in any case, how would you transport high temperatures to the industrial sites? water boils at 100° and few liquids boil above 400°. most liquids will be impractical due to cost or safety (combustibility, toxicity…).
Pump water through, producing steam to drive a turbine, use turbine to generate electricity, use electricity for industrial process.
Now, in practice you _probably_ don't want to do this, because, in this case, you have district heating demand, which is a far more efficient use of the power.
Not to say there's nothing wrong with modern construction, but keep in mind that most roman buildings also only lasted a few decades. You only see that ones that didn't disappear.
Also, do we really want to build houses that are meant to last 2000 years? It seems expensive and very impractical when you want to tear it down to build something new.
I don’t know if that is the right approach. While I am sure fashions changed in Ancient Rome, I am not sure how fast the pace of innovation was. Within a hundred years modern building techniques have changed massively. I know certain Europeans always love to tout their stone homes but for lots of the world it’s not very practical or cost effective.
Those Roman buildings are not what you want to live in. Just adding electric lights which you want is going to be a major effort and likely ruin a lot of what made it a nice building in the day. Not to mention you want indoor plumbing (without the lead pipes). Modern insulation so you can have modern HVAC...
I am not in the industry but I've been following closely and I am usually skeptical, but while I erred on the side of "this is just a tool" I also wondered "what if?" more than once.
Those tasks they are measuring are extremely well-defined problems that are extremely well-known. They don't really represent general programming as it is practiced day to day. "Find a fact on the web", "Train a classifier" these are trivial things given the answers are all over the place on Github, etc.
So they're getting exponentially better are doing some easy fraction of programming work. But this would be like self-driving cars getting exponentially better at driving on very safe, easy roads, with absolutely no measurement towards something like chaotic streets, or rural back-roads, or edge cases like a semi swerving or weird reflections.
I respect the FKT guys, but I'm more of through hiker type. When I saw that pic, I thought "Yikes, nope, nada, never will I ever do one of those trips."
New Zealand did this in the 80s. Caused a lot of pain in the rural community, a bunch of bankruptcies, marriage failures and suicides as farming operations only sustainable because they were subsidised failed.
We now have a very internationally competitive agricultural sector, but yeah, getting there caused a lot of pain.
I disagree, food subsidies are the only alternative to the granary system, or foolishly counting on food imports. Agriculture is an industry with notorious slim margins, but yield can vary up to 30% year to year just on random weather patterns and often effects large areas at once. Combined those are a recipe for an eventual shortage unless you pay to over produce. A farm running on 2% margins on a good year can't risk planting 10% extra if they might not be able to sell it and will take it all as a loss, and so farmers without decent subsidies would only try to produce up to the current demand and not a bushel over it. And if a large agricultural area experiences a bad year, as we have seen happen historically many times over, and everyone was already only planning to barely meet demand, all of a sudden you have a food shortage and people starve. And on top of that weather patterns across the globe are changing and becoming less predictable. Famines essentially became nonexistent in places with decent crop subsidization, but in places without it that still rely on large granary stores shortages still happen.
And in the US, a lot of the subsidies flow towards food that isn't edible without processing - soybeans and field corn as opposed to sweet corn.
Why? Because they've always grown it. So the subsidies encourage them to keep on growing it instead of diversifying into more competitive or higher value crops.
The subsidy is received by way of reduced insurance premiums. While that does make insurance affordable where it mightn't otherwise be, the rate of reduction is the same across all crops, so the insurance is made equally affordable no matter which crop you grow. Thus, for all intents and purposes, we can completely ignore the subsidy and simply focus on the insurance as that is ultimately what you are suggesting is significant. After all, if the subsidies were taken away, all it would really mean that you theoretically couldn't afford insurance anymore and would do without.
But what is significant about insurance? Since no good discussion is complete without a car analogy, let's go there. Say you always drove a truck. By your logic, auto insurance encourages you to keep driving trucks. Which suggests that if you could no longer get auto insurance, you would start driving a bus/van/car/whatever instead. But what makes you think that? If auto insurance disappeared for some reason, why wouldn't you still keep driving trucks as opposed to buses/vans/cars/whatever? There is probably a reason why you started driving trucks in the first place that doesn't go away even if insurance did.
In the case of corn and soybeans, there is a really good reason why they are grown so much: Because that's where the market is. It is what people want to buy. They are the most competitive and highest value crops in the regions they are grown.
> In the case of corn and soybeans, there is a really good reason why they are grown so much: Because that's where the market is. It is what people want to buy. They are the most competitive and highest value crops in the regions they are grown.
Given the fact that they're subsidised, I doubt that they're the most competitive crops. Competitive crops don't need to be subsidised.
Also, if they're so competitive, then why has the demolition of USAID caused them economic harm? A competitive product doesn't rely on a taxpayer subsidised buyer to make their market.
> Given the fact that they're subsidised, I doubt that they're the most competitive crops.
Every crop is subsidized.
> Competitive crops don't need to be subsidised.
Then no crop is competitive, so what is this alternative product that you are picturing? Stones? Who is going to buy those stones?
> then why has the demolition of USAID caused them economic harm?
John Deere's stock price is basically at its highest point ever. What economic harm are you talking about? When they are warning of imminent bankruptcy, then we can talk about there being economic harm. Some people sitting around complaining about something being different isn't real economic harm, just talk. Actions speak louder than words.
A lot of it also gets turned into biofuels or sent to third-world countries as food aid. That could easily be rerouted in a crisis scenario, if domestic food security became an issue.
The corn that gets turned into biofuel isn't edible without further processing into maize derived products, so in a crisis scenario, hope you can still highly process corn.
The subsidies are generally to have spare production capacity, so as to reduce the risk of famine that can occur from the capitalistic incentives of optimising the system for efficiency above resilience.
(Not that the subsidies are always actually the most sensibly set out: but the general idea of subsidizing farming is an important one)
> The subsidies are generally to have spare production capacity
Maybe originally, but not anymore. Exhibit A: See America's waistline and the reason behind it (hint: farm subsidies and SNAP, two sides of the same coin).
What's needed is for countries to create risk profiles for food availability under different scenarios. At the same time establish maximum risk threshold.
Not sure about this year but either two or three years ago over 90% of the University of New England’s grant money (over $20MM) was from the School of Agriculture
I hate many aspects of the Australian economy (especially our lack of economic diversity) but having world-best tech for farming isn’t one of them. America is still leaps and bounds behind us in many different subdomains of Agriculture and Mining
Australia is weak for only really having primary industries, but we sure are very optimised for it
The land isn't free and arable land with good water is hard to come by.
Mangoes are not grown in the Tanami or Great Sandy Desert. They're not grown around Kalgoorlie (that relies on piped in water from far, far away), etc.
Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are predominantly grown in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and when combined, produce approximately 95% of the total national crop. Mangoes are also grown in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
The areas they are grown have tropical rainforest (Qld), vast Wetlands (those parts of the Northern Territory with fresh water crocodiles, swamps, etc), annual monsoons (Kimberley), etc.
You're not familiar with the geography of Australia, huh.
A) They're not growing mangoes in the desert.
B) They're pretty fucking terrible at water management, google the Murray - Darling and learn you some Australian water management.
> They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm.
Australia is vast and empty. In the interior, rivers are few and far between and the landscape is flat and featureless. Any 'free' land is going to be essentially desert. Even if you could grow something on it, you wouldn't want to live there.
You can buy and sell x-year leases from the crown. Any with a commercially viable site sell for just below or even more than freehold land (depending on supply)
Farming logistics also works radically differently than in America: the reason our farms are orders of magnitude higher larger than American ranches spatially is because it’s only somewhat profitable at the largest possible scales
The valley I’m from originally (The Tweed) is cane country, and not a single company is viable independently. Hell we only have one mill left nationally that’s not-megacorp owned (note we have no land leases though, it’s all freehold where I’m from)
cars are just people that move from A to B.
if there is no sensible way to move where you need to go it is not a city made for humans but just hostile to people and their requirements.
i need exactly 63 downvotes please, don't be cheap.
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