RE: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232524241982831
Additional note: when foodprices rocket, that is ALMOST ALWAYS the trigger for civil unrest and revolutions. (The other is a fiscal/tax/revenue crisis, caused by government turning into rent-seeking by the rich *and* trying to fund a war simultaneously, as with the French Revolution.)
Does this look familiar to you, too?
@cstross Right-to-repair is a huge issue for farm equipment.
One of the reasons is not so much that the OEM prices are high is that the stocks of spares are sized based on the order rate against the high prices; you order it, they make it, and you get it many weeks later.
Combine "the software servers are down" with "the supply chain to the plant that makes spares is disrupted" with "fuel prices are too high for profitable farming according to the financial system" and food supply shrinks.
@cstross What I think people don't get is that the farm skillset in the US is in old people (on the whole and by and large), COVID has been hard on them, and the ethnic cleansing has taken away big chunks of the skills base.
Compelled system change in a context where you've got some patrician landowners and invalidated-axioms agribusiness and not much else is not going to hold together so well. Then throw in the extreme weather events, plural, the US has already had through the Midwest.
@graydon @cstross It's also old people because new people see the capture involved. A US farmer basically buys overpriced one use seed from a vendor that requires overpriced one use fertilizers and other products to grow, then they harvest it and have to take the price the tiny number of buyers will give them.
They were told this was where their behaviour was leading in the 1980s, so now there is no point being a new US farmer.
Even bailouts will just end up captured by the big corporations.
Charlie Stross
Graydon
The Penguin of Evil