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After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates
Peter S. Magnusson writes "As reported widely in business and mainstream press, the ILO recently released world market employment statistics. Most outlets focused on US economic competitiveness vs. China and Europe. Few noticed the gem hidden away in the ILO report: for the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of manufacturing."
...once you take land out of agricultural use, it is never used for agriculture again. By that I mean the growing of crops. Once a building is there, that's it.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Over 10.000 years there wil be an iceage... no, farming will not dominate then.
Well with machines, and 10,000 years of practice we do not need everyone farming or the biggest sector farming. So that then leaves a majority of the rest of the people to work in the service industry. Earth has 6 Billion+ people on it we can not all be farmers, or programmers. So that leaves a large majority to work at Wal-Mart or the grocery store etc. Not a great job but it is a job.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Simply put, this is about delivering Food Solutions rather than Food.
Have you got your cut, yet?
have you seen me?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Question: Are Chinese gold farmers in the service or agriculture industry?
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is petersmagnusson.com a reliable
Title of the place is "Thoughts on Tech and the Tech Industry"
Couldn't we have found a better source
Is it agriculture? Is it a service? Floor wax? Desert topping?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Wonder what it stands for in this case?
You'll note, from this article:
Caution should be used, however, where the information refers only to employees or only to urban areas. For some years in certain countries, the sectoral information relates only to urban areas, so that little or no agricultural work is recorded. Also, there is no data culled for the vast majority of African nations, where the sector of choice would be agriculture. So, to sum it up - your blog about the rise of services vs. agriculture could only be considered partially correct, at best.We seem to be selling each other services and properties without really adding value. It's something Thomas Pynchon wrote about in "The Crying of Lot 49," where he describes how in a zero-sum game it's false to pretend you can take something away from it. Agriculture, manufacturing and intellectual property (software development) make value, but the rest of this services-based economy just pushes money around.
technical writing / development
This is more about technology than the people... over time, we've managed to create more and more efficient ways to do things with machines (technology) than with people. It is interesting to note that technology was applied to manufacturing first, then agriculture on a large scale. So mass production first displaced workers from craftsman occupations (gunsmiths, blacksmiths, fill-in-the-blanksmiths). At that time, farming was still largely a people job. What drove the rise in manufacuring jobs was the rise in demand for goods. The same could not be said of agriculture - once you have enough food, you stop buying more... with manufactured goods, you always want more... But now we are seeing industrial agriculture displacing workers... we have automated the easy stuff (grain production) and now we're automating the harder stuff (fruit picking)... over time, the number of workers required will fall and since nature abhors a vacuum, these people start working in services... you see the same trend with working mothers over the last century... in the US, taking care of a home was a full time job - washing clothes, dishes, preparing meals, etc. were all labor intensive - now they are trivial (washing machines, microwave dinners, etc). So as the 50's rolled into the 90's, you saw all this home automation drive the job of keeping a home to part time work instead of full time. So the traditional stay at home mom started working outside the home - at first in jobs like teaching where you could still be with your kids when they got home, now with a much more varied opportunity for women. We have two wage earners in a family now not because it takes more to maintain the home, but because it takes less...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
bu bu bu... God only created the earth 6,000 years ago!
By definition, we all still need food. Agriculture may have fallen behind but the decline has been happening since mechanisation but we are still eating. The cost of food at the farm gate has fallen, the value added bit of the chain moving more and more to the processing and manufacture of food items. I can't find an easy way of looking at the food sector as a whole from farm (or vat for that matter) through to supermarket but it must remain massive.
See my journal, I write things there
We are discovering that some of our activities can't be sustained.
EXAMPLE: Farming on the prairie. Up to now, farms have gotten bigger. Around 1900, an economic farm on the prairie might have been a quarter section. (ie. 1/4 square mile) Now, most farms are several square miles. That is due to mechanization and it means there are a lot fewer farmers. The trouble is that the fertility of the soil has become badly depleted. At some point, we won't be able to continue on our current path and more labor intensive methods will probably come back.
We are starting to use corn for ethanol. That means that all grain crops are becoming more expensive. That is likely to bring marginal land back into cultivation using more labor intensive methods. It also means we won't continue to dump subsidized food into the third world. Farmers there will become price competitive again and farming activity will increase.
Large scale mechanization pretty much implies monoculture. That can't be sustained. My guess is that we will see the number of farmers begin to increase in the next few years.
Yes, I did RTFA, and I think the following is only one example in the blog of why one should proofread one's works or at least get an editor to do so.
(sic) "If you licked this posting, then please click here..."
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never felt the urge to lick someone's blog.
That's because McDonalds employs more folks to ask, "Do you want fries with that," than farms that raise the cows and potatoes.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
For that matter... is Phishing and Pharming agriculture or service industry? There certainly seems to be no shortage of people employed doing that.
As long as games like WoW exist.
Farming will always be there.
Read: McDonalds, DMV. Service jobs do not produce tangible objects. There is is no equity in the service industry. The dollar devalues as it is is handed from one schmuck to another. At least in manufacturing people are making some kind of widget. But as we can see in the US service jobs pay the least. And labor jobs are leaving the US. Have left.
I'll go and feed my herd of viruses now.
Once we start sliding down the back end of the depletion curve, fertiliser will become increasingly expensive, as will pesticides. Farming will become more labour intensive, and farming will, again, dominate the economy, as it always has and always will.
Enjoy living in Atlantis, while you can.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Semi-seriously. I'm not sure the services-dominant model is sustainable.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Almost as soon as there were cities, there were temple prostitutes who, along with grain, formed the backing for much of the early currencies. These days the temple is returning to "services" for backing of the value of its currency, but we must ask ourselves one simple question:
When subsistence agrarians are cut off from their lands through centralized land ownership, and wealth is increasingly centralized, how are we going to keep tabs on the portion of "the services sector" that is really just some form of temple prostitution? Or don't you care that the children of the world are increasingly going to have to provide, in the form of "services", what amounts to prostitution for their food and shelter?
Seastead this.
fewer people making food makes the agricultural system more sensitive to disruption whether due to political upheaval, new and exciting crop pests, weather misfortunes, etc... Many folks on slashdot realize the advantages of decentralized, i.e. distributed systems, and it's an especially good thing for food production.
Also, the argicultural "miracle" we are currently seeing, is borrowing from the future to pay for itself in terms of environmental damage. You should really be worried when growing food hurts the environment, it really shouldn't be that way.
Absolute statements are never true
Something like three percent of the US population produces and processes enough food fo r the entire US population, when it took 70% when the country was founded. Thanks to technology, non-renewable energy, and better business organization. Farmers use GPS, Google Maps, wireless, spreadsheets, etc. to manage their operations now.
I can't understand why the author feels this is such an important "event". It doesn't seem like anything to crow about or be proud of as a species.
Read Alvin Toffler's 1980 book _The Third Wave_ which predicted with uncanny accuracy just how this would play out. Stay ahead of the next 10,000 years.
--
make install -not war
Random thoughts:
1) When a farm is converted to housing, a lot of trees go up, and as a result, we are sort of reforesting ourselves.
2) I left an open bag of top soil and an open bag of grass seed sitting on top of each other, next to a leaky hose. Sure enough, the water dripped down, and, when I was cleaning out my garage, I discovered I had a small lawn inside.
3) Also, if you take a look at some industrial areas in PA, you'll find that a lot of old buildings are being overrun by nature.
The moral of the story, point by point, is this. 1) a lot of what was farmland was trees to begin with, and is going back to trees. 2) nature always finds away to prosper, even if you turn your back on it for a month, and 3) large parts of American cities that were manufacturing centers will be reforested within our lifetimes, and you can see that happening now, if you ride the R2 rail line from Chester PA to Philadelphia, and I imagine in other cities as well.
Finally, fuel prices are rising and will continue to rise, and this will over time put a break in the suburban sprawl that so many are against.
This is my sig.
The death of agriculture ... LOL
Ethanol is most criticized, and with due cause. Traditional methods of ethanol production (for instance) deserve criticism. Using only corn kernels is horribly inefficient, particularly when corn is a food source.
But the old ways are changing. The State of Georgia will host the nation's first cellulosic ethanol production facility. Cellulosic ethanol production is more than 15 times more efficient than traditional production methods. Any green biomass can be used: corn kernels, corn stalks, corn roots, switchgrass, cane sugar, tree chips, industrial green waste, and even pig shit. This is the future of biofuels.
Range Fuels is building the new facility in Georgia. They do not use any biomass also used as a food source for humans or animals. The Georgia plant will use industrial tree waste from the many paper mills in the region.
you is welcome.
Gee, one arbitrarily-defined segment of the economy is now larger than another arbitrarily-defined segment of the economy. I'm shocked.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Since there is no real value to having someone clean your hotel room, you might as well do it, right? And cook your own burgers? Why do they have chefs, why not just have the customers cook their own etouffee? Maybe if we drive to Iowa to pick up our own corn, we won't have to push money around without adding value. From now on, I'm going to roll my own sushi!
In July of this year, a study (Study: Organic Farming More Efficient) was published that found that organic farming methods can produce up to 3 times more food than more 'conventional' methods... just wanted to add to the debate!
Not necessarily. You can always put a green roof on the building. You can also use corner offices for greenhouses. Especially Southwest and Southeast corners.
I was thinking of green roofs, but corner office green houses had not occurred to me. I would like to add the backyard victory gardens of World War 2 as well.
Our entertainers, doctors and teachers all count as 'service' jobs. So are the graphic artists who design our toys and the advertisers who sell them to us. So are the truckers that bring us our food, the McMinions that cook it for us, and the lawyers that sue for us when we eat too much of it. Just because someone's in a 'service' job doesn't mean they aren't useful, valued, and improve the human condition. It also certainly doesn't mean they make minimum wage. (Sure, the McMinions will make minimum wage, but it's not like the assembly line workers or grunt farmers are doing any better for themselves).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
However, it's being done by people growing illegal crops - marijuana. Growing marijuana outside has many disadvantages; pests (both insect and law enforcement), seeds, thieves (both pot smokers and pot law enforcers), weather, etc.
Pot grown inside has little chance of being discovered; the only way to be found out is by letting someone know it's being grown there.
Outdoors, insects are a problem. Indoors the insect problem is easily controllable.
Pot grown outdoors has seeds, which weigh far more than the pot itself, taste bad, and produce no high. Indoors the male plants can be pulled befors they produce pollen.
Outdoor crops are prone to drought and overwatering, even floods. If indoor pot is overwatered, it's the farmer's fault.
Indoors, pot is easily cloned. One can find one great plant and clone it, producing what toiday's potheads call "hydro". It's believed by smokers that pot grown hydroponically is of higher quality than pot grown in dirt, but given the same genetics, either farming method will produce the exact same quality, and the clones are exectly the same potency as their parent plant (given the same amount of light, water, and fertilizer).
OT for the subject but on topic for this post, It's ironic that the War On (some) Drugs has produced more potent drugs! Today's pot is all seedless bud, while 1970s pot had stems, seeds, and leaf. And the bud itself, even without the seeds, is up to four times as potent as the 1970s bud. And without the "war", it's possible that crack cocaine might never been invented (or been invented yet). Prohibition not only doesn't work, it exacerbates the problems it is supposed to solve. Alcohol prohibition had America in a domestic, gang-fueled bloodbath, and often the illegal hooch had very harmful impurities, often produced by the government itself. Likewise, reefer prohibition had the Feds spraying paraquat on outdoor crops, sickening and killing American potsmokers (there is no lethal dose for unadulterated reefer) and contributing to pot's being grown indoors. Cocaine prohibition is producing the same gang-fueled bloodbath as alco hol prohibition did, and possiby was the cause of crack being invented.
When my daughters were in high school, one made the astute observation that you could buy pot, coke, and crack in school. I asked if you could buy beer in school? The answer is "no". So please think of the children and legalise drugs!
-anonymous coward
Following the advice of a lawyer or politician may not always be good, but I'm certain we all need food.
http://www.thehenryford.org/village/workingfarms/d efault.asp
Get up at 4:00 a.m., slop the pigs, milk the cows, brush the horses, feed the chickens, cook breakfast, eat breakfast, hook up a plow to the tractor, plow the north 40 acres, meet the vet to see that sick heifer, drive to town and plead for another loan, buy feed for the animals and groceries for the family, drive home, cook dinner, eat dinner, pay bills, balance the checkbook, go to bed (9:00 p.m.)
Then get up the next day and repeat. And continue to repeat for two weeks (except Sundays - go to the church of your choice on Sunday and pray to God you survive another year). Then come back and complain.
What?
Awkward sentence structure, yes. Grammatically incorrect? No.
What the article did not address, however, which wholy invalidates the entire argument, is exactly how much energy cost there was in this type farming - from planting, to de-weeding, to harvesting and processing. The amount of energy expended to acomplish those process likely exceeds that energy which it portends to save.
Except that the value of things is not, unlike some Libertarians like to think, totally contemplated within the market. You think if farmland's expensive, buildings will be torn down? I'd say, forests and other natural ecosystems will be torn down WAY before buildings are! Have you looked at the Amazon recently?
The fact remains, continued growth of the population will result in the destruction of fragile ecosystems long before it makes an impact (at least in the short term) to city dwellers. It's not like animals or rare plants are active participants in the economy, so their interests are a bit underrepresented.
Already done... http://maps.google.es/?ie=UTF8&ll=36.752639,-2.732 162&spn=0.247571,0.466919&t=k&z=11&om=1
The parent is not flamebait. It echos the well thought out opinion of many intelligent and educated people both within and without the agricultural industry. The fertility of much of our farm land is way less than it was a hundred years ago and in that respect, we truly are borrowing from our grandchildren.
With the increase in automation (read: robotics) the price of food will drop and subsequently the profit.
Extrapolating into the future, perhaps farms will be (almost) completely automatic. Everything will drop in price when automation is put into play. This is what I see as the cause.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
in place like Second Life, Wow and other MMORPGs.
for a second i thought i had traveled into the future and that this article was about WoW. figures, it probably would take blizzard 10,000 years to end the WoW farming trade...
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
When labour is divided into Agriculture, Industry and Service: where do you put the Government burocracy? The Military? etc...
:)
Services.
Now we have services, as the largest employer. Translation: More tax collectors and tax spenders worldwide
PS: Yes. I know the whole Slashdot crew is in the services sector. Stop nitpicking.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
...has bought the farm? ...is pushing up daisies? ...is worm food? ...has bitten the dust?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I thought the issue was land use not energy use.
The state-owned Conasupo (which distributed and/or imported most of the grains in Mexico) was shut down in order to cover the rampant corruption within led by Raul Salinas de Gortari (in charge of Conasupo during the presidency of his brother Carlos).
The void was quickly filled by Cargill and Gruma (led by Carlos Salinas' buddy Roberto Gonzalez Barrera). They have created an artificial scarcity of maize in order to raise their profits.
Brazil recently sold protected rainforest to industry. They grow tons of cane sugar for ethanol, apparently without any regard to the environment.
What is more concerning to me is laws like the Atlanta city council is trying to pass, which would make visible bra straps illegal.
None of which actually CREATE goods- they just mess up the market with unproductive activities that are better done by government.
If the activity is unproductive, it's probably better if the government doesn't do it at all. I certainly don't consider doctors or teachers to be unproductive myself, and while I consider most entertainers to be worthless, I place great value in others. Fortunately I'm only required to support those entertainers I actually enjoy, since I'm not living in a socialist state. Ditto with designers and advertisers- every once in a while one of them will create something I value, and these are the ones that I actually support. The government is already the biggest employer of service workers in the U.S. anyway, if I remember correctly. You're not advocating the elimination of service jobs, just changing how they are paid for.
Yes, but they don't create wealth.
What is wealth without health or entertainment? Certainly having food and a roof over your head is important, but wealth for its own sake has little value. I work in industry myself (it's nice being able to see something concrete happen from your labor) but after a day of coding (with some Slashdot thrown in) I would rather go home and be entertained for a few hours than accumulate more wealth by working overtime. Even Marxists like you spend time trolling on Slashdot, a service, created by web designers and paid for by advertisers. Clearly this has value to you, even though it doesn't produce any wealth.
Ok, I'll give you that one. They only make minimum wage if the service is unskilled, or if it hasn't been opened to global competition yet.
Are you saying that salesmen aren't up for global competition? Certainly there are Indian telemarketers, but real salesmen still make far more than I do. (This goes for Businessmen of all sorts). Ditto for Authors, Producers, Editors, Screenwriters, Designers, and any sort of 'intellectual property' based job. As a programmer I could also be replaced by anyone with a computer, and yet I make far more than minimum wage. It's only the unskilled jobs that make minimum wage in this country.
You may want to re-think your position. Other than Slashdot, how many services do you use each day? How many merchants do you do business with? What value do you place on the Internet, the components of which were made in industry, but which is maintained by, sold by, and filled with content by people in the service industry? None of these create wealth, but all of them create value. My guess is that your only idea of service jobs are the McJobs, which is just as ignorant as assuming everyone in agriculture drives a tractor or everyone in industry works an assembly line.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
...the number of people involved in agriculture is. This is an effect of the mechanization and the industrialization of food production, not a measure of how much land is in production.
Also, agriculture did not become the dominant economic mode on the planet until much more recently than 10,000 years ago. I don't know when it happened, exactly, but a good guess would be no earlier than about 4,000 years ago.
Duh
agriculture is only 5% of the gross world product, been a minor part for decades.
Better than that- I want the government running railroads! Actually, the government might not drive the truck, but they spent over $2 million/mile to give that truck a road to run on....
That's an interesting statistic. That would mean the government spent 8 Trillion on our highways alone, which is probably what you are referring to. The rest of our road system doesn't cost nearly as much. You can pave a road pretty cheaply.
And getting the corn from the farm to NYC is not productive?
For two reasons- one is that it's usually more efficient to put the people where the food is rather than trucking it hundreds of miles, and the other questioning whether ANYTHING goes on in NYC that is actually productive instead of just an overhead drain on society. No, trucking does not create a new product- and shipping in this day and age, except for a few rare earth metals, is just a waste of resources.
Further evidence that you don't have a clue what you're talking about. It's cheaper and more efficient to build computers in one city and ship them to another than it is to create a computer manufacturing plant in every city. (Consider that it costs billions to build a state-of-the-art plant and paltry millions to ship everything from it). Interestingly, the same applies to almost any product, including food. Obviously you never took any economics classes, which makes sense given your nickname.
The bit about Amtrak I'm not going to argue with- I don't know enough to discuss it, and you're probably correct anyway.
Moving goods and bits of paper around is negative value that destroys local producers.
This is another case of not knowing what you're talking about. Sure, a global economy sometimes destroys local producers, and sometimes enables them to help more people. But it's certainly not negative value. If I can make and ship you a computer for cheaper than you next-door neighbor can, you could argue that I'm destroying his business. But how am I producing negative value? You're better off, the trucker who brought you the computer is better off, and I'm better off. Your neighbor who produces computers hasn't even lost anything, since you were under no obligation to buy his products in the first place, and he still has the inferior computer you could have purchased from him. (You might argue that the trucker's damage to the environment hurts more than the money you have saved, but consider that he would probably be driving near your city/town/village/hut anyway, so you're only a few blocks out of his way. You could donate a single dollar that you saved to the Arbor foundation and have a net positive impact).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I have been reading "Deep Economy", and it argues the case that the larger modern farms (as most smaller ones have now consolidated or disappeared) produce more food per dollar than farms of the past, however to do this they use vast amounts of excessively cheap energy given to us by oil. They also use petroleum based fertilisers etc etc. Historical farm practices developed before mechanised farming was driven by oil and diesel produce more crops per unit of land, and are less energy intensive, simply because the farmers had to make a living off a small allotment of land, and did not have an abundant supply of energy. These days it's all about driving down costs, and this can be done by increasing the size of a farm to push down overheads. The margins are so low in that business now, there is little choice about how you think of efficiency, it has to be efficiency in terms of dollars. It's more efficient in terms of dollars to buy more land, than to hire more labour to reduce (cheap) energy costs, or to use that labour to further maximise yield. A lot of the historical farming methods also utilised free energy in forms like encouraging animals that would eat the weeds and not the crops. I doubt energy efficiency and other forms of efficiency will become a focus until there are large changes in our economic system, or legislation that ties somethings dollar value closer to it's energy input and environmental cost values. At this point it is far cheaper to just burn some extra oil, than to make your process more efficient.
After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates
A temporary aberration. After the Great Collapse of 2027, everybody that survived was learning how to grow food again.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think the points you raise are unquestionably true, to argue against them is to demonstrate some severe ignorance.
All we're doing now is currently using huge stockpiles of non-renewing (or renewing on too massive of timescales) biomass to convert to energy. The biomass is essentially a large capacitor or battery that had stockpiled billions of years of the sun's energy. We keep thinking of newer and newer ways to drain this battery, and more efficient ways to extract that energy (or at least widen its pipes for more watts per second). We're using it for everything from getting to space to farming to arguing over the internet. Eventually, whether next year or 3000A.D. it's going to start becoming harder and harder to access this energy, ultimately resulting in it drying up.
Really, this "efficient" farming as we see it is robbing peter to pay paul. It's like saying your hand-cranked flash light is more powerful than mine, while you have a 9v you found lying on the ground hooked up in series. Eventually, it's going to drain.
I venture to guess, however, by the time energy supplies start diminishing and drives the price up, we'll find some more cost effective energy.
I think the Ob/Gyns that delivered the Monsterettes from the womb of The Bride of Monster produced something tangible. I think the cook and waitress that get my dinner to the table at Denny's tonight (after closing time at the library where KCLUG meets) are producing something tangible.
Oh, sure, the Monsterettes were more tangibly produced by TBoM, and the dinner is more tangibly made by the chickens who laid the eggs, or the pigs turned into bacon... But why is it that the service provided by the farmer who collected the eggs from the chickens, or saw to it the pig got fed is any different from the services provided by the trucker who hauled the produce off to processing plants, etc.?
What the hell's a "labor job" (other than giving birth or helping out like the Ob/Gyn did)?[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
High electricity usage and infrared sensing from helicopter or plane flyovers can give away an indoor growing facility.
I was at an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London called Global Cities a few weeks back and it was based around one simple fact:
For the first time in human history, more than 50% of Earth's population lives in cities. They figure by 2050 it will be up to 80%.
The difference between raw materials and a car is simply arrangement: a car is an arranged form of its materials. The raw materials have value, but probably most of the car's value is in its arrangement. Thus, order has value.
I would think that all economics is derived from the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Allow me to correct myself, my post was hurried.
I didn't mean unquestionably, I wrote it - but it was wholly inappropriate. It was far too much of a blanket statement. I should say that I wasn't debating on that point, and as far as the future is concerned, I suspect that will hold. If such evidence is presented to the contrary, I certainly hope I'll be in a position to evaluate it.
On my third paragraph, I meant "This efficient farming..." to mean the farming with tractors, petroleum based fertilizers, etc.
Finally, I hold the opinion that it's not unreasonable for us, the human race, to exploit our resources to the degree that it gives us a better quality of life. If this means draining the battery, as it were, I think it's totally appropriate. The question I'm sure your book poses, and I've posed to myself on many occasions, is if we will recognize these resources are running low, and how we will compensate.
"You use "worth" instead of using my term "value" for some reason. But what you're really describing is "cost". The "value" of the car is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (a purely subjective measure). Cost is not a factor."
Oh, I wouldn't say that. Costs plus profit equals value from the standpoint of the one doing the selling. Cost alone is either breakeven or at a loss. Anyone who wishes to have a viable long-term business will not let such a situation last too long, or grow too big. Value from the standpoint of the one doing the buying is indeed zero to what's being asked. However per my previous point viability of the producer in question effects the consumer and hence cost being indirectly important.
Sure - we have the luxury of a service economy because we have a huge amount of oil that permits things like fertiliser and pesticides and trucks to move food and all that crap. Once we start sliding down the back end of the depletion curve, fertiliser will become increasingly expensive, as will pesticides.
Oh, don't worry. By then, we'll all be using bio-diesel. ;-)
Rotating corn with soybeans seems like the only way to help put an end to the growing dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a price we'll need to pay.
Not all land is equally suited to agriculture. Only an MBA would consider squares on a map equivalent, instead of following contours, soil types, microclimates and sun. Unfortunately we're taking the best land out of production and turning it into office parks and other death. As was pointed out high up on the thread, once you put a building on a site, there's no going back. That land is gone.
I would not be the first to point out that you cannot eat money.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Nigerians are moving straight from farming to pharming...
I don't understand how this can be true, if the world population is rising daily, how can food sources be decreasing? What are the alternatives? Hunting in the wild? Crash diets?!
Prohibition not only doesn't work, it exacerbates the problems it is supposed to solve.
... prohibition.
Correction: The US didn't succeed in prohibition. Prohibition works well in some other countries. Pot smoking and other drug use is very low in the Nordic countries, as a result of
Steve Fossett disappears, the world stops producing and goes into 'services'...
Who is John Galt?
I'll suppose that when you talk about "non-renewing biomass" you mean coal, oil and other fossil carbons. Actually, that is _not_ all we are doing now: see Brasil and ethanol or Europe requiring increasing quantities of it in gasoline and biodiesels. We are slowly migrating from unsutainable power resources to sustainable ones (well, the USA may not, since corn ethanol wasn't self-sufficient yet last time I read about the subject). For example, Spain has had its grain production curtailed for years, to the point farmers received money so they wouldn't sow wheat. Now the tides are turning and they are getting paid to sow it. Another case in point is kudzu, currently a weed in the USA, which may end being an sutainable source of ethanol, too.
The point everyone seems to have missed is that the largest employment category is now spiv instead of farmer.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
What about a nuclear-powered hydroponic farming plant? Make it 20 floors high, multiply surface production by 20 - so we can grow food in cities and not use fossil fuels to move it around, or to farm the land.
How's that for ecology?
As for animals, well, they're already bred just that way (more or less)...
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Fission or fussion powered? The first one isn't renewable (the second isn't either, but there's a lot of hydrogen around), the second one isn't yet at the production stage. And looking beyond your question, there is no need to have either one energy source or the other: unless one of them is much better and flexible (and sustainable and...) than any of the others, there will be niches that benefit from a specific energy source.
Cellulosic ethanol production methods do not require food as biomass. Industrial green waste is preferred and will be used by the new cellulosic facility in Georgia. Importing ethanol or biomass from Brazil is wrong in so many ways. We have resources here to produce sustainable green fuel.
they don't take under consideration all of those IT guys taking care of server farms.
By stealing the local consumers of local businesses. What it really comes down to is how you measure value and what having an economy is all about. If you think having an economy is about the individual, then you are quite correct. But if having an economy is about providing value for the community, then it's much easier to break it down into small local community units that do not trade.
What you don't seem to get is the power of trade. For instance, lets say that I have great open farmland for corn, and my 'neighbor' 50 miles away has great marshy farmland for rice, and another 'neighbor' of ours 50 miles away from each of us has a great orchard for apples. Which is optimal:
1. I live without rice or apples.
2. I plant a bunch of apple trees in a field, create a marsh for rice, wait 20 years, and then I produce all 3 myself.
3. Trade with my neighbors so all of us have corn, rice, and apples.
#3 is by far the best choice for me (assuming I actually like rice and apples, of course). Thanks to economies of scale, if I specialize in corn I can produce about 3x as much total goods as if I didn't specialize. (i.e. instead of producing 100 bushels of corn, 100 bushels of rice, and 100 bushels of apples, I can produce 900 bushels of corn). This means that I can sell 800 of my bushels to a trader, buy 100 bushels of rice and 100 bushels of apples, and still have ~400 bushels worth of profit (the trader will get his own cut, of course). Plus, I'm overproducing enough food that other people can work in industry or services instead of farming, producing things for me to spend my profit on.
I hope you see how #3 is much better than #2. The advantages to specialization apply to almost all goods, foodstuffs, and services, and allow everyone involved to live a wealthier life. (Capital in the form of specialized machinery and training results in the greater economies of scale. If you don't have tractors, combines, threshers, etc., then generalization is almost as good as specialization. We're not in the middle ages any more, though.)
And that's where your theory breaks down- in the value of the COMMUNITY, I do have an obligation to buy his products in the first place, else the community and local economy fall apart.
I like the theory that individuals (collectively) are more important than the 'community' in which they reside. If a town becomes a ghost town, deserted and empty, but every individual in the town has moved elsewhere, becoming wealthier and happier in the process, I consider that a huge improvement. Just because someone lives next to me doesn't make them more valuable as a person than someone living far away. I especially don't need to support inferior products just because the merchant lives nearby. Do I need to buy pot from my neighbor because he's local? Do I need to attend the 4th-grade orchestra performance instead of buying Yo-Yo Ma? Should I only browse websites maintained by people in my home town? I suspect that you support very little that's truly local, unless you live in the middle of nowhere. And even if you're in the middle of nowhere, you're still browsing slashdot instead of supporting your local community, running a computer that was made elsewhere, and buying dial-up internet access from a distant telco.
Actually, to have net positive impact, you'd have to donate the full profits to the Arbor foundation. But that still doesn't help the local community, though it may well help global warming..... How much do you think it hurts the environment to drive a mile in a truck? Does it do more than $1 of damage? If so, the damage we do to the environment EACH YEAR is greater than our GDP. You'd have to be a serious wacko to think that, so I'll just assume you made a calculation error.
You think that everyone should be in their own little isolated fiefdom, not realizing how much trade improves everyone's lives. You probably realize that in a small community, everyone benefits
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Enjoy the good times while you can, your children will probably be peasants. We, the first world, have been living high on the hog ( aka oil and natural gas ) for the last 50 years, but that's all about to change. Our farmers are amazingly productive because of artificial fertilizers ( made from natural gas ), pesticides ( made from oil ), incredible mechanization ( powered by oil ), and in many cases shipping produce thousands of miles to your dinner plate ( more oil ). Unfortunately for us, the cheap oil is mostly gone, we can't produce the more expensive oil fast enough, and India and China's use of oil is increasing by double digits. All this means that the mega productive mega farms, run by a micro staff of farmers are not long for this world. Soon we will have more, smaller, farms run of necessity by more hand, and even animal labour, struggling to produce enough food for us, with nothing left for export or bio-fuels. If you think Steven King is for wusses, try Googling Peak Oil. It will scare the sh*t out of you.
Clearly there are problems with the current patent/copyright system, as well as with the health care in the United States. I'm sure there are good ways to set up state-sponsored doctors, since other countries have pulled it off. (Some have miserably failed, too, so we want to make sure we don't make the problem worse). I doubt, however, that there are good ways to set up state-sponsored entertainment. Unlike health care, the goals of entertainment are non-obvious and the end results entirely subjective. What I may find to be the best story/game/movie ever you may dismiss as boring trash, and vice-versa. In health care, if I have a broken arm or a failed kidney, it's pretty obvious what I want (a repaired arm/working kidney). Likewise, if you have a broken arm and a failed kidney, you will also want a repaired arm and a working kidney. It may not be obvious what the best way to fix the problem is, but at least the end goal is clear. I fear any sort of state-mandated entertainment would be as bland, inoffensive, and unoriginal as possible, not to mention carry no criticism of the government in charge.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Not one to normally comment on spelling (I am guilty of far too many butcheries), but it's pathetic to see a slashdotter derive the word for "Hidration-based farming" from "Hidrogen". [sic sic sick] :-(
I think we're trying to reach mutually exclusive goals, though certainly we could change our society in ways that makes us both happier. We both value individuals, but you seem to value communities as being the best way to promote individual welfare, while I place little value on them. I still don't think you grasp the value of trade, despite the necessity of it for things as specialized as your computer.
One minor note I wish to make about Spaceports is that they work best near the equator- so Florida and New Mexico can have more productive spaceports than Maine and Oregon. This is supposed to suggest that certain communities are naturally more suited for certain occupations, but if you're unaware of this then my post makes much less sense.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
That was an incidental benefit of the socialist dole. There are arguably just as many authors who didn't write a book because they were receiving a paycheck without doing any work. Besides, J.K. Rowling is one of those success stories of people on welfare- the people who needed help, but then got back on their own feet. Only the most callous jerks don't want to support them. It's the people who've been supported by welfare since their mother was fourteen that annoy me and most others who oppose the welfare state.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I thought fission when I was writing it. The only problem with fission is waste disposal, but that one or how to make fusion work will be solved at some point in time anyway, because they're technical problems that will find technical solutions.
The technical solution to hunger is to grow food. Don't tell me Africa isn't fertile enough to feed all its inhabitants...
As for energy, well, I was just thinking that using solar to grow food under lamps is pretty stupid. Maybe wind?
Aw, yeah, right, forgot that one : use sea barrages. Most humans inhabit near the coasts, so there would be no need to transport the majority of power to the land, which could better be served by local solar and windmills, if that's less expensive than the logistics of distribution.
Now THAT's renewable.
About niche applications, I'm thiking of one. Is nanoscale fission possible? If yes, we can happily begin to replace the AA(LR6) batteries by ones with the same format and 500 years of use. (If that's too much cheap cyberpunk for you, so is tagging people with RFID chips and that's been done already.)
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
I would rather see the incompetent rise to mediocrity than live forever off the forced mercy of others. But we're diverging off our original topic anyway.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.