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Geographically distributing food production increases food security at the expense of transportation costs. This is a tradeoff, it's not a perfect one. Monocropping a plot of land is an act of environmental destruction, but it also improves the efficiency of the food production and distribution network, so again, a tradeoff. There are demonstration farms that do things like multicropping (growing more than one crop in the same field at the same time) but they all run up against the fact that you can't just load up a single worker in a combine harvester and reap 50 acres in a few hours. E.g. they add labor needs which increases the costs of food. So it's a tradeoff, again. If you wanna get real mad about how lovely our food production systems are now, sure, there's plenty to be mad about, including environmental and racial injustice, carbon footprints, the overuse of fertilizers, the shift of land use that puts our most productive fields underneath paved-over suburbs, and so forth. But, hey, maybe also let's all just acknowledge that this poo poo is really really hard and just giving everyone their 40 acres and a mule is a laughably oversimplified suggestion? Reorganizing our society to produce food that is healthy, safe, low-carbon, abundant and affordable for everyone, and reduces the destruction of natural environments, is a really really really complicated and difficult endeavor.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:31
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BeAuMaN posted:It depends on what kind of farming you're doing, and how one defines "multicropping". With open land farming "multicropping" is often done via crop rotation so that they're almost always growing something on the land. You can see this on steroids with how hard some of the smaller hmong farms will run their land with the various rotating specialty crops. Yeah that's definitely multicropping, but when I was talking about acts of ecological destruction from monocropping I don't think raising a single, secondary crop between your monoculture grapevines is rescuing very many ecologies; although if it means you leave wild land wild rather than plowing it, maybe. You do that just by increasing food yields of any staple too, though. I was more thinking of the so-called "traditional" forest multicropping thing; multiple varieties of food plants all intermixed in a biome that is essentially self-sustaining, albeit focused on human-edibles, but which also provides habitat. There are monocultures that can provide habitat, like rice paddies, and of course there are animals that have adapted to surviving in human farmland, including a few species we don't regard as pests and do our best to eradicate. But for the most part, creating millions of square miles of wheat and corn that used to be north america's great prairies supporting millions of bison and hundreds of millions of other animals spread across a hundred or so species is the sort of thing we did in order to provide a huge overabundance of carbs to a rapidly expanding and now rapidly obesifying north american population and gosh it sure would be cool if we could not do that. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a whole farm-to-plate buy local low-carbon-footprint food thing going on, and I'm afraid that sensibility, while laudable, leads to a lot of people who mistakenly believe that with current technology we could feed everyone in america with nothing but urban gardens and small locally-run solar powered organic multicropped family owned farms. And no, we absolutely cannot do that yet, maybe not ever, because none of those farms are producing the megatons of corn, wheat, or soybeans that we consume on a daily basis in this country. We can't support closing in on 400M people with locally-grown kale and neighborhood zucchini. Sure as gently caress aren't going to provide sustainable free good nutrition to poor people by assigning each of them a quarter acre and a rototiller or whatever. We sure as hell can do a lot better though, and community gardens are definitely cool and good. So basically, HelloSailorSign posted:In a year round growing place like many areas of California, you could definitely feed a family of 4 on an acre and a half, not just with high calorie crops, and make it work... Megaman's Jockstrap posted:You can feed an entire family on an acre in CA because it's a year-round growing season. quote:Having said that, most agriculture needs to go much more local, so that we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere to move food around. Absolutely, yes. Suburbs are a blight not only because of the insane cost of delivering infrastructure, and not only because commuting is inherently wasteful, but also because they're often right on top of what used to be local food production and the best soil. We still need vast fields of wheat and corn and soybeans etc., but they don't need to be in Kansas.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:41
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This one is also super good https://maps.nwcg.gov/sa/#/%3F/EditLayerActiveIncidents/37.3686/-121.6893/7 I've set it to show active incidents and NIFS fire perimeters across the whole state but it's more useful if you zoom in. It uses satellite data to find high temperature spots, and color codes them by time; the dark red are the current hotspots. You can see that the four or five really big major burning areas in the greater bay area have all improved a great deal, but there are still serious hotspots and uncontrolled fronts. Play around with layers by expanding the left bar.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:26
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Jaxyon posted:Of course it does, that's literally all he's going to do. also lol at people still thinking trump declaring he has a power and using it actually results in that thing happening for realsies trump hasn't bailed out poo poo, guys e,. also it's a moratorium with no forgiveness so it also requires renters to pay back all the missing rent when it expires not that it'll expire because it won't hold up in court Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 00:34
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I thought the lightning complex fires from three weeks ago were big, but Holy moly that fire in the sierra national forest is enormous. And the one up in Mendo is even bigger. Jeeesus these are some huge loving fires.
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Sep 8, 2020 18:42
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Here, have a smokemap: It's not so much that OC has a fire, as that there's smoke covering the entire country and especially the entire west coast, from several incredibly huge fires and some very unfavorable wind patterns.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:26
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Taxes that take a small slice out of the accumulation of wealth, do not in any way reduce either the incentives or the abilities to accumulate that wealth. Also, anything that reduces the degree of speculation affecting residential real estate markets is good. Speculation on homes is bad for everyone who has to live in homes and only benefits speculators and the middlemen who extract money from speculative activity.
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Sep 10, 2020 21:18
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literally every argument in favor of prop 13 can be countered with "but look at how most every other state doesn't do this and yet somehow the grandmas survive"
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Sep 11, 2020 01:01
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Doc Hawkins posted:so, what do you do for a living? Construct a biography suitable for a presidential candidate
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Sep 12, 2020 03:08
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The jungle primary exists in California only because the Republicans had entirely lost the state and were clearly never going to get it back. Implementing it in Flordia will not have the same outcomes because it is a battleground state. 99% of the time in Florida it'd still be a dem vs. a republican in general elections, and voters in the primaries would still vote for who they think could beat the leading candidate from the opposition party, rather than voting for the candidate they actually would prefer to have in office, exactly as they do now. Jungle primaries only actually matter in states that are already solidly blue or solidly red. We live in a two-party system and jungle primaries don't change that.
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Sep 18, 2020 22:29
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I would guess that interstate commerce clause means CA can't prevent people from buying cars in other states and bringing them into this state. I suppose he might be able to refuse to license them? Or maybe they just automatically fail smog?
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Sep 23, 2020 23:18
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Highbrow Slick posted:I'm not 100% on how it works but I'm pretty sure you already cannot purchase a car out of state and register it in California if it doesn't meet CARB standards. It has to be seasoned. Like, you have to own it out of state for some period, I think 6 months, to prove you weren't planning on just importing a car. e. Also the manufacturers figured out that having a 1-state and then a 49-state version of all their cars was a lot more expensive than just selling CARB-compliant cars to everyone in the country, because california buys like a fifth of all cars or whatever. So effectively CARB standards reduced emissions country-wide. But I dunno if an outright internal combustion engine ban would work the same way.
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Sep 23, 2020 23:31
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judges aren't fooled by that sort of thing and it would definitely wind up in court if we went through with it, though. Like, if California can't just ban cars from other states, we're not getting around that with this one weird trick those other states hate
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Sep 23, 2020 23:37
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Wicked Them Beats posted:And of course millions of additional EVs increases electric grid load which we keep fueling with fossil fuels, soooooooooo it's a net improvement because making electricity with fossil fuels and then using that electricity for cars is still far more efficient in terms of carbon per mile, than just burning fossil fuels in cars it's just not enough of a net improvement to save the planet. We should do it anyway though because net improvements are better than nothing.
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Sep 24, 2020 00:56
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Sydin posted:If he actually had a plan to even just get the process of phasing ICE vehicles out started in a reasonable timeframe - say within his actual possible term - then yeah sure why not, cars suck but cars that aren't as bad for the environment suck less. Signing a paper that says "we will do a thing 15 years from now, pinky swear" ain't impressing me though, sorry. It would be insane without that exception, but, the exception makes it worthless. It's impossible to legislatively determine who can and who can't work from home without either destroying some legit businesses, or creating loopholes any business can trivially exploit. The best way to encourage work-from-home is to prove that companies save money and remain competitive by doing so... and we are doing that now just by virtue of the covid shutdowns. A ton of commercial office real estate is about to lose a lot of value across the whole state.
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Sep 24, 2020 03:12
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In theory, employers want housing prices to fall so they can attract talent to the area more easily, and pay employees less. That's the only powerful interest that immediately comes to mind; and, those companies' actual employees and especially execs already living here are personally invested in their own property values going up, so I wonder just how motivated they'd be to lobby for reform that lowers real estate values.
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Sep 24, 2020 17:18
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predicto posted:gently caress Dianne Feinstein and gently caress Richard Blum " Regents’ policy 2201 says that regents “should not seek to influence inappropriately the outcome of admissions decisions beyond sending letters of recommendation, where appropriate, through the regular admissions process and officers.”" it's fine for normal people to get letters sent through the normal channels. The difference here is A) not normal channels and B) undue influence given his position. e. well, maybe not "fine, but at least "allowed within the rules". Wealthy and powerful people sending support for their peers and their peers' kids, even just using the normal admissions process, definitely is part of the privilege systems that poor and disadvantaged people get crushed by all the time. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Sep 24, 2020 |
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Sep 24, 2020 21:41
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Like basically all other cases, the severity of punishment has almost no deterrence factor on crimes of any kind. The vast majority of people either care about being caught and punished at all, or, don't. Most people don't even know what the punishment would be for most crimes they might do. The main reason for harsh punishments is to satisfy the sense of justice the public demands after someone does a bad thing - e.g., it's revenge, not prevention. It's not like accidentally starting an inferno is a recidivist issue, either. What would help with prevention is if there was a lot of public shaming around the entire concept of causing fires, contributing fires, being in the way of forest fire management/controlled burning, etc. For every one gender reveal party inferno there's a half million homeowners standing in the way of sane forestry management because they just deserve to live among the beautiful trees and nature that they love so much (but won't pay a dime to protect). Society needs to tell people for a generation or two that this is not a reasonable or acceptable way to live, as opposed to the current situation where it's considered enviable and a worthy goal for any middle class family to aspire to.
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Sep 25, 2020 18:55
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An algorithm doesn't even have to be based on racist data, if the charges being brought are a component of the algorithm; because DAs will quickly figure out which charges are more likely to result in denied bail, and then always bring those charges. It occurs to me that an algorithm could be better than a judge's discretion in at least one way: it'd be fast. One of the key things that pushes innocent (or at least, defensible) defendants into plea bargaining, is that just sitting around waiting for an arraignment can result in lost income, lost employment, social shame, family hardship, trauma, etc. If the use of an algorithm sped up the process, maybe people would be released more quickly? This is wild speculation though.
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Sep 27, 2020 07:56
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I used to think we would all be fleeing to canada, but they burn down regularly now too, what with the pine bark beetle and the hot weather and stuff. There's not really anywhere to go that is going to be fine or better for sure. We gotta all stew in the mess our species has made and deal with the consequences until we either figure out how to sequester a vast amount of carbon, or witness the end of human civilization.
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Sep 29, 2020 17:58
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Oregon and Washington won't be wiped out when the big one hits them... but their economies and infrastructure will be devastated, and the tsunami will kill more Americans than have ever died in a natural disaster in our entire history, unless you count diseases as natural disasters. We're talking devastation considerably worse than what Wilma did to Puerto Rico. They are very belatedly starting to sort of deal with the risks; building codes have been updated for example, and the state advises people to be ready for two weeks without services after a 7.0+ quake (the last one, in 1700, was a ~9.0). But the point here is that if you want to live in a place that is actually ready for an earthquake, CA is vastly better off than OR and WA.
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Sep 29, 2020 22:45
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loving argh well oh street
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Oct 4, 2020 17:59
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what job
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Oct 7, 2020 00:40
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Rah! posted:speaking of poo poo rear end cops, the SFPD arrested the guy who punched the nazi at the failed proud boy rally in SF, and charged him with a hate crime Forgive me for nitpicking, but isn't it the DA, not the police, who bring charges? And in that case... why is noted progressive SF DA Chesa Boudin bringing hate crime charges?
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Oct 23, 2020 01:31
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Except 2 both expands and narrows special rules for property taxes: expands for transferability to other homes for over 55s, and narrows for usage by inheritors. And I'm against the first bit and for the second bit, so it'd still be a mixed-case thing that I struggle to vote for or against.
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Oct 26, 2020 02:00
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:59 |
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Senator Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, to reach across the aisle and show everyone how future president gavin newsom wants to heal the country
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Nov 6, 2020 00:28
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