Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

It's not the first-order (i.e. direct) effects of suburban life. In fact, TBH, suburban life can be downright cozy--you got your own decent-sized home, a little patch of grass, maybe a patio, barbecue, deck, maybe even a garden.

That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people.

At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful.

But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses.

But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.

Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls...

But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.

> We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation?

Absolutely.

There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and other corporate entities making decisions based on what they perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited and fallible.

Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the quality of planning forecasts.

I feel you. In my extended family environment, more food is wasted than necessary. Some relatives have a habit of buying lots of food, more than they need, because they used to be poor and now that they are no longer poor the derive happiness from buying lots of things. The fridge is always full, and they'd still come home with two huge bags packed with food. Food is regularly thrown away because it has rotted in the fridge: food comes in faster than anybody can eat it.

And meals are often bigger than what everyone can finish during that meal. This is especially so when there is visit. In Chinese culture, it's not done to ask visit whether they want more food because they are not supposed to say yes. Asking is thus equivalent to signalling that you don't want to give them more food, i.e. a lack of hospitality. Thus people make more food than necessary.

That in itself isn't a problem because one could save the leftovers in the fridge. But some refuse to eat leftover food because it's not fresh, or they refuse to eat fridge leftovers that are more than 1 day old (you can save most leftovers in the fridge for 3 days if you put them in the fridge immediately after eating). Some even believe that even frozen food is considered unfresh, or has fewer nutrients or something. Others refuse to put anything in the fridge at all because they hate colder-than-room-temperature food (why reheating is a problem eludes me, but they refuse to use reheating as a solution).

All of this pains me. I hate wasting food. The result: I'm often the only one who eats the oldest leftovers, everybody else eats fresh even though there are lots of leftovers.

This doesn't just apply to food, but also energy. Some insist on turning the heat so high that they can wear tshirts indoors during winter, because that's more comfortable than wearing more clothes. Others think I'm being weird for trying so hard to drive electric-only (driving to a public charging station can be a pain compared to parking at the most convenient location).

While people try to figure out how to feed themselves, it'd be a good opportunity to blame you for their problems and get some political capital :)

Yeah but thirty years ago they were all little 2WD Nissans and Toyotas with a few bales of hay in the back. The trucks you're talking about were kind of family tractors and would rarely be used for distance. They all got like 9mpg and just needed to run when something got stuck.