291–300 of 337 posts
This is also true in some places like semi-rural parts of Dongguan city, Guangdong province of China.
This makes for an interesting comparison to Japan. I’ve lived in rural Tokyo for about two months, and local produce is a thing there. The produce doesn’t need to be sold at a market. The farmers just sell their produce on the roadside, right next to their plots of land. This is also true in some places like semi-rural parts of Dongguan city, Guangdong province of China.
Did you mean to say rural Japan?
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> When we have guaranteed lunches for every school student, then we can talk about subsidizing services for people in rural areas. Why do these have to be a one or the other? It's like the argument of "Why are we doing stuff in space while we still have poor people". As a society we're capable of solving multiple problems simultaneously. Many farmers are going out of business because of major corporations driving out…
For individual issues it’s not one or the other, but collectively it becomes that way due to finite resources. In a finite economy wasteful spending ends up costing lives in the short and long term. Subsidies rarely help people in the long term because the markets adapt. Increase corn production and prices drop to match, but now you need to dump all that food on the market. Worse this is directly resulting in increas…
There is plenty of food and money to go around, but the complexities of getting it there, navigating the politics, culture and myriad of other issues are the real barriers.
Which is why it is so short sighted to think we should only spend money on the most pressing issue first, until it is solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then the government can pay the people in rural areas enough cash to fly in food, or enough to pay for prices high enough to make it worthwhile to open a grocery store. Costs should be as transparent as possible. If there is low supply and high demand, you can increase supply by moving the prices up. Alternatively, people in rural areas have to charge far more money for what they sell.
Everything you say sounds good in theory, until you spend a bit of time studying the history of economic policies. It's...really fucking complicated, which is why nobody really knows what they're doing (I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?). But what you're proposing is the sort of thing that works with a small group of people, but then as you scale more and more you realize there are…
I agree with the spirit of the post - subsidies should be implemented for non-economic reasons and are therefore justified with arguments that say there are other good reasons to pay the price.
But this specific example isn't the best example because the stock market is a competitive human-driven environment where if a signal is predictive people will make money off it until it stops being predictive.
That is quite different from real-world processes where the laws of physics tend to remain in effect no matter how many what people figure out. Eg, resource depletion behaves differently to the loss of signal in a stock market.
"Walmart and the like killed local competition." I disagree (kind of). I grew up in the most rural part of Virginia. There was no competition. We had a local grocery store, for sure; but it sucked. No ethnic food, not even soy sauce. No seafood. No link sausage, three kinds of salad dressing. Maybe four or five green vegetables. It was like a grocery store in some third-world countries I have visited. And there was l…
I'm curious which third world countries? The only one's I've visited have been Melanesian, some with people literally living in shacks about the size of a queen bed, they didn't exactly have the number of products we do in the west but always had a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. I always found it aggravating that I didn't have access to a kitchen when I visited.
I always assumed this was typical but I guess other places don't have the climate for it.
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Yes, and then they often blame "the system" (could either be corporations or the government, or both) for the natural outcome of living in an area without many people, which is that there are fewer useful services around, or that they're more expensive. Rural America as it is, is already heavily subsidized by urban America, but it's common for people to say that we're leaving them behind, when even as it is they're b…
I don't believe that rural Americans are any more or less dependent than urban Americans. It is just different. In a lot of places there just isn't enough population density to have everything.
The sad part is that they think urban areas are the dependent ones. They want to think of themselves as ruggedly independent compared to city slickers, so the willful ignorance runs deep.
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This is how I feel. A major point that is missed is that Walmart has brought many more products to a small market that otherwise would not have been there. You can cry that Walmart killed the town square, but when pushes comes to shoves consumers value lower prices and greater variety.
Even on the employment side I'm not sure that local small businesses are better. I (unsuccessfully) ran my own small retail business for a few years. I could barely afford to pay minimum wage. Never mind offering any sort of pay bumps over time or medical benefits. I didn't blame my teen workers for moving on to employment with big chain stores as soon as they could. The pay and benefits from chains might be "terribl…
A smaller business, as you said, has social advantages, but they're likely to be flakier, limited recourse if there's an HR issue, etc.
We gave up on farms in the 80s. Agriculture is just another industrial process now. Since we subsidize growing vegetables in the desert and abroad, the market for stuff like vegetables, dairy and meats is hyper-consolidates. There are viable farms on the fringes, but they cannot get capital to grow and cannot compete. I grew up in an area of upstate NY that was a breadbasket at one time, with a rich, diverse agricult…
An illustrative discussion of the death of small dairy : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything you say sounds good in theory, until you spend a bit of time studying the history of economic policies. It's...really fucking complicated, which is why nobody really knows what they're doing (I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?). But what you're proposing is the sort of thing that works with a small group of people, but then as you scale more and more you realize there are…
> I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash? I agree with the spirit of the post - subsidies should be implemented for non-economic reasons and are therefore justified with arguments that say there are other good reasons to pay the price. But this specific example isn't the best example because the stock market is a competitive human-driven environment where if a signal is predictive people…
This makes for an interesting comparison to Japan. I’ve lived in rural Tokyo for about two months, and local produce is a thing there. The produce doesn’t need to be sold at a market. The farmers just sell their produce on the roadside, right next to their plots of land. This is also true in some places like semi-rural parts of Dongguan city, Guangdong province of China.
>I’ve lived in rural Tokyo Did you mean to say rural Japan?