![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Was just about to post a comment to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kawuli's great post on District 9, which is chock full of details about modern agriculture and her headcanon, when I realized that I had a long digression that I should probably put somewhere I can find again.
kawuli noted, "Which means that District 9 probably has a few scattered crop-production centers with something like 10 people responsible for growing hundreds of square miles/kilometers of row crops, probably with zones for various (rotations of) cereals/legume field crops and some seed-production and research areas (with visiting scientists/geneticists from 3)." I definitely agree with the idea that there are some scientists from Three who get to travel occasionally as a part of their work, and think this can actually have some funny wrinkles in culture among D3's scientist class.
In my hc, I figure that all higher education in Panem takes place at the University of Panem, because all other colleges and universities were subsumed into the state university or shut down when the Capitol came to power, in the aftermath of the Dark Days, if not before. The UofP has satellite campuses around the Capitol and in certain of the inner districts. All students in Three identified in testing the 'alpha' strata (generally, the top 2-3%) are tracked for training at the Three campus of the UofP (commonly referred to as the National Science Academy).
I figure that, like a lot of the industries we see in Panem, STEM research and manufacture are controlled by the Capitol. They pick which firms get contracts (probably with plenty of within-Capitol graft), what to manufacture, and what areas of research (pure and practical) should be funded. There's very little independent industry left in Three (the Capitol can't risk Three becoming an economic power in its own right).
Because of these limitations there's limited opportunity for even the best and brightest, so when you show up for your first day at the academy, your classmates are also your competition for the plum firms and assignments. I think, to the degree that a student wants to see what lies beyond Three's fenced-in city, the student should think carefully about what specialty s/he wants to try for. Some of this is out of the student's control; there are a certain number of geopetrolium engineers that are going to be needed, and it doesn't matter that you don't want to be sent to freeze your *#$% off in Five for a few weeks in the dead of winter. But working hard to be at the top of your class in, say, computer engineering, lessens the likelihood of that happening.
As with a lot of other things in Panem, I think the Capitol privileges control over efficiency in the matter of Threes working outside of their district, and so visits are probably much less frequent than they should be, which ends up with a lot of frustrated scientists and engineers not being allowed to know all of the context of a problem that they're working on, as well as frustrated factory workers, miners, etc. who have to make do with what arrives from Three, even if it's not optimally suited to their needs, or wasn't sufficiently empirically tested before it was deployed. There are also security issues with travel, so scientists whose rebellious leanings are exposed, or have family members who commit serious offenses are not going to be allowed to travel at all.
( cross training, it's not just for jocks )
kawuli's great post on District 9, which is chock full of details about modern agriculture and her headcanon, when I realized that I had a long digression that I should probably put somewhere I can find again.kawuli noted, "Which means that District 9 probably has a few scattered crop-production centers with something like 10 people responsible for growing hundreds of square miles/kilometers of row crops, probably with zones for various (rotations of) cereals/legume field crops and some seed-production and research areas (with visiting scientists/geneticists from 3)." I definitely agree with the idea that there are some scientists from Three who get to travel occasionally as a part of their work, and think this can actually have some funny wrinkles in culture among D3's scientist class. In my hc, I figure that all higher education in Panem takes place at the University of Panem, because all other colleges and universities were subsumed into the state university or shut down when the Capitol came to power, in the aftermath of the Dark Days, if not before. The UofP has satellite campuses around the Capitol and in certain of the inner districts. All students in Three identified in testing the 'alpha' strata (generally, the top 2-3%) are tracked for training at the Three campus of the UofP (commonly referred to as the National Science Academy).
I figure that, like a lot of the industries we see in Panem, STEM research and manufacture are controlled by the Capitol. They pick which firms get contracts (probably with plenty of within-Capitol graft), what to manufacture, and what areas of research (pure and practical) should be funded. There's very little independent industry left in Three (the Capitol can't risk Three becoming an economic power in its own right).
Because of these limitations there's limited opportunity for even the best and brightest, so when you show up for your first day at the academy, your classmates are also your competition for the plum firms and assignments. I think, to the degree that a student wants to see what lies beyond Three's fenced-in city, the student should think carefully about what specialty s/he wants to try for. Some of this is out of the student's control; there are a certain number of geopetrolium engineers that are going to be needed, and it doesn't matter that you don't want to be sent to freeze your *#$% off in Five for a few weeks in the dead of winter. But working hard to be at the top of your class in, say, computer engineering, lessens the likelihood of that happening.
As with a lot of other things in Panem, I think the Capitol privileges control over efficiency in the matter of Threes working outside of their district, and so visits are probably much less frequent than they should be, which ends up with a lot of frustrated scientists and engineers not being allowed to know all of the context of a problem that they're working on, as well as frustrated factory workers, miners, etc. who have to make do with what arrives from Three, even if it's not optimally suited to their needs, or wasn't sufficiently empirically tested before it was deployed. There are also security issues with travel, so scientists whose rebellious leanings are exposed, or have family members who commit serious offenses are not going to be allowed to travel at all.
( cross training, it's not just for jocks )
