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You can see why technology advances less fast in these matters from this attitude. It's borne of experience, true, but real machines are less profitable in ever

You can see why technology advances less fast in these matters from this attitude. It's borne of experience, true, but real machines are less profitable in every way, so people do the capitalist thing and follow the profit margin. Google has a margin, after paying obscene salaries to its engineers, of over 40%. Sales cycles are 10-1000x faster, except for larger companies who negotiate - but the larger companies have lots more money. Agriculture is the oldest and most essential part of civilization. However, that means we know the most about it, and therefore it is among the most unprofitable parts of it.

jelliclesfarm 10y ago
When you take a snapshot of 'agricultural knowledge' in 100 BC and 100 AD..1800s and 1900s and post 2000s...it's easy to see that it's pretty dynamic. Everything from soil to weather pattern to water to labour availability to market changes. I have a kubota tractor that is about 15 years old. Since then, so many things have changed. Why am I still using tech from 15 years ago? Obviously agriculture techniques and methods ought to change too. It needs to be dynamic because agriculture in my grandfather's time is not the agriculture of today. Even though everyone needs food..it's very necesscity has created an expectation that it is a human right to be fed. No one expects starvation deaths these days and if one hears about it, it is shocking. But it used to happen all the time. A weird supply/demand equation has emerged. Instead of value going up for a universal necessity, it's value has gone down because it is seemingly more productive. But it is not. What we don't see is the invisible costs extracted to get to the point of making food so cheap that it has lost value. It still blows my mind when people ask why food isn't free and abundant. I want to ask if they realize that it is tech intensive, labour intensive, environmentally expensive and cash enterprise. If food is cheap, someone is certainly being exploited and something is most certainly being abused. And somewhere someone is subsidizing it. But with technology and robotics we have an opportunity to right the many wrongs and to maybe erase some of the damages..and yet, there seems to be little capitalistic will to do so...if capitalism doesn't accommodate the tech necessities, what else will? One solution is to make food expensive again. I would wager that it might even contain the population explosion we might see..Italy and Japan are experiencing negative birth rates. Mostly because of economic depression, shrinking age and restricted resources. Maybe that will be the antidote to child like capitalism.

jelliclesfarm 10y ago

When you take a snapshot of 'agricultural knowledge' in 100 BC and 100 AD..1800s and 1900s and post 2000s...it's easy to see that it's pretty dynamic. Everything from soil to weather pattern to water to labour availability to market changes. I have a kubota tractor that is about 15 years old. Since then, so many things have changed. Why am I still using tech from 15 years ago? Obviously agriculture techniques and methods ought to change too. It needs to be dynamic because agriculture in my grandfather's time is not the agriculture of today. Even though everyone needs food..it's very necesscity has created an expectation that it is a human right to be fed. No one expects starvation deaths these days and if one hears about it, it is shocking. But it used to happen all the time. A weird supply/demand equation has emerged. Instead of value going up for a universal necessity, it's value has gone down because it is seemingly more productive. But it is not. What we don't see is the invisible costs extracted to get to the point of making food so cheap that it has lost value. It still blows my mind when people ask why food isn't free and abundant. I want to ask if they realize that it is tech intensive, labour intensive, environmentally expensive and cash enterprise. If food is cheap, someone is certainly being exploited and something is most certainly being abused. And somewhere someone is subsidizing it. But with technology and robotics we have an opportunity to right the many wrongs and to maybe erase some of the damages..and yet, there seems to be little capitalistic will to do so...if capitalism doesn't accommodate the tech necessities, what else will? One solution is to make food expensive again. I would wager that it might even contain the population explosion we might see..Italy and Japan are experiencing negative birth rates. Mostly because of economic depression, shrinking age and restricted resources. Maybe that will be the antidote to child like capitalism.