171–180 of 217 posts
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These things only become familiar with continued usage. Give it time.
It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.
That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.
Here's what I find funny: many of the people who extoll the virtues of capitalism also bemoan the death of small businesses and family farms. Or at least they pay it lip service. Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring.…
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> The economic value from operating it will generally not match the opportunity cost of not doing other things. Trouble is finding a better opportunity. From personal experience, my small acreage and old equipment, on average, nets me half of my developer income for just a couple of weeks per year of work. That's really hard to compete with. What else are you going to do instead? It doesn't scale in the sense that if…
A friend who was an agricultural banker and financial advisor, who would regularly suggest to farmer customers that they could truly be better served financially by taking all the equity out of their farms, put it into an index fund and go to work at WalMart, or better still the post office. But not all decisions are purely financial.
That said, you can leverage the debt. It is much harder to get someone to loan you money to invest in index funds. With the huge run-up in asset values over the past decade, I expect the farmer with a small holding 10 years ago, who then bought up everything he could with the bank's money, is now considerably further ahead than he who invested the same amount of money in index funds 10 years ago and took a job at Walmart to try and top up those investments.
But you are right that not all decisions are financial. I expect the Walmart job is far less stressful and that is worth quite a bit.
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Probably not even that expensive. I live a town or two further out. One of my neighbors has a small apple tree orchard and the other has a Christmas tree farm. It's pretty accessible to Boston for the day but not really close. My old farmhouse was the original property for about a 75 acre farm. It's been renovated but certainly not a multi-million dollar property. You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to…
"You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to reasonably priced real estate" Maybe compared to SV. I'd argue that it's surprisingly still very expensive even an hour out of Boston. I always wonder who are these wealthy people that can afford these million+ dollar mansions not even close to Boston.
A lot of people who live that relatively far out just don't go into Boston much.
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It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.
Yeah, you have to give it time. That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.
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Recently like in the past 30 years or so? It has certainly been common practice for at least that long. I have vague recollections of our farm still pulling whites in the early-to-mid 80s, so perhaps not that far back. But that may have simply been a product of our farm being hesitant to try new things, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, I was a bit too young at that time to understand the motivati…
My understanding is it's mostly a thing in the northern latitudes -- England and Canada, and some northern US states, especially North Dakota. In eg Indiana and Iowa the growing season is long enough there's no need to desiccate -- the weather isn't going to turn before the crop has a chance to dry.
> The question of what will become of the farm is a very complicated and painful one for Eleanor. They are an academic and a writer, and their family wants them to pursue their passions. Eleanor has no interest in farming themself, but they don’t want to see the farm disappear. They now live in New York State and miss home all the time. The family wants to hold on to the property, if at all possible, so they can live…
Granted, I’ve seen some sentences that are more ambiguous. But most of the time, context makes it plainly obvious, as it does here. The benefit is that by using “they”, the writer is making fewer guesses or assumptions. So it’s a trade off - more ambiguity, fewer mistakes. I think it’s a win overall.
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America relies heavily undocumented immigrants, from dairy to produce farm ag to meat processing to restaurants to landscaping. An open secret is that ICE doesn't touch meat ag's workers except for token enforcement. It's a dangerous occupation that includes underage child labor, deaths, and amputations without a social security net.
If its an open secret (like the open mystery in Ephesians 3:9,10), can you provide some sources to substantiate your claim? Thanks!
Here's what I find funny: many of the people who extoll the virtues of capitalism also bemoan the death of small businesses and family farms. Or at least they pay it lip service. Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring.…
I would call this distributed capitalism. The farm owners can still run the farm however they like, keep the entire profit of the farm, invest in capital machinery over a long term that they have exclusive ownership of, etc. The outcome is indeed closer to socialism in that it's likely the owners will also be workers, and profits are spread around throughout society. I'd say the key difference is that distributed capital divides power bottom-up, whereas socialism is more of a reaction to the lack of it or the failings of it.
What we're suffering today is centralized capitalism, where that ownership has been concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. I look at the federal government giving many trillions of dollars to centralized Wall Street in the form of low interest loans over the past few decades, and can't help but think that is a significant cause of the centralization - especially in light of the waste that centralized management seems to create (otherwise you'd expect larger business structures to be outcompeted in many areas). These subsidies are also the cause of beancounter-centric monocultures, because in order to direct those loans (leverage) into specific concrete endeavors the financial outcome must be made extremely predictable.
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Not the person you’re replying to, but China over literally Millenia have effectively terraformed mountains into channels and channels of rice paddies for the cultivation of rice - areas that westerners would not typically consider farmland. Of course you can also plant rice on flat fields (and China does as well), but this does skew the comparative ratios of acres of land use : people fed.
I'm a westerner in agriculture (Australian, northern territory cattle stations -> mining - Geophysics -> large acre grains) and I consider that to be farmland. Maybe you're thinking of some specific subset of urban western non agricultural people. Of course in western culture the "typical" westerner lives in an urban environment so perhaps that explains the disconnect.