I learned about permaculture from books in my native language (eg Louis De jager from food forest institute in Belgium). I'm no expert though. I did find docu like "The Biggest Little Farm" very inspirational.
My parents had a highly computerized feeding system on our farm. In the summers I worked student jobs in highly technological green houses picking tomatoes and pig slaughter houses besides the work on the farm. I've grown some form of scepticism from experience of the high degree of automation in food production systems from a consumer or operator side. Do mind I work in automation but it needs to bring more value than just playing with toys. Permaculture systems are designed to reduce or optimize usage of all resources also labor. You set up an ecosystem where pests are kept under controle by other organisms instead of relying chemical or mechanical controls. This is even more puritanical than classic organic farming where you rely on natural pesticides. I am from Belgium where we have the belgium blue white cow which is very highly yielding in meat because of a genetic mutation but you are very dependent on vets for giving birth via caesarians because of the high degree of muscularity. There is a trend towards other races like limousin for meat production. In biological systems theory of constraint applies very much were you are very dependent on limiting factors like micronutrients, vitamins or in this case microchips. Humans and hamsters are both the only animals that can't produce vitamin C which makes fresh fruit a limiting factor for us or we get scurvy. The reliance on natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer via the born haber proces is already a handicap in a polarizing world. Imagine being reliant for operation of your food production system on a geopolitical hotbed like Taiwanese computerchips. I do think technology can also help with the design of robust food systems. I know the food forest institute in Belgium has a course on using drones for surveyance.
Well this does go back to traditional high yield techniques like terra preta which besides making superfertile soil has the added benefit of being a carbon capture and soil preservation solution or the three sisters system where you get yields from three crops on one field and even get nitrogen capture from legumes. What does high yield mean in the short term when you are destroying your most valuable resource. Even if you have high yield one dimension, how efficient is this when you have multiple inputs and outputs and you end up in a pareto efficient situation. The highest yielding farms do not necessarily have the best scale efficiency. Permaculture and food forest systems can have very high yields if designed correctly. California is losing thousands of acres of land to salinization because of bad irrigation practices. Permaculture means to improve and protect to soil and increase water retention with the help of carbon content in the soil. I'm not from the US so I would'nt know about Indiana.
Nice project indeed, been following it for some time. I grew up on a farm, have agricultural and IT degrees and also worked in automation in farming, factories, cities and warehouses.
This project focusses on a technological solution to societal, economical and agronomical problems. You could try to make a cheap robot that does traditional farming like tillage, fertilizer and pesticide spraying, irrigation on a monoculture. Or you could design your farm with permaculture and foodforest principles which makes it like a self sustaining ecosystem that reduces a resource usage of water, labour, nutrients, pest control etc. Society leads people into bullshit desk jobs where they have to spend their free time in the gym to not become morbidly obese. I think society could benefit if people could enjoy at least part time doing manual labour growing food instead.
The farm commodity hedge markets are dominated by players who leverage private access and knowledge to make massive margins. I think decentralizing this market (by anyone and their brother) would certainly benefit producers and end consumers by increasing transparency and thus lowering these transaction costs and providing liquidity. What you are talking about are auctions (like for pigs, fish or flowers) and this is already invented, centralized and corrupted and they set prices for producers and consumers in secret meetings and calls (before that wasnt even outlawed). For distribution, how easy is it to set up an ecommerce shop and for distribution you have a lot of thurd party logistics service providers. By increasing competition between these service providers of distribution etc you would again lower costs for producers and prices for consumer instead of relying on massively vertically or horizontally integrated supply chain players. Few benefits from massive monoculture productions (certainly not producers, consumers or the environment). Do you really think there are no scandals in centralized quality control systems?
Talking about price volatility. Costs for producers and prices for consumers are increasing dramatically because central banks in the western world decided to print massive amounts of currency and buying zombie companies on the stock exchange. How are these currencies considered stable in any way? Look what is happening in is happening in Turkey or Lebanon. Even worse what the US is doing to the people of afghanistan.
Well I do know the specifics, I've worked on our farm. I've worked in and for processing plants and at food retailers. I did an engineering degree in agriculture with a minor in economics (plus some post grads in IT). We produced and sold our farm products at local farmers markets. I now work at the agricultural government agency of my local region. And I can tell you that the margins that those gatekeepers take are not proportional the service of marketing and distribution they provide. I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about mathematics and logic in the form of proof systems that have the authority that would otherwise be relegated to central enforcers. There is distributed ledger technology that already uses proof of stake like cardano or polkadot. As for high transaction cost and scalability of pos you should look into zero knowledge proofs which allows to package a massive amount of transactions into one proof that hides a lot knowledge and still allows for checking transactions: https://starkware.co/
if you ever worked at the bottom of a supply chain you would understand that there are currently major issues with gatekeepers levying high margins (note I grew up on a industrial farm). If a farmer could sell his product under a smart contract that garantueed a percentage of the transaction costs flowed back to him and end consumers would have greater transparency into the origin of its product their would be a nett societal benefit. Minig farms blablabla, you can use other proofs for verification (proof of stake) or scale it with zero knowledge proofs
I do think NFTs are a bubble now. By investors that think that one NFT is worth the same as the next one minted while it is just the exact pointe that they are not interchangeable. You don't get a piece unique with significant history attached. Mondriaan, Van Gogh and Monet were innovators now it is just a deep learning gan style trick. I do see the value of NFT in asset tracking of unique pieces to provide transparency, fairness and safety in supply chains.
This is all also described in the book "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams". Especially the importance of individual flowtime. I tried to explain this once to an agile coach and suggested he read that book. We then continued to stuff our faces with candy while he started a "flow" game mostly focusing on imaginary situations demonstrating that collaborating as much as possible increased the flow of the team.
I think causal inference is succesfull where it is impossible do an intervention to force a randomized trail on your population. Classical statistics like in agriculture that you set up a design and field trail to find out the interactions and additive effects is sometimes not possible. Say you want to check the effect of some economic policy change or medical treatment that would be unethical to refuse to some part of the population.
Well isn't the point of ubi that people less people could work. Productivity with automation has never been higher and we still work ourselves to death for less pay. We need to take the path of increased automation anyway since we've got some sort of ubi for the elderly population already. Now it's a burden for the young people. If we could automate a lot of basic needs like food production and processing, construction, transport etc you would have unlimited near costless basic needs met and provide for the elderly. Then it would just be panem et circenses but a bit more advanced and without the slavery and the need for empire building like the romans but just technological advancement and automation.
Well autism is sometimes labelled as individuals that are less "self-domesticated". Animals can be domesticated by humans and breeded to be tamer. Tame animals are more sociable towards humans, also have lower intelligenc and brain capacity since alot of their needs are met by the domesticator I guess. See the difference between cats/wild cats, dogs and wolves or foxes and domesticated foxes. Self domestication is the concept that we as humans have domesticated ourselves. At one end of the spectrum you have individuals that are less domesticated and fit in less with society (autistic people or psychopaths: generally lacking some sort of empathy (respectively cognitive and affective because there is a difference). On the other end of the spectrum you have Prader Willi and Angelman which are very tame and sociable but with lower cognitive abilities. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/...
money printing is done by handing it to banks at zero interest and flooded on the stock exchanges. The rich get richer and the poor can buy less with the same money since wages are the last thing to raise (while the rich buy up houses and commodities with their free money). Inflation is a tax on the poor and elderly. Literally since VAT is percentage-wise levied on relatively more expensive consumer goods and if wages rise they come in higher income pay scales for taxation. Crony capitalism at it's peak where the players get bail outs and handouts and the poor get poorer and the middle class disappears.
(a bit like the subprime mortgage bubble but for corporate debt)
Those faulty and badly managed companies got even more free money injected and are even more addicted to near zero interest rates because of covid...
Now if inflation becomes to high for consumers the feds have to choose between consumers or once again rescueing those companies when setting interest rates. Neither will turn out good
how about physical limitations when oil well's permanently can't restart after stopping because of covid lockdowns and a lot of other reasons (mainly very rich people who became much richer and start looking at commodities at one point to spend their less valuable currency) driving up commodity prices and devaluing currencies pegged to the US dollar. This causes consumers coming under pressure to be able to buy food or shelter since wages are the last thing to rise since inflation is tax on the poor and elderly (see the commodities boom driven by high oil prices and bio fuel crazes preceding the 2008 financial crash and arab spring but at a global scale). Not to mention a lot of baby boomers are retiring burdening all civilized nations (with pensions systems) increasing labor shortages and driving up all prices. TLDR restarting economies hitting limitations and shortages that can't be fixed by printing imaginary money
Using linked data to avoid vendor lock-in for goverments. DTDL is an ontology definition from microsoft to easily onboard new IoT devices. NGSI-LD is set of canonical data models that cities can re-use.
well you could validate data integrity based on
- feedback from consumers of the commodity
- some kind of built in monitoring with growth model benchmarking the different suppliers and instead of proof work do a decentralized/federated machine learning competition as a hard to falsify computation which uses private data for training and verification
I've worked at a mediacorp in user authentication team where one rogue junior developer from another team (with the most seniority though at that company subdividion because everybody else left) went behind my back to pressure my junior colleague to merge a pr in our codebase which opened a security hole in the back end because he was working together with a project lead who promised to deliver something that we couldn't.
I've worked on two seperate old code bases with pms who read the lean startup and they believed that technical debt does not exist. Seriously aggravating the situation thus. They did not seem to understand that the main thesis for that book is assuming that you have one in a million change of becoming a unicorn or selling the company to another party and cashing out.
The whole discussion of typed vs untyped is stupid. Types and structures are all around us (albeit simple or infinitely complex, eg inductive vs coinductive). It is rather a discussion about typesystems that check type constraints immediately before shipping and/or after shipping while running the program. Without a proper typesystem the programmer has to check the types in his mind, or the end user gets a runtime error.
For small hacks or prototyping type checking is not really required because of low overhead. But in non trivial larger, long running systems with a lot of maintenance the cognitive overhead is too big to not use a typechecker. Even if you decompose in microservices or microfrontends you still stuff like schema definitions and IDLs. Even hardcore ecmascript evangelists use linters extensively before shipping (potatoe/potato linter/typechecker)...
I've found myself in similar situation involved with evil forces within academia (which the corrupt system creates). Just get out of institutional/ bureaucratic academia and research. It will either make (you equally evil) or break you.