4 ms·

This reminds me of Mao's efforts to get people to smelt steel in their backyards. It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly

by wyager 5y ago

This reminds me of Mao's efforts to get people to smelt steel in their backyards. It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

analyte123 5y ago
While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.
- Auracle 5y ago
  I live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Permaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
- asdff 5y ago
  It takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.
colinmhayes 5y ago
Except composting doesn't involve destroying useful resources and creates a product that actually works quite well.
qiskit 5y ago
> It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nuclear attack from both the soviet union and the united states, who both had absolute aerial superiority over china, and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population? It's the simple idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. It's better to have 1,000,000 small producers of steel than 1 major producer of steel when you are facing nuclear armed adversaries. It's also why china didn't start to urbanize until after they produced enough nukes and icbms to guarantee their own safety. Just like Bush didn't want to waste a $5 million missile to take out a $5 tent in afghanistan, nukes are pretty much useless against an un-urbanized nation. There were studies done by the US government on nuclear war vs soviet union and china. All the studies showed that even though china had a much larger population, our nuclear attack on the soviet union would be far more devastating because the soviet union was urbanized whiles china was decentralized and rural. It's so funny how these people who were doing such inefficient and pointless activities set the foundation for china to eventually usurp the united states. We've been told how incompetent and backwards "the ccp" are and yet we are told that they are our top threat? Which is it? So much of what's written about china turns out to be nonsense propaganda when you just take a closer look. Could it be that mao and the communists were smarter than people who write wikipedia articles or just read them passively without giving it any thought?
- wyager 5y ago
  > and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population Fun idea, except it (predictably) didn't work at all, because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.
  - qiskit 5y ago
    > Fun idea It happens when you try to make sense of a crazy senseless world sometimes. > except it (predictably) didn't work at all Some would say it worked precisely as expected. > because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale. When you are faced with nuclear annihilation, you don't worry about economic feasibility but economic necessity. You do what needs be done. That's why war is terrible economic policy. Everyone is doing the economically infeasible. China wouldn't be where it is now if it didn't work. Maybe in the most populous country, they were able to produce one or two people who knew what they were doing? Just a thought. You are probably right though. Those bumbling chinese accidentally stumbled upon the largest economy in the world. Sometimes you get stupid lucky.
nfriedly 5y ago
I'm not sure if the grandparent was thinking of this, but I have lived places where the city collected compost on the same days as the trash and recycling - there was just an extra bin that you could throw food scraps and yard waste and whatnot into, and then the city managed it from there. I think they also let you come get some soil back for your garden or whatnot if you wanted to. It seemed like a good way to handle things.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  According to the EU report [page 15], food waste collection in the EU varies between 0% and 47% of total food waste, depending on the country. The average is 16%. https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_07_06_bic_zwe_report_bio_waste.pdf https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_0...

by wyager 5y ago

analyte123 5y ago

While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.

Auracle 5y ago
I live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Permaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
asdff 5y ago
It takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.

colinmhayes 5y ago

Except composting doesn't involve destroying useful resources and creates a product that actually works quite well.

qiskit 5y ago

> It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nuclear attack from both the soviet union and the united states, who both had absolute aerial superiority over china, and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population? It's the simple idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. It's better to have 1,000,000 small producers of steel than 1 major producer of steel when you are facing nuclear armed adversaries. It's also why china didn't start to urbanize until after they produced enough nukes and icbms to guarantee their own safety. Just like Bush didn't want to waste a $5 million missile to take out a $5 tent in afghanistan, nukes are pretty much useless against an un-urbanized nation. There were studies done by the US government on nuclear war vs soviet union and china. All the studies showed that even though china had a much larger population, our nuclear attack on the soviet union would be far more devastating because the soviet union was urbanized whiles china was decentralized and rural. It's so funny how these people who were doing such inefficient and pointless activities set the foundation for china to eventually usurp the united states. We've been told how incompetent and backwards "the ccp" are and yet we are told that they are our top threat? Which is it? So much of what's written about china turns out to be nonsense propaganda when you just take a closer look. Could it be that mao and the communists were smarter than people who write wikipedia articles or just read them passively without giving it any thought?

wyager 5y ago
> and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population Fun idea, except it (predictably) didn't work at all, because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.
- qiskit 5y ago
  > Fun idea It happens when you try to make sense of a crazy senseless world sometimes. > except it (predictably) didn't work at all Some would say it worked precisely as expected. > because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale. When you are faced with nuclear annihilation, you don't worry about economic feasibility but economic necessity. You do what needs be done. That's why war is terrible economic policy. Everyone is doing the economically infeasible. China wouldn't be where it is now if it didn't work. Maybe in the most populous country, they were able to produce one or two people who knew what they were doing? Just a thought. You are probably right though. Those bumbling chinese accidentally stumbled upon the largest economy in the world. Sometimes you get stupid lucky.

nfriedly 5y ago

I'm not sure if the grandparent was thinking of this, but I have lived places where the city collected compost on the same days as the trash and recycling - there was just an extra bin that you could throw food scraps and yard waste and whatnot into, and then the city managed it from there. I think they also let you come get some soil back for your garden or whatnot if you wanted to. It seemed like a good way to handle things.

Symbiote 5y ago
According to the EU report [page 15], food waste collection in the EU varies between 0% and 47% of total food waste, depending on the country. The average is 16%. https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_07_06_bic_zwe_report_bio_waste.pdf https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_0...