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people like to just have a contrarian talking point to fire back to anything you can mention pulling out the "well actually lithium..." card is one of the biggest red flags someone can give to show they're just a pendant and haven't even slightly wrapped their brain around the real challenges let alone care about them.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 01:37 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:58 |
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call to action posted:Dude, you've got absolutely no idea what you're talking about. EV batteries aren't thrown into the trash, they are almost always recycled (as they're by far the most valuable part of a wrecked/old EV). Tesla Powerwalls, for example, are made of recycled Tesla car batteries, and there's a robust market in Leaf battery cells amongst the off grid crew. In North America Lithium battery recycling is handled by vaporizing them in a smelter at around 1000 degrees, which releases about 50% of the product as toxic gasses and renders the other half into slag which is collected and separated into various elements. If they end up in the e-waste plants in China, well, it's still burnt but at a far worse rate of recovery for the various elements. There isn't a happy clean-room recycling chain for lithium batteries and why you think there would be is somewhat befuddling. They're little packets of toxic material and residual charge, you can't disassemble them. Do you also believe that plastic is recycled, rather than being sold to waste-fueled power plants or otherwise disposed of? Much of this thread really does seem to be wallowing in delusion regarding the efficiency of our current recycling programs, and indeed does not understand that most of that recycling amounts to "burn it". Rime fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Aug 26, 2017 |
# ? Aug 26, 2017 02:09 |
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StabbinHobo posted:one of the biggest red flags someone can give to show they're just a pendant
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 02:34 |
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permaculture agroforestry with carefully implemented burning regimes is the way forward and when i have my place set up scientists can do whatever experiments they want there. the problem with agriculture is capitalism. what organic farmers actually don't want scientists to expose isn't that organic farming uses heaps of land and has no quantifiable health benefits - it's that proper ecologically sustainable farming is not compatible with a capitalist system that demands constant obscene surplus and wealth from every enterprise or it doesn't get funded. once that is removed from the equation and the focus shifts to producing enough food for everyone rather than generating an exponential amount of profit every year, radical long-term restorative techniques will take over. we are a few natural disasters away from society figuring out that the ocean and the wind don't care what your nation's gdp is and the first world can't buy its way out of paying for climate change forever, and that's when permaculture and science will come together for good and magic will start to happen
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 02:41 |
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the problem is that it's the first world that is most in love with the golden calf and that's where the change has to come from, because we can still afford to experiment. if i take a risk and gently caress up and lose my harvest for the year, i can go on welfare and move back in with my mother and rely on the supermarkets until i've built my savings back up and then i try again. if a farmer in sudan takes a risk and fucks up and loses his harvest for the year, he is now a refugee and his family's life is ruined and there is a possibility they will all die. that's why we need immigration reform. the hypothetical farmer in sudan knows a fuckload more about farming than i do; he's a better farmer than me, he was just born in the wrong place at the wrong time and now his farm is gone, he's going to spend the rest of his life in a loving coal mine or something and all his knowledge will be lost. the people now fleeing the rural equator know what it's like to farm in the desert, and if they were given access to our technology, our education and our social safety nets, they could do poo poo with it that i couldn't dream of once the pressing everyday risk of starving to death was removed. there are potential world-savers dying every day in the mediterranean sea and some of them are taking literal thousands of years of knowledge with them, while i am stuck in post-industrial australia with all this useless money trying to learn this poo poo from scratch and i only have about ten years to do it. the climate refugee crisis is a loss of accumulated and potential learning that has never been written down and will be lost forever - it's the modern-day burning of the library of alexandria the same goes for the annihilation of indigenous people. there were people who absolutely knew how to farm australia without destroying it. they were all killed so that early settlers could tear down the bush and plant wheat and run cattle on land that just is not suited to wheat or to cattle, and now wheat and cattle are the backbone of our industry and they are failing fast. the descendants of those people live in poverty - they have no more opportunity to contribute to agricultural progress than a kid who drowns off the coast of libya. it is hosed the old ceremony fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Aug 26, 2017 |
# ? Aug 26, 2017 02:59 |
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the old ceremony posted:permaculture agroforestry with carefully implemented burning regimes is the way forward and when i have my place set up scientists can do whatever experiments they want there. the problem with agriculture is capitalism. what organic farmers actually don't want scientists to expose isn't that organic farming uses heaps of land and has no quantifiable health benefits - it's that proper ecologically sustainable farming is not compatible with a capitalist system that demands constant obscene surplus and wealth from every enterprise or it doesn't get funded. once that is removed from the equation and the focus shifts to producing enough food for everyone rather than generating an exponential amount of profit every year, radical long-term restorative techniques will take over. we are a few natural disasters away from society figuring out that the ocean and the wind don't care what your nation's gdp is and the first world can't buy its way out of paying for climate change forever, and that's when permaculture and science will come together for good and magic will start to happen I wouldn't be surprised if they call future agricultural systems permaculture, since it doesn't really mean anything and even eco-futurist BECCS purveyors are calling their systems permaculture, but it won't really have anything in common with permaculture as described by Mollison and Holmgrem. All of the main permaculture practices that aren't just agricultural common sense are well-established as hokum from a yields perspective. Agroforestry will probably have an expanded role, but that's because subtropical climates will become tropical climates where agroforestry has proven results.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:06 |
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It doesn't really take science to prove that permaculture is a fraud. It just takes a few minutes of critical thinking. Permaculture claims to deliver ultra-high yields beyond even what modern intensive farming can produce, while requiring low inputs of labor, capital and natural resources, all while being low-tech. If such a system actually existed we would have started using it thousands of years ago. It's a paradigm example of "too good to be true".
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:17 |
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agroforestry only has proven results in tropical climates because that's the only real zone where a lot of study has taken place. that's mostly because tropical climates have a lot of water, which means they can afford to experiment. again, someone with no money trying to farm the desert isn't going to potentially waste a shitload of water trying to set up an experimental agroforestry system because if they run out of water and can't afford to have it shipped in from elsewhere, that's it for them. current temperate prime farmland isn't getting experimental treatments because researchers can't afford big chunks of temperate prime farmland to experiment with, and that farmland is still producing loads of wheat and beef so as far as the capitalists are concerned it would be a step backward to donate it to science and cut its short-term gains in favour of long-term viability that may or may not end up eventuating. because that's what would be needed to give sustainable agroforestry the attention it deserves - huge tracts of valuable land donated by the corporations that currently own them to rag-tag bands of permaculture hippies and ecologists with absolutely no promise of future return on their investment. i know this is probably going to derail the thread for a year but... the most exciting place right now for dry-climate permaculture is israel. this is because israel has money; it has a thriving scientific community; and most importantly, israelis love their land. people will devote their lives for very low wages to make the negev desert agriculturally viable not because they can't afford to move to a better climate, but because they love the negev desert and they want to stay there. the connection goes deeper than money, and they don't care if it doesn't pay. real agricultural reform is going to come from people who are on land that they feel a connection to. the most tragic missed opportunity of the past decade is the drought in the fertile crescent that drove thousands off their farms for good (and started a civil war and you know the rest) - if people had their priorities straight there should have been a massive international investment into propping up rural communities, studying the drought, trying to farm in the drought, learning what works, learning what doesn't work, and planning for the future, because the mess that the fertile crescent is in now is the future of the world. it was an opportunity to learn and discover that was completely missed, and we are all much worse off for it, especially the people who have died
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:22 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Permaculture claims to deliver ultra-high yields beyond even what modern intensive farming can produce, while requiring low inputs of labor, capital and natural resources, all while being low-tech.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:23 |
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the old ceremony posted:any "permaculturalist" who describes it that way is full of poo poo and trying to steal your money That's certainly what Fukuoka Masanobu claimed, and he's the whole basis for permaculture in the first place. I haven't encountered a single purveyor of permaculture as a replacement for the industrial food system that doesn't claim it's a low-input, high-output system. In reality is a low-input, low-output system which is great for gardening in your spare time but horrible for feeding the world, which is why permies garden and build rocket furnaces rather than producing food for sale. Thug Lessons fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Aug 26, 2017 |
# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:35 |
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permaculture = you will not make a profit. a central tenet of permaculture is the rejection of profit. profit is an outdated concept. money is an outdated concept. permaculture is about subsistence: meeting everyone's basic needs, without anyone expecting to live in obscene luxury. abandoning the idea of money is the first step toward realising this dream, because money is hosed and it has led us to where we are today
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:36 |
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i know what you're saying. there's a big focus in modern permaculture on getting a million different species of plant growing in a tiny little space, which honestly i think is just showmanship, because those flourishing forest gardens look amazing and put a nice polish on the whole movement. but they are a huge amount of work, and the finest of them will only feed like a dozen people. creating incredibly complex tiny ecosystems and carefully controlled microclimates and jungles that require 24/7 attention is a nice hobby but yes, those people need to be seen as artists, not scientists. they're doing useful stuff, i'm glad they're doing it, it's beautiful, and they're making good discoveries that are helpful to everyone, but positioning their techniques as anything like a large-scale solution is counterproductive. part of the problem is that they're still working against the landscape, not with it. the local ecosystem needs to be integrated. the plants that grow best in the climate are the ones that are already there - we need to build around the existing forests, not keep trying to replace them with our own. and we need to stop trying to tell people that permaculture is going to generate wealth, because drat it it's not, trying to make it economically viable by 21st century standards is dooming it to failure, and we need to understand that we're ahead of our time and working for a future in which the focus of society will not be on profit but on survival
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:46 |
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the old ceremony posted:permaculture = you will not make a profit. a central tenet of permaculture is the rejection of profit. profit is an outdated concept. money is an outdated concept. permaculture is about subsistence: meeting everyone's basic needs, without anyone expecting to live in obscene luxury. abandoning the idea of money is the first step toward realising this dream, because money is hosed and it has led us to where we are today This I agree with. Perma is a political ideology that fetishizes "the simple life" and subsistence farming. Meanwhile the entire developing world is scrambling as fast as it can to transition out of that paradigm, because subsistence farming is a hellish existence incompatible with human flourishing and no one would accept it by choice given a viable alternative. As climate change advances it will probably become incompatible with human life entirely for most of the world. I am certainly for socialism, but since I'm not Pol Pot I don't see any reason to hold up the subsistence farmer as a model of it.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:49 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Meanwhile the entire developing world is scrambling as fast as it can to transition out of that paradigm, because subsistence farming is a hellish existence incompatible with human flourishing and no one would accept it by choice given a viable alternative. What exactly is human flourishing?
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 03:52 |
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the old ceremony posted:i know what you're saying. there's a big focus in modern permaculture on getting a million different species of plant growing in a tiny little space, which honestly i think is just showmanship, because those flourishing forest gardens look amazing and put a nice polish on the whole movement. but they are a huge amount of work, and the finest of them will only feed like a dozen people. creating incredibly complex tiny ecosystems and carefully controlled microclimates and jungles that require 24/7 attention is a nice hobby but yes, those people need to be seen as artists, not scientists. they're doing useful stuff, i'm glad they're doing it, it's beautiful, and they're making good discoveries that are helpful to everyone, but positioning their techniques as anything like a large-scale solution is counterproductive. The existing forests (and all other natural environments) are hopelessly unproductive for human needs given current population levels. There is no way to support human life as it currently exists based around them. That said, I believe what you're proposing is a beautiful idea. Perhaps in a few centuries, after we have lived through industrial communism long enough to get sick of it and science has advanced far enough to allow it, we will choose to invest our surplus into creating an ecosystem where such an existence is possible.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 04:01 |
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please don't compare me to pol pot because i want to create a 50-acre kurrajong forest with an endemic feral goat population
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 04:04 |
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NewForumSoftware posted:What exactly is human flourishing? Hard to say, but I am quite certain it isn't living in the abject poverty subsistence farming produces.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 04:04 |
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the old ceremony posted:please don't compare me to pol pot because i want to create a 50-acre kurrajong forest with an endemic feral goat population Oh well if you're Australian all bets are off because you're living in one of the richest and least-despoiled natural environments on earth. As an eco freak I'd love to live there. But I would say those resources should be devoted towards absorbing climate refugees rather than banging your head against the wall, which is essentially what trying to increase prosperity without economic growth entails.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 04:07 |
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Thug Lessons posted:... rather than banging your head against the wall, which is essentially what trying to increase prosperity without economic growth entails. theeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrre it is
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 05:29 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Oh well if you're Australian all bets are off because you're living in one of the richest and least-despoiled natural environments on earth. As an eco freak I'd love to live there. But I would say those resources should be devoted towards absorbing climate refugees rather than banging your head against the wall, which is essentially what trying to increase prosperity without economic growth entails. Are you Arkane?
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 05:30 |
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Rime posted:In North America Lithium battery recycling is handled by vaporizing them in a smelter at around 1000 degrees, which releases about 50% of the product as toxic gasses and renders the other half into slag which is collected and separated into various elements. If they end up in the e-waste plants in China, well, it's still burnt but at a far worse rate of recovery for the various elements. Again, duder, this is not an inherent problem with battery technology. Melting the battery modules and discarding lithium and rare earths as slag is economical right now because lithium cobalt oxide is coming cheap out of dirty Chinese mines. The slag recyclers don't leach out the lithium; they are interested in the nickel and cobalt. If you want to recover the lithium you can grind up the modules, wash them and precipitate out LiCO3. I don't know the chemistry but I presume it's not hard to go back to LiCO2 from there. But why would you want to when lithium is so cheap right now? And the same thing applies to not being able to disassemble them: lead acid batteries used to he manufactured however, but now more than 80% of them are recycled because the government mandated they be manufactured and disposed of in a certain way. Is it hard to imagine DOT or EPA standards for Li-ion battery packs that make them easier to strip down and recycle at end of life? I wonder what background you have in electrochemistry or high tech manufacturing that you find yourself in the position of disabusing us all of our delusions on the subject.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 06:20 |
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the old ceremony posted:please don't compare me to pol pot because i want to create a 50-acre kurrajong forest with an endemic feral goat population The problem with simply going "drat those dastardly ~~~CAPITALISTS~~~ who won't give us free ecocommunes" as an answer to "how do we feed everyone without totally loving the planet" isn't helpful. Laissez faire capitalism is often terrible for the environment, but even without it, there will still be 9-11 billion people. That number is large enough to make any solution that doesn't involve going for the highest yield possible under the constraints of acceptable levels of land use and pollution a complete non-starter. Socialising agriculture and helping developing countries build farms that don't suck just because we can rather than to extract profit could be a very good idea, but the goal should be a combination of sustainable intensification, management of pollutants as point sources as far as possible (greenhouses rule), and large scale landscape planning to avoid fragmenting remaining habitats.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 07:54 |
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Thug Lessons posted:That's certainly what Toyohiko Kagawa claimed, and he's the whole basis for permaculture in the first place. I haven't encountered a single purveyor of permaculture as a replacement for the industrial food system that doesn't claim it's a low-input, high-output system. In reality is a low-input, low-output system which is great for gardening in your spare time but horrible for feeding the world, which is why permies garden and build rocket furnaces rather than producing food for sale. I am getting more and more interested in permaculture here in Iceland, follow the workshops and nascent movement here, and have *never* once heard it described like your strawman.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 10:57 |
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NewForumSoftware posted:What exactly is human flourishing? Not having to read your posts.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 11:19 |
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poopinmymouth posted:I am getting more and more interested in permaculture here in Iceland, follow the workshops and nascent movement here, and have *never* once heard it described like your strawman. fwiw his strawmen on peak oil and on population control were similarly bullshit so the clear pattern here is "thug is dumb"
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 14:50 |
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poopinmymouth posted:I am getting more and more interested in permaculture here in Iceland, follow the workshops and nascent movement here, and have *never* once heard it described like your strawman. Really? You never hear it? Because I hear it all the time. Here's a few examples I found just by typing "permaculture yields" into Google. From Charles Eisenstein, a successful perma/alt-ag author and speaker: quote:This reflects a common conception about organic agriculture – that it sacrifices productivity in the interests of the environment and health. It stands to reason that if you forgo pesticides and chemical fertilizer, yields are going to suffer. From permies.org, the most popular permaculture website: quote:My understanding is that one of the basic claims of permaculture is: Superior yield/cost per acre, when compared to typical monoculture farming. From Permaculture Apprenctice, a popular blog: quote:What if I told you that it is possible to make a living from a 4-acre orchard and you can even do this with less work, more yield and more fun. All of this should be unsurprising. It is a matter of record that permaculture is inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming", with "do nothing" in this case meaning, "don't use fertilizer, don't use pesticides, and don't do much work", i.e. low-input, high-output. Fukuoka claimed his system produced yields equal to conventional farming, though this was never independently verified. As you can see, modern permies claim they can produce "much more" than equal yields, at least two or three times. The reality is that nearly every permaculture practice that isn't just common sense, (for example polyculture or planting perennials), is less productive than your standard monoculture row farm, often spectacularly so. Permaculture is really only good at one thing: separating idealistic, ecologically-minded people from their money.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 16:15 |
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The argument that if permaculture worked we would have discovered it long ago and used it is bullshit by the way. I don't know anything about permaculture but I know when the Reconquista finished they got rid of the "insubstantial" things the Muslims at like nuts and vegetables and replaced it with monoculture wheat and sheep not because it was more productive but because you can't have feudalism without centralized control of food resources. The result was massive desertification.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 16:51 |
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its an absolutely insane way to approach life and learning. forget the topic at hand, lets make up a fake topic: blurgsparting if your process looks like this: - come across more and more mentions of blurgsparting, notice its getting popular - notice that most people (read: median dumbass on the internet) seem to be saying things your default skeptical mindset flags as warnings - google blurgsparting, find its more zealous advocates and early adopters who are now riding this wave of popularity and a little high on their own farts - tease out some short list of outlandish claims about blurgsparting from these incredibly cherry picked sources - forever associate blurgsparting with this short list of silly factoids you've memorized, triumphantly congratulate yourself for your skepticism - poo poo all over anyone trying to point out or learn about the more realistic underlying truth to the blurgsparting topic that made it come up in the first place just loving get off the internet your brain is broken
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 17:12 |
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StabbinHobo posted:its an absolutely insane way to approach life and learning. forget the topic at hand, lets make up a fake topic: blurgsparting FTFY (reflecting my experience at least).
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 17:40 |
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thug lessons is 100% right.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 17:58 |
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Squalid posted:thug lessons is 100% right. We got another blurgspart denier here
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 18:43 |
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Climate Change: Bluurg is to be Spart?
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 19:29 |
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the old ceremony posted:permaculture = you will not make a profit. a central tenet of permaculture is the rejection of profit. profit is an outdated concept. money is an outdated concept. permaculture is about subsistence: meeting everyone's basic needs, without anyone expecting to live in obscene luxury. abandoning the idea of money is the first step toward realising this dream, because money is hosed and it has led us to where we are today Money is just the unit of account for trade between two entities that lack the necessary resources to engage in barter or the necessary community to engage in prestation. Someone using the internet to propose that we abandon the societal developments that made scientific progress (and thus, the internet) possible by returning to subsistence farming is colossally stupid. While some people use their excess money to live lives of what many people would consider excess, other people use their excess money to fund research or help those in need. A return to subsistence farming means all those things go away, not just the one that you don't like.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 20:35 |
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Hello Sailor posted:Someone using the internet to propose that we abandon the societal developments that made scientific progress (and thus, the internet) possible by returning to subsistence farming is colossally stupid.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 20:40 |
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this but unironically
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 20:54 |
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Hello Sailor posted:Money is just the unit of account for trade between two entities that lack the necessary resources to engage in barter or the necessary community to engage in prestation. Most of modern farming is optimization for cash crops and control not nutrient density.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 21:40 |
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TildeATH posted:Most of modern farming is optimization for cash crops and control not nutrient density. 1) "modern farming has problems" doesn't automatically mean "subsistence farming (but with a new word for it) is the best alternative, or even better at all" 2) define what you mean by nutrient density
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 21:46 |
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Hello Sailor posted:Money is just the unit of account for trade between two entities that lack the necessary resources to engage in barter or the necessary community to engage in prestation. To be fair, I don't believe TOC believes we should do that, his affection for perma aside. TildeATH posted:Most of modern farming is optimization for cash crops and control not nutrient density. Can you expand on what you mean here?
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 21:52 |
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This just in, capitalism prioritizes money over efficiency/good for humanity. News at 11.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 22:13 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:58 |
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I don't know anything about this perma stuff. But subsistence farming results in a wretched standard of living. Anyone who advocates for it or anything like it shouldn't be taken seriously.
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# ? Aug 26, 2017 22:31 |