I've encountered less about rice, but the transitional practices I described can be used in the (otherwise conventional) growing of corn and wheat and can produce comparable yields for lower cost to the farmer, directly in the case of reduced fertilizer cost, but especially when you factor in reduced losses to drought events from the ability for high organic matter soil to absorb and retain water, as well as greater resilience to disease and pest wipeouts due to healthier plants and a more diverse farm ecosystem. It's all somewhat anecdotal, though, since this sort of thing resists formal research, both from the funding angle (doesn't lead to profitable results for industry; not sexy/high-tech enough for ambitious academics and their departments) and the experimental design angle (too many variables; farmers are all trying out different things in different ways and different climates).
From the permaculture/food forest/holistic side, you can certainly vastly beat the economic output of conventional agriculture (e.g. just growing corn) on a $/acre basis when you integrate all the possible enterprises available (meat, eggs, vegetables, herbs, fruit, wood products, flowers, ecotourism, etc.). I'm not sure in terms of marketable calories per acre, i.e. stuff human beings actually want to eat, but I'd think at least within an order of magnitude of corn (eggs go a long way). But you're right, the bottleneck is availability of farmers, since one farmer with machinery can grow hundreds of acres of corn or wheat at millions of calories per acre. I think it's fair to say there's plenty of opportunity for people to become farmers if they want to, though, in that information is more accessible than ever and there's land available.
We do have the example of Gabe Brown [0], who I believe manages 1000+ acres regeneratively with only his family for labor. I don't recall any attempts to calculate his kcal/acre, though. Farmers are understandably more concerned with $/acre.
It would be maximally eco-friendly to transition agriculture away from chemical fertilizers (and pesticides, herbicides and fungicides/off-farm inputs in general) by focusing on soil generation and ecosystem development primarily through radical plant diversity/polyculture. For example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8_i1EzR5U8
Cover crops, no-till & soil health - Quorum sensing in the soil microbiome (understanding the role of soil microbial interactions for soil health); Dr. Christine Jones
Early manifestations of this movement are in traditional farmers eliminating tillage/plowing ("no-till"); converting fields to rotations with diverse cover crops (not just a legume monoculture like soybeans, as has been practiced for thousands of years) to reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizers; reducing fallow periods through practices like "planting green" (sowing cash crops while the cover crop is still living), interplanting and companion planting; and use of fungal and bacterial biostimulants (application of cultivated strains of specific microbes and/or large scale brewing and application of compost tea). I view these practices as on the same spectrum as less commercially oriented approaches like permaculture food forests and foresee some kind of merger in the future.
Unfortunately, industrial influence will continue to steer research and advocacy toward hub-and-spoke systems (centralized fertilizer/GMO seed production + farmers selling into centrally managed distribution channels, or ultimately just the "growing" of calories in corporate-owned lab-factories) and away from distributed alternatives (farmers growing food using local inputs and nitrogen from the air via microbial activity + selling to local markets), simply because hubs allow for concentration of profit and control.
(Attempting to speak from the Orthodox Christian point of view:) While we know some things due to divine revelation, there's plenty of truth to be discovered through the observation and contemplation of God's creation (both seen [the physical world] and unseen [logic, math, thought itself]). Whatever is true that comes out of Buddhism is true because it comes from God, it just comes by way of extraordinary insight, unaided (as far as we know, in the Christian tradition) by direct communication from God.
The Orthodox Christian version of stoicism is to recognize that your selfish desires and fears ("passions") aren't who you are, that they're more like spirits who want to bring you down, and that once you observe them and set them aside you can be who you truly are, which is an image of God, i.e. infinite and eternal love.
Do you run the Linux versions of your Jetbrains IDEs using WSL or the native Windows versions? I was setting exactly this up just this past weekend after 10 years of running Linux exclusively and I'm not sure which way to go.
> Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver.
I get your point, but I was just making an observation: historically, when we encounter something that doesn't seem to make sense (like the weird orbits of the planets around the Earth) there tends to be something we haven't thought of yet that makes sense (the Sun is actually in the center). I'd say that's been the case more often than not, hence reality "tends to" make sense (in the end).
There are things we can't explain in cosmology and quantum physics, but they generally still make sense enough that we can name them and make calculations that take them for granted. Being able to explain something just means putting a name on it and describing what causes it using other things you've put a name on and described using other things you've put a name on .... Things can still make sense in terms of being consistent even if we can't explain them (in terms of other things).
> What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of?
I think you're begging the question. The easy answer to all of this is that consciousness isn't actually a thing, but grant me that we're conscious beings with subjective experiences ("I think therefore I am"). What the article's talking about is the idea that you can tear apart your sense organs and your brain molecule by molecule and you'll never find the place where all that tissue interfaces with your consciousness. There's no physical vessel where your eye organs finally plug into your experience of vision.
The materialist view is that consciousness must therefore be something that emerges out of the complex interactions of the neurons and whatnot in your brain, because the atoms that make up your brain are the only thing there, so what else could it be? The article proposes the possibility we've got it backwards, that consciousness is what's real, and the matter we observe is some kind of consequence of the consciousness-es that exist in everything and interact and combine to create different kinds of consciousness-es that have different experiences. I think that's what he means by panpsychism. Something like that. Hey, it's a brand new idea to me, too.
The idea might be that you have a brain because you're a consciousness that thinks, you have ears because you're a consciousness that responds to perturbations in the air, and so on. So what you experience as sound is an interaction between your consciousness and the consciousness of the air vibrating against your eardrums ... and if you damage your eardrums you no longer experience sound because ... the part of your consciousness that experiences sound is linked to the part of the material world that looks like your eardrum?
That's a little woo-woo even for me, but compared to that it's not completely out there to speculate that an electron "experiences" gravity and electromagnetic forces and responds accordingly because that's the type of consciousness it has, or rather the type of consciousness that responds in that way to those forces looks like (or manifests as) an electron. Unclear whether forces are conscious, too, in this model, but I'd guess so.
Conceptually, as an interesting inversion, it kind of reminds me of Dawkins' "selfish genes," or at least the pop-sci misunderstanding of it, where you think of the genes as having motives. I'm not thinking about it too hard, but it seems like it would be tough to harmonize panpsychism with genetics.
The article talks about a philosophical concept called "dual-aspect monism" which, in the author's interpretation, basically means that everything we think of as physical/material has some kind of consciousness, and that our own consciousness emerges somehow from the interactions of the elementary consciousnesses of the particles in our brains. So consciousness is the hardware of reality and physical phenomena are the software, an inversion of the typical materialist view. (As a programmer, I'm not sure that metaphor really works, but I'll allow it.)
The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience itself.
Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it.
The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it.
If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior).
I'm also reminded of:
John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made."
> Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated ... as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate
I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.
Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.
The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.
So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.
The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.
Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.
The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)
The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.
Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bottom, is prone to envy.
"Wisdom of the crowd" was also a common refrain for a time. Somewhat trendy in the years before Twitter and Facebook blew up. I think it's widely regarded as naive nowadays, though.
By the standards of early 2004 (when Facebook was originally written) this is still mediocre PHP. People who cared about writing good PHP were reading magazines like this (2003):
They knew global variables and hundreds of lines of top-level code were bad PHP, they just didn't know yet that trying to ape Java wasn't good PHP. If I remember correctly, DHH came out of this period: he got so sick of enterprisey PHP that he jumped ship to Ruby and wrote Rails. That was 2005.
Fair enough that Facebook hadn't done a major rewrite by 2007, but still: not good code.
I'd say the phenomenon is pretty unique to Trump and Sanders. In Trump's case, his speeches are largely stand-up comedy, and the parts that aren't played for laughs contain the kind of rah-rah patriotism that people come out to see at 4th of July parades and the like.
Most Americans are indifferent or hostile to their representatives, when they even know who they are.
The only somewhat encouraging thing to me in the IG report was that the FBI's lawyers refused to submit the FISA application initially because there wasn't enough meat to the suspicions about Carter Page. They reversed their decision only when the investigators decided to credulously include the allegations from the Steele dossier. The optimistic take on this would be that maybe it's a big black eye to your career if you get rejected by the FISC, so they're careful about what they take there.
Of course, it was an FBI lawyer who later doctored an email from the CIA to say Carter Page was not working with the CIA when the email actually said he was, allowing them to renew his surveillance two more times. But hopefully that guy goes to jail.
All I know about Carter Page is he was falsely painted as a spy for Russia by the FBI and compliant media organizations for several years, even after the FBI knew he had been working with the CIA. Not sure what makes him the scum in that equation.
Sounds like they're going to mass produce white-label websites and apps for content creators with existing audiences in exchange for 5% of subscription revenue. No upfront cost (as long as you already have an audience). Sidesteps issues around content moderation by not really being a platform. Some vague stuff about networking between different creators' websites/apps, but adamant that each creator owns their own site/app.
> Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying.
Check out [1] and scroll down to Table A-7 (it's an Excel file). It's the real earnings data (in 2018 dollars), by gender, from 1960 to 2018 (though it's kind of spotty before 1967). What sticks out to me:
* For men (looking at Total Workers), real earnings are currently around 10% higher than they were in the 70s (moving from low-$40K's to recently just past mid-$40K's, with some peaks and valleys along the way). Doesn't sound like much, but...
* For women, earnings have roughly doubled in that timespan
* The number of men in the workforce has increased by almost 50%
* The number of women in the workforce has increased by almost 100%
From a certain perspective, it's kind of amazing that real earnings haven't gone down significantly.
> Would they know how? They wouldn't normally be accustomed to using those tools, right? A sighted person with laryngitis doesn't need to bother with learning text-to-speech for the 2 weeks they don't have their voice because they can just use the website. If blind users have to learn the tools, that's adding an extra burden on them. (And yes blind users have to learn how to use screenreaders, which sighted users don't, but that's a permanent requirement associated with their disability)
That's all true, but I feel like there's a missing "Therefore..." at the end.
> > because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.
> That's not what I said. I've added parentheses to my statement so it's easier to parse as a boolean "(blind and (speech impaired or unable to speak the local language))".
I know that's not what you said. It's what I said. I don't see what your second sentence has to do with it.
> But Domino's provides access to their website in multiple languages. So a blind non-English-speaker isn't enjoying the "equal and full enjoyment" of Domino's services that a sighted non-English-speaker would.
Yeah, they got sued because blind people allegedly can't use their website. Language has nothing to do with it.
I should have said "Not being able to speak the local language isn't germane to a discussion about the Americans with Disabilities Act," because not being able to speak English isn't considered a disability under that law.
A blind person who has lost their voice could avail themselves of the text<->speech service I mentioned. If they also don't speak English they may need to employ a translation dictionary or some other translation service as well, but I'm not aware of any legal obligation for private businesses to provide translation services in the US.
From the permaculture/food forest/holistic side, you can certainly vastly beat the economic output of conventional agriculture (e.g. just growing corn) on a $/acre basis when you integrate all the possible enterprises available (meat, eggs, vegetables, herbs, fruit, wood products, flowers, ecotourism, etc.). I'm not sure in terms of marketable calories per acre, i.e. stuff human beings actually want to eat, but I'd think at least within an order of magnitude of corn (eggs go a long way). But you're right, the bottleneck is availability of farmers, since one farmer with machinery can grow hundreds of acres of corn or wheat at millions of calories per acre. I think it's fair to say there's plenty of opportunity for people to become farmers if they want to, though, in that information is more accessible than ever and there's land available.
We do have the example of Gabe Brown [0], who I believe manages 1000+ acres regeneratively with only his family for labor. I don't recall any attempts to calculate his kcal/acre, though. Farmers are understandably more concerned with $/acre.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXwGkJ1oGI