481–490 of 589 posts
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Interestingly, it's a shift-by-one kind of situation. I.e. while British or German crops are picked by Poles, Polish crops are picked by Ukrainians... It seems that agriculture everywhere relies on underpaid migrant labor. I wonder if even Ukraine imports some migrant labor for this purpose.
Since we can't turles-all-the-way-down with this, where does the chain end? What do they do there?
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So, to put it bluntly, people are sitting on ass and their food crops are rotting in the field? Even if you do nothing the market will probably fix it: Less food in the markets > high demand drives up prices > higher salaries > slightly lower prices At some point some people are hungry enough to get a... shall we say... real job? With some regulatory sanity we subsidize it a bit. Perhaps we should test and quarantine…
So in other words, after one famine where a large fraction of the population dies, the market will be better afterwards? Especially with anti-price-gouging laws - this process is explicit forbidden from happening during a crisis.
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Human civilisation has reached the point where keeping our fake paper moving is more important than staying alive. How exciting!
Without paper moving, other things, like goods, can't move efficiently enough to feed 8B of the population.
Fruit and veg 'will run out' unless Britain charters planes to fly in farm workers from eastern Europe. UK urgently needs 90,000 labourers to pick crops that will otherwise die in the fields, warns charity. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-an...
Actually, this is a golden opportunity for east european countries to grow their agro industry. COVID now gives legal grounds to keep workers in their own country, so they neither catch the virus nor enjoy british racism. This can help their economies as well.
Got a butternut squash in your pantry? Maybe a couple of tomatoes? Cook it up for dinner and save some seeds! Wash off the pulp and dry them out on a paper towel. It's not too late to start some seedlings, and it's a nice way to pass the time. I've also been experimenting with different dried beans that we stocked up on, and most of them have a pretty high germination rate. Roma beans are super tasty and high in prot…
Thank you for both having the foresight to plan(t) as well as the willingness to help those around you. Otherwise you could end up like my neighbor with a strategic reserve level of toilet paper, proud to hoard yet share with no one even when the stores are empty.
When I was young and we visited grandparents, we used newspaper.
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As an eastern European I think the British should pick their own fruit and pay the appropriate price if they like it so much, otherwise the market is artificially inflated. Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus. We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.
I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off. To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops. If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively…
In the mean time poor countries will start planting their own trees with their own people and appropriate prices for their country. And Mexico will have their own corporation making money.
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Thank you for both having the foresight to plan(t) as well as the willingness to help those around you. Otherwise you could end up like my neighbor with a strategic reserve level of toilet paper, proud to hoard yet share with no one even when the stores are empty.
I really do not understand this toilet paper thing. I mean as long as there is water, why people do not wash their asses. It is cleaner anyway... When I was young and we visited grandparents, we used newspaper.
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Human civilisation has reached the point where keeping our fake paper moving is more important than staying alive. How exciting!
Unfortunately life expectancy and quality of life is very strongly correlated to GDP. I’m not saying we can’t live without money, or anything like that. But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply. The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP, a significant drop in GDP (such as a depression) strongly suggest that economy isn’t healthy, and then the…
Got a butternut squash in your pantry? Maybe a couple of tomatoes? Cook it up for dinner and save some seeds! Wash off the pulp and dry them out on a paper towel. It's not too late to start some seedlings, and it's a nice way to pass the time. I've also been experimenting with different dried beans that we stocked up on, and most of them have a pretty high germination rate. Roma beans are super tasty and high in prot…
Thanks for this! Can you recommend some simple concise instructions on growing tomatoes? I’ve explored a little in the past, but always seemed to run into fairly impenetrable instructions. A basic list of what to buy (in non-gardeners’ terminology) and some simple instructions would be great.
Try potatoes or carrots. Potatoes sprout anyway if you do not put them cold and dark so there is not so much to do.
If you buy "earth" make sure it is clean (i.e. sieve it or search with hands)! Here it often contains stuff like cockchafer grubs.
We us some old cheap wax cloth like this: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B079SHYV6S/ref=psdc_12964001_t1_B07... So we do not have the dirt on the floor when planting.
BTW: Carrots can be stored for very long. Here is a video how carrots are stored usually in winter time at industry scale. But you can do this at home as well:
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Historically problems in fresh veg supply has translated into higher prices for both meat and grains as consumers switch their preferences. The futures markets for grains and meats are both running lower right now. The pros think that demand is going down due to economic activity and the supply chain issues aren’t going to make a dent in that. I have no position but the reading of the markets is that no one is worrie…
> The pros think that demand is going down due to economic activity Does that make any sense? Do people eat fewer grains when economic activity goes down?
More darkly, there may be 1 percent fewer people around to eat bread, steak and drink vodka.