Farmers fuming over California's ban on driverless tractors, other robots
nbcbayarea.com
nbcbayarea.com
This is NOT a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a fleet today will have someone watching almost all the time in one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1 ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g., at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a button, then that might already be all that is required. It certainly is logically.
If data connectivity is available.
Maybe a reasonable assumption now with starlink, but previously not so easy in a lot of rural area.
For control network you'd rely on local comms. Not generic telco grid.
And what of the other 38 states?
The graphic shows those tractors are also not adopted in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee, all top 10 farming states by acreage. [0]
California is an ironic example due to its tech industry, but hardly seems like something specific to "dysfunctional" California, as suggested by other commenters.
[0] https://www.agriculture.com/farming-across-america-a-state-b...
Of course, there is a strong case to be made that if you can't find enough people to help, you've simply bit off more than you can chew and that it is time to scale back your operation.
So provided the farm makes no investments on equipment or expansion, has a great year to get near maximum possible returns and all of that ends up as payment for labor, there is zero spoilage or waste, and you buy the cheapest possible flour, 10% x 1/5th = 2% is the highest possible amount of money you can expect from your flour purchase to go towards farmer's labor. If we use more realistic averages of farm profits it drops down to 1% or less, and if you include the costs of buying and upgrading farm equipment like any successful farm has had to do to stay alive throughout the last 40 years it drops even lower.
And if you look at the amount of land that a farmer needs to own (or god forbid rent) it looks like an even shittier deal for the farmer. At the US average of 40 bushels of wheat produced per acre planted, with a price of $5.55 per bushel, you get $222 per acre. With 90% of that going towards material input costs (its actually negative return on investment at that price but lets just assume 10% margin for the farmer's sake), that is only $22.2 per acre for the farmer, so in order for a farmer to earn $60,000 per year at that rate, they would need to farm about 2,700 acres of wheat, thats over 4 square miles. If we drop to only 5% margins, which is still better than most farms would ever expect, thats about 9 square miles of wheat they have to work. And you can double that again if you go for the more realistic expected margins of 2-3 percent. So unless you have a full 4 mile x 4 mile block of arable land, plus all the equipment needed to farm it, you couldn't really survive off anything less than a 4 mile sided square of wheat planting.
Also, whenever headlines say "Farmers [something]," they're not talking about actual farmers. They're talking about farm organizations like Farm Bureau that claim to speak for farmers but really speak for the ag industry.
Many such cases.
It’s no coincidence that the industries that have seen the most explosive growth and added the most value to the economy have also been the least regulated ones (e.g. software).
On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states. Wouldn't want those Massachusetts doctors or NYC financiers sticking their dick in Pennsylvania's farming economy or Maine's lumber and tourism economy and screwing it all up. Or vise versa. And those are the problems that CA suffers from.
If the argument not to is federal party politics there are plenty of solutions to slice and dice in a net-neutral manner.
That makes it sound like the eastern seaboard was originally the size of California, and then we recently decided to break them up when it was too big to effectively govern.
(I mean, I guess you could say that is what happened during the colonization of the area, and the Revolutionary War... I'll leave that debate to someone who studied more history than I did.)
Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
>Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
And their misery is their own doing so nobody feels bad for them in the way that people feel at least a little bad for CA famers who are getting crapped on by people the white collar workers elected or feels bad for LA being hamstrung by policy that appeals to SF and Sac or whatever.
Soon as you open the door to the conversation though your simple pipe dream is clogged by every land developer, US or overseas, environmental groups, etc
Because people outside the government exist and will engage. It’s opening a new lane on the freeway assuming it will help forever and it’s clogged in a couple years.
People flock to a void and a new set of states and legal boundaries is a knowledge void to fill with special interests.
But go ahead and forget every NGO, and people themselves and just put our agency at the whims of government. Not say government bad, just that no it won’t just be government dictating. And it should not be cause that’s how you get to “government bad”.
Not that simple. Other states, the small ones, will not permit [0] it to happen, since it would dilute their own unfair influence on the federal government, [1] the relic of an ancient join-up bribe from 1788.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S3-C1-4...
[1] https://medium.com/qri-io/youre-probably-underrepresented-in...
Most claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.