81–90 of 386 posts
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Reminds me of governments who try to switch people to public transport by making driving harder, rather than making public transport better.
In my experience, the number one thing that makes driving harder is other drivers, not the government. Drivers full roads to over-capacity and then I sit in gridlock.
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Not producing enough food is pretty normal. In my native Norway we have not been self sufficient in hundreds of years. Only 2.5% of the land is arable. Any time there was a serious war and shipping lanes got blocked like in Napoleonic wars we got into deep trouble. Plenty of people died. Same deal in the Netherlands. They were not self sufficient in their Golden age. The Soviet Union was not self-sufficient. It was a…
> It can in principle print itself out of any problem. Except inflation, as we are learning.
But you have to stop when the recession is over. That has proven hard for people to remember to do.
> Without imports, many Sri Lankans will quickly find themselves hungry, stranded How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? How much of this is because o…
not 100% sure.. my guess is that they depended upon tourism and it was severely impacted by the pandemic. For Sri Lanka, the right thing to have been done (in hindsight) is to keep the country open for tourism and disregard covid impact. Kind of like Texas/Florida. They had to choose between the lesser of the two evils. This is a hard decision to make.
but even if they did, would tourists still be arriving? I suppose if the leaders thought that the human toll is worth keeping the economy alive - but then again, they wouldn't have mandated "organic" farming if they could come to that conclusion.
And in any case, the inflation and war in ukraine raising fuel prices would not have been helped by tourism imho. A double whammy isn't easy to recover or prevent tbh.
> Without imports, many Sri Lankans will quickly find themselves hungry, stranded How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? How much of this is because o…
Well, not from producing copious quantities of tea. Globalization meant they (thought they) could specialize in growing tea and let someone else specialize in growing food. In theory - everyone wins.
The risk is asymmetric because your specialty (tea) isn't an absolute necessity (may be 'cept to the brits), and yet, you _need_ food (an absolute necessity).
The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. Any level headed person , forget a politician , would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense . I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps. This also underlines the importance of se…
I've been reading a lot of Soviet history lately and it provides a source of a huge number of similar agricultural disasters. Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans, and it shows in how these countries have had disasters: * collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millio…
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Well to be fair to Mao, sparrows are renowned for their bourgeois capitalists tendencies.
Sometimes I think a huge percent of communism's economic overhead is simply everyone having to remember another dictionary's worth of current communist truths. To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work. Even in abridged form... that's a lot. https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chai...
> But the most boneheaded, bizarre mistake that the Sri Lankan government made was a disastrous plan to shift the entire country to organic agriculture. In April of 2021 the government banned the import and use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. This devastated Sri Lankan agriculture, since, as it turns out, fertilizer is really really important. Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a…
> The US is actually lucky to understand this at the deepest levels of policy and law making, with massive aid packages to prevent total collapse. The current inflation crisis suggests that even the US economy can reach its limit with endless money printing and stimulus. With the cost of borrowing going up, the executive and congress are going to start feeling pressure to cut spending or dramatically raise taxes.
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This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better. It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds. This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.
It's not that, really. There are only so many boneheaded decisions that can come from a central government, and you risk over-weighting one person directly . More frequently, it's the indirect , created conditions typical of centralized power that allow sycophants and incompetents to run decision-making at lower levels -- where there is more impact and volume -- based on purely political and personal reasons.
I would love to go deeper into the rabbit hole here. What is MIA in the Sri Lanka discussion is the underlying reasons for the situation. It seems one of them was misguided govt policy, in that they banned common fertilizers in favor of ESG-friendly fertilizer. It seems said fertilizer collapsed output, which meant less exports, less hard currency to import (late on the game) regular fertilizer. I still sont know why…
Nothing so sophisticated. No money left for fertilizer, no fertilizer. Dressing it up as "ESG" or "organic" amounts to blame-shifting.
Perhaps a dumb question: why does every little country need its own currency? Are they all just addicted to printing money? Ignoring the volatility and environmental concerns, why shouldn’t all these small to medium-sized countries standardize on a cryptocurrency?