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Comment by throwaway0x7E6 | Hacker News Reader

>Licenses for fishing and for fish processing are distributed separately, Sengers explains. Authorities saw fishing as one form of employment and fish processing as another, and they wanted to distribute both forms of employment equitably among the communities of the province. As a consequence, however, fish caught near Change Islands can’t be processed there.

the idiocy of nanny state lawmakers never ceases to amaze me

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Silly lawmakers, thinking that a boat that sticks nets in the water is a different business with different concerns than an on-land factory that takes fish as an input.

BTW, this is Newfoundland where, left to their own devices free from interference from “nanny state lawmakers”, the local fishing industry used improved technology and salt-of-the-earth rural knowhow to … deplete fishing stocks so quickly and efficiently that the cod catch fell to 1% of historic levels by the time a 30 year moratorium was declared in 1992.

The maintenance and management of the illusion that the Newfoundland coast’s core industry, and the “outport” communities like the Change Islands that depend on it, are viable, and the softening of the landing of their decline, has been a project of that annoying nanny state for like a half century at this point.

There’s no fish processing facility on those islands because there are eventually going to be no little fishing boats and no town. Stand back a bit, and it’s 185 people whose net-negative presence on some remote islands is being subsidized at a massive loss by the rest of society.

That’s a rather uncharitable take. Managed properly, fisheries are a renewable resource. Atlantic Cod stocks are recovering.[1] We need protein as a society, and there’s no reason to entirely outlaw this source. If you do, it will only increase pressure on other sources.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c0da63a0-6bc5-11e7-b9c7-15af748b6...

The 1992 moratorium to allow the stocks to the recover is it being managed, correct. It’s an example of a coordination problem that that darn nanny state is decent at handling.

But restarting fishing won’t help the outports much if at all, because the efficient solution to the problem of someone needing to go out into the ocean to get a bunch of cod changed from being a town acting as an aircraft carrier for small fishing boats into a large fishing boat that returns straight to a larger port, and the industry as a whole employing an order of magnitude fewer people.

> It’s an example of a coordination problem that that darn nanny state is decent at handling.

I agree with you, but I think you're being condescending.

I agree with you that the industry has changed and certain ways of life wont be sustainable in that context. It's unfortunate.

> I think you're being condescending.

I share some of the attitude, because farming and fishing get weirdly good branding compared to other extractive industries. This thread is full of people opining about how things would be better if only the government would stop pushing regulations they don't understand on hardworking farmers who know better. I live in the US state of Iowa and it's a truly laughable sentiment. There was a recent local public radio call in show where water quality experts and environmental engineers were told by a caller to "try riding along in a combine sometime to see what it's really like out there". These people are experts in their fields and have absolutely studied farming, but get talked down to by large agribusiness concerns like they're naive little kids.

It makes me really angry to see, when the environmental harms agriculture in my state commits are so well documented. With that context, I tend to come to these conversations with a lot of extra salt.

> These people are experts in their fields and have absolutely studied farming, but get talked down to by large agribusiness concerns like they're naive little kids.

Presentation is everything. If, say, experts started pushing regulation to require that developers practice TDD, even if we’ll justified, without consultation with the developers to hear out their concerns you'd get the exact same kind of pushback. "try programming alongside me sometime and see what it is really like"

There are plenty of exports who are actually out there in the combine, both metaphorically and quite literally. It is not a novel approach to get closely engaged with farmers when your research affects farmers, just as you would expect in any other industry. Those who fail to participate with the actual people their research involved end up looking like they are the ones talking down to others like they are little kids, and that's where you get the emotional reactions.

I object to your example, since developing with or without TDD

1. Would directly be a free speech issue 2. Doesn't involve the same kind of externalities 3. Doesn't involve a narrow range of powerful industries 4. The primary thing I hear from experts isn't mandating how farmers do things, but rather advocating for regulations on the effects of ag activity.

Now, if you wanted to start narrowing it down based on security, safety, and market cap you might get closer, but it's still not a great analogy.

Point number 4 is a crucial one - I don't need to know what farming is like to think they shouldn't be given an exception to the point source regulations other industries have to comply with, when their tile lines are dumping nitrates into our waterways. It's especially galling given the sheer magnitude of direct and indirect subsidies that I'm helping to pay for, and the fact that we've been told for years that the voluntary nutrient reduction strategy will get farmers who "know the land best" to "do the right thing".

I'm done holding hands - this isn't a question of your friendly neighborhood farmer (I directly support several through CSA, and they're great). We're talking about heavy industry that we're already paying. We should demand more for the money, period.

> but it's still not a great analogy.

It doesn't need to be a realistic hypothetical as the only relevant bit is the reaction, and we all know that is exactly what would happen. Curiously, this emotionally charged attempt to find fault in the comment is rooted in the exact same behaviour of which we speak. If I "rode in your combine" when presenting it the reaction would be quite different, but since I sit in my "ivory tower" a visceral response is prompted. Quite predictable, of course, and a perfect example of how presentation is everything.

> this isn't a question of your friendly neighborhood farmer

Nobody other than your friendly neighbourhood farmer is prepared to have you in their combine ready to show you what it is like. The people behind faceless big agri business are sitting in office towers in the big city and couldn't care less about what some small time Iowan radio station has to stay. Radio isn't where policy is set and they know it. Not that I'm sure that changes anything as if there is a problem that the friendly neighbourhood farmer is causing it needs to be addressed, but still, presentation is everything.

> We're talking about heavy industry that we're already paying. We should demand more for the money, period.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda – I guess. Thing is, the feedback loop between consumer want and on-farm results is incredibly tight. Services like CBOT provide farmers updates in real-time about what consumers want of them and any farmers who don't react will have their lunch eaten by those who pay attention. Something is holding you back, and whatever it is that is holding you back may be more significant than you are letting on.

Yeah, I understand why you would need licenses for fishing. It's a limited resource and you want to prevent overfishing.

But why would you need s license for a fish processing plant? Why shouldn't anyone (whose facility fullfils hygiene criteria) be able to open one?

You said it yourself- hygiene and zoning are two big reasons, you don't want your next door neighbour opening a stinky fish processing factory.

I assume fish processing includes fish farms, those are quite dirty...it's not just the stink.

I disagree with that. You can legislate how much smell the factory is allowed to emit. You can legislate some other environmental impacts. However let the factory builders figure out how to work with that. If the factory doesn't smell (or other adverse impacts) then let them build it.

Fish factories just smell. There's not much you can do about that.

Are you sure? Farmers have started to figure out things they can do about chicken/pig smell. Most just live with it, but when forced it turns out there is a lot you can do.

Hard to say. Canada's really funny sometimes when it comes to such things. We have supply management for dairy, poultry, turkey, and eggs. Quebec has similar protectionism for maple syrup and until last decade, the Canadian Wheat Board acted as a similar supply management role for Western Canada.

https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear... <-- supply management

https://ppaq.ca/en/ <-- Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers... much of it is in French.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board

To add a couple more: Tobacco was also supply managed until 2009. Ontario's wheat board, which continues to operate as Grain Farmers of Ontario, gave up its single desk in 2002.

Prior to NAFTA, rural Canada was in deep on the socialist end of the spectrum. This is where things like universal healthcare emerged, but along with that there was also a push towards what are effectively unions in industry to provide bargaining power amid an increasingly urbanized country (and world).

A number of industry unions were established at this time, a lot of which has lingered into the modern era. The most famous no doubt being the dairy industry, which has long been a particularly notable point of contention with the USA in trade relations. Dairy processors in Canada are encumbered in a similar manner, requiring quota to be able to operate.

"Shouldn't" requires opinion, which are best left in our own minds, but "can't" is a functional necessity of maintaining a union. If anyone could open a competing plant, with the only requirement being to meet hygiene criteria, they could destabilize other processors which is what these unions were established to prevent.

-> rural Canada was in deep on the socialist end of the spectrum.

Isn't socialism an urban phenomena? How did socialism develop in rural areas?

Modern socialism is a response to industrialization and as Canada has historically been a resource-based economy industrialization rose most prominently in rural areas (mines, for example). Early agriculture in Canada was also steeped in socialist-like thinking, such as cooperatives that were established to supply the means of production, a lot of which still exists today. With that, it wasn't long before the farmers and labourers were working together. Canada's NDP political party was born out the amalgamation of earlier labour and farmer parties.

Once NAFTA opened the US floodgates, though, it was compete or perish and that quickly changed attitudes as the old ways were largely no longer sustainable, except where certain trade restrictions were able to be maintained (dairy and poultry, for example). There has been a push towards 'Americanization' in rural Canada over the last 30-some-odd years in an effort to remain competitive.

The Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, China's revolution all had substantially rural components.

But the tldr; is that land/resource ownership, the distribution of surplus value and softening the blows of the market when your produce depends on the weather are extremely relevant concerns of rural areas

NZ had a similar pattern; farmers there had to pool resources to process and export products (in their case, wool, meat, dairy, later on fruit too). Importantly and probably like Canada these markets developed with the industrialisation of Europe and the British Empire and the organisation of labour, and followed on from earlier co-operative movements in the UK & France.

These producers set up on co-operative lines, first locally i.e. most dairy areas had a creamery or something in each village. Over time these merged to take advantage of scale, especially in the 1970s and 1980s to compete internationally with the loss of the UK market to the EEC. Even today the largest NZ dairy company, Fonterra, is a supplier-owned co-operative, though it's now big enough to warrant a private segment on the New Zealand Stock Exchange for them to trade with each other. On the purchasing side a similar pattern emerged, and purchasing co-operatives are still common especially in the agriculture sector.

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