Designed for Rural Living
research.cornell.edu
research.cornell.edu
Almost every road in my county is dirt/gravel. When you have very minimal use, this is a vastly superior road medium. No specialty equipment is needed to maintain the roads, just a dump truck and (ideally) a grader or plow. Nearly every farm out here has both, so road maintenance is a community affair.
Likewise, we have nearly no bridges, the roads just go through the creeks and you are expected to have the ability to judge whether or not you and your vehicle can cross. We have a bridge in need of repair, it's been closed for four years with no sign of fixing soon. We do not have the money (as a county) to fix it. The water crossings are closed after storms, for a few hours, this is vastly superior, for my rural community.
It's the same as it is in tech. Your tech choice are partially informed by the size and capability of your org.
Not good enough for many, but it's a very strong value proposition none the less.
How do you manage work and remoteness? Long commute? I imagine internet isnt good at home.
Air and water for example, they don't just stick around in one place. So if you pollute something, that pollution happily goes elsewhere making it everyone's problem. Same with disease, or cancer. Say you need to go out to the hospital for radiation treatment every day, and you can't do it without assistance from an ambulance, that gravel road and the no-bridge concept is suddenly a really bad idea.
I think it's ignoring more than just 20% of the problems, it's ignoring looking (and planning) ahead, and understanding that not all factors are known, especially not in lower-populated areas.
And then there is the power imbalance a supplier will have over a small rural town, as it is unlikely that there is much to choose from, and no real power to influence a large company anyway. So now you're stuck with undrinkable water, bad internet, and barely any healthcare.
I think this is an unfair statement. You make it sound like rural communities intentionally do not plan ahead, which is both a generalization and inaccurate.
I've lived in (very) rural communities that definitely plan ahead. When the consequences of not planning ahead can include death or financial ruin, the incentive to plan ahead is high.
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2021-02-24/new...
There are many farmers who would love to manage their land more holistically, but recognize that it's financially impossible to do so unless they get lucky and hook a privileged group of rich people who are willing to pay an extreme premium for their food in order to buy non religious indulgences to relieve their guilt for their own contribution to the problem.
And really, to lay blame for this problem on the backs of any singular entity alone is absurd. It's a systemic problem that every single one of us participates in.
All hail Moloch. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Wait, don't answer that. Instead, tell me how much time you've spent studying rural economies, rural infrastructure, and the development of rural communities over time.
Rural life usually is on well and septic, which is hyper-local.
I do agree that it requires looking ahead but that's kind of what the OP is saying the solutions they are being given are not looking ahead to the realistic problems they are actually facing no?
Disease is a particularly curious example because disease spreads much more readily in an urban environment. Moreover, just because you're in a rural area doesn't mean you live far from a hospital. My parents live in a rural area and they're 5 minutes from a clinic and 20 minutes to a hospital (perhaps a dozen hospital options in a 40 minute radius and multiple world-class healthcare options in a 3 hour radius). But yes, if you are seriously disabled and you have no meaningful community to help you, then you're probably going to have a hard life in a rural area.
Further still, if you move everyone out of rural areas, then you are basically committing your food production to large-scale industrial farming operations as that's the only way it can be done with sufficiently few people.
> And then there is the power imbalance a supplier will have over a small rural town, as it is unlikely that there is much to choose from, and no real power to influence a large company anyway. So now you're stuck with undrinkable water, bad internet, and barely any healthcare.
ISP monopolies are a problem everywhere, and I don't know why a rural community with their own wells would be subject to worse water quality than an exurban community like Flint or urban communities like Jackson, Baltimore, or NYC. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-growing-drinkin...
There are also a lot of benefits to living in rural areas--fresher food, cleaner air, access to more/better nature, closer-knit community, dramatically less violent crime, etc.
Mainly for human-only diseases. Bacterial and fungal diseases can be a much different story. Still a couple of naturally occurring anthrax cases in USA per year in rural areas even.
> Moreover, just because you're in a rural area doesn't mean you live far from a hospital.
This is often a U.S. thing since they have subsidized “critical access hospitals”
It took me awhile to realize the necessity of building infrastructure this way. Strongtowns talks a lot about this -- for instance, see this piece about how many cities in the US cannot afford their own water infrastructure [1].
It makes sense that larger, more dense, more economically productive areas need and can afford different infrastructure than more rural areas. If you mandate or incentivize rural areas to use the same infrastructure as the more urban ones, you can often end up with problems.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/12/1/we-cant-afford...
> whether there should be a small community in that location at all
This isn't particularly actionable; we can't just forcibly uproot people. Moreover, liberals (including me) and progressives usually (and rightly) advocate for the state subsidizing public services for communities that can't afford them--e.g., quality schools and libraries and so on in low-income communities, but then when it comes to rural communities, there's often an attitude that rural communities are leeching resources that rightly belong to larger areas (especially urban centers) and that their problems are their own fault (despite that most rural people were born in their environments). This seems pretty philosophically inconsistent.
By the way, I don't mean to impute this sort of attitude on the parent, by the way--his "whether there should be a community in that location at all" remark made me think of it, but I don't think he intended it as urban chauvinism.
That's what I read.
The weird rural inferiority complex presented as the pretense that outsiders are looking down the country folks seems a lot more common than any actual down-looking. It's almost tempting to think that the source is actually a hierarchical worldview more commonly embedded in the minds of rural-dwellers.
Personally I'd guess that lifespan and/or various quality of life measures don't correlate neatly along any urban-rural divide, so if I wanted to disabuse someone of the notion that they did, I'd go looking for statistics to that effect. If they show life expectancy for rural communities is the same or higher, then the question is answered. If they show life expectancy is lower, surely solving that problem would be more important than rural pride... unless of course that hierarchical worldview speculation is correct.
That’s a problem
I think the chance of the feds paying for the replacement is doing a lot.
[1] https://blog.midwestind.com/converting-paved-to-unpaved-road...
For 4WD vehicle owners in your rural community who don't need an ambulance, I guess?
I mean, it's sorta reasonable to argue that this is OK for you personally (until your next hip fracture or stroke, anyway), but... you can't run a "community" well this way. What happens to elderly residents? I'm guessing they live in the wilds until they're too old and then move to a facility in the exurbs? Likewise anyone who needs regular health care access for chronic conditions isn't a fit.
Bluntly: you're still being subsidized. Even if you don't take cash from the government for your infrastructure[1], you're still riding on the ability of the rest of society to take on the people who you can't support.
[1] And I don't buy for a moment that you don't get any infrastructure funding. Your power lines and phones are regulated and required to be provisioned at a loss, if nothing else. Mobile and internet access is subject to similar laws in many states.
Also, no one here uses an ambulance the hospital is nearly two hours away. You call 911 and a helicopter comes. You pay $120 / year per household for the helicopter evac coop or you pay a few grand when they pick you up.
Edit: You do not need four wheel drive or all-wheel drive. The water crossings are capable in any vehicle with a standardish ride height (my 2001 Legacy can manage it with only ~6" of clearance). And these dirt roads are not like private ones you might have seen. These are well made and maintained roads. No more pot holes than a well kept paved road.
And you don't see the dissonance here? Why does that call even go through? You think the phone company can make that happen based on the sub-million/month bills your community pays? Of course not, they take a huge loss. Someone made sure you had phone service!
Likewise someone made sure you had roads. I know you think they didn't, but they did. Nowhere in the continent is more than two hours drive from a paved state road artery, you probably use two or three every week. And that paving happens out of state coffers paid for by cityfolk. Likewise the helicopter rides you're talking about don't make money, and it's laughable to think they do. Emergency services are subsidized everywhere, the only profit-making ambulances you see are in (yes) cities where they can lean on more statistically reliable business and more typically insured customers.
Your focus on the specifics ("bridges" vs. "infrastructure") is obscuring the truth that your rural lifestyle is, like all such environments, very heavily subsidized by urban taxpayers. It's simply not possible to operate a modern society at that density. It's just not.
I agree you have broken bridges and unpaved roads and raw river fords and whatnot that no one is fixing for you or trying to making you fix. I just don't see how that's interesting?
There's a lot of truth in it. You think there's bad regulation in tech? It's nothing compared to regulation on farming and ag generally.
In terms of solutions, the only one I've ever seen proposed which I think could work would be to have governing bodies for rural areas (and this could apply more broadly to areas of society), where they are free to make laws as it pertains to the area of responsibility of the group, with a coordinating body overseeing the groups to design for efficiency and arbitrate where conflicts arise.
This isn't a disagreement, I'm just pointing out how great regionalism/federalism could be for the UK
The GLA is not a legislative body at all.
The mayor is responsible for transport and, uhh, that's about it.
p.s. FWIW I don't think you should be downvoted for this comment. You were right.
This is basically subsidiarity which says to make decisions at the lowest possible level.
That's the issue here.
We could solve it the way you say, but then we'd need an actual market, and when supplies ran low to import and to accept many farmers going bankrupt and their land being sold off to farmers who do do it right. That's been politically verboten for at least 50 years.
Maybe it's true, but how likely is it?
It's more likely the farmers have concerns that are not being addressed. I can easily see "You should do this because it will make more crops and we don't care about your increased financial burden from it".
First, in many cases, the local operators (who are often not owners) are not especially autonomous, and may be acting on behalf of corporate concerns or decisions made far away, not infrequently in entirely different countries. To that extent, governmental regulation is a countervailing force to corporate power.
Secondly, ag, food production generally (e.g., fishing and grazing), and forestry are classic cases of the somewhat maligned "tragedy of the commons" situation. Localised decisionmaking absolutely can and has resulted in long-term and permanent degradation of ecosystems and populations. This includes the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin as well as much of Europe, old-growth forests within the US, much of the Amazon jungle, and tropical woodlands throughout the world. (That some of this has occurred due to or subject to government planning doesn't negate the fact that much of the interest is corporate and commercial.) Even local small-scale decisionmaking can be exceptionally detrimental. Collapses of fisheries such as sardines off Monterey, California, cod off the Grand Banks, and elsewhere, commercial whaling, overgrazing throughout much of the world, and decimation of wild animal populations including the North American bison and passenger pigeon.
Third, ag production is governed by a huge array of factors ranging from local soil quality and conservation (see the recent HN article on topsoil loss within the American Midwest), seasonal weather forecasts, and international trade policies, tarrifs, credits, and the like.
In all, there are strong arguments against strictly local decisionmaking, no matter how unpopular that fact may be locally.
In practice within the US, the Department of Agriculture is among the most distributed federal departments, with both a strong presence in the District of Columbia and numerous field, research, and teaching operations throughout the country. "Distant federal oversight" is a poor description of the actual situation.
What you're describing is different priorities, which I completely understand. But if those changes are forcing farmers to take on more of a financial responsibility (as an example), then maybe the ones making those decisions should be more willing to consider that in their decision making.
It's not a matter of these farmers not understand, but that they don't agree.
It's like security people telling developers they're not allowed to execute powershell scripts on their local machine. It's easy for them to make that decision because they don't deal with the pain of it.
> the reason agriculture has to be run more centrally is because farmers are actually amazingly bad at farming. There are entire offices filled with people who's job is to try and convince farmers to do things that work. From new crops to new technology to when to plant to climate change, farmers just refuse to budge.
If farming were a market and farmers were self reliant like other businesses it would be none of my business how they ran things (within the usual bounds of not eating babies etc). But it's not, farmers get the majority of their income from government subsidies. So they're free to fuck up actually farming because they get those either way. In that environment, you need someone to actually be responsible for output who is motivated to care.
absolutely not what I said, if you want me to engage you seriously please read back over and avoid the strawman.
You have assumed it's the farmer. But he just inherited (or rents) some land. And since the majority of his income comes from subsidies, there is no reason to assume he is competent.
On the other hand you have actual experts with real field trial results.
That's my point here.
These subsidies were created to affect the behavior of farmers and now there's bitching that farmers want to keep the behavior that most benefits them and people are doing it by trying to argue these farmers are just bad for doing exactly what people initially wanted them to do.
If you think farmers are using the same techniques they were back in 1066 then perhaps you're strawmanning more than just me.
Remember that each farm is a complex system, often managed over multiple human lifetimes. Consider that farmers may have management goals beyond producing the optimal-on-paper calories/hectare this year, or whatever other arbitrary definition of "good" is chosen.
The bucolic picture of farms as family homes combined with a flock of peaceful sheep, a family dog, and some silly chickens and a hard working sole proprietor is really hobby farming and a primarily aesthetic thing at this point.
The real world of the countryside is one of industrial extraction/production, but where somehow homes are mixed in. Not saying this is ideal, but a lot of the conflict that arises is around the disjoint nature of our traditional view of "the countryside" vs what it's actually "for" (industrial farming + future suburban development + mixed residential uses)
no one can say that with certainty, you use the same rhetorical trick as people in politics when "progress is inevitable"
bad news for everyone -- the industrial world has spoiled the nest.
Myself, I am generally what you'd call anti-capitalist by convictions; but I've lived rural most of my life. And never in the actual "industry" that dominates the rural world, just... next to it.
It's been a while since I looked at it and it depends on what you consider a "small farm" to be. But when I last checked a few years ago, farms employing little or no outside laborers were a small minority. And more significantly here, those households were both above median household income and half or more of their income came from outside-the-farm sources.
You can twiddle with it if you want but to me that seems like a pretty reasonable definition of "hobby farming." Which is not a value judgement per se. Not being strictly dependent on farm income allows these farmers to pursue traditional or sustainability-focused practices that may not be economically viable otherwise.
But just be clear-eyed about it. The ideal of the small, self-sufficient, productive and profitable family farm is just that, an ideal and to a large extent a myth. In a very serious way it's not how things ever worked and, maybe unfortunately maybe not, it's not how they're going to now either.
professional researcher speaking -- your elementary-school approach is for someone else
> I last checked a few years ago, farms employing little or no outside laborers were a small minority.
news to no one
> You can twiddle with it if you want but to me that seems like a pretty reasonable definition of "hobby farming."
dismissal with faint praise, check
> The ideal of the small, self-sufficient, productive and profitable family farm is just that, an ideal and to a large extent a myth.
you now speak for all people in all ages, (edit) confident? If you want to show up as a voice of reason, you will need to show some better understanding of economic contexts over the last thousand years, not the latest NYTimes
I will offer this -- economics as a science was invented to explain food trade, not the other way around! Food trade is the basis of empires, armies and abundance.. speaking of which.. while "family farming is a myth" the violence of armed warfare, its destruction and death, is not a "myth" .. maybe those humans who chose to wage war might have literally killed off the ones who attempted to wage "family farms"? History is written by the winners so, "family farms" are a myth while War gets daily headlines and new fresh billions in weapons and monetization ?
The burden of proof to refute that "family farming is a myth" in the face of daily war news in a place that is renown for fertile soils?
rural Mississippi might be part of this discussion, but so are the plains of Canada, and Argentina, and Eastern Europe. I have no chance of accurately describing histories in South East Asia, big parts of Africa or South Asian subcontinent.. but those people have "family farms" right now?
let's agree to set aside the personal indignations -- this topic is massive and I suggest, not at all solved.
No more than saying that a two-income household is "hobby working." The reality of a farmer needing multiple sources of income (including non-farm income) does not make it a hobby farm. A hobby farm is a very specific thing and includes the word "hobby" for a reason: the primary goal is not to generate income, like any other hobby.
Depends on your debt load. My small farm is now sufficiently profitable with most of its debts paid off. If you are carrying massive debt like many farmers you need to grow bigger and bigger just to eke out a small margin as most of the potential profits are handed away to creditors.
It also depends on what you want. Often farmers purposefully drown themselves in debt in order to have amassed extensive wealth later in life. They could keep a tidy "mom and pop" business but want more. It's a question not unlike that faced in tech: Do you aim for nice little business that keeps you comfortable or try to blow up to be the next FAANG?
The profitable small farm is common enough, particular among the older generations who have their debts paid off, but, of course, those who remain small are much less visible. The casual onlooker only notices the big farmers with the big equipment, big buildings, and big acres. That no doubt skews perceptions.
The purchase of said farms and the paying off of said debts wouldn't happen to be enabled by a long career in tech by said older generations, would it?
However, what I was referring to is that many older farmers just slogged through many years of making nothing until the debt was paid off. Not a whole lot different to what the indebted younger farmers are doing, as described in my previous comment, just that they're 40-50 years deep into the process and now sitting on that wealth.
Farming is hard, low margin work.
I think the truth of your statement depends on local environment. In the area I grew up there are still small families running dairy operations. They have admitted it's getting harder to keep the farm competitive.
I agree farming has consolidated considerably since the mid 20th century. It's consolidation by design - the federal gov't has pursued policies to encourage consolidation. From a cost efficiency standpoint, it makes a lot of sense, but it has cost a lot of people their livelihoods.
The joke is, to make a million dollars in farming, start with two million.
https://apnews.com/article/politics-environment-iowa-des-moi...
Farmers don't care. They care about profits, not sustainability which is why they are fine letting the top soil just erode away. They know at some point they will be bailed out despite their complete irresponsibility in managing their resources.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-say...
Finally, there is some talk about gravel roads being the right choice for rural areas but that's not so clear cut. The cost for maintaining gravel roads is significantly higher than indicated and you often need more than just a grader and dump truck because these roads are prone to washing out which requires major repair. The initial cost of paved roads is higher up front, but the maintenance costs are lower over time. Gravel needs to be maintained yearly.
https://blog.midwestind.com/road-maintenance-costs-unpaved-v...
Rural residents rarely feel the actual cost of maintaining their lifestyle. Miles and miles of county roads servicing a handful of people a day. In Iowa roughly 40% of the population lives in rural areas and there are 98,000 miles of road to support them. While the other 60% of the population needs 17,000 miles of road to support their daily activities and that's putting all highways on the city side of the budget. Rural residents love to talk about how much cheaper their lifestyle is, but they are being heavily subsidized by people who live in the suburbs and urban areas while pretending to be "fiercely independent" and "self sufficient".
the idiocy of nanny state lawmakers never ceases to amaze me
But why would you need s license for a fish processing plant? Why shouldn't anyone (whose facility fullfils hygiene criteria) be able to open one?
https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear... <-- supply management
https://ppaq.ca/en/ <-- Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers... much of it is in French.
A number of industry unions were established at this time, a lot of which has lingered into the modern era. The most famous no doubt being the dairy industry, which has long been a particularly notable point of contention with the USA in trade relations. Dairy processors in Canada are encumbered in a similar manner, requiring quota to be able to operate.
"Shouldn't" requires opinion, which are best left in our own minds, but "can't" is a functional necessity of maintaining a union. If anyone could open a competing plant, with the only requirement being to meet hygiene criteria, they could destabilize other processors which is what these unions were established to prevent.
Isn't socialism an urban phenomena? How did socialism develop in rural areas?
Once NAFTA opened the US floodgates, though, it was compete or perish and that quickly changed attitudes as the old ways were largely no longer sustainable, except where certain trade restrictions were able to be maintained (dairy and poultry, for example). There has been a push towards 'Americanization' in rural Canada over the last 30-some-odd years in an effort to remain competitive.
But the tldr; is that land/resource ownership, the distribution of surplus value and softening the blows of the market when your produce depends on the weather are extremely relevant concerns of rural areas
These producers set up on co-operative lines, first locally i.e. most dairy areas had a creamery or something in each village. Over time these merged to take advantage of scale, especially in the 1970s and 1980s to compete internationally with the loss of the UK market to the EEC. Even today the largest NZ dairy company, Fonterra, is a supplier-owned co-operative, though it's now big enough to warrant a private segment on the New Zealand Stock Exchange for them to trade with each other. On the purchasing side a similar pattern emerged, and purchasing co-operatives are still common especially in the agriculture sector.
BTW, this is Newfoundland where, left to their own devices free from interference from “nanny state lawmakers”, the local fishing industry used improved technology and salt-of-the-earth rural knowhow to … deplete fishing stocks so quickly and efficiently that the cod catch fell to 1% of historic levels by the time a 30 year moratorium was declared in 1992.
The maintenance and management of the illusion that the Newfoundland coast’s core industry, and the “outport” communities like the Change Islands that depend on it, are viable, and the softening of the landing of their decline, has been a project of that annoying nanny state for like a half century at this point.
There’s no fish processing facility on those islands because there are eventually going to be no little fishing boats and no town. Stand back a bit, and it’s 185 people whose net-negative presence on some remote islands is being subsidized at a massive loss by the rest of society.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c0da63a0-6bc5-11e7-b9c7-15af748b6...
But restarting fishing won’t help the outports much if at all, because the efficient solution to the problem of someone needing to go out into the ocean to get a bunch of cod changed from being a town acting as an aircraft carrier for small fishing boats into a large fishing boat that returns straight to a larger port, and the industry as a whole employing an order of magnitude fewer people.
I agree with you, but I think you're being condescending.
I agree with you that the industry has changed and certain ways of life wont be sustainable in that context. It's unfortunate.
I share some of the attitude, because farming and fishing get weirdly good branding compared to other extractive industries. This thread is full of people opining about how things would be better if only the government would stop pushing regulations they don't understand on hardworking farmers who know better. I live in the US state of Iowa and it's a truly laughable sentiment. There was a recent local public radio call in show where water quality experts and environmental engineers were told by a caller to "try riding along in a combine sometime to see what it's really like out there". These people are experts in their fields and have absolutely studied farming, but get talked down to by large agribusiness concerns like they're naive little kids.
It makes me really angry to see, when the environmental harms agriculture in my state commits are so well documented. With that context, I tend to come to these conversations with a lot of extra salt.
Presentation is everything. If, say, experts started pushing regulation to require that developers practice TDD, even if we’ll justified, without consultation with the developers to hear out their concerns you'd get the exact same kind of pushback. "try programming alongside me sometime and see what it is really like"
There are plenty of exports who are actually out there in the combine, both metaphorically and quite literally. It is not a novel approach to get closely engaged with farmers when your research affects farmers, just as you would expect in any other industry. Those who fail to participate with the actual people their research involved end up looking like they are the ones talking down to others like they are little kids, and that's where you get the emotional reactions.
1. Would directly be a free speech issue 2. Doesn't involve the same kind of externalities 3. Doesn't involve a narrow range of powerful industries 4. The primary thing I hear from experts isn't mandating how farmers do things, but rather advocating for regulations on the effects of ag activity.
Now, if you wanted to start narrowing it down based on security, safety, and market cap you might get closer, but it's still not a great analogy.
Point number 4 is a crucial one - I don't need to know what farming is like to think they shouldn't be given an exception to the point source regulations other industries have to comply with, when their tile lines are dumping nitrates into our waterways. It's especially galling given the sheer magnitude of direct and indirect subsidies that I'm helping to pay for, and the fact that we've been told for years that the voluntary nutrient reduction strategy will get farmers who "know the land best" to "do the right thing".
I'm done holding hands - this isn't a question of your friendly neighborhood farmer (I directly support several through CSA, and they're great). We're talking about heavy industry that we're already paying. We should demand more for the money, period.
It doesn't need to be a realistic hypothetical as the only relevant bit is the reaction, and we all know that is exactly what would happen. Curiously, this emotionally charged attempt to find fault in the comment is rooted in the exact same behaviour of which we speak. If I "rode in your combine" when presenting it the reaction would be quite different, but since I sit in my "ivory tower" a visceral response is prompted. Quite predictable, of course, and a perfect example of how presentation is everything.
> this isn't a question of your friendly neighborhood farmer
Nobody other than your friendly neighbourhood farmer is prepared to have you in their combine ready to show you what it is like. The people behind faceless big agri business are sitting in office towers in the big city and couldn't care less about what some small time Iowan radio station has to stay. Radio isn't where policy is set and they know it. Not that I'm sure that changes anything as if there is a problem that the friendly neighbourhood farmer is causing it needs to be addressed, but still, presentation is everything.
> We're talking about heavy industry that we're already paying. We should demand more for the money, period.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda – I guess. Thing is, the feedback loop between consumer want and on-farm results is incredibly tight. Services like CBOT provide farmers updates in real-time about what consumers want of them and any farmers who don't react will have their lunch eaten by those who pay attention. Something is holding you back, and whatever it is that is holding you back may be more significant than you are letting on.
The problems mentioned come partly from having too many part numbers. That is, how much inventory do you need to be able to fix something? It's not the level of technology. It's the lack of standardization.
Companies hate standardization. It allows customers to switch too easily. It makes repair too easy.
The physical dimensions and interface (available pins with functions) would be an ongoing standard (think similar to washer or screw sizes today).
The CPU would probably have to be, or be capable of sufficiently emulating (hard realtime accurate) a target profile and speed. There are several likely candidates among existing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations (RISC-V implementations); for micron-controllers Berkeley's BOOM might be a bit much, but is more likely to be useful in MMI ((hu)Man Machine Interfaces) and user-facing systems, while there are at least 4 useful Microcontroller unit designs that look suitable for programmable controller card use.
Oddly, though I mention cooling, heating might also be required for devices exposed to harsh winter conditions. It might be suitable for a design to be mounted adjacent to an external heating block.
A team of experts in the field (rather than someone who years ago might have had such a future as a possible career path) would be better than I at picking the winner and initial profile targets. However those targets should probably have a wide range, possibly from some embarrassingly low Hz mode for 'sleep' / standby / simple toy use (E.G. the chips are reused in products rather than modules), to a low, moderate, reasonably fast, and high performance mod as possible options for industrial products with different demands. Thinking of potential higher order demands (vector graphics printers, CNC machines of various sorts, etc) the more fully featured Berkeley https://boom-core.org/ (64 bit, with IEEE fp) design might be a better fit; possibly enough to have two grades, with the higher end BOOM design able to emulate the responses of the initially power / space optimized designs. Though experts in the field might find that irrelevant compared to economies of scale from a single design (and the potential of binning to move partial failures to lower market segments).
Why not just capitalize that h? HMI is a standard initialism anyways.
I suspect it is just that the grandparent is older that 40 and has worked with/in manufacturing.
I work in the industry so I can't say too much (don't ask questions)
Fans are not allowed, this system must be passively cooled. Fans just bring in dust and soon the cooling fins are clogged. Not to mention most fans won't last long enough. Remember equipment in this space is expected to work for decades with minimal maintenance.
You can get that now.[1]
But there are too many products in that space. If there were 10-20 standard vehicle electronics boxes for trucks and ag equipment, maintenance would be much easier. Manufacturers would hate it. The EU or China might mandate something like that.
Were there a fleet of same-model ferries operating close together, then their repair and parts would be readily available nearby. Were it actually important economically for the town to be continually accessible, a ferry repair facility would be located on the route.
It's not about the solution to this specific ferry problem (though generally: find more appropriate technology, or find ways to support brittle technology in a remote location) than it is to recognise the class of problems.
To head off the inaccurate assumptions that designers can sometimes make, the project is fostering collaborations between infrastructure developers and experts in community engagement. In particular, Sengers's research group will be looking at the social impact of technology on rural communities and how those issues might inform the design of new technology or policies developed for this kind of infrastructure.
I've seen a few family farmers, for example, and they seem very well aware of the importance of equipment that they can maintain themselves, and they also DIY a large number of pragmatic necessities.
But look around at our own field's technology design right now, and it's often:
* By people who don't understand the application domain, and apparently don't care to understand it.
* By people focused -- not on the interests of the users -- but on the interests of some other party. (For example, any time you see what we currently recognize as UX dark patterns, and then the other engineering effort against users' interests, for which we might not yet have terms.)
* By people who'll make technology choices for individual gain, not even gain of their company. (For example, to add a marketable new stack keyword to resume, even when it's clearly inappropriate for theis project and the company right now. Or to do an unwarranted new project, so that it can be credited to them.)
* By people strutting around and posturing about their skills/impact/status. (Contrast with your stereotypical small family farmer, where boastfulness is frowned upon.)
Maybe it'd help us to think of those stereotypical farmers, to remind ourselves of humility and user-driven design.
For example I live in a big city where they built an interstate spur that was essentially unneeded in the 60s because nobody expected the cities to start decaying in the late 60s, so they demolished the unused spur a couple decades later when it was apparent the city was permanently blighted and would never grow in that direction.
Insert a zillion "bridge to nowhere" stories here for a similar transportation infrastructure fail.
Another big city story: A local hotel/condo development wanted the entire city to pay for a light rail system for bragging purposes. They got it. It connects to very little and very few people ride it, but paying off the politicians to get it was less expense than the marketing bragging increased the sales price. Admittedly this is a corruption story not a civ-eng transpo engineering failure.
I mean, yeah, its sad whenever a "solution" makes things worse, but it's not specifically a rural problem. Reformers usually make money off making things worse, its a very old human story.
Ultimately people who don't live in the environments things are being designed for might be predisposed to assume that advanced is better (or even the only option). The article argues that this is not always the case and we should take that into account.
Two ferries?
A ferry with four outboards on the back and more in storage, so the operator can swap them out when they break?
I think you just proved the point the article was making. You aren't pushing a blue-water, RoRo ferry [1] with a couple of outboards.
1 - https://www.gov.nl.ca/ti/files/ferryservices-schedules-photo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem
There may be limits to what you can do with a modern ferry, but it would be nice that if when everything else fails, it just revert back to being a "dumb ferry". So you'd be able to use it, but only in fair weather, or with more staff, something like that. Then you yank out the broken bit and install a replacement. While knowing very little about ferries, I suspect it's the integration of systems that makes repairs difficult.
<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fogo+change+island+ferry+site%3A.c...>
Upshot / TL;DR:
The new ferry, the MV Veteran, was built by a Dutch firm, and at least one set of repairs required it being returned across the Atlantic to Europe for an engine refit. Substitute service had been provided by, variously, a sister ship, the Galatea, the older ferry that Veteran and Galatea replaced, MV Earl W. Winsor, as well as a fourth ship, MV Legionnaire, fixed-wing and heliocoptor aircraft, the latter at standard sea-based ferry rates.
This 2017 article discusses then-current issues as well as a five-year history of troubled reliability:
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/mv-vete...>
Per the article’s main theme: we should eliminate the time and place problem by mostly not living in remote locales where we don’t need to, and do whatever we can to minimize the impact of distance for those who have to.
When the Stay Behind cohort has the power to veto, accommodation becomes extortion.
Worse, Stay Behind often thwart efforts to help Left Behind.
Every budget cycle, my state argues about funding public education. It'd be easy to write off the Left Behind, especially since the Stay Behind work to end public education, especially since rural areas are subsidized (accommodated).
But the wiser, calmer nannies in the capital fight to keep the rural schools funded, as best able. Can't abandon people just because they were born in the wrong zip code.
Then the Stay Behind always extracts some concessions to allow the nannies to help the Left Behind. Aka extortion.
And Stay Behind despises the nannies for the effort.
I also eventually made the same choice, and switched my parents from Linux to Mac after I realized that Linux was definitely not the Right Thing for them. Still had to learn the lesson, though :P
Cos you know, you might start to ask why are you paying them.