jools posted:how is our agricultural infrastructure not self-sustaining now, what do you mean by that
partly transportation issues and their reliance on fossil fuels
also local specific ecological issues: Australia exports twice as much food as it consumes which is great and all, but it comes at the cost of doing possibly irreparable damage to marginal land and threatened ecosystems.
roseweird posted:i mean, i live in new york, so i can either throw my hands up and say none of this matters, because a place like new york is extremely bad and would not exist in the first place under global socialism, and either leave or turn to nihilistic striving, or i can try to apply my insights to the world at hand, which looks like bourgeois utopianism because, again, i live in fucking new york. i guess i could be tabling with ISO kids i guess? whatever.
concentration of population/urbanization is not inherently bad. there are already too many people for everyone to live a "rural" existence. population centers are great for all sorts of efficiency reasons, including power transmission, fuel consumption, scaling of resource transport, preservation of more land for other purposes (including agriculture), and, if certain crazy theorists are to be believed, the development of socialism
VoxNihili posted:roseweird posted:
i mean, i live in new york, so i can either throw my hands up and say none of this matters, because a place like new york is extremely bad and would not exist in the first place under global socialism, and either leave or turn to nihilistic striving, or i can try to apply my insights to the world at hand, which looks like bourgeois utopianism because, again, i live in fucking new york. i guess i could be tabling with ISO kids i guess? whatever.
concentration of population/urbanization is not inherently bad. there are already too many people for everyone to live a "rural" existence. population centers are great for all sorts of efficiency reasons, including power transmission, fuel consumption, scaling of resource transport, preservation of more land for other purposes (including agriculture), and, if certain crazy theorists are to be believed, the development of socialism
yeah new yorkers have the lowest environmental footprint of any US city by quite some margin.
jools posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:can you check the prevalence of 'friend zone' for me jools
you can do it yourself you know...
http://www.google.com/trends/
how to friendzone
ah yes, who among us can forget the dark days of september 2011 when the global feminist councils began rounding up the surplus beta population and expelling them via railcar to the isolated friendzones of the frozen north? 'but... i thought girls wanted a nice guy' the captives could be heard to sob from beside the tracks.
jools posted:how to friendzone
lol
roseweird posted:jools posted:
how is our agricultural infrastructure not self-sustaining now, what do you mean by that
well currently a few enormous agricultural businesses own i don't know, most of the midwest and california, and lease it to farmers who pay migrant workers a pittance to bust their asses harvesting it, loading it onto trucks driven by people who carry it across the entire goddamn continent for like 18 hour drives at a time. i don't know if greenhouses are the most efficient thing in the world and i know they are not magic but i feel like it is a socialist imperative to try to stop perpetuating this system in some way if possible
alright but be careful with fixing it, the American grain surplus feeds a lot of people around the world
roseweird posted:jools posted:how is our agricultural infrastructure not self-sustaining now, what do you mean by that
well currently a few enormous agricultural businesses own i don't know, most of the midwest and california, and lease it to farmers who pay migrant workers a pittance to bust their asses harvesting it, loading it onto trucks driven by people who carry it across the entire goddamn continent for like 18 hour drives at a time. i don't know if greenhouses are the most efficient thing in the world and i know they are not magic but i feel like it is a socialist imperative to try to stop perpetuating this system in some way if possible
that sounds inequitable but self-sustaining is a different concept
roseweird posted:am not trying to glorify agricultural work, i know it is brutal, i don't really think there is any way to make agricultural work equitable.
i don't think this is really true. i worked on a farm for a bit (not a large one, but one that was industrialized and specifically for profit) and also lived on one for a longer bit (i.e. for feeding ourselves, though not as our primary source obvs) and the differences are huge between some bullshit large-scale operation and when your goal is just "let us, a family, grow enough to feed ourselves". i think if people are going to discuss small-scale agriculture it is important to remember that growing food is not some kind of impossible insane task. it just takes a reasonable sized area of fertile land and some tools and some work, but it isn't literally sunrise to sunset every day forever. with a few people cooperating it is satisfying and good and doable
global capitalism, an endless laff riot.
jools posted:
Ironicwarcriminal posted:VoxNihili posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
someone sent me a unicef-sponsored income calculator the other day and it turns out my middling salary literally puts me in the top 1% of the world's income earners
poverty is relative though and i still feel kind of oppressed so can we change the terminology to 99.12% vs the evil .88%?
if it makes you feel any better, income alone doesnt actually determine quality of life. im sure there are plenty of people living more meaningful, fulfilling lives than yoursof course...at first i was upset because i was like 'man if i'm anxious and unsettled then what's it like for all those people who earn less' but then i realized that much of the world's population had the privilege of being born into non-liberal, non post-industrial societies where religion and community still mean something
lmao religion and community
hey buddy sorry about the fact that you havent had a clean drink of water in 7 years but at least you still are ignorant enough to believe that there is some purpose to it
jools posted:how is our agricultural infrastructure not self-sustaining now, what do you mean by that
haber process
mongosteen posted:well yeah i got malaria and live in a tin shack on $2 a day and yesterday i had to bury the bulbheaded ebony skeleton of my child but i was too weak to get it deep enough that the animals wouldn't get at it, but otoh any time i need i can get free babysitting for the rest of my wretched hellbound spawn because i live in a tight-knit community
i know rite i bet they don't even have wifi at their starbucks urgh
swampman posted:
see. see!! the singularity is real
jools posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:can you check the prevalence of 'friend zone' for me jools
you can do it yourself you know...
http://www.google.com/trends/
how to friendzone
now THIS peirces my shared pessimism!! (begins making more an more suggestive glances at khamsek)
jools posted:yeah im hyper suspicious of "greenhouses!!" as a solution. why doesnt shennong or whoever it was still post... they were an actual agricultural scientist....
that guy owned... he talked about owning some land in michigan that he was going to farm. i wonder if he got sucked into that
jools posted:try some slurs now
may 2011: poop pulls ahead of pee
e: seems to be due to pee-wee herman's failure to thrive