Unfortunately there are really only two practical ways to get into farming these days.

Some of us are. I did my BS in computer science. Spent 15 years in IT working mostly with Linux servers.

I now run a large farm. My background is actually a really good fit for farming. In fact I think farming would be a good fit for quite a few Linux enthusiasts and makers.

We still have running tractors from the 1940s and 50s. John Deere two-cylinder "putt putt" tractors.

If there was a golden age of tractors, it's hard to pin it down. Yes the 4020 was and is a great tractor, but it's not a tractor you'd want to run all day every day. It's loud and the cab was never comfortable. The Deere 50-series tractors from the 1980s were pretty good, and the cabs were comfortable and quiet. In the 90s there were some good ones too but ideas on what looked good were really weird in that decade. Our current tractors are all 15-20 years old with about the right amount of electronics for my taste. However the engines from this era have a mixed reputation for longevity on some models.

So it's a mixed bag. Computer-controlled engines sure start nice, even in the winter. But a fully mechanical engine can be rebuilt several times.

Like many of us he's enamored with the fictional tech from Star Trek that portrays talking to an intelligent computer and seems like a great idea on screen at least. So futuristic. Computer, please reconfigure my warp core for more power. Done. Best idea ever.

That and touch panels everywhere! Works so well on a star ship, why not put them in our cars?

Never mind that copilot, like all LLMs, confidently lies. And "super smart" really means it reads rubbish posted on the internet and pretends it is accurate and truth. There's no way it can be super smart because it was trained on all our data! At best it's average smart. And we want copilot actually in control of our computers? No thank you. I find it mind blowing he would think giving copilot agents physical control over a PC is a good idea.

Anyway, Star Trek has a lot to answer for!

Sigh. Nevermind. Nothing to see here. Move along Stupid Google keyboard fails yet again.

Yet another Obama executive order. So wrong. Oh wait, what's that? It's out guy? Never mind. Carry on. States rights? Never heard of them.

Nope. European long haul truckers driver every bit as far as American ones do. Thousands of km. Do you understand how vast Europe really is? Watch s few of electric trucker's videos. He did a 5000 km trip recently.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

Oh and I should add the electric trucks he's driving are the equivalent of our north American class 8 trucks. 40 tonnes GVW (with a few extra tonnes allowed for batteries), so the same as most long-haul box trailer trucks. His trucks are 400-600 kwh depending on the model, and he averages around or just under 1 kwh/km. Charging takes 45 minutes or more, which he does during his mandatory breaks. And often charges overnight. Lots of things I'd never think of such as the fact the fuller the battery the less regen it can do. So it's better to have larger batteries that have less usable watt hours so they can soak up the extra during braking.

The article did not say what types of trucks they were talking about in China. I imagine it's everything from single-axle delivery vans to articulated lorries as they say. Some companies are talking about megawatt charging, so that's a lot of electricity to deliver to the various charging stations. One short-term way to address this problem is to deploy charging stations with built-in batteries which can be charged slowly when the charger is not in use, and then deliver power more rapidly to the trucks or cars. Would be ideal for North America to bring chargers to more places.

If you want a picture of how electric trucks can work when there's some infrastructure, watch some of YouTuber "Electric Trucker" videos. He's doing long haul trucking with electric. All across Europe and up to the UK and even to central Turkey. Fascinating. To head off the comments about how the US is so vast compared to Europe I should say this guy drives up to 800 km a day and one of his longest trips was 5000km. So definitely comparable to the longest distances trucks drive in the US. Obviously a difference is the population is more dense so there's more infrastructure. But very interesting and as someone with a commercial license I'm a little jealous of those trucks. Smooth constant power with Regen makes for a great experience.

It's interesting to see how this will work out for lots of places in China.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!