Renewables investment in UK will fall 95% over next three years

Labour intensive "by hand" (your words) farming is subsistence farming mate. When you spend most of your time and effort in growing the food too keep yourself alive.

Using technology to farm is all about removing the "by hand" part.

Appropriate technology in the way you're abusing the idea is honestly bullshit. It's not a bad way of thinking when talking about technological transfer from industrialized nations to non-industrialized ones (within limits), but your idea that we should all be scaling back to some kind of farm based, 1 plot of land per person existence is horrendously awful.

The entire bloody point of technology is about removing human labour from all activities required for basic existence. With the ideal end result being that all human labour is optional for our own pleasure or advancement - zero needed for basic survival needs, so we can dedicate ourselves to art, science - or just consuming art and culture learning whatever the hell we like with no worries about food nor shelter.

I'm all for cleaver technological solutions that are both environmentally friendly and suitable for the reality of the situation (say hand pumped water pumps in african wells, sure) but the idea that we should be giving up the advancement of technology to all become part-time farms is absurd.

/r/unitedkingdom Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com