Premium 283: Liberalism Does Not End Well
Added 2023-12-19 01:50:12 +0000 UTCRecorded 12/18/23
Comments
This episode was a depressing-ass banger.
Daniel Saunders
2023-12-27 22:25:33 +0000 UTCFrom the Thursday episode, HTBUaP is great, nothing like the movie, it's more reasoning why sabotage is effective and why is hasn't happened in a wider scale for the climate movement. Also touches on the luddites (actually a good workers movement rather than a pejorative)
Kyle
2023-12-22 16:38:21 +0000 UTC//Thursday episode - I remember early on in the AppHarvest story someone on the pod speculated that this was basically a way to lay the infrastructure for when weed-legalization (inevitably) would come to the region. I don't know to what extent you can still pivot to that, though it's no doubt being considered. I think the main problem with the whole operation is that they were planning for electricity to continue to be very cheap, which - in theory - would make it advantageous to make vertical farms, rather than mainly building horizontal farms (essentially big one-plane-green-houses) that utilizes the sun as much as possible as the main light source. I've been growing vegetables (including tomatoes) hydroponically on a hobby-level for 4-5 years now in my own apartment/closet/balchony, and the step from lettuce (and to a lesser extent, herbs) to fruiting vegetables like tomatoes is enormous in terms of quality, yield, pest-problems, etc. I suspect that a lot of these tech-start-ups basically have/had my exact same attitude before I actually started, which was "ok, this doesn't seem too hard. Lights, nutrients, I have this space to work with, ok, this should work" and then flash-forward several years of just trying to get anything actually working (let alone being cheaper than what I can get at a store, which flat out cannot happen, period). Even if you assume that the people at AppHarvest were earnest with their intentions, I think it seems a little short-sighted to not utilize the main asset that appalachia seem to have: space. I don't know what model they were adopting from Holland, but I'm guessing it's a vertical model . But that mostly "makes sense" if: a) space is at a premium, ie, you're building in a major city b) electricity is dirt-cheap at the time of planning, and barring "anything happening to the global energy economy", will probably continue to be so 5-10 years in the future, when we start making a profit. It feels silly to chide these people for not being prescient enough to know that 2022-2023 would have two internationally-significant wars (with one of them, Ukraine, significantly impacting a bunch of markets, for real or opportunistic reasons). ...But still, it does feel very blinkered, "urban-centric-thinking". The outside-looking-in impression of Appalachia is that it's full Fallout 5, "nothing of value is buried here". But if that's true, it would logically follow that land is fairly cheap, which means that you can build horizontally for your controlled-garden, and if you can do that, you have access to the sun in a way that's not practical for a lot of spaces where "smart garden efforts" tend to pop up (warehouses outside NYC, for example). ...I think my main point is that "all this is actually quite difficult, beyond fresh greens and herbs, and relatively small-volume speciality items for high-end restaurants". I understand why they "started with tomatoes". It's an extremely versatile fruit that can be pitched for a variety of uses and price-classes. It's also one of the hardest to get to a large-scale "reliable producer" for anything that isn't really sub-par tomatoes (ie, "mostly salsa/ketchup mass"). I think maybe my own experience with growing tomatoes in a very restricted, artificial environment made me feel less ready to assume that the whole AppHarvest thing is a cynical project from the get-go, and maybe more a case of "a bunch of people who don't have precise experience with this, thinking, well how hard could it be, even if we hire people who do know?". ...all this is of course completely beside the very lofty and obviously insincere latch-on-promises from politicians that this is going to help combat local food-insecurity. If that actually was a genuine concern, you would obviously do some kind of "good faith partnership" with Mexico (or whatever close-to-evergreen strip of geography that's close to you), where they provide you with good-quality vegetables at low cost, and you provide them with whatever they might need, rather than spending all this money to build what is essentially "duplicate infrastructure" for what ultimately comes down to purely ideological reasons. ...a lot of these projects just fundamentally fall back to: "what kind of problem are you actually trying to solve here? And are you even trying to solve a problem?"
Jesper Ohlsson
2023-12-21 22:56:36 +0000 UTC
