the difficulty of bringing produce to market is reflected in the cost structure. 90% of a food dollar goes towards all the efforts required to get food to the customer (transportation, packaging, warehousing, marketing, retail, etc).
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
We used to have a lemon tree. When it was producing, 80% of it went to waste. When it wasn't producing, we had to buy.
It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.
My parents have the biggest walnut tree I've ever seen in their yard. It's a similar situation as you described with the lemon tree. During fall we would get dumped with walnuts, filling multiple boxes; more than any of us care to eat in a year. So for many years, we've been sharing our walnuts with the neighbors, some of them I've only ever seen, when they ring to ask for the walnuts. In return they bring us some of their produce every now and then: cherries, onions, eggs, apples, apple cider, freshly baked cakes and jam. I would have loved to trade you some walnuts for those lemons.
You're assuming that the customer growing their own fruit could do it at lower overall cost. Logistics are fairly inexpensive all things considered, if they really represent 90% of the total cost of fruit it says a lot for how low agribusiness has driven down the cost of the other 10%.
I think for some types of produce, a home garden is an easy win when it comes to cost. Sure there are things that are very difficult (labor intensive, water intensive, etc.) to grow, so avoid those. But tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, potatoes, peas, and beans are pretty easy to grow, and seed stock can be purchased cheaply. I haven't done this as an adult because I am so excessively lazy (but it's on my to-do list for this year, finally), but we had a vegetable garden when we were kids, and between my mom, my sister, and I, it was very manageable, and we ended up growing more than we could use, and gave some away to neighbors.
Not really. I buy bare-root tree from home depot, throw it into the ground, and get fruit in a few years. No fertilizer, no anything, just give it water and sun. It's not rocket science.
Firstly, half the produce we buy does not grow well in our climate.
Secondofly, my parents both grew up on farms and have gardened most of their lives. They struggle to get a good yield between growing conditions, adjusting irrigation, and keeping the birds, hogs, deer, raccoons away.
Don't forget the bugs. My parents planted a cherry tree thinking the birds would be the biggest pest. Then we found every single cherry on the tree had a cherry fruit fly larva inside it. If you don't cover or spray them at the right time, the entire crop is ruined.
It's definitely science, and it definitely doesn't work that way for most people. Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.
> Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.
The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.
This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.
Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.
I wasn't making an argument against growing your own fruit, I was just helping explain why a lot of people don't do it. Personally, I am trying to grow blueberries.
Not just deer, but a number of insects will thank you for your generosity. And you will have to learn when and how to fight them in order to get a decent harvest.
water softeners in general are pretty bad. they're not great for your health, they're terrible for your soil. and the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best. i completely shut down my water softener.
> the benefits to pipes and appliances are marginal at best
It probably depends on how hard your tap water is. My tap water is really hard. because it all comes from a river fed via glacial runoff in the mountains, so a water softener makes a huge difference, to the point where the water even feels different in the shower. But if your water source is naturally softer, then I can see that it would make less of a difference.
not at all. the author, said he was getting his obligations done and making his boss's life easier. that's a win for both the employee, the boss and the company.
why do you think it's morally acceptable for an employee to negotiate as toughly as possible for his/her salary but not for their time? It's all a negotiation process. the key thing is, he's meeting his agreed upon obligations. whether or not you do it efficiently (like him) or inefficiently wasting all your time is up to you.
If you are salaried and can complete your tasks (job description) in under the alloted time, is the onus on you or your manager to find more tasks?
Why is ok for your employer to make you complete additional tasks, draining you of your excess energy, but not increasing your salary at all?
When there exists this productivity/energy gap, the default US view seems to be you should give it up to the employer, but the article author is instead keeping it for himself.
but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
reversing denied health insurance claims only changes who pays for it (end of the day premiums will probably go up proportionatly), it does nothing to reduce the overall cost which is a much bigger problem.
The argument that AI guys are making about the coming mass unemployment goes like this: those companies that are spending on AI rather than humans may have a huge competitive advantage that allows them to take marketshare from human run companies and thus there's less and less demand for human labor.
But, how many businesses/sectors of the economy actually need to compete for marketshare? we assume it's nearly all of them. if that were the case, we'd see AI taking over much quicker.
I am very skeptical of the argument that companies are competing with each other on market share. There is arguably a lot more competition between AI companies than in most of the sectors of our economy.
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
That would require them to accept it was the wrong decision.
I am doing the only thing I can: to vote with my wallet.
My current phone is a Sony Xperia and it has the headphone jack. I am listening to Hi-Fi music from Tidal right now, using the jack, and wired Crinacle earbuds.
meat uses up enormous quantities of water. potatoes for instance use about 75 gallons to produce 2000 calories compared to say 1500 to 2500 gallons for 2000 calories of beef.
For grass fed cattle, the vast majority of said water is from rain that would have fallen on the land with or without the cattle. It's not generally municipal supplies of water in use for naturally raised cattle.
Would it really be though? From my experience, most of the anti-meat crowd is against all meat, for any reason.
As to alternatives for real meat not grown as animals... we don't even get micro-nutrients for baby formula right... I won't trust alternatively grown meat for a very long time. I and my brother wouldn't have survived on conventional baby formula... I have issues with just about everything outside eggs and red meat.
As for all beef being grass fed/finished... I'd be way more than happy to see it become the norm, exceptions for snowy parts of the year only. I'd like to see regenerative farming, which pretty much requires ruminant cycles, be the norm everywhere... we need more ruminants, not less imo.
The most vocal anti-mean crowd, perhaps. I eat only free-range, sustainable meat from animals that had a happy life outside, instead of being locked up into tiny boxes. A lot of meat comes from factory farms where animals are force fed in boxes and never see the light of day.
I don't have a problem with hunting, as long as it's done sustainably. I have no problem with fishing, as long as it's done sustainably. The problem is that there are too many people and we cannot possibly feed them all meat every day in a sustainable manner.
A lot of the "meat uses too much water" arguments are stupid because they're based on food grown in places where it rains all of the water they ever use.
We drain the land in Iowa otherwise the north half of it would be a swamp. Complaining about water usage for all but the western edge of Iowa is much the same as complaining about how solar panels use up the sunlight.
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
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