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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Just practically speaking, hard work alone doesn’t cut it. You need to figure out how to get enough money out for the labor you’re putting in. Goes without saying, for many people that’s impossible, especially with no financial wiggle room. On top of whatever inequalities are inherent to capitalism, the government’s also gone out of their way to completely rig the rules of the game.



  • Right, so up until the point the USDA PLC programs get exhausted (afaict ~$25B/yr), they compensate for the difference between the price floor (not sure if we’re above or below that now) and market price. But that’s a subsidy to the farmers, not an effect on the market price - the expense comes to taxpayers. And sometimes, they scoop up surplus through CCC, then remarket it elsewhere, an indirect/artificial market mechanism, which can include exports.





  • It depends on the market. If producing less food with the same resources costs more, prices will rise–especially on large commercial farms, which dominate the U.S. agricultural sector.

    The part you quoted from what I said was in reference to an agricultural buyer being lost. There are other reasons to anticipate the costs of inputs increasing, but I’m going through analyzing factor by factor (descending analysis) and all of a sudden we’re jumping back up to the top to talk about something else.

    Re: grocery chains (not USAID) and futures contracts - not sure how this ties in either, we’re talking about USAID, which AFAIK does procurement through a bidding process for direct purchases, not via futures.


  • I’m not sure what your main point is here. I was responding to you grouping together a labor shortage and a demand shock as - from what it sounded like - a reason to expect high prices. But demand shocks lower prices on the consumer side of food production, as opposed to raising them, because the food at that point exists, and whoever has it needs to sell it, more desperately than they were before.


  • True, well, I mean, take the effects I described and apply them to the respective agricultural sectors. We will very likely see price increases in fresh produce and some price decrease in corn, soy, wheat, dairy, etc. (I say “some” because the actual global demand for food hasn’t decreased, rather, the purchasing power has been decreased because some subsidization has been lost due to USAID absence).





  • dx1@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldWelcome ex-Redditors!
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    16 days ago

    In the past week I caught a 7 day ban for “misinformation” (x3, then for reposting a link to the mod logs, “skirting the rules”, “repeated offenses” etc.) from /c/WorldNews for accusing Democrats of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An actual fact - tens of billions of dollars in arms sent to an ongoing genocide/ethnic cleansing by Biden. No problems like that on lemmy.ml. That really says it all for me. Lemmy’s basically just a fediverse reddit, with the same mod structure - if mods abuse their power, and admins don’t keep them in check, it’s time to ditch the instance.

    By the way, Lemmy itself was created by Dessalines, the admin of lemmy.ml. Who I collaborated with briefly on building some of the UI that you’re using right now to read this. Very thorough guy.