MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Refugees to Tout Food Computers That Didn't Work

Re:MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Refugees to Tout Food Comput... by barry-cotter on Friday October 25, 2019 @04:35AM (#21352980)

The ecological footprint argument is for greater industrial concentration and more efficiency. The US has returned farmland equal in area to Washington state to wilderness over the last twenty years because it became uneconomic to farm it. This while basically every measure of how much did the US produces goes up. This is part of a more general trend of doing more with less resources in the developed world. There’s a book on this More from Less , Andrew McAfee.

Robustness and efficiency are at odds with one another. Any highly robust system will be very wasteful indeed compared to an efficient one; any system with lots of slack just isn’t efficient. Obviously if you think a large decline in standards of living is an acceptable price to pay for that robustness that’s a political position you’re free to support but good luck getting the votes for it.

Ability to grow anything anywhere requires energy. If you’re assuming civilization hasn’t collapsed anyway these farms in a box are either solving a non-problem or one with limited applicability.

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Re:MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Refugees to Tout Food Comput... by TeMPOraL on Friday October 25, 2019 @07:02AM (#21353754)

Fair. I'm a person who frequently comments here that centralized systems beat decentralized on efficiency, so I understand that point.

RE More from Less, I need to buy and read that book. I remember an article promoting it being discussed recently on HN, and from it I got a distinct impression that US "doing more from less" is just an artifact of not accounting for embodied energy and material waste during (outsourced) manufacturing. I.e. if copper imports go down and electronic components imports go up a bit and consumer electronics production go up even more, it doesn't mean the US is better at using less copper for consumer electronics; it means you're not accounting for copper China wasted manufacturing components.

Anyway, that's my initial impression; I'll have to read the book to see if it goes into any more details to support its conclusion.

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Re:MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Refugees to Tout Food Comput... by barry-cotter on Friday October 25, 2019 @07:33AM (#21353922)

There’s a recent episode of Econtalk that’s an interview with the author of you’re a podcast listener. If you put in the work to have an informed opinion please share it with the world somehow, whether in a review, a Twitter thread or an email to me.

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Re:MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Refugees to Tout Food Comput... by TeMPOraL on Friday October 25, 2019 @08:24AM (#21354250)

Thanks. I put it on my todo list to send you an e-mail when I read and think through the book; about sharing it with the wider world, we'll see then.

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