“No, stop farming, infant mortality rates are supposed to be over 50%!”
They’re going to be 100% every few years due to flooding destroying the crops!
Yes, let’s have exponensial groth instead.
The farming is okay. Just make sure to discourage anyone from feeling they have some sort of divine ownership over the land. Examples:
Little Johnny says “This is my land!” Knock that little bugger over and say “it’s mine now.”
If John says “God has given me this land to carry out his will!” turn that fucker into fertilizer so that he may be of use to society.
So if you spend months preparing a harvest, you’d be cool with someone turning up in the night and taking the crops after you’ve done all the hard work? After all the land wouldn’t being to you.
They took more than was fair, so it wouldn’t be fair.
Group ownership of a resource isn’t in conflict with controlling the resource, or having laws and practices to determine how it’s used.
Kinda like how we all own Yellowstone park, but no one is free to bottle and carry off all the water from old faithful.
So do you think it’s fair for a group of people to raid a farm and pick what they haven’t contributed to growing as long as they take just enough to feed themselves, piggybacking off the work of the farmer? Why should the farmer agree to this?
Edit: rewrote the question to satisfy people who think asking questions about is somehow combative.
The capitalism is strong with this one…
Do you have anything to contribute? I’m trying to have an actual discussion about policy.
I think the profit incentive is important in maximising yield, do you have anything to add to this as to why I may be wrong? Or are you just going to signal me as an other so that others just switch off and get defensive.
I think it’s kind of ironic that some claim to want the world to see things from their point of view but then immediately attack those who question their views or try to understand. This just suggests to me you’re more about signalling to your in group than growth in ideas and discussion.
What’s to discuss? We live in a society that you’re describing and it’s awful for most people. You defeated yourself.
There is a lot to discuss. I’m discussing about why I think communal style living/economics don’t scale well. You think it does, there are reasons we both have our opinions and maybe we could actually learn from each other rather than you viewing me as someone to be defeated.
Small-scale, local farming is where it’s at. Growing a bucket of potatoes on a balcony or helping out at a community garden are small but achievable steps to bring the food closer to us. In addition to sustainability, it promotes knowledge of how to produce our own food and reduces dependence on large-scale monoculture farming.
It’s nice to walk a few paces and pick up an ingredient for dinner with the satisfaction that you nurtured it. But mainly, I just don’t feel like going to the grocery store as much lol.
Check out !BalconyGardening@slrpnk.net :)
I do sure wish I had a balcony. I grew peppers and cherry tomatoes on my windowsill a few years in a row but the effort isn’t worth it for an apartment…
I feel ya! We work with what we can and if the space you have isn’t feasible, then that’s okay if it simply doesn’t work out.
That being said, here’s a few options to consider but do what you want. :)
One option is to grow some herbs since those tend to get pricey and they therefore offer the best bang for your buck. Plus they take up little space. Starting from seeds is the most cost effective (only a couple dollars for 1000s of seeds). Sow them in an empty plastic egg carton, nursery pots, or other upcycled plastic container. Then, you can germinate and grow under grow lights. Don’t bother with “grow light” marketed ones. Just the brightest, whitest generic LED bulb will do. If you run it all day, it’ll only cost a couple cents per month. Then, you can harvest fresh herbs year-round! Lamps can be found for cheap and sometimes free on Facebook marketplace.
Another option is finding a community garden in your area.
I do already keep herbs going as much as possible! (though I don’t do it from seed, lazy bum)
The community garden idea is great, but the ones in the city center here are… expensive and quite “hipsterish”.
It really is so much more convenient getting seedlings!
Also that’s bizarre that your community garden is expensive - kinda defeats the purpose of it.
Anyways, enjoy the rest of your day Moghul!
Thanks, you too!
Thank you for referring this community. Its the first time I see it and it was very inspirational. Cheers
I think most of the things you say are true, but small local farming isn’t going to solve world hunger. The bigger a farm gets the more efficient it can operate. The progress we made as a species boils down to how much more efficient we can do stuff.
For sure! Industrial-scale farming has been integral to the population growth of our modern society. It doesn’t hurt to alleviate a small amount of pressure from those systems at a local scale in a sustainable way. I mainly just find it fun to grow a few veggies here and there and thought others may be interested. :)
Absolutely, I planted some tomatoes and very spicy peppers. All of them failed (planted in the wrong month I guess). Definitely a learning experience and definitely something I’ll try next summer.
I really hope the plants survive the winter, but I might have to start from seed again
I grow tomatoes in my balcony. Constructive and fulfilling activity, love it.
But I can’t imagine eating like 15 tomatoes per year lol
And that’s ok! Nobody expects to live off of a small garden, nor is it feasible for everybody to grow everything they eat.
It provides many benefits already, such as being a fulfilling activity as you said. It also cuts down on food waste since you can harvest when you eat it and leave it on the plant for a bit longer otherwise. It also reduces trips to the grocery store and reduces emissions of importing food over long distances. Finally, it’s much cheaper if you grow from seed and upcycle plastic containers for planting. Especially if you grow expensive crops like fresh herbs.
Didn’t you read the meme? Stop farming!
Could’ve been hunting mega fauna with my homies but here I am with depression and anxiety
One theory is that hunting and gathering stopped because the human population exceeded what could be supported by mega fauna, and early peoples had no choice but to settle down and defend what resources they could gather.
It likely started with semi permanent settlements, simple fortifications that could be returned to year over year, and when it became too difficult to leave again, or when they found themselves unable to return to a location they were expecting to, they settled down permanently.
But you really can’t go out and hunt when you can’t leave. So they started to depend on agriculture, and what livestock they’d been able to keep with them.
Right. And then there’s the fact that agriculture is a trap in that once you adopt it you can never go back and anyone nearby who doesn’t adopt it as well will eventually be outcompeted and disappear as a people, or they will be driven into ever more remote and inhospitable environments. None of this requires anything like foresight or intention either.
plain old evolution
Farming basically invented work and employment. They should have realized something was not right about that back then.
It invented having a relatively reliable food surplus.
I wish I could make all these neoprimitives actually live the life for a week so they shut up forever about it.
Practically every single tribe on the planet decided that the odds for farming was better than rolling the dice every year.
I think it’s more likely that it was better odds, and those that continued nomadic life died off at a much higher rate.
I think both of you are not considering two major aspects:
Farming can feed more people on a given fertile area than hunting and gathering can.
Farming is area exclusive, e.g. there is a set amount of people farming in one area and considering this area to be theirs, excluding everyone else from usage.
It is very much possible, that in terms of providing food for the existing population both are equally viable. But with farming you could create larger more densely packed populations, which in turn provided means to exclude others by force. So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
Man’s never heard of the Mongols, Turks, Huns, etc etc etc.
Whose lifestyles only worked because they could trade for food and goods from farming communities btw
And they existed about 2000-1000 years ago. Humans started settling and farming as far back as 10.000-12.000 years ago.
Of course by then populations have increased tremendously. But in the spirit of the meme that probably wasn’t the best overall course of action, was it?
So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Have you seen nowadays how they fish? They destroy whole huge areas leaving no fish behind. This is a type of imperialism. The problem is capitalism in its nature
And for that kind of fishing you need large vessels, built in stationary warfts, using stationary ports. The materials are made in stationary complex apparatusses to extract and shape metals from ore and the ore is mined in stationary mines.
All of this is only possible as a result of settling
Sure. So your idea is that people should be mandated to travel and change places every X years? Or what? I don’t get it.
Isn’t the problem the disproportionate accumulation of goods, resources and money? AKA capitalism? I mean theoretically, if you restrict these, you can also settle in one place without taking advantage and destroying everything around it.
Farming is like a memetic prion disease. Every other food production method it touches turns into farming.
That and hunter-gatherer tribes tend to get genocided.
I wish I could get them to come to an actual farm and realize we aren’t trying to kill them or ruin the world.
We have more food than we know what to do with and people are still starving. Growing your own food provides a reward someone like you not only can’t experience, but if you did you wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What the fuck are you babbling about?
?
Right, because hunting and gathering isn’t work. People just got food into their mouths doing nothing - like wild animals.
There’s a difference between working for your own and your communities good and working for someone else while not being allowed to keep your (fair share of) product/profit.
That’s not how farming started though. They started farming so that they can feed themselves and their community. It eventually devolved into that, but it’s not how it started.
Just don’t assign corporate ownership of the fields and it’s all good baby.
Just don’t overadjust and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkhoz
Personal ownership is just as bad. That leads to OG feudalism.
If i care for area for years, build, plant etc, someone else can come take it?
No, but you should not be allowed to accumulate more than what you can consume when your community is starving
But you can throw people out of your community? Then some communities will be a lot better off than others
Yes, but as long as the “better” community doesn’t interfere and doesn’t try to take advantage of the less good communities I don’t see a problem. And of course doesn’t steal them their area and resources. Or does’t try to expand in ways that they accumulate more goods and resources than they need and can consume
Hmm, who decides when they have too much area, and stops them from not following rules?
Is this a genuine question wanting to find an answer? Only their consciousness can really prevent them or a “law enforcement” that we should first find a way to be uncorrupted. Is this realistic nowadays? Of course not, but we were talking hypothetically I think
I wasn’t advocating personal ownership either. But how does that lead to OG feudalism?
Wealth inequality trends to increase over time. Without some system that actively redistributes wealth, eventually a few people own everything of value, and ordinary people are obligated to do whatever the lords want in order to gain access to the material resources they need to survive. That’s feudalism.
You mean like how it is right now?
Can you name me one single time in human history that this wasn’t just the condition of the human race? Every time humans try to institute a wealth redistribution mechanism it becomes corrupted in less than 70 years and it just becomes feudalism again where the people are impoverished and starving and the only people living well are state officials lol
Every pre-agricultural society? I’m not saying they didn’t have their own problems, but feudalism wasn’t one of them.
Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it’s impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s why we still haven’t figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.
That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.
Were I not lazy, I’d be willing to bet if I sift through their comments that I’d find something about landlords being bad.
They don’t like feudalism? ohhh noooooo.
Well, utilizing a little thing called “context clues” you can see that I’m very clearly not talking about the person I’m responding to. I’m talking about the person claiming private ownership would be better.
My point, is the hypocrisy. But I get it, over half of America reads below a 6th grade level. Ya’ll need help getting there.
What hypocrisy have you unearthed?
“Were I not lazy”
I get it, you don’t read.
Well, you called it with me. I was denied an education so I could work and support my family.
Horrah. Good on you. Very observant.
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No! You’re looking at this the wrong way. Bisophenol A is the most affordable gender affirmation therapy in existance.
Only works in one direction though.
You’d think it would work on other boy bands as well
Username doesn’t check out.
They knew. Agriculture is what created the whole concept of “work”.
I would argue the opposite; that semi-agricultural societies --pre-columbian California is a good example-- had no way of knowing where an increasing reliance on predictable harvests would eventually take them.
bro credit scores aren’t even real
They’re as real as property is.
True but last time the banks stopped caring about them we had the global financial crisis
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that’s stilt houses and rice terracing. those people are gonna invent rectangular sails and fire pistons
Do you think it is possible for our current level of scientific knowledge to exist in a hunter gather society?
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noone is stopping you from living in an African savannah hunting gazelles
Bruh, there are quite a few things stopping people from doing that, what are you dumb or something?
what? you can’t take a trip to Tanzania and just disappear?
They arrest people for poaching. If they don’t just shoot them.
