You can make a reasonable estimate for most of them. And if you did, you'd know it's not going to work unless your end product is cocaine.
Have you ever actually tried to do this sort of estimate in good faith? I'm pretty sure you have not because if you had you would not be nearly so confident and glib. Yes you can make estimates but they will be wrong. You're just trying to make sure they aren't off by orders of magnitude. You also have the problem of stacking variances. Even if you nail one of the estimates, the others collectively add up to a net result that is pretty far off from reality.
Have you ever heard of Zillow? City land prices are 10x rural prices so right off the bat your crops are going to be 10x more expensive.
??? Only if you are an idiot an buy the same amount of acreage as a traditional farm. Or are you unaware that farms cover hundreds of acres? You buy 1/10th the land and build 10X as high vertically. In fact if you can go high enough you can actually get better crop densities for an indoor farm. The average cost of an acre of farm land in the midwest corn country is around $6000. So you could buy an acre in suburbia worth $60,000 under your assumptions and it would be a wash economically because you'd have the same growing area. Cost of land really will only be a major consideration if you want to locate in a really dense high cost area like Manhattan or downtown SF.
You can get this from the small experiment too, but there's also existing literature. Aeroponics? Hydroponics? Plenty of research exists for how efficient those systems are for different crops.
All those tell you is expected values. It does not tell you how many bushels of product you will actually bring to market. The only way to know that is to actually grow the crops. There is variability there to account for including the possibility of total crop failure.
Also, small experiments do not necessarily scale. The logistics and production efficiencies at scale are often not linear in unfavorable ways.
Get a quote from PG&E? Your farm uses less energy than a typical office so you're not going to be negotiating bulk pricing.
You really don't get the concept of variance do you? Getting a rate from your energy company doesn't tell you how much you will actually use. You can make a pretty reasonable guess on energy costs but again there is variability here. You don't know crop yields so you don't know the per unit energy costs of the product you are selling. But let's say you nail the energy cost number - there are hundreds of other cost variables you have to consider and you just hope you can get close on most of them.
Oh and an indoor farm is going to use a LOT more energy than a typical office. That's actually how some people growing weed illegally got caught. Suddenly they are consuming WAY more power than before because grow lights use a lot of energy.
It sounds like you've been investing in a lot of idiots. Ok, maybe not all of them. A business plan is not meant to be as accurate as possible, it's there to sell the idea, and unfortunately, wildly optimistic numbers is what's going to get them the investment.
You're equivocating and it's pretty obvious you have probably never actually tried to do these sorts of financial calculations. Go ahead and try it. I'll wait. You're going to find that no matter how honestly and earnestly you try to pin down the numbers that it's literally impossible to get it right and it's hard to even get it close a lot of the time. And that's not your fault, because nobody can do it with great accuracy. The best you can do is to try to get a realistic picture of the economics and get reasonably close. You are going to be wrong. The only question is by how much. So at some point someone is going to be taking a gamble to find out if it works. You do your due diligence and then you try it and hope for the best.
But when the tax code for ordinary citizens (I'm not even talking corporations) is so complicated that IRS employees who are answering questions from the public can't understand it, perhaps it's gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
Oh there is no question that you can overdo the complexity. But most of the unnecessary complexity of our tax code comes from politicians using it to fund their pet social policies inappropriately. For example whether you are married or single should have ZERO impact on your taxes. If the government wants to address that, the tax code is not the proper place to do it. If the government wants to subsidize something, just do so directly. Using taxes to do it is inefficient and adds needless complexity to the tax code. So we get heaping mounds of complexity where none needs to exist.
That said, some of that complexity is necessary. If we are going to have an income tax (whether we should is a separate question) you have to define income and that is surprisingly difficult to do in a way that doesn't have loopholes you can drive a semi through. I'm an accountant so I should know. There also is the question of fairness which is more of a social question than a technical one but it's also hard to have a tax code that is fair, functional, and simple. (no - plans like a flat tax fail that test though I understand the appeal) As HL Menken said "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
At one time science was intended for the masses - that the Atlantic attributes this to "a simpler time" is also moronic as it was the intent of the authors, in fact all authors of the time, to write clearly and succinctly so that anyone could understand their work.
Science has never been "for the masses". Most concepts of any meaningful complexity are not going to be written at an 8th grade reading level. Issac Newton's Principia is certainly not written "for the masses" nor should it be expected to be dumbed down. As Einstein once put it, things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.
You see that not only in the scientific papers of the time but also in the laws (the US Constitution).
You also see the same problem in laws today where laws are now tends of thousands of pages long. How is any one person (let alone a dedicated group) supposed to understand the law as written?
You are presupposing that it is a good thing that laws be so simple that a single person can understand and know all them. The reality of our society is that it is so complex that the laws governing it inevitably will be similarly complex. Make a simple law and there are going to be gaps in that law unless you add complexity to deal with the corner cases. To circle back, science has no obligation to be simple enough for "the masses" to comprehend any or all of it.
This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem of shipping fertilizers, laborers and water into the city.
This is an incorrect analysis. Cities already have water and labor so that's not an issue as a general proposition. As for fertilizer and other supplies, if there is a sufficient number of indoor farms clustered together, the supply chain will develop nearby. You can literally park the fertilizer plant next door to the indoor farm in principle unless you are (foolishly) locating in the heart of downtown. Plus you can supply several farms with a lot less driving. Right now farms are irreducibly geographically dispersed. That isn't true with indoor farms because you can park them much closer together.
Yes, but traditional farms can use bug nets too, they just don't because pesticides are cheaper and safe enough.
Missing the point. Indoors the pests have a harder time getting to the crops so you need fewer pesticides. And "safe" is debatable.
Really? You think nothing could go wrong? Nothing unexpected could crop up or costs couldn't be different than you expect?
You can find out how much everything costs and do some basic math.
You cannot find out in advance how much everything will cost. I've never seen a business plan where that actually happened and I've seen a LOT of business plans. The only thing you can be certain of is that a lot of your assumptions about costs and revenues will be wrong. Probably by a lot. You just hope you are wrong in the direction that works out well for you. Here is a short and incomplete list of things you won't know in advance:
1) Cost of real estate 2) Cost of capital equipment 3) Cost of labor 4) Efficiency of labor 5) Crop yields 6) Energy costs
Good luck actually getting any one of those right prior to asking for funds to start the business.
It's not really that simple. Your assuming traditional agriculture with traditional crop yields, traditional crop spacing, etc. Those all change when you farm indoors and control all the variables. You can get more crops out of the same space indoors AND you can do it more times per year. And your estimates are too high. It's more like 1.5-2 acres to feed a family of 4. There would be no point to indoor farming if they couldn't get better yield out of the same footprint.
So they are going to do what, make it 1 million stores high?
No but if profitable there would eventually be a lot of buildings making food. It's not an either/or sort of problem. Indoor farms may be able to solve certain problems. Traditional farms aren't going to disappear in the lifetime of anyone reading this.
This is a joke, right?
Not even a little bit. It might turn out to be economically impossible but it's definitely not a joke.
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
There are but lets be honest, the VAST majority of the food is produced a long way away from the cities. Your average meal has traveled 1500 miles to get to your plate. The ONLY way you are going to reduce this substantially is to do some sort of indoor farming. Lots of crops cannot just grow anywhere and there is the problem of seasons too. Hard to grow leafy greens when it is snowing.
Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out.
That's no different than traditional farms. Traditional farms are basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and they require a lot of stuff to be transported a loooong way. Plus once you get a number of indoor farms located close together you can build a compact supply chain. You can process the fertilizer literally next door. Same with the waste. With traditional farming that is impossible because it is necessarily and irreducibly geographically dispersed.
. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing.
All it means is that we reorganize a bit. Dedicating some buildings to farming isn't going to cause some massive displacement.
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living in single family homes in the suburbs.
Even if true it's irrelevant. I'm not going to pick where I live for the environmental footprint and neither are you.
Pushing more people out of the urban cores to make room for farms is not helpful.
Who said they had to be pushed out of the core? All you need is for the farms to be close. You don't have to transform midtown Manhattan into farmland. Put the warehouses with the farms a few miles from city center in the suburbs.
Do you remember the Jarvik heart? That was nearly 40 years ago and people thought that kind of bionics would be commonplace by now.
Yes I remember the Jarkik heart when it was in all the headlines. I'm old enough and I've actually seen a Jarvik 7 in person. People talked about it but there was not widespread belief that bionics would be routine. Like any technology advancement there was a lot of prognosticating and a media circus but we also saw what happened to Barney Clark (spoilers: he suffered a lot) so there wasn't a lot of optimism by the public.
Just because something can be done by nature doesn't mean that we are any where near as good at replicating it with technology.
True in some cases. In other cases we are actually quite good or even better. Just because one problem proves difficult doesn't mean we can't solve any problems.
What about it? A) it isn't available in a lot of places reliably or for much of the year. B) The availability of the sun can't be optimized further than it already has been. C) Sunlight is not even close to the only variable in play. Weather, pests, pollution, fertilizer, seasons, climate, etc all matter and indoor farming can take a LOT of those variables out of play.
You only get so much solar flux per unit of area anyway.
Again, so what? There is more than enough available. We have VAST areas devoted to growing crops not to mention plenty of non-arable land available.
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
A) It wouldn't be a single tower. It would necessarily be a bunch of buildings, probably more resembling warehouses than towers. B) It wouldn't be any different than a farm failing now due to a weather event or crop failure. You simply pay more and get the product from elsewhere just like today. C) The operational costs of large towers would likely be prohibitive.
Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
"Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right? Claiming that we can't grow our crops using solar power (directly or indirectly) is just an idiotic claim.
You could power the entire globe by covering an area roughly the size of Spain. Close to half of that could be supplied by "simply" (it's not simple) converting existing rooftops to solar. That is more than enough to power all agriculture around the globe. Even if we sacrificed non-arable land for solar panels we could easily generate enough solar energy to power enough indoor farms to supply the world.
The question is whether we can do so economically. There is no question solar can provide adequate energy to power every farm on the planet.
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit?
Potentially several: 1) Crop losses due to weather no longer a concern. 2) Reduced exposure to pests and pathogens 3) Less transport costs to get product to market (esp for big cities) 4) Increase crop yields due to optimized conditions 5) Less horizontal footprint required so cost of land cheaper 6) Complete control over conditions (light, water, nutrients, soil (if any) etc. 7) Less need for chemicals and fertilizers 8) Less pollution from runoff of chemicals and fertilizers as they can be controlled on site 9) Can be located anywhere
Disadvantages: 1) Buildings are expensive 2) All water, light, and nutrients have to be artificially provided which costs $ 3) The equipment isn't being produced at sufficient scale to get full economies of scale. (again $) 4) Competing traditional farms aren't required to control their pollution and runoff (again $) 5) Competing traditional farms have less up front capital costs because they're already in operation
So basically the only disadvantage to farming indoors is cost. Unfortunately that's by far the most important consideration. They're basically gambling that the increased yields and reduced transport costs will offset the expensive of the building and controlling the conditions. Unclear if it will be possible to make it competitive but it's arguably a worthwhile gamble.
Just saw some cool vertical plant growth at Epcot center that looked pretty cool, not sure how well it would work at scale but certainly worth investigating.
They've had some version of those at Epcot for 35 years. I visited Epcot in the 80s and saw demos of hydroponics and automated gardening. Never amounted to much outside of some cool science demos because it cost WAY more than traditional farming.
That said, the state of the art has progressed a LOT since then so maybe they can finally figure out how to make it economically competitive.
So for these vertical farms to work the cost of their product has to be roughly equal to or less than the cost of farming in an open field + transport + crop loss. Bear in mind that open field farming has minimal electricity costs and at least some of the irrigation comes from rain. It's basically the cost of transmuting diesel fuel into food crops. It takes a lot of space but the upside is that cost per unit area tends to be rather low.
Indoors all the light, water, and nutrients, and crop handling have to be artificially provided, all of which costs more money than an open field under normal circumstances. Buildings + HVAC + lighting + irrigation = expensive. BUT indoors you can control the environment completely and optimize so presumably there is the opportunity for a gain in crop yields as well as reduced losses of crops due to pests, weather, etc. Plus you can farm indoors all year with minimal worry about location AND you can be closer to your destination market. You also can grow crops on multiple vertical levels so the amount of land needed is less which somewhat offsets the cost of the building.
It's not clear to me whether indoor farming can be done economically but it seems worth trying. I tend to believe there will be at least some use cases where it makes sense. It will have to get some significant scale to be economically competitive so someone will have to take a big financial risk to try to make it work. But if they succeed the benefits could be huge.
The point is that you are not lied to and told that your non-adaptive cruise control will magically slow you down if something gets in the way, so you keep watching the fucking road.
Show me where Tesla has lied about the capabilities of their system. I've never once seen them make the claim that the driver wasn't responsible for watching the road and taking control if the autopilot functions fail for any reason. If the system doesn't kick in early enough the driver should take control. Tesla has been quite unambiguous about this.
It is a fundamental flaw to have a system where you can sort of half watch the road most of the time and probably not have much of an accident unless you're unlucky.
Fortunately no such system is on the road in a production vehicle to my knowledge. The fact that Darwin Award candidates attempt to use them in such a fashion does not change that fact.
With normal driving, you basically have to concentrate 100% of the time. A self driving car would mean you had to concentrate 0% of the time. It is absurd to have something in between.
Anyone who believes these driving aids are a substitute for paying attention is mistaken. The purpose of driving aids is so you can focus your attention on what is critical to pay attention to and to help you do it better or with less effort. It also can provide an additional layer of security in case the driver misses something or becomes distracted. It is NO different than autopilot in a plane. The pilot still has to fly the plane - the autopilot system just helps them do it a little more effectively by partially automating certain tasks. But make no mistake the driver is 100% responsible for controlling their vehicle.
Fucking "designers" are getting way too full of themselves. Look, I grant that good industrial design is a hugely useful and can add a lot of value to a product. But WAY too many products these days (software especially) have changes for the sake of changes so designers can collect a paycheck and keep busy. My smartphone has WAY too many applications with needlessly obtuse interface decision because the "designer" thought they looked cool or wanted things to be needlessly minimalistic. It's function following form when it should be the other way around.
It seems pretty clear that usability testing is no longer a thing in software interface design. I am SO tired of incomprehensible icons, unintuitive gestures, blind navigation spaces, hidden design elements, lack of written labels, inconsistent interfaces, and needless changes to perfectly functional software. I hate web pages that put information that should fit on one screen in a huge page forcing me to scroll endlessly over needlessly large graphics that convey little information. (Apple I'm look at you here)
It's nothing but smart cruise control and lane assist (that kills you).
Regular cruise control will kill you just as dead if you fail to operate the vehicle in a safe manner. It's a driver assistance system not a driver replacement system. It did not kill the driver. The driver's stupid and careless behavior killed the driver.
I'm not asking for perfect. If visibility was as good as Tesla says it was, why couldn't the car stay in its lane, and why did it steer into an obstruction?
While that is a question it is not the important question. The question is why the DRIVER didn't direct the vehicle to stay in its lane and avoid the obstruction. The tool is not at fault here and it seems clear he relied upon it inappropriately. While it seems clear that the autopilot system may have had a flaw of some description the responsibility is still on the driver to steer the vehicle in a safe manner.
Tesla blames dead driver. Dead driver's family blames Tesla. Who is really at fault here?
Unless there are facts we are unaware of the blame is clearly the driver in this case. He failed to control his vehicle. It doesn't matter what the Autopilot system did or did not do. The driver is responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. Tesla's autopilot system is a driver assistance system, not a driver replacement system. The difference between those is not trivial.
More fundamentally to me is the issue that said car should not drive straight into a wall at full speed without trying to slow down.
Wrong. The DRIVER should not drive straight into the wall without slowing down. It's not the responsibility of the car. The driver/pilot is the one responsible for its safe operation of a moving vehicle. Always. If they abdicate that role for any reason then the driver/pilot is the one who is negligent.
What blows my frigging mind though is that the car will drive into a stationary object with high contrast safety striping without attempting to brake.
Why should that blow your mind? Sensors are not infallible. Neither are people and humans do EXACTLY the same thing with some regularity.
Their "neural net" doesn't seem to be learning some important lessons quickly enough.
Here's a hard truth for you. Safety systems get improved by people getting hurt. it's unfortunate but true. Airplanes are very safe today but the reason they are safe is because a lot of people died to learn the lessons necessary to make them so. Cars are not any different in that respect. People will die to make driverless cars a reality. Many of those lessons are not obvious until after the accidents. As the saying goes the rules are written in blood. The real tragedy would be to not learn from these accidents so that we don't repeat them.
All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
Did you read that? It says "HAVE THE HARDWARE" (emphasis mine). It doesn't say it is a functional self driving vehicle or that they have the software to make it work. Now granted someone who isn't reading carefully might be confused but that is clearly NOT a claim that they have a self driving system that is functional today. They just said they put the hardware necessary for that function into the car presumably to be enabled at a later date.
Comparing it to cruise control is stupid. Cruise control maintains your speed extremely well and doesn't ever fail catastrophically.
Tell you what. You get on the highway and put on a non-adaptive cruise control like the one in my car and let it maintain your speed while traffic slows in front of you. Let me know how that didn't "fail catastrophically" when you are done rear ending the car in front of you.
Every accident with the Tesla autopilot I've seen has been idiots relying too heavily on the system thinking it replaces the driver instead of assisting the driver. While it's a capable system, the person behind the wheel still has to use their brain and pay attention and take control of the car.
What good is it even if they say you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel? It doesn't sound very auto to me.
So unless it completely takes over operation of the vehicle you think it is worthless? That's not what the system does.
Per wikipedia it is described as follows: "advanced driver-assistance system feature offered by Tesla that has lane centering, adaptive cruise control, self-parking, ability to automatically change lanes without requiring driver steering, and enables the car to be summoned to and from a garage or parking spot." Note that NOWHERE does it say it drives the vehicle for you or that it is a hands off system. The key words there are DRIVER ASSISTANCE. It is not a driver replacement.
Frankly I pretty much assumed that there would be some Darwin award submissions by idiots who can't figure out that they still need to drive the vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
You can make a reasonable estimate for most of them. And if you did, you'd know it's not going to work unless your end product is cocaine.
Have you ever actually tried to do this sort of estimate in good faith? I'm pretty sure you have not because if you had you would not be nearly so confident and glib. Yes you can make estimates but they will be wrong. You're just trying to make sure they aren't off by orders of magnitude. You also have the problem of stacking variances. Even if you nail one of the estimates, the others collectively add up to a net result that is pretty far off from reality.
Have you ever heard of Zillow? City land prices are 10x rural prices so right off the bat your crops are going to be 10x more expensive.
??? Only if you are an idiot an buy the same amount of acreage as a traditional farm. Or are you unaware that farms cover hundreds of acres? You buy 1/10th the land and build 10X as high vertically. In fact if you can go high enough you can actually get better crop densities for an indoor farm. The average cost of an acre of farm land in the midwest corn country is around $6000. So you could buy an acre in suburbia worth $60,000 under your assumptions and it would be a wash economically because you'd have the same growing area. Cost of land really will only be a major consideration if you want to locate in a really dense high cost area like Manhattan or downtown SF.
You can get this from the small experiment too, but there's also existing literature. Aeroponics? Hydroponics? Plenty of research exists for how efficient those systems are for different crops.
All those tell you is expected values. It does not tell you how many bushels of product you will actually bring to market. The only way to know that is to actually grow the crops. There is variability there to account for including the possibility of total crop failure.
Also, small experiments do not necessarily scale. The logistics and production efficiencies at scale are often not linear in unfavorable ways.
Get a quote from PG&E? Your farm uses less energy than a typical office so you're not going to be negotiating bulk pricing.
You really don't get the concept of variance do you? Getting a rate from your energy company doesn't tell you how much you will actually use. You can make a pretty reasonable guess on energy costs but again there is variability here. You don't know crop yields so you don't know the per unit energy costs of the product you are selling. But let's say you nail the energy cost number - there are hundreds of other cost variables you have to consider and you just hope you can get close on most of them.
Oh and an indoor farm is going to use a LOT more energy than a typical office. That's actually how some people growing weed illegally got caught. Suddenly they are consuming WAY more power than before because grow lights use a lot of energy.
It sounds like you've been investing in a lot of idiots. Ok, maybe not all of them. A business plan is not meant to be as accurate as possible, it's there to sell the idea, and unfortunately, wildly optimistic numbers is what's going to get them the investment.
You're equivocating and it's pretty obvious you have probably never actually tried to do these sorts of financial calculations. Go ahead and try it. I'll wait. You're going to find that no matter how honestly and earnestly you try to pin down the numbers that it's literally impossible to get it right and it's hard to even get it close a lot of the time. And that's not your fault, because nobody can do it with great accuracy. The best you can do is to try to get a realistic picture of the economics and get reasonably close. You are going to be wrong. The only question is by how much. So at some point someone is going to be taking a gamble to find out if it works. You do your due diligence and then you try it and hope for the best.
But when the tax code for ordinary citizens (I'm not even talking corporations) is so complicated that IRS employees who are answering questions from the public can't understand it, perhaps it's gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
Oh there is no question that you can overdo the complexity. But most of the unnecessary complexity of our tax code comes from politicians using it to fund their pet social policies inappropriately. For example whether you are married or single should have ZERO impact on your taxes. If the government wants to address that, the tax code is not the proper place to do it. If the government wants to subsidize something, just do so directly. Using taxes to do it is inefficient and adds needless complexity to the tax code. So we get heaping mounds of complexity where none needs to exist.
That said, some of that complexity is necessary. If we are going to have an income tax (whether we should is a separate question) you have to define income and that is surprisingly difficult to do in a way that doesn't have loopholes you can drive a semi through. I'm an accountant so I should know. There also is the question of fairness which is more of a social question than a technical one but it's also hard to have a tax code that is fair, functional, and simple. (no - plans like a flat tax fail that test though I understand the appeal) As HL Menken said "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
At one time science was intended for the masses - that the Atlantic attributes this to "a simpler time" is also moronic as it was the intent of the authors, in fact all authors of the time, to write clearly and succinctly so that anyone could understand their work.
Science has never been "for the masses". Most concepts of any meaningful complexity are not going to be written at an 8th grade reading level. Issac Newton's Principia is certainly not written "for the masses" nor should it be expected to be dumbed down. As Einstein once put it, things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.
You see that not only in the scientific papers of the time but also in the laws (the US Constitution).
The Constitution isn't really a law. It is a framework for the laws. It sets the boundaries that are fleshed out by the laws. The actual federal laws are the United States Code, the United States Reports and the Code of Federal Regulations. There also
You also see the same problem in laws today where laws are now tends of thousands of pages long. How is any one person (let alone a dedicated group) supposed to understand the law as written?
You are presupposing that it is a good thing that laws be so simple that a single person can understand and know all them. The reality of our society is that it is so complex that the laws governing it inevitably will be similarly complex. Make a simple law and there are going to be gaps in that law unless you add complexity to deal with the corner cases. To circle back, science has no obligation to be simple enough for "the masses" to comprehend any or all of it.
This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem of shipping fertilizers, laborers and water into the city.
This is an incorrect analysis. Cities already have water and labor so that's not an issue as a general proposition. As for fertilizer and other supplies, if there is a sufficient number of indoor farms clustered together, the supply chain will develop nearby. You can literally park the fertilizer plant next door to the indoor farm in principle unless you are (foolishly) locating in the heart of downtown. Plus you can supply several farms with a lot less driving. Right now farms are irreducibly geographically dispersed. That isn't true with indoor farms because you can park them much closer together.
Yes, but traditional farms can use bug nets too, they just don't because pesticides are cheaper and safe enough.
Missing the point. Indoors the pests have a harder time getting to the crops so you need fewer pesticides. And "safe" is debatable.
I don't see why it needs to be a gamble.
Really? You think nothing could go wrong? Nothing unexpected could crop up or costs couldn't be different than you expect?
You can find out how much everything costs and do some basic math.
You cannot find out in advance how much everything will cost. I've never seen a business plan where that actually happened and I've seen a LOT of business plans. The only thing you can be certain of is that a lot of your assumptions about costs and revenues will be wrong. Probably by a lot. You just hope you are wrong in the direction that works out well for you. Here is a short and incomplete list of things you won't know in advance:
1) Cost of real estate
2) Cost of capital equipment
3) Cost of labor
4) Efficiency of labor
5) Crop yields
6) Energy costs
Good luck actually getting any one of those right prior to asking for funds to start the business.
That's just over 2 acres.
You're still thinking in 2 dimensions.
It takes 3 to 5 acres to feed a family.
It's not really that simple. Your assuming traditional agriculture with traditional crop yields, traditional crop spacing, etc. Those all change when you farm indoors and control all the variables. You can get more crops out of the same space indoors AND you can do it more times per year. And your estimates are too high. It's more like 1.5-2 acres to feed a family of 4. There would be no point to indoor farming if they couldn't get better yield out of the same footprint.
So they are going to do what, make it 1 million stores high?
No but if profitable there would eventually be a lot of buildings making food. It's not an either/or sort of problem. Indoor farms may be able to solve certain problems. Traditional farms aren't going to disappear in the lifetime of anyone reading this.
This is a joke, right?
Not even a little bit. It might turn out to be economically impossible but it's definitely not a joke.
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
There are but lets be honest, the VAST majority of the food is produced a long way away from the cities. Your average meal has traveled 1500 miles to get to your plate. The ONLY way you are going to reduce this substantially is to do some sort of indoor farming. Lots of crops cannot just grow anywhere and there is the problem of seasons too. Hard to grow leafy greens when it is snowing.
Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out.
That's no different than traditional farms. Traditional farms are basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and they require a lot of stuff to be transported a loooong way. Plus once you get a number of indoor farms located close together you can build a compact supply chain. You can process the fertilizer literally next door. Same with the waste. With traditional farming that is impossible because it is necessarily and irreducibly geographically dispersed.
. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing.
All it means is that we reorganize a bit. Dedicating some buildings to farming isn't going to cause some massive displacement.
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living in single family homes in the suburbs.
Even if true it's irrelevant. I'm not going to pick where I live for the environmental footprint and neither are you.
Pushing more people out of the urban cores to make room for farms is not helpful.
Who said they had to be pushed out of the core? All you need is for the farms to be close. You don't have to transform midtown Manhattan into farmland. Put the warehouses with the farms a few miles from city center in the suburbs.
Do you remember the Jarvik heart? That was nearly 40 years ago and people thought that kind of bionics would be commonplace by now.
Yes I remember the Jarkik heart when it was in all the headlines. I'm old enough and I've actually seen a Jarvik 7 in person. People talked about it but there was not widespread belief that bionics would be routine. Like any technology advancement there was a lot of prognosticating and a media circus but we also saw what happened to Barney Clark (spoilers: he suffered a lot) so there wasn't a lot of optimism by the public.
Just because something can be done by nature doesn't mean that we are any where near as good at replicating it with technology.
True in some cases. In other cases we are actually quite good or even better. Just because one problem proves difficult doesn't mean we can't solve any problems.
What about just using sunlight? Too crazy?
What about it? A) it isn't available in a lot of places reliably or for much of the year. B) The availability of the sun can't be optimized further than it already has been. C) Sunlight is not even close to the only variable in play. Weather, pests, pollution, fertilizer, seasons, climate, etc all matter and indoor farming can take a LOT of those variables out of play.
You only get so much solar flux per unit of area anyway.
Again, so what? There is more than enough available. We have VAST areas devoted to growing crops not to mention plenty of non-arable land available.
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
A) It wouldn't be a single tower. It would necessarily be a bunch of buildings, probably more resembling warehouses than towers.
B) It wouldn't be any different than a farm failing now due to a weather event or crop failure. You simply pay more and get the product from elsewhere just like today.
C) The operational costs of large towers would likely be prohibitive.
Wow, I knew the USA are a bit backyardly, but you have no supermarkets?
Nice troll jackass. Read about food deserts and educate yourself. Every country has them. Including whatever backwater you hail from.
Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
"Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right? Claiming that we can't grow our crops using solar power (directly or indirectly) is just an idiotic claim.
You could power the entire globe by covering an area roughly the size of Spain. Close to half of that could be supplied by "simply" (it's not simple) converting existing rooftops to solar. That is more than enough to power all agriculture around the globe. Even if we sacrificed non-arable land for solar panels we could easily generate enough solar energy to power enough indoor farms to supply the world.
The question is whether we can do so economically. There is no question solar can provide adequate energy to power every farm on the planet.
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit?
Potentially several:
1) Crop losses due to weather no longer a concern.
2) Reduced exposure to pests and pathogens
3) Less transport costs to get product to market (esp for big cities)
4) Increase crop yields due to optimized conditions
5) Less horizontal footprint required so cost of land cheaper
6) Complete control over conditions (light, water, nutrients, soil (if any) etc.
7) Less need for chemicals and fertilizers
8) Less pollution from runoff of chemicals and fertilizers as they can be controlled on site
9) Can be located anywhere
Disadvantages:
1) Buildings are expensive
2) All water, light, and nutrients have to be artificially provided which costs $
3) The equipment isn't being produced at sufficient scale to get full economies of scale. (again $)
4) Competing traditional farms aren't required to control their pollution and runoff (again $)
5) Competing traditional farms have less up front capital costs because they're already in operation
So basically the only disadvantage to farming indoors is cost. Unfortunately that's by far the most important consideration. They're basically gambling that the increased yields and reduced transport costs will offset the expensive of the building and controlling the conditions. Unclear if it will be possible to make it competitive but it's arguably a worthwhile gamble.
Just saw some cool vertical plant growth at Epcot center that looked pretty cool, not sure how well it would work at scale but certainly worth investigating.
They've had some version of those at Epcot for 35 years. I visited Epcot in the 80s and saw demos of hydroponics and automated gardening. Never amounted to much outside of some cool science demos because it cost WAY more than traditional farming.
That said, the state of the art has progressed a LOT since then so maybe they can finally figure out how to make it economically competitive.
So for these vertical farms to work the cost of their product has to be roughly equal to or less than the cost of farming in an open field + transport + crop loss. Bear in mind that open field farming has minimal electricity costs and at least some of the irrigation comes from rain. It's basically the cost of transmuting diesel fuel into food crops. It takes a lot of space but the upside is that cost per unit area tends to be rather low.
Indoors all the light, water, and nutrients, and crop handling have to be artificially provided, all of which costs more money than an open field under normal circumstances. Buildings + HVAC + lighting + irrigation = expensive. BUT indoors you can control the environment completely and optimize so presumably there is the opportunity for a gain in crop yields as well as reduced losses of crops due to pests, weather, etc. Plus you can farm indoors all year with minimal worry about location AND you can be closer to your destination market. You also can grow crops on multiple vertical levels so the amount of land needed is less which somewhat offsets the cost of the building.
It's not clear to me whether indoor farming can be done economically but it seems worth trying. I tend to believe there will be at least some use cases where it makes sense. It will have to get some significant scale to be economically competitive so someone will have to take a big financial risk to try to make it work. But if they succeed the benefits could be huge.
The point is that you are not lied to and told that your non-adaptive cruise control will magically slow you down if something gets in the way, so you keep watching the fucking road.
Show me where Tesla has lied about the capabilities of their system. I've never once seen them make the claim that the driver wasn't responsible for watching the road and taking control if the autopilot functions fail for any reason. If the system doesn't kick in early enough the driver should take control. Tesla has been quite unambiguous about this.
It is a fundamental flaw to have a system where you can sort of half watch the road most of the time and probably not have much of an accident unless you're unlucky.
Fortunately no such system is on the road in a production vehicle to my knowledge. The fact that Darwin Award candidates attempt to use them in such a fashion does not change that fact.
With normal driving, you basically have to concentrate 100% of the time. A self driving car would mean you had to concentrate 0% of the time. It is absurd to have something in between.
Anyone who believes these driving aids are a substitute for paying attention is mistaken. The purpose of driving aids is so you can focus your attention on what is critical to pay attention to and to help you do it better or with less effort. It also can provide an additional layer of security in case the driver misses something or becomes distracted. It is NO different than autopilot in a plane. The pilot still has to fly the plane - the autopilot system just helps them do it a little more effectively by partially automating certain tasks. But make no mistake the driver is 100% responsible for controlling their vehicle.
Fucking "designers" are getting way too full of themselves. Look, I grant that good industrial design is a hugely useful and can add a lot of value to a product. But WAY too many products these days (software especially) have changes for the sake of changes so designers can collect a paycheck and keep busy. My smartphone has WAY too many applications with needlessly obtuse interface decision because the "designer" thought they looked cool or wanted things to be needlessly minimalistic. It's function following form when it should be the other way around.
It seems pretty clear that usability testing is no longer a thing in software interface design. I am SO tired of incomprehensible icons, unintuitive gestures, blind navigation spaces, hidden design elements, lack of written labels, inconsistent interfaces, and needless changes to perfectly functional software. I hate web pages that put information that should fit on one screen in a huge page forcing me to scroll endlessly over needlessly large graphics that convey little information. (Apple I'm look at you here)
It's nothing but smart cruise control and lane assist (that kills you).
Regular cruise control will kill you just as dead if you fail to operate the vehicle in a safe manner. It's a driver assistance system not a driver replacement system. It did not kill the driver. The driver's stupid and careless behavior killed the driver.
I'm not asking for perfect. If visibility was as good as Tesla says it was, why couldn't the car stay in its lane, and why did it steer into an obstruction?
While that is a question it is not the important question. The question is why the DRIVER didn't direct the vehicle to stay in its lane and avoid the obstruction. The tool is not at fault here and it seems clear he relied upon it inappropriately. While it seems clear that the autopilot system may have had a flaw of some description the responsibility is still on the driver to steer the vehicle in a safe manner.
Tesla blames dead driver. Dead driver's family blames Tesla. Who is really at fault here?
Unless there are facts we are unaware of the blame is clearly the driver in this case. He failed to control his vehicle. It doesn't matter what the Autopilot system did or did not do. The driver is responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. Tesla's autopilot system is a driver assistance system, not a driver replacement system. The difference between those is not trivial.
More fundamentally to me is the issue that said car should not drive straight into a wall at full speed without trying to slow down.
Wrong. The DRIVER should not drive straight into the wall without slowing down. It's not the responsibility of the car. The driver/pilot is the one responsible for its safe operation of a moving vehicle. Always. If they abdicate that role for any reason then the driver/pilot is the one who is negligent.
What blows my frigging mind though is that the car will drive into a stationary object with high contrast safety striping without attempting to brake.
Why should that blow your mind? Sensors are not infallible. Neither are people and humans do EXACTLY the same thing with some regularity.
Their "neural net" doesn't seem to be learning some important lessons quickly enough.
Here's a hard truth for you. Safety systems get improved by people getting hurt. it's unfortunate but true. Airplanes are very safe today but the reason they are safe is because a lot of people died to learn the lessons necessary to make them so. Cars are not any different in that respect. People will die to make driverless cars a reality. Many of those lessons are not obvious until after the accidents. As the saying goes the rules are written in blood. The real tragedy would be to not learn from these accidents so that we don't repeat them.
All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
Did you read that? It says "HAVE THE HARDWARE" (emphasis mine). It doesn't say it is a functional self driving vehicle or that they have the software to make it work. Now granted someone who isn't reading carefully might be confused but that is clearly NOT a claim that they have a self driving system that is functional today. They just said they put the hardware necessary for that function into the car presumably to be enabled at a later date.
Comparing it to cruise control is stupid. Cruise control maintains your speed extremely well and doesn't ever fail catastrophically.
Tell you what. You get on the highway and put on a non-adaptive cruise control like the one in my car and let it maintain your speed while traffic slows in front of you. Let me know how that didn't "fail catastrophically" when you are done rear ending the car in front of you.
Every accident with the Tesla autopilot I've seen has been idiots relying too heavily on the system thinking it replaces the driver instead of assisting the driver. While it's a capable system, the person behind the wheel still has to use their brain and pay attention and take control of the car.
What good is it even if they say you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel? It doesn't sound very auto to me.
So unless it completely takes over operation of the vehicle you think it is worthless? That's not what the system does.
Per wikipedia it is described as follows: "advanced driver-assistance system feature offered by Tesla that has lane centering, adaptive cruise control, self-parking, ability to automatically change lanes without requiring driver steering, and enables the car to be summoned to and from a garage or parking spot." Note that NOWHERE does it say it drives the vehicle for you or that it is a hands off system. The key words there are DRIVER ASSISTANCE. It is not a driver replacement.
Frankly I pretty much assumed that there would be some Darwin award submissions by idiots who can't figure out that they still need to drive the vehicle.