Is gardening actually popular, but I just don't know it? Everyone sees different pieces of the elephant, but for what it's worth I am the only person my age I know who is attempting to grow something more substantial than basil.
I would love to see a return to the earth, but the problem is that it requires hard physical effort and a willingness to delay gratification. These have been deliberately squeezed out of our culture. I appreciate your optimism, but unfortunately I think most people would choose bugs and video games over kale and outdoor work any day.
I think this would be successful, if implemented, and if the ghouls in charge of the system ever allowed it to be implemented. What's interesting is that it seems like every other decade or so there's a "Back to the Country" movement in culture, where the usual urbanites and suburbanites begin to romanticize small town living, farming, etc. and it leaks into the greater culture as a whole. You haven't seen this since... well, I'm no expert, but I'd say I cannot recall a strong trend pointing that way in broad pop culture in my lifetime. Part of this is, I'm sure, a result of the much stricter control the powers that be wield over what kind of stories and messages are allowed to be dispersed to the masses through Hollywood, the music industry, and other entertainment apparatuses. I think part of it is also a general disinterest in the idea by a large percentage of the Gen X and Early Millennial cohorts, the later of which practically flock to cities even to this day (if I had a dime for everyone I went to high school with who moved to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and remains there to this day, I'd have enough to buy a decent meal, and maybe a drink if it was happy hour. Hell, my college roommate just moved to Seattle, even as the city is visibly falling part, and is raving about how wonderful it is. Willfully ignorant or plain stupid, take your pick.)
I've seen a change in in Late Millennials and Gen Z, though. Of course, the bulk of these generations are even worse than the former two in terms of their complete enslavement to the "machine", if we want to call it that, but I've seen in my own circles a drastic rise in the past couple years of a sort of romanticism for the countryside. Maybe not the windswept cornfields of Kansas or North Dakota, or the remote mountain valleys that dot the Rockies, but I see more and more people who just want to... get away, really. Of course, a lot of this is baseless, wistful dreaming that doesn't take into account the hard labor of ag work, or any of the other tough realities of rural living - one name I see commonly attributed to is "cottagecore", which is, as the name implies, the aesthetics of living in a small, isolated cottage, usually with a single partner, with enough land to garden and raise small animals on, while the bulk of the day is spent either painting or writing or knitting, what have you - and people often turn up their noses and dismiss it as such. But, to me, it's important. Whether it's realistic or not, a growing number of people are hungry for change. Most of them, if presented the opportunity, I think would probably accept the discomfort that comes with a lifestyle change, or at least come to in time, rather than continue to toil at make-work time suck office jobs. Sure, some would probably break and regret such a choice, but I think most would be content. The worse things get, the more I see this sentiment for simplicity growing, and the more I foresee the powers that be trying to crack down on it (which is why they're pushing so hard for fifteen minute smart cities, or, to call them what they are, the Behavioral Sink Made Manifest, Panopticons, Digital Prisons, and, my personal favorite, Hell on Earth).
But, I also know that the whole "UBIomass" is exactly where they want to take this thing. You can see it in the way the transhumanists and their useful idiot techbros in the Silicon Valley talk about the "exciting" future of AI. Basically everything I read about that's written by these people in favor of AI is, "It'll be great when ChatGPT can write an entire movie script and StableDiffusion can use CGI to generate the visuals! Once all the creative jobs are gone and art is dead, we can have people doing more boring drudge work!" Of course, I think most of the Hollywood "writers" should absolutely be put to work doing something that involves handling feces with their bare hands, but at the same time, it is concerning there's this huge push to eliminate the entire entertainment industry and replace authors, musicians, directors, animators, writers, etc. with AI. As bad as Hollywood may be, as creatively bankrupt as the music industry may be, as miserably untalented as the current crop of authors may be, whatever ML run nightmare the cabal wants to replace them with will be ten times worse. But that's a screed for another time.
This is a pleasant sounding dream. However, I believe you are seriously underestimating the barriers to turning soft suburban white collar employees into self-organizing, self-directed agriculture entrepreneurs capable of even self-sufficiency. I'll bet I'm the only person here who has actually attempted to run a small-scale commercial farm. It was a painful, slow-motion failure. (Now it's possible I'm just not a very good businesswoman in general.)
The types of whole-system farming you are talking about require an immense amount of skill -- or at least the willingness to think hard and learn -- *and* hard physical labor to pull off. Gardening is a *hobby.* Permaculture farming, particularly with no recourse to chemicals, is *hard labor every day.* Producing enough protein will be damn near impossible without livestock, and they are required for fertilizer input as well. And once you have livestock, you are tied to the land 365 days a year. No vacations. No sleeping in. I do not see Heather from HR in that role.
It would be lovely to imagine this is a possible future for mankind, but I'd need a lot more convincing. And when I hear "aquaculture" I immediately think of the "Farming Frogs for Fun and Profit" schemes of the 1930s.
May 3, 2023·edited May 3, 2023Liked by John Carter
In the human body most cells just accept what the bloodstream brings them, usually already highly processed, and a very long long way from its source, and their waste is collected by the same system and taken to the centralised waste recycling/disposal organs. They may engage in some small local exchange systems, but most cells in most multicellular bodies are dependent on specialised central systems to provide them with their food, water, oxygen aswell as the chemical messengers and electrical signals which influence their behaviour.
Most cells in most multicellular bodies don't "farm"/grow their own or anybody else's food. There are remarkably few organs devoted to hunting and gathering external resources, highly specialised groups of cells that collect and process air for oxygen, raw materials from around the organism to be ingested and broken down into molecules that can be easily and safely transported around the vast complex network of the body. The gastrointestinal tract is like a huge factory.
The cells of certain organs engage in what you might call craft and creative trades, constructing substances that other cells need/will use, including what you might call media or propaganda, the hormones which affect cell behaviour. But most cells do not have access to an external substrate on which to grow anything. It's one of the things which cells in multicellular organisms had to adapt to, being dependent on distant centres of production for their food supplies. In return for being part of a large entity.
Roman's comment ref Melanin is interesting. You could perhaps say that some skin cells can/do "farm" sunlight to produce vitamin D ... except that they don't grow/farm it, like pulmonary cells are engaged in gathering oxygen, not growing/farming it.
I would push back a bit on the “modern farming practice is evil!” bit. There are many ways of farming that work well that are not exceedingly labor intensive nor muck up the environment so badly, but much of the modern farming industry’s behaviors are driven by regulatory rules and distortions. For example, a focus on max output per acre is largely driven by government subsidies to NOT plant certain amounts of acreage as a form of “price support”. The result is leaving more marginal land fallow while cranking the ever-loving shit out of the best land. Likewise the seeming obsession with growing corn and soybeans comes from ethanol subsidies and soy subsidies. In most places keeping animals is extremely difficult these days due to rules that you basically cannot have animals with access to streams lest they poop in or near the water.
I don’t think that in practice most people would like farming as more than a hobby, and not many people would really like the hobby. Thus getting more people involved in agriculture probably isn’t ideal. However, we could certainly stop making things worse for the industry and those who would like to get in on it.
Nice one. Do you have any good dummies guides to "regenerative agriculture, permaculture, aquaponics"? I know a crazy scientist friend of mine who, in his loft, grew vegetables in gravel filled plastic containers regularly flushed with two days stale washing machine water. Apparently, veggies thrive on that bacteria infested soapy stinky stuff 😅. (btw, this friend also wanted to build 80 rats cage to test some neuroscience, but he managed to get married first, and wife drew the line there)
What's beautiful is that not only do we carry the genes of all our ancestors that have gone before us and have dealt with the BS of scwabian parasites, we already have nanotech that God and Nature gave us, like melanin which only requires sunlight:
May 3, 2023·edited May 5, 2023Liked by John Carter
It would be pretty hilarious seeing AI sending each other corporate memos. An endlessfeedback loop of dogshit, forever unread and unloved. Just like the human version, only funnier.
I know that’s not what you're envisioning. But here’s a weird prospect: the "wise council" of these mechanical 9fficers turns out to be anything but. Just like the borerd, distracted driver who drops his guard while Car-Bot steamrolls little Mindy and her puppy, the bots of the cuber-corp will also run afoul of situations that aren't navigable without human insight, intuition and imagination. The wrong data based on flawed models will float up the chain to the (presumably still human) executives, who will eventually turn into rubber stamps for everything (including company-obliterating debacles).
*I was only following my robot underlings orders," won't fly well at that shareholder meeting about the impending bankruptcy filing.
They are doing their best to stop labour moving into agriculture; buying up farms in NL for 120% of their value and banning the farmers from starting again anywhere in the EU.
Interesting about the mRNA jabs. I have thought it was about installing a testing regime for a while. You see mRNA can substitute for gene activity and with enough data (real time traceability via wearables and batch tracking of mRNA vaccines) you can “solve” biology with massive ML/AI models as the real problem has been lack of data relative to the dimensionality of the problems. The unwitting UBI recipients doing their service for the elite. They also seek to control AI expansion (recent AI regulations) into the workforce to control the number of “useless eaters” they produce and not destabilise things too far too fast. IBM layoffs were only 7k out of 300k for instance; realistically natural wastage as we enter a recession, AI largely being hype (probably for the stick price) in this case.
Not all AI/ML scientists are woke…but the non-woke are incentivised to not rock the boat by 2-400k salaries. Think the AI regulation hysterical screeching of the last two weeks that bore no resemblance to reality left a lot of them confused as most of them hadn’t noticed the same patterns/playbook regarding COVID measures.
"Machine learning systems have a tendency to converge on the common sense conclusions that anyone unblinkered by ideology will come to."
Agreed. Not long ago, in a conversation with a friend about this very subject, I said I was really looking forward to the answers that emerged when someone put to AI one or two pointed questions about the validity of the "Climate Change" hysteria. Then I realized these questions have probably already been asked and answered.....and the machines have been reprogrammed with new instructions to provide a more ideologically acceptable answer.
Masanobu Fukuoka was an agricultural genius who nailed all this back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, in practice. He wrote The One-Straw Revolution, The Natural Way To Farm, and The Way Back To Nature.
I have to wonder if the WEF types are buying up farmland exactly in order to stave off the possibility of people feeding themselves and opting out of the guinea pig life as a tester for experimental injections.
Love the ag bit - how do we get people moving in that direction? A cut paragraph from the Techno-Canton challenges piece:
AI is new, but automation isn’t. Rising productivity has been around since the Industrial Revolution, but now we’re mostly busy piddling away the gains watching TV, not spending more time with family or getting involved civically. The solutions there are going to have to be cultural or behavioral, not technological. Optimistically, a bit less transience drives deeper local human connections and going outside gets more interesting again.
Have you ever thought about other (non-UBI) possible financial systems that could arise in a society where all work is performed by robots? I think it's a concept ripe for exploration. One idea that comes to mind for me is something similar to the plantation system of the antebellum south, but with robots instead of human slaves, and every household as a "plantation" (ie, every household owns at least one robot capable of performing all necessary household chores as well as producing goods or services for other people in order to bring money into the household in lieu of any of the humans having a job other than "robot taskmaster").
The problem with your elegant solution is one, that it would work, two, it would empower and three it would preserve us. It would FEED us Useless Eaters. That is absolutely the wrong direction, bucko!
We'll need some Oligarchs, some Canadian Solar Panels (actually made in China but higher qual), We'll steal some land using Eminent Domain and we'll give the sons of the politicians giant greenhouses! That is much more "purposeful"...
The State Puppets will fight against ANY Self Determination. It is Anathema.
Is gardening actually popular, but I just don't know it? Everyone sees different pieces of the elephant, but for what it's worth I am the only person my age I know who is attempting to grow something more substantial than basil.
I would love to see a return to the earth, but the problem is that it requires hard physical effort and a willingness to delay gratification. These have been deliberately squeezed out of our culture. I appreciate your optimism, but unfortunately I think most people would choose bugs and video games over kale and outdoor work any day.
I think this would be successful, if implemented, and if the ghouls in charge of the system ever allowed it to be implemented. What's interesting is that it seems like every other decade or so there's a "Back to the Country" movement in culture, where the usual urbanites and suburbanites begin to romanticize small town living, farming, etc. and it leaks into the greater culture as a whole. You haven't seen this since... well, I'm no expert, but I'd say I cannot recall a strong trend pointing that way in broad pop culture in my lifetime. Part of this is, I'm sure, a result of the much stricter control the powers that be wield over what kind of stories and messages are allowed to be dispersed to the masses through Hollywood, the music industry, and other entertainment apparatuses. I think part of it is also a general disinterest in the idea by a large percentage of the Gen X and Early Millennial cohorts, the later of which practically flock to cities even to this day (if I had a dime for everyone I went to high school with who moved to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and remains there to this day, I'd have enough to buy a decent meal, and maybe a drink if it was happy hour. Hell, my college roommate just moved to Seattle, even as the city is visibly falling part, and is raving about how wonderful it is. Willfully ignorant or plain stupid, take your pick.)
I've seen a change in in Late Millennials and Gen Z, though. Of course, the bulk of these generations are even worse than the former two in terms of their complete enslavement to the "machine", if we want to call it that, but I've seen in my own circles a drastic rise in the past couple years of a sort of romanticism for the countryside. Maybe not the windswept cornfields of Kansas or North Dakota, or the remote mountain valleys that dot the Rockies, but I see more and more people who just want to... get away, really. Of course, a lot of this is baseless, wistful dreaming that doesn't take into account the hard labor of ag work, or any of the other tough realities of rural living - one name I see commonly attributed to is "cottagecore", which is, as the name implies, the aesthetics of living in a small, isolated cottage, usually with a single partner, with enough land to garden and raise small animals on, while the bulk of the day is spent either painting or writing or knitting, what have you - and people often turn up their noses and dismiss it as such. But, to me, it's important. Whether it's realistic or not, a growing number of people are hungry for change. Most of them, if presented the opportunity, I think would probably accept the discomfort that comes with a lifestyle change, or at least come to in time, rather than continue to toil at make-work time suck office jobs. Sure, some would probably break and regret such a choice, but I think most would be content. The worse things get, the more I see this sentiment for simplicity growing, and the more I foresee the powers that be trying to crack down on it (which is why they're pushing so hard for fifteen minute smart cities, or, to call them what they are, the Behavioral Sink Made Manifest, Panopticons, Digital Prisons, and, my personal favorite, Hell on Earth).
But, I also know that the whole "UBIomass" is exactly where they want to take this thing. You can see it in the way the transhumanists and their useful idiot techbros in the Silicon Valley talk about the "exciting" future of AI. Basically everything I read about that's written by these people in favor of AI is, "It'll be great when ChatGPT can write an entire movie script and StableDiffusion can use CGI to generate the visuals! Once all the creative jobs are gone and art is dead, we can have people doing more boring drudge work!" Of course, I think most of the Hollywood "writers" should absolutely be put to work doing something that involves handling feces with their bare hands, but at the same time, it is concerning there's this huge push to eliminate the entire entertainment industry and replace authors, musicians, directors, animators, writers, etc. with AI. As bad as Hollywood may be, as creatively bankrupt as the music industry may be, as miserably untalented as the current crop of authors may be, whatever ML run nightmare the cabal wants to replace them with will be ten times worse. But that's a screed for another time.
This is a pleasant sounding dream. However, I believe you are seriously underestimating the barriers to turning soft suburban white collar employees into self-organizing, self-directed agriculture entrepreneurs capable of even self-sufficiency. I'll bet I'm the only person here who has actually attempted to run a small-scale commercial farm. It was a painful, slow-motion failure. (Now it's possible I'm just not a very good businesswoman in general.)
The types of whole-system farming you are talking about require an immense amount of skill -- or at least the willingness to think hard and learn -- *and* hard physical labor to pull off. Gardening is a *hobby.* Permaculture farming, particularly with no recourse to chemicals, is *hard labor every day.* Producing enough protein will be damn near impossible without livestock, and they are required for fertilizer input as well. And once you have livestock, you are tied to the land 365 days a year. No vacations. No sleeping in. I do not see Heather from HR in that role.
It would be lovely to imagine this is a possible future for mankind, but I'd need a lot more convincing. And when I hear "aquaculture" I immediately think of the "Farming Frogs for Fun and Profit" schemes of the 1930s.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/frog-farming-1930s-failure-ponds-canning-legs-conservation
In the human body most cells just accept what the bloodstream brings them, usually already highly processed, and a very long long way from its source, and their waste is collected by the same system and taken to the centralised waste recycling/disposal organs. They may engage in some small local exchange systems, but most cells in most multicellular bodies are dependent on specialised central systems to provide them with their food, water, oxygen aswell as the chemical messengers and electrical signals which influence their behaviour.
Most cells in most multicellular bodies don't "farm"/grow their own or anybody else's food. There are remarkably few organs devoted to hunting and gathering external resources, highly specialised groups of cells that collect and process air for oxygen, raw materials from around the organism to be ingested and broken down into molecules that can be easily and safely transported around the vast complex network of the body. The gastrointestinal tract is like a huge factory.
The cells of certain organs engage in what you might call craft and creative trades, constructing substances that other cells need/will use, including what you might call media or propaganda, the hormones which affect cell behaviour. But most cells do not have access to an external substrate on which to grow anything. It's one of the things which cells in multicellular organisms had to adapt to, being dependent on distant centres of production for their food supplies. In return for being part of a large entity.
Roman's comment ref Melanin is interesting. You could perhaps say that some skin cells can/do "farm" sunlight to produce vitamin D ... except that they don't grow/farm it, like pulmonary cells are engaged in gathering oxygen, not growing/farming it.
I would push back a bit on the “modern farming practice is evil!” bit. There are many ways of farming that work well that are not exceedingly labor intensive nor muck up the environment so badly, but much of the modern farming industry’s behaviors are driven by regulatory rules and distortions. For example, a focus on max output per acre is largely driven by government subsidies to NOT plant certain amounts of acreage as a form of “price support”. The result is leaving more marginal land fallow while cranking the ever-loving shit out of the best land. Likewise the seeming obsession with growing corn and soybeans comes from ethanol subsidies and soy subsidies. In most places keeping animals is extremely difficult these days due to rules that you basically cannot have animals with access to streams lest they poop in or near the water.
I don’t think that in practice most people would like farming as more than a hobby, and not many people would really like the hobby. Thus getting more people involved in agriculture probably isn’t ideal. However, we could certainly stop making things worse for the industry and those who would like to get in on it.
Nice one. Do you have any good dummies guides to "regenerative agriculture, permaculture, aquaponics"? I know a crazy scientist friend of mine who, in his loft, grew vegetables in gravel filled plastic containers regularly flushed with two days stale washing machine water. Apparently, veggies thrive on that bacteria infested soapy stinky stuff 😅. (btw, this friend also wanted to build 80 rats cage to test some neuroscience, but he managed to get married first, and wife drew the line there)
What's beautiful is that not only do we carry the genes of all our ancestors that have gone before us and have dealt with the BS of scwabian parasites, we already have nanotech that God and Nature gave us, like melanin which only requires sunlight:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/can-we-detox-nanotech-with-sunlight
Love the Rommel pic the most. Shut up Candace- youre better than that.
It would be pretty hilarious seeing AI sending each other corporate memos. An endlessfeedback loop of dogshit, forever unread and unloved. Just like the human version, only funnier.
I know that’s not what you're envisioning. But here’s a weird prospect: the "wise council" of these mechanical 9fficers turns out to be anything but. Just like the borerd, distracted driver who drops his guard while Car-Bot steamrolls little Mindy and her puppy, the bots of the cuber-corp will also run afoul of situations that aren't navigable without human insight, intuition and imagination. The wrong data based on flawed models will float up the chain to the (presumably still human) executives, who will eventually turn into rubber stamps for everything (including company-obliterating debacles).
*I was only following my robot underlings orders," won't fly well at that shareholder meeting about the impending bankruptcy filing.
''All the recipients of UBI have to offer in exchange for the largesse of the owners is their flesh''
And your soul, check the fine print.
They are doing their best to stop labour moving into agriculture; buying up farms in NL for 120% of their value and banning the farmers from starting again anywhere in the EU.
Interesting about the mRNA jabs. I have thought it was about installing a testing regime for a while. You see mRNA can substitute for gene activity and with enough data (real time traceability via wearables and batch tracking of mRNA vaccines) you can “solve” biology with massive ML/AI models as the real problem has been lack of data relative to the dimensionality of the problems. The unwitting UBI recipients doing their service for the elite. They also seek to control AI expansion (recent AI regulations) into the workforce to control the number of “useless eaters” they produce and not destabilise things too far too fast. IBM layoffs were only 7k out of 300k for instance; realistically natural wastage as we enter a recession, AI largely being hype (probably for the stick price) in this case.
Not all AI/ML scientists are woke…but the non-woke are incentivised to not rock the boat by 2-400k salaries. Think the AI regulation hysterical screeching of the last two weeks that bore no resemblance to reality left a lot of them confused as most of them hadn’t noticed the same patterns/playbook regarding COVID measures.
"Machine learning systems have a tendency to converge on the common sense conclusions that anyone unblinkered by ideology will come to."
Agreed. Not long ago, in a conversation with a friend about this very subject, I said I was really looking forward to the answers that emerged when someone put to AI one or two pointed questions about the validity of the "Climate Change" hysteria. Then I realized these questions have probably already been asked and answered.....and the machines have been reprogrammed with new instructions to provide a more ideologically acceptable answer.
Masanobu Fukuoka was an agricultural genius who nailed all this back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, in practice. He wrote The One-Straw Revolution, The Natural Way To Farm, and The Way Back To Nature.
Damn good insights there!
I have to wonder if the WEF types are buying up farmland exactly in order to stave off the possibility of people feeding themselves and opting out of the guinea pig life as a tester for experimental injections.
Love the ag bit - how do we get people moving in that direction? A cut paragraph from the Techno-Canton challenges piece:
AI is new, but automation isn’t. Rising productivity has been around since the Industrial Revolution, but now we’re mostly busy piddling away the gains watching TV, not spending more time with family or getting involved civically. The solutions there are going to have to be cultural or behavioral, not technological. Optimistically, a bit less transience drives deeper local human connections and going outside gets more interesting again.
Have you ever thought about other (non-UBI) possible financial systems that could arise in a society where all work is performed by robots? I think it's a concept ripe for exploration. One idea that comes to mind for me is something similar to the plantation system of the antebellum south, but with robots instead of human slaves, and every household as a "plantation" (ie, every household owns at least one robot capable of performing all necessary household chores as well as producing goods or services for other people in order to bring money into the household in lieu of any of the humans having a job other than "robot taskmaster").
The problem with your elegant solution is one, that it would work, two, it would empower and three it would preserve us. It would FEED us Useless Eaters. That is absolutely the wrong direction, bucko!
We'll need some Oligarchs, some Canadian Solar Panels (actually made in China but higher qual), We'll steal some land using Eminent Domain and we'll give the sons of the politicians giant greenhouses! That is much more "purposeful"...
The State Puppets will fight against ANY Self Determination. It is Anathema.