I've grown chilis and cannabis without really knowing what I am doing, now I wanted to learn to grow any veggies, but finally learn about soil and prepare it well myself.
I naively tried to use coco substrate with tap water and killed off my tomato seedlings pretty fast. Then I've did some research into soil and learned about more organic approaches, and also that pure coco is a bit like dry hydroponics and needs a lot of understanding, and that I probably both over-fertilized and starved them at the same time.
I'm going to start from seeds in Mel's mix with 1/3 coco 1/3 perlite/vernaculite 1/3 compost. Is this kind of substrate to be treated as organic or as mineral approach? The compost probably adds the typical soil properties including the buffering of pH and EC and taking care of fertilization.
But I do not want to re-pot all the time, it is messy and inconvenient. I don't really like working with soil. Instead I want to use mineral fertilizers. Once the compost is depleted, can I consider it to be like a non-soil grow? I got a pH/EC sensor to check my water and the drain coming out, diluted a pH- down based on diluted citric acid to normalize my water to 6,5pH, which seems like a good starting point for any situation.
Does it make sense to follow some generic approach (like keeping pH/EC in certain ranges in certain growth stages)? I do not want to use commercial fertilization formula schemes. I want to work with standard off the shelf mineral fertilizers. Is it possible to get decent results with that?
And where can I find that kind of information for general vegetables, like tomatoes or cucumbers etc.?
The whole soil business is pretty overwhelming, but I want to learn enough (without getting a degree in agriculture) so that I can do this not blindly but improvise with available substrates and fertilizer. How to get this knowledge?
What is it that you call capitalism is the question.
Market capitalism is a practical approach to solving a intractable optimization problem - allocating finite resources in the best way to get optimal results (whatever it may be, such as maximizing production of certain goods while minimizing waste and loss and minimizing "unfairness", however it is defined).
The alternative to capitalism is planned economy. It could not work 100 years ago because technology was not even close to the advancement level to be able to optimize a whole economy, i.e. solve a highly complex set of equations with billions of variables.
Maybe today it would work out, technology-wise, but it is not clear in detail how a society completely without markets could work. Certainly not everything is feasible to be decided by some election or by decision of some committee. It would lead to what was seen in the soviet union - bad planning based on incomplete and unreliable data.
Markets solve this problem and the whole thing works.
The question is who controls the markets.
In capitalism = neoliberal dystopia actually the capitalists themselves all instead of competing try to transcend beyond competition by either becoming a monopolist or becoming the market itself ("platform"). The fascist US oligarchs are working towards this.
On the other hand, China has state capitalism - the government has a strong upper hand, but use capitalistic market mechanics (with the needed biases to ensure the market is working towards the goals of the state, not some wealthy class).
Now you can explain to me how I maybe use the terms all incorrectly, but what I'm saying is: what China is doing is working, what the Soviets tried to do did not.
If China was not authoritarian, but had elections, it would be democratic and capitalistic, so what wie also call social democracy. In contrast to socialism, which is supposed to be democratic and anti-capitalistic, i.e. planned economy, which never worked and probably still would not.
The problem is not capitalism as a mechanism of economy, it's the distribution of power. Corruption and decay and abuse is possible in every coceivable economic system. The question is, who is the system working for.
Ideally the state works for the people, in the sense of a collective of respected individuals, and the economy works for the state. If that is given, details such as the exact structure and processes for decision making and resource allocation are irrelevant, as long as they are sustainable and ethical.