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Posts
2
Comments
761
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I only see one country bragging about influencing U.S. election outcomes, and it's not Russia. You guys constructed Pepe Silvia-level theories about Russian influence and ignored the domestic corporatocracy and entire U.S. empire in favor of the media's chosen explanation of "Russian influence". As the saying more or less goes, nobody is immune to propaganda, including you. Modern propaganda narratives include accusations of propaganda leveled at the propaganda narrative's scapegoats.

  • History will look back at the American empire and judge all its complicit civilians equally. It's Democrat vanity that makes them think they're not in the same genocidal boat as Republicans. You may think of yourselves in another class, but your politicians were complicit in the same crimes.

  • Just practically speaking, hard work alone doesn't cut it. You need to figure out how to get enough money out for the labor you're putting in. Goes without saying, for many people that's impossible, especially with no financial wiggle room. On top of whatever inequalities are inherent to capitalism, the government's also gone out of their way to completely rig the rules of the game.

  • Right, so up until the point the USDA PLC programs get exhausted (afaict ~$25B/yr), they compensate for the difference between the price floor (not sure if we're above or below that now) and market price. But that's a subsidy to the farmers, not an effect on the market price - the expense comes to taxpayers. And sometimes, they scoop up surplus through CCC, then remarket it elsewhere, an indirect/artificial market mechanism, which can include exports.

  • No, I'm still not really sure what you're trying to say. Your original post was about the price to consumers.

    And as for the relationship between farmers and distributors, that really depends on the specifics of the purchasing agreements they enter into.

  • Uh-huh. So of all the options - just shooting adult deer, or restoring the ecosystem to the way it was, or actual scientific approaches like sterilization, you're only interested in the one that benefits you, and then you start ignoring the moral implications, and associated risks like humans getting shot. See, the conversation would go smoother if you just declare from the outset that you only care about what benefits you, and we could drop the pretense that this is about what's actually the best solution.

  • Taking just the "solution" of reintroducing predators - it's still not the same. Predation specifically targets old, weak, sick members of a herd. What do hunters do? It's what, a tag limit and age limit, and that's it.

    This whole conversation always seems so disingenuous. People doing hunting claim these altruistic motives, but have every adverse incentive that has nothing to do with those motives, from stocking their freezers to just bragging about what they hunted. Let's be for real here, you're not scientists or veterinarians carefully monitoring and managing a population, what you're doing is taking the first justification you can find for what you already wanted to do.

  • It depends on the market. If producing less food with the same resources costs more, prices will rise–especially on large commercial farms, which dominate the U.S. agricultural sector.

    The part you quoted from what I said was in reference to an agricultural buyer being lost. There are other reasons to anticipate the costs of inputs increasing, but I'm going through analyzing factor by factor (descending analysis) and all of a sudden we're jumping back up to the top to talk about something else.

    Re: grocery chains (not USAID) and futures contracts - not sure how this ties in either, we're talking about USAID, which AFAIK does procurement through a bidding process for direct purchases, not via futures.

  • I'm not sure what your main point is here. I was responding to you grouping together a labor shortage and a demand shock as - from what it sounded like - a reason to expect high prices. But demand shocks lower prices on the consumer side of food production, as opposed to raising them, because the food at that point exists, and whoever has it needs to sell it, more desperately than they were before.

  • True, well, I mean, take the effects I described and apply them to the respective agricultural sectors. We will very likely see price increases in fresh produce and some price decrease in corn, soy, wheat, dairy, etc. (I say "some" because the actual global demand for food hasn't decreased, rather, the purchasing power has been decreased because some subsidization has been lost due to USAID absence).

  • Killing animals isn't ethical. Inevitably the false dilemma gets painted between killing them or overpopulation, but the overpopulation is also a human-created problem, both through overdevelopment and killing off natural predators - the actual antidote is to scale back our development, or reintroduce predators, or simply let other natural stressors manage the population. Plant-based/vegan diet is far more ethical (nonsense about "plants feel pain", "mice killed by plows", "I can't eat vegan because of my blood type" and other vegan bingo card BS aside).

  • Reminder, losing a large purchasing segment decreases demand, which lowers prices until the market adjusts. I.e., it frees up agricultural output that they have to sell, which they'll lower prices to make sell to other buyers (domestically or internationally).

  • In the past week I caught a 7 day ban for "misinformation" (x3, then for reposting a link to the mod logs, "skirting the rules", "repeated offenses" etc.) from /c/WorldNews for accusing Democrats of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An actual fact - tens of billions of dollars in arms sent to an ongoing genocide/ethnic cleansing by Biden. No problems like that on lemmy.ml. That really says it all for me. Lemmy's basically just a fediverse reddit, with the same mod structure - if mods abuse their power, and admins don't keep them in check, it's time to ditch the instance.

    By the way, Lemmy itself was created by Dessalines, the admin of lemmy.ml. Who I collaborated with briefly on building some of the UI that you're using right now to read this. Very thorough guy.