11 thoughts on “Bloomberg”

    1. But we might also get a lesson called “Buying off biased moderators.”

      “Mr. Bloomberg, you’ve released some amazing plans for revitalizing America. Can you elaborate?”

      “Mr. Buttigieg, how can you possibly compare being mayor of South Bend to being mayor of New York City? Mr. Bloomberg could afford to buy every single house in South Bend. Isn’t your mere presence on this stage an insult to everyone?”

      “Mr. Biden, just what is a dog-faced pony soldier, and why would you hurl such a charge at a young girl?”

      “Mr. Sanders, why are you trying to steal all of Mayor Bloomberg’s hard earned money, which he most graciously spends on my network and other networks in an effort to stop Donald Trump? Are you a communist or something? Do you work for Putin?”

      “Ms. Klobuchar, why are you even here? Nobody likes you.”

      “Mrs. Warren, are you upset that your ancestors sold Manhattan to people like Mr. Bloomberg for a few beads?”

      “Mr. Bloomberg, as you’ve moved from success to success throughout your long and distinguished career in both the private and public sectors, what principles have guided you? Is it concern for American’s health, their happiness, their personal safety, or their financial well being that usually comes first in your mind?”

  2. As I mentioned on instapundit, modern tractors have a cockpit like an F14, and I doubt Bloomberg could even start one – assuming his feet can reach the pedals.

    1. That a modern tractor cab is complicated in the style of the cockpit of an F-14 is besides the point. By the way, do you not mean a more modern F/A-18 that has video displays — I am thinking the F-14 still had “steam gauge” dials.

      There is a lot more to farming even if you are not in debt up to your eyeballs making payments on one of those fancy tractors on which you cannot even make repairs owing to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

      An example of this is pecan pie. How well you ate traditionally had to do with your status, and yes, Mr. Bloomberg is right, farm laborers were never high status. The American way of farming was to feed your farm hands a lot of calorie-dense food, of which a serving of pecan pie for dessert is just a top-off. Feeding them this way gives them energy to do a lot of hard work in a short period such as harvest time. Think of the training diet of competition cyclists — farm families have known about this for a least a century earlier.

      Another example is the plough horse. The ox was used for prior millennia (think of the dude in the Bible who slaughtered his oxen and fed the meat to the people in his village when he has tapped on the shoulder to become a Temple priest). The ox may have more strength than a horse, but they tell me a horse has much greater aerobic capacity. I was at a horse-carriage driving competition (those of you with aviation training would be good at helping a horse-owning friend by being the guy standing on the back of the carriage — your skills at remembering routes and directions would come in handy). A veterinarian pointed out to me the large portion of a horse’s chest taken up by its heart.

      Yes, growing food is as simple as digging a hole, dropping in a seed, filling it in, watering and watching it develop. But you have to know what to grow in your soil and climate, preparing the soil is a bit more complicated than digging a hole, you have to know about fertilizers and crop rotation and how to control plant pests (weeds), insect pests and fend off avian and mammalian pests — crows, deer, rabbits, wood chucks and other people wanting to eat your crop. If you are doing this commercially, you will have to know how to market your production and how to manage the debt that you take on to achieve economy-of-scale.

      The whole point of the agricultural land-grant institutions, derisively referred to as “cow colleges” by city slickers like Mr. Bloomberg, is figuring this stuff out and disseminating the knowledge through “Extension.” This is the competitive edge that the United States has had over the rest of the world since the time of the Civil War. The phenomenal agricultural productivity of our country (along with abundant hydrocarbon fuels) has been the “engine” driving the industrial and later high-tech economy layered on top.

      I dabble in a vegetable garden, but I have a fairly serious orchard. I learned from Extension about synthetic nicotine (acetamiprid) as a lower-risk insecticide that I only need to apply twice a year. I met this man in a fruit-growing club, but he was a retired professor studying viruses in chickens, and he taught me about effective personal protective equipment (PPE) for applying pesticide sprays. I received advice on saving my trees from a mite-flareup, I learned about Bitter Pit as a calcium deficiency and how to prevent the Honey Crip crop from rotting by spraying a bone-meal emulsion on the leaves. I have learned good pruning practices — as recently as last year, I learned from Michigan State University Extension that it is better to cut branches from plum trees much later in the dormant season to reduce the risk of disease from the cuts. I learned on the Web from Washington State University extension about the “pre-chill” storage technique to ripen Anjou pears — before that, I was throwing away those billiard balls that I could never ripen.

      A person can grow apples and other fruit in their backyard as good or better than what you get in the store, but there is a lot of knowledge involved in not having an apple tree that litters the lawn with “worm”-infested shriveled fruit. The process is quite low-tech, that is, if you consider and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practice low tech, which means learning how to spot the apple pests or their effects, knowing what insecticide to use and when to apply it (acetamiprid is particularly effective if you know its mode of action and how it works — it won’t even kill your mosquitos because it is specific to insects that chew the leaves or lay eggs in the fruit, and no, it won’t kill bees if you follow the EPA label instructions, but yes, you can only buy it from existing stocks because the fine people at Ortho-Scotts pulled Ortho Flower Fruit and Vegetable Insect Killer Concentrate from the market because of enviro-Bloombergs).

      The “modern tractors” argument only scratches the surface if you want to be more effective growing food than the pathetic hippie farmers in Easy Rider who were starving because they believed like Mr. Bloomberg.

      2. Tractor mastery is only the training wheels for self-propelled harvesters. I was there and done that back in the day. Long before electronics. Or the GPS driven fertilization techniques used now to spot fertilize fields. Did I mention the use of robotic drones for monitoring field drainage? I thought not. In fact it was an honor and privilege to know the inventor of the first ag electronics, Barry Hamilton, who sold his patent for a planter monitor to Dickey John Corp. A device that used LED and Intel 8008 technology to detect seed dropping at the correct frequency for each row of the old gravity fed planters long before the compressed air versions hit the market. Even modern day planters still use a variant of this technology to keep a clogged feed hose from creating a loss of a crop row that is impossible to replace with mechanized planting, even today. Sorry (not sorry) if these concepts are over the head of Mr. Bloomberg.

        http://www.dickey-john.com/product/hy-rate-plus/

  3. Bloomberg’s derision of farming falls into the category of “magical thinking” that’s quite common in certain parts of the world. Arthur C. Clarke noted that “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” People flip a switch and a light turns on. Magic. They have no clue or desire to learn about the vast number of people of widely differing skills whose work was necessary to make that magic happen. Likewise, they turn on a faucet and clean, safe water appears. They flush their toilet and the excrement disappears to be processed for safe disposal. More magic. Food comes from a grocery store or restaurant. It magic to those who don’t understand the hard work necessary to make that happen. Yes, at the beginning of the last century, over 90% of Americans were farmers. Today, with a far greater population, only 2% are farmers. Food is so much cheaper that the number one health problem in the country is obesity. That miracle of production is possible because the people doing the farming and all of the associated activities associated with agriculture and food production are vastly more efficient than their counterparts were 120 years ago.

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