a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  4229 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Against local food | MattBruenig | Politics

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.