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For a very long time now, homeopathic remedies have been regulated by specific US law, called HPUS, and are labeled accordingly. They’re actually required to include examples of what they treat even though many in the homeopathic community would rather it be labeled more generally.

If you are of the opinion that there’s something that needs to be changed about this arrangement, your lawmaker is the one to contact.


What we don’t understand yet is what that means. We have never had such a thing before and it’s not clear what the patterns are that will make the best use of its known attributes with the least exposure to downsides — whether those be related to the tools, the end users, or the business stakeholders, or any other parties. Volumes more nuance to understand, and we’re just getting started.


Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.

The profit per unit area can become very high.


Does that scale? It seems like the planting and harvesting would be difficult to automate and/or require increased labor. However, I am definitely not an expert.


"Does that scale?"

Not in my experience.

The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.

Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.

But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.

And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.

So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)


I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.


The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.


your comment introduced me to the term permaculture, looks interesting. Do you leverage numerical optimization - linear programming or integer programming for example - in your work?


I’m a permaculture designer and have run a small vegetable farm. I have visited Polyface twice and spoken personally with Joel Salatin both times. I’ve read several of his books. I think that Polyface shows up in this discussion very much on the side of the systemic safeguards the article recommends. His farm is full of systems and safeguards a great many things by design. He plans for every risk he can think of and adapts his system in response. He got the farm from his father and has largely transferred it to his son, and they have built a business training both interns and the interested public in their methods.

Safety measures ≠ world-dominating industrial scale.


Sorry, I wasn't trying to claim that small businesses don't need any safeguards. For example, small businesses also need backups, they need TLS certificates, lots of industry-standard stuff. What they don't necessarily need are everything required by the checklists that are thousands of items long where every box must be checked to pass SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, etc.


You’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.


Company I worked for gave us all a copy of the book and made us go to a 3-hour presentation by the guy. I was not impressed!


Yes, it’s a mistake to design your company’s output in a way that results in shipping a defective product.


Is it a defective product, or is it a fully-featured demo that is just good enough to show companies what they could have if they host the software themselves? "You get all these features, plus all the speed and security that comes with running this in your own corporate environment"

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?


Looks like an Orthodox Christian family? If so I will write your baptism names down at church if you are willing to share them.


That's kind of you. You can email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com


Right, don’t use that, but there are well-implemented timeouts in network libraries, etc.


Hopefully people speaking up will change that equation so that everyone is served.


I use Keybase git for this reason, and it works great.


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