Yoxa Asked:
“That is impressive.I’d be very interested to hear more about what you do to achieve that, lessons learned, etc…”
Not so impressive since his net after expenses was only about $14K a year. and earned about $1.50 per hour of labor.Farming is a difficult business. The capital costs are very high (land + equipment), lots of hours (probably about 12 days and weekends). Most people lose their shirts running small farms. Farming is probably even worse than running a resturant business. If you want to do farming. do it for your own personal needs, but not for income.
Jefferson Bramlett Wrote:
“If there is a robot that can do my job, it will need to be very good at hundreds of tasks, multi-tasking, and figuring out what is most important, since we are always in triage mode, always up against limits.”
FWIW: Automation applies to controlled enviroments when the process to complete a task is dead-on the same over and over. Automation isn’t reducing job hours, its eliminating jobs. For instance automation is likely to replace 1/3 of all american workers, thus reducing the working hours by 1/3. Those that still have jobs will still be working 40+ hours. The jobs getting replace are in retail (kioks & self-checkout instead of cashiers) and office (IT, Legal, Sales, Accounting, etc).
That said some automation will come to farming, but its not cheap and still likely to require frequent maintenance, just like existing ag. machinery. The push for ag automation is because the lack of farmers. less than 2% of the population has any involvement in food production and the average age of US farmers is about 60 years. Either in the future, machines will need to do more of the work, or people will have to eat a lot less :). Still I think maintenance is not going away. Still need to grease joints, Sharpen/replace blades, Replace damaged parts, clean gunk, etc. No Ag machine is going to be maintenance free.
I think we will see more automation in the form of semi-robotic tractors that automate seed drilling, cultivation, applying fertializer, etc, on a well mapped out field. However I am not sure if this can be applied to fields that are not consistant of have too many curves that would be difficult for the machines to track properly. There will be some advancement in harvesting equipment such as fruit pickers, but to justify the cost for picking machines, the costs for fruits would probably need to double. Its far cheaper to higher a group of undocumented workers that to buy & maintain a $750K to $1M mechanical picker, that probably is a lot slower than a human.
A race could continue to grow if it is able to move off planet, something that Arthur Robey has long been talking about.
Energy, raw materials and room are available. But not on the surface of Earth.
I’m not that trilled by being an early colonizer of an asteroid or nearby planet. But some might be. Like those who left “civilization” in the late 1700’s to explore and settle the wild west.
Milwaukee had a coal-fired power plant (recently converted to NG) that sent its output heat to many buildings in downtown Milwaukee as free heat including older apartment buildings. If you drive in from South on 94 and approach the exit for downtown it is the two-tower plant West of 94. You may use Milorganite; it is produced from Milwaukee sewage. Drive over Hoan Bridge by that big tower and open window when plant is operating.
Instead of constant bailouts it would be better to use some of that money to fund moon-shots for new nuke designs. Pick 3 and fund proof of concept. 2 will probably fail but 1 will be the moon-shot. Instead we bail out the cronies CONSTANTLY. CITI was given over $2T in latest estimates including both FED and Taxpayer money.
Quote:
Not so impressive since his net after expenses was only about $14K a year 
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Arnie is a real expert on nuclear energy, Chris. Are Gundersen and Martenson from the same part of Europe originally?
Part One: Economics Of Nuclear Power with Arnie Gundersen
Part Two: Economics of Nuclear Power with Mycle Schneider
Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen on nuclear power vs alternative energy technologies
More here
when the people try to talk about alternative energy, they talk with much emotion about nuclear energy. To take decisions, we need to set apart the emotions and see the facts.
Fascinating book due out by Reinout Guepin on Viktor Schauberger who as a forest ranger discovers free energy in 1920s Austria by observing water.
The Nazis and then the Americans force him to help them develop flying saucer engine and then the H-bomb with his implosion technology!
The title is " One Eye in the Land of the Blind - the Rediscovery of Aether ". Not Fiction.
Cornelius999 wrote:
Fascinating book due out by Reinout Guepin on Viktor Schauberger who as a forest ranger discovers free energy in 1920s Austria by observing water. The Nazis and then the Americans force him to help them develop flying saucer engine and then the H-bomb with his implosion technology! The title is " One Eye in the Land of the Blind - the Rediscovery of Aether ". Not Fiction.This is the second law of thermodynamics:
You cannot create more energy in a system then enters the system.