It's not just that, certain pieces of equipment (combines in particular) are needed at the exact same time in multiple different places, and a delay of a day or even a few hours can be ruinous (if you don't harvest wheat at exactly the right time it can be more or less destroyed by the weather)
If you have 20,000 acres and equipment failure means you don’t harvest the last 1,000 acres before a rain that’s a problem. But for smaller farms it’s more binary where either 100% is on time or 0% is. You can bet people are more willing to let the first happen than the second.
To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a much larger farm, while the real profits flow to a single entity.
When people talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, this is exactly what they mean. Capitalism is very efficient at producing wealth but extremely inefficient in distributing it.
Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network. The distribution network in turns requires a lot of people not working the farm but instead distributing things around. To make this work you need large farms with surplus.
In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.
Correction - the local system means that when the local system fails _for years on end_ then the remote part of society needs to step in to support those who are starving locally. But this is true, no matter how high you push things. If something kills all the okra (see Interstellar) then we'll have to fall back on spinach _as a society_ if we have one mega-farm. If everything on the planet dies off then we'll have to flee the solar system, or get support from neighbors in the local galactic cluster.
I don't know what Intersetellar is (obviously a book/movie but I don't care to look it up).
What is the local vs remote system? When you have small farms local is you, and remote your neighbors who you walk to. When you have large enough farms you can generate enough surplus that the world cares - and they are generating enough that they can afford to play nice. Small farmers in general don't generate enough surplus that they can feed each other across the distance of a continent.
Support from a galactic cluster is nice in SciFi, but in reality space is too big. It is questionable if Earth/Venus could support each other, as our orbits are often too misaligned to do anything in time. (the fast trip to mars involves Venus so things are even worse). Going between stars - forget it, by the time we find out about a problem they are dead or have survived.
Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.
No, I mean it's less efficient. A large field can be farmed with larger machinery which is more fuel, time (and yes, cost) efficient than smaller machinery. There is less time spent moving between fields which can be critical for something as weather sensitive as harvest. Large machinery typically produces bigger gaps between tramlines and reduces spillage when turning, leading to greater yields and less waste.
You're just restating what you said and what I accurately interpreted: the costs are higher with smaller farms. You define this as inefficiency. I point out this definition of efficiency only considers amount of surplus generated, not how the surplus is distributed. With larger corporate-owned farms the surplus is distributed in a very inefficient way.
I'm talking about the process of turning sunlight into food. If you want to make that process use as few resources as possible (especially fossil fuels) then you need big fields with large machinery. Distribution of wealth is a different topic.
It is astonishing to me that you can look at how technology has impacted labor over the past half-century and believe that this definition of efficiency, which by necessity includes human labor cost as something to be minimized for the benefit of the recipients of the resulting surplus, has nothing to do with distribution of wealth.
I'm saying that's a different argument, and not one I raised.
You incorrectly inferred my meaning from my original post and are now doubling down, I'm not sure why.
It's as simple as this: We want to produce as much food as possible from as few natural resources as possible, emitting as little carbon as possible in the process. Large fields are more efficient at this, for reasons I've spelt out already.
Even in a fully communist society this would be true.
> There is no way the first group to land there will be able to establish dominance over the whole planet in one go.
Every potential adversary is approaching from the same direction and you have weeks / months of warning before they arrive. If you have the resources to establish a colony on another planet then defending your stake is relatively trivial in comparison. Also your team are already experts at the rocketry required to implement such a defence.
While I agree that object tracking is relatively cheap to implement in a newborn colony, I can't agree with defending it being trivial. Every bombing will destroy precious and rare resources, and even if you seek shelter underground, Earth could just send a stream of cheap kinetic missiles and carpet-bomb for months.
Your only hope would be that Earth wanted to take over your settlement. The military would need to land, and at least you could die mounting some kind of pathetic resistance... or blow it all.
Wind turbines can be incredibly dangerous, I'd be worried if this was anywhere near my home. jacquesm wrote up his experiences making a wind turbine from scratch here: https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill/
If there is an accident you'll have a giant wind spill to clean up.
But more seriously large chunks of spinning metal can turn into deadly flying knives when things break. With a properly engineered windmill this is extremely rare and usually requires a severe amount of neglect. With some DIY project built from scraps you probably shouldn't mount it anywhere near people.
I don't think so, because critical services/systems are targetted by ransomware operators regardless of the exception. And I don't think the victim should be burdened to decide between losing a life vs paying hefty fines.
Perhaps that is because, in this instance the term “political” has 2 meanings which we need to tease out to see why your statement is false.
1. Political intent - acting or omitting to act because of a political view point.
2. Political outcomes - the results of actions or omissions to act which impact politics.
I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
We should also agree what “politics” means. I’m not simply referring to the science of government but to the decisions around the distribution of power, resources and status in groups of people.
> I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
It does not even stop there. If we choose to understand what's political in this way everything that humans choose to relate to (even things that do not exist beyond human imagination) have, of course, probably some influence on political outcomes.
Rain, an escaped alligator from the local zoo, the color of a button in a web form, etc.
I think that this second idea of what's political is merely the realization that we can choose to view everything according to it's political impact. Like a pair of glasses we might wear or might want others to wear.
...to stick with my example: One might end up making a long term study on how news about escaped zoo animals affect election outcomes. That might lead to surprising results. It's just not always guaranteed to be a very productive use of time.
I think there's probably a healthy middle ground here. It's not hard to argue that there's some reasonable moral expectations regarding company decision making. Like, don't construct gas chambers. (Local example from my German home region.)
On the other side it's easy to see that insisting on questioning every minor decision will lead to almost instant gridlock.
That's why I think that both radical positions are pretty hard to defend. A better society might hide behind pragmatic decision making with some reasonable, probably even academically shallow moral questioning of ones own actions. Not in corporate apathy or zealotry.
You’re constructing a hypothetical “what-if” that sometimes could be true, but is not guaranteed to be true.
I could just as well say “no one should ever argue anything because then people could argue about every little thing and it would be impossible to do anything at all.”
I don't think it's a hypothetical. Overpoliticization is already at this point. There was a week or so at my company where a slack bot would automatically scold us for not being inclusive if we used the word "guys".
On a recent project we decided to use the term “main” instead of “master” for our primary branch.
At first I was like “ugh” - not a big fan of that kind of language change, but then I was like, well, if it does matter to some people, what is my investment in this particular term anyway?
I could see how it gets trickier as a company policy, as opposed to something chosen collectively by the group.
Nonetheless, with everything going on in the world right now - and I say this as an advocate of free speech and of freedom of expression in art - this seems like such a small thing to stress about.
Tbh if this is your big fear then I’d say maybe read more news?
Being excoriated for an honest slip Of the tongue or absent mindedness is a different story though and there are definitely people that do that.
In some ways I think the conversation to be had around changing how we use certain language is equally or more valuable than the change itself :).
If anything, I'd say the news is what causes me to be concerned in the first place. I don't personally know anyone who's been fired for not using precisely the right language, but I've read a lot of news stories about it.
I feel like that's kind of a manager-conversation thing, plus, like many policies, will depend on the workplace culture to begin with.
IMHO the tricky bit is that, there is both an honest and genuine way to express concern around using "precisely the right language", so to speak, and, a malicious, not-an-honest-partner-in-the-conversation, gum-up-the-works way.
And also, I guess a "this-is-all-unpleasant-and-I-just-don't-want-to-think-about-it-or-think-about-the-historical-context-for-why-we-are-talking-about-this-in-the-first-place-I-have-enough-on-my-plate-as-it-is" kind of way.
Of course there is also virtue signaling or what have you; that's a thing. Human foolishness has no bias.
Obviously HN is not the right place for discussing specifics, but, IMHO, that's maybe the only way to have a real conversation around this stuff. Which takes trust and a shared safe space.
Which can be hard to come by these days.
That said, IMHO my patience decreases a bit, sadly, every day when I read the news. There's a context to all this, after all. And a very real history.
My point is your parent is right and you are wrong.
Artificially extending what's seen as political to excess is a pointless exercise that removes all meaning and usefulness from the concept.
That's bad because a shared understanding of some political sphere (which comes into existence through its boundaries) is really important for democratic discourse.
In a best case scenario those boundaries are continuously questioned in the democratic discourse.
Some moral entrepreneur might argue: Politics should govern the bedroom for [reasons]! ... and others might object: No; the bedroom is a private sphere where politics has no say for [reasons].
... and over time there should emerge a shared understanding of which aspects of life are political grounds and which are taboo.
The bedroom case is mostly decided today. One side won (mostly LGBTQ&Friends) and now we see the bedroom as something that should be free from politics. ..like I think that the vast majority of people in the western world now sees sodomy laws as bad fit for modern democracies.
But there are other issues that are more contemporary: The idea that speech is violence, for example, is prime moral entrepreneurship. Western societies regulate violence in a certain way and this equivalence would suggest to treat both equivalent, one way or the other.
... and it's far from decided how speech will be treated in the future and we all have many open arguments on the matter.
It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
I have difficulties seeing the "everything is political"-trope as anything but the proposal to be reckless regarding the process of a shared understanding of the boundaries of politics.
> It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
To rephrase: through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
If how we decide what is or is not "acceptably" political is itself a political process, how can you honestly say certain things aren't political.
Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms. Just because one side, and the side you presumably agree with, appears to have won the argument for now, doesn't mean that things are finished.
There are lots of things that I think should be outside of the realm of politics: basic human rights, white supremacy, a woman's right to choose. And yet.
So we return to the original question: how come those topics are "political", but in your opinion "bedrooms" aren't? (And would someone in the UK agree with you? They probably would, despite laws that affect them).
Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
And when you start into this meta-discussion of how do we make something political? The answer is pretty straightforward: you find people who are that there's an issue and you make noise about it.
When lots of people see a problem and make noise about it that problem becomes political. Disagreements, on a societal scale, are politics. So "this shouldn't be political" isn't much more than "I don't think the status quo is worth spending resources on". And, well, the people who think there's a problem will disagree on that. And thus: politics.
Yeah there are things that I wish we didn't disagree about, but I also am willing to stand by my convictions and say I disagree, instead of hiding behind "this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint because this isn't acceptable politics". If you're fine with the way things are, say that.
> through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
This difference is important since the discourse is in itself not framed by any material boundaries. This difference also answers your question on whether political action deciding on the scope of politics might be incoherent.
> Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" [political] is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms.
A shared understanding of what is political does not require every single person to agree on the scope of politics. In the end it's all about relative stability, not unanimity or majority or something like that.
> Just because one side ... won the argument ... doesn't mean that things are finished.
There I agree. I don't think the concept of "finished" exists in any human context.
> Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
This question on who specifically might make a specific decision seems to be a reoccurring theme in our dialogue. In modern societies that's usually a multitude of interlinked processes. Very rarely there's an isolationable agent/action relation relationship. ...and that's, of course, a good thing.
> ... this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint ...
Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
I have no strong feelings on any of the many crossroads in debating social science epistemology or democratic theory in general.
Politics is how groups make decisions (literally that's the definition). Discourse with the intent to influence how a group makes a decision is political discourse.
> Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. Presumably this means one can't discuss them. Maybe you don't intend to enforce this beyond the force of your moral condemnation, but you're still saying "you're a bad person if you bring up this topic because it's not part of the political discourse and we're only discussing political stuff".
Politics is many different things depending on who you ask. Obviously. Luhmann wouldn't agree with Foucault who wouldn't agree with Rousseau who wouldn't agree with Arendt, etc.
In our previous conversation I'd argue that politics as power relations or as a specific set of societal institutions might be the most productive definitions just because both are compatible with our main argument.
Nobody said they can't discuss something. It's a good example though:
You might believe that someone who argues that something does not belong in the sphere of politics does not want to or is unable to discuss something at all primarily because you already very strongly believe that politics necessary includes everything.
If you were to step back from that premise for a second you would see that there might be other human endeavors, think science, philosophy, math .. and that those are discussed by people completely without any connection to politics (..or as you would probably argue: they're willfully ignorant of the political dimension of their actions and might even be motivated by subversive, ultraconservative intentions.)
I just of course can't make you realize that this is only one very specific worldview out of many. ..which might have its place and usefulness but probably wasn't meant to act inhibiting on its enthusiasts.
Some do believe that every action needs to be reflected according to its compliance with some religious dogma. For them, ignoring the religious dimension in any action is very suspicious, because they are able to see a religious component in any action. Surely others must appear as stupid or willfully ignorant to them.
They're driven by a specific set of religious premises and that's completely okay. We just wouldn't want them to be literally unable to understand that there are other worldviews out there with their own premises.
A strong conviction is born through the understanding of its opposing ideas.
> You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. [...] you're still saying "you're a bad person
Oh dear goodness, where? Would you mind to quote me on that?
You seem to agree with me despite denying it. Everything is political, there are complex interrelated systems by which decisions get made and people hold power. Arguing that some things aren't within the sphere of acceptable political discourse is naive and pointless since you can't actually enforce it at all.
A while ago I built this exact mechanism for Flow, it could be done in TypeScript if there was enough demand for it (it's rather a large effort) https://gajus.github.io/flow-runtime/
