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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Against local food | MattBruenig | Politics

The fuck.

This is a giant stack of groundless assertions masked as data points in order to support an allegation that has no basis in reality.

    First, charging for carbon emissions will solve the problem more comprehensively.

...because gas taxes have handled this so well. Has this fuck priced diesel lately?

    In particular, if the local food movement manages to reduce carbon emissions in food production because it reduces fuel consumption, that will just free up the saved fuel to be used elsewhere.

Right. When everyone in Los Angeles lost their service-sector job in 2008 and didn't need to commute from West Covina to Malibu twice a day any longer, traffic didn't get better because more people weren't staying home, they were driving around in circles for no good goddamn reason. That's exactly what happened.

The notion that "you should sell your produce as close to your farm as possible" is expounded upon at length in Ten Acres Enough, which was written in 1864. "Carbon tax." Whatever.

    Reducing demand will, in all likelihood, just cause the price of fossil fuels to fall, which will lead to others buying up and using the fuels for other purposes.

Yup. When the DVD came out, all those cheap VCRs on the shelves were snapped up by...

    For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.

Let's not pretend that food isn't shipped by the truckload and that one semi-trailer worth of lettuce driven a mile doesn't use half the gas of two semi-trailers worth of lettuce driven a mile.

    Moving a unit of food by train is way less fuel-intensive than moving it by road vehicle for instance.

...but the infrastructure in North America transports food primarily by surface so what the fuck's your point?

    Third, local food flies in the face of specialization and the kinds of gains it allows.

So wait a sec - y'all were all "OMG THERE'S MORE THAN FIVE KINDS OF APPLE ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG" yesterday but today you're all "whoa! Food specialization is impossible with local food!"

Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel?

Where's my "block mattbruenig.com" button @mk?@





thenewgreen  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So what you're saying is you weren't a fan of the piece? :)

I posted it because I have a number of friends/family that are REALLY involved in the whole local movement, so much so that one of them quit a high paying marketing gig in Chicago to move to rural Michigan and become a farmer. As I mentioned below, one of the the things that is most often pointed to as a major benefit from the local movement is that it saves from all the fuel costs of sending a truck from mexico to the midwest so we can all have tomato's year round. I hear this often. But it's not that simple and it shouldn't be painted as such. The paragraph I enjoyed and planned to share with said family/friends is this one:

    Second, even if we ignore point one, food being local does not necessarily tell us anything about its overall carbon footprint. Activists within the movement talk often of food miles under the assumption that the farther food travels to get to you, the more emissions it contributes. This is obviously wrong. For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.
It's a point not often considered by those I've interacted with on the topic.

    Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel?
I think people tend to share as much for the ensuing conversation as they do the piece that inspired it. I've shared posts that you've commented on just because of your comments, without actually having read the piece. I'd have shared this piece solely for the sounds_sound comment with the link to Costa del Polythene. But, to answer your question about how to block, if you are in your feed you will see the name of the domain in the title line. Click on it and you can either follow or ignore.

Alright, gotta run. I have to drive 4 hours for a 30 minute meeting. Talk about inefficient fuel usage!

kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Also:

    But, to answer your question about how to block, if you are in your feed you will see the name of the domain in the title line.

Nope. Not there. No option. If you're going to put a "follow this baseless crap" at the top of this page, "block this baseless crap" needs to be next to it.

b_b  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ignore domain appears as an option if you click the domain name within your feed or global pages. The reason it's not on the main page is because it's already too damn crowded with three tags, user options and follow domain option. Can be fixed, however.

kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Should be on this page. If "follow" is on this page, "block" needs to be on this page.

thenewgreen  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No disagreements here. I think the more we can do to help people curate their experience, the better. Where there is a follow, there should also be an ignore. Make sense to me.

b_b  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I wonder if it might work better to have follow/ignore options for each element as a popup when you click on the element. That might look a little more elegant and allow for more controls. As it is, that top line is already encroaching too far to the left for my taste, but I agree that having both options is better for functionality.

kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So long as it's consistent.

thenewgreen  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm on my phone, at a stoplight but it's there for me. b_b, Can you check and make sure that the ignore is working for domains?

kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    So what you're saying is you weren't a fan of the piece? :)

I'm not even a fan of the style of the piece. Frankly, I'm annoyed at you for thinking the quality of the piece rose to the standard of sharing, and equally annoyed that seven people also lacked the intellectual rigor to recognize a baseless polemic when they see it.

    I posted it because I have a number of friends/family that are REALLY involved in the whole local movement, so much so that one of them quit a high paying marketing gig in Chicago to move to rural Michigan and become a farmer.

And I'll bet they did a fair amount of research to support their feelings and if you ask them why they did it, they can tell you. That's the sort of thing that's wholly absent from this screed.

    As I mentioned below, one of the the things that is most often pointed to as a major benefit from the local movement is that it saves from all the fuel costs of sending a truck from mexico to the midwest so we can all have tomato's year round. I hear this often. But it's not that simple and it shouldn't be painted as such.

It is. It is absolutely that simple. It is positively, demonstrably, 100% that simple. You have fallen victim to fuzzy math. Let's play.

    For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.

Broken down into plain language:

"Let's suppose John is selling a pound of tomatoes. He loads his pound of tomatoes into his pickup truck and drives a mile to the farmer's market. Now suppose Sally is also selling tomatoes but Sally loads THREE pounds into her pickup truck! Wowzers! Sally sure is clever - she put more tomatoes in her pickup truck!"

The fallacy presented is that agribusiness somehow has "bigger trucks" than local business. It further puts things in false equivalency. The actual argument is:

Let's suppose John is selling a truckload of tomatoes. He loads his truck full of tomatoes and drives fifteen miles to his Associated Grocers depot, which adds John's tomatoes to the shipments AG is sending to seven grocery stores within their distribution area. Now lets suppose Sally is selling a truckload of tomatoes. She loads her truck full of tomatoes and drops them off at WalMart's logistics fifteen miles away. AG drives John's tomatoes to grocery stores, where people buy them. Wal Mart, on the other hand, drives Sally's tomatoes 400 miles to the local Consolidation Center, inventories them, packages them and redistributes them to 5 other logistics centers between 500 and 2000 miles away. From the logistics centers, Wal Mart then drives Sally's tomatoes another hundred miles to get them to SuperCenters, which are designed to be no closer than 50 miles apart. Whose tomatoes have more "miles"?

    I think people tend to share as much for the ensuing conversation as they do the piece that inspired it. I've shared posts that you've commented on just because of your comments, without actually having read the piece.

I shouldn't have to make these comments. I'm annoyed that I have to sink the time into this crap in order to dismantle an argument that has absolutely no basis in fact, and makes exactly zero attempt to ground its assertions in any sort of evidence. This is like saying "The easter bunny is real" and then acting as if evidence was presented that needs to be refuted.

b_b  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel?

I shared it, because I wanted to see what others thought. I disagree with the article, and wrote as much below, but sometimes I share things I don't agree with to see if I'm missing something. It's not always an endorsement, but rather a way spread a story I think warrants discussion.

kleinbl00  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fair enough. I think it's so craptastic as to be a waste of time and deconstructable by inspection, and I had thought others would see it the same way. This article is not even approaching the standards I expect from this place.