I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project.
But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home.
This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentucky land. Then you pay $170 a year to power the system for again, 1 square meter.
Meanwhile the 1 square meter produces like less than $100 in annual produce.
Green house farms like in the Netherlands have perfected this growing method and it’s quite effective. Home food production is a joke by comparison just like home anything production of a commodity product.
So fun DIY projects but as a serious way to grow food it’s terrible, not economical or sustainable. I tore down my project the same year I built it, taught me a lot but made no sense to continue.
When you buy a couch, are you thinking "will this couch offset the value of the square footage it occupies" or "will this couch be comfortable and match my décor?"
I'm glad someone is doing something fun in their home.
I, too, bought a couch I could afford. It was new, but it was a cheap one. It's blue.
When I bought a couch, I had a budget. What I didn't do was walk into the store and ask myself how this couch is going to pay for the square footage it occupies. It won't. It can't, that's not the point of a couch.
By the logic in the top comment, nobody should own a couch because it doesn't generate money that would offset the cost of the space it occupies. That's my issue with the top comment.
Nowhere in the OP is there a suggestion that they are doing it with the intention of saving (or earning) money. Nobody, no matter what their means, buys a couch because they think it will behoove them financially to do so.
OP made an aquaponics thing because they wanted to. I bought a couch to sit on it. God forbid.
And on that note, buying something cost-optimized to your space is itself a mark of privilege. My first couch was the nearest free one to my home, since I didn't have a car. It was much too big for the space I put it in. But it's what I could afford, which was nothing.
There is a dollar amount I am willing to pay to elude suffering- and there is an amount I will not. Try sitting on a floor for weeks and you will see the dollar amount you want to pay for a couch. And try booking a long haul flight- see what is your dollar amount you’ll spend to get more leg space.
Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense.
Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.
It makes me a bit sad that even with modern tech we haven't really made it much easier for people to produce their own food. But it's a reminder that our food production requires large scale collaboration and cooperation. Maybe that's a good thing.
There are a lot of cool growing technologies but it’s really hard to beat the sun and rain and soil on cost. Once you go inside you have to provide the medium, the energy via lamps, watering system and all the micro and macro nutrients. Gets more expensive naturally
As a small farmer, I will tell you that, without exception, home-farmed food is immeasurably better than the food in grocery stores. Appearance, taste, nutrition are all superior to store-bought equivalents. Cost is the only metric where store bought food wins.
Yep. I grow around 1/3 of my food and most of my produce in the warm months. I have put a lot of effort into selecting flavorful varieties and making a flavor assisting soil medium. I cook based on what is available at the time.
It's a lot of work and not terribly cost effective (if you count labor) but it's also fun work.
But the real payoff is the quality of the food and it feels kind of weird sometimes, like, I'm not uber wealthy, I'm not a movie star nor famous person and yet this is possibly some of the highest quality food available I'm eating. Flavor and probably nutrition as well.
I made this eggplant parmesan last night and everything in it but the salt and oil and breading was from my garden. The tomato sauce, the herbs, the garlic, everything. All fresh picked that day. It's unbelievable how delicious it was I really wish I could share the experience.
Store produce seems like a ghost now, like this faint shadow of the taste produce should have.
100% with you on the taste and nutrition. I think you forget sustainability at scale. I love the idea of eating local food, but with current levels of personal productivity and home-farmed food costs, there is no way it could work for all of us.
It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do.
It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)
1. Tomatoes off a vine crush anything in a u.s. supermarket.
2. I eat unwashed basil leaves and other greens growing outside, I eat them by first putting them under my tongue, my seasonal allergies (I am allergic to everything but mold) have plummeted over the last 3 years of this. The folk remedy of farmers market honey did nothing for me.
I did sublingual drops a decade ago and there was moderate improvement but for medical reasons I can't get a prick test again and I haven't been able to find a provider that will just make drops for me based off my original prick test.
It's impossible to find what plants capture the most environmental allergens on leaves or in edible flowers so I just have a collection, I figured that made more sense than licking a swamp cooler.
Anyway, I've gone from taking Allegra most days to only 2 months out of the year.
The idea of self sufficiency either from individualism or associated with a sense of "being prepared" is enticing. But growing something yourself is also cool in itself. Watching a plant grow, eating the tomato you grew tastes better than the one you bought.
If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.
I think the problem is that a lot of soil here in the US isn't up to the quality of other countries. It may be tastier and healthier to eat imported tomatoes than ones that we even grow ourselves.
It gives you a sense of control, for one. I could repurpose existing software to do most of the things I program myself on my own time. Ikea is way cheaper than most things you can make yourself, but you end up planning around commodity furniture instead of getting furniture that fits your plan.
An inordinate amount of the benefits of specialization is sucked up by middlemen leaches and enshittification is very real in the physical world too.
A lot of "specialization" looks more like enforced helplessness where the world around you seems to be full of mysterious magic outside your one specialty and often your specialty is very many levels of abstraction away from anything obviously useful to an end user (i.e. some brand of navigating office bureaucracy).
Many things aren't actually all that hard to do yourself nor do they take up all that much time or energy. And there are many things which aren't actually possible to distribute to end users so what's possible by yourself is so much more than what's possible to sell.
So... This is more comparable to a guppy tank than a farm.
Generally, yes you are right. Home farming (eg vegetable gardening) generally isn't economical. That doesn't mean it's not valuable. Besides being fun... I do think home gardening some resilience to the food system.
Aquaponics is, in general, not really a viable commercial method. Or rather, the plants are just a filter for the pinds...not a true secondary product.
By this logic, doing anything yourself is inefficient and a waste of time.
However, I think that by reducing it purely to a monetary number, you are not measuring things correctly. Part of the output of doing DIY things is the knowledge, experience, and fun that comes from doing it. If you insist on putting a dollar sign on that, I’m sure it ends up being much more equal.
People seem to think you’re attacking the article. I read the article but know nothing about aquaponics otherwise, and I was wondering why we don’t see it used more. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on the subject.
So probably 99% of the users are clicking directly to the comments and upvoting the inane GP comment to the top, and the “no one reading this” is actually almost no one.
The article itself is clearly just a hobby learning fun project.
It's less about the square foot economics for at-home, and quite often the time to travel between growing space and home, if in the case of an apartment, it was somewhere else.
Could you also add your thoughts on whether you think a B1 level is a sensible requirement for permanent residence in any country?
Because that's what the post seems to boil down to, but you haven't opined on it (other than refusing to learn B1, which implies the answer somewhat).
B1 by the way is considered doable for a consistent parttime learner in 9 months, and 1-2 years for someone doing weekend studying. That's an average.
For a studious family with higher educational background making 200k a year (this is significantly above average in Germany), you've got both the IQ and the capital for tutoring to do better than average.
Seems like a sensible, useful, necessary and practical bar to set for permanent residence, to me.
Exactly this, he should've just fixed this, or not written an article about it.
After the 'sensorium effect' (he should've used ancient greek for a +10 bonus to archaic intellectual points), he describes the 'knowledge-doing gap'. i.e. the AI reasons it needs to build X, logs this for 110 turns in a row, but doesn't do it. It doesn't actually specify why not, and whether it is again a limitation of his MCP implementation. If the AI articulates it must do it like the author says, but decides not to, either it doesn't think it must do it, or it does think it must but somehow can't technically execute its own decisions, it can't be anything else.
In fact in the context of 'advising the UK government', this 'knowledge-doing gap' I assume is a technical limitation, is entirely moot. For the cost of 0.00001% of the UK's government you could just hire a human being to execute that which the AI articulates. I'm curious what the results would be if he just did a manual execution of the AI's articulated actions would be.
The fact he doesn't go in to this but just keeps repeating examples of this makes it a pointless article.
Quite annoying to have to read a paragraph of text next to a moving image. I right-clicked every GIF and turned off 'loop'.
Beyond that reading an AI piece just feels like a waste of time. The text goes on and on without making a point, or getting to an actual learning. It just delineates the AI's limitations, doesn't go into whether these can be fixed, are innate, or what conclusions you can draw from it, over and over with example after example but no point.
Mostly it seems to keep repeating that the AI has the correct analysis but just doesn't execute. The AI knows to build X and logs this in each of its turns, yet doesn't build it. It's like there's some API connection missing between analysis and execution, and turns this into a 10 page article.
The article ends with some weird question to the AI asking if it enjoys the games, and you get some quasi-scifi mumbo jumbo answer back that looks very profound to say my mom, but is just silly to post if you know what the LLM is doing: predicting the next word. Honestly this is a poor article and I wish it wasn't posted.
I thought it was quite the opposite, too easy. Your ship recharges health. Also you can claim and island and heal there. It's so easy to the point it's actually boring, I got 10 kills before I quit, never got close to dying. Hell you can even claim an island, sit there in healing-mode, while shooting down enemy ships that don't heal...
Yea, the difficulty seems to hinge on whether or not you manage to capture an island. If you do, then you can heal your ship, at which point I agree with you--the game becomes super easy. If you fail to kill three enemies (prerequisite of capturing an island), then it becomes a "sail around at zero health" game.
A "difficulty" feature could just be a toggle: Start with a claimed island, or start with no claimed island.
For one it's a peace-time situation where strong-arming interventions are met with consequences, in this case China can stop supply of critical products to punish the Dutch. In a wartime situation such supply would've been stopped anyway, so there is nothing further to lose and everything to gain from an intervention, but such an intervention is only possible if the factory is on your soil.
Second, Nexperia is a legitimate Dutch company with Dutch expertise. The Chinese bought it. The Dutch don't need Chinese expertise to operate the local factory they built and sold to the Chinese.
Third, China is a global hegemon, South Korea isn't by comparison, and South Korea is a neighbour of China, the Netherlands isn't. China could pressure a battery factory in South Korea during a military conflict by military force, but in Western Europe that's a different story.
'breaking records' implies a lot more than it is. The amount of breaths anyone takes in their life also continues to break their own personal record, but it's not as impressive as it sounds.
Output today is 2x what it was 10 or 20 years ago. Nice but 'record breaking', meh. Especially in global context, it's quite tiny.
What is significant is production of batteries for grid storage. In 2020 and earlier domestic production in the US was under 10 GWh per year.
Incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act let to a big increase in that. By 2025 it was 70 GWh per year. It will be more than twice that in 2026, and will continue growing.
Of particular significance is that it now above the level needed to satisfy all of the US grid storage battery needs from domestic production.
Similar growth (again largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act) is happening with EV battery production.
PHEVs are typically discouraged in many countries nowadays, because drivers fall into one of two categories:
A) plug-in to charge on a (virtually) daily basis at home
B) plug-in to charge as necessary, some of whom have no home-charging (apartment-dweller)
PHEVs make no sense for category (A) people because there is no range-anxiety if you home-charge every day. Typical drivers do 40km a day on average. Even an entry-level Tesla model 3 has >530km of range, and goes up to 750km for the model 3.
PHEVs also make no sense for category (B) people, because the PHEV has just 50km of range. So if you don't plug in all the time, you're basically driving a gasoline car with an extra engine and a battery, increasing weight (= fuel) and maintenance cost.
Various studies of real-world usage have shown PHEVs are less efficient because the behavior of its drivers. They'd be better off just driving a regular hybrid, like a Corolla.
The only area where PHEVs make sense are people who drive short-distances on a daily basis, plug in the car always at home, yet make frequent (say weekend) long trips of 6+ hours of driving without any breaks, or long trips to remote areas with no charging infrastructure. This is a pretty rare combination. Most PHEVs are traditionally owned by urbanites lured by a green dream and green subsidies, who're better off getting a pure EV or just an efficient boring hybrid.
But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home.
This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentucky land. Then you pay $170 a year to power the system for again, 1 square meter.
Meanwhile the 1 square meter produces like less than $100 in annual produce.
Green house farms like in the Netherlands have perfected this growing method and it’s quite effective. Home food production is a joke by comparison just like home anything production of a commodity product.
So fun DIY projects but as a serious way to grow food it’s terrible, not economical or sustainable. I tore down my project the same year I built it, taught me a lot but made no sense to continue.
reply