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Comment by zackkitzmiller | Hacker News Reader

Unless you move to a farm and grow everything yourself, I think yes. It would literally be impossible to live with out them.

I'm sure the POS at your corner store somehow interacts with AWS or GCP, but I'm not sure that should 'count.' As well as not visiting any site that is hosted on a cloud provider.

You could almost certainly live a life with significantly reduced quality by living without the tech giants directly, but to not visit websites that are hosted on AWS, and still shop at a local shop that uses Square or other payment provider that's hosted in the cloud seems disingenuous to me.

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HA! Try growing or raising animals and not using Amazon...

How in the world did farmers and ranchers do it before July 5, 1994? How did humanity survive?

A lot of farmers still do. Especially older ones. I don’t know about the USA but up here many older farmers operated entirely on in person deals with other farmers, farmers markets, and local grocers.

(Depending on how abstracted you want to get, but yes the farmer probably filled up their pickup for the morning delivery at a gas station that has a POS that connects to some service that interacts with AWS somewhere a long the line. Though the farmers I’d met likely used cash)

I'm really not sure where the GP was trying to take the sustaining w/o Amazon would be impossible. It's not like farmers are buying there tonnage of seeds from Amazon. They are not buying new calves at Amazon. They don't buy tractors from Amazon. Maybe they buy new items for the kitchen/office, but that's not a large line item on the farm.

Obviously you're being glib, but the truth is that a lot of the "old" production and supply lines no longer exist. So ordering from afar (Amazon or its moral equivalent) has become necessary for some basics.

(If you're suggesting that farmers and ranchers should go back to the days before production of plastics, hard goods, petroleum products, and rubber materials...well then they will cease to be farmers or ranchers, because 1700s-era tech won't survive market forces today.)

Similarly, no one can build computers in the US any more. Apple's Mac Pro project is interesting, but very low volume and mostly just an assembly effort.

>Obviously you're being glib, but the truth is that a lot of the "old" production and supply lines no longer exist.

I would counter that "old" farmers were able to use the seed from the current crop to plant for the next season so that it was self-sustaining. Now, with modified seeds from places like Monsanto where the plant from the seeds of this year's crop will not produce fruit. This forces you to need to buy new seeds each year.

I'm also suggesting that we go back to planting more than one crop per farm, and then even switching which part of the farm each plant is grown in. Crop rotation is such a huge concept that we've just thrown away. We can still use "plastic" and even "smart" equipment. We don't have to go back to stone age tools, that's just daft. We had that before July 5 1994 too.

Long ago and far away I had an idea for a short story that touched on these issues of seeds gene-modified to be one-yield-only and multi-cropping. I fizzled on the story but not so hard that I shouldn't be able to pick it up again.

I'm glad for the research I did 15 years ago; I still encounter situations where it becomes relevant, e.g. this discussion here and why certain water pipes are colored purple [or other colors, but at this time I remember only what purple means].

You're right of course, and my comment was oversimplified.

But supply chains for agriculture are a lot more complicated than sourcing seeds.

I agree with you that the current state is unsustainable. On a more general level, again, it's similar in manufacturing. Seeds or other raw materials, tractors or other specialized equipment.

Globalization adds and subtracts different kinds of resilience. Specialization only subtracts resilience.

Neither of our points has much to do with AWS though. :)

It's hard to survive commercially if you're paying more for everything than the competition. Amazon has pushed prices down for a lot of items, has free delivery, and is JIT for a lot of things too.

I'll buy elsewhere if it's < 5% more. I've no problem paying £5 delivery on a £100 item just to support 'the little guy' all other things being equal. But on a £10 thing, Amazon wins.

(not a farmer, but the point still counts)

Farm supply stores are great. A lot of what you need is on the land.

The point of the article was to demonstrate that everyday consumer behavior is completely dependent on big tech. Not that life without is somehow, "better."

for other readers, POS = point of sale, not piece of s* * *. I had to stare at it for about 10 seconds before realizing.

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