theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml

I write about technology at theluddite.org

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Yeah I totally agree.

I think about this a lot for obvious reasons, especially the, as you put it, "road bad once a year" mentality. I think it's part of this underlying capitalist pathology that we must continue to be productive no matter the weather or physical conditions. It's as if the economy is more real than the world being covered by a foot of snow, which is an inconvenience that we must overcome, rather than a reality that we should accept, and maybe stay off the roads for the day if we can. People shouldn't have to drive to their fucking office and retail jobs when it's shitty out, nor should they expect the world to be fully open for business. We have this underlying assumption that we are above nature instead of a part of it. It is this extraneous thing that we have the duty and the right to overcome anytime no matter what, so we buy this giant F150 man-van, which not coincidentally contributes to the destruction of nature, because we shouldn't be inconvenienced by nature ever

Also, not a good pic, but here's the calf in the car!

I'm sure there are some places in the US that are worse, but at that point it's some very extreme edge cases. My canyon can be loaded up with hay and driven around icy, wet, steep, and rutted out pasture without a problem, but it's always the smallest truck with the lowest clearance on the road. Your roads have to be completely fucked if they're worse than my pastures in mud season. I'm sure those roads exist, but it's pretty rare.

edit: for reference, this classic VT meme template was actually taken nearby

I live on a hilly dirt road in Vermont and we get by fine with a Toyota Yaris and a 2007 GMC canyon with 4wd. There's maybe 2 or 3 cumulative weeks a year when the Yaris can't handle the road conditions, and on those days, it'd be better if everyone who could stayed home anyway.

Even my truck, which gets used for lots of construction and farm chores, is smaller and has a lower clearance than most modern SUVs. I challenge any SUV or truck owner who claims they need something bigger than I do to compare our vehicle usage. I moved a baby cow in the Yaris just yesterday. In fact, I literally bought the smallest used truck I could find. I'd buy a smaller truck tomorrow if I could.

Also, while I'm here, my tiny town of a few thousand people has a train station with service to NYC and even DC, but it takes way, way longer than driving, and it only runs once or twice a day. All these little towns in Vermont ALREADY HAVE TRAIN STATIONS but no one can use them because the service is worthless. If the train was even somewhat regular and as fast as driving, I would use it all the goddamn time.

Maybe. It had been almost 15 years since I last heard of him until the EA stuff started going mainstream, but he was a very well respected physicist, especially for how young he was back then. After having taken several very small classes with him, it would surprise me if he was a clout chaser. People are complicated though, so who knows.

I had Max Tegmark as a professor when I was an undergrad. I loved him. He is a great physicist and educator, so it pains me greatly to say that he has gone off the deep end with his effective altruism stuff. His work through the Future of Life Institute should not be taken seriously. For anyone interested, I responded to Tegmark's concerns about AI and Effective Altruism in general on The Luddite when they first got a lot of media attention earlier this year.

I argue that EA is an unserious and self-serving philosophy, and the concern about AI is best understood as a bad faith and self-aggrandizing justification for capitalist control of technology. You can see that here. Other commenters are noting his opposition to open sourcing "dangerous technologies." This is the inevitable conclusion of a philosophy that, as discussed in the linked post, reifies existing power structures to decide how to do the most good within them. EA necessarily excludes radical change by focusing on measurable outcomes. It's a fundamentally conservative and patronizing philosophy, so it's no surprise when its conclusions end up agreeing with the people in charge.

That's fine, but energy is not unlimited and probably won't be anytime soon. I think it's important to understand the realities of indoor farming. I find many in environmental communities like this one labor under the same misapprehensions that I found in this thread, and as a result have an unrealistically charitable outlook on them.

lol no worries. If you want a more detailed breakdown, check out this thread: https://lemmy.ml/comment/4075176

Still doesn't work out. These people are bragging that their farm uses only 600kw/hr per meter, which is still 2% of what the sun gives you for free. Even if you divide every result I got by 50 to do that conversion, you're still using 40x more energy growing it than trucking the resulting product the entire way across the country.

I think you meant to reply to me here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/4074486

First, it's not 5x; it's five orders of magnitude, so that's 100,000x.

But more importantly, cereal crops are actually not that productive in terms of calorie per unit area of land use. Wheat, for example, produces some 6.4 million calories per acre, which is way less than potatoes (17.8).

Also, no plants require huge variations in their energy input per area than other plants, because they all roughly need what the sun provides. Some plants have different growing seasons, and some can tolerate lower light conditions, but we're talking about factors of like 1 or 2 here, not 100,000.

The reason grains support civilizations is that they scale as an agricultural practice, and they give you a very convenient resulting food. They're easy to farm because they're literally grass, plus their grains can be dried, stored, and transported easily, and they happen to make a reasonably nutritious staple for a diet. Their main labor input is the initial seeding, the harvest, and then the processing (threshing, milling, etc.), all of which scale much better than say picking tomatoes, blueberries, or apples by hand out in the field; this was true back in the day, and is even more true now with modern mechanized harvesting. We still pick tomatoes by hand, but our grains are almost grown autonomously at this point.

No, I'm not. Moving things, even refrigerating them, takes so, so, so much less energy than replicating the literal sun for months. The sun gives you approximately 1,360 watts per square meter. That's 117 million Joules of energy per day per square meter for the entire area of that operation, which conveniently happens to be very close to Joules in a gallon of gas (~120 million).

In other words, for every single day, for every single square meter of an indoor operation, you need to use the equivalent amount of energy as is in a gallon of gas to grow things indoors. That's ~4,000 gallons of gas (or the renewable equivalent) per day per acre, which is not that big of an operation.

A quick google tells me that lettuce, probably the least energy intensive crop, can harvest about 10 tons per acre. According to the railroads, which might be a dubious source, a gallon of gas can move a ton of freight about 100 miles on a railroad. To move an entire acre's worth of lettuce by train 3000 miles, approximately the entire width of the US, would use only 30 gallons of gas.

Even if they're exaggerating by a several orders of magnitude, there's just no way for vertical farming to come out ahead on that.

If you truck instead, a quick google tells me that a truck's average fuel cost per mile is between 30 and 40 cents, and a truck can carry about 10 tons. In other words, moving our acre of lettuce takes about 1 gallon of gas per 10 miles. Even if we move that 3000 miles, we're only using 300 gallons of gas (or the energy equivalent). Again compare that to using 4,000 gallons of gas per day on the vertical farms. Over a 2 month growing period, that comes out to 240,000 gallons of gas.

In other words, trucking things all the way across the country uses 800x less energy than an indoor farm with 0 transportation costs would use to grow it.

No way. Shipping things to market once uses very, very, very little energy when compared to continuously replicating the sun indoors with artificial lights for months.

Cereal crops are just the information that's easily available. It's not a perfect comparison, but still, 5 orders of magnitude is a shocking result. That's the average American's daily commute distance vs the distance to Venus. Any reasonable use of indoor farming must somehow overcome how mindbogglingly energy intensive it is.

Yup that's about right. I think the obsession with engagement comes from a cultural desire to appear objective. It's performative more than it is rational.

Yes exactly this. Indoor farming uses many, many orders of magnitude more energy than traditional farms. Low-Tech Magazine (one of my favorite publications on the internet) did a write up where they discuss actual experimental results on how much more land solar powered indoor farming uses than just traditional farming.

If we use their energy measurements for vertical farming, and compare them to published amounts of fuel used per acre of cereal crops to get a rough comparison, we conclude that vertical farming is about 157,827 more energy intensive than traditional farming — a whopping 5 orders of magnitude.

You might be interested in one of my oldest posts: https://theluddite.org/#!post/why-attention-economy

It's about what you're saying. I come to an adjacent but slightly different conclusion than your comment.

Yeah, the broken Internet is just so much dumber than people think. Welcome aboard!

Haha thank you. I've generally found that Google decides most of the ad clicks that come from my site are "invalid," so it'll pay me and then take it back 🙃. 90% or so of my ad revenue has been reversed within a day or two. We're talking like 12 USD so it's not like I'm losing a fortune, but still!

Ah crap that sucks!

If i may be so bold, I and a few others write about tech at https://theluddite.org/.

I focus on the intersection between technology and human decisions. A lot of tech coverage has a techno-optimist, or tech-as-progress default perspective, where tech is almost this inexorable, inevitable, and apolitical force of nature. I strongly disagree with this perspective, which I think is convenient for the powers that be because it obscures that, right now, a few rich humans are making all our tech decisions.

I also write code for a living, which shockingly few tech writers and commentators have ever done. That makes it possible for me to write stuff like this.