m_coder

I am quite confident that a normal 16 year old will can still drive in 6 inches of snow better than the most advanced AI driven car. I am not sure the snow driving bit will ever be solved given how hard it is.

And with thoughtful care could do a better job a transforming it some more.

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.

I believe you are on target. Small plots of land are on average far more productive per acre than large mono cropping plantations.

"Dacha gardening accounts for about 3% of the arable land used in agriculture, but grows an astounding 50% by value of the food eaten by Russians." (from https://smallfarmersjournal.com/russian-dacha-gardens)

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.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31237965

>>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

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?

>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale compressed air energy storage system (CAES).

Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in real life not just theory with no howto steps .

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.

And moving to five children is another level. :) Parenting is what you do not a side project. Also the effects of parenting are more like keeping a good culture going and showing what are healthy ways of relating so that children can relate well to each other and enjoy being part of the family.

Have you had the fish from well run systems like this? I think it is fantastic. Data point of one.

>> Unsold inventory is the curse of retail.

Absolutely. I run a small retail pet-farm store location. This is such a curse, that I often wonder why it isn't talked more about among small retailers. Certainly the salespeople from the different suppliers never ever talk about about it for obvious reasons. The problems with not talking about it to me is that I may go out of business if I don't understand this principle/curse.

I use Square all day every day here at my pet store. The killer feature for Square is the consistent pricing. There are no add on fees and no clowning around. You get the same 2.75 percent on (almost) every transaction and it builds a lot of trust. There are a few cards where it goes up a little but not enough to bother me.

>>learn Pennsylvania Dutch and join the Amish.

I know Amish people and have grown up Mennonite. There is a significant way of thinking that is very hard (though not impossible) to overcome coming in. This is true even if you have a supporting Amish community and find language learning easy.

I am very interested in this process and how it feels to those on the outside coming in. Let me know if you attempt this.

I was going to say something very similar. People have a (faulty) fake radar and if you are trying to just remarket crops without raising them yourself, you better have a good sales line if the next stall over is a family selling the produce that they have grown themselves. People like to meet and support the person who is responsible for the entire process.

And now I am very glad that I never used Google Drive for much of anything. I never had a good gut feeling about drive in general and especially after I read about a man who lost a year's worth of stuff with no recourse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612854

The space isn't what is used efficiently by industrialized agriculture (for the most part). The efficiency comes from saving time by having large machines. Space is used most efficiently when you have people actively involved on small plots.

>>Having a 1 acre garden as a hobby, is huge ecological violence

Can you explain how this hobby is so violent? I don't think I am following the line of thought.

The typical one acre hobby garden is farmed with far fewer chemicals than the typical commercial farm. There is far more diversity and a better balance of minerals. Compost is often used and waste is effectively recycled.

I really wonder what how much food could be produced if all the lawn and empty lots in a city were effectively productive as vegetable plots. I know that it can't be used because people like their lawns and things but often there is unused space in densely populated areas.

I was hoping that someone would mention biochar. Heating your house using the leftover heat from the process of creating biochar could be carbon negative.

Isn't the burden of the article poking at the people who have tremendous wealth and who use it to influence policy?

>> inflation exists precisely as a tax on savings

I don't think the article is suggesting that a person who has a savings account at the bank is the problem. Although the title is misleading in that case....

I had been itchy for quite a while in the field and thanks to a very generous boss and a wife who could put up with a very low standard of living, was able to do some farming part time last year. I realized that while I grew up on a farm, the area I lived in, didn't have enough of a farming network to allow getting started slow. It was all or nothing and I didn't like the prospects of either actually. If I would have been successful, I would have worked like crazy and not been home much. If I would have failed, it would be the same except for no fun at all. The pet store was up for sale and I did the figures and realized that if it all goes down in flames, I could still code myself out of the hole if needed. This gave me the courage to give it a try. I work much harder now in some ways and in other ways I work less. Hanging out and talking to people is now part of my job description. Working with animals and figuring out what makes them tick is also part of my job. People regularly show up and ask my opinion on what they should do with their dog itching and hot spots and stuff. Often, simply switching away from a cheap bottom dollar food to a better product is the answer and is far less expensive than a vet visit. OK done.....

I often hear testimonials from owners who say "I have been feeding this food for 14 years and my dog looks great!" I think that there could be such a thing as a good enough people kibble the same as I believe that many dogs live healthy and happy lives eating one kind of dog food all their lives. This is not to say that I believe all dogs could eat the same exact kibble all their lives and be perfectly healthy. Full Disclosure: I have owned a pet store for the last 8 months after getting tired of programming.

I know that no one here cares but VBA returns 0.3

Edit: however a better test of ?.1+.2-.3 in the immediate window now returns 2.77555756156289E-17 I wondered about that first result...

He isn't done 'hacking' either. He brings younger people to teach them what he knows and to learn from them and their ideas.

Thank you for confirming my gut response to that statement. This is very interesting.