I have no issue with the stats. It's how you draw your conclusions from those stats.
I think that bureaucrat is simply being honest. If you're not expanding, you're dying.
Just as is true in virtually every other type of factory. Efficiency is king. There is no other way around it. If your lucky you're able to boutique your agricultural business somehow. (I've read how some our successful doing this with unique crops giving the farmer an opportunity to sell at premium prices.) But that seems like a long shot for most.
But that isn't the Democrats fault. That's the nature of the corporate industrialized world. Automation has killed the vast majority of factory jobs and its been killing the family farms as well.
Would you rather be lied to like the coal miners in West Virginia who believed that tripe Trump sold about saving coal jobs there? Hillary told them the truth. Coal is uncompetitive and particularly so in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio where the mines are underground.
They can't compete with the mechanization of thebig strip mines out West or natural gas or even solar now. Not only did more coal power plants closed last year than ever before, twice as many are expected to close next year.
I would love to save the family farm and your way of life. But I don't see how. As someone who is a Democrat and despises the disconnect between urban and rural needs. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
No not at all. You conclusion does not fit the facts at all, because the bureaucrats in question actually designed the ag policy changes to force the outcome preferentially, that is very different than the normal dynamic in business. Furthermore, the family farm dynamic actually is significantly different economically than most other businesses. You literally must force the change from the economics of abundance to the economics of scarcity in order to force the financial instability of those farms with a model that is actually less efficient and with higher input costs.
It doesn't happen that way naturally. This was central planning at its worst.
It's also probably why the pushback on the verified carbon market offsets, because that economic pressure is all the opposite direction. As soon as the policy propping it up collapses, it will rebound fast. And carbon offset money would build back the lost infrastructure very fast.
The industrial models approved by GAP now can't come even close to the rates of sequestration the well educated small family farmer can accomplish. It's not even close actually.
As usual I am nearly the only person actually supplying citations on the whole damn thread, yet because the facts don't fit the common paradigm, I get accused of being fact challenged by people who never actually supply any refuting citations.
I do find it interesting how accurate this press release form 2007 was (in my previously spoilered text)
Earthquake, fire and nuclear leak in Japan
It's hard to call the residents of Kashiwazaki lucky. Hundreds were injured by the quake, at least nine have died, thousands are in emergency shelters. But, if any of the four working reactors had lost power to their coolant system, it could have gone much worse. From the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center:
Even after automatic shutdown, the fuel in the reactor core is still extremely hot, so it is necessary to maintain a continual flow of coolant. If it is not maintained, the fuel could melt, leading to the release of highly radioactive material into the environment. Under some circumstances, it could also result in an explosion.
Despite the potential seriousness of this fire, TEPCO failed to announce whether the transformer continued to operate, or whether the emergency generator started up.
According to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO admitted its disaster response measures did not function successfully, and that there were only four workers available to extinguish the fire, which burned for almost two hours.
I don't think reactors should be feared*. I'm pro-nuclear. I do like to make decisions based on true facts however.
Do you think that Japan should not have evacuated anyone at all due to the reactor accident? Put aside the tsunami evacuations. Are you entirely convinced that the evacuations specific to the reactor accident should not have happened at all?
* ETA well, not feared excessively. As some have already pointed out, everything has risks.
I see. So rants against Libtards is bad but rants against NeoLuddites and Neoliberals is ok?
I thought I was ranting against all the damn politicians micromanaging agriculture and destroying the foundational infrastructure that built this country.
Thanks for reminding me that actually most the damages were started by the libtards, before the other idiots copied it.
No not at all. You conclusion does not fit the facts at all, because the bureaucrats in question actually designed the ag policy changes to force the outcome preferentially, that is very different than the normal dynamic in business. Furthermore, the family farm dynamic actually is significantly different economically than most other businesses. You literally must force the change from the economics of abundance to the economics of scarcity in order to force the financial instability of those farms with a model that is actually less efficient and with higher input costs.
It doesn't happen that way naturally. This was central planning at its worst.
It doesn't fit the reality? Efficiency is almost everything at most businesses.
Now if you want to say that politics led to preferential treatment towards big corporate agribusiness conglomerates, my guess without having studied it in detail is that is probably true. Just as it was with the railroads and countless other businesses. My experience is big money bought the policies that they thought would help them.
It seems as if money in politics is as much your problem as it is for the working class in the cities.
It's also probably why the pushback on the verified carbon market offsets, because that economic pressure is all the opposite direction. As soon as the policy propping it up collapses, it will rebound fast. And carbon offset money would build back the lost infrastructure very fast.
The industrial models approved by GAP now can't come even close to the rates of sequestration the well educated small family farmer can accomplish. It's not even close actually.
I'll have to look into this more closely. I'm one who believes that the answer to the carbon problem resides mostly in energy efficiency. This is why I'm a big proponent in improving ICEs in the short term and developing Nuclear Energy. Vaclav Smil seems to be the most honest and best writer on this subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil
Bill Gates has him on the top of his reading list. I recommend him too.
Not as bad as Chernobyl but not a great effort either. I know nuclear can be a lot safer but it's not just because of Chernobyl that nuclear gets a bad name.
I would accept a proper state of the company would have been an effective and considered emergency plan. They didn't have one.
I would have expected that they immediately ask for as much outside help, both material and advisory, the moment they knew that the plant was running on batteries with a time to expire of about 12 hours.
I would have expected that after it was found that TEPCO had forged documents about plant maintenance and standards, they would have had the nuclear plants taken off them, or the TEPCO management would have been placed under strict governance, with all safety standards and plans revised.
I would agree with what you say, but object, that we don't hear TEPCO or Japan's side of this conversation; all we are hearing is Americans, and that is what I was responding to.
There is plenty of evidence for TEPCO falsifying safety reports
for example within this article form the Wall Street Journal
We also know that there had been at least one earthquake-induced incident before that greenpeace flagged up as demonstrating the weakness in the cooling system that actually caused the disaster. I don't like linking to greenpeace as it is partisan, but in this case, given the date of 2007, it is valid.
Nobody thought to ask "What if another building falls onto it and it catches fire and the fire is left burning for 6 hours?"
Same thing goes for Fukishima, nobody thought to ask "What if a tsunami hits and it knocks out the pumps"
The anti nuke crowd has it right to point out that no matter how well planned or designed something may be, human error or even nature has a demonstrated ability of finding the flaw and exposing it.
It get even worse when humans with their ingenuity set their minds to finding the flaws and exploiting them.
What the pro nuke crowd has got right is that even when these flaws are exposed we have a demonstrated ability to contain and manage them. 3 mile, Chernobyl, Fukishima, have done relatively little damage.
Long story short it's an acceptable risk. Accidents are going to happen, people are going to die, the land and air will be poisoned, absolutely. That's the price of doing business and that's nothing new.
In a 1990 report, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for ensuring the safety of the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant in Fukushima prefecture, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.
It's hard to call the residents of Kashiwazaki lucky. Hundreds were injured by the quake, at least nine have died, thousands are in emergency shelters. But, if any of the four working reactors had lost power to their coolant system, it could have gone much worse. From the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center:
Even after automatic shutdown, the fuel in the reactor core is still extremely hot, so it is necessary to maintain a continual flow of coolant. If it is not maintained, the fuel could melt, leading to the release of highly radioactive material into the environment. Under some circumstances, it could also result in an explosion.
Despite the potential seriousness of this fire, TEPCO failed to announce whether the transformer continued to operate, or whether the emergency generator started up.
According to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO admitted its disaster response measures did not function successfully, and that there were only four workers available to extinguish the fire, which burned for almost two hours.
The Fukushima Daiichi plant has a black mark on its record from earlier in the last decade, when a scandal involving falsified safety records led to parent company Tepco briefly shutting down its entire nuclear fleet in Japan. In 2002, Tepco admitted to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency that it had falsified the results of safety tests on the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor, which is now one of three reactors that workers are struggling to keep from overheating. The test took place in 1991-1992.
The scandal was the latest in a string of nuclear safety records cover-ups by Tepco, including the revelation that the company's doctoring of safety records concerning reactor shrouds, a part of the reactors themselves, in the 1980s through the early 1990s. Five top executives resigned after the company admitted to having falsified safety.
In 2003, Tepco shut down all of its nuclear reactors for inspections, acknowledging the systematic cover-up of inspection data showing cracks in reactors.
Japanese regulators already have some credibility issues after previous episodes in which the strength of the response was called into question.
In Japan in 1999, an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction at a uranium-reprocessing plant killed two employees and spewed radioactive neutrons over the countryside. Government officials later said safety equipment at the plant was missing and the people involved lacked training, adding that their assessment of the accident's seriousness was "inadequate."
Given that the current mitigation plan for Fukishima involves freezing the groundwater for the indefinite future it's quite possible that that plant will actually end up using more energy than it makes.
I used to be more in favour of nuclear power, but now think that it's rarely the right solution. I am not sure that the lifetime energy costs are adequately calculated, let alone the problem of high-level waste disposal, whilst continent-wide solar, wind, tidal and hydro (including pumped-storage) are all getting cheaper and certainly with solar, will continue to get cheaper even with no additional technological improvements.
ETA: As opposed to merely the warnings that dated back to 1990
from my spoilered text:
In a 1990 report, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for ensuring the safety of the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant in Fukushima prefecture, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.
Agreed 100%. That's why the insanely inefficient industrial model we use now would never even have existed without purposeful policies to force the far more efficient integrated local farms and infrastructure out of business.
Now if you want to say that politics led to preferential treatment towards big corporate agribusiness conglomerates, my guess without having studied it in detail is that is probably true. Just as it was with the railroads and countless other businesses. My experience is big money bought the policies that they thought would help them.
That's interesting, but how do you explain that happening when the policies themselves created the agribusiness conglomerates. They basically did not even exist until the USDA made policies to create them on purpose, with the hope that they would make agriculture more efficient. The results were the opposite as expected though. Agriculture is far less efficient due to their creation.
That's probably a fair statement. It's a bit more nuanced than the way you said it, but yes, that's a big part of it.
We need business and even big business, where it is more efficient for the job that's exactly what works best. I don't want my trains, or 747's being built by backyard car mechanics. There is a time and a place for that sort of big money big business.
But subsidizing inefficient harmful business models just for the sake of making them big, even when the smaller local models are more efficient and higher quality food, is so insane it's almost criminal. And the fallout of destroying the natural carbon cycle over vast areas of the country causing AGW is just yet another unintended consequence of this insane policy.
I'll have to look into this more closely. I'm one who believes that the answer to the carbon problem resides mostly in energy efficiency. This is why I'm a big proponent in improving ICEs in the short term and developing Nuclear Energy. Vaclav Smil seems to be the most honest and best writer on this subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil
Bill Gates has him on the top of his reading list. I recommend him too.
Not a fan of Bill Gates Foundation proposed policies in agriculture. Pretty naive. But he does understand big business and big money. Vaclav I will investigate. Never heard of him before.
Oh I found this on Vaclav: " The heart of the book addresses the consequences of the ""massive carnivory"" of western diets, looking at the inefficiencies of production and at the huge impacts on land, water, and the atmosphere. "
Pretty spot on at observing the huge inefficiencies environmental and public health issues of the industrialized system.
I certainly will read the book.
But according to the review it seems he has drawn the conclusion that meat production somehow must be this way and the only solution is force people to stop eating it, when actually it is the inefficient industrialized production model that is to blame.
Agreed 100%. That's why the insanely inefficient industrial model we use now would never even have existed without purposeful policies to force the far more efficient integrated local farms and infrastructure out of business.
That's interesting, but how do you explain that happening when the policies themselves created the agribusiness conglomerates. They basically did not even exist until the USDA made policies to create them on purpose, with the hope that they would make agriculture more efficient. The results were the opposite as expected though. Agriculture is far less efficient due to their creation.
That's probably a fair statement. It's a bit more nuanced than the way you said it, but yes, that's a big part of it.
We need business and even big business, where it is more efficient for the job that's exactly what works best. I don't want my trains, or 747's being built by backyard car mechanics. There is a time and a place for that sort of big money big business.
But subsidizing inefficient harmful business models just for the sake of making them big, even when the smaller local models are more efficient and higher quality food, is so insane it's almost criminal.
I don't disagree per se. But here's a little pushback on that. I have friends who buy organic everything and specialty farm items. Which is great for those farmers. But some of us can't afford cheese at $15 a pound or tomatoes at $4.99. Not when a 650 sq foot studio apartment rents for $1500 a month.
Not a fan of Bill Gates Foundation proposed policies in agriculture. Pretty naive. But he does understand big business and big money. Vaclav I will investigate. Never heard of him before.
He, (Vaclav Smil) understands energy issues probably better than anyone. He has his biases, but he comes by them fairly. He has a no BS approach. It was his writing that led me to rethink my position on nuclear energy. As for Gates on agriculture, I fully admit I'm pretty ignorant on those.
Oh I found this on Vaclav: " The heart of the book addresses the consequences of the ""massive carnivory"" of western diets, looking at the inefficiencies of production and at the huge impacts on land, water, and the atmosphere. "
Pretty spot on at observing the huge inefficiencies environmental and public health issues of the industrialized system.
I certainly will read the book.
But according to the review it seems he has drawn the conclusion that meat production somehow must be this way and the only solution is force people to stop eating it, when actually it is the inefficient industrialized production model that is to blame.
I don't disagree per se. But here's a little pushback on that. I have friends who buy organic everything and specialty farm items. Which is great for those farmers. But some of us can't afford cheese at $15 a pound or tomatoes at $4.99. Not when a 650 sq foot studio apartment rents for $1500 a month.
He, (Vaclav Smil) understands energy issues probably better than anyone. He has his biases, but he comes by them fairly. He has a no BS approach. It was his writing that led me to rethink my position on nuclear energy. As for Gates on agriculture, I fully admit I'm pretty ignorant on those.
I don't know about that. But I have read some interesting articles about the value of local farms. Vertical farming sounds interesting.
The problem for me is cutting through BS, politics and hype to understand what's real. I hear pie in the sky ideas from the left and head in the sand positions on the right. Who's right, who's wrong? Sometimes they're both right and sometimes they're both wrong.
I want everyone to do well. And living in the city, the problem that gnaws on me the most is the absurd cost of housing. Why is it that everything is cheaper and housing and health care just go the other way? That's rhetorical but I think it needs to be addressed
Like most city folk, I'm ignorant about farm issues. That said, I don't think just because someone has purchased a piece of land, that this constitutes a right to do whatever they please with it. And it seems, some farmers think it is.
I am well aware of the propaganda Shrike. Pretty surprised you bought into it, but aware never the less.
Sure when your goal is to drive all those farmers off their land, then sure you can claim labor efficiency. As if the small farmer doesn't have the ability to buy a new tractor appropriately sized too. But I would contend that particular stat showing fewer farmers feeding more city folks really doesn't address efficiency at all.
How much food per acre? How many calories of fossil fuels required per calorie of food produced? How many tons of lost soil due to erosion, compared to tons of food grown? These and many more tests of efficiency all show that sure, more food is grown per farmer, but at a massive loss of efficiency. I mean come on, 10 calories of fossil fuels to grow 1 calories of food and solar is free? Are you kidding me? And 100 tons of soil lost per ton of food produced over all crops and even the best ratio is still less than 1:1? Don't you think it might be a bit more efficient to actually put a skilled laborer in the field to improve the efficiency back to at least break even, if not regenerative? In the US system of agriculture the average soil loss rate is 5.8 tons per acre per year. Average yields of corn, the highest crop we commonly grow over the same period was 3.9 tons per acre per yr!
Oh an by the way, where on that chart is the land that was degraded by agriculture so bad it is now abandoned fallow or desertified? Don't you think any true test of efficiency of land use in agriculture should include those stats too?
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