Organic and regenerative ag are built on the assumption that crops must be grown in open air soil. The reality is that crops can be grown in open air soil and, if they are, regenerative ag in particular is significantly better for soil longevity.
That said it is not necessarily better to produce all crops in low density, high volatility, season dependent environments. Some material % of crops can move to more intelligent indoor settings where yields are higher, weather isn't a factor, and production yields can be scheduled without risk of weather impact. I'm actually a partner in one of these high volume operations in Montana (randomly). Uses less water, has zero soil impact, requires little to no chemical agents and is predictable.
What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. This could serve to reduce soil stress and leave soil for crops that need more space (e.g. tubers) and livestock to aid in improving soil longevity.
Note this is not a plug for vertical farming. That's an entirely different mirage of financial engineering.
Sweet, there is only approximately 300 million acres of cropland in the United States alone.
Sun == free, rain == free
How does indoor ag plan on scaling up for anything other than super high margin vegetables and spices when their competitor (outdoor ag) has no cost associated with sun or rain? Not even to mention soil.
edit: I like indoor/vertical ag a lot (when applied correctly) When people try to propose producing things that have no chance of succeeding in our current Kardashev scale, it makes me think they are arguing in bad faith or with a fundamental lack of understanding of the problems faced in food production.
I actually agree with you. It's purely a math problem. Where can predictable yield be profitable (including loss calculations) and where can it not.
Vertical as it is today is an excellent nursery solution to feed growable plants into float ponds with little to no loss. As an independent production method, vertical isn't mathematically sustainable.
40% of fresh food is lost before it makes it to the end user (USDA data). The loss comes from a combo of unpredictable weather, timing issues where market prices dip below production costs at harvest time, and supply chain issues.
So it's a complicated math problem but it's important to consider in the suite of food security tools we look to.
Absent regen, we're likely to decimate soils over generations. If we flip totally to regen, we won't have enough land.
I'm mulling whether we have enough land (at 100% regen practices). I almost think we do.
From a system-level, we're over saturated because of ethanol and other things that realistically could disappear and society would be better off. Just need to recalibrate our acres a bit
I don't know the number but I suspect some material % of corn production could go away if we stopped subsidizing that industry for insane things like making gasoline for electoral reasons. :-)
Should we be worried about how many more ruminants this would require, and their impact on the climate? I just saw some estimates of 90 million acres used to grow corn in the U.S., and a cow calf pair needs 1.5-2 acres to feed itself. I know we probably wouldn't maximize cows to the area for the type of growing we're talking about, but that's 45 million cows (with calfs) at the low end if we were, and I'm seeing reports we currently have ~95 million head of cattle in the U.S.
Those are all napkin numbers, or poorly sourced, and worst case, but I would love to see some good numbers on what it means to the climate to have a lot more ruminants in the farming process. (If much of current beef cattle production was moved to be dispersed along these lands, that seems like it might be a good idea for all involved though).
I think these numbers are from the more traditional way of farming.
At least one practitioner of regenerative agriculture, Gabe Brown, uses super dense grazing and frequent movement of the cattle to actually restore his soil health.
Imagine all the kick in the mid 2000s for "vertical living walls" as all the rage in large scale office complexes.
Imagine that if instead they put vertical gardens in every high-rise and the farming of the veggies was a part of the HOA and the veggies were just included in the cost of the living in the home - and you could opt-out and give the veggies to the homeless/shelters/churches/etc...
Now imagine if the US was like Singapore, where the setbacks in dense urban environs is massive enough to manage handling a ton of eatable growth between all buildings.
There are three things that should be required for every single building going up (aside from structural sound-ness)
1. Parking underground for 3 levels
2. Vertical EATABLE gardens
3. A network of 'non=potable' water supplies (water you can get from a grey-water system run through the entire building to feed the plants in the vertical gardens.)
Sure, sun and rain are free, but the costs for outdoor farming are huge too. Irrigation, pesticides, fencing, harvesting equipment, anti-weed chemicals. Then your yields are super volatile -- weather can be bad, you can just get unlucky, you can have weeds/bugs/mice eating into your yields. Then you need to get your crops all the way from Montana to big markets hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Indoor farming sure does require an input of energy and a high up-front cost, but you can get extremely high yields reliably, and you can dramatically reduce transportation and chemical costs, plus reduced water costs often.
Those costs are known, and outside of California and Nebraska, almost no crops are irrigated.
As far as transporting crops to markets? That's actually a success story. Rail hauls most of the crops from Montana to the PNW (if exporting to China). Rail is dirt cheap and efficient, as any true HN reader will know. :)
For context, the "almost no crops" that are irrigated comprises about fifty-five million acres, a little over 7% of cropland & pastures. Removing pastures from this data is difficult, but since we're only looking at three hundred million acres primary cropland in the US, we can confidently approximate between a tenth and a sixth of primary crops are irrigated.
I believe around 50% of that 55M acres are hay/forage/pasture. Nebraska and Colorado are easily top players. I underestimated the delta. Point remains there isn’t a ton a irrigated production for commodity crops (corn/soy/wheat/cotton)
Do you know if things like sprinklers count as irrigation? I grew up spending a lot of time in Delaware which is tons of farmland, and I remember seeing lots of weird watering devices and sprinklers.
By providing predictability/consistency/efficiency. Yes you end up paying for things that are otherwise free, but those free versions are at the mercy of nature and nature isn't exactly getting more predictable/consistent. You can also create highly efficient watering systems where evaporation is nearly nonexistent and nutrients are easily distributed meaning you're making way better use of that water. And let's be honest - if you're working with 10" of rain per year you're not just relying on the free rain anyway. California's central valley is also a prime candidate for this sort of thing as they're pumping water out of the ground so fast it's sinking and the underground aquifers are getting destroyed meaning the groundwater can't replenish and they're unable to capture as much snowmelt. That's in addition to importing water from other regions that are on the brink of not being able to sustain those exports. Water's already expensive and about to get more expensive.
And that's not even taking into consideration the higher density you can get indoors vs outdoors - the amount of land that is cleared for ag around the globe is staggering. Getting an order of magnitude more output from the same amount of land, but having to pay for water and light, is likely to make business sense and be better overall for the environment.
Do the actual economics work out right this second? Maybe not. Will they in the not so distant future? I'd bet on it.
I'd say that future is far more distant than you're willing to entertain.
California's central valley is a primer candidate not so much because of geographic concerns, but economic ones. Almost everything grown in the Valley is high margin. Those indoor ag systems need to get their water from somewhere so if if aquifiers and fresh waters supplies are dwindling, that will affect indoor ag too.
Growing stuff indoors, at any scale has proven harder than people thought. My experiences have mostly revolved around pests being more present in indoor setups (thrips, white flies) and you end up spraying more pesticides indoors than you would outdoors. Indoor systems are susceptible to the same climate variability as outdoor systems. A storm knocks out power for an extended period will kill an indoor crop too, or the storm itself may destroy the building.
I'm pro indoor ag. It needs more investment, but it needs the right investment, not this pie-in-the-sky mindset that we shouldn't grow anything outdoors and indoor ag will save us all.
It seems like vertical and hydroponics are great for leafy green cash crops and spices, but don't work well to produce cereals, soy, or pulses, which are materially where all of the calories come from.
Good new farming: put solar panels in sun, connect lightbulbs to solar panels, put plants under lights.
(Although it's not totally as daft as I make it sound, because it's theoretically possible to do frequency conversion in a way that makes all the energy of sunlight available to plants instead of everything but green.)
The physical limit to frequency conversion efficiency, whatever it is, is much higher than the efficiency of today's cost-effective solar panels plus cost-effective purple LEDs. So it may happen some day.
I'm generally referring to float pond greenhouses though some variants are emerging that use artificial light in a vertical setting for the germination stage where loss rates are high and you can get extremely high density. The types of density you can't get in the overfunded vertical pipe dreams in VC.
So that when you hit the float pond for a 12-16 grow cycle, there's marginal loss.
Hydro grown plants are often more susceptible to pests and problems because they lack the natural fortifications provided by soil. Large scale living soil can still be done indoors though.
It's mostly high margin vegetables and spices. Look up gotham greens for a successul and properly done indoor ag startup.
Generally tomatoes and maybe peppers have enough margin and volume to be justify indoor settings.
Things like nuts are a no-go or any sort of wheat/cotton/maize/soybean operation (even specialty applications like edamame have severe uphill battles to profitability)
Well, with low yields, financial viability is the problem. It's already difficult to make a living farming, unless maybe you're in an area with lots of rain or where you can mine groundwater.
>>*What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. a*
WTF - I hope ZERO of this happens... Don't attempt to think that youre smarter than ~5BILLION years of earths bio/eco balance until we were weaponized by fungi...
We dont need "higher yields" -- we need more efficient consumption and distribution...
I've developed several multifamily projects including my current focus, a 72-unit apartment development.
Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning.
Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the question of whether a multifamily development makes economic sense for a developer.
There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula checks out, you see lots of development.
All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the necessary rents would be $4,950.
California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it has to be willing to look at the problem holistically.
- What role do planning review delays play in increasing the costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through the process?
- What % of potential building sites are classified as historical properties?
- What are the parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for?
- What power do unions have to dictate building programs?
- Who can object to proposals?
I'm not suggesting that everything has to be Texas-style free markets, but to solve the problem one has to be willing to admit that it may require something a bit more comprehensive that simply changing zoning.
Most of that area is not classified as historical, and a lot of it is filled with relatively cheaply constructed and not particularly beautiful buildings (property values have increased a lot in the past few decades). The residential streets in most of that area are way wider than currently necessary and there is a lot of free or cheap street parking everywhere, but some arterial roads are a bottleneck during commute hours and public transit is inadequate. The zoning is basically “sleepy low-density beach town” rather than “cosmopolitan city”.
Changing the zoning of most of those areas to the purple (NCT) or medium orange (RM, RC, RTO) types is not the only change needed, and it won’t make a difference overnight, but it would eventually allow something like doubling the population of the city without requiring anything taller or larger than 4–10-unit low-rise buildings. It would probably also force the city to make a bunch of public transit upgrades, as the whole western half of the city is currently pretty isolated from the more connected eastern half.
The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the things that has to change. If everywhere in California had Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in the problem.
Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong with housing in the bay
Why not free markets though? Why is this concept so dirty?
The idea housing is so expensive is just ridiculous. There should theoretically be no arbitrage between renting and owning. The market is so distorted though that the idea is a joke.
If there is something that free markets would do a very good job at solving it is this problem. If we don't believe in that at least we are really in trouble.
The really sad thing is this is just crushing poor people with rents. No one would be helped more by free markets in real estate than poor people.
Hopefully this is exactly what you're asking for. one of a series of changes.
The bigger the change in a single effort, the faster it often dies. This one is already fairly large and what happens to rent will be important in the short term but also the long term where you could build enough to keep things stable or growing slower.
One thing we seem to be overlooking is the difference between representing yourself as X versus engaging in the professional rendering of X services to the public.
This is a significant distinction. While I'm generally opposed to the majority of occupational licensing requirements but I can understand the function of regulating professional offerings.
So in both this case and the referenced Oregon case from another comment, the "charge" by the licensure body is that the individuals are using the term engineer while doing things that aren't "rendering the service of engineering for payment."
I am a reasonably decent electrician and feel confident fiddling with my own outlets. The electrician's body does not have the right to regulate that activity. Nor can it regulate my saying I'm a decent electrician.
It does, however, have the right to regulate my rendering those services to the public for payment (with some legal gray area around rendering it for free).
This is what makes this a first amendment case that seems justified.
EDIT: I do understand by using electrician as an example, I invite comments about how I might be breaking fire code or my home insurance covenants. That's correct but it's a different externalities problem.
- Sell shelf location slots to the highest bidder.
- Include a consignment clause in their vendor agreements requiring vendors to take back spoiled, customer-damaged, and unsold inventory at X point or on-demand.
- Require merchandisers to keep inventory in-stock for as many products as they can get vendors to manage (e.g. the coke delivery person is in-store several days a week.)
All of this is especially true for shelf stable products and beverages.
The modern grocery store is effectively managed like a flea market and is allowed to do so because the chains have so much leverage.
So while we can take issue with Amazon’s practices, we have to remember that most of large-scale retail operates in ways that if written about to the level of Amazon, we’d also be griping about.
What you have described is false. The major brands do not "sell shelf location slots" to the highest bidder (aka slotting fees), or require consigment clauses, or require merchandisers to keep inventory in-stock, as a general practice.
Slotting fees and consignment clauses only apply to new products. Slotting fees are used as an alternative to consignment; they are basically a discount on the wholesale price paid by the store for new products that may not sell through. Alternatively, the store may sell the items on consignment, in which case it only pays the distributor for products actually sold through.
Merchandisers...are employees of the stores (they're responsible for internal marketing efforts)...Perhaps you meant distributor? Only a few store chains have an in-stock requirement (Walmart and Costco), and that is due solely to the volume at which they sell-through.
More importantly, and the crucial legal distinction: retail stores pay the distributors for the inventory on their shelves, except for the 1% offered on consignment (i.e., new products sold on a trial basis), while Amazon gets paid by the distributors. That legal distinction is at the heart of why what Amazon does is problematic.
This is a good point. I don’t think Amazon’s practices are structurally different than those historically of Walmart or Costco.
Each captured sales data and built private label alternatives to key brands on a regular basis. Small differentiator in the case of Costco is that they have a practice (though not a policy) of offering the leading vendor the opportunity to produce the private label before doing it themselves. But that’s a small detail.
Besides the fact that headlines about this get traction, there is a differentiator with Amazon in that they actively market themselves as a marketplace for small businesses in the way we’ve come to view Shopify. Costco and Walmart were always very clearly retailers...they buy stuff and sell stuff at a margin.
So while I think a lot of the blowup about this is overdone, there is a legitimate argument about the difference between how Amazon markets itself and what it does. But, frankly, for anyone with any level of experience with retailers or, frankly, tech platforms, this kind of capture behavior should be expected.
I think you can have a favorable opinion about the intent of AB5 but also realize that it was a sloppy law that had caused lot of collateral damage when it was passed. Its sponsor even had a dispute on Twitter with a journalist affected where she said, basically, hey, we had to get it done and we didn't have time to get the details right.
I suspect this is not the end of this fight but hopefully if it comes up again, the legislature will be more thoughtful about crafting a bill.
Prop 22 is written such that it can only be modified by 7/8 vote of the legislature in the future. Its funders made sure to protect their "investment" from the normal political process of push/pull/debate/change.
In the words of one political science professor:
> “I’ve looked at a lot of ballot measures over the years,” said Moylan, adding that a two-thirds majority is common.
> But a seven-eighths “super, super, super-duper majority,” she said, “is new as far as I’m aware.”
Your article states Prop 22 gives the legislature more power than normal.
> By default, a law enacted by ballot measure can only be changed by another law enacted by ballot measure.
The exception to that rule: If crafters of the initiative explicitly say otherwise.
No surprise, many ballot measures do not say otherwise. Compared to that default, Prop. 22’s high bar for amendments actually gives the Legislature more influence than the norm.
Most Propositions in CA can't be modified by the legislature at all.
So, while 7/8th is a very high threshold, it still means that it is theoretically possible for the legislature to draft new labor laws that override Prop 22.
Uber and Lyft are betting that 7/8 threshold will never be hit organically, but they can buy a 7/8 share of the legislature ensuring that this measure can only develop in one direction.
I'm definitely not one closed off to this story, I think it's important. That said I think "we" tend to forget that platforms like Twitter are private companies, we don't really have a "right" to post anything to them.
Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
If we're not happy about the moderation we don't have to use the moderating platform.
The problem here is something new, as Matt points out.
Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a commoner) to know what I did wrong? Do I have the opportunity to change? Do I have the opportunity to face my accusers in a forum?
Our rights, and the framework they reside in, are far too outdated for this sort of problem. The leaders we have in both business and government are too cowardly, weak, or self-interested to directly address the McCarthy-esque patterns that are beginning to emerge that seem to be opportunistically aligned to further narratives.
If your point is that the originators of the Biden story are shocked and confused that it's being suppressed in an opaque tech cooperating agreement, they shouldn't be: the story is being suppressed because it's at best illegally obtained data, and at worst deliberately falsified; and in either case, it's now being used by bad actors in an attempt to manipulate the results of the election. There's no mystery here: Twitter is being very clear about why this story is blocked.
As Matt stated, and really the whole point of the article, the Biden story doesn't matter. Forget about charging Biden with any wrong-doing for a moment and see what this relationship and mechanism between law enforcement, tech companies, and media entities is for its merits: The same mechanism that autocratic governments use for control and operated in the name of "the public good".
I don't follow, are you suggesting that Tech companies and the media, in acting directly in opposition to the sitting president, are somehow forming an autocracy? Does that word continue to have a meaning?
There's a severe double standard here given that Twitter has allowed worse than that, which was the whole point of the article: that the decision making is opaque, arbitrary, and probably coordinated.
I do not think anyone is confused about whether or not the bill of rights applies to private companies. Free speech is an idea that can be extended to all types of speech.
Comments exist on many prior HN discussions of Twitter and Facebook that demonstrate confusion around whether the bill of rights applies to private companies or not.
>Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
Congress is currently grilling tech CEOs as to why they aren't banning / censoring QAnon and similar information. It seems Congress has moved to attempt to censor free speech by applying pressure on these private platforms to censor free speech.
>That issue about the functioning of democracy is one where Facebook is in the spotlight right now as a hugely powerful platform for misinformation in the run-up to the US election.
>This week the social media giant moved to shut down groups spreading the Qanon conspiracy theory, which promotes the idea that President Trump is leading a battle against satanic child abuse.
>It was the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who wanted a really tough approach - a minority report from the Republicans agreed there was a problem, but favoured milder solutions.
Congress is grilling tech companies as to why they aren't censoring speech hard enough and are threatening a "really tough approach" if they don't comply. It seems censoring speech is not only government pressured now, but also bipartisan.
> Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
That may be the latest popular interpretation of the bill of rights, but it is absolutely not in the original spirit of its authors. They were defined as "inalienable rights" granted to all people. In other words, your essential human rights to free expression don't get waived depending on who the offending party is.
There is no “offending party”. Freedom of speech means speech cannot be compulsory. What would be contrary to the “original spirit” would be forcing Twitter and Facebook to amplify speech they don’t want to.
Your implication is that Twitter and Facebook are human beings, and I think a majority of people would contest that idea.
What I am saying is that the authors of the bill of rights did not intend for a person's human rights to go away the moment they are persecuted by an entity other than the United States federal government.
The New York Post is also not a human being, for that matter. But I wasn’t implying that.
People want to use Twitter’s property to spread a message, and Twitter said no. That’s not “persecution”, it just means they have to find some other way to do it. If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
> If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
In some countries that would be violation of consumer protection laws. If some service or product is offered to a general public, than arbitrary exclusion of a consumer is illegal in some jurisdictions.
We already have a significant amount of legal precedent to compel a private business to serve certain groups. Those protected groups were legally enshrined in the first place to extend them the same rights that everyone else already enjoyed by common custom, not to create a new group of people with elevated privileges. In my opinion, it's time that we now legally enshrine the common custom of a right to service as well.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. What group has elevated privileges, and what group is being discriminated against that needs protecting?
This will all depend what % of employers stay with their current remote structure. It’ll be somewhere between 1% of 80/90%.
The point is that we’re making long-term decisions based on short-term problems. Specifically this week JP Morgan asked its traders to return to the office.
You can counter this with examples like Facebook opening an office in Austin some years ago because that’s where the talent had moved. Similar in Boulder.
There will certainly be some % of employers who keep remote-first. And another scenario where they are forced to or the employees decide they love their lifestyle (which is likely). In the latter employers are either forced to adopt it or or the employees just leave or in some concentrations big companies start building offices in a distributed way.
We’re severely limiting our job choices if we stay remote but most employers don’t.
Before when we go off and buy houses or sign long-term leases we should really just wait this out until the Spring or whenever the virus is neutralized.
exactly this. i'm pretty surprised at the number of people buying homes in far out locations, like this "new normal" is going to be the "new normal" ongoing. I don't buy it (yet). There are a few companies that have bought in, and if you work there then at least you're set for a bit. But people only stay at a tech job for a few years typically - what happens when you want to switch companies?
It's certainly possible that people have taken a liking to remote work and decided it's the right move for themselves. Whether in 5 years remote work is much more prevalent than it was in Feb 2020 or about the same doesn't necessarily affect your own individual decision making.
If you’re used to receiving BigCo pay and bought a mansion in a remote vacation hotspot, you could be in for a rude awakening if you find other remote jobs pay half as much and your employer knows that and stops giving you refreshes.
Erm, in my experience (20 years, good but not a superstar) the numbers are 2x that. My last BigCo offer was $300k total comp and jobs with smaller companies (all remote) were around $120-150k. One startup offered me $190k to work remote (but I would have been the only remote worker).
That said, I agree that your average non-FAANG job pays about half of FAANG. Although this is true regardless of remote-ness.
You are getting those offers because of your 20 years of experience, not because remote work is inherently lucrative. Most people with 10 or fewer years of experience are used to seeing remote-only offers of less than $100k.
It's less me, and more the experience of myself, my close friends and professional colleagues. But as with everything, I would assume it's a mix of both.
I work for a big company you've heard of as a developer. I'm fully remote since pre-pandemic and plan to stay fully remote indefinitely.
If you're a good developer with experience, it doesn't really matter where you are. I actually get paid more total comp than I would in SF, my cost of living is lower, and my tax situation is much better.
Sorry I missed your reply, but technically, yeah. Being remote when I switched jobs gave me an absolutely great negotiating posture. I didn't even have to leave the house, and it's not as if I was stepping away from my desk to make secret phone calls. Plus I could work anywhere in the world, so it became about company selection and negotiation.
Once I found the company and nailed the interviews, I got an offer ~30% lower than the SF salary because of CoL adjustment. My position was that if my salary could be offset by much riskier equity (aka more than the 30% cut, but essentially free for the company), I would accept the position. So I ended up getting a larger total comp than would have been available to me in SF. Also I don't even need 50% of my salary to live outside of CA anyway, so it's a major lifestyle upgrade.
This only works because I get to choose any company in the world. That means the equity I get is something I would have invested in anyway given the opportunity.
For the first time in my career I feel that I negotiated well and have confidence in my employer, and it never would have happened by just being another dev in the bay area.
This comment is all kinds of wrong. FAANG is "used to" pulling down anywhere from 150-400k.
On the flipside, many many remote jobs pay significantly more than you're describing, more in line with every other non-FAANG developer jobs. If you're just looking at those poorly managed "Remote Job Board" sites, of course you'll think that, because most of those jobs are just subcontracts and gig-type roles.
Yes, there'll be a COL difference, but it's not like you're describing. Gitlab, as an example, pays a Data Engineer in nowhere Indiana 90-120k for remote work.
I too want to wait and see, but I could see things shifting more permanently. When employees get benefits, they tend to be "sticky": they're not easily given up. Working remotely in a nicer place is a pretty good benefit for a lot of people.
You only interview at companies that support remote (or with hiring managers who will support you being remote in an org that isn’t fully committed to remote) and you keep a large emergency fund to give you substantial runway between jobs (~1 year expenses). Very easy to do on a tech salary and you moved to a low cost of living area with cheap housing (<$1k/month mortgage, reasonable property taxes).
I hate to ask for a citation, but where are you getting that 1% number? It seems made-up.
I would guess that more than one percent of office workers will be permitted/encouraged to go remote, but I think that few companies will go remote. There is no reason why remote needs to be a company-wide Boolean selection.
well what we've heard from remote-first companies is that remote culture is a very deliberate thing. if you have hybrid model and don't actively work to include remote folks, they will naturally become second class citizens - less visibility, less in the loop, and less likely to get promoted. so i think that's in part where the boolean pressure is coming from.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states.
I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects.
Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups.
These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money, but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the person serving their coffee at a diner working their third job, and knows that their wife is working longer hours than they are for much less money, is going to be less productive as a result no matter how they're treated as an individual. Poverty is a structural problem in society. It doesn't just affect poor people.
Oh, I'm not disputing that at all. Just that the bridge's enduring quality (much as with other Deoression-era / WPA works) is at odds with your observation on poverty. Though that does seem to have some validity otherwise.
Maybe focus more on inequality and uneven reward? The Depression seems to have often been, as with the WWII recovery, something of a leveller.
That said it is not necessarily better to produce all crops in low density, high volatility, season dependent environments. Some material % of crops can move to more intelligent indoor settings where yields are higher, weather isn't a factor, and production yields can be scheduled without risk of weather impact. I'm actually a partner in one of these high volume operations in Montana (randomly). Uses less water, has zero soil impact, requires little to no chemical agents and is predictable.
What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. This could serve to reduce soil stress and leave soil for crops that need more space (e.g. tubers) and livestock to aid in improving soil longevity.
Note this is not a plug for vertical farming. That's an entirely different mirage of financial engineering.