How AppHarvest's indoor farming scheme imploded | Hacker News Reader

How AppHarvest's indoor farming scheme imploded

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38 pointsrntn20 comments

> “People with billions of dollars became aware of this industry and they think it’s the wave of the future,” said Bugbee, “but it doesn’t mean there’s been a scientific shift. It staggers me how much money they’re putting in.”

This description seems like it could fit quite a few other disasters in different business-areas. Manufactured hype is taken as social-proof that something fundamental changed.

Oh, I know this story.

The founder/CEO from Kentucky got a business degree, moved to D.C. to work as a contractor on renewable energy projects and then in 2018 Congress passed a farm bill, to distribute over $40 million in grants to controlled environment agriculture. AppHarvest was founded in 2018. One of the lead investors? The USDA.

Just grifting taxpayers through the public/private revolving door, happens all the time. Maybe this story is especially interesting because it involves a startup and agriculture. If it were some military or management industry grift, it'd be just another Thursday.

ETA: I'd love to see a journalist look into any interests Kentucky elected officials had in any of the investors. Did anyone in Kentucky politics, either state or federal, make money off this?

Makes it hard to have any hope for the future of our politics, because this is the case at all levels these days. Everything political is just someone’s money-making scheme at the public’s expense. But hey, “greed is good,” right?

Back in the 80s it was popular to privatize all kinds of government functions, on the basis of the claim that the free market would provide better solutions. Somehow the scope of the transfer of money from taxpayers to private industry was not seen as distorting the market. At least, not as much a distortion as having the services be provided directly by the government.

I think America has entered a post labor world in which manual labor is getting harder, lower paid, and lowered value. Labor will always be needed, but there are less and will be even fewer of those jobs to go around. As more low income, low education laborers proliferate, it will get increasingly hard for others to get a job in that market.

> in which manual labor is getting harder, lower paid, and lowered value

I think the trades are paid more than ever, and they're scarcer than ever. I'm not sure this will change anytime soon.

AI is likely to make a respectable dent in knowledge work.

As soon as AI is embodied, via Boston Dynamics or Tesla or any of a number of other players, it will take a big bite out of the skilled trades as well.

I don't think that will happen nearly as soon as there AI automation. Navigating intelligently through 3D space with arbitrary obstacles has always proven the more challenging of AI tasks.

Disagree. Boston Dynamics has had locomotion solved for a decade. Vision systems have advanced significantly, as well as the human language interface. Both seem to have held back industrial robotics use since widespread deployment of the technology on auto assembly lines. These days, asking the computer to recognize a coffee mug on a dining table is no big deal.

> Boston Dynamics has had locomotion solved for a decade

Locomotion is not navigation, as you can see from the persistent failures of the self driving cars.

It's funny, where you see persistent failure, I see the engineering process at work and making previously unfathomable progress. Amazing what people take for granted.

Being consistently wrong in the estimates of how long it would take, despite the history of failures, does not make the projections reliable. It shows the problem is poorly understood, even now.

> Being consistently wrong in the estimates of how long it would take

I don't know if you've ever organized a group of people... If you want everyone to be together and ready to go by 8:00am, you will have to tell them to be ready by 6:00am. Else you will be late waiting for someone. The consistently wrong estimates you point to are exactly that. Else they wouldn't be consistent.

Again, where you see failure, I see effective management practice. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, good luck getting a robot to plumb or wire an entire house anytime soon.

Great example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

By this logic - and I’m not saying you’re wrong - a good strategy for low education workers would be to try and limit the supply and thus limit low education immigration.

Which would explain current American (and most of western Europe’s) politics and its right wing culture rather well, and indicate that low education workers make rather rational voting decisions.

Happy to hear other analyses :).

I really wanted to down vote your comment based on my own reactions to it, but I can't fault your conclusions.

Yeah, the problem with political discourse these days is assuming that the "other side" is irrational. Vast majority of people have beliefs that are at least defensible if you take care to look into their individual situation. They may be globally irrational, but they are usually locally rational (in the algorithmic sense of "global"/"local", not geographical).

(If in doubt, the reason for any widespread and stable set of beliefs is usually economical in nature.)

I’ve not heard anyone call them irrational for voting to protect their job access.

The irrational takes regarding immigration IMO are the ones suggesting immigrants are a unique source of increased crime, despite data analysis suggesting otherwise.

I wonder what the extended friends network looks like for a lot of folks here. I think maintaining diversity in your network of friends would go a long way towards preventing situations like this.

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