I don't care what the article says, couldn't the headline have used "shit", "bad" or anything else instead of "developing world"? (despite being thick-skinned) I find it offensive
We changed the title above.
Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#22Well.. Between the economy, the health sector, the infrastructure, the political developments, the education, the state of civil rights, the widespread religious influences at all levels of society and a culture of armed violence ... Who's to say that the US, by and large, isn't a developing nation? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-develop...
Please don't take a baity title as an excuse to pour fuel on national/political flames on HN. That's exactly what we don't want here.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#23Globalization: it works both ways! We can exploit rural Chinese and they can exploit rural Americans.
Exploitation? I thought this was the miracle of an unregulated free market uplifting people from economic depravity. Also the article does eventually make your point, but it's unfortunately buried in the conclusion: > American economic philosophy has long centered on the idea that deregulation is good for businesses, whose growth will provide jobs and prosperity, which will make America strong. But that thinking was…
Not your parent, but the verb "exploit" is frequently used in a non-negative manner, especially when talking about natural resources. It simply means to make use of.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#24One of the things this article doesn't touch on is the very deep roots of hog farming in rural NC and the general prevailing attitude of "This is how we've always done it and I don't want no gubment telling me what I can and can't do with my land!" There is a sense of pride in being a hog farmer like your daddy and your granpappy and your uncle and you hope to pass down those roots to your sons some day. As to why there's a blind eye to the literal rivers of hog shit flowing into the creeks/rivers every time it floods, that I have no idea- I don't understand why people who live in that part of the state will cut their nose off to spite their face by accepting huge hog waste lagoons as a fact of life with hog farming. Being from NC I absolutely see Southern Stubbornness at work here.
Driving down the interstates in the eastern part of NC you see multiple billboards both pro- and anti-hog farming, with arguments ranging from "Hog farming keeps my children fed!" to "Hog farming is destroying our environment!" It reminds me of the pro- and anti-coal arguments currently underway in West Virginia.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#25Well.. Between the economy, the health sector, the infrastructure, the political developments, the education, the state of civil rights, the widespread religious influences at all levels of society and a culture of armed violence ... Who's to say that the US, by and large, isn't a developing nation? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-develop...
I’m British. I’ve visited the USA a few times (CA, NY(C), MA, RI properly, a few more incidentally), and also Kenya.
Many of my fellow British say similar things about the UK as you say about the USA, unfairly in both cases.
Once you see a place that really is developing, it becomes clear how advanced our nations are. We complain about potholes, they complain the road fell off when it rained. We complain about civil rights, they have to deal with post-election violence. We complain about our schools, they only got free high schools a decade ago.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#26>Why Is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?
Because of karma?
(Not to mention the "the developing world" as used in the phrase, is quite snotty).
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#27I don't care what the article says, couldn't the headline have used "shit", "bad" or anything else instead of "developing world"? (despite being thick-skinned) I find it offensive
We changed the title above.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am not blaming HN of anything. I am just sad about rollingstone's opinion about developing nations.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#28One of the things this article doesn't touch on is the very deep roots of hog farming in rural NC and the general prevailing attitude of "This is how we've always done it and I don't want no gubment telling me what I can and can't do with my land!" There is a sense of pride in being a hog farmer like your daddy and your granpappy and your uncle and you hope to pass down those roots to your sons some day. As to why th…
I'll not argue the point you are making as I don't disagree.
I would just like to say I find it highly annoying when people denigrate people from the south by using 'words' like 'gubment' and 'granpappy' as some sort of assumed indicator of intelligence level of the subject being discussed. You being from NC and using this same backhanded insult troubles me even more TBH. Do people from the south use those words, or ones that sound like that, in conversation? Sure, sometimes. But your usage of them isn't in an effort to be accurate but more to signal some perceived superiority of intellect. You allow a difference in speech to sway opinion on your subjects possibility of knowing what they talking about.
I was born in the south, raised in the south, and currently live in the south. Whilst I find the southern twang of the people around me amusing (I don't have much of the southern speech patterns for some reason), I would never let their words and pronunciations cloud the fact that there are super smart people amongst the crowd, just like any other part of the country.
And just in case I wasn't clear, using words like 'gubment' and 'granpappy' naturally in your own writing isn't my issue, it's using them as a signal about your subject that bothers me greatly.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh man, you had a great point until you went off and decided to become a self-righteous douche at the end there. Just couldn't stick the dismount... To your point: I think the better mechanism isn't taxation, but regulation/fines. And there was regulation in place, but one of the points of the articles is that government officials in these areas 1- tend to be controlled by these massive industries and 2- push legisla…
Fines do not work. Look at the banking sector: HSBC, JP etc. they get slapped with fines all the time but continue business as usual. Heavy taxation is a very quick way to make these types of socially and environmentally polluting business to change or to go away all together.
So we don't want to punish the well run farms that don't pollute. But you can't "tax" only the offenders, because that's just...a fine. It's a punitive financial incentive when you pollute, that's regulation and fines. You can make the fines extreme so that people won't ignore them, but they're still not taxes.
I think we're just arguing semantics over what the difference between a fine and a tax are.
Re: Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US
#30Laugh all you want, but I just got done talking to one of these NC pig farmers yesterday and he is in the process of converting the sewage into methane gas for electrical production. Local, community electricity, with a lower CO2 footprint than Methane!!?!
This is what I was hoping to see when I clicked on the comments thread. If you can find a valuable use for the waste, then you can make it profitable (or at least less expensive) for the farmers to keep the sewage out of the water table.
One man's disgusting pig shit is another man's profitable pig shit.