"California safety regulations currently require operators to be "stationed" at the controls."
This is NOT a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a fleet today will have someone watching almost all the time in one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1 ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g., at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a button, then that might already be all that is required. It certainly is logically.
"[John Deere autonomous] tractors are currently being used by farmers in 11 states but not California."
And what of the other 38 states?
The graphic shows those tractors are also not adopted in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee, all top 10 farming states by acreage. [0]
California is an ironic example due to its tech industry, but hardly seems like something specific to "dysfunctional" California, as suggested by other commenters.
Seems kind of silly, but at the same time, with the width of modern combines and tractor implements, it isn't really a big deal. The labor cost of people driving a row crop tractor or combine is barely even a blip in the cost of food. I would be surprised if this even came out represent even a single percentage of food costs for row crops.
To further expand this out since someone wanted to throw AI trash math at this, a REALLY good year for a farmer is a 10% return on input from fertilizer, seed, and equipment maintenance, usually it isn't that high and many farms average only a 2-3% margin over time but ill stick with 10%. Current average wheat prices are 9.3 cents per pound, while the cheapest flour you can get from walmart is 48 cents per pound, so 1/5th of that.
So provided the farm makes no investments on equipment or expansion, has a great year to get near maximum possible returns and all of that ends up as payment for labor, there is zero spoilage or waste, and you buy the cheapest possible flour, 10% x 1/5th = 2% is the highest possible amount of money you can expect from your flour purchase to go towards farmer's labor. If we use more realistic averages of farm profits it drops down to 1% or less, and if you include the costs of buying and upgrading farm equipment like any successful farm has had to do to stay alive throughout the last 40 years it drops even lower.
And if you look at the amount of land that a farmer needs to own (or god forbid rent) it looks like an even shittier deal for the farmer. At the US average of 40 bushels of wheat produced per acre planted, with a price of $5.55 per bushel, you get $222 per acre. With 90% of that going towards material input costs (its actually negative return on investment at that price but lets just assume 10% margin for the farmer's sake), that is only $22.2 per acre for the farmer, so in order for a farmer to earn $60,000 per year at that rate, they would need to farm about 2,700 acres of wheat, thats over 4 square miles. If we drop to only 5% margins, which is still better than most farms would ever expect, thats about 9 square miles of wheat they have to work. And you can double that again if you go for the more realistic expected margins of 2-3 percent. So unless you have a full 4 mile x 4 mile block of arable land, plus all the equipment needed to farm it, you couldn't really survive off anything less than a 4 mile sided square of wheat planting.
The problem isn't so much an issue of cost of labor, but the ever-present situation that the abled bodies, who by and large live in cities, have this idea that there isn't any work in rural areas. There aren't usually strong social ties between regions to make introductions and when one is searching for a job, nobody is trawling the jobs sites with "Find me a job in the middle of nowhere" over "Find me a job in <insert city name>". Meaning that connecting with someone to do the work is a huge challenge.
Of course, there is a strong case to be made that if you can't find enough people to help, you've simply bit off more than you can chew and that it is time to scale back your operation.
You have one guy in the 'master' cab, and several other harvesters following in convoy diagonally behind it. So the single (hands off) 'driver' is running a whole fleet of these.
Typical example of how bureaucracy and over-regulation stifles productivity and innovation.
Many such cases.
It’s no coincidence that the industries that have seen the most explosive growth and added the most value to the economy have also been the least regulated ones (e.g. software).
You don't even need to involve the feds or the balance of fed-state power. Just slice up the damn state. There's just no avoiding dysfunction at its current scale. No one state government can serve so many diverse interests.
On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states. Wouldn't want those Massachusetts doctors or NYC financiers sticking their dick in Pennsylvania's farming economy or Maine's lumber and tourism economy and screwing it all up. Or vise versa. And those are the problems that CA suffers from.
If the argument not to is federal party politics there are plenty of solutions to slice and dice in a net-neutral manner.
> On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states.
That makes it sound like the eastern seaboard was originally the size of California, and then we recently decided to break them up when it was too big to effectively govern.
(I mean, I guess you could say that is what happened during the colonization of the area, and the Revolutionary War... I'll leave that debate to someone who studied more history than I did.)
Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
I should have said "doesn't have this problem much at all" rather than "solves" but regardless...
>Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
And their misery is their own doing so nobody feels bad for them in the way that people feel at least a little bad for CA famers who are getting crapped on by people the white collar workers elected or feels bad for LA being hamstrung by policy that appeals to SF and Sac or whatever.
Not that simple. Other states, the small ones, will not permit [0] it to happen, since it would dilute their own unfair influence on the federal government, [1] the relic of an ancient join-up bribe from 1788.
Yeah pretty sure CA suffers from humans not made up gibberish as you put it
Soon as you open the door to the conversation though your simple pipe dream is clogged by every land developer, US or overseas, environmental groups, etc
Because people outside the government exist and will engage. It’s opening a new lane on the freeway assuming it will help forever and it’s clogged in a couple years.
People flock to a void and a new set of states and legal boundaries is a knowledge void to fill with special interests.
But go ahead and forget every NGO, and people themselves and just put our agency at the whims of government. Not say government bad, just that no it won’t just be government dictating. And it should not be cause that’s how you get to “government bad”.
"California safety regulations currently require operators to be "stationed" at the controls."
This is NOT a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a fleet today will have someone watching almost all the time in one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1 ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g., at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a button, then that might already be all that is required. It certainly is logically.
> so these controls can clearly be remote
If data connectivity is available.
Maybe a reasonable assumption now with starlink, but previously not so easy in a lot of rural area.
Many of these (used to?) have a local positioning setup for getting high resolution local precision. Maybe advances in vision have lessened the need.
For control network you'd rely on local comms. Not generic telco grid.
"[John Deere autonomous] tractors are currently being used by farmers in 11 states but not California."
And what of the other 38 states?
The graphic shows those tractors are also not adopted in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee, all top 10 farming states by acreage. [0]
California is an ironic example due to its tech industry, but hardly seems like something specific to "dysfunctional" California, as suggested by other commenters.
[0] https://www.agriculture.com/farming-across-america-a-state-b...
[dead]
Seems kind of silly, but at the same time, with the width of modern combines and tractor implements, it isn't really a big deal. The labor cost of people driving a row crop tractor or combine is barely even a blip in the cost of food. I would be surprised if this even came out represent even a single percentage of food costs for row crops.
To further expand this out since someone wanted to throw AI trash math at this, a REALLY good year for a farmer is a 10% return on input from fertilizer, seed, and equipment maintenance, usually it isn't that high and many farms average only a 2-3% margin over time but ill stick with 10%. Current average wheat prices are 9.3 cents per pound, while the cheapest flour you can get from walmart is 48 cents per pound, so 1/5th of that.
So provided the farm makes no investments on equipment or expansion, has a great year to get near maximum possible returns and all of that ends up as payment for labor, there is zero spoilage or waste, and you buy the cheapest possible flour, 10% x 1/5th = 2% is the highest possible amount of money you can expect from your flour purchase to go towards farmer's labor. If we use more realistic averages of farm profits it drops down to 1% or less, and if you include the costs of buying and upgrading farm equipment like any successful farm has had to do to stay alive throughout the last 40 years it drops even lower.
And if you look at the amount of land that a farmer needs to own (or god forbid rent) it looks like an even shittier deal for the farmer. At the US average of 40 bushels of wheat produced per acre planted, with a price of $5.55 per bushel, you get $222 per acre. With 90% of that going towards material input costs (its actually negative return on investment at that price but lets just assume 10% margin for the farmer's sake), that is only $22.2 per acre for the farmer, so in order for a farmer to earn $60,000 per year at that rate, they would need to farm about 2,700 acres of wheat, thats over 4 square miles. If we drop to only 5% margins, which is still better than most farms would ever expect, thats about 9 square miles of wheat they have to work. And you can double that again if you go for the more realistic expected margins of 2-3 percent. So unless you have a full 4 mile x 4 mile block of arable land, plus all the equipment needed to farm it, you couldn't really survive off anything less than a 4 mile sided square of wheat planting.
The problem isn't so much an issue of cost of labor, but the ever-present situation that the abled bodies, who by and large live in cities, have this idea that there isn't any work in rural areas. There aren't usually strong social ties between regions to make introductions and when one is searching for a job, nobody is trawling the jobs sites with "Find me a job in the middle of nowhere" over "Find me a job in <insert city name>". Meaning that connecting with someone to do the work is a huge challenge.
Of course, there is a strong case to be made that if you can't find enough people to help, you've simply bit off more than you can chew and that it is time to scale back your operation.
You have one guy in the 'master' cab, and several other harvesters following in convoy diagonally behind it. So the single (hands off) 'driver' is running a whole fleet of these.
[dead]
Typical example of how bureaucracy and over-regulation stifles productivity and innovation.
Many such cases.
It’s no coincidence that the industries that have seen the most explosive growth and added the most value to the economy have also been the least regulated ones (e.g. software).
Crypto? It’s very unregulated. But did it add value to the economy?
[flagged]
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You don't even need to involve the feds or the balance of fed-state power. Just slice up the damn state. There's just no avoiding dysfunction at its current scale. No one state government can serve so many diverse interests.
On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states. Wouldn't want those Massachusetts doctors or NYC financiers sticking their dick in Pennsylvania's farming economy or Maine's lumber and tourism economy and screwing it all up. Or vise versa. And those are the problems that CA suffers from.
If the argument not to is federal party politics there are plenty of solutions to slice and dice in a net-neutral manner.
> On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states.
That makes it sound like the eastern seaboard was originally the size of California, and then we recently decided to break them up when it was too big to effectively govern.
(I mean, I guess you could say that is what happened during the colonization of the area, and the Revolutionary War... I'll leave that debate to someone who studied more history than I did.)
Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
I should have said "doesn't have this problem much at all" rather than "solves" but regardless...
>Although I will say that New Jersey and NYC do constantly do things that affect the other one; it's just a function of NYC being a huge city, on the border of a dense state.
And their misery is their own doing so nobody feels bad for them in the way that people feel at least a little bad for CA famers who are getting crapped on by people the white collar workers elected or feels bad for LA being hamstrung by policy that appeals to SF and Sac or whatever.
Did you know Maine used to be part of Massachusetts?
I did not!
> Just slice up the damn state.
Not that simple. Other states, the small ones, will not permit [0] it to happen, since it would dilute their own unfair influence on the federal government, [1] the relic of an ancient join-up bribe from 1788.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S3-C1-4...
[1] https://medium.com/qri-io/youre-probably-underrepresented-in...
Yeah pretty sure CA suffers from humans not made up gibberish as you put it
Soon as you open the door to the conversation though your simple pipe dream is clogged by every land developer, US or overseas, environmental groups, etc
Because people outside the government exist and will engage. It’s opening a new lane on the freeway assuming it will help forever and it’s clogged in a couple years.
People flock to a void and a new set of states and legal boundaries is a knowledge void to fill with special interests.
But go ahead and forget every NGO, and people themselves and just put our agency at the whims of government. Not say government bad, just that no it won’t just be government dictating. And it should not be cause that’s how you get to “government bad”.
California is one of the best functioning states in the country.
I'm going to need some data support that. I would consider it the worst run state in the Union...
Its education, wages, healthcare, opportunities, safety net, crime, etc are all top tier.
Most claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
Best in terms of outcomes, but I guess worst in terms of some people's preferred politics :)
Haha, just wait to see what happens when they succeed from the Union. :)
Wait until you hear about the Feds rounding up the farmers workers (right out of the fields) this week. Talk about dysfunctional.