driven (or subsudies-driven?) industry will happily spit on the well-being of cows, but why not attack their actual transgressions and not the whole concept of industrial farming? For example, why doesn't PETA attack specific farms (companies) that hold their cows in bad conditions, while co-operating with some other farms that do respect their bovine partners?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
If you've checked your rural population and employment trends lately, you'd discover that in many of these places, you can't find a milk(maid/man/dude) to hire. Frankly, even amongst the underemployed, not many will work the hours a dairy farm runs at given what a farmer can afford to pay. In my parents area, northern Pennsylvania, there's actually an uptick of hispanic immigrants who come to work in the dairies, as it's otherwise almost impossible to find someone willing to get up at 4:00 a.m., milk cows, then repeat the process again at 4:00 p.m. Farmers with large enough herds to milk on the three-shift schedule have it even harder. The advantage of the machines are that they are reliable, consistent, and always on the job. If the cows are happier as a result, then that's a genuine added bonus.
(completely off topic, but I remember one cow we had that had injured herself, so that she had to be hosed off and have antibiotic spray applied a couple of times a day. After a couple of weeks of this routine, she became tame, and would sneak up behind you, put her head under your arm, and just about demand to be scratched behind the ears. So, I've seen the difference between a merely contented cow, and a genuinely happy one.)
Not to ruin anyone's agrarian fantasies, but my grandfather, who farmed all his life except for brief stints in the coal mines and on highway crew in the summer, said that he would have never gone into farming if it hadn't become mechanized. The work was bad enough that a summer spent shoveling (by hand) hot asphalt into holes in the highway for 8-10 hours a day was a vacation by comparison. He made sure that his kids got an education, kept their act together, and had a chance to get out.
Frankly, mechanisation of this type is what will allow small farmers (or at least smallish) to continue to exist. The problem with the OP's idea that those jobs should be left, so that people with lower IQ's have something to do, is that unmechanized farming will require far more than just their labor. Think carefully; do you want to go back to a system where fewer sysadmins are employed, but there are great opportunities in bovine lactate extraction? We did an informal poll at one of my previous jobs, and it turned out that at least 1/2 the sysadmins had some sort of agrarian upbringing. Maybe we were just all malcontents who didn't know how good we had it when we were cowherds, but somehow I doubt it.
Machines should Work, People should Think.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken