Bloomberg's Funny Way of Being Stupid

Back in 2016, Mini-Mike Bloomberg was at a forum and uttered the immortal lines:

“I could teach anybody in this room to be a farmer.  It’s a process.  You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on to, add water, up comes the corn.”

But he wasn't finished.....because then he added that information technology had arrived, and things were "fundamentally different, because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets you need to learn are how to think and analyze and that is a whole degree level different, you need to have different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

I sat and watched the video of this event here in the AM.....maybe four times.  It kinda bothered me.

Back in the early 1970s, living on the farm as a kid, it was obvious to me that technology was creeping in, and in an average year.....there were probably 100 different technology items that were being funneled into the farm 'world' and the old guys who'd quit school in the ninth-grade in the 1940s.....were screwed.  They would be lucky to last out another twenty years, but the idea of low-knowledge idiots becoming farmers were rapidly disappearing.

By the 1990s, if you looked around a typical rural country....there were a thousand different technology items being introduced. 

Today?  I'd take a guess that it's near 10,000 technology items in a rural county, and farmers are sitting at the feed-store, or in some regional farming 'fair'....absorbing introduction material to things approaching in the next year or two.

I look at Bloomberg and kinda suspect that he hasn't hung out with regular people (carpenters, plumbers, farmers, bus drivers, or longshoremen) in the past fifty years. 

You know who he reminds me of though?  Hillary Clinton.  She was the same way....she hadn't hung out with regular people either....not since the 1980s.  She also talked about knowing things about technology.

So here's the whole angle to technology and farming.  Around 300 years ago, in a single year....you might have had one single technology advancement introduced to you as a farmer. 

Somewhere around the 1880s...the technology advancement went up two or three notches, and you could show up at a state farm exposition (say in Iowa or Ohio), to find forty advancements. 

By the 1940s, between articles in farm magazines and farm expositions....you were up to around 300 advancements. 

At the present rate?  Just within five years, I think a number of farmers will have drones which routinely check on cattle or fence conditions, allowing the farmer to sit at the barn 'office'.   Extended weather forecasts will allow farmers to plan out their work for the next ten days, and prevent wasteful periods. 

What bothers me here, is that it's actually the moron political figures with zero talent or capability....running for some office, who fake you out with a resume that seems mostly blank or bogus.  Maybe it's the farmer who could teach the politician a thing or two.