I picked tomatoes and various other commercial vegetable crops in the early 80's (Australia), even back then they had mechanical harvesters. Hand picked tomatoes were the "cream of the crop", you pick them for about 2-4 weeks when the crop starts ripening, they are early to market and good quality so the farmer gets top dollar. However once the contract date* comes up for the entire crop to be harvested they were
mechanically harvested and ended up in cans and/or sauce bottles. Same with peas, a 1980's era pea harvester could pick the peas, pod them, wash, snap freeze, and bag them. Again "shop peas" were picked by hand and sold with their pods intact before the crop was at the optimum point for mechanical harvesting.

* - Large commercial vegetable crops are often sold on contract before they are even planted. The thing about tomatoes (other than copper coloured hands from the chemicals on them), is that a heavy summer downpour will cause a ripe tomato to swell to the point it's skin bursts. When such a scenario occurs all the mechanical harvesters are in full demand since everyone wants their tomato crop picked before it turns into tomato sauce and simply drips onto the ground. The farmer doesn't wait days/weeks for a harvester turns up. While it is raining he will be recruiting as many pickers as he can at a higher dollar rate per bin. From my experience the extra dollars did not make up for the futility of trying to fill a half ton wooden vegetable bin with tomato jelly.

As to TFA, unless they set up the whole plot as a hydroponic farm there's no way it's going to significantly reduce the food bill for ~1500 people. However I think that's the wrong way to look at the project, TFA compares the farm to a public park, pool or golf course in conventional towns, it's nice if such amenities can pay for their own upkeep but profit (in dollar terms) is not the goal. If nothing else the people in the community who use it will gain a much greater appreciation of where their food comes from and just how much planning, hard work and patience is involved in growing something edible and eating it before some other critter does.

You miss my point. It's the exact same argument that the NSA put forth a week ago that FISA shot down at that time. If a lawsuit was determinative this week, then it should have been last week as well. The argument of why didn't change, yet FISA flip-flopped when it happened in practice.

I see you bought a nice bunch of cherries from Anthony Watts.
Sadly the only thing it proves is your (and Judith Curry's) lack of education on the subject of statistics. Note I am actually being generous here by assuming that Curry doesn't understand her mistakes.

Weather forcasts are NOT based on trends found in any data set, they are based on the laws of physics and chemistry, they use the same "finite element analysis" techniques found in numerical wind tunnels and other engineering models that are used to build everything from bridges to aircraft. Archival data is used to test the "skill" of the model by making "hindcasts" and comparing them to the instrumental record.

Climate is basically the long term statistics of weather - meaning a hundered year trend in temprature is a climate statistic, not a weather trend. Climate models and weather models are more or less the same thing using different spacial and temporal parameters, climate statistics such as temprature trends are a completely seperate line of evidence to climate modelling.

But the fact that electric car advocate geeks will take issue with the above scenario and will make endless excuses for their technology and will dismiss very legitimate practical concerns with electric says a lot about how detached from reality the electric car movement really is right now.

Poe's law strikes again.

Once you can replace an 18 wheeler's diesel engine with an electric drive system, then you've changed the world and made a real impact on emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_locomotive

It's a pity Tesla's wireless transmission of electricity didn't work, otherwise all vehicles would be electric.

But, but ... actually working doesn't matter.

It's electric! {funky seventies jive plays ... }

... it's such a nice idea to think about, but as the other comments have mentioned the reality is a bit different.

Modding me down is so much easier than admitting you made a mistake.

Hi, thanks for the info. I actually learned something. :D

(Not a Comcast customer, tho... where I live, if you mention cable, they laugh and point.)

The NSA hasn't been cancelled, or even had a major budget cut. Ergo clearly bad government programs and agencies continue. Has even one person responsible for that mess been fired?

Why would they be? The NSA "gets the job done". The job it's doing is dirty, but the fault for that lies on the feet of the people who gave it its mandate - ultimately American people.

Besides, even if the NSA was destroyed, the problem that gave it birth would still exist: taking national security to be a concern overriding all other considerations, including rights of individuals. As long as America is more important than Americans, something like the NSA will always exist.

Hmm. I use Google's DNS, and eztv.it resolves for me as of two seconds ago (and has the couple of times I've been to eztv.it in the past month, too).

What DNS did you add?

My city (Melbourne, Oz) is on the upper edge of the southern ocean's "roaring forties", there are a few windmills dotted around the state but for some reason we are still fully reliant on brown coal for electricity, a mine that feeds the coal plants recently caught fire and burnt for a month resulting in the town of Morwell being partially evacuated due to the toxic cloud from the fire. Looking at it from a purely logical POV, it's fucking insane!

The US is a paradox. From the very beginning of talks in the late 80's US foreign policy has sought to derail any coordinated global effort to curb GHG emissions, often being the sole roadblock to progress, yet at the same time they have (on a per capita basis) built more wind power capacity than anyone else?

No it is not a "major problem", can we drop please that bullshit meme, smaller (fast spinning) windmills and windmills built on migration paths do kill birds and this was a minor problem in the early days that closed down a few mills. Modern windmills sited with a bit of forethought are no more likely to kill birds than a stationary skyscraper.

Minor problem* - The number of birds killed by flying into windmills and other large buildings pales into insignificance when you consider the impact of domestic cats on birds.

During the 80's I worked at a large nylon factory (1200 employees), they had two large HV transformers side by side under a chicken wire cage to keep humans and animals out. Somehow a possum (about the size of a racoon) found itself on the inside of the cage and was electrocuted, the shock threw it from one transformer to the other shorting out both. Damage bill was $50K plus a couple of days lost production.