Comment by drugstorecowboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drugstorecowboy | Hacker News Reader

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drugstorecowboy

> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on.

They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where it wasn't before and it's a good way to make more money. Do you honestly believe that pre-covid people worked at McDonalds because of their desire to provide food to people?

> We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato.

This is progress. Do you believe a world where everyone grows their own crops to feed themselves is an improvement? People don't grow potatoes because it is a waste of their time when you can buy a giant bag of them for next to nothing. Something only possible because of the modern JIT economy. What you call stability is actually inefficiency and waste in disguise.

Its not progress. Your car plant now needs a truck worth of car bumpers every day, when they take 4 weeks to ship from overseas. Any disruption means that your whole plant is now idle. But because of accounting rules, it made companies look much better off if they got 2 trucks of bumpers every day, rather than have 28 trucks worth of bumpers sitting in a warehouse. Much more risk, but sure does help up that earnings per share to help the CEO with his bonus based on stock price.

Remember how hospitals didn't have PPE, because they could always get more shipped in 2-3 days? Works great. Until it doesn't.

People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker.

You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid.

Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders.

One cannot wave away reality for philosophy.

The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. Some level of self sufficiency is a requirement for stability and resiliency. Past generations learned this lesson with some portion of the population starving. There aren't any farms within 500 miles of where I live. If we can't get shipments from outside people are going to starve. This realization of supply chain fragility is what many people have come to after seeing some items absolutely unavailable at stores. Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.

> The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient.

I'm a millennial and I worked for 2 of the big 3 German Auto manufactures in Supply Chain and Logistics and then went to work for a US megacorp, I can assure you: many of us of from all ages have been sounding the alarm since of an imminent crisis since at least 2016. No one cared, the MBAs in collusion with the executive board were too busy asset stripping and optimizing business models for short-term gains and massaging PnL sheets to make it look like the future was filled with endless profits.

The reality is that accounting displaced it's responsibility on to the SC and Logistics side to the absolute limits to the determent of accurate forecasting and modeling in order to keep the 'make believe' narrative alive.

> Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.

To be fair, 2020 marked a high-water mark for CSAs in the US [0] due to the COVID shortages, sadly it was soon forgotten afterward. People have short-term memories, and the appeal of outsourcing this vital component of keeping Society functioning has little effect on people until it's often far too late.

0: https://www.small-farm.com/wp/2020/04/24/2020-csa-shares-sol...

"Inefficiency/waste" and "slack" are very different things.

"Waste" is running an O(n^2) algorithm on a task that already has O(n logn) solutions suitable for the same dataset.

"Slack" is having 100 USD cash in your pocket even if you do not immediately plan to spend them.

This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.

Eh, first world countries produce a lot of food. Farming is generally heavily mechanized. Nobody needs to have their 'hands in the dirt'.

In fact, I expect most potatoes will not be touched by a single human hand until they reach the person who actually cooks and eats it.

That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.

Getting rid of those things would at most double the farm payrolls, which is still a tiny minority of Americans. For the most part, monocrops, pesticides, and fungicides have HUGE economic efficiency incentives ($ ROI / acre) even if you subtract the contribution to labor efficiency (humans / acre).

That's only true if you don't place a $ value on the environmental impacts.

I used to be sympathetic to this line of argument, but I'm no longer so sure. Organic farming has lower yields, so to feed the same number of people, you'd have to bring more land under cultivation. That would presumably outweigh any environmental advantages you get from using less chemical pest control.

Second, the extra people you employ, aside from the obvious mind-numbing drudgery and hard labour you're ruining their lives with, would have a carbon cost.

Third, I can see that some pest-control chemicals are bad for the environment. However, it seems also clear that the demarcation line between eco and non-eco is not the same as the line between organic, and non-organic. In fact, it seems like there is no relation at all. There are many chemical pesticides that are not environmentally damaging, and many traditional farming techniques are environmentally damaging.

Actually if you look at no-till and permaculture it 100% can have the same or higher yields per acre. The process of farming also doesn't have to be mind-numbing in this case. The combination of AgTech/Robotics and no-till/permaculture could produce vastly larger yields vs Organic traditional farming.

That's for soil based farming, personally I think Hydroponics (raising plants in water with no soil), Aeroponics (Hydroponics but grown in vertical towers), and Aquaponics (closed ecosystem using fish to fertilize the water the plants are grown in) are the only real way to feed a growing population and not destroy the environment. The Netherlands is already the leading European exporter of food, here is a great youtube video that touches on some of the ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk

Bottom line is that traditional Organic farming isn't the answer anymore than modern factory farming. AgTech is something I'm passionate about and I honestly believe that if we don't adopt more modern science will we face a large crisis in our food systems sooner rather than later. Some crops will need to be soil based (grains and related crops mostly) but nearly everything else grows faster, more reliably, and with out the need for chemical treatments. There are a large number of Hydroponic and Aquaponic farms already in operation but the percentage is still very small.

Isn't that more mechanization, not less?

Aside from the no-till/permaculture stuff (which has been around for decades now, and has never seemed to take off), what you are talking about is ultra-automated, extremely centralized farming - and in general, I kinda agree that it's a part of the future.

One issue is just that if you're trying to convert solar energy into calories, you naturally want to spread out over a large area (a field) then use an efficient process to do this (photosynthesis). You then want to make these calories easy to process with machines (monoculture), and to defend them against pests (sprayers), etc. So there are advantages for traditional farming that are rooted in simple physics and economics, and a lot of that won't go away.

I do think the use of robots to apply pesticides in a more targeted manner is probably something we'll see more and more of, but I think for most crops, building a super-controlled green house is probably never going to be economical.

Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time.

Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).

> Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).

How much so? FOr all the talk of techno-utopian ideals amongst the HN crowds, it isn't until you reach the 'I'm burned out, so I'm going farming' phase of a tech worker (I did rather early at 26) that most here will take any level of consideration in making any effort towards that end.

For most, it seems like a contrarian past time to argue the merits of conventional vs organic food becase: 'carbon is carbon.' Not realizing the underlying aspect of most of the local and organic movement is to strengthen the food supply that had been vastly consolidated by the pharmaceutical corporations in the late 70s who filled your plate with pesticide-laden franken-food shipped from all over the World and made us more food insecure (in non=processed junk) and diseased than ever in the US history.

In short, simply going to the farmers market once in a blue moon to have a story to tell here isn't living up to your rhetoric, and it seems that salary/TC alone isn't enough to compel some of the most well paid workers in the US to opt for making the food supply less fragile at all.

"Waste of their time". Is binging a Netflix series more important than having survival skills?

Surviving a societal meltdown is not a goal of mine, so yes.

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