You may be happy with the current status but it’s actually both risky and expensive.

Risk management means managing risks, there’s plenty of things having more farmland doesn’t actually protect you from. On the other hand having a decade of food protects you from basically everything as you get time to adjust as things change.

Just as an example, meteor strike blocks sunlight and farmland is useless for a few years. Under the current system most of us starve to death. Odds are around 1 in 1 million that it happens in a given lifetime, but countries outlive people start thinking longer term and it becomes more likely.

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fc417fc802 4 days ago | parent [-]

I fully support having huge stockpiles in addition to subsidies. There's a lot of things midway on the scale between "business as usual" and "meteor strike" where minimizing supply chain disruptions would likely prove to be of great benefit.

I completely agree that the current way things are being handled appears to have its share of problems and could stand to be better optimized. But that doesn't mean it's useless either.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent [-]

Subsidies as a concept includes spending 1% as much on subsidies. Subsidies as they exist now however are a specific system that’s incredibly wasteful.

Producing dramatically less food and ending obesity are linked. If the average American eats 20% less obesity would still be an issue, but that’s a vast amount of farmland we just don’t need.

The current system isn’t designed to accommodate increased agricultural production, lowering food demands, or due to decreasing fertility the slow decline in global population. Instead the goal is almost completely to get votes from farmers.

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fc417fc802 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You want to solve obesity by ... making food cost more? Assuming I've understood you correctly then I think it would be difficult for us to be more opposed to one another. I want basic necessities to be as cheap as possible. Preferably free.

I'm happy to debate what sort of free food the government should or shouldn't be handing out, what measures could be put in place to minimize waste, etc. But from my perspective the ideal is a free all you can eat buffet that's backed by the government.

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Retric 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, I’m saying solving obesity reduces the need for food. Did you not see the post directly below this one posted 6+ hours before your comment where I said:

“For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption.”

Technology isn’t going backwards, we can expect increasingly effective medications with fewer side effects at lower costs to drive down food demand over time. Policies designed to prop up production in the face of falling demand are deeply flawed.

If you want to give people money, give them money, don’t give them lots of money so they can keep a little bit while they waste resources producing something without value.

	▲	fc417fc802 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Apologies, I saw it at the time but failed to follow. IIUC you're saying that subsidies will tend to ratchet in only the one direction. To be clear I don't object at all to the idea of optimizing how subsidies are determined. I just don't think that subsidies and the resultant overproduction are a bad thing in general. I'm all for efficiency in the general case but I think a fair amount of paranoia is called for regarding long tail scenarios that lead to famine.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251412834

Obviously that impacts food demand.