461–470 of 575 posts
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I dream of having land with a pond. Properly managed, it could produce about 50 pounds of bluegills, etc from a 1/2 pond every year, with little input and infrequent work.
Do bluegills taste any good?
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Based on playing Civ I just assumed they were mostly valuable for their use in making gunpowder.
You seem surprised that a game simplified the mechanics of the real world until they are unrecognizable.
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> but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed Spoiler: most agriculture goes to supporting industrial livestock farming. It doesn’t change the economics. The ethanol mandate is horribly stupid.
I’m open to that, I was looking for more information rather than a pre-determined opinion though :-)
Food security always makes me think about food waste. When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever. In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parent…
I feel you. In my extended family environment, more food is wasted than necessary. Some relatives have a habit of buying lots of food, more than they need, because they used to be poor and now that they are no longer poor the derive happiness from buying lots of things. The fridge is always full, and they'd still come home with two huge bags packed with food. Food is regularly thrown away because it has rotted in the…
3 days? Try a week or two.
I'm just happy if I can get my wife to put food in the fridge in under 2 hours.
Food security always makes me think about food waste. When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever. In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parent…
I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
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Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up. Plus, crop failure and marker failure of any one crop doesn’t mean complete failure — the other crop still yields something. It becomes less of betting the farm. And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won’t really start becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5. But like I said — the Cubans had to do this. They were…
from what I understand / have read. yields go down per acre when moving from synthetic fertilizer to organic / natural fertilization. not just in the immediate, but forever. soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre. from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre never reaches a…
None of those are necessarily true. Sometimes they are, but organic prohibits some farming methods, but non-organic doesn't prohibit anything that organic does that work.
Some of the natural chemicals allowed in organic are worse for the soil than the synthetic counterpart. In some cases there isn't a natural chemical that is allowed and so the farmer resorts to plowing the soil which is a horrible thing to do to the soil, and because of the fuel used more expensive than synthetic chemicals.
Organic has found some useful things, but farmers are adopting them. Farmers have also found useful things that organic is adopting.
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> I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot. On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighb…
> [Cars] are a feature of the new world, just not the US. If Europe had the bulk of it's development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, som…
The cities were already established. They weren't repopulating the continent from scratch.
> In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument.
Yes, but space-occupation is a foolish thing to optimize for in an environment that isn't constrained by space. This is a trivial argument.
> "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
I spend quite a lot less time driving than I would if I took the trains. This is true virtually everywhere in Chicago, and Chicago only has only 3-4 main highways (which is to say it's not an especially car-friendly city and it's 5th ranked for public transit). Most of the time, it's twice as fast to drive as to take public transit, but if you have a transfer it can easily be 4 times slower than driving.
> Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
Agreed that cars are less space-efficient, disagree that space-efficiency is the paramount variable.
> Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
This isn't my argument at all. I'm not universally against public transit--it makes sense in some places and in those places it should be improved and expanded. My whole thesis is that different places have different constraints and thus we shouldn't expect "public transit" to be a panacea.
> As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem.
I didn't claim that driving solves social problems, only that it lets people control their own environments. I can't get my city to police or clean public transit appropriately, and I certainly can't get them to fix the underlying social problems; however, I can control my commuting environment by opting to drive. I'm happy to revisit public transit if/when we can solve poverty and mental healthcare, but until that utopia arrives, driving is a nice alternative.
> We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function.
These are orthogonal issues. Me driving (or not) doesn't stop my society from addressing its issues. I appreciate that people are more likely to advocate for issues that are visible to them, but that will probably look like cracking down on these people rather than solving ultimate causes (and anyway, our cities have a whole lot of people taking public transit already and yet these issues persist while other parts of the country have fewer problems).
> You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
I grew up working class, and it doesn't take a lot of money to escape the burden of public transit. We should absolutely expand the franchise to more people, however. Moreover, whether I take public transit or not has no bearing on my willingness to improve society. Please don't make assumptions about my motives, it's rude and unnecessary, and it violates site guidelines.
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They could prove their case by actually doing it at commercial farm scale. But as far as I know, no one has. Which, to me anyway, shows they're probably (but not certainly) wrong.
Gabe Brown manages about 5000 acres, with a skeleton crew. On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or…
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.