m_coder

I am quite confident that a normal 16 year old will can still drive in 6 inches of snow better than the most advanced AI driven car. I am not sure the snow driving bit will ever be solved given how hard it is.

And with thoughtful care could do a better job a transforming it some more.

I have settled on a strategy of bidding that seems to work when I am actively bidding (this goes only for little stuff not land and such). When I hope the other person bids, then I know I don't want the item at the stated price. I can feel intuitively that I will not want the item if I get it.

Does anyone have a help for the opposite scenario? In this scenario I have not yet bid but the price is quite low and I don't want to bid in case I missed something. The price stays very low and the item is sold. I am left kicking myself for not sticking my neck out there and making a good deal. Maybe I should bid once and see if I like it. The problem is that one bid might get it...

I have raised multiple 100s of mice and have an active ongoing interest in this idea. I have wondered mightily about the cleanliness of the mouse experiment. If you have tried to raise mice, you know that cleanliness is imperative. The question and answer at the end was helpful for me.

>>The Chairman thought Dr Calhoun had not mentioned pollution and asked what remains the animals left and how these affected the situation?

>>Dr Calhoun said that they (the investigators) were not very sanitary in their husbandry, if that was the kind of pollution inferred. The environment was cleaned, most fices and soiled bedding removed, every six weeks or two months, but nothing was ever sterilized. He did not consider this necessary in such a closed system and the mice had better survival than in most laboratory colonies. Dead bodies were eventually removed for examinations, but the major pollution was the excess of living bodies; this was the essential factor. The pollution was social in that there were too many interacting elements, exceeding the social system's capacity for incorporation of new individuals. Capacities were genetically determined and situation- ally modified.

>>The Chairman thought the point had been made very clearly, but there must be a pollution factor. There were the remains, frces, urine and dead bodies. Those must surely be a factor.

>>Dr Calhoun thought these were minor factors. They needed to maintain a situation in which there was not continuous waste accumulation, but beyond that the environment mirrored certain normal, external ecological settings.

I thought that they got sloppy with cleaning and I don't see that my hunch was incorrect. In my opinion, that much poop and dead bodies will stress a mouse colony out and I would like to replicate this experiment myself and see what happens when you keep the colony super clean as it ought to be.

You are right on target however I am not seeing people here understanding that the tight spot is not land but manpower.

It seems to me that people think that if the first farm is more efficient in converting labor, dollars and cheap fuel into food than the second farm, then the first is the most efficient farm across all categories including land use. When one of the pieces changes (for instance fuel costs) then the formula needs to be revisited.

Realizing that personal, scientific and careful management of land yields more food per acre without agri chemical products is an important first step to thinking about the picture even if the low cost of fuel is a current reality.

>>At some point on of these companies is going to hit someone with enough power to force them to do a better job.

And then they fix that one situation and go on about their normal business. At least that is what it seems to me. I would wish for something more long term to happen but I am becoming less hopeful.

I unblocked Facebook right now from my hosts file so I could message someone and couldn't figure out why Facebook failed to load. I tested HN and viola I see that the entire world has sent Facebook requests to 0.0.0.0 lol

Yes, I did read those articles and it has me very interested. What I would be more interested in is some sort of applied DIY situation. Something I could cobble together myself and it would have the potential to get the efficiency that is discussed in lowtech mag. It seems to me that with the sorts of articles they write, I would be able to follow along on a small scale if I wanted. In particular, how do you make a compressor going one way and a generator going the other?

>>More likely is that we eventually switch to a more poetic small-scale compressed air energy storage system (CAES).

Please do this!! I want to see that article on CAES actually worked out in real life not just theory with no howto steps .

Best quote was at the end. "However, human being are such creatures of habit and imitation, that what is necessity soon becomes fashion, and each one wishes to do what everyone else is doing. A lady in the neighbourhood closed all her binds and shutters, on May-day; being asked by her acquaintance whether she had been in the country, she answered, "I was ashamed not to be moving on the first of May; and so I shut up the house that the neighbours might not know it." One could not well imagine a fact more characteristic of the despotic sway of custom and public opinion, in the United States, and the nineteenth century.[29]"

>>practically impossible for modern citizens to overthrow a corrupt government.

However, given a sufficient percentage of the population which is interested in doing this, it would be very difficult even for the US military to completely conquer.