In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.
When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).
Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.
Of course that doesn't mean that the whole content of the soil is man-made, but coupled with other fertilization methods (which bring nutrients that were naturally almost absent from the soil before), it helped transformed regions which used to be margins with very low yields, into agricultural powerhouses (For instance, Brittany, the region I'm from in France, went from being one of the poorest due to low soil fertility, to the agricultural leader of the country).
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.
> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture.
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
As a friend of mine who also happens to be a math professor once said: mathematicians are like sculptors who marvel about the beauty of their creation, and are kind of disgusted when a physicist comes nearby and says “that's a cool hammer you got there, may I borrow it?”.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.
The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
> This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador Gerard Araud puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
Exactly: tsc was “slow enough to be painful” in the context of the 2.5Mloc codebase of VScode.
But it's not too slow for most people.
Likewise, Rust may be slow enough to be painful for some big projects that need to often rebuild from-scratch in release mode, but that niche is definitely much smaller than the size of the “rust compiles too slowly” crowd on HN.
I gave Rust classes in university a few years back, and literally none of my students complained about slow build times. At this point it's much more of an internet meme than an actual pain point for most devs.
> But you have to compile Rust code to run it. You can run TypeScript code without type-checking it. That’s a massive difference in the development workflow.
And yet I'm waiting for TSC every day while almost never thinking about rustc…
> The new TSC, supposedly 10x faster, will be very pleasant to have but not as much of a game-changer as you might expect.
It will be very nice, but I don't expect it to be a game changer, tsc isn't fast but it's fast enough to get the work done, the annoyance is there but it's objectively minimal. Anything else is pointless internet language war.
> A 10x faster Rust compiler would be incredible.
For development? Not really, not for me at least. Against the endless rants about rustc's performance on HN, absolutely.
The average cargo check for the projects I've worked on, usually finish in less than 1 second, with `cargo build` completing in a single digit second (often below 2s), it's not slow by any means.
> I believe c, Fortran, zig, C#, Java and golang are all faster compiling languages.
Sure, but the difference between type checking is 10ms and type checking in 500ms is barely noticeable for a human being anyway, despite the x50 difference.
> That makes rust pretty slow in my book.
“Slow” is a perceptual thing. It doesn't matter if it's slower in absolute benchmark performance. If it doesn't slow you down in your work it's not “slow”.
> As far as I know the only language that compiles slower is C++
Typescript's compiler is much slower than Rust's, but it's plenty fast enough for most people and you almost never see complains about it because it mostly doesn't matter outside of pissing contests.
It's not “very slow”, that's a tired meme. It's slower than it could/should, but complaining about rustc being “very slow” is a clear misrepresentation, especially when everybody seems to have been fine with tsc's historical performance for instance. It could be nice if it was faster indeed, but people claiming it's “very slow” are just showing they never worked with it.
> The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.
In this context (where you don't plan on publishing you stuff on crates.io) a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.