181–190 of 589 posts
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Somehow I think your keyboard bravado will vanish once you start paying 60-70% of salary for just basic necessities. And even if I were to concede that you - presumably high paid tech workers - were willing & able, imagine the fate of the pensioners, bus drivers, retail workers...they barely make ends meet as it is.
Things already are expensive and with all the automation the salaries make up a crazy tiny amount of it.
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What people want to do work that damaged their body, is subject to short term changes in demand due to weather and has high income instability, and leads to no future growth? $20/hour for temporary backbreaking work in exchange for not being near friends or family, having to move constantly, having to live in a rural area (not what most people want), having no upward income mobility. The people that do it, do it beca…
> The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to. Isn't that most people in their current job?
Whereas an engineer might answer that they like the work they do, I doubt someone bending over all day and picking strawberries would.
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You realise such transitions take crop cycles - if the current crops fail because lack of labour and it leads to a food shortage food prices will go through the roof.
...and not to mention everything is interconnected in an economy. If food prices rise by x%, there is a cascade effect on the prices of everything, not just groceries.
PS: In the short term inflation and deflation can be caused by a huge range of effects, but in the long term it’s bound by government spending and taxation.
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I'd be interested to hear more about what you think will go wrong. It seems like this is an important problem to solve.
Search for images or videos of asparagus or strawberry picking. Or try holding small bottles of water in each hand, bend over with your arms stretched out, hold for 8 hours.
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Hopefully this won't lead to any actual starvation? As I understand it, staples like grains and root vegetables can mostly be harvested by machine. While it would be sad to waste fruits and leafy vegetables, I expect you can survive without them for quite a while, especially if you have access to multivitamins.
Zero risk of starvation. The labor-intensive produce at this time of year (and the next 3 months) is mostly asparagus and strawberries. Grain & corn is all machines. If there’s a second wave, or it takes very long, olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec). Not for nutrition, but economically and my breakfast routine. There’s still a lot of fresh fruit in warehouses. Apples, for example, which will last until the…
I don't think so. My country is a top olive oil exporter and I can tell you that stocks and harvest are at full capacity. Many people (my father included) did not harvest this year because of the low prices. Many exporters are also struggling to sell their produce.
Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though. It was just a simple decision for them: cheap labor that's available today or expensive labor... They mostly went with cheap, and now they don't have anyone available. Tough luck I guess, but it always was just a question of time until this happened.
Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though. It was just a simple decision for them: cheap labor that's available today or expensive labor... They mostly went with cheap, and now they don't have anyone available. Tough luck I guess, but it always was just a question of time until this happened.
We are in a time of crisis and the first instinct is to close ourselves but I think we should not throw away what the “free”(almost in some cases) movement of people made possible: Cheap good food => more people can afford to buy it => less hunger/suffering in the world. Here is another example: Cheap technology => more people have access to computers => more innovations are possible => more cheap technology => bette…
You can have cheap good food with mechanical and/or high-scale production. Just means you'll be eating bananas instead of strawberries. And whatever's in-season or canned out-of-season instead of fresh anything year-round. And chickpeas instead of beef. Sugar instead of honey. Lettuce instead of kale.
If anything, this is an opportunity to make cheap food even cheaper instead of using that land resource to make luxury fresh fruits/herbs year-round.
People will complain about it non-stop though.
> From Huelva to Hamburg and Newcastle to Naples, Europe’s farmers are struggling to find people to bring in rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables, which frequently must be hand-picked, usually within a window of just a few days. They typically rely on seasonal workers from eastern Europe or northern Africa, but fears of the coronavirus are keeping hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from leaving home, and con…
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China imports a gigantic amount of food, and ports were first to be hit by disruption . As a person who works in OEM electronics in China, I can tell at least that. So, at any normal day, China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself. Agriculture has been on shutdown for the past 2.5 months. Farms have slaughtered a large portion of their livestock, and a big portion…
Where is the source on Chinese ports being closed? I work in the international trade sector and since March 9th we’ve had record breaking activity on our system. Even looking at AIS you can see 1000+ dockings over the next 3 days at Shenzhen - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/data/?asset_type=arrivals_d... Also air freight volume is off the charts! We’re starting to see airlines use their 777’s with cargo in the bell…
That means 50€/hour plus benefits, and fully paid transportation and accommodation.
There are enough jobless people in Germany that should be able to pick any number of fields. For this kind of money, that'd be a no-brainer.
Here we have two problems: Wages are too low to pay for higher food prices that could sustain local field labour, and the majority of average people are already having their hands full with and pockets empty from paying rent, gas, transportation, emergency fund & food as-is. That means, all other jobs also don't pay that well here, and there is simply no local money that could pay high prices.
It's the consequence of having an export-oriented economy: labour must at all cost be as low as possible.