News on China's scientific and technological development.

L

latenlazy

Brigadier
ZeEa5KPul said:
Let's start with the sunk costs of building a skyscraper for the purpose of growing a low-value crop. You're going to have to grow a lot of that crop to pay back those costs, and more crop requires more levels which raises the capital cost. That alone kills it, but to add insult to injury we can add the electricity costs for providing the light for photosynthesis - light your competitors get for free from the sun. Water you'll either use a lot of and pay high running costs or you'll use efficiently and increase the capital cost to put in the efficient infrastructure.

As a "meatarian" myself, once the Impossible patty becomes more widely available in my neck of the woods, I won't pick up a packet of 80/20 again.

And this isn't directed at you specifically (you tried the stuff and didn't like it, fair enough), but the mentality I see here is rejection of the idea of plant-based meat out of principle. It's like it's an act of self-affirmation to eat animal meat. In a Westerner, I would say this is just the usual petty entitlement they have about everything, but in this case I believe it's a manifestation of the nouveau riche mentality a lot of Chinese people are afflicted with, "No! I made it and I'm going to eat dead animals, goddamit!!"

I'm giving you the cheat codes that will get China to 100% food security while boosting every single Chinese citizen to middle-class status, and the feedback I'm getting from you is "mUh DeAd PiGs!" America has a fifth of China's population and more arable land, they can afford to rape their environment raising livestock to their hearts' content - China doesn't have that luxury.
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You need infrastructure construction for both vertical farming and for water transport for desalinated water, but because your construction for water transport has to be spread across a massive area of land and needs to be large enough to facilitate massive volumes of water to meaningfully reach all the farms that you’re trying to help construction for it is both more times and resource consuming, and far less efficient, than for vertical farms. Vertical farming is about *changing* the cost equation to be less dependent on land and open environment factors, *not* about slapping more costs onto the current method of farming. There are indeed some extra costs for vertical farming relative to current conventional agriculture, but there are also some significant cost savings from vertical farming that conventional farming can’t leverage.

Vertical farming is far more pliant to automation, efficient use of energy and other resources, and labor and transport saving methods, in part because farming across a wide physical land area has large cost effects on productivity and efficiency along those factor. Being land area dependent introduces very significant diseconomies of scale that hold back how cost efficiently you can scale up output by land. Heck, if we’re just talking about ensuring enough water for growing food, the much smaller surface area of closed environment growing spaces by itself will do wonders for water efficiency via reduction of evaporation loss. Then you add direct climate and water circulation controls, and the water efficiency gains very quickly adds up.

That said, I don’t think desalination technology by itself will stay unviable. Desalination that depends on thermodynamic cycles will never be as energy or cost efficient relative to passive water sequestration techniques, but there are newer membrane and filter based desalination technologies being studied that don’t require injecting massive amounts of heat, and that’s probably going to break open desalination as a viable water source.

However insofar as desalination can be made workable, trying to transport desalinated water over a wide area of land, especially since all the desalinated water production will have to be on one side of the country and most of the land that will need water assistance is on the other, is probably the *least* efficient way of using that desalinated water to assist agriculture output. It would be far more efficient use that desalinated water on vertical farms located very close to the desalination plants. These technologies are not actually rivals but complements.
 
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S

sinophilia

Junior Member
Registered Member
Anlsvrthng said:
You don't get it, the people doesn't feel or care with the level of living difference between say Bangladesh, all that they care about is the change in they conditions.

Means if they see that the salary , material wellbeing growing, and they feel secure then they happy to have more child.

however if they have less salary, feeling like they can't cover the bills , or struggling to get job then they won't consider to have baby.

The USA/European middle class income stagnating, the new jobs available paying less than the old ones, means the workers has insecurity and stagnating/decreasing level of living, hence the falling fertility rate.

And don't forget, just living in a high cost city and having very high salary doesn't means the person living well, considering that probably he /she can afford only a small apartment due to the high rents. From the same salary in a low cost country he/she could afford a spacious house, childcare and so on - making easy to have kids.
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I never said that fertility rates are informed by the fertility rates of other countries. That doesn't make any sense so I assume you are misunderstanding me. I said there is an inverse correlation between wealth/income/education and fertility, and it exists between countries and within countries.

The wealthier people or nations or regions become the less kids they have. It's funny people are arguing against this. The relationship exists between countries and within countries and has never really been disputed since it's so obvious.

The expectation that fertility will magically rise in China as a consequence of increasing wealth, education, income, etc. is so crazy and polar opposite of everything that happens in the world.
 
PiSigma

PiSigma

"the engineer"
ZeEa5KPul said:
Let's start with the sunk costs of building a skyscraper for the purpose of growing a low-value crop. You're going to have to grow a lot of that crop to pay back those costs, and more crop requires more levels which raises the capital cost. That alone kills it, but to add insult to injury we can add the electricity costs for providing the light for photosynthesis - light your competitors get for free from the sun. Water you'll either use a lot of and pay high running costs or you'll use efficiently and increase the capital cost to put in the efficient infrastructure.

As a "meatarian" myself, once the Impossible patty becomes more widely available in my neck of the woods, I won't pick up a packet of 80/20 again.

And this isn't directed at you specifically (you tried the stuff and didn't like it, fair enough), but the mentality I see here is rejection of the idea of plant-based meat out of principle. It's like it's an act of self-affirmation to eat animal meat. In a Westerner, I would say this is just the usual petty entitlement they have about everything, but in this case I believe it's a manifestation of the nouveau riche mentality a lot of Chinese people are afflicted with, "No! I made it and I'm going to eat dead animals, goddamit!!"

I'm giving you the cheat codes that will get China to 100% food security while boosting every single Chinese citizen to middle-class status, and the feedback I'm getting from you is "mUh DeAd PiGs!" America has a fifth of China's population and more arable land, they can afford to rape their environment raising livestock to their hearts' content - China doesn't have that luxury.
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I'm not sure you know what a vertical farm look like. They are typically modules with glass on one side that is only 5-8 stories high. The light is free as well from sunlight.

Electric lighting is typically only turned on at night to increase the growing cycle.

I had my coop student actually do a study on exactly this using excess heat we got from oil production for fort McMurray Alberta. The logistics is actually the hardest part, cost was fairly low.

Soy was an example of what you could grow, but it's typically higher value crops that would be grown like vegetables and herbs. Especially ones that don't travel well.

This is especially precious in cold climates where growing seasons are short (thus ft mac), where if you can get fresh produce in winter from a local farm could definitely charge a premium.

What China can do with verticals farming is to use them to grow vegetables in NE provinces. Then this will allow available land to grow staples like rice and wheat and raise animals.
 
L

latenlazy

Brigadier
PiSigma said:
I'm not sure you know what a vertical farm look like. They are typically modules with glass on one side that is only 5-8 stories high. The light is free as well from sunlight.

Electric lighting is typically only turned on at night to increase the growing cycle.

I had my coop student actually do a study on exactly this using excess heat we got from oil production for fort McMurray Alberta. The logistics is actually the hardest part, cost was fairly low.

Soy was an example of what you could grow, but it's typically higher value crops that would be grown like vegetables and herbs. Especially ones that don't travel well.

This is especially precious in cold climates where growing seasons are short (thus ft mac), where if you can get fresh produce in winter from a local farm could definitely charge a premium.

What China can do with verticals farming is to use them to grow vegetables in NE provinces. Then this will allow available land to grow staples like rice and wheat and raise animals.
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Hold on are you based in Calgary?
 
A

antiterror13

Brigadier
PiSigma said:
The impossible beef taste terrible. It's better than other fake meats out there, but it's not anywhere close to palatable. You need to eat some good beef from Canada before judging what beef should taste like. American beef taste like cardboard.

Chinese people prefer pork anyway, it can be expanded with verticals farming of soy.
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Try NZ beef ;)
 
supercat

supercat

Major

World-first split liver transplant helps save 2-yr-old twins​

A Shanghai hospital has successfully performed a liver transplantation for a pair of twins suffering from glycogen storage disease by splitting the liver of a 9-year-old donor, the first such instance in the world, Science and Technology Daily reported.

The split liver transplant was performed on Dec 18 by a medical team from Renji Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. The operation included three stages: dividing the donor's liver into two pieces, and transplanting them into the twins separately, all of which were performed simultaneously.

The 2-year-old twin boys were raised by their grandparents from a village after their parents left them not long after birth. On New Year's Eve in 2019, the twins suddenly developed fevers in succession and became very weak. They were later sent to the hospital and diagnosed with GSD, a rare genetic disorder characterized by a deficiency in the liver's glycogen phosphorylase enzyme. A liver transplant was the only way to save their lives.
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O

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
Tam said:
China expat and vlogger maintains a Xiaomi smart home.

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This whole industry was lost by Chinese tech players. Google Home and Amazon's Alexa all came years after the Chinese tech companies exhibited basically the same devices which Google and Amazon eventually decided to get into as well. They've had much better marketing, improved and integrated their tech with the rest of their products and services better (well since they're giant multinationals in multiple fields).

Xiaomi's MiJia range came out literally years before Google and Amazon offered their core product (Home and Alexa) and the MiJia stuff operated using the exact same principles (wifi and phone connectivity, internet of things) using "smart" switches and sensors. I bought some back in 2016 to get some home security and motion+thermal triggered lights that also show alerts to my phone. This sort of concept was in individual devices in China since the turn of the century/millenium with programmable ricecookers, lights, etc etc. Google and Amazon make it seem like they've pioneered this. But it has to be admitted they've got much better products now which is what matters.

It's really just a shame that the Chinese equivalents that actually pioneered smart home devices are being left in the dust compared to what Google now offers along the IOT within the home. I guess the guys that watch everyone can't let such an opportunity through.

Back in the day some people were angered and terrified that whistleblowers revealed smartphones recording without consent and even smart TVs being able to spy for the relevant authorities. Now with a host of these sorts of capabilities in multiple devices, we've all just given up. At least they're probably just harvesting consumer behaviour data and the sort lol.

I suppose none of these companies actually developed the entire set of tech but used plenty of smaller suppliers and developers from Shenzhen. That's where Amazon sourced the majority of its Echo development and production.
 
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