I have settled on a strategy of bidding that seems to work when I am actively bidding (this goes only for little stuff not land and such). When I hope the other person bids, then I know I don't want the item at the stated price. I can feel intuitively that I will not want the item if I get it.
Does anyone have a help for the opposite scenario? In this scenario I have not yet bid but the price is quite low and I don't want to bid in case I missed something. The price stays very low and the item is sold. I am left kicking myself for not sticking my neck out there and making a good deal. Maybe I should bid once and see if I like it. The problem is that one bid might get it...
I have raised multiple 100s of mice and have an active ongoing interest in this idea. I have wondered mightily about the cleanliness of the mouse experiment. If you have tried to raise mice, you know that cleanliness is imperative. The question and answer at the end was helpful for me.
>>The Chairman thought Dr Calhoun had not mentioned
pollution and asked what remains the animals left and
how these affected the situation?
>>Dr Calhoun said that they (the investigators) were not
very sanitary in their husbandry, if that was the kind
of pollution inferred. The environment was cleaned,
most fices and soiled bedding removed, every six
weeks or two months, but nothing was ever sterilized.
He did not consider this necessary in such a closed
system and the mice had better survival than in most
laboratory colonies. Dead bodies were eventually
removed for examinations, but the major pollution
was the excess of living bodies; this was the essential
factor. The pollution was social in that there were too
many interacting elements, exceeding the social
system's capacity for incorporation of new individuals.
Capacities were genetically determined and situation-
ally modified.
>>The Chairman thought the point had been made very
clearly, but there must be a pollution factor. There
were the remains, frces, urine and dead bodies. Those
must surely be a factor.
>>Dr Calhoun thought these were minor factors. They
needed to maintain a situation in which there was not
continuous waste accumulation, but beyond that the
environment mirrored certain normal, external
ecological settings.
I thought that they got sloppy with cleaning and I don't see that my hunch was incorrect. In my opinion, that much poop and dead bodies will stress a mouse colony out and I would like to replicate this experiment myself and see what happens when you keep the colony super clean as it ought to be.
You are right on target however I am not seeing people here understanding that the tight spot is not land but manpower.
It seems to me that people think that if the first farm is more efficient in converting labor, dollars and cheap fuel into food than the second farm, then the first is the most efficient farm across all categories including land use. When one of the pieces changes (for instance fuel costs) then the formula needs to be revisited.
Realizing that personal, scientific and careful management of land yields more food per acre without agri chemical products is an important first step to thinking about the picture even if the low cost of fuel is a current reality.
Yeah, people are just completely inoculated against all forms of nuance :D
What I think is important to add to that equation is some dynamism of those prices/costs. Because even though fuel (fertilizer) costs are rising now, it's unlikely that they'll stay high, and changing from one form of industrial scale agriculture to some other is likely even more costly (than bearing years of high fuel costs).
One quite possible scenario is that if fossil fuel use falls so much that production becomes so uneconomic that prices still rise (or remain relatively high).
Of course, eventually as with everything that is eaten by technological progress it's likely that we'll start using a lot more energy (just not from burning fossil fuel) to have better controlled production. (Call it 'vertical farming', but it might look completely different, maybe big domes or ... who knows.)
that isn't a fair comparison though. Small farms grow high value crops that need a lot of labor, large farms that grow the same crops are even more productive (not by much though), except that there isn't enough demand to support a large farm growing those crops. There is a large demand for corn, so a lot of large farms grow it.
The comment farther up the thread (at this point anyhow)[1] references Gabe Brown. He is using very little to no commercial fertilizer on his farm and has been for years. I am guessing his audience among cash strapped young desperate farmers has increased a lot in the last 3 months.
There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors got hit by more than 3 of them).
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.
No, the problem is that to get half an inch of water to cover your fields takes a giant storage tank and a giant collection area. Install a hard scape big enough to provide any notable amount of water storage and lack of arable becomes your primary issue.
Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.
>>At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone with enough power to force them to do a better job.
And then they fix that one situation and go on about their normal business. At least that is what it seems to me. I would wish for something more long term to happen but I am becoming less hopeful.
I unblocked Facebook right now from my hosts file so I could message someone and couldn't figure out why Facebook failed to load. I tested HN and viola I see that the entire world has sent Facebook requests to 0.0.0.0 lol
I didn't receive expected WhatsApp messages and am only now realizing there's no indication within the app that there is even a problem. It only becomes (somewhat) apparent when sending a message never gets a single check mark. Not a graceful failure for the user view.
Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a generator going the other?
Best quote was at the end.
"However, human being are such creatures of habit and imitation, that what is necessity soon becomes fashion, and each one wishes to do what everyone else is doing. A lady in the neighbourhood closed all her binds and shutters, on May-day; being asked by her acquaintance whether she had been in the country, she answered, "I was ashamed not to be moving on the first of May; and so I shut up the house that the neighbours might not know it." One could not well imagine a fact more characteristic of the despotic sway of custom and public opinion, in the United States, and the nineteenth century.[29]"
>>practically impossible for modern citizens to overthrow a corrupt government.
However, given a sufficient percentage of the population which is interested in doing this, it would be very difficult even for the US military to completely conquer.
