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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#471

Post by wyager »

corrral wrote: post #234
wyager wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping". They are not an effective or efficient way of improving food availability. If you enjoy gardening as a hobby, that's great, but these are not practical bulwarks against food shortages. The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.

It keeps your variety and options up if rationing kicks in, and lets you stretch the rations farther. It's not a replacement for raw calories.

If rationing kicks in, and you're able to garden, that means the government is somehow preventing the ag supply from expanding. Random people gardening is a really inefficient way to work around that.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#472

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

woojoo666 wrote: post #424
mullingitover wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy has a vested interest in convincing people we’re in for a rough year or two.

I don't see them selling anything, just a Patreon and some referral links. If that's considered some dark ulterior motive, then you also wouldn't be able to trust most youtubers (Veritasium, CPG Grey, MinutePhysics, etc)

not to speak of individuals like those listed, but you cannot, in fact, trust most youtubers

the vast majority of them have no independent editorial team with a track record of credibility

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#473

Post by batter »

t-3 wrote: post #469
boardwaalk wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, yes? They elected a comedian with no political experience or ties for f's sake. But I suppose that was some sort of rigged election or he's just a figurehead or something?

Uh, he's banned all opposition parties. Where's the democracy? He was a direct employee of a Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, plenty of ties, just check the Pandora Papers...

What are you talking about? He didn't ban opposition, only pro-russian (and that is just small part of opposition).

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#474

Post by dendriti »

im3w1l wrote: post #437
paulryanrogers wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can it be fixed and meet all the demand for beef today? And without making people poor in the process? Perhaps the solution is a mix of both: eat less meat and only eat sustainably raise meat.

Grass-fed cows use more land and water than grain-fed cows. So no.

Are you going to take your bucket out to the Great Plains and capture some of that water?

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#475

Post by asah »

Jensson wrote: post #418
SkyMarshal wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he said is generally true [1], so you must have either stored your rice in an environment that prevented them from hatching, or got lucky. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil

I've never seen anything like that and I've kept rice around for years as well. Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies? If things like that hatched in food people bought from stores that would make the news, I've seen it in the news before so it can't happen that often.

Can confirm both: I've gotten lucky with some batches and unlucky with others.

Unlucky is quite nasty, but maybe extra protein? /s

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#476

Post by metta2uall »

exploding_water wrote: post #363
bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

The third solution doesn’t make much sense since livestock consumption is mostly made up of inedible foods that we can’t eat like husks, stems, leaves, etc. of plants. Livestock is effective for up-cycling foods we can’t digest and turning it into foods that we can such as meat and dairy. Also there is a lot of food waste in the US. Good food that is suitable for livestock…

When scientists take all the complex factors into account and do the sums it turns out that in general plant-based foods are still far more sustainable than livestock, e.g. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-the-climat...

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#477

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

husainfazel wrote: post #157
Comevius wrote: post #65

What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/2/02... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1712-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-... We either fix this or we simply won't have a global…

What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors. 1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy. 2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrib…

hi, please don't say "russia/Ukraine", it encourages the false equivalency between an international pariah state engaging in a genocide, and the country the genocide is being perpetrated against

Ukraine is not under sanction, and the only things preventing it from providing more food to the world are russia's genocide against Ukrainians, farmers included, russia's blockade of Ukraine, and russia's theft of Ukrainian grain

indeed, the sanctions of the world against russia and belarus, too, are purely a predictable result of their actions, which they nonetheless choose to perpetrate to this very moment, and thus they bear the entire brunt of the consequences

thanks

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#478

Post by bobthepanda »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #461
Xylakant wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. Ok top of that, there is a gauge change when crossing over from Ukraine to the west and the infrastructure towards the west is hardly at the level required. For example, train crossing…

Side note: This gauge difference worked in Ukraine's favor in one respect. Russia's military logistics infrastructure is heavily train-based, but Russia's trains had to stop at the Ukrainian border because of the gauge difference. This meant they had to switch to trucks which are old and unreliable and they got bogged down in mud, which meant they had to stick to roads where they were easy for the Ukrainians to attac…

Ukranian and Russian railway gauge are the same, 1520mm.

It is EU that is different with 1435mm.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#479

Post by tptacek »

dang wrote: post #358
mrdoe wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Whats wrong with calling someone a Karen?!

It doesn't take much googling to answer that. Edit: look you guys, We're not Bowdlers and have never been interested in language policing but I wouldn't have thought this was a borderline case.

It's not a borderline case. People have trouble with the distinction between a judgement about a word overall, and a judgement about what a word will do to an HN thread. Also, people just like to gripe.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#480

Post by yourapostasy »

88840-8855 wrote: post #255
vorpalhex wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No society is ideal, but it is better to help a flawed country than to let a war monger who is violating sovereignty norms act freely. Real life is not a series of choices between good and bad - it is a series of choices between bad and worse.

We had the chance to open up and help substantially during the crazy 90s when the post-Soviet economies dropped GDPwise to the 1960s/1970s levels, average male life expectancy dropped by 10-12 years, life-savings were destroyed, criminals became ultra-rich and were welcomed in Zurich, New York and London with open arms. We did not. We had the chance to open the EU and NATO towards the Russian in the 00s, even when th…

> We had the chance...

One of my theories it happened the way it did is that the US at that time was far weaker and spent from the Cold War than it let on. That it was fiscally more of a close a call as WW2 prevailing fiscal standards were, and the US simply did not have it within itself to financially support another rebuilding like it did with Germany and Japan. The US possibly also expected that if Russia integrated with Europe, the US would underwrite most of the check, the NATO alliance would absorb the benefits, dissolve, turn around and economically compete with the US after the US just exhausted itself from the extended effort.

Please ELI5 because I'm not following your anecdote. For your "90%" figure to make sense to me, you'd have to be able to draw the line connecting the dots that explains how 10% of the Ukrainian population can coerce however many remain in Ukraine to join that 10% and put up sufficiently organized resistance to stall Russian forces. The widespread expectation at the beginning was that too few Ukrainians would put up a fight (your "90%") and it was time to cede all of Ukraine like Crimea was ceded and move on.

How do we get from that expectation to the reality on the ground where the titular second most powerful military in the world was supposed to steamroller through Kyiv in a few days but is now bogged down in a conflict it now admits to its own citizens might be a long slog, on only 10% popular support of Ukrainians? I find it more plausible that 90% of those at the border might have this attitude, but that is still a minority fraction of the total population remaining in the country. Perhaps 90% of those fleeing are predisposed to just wanting it to all be over no matter who rules them?

And why would these people trust Putin's word that he wouldn't implement a modern Holodomor if they just let him have Ukraine, even as he's shipping grain away from Ukraine by the metric thousand-ton right now? And what would they feel if the rest of the world turned their backs on Ukraine in such a scenario because 90% "just want this war to be over - even if Putin 'wins'" and Ukraine is definitely a part of the Russian Federation instead of a currently-recognized sovereign state, and strategic nuclear weapons are instantly in play in that scenario to wrest control of Ukraine-the-Russian-Federation-territory from Russia?

Once Ukraine is under a vengeful narcissist's thumb with the other thumb on the nuclear trigger, just what exactly do you think will happen, Slavic brotherhood rainbows and unicorns? If that 90% ever existed in reality at all, then it lost its chance at any kind of "just want this war to be over" in the first week or two.

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