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Comment by grayfaced | Hacker News Reader

I would consider consumer electronics to be discretionary purchases. So what I suggested is the opposite of that. If disruptions are an acceptable risk, then you should prioritize efficiency. Consumer complaints are meaningless if they don't have a viable competitor to shift their money to.

But we must prioritize resiliency when an economic shock would result in societal instability. I'm willing to pay more for food to be available 100% of the time versus paying 20% less for food to be available 80% of the time.

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Isn't that why the US government has longstanding agricultural subsidies, guarantees on prices, etc.? Do we really have a shortage of food?

That's the stated purpose. But it has no teeth. Last year we saw aisles empty of meat and lots of news about meat shortages. But during that time domestic pork supplies were down 40% in the same period that pork exports to China quadrupled.

Those subsidies failed in their stated purpose of resiliency. During the bad times, all that mattered is where more profit could be found.

> During the bad times, all that mattered is where more profit could be found.

The people in China need to eat too; the pork is going to be eaten. It is hard to understate how hard the Chinese have been working to provide goods, services and technologies to the rest of the world for the last 40-odd years. They've been quite clear the whole way through that one of the things they want in exchange for that is support feeding themselves.

Them buying American pork in a tough year is not some capitalist failure. This is what hard work and savings is supposed to get China - front of the line in a crisis. It would be grossly unfair to pay them then tell them that they've actually got monopoly money that can't even buy pork.

Meat can be easily substituted, so I'd consider that discretionary spending. Furthermore, producing meat consumes many times the plants, than if humans directly consumed those plants. So in an emergency, just stop producing meat and you'll have plenty of plant-based food left.

Can you eat grass? I know I can't...

Yes, producing meat requires animals eating a ton of plants and they also need a lot of water.

Except that can be mostly grass (that humans don't eat), and the water is just rainwater (that the animals in question will piss later, so it will end on the ground anyway).

The reason why animal-based farming exists is because it is the only way we have to get any food in certain parts of the planet where the only thing that grow naturally is grass.

There is a certain level of meat production that uses only waste as fodder, land that has no other agricultural value, and doesn't require destroying areas of high biodiversity to make room for our animals. The current global levels of meat productions are extremely far away from this. We cut down vast swathes of forests to get cheap farmland, both for grazing as well as for producing grain and soy as fodder.

The Great Plains in the US are huge. Lots of cattle grazing out there in an environmentally sensitive way. Most of the feed is hay cut from fallow farmland. Maybe what you’re describing happens in South America, but it’s not at all what happens in the US.

That is not how the water cycle works.

Cows eat grass? Farmers are all panicking and buying hay (premium hay that tests properly for nutrients) at outlandish prices. You need a crap ton of the right hay to keep beef cattle alive. No to mention all the corn to fatten them so that your meat gets graded as choice+.

The US doesn't subsidize meat production, your comment has no basis in fact.

I'd claim those subsidies worked fine then. The problem wasn't supply - It was delivery. There weren't enough drivers to move stuff around, so stuff didn't get moved around and shelves were empty. The supply chain's weakest link was delivery, so that broke. Exports to China used different infrastructure that wasn't as affected, so they still happened

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