Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.
Worry is going to present, no matter what. Parents with hundreds of thousands in the bank worry, too. That can't be optimized for.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
And I'm sure a farmer who's already busy is going to waste his time on a five acre lot. Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that would motivate someone, but at a profitable rate, not a chance in hell.
> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible.
One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.
25% would be quite extreme. There is some evidence of that much loss on individual rows being possible, but not the entire headland. 10% is considered to be more typical, which works out to be around a 4% loss across the entire piece. Which is well within the normal range of field variability, so it is ultimately not noticeable.
Of course, if it were a 5 acre field, with some assumptions about its shape, we'd only be talking more like a 2% loss across the entire field. Not nothing, but terrible...?
Year-to-year variability will see much larger swings than that. If that's the margin you're trying to operate on, I dare say you're cooked, even if your fields are large.
Well the smaller a field, the larger proportion of end rows. And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field. A 5 acre field is pretty small, and my rough guess is that between end rows, rows shaded by trees and close to water sources, the loss could be pretty significant. Now if you're talking 500-1000 acres, end rows are nothing in the scheme of things.
> And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field.
As was I. 10% loss is considered typical, but that amortizes to only ~4% and ~2% for two and five acre fields respectively. So you suggest that 2% is "terrible" and "pretty significant", but I say it is essentially imperceptible from normal field variability. If you pick a random five acre plot out in the middle of a 100 acre field, there is a decent chance that it will 2% or more below the field average too.
We already have those people, they're called farmers. And they are already very used to working with high technology. The idea of farmers being a bunch of hicks is really pretty stupid. For example, farmers use drones for spraying pesticides, fungicides, and inputs like fertilizer. They use drones to detect rocks in fields that then generate maps for a small skid steer to optimally remove the rocks.
They use GPS enabled tractors and combines that can tell how deep a seed is planted, what the yield is on a specific field (to compare seed hybrids), what the moisture content of the crop is. They need to be able to respond to weather quickly so that crops get harvested at the optimal times.
Farmers also have to become experts in crop futures, crop insurance, irrigation and tillage best practices; small equipment repair, on and on and on.
Read some interviews with Spielberg and Lucas about how they wanted the Marion character to act and the age they originally wanted. It's not pretty at all. I'm not sure who convinced them to follow a different path, but Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been quite a different film if they had followed through with some of the ideas they were spitballing.
"None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more."
At least where I live, real estate sales are public and you can easily find the sale price at the county assessor's website.
The Soviets had a lot of Western assistance with industrializing. Ford in particular played a huge role in the Gorky factories.
The Wehrmacht lost because numbers kind of matter in war. When you look at the natural resources Russia had, the population disparity between Russia and Germany, and the size of territory the Germans attempted to conquer, it really wasn't a close contest at all.
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.
The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
The Soviets would have developed the atomic bomb (and eventually the hydrogen bomb). This simply accelerated their development. And considering that for the first decade after the end of WW2 the US considered and threatened the USSR with nuclear annihilation frequently, this is probably a good development...
Soviet under Stalin was just as bad as Germany under Hitler.
The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2 and the post war world would have been a much better place, including a non communist China. That's my guess at least. Impossible to know, of course.
In reality, the Rosenberg documents wasn't very decisive. Stalin already had the Manhattan Project blueprints from Klaus Fuchs.
> The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2
This is dubious, for several reasons: Public sentiment, starting another major war immediately after they thought they'd catch a break from war for a while. The premise of America building enough nukes to actually get the Soviets on their knees instead of provoking them to steamroll the rest of Europe instead. The ability of American forces, in the late 40s and early 50s, to get nuclear armed bombers over the appropriate targets in Russia.
Japan was already defeated, and two bombs proved enough to make them admit it. That context doesn't hold true for the Soviets; they may well have tanked several bombs to major cities then proceeded to fight a conventional war instead of surrender.
It's fascinating to read how few nuclear bombs we actually had until the 1950's. There was real concern that we would need more than two for Japan, and really had none ready after Fat Man and Little Boy were expended.
Almost as fascinating is how often in the late 40's and early 50's we threatened the USSR with nuclear weapons. Don't leave Iran quickly enough? We'll blast you. Amazing and scary how the world has survived so far...
Stalin was undoubtedly evil with the blood of millions on his hands.
I don't think that the West had any chance to liberate the Soviet bloc (I'm assuming what you meant is the Warsaw Pact countries). The Red Army was simply too big, too powerful, and too experienced at the end of WW2. Even using the few atomic bombs available between 1945-1949 (when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon), the USSR was just too big a country, with too many people.
And if you look at the willingness to take casualties that the Red Army demonstrated while fighting the Nazis, trying to take on the USSR would have been folly.
The West was spent after WW2 (as were the Soviets), with no appetite for further conflict. Even the US was tired of war, and only the drumbeat against the Red Menace did much to motivate the populace.
Yeah, that's about it. General Patton, John von Neuman were among those advocating for it, and in hindsight I think it would have been a good thing to avoid the Cold War and the communist era, saving China from the horrific Mao era, etc.
But I agree that turning on an ally, sacrificing millions more of your soldiers etc at that point would have been a very hard sell. I'm sure I would have been opposed to it at the time.
reply