Why Still No Vertical Farms? #1

They were all the vogue a few years ago. Going to save the world from famines. FSM knows we could use them now, hey? What with the climate warming, and all?

If you want to hear what's going on, Two Bit da Vinci has a video. It's a 14m watch and lays out some issues that have seen Vertical Farms (I prefer the term I think I may have coined, Agricultural Vertical Farms or AVFs) go from venture capitalists' darlings to shunned money sinks. And it started me thinking. I pinned a lot of hopes on AVFs becoming a real thing. And they almost would have, if it wasn't for those pesky people building them... 

Why Are Vertical Farms Failing?

There were a few spreadsheets in the video near the latter half and they didn't paint a good picture. Because they used "agricultural technology trained" staff because their whole system of techno-farming is still experimental. Whole vertical farms have been wiped out by something as simple as mold. (True - at least one farm had to be turned into a warehouse because once it's in an ideal space with plant-friendly air and surfaces and lighting and recirculating air and water, it stays around...)

I can't recall the figures Ric used for "blue collar" labour. But upwards of $24,000 and the largest cost, easily outpacing electricity costs. Hang on - weren't they "agricultural technology trained" staff? I can't remember, but I do remember thinking that if you put people into the same space as your crops, you pretty much guaranteed that something random and not good would happen. A person who has mold in their home forgets and because they have a cold, bring their handkerchief into the grow area. Or sneezes...

There are people who say that greenhouse operations are among the most productive grow operations out there, and produce by far the best, most plentiful, and cost-effective solutions for a range of food crops. Then again, I've heard of greenhouses also wiped out by introduced pests and plant pathogens. 

Is There A Solution?

If you believe the doomers, no. It's always going to happen. (Which, I'll explain a bit later, would be a pity for colonies on the moon or any other moon or planet...) But Nature's done all this groundwork for us, and we're shutting it out. I think that's not the best approach. 

If you believe the bean counters, having to have plant biologists and botanical specialists on staff is another game-ender. Again - not the best approach that I can imagine. 

The solution is to rethink, rethink, and then get a man and a dog to sit in the control room of each AVF. The man to keep an eye on the computer and the dog t keep the man from touching the computer. (I know, a joke so old Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace chuckled about it... Git offa my lawn...) 

You know what doesn't bring pathogens and unwanted lifeforms into an otherwise pristine sealed environment? Keeping people out. Filtering the incoming air. Using the AVFs to scrub CO2 out of the filtered air. 

And you know what fixes pathogens and pests? Their natural antagonists. Certain bacteria and insects devour mold. Others, pollinate and hunt down pest species. Twenty-seven bazillion microbes and minutiae in soil, they balance out pests and nutritional deficiencies. Humans, don't. 

AVFs are good for fast-growing leafy greens, some vine crops, and some larger crops. But they can't be the total expenditure we make on improved agriculture. They can't be the Saviours Of Suburbs. They belong out in the fields. And there IS a solution. 

What's The Basis For This Article?

I've thought about this - a lot. Since I realised that solar farms were the way of the future, that our soil in heavily-farmed areas was becoming so denatured and impoverished that we were eating foods that were of lower nutritional density than the same crops in the same locations a century earlier due to that bastardising the soil,  and some trace elements and nutrients are all but gone from the food.

This all adds up to the whole list of challenges the human race is facing. We've poisoned ourselves with plastics, PFAS, and lead, to name a few, and it's affected our fertility rate to the point where it'll become a crisis in this generation. Not helping has been our profligate waste, and those waste dumps releasing greenhouse gases more potent than CO2 at an ever-increasing rate. Methane. From food waste. Food that's already nutritionally poor, and we throw between a quarter and a half of it away. 

(Estimates vary, depending on if, as well as the estimated one-third wastage rate of all the food we buy, you also count crops that farmers plough back into the ground because the supermarkets don't buy it - because they realise that we won't buy it if it has the slightest blemish. Either way - attributable to us, not those bastard supermarkets. Something to think about when you chuck out that half a cabbage you bought, but only needed half of for your recipe...)

We need a complete overhaul of our food systems. From coming up to going into us to coming back out of us. 

From In To Out, To In To Out, Again.

What's most missing from our supply chain? End-to-end connection. I don't care if that's a conventional farm growing food the old-fashioned way, someone's aquaponics system in their backyard, a greenhouse farm, a robotic vineyard, the Vegetable Production System (Veg-01) on the ISS, or AVFs. 

Of all of them, Veg-01 comes closest to encapsulating the problem. I had a quick look at the system that the Vegan Society wants to see in the ISS, and it's - simple. And lacking. The system in the movie The Martian came a bit closer, but was still miles off anything that might work for more than one rotation. (Aside from the inconvenient fact that any food crop grown in Martian soil would kill anyone eating it.)

And all - ALL - of them have those other great big huge disconnect with the way growing anything works. Everything we depend on, is circular. We breathe out CO2, the plants absorb it. The plants breathe out O2, we breathe it back in. The thing that powers that magic cycle is the energy of the Sun. 

Similarly, a rabbit (or human) eats a carrot, they absorb all those nutrients that the carrot extracted from the soil and packaged as sugars and trace elements we evolved to make use of to power our activities and our growth. 

The first cycle, that's circular. O2 into human, CO2 out of human, CO2 into plant, O2 out of plant, repeat. The second one used to be closed. Carrot nutrients into animal, excrement our of animal on the ground, excrement into plant, nutrients out of plant. 

But we go to great lengths to mismanage our waste cycles at every step of the way. We like to have our food crops close to hand, but our shit as far away from ourselves as possible. The nutrient deficit gets bigger and bigger, the soil gets poorer and poorer, plants get less nutritionally dense. I've omitted a HUGE step in that cycle. 

Plants don't use our crap directly - the soil (with millions of tiny lifeforms in every single teapsoonful) first converts it to plant nutrients. THEN the plants hoe into it and use sunlight and photosynthesis to convert it into a nutritious carrot. A carrot that's BTW covered in nutritious microbes that made the soil fertile, and that, instead of allowing to pass through our systems, we wash off carrots with (usually) a bleach rinse, which kills all that microlife that was supposed to go into us and build up our immune system, our gut biome, and end up in our crap to further build up the soil we grew the next carrot in.

Did you notice an "ick!" factor creeping in there? That's why we're in this situation. I'm sorry, but your squeamishness is killing you and everyone around you. 

Sewage

We currently either kill our sewage and pump it into oceans, or convert it to a compost and try to sell it to farmers  - who try to avoid it because of that "ick!" reaction you experienced earlier - or dry it and burn it. 

And one of the reasons we do that is because of another of your habits. Drugs. Illicit drugs, and prescribed drugs. When you partake, it ends up in your wastes. Your wastes, in a well-designed city or town, end up in the sewage, which is as a result loaded with antibiotics enough to cure a third world country of all its sicknesses, enough illicit drugs to power three Splendour In The Grass festivals, and enough rat poison and insecticides to demolish a farm's worth of every "pest" species. 

No-one back when we were first designing ways to get rid of the shi in the streets thought about how best to get it back to the farms that grew the food that we ate back then and turned into that shit. And as a result, we now have a perfectly fucked food system that has pipes that go nowhere, pipes that go to the wrong destinations, and starting points that aren't capable of producing what each articular pipe was meant to carry. 

Farmers whose 

The Answers Won't Be Easy.

A Deeper Dive Into What's Wrong.

At the moment, our toilets are wrong. Our sewage systems are wrong. Our cities are wrong. Because we started with the purpose of increasing productivity and speeding progress - not per se of course, but because we wanted life to become easier through our ingenuity and cooperative efforts - and didn't think about the planet as a life support system which is what it in fact is. That's in fact why I also referred to Moon / Mars / other planet colonies. They too will need carefully-balanced ecosystems - and then try not to throw a spanner in them like we've done here. 

I'll start at the farms, since I started this article with them. AVFs are a small part of the equation. By producing some food in a small footprint we're in effect freeing up farmland for other purposes. (Which, knowing us, won't be to regenerate the planetary ecosystems, although that should be our priority right now...)

Conventional farms should stick to things that can't be produced better and easier in greenhouses and AVFs. They should also stop specialising and monocultures. They need diversity, the ecosystem needs diversity, to manage properly. If you can grow spinach in an AVF then rather than give over twenty acres to spinach, use that to grow a range of other greens that aren't so easy to grow vertically. Split your fields between cereals and legumes and animal grazing. 

Plant rows of trees between fields. Not just local native forest trees, but maybe a few rows of local fruit trees. Run a few pigs here, some sheep there. And rotate plot usages where you can. Leave nature strips, let nature have them back. 

Greenhouse and orchard lots are going to need to do much the same. Surround each stand of trees, each greenhouse, with natural habitat. Find new places to grow food. I've mooted using the land under solar panels to grow crops intensely. It's one option. Moving AVFs  near solar panel farms is another. 

AVFs themselves need to undergo some pretty deep changes before they become viable.

Ditch the humans! At present I see so many verticals with medium trays that are made for humans to handle, plant, and harvest. What sort of BS is this? Humans introduce (as I said a little while back) most of the pathogens that destroy AVFs. 

The stacks are spaced so that humans can get in between them and handle those trays, there are floors for those humans to get in amongst the trays. There are complex mechanisms to rotate stacks for the convenience of those humans. 

And nature - specifically, a diverse biome - is zealously kept out while the walking pathogen-spreaders are specially catered for. 

All of our AVFs are in development phases, our greenhouses and roboticised farms are in development, alpha, or beta stages. There are no "release" versions anywhere. Imagine transporting ANY of these technologies from a broadacre farm to a cutting-edge AVF to another planet. It's Destination: F, isn't it? There's a zero chance it'll keep the initial colonists alive, let alone another generation. 

So our whole approach has been wrong all this time. To how and where we live, how and where we grow our food, and how and where we deal with our waste. There's a LOT of infrastructure involved. And notice I'm steering clear of the whole fossil fuel debate... 

I won't steer clear of the whole "pests eating a peach" thing though. You know the one, bugs that are born to eat peaches because they've lived all their life on a peach, and they eat and eat until the weaker ones drop off and die, and finally the last surviving bug is on its deathbed clinging to a shrivelled peach pit and going "But it was all going so well! What happened?"

Summary:

ALL of agriculture needs to change.
ALL of city infrastructure needs to change.
ALL of our transport infrastructure needs to change.

It all has to change by a handful of years. Welcome to the peach pit. We're sooo screwed.

To Be Continued

This has reminded me about several thoughts I've had on the subject of farming, and I'll have to go find those older articles, knock the concepts in them into a more cohesive shape, and post them as I get time. Life's still very up and down at the moment, and will continue to be so for a year or maybe two. But with your help in donations, my beloved wife and I will weather that storm and I'll be able to devote more time to writing and Making and sharing projects with you again. 

So please, share this article and others off any of my blogs to give me some reach, if you don't know about my other blogs use the newspaper icon below to see my latest twenty posts across all my blogs, and while you're there subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter. 

And finally - do make a small donation via any of the links included below, and consider making it a monthly one... 

Stay awesome, check back often, and enjoy!

.

I'm A Craarrppp!

Drinks like a fish, flops about like a fish, has a decided enmity for any shapely carp that crosses his path. Perhaps he's had a chance encounter end in disaster in the past? Wouldn't put it past this shagmeister. Or perhaps he thought he was merely fondling a trevally. (Sorry - you have to sit through a whole ten seconds or so of preamble to get to the trevally. Life's tough.) Or maybe - who knows - he's not really part of the Government and there's a "higher authority" who's judged the whole world only worth destroying and not judged Baaaaarnaby at all for being the drunken philandering pile of shit that he is. 

Ah crap. I've just about used up all the time I have for Joyce and that party. Put the LNP in the bin where they belong.

Keep The Bastards Honest!
(and sober FFS!)

Social Media Platforms Compared - Where Would You Like To Be Today?

Why Are We Still On FB? It's become a pile of stuff (euphemism) and basically assaults us using psyops and propaganda, and is now blocking news from Canada and Australia. So why have we not moved on?

I like The Conversation, it's an alternate news resource like The Guardian and The New Daily that offer good alternatives to MSM Murdoch-opoly. I haven't gotten my news from Facebook for years, other than friends and family stuff, but for everyone in Canada and Australia that were hoping to get their local news, bad news. Facebook are pulling an Elon - refusing to pay their way. So tell me again - Why Are We Still On FB?

I backed right off FB for a few years, found some great alternative sites where the tendrils of corporate control aren't ever going to reach. Some are independent and trying to become the next big thing, some are federated and thus fiercely independent of any corporate interferings. I only come back to FB because of inertia. And it ain't my inertia, I've pretty much ballistic'd myself outta there. I just wish more friends and family would come over to the Good Side.

When Musk turned the bluebird to Xitter, I bailed for another platform that isn't ever going to be able to be screwed over like Twitter - and FB-Insta-Threads - are. I found more than a couple more that are all good, all have a decent user participation, and Zuck and Musk and Bezos et al aren't going to get their hooks into.

When Youtube got to be a shittified platform I found many alternatives, one that had almost all the video creators I enjoy, several independent platforms, and a few Federated ones. 

The No-No Go Zone:

For me, the following platforms are anathema. I can't freely post what I want, and it's one of the reasons to Get Out Of Dodge. Read that link - it puts the case very well. On FB and Google properties, you're at their mercy. I can't count the number of platforms and apps Google created, that attracted a large userbase - and then they shut it down. 

On FB, I can't format a post with different typefaces or font weights, but there used to be one case where one could. You'd think a rather easy editor and database change would have been - but no, they chose to do experiments on some of their users by slewing their newsfeeds, they still do that to this day and are now doing it to our local news resources. 

The advantage of going to independent platforms is that a) it breaks your "brain rust" that you got from the Old Order of social sites, b) it's hard to leave a cosy comfy little cave even though it's been filling up with feces down there near the servers and c) where will all your friends go? Will they go to the same services as you? You took ten to twenty years to cultivate that particular bunch of friends. (And yet you seemingly can't get even 10% of them to take the plunge with you. Some friends, huh?)

Facebook's parent company Meta owns and operates FB, Instagram, and Threads, all of which started out as good ideas but became enshittified. Instagram started off as a great independent thing, was bought by FB/Meta and the developer promised free rein -but wouldn't you know it, they were lied to and let go. It turned into poop pretty much from that moment on. 

Threads was meant as a competitor to Twitter, but I think it was only ever considered as a  REALLY distant sort-of maybe kinda replacement because of Elon Ego and the Xitterapocalypse. Which brings me to Xitter, the shitterbox of IM platforms now. And 'nuff said about that.

Youtube started to become a terrible platform for smaller creators quite a while back, and rang its death-knell for me when they started encouraging the brainless short-format videos over longer more thoughtful content. 

They were doing it to compete with Tiktok, which I've visited a few times and I'm still trying to get the mental stain out of my head. There's crap and there's crapper-worthy and then there are short-form videos. (Even FB has gotten onto that bandwagon, so maybe a majority of short-form content is a good way to tell which platforms are enshittified beyond redemption?)

So far I've provided no links because that's just the problem - they're so well known that you can find them on your own, and the noise is drowning out some good and very useable platforms, so I won't give those bigger platforms air. 

Here are some alternatives, with my personal preference rating:

The Better Choices

MeWe

MeWe is an almost perfect FB replacement. It has Newsfeeds, a lot of Chat channels associated with every Timeline, Group, and Page, so that in mnany ways it thrashes the hell out of FB. It's also extremely privacy-oriented, so it's hard to make Public posts and that makes it hard initially to follow particular Pages Groups or people because nothing is public by default. It's also hard to share your MeWe content to another platform because - privacy. They're now experimenting with federation but once again it's going to the walled garden approach in that the federation mechanism they use is not open. That "walled garden" approach is admirable, but also the one main reason I find it hard to rate it more than a 5.

BlueSky

BlueSky is made by the people that made Twitter. It's a work in progress but very useable and already populated with a huge number of users from all over. It takes almost no getting used to if you used early Twitter. It's still missing some features like multiposts, but it's also being worked on constantly and dropping out improvements from time to time. I have to give it a solid 8. I'm not sure if registrations are open by now but if not I have invites to give away. 

Matrix.

Matrix is a an open framework, you can share a document or workspace across different platforms or direct on the web, and while it's not social networking per se, it does allow you to do things that otherwise you'd have to use a proprietary and thus controlled-by-others platform for. Not being proprietary means no proprietor will suddenly decide to enshittify it for personal, financial, or political reasons. 

This is the main reason I'm suggesting these alternatives at all, the very real (and now proven over and over by Meta/FB, X(itter), Google/Alphabet, and all the other disappointing original Old Order of apps) enshittification going on in those apps we once loved and that are now become just plain abusive. The high investment you have to make in getting an app to access into Matrix (at the moment I've only ever used Element) and so forth means I give this an 8 for concept but a 3 for usability.

Nebula. 

Nebula is a subscription-based video platform like YouTube, and in fact many of the video creators on there are YouTubers, the difference is Nebula isn't ad-supported but rather based around a very reasonable subscription. As with all the other sevices I mention , it's here to allow you to avoid the Old Order of now-enshittified content. Rated: 8.

DailyMotion, Vimeo, Twitch, D-Tube.

These are all video sharing and streaming platforms that do what YouTube does, some with subscriptions, some free, all accessible and less likely to enshittify than YT. There's also Peertube on the federated networks but I'll get to the Fediverse in a second. Ratings: PeerTube: 7, others also solid 7s.

And here's the Fedi:

The Fediverse - MissKey, Mastodon, Peertube, PixelFed, and a whole galaxy of others. 

This link will take you to a guide of Fediverse services, server instances, and give you some idea of how much social media ground the Fedi covers. It's impressive. 

Mastodon is one of the best known Fedi services because, well - Elon Ego / Xitterapocalypse had people trying them all. It's all of what Twitter was but without algorithms to direct chosen content to you as X and the FB properties do, and it has a different interface and terminology for stuff you already used in FB ab Twitter.

Because of that, a lot of people felt overwhelmed and went off Fediverse stuff. But it's at its core just the same principles as those that guided you to create the social graph you now have on the carp platforms. I'm rating it an 8.

But the whole Fediverse of different servers has to get at least a 9 from me because they cover such a wide range of platforms and services, are pretty much undisruptable being so widely distributed, and did I mention they all interoperate? There's even a plugin for WordPress to connect into the Fediverse. 

I predict that with a few more people aboard, this could become a whole new paradigm of Internet. There 13,000 server instances around the world, meaning it has staying power. Seven million people use the various Fedi services, that cover every aspect of online social activity from IM chat to chat to social networking to forums and even blog platforms.

One upside of the Fediverse is that ALL the servers talk the same language. If you happen to come across a mentioned post that mentions a good creator on PeerTube (yep, the YT alternative) and have their handle (@brilliantcreator@diode.zone, which happens to be where one Peertube group serves from) you can enter that handle into Mastodon, find follow and -  -  -  you will now see their Peertube posts - including videos - scrolling in your home feed. And be able to reply!

First, a better look at the Fediverse. This link will take you to a guide that shows the range of different services, and each services has a range of servers located all around the globe, most maintained by private individuals or small companies as a social service. I'll write more on the whole Fediverse as I write a (short, not comprehensive) list of types of services that are available in the Fediverse. In fact, here's another great list of resources.

Choosing servers.

It's important to know that the choices here are pretty wide-ranging. If you want to mainly interact with a group of Allies, there are servers maintained by LGBTQI+ communities, if you want to join a bunch of computer geeks, there's a server for that too. 

Then the choice - IM style chat, longer-form chat, discussion-group / forum, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging? Just like with the established and now thoroughly enshittificated Old Order social apps, you'll want to join several. 

Also consider: the service server's location, the community registered on that server, and the size of the community. 

• The location helps with language, and also ensures you get to see a fair proportion of local content. 
• The community of people makes a difference. This will ensure you see a fair proportion of content relevant to you. 
• And the size of the community matters too. A server with a lot of users may tend to offer long-term service, but it can become lagged, and your local newsfeed will be quite frantic. A tiny server with fewer than a hundred users is likely to be a closeknit group and may not offer you the content you want. 

Notwithstanding those three points, just joining ANY server is a good first step, and a larger one might be helpful in the beginning. You can always move stuff to another server later. It's been made really easy, and I encourage it.

I initially joined a large server some two - three years ago, lost interest, and then the "Xittastrophe" happened. So I promptly forgot I already had an account, and started another one on another big server. mastodon.social. It was noisy and busy but I got good tips on where to find server instance lists, found another more local 

found that joining a Mastodon instance that's operated by a few individuals and with a few thousand users here in Australia was a good move. For a start, my local newsfeed is populated by more Aussies, for another, that sorts out the language issues, and - more importantly - this is a medium sized server in terms of membership. That means it's not going to get hammered by tens f thousands of people accessing it, but it's large enough to avoid instability and any kind of radicalisation. (Not like, ahem, various organisations have become lately...)

The other thing to keep in mind is that this is probably not going to be your only account. You might want to join a chat service, a video service, a discussion and forum server, and a social platform that's a bit more FB-like. And you can. Right now I bet you have a FB account, a X(itter) account, another on a forum site like reddit. 

It's the same on the Fedi. The only difference is that on those other accounts, you can log in FB and see your messages from X in your newsfeed, can you? If you still have Flickr, will you see your friend's hoilday snaps while logged into X or FB? You can in the Fedi. 

You'll still need to have accounts on Friendica, Mastodon, pixelfed, and Peertube. But you can follw accounts from one platform, on your account on another platform. And reply to them. That right there is the beauty of Federated services.

Mastodon.

Mastodon evolved out of Diaspora, the OG federated chat service. It's the best place to get started, and also the best place to get over the initial learning curve. If you follow that link above it'll take you to the easiest way to pick a good server to join. (Some servers are occupied by photographers, some by technical people, the majority are social. In almost every case, starting with a server in your country is the best option.) Once you've found a community, you'll get lots of news from that community, and then from the broader Mastodon community worldwide. 

And once you have a few followers and follows here, you can start deciding which other services will interest you, create accounts there too, and then follow people across accounts and services. 

Friendica. MissKey. Pleroma. 

Much like Mastodon, but with a wider range of features making them more like a FB alternative with a Mastodon-alike streams setup. The thing is, like all the other Fediverse services, is that they can interoperate, you can join one but follow people on other services.

pixelfed. PeerTube. 

Miss good old photo-sharing apps? Like what Instagram and Flickr once were? pixelfed. Youtube? Try PeerTube.

Lemmy. Mobilizon. 

These are designed more for discussion groups, forums, link sharing, and the like. 

Writefreely. Plume.

These are writing and blogging services. There's even, as mentioned, a plugin for WordPress that allows you to reach the Fediverse audience. 

Fed.brid.gy. 

An interesting one because you can add a website such as a blog, then follow it just as though it were an individual on any of the Fedi services, and see when new stuff gets posted. Great for giving blogs an identity people can follow in their timelines wherever they are. 

I already added one of my blogs, you can follow @ohaicorona.com@fed.brid.gy or also follow it on https://fed.brid.gy/web/ohaicorona.com from any web browser, it's a great idea. 

And look - most of the Fediverse is operated by individuals off their own back, they carry the costs themselves (or some may have a link where you can donate to help cover costs) and that's one of the attractions of the Fedi - you can talk to the person running your server instance, and they're generally the nicest people. Try getting support out of Google or FB or (these days) X(itter)...

But also, and right on schedule, this happened. For the first time in the year and a bit I've been on this server instance.

This kind of thing does happen: 

Went to log into mastodon.au only to be presented with the following message:

Due to some scheduled maintenance, one of the links between two of our datacenters is down.

This should IN NO WAY have broken anything. But it did. It turns out that "someone" needed an extra 10gbit link in a certain area, and replaced a simple optical joiner with a switch, instead of running a NEW optical cable. Network switches need power. Two optical fibres joined together don't. Now, because that "someone" didn't want to run a new optical cable to keep everything isolated AND managed to not write it down in the network map, that switch was installed in the an area that was scheduled for a power outage this weekend.

The work was meant to be finished by this morning (Sunday), but the outage window is until 6pm tonight. As this is out of my control, and as I explicitly agreed and confirmed that they can do this and it won't affect anything, I can't even go and ask them to hurry up. Sigh.

For anyone concerned about data loss, everything is up, I can get into everything out-of-band, it's just that they can't reach the internet.

Feel free to ask me stuff, I'm 'xxxxxx' (obscured by me. Ted/PTEC3D, to maintaion Rob's privacy) on pretty much every social, but I don't get notifications from the Xitter, try anywhere else!

Sorry!

In this case Rob was hit with an issue where the service provider he uses (just the way I use Digital Pacific ) made an unrecorded blunder and he's now stuck waiting for them to fix the issue. You take it on the chin because Rob's set up a system which is now quite large, to handle the amount of Aussie users he was getting. I've asked where I can make a regular donation but he's steadfastly refused to accept any. All out of his pocket. 

I lost a day of connectivity but guess what? I was still following quite a few regular contacts on MissKey and several other Fedi services, that's where the power of federation really shines. I hadn't lost touch with the people I follow. I also have two alt accounts on two other servers, but because I knew everything was going to be fixed in a few more hours I didn't even bother to fire either alt account up. Try THAT when Elon shuts his toy site down in a fit of pique...

 

Criminal Supermarkets

Supermarkets justifying record profits because of the many employees they have is bullshit. 

Supermarkets are "criminal."

It's not just me saying it, it's more or less official now. This post has had to be updated before it was even scheduled. The original post was everything below from the heading "Profit(eering)" to the "And Now - UPDATED:" heading further down. The post has also gone from "scheduled" to "for immediate release" status. 

I urge you to share this everywhere, share it often, and discuss it widely if you want food justice for Australians. (And Americans - unless your goverment stops a few "strategic mergers" from taking place, you'll be in this effective duopoly situation soon too - share the hell out of it everywhere!) Please read all the way down to the "Call To Action" and take action. Australians need the supermarkets to be reined in and punished. 

Profit (and profiteering)

They do know, don't they, that profit is what's left AFTER all outgoings have been paid, and therefore blaming employee payrolls is total bullshit? They HAVE record profits. AFTER having paid all outgoings. All outgoings includes wages last time I looked it up.

That means they've paid all their employees fairly - HAVEN'T . THEY? - and then they STILL have this mountain of money left over. The wages aren't paid for out of the profit, they're paid before they declare the profit. Either that, or they're lying right in our faces and hoping none of us has ever done maths.

And saying people are just trying save - when those people are still earning the same or more than last year but are having to choose the cheaper generic versions - that seems to me to say that it's more likely that the price on the original thing they wanted HAS gone up. Really. They could afford it last year and the years before, their budgets are still broadly the same; - but this year that nice ham is out of their price range. In plain terms, that nice ham has almost doubled in real price. 

What Can We Do?

Take the stores back. If you see anyone flogging a pack of mince - no. No, you didn't see anything. If they'd kept their staffing levels up to the point where it made their profits merely reasonable rather than rapacious and greedy, they could have a staff member standing alongside every customer and checking their baskets out for them to prevent this. 

In fact, they could have re-installed much cheaper and simpler things called "staffed checkouts" - as they had 20 years ago. Because you know what? Back then "stock shrinkage" was far lower than it is now with self-checkout. It's been a stupid, profit-motivated, unremitting and stinking stuff-up that the supermarkets made and we (the customers) have been paying for ever since. 

So, if you have a docket from last year, find the items you bought back then on the shelves today and write the old price on their price stickers with a fine felt tip marker. Be careful not to mess up the barcode though, because we don't want to cause any hassle. Also don't cover their price, just add the old price you paid and the date you paid that price. We just want other shoppers to see the price increases and decide for themselves if they want to buy that item there or perhaps just find another store where the two label amounts are closer together... 

Or print yourself a bunch of labels and take them with you to put near label holders - alongside the current price label, not covering it. Again, it's just nice to let other customers know how it's apparently us that need to change our budgets because of the rampant price gouges, rather than that the supermarkets make less profit so we can afford that item.

Print some nice notes or posters explaining that this doubling of some prices in less than four years is not acceptable, and put them near the worst rip-off items in the store. Nothing rude, just facts. Other people need to know, so that they can decide if they want to be ripped off or treated fairly. 

Get creative. Drive home that we are tired of being bent over for our wallets. And maybe someone that sees one of your posters will also start taking action. And the ripples will spread.

Retrospect

This whole situation happened because way back when, when someone decided that Australia didn't need competition in the supermarket sector, the "free market will take care of it." And so chains like IGA, ALDI, Costco, and a whole swag of other potential competitors weren't really welcomed into the market in Australia despite the healthy competition they'd have generated, back when it could have made a difference.

America - for once - is following us down the chute as they try to prevent a similar duopoly situation occurring there. You can see how our stupidity and docility in allowing a duopoly to get so stongly established and so deeply embedded has emboldened the same behaviour in other countries. It's time we showed them the other side of the coin. And 

But bear in mind - no matter where it is, a duopoly is exactly the same thing as a monopoly with two trading names. It was shown in interviews and questions that our two supermarkets actually do tacitly fix prices between them, develop the same anti-competitive practices between them to keep other players out, and work the same - let's call them what they are, scams - on their victi-... their customers. When more than two similar corporate bodies collude and collaborate between them to fix prices and scam their customers, the term is "a Cartel." We have those in Australia and all over the planet, too. But that's for another article.

In none of those scenarios are the customer's interests considered. Only our wallets.

So Keep The Bastards Honest, get activated and irritated, and let them know we won't take their thievery for much longer. Every store manager has a name and an address, write them a nice letter explaining why you think they should be working for the sake of their customers more than their shareholders. Oh and of course those upstream people also have names and addresses - write them a nice letter too. But do write letters, posters, labels, stickers. (Oh, and I forgot to mention that they have email addresses too...)

And Now - UPDATED:

The latest senate enquiry into the conduct of the supermarket duopoly robbing Australian consumers to within an inch of their lives has labelled their behaviour as "criminal." Colour me unsurprised because this is what I've been saying for over a decade already.  I'll hand you the lede now:

"A senate inquiry into supermarket pricing has heard that people are turning to dumpster diving and stealing to combat the cost of living.

The first of three hearings, held in Hobart on Thursday, also saw the conduct of Coles and Woolworths labelled “criminal”." -- https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/03/07/supermarket-inquiry 

People are scrounging from dumpsters items that the supermarkets would rather throw away (showing very clearly that their profits are wayyyyy too high, otherwise they'd at leats make an effort to sales-price these items and make some money from them) and some are turning to petty crime. 

What I may not have seen stressed enough in articles about this deplorable greed and rapaciousness the supermarkets are displaying is: if you saw someone steal an item at the self-checkout - NO! No, you did not see anything at all. Their actions didn't cause the supermarkets to record record billion-dollar profits, should indeed have caused the supermarkets some losses, and yet - lo! - for they STILL make record profits despite throwing out a significant proportion of perfectly within-code products, despite stock shrinkage being on the rise.

They Are Making Far More Than A Fair Profit, They Are Profiteering At YOUR Expense!

Remind everyone - once more, with feeling - Keep The Bastards Honest. Especially remind your local MPs and Ministers that every store manager has a name and an address, every CEO and COO and CFO too. Ask your Minister to write to them on your behalf, perhaps, or to forward your concerns via a new item of legislation being tabled or some such governmental magic. Because - and you should feel free to let those government persons know this - you will definitely support them in the next local election, by-election, and State or Federal election, and you just don't know if that would be the case if they didn't act... 

Call To Action

I know - I'm a tiny insignificant blogger writing on a tiny insignificant blog and yelling at the clouds. But even such a tiny voice can be magnified if it's taken up by many. And right now we need not only Senate enquiries and ACCC looking into the actions of supermarkets, we need EVERYONE  to get activated, be informed, read about it so that they too can make their feelings known. Share this post (https://bit.ly/store-rage) so that many others will see it. Ask them in turn to share it too. Just please get the word out there - our supermarkets are just the tip of the iceberg, fuel companies, energy companies, real estate and landlords - they're all chowing down hard on the record profits they've been building up to, and consequently reducing our lives to just being cash machines for them. It's time at least one country stood up for older more human values again. Help the change along

As always, stay awesome and

KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

Got a tip? Questons? Want me to email you? Go here for contact details.

Enshittification 101: More F-lockin-tech

I've used the word "flockintech" a few times now, most of you will have gathered it's a portmanteau word for "F'ing Lock-in Technology," but how many people are aware of just how much flockintech we are actually stuck with already? And this also goes ,for our techie/geeky focus in my blogs, particularly for technology products and software.

I've pointed out the matter of John Deere tractors (and yes they are "technology" because technology is inextricably tied up with almost every machinery technology) and a Polish railway that had to hack a piece of carriage-disabling malware that the carriage manufacturer introduced into the carriages to ensure they had to always be heavily used and regularly "serviced" by the manufacturer, which caused significant downtime for the railway and was eventually fixed by an anonymous hacker group removing the malware from the carriages. 

There's a video platform where people have paid to save videos and as the company founders, are unable to keep the videos they've saved on the platform. There have been several other online properties that sold a permanent product to their customers and then said products became unusable when the company went tits-up and the servers were switched off. 

Got A Fitbit? 

I'll start off, for now, among the first items on this week's "Download This Show" podcast is the Fitbit Update Bricking And upRoar incident I'm choosing to call FUBAR. (Yep. Look FUBAR up if you don't already know what it means and where it came from...) Marc mentions in the podcast that Google are being a bit coy about the update possibly/possibly not causing the fitbits to go from a battery life measurable in days, to a battery life measurable in around 60 minutes. 

I can tell you what I think. Enshittification. That's how you add or subtract features to an existing successful product, and (as the name suggests) turning said product into ka-ka. My newsletter software is a case in point, offered a free-forever low volume product,realised that meant a lot of small bloggers like myself, and at first began adding bloat features I'll never use, and finally, when they realised after a year that we who can't afford it, simply can't afford to go to the Pro version, so they've introduced a "we're turning this server to a Pro server and you'll have to follow this five thousand word guide to move your existing newsletter to another server just for Free tier users." 

I voted with my feet, I have few newsletter users, very little free time to be moving them to another platform or whatever, the newsletter will have to wait. If I had a few donations I could just Pro-ify the existing account again but as I have neither I'll get to it when convenient. 

Back to the Fitbit:- Google bought the company and began integrating it with their own ecosystem, which was fantastic for the fairly basic thing the Fitbit was in its infancy. (They mention this in the podcast.)

They also mention that Google now has a smart watch product of their own that does what the Fitbit does among a host of other features. I'd be enshittifying the hell out of the Fitbit if I was the person marketing the Google Watch which is purpose-designed to work in their ecosystem, and mayber that's what's just happened. Stay tuned to this - will a new update be able to reverse and fix the last update, or will it turn out that the software update overdrove some components that then shorted out and will now the affected Fitbits now be rendered unusable?

Got Windows? 

This has to be my favourite example of enshittification and flockintech ever. Windows 2 - almost no-one knew about. Windows 3 - much the same. But there wasn't an upgrade path. You bought each version. Windows 3.11 (the first one with networking and thus the first natively Internet-capable Windows operating system) I think was the same. 

And it's not like you could afford to keep using W3.11 to this very day. For a start, it's well-known and has well-known exploits. Microsoft started offering some security updates but of course support stopped because they wanted us to buy the next great OS from them. For a another, the hardware it ran on is hard to get. (Although I have to note that just recently, a job opening for a Windows 3.11 Administrator has become one of the most rarified jobs in IT, and probably the last workplace to use this version of Windows which would by now be over twenty years old, and replaced by Windows 95 in 1995.)

There have been 27 versions of Windows since W95, some upgrades, some for different tasks (server vs workstation etc) with 14 just being upgrades of W10. Until W10, you bought each new version of Windows as it cam out. W10 offered free installation to owners of approved older operating systems, so not quite as much money was made on W10, and some enshittification resulted, where things were added to W10 to allow exfiltration of the "owner's" usage data, and a whole lot more details. 

W11 has been described as a "Spy in a trenchcoat" it exfiltrates so much user data. Losing so much of my personal information constitutes enshittification to me. 

Also, even if you own one of the earlier Windows versions and are still happy with it, Microsoft tries to lock you into their upgrade cycle by ending update support for the old version. You may say "Big ****ing deal" to that but Internet security is one of the things that you'll no longer get updates for. And the older an operating system, the more vulnerabilities are found, even after Microsoft stops patching. Due to the fact that while you notionally "own" that version of Windows, you have no access to the code, so you can't fix new vulnerabilities yourself. So in that sense you're either locked-in to their versions cycle, or locked-in to being hacked within five minutes of putting your new re-installation of your OS online. 

EverNote

I've had an account on Evernote since before forever or even further back. The free account was fine for me, I didn't turn that much traffic or quantity on the servers, I used it well within the usage limits for a free account. I only used it to keep blogging notes current between my laptop, my PC, and my phone. Not long after I got it working for me the way I needed, They reduced the number of devices I could use it on. No longer useful. And the other day I wanted to download my notes for historic reasons, and I have to install the PC app just to make an archive. I will. But then Evernote will see one less user for their enshittification, lock-in, and general bait-and-switch tactics.

I'm just listening to another enshittified product:

TED Talks Daily

This one isn't flockintech but definitely enshittified. I've been listening to the 'cast for ages, and ads. And I cast them to the TV when in the lounge because it feels more natural to me to listen to stuff on speakers while working. (As I'm doing right now, listening to a TED  Talk on climate technologiews that are worth supporting.)

Ads. TV and radio have long been legislated into keeping the audio and colour saturation levels down to normal levels. The audio level of a commercial must be the same as the program material, preventing those SHOUTY!!! ads on TV that used to shake the house in an effort to get your attention. 

Apparently, there's no such restraint placed on TED Talks Daily. While my wife's unwell, she needs bed rest. It's all the way at the other end of the house from the loungeroom, but in order to hear the program 3-4metres away from the screen, I need a certain volume level. 

That level is inaudible in the bedroom, but the ads on the podcast are loud enough to wake a person in the bedroom. So in a way TTD has locked me into earhpones or earbuds. 

Others?

I said earlier that I'll go back and find a few more of the thousands of great technologies that gradually enshittified and locked-in their users bit by bit to the point of killing their business, and I will. I suggest you bookmark this page and come back to it in a few weeks. Also maybe share it, and maybe make a small donation to help me keep things online, maybe afford a better newsletter provider, and pay for the subscriptions I keep so I can keep up with the news I post here. 

Supermarkets Are Overflowing - multiple updates!

- with profits! Profits! Glorious profits! Money! YOUR money! The only difference between supermarkets and Uncle Scrooge McDuck is that Scrooge has a pang of conscience at the end of each episode and stops some of his exploitative behaviours..
 .

Lookit these updates! These are only selected updates that come to me via newsletters I'm subscribed to, not that I've searched for. (BTW at Teds News Stand there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter, hint hint...)

8 April 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2024/04/08/supermarket-review-recommendations Some of my ideas are being applied - significant fines based on the egregiousness of their thievery.

20 March 2024 Update: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2024/03/19/divestiture-greens-supermarkets Finally the Nuclear option unleashed. Break the b*st*rds up and break their grip. 

EVEN MORE UPDATE: Four Corners: these supermarkets are the gift that keeps on giving - if you wanted material to string them up by the privates, at any rate. The CEO of Wo - that one supermarket - walks out of his Four Corners interview because he heaped shit on a professional in the industry, and wasn't allowed to ask to have that bit edited out. Oh and then a few days later he conveniently resigns. 

(Probably to get his golden handshake before he was pushed, but. And even though he claims it was planned all along, Wo - that place - obviously were NOT expecting him to resign because they're now scrambling because they had no succession plan. Sucks to be an incompetent money-pilfering slug...)

And the CEO of Co - the other place - adjusts their lipstick to "incandescent" setting, and bald-faced declares that they're not actually on a rocket ride of profits. How can you tell a ColesWorths CEO is lying? They just are. Always.  

UPDATE 14/Mar/2024: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/03/13/supermarket-woolworths-coles-theft how the supermarkets are reacting to desperate people who resort to shoplifting to pay for supermakets' price gouging. I wonder how long this will last? 

AND ANOTHER UPDATE!: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/11/coles-woolworths-senate-inquiry

UPDATED AGAIN AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/30/supermarkets-government-profits This is becoming the spectacle of the decade!

UPDATED AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/06/price-gouging-report 

UPDATED: There may be some activity afoot. (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/16/grocery-prices-inquiry) I asked in this older article whether the probe will have teeth, i.e. will it be able to actually compel the corporations that own the thieving supermarkets to act with humanity, and this update seems to suggest that the probe will get teeth. Unfortunately, legal action in a year is still a little bit too late for people already doing it hard...

You may know the back-story to this - over a year ago, meat producers (farmers, basically) got bent over and shafted, as the prices of meat were wound back by large amounts. I imagine this reduced their ability to purchase things, and because some fairly large communities' fortunes rise and fall in time with the primary producers, that starts to be a bit of a large number of people who suddenly have fewer dollars, while simultaneously their costs went up as supermarkets raised prices. 

It's all very well to say "but they live in a farming district, they can get their meat / vegetables locally at farm prices" but you lose sight of a few factors there.

• The farmers will need to make a profit on their unsold meat animals. 
• Most people in farming communities lack the skills to butcher and dress meat
• The butchers in those communities need to make money too.
• If the community is centered on meat, then vegetables and cereal products are still at the mercy of the supermarkets.
• Vice-a-versa in the case of growing districts. In their case, they need someone to process the grain and produce goods from it. The supermarkets again.And they're at the mercy for anything related to meat.
• Vegetable (market garden) regions are probably best off in one sense, but also their market gardeners need to make money so prices will go up when the prices they get from supermarket buyers goes down.
• On top of that many farmers/growers have draconian contracts with the supermarkets that prohibit them from sell surplus to third parties, many many many penalty clauses, and so there are a lot of things they can't do even if they wanted to... It sucks.

There's unfortunately not much that many people can do about that - "food deserts" are engineered into local planning by design, making it hard to get anything but fast food or some supermarket foods. It means the fast food places and the supermarkets have a huge customer base that doesn't have any alternatives.

It's also down to some selectivity by sellers, of course. You'll find upmarket grocers and butchers and bakeries in upmarket suburbs, because there, they will get the prices they need in order to stay profitable. Same with farmer's markets etc - if they're set up in a suburb that has two McDonalds, two KFCs, a Hungry Jacks, and four chicken fast food places, they don't do well.

Jaks Sisko in Star Trek focuses this problem perfectly - he cooks his own meals because he considers them superior to the replicator-generated meals - but where does he get his ingredients? Wouldn't that also be from the replicator? 

So people shop at supermarkets where the growers and suppliers have been stretched to the limit to supply nutritious food but - under that kind of financial stress, they can't afford to do all the things that would be needed to make the food truly nutritious. That kind of farming requires far more land, land that can be regeneratively and ecologically soundly managed, and even then the soil will lack some of the nutritional components needed to make the produce truly nutrition-packed.

Even if you go to farm gate stores, they're still in the same situation, so whether they sell it to the supermarkets or to you direct, it's still no longer what it was. The world population is showing the effects of slow nutrition deprivement. 

But the story I'm showing revolves more about the sheer extortion supermarkets are engaging in at the moment. They've always found ways to extract more dollars from a given kilo of produce, but now they're just going "fuck it," and charging extortionate prices. 

I can think of one way to end that, but it's not pretty. We could also end it by boycotting those supermarkets for a month or two, but as mentioned, that isn't an option for anyone wanting to feed a family unless they have their own homestead or farm, or access to farmer's markets and farm gate stores. 

The other way is for farmers to void their contracts with the supermarkets and only sell direct to the public or to independent grocers and stores. And they can't afford to do that because of the logistics involved. 

Also, automated local vertical farms can produce many of the vegetables and fruits within their local suburbs, but this is a) unlikely to be profitable for the first five years or so until it starts hurting the big supermarkets and people get used to them and b) - come on! This would be like living in a colony ship or a colony on another planet with carefully-maintained agriculture and a limited range of produce, and this is supposed to be our home. 

But there's also the other way - write to your local Members, to the ministers responsible for finance and food security and anti-competitive practices by corporations and let them all know that you'd like them to use their powers to fix this piracy. Start petitions or sign them, have meetings with others in your suburb, decide on some action before food becomes unaffordable to you, too. And trust me, it can easily happen. 

---

Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there. 

That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.

You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.

Flockintech

First I have a favour to ask you. I probably won't have time to post as regularly as I have been. Family / health problem, yes serious. But it means I'll need your help - please share this post, share the News Stand link, and help others to find my articles.

What kind of tech is "flockintech?" Stick around. What do Polish trains, premium EVs, and farm tractors have in common? Stick around. What does flockintech have in common with - no, hang on. Just stick around...

John Deere

So you probably know about the John Deere vs farmers saga. If you bought a John Deere tractor and got your local mechanic to change a filter, the tractor would probably shut down. John Deere designed this and other gotchas into the machines. The idea was that a JD technician would come to the farm, change that filter with an identical filter that your local mechanic would have put in, typed in a secret JD authentication code, and the tractor would work. 

The JD technician would cost the farmer thousands of dollars, the mechanic probably only a few hundred. Can you say residual income rip-off? 

Premium Vehicles

Many premium cars and especially EVs, come with dozens of features included in the construction by default, but you can't have them unless you pay extra fees for them. This is a particularly vexing ... umm, let's call it what it is, a total fraud - because you bought the car with all those features in it but the manufacturer is holding you to ransom if you want them enabled. Worse still, some of those features are only available by subscription, meaning they can deny you them if you don't provide them with that residual income rip-off. 

There aren't all that many ways around this issue unless you're extremely good at writing a whole new management program for the vehicle, and of course if you muck it up you void any warranty...

Polish Trains

"Newag, the company that manufactured the trains, had software in place that put locks on the carriages if they were serviced by third party mechanics or if the cars remained stationary for too long."

Seeing a familiar theme develop here? Gouging goes deep, and there needs to be some kind of solution. 

Worldwide, "Right To Repair" laws are being drafted and enacted, that will force manufacturers to allow a person who buys a product, to perform maintenance and repairs on that product. Many manufacturers are pooling their resources to fight these laws being introduced, but as you read, John Deere have been wrestled to the ground on this, and once more RtR laws are enacted, so will most of these other thieving bastards.

RtR laws will also require that devices are not "permitted" to be repaired but then physically obstructed, that is, no "proprietary" fasteners to prevent access, no filling the electronics with potting resin except where a product's Ingress and Explosion ratings require it. 

And as for the Polish railway line, their fightback has involved a rather strange ally. Read it here.

Anonymous Assistance

The precedents have been set, before JD were forced to relinquish their ransom booty, a few farmers hacked their own tractors and faced legal action from JD, and in fact was one of the factors that shaped the JD-farmers outcome. 

It would now appear that the few hacks I've found online for unlocking the premium features of your car, may soon be legal, and there's not a thing BMW will be able to do about people unlocking the massage feature and heated seat options of their cars, because the car was sold with those things already built in, and you can argue that the manufacturer locking them down amounts to sabotaging the vehicle and introducing faults that it's your right to repair.

There's another name that sprang to mind when I read those articles, and it's "Lock-In Tech." They lock you into a system and then charge you a premium price or subscription to unlock the features. In the case of JD, there may be a case for charging them with sabotaging a farmer's livelihood, I'm not sure on that point. 

But now when you read me writing F Lock In Tech you'll know exactly what the title means...

Come on - share the link to this article, share the link to the News Stand where people can see my latest twenty or so posts, and maybe make a donation to help me pay my server and sundry online fees.