Tristan Vitali

Lina Joana wrote:
I can’t see this, or anything, preparing someone for 70% unemployment. For context, the height of the Great Depression saw 25% unemployment.
If it comes to that, there will either be a complete and utter collapse of society which will include the big businesses and AI (nobody to buy their products) or there will be a new economic model.

In the first scenario: How will the farmer who supposed to will his land to the skipper hang on to his land long enough to do so? How will he pay taxes when his bank crashes, taking his savings? How will he finish out farming when there is nobody who can afford to buy the crops he sells? Same questions apply even if you own land- how will you pay for electricity to run your well? How will you replace those 20-year lifespan solar panels? Or the well pump, or the excavator parts, or or or…
Upshot - lets hope this doesn’t happen. It is never a bad idea to own land, learn skills, and do a bit of “prepping”. But I personally don’t think that this will save you if we are talking full societal disintegration. Then again, I have never met a gert - only farmers trying hard to live by those principles, and finding it tremendously difficult. So maybe my perspective is incomplete.

A new economic model indeed. Or perhaps we could think of it in the sense of "the old economic model" where people were/are subsistence farmers, sell what little surplus they have and/or trade based on their practical skill sets (masonry, carpentry, blacksmithing, etc), and eek out a fairly fulfilling existence within their tight-nit communities, raising a family and teaching their children the trade.

The "prepper community" often speaks of this sort of collapse stemming from an economic implosion and point to things like gold, silver, .22 ammo and practical skill sets as "worthwhile investments for trade and barter in that dire future". Even things like alcohol and tobacco fit that bill - imagine something similar to the so-called prison economy at a community level where you can buy some apples from the guy down the road for a few packs of cigarettes.

In that sort of scenario, the government "adjusts" - a good thing to remember is that government is downstream of culture, and culture is a product of community.

Would it ever get to that point? I say "sure, why not?" - anything is possible. Add in a few natural disasters, collapse of social services like policing and welfare programs, and mobs of angry people who don't have practical skills like growing/raising food. College can't prepare you for that world and was never designed to. Instead, college prepares you only for the "rat race" world of earn money - spend money. If that fails you for any reason (such as AI taking over everything), the only conventional alternatives available to the college graduate are tax-payer funded social welfare programs or criminal activities.

If we're heading in that direction, or anything like it, I'd prefer to have millions of Gerts-in-training out there who would be much more equipped to succeed and perhaps flourish in a world with no money, no jobs and no holds barred. "Gert" is someone I don't foresee robbing and thieving as a way of life. "Gert" is a valuable, productive and highly appreciated member of a community. In fact, a community might gather around "Gert" in such a scenario in an effort to learn from her insight and understanding of how systems work, allowing the whole community to become "Gerts" themselves (Gert the carpenter living next door to Gert the blacksmith, both growing most of their own food and trading their skills / surplus for things they don't grow or can't do).

Will AI cause a 70% unemployment? I personally doubt the number, but it's certainly not making things "better". Some numbers on unemployment (such as those that include "underemployment" and those who've given up looking for work) show us to be much worse now than during the Great Depression already.

Another thing that comes to mind: Big corporations spend gobs of money trying to astro-turf culture for a reason. Collapsing society through economic implosion would be bad business. Adopting a new economic model is something they have spent a lot of time on already. We've heard some truly out-there ideas over the years of what models they'd like to bring in, but from this vantage point, they don't seem to have a solid idea of what new culture they'd like to roll out. Much of what they've "presented" to us as "options" thus far have been flatly rejected by most cultures around the world ("own nothing be happy" rental-only economies, universal basic income, smart cities, population reduction, etc).

From a purely selfish point of view, I'd rather have a generation of Gerts than a generation of college educated debt-slaves if ANYTHING dire occurs, be it AI-apocalypse or some other obvious and foreseeable future catastrophe

Craig Weiser wrote:Even if AI/robots didn’t exist, the current standard of going to college for a wage so you remain in debt for the rest of your life makes no sense.  Perhaps still viable for those who have a natural talent better than most.  But for the rest of us, the very concept of giving up our time for money to service a lifelong debt in the suburbs must be reevaluated.  So young people logically seek other options: can you live in poverty skillfully?  Can you have sufficient shelter and community with minimal dependency on the currency?  Has the definition of “work” always been sacrificing your time for money?  Now here comes AI and fine labor robotics to exasperate the whole thing!  

Trades, crafts and food production are what's in demand, and it's always been that way. Associates, bachelors, masters and doctorates, in all various studies, stems from what we often call the wealthy / elite "class" of Europe and only caught on as a "thing" in very recent times (as mentioned by a number of people already). Schooling itself is fairly new in culture, and the modern version of it even more new (and some would say quite artificial in its origin)

Up until the so-called industrial revolution, the majority of people (in the now United States) ran their own "business" off their "homesteads". The family business was just that and generally speaking, the father passed on the trade, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, etc, to his sons and likewise the mother passed down knowledge of midwifery, herbal medicine, etc to her daughters. Where a son (or daughter) wanted to learn a trade outside the family's existing skill set, they would apprentice with someone who could teach them in an on-the-job training relationship (often getting room and board as part of the deal, incurring some set number of years doing the grunt work). Not many even offer something remotely similar now, though some of the trades still give a wink and a nod to the tradition

Really, this idea of people working for someone else to earn a wage or salary arrived in a big way pretty recently. You can insert a discussion of conspiracies by notorious gangster-style bad guys in positions of political power and/or long-term astrological cycles here, but the point is that this way of life was mostly confined to big cities prior to industrialization. In fact, this is where much of the slavery in past centuries occurred, whether through full-on "owning" of people or the slightly softer version of indentured servitude. History is rife with examples of "how things were" we can all easily read.

I mean, I'm a way far out there conspiracy theorizing woo-woo character, so probably ran right of the end of the twig (to partially quote my favorite woo-woo thinker), but it makes perfect sense to me - what we're experiencing now in our current style of western culture is so bizarre, untested by time and new to us humans. For many thousands of years, or perhaps millions depending on who you talk to, humans lived a "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle which was neither about hunting nor about gathering in the way we're taught to think of such things today. Instead, they planted entire continents to "food forests" and practiced what we'd today call high intensity rotational grazing / mob-stock grazing. They certainly did here in North America, and there's signs of the same throughout Central and South America, large portions of Asia and certainly in very early Europe.

In essence, they were permaculturists. Pretty time tested methodology if you ask me

The problem we face is that the menial jobs that require very little skill, which became so prevalent during the industrialization process, are quickly being automated, leaving no place for those who are unwilling to learn a high-level skill. College degrees themselves are not skills, even when you're talking STEM related studies. Animal husbandry, herbal medicine and natural building are trades that require skill. Holistic thought and creative problem solving is required to practice a trade, and AI is not capable of those things. Robots may harvest your better than organic carrots some day, but you can bet there's a permie behind the succession planting, dense polyculture designs, nutrient cycling and water harvesting systems the robot is harvesting from.

Les Frijo wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:I hear from many people (and see it all over the internet):  gotta stop AI; gotta stop the bots ...    "DEY TERK ER JERBS!"    ...   it strikes me as twisted to desire jobs so much.

I had huge hopes that we would embrace the scenario I laid out, and then explore permaculture solutions.  

With a humble home and a huge garden ...

  - maybe it doesn't matter if you lose your job

  - maybe you have a MASSIVE advantage

  - maybe all this stuff becomes interesting rather than scary

  - is better than living in the city with a lot of money ...  which will drain away

  - maybe you can share your bounty with friends

Community seems the hardest thing to build and grow. Maybe the best thing that could happen is for jobs to go away and peeps will have no choice and more time for building community.

That would be interesting and exciting.

Those with menial job skills will and are being replaced - that's always been the case. The question is what they do with their forced free time, and the answer for the last 30 years has been "play with technology" (video games, social media, etc). I don't see that changing without a very significant (and likely involuntary) cultural change.

I believe my comment about "thinking" being the new in-demand workie job holds - there's a big push within the so-called "alternative" community toward healthy food and real, tactile experience of the world, and only thinking people will be able to produce this. From Montessori style schooling to "paleo" style diets, there's a definitive theme out there, and it's one that's driving an increasing demand for production of real food with real hands in a really contaminated world. Permaculture is the answer to this. The number of "social media influencer" and "podcaster" people that source most of their foodstuffs from the Amish community is a great example of the market demand, and that trend is only growing. Fake food is out and permie apples, land race sweet corn and free-range hams are in.

Basically, hard thinking people catch on quickly to the design of the rat race: the futility of becoming a debt slave where they make money only to pay for services they could be doing for themselves if only they didn't have to work so much for that money, resulting in a spiral of more money for more stuff.

Gert is the ultimate answer to many of the bigger questions most thinking people find themselves asking. The Mexican fisherman story is an older example of this, but has been taken to something of a conclusion by Paul in the story of Gert. But the issue is that many people aren't very good at the thinking thing, and so they don't see the value in it. That's my take anyway. Gert sounds like a crappy life to some because they don't get to have lots of expensive things and pay people to do the yucky or boring things for them. Gert can't afford a plummer to snake her toilets, so she designed around that problem and has a willow feeder...but now "she poops in a bucket - ewww!"

Considering a small-scale Gert can only help support maybe a dozen or two additional people with what she produces, we need millions of Gerts in the current economy. Think about how few we have even here on permies. I certainly haven't achieved Gertitude yet ... it doesn't happen overnight.

AI isn't going to take over the thinking jobs any time soon, but the thinking jobs need to be supported by thinking people's food.

Christopher Weeks gave a collapse of the current modern system into a dark age 50-50, but without enough thinking people to fill the rolls of producing real, healthy food, cleaning up abused land and guiding the industry of "making money" away from the edge of the very obvious cliff we stand on the edge of today, I give us a 90% chance of going completely medieval in the next quarter century. It's a choose your own adventure story as to how we get there, but I can't help but foresee a lot of people harvesting "lovely muck" Monty Python style before 2050

Not for nothing, I'll add a couple thoughts here. I rarely do these days, but steaks are just going on and I finished the paying work for the night.

The AI thing has been so big lately, being pushed all over the place and being talked about like it's such a huge fancy replacement for everything. My experience, limited at best, is that it's horrible at "thinking". It can perform simple tasks, and even sequences of simple tasks lined up in such a way as to appear complex, but it's still just a lot of simple stuff in sequence. I've spent a little time on the latest AI chat bots trying to get some basic things done to no avail. I'll detail the best example.

I needed to scrape some 10,000 official product images that I could "more easily" load into a client's square inventory. The AI told me it could do this with a spreadsheet of product names plus SKU and GTIN numbers. Then it said it couldn't. After several iterations of this kind of nonsense, I had it develop a perl script that would presumably do the task, scraping the images and renaming them according to specs for "easy" manual importing on my end. The script was a total failure over and over, failing to run, then failing to save the images, then failing to rename them, then failing to run again. This went on and on until I gave up and just wrote my own script, from scratch.

I spent probably 6 hours "playing" with the AI trying to get this task started, but ended up spending about 1 hour writing up a script in a language I have never used before to do the task.

So trying to use AI hurt more than helped with what to ME was a simple task but was actually way too complex for the AI itself to perform itself due to it's inability to "think". It just regurgitated search results from stackoverflow in various combinations.

My take at this point, after much thought and some experimentation, is that AI is not coming for "our jobs". Instead, what's happening is people are losing jobs for non-performance and misunderstandings of what AI is actually capable of doing in their place. People can think, but AI can only do what it's told (and it's not even very good at that).

We're heading right off the edge of a cliff right now, and things are going to become a complete mess if those in charge don't slow down a little and do a feasibility study first.

Robots, on the other hand, are definitely going to take over lots of manual tasks. They already have in many ways. Thinking will become a job very much in demand over the next several years, and I fear we don't have enough people with the skills to fill those jobs.

Just my two cents (or what...$200 adjusted for inflation?)

Pearl Sutton wrote:

Mike Barkley wrote:... when you think see a bunch of tiny ants roaming around on your kitchen counter. Only to realize that they are turnip seeds. Bag had a hole in it.

A variant on that I have done is when you sneak carefully to the counter, and beat a watermelon seed to death with a flyswatter.

Some bright white melon seeds fell behind the chicken scraps container on the counter - had a nice moment of panic when I thought we had a maggot infestation!

Those melon seeds are from the second year in starting the "central maine short wet season on cold heavy clay" landrace. Only gagged a little before I realized what they were  

The next "you know you're a permie when" connected to this little event is that I realized we're perennializing the beds so much I wont have enough open space / sun for these melons in a couple more years. It's definitely time to start planning more hugles (melons LOVE south slopes of hugles, btw!)

Matt Todd wrote:Looks like you're asking about lavender specifically. I grew about 3 dozen plants from seed last year with NO stratification! In my studying before, I found a lot of growers saying it was not necessary for lavender and indeed it was not for me.

I filled 6 pack cells with sterilized 1:1:1 Sand, perlite, coir soil mix. Sterilized because lavender seedlings are very mold sensitive. 70-80 degrees with light 16 hrs/day. They sprouted in about 7 days. Keep moist for about one month after sprouting (until roots are established). Pot up at 6 or more leaves.

Agreed that they don't (always) require it, but it sure does help with germination. Just a week to a month for lavender helps in a big way. About to start some sempervivum (hens and chicks) which are similar...they don't (always) require it, but it helps. A lot of seeds are like that, and when they don't necessarily require it, that's when planting in a flat and putting in a cool shady place before spring has fully sprung usually works best. Otherwise, best to plant either in the ground in mid-fall or start your flat late fall / early winter so you can control the stratification process.

... again, for those of us on low power, off grid systems (400w panels with a 400AH battery bank here at 45*N and generally cloudy winters!)  If you've got a grid connection and a fridge with the space, that probably works just as well if not better for most things

Riona Abhainn wrote:Some of this depends on your grow zone too, in some places its still winter.

Very true and that definitely has an impact. In the other half of the world, it's still summer!

Generally speaking, keeping the seeds between 32 and 45 degrees fahrenheit (zero to roughly 7 celsius) will do the trick. Many probably have basements or garages that maintain a low enough temperature leading well into the spring due to cold cement and the like, so that's also an option for some if the outdoor temps are going to be too warm in the short term. A 90 day stratification might be a bit much this time of the year, even up here in the tundra, but depending on sunshine and ambient temps, a 30 or 45 day stratification further down south might work out in a cold corner of the garage. Offgrid people that don't have magical modern conveniences would just have to pray for gloomy weather

Pearl Sutton wrote:...when you attempt to deny your inherent redneckiness by claiming this is an artistic photo, staged just for the effect that I wanted to photograph, yeah, that's it!!

Ok, maybe I'm a permie and I'm taking advantage of the warm weather to wash my flannel sheets....  :D  And drying them on the cattle panel arch arbor that grows beans and squash...
Function stacking! Solar energy!! Artwork! That's it!!

or maybe it's just laundry.

:D

That, my dear, is called stacking functions :D

Nothing more permie than what you do!

Funny this came up in the dailyish - just brought my flat of highbush cranberry seeds out for their final round of cold strat  I'm offgrid with no refrigerator to use for such things, so I have to rely on mother nature to do it for me. I often plant things I know will be very vigorous direct in the ground in the fall, but that's certainly not going to work for everything.

They were seeded into a bit of garden soil, which had been heavily amended with duck pond "muck" earlier in the year before growing hungry cabbage and brussels sprouts. This was in a cheapo plastic bin from wally world I picked up about 12 years ago now for just this purpose (side note - the trays have had it the last few years and are cracking into pieces...they don't like the UV in sunlight at all! Good investment, but bad material to have breaking to pieces every time you touch it!)

Because highbush cranberry seed has a double dormancy, it's extra tricky. The cranberry was put in the tray october or november sometime and left outdoors in a cool, shady spot for their first round. The tray was then brought in and kept on the RMH bench from Jan 1st to now, watered occasionally as the 80 to 100 degrees F of bottom heat tends to dry out my plants pretty quick. Not it's back outside buried under a pile of snow in a "warm" area so it doesn't freeze up solid right away. When the "warm" area gets too warm, I'll move it to a shady, cool area on the north side of the "shed wrap" to finish the cold stratification. If necessary due to a good solid warm up in the weather coming, I'll pile snow and ice over the tray then put a light colored tarp over it so it can get what cold it needs

I also brought in other cold strats just a couple days ago from the winter cold. Black walnuts, gentian, hazelnuts, elecampane and several other things. Actually lost track of what I planted in the fall. Same process though - seed tray filled with mild garden soil seeded and placed in a cool area for the fall and winter, then "brought in" to warm up. By "brought in", I'm actually bringing them into a half-hoop "hoop house" type sunroom I have attached. I even have a garden bed in the sunroom I keep planted with usually green onions, brassicas and parsley - nothing better than harvesting fresh broccoli florets in your t-shirt while it's still dropping to near zero outside at night in february.

Another side note - some stratification I've done right in the sunroom garden. I accidentally didn't get my pots seeded with apple out in time and many started sprouting. Gets cold enough down at the shadier end near the plastic that they got what they needed for chilling to sprout.

That's my weird way of doing stratification, which just goes to show you need not be a scientist to get it to work. Nature doesn't require fancy paper towels, plastic bags, special sand or any of the other stuff. Cold is cold - with my methods up here in maine, you just have to avoid going so cold it doesn't count anymore

Matt McSpadden wrote:

Mike Feddersen wrote:Are you located somewhere near the tri-state area of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky? We live south of Huntington WV and east of Louisa Kentucky. I drive for Walmart out of Washington Courthouse Ohio and would bring you one, or more! Lol

I'm nowhere near there, but I thank you for the offer I live in Maine, so while I appreciate the offer... I will probably try to find one a little closer to home.

Do you find that breed smart and trainable along with sociable?

Sad to say it Matt, but trips for good animals from up around here is sometimes just necessary. I know there are breeders here and there are the occasional mixed breed puppies that accidentally happen, but this state is very dry for animals. What you do find is usually expensive to an outrageously level AND you have to sit on a wait list (or get "lucky" on a facebook post).

Literally all the critters I have now are from out of state or hatched/birthed on-farm.

Turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens all have to be ordered in by mail to be affordable. I had bought some muscovy from a woman down near Portland about 10 years ago now, but her prices made that a one time thing never to be repeated.

Penny, our great pyrenees / anatolian shepherd mix, encountered an inattentive driver a few years back. She was from Missouri and had originally flown in via BGR. Guarding our birds now are Remy, a karakachan mix flown in from georgia and Missy, a maremma mix driven up from tennessee (both are 1/4 each pyrenees and anatolian shepherd).

Even my cats - I drove them home from a florida shelter after years of trying to find one in state without getting a credit card to pay for it. One was pregnant and we were able to give away kittens to loving homes without charging people a grand or more, which was extremely rewarding

Take my advice and don't restrict yourself to what's currently available here in Maine. Demand and prices are very high, supply is always low and breed variety (not to mention selection) is very poor. I hope to see that change as we get more and more homesteaders and small farms, but we're still a long way from where it is in the heartland.