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Global Bacon Shortage 'Unavoidable'
New submitter The name is Dave. Ja debuts on the front page with the most dismal news of our time: "This is truly 'Stuff That Matters'. Where would civilization be today without bacon? I don't mean to be alarmist but ... sound the alarms! This is big — it could lead to civil unrest."
Yes, a bacon shortage. Hopefully what bacon there is will be more delicious after being fed with gummi worms.
. . . and now this. It's like a war on breakfast.
I am not a crackpot.
Venkman: Or you can accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff!
Venkman: Exactly.
Stanz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
Winston Zeddmore: The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!
Mayor: Enough! I get the point! And what if you're wrong?
Venkman: If we're wrong, then nothing happens. We go to jail, peacefully, quietly. We'll enjoy it. But if we're right, and we can stop this thing... Lenny, you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.
I love it when vegetarians prove my favorite joke about them right...
'How can you tell a vegetarian... don't worry... they willl ALWAYS tell you.'
There's enough pork in Congress to carry us through these dire times.
Okay, gonna try and be nice, but I love how naiive people are about farming and ranching in the US (which for the rest of this post I will simply call farming, because I don't care if some rancher gets offended).
First lesson of farming:
Farmer's are the cheapest mother fuckers on the planet. Seriously, I am not kidding, if they can make a sixties tractor work by using bailing wire to "fix it" (no matter how fucking dangerous or inefficient the fix) they will. I'd bet you'll never find a group of Americans more consistantly willing to cheat on their taxes as well. As a sub lesson, they fucking hate the government, which can do no right, except when giving them free money, which they will bitch and moan about any whisper that something might change in the future.
Second lesson of farming:
A lot of farmers are terrible businessmen. They often don't take long term views, many are really bad at math and don't even know how to calculate costs. There's actually bankers that loan to farms (or there used to be), they used to send in consultants to save farms from defaulting on their loans. Seriously, this isn't all farmers, but the idea of calculating costs, risks, and returns is completely foreign to many of them. This is why they use inefficient machinery, because it never occurs to them that the total cost of operation exceeds the cost of replacement.
Third lesson of farming:
Farming has a vast infrastructure that requires massive amounts of energy input (10% or so of our energy in the US, daily, goes to agriculture). Part of that infrastructure, as stated, is old. Another part, for some insane reason lumped in with "capital" in modern economics, is land, and you cannot trade suddenly infertile land for "new land", complete with the infrastructure you need, just because we've fucked up our farm belt. A lot of infrastructure isn't even directly owned by the farmer (e.g. some farmers don't own any harvesters, they pay someone per acre to come do it for them). You'd have to move entire communities in order to move the location of production. As for irrigation, it couldn't have solved this (though the water supply is not nearly adequate), since it got too hot for the corn and it simply died. But we've depleted aquifers at alarming rates in the last couple of decades always gambling on that one "really good, wet year" to fill them back up. This gamble cannot always pay off. Supposing you could find a supply of water, how would you get it where it needs to go, suddenly? You have a few weeks at most, to solve most issues like this, you can't suddenly make new irrigation appear. Btw, the same thing goes for all the solar tractors or non-oil based fertilizer (laughable on its face, anyway) that people imagine will happen as oil prices drive up, that shit won't magically appear, people will go hungry first, for years in fact, and in some nations will actually starve to death.
Final lesson of farming:
Most farmers know how to produce limited crops. I.E. they know hogs, or they know dairy, or they know corn, or soybeans. Not only will their set up be geared towards that one crop, you can't always convince them to switch products for a variety of reasons. If they have decided they want to grow corn, good luck getting a pig headed (har har) farmer to grow soybeans instead. You could show him a fucking spreadsheet that indicates double his profits and he's more likely to keep growing corn than switch. Now, if all his neighbors switch (especially if they think they're putting one over on the big, bad government), that might convince him, but you, based on public policy and/or good sense, will not. Even if you could convince one to switch, he might be little better at producing his new crop than you would be, knowing fuck all about any of it.
If I've sounded harsh to farmers, well seriously, there are a few decent ones, but fuck em, as a group. They are entitled, ignorant brats, by and large. Big ag is not much better, if more efficient. I do know some farmers I like, but I like them as they stand out as quiet a bit different from most farmers.
- A guy who grew up around farmers
We could have had *one* thread, ONE thread, a happy fun thread about piggies and bacon and condoms, and NO nation-state based bigotry whatsoever. One thread.
*sigh*
This is why we can't have nice things. Or bacon.