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Comment by throwaway6734 | Hacker News Reader

>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 for themselves.

This is hyperbolic. The US is not a banana republic. Why would you expect the average person to need to know how to grow a potato?

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Replace potato with any old piece of handy info, like home or car maintenance. A lot of younger Americans (myself included) have little practical knowledge, so everything needing knowhow in this generation must be outsourced.

Compare this to my grandfather's generation, he knew how to frame houses, plumb, electric work, auto work, gardening, etc, and he was not alone. If he needed something done you'd get four of your buddies and work on the project for the weekend instead of hiring a contractor. In my dads generation fewer people knew these things but still, a lot of people learned from their dads. In my generation otoh it seems like no one knows any of this, and therefore any issue around the home or the car becomes this catastrophic repair since you have to hire a specialist who charges hundreds an hour because you haven't learned very much that's actually practically useful for your life.

If you go a few generations further back, your ancestors lived in crushing rural poverty but literally hand-made most of the things in their own house, with the rest produced by local craftspeople; grew/raised or gathered/hunted most of their own food; made their own clothing starting from raw materials; etc.

Your buddies today have dramatically greater material wealth due to worldwide supply chains and mass production, but don’t know how to turn an unshorn sheep into a blanket or sweater or build walls out of mud and sticks. Today it’s no longer worth even fixing most stuff because the labor costs to do anything as a one-off are prohibitive compared to buying a new one from a streamlined (capital and energy intensive) factory.

You can still learn these skills. In fact, the wide access to knowledge should give you enough to learn these skills without ever having to ask someone else. The larger reality is a lot of these people don't need to learn these skills, so they won't, for various specific reasons.

Same way you can ask a ton of people gen X and higher how to open a Word document, many of them don't know. They don't even know where to get the information besides asking family and friends, because that's their modus operandi. Tons of human support still has a job only because these people can't figure things out without another person helping them.

Every generation currently alive has a large degree of learned helplessness. The areas where they are helpless just vary.

The other limiting constraint is the capital needed to engage in some activities that were comparatively inexpensive a generation or two ago.

This sounds a little rose tinted to me. I personally think for simpler tasks, much more information is available these days compared to older times. There's many resources on how to grow a potato (and other things) on the Internet.

For other tasks, some things have simply become a lot more complicated to work on. Electronics were a lot simpler in older times, for instance; swapping out a surface mount quad flat package will require a lot more "finesse" than swapping out a 1960s capacitor. Cars too have gotten more electronics and software. Despite this, there are definitely still people that have the skills to repair modern electronics and cars. (I will say that these types are often hampered by manufacturers that seem hostile to the idea of users being able to practically repair devices, hence the "right to repair" movement being a thing these days.)

I'm convinced there's more noise but I'm not sure how much of it is really more signal. Consider growing a potato and searching for that term on Google. I'm betting a lot of articles are going to be somewhat junky SEO spam that's repeating the same few pieces of info. Whereas if you were to go to a garden center or library, and find a book or pamphlet on growing a potato, that's probably going to be great information and very comprehensive, and covers a lot more than those short articles ever do. This generation wasn't without good information. They were consulting things like the Haynes manual for their cars the same as your mechanic does today, or reading on the pros and cons of different truss designs from books available in the hardware store.

Information about 'how to grow a potato' and a season or two of experience working out the kinks of growing a small crop of potatoes on available land near you are two very different things.

I dunno. I’m early millennial and, due largely to money reasons, I’ve done the following myself in past 12 months:

- re-graded slope of dirt in back yard (by hand, oof), trenched and added irrigation (to code), and seeded a successful lawn

- rebuilt upper valve train on my minivan (5 failed hydronic lifters)

- reframed my garage, which had massive termite damage and wall was 1.5” out of plumb, roof sagging badly

- wired new 60A circuit for EV charger (to code)

- excavated (by hand) and replaced 10’+ section of sewer lateral

- rebuilt washing machine pump, added dynamat sound deadening so quiet when on calls in garage

- re-heeled my wife’s shoes

- designed / built custom bunk/loft/desk for my sons’ shared room (Baltic birch, flat packable, surprisingly beautiful)

- re-roofed and reflashed chimney to fix leak (then re-drywalled 1/5 living room ceiling, skip trowel texture)

- abs so on…

Not trying to humble brag, but I hadn’t done a single of those tasks before (except framing, drywall, electrical, plumbing, which I taught myself in last decade). Push comes to shove, people can get a book from the library.

This [1] is worse than a banana republic, is society collapsing onto itself. Supposedly, inside a banana republic the family as an institution still holds some value, close friends and relatives still act like a de-facto safety net if the need arises. The people from that video have none of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOBoDT-3oM0

You don't even need to know how to grow to a potato, you just need to be able to learn how to grow one.

Because someone has to know how to grow the potato or raise the cow or plant the corn. Right now we (modern first world countries) export that to fragile processes far away. Generally at great cost, environmentally and to the people/countries we export form. See the Amazon rainforest, slave labor in China or Africa, or un-controlled overfishing.

You sure? I'm in the Midwest and absolutely surrounded by farms. Do you really think your beef, grains, and potatos don't come from the heartland? How in the world would that make sense?

Yes the US supplies the majority of it's food. I was talking about the first world countries in general. Second the monoculture farming system the US is using creates HUGE environmental costs, it's not just about import/export. Beef feed lots with thousands of cattle packed together, chicken and pork farm pollution, monoculture (corn and soy beans) destroying soil, pesticides polluting and killing river ecosystems, and up to 40% food waste. All products of the JIT food systems. The rest of the western countries (except Canada which is similar to the US) are mostly food importers generally from the Global south (with Russia and the Ukraine also supplying quite a lot). I grew up in the midwest in a family of farmers and my wife grew up on a working small cattle farm. There are MAJOR issues with the US system, generally it's not the import/export part though. That's more of an issue in European countries (the Netherlands seems to be the major exception here). Palm oil is also a major factor in rain forest de-forestation, which is a major import in many countries:

https://www.worldstopexports.com/palm-oil-imports-by-country...

In general a food system that is industrial in scale has terrible costs, just not usually economic costs.

The average person actually exists. They should have reality based skills and knowledge in self sufficiency.

Low effort consumerism, freedom to, takes freedom from others.

Freedom to be yourself cannot cost others freedom from the same. We’re a caste system that uses concepts like net worth as the measure instead of religious sigils and totems.

Freedom to sit at home on a laptop takes freedom from others in measurable ways; making less for work laptoppers want to avoid but need is kind of a joke system.

Remember millions of real people are being pinched harder and harder. That’s never ended well in human history. You can’t simply point at a philosophy and demand well understood biology to deal with it forever.

What’s hyperbolic is a defense squishy meat bags very much like passed squishy meat bags aren’t just larping the same old. That somehow magically it’s all different.

Keeping stats in the right place just makes truism out of political bias.

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