> If you’re a good guy, you’d leverage this data to empower farmers. If you’re an asshole, you’re looking to see who has planted your crop illegally, or who is breaking your insurance fine print, etc.

How does using it to speculate on crop futures rank?

Every time someone explains the way short selling or speculative markets work, I have a “oh, I get it…” moment and then forget months later.

Same with insurance… socialized risk for our food supply is objectively good, and protecting the insurance mechanism from fraud is good. People can always bastardize these things.

It is good to enable people to hedge against bad harvests.