The chart in the article does a nice job at illustrating that prices are roughly speaking back to essentially pre-pandemic levels after giant spikes. This seems healthy to me.
Considering that books are written on the subject, it's not reasonable to summarize what's happening in Florida in single comment. The subject may be easily dismissed here as trivial in the carbon tunnel vision of wondrous 'hackers', but it's very real and recognized by many.
If you're young enough, you'll see the future look back in great disgust at what has been done to this state and others. If all newcomers to Florida were constrained to visit only Disneyland, they'd probably and understandably think it was an accurate representation. Lennar is Disney, without any of the cool stuff.
Seems this is could be a direct result of warming:
"The Asian form, Ca. L. asiaticus is heat tolerant. This means the greening symptoms can develop at temperatures up to 35 °C. The African form, Ca. L. africanus, and American form, Ca. L. americanus, are heat sensitive, thus symptoms only develop when the temperature is in the range 20–25 °C."
Something similar happens with Spanish olives, and with them, olive oil. Most Olive groves are not irrigated, because they historically don't need to be, and we've had two very dry years. Production is down to 50% of what it was, and irrigating isn't cheap or easy. And again, replanting isn't a sensible choice, as the trees don't mature in a season. We can plant different kinds of corn and wheat in different places as weather changes: A winter that is a little too short, and too long, and big ag will sell you a different bag to adapt to your updated planting date with minimal yield losses. But not with trees.
Same with my own cherry trees. Beautiful flowers. Looked like it would be just as good as last year's awesome harvest. Then frost at just the wrong time. I had maybe a couple handfuls of cherries. Not even enough on the trees to warrant putting up the bird netting.
[1] https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/news/articles/update-three...
Just because "lots of people not being able to go to their job and get paid" doesn't mean all or even most were in the same situation; the numbers[1] tell a different story, and that doesn't even begin to account for the aggregate impact of nationwide loan pauses, or the irrational exuberance in equity/crypto markets at the time.
And during a pandemic, that is almost free, since many people are stuck at home with nothing to do.
It seemed like a combination of fear and restrictions, plus free money at least in the US. I saw hourly rates for physical labor jobs go through the roof, double the pre-response rates and still couldn't fill positions.
Could do the same even if you did..
Not insignificant but not the majority either.
It sucked but plans were in motion pre-covid and waiting a year (or two? Who knew back then) would have meant missing the window that minimized disrupting our kids' school lives.
Sometimes timing matters more than other factors.
However, in addition, we can see that nominal prices remain stable over multiple 5 year periods. So yes, healthy.
Too bad that this very good presentation on a decent blog has such a clickbait headline. I guess that's the world we live in. Someone somewhere is going to say this is the death of lumber or other such drama, based on just the title of the post though.