The Emotions of Reaction and Socialism?

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
I... I don't know how this relates to Neoreaction and Socialism at all.

One of Socialism's big pushes/claims is 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.' It tends to push claims that you need government involvement in ensuring that basic needs are met.

Enough food to live on is an extremely basic need.

Whether decent food is reasonably affordable on a tight budget is a pretty key indicator as to whether or not government aid is needed for society at large.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
I'm not sure what you're getting at with discussing differences between Australia and the US in agriculture, given that the main fact I used was the (obvious actually) point that it's harder to transport groceries without a car. Are you seriously suggesting that it becomes easier to haul groceries around on a subway in the US than Australia? Or that bus service and subway service are better outside of capital cities than in rural areas?
I'm saying that it's easier to get the groceries outside urban areas, because the trucks that bring the food into the area don't have the urban traffic to deal with. And Australia stacks import complications onto that. It's easier to go by rail and road from a giant mostly-empty plains region than get things through major metropolitan areas. The situation of Australia's province capitals has extremely limited bearing on some 70% of the United States, because the considerable majority of the US population isn't crammed into hyper-dense mega-cities and our economy has much more food going around, which both lower the bar for the food being in reach.

The point of bringing up the graph being solely capitals is that capitals are virtually always massive outliers in the problems of population density. And the graph itself shows the price of the food rising, in a time when Australia's food production fell. This is a set of variables that describes a reason for food insecurity utterly independent of any "food desert" in that it describes being priced out of the food due to conditions fairly specific to Australia regardless of open time, and additionally describes a cause of formation for them, because these impoverished neighborhoods are typically the most densely populated or have the worst road layout or are the deepest in the metropolitan area, in a time with declining supply of food driving up the price, all of which establish the difficulties to be able to stock those grocery stores.

Did you know that every company that handles cargo by truck in New York City has a budget set aside for traffic tickets? Because it is literally not possible to get their cargo through in a sane amount of time following the traffic laws properly. This is rather important for perishables like food, and doubly so due to "worker protection" laws that set hard limits on trucker work weeks decided by people with zero experience making routine round trips across half the country. If multi-million dollar companies can't make sensible time without routinely breaking the law, what makes you think individual people stuck in the worst neighborhoods can?

The problem has a great deal to do with the cities. Not the failures of the wider economy to provide opportunities for wealth, but specifically the hellish mess that is supplying a major city.

Edit: There's one big thing you still have yet to provide, and that's the work-hours of the poor you're saying can't get ahold of sensible food. This is rather key, because "the poor" aren't a homogenous mass. There's a lot of ways to be "poor", and they usually have little to do with eachother.

Debt spirals, lack of jobs to take in the first place, bad qualifications, a criminal record screwing you out of work, ill-advised purchases, specifically wanting to avoid the hell-hours you mention as preventing the ability to cook and thus being stuck working part-time, and then there's very much some number who are just lazy freeloading sacks of shit, genuinely mentally incompetent, or drug-addicts who are generally perceived to overlap heavily and round out the very bottom.
 
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LifeisTiresome

Well-known member
There are tons of videos on youtube that are all about cooking food and how to do it. There are entire tv channels dedicated to this.

I fully admit that I don't cook cause I'm lazy and i don't have a kitchen in my room. The kitchen belongs to the landlord and I would have to intrude in their home to cook food and while they allow that as other people in the building do that. I don't wish to do so. I only enter their home to use their fridge. Otherwise I stay out.

If I had a kitchen in my room, then sure I would try cooking.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
I think you're missing the point a bit. The point of the hamburger helper think is not "this is a great meal that anyone can cook", the point is "look how easy it is too cook this, are you seriously saying it's beyond people's ability to do this?" Which you are conceding they can do. If they can manage this, I don't see how other recipes are beyond them.
Because you ignore the other constraints and costs involved in cooking and go straight to "follow the recipe instructions." And again, you're pulling out a huge goalpost shift since the discussion began about access to Farmer's Markets, I have never argued that poor people can't make Hamburger Helper. I've argued that finding, transporting, and storing quality food has a lot of extra costs that make it extremely difficult for poor people.

Also, you're overstating how unhealthy it is. The worst thing about is the high sodium, which can be an issue for some people, but most people should be fine with going over the limit, and for that aren't fine, the main risk is high blood pressure, not weight gain. It's low on vitamins, yes...but they sell vitamins, a bottle of Once A Day costs like 6 bucks.

I didn't miss the point, because it's irrelevant. less than a quarter of poor people lack access to a vehicle, and I assume those that don't still buy and need to transport bulky objects, and are grown adults that can figure out a way to do so. At the very worst, you can just catch a ride with one of your poor neighboors that does have a car.
Well we're getting somewhere as at least we've moved away from "even a child can do it." The thing is you keep harping on "well it can be done" but there's a limit to how much extra difficulty you can keep piling on before it gets too difficult. Just because it's theoretically possible to overcome all these obstacles doesn't mean it's easy or that the opportunity cost for overcoming these obstacles is actually better than a Big Mac.

Your math is wildly off. A box of hamburger helper+ beef costs, as you said, about $7. That easily makes enough food for 4 people, plus enough leftovers for 3-4 more meals. 8 big macs cost 24 dollars. Cooking at home saves people a massive amount of money.
Holy crap, are you feeding Hobbits or something? A box of Hamburger Helper plus a pound of ground beef leaves you with five cups of food at the end. Splitting that into 8 meals leaves you a meal size so tiny you can eat it in maybe three bites and gives you about 90 calories per meal. The entire Box of Hamburger Helper plus ground beef has about the same nutrition as 3 Big Macs, not 8 (the Hamburger Helper also feeds you ~2500mg of sodium and over 300 of cholesterol).

Lemme note here, a housecat needs about 230 calories a day. You're proposing humans survive on 270.

No wonder you have so much trouble understanding the most basic things about the poor and food if you're that bad at doing basic math.
Most people are stupid and lazy, not just the poor. But when you have money, you can ameliorate many of the consequences of stupidity/lazyiness, whereas when you're poor you cannot, and the best way to not be poor is to not do stupid things. There are three basic rules people can follow that substantially shift their odds of avoiding poverty, and a huge number of poor people fail to do so.
Ah, the neo prosperity gospel raises it's head. Poor people deserve to be poor because they're stupid and lazy.
I'm saying that it's easier to get the groceries outside urban areas, because the trucks that bring the food into the area don't have the urban traffic to deal with. And Australia stacks import complications onto that. It's easier to go by rail and road from a giant mostly-empty plains region than get things through major metropolitan areas. The situation of Australia's province capitals has extremely limited bearing on some 70% of the United States, because the considerable majority of the US population isn't crammed into hyper-dense mega-cities and our economy has much more food going around, which both lower the bar for the food being in reach.
The point of bringing up the graph being solely capitals is that capitals are virtually always massive outliers in the problems of population density. And the graph itself shows the price of the food rising, in a time when Australia's food production fell. This is a set of variables that describes a reason for food insecurity utterly independent of any "food desert" in that it describes being priced out of the food due to conditions fairly specific to Australia regardless of open time, and additionally describes a cause of formation for them, because these impoverished neighborhoods are typically the most densely populated or have the worst road layout or are the deepest in the metropolitan area, in a time with declining supply of food driving up the price, all of which establish the difficulties to be able to stock those grocery stores.
Did you know that every company that handles cargo by truck in New York City has a budget set aside for traffic tickets? Because it is literally not possible to get their cargo through in a sane amount of time following the traffic laws properly. This is rather important for perishables like food, and doubly so due to "worker protection" laws that set hard limits on trucker work weeks decided by people with zero experience making routine round trips across half the country. If multi-million dollar companies can't make sensible time without routinely breaking the law, what makes you think individual people stuck in the worst neighborhoods can?
The problem has a great deal to do with the cities. Not the failures of the wider economy to provide opportunities for wealth, but specifically the hellish mess that is supplying a major city.
Edit: There's one big thing you still have yet to provide, and that's the work-hours of the poor you're saying can't get ahold of sensible food. This is rather key, because "the poor" aren't a homogenous mass. There's a lot of ways to be "poor", and they usually have little to do with eachother.
Debt spirals, lack of jobs to take in the first place, bad qualifications, a criminal record screwing you out of work, ill-advised purchases, specifically wanting to avoid the hell-hours you mention as preventing the ability to cook and thus being stuck working part-time, and then there's very much some number who are just lazy freeloading sacks of shit, genuinely mentally incompetent, or drug-addicts who are generally perceived to overlap heavily and round out the very bottom.
Melbourne has an average population density of about 1603 per square kilometer. New York is over 10,000. Comparing the two and claiming Melbourne is hyper-dense is less than convincing.

First off, posts have gotten moved from thread to thread. I guess you didn't notice, but whatever study you linked earlier (I think the one about 'food insecurity') is not on this thread. I don't know which thread it's on now, so I asked you to provide the link again, because I assume you still have it somewhere and it would be easy for you to provide.
I have not pursued the Food Insecurity link here as I felt there was no point, when Marduk could not go an entire post without 180ing his position (going from "Obesity disproves it" to "Obesity is coincidence" to "Obesity disproves it" in three consecutive posts) I felt there was no real point in bothering, there's no rules against bad faith debating on these boards and no point trying to talk to a person who are debating in such bad faith they will happily contradict themselves repeatedly.

Yes, there are some people for whom this is true, but it is an extremely small minority, not even 1% of the full population, much less over 10%.
Lemme guess, if I ask you to prove this claim you'll cry that you don't have to again.

Let me take a step back. What the heck are you actually arguing for if not A. More government intervention/regulation or B a turn back of the technological clock? I think you're confusing me and a good chunk of others on this thread.

The great depression is a good example of people moving in an attempt to get a better life and doing some pretty extreme ways to do it.

Also look no further than the flights from cali and new york.
Thank you for actually linking to a source.
Mostly I just really despise the prosperity gospel and it's cousin here, the holier-than-thou attitude that the poor are poor because they're inferior humans unlike us superior middle-class to rich types. I'm an orphan, I grew up in the meanest, poorest situation in the country and clawed my way up to becoming a successful landlord today. And I did do it because I'm awesome, but also because there were food stamps, and Pell grants, and private charities, and mentors giving me a hand up. Without those things I would not have been enough on my own. I also got stepped on a lot. I feel compelled today both to make my own charitable works to give back and to rail against people who think the poor are just poor because they're subhumans who are stupid and weak and lazy and deserve to be down there in the dirt.

As far as changes, the most radical one I proposed in a previous thread was taking the agricultural subsidies that are used to pay farmers not to grow crops and instead using it to pay them to grow soil-improving legumes in poorer soil, and then creating a national food stockpile for emergencies and contributing the excess and food from the stockpile that started aging to soup kitchens to improve the supply of free food to the poorest poor. I also support improving the education system a good bit and subsidizing trade schools to teach more practical skills than are available in some colleges. I'd be in favor of, for instance, mandatory classes on home ec, how to balance a checkbook, budgeting, etc.

Complete bullshit. When I was walking or biking to and from a grocery store, round-trip for one load that would get me meals for 3-10 days would take me perhaps an hour. Let's assume someone in much harder conditions takes two hours, or even four. That's still at least 15 meals when they're not aggressively planning ahead to be much more time-efficient. This is assuming that the grocery store is not somewhere that they can stop at on the way to work.
Did you know that every company that handles cargo by truck in New York City has a budget set aside for traffic tickets? Because it is literally not possible to get their cargo through in a sane amount of time following the traffic laws properly. This is rather important for perishables like food, and doubly so due to "worker protection" laws that set hard limits on trucker work weeks decided by people with zero experience making routine round trips across half the country. If multi-million dollar companies can't make sensible time without routinely breaking the law, what makes you think individual people stuck in the worst neighborhoods can?
Unbelievable. I have one person telling me I'm wrong because providing transport is so incredibly easy even a child can do it and one person telling me I'm wrong because providing transport is so incredibly hard even major shipping companies can't do it.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
Melbourne has an average population density of about 1603 per square kilometer. New York is over 10,000. Comparing the two and claiming Melbourne is hyper-dense is less than convincing.
...Okay, so it seems I was wildly off on the scale of Australia. New York City proper is indeed massively more ridiculous than anything in Australia, but you do additionally have the hundred miles of sprawl surrounding that, and you see a little over two thousand per square kilometer for Sydney in a metro that has a fifth of the entire country's population for some fairly impressive sprawl in its own right. It's not just gridlock, there's a lot of time added going through a large area of "small town" density absent usefully-placed high-speed roads, especially with the "arterial" structure of many pre-automotive cities being a poor fit for covering every nook and cranny as is needed to avoid "food deserts".

For a point of comparison, your link gives an urbanized area of 1,701 square kilometers at that density, with Port Philip (? What does that formatting mean?) having a density of 5,585 per square placing very firmly "ultra-dense" urban terrain between the imports and the wider population (certainly more than doubles the actual city I live in...), and Inner Melborne tripled its population in the five year period covered, marking it as on its way to ultra-density in some capacity.

I'll also note that the link you've given me is twenty years out of date, so it's rather inapplicable to discussions of the current state of affairs. It appears to be abandoned for so long that it's undergone some manner of data corruption.

Where do you think the "food insecure" live in the US, by the way? The talk of "food swamps" has to do with the scenario of a lot of fast food chains and few grocers, a situation that arises almost exclusively in larger cities where real estate is ridiculous and transportation gets tight. You are going out of your way to try and justify your statements as a coherent argument using data about multiple very different conditions.

Unbelievable. I have one person telling me I'm wrong because providing transport is so incredibly easy even a child can do it and one person telling me I'm wrong because providing transport is so incredibly hard even major shipping companies can't do it.
They're actually not contradictory statements, as one is saying it's easy by way of bikes, walking, or other "pedestrian" methods, while my own statement has to do with road traffic being hell. They're almost entirely independent modes of transit and are opposite ends of the issue. Sure, walking five miles with groceries in hand is a bit of an ass, but not exactly unworkable.
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
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Obozny
Because you ignore the other constraints and costs involved in cooking and go straight to "follow the recipe instructions." And again, you're pulling out a huge goalpost shift since the discussion began about access to Farmer's Markets, I have never argued that poor people can't make Hamburger Helper. I've argued that finding, transporting, and storing quality food has a lot of extra costs that make it extremely difficult for poor people.

You're the one who started this off with "but following written directions is so hard, most people are kinesthetic learners, etc etc", these "other constraints" of yours only came up after defending that point proved untenable.

Well we're getting somewhere as at least we've moved away from "even a child can do it." The thing is you keep harping on "well it can be done" but there's a limit to how much extra difficulty you can keep piling on before it gets too difficult. Just because it's theoretically possible to overcome all these obstacles doesn't mean it's easy or that the opportunity cost for overcoming these obstacles is actually better than a Big Mac.

The majority of the obstacles you've presented are not present for most poor people, and are trivial to overcome for those do have to grapple with them.

Holy crap, are you feeding Hobbits or something? A box of Hamburger Helper plus a pound of ground beef leaves you with five cups of food at the end. Splitting that into 8 meals leaves you a meal size so tiny you can eat it in maybe three bites and gives you about 90 calories per meal. The entire Box of Hamburger Helper plus ground beef has about the same nutrition as 3 Big Macs, not 8 (the Hamburger Helper also feeds you ~2500mg of sodium and over 300 of cholesterol).

Lemme note here, a housecat needs about 230 calories a day. You're proposing humans survive on 270.

No wonder you have so much trouble understanding the most basic things about the poor and food if you're that bad at doing basic math.

It's been a while since I cooked up a box, maybe I'm misrecalling how much food it makes, but even if I was 100% off and it's only four meals, you're still looking at $7 vs $12. I've actually got a box lying around the house, I'll take a look at how much it makes tonight (and the oh so critical time involved in making and cleaning up).

Ah, the neo prosperity gospel raises it's head. Poor people deserve to be poor because they're stupid and lazy.

I find it amusing you explicitly say this "neo-prosperity gospel" consists of "the poor are poor because they're inferior humans unlike us superior middle-class to rich types", and accuse me of having that mindset because I said *everyone* is stupid, but middle class and rich people can avoid the consequences of that stupidity with money while the poor cannot, and that social mobility generally requires people to not act stupid.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
...Okay, so it seems I was wildly off on the scale of Australia. New York City proper is indeed massively more ridiculous than anything in Australia, but you do additionally have the hundred miles of sprawl surrounding that, and you see a little over two thousand per square kilometer for Sydney in a metro that has a fifth of the entire country's population for some fairly impressive sprawl in its own right. It's not just gridlock, there's a lot of time added going through a large area of "small town" density absent usefully-placed high-speed roads, especially with the "arterial" structure of many pre-automotive cities being a poor fit for covering every nook and cranny as is needed to avoid "food deserts".

For a point of comparison, your link gives an urbanized area of 1,701 square kilometers at that density, with Port Philip (? What does that formatting mean?) having a density of 5,585 per square placing very firmly "ultra-dense" urban terrain between the imports and the wider population (certainly more than doubles the actual city I live in...), and Inner Melborne tripled its population in the five year period covered, marking it as on its way to ultra-density in some capacity.

I'll also note that the link you've given me is twenty years out of date, so it's rather inapplicable to discussions of the current state of affairs. It appears to be abandoned for so long that it's undergone some manner of data corruption.
Okay... but the only point I actually used or needed from that report was that their analysis showed that it took about six times the effort for the poor to get groceries home compared with the middle class. The rest of the analysis wasn't important to the discussion.

That said I do commend you for reading the information and looking for flaws it in, I appreciate this kind of debate much more than people just asserting their opinions. There are indeed significantly better studies but I was not able to find a more recent one that also broke down the difficulties of transport for the poor. I should probably search more when I have time.

Where do you think the "food insecure" live in the US, by the way? The talk of "food swamps" has to do with the scenario of a lot of fast food chains and few grocers, a situation that arises almost exclusively in larger cities where real estate is ridiculous and transportation gets tight. You are going out of your way to try and justify your statements as a coherent argument using data about multiple very different conditions.
I'll grant that's a weak point of my position, "The poor" is an extremely wide net and unfortunately it's hard to slice data down to individual types of poor, or by specific location. The trials of a poor person in Wyoming are going to be very different than one in California. However trying to debate things at that fine a level leads to too many points to cover anything with any depth or reason.

I will say that I think most of the poor who need help are located in inner cities, the rural poor tend to have a significantly better safety net since religious groups are alive and well there, private charities are more effective, there's more chances for work that's purely physical if education has been a problem, and food is often more available. Most of the food insecurity as you say is caused by food deserts and food swamps. Proper zoning would help with that, as would tax breaks for healthier foods, and education to encourage eating the right foods. Ultimately I think fed people should be a compelling interest of the national government. Well-fed citizens with healthy diets are more content, healthier to slow the spread of disease, stronger in case you need to conscript them, take burdens off the healthcare system, and can take a wider range of jobs due to being physically more fit and available for labor.

They're actually not contradictory statements, as one is saying it's easy by way of bikes, walking, or other "pedestrian" methods, while my own statement has to do with road traffic being hell. They're almost entirely independent modes of transit and are opposite ends of the issue. Sure, walking five miles with groceries in hand is a bit of an ass, but not exactly unworkable.
He was also arguing that the poor mostly can just drive their cars or borrow one.

This issue with "a bit of an ass but not exactly unworkable" is how many things are required that are a bit of an ass. Poor people also have highly limited time and energy and the people in this thread insisting "you can just do X" tend to gloss over how many extra hours a day their ideas will eat that people simply don't have. Decision Fatigue is a thing and while there's still some debate about it, Ego Depletion has been observed in hundreds of studies and those things together go a long way to explain why in addition to limited money, limited time, and limited energy, people have limited decision-making abilities and willpower itself is a limited resource and a person can't act like a perfectly rational robot 24/7.

Ultimately everybody's running the rat race but for some people are driving cars and some are taking an obstacle course. I don't want everybody to be forced to be equal but I'd like to take some of the worst obstacles out.

You're the one who started this off with "but following written directions is so hard, most people are kinesthetic learners, etc etc", these "other constraints" of yours only came up after defending that point proved untenable.
No, I already pointed out the difference. It started with Hastur insisting the poor had access to Farmer's markets and Terthna stating that healthy food was cheap and easy if you knew where to get it, we were discussing fresh high-quality produce there. This began at post #35. My response was that it was possible if you knew where to get it, were close enough for easy transport, knew how to transform farmer's market produce into quality meals, and had access to certain electronic cooking implements that I found to be thief magnets by personal experience.

At that point LordsFire chimed in with his bit about how recipes were on the Internet, he ignored all the other obstacles, and claimed poor people were just too lazy and stupid to cook, and refusing to provide any cites. I did indeed knock that down by pointing out that a significant percentage of the population are kinesthetic learners. Eventually it was revealed you and he were talking about Spaghetti and Hamburger Helper, having completely failed to notice you were responding to a line of reasoning that came from preparing produce from a Farmer's Market into high-quality meals.

The majority of the obstacles you've presented are not present for most poor people, and are trivial to overcome for those do have to grapple with them.
Poor people are just lazy and stupid, Prosperity Gospel Ho!

It's been a while since I cooked up a box, maybe I'm misrecalling how much food it makes, but even if I was 100% off and it's only four meals, you're still looking at $7 vs $12. I've actually got a box lying around the house, I'll take a look at how much it makes tonight (and the oh so critical time involved in making and cleaning up).

I find it amusing you explicitly say this "neo-prosperity gospel" consists of "the poor are poor because they're inferior humans unlike us superior middle-class to rich types", and accuse me of having that mindset because I said *everyone* is stupid, but middle class and rich people can avoid the consequences of that stupidity with money while the poor cannot, and that social mobility generally requires people to not act stupid.
Le me answer with your own words:
There are three basic rules people can follow that substantially shift their odds of avoiding poverty, and a huge number of poor people fail to do so.
You're putting the blame for their state directly on the poor there, not saying it's everybody.
 

LifeisTiresome

Well-known member
Another source of money disappearing for people is streaming. You see it on Twitch and youtube and OnlyFans and Chaturbate. People throwing away money to pay streamers.
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
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Obozny
I did indeed knock that down by pointing out that a significant percentage of the population are kinesthetic learners.

No, you didn't. You provided that a large chunk of the population would be better off learning via another method, but that doesn't support your claim that learning simple tasks via non-optimal means is excessively difficult.

Eventually it was revealed you and he were talking about Spaghetti and Hamburger Helper, having completely failed to notice you were responding to a line of reasoning that came from preparing produce from a Farmer's Market into high-quality meals.

Ok, so define what you consider a "high quality meal" that is apparently the only thing you can eat if you want to not be poor.

You're putting the blame for their state directly on the poor there, not saying it's everybody.

Given that those rules are about getting out out poverty, they're obviously not applicable to people that are not in poverty. That doesn't mean everyone else is fine, they just make other, different stupid mistakes. They're just lucky in that they have the means to avoid the worst consequences for those mistakes.

Another source of money disappearing for people is streaming. You see it on Twitch and youtube and OnlyFans and Chaturbate. People throwing away money to pay streamers.

That's not really a poor people specific thing, most Americans are not fiscally competent.
 

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
The food costs five times what junk food does and people can't afford it.

Zoning laws, building regulations, and HOAs that demand houses of a specific size and quality and will condemn the place if you try to build a shack.

Laws against Trespassing and Vagrancy.

Not that many people aren't responsible for their own situations, but there's always something more than "yourself" holding you back because none of us are Islands.
Grow your own food its really not that hard to start up a garden. If the place you live wont allow it then move. If you buy land or a house where an HOA exists that's your own stupidity so who care? The remainder is fairly solid but those two points are pretty weak sauce.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Grow your own food its really not that hard to start up a garden. If the place you live wont allow it then move.
Bullshit. Only people who've never worked in actual agriculture would say such a thing.

Only the largest and most extravagant home gardens grows enough food to actually feed a person and you can't work such a garden and also maintain a job. A few lettuce and tomato plants can get you a treat and a good feeling but actually feeding yourself requires significant acreage.

There's a breakdown here of the minimum land a single person needs to feed themselves, but I think this illustration is helpful.
l2Wi5vY.png


This assumes they're physically fit enough to do all that harvesting alone, have no floods/droughts/pestilence to deal with, and that they have not only fertile cropland but expensive machinery, at least a rototiller for this though really you need a tractor if you're doing five acres. Even with machinery, as the link brings out, you will be burning 5000 calories a day maintaining this large a garden and thus require vastly more food than a normal person if you're growing it yourself.

If you buy land or a house where an HOA exists that's your own stupidity so who care? The remainder is fairly solid but those two points are pretty weak sauce.
You expect the poorest poor under discussion to be buying and selling houses and land? Really? Not only that, you expect them to be in a position to be choosy about the land they get? Do you actually know what the word poverty means?
 

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
Bullshit. Only people who've never worked in actual agriculture would say such a thing.

Only the largest and most extravagant home gardens grows enough food to actually feed a person and you can't work such a garden and also maintain a job. A few lettuce and tomato plants can get you a treat and a good feeling but actually feeding yourself requires significant acreage.

There's a breakdown here of the minimum land a single person needs to feed themselves, but I think this illustration is helpful.
l2Wi5vY.png


This assumes they're physically fit enough to do all that harvesting alone, have no floods/droughts/pestilence to deal with, and that they have not only fertile cropland but expensive machinery, at least a rototiller for this though really you need a tractor if you're doing five acres. Even with machinery, as the link brings out, you will be burning 5000 calories a day maintaining this large a garden and thus require vastly more food than a normal person if you're growing it yourself.


You expect the poorest poor under discussion to be buying and selling houses and land? Really? Not only that, you expect them to be in a position to be choosy about the land they get? Do you actually know what the word poverty means?
No I dont but you mentioned HOAs so apparently you do.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
Bullshit. Only people who've never worked in actual agriculture would say such a thing.

Only the largest and most extravagant home gardens grows enough food to actually feed a person and you can't work such a garden and also maintain a job. A few lettuce and tomato plants can get you a treat and a good feeling but actually feeding yourself requires significant acreage.

There's a breakdown here of the minimum land a single person needs to feed themselves, but I think this illustration is helpful.
l2Wi5vY.png


This assumes they're physically fit enough to do all that harvesting alone, have no floods/droughts/pestilence to deal with, and that they have not only fertile cropland but expensive machinery, at least a rototiller for this though really you need a tractor if you're doing five acres. Even with machinery, as the link brings out, you will be burning 5000 calories a day maintaining this large a garden and thus require vastly more food than a normal person if you're growing it yourself.


You expect the poorest poor under discussion to be buying and selling houses and land? Really? Not only that, you expect them to be in a position to be choosy about the land they get? Do you actually know what the word poverty means?

as much as I disagree with Bear ribs on well pretty much everything.

He is right on this, farming is not easy like at all. I worked on a farm it sucks hard core, that said having a Garden does help, we had victory gardens during the world wars for a reason. Its a useful supliment to your food supply not a replacement. Just like wind and solar are useful additions to our energy supply but not a replacement for a national grid.
 

Mimas

Well-known member
Bullshit. Only people who've never worked in actual agriculture would say such a thing.

Only the largest and most extravagant home gardens grows enough food to actually feed a person and you can't work such a garden and also maintain a job. A few lettuce and tomato plants can get you a treat and a good feeling but actually feeding yourself requires significant acreage.

There's a breakdown here of the minimum land a single person needs to feed themselves, but I think this illustration is helpful.
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This assumes they're physically fit enough to do all that harvesting alone, have no floods/droughts/pestilence to deal with, and that they have not only fertile cropland but expensive machinery, at least a rototiller for this though really you need a tractor if you're doing five acres. Even with machinery, as the link brings out, you will be burning 5000 calories a day maintaining this large a garden and thus require vastly more food than a normal person if you're growing it yourself.

Not to mention the things that come after the harvest. You need a plan and means to store the food. That's additional infrastructure. You'll need to preserve the food. Even with just our garden when I was little, we'd have weekends set aside for making 20 to 50 jars of salsa depending on how the tomatoes had done, 20-30 jars of pickles, jars of beets if we'd grown them that year, and then set aside a freezer to fill with vacuum sealed bags of corn, beans, peppers, and eggplant/squash.

And what we had wasn't enough by any stretch of the imagination to feed us for a year. Enough to last a year when eaten as side dishes or parts of an entree, but not as our sole source of nutrition.

A serious garden is a lot of work, and running a serious will-feed-you farm is a year round, every day job.

So yeah, I definitely agree with this.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
No I dont but you mentioned HOAs so apparently you do.
I notice you left out the rather subtle context that I was answering somebody making a claim nearly as absurd as your garden notion, that the poor can just build shacks from scrap to live in without issue.
 

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