• LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    As someone who farmed for the first couple of decades of my life - no. We need to utilize drones for farming and ban the use of tires and fossil fuels (which deposit heavy metals) on fields.

    Also pretty sure glyphosate/Roundup caused health issues for everyone I know and myself (all farmers/in farm communities). It’s a neurotoxin and is in the entire Ogallala acquifer and most ground water around farms and their watershed. I spoke with a lead state toxicologist in the PNW about this. It verifiably has effects on fish and insects in the watershed here (which Monsanto claims is too diluted to have effects).

    • Chainslaw@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      My father was a farmer in the 90s and wrote to Bill Clinton to ask for more regulation and study of the effects of pesticides and more protections for farmers in relation to pesticides and Bills response back was basically “No”. It did come on a really nice piece of paper though and had the “from the desk of the president” letter head and everything.

      • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I emailed Trump and Biden both about implementing a free national online school prek-college, using adaptive learning and with no time restrictions. Kids can use this online school as a supplement to regular schooling or in lieu of. This way, parents who are concerned about school shootings or illness can still feel like their kid is getting an okay education.

        Adults who have already graduated can take these classes to refresh knowledge (helping to combat misinformation online). If Christians want to teach and learn Christian theory, fine, that can be in a Christian theory area (Christian science should not be considered actual science but instead a theology).

        Teachers can compete for best online class and schools and teachers could get bonuses for the most popular material. The grading should be done by either a computer or paras who are employed at the national level.

        Students then can also have access to various language accomodations and disability accomodations for all their lessons. This is also why there should be no time restrictions - kids with learning disabilities might take a year to learn a half semester of algebra, or young adults with jobs might also need extra time too. The time limits we place on learning are arbitrary and only help out people with advantages already.

        Last there should be no general studies requirement with the adaptive online learning. If a kid LOVES trains, let the adaptive learning teach them all about trains. Maybe that means the kid will learn about calculating the impact speed of two trains colliding, so they incidentally learn math and physics. But we shouldn’t require they learn math and physics if they don’t choose to.

        Anyway, I wrote this out to them and got really lame letters back too. It’s crazy because this school idea is a legacy program that could cement a president’s name forever in education, like how Teddy Roosevelt is associated with National Parks. Yet Trump didn’t want the idea. Biden neither. Maybe Harris will like it. It’s quite elegant imo and win/win. I’ve spoken with numerous educators about it and they have no criticisms. It’s like our government doesn’t want progress

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Spin universal healthcare as “Those damn overpayed doctors should be forced to support their nation!” and BOOM, patriotism.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Socialism/communism = “someone got something that I don’t think they deserved.”

      They’re just bad words to people. I think a lot of the “normal people” on the right are just people who are too stupid to understand politics, so it works like their football team. You don’t need to know anything about the Dallas Cowboys or Patriots to hate them. Democrats are bad because they are the other team. We don’t need to know what “woke” means - it’s just a word that describes people on the bad team.

      If you manage to avoid the trigger words, and they haven’t been propagandized on whatever specific topic, it’s really easy to convince them to agree with a lot of left leaning ideas.

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Or just make it a function of the military. A crop corps, if you will. We already have the Army Corps of Engineers. This would be just another civil function.

    After all, food independence from other states, and ensuring the security of logistics supply like food, are an important part of any military strategy.

  • BigPotato@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Every American has to do one season of farm work but all food is now free. Monkey’s paw curls and all that.

    Farmers can’t just have free labor and still get all the profits.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I remember hearing that there was a similar concept in Soviet Union at some point, when normal citizens worked collecting fruits or something like that.

    • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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      3 months ago

      Some choice excerpts:

      Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

      “These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”

      She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”

      And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

      But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

      “There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "

      My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Sure, but only if all Americans have to work for, and live on, one year of service industry work - like waiting tables, checking out customers, or serving fast food. Especially the rich ones.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Yeah, not doing volunteer farm work to give private people and corporations free work and profit.

    If there were some state-owned ones that the food was used to feed public school kids or others on government programs, maybe.

    But no way for someone else’s profit.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      That’s the beauty of it.

      Conservatives will push for laws that affect urban public schools and have their kids in private schools or live outside city limits.

  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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    3 months ago

    The person that wrote that is like 31 years old last week

    and

    “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

    old habits et cetera

    • BlackDragon@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      Why aren’t drafts unconstitutional then? A draft for farming would be infinitely more valuable than a draft for murder.

    • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      What if we just make being black, like, illegal, and then we can arrest all black people and force them to work in farm fields…

      Wait. This seems familiar.