Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you’re not eating anything else, but still have a year-round growing season, it takes an acre or two for modern agriculture to feed a person. That’s a lot by city standards, but not in general (it was more like 60 in pre-modern times). It’s basically what the Ethiopians mentioned are doing, plus the cocoa so they can have things that don’t grow on trees, as well.

    and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.

    Mountains of human experience suggests it takes a lot more effort than that. Have you had to deal with pests, drought or disease yet?

    You might still come in under 8 hours a day, but then you add in the cash crops… Again, this is something only white people generations away from subsistence farming seem to think will be easy.







  • At the end of the day, farmland is going to earn a similar basic return to whatever other capital asset, and while farming labour isn’t unskilled the amount of people raised in it means it earns like it is.

    Nobody who says this is picturing manhandling half-dead chickens, and it’s usually someone white who isn’t going to move to the mountains of Ethiopia to farm subsistence crops and cocoa. That pretty much leaves something land-intensive.

    I did talk to someone here who made it work with ranching, but ranching is definitely not a good earner right now, and a lot of people are leaving the industry. Modern crop farming seems a lot like a desk job on wheels. Mainly, I think people just want space and fresh air, and have no idea what rural life is actually like.






  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldIt hurts.
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    2 days ago

    I mean, there’s more options than just tree or grid, and if it’s not strictly a tree the fastest route from A to B could be something small again. And of course trees have their own issues, like what happens if you need to get from one leaf to another that’s nearby, but only “as the crow flies”.

    That example about having to move aside for a car going through a narrow European street is something I’ve actually experienced. Maybe it’s just my Canadian brain but it feels unsafe.


  • That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them.

    I feel like so much of the debate misses this forest for the trees. Sure, X regime is awful. How does valued ally Saudi compare? It’s at best an often-decisive factor in whether to be nice to someone or not.

    Edit: Another good one:

    There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.

    Even if you only care about economics, continuing the war just has to be personally cheaper for an official than ending the war. And then there’s tons of coercion, ego and ideology in the mix as well, and sometimes raw irrationality.

    Early on in this, there were oil traders talking about how nothing will even disrupt oil because it’s too important. That’s replacing history with a fanfic you wrote, basically. Same vibe as the 90’s when the world decided free markets always become a democracy.




  • I mean, you can organise grids to be more or less stroady, and if you have too much of this going - like you have a medieval street plan - you can get the opposite thing where cars are forced through areas only suited to pedestrians, and everyone has to flatten themselves against building walls to make room.


  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldIt hurts.
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    3 days ago

    Yeah, someone deciding to clear out an area and develop it in a completely different way is possible, I guess, but seems a lot less likely. Maybe there’s a bit of both - something large like horse stables or a hospital was there, then it was replaced with a new self-contained development, and then they built out into the margin around it later on yet.

    In any case, somebody had a big urban planning idea of some kind, but it hasn’t really continued to make sense as things changed. The angle could just be because one grid is aligned true north, and the other magnetic north.