jly

> Modern agriculture is a highly skilled job done with millions of dollars of capital equipment. Unskilled laborers are more hindrance than help, and will be sent off to the "back 40" to indulge in mindless busywork.

I think the point being made in the original post is that modern agriculture has a lot of problems and this is a way to address some of those. Producing local foods in a sustainable way requires more labor and a more distributed structure, with many more individuals involved directly in the process. Market gardeners around the world produce high quality foods without millions of dollars of equipment. Anyone can be taught enough to be highly useful in this role.

It's not just what they grow, but how they grow it and sell it. The soil on many mid-country farms is bad because of years of growing with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and bad practices, something that is potentially reversible with alternate growing methods.

Commodity growers on huge farms distribute their food into large grocers potentially all over the world, to be sold at the lowest possible price. They must maximize yields at any cost to make money. Specialty growers sell into farmer's markets, CSA's, etc, at a much higher cost for the goods. This is why many of them are in coastal and affluent areas, where the buyers are willing to pay considerably more for local, fresh produce that has been grown organically.

Keep in mind there are thousands of low income earners throughout the country that only afford their housing because of low-income subsidized housing programs. These programs are income-based to set monthly cost at an affordable level - sometimes only a couple hundred dollars per month. These people would not be able to afford housing even in low-cost cities without assistance. In areas where these programs are not available or not in sufficient numbers, homeless situations can easily arise.

This is a compromise made to appease antitrust regulators in some situations, already. In a deal of this size, approval would likely require some patent portfolio compromises to get done.

Case in point the current Qualcomm acquisition of NXP. In that case, to satisfy EU regulatory officials, Qualcomm has agreed to give up some NXP patents (that must be sold) and agreed to not take legal action on some others, except for defensive purposes.

I get your point about disappearing art being reproducible, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the role art has played for humans throughout our existence.

Not only does art greatly enhances the enjoyment of life, it's been a critically important survival tool throughout human history and pre-history. Even for primitive humans, art was used to help record and offload and pass on critical information through stories, waypoints/maps, and artworks. Our appreciation for beautiful forms, structures, rhythms, etc, is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us arouse interest and fascination with our world, inspiring us on to greater things and ultimately increasing our survival. This is why our appreciation of natural beauty and art is universal across cultures and time. Many have written and talked about these ideas. STEM doesn't happen without art.

Technology, on the other hand, has put us and our planet on the brink of extinction. Obviously we are now 'all in' on STEM for the survival of modern civilization, but there are a lot of people living in the world today who may disagree about the fruits of progress.

> But can ESPN exist as a network without NFL games?

Yes. It broadcasts < 20 NFL games per year. This is not a lot of airtime for a 24h sports network. It does spend a considerable amount of time talking about NFL, but that can continue whether it broadcasts their games or not. It has a 3-hour lead-in show on Sunday morning that gets sizable ratings while broadcasting zero games that day. Nobody subscribes to ESPN/cable just for MNF.

In contrast, ESPN broadcasts dozens of college football games per year and spends probably an equal amount of time - or more - discussing those. It spends about $1.4b per year in total on those TV rights which have lucrative advertising and cable subscriber value. That's in addition to all of the other sports ESPN broadcasts.

ESPN will bid less for MNF because they can't afford it any more but mostly because the ratings don't fully justify the current cost. The overall success of ESPN doesn't hinge solely on whether or not they broadcast any NFL games, it's based on how sensible the price is for the rights they own. They have plenty of other content to fill airtime that people watch and will pay a reasonable subscriber price for, even if that's not quite as much as they extract now from cable providers.

Invertebrates often get overlooked for conservation efforts and money spent, in favor of larger animals. Pollinators are critically important for their direct food supply services, but we really just don't know the full ecological impact down the road of mass species loss on a scale we could be heading towards with many other species of insects, other arthropods, molluscs, coral, etc.

If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/

The obvious emphasis of the maps is on the vastness of oceans and how much remains unknown, but I would stress also surprising is how little we know about the biodiversity of land. The 'remoteness from cities' map highlights places based on how few humans live there, but many of these areas (dense tropical forests) are home to the majority of species on the planet. We are barely now starting to see some consensus on estimates for how many species of land-dwelling arthropods there even are (several million). We know nothing or next to nothing about the vast majority of these. This is pretty amazing to me.

Commercial container homes are just another type of prefab, and they share many of the advantages of that style, including typically being cheaper in both materials and construction costs and having easy assembly (days instead of months). Being made of steel, they are also more durable and rot/mold resistant than the typical wood-framed houses found throughout much of the US. Many prefab container homes are double-height meaning they actually feel less cramped than a framed home with standard ceiling height.

There are pros and cons to all types of building, but I don't think shipping containers are "terrible to use for homes for so many reasons".

There has been interesting research over the last couple years on this topic. It is in fact not royal jelly that pushes female bees down the queen development path, but rather the addition of honey and pollen that stops them from becoming queens. Feeding beebread to female larvae is what alters their gene expression to less developed ovaries, because of a specific plant chemical, where they would all normally develop into queens.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500795

GMO seeds are designed to allow application of pesticides, but after years of this the targets - weeds and insects - become progressively more resistant. This has begun happening with glyphosate (Roundup) and insecticide-resistant crops like Bt-corn. This forces farmers to both greatly increase the total quantity of pesticides applied, and reach back to older and less safe chemicals. This is the worry that they refer to, and why Monsanto continues to create new products.

> Airburst nuclear weapons produce basically 0 fallout. The bomb has to burst on the surface to pick up particles of earth and debris to create fallout.

Air bursts produce minimal localized fallout, but they have long-term global consequences, especially detonating many powerful fusion bombs. The fallout produces atmospheric carbon-14 and strontium-90, among other dangerous isotopes, that can have consequences for many future generations. This is part of the reason why the nuclear test ban treaty was created.

Besides water, California almonds are one of, if not the largest problem facing managed honeybees in the United States, due to the the agricultural practices of this industry and need to migrate in almost 2 million hives annually (first answer here has some good details: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-almonds-are-not-vegan).

If you care about protecting our managed pollinators, giving up almonds is a good first step. I have also switched to peanuts.

I agree there is value added by curation. But today, academic publishing is an industry worth over $10b, and they don't actually pay for the original access or license of the content or the editing and peer-review. Publishers do add value but not to the extent of the cost that's passed on to the public today.

Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is unparalleled.

I'm not a working scientist - I have no paid-for University access to a variety of journals or other such connections, nor do I know the intricate details of how research is published. What I do know is that I'm a citizen helping to fund much of this work, and access to primary literature is critically important to make informed decisions about our future. The academics are paid a salary to produce findings, not to sell individual copies (unlike the music industry comparisons). While I'm willing to pay something, I can't be expected to pay the huge costs to access individual papers that are demanded today. Open access journals like PLOS are fantastic, but it's an unfortunate reality that much of the quality research is published on platforms that charge $30 for a paper. Until this changes, sci-hub is my answer.

Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard. There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits, climbing, or whitewater rapids. The deaths that do occur are almost always from experienced jumpers that not following recommended safety processes, often in the pursuit of pushing things to the edge. The point is that unlike some other extreme sports, most skydiving deaths are preventable by conservative jumping.

You shouldn't, but this example is not the way the existing capitalist economies of the world work.

In your example, a shared resource has labor applied to meet a clear human need, and those that physically do more of it reap more rewards. In the real world, someone owns the field, does no work, pays individuals (potentially) far less than the value of their labor to do the picking, and reaps most of the rewards. Then that field gets passed down to their offspring who continue to gain the rewards without doing any work.

Why should they get to do that?

Jame Dimon did say this recently, but the context of his frustration with government regulation of the banking industry. He is lobbying hard to get oversight removed that was put in place after that industry tanked the global economy only a decade ago.

Super markets certainly have their problems, for reasons you've said. However, you can choose not to put your groceries in any plastic from the supermarket, if you wish. I have done exactly that for a while now and it's easily doable, you just have to be a little choosy about what you buy.

If people switched to shopping at local farmer's markets - so food wouldn't be shipped around at all - we would produce much less pollution and have much sustainable agriculture than either of those options.

I read the entire recipe through once to get a feel for what I must do before cooking and what I can delay. This hasn't proven to be an issue for me. Even if you just make it as-written, you're killing what, an extra 5-10 minutes? I pour a nice glass of wine or a beer and turn the cooking into a fun experience instead of viewing it as a waste of time.

I agree with many of your points. I didn't have an issue with the time or complexity - I cook most nights and spend a lot of time doing it so this wasn't an issue.

My biggest problems were that #1 it's expensive relative to what I would pay to buy my own ingredients (especially for no leftovers), and #2 a lot of waste in the process. Specifically regarding waste, a lot of extra shipping packaging and each individual item is often individually wrapped in plastic. I get that they might not have any easy choices, but it seemed excessive and after a while it didn't sit well with me.

At the end of the day, I view this as an occasional luxury and not an everyweek thing like they want it to be. It's considerably more sustainable to go to the local farmer's market and grocer to pick up healthy, locally-grown produce and meats that are fresher and cheaper.

The recipe cards are by far the best part and I will give them a lot of credit for crafting some real tasty meals. I have made several meals more than once on my own with the recipe card.

Another Beethoven biography for the beginner that I can recommend is 'Beethoven: The Music and the Life' by Lewis Lockwood. This one does a good treatment on his life while also weaving in relevant analysis of his music for the layperson with some musical background. It's a great introduction to both aspects of his life for the non-serious musician and will give you a much greater appreciation for his work.

This shift is happening, but I see it far too slowly, still. At least in my area, the dominate beekeepers who do it for commercial enterprise (and have the majority of all hives) still treat because they are protecting their income. Hobbyists are more quickly adopting treatment-free methods which I think is accelerating this trend.

Yes, per-capita rates are tricky with honeybees since they adjust their hive numbers significantly during the year and slim down for winter and potential summer nectar dearth.

Measuring colony survival is what is really important.

All workers are also females, and they start out the same egg as a queen (fertilized). The workers choose to create a queen which has mature reproductive organs by what it feeds the larva. Specifically, NOT feeding it honey and pollen, typical worker larva food, and continuing a diet of royal jelly. Once the larva exceeds a certain age (typically 4-6 days), the path is set and cannot be changed.

There are very many backyard beekeepers, even in urban areas. I have a pair of hives on my small city lot and most neighbors don't even know. This isn't uncommon these days.

Having said that, there are wild bees, and bees 'escape' from beekeepers by swarming and forming new hives on their own. They try to reproduce by creating new hives as frequently as they can.

This is absolutely not true. A common and unfortunately widespread misconception by many in the beekeeping world and it's unfortunate these ideas persist.

This is a landmark census of a known population of feral bees before and after Varroa introduction: ~25 years apart [1]. The evolved methods of this particular group for Varroa defense are not the typical methods (hygienic behavior) that are seen with modern treatment-free survivor bees. There are now known to be a diverse array of natural methods that honeybees survive in the wild against Varroa. A couple of very recent papers survey these [2][3]. The last 5-10 years have seen an explosion of primary literature research on the topic, as well as queen breeders all over NA producing bees with genetic traits that allow them to survive without our help. You may also want to peruse this recent and passionate plea from one of the top honeybee researches in the world to move towards beekeeping methods that let bees better survive in the wild and stop circumventing their efforts [4].

Honeybees survive in the wild in North America despite beekeeper activities, not because of them.

[1] https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2007/01/m6063/... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [3] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eva.12448/abstrac... [4] http://www.naturalbeekeepingtrust.org/darwinian-beekeeping

There is public transportation and hopefully it's on the way to getting better. I personally take the bus to work everyday. Cap Metro is adding bus routes on the mopac express lanes from RR to downtown Austin.

The problem is there is a culture of driving in Austin and not of taking the public options. Most people don't even know what is out there. We could do with quite a few less cars on the road.

South Austinite so I'm a bit biased, but here's my take. Cedar Park and RR are quite a ways out of the city and traffic in Austin heading north/south is atrocious and getting worse, fast. You can live up there cheaply but if you're coming for the Austin city experience, you may be disappointed. If you do end up that far north, I would recommend looking into Pflugerville, as well, which is a very nice area.

The Domain/Arboretum is between those suburbs and the city and it's a booming area these days with a lot going on. My advice would be to look near there or south of there for your housing. This gives you good commute flexibility for jobs in the burbs and the city, and makes getting into the city much more pleasant.

After trying a lot of digital list/note-creating products, I now primarily use paper and haven't looked back. Writing the grocery list on paper is much easier than fumbling around with (and dropping) my phone while I'm shopping, for example. If I will ever look at it while not on my laptop/desktop, it always goes on paper. Some things (mostly work TODOs and notes) go in plain text files. I find tagging/organizing digital notes takes me more effort than it's usually worth.

I use 1Password to synchronize and store logins, passwords, CC/bank info, and other specific personal numbers (passport/ID, membership programs, etc). This solves two problems: I can view the info easily without hunting for the information, and I can sync it easily with my spouse. Moving to this has simplified a lot of the tedious "number management" that is modern life.

Important single and recurring events for me and my spouse go in digital calendar that syncs to mobile devices, with reminders. I use this for everything - work meetings, travel, fill out my fantasy sports roster, change my toothbrush, etc. You shouldn't have to live off your calendar, but I've found this very useful for things I'd like to make sure I do but would forget with high frequency.