HN user

ldiracdelta

853 karma
Posts0
Comments405
View on HN
No posts found.

Conventional IPM programs use more toxic, but muuuch less volume of pesticides.

Organic programs user "better" pesticides, but much much more.

Which is better? We'll, it depends on how fast those pesticides break down and what those degraded molecules are. It depends on how much volume is applied to the produce. It depends on if it accumulates in the flesh of the produce.

What if a pesticide outrageously lethal to humans, but breaks down in 2 days and you only apply it in the first 25% of the produce growing window?

Which is worse? 400 lbs of feathers accumulating on your chest at 100 lbs/week for 4 weeks or 400 lbs of steel on your chest applied once.

Silly metaphor, but the answer to incredibly difficult system problems is really "it depends". Conventional vs organic is not clear cut.

Unless the farmer is a moron, IPM is how most farmers try to use pesticides. Pesticides and chemical applications can be very expensive. Farmers try to use the least possible amount they can for purely economic reasons. My wife's grandfather was using IPM back in the 70s. Farming is competitive. If your costs are too high, you eventually go bankrupt during bad years. For the most part IPM is the rule, not the exception. Purely limited by the farmer's ability to understand pest cycles.

That's fair. Traditionally land jubilee's and debt jubilee's helped this happen. In ancient Israel of the Old Testament there was a complete unwinding of ALL debts every 6 years. Any that extended into the 7th year were... cancelled. Also, land wasn't sold, according to the law. It was apportioned by family and you could only _lease_ it for 50 years -- after that, it reverted to the family. Thus preventing land accumulation in a few hands.

The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.

Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state.

Now the effect of terrorizing people with scarcity of food may have caused them to try to grow more of their own food, but I'm not sure that's the best tactic.

50% of my cc student body was high school students in that program. That cohort was higher achieving than the average hs student.

I think the big difference was that they were there to teach, not do research. They would have left for engineering or s/w jobs long ago I they didn't actually love teaching

I went to a cc as part of a high school program. The math department was sooo much better at teaching and having passion for the subject than when I arrived at univesity.

Bingo.

From my readings, the reason certain parts of shipping are mandated to be constructed in USA is that we Americans don't want to lose the ability to construct war ships. Tariffs may not be maximally efficient from a theoretical free trade perspective, but the cost premium of a tariff forcing local production may well be worth it compared to losing your ability to protect yourself on the seas.

Now, whether you agree with that sentiment or not is orthogonal. Chesterton's Fence says that if you don't understand why this law exists, then you don't get to tear it down until you do understand why it was ever thought to be a good idea.

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I would classify Scott Adam's statement as a trueism -- true for most people, under most circumstances, for most times. Unfortunately, couching a trueism in its most precise linguistic form with associated probabilities and error margins is a path to simply being ignored. Once a thread switches to rhetoric, dialectic responses are like pissing in the wind, forgive the analogy :-)