4 ms·

Nobody will prevent you to grow your own food and raise your own cattle like it was the case for 99.9% of humanity's time. One of the biggest problem we have t

Nobody will prevent you to grow your own food and raise your own cattle like it was the case for 99.9% of humanity's time. One of the biggest problem we have these days is that most people don't want to live in the countryside and consider that

gdubs 8mo ago
Farming requires inputs unless you started an agroforestry farm 10 years ago and are now just maintaining it. It's also insanely time consuming.
- davidguetta 8mo ago
  The entire point is that you won't have a job to do so time is not the biggest issue then
  - gdubs 8mo ago
    As someone who owns a small farm — and actually enjoys land, growing things — I'm just saying this is not a "solution" for the vast majority of people.
    - davidguetta 8mo ago
      Why ? Food has to bé made Somewhere. Lets just try to empower more people on it in the future
      - gdubs 7mo ago
        Don't get me wrong – I think if people grew more of their own food it would be fantastic! And technology combined with alternative farming practices has the potential to be hugely transformative. I'm all for it. But the way things are currently, it's a monumental effort to grow food for sustenance on any meaningful scale, and would take enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort – leaving very little for other pursuits. I want people to also be able to make art, music, etc.
pyrale 8mo ago
> Nobody will prevent you to grow your own food and raise your own cattle like it was the case for 99.9% of humanity's time. It certainly was not the case in most agricultural societies that people could get their own plot of land that they could cultivate without interference from the rest of the society. To expect that people able to replace other humans completely for working purposes, especially the kind of people who end up at the head of the kind of company able to do that, would peacefully let the rest of us be, is delusional.
yoyohello13 8mo ago
What's to stop 200 year old High Lord Musk from bulldozing your farm to put up a new power plant?
- davidguetta 8mo ago
  Castle Doctrine ?
  - RankingMember 8mo ago
    Castle doctrine doesn't work when you've got a veritable army at the door, which a bought government would happily send.
goatlover 8mo ago
That doesn't scale to billions of people.
- jmclnx 8mo ago
  Yes 8+ billion people cannot grow their own food, and if you factor in climate change, many food producing areas will be unable to grow anything eatable. So I would like to know davidguetta thought process. Maybe he was being sarcastic.
beej71 8mo ago
It's true... maybe we can live like we did 2,000 years ago. "Nobody will prevent you..." Can I plant on your property and keep all the produce? My property isn't big enough to support my family of two. Where shall I plant? The fiefdom? I just don't get this take. It sounds awful for virtually everybody. We live at a scale that is not like it was when I was born. Asking everyone to raise their own beef and vegetables is a as much a non-starter as telling them they can just build their own tractors to till. Edit: I'd like to acknowledge Poe's Law might be in effect here. :)
- dns_snek 8mo ago
  > I'd like to acknowledge Poe's Law might be in effect here. :) It's depressing that we can't be sure anymore because far too many people say things like this and actually mean it.
- davidguetta 8mo ago
  There's plenty of cheap land if you dare going a bit further that big cities, at least in my country. Most people just want to live where everybody already lives
  - beej71 8mo ago
    > There's plenty of cheap land if you dare going a bit further that big cities, at least in my country. Yes, but it's cheap because there aren't a million people bidding on it, which is what will happen when everyone moves out of the big cities.
- Ensorceled 8mo ago
  There should be an alternative version of Poe's Law where the view being parodied is so common, so ludicrous and associated with bad faith actors that it wraps back around to the person deserves all the ridicule and an assumption that they are a bad actor. Like, we get to assume it's a Motte and Bailey or Schrödinger’s Joke.
Ensorceled 8mo ago
People also starved to death if there was a late frost or potato blight. When I was a kid we had an half acre potato patch a quarter acre vegetable garden. It was a fuck ton of work. It was only possible to keep up because my brother and I did most of the weeding, watering and assorted up keep during our summer "holidays" I wouldn't wish a subsistence farming lifestyle on anyone.
lambda 8mo ago
There is not enough arable land in the US for every person in the US to be able to live on subsistence farming. Subsistence farming is a lot more work, and much less efficient, than large scale industrialized agriculture.
iamalexm 8mo ago
That option has a few problems - 1. It's not very cheap. The price of land is really high and if it is fertile land it is even that much more expensive. Not to mention the cost of raising animals and plants isn't free. 2. Specializing is much more efficient than trying to do everything yourself, requiring at least a basic economy. 3. Do you like healthcare? Trying to move to the countryside while affording healthcare(at least in the US) and actually having access to it are considerable hurdles. 4. Providing your own power isn't cheap and getting it from others certainly requires something. And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list. We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen. What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.
toss1 8mo ago
That may work when the global population is 200 million to maybe 800 million, and it didn't even work that well back then. Feeding eight billion plus people requires scalable technologies. So, which nine of every ten people should die? You volunteering? Who owns the land on which to do this farming? Oh, perhaps start with one of the oligarchs, Bill Gates, who owns 275,000 acres, ostensibly to increase agricultural prodictivity, but still, it's his land not yours or mine, so how will we buy the food from him without a means of earning money? My family gardens, but with a LOT of work, we produce only enough to supplement diet for part of the year. Fully sustaining would require multiples of the land we have... Also, look into the actual lifestyle of subsistence farming, even for those who DO own the land. It is generally miserable hard labor and still entirely unreliable. One crop failure and your family gets to starve for a year...

gdubs 8mo ago

Farming requires inputs unless you started an agroforestry farm 10 years ago and are now just maintaining it. It's also insanely time consuming.

davidguetta 8mo ago
The entire point is that you won't have a job to do so time is not the biggest issue then
- gdubs 8mo ago
  As someone who owns a small farm — and actually enjoys land, growing things — I'm just saying this is not a "solution" for the vast majority of people.
  - davidguetta 8mo ago
    Why ? Food has to bé made Somewhere. Lets just try to empower more people on it in the future
    - gdubs 7mo ago
      Don't get me wrong – I think if people grew more of their own food it would be fantastic! And technology combined with alternative farming practices has the potential to be hugely transformative. I'm all for it. But the way things are currently, it's a monumental effort to grow food for sustenance on any meaningful scale, and would take enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort – leaving very little for other pursuits. I want people to also be able to make art, music, etc.

pyrale 8mo ago

> Nobody will prevent you to grow your own food and raise your own cattle like it was the case for 99.9% of humanity's time. It certainly was not the case in most agricultural societies that people could get their own plot of land that they could cultivate without interference from the rest of the society. To expect that people able to replace other humans completely for working purposes, especially the kind of people who end up at the head of the kind of company able to do that, would peacefully let the rest of us be, is delusional.

yoyohello13 8mo ago

What's to stop 200 year old High Lord Musk from bulldozing your farm to put up a new power plant?

davidguetta 8mo ago
Castle Doctrine ?
- RankingMember 8mo ago
  Castle doctrine doesn't work when you've got a veritable army at the door, which a bought government would happily send.

goatlover 8mo ago

That doesn't scale to billions of people.

jmclnx 8mo ago
Yes 8+ billion people cannot grow their own food, and if you factor in climate change, many food producing areas will be unable to grow anything eatable. So I would like to know davidguetta thought process. Maybe he was being sarcastic.

beej71 8mo ago

It's true... maybe we can live like we did 2,000 years ago. "Nobody will prevent you..." Can I plant on your property and keep all the produce? My property isn't big enough to support my family of two. Where shall I plant? The fiefdom? I just don't get this take. It sounds awful for virtually everybody. We live at a scale that is not like it was when I was born. Asking everyone to raise their own beef and vegetables is a as much a non-starter as telling them they can just build their own tractors to till. Edit: I'd like to acknowledge Poe's Law might be in effect here. :)

dns_snek 8mo ago
> I'd like to acknowledge Poe's Law might be in effect here. :) It's depressing that we can't be sure anymore because far too many people say things like this and actually mean it.
davidguetta 8mo ago
There's plenty of cheap land if you dare going a bit further that big cities, at least in my country. Most people just want to live where everybody already lives
- beej71 8mo ago
  > There's plenty of cheap land if you dare going a bit further that big cities, at least in my country. Yes, but it's cheap because there aren't a million people bidding on it, which is what will happen when everyone moves out of the big cities.
Ensorceled 8mo ago
There should be an alternative version of Poe's Law where the view being parodied is so common, so ludicrous and associated with bad faith actors that it wraps back around to the person deserves all the ridicule and an assumption that they are a bad actor. Like, we get to assume it's a Motte and Bailey or Schrödinger’s Joke.

Ensorceled 8mo ago

People also starved to death if there was a late frost or potato blight. When I was a kid we had an half acre potato patch a quarter acre vegetable garden. It was a fuck ton of work. It was only possible to keep up because my brother and I did most of the weeding, watering and assorted up keep during our summer "holidays" I wouldn't wish a subsistence farming lifestyle on anyone.

lambda 8mo ago

There is not enough arable land in the US for every person in the US to be able to live on subsistence farming. Subsistence farming is a lot more work, and much less efficient, than large scale industrialized agriculture.

iamalexm 8mo ago

That option has a few problems - 1. It's not very cheap. The price of land is really high and if it is fertile land it is even that much more expensive. Not to mention the cost of raising animals and plants isn't free. 2. Specializing is much more efficient than trying to do everything yourself, requiring at least a basic economy. 3. Do you like healthcare? Trying to move to the countryside while affording healthcare(at least in the US) and actually having access to it are considerable hurdles. 4. Providing your own power isn't cheap and getting it from others certainly requires something. And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list. We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen. What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.

toss1 8mo ago

That may work when the global population is 200 million to maybe 800 million, and it didn't even work that well back then. Feeding eight billion plus people requires scalable technologies. So, which nine of every ten people should die? You volunteering? Who owns the land on which to do this farming? Oh, perhaps start with one of the oligarchs, Bill Gates, who owns 275,000 acres, ostensibly to increase agricultural prodictivity, but still, it's his land not yours or mine, so how will we buy the food from him without a means of earning money? My family gardens, but with a LOT of work, we produce only enough to supplement diet for part of the year. Fully sustaining would require multiples of the land we have... Also, look into the actual lifestyle of subsistence farming, even for those who DO own the land. It is generally miserable hard labor and still entirely unreliable. One crop failure and your family gets to starve for a year...