Wolves and America's urban-rural divide
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
My partner worked for Colorado Parks & Wildlife and that organization was largely in favor of this for obvious reasons.
However I do feel for some of the ranchers. Some are barely scraping by and wolves in the area is an additional stressor they have to worry about. Though I do think they are over exaggerating the effects this has had to some extent. The richest ones with the most land won’t be affected nearly as much as the small guys.
If the ranchers are barely scraping by, maybe they shouldn't be ranchers?
I mean, I spent a while trying to be a photographer but it was hard and paid really badly. So I stopped being a photographer.
Obviously that sucks and it's good to have a safety net for people to fall back on but I don't see why someone being a rancher now means they have to be forever.
“Family farms” are more impactful, but that’s including operations with 50,000+ acres and large workforces.
Loosen up regulations, but allow everyone to be accountable again, and common law will sort it out.
But, from my perspective most of what’s going on gets zero attention because it’s boring. I know a lot of small farmers who aren’t struggling because that’s not their primary income it’s just a hobby / lifestyle. Making or losing a few grand per year on a hobby just isn’t that strange, but toss growing food into the mix and people assume it’s more meaningful. Larger operations are run like any other business and some of them fail through mismanagement just like any other businesses.
Automation/economies of scale + government subsidies + many farmers having massive amounts of specialized knowledge and skills vs what amounts to subsistence agriculture is just wildly in favor of large scale operations.
This also works in reverse, (2) artificially destroying the pricing mechanism, and externalizing costs to the taxpayer.
1) https://en.irefeurope.org/publications/online-articles/artic...
2) https://www.farmpolicyfacts.org/the-bitter-impact-of-foreign...
Hunting by comparison has a vastly better ROI if you want some food independence.
I wish we had a healthy safety net in the US but people in need live different lifestyles beyond ranching.
Sure I don't recommend young people getting into it, but I don't think you really understand long-time ranchers here.
If the ranchers had what they considered to be better options, they'd go for it.
I read in a response that the alternative is conglomerate corporate ranching, that's because they have the necessary resources to protect livestock and withstand financial shocks. The article points out high real estate prices because people buy homes for recreation, it makes it hard for ranchers to hire employees who can afford to live in the area. We can import meat from nations that lower costs with more abundant housing.
Having local production is a national security defensive measure. It makes sense not to JIT our food supplies.
From what I understand, in archeology driving marginal land out of cultivation is one of the prime indicators of a civilization in terminal decline.
Advanced civilizations tend to rely on irrational productivity quite a bit, hence things like the post-COVID labor shortage.
Great, but they did and now they're hosed. Just like in this case, perhaps those ranchers shouldn't have become ranchers and thus caused themselves to go into incredible debt. But they did and now they're hosed.
One can choose whether or not that we the people should help them out when in this situation, but we should apply that with more quality.
are you saying they will all lose the same stock on a weighted basis, but rich ranchers can last longer all the while losing money till they too are small ranchers with a wolf problem?
If you have 1 employee who needs to go on leave, you're required to pay benefits (maybe a salary), the work she was doing still needs to be done, and you have to replace whoever you hire as a substitute when she comes back, then you're going to be in a real pickle. [0]
If you have 1,000 employees, approximately the same work gets done, and it's just the cost of doing business. You're able to effectively self-insure against that risk.
The wolf thing is similar. If you're poor, have one cow, and a wolf eats it, that's your livelihood down the drain. If you have 10,000 cows then even a multi-day onslaught from a pack of wolves as you work out the details of why your herd is shrinking is just the cost of doing business.
[0] That isn't arguing against maternity leave, just that saddling individuals with a society-level goal isn't often a great use of resources. In this case, instead of a communal tax for the things society values, you randomly cripple the small businesses you claim to support. Taxes hurt your reelection chances though, whereas pushing the risks to ordinary people (no matter the extent of the worst case) rallies the electorate around your welfare initiatives and concentrates the damage on a group to small to hurt your election. As a side-cost (one I assume is intentional, but I might just be a bit jaded), large companies are unharmed.
if you have 10,000 farmers with one cow each, some number of them will lose a cow to a wolf, the same number of cows that the big rancher loses to the wolves.
it's the same cost of doing business, and the devastation of a small number of individuals is made up for by the large population of 1 cow farmers who suffered no losses at all, doing thus even better than the big farmer.
plus, the one cow farmers, being people and not corporations, will pitch in and help their neighbors because that bad luck could affect any of them.
In aggregate, sure, but people make personal decisions for personal reasons, not because of aggregates.
Early in my career I had an opportunity that looked like a 92% chance (based on stats of previous people going through the program) of a nice tech job and an 8% chance of >2yrs of financial problems keeping me out of tech (1st year going into debt for a below-CoL internship type thing, 2nd year working 80+hrs/week in a decidedly non-tech job to pay off that debt, not having time to devote to portoflios and programming better). On average the program is great, but I didn't take it because an 8% chance of major life problems was too risky for my other goals at the time (early marriage, wife still in school, ...).
That's what I meant by "self insurance." If you add up thousands of events, each of which are fine on average, then the aggregate is likely fine. If one of them is devastating though, the risk of devastation is high if you only have a few events.
> pitch in and help
I'm not familiar enough with rural CO culture to comment. In other rural areas I've seen, neighbors are happy to help with labor (coming together to ward off wolves, helping rebuild broken structures, ...). They're happy to help with physical goods that are effectively a manifestation of labor (bringing over dinner as you're struggling financially or what have you). They're not going to give you a new cow though. Your finances are still hosed if the wolf gets to you.
They say the wolves are good for tourism, but would all the ranchers disappearing also be good for tourism?
Denver residents probably weighed risks of higher costs of beef with the overall improvement of the Colorado ecosystem as a net positive.
I think it’s pretty obvious the people that voted for the measure don’t feel the effects of it, just from that quote alone.
That's why there's a Senate in the US. So that the rural folks get some kind of voice in these matters when they don't have enough bulk population to matter in the House.
> No, there's a senate to get the small states in the late 18th century to ratify the constitution.
There's nothing really incompatible about these statements. The reason you needed a Senate to get the little states in on the whole deal was precisely the "populous states swamp out the less populous states" problem. I'm pretty sure the rural vs urban divide was already happening even then even if it was smaller in magnitude.
I would love to know more about the statehood population minimum you've referred to. Did some googling and didn't find much so a link would be greatly appreciated.
so you're saying Karen should get more votes?
And anyway, why shouldn't 49 deeply invested people get their way over 51 "meh" responses? That's maximizing utility. And this is usually what happens in practice - focused pressure groups, lobbyists etc press their case and get what they want, beating out average public opinion more often then not. Always has been this way.
So, a bunch of people voted to spend their money to ensure wolves are reintroduced and you are saying they do not feel the effects of it?
Obviously, there is more far reaching consequences than just money, but that means you need to listen to the experts and take their opinion. If it is just majority opinion, it is clear what the opinion is.
The people with the money voted to approve a measure the hurts the people without money.
People wonder why we have the administration we have.
Is it? In other states it comes from the department that oversees fish and game, which is primarily funded from hunting and fishing licenses.
Their taxes are being used to pay compensation for wolf kills, from the article that's the price of a single ungrown calf.
The cost to the rancher is, again according to the article, the loss of the full grown cow the calf would grow to AND a reduction (10% ?) in birth numbers and calf weights in the herd overall which witnessed the wolf attack on the calf.
The birth reductions and weight numbers come from agricultural stats which ranchers and farmers keep these past decades, it's a data driven business, and we can hope these are accurately reported.
These claims are being made but they're apparently swamping the compensation fund setup.
Perhaps if they want healthy rivers with more plant growth then they might achieve this by hunting more elk, even using elk bounties, rather than wolves that harrass and stress the herds.
Everyone can pay their own risk level in insurance, we can remove social security and Medicare and allow for optional private insurance.
Emergency care is tough, but I think it's probably better to let people die than to have someone decide to spend another's money on a third person.
Power transmission for the rural is an issue, and for urban people whose power is generated rurally. But I'm sure the power companies can charge appropriately.
Queries will cost $1 with quadratic increase.