babyhueypnewton posted:what solutions? there are no solutions to global warming possible under capitalism. so unless you think marxism needs more theoretical work to say 'overthrow capitalism or we're all going to die' than I'm not sure what you're talking about.
yeah this is the shit that makes me think environmentalists are total retards. its blazingly obvious that mere issue protest isn't going to change things. when oil companies are out-earning many countries GDPs, their profit is not going to be threatened by a few people with signs.
roseweird posted:there are no solutions to being in a permanent energy crisis because being in an energy crisis is what's known as "being alive"
woah #woah
guidoanselmi posted:Scrree posted:HOWEVER mechanization removes the possibility of polyculture because each machine can handle only one type of plant, and only those that all ripen at the around the same time.
youre not thinkin about the future where drone gundams harvest our polyculture fields.
Scrree posted:using large machines in harvesting is going to require monoculture, which reduces yields, which must then be boosted by genetically vulnerable produce and water-poisoning fertilizer.
not really the latter afaik, but it's obviously not good for the soil and it clearly is not robust for changing conditions. i'm sure you can design cultivating machines that can accept more diversity within crop types.
Scrree posted:properly managed ecosystems produce an energy surplus from the sun, not a deficit from the earth, and combines haven't been proven to work within that kind of system.
what? show me an equation balancing the energy and how you define your system. to oversimplify, it'll always be dissipative if only for 2nd law losses, even for biological systems. more on point, you have to track your sources as bookkeeping fossil fuels requires a whole need system to include. ultimately, the complexity is rather staggering.
in general, i don't know if the difference is in the noise or not, but i imagine it is more energy intensive to harvest polyculture fields. tools and labor have to vary for each crop on a given field. bringing out X, Y, Z tools for harvest and then changing your work flow for each plant is more disruptive. i imagine it might be minor with good design, but just a thought.
Scrree posted:and so its important to the remember that the reason monoculture was adapted by humans in the first place wasnt to increase the amount of food avalible, but to make food production more legible to the tax officials of kings.
its origin isn't really relevant at the stage of industrial agra and it's meaningless to bring up. if you are to imagine the harvest problem as an optimization (to get wonky linear algebra) problem, monoculture clearly has less variables and permits simpler theoretical and practical solutions. given some of the reasons above and for the farmer, as opposed to, but perhaps, the holistic system, the added complications of polyculture not just complicate the solution but i posit would add terms that would increase the energy/action (in lagrangian terms).
well, and he can correct me if I am wrong, but scree was talking about primarily low-mechanized farms. the fossil fuel inputs in such cases exist, but are going to be significantly lower. and if you're growing an order of magnitude more food than you and your livestock consume, then you're probably going to be fine. and sure, if we're looking at it in terms of "more crops = more variables" your dynamical systems are going to be more complicated, but that's not necessarily a fair axiom in modelling since we're dealing with an effectively uncomputable amount of variables to begin with, so choosing to work with a limited number of variables may produce a completely unstable dynamical system.
guidoanselmi posted:what? show me an equation balancing the energy and how you define your system. to oversimplify, it'll always be dissipative if only for 2nd law losses, even for biological systems. more on point, you have to track your sources as bookkeeping fossil fuels requires a whole need system to include. ultimately, the complexity is rather staggering.
if your system is the earth and not the earth+sun you can net energy.
babyhueypnewton posted:Lessons posted:roseweird posted:why is the left full of crypto-primitivists hoping to wait out an apocalyptic starvation event? it's unseemly. come on. get up, dust yourselves off, remember the state you must inherit as communists.
probably because global warming and the energy crisis in its modern form (capitalism is actually in a perpetual energy crisis but lets leave that aside) are relatively new things and no one's done the theoretical work to integrate the solutions coming from environmental science and theory into a marxist framework, or at least not well enough to reach a wide audience, and so people just wail about how we're all going to die. not that thats what scree is doing necessarily.
what solutions? there are no solutions to global warming possible under capitalism. so unless you think marxism needs more theoretical work to say 'overthrow capitalism or we're all going to die' than I'm not sure what you're talking about.
roseweird posted:ultimately it would be ideal to model the biosphere alone, rather than simply the earth, then you can net energy from both geothermal and solar action, which are both pretty important in placing the context of the overall earth-sun system, since the main thing about that system is that it's going to collapse eventually
if you want to be specific its better to model the total energy available from any given source (solar, geothermal, fossil, nuclear, tidal) as well as the average flux and so on because they're all going to give out at some point
c_man posted:if your system is the earth and not the earth+sun you can net energy.
you mean the otherway around? energy is conserved in a closed system, that's zero sum - but some of it is squandered as heat. 2nd law and whatnot. solar flux is more or less fixed and adds energy into the system, but even if what you say is right...
having net positive energy is meaningless w/o some definition of value or utility in this context. (to side step what you wrote). e.g. energy is expended to create corn plants - but some of that goes toward biomass without immediate use, like the stem and husk.
elemennop posted:so choosing to work with a limited number of variables may produce a completely unstable dynamical system.
totally.
elemennop posted:but that's not necessarily a fair axiom in modelling since we're dealing with an effectively uncomputable amount of variables to begin with
it just depends on how you define the system, parameters, and their relations. you can find out some general behaviors for highly non-linear systems without too much effort. but yeah, i'm just saying what he wrote was something too vague to be prescriptive
roseweird posted:swampman posted:you guys have made some okay posts in this thread, i admit that, but really what i wanted to talk about was killing 6 billion people
i know you really want this to be funny but if 6 billion people starve or die in desperate violence you're going to remember that back when a thing called the internet existed you used it to joke about killing 6 billion humans
if it offends your delicate sensibilities to think about it then go post somewhere else
guidoanselmi posted:you mean the otherway around? energy is conserved in a closed system, that's zero sum - but some of it is squandered as heat. 2nd law and whatnot. solar flux is more or less fixed and adds energy into the system, but even if what you say is right...
having net positive energy is meaningless w/o some definition of value or utility in this context. (to side step what you wrote). e.g. energy is expended to create corn plants - but some of that goes toward biomass without immediate use, like the stem and husk.
no i mean that if you just consider the earth you can have processes (e.g. life) that result in a net increase in free energy for the earth, which has no 2nd law problems because there's non-thermalized energy input from the sun
swampman posted:Thats about half a trillion pounds of people parts, to put that in perspective, they (we) would weigh as much as 2.5 million blue whales
speaking of that, how much do you think the actual world population would be if we pro-rated for the body mass of fat people
littlegreenpills posted:maybe eye shd change my avatar. my eye key on ths keyboard s broken btw
Do not do that.
thirdplace posted:swampman posted:Thats about half a trillion pounds of people parts, to put that in perspective, they (we) would weigh as much as 2.5 million blue whales
speaking of that, how much do you think the actual world population would be if we pro-rated for the body mass of fat people
my thoughts on the matter are irrelevant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_weight
the average adult worldwide weighs 62 kg. the adult americans weigh an average of 81.9 kg. so we're basically supporting 33% extra biomass comparing to the average countries like djibouti and swaziland.
