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> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegia

> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where it wasn't before and it's a good way to make more money. Do you honestly believe that pre-covid people worked at McDonalds because of their desire to provide food to people? > We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato. This is progress. Do you believe a world where everyone grows their own crops to feed themselves is an improvement? People don't grow potatoes because it is a waste of their time when you can buy a giant bag of them for next to nothing. Something only possible because of the modern JIT economy. What you call stability is actually inefficiency and waste in disguise.

rabuse 4y ago
"Waste of their time". Is binging a Netflix series more important than having survival skills?
- heartbreak 4y ago
  Surviving a societal meltdown is not a goal of mine, so yes.
oicU00 4y ago
People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker. You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid. Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders. One cannot wave away reality for philosophy.
breakfastduck 4y ago
Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time. Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable). How much so? FOr all the talk of techno-utopian ideals amongst the HN crowds, it isn't until you reach the 'I'm burned out, so I'm going farming' phase of a tech worker (I did rather early at 26) that most here will take any level of consideration in making any effort towards that end. For most, it seems like a contrarian past time to argue the merits of conventional vs organic food becase: 'carbon is carbon.' Not realizing the underlying aspect of most of the local and organic movement is to strengthen the food supply that had been vastly consolidated by the pharmaceutical corporations in the late 70s who filled your plate with pesticide-laden franken-food shipped from all over the World and made us more food insecure (in non=processed junk) and diseased than ever in the US history. In short, simply going to the farmers market once in a blue moon to have a story to tell here isn't living up to your rhetoric, and it seems that salary/TC alone isn't enough to compel some of the most well paid workers in the US to opt for making the food supply less fragile at all.
inglor_cz 4y ago
"Inefficiency/waste" and "slack" are very different things. "Waste" is running an O(n^2) algorithm on a task that already has O(n logn) solutions suitable for the same dataset. "Slack" is having 100 USD cash in your pocket even if you do not immediately plan to spend them.
tastyfreeze 4y ago
The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. Some level of self sufficiency is a requirement for stability and resiliency. Past generations learned this lesson with some portion of the population starving. There aren't any farms within 500 miles of where I live. If we can't get shipments from outside people are going to starve. This realization of supply chain fragility is what many people have come to after seeing some items absolutely unavailable at stores. Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. I'm a millennial and I worked for 2 of the big 3 German Auto manufactures in Supply Chain and Logistics and then went to work for a US megacorp, I can assure you: many of us of from all ages have been sounding the alarm since of an imminent crisis since at least 2016. No one cared, the MBAs in collusion with the executive board were too busy asset stripping and optimizing business models for short-term gains and massaging PnL sheets to make it look like the future was filled with endless profits. The reality is that accounting displaced it's responsibility on to the SC and Logistics side to the absolute limits to the determent of accurate forecasting and modeling in order to keep the 'make believe' narrative alive. > Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles. To be fair, 2020 marked a high-water mark for CSAs in the US [0] due to the COVID shortages, sadly it was soon forgotten afterward. People have short-term memories, and the appeal of outsourcing this vital component of keeping Society functioning has little effect on people until it's often far too late. 0: https://www.small-farm.com/wp/2020/04/24/2020-csa-shares-sold-out/ https://www.small-farm.com/wp/2020/04/24/2020-csa-shares-sol...
jaegerpicker 4y ago
This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  Eh, first world countries produce a lot of food. Farming is generally heavily mechanized. Nobody needs to have their 'hands in the dirt'. In fact, I expect most potatoes will not be touched by a single human hand until they reach the person who actually cooks and eats it.
  - jaegerpicker 4y ago
    That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.
    - throwawaygh 4y ago
      Getting rid of those things would at most double the farm payrolls, which is still a tiny minority of Americans. For the most part, monocrops, pesticides, and fungicides have HUGE economic efficiency incentives ($ ROI / acre) even if you subtract the contribution to labor efficiency (humans / acre).
      - jaegerpicker 4y ago
        That's only true if you don't place a $ value on the environmental impacts.
briffle 4y ago
Its not progress. Your car plant now needs a truck worth of car bumpers every day, when they take 4 weeks to ship from overseas. Any disruption means that your whole plant is now idle. But because of accounting rules, it made companies look much better off if they got 2 trucks of bumpers every day, rather than have 28 trucks worth of bumpers sitting in a warehouse. Much more risk, but sure does help up that earnings per share to help the CEO with his bonus based on stock price. Remember how hospitals didn't have PPE, because they could always get more shipped in 2-3 days? Works great. Until it doesn't.

rabuse 4y ago

"Waste of their time". Is binging a Netflix series more important than having survival skills?

heartbreak 4y ago
Surviving a societal meltdown is not a goal of mine, so yes.

oicU00 4y ago

People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker. You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid. Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders. One cannot wave away reality for philosophy.

breakfastduck 4y ago

Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time. Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable). How much so? FOr all the talk of techno-utopian ideals amongst the HN crowds, it isn't until you reach the 'I'm burned out, so I'm going farming' phase of a tech worker (I did rather early at 26) that most here will take any level of consideration in making any effort towards that end. For most, it seems like a contrarian past time to argue the merits of conventional vs organic food becase: 'carbon is carbon.' Not realizing the underlying aspect of most of the local and organic movement is to strengthen the food supply that had been vastly consolidated by the pharmaceutical corporations in the late 70s who filled your plate with pesticide-laden franken-food shipped from all over the World and made us more food insecure (in non=processed junk) and diseased than ever in the US history. In short, simply going to the farmers market once in a blue moon to have a story to tell here isn't living up to your rhetoric, and it seems that salary/TC alone isn't enough to compel some of the most well paid workers in the US to opt for making the food supply less fragile at all.

inglor_cz 4y ago

"Inefficiency/waste" and "slack" are very different things. "Waste" is running an O(n^2) algorithm on a task that already has O(n logn) solutions suitable for the same dataset. "Slack" is having 100 USD cash in your pocket even if you do not immediately plan to spend them.

tastyfreeze 4y ago

The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. Some level of self sufficiency is a requirement for stability and resiliency. Past generations learned this lesson with some portion of the population starving. There aren't any farms within 500 miles of where I live. If we can't get shipments from outside people are going to starve. This realization of supply chain fragility is what many people have come to after seeing some items absolutely unavailable at stores. Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. I'm a millennial and I worked for 2 of the big 3 German Auto manufactures in Supply Chain and Logistics and then went to work for a US megacorp, I can assure you: many of us of from all ages have been sounding the alarm since of an imminent crisis since at least 2016. No one cared, the MBAs in collusion with the executive board were too busy asset stripping and optimizing business models for short-term gains and massaging PnL sheets to make it look like the future was filled with endless profits. The reality is that accounting displaced it's responsibility on to the SC and Logistics side to the absolute limits to the determent of accurate forecasting and modeling in order to keep the 'make believe' narrative alive. > Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles. To be fair, 2020 marked a high-water mark for CSAs in the US [0] due to the COVID shortages, sadly it was soon forgotten afterward. People have short-term memories, and the appeal of outsourcing this vital component of keeping Society functioning has little effect on people until it's often far too late. 0: https://www.small-farm.com/wp/2020/04/24/2020-csa-shares-sold-out/ https://www.small-farm.com/wp/2020/04/24/2020-csa-shares-sol...

jaegerpicker 4y ago

This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.

pasabagi 4y ago
Eh, first world countries produce a lot of food. Farming is generally heavily mechanized. Nobody needs to have their 'hands in the dirt'. In fact, I expect most potatoes will not be touched by a single human hand until they reach the person who actually cooks and eats it.
- jaegerpicker 4y ago
  That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.
  - throwawaygh 4y ago
    Getting rid of those things would at most double the farm payrolls, which is still a tiny minority of Americans. For the most part, monocrops, pesticides, and fungicides have HUGE economic efficiency incentives ($ ROI / acre) even if you subtract the contribution to labor efficiency (humans / acre).
    - jaegerpicker 4y ago
      That's only true if you don't place a $ value on the environmental impacts.

briffle 4y ago

Its not progress. Your car plant now needs a truck worth of car bumpers every day, when they take 4 weeks to ship from overseas. Any disruption means that your whole plant is now idle. But because of accounting rules, it made companies look much better off if they got 2 trucks of bumpers every day, rather than have 28 trucks worth of bumpers sitting in a warehouse. Much more risk, but sure does help up that earnings per share to help the CEO with his bonus based on stock price. Remember how hospitals didn't have PPE, because they could always get more shipped in 2-3 days? Works great. Until it doesn't.