hahahahahhahahaaha that's awesome

I took his post to talk about the poor in the world, not just in america. With that in mind I think some of your comments may be misdirected. Maybe i'm wrong in my thinking this though.


I agree that it takes more management, but allowing the animals to do what is natural does not till your field for you. Besides, planting allelopathic plants or placing in predatory insects also costs money, something the poor do not have ready access to, especially in the case of the *third world.*

True, unless we're talking about countries where people not only don't have cell phones, but don't have the medical means to keep their children alive.

this is right on. US farmers are not going broke, especially with governement subusidized crops like corn. Our definition of sustainable is way different than the rest of the world.

I agree with you in terms of american farming, but when expanded to a global level, the most impoverished in many countries don't have the benefit of a government on thier side (not that I'm sure that we have that either.)

We do need to recognize food as being important and if we care about the planet and people in it, we should care about how people's farming practices are affecting the environment and others. We should also care about seeing other people fed. Whatever we can do to help people eat is important.

Many of us save money by biking instead of driving a car, just one of the benefits of being sweet and rocking a bike. However, a ton of people use that extra money on bike stuff that is unnecessary when it could be given to help others eat.

Just a thought. I'm not trying to **** on anybody's parade, but it's worth considering.

yeah a lot of what I was talking about is specific to america, but I think sustainable methods translate even eaiser to countries with less resources than our agro-industrial farming machine does. large-scale farming like we have is so unsustainable it probably couldn't even get off the ground in impoverished countries.

I was mostly countering the idea that organic is some kind of boutique food here and that people "cant afford" it. ironically, I think "organic" is just the way people farm normally in a lot of places. our crops need pesticides because they are genetically identical and the depleted soil with artifical fertilizer they are grown in renders them weak to infestations. countries like india have rejected buying non-germenating and GMO crops in favor of just doing it the old way. genetic diversity means a slightly lower yield, but a higher resistance to insects and disease.

well the farmers themselves are barely scraping by due to how the system works. subsidies exist to keep the price of corn and soybeans artifically low, since these are then bought up (cheaply) to make processed foods by large conglomerates. industrial farming in the US is *highly* depenedent on petroleum to create the fertilizer necessary to continue high yields in the same soil year after year.

My point is more that with sustainable methods you don't need government assistance, at least not like the setup the US has.

no no no no
Sustainable farming is economical. It is just that you don't cost things up right. When you have a dirty farm someone should reallly be paying to clean up the mess it makes. If you were to factor this into the equation, clean farms would be much cheaper. Don't know if you have subsidies in the US, but in the UK the average chav wants to go into the super market and buy their hormone pumped sack of fat they call a chicken and they want to pay next to nothing for it. This means the supermarkets push down all the prices, making the farmers go out of business unless the government steps in and subsidises it. So cheap chicken, but higher taxes. And don't even get me started on what one of those chickens tastes like.

this is a bike forum isn't it?

Don't you people understand that sustainability is a foolish, foolish dream that can never be attained. The proton will decay in a scant 10^72 years, so why bother? It's over man. Game over.

There is also a problem with uk farming in the fact the people want well run and regulated farms in the uk. Hence we have high animal wellfare but then want cheap food as stated above, so beef is imported from Venezuela. So ship your problems to another country and ship in cheap food.

I wish everyone would stop trying to be a superhero and save the planet, and just do their part, except that other people have different opinions, and keep their mouth's shut. Everyone has their own personal crusade they want everybody to believe in, and no one to listen to them. The best kind of change is the one that happens when no one notices.

Do your homework -- hormones aren't used in chicken production in the UK, or almost anywhere else in the west for that matter.

do you know how much pollution the production and disposal of computers causes? or even just having them on?

this thread makes me laugh almost as much as web pages devoted to primitivism.

on that note he's a chart!






http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r...acmanchart.png

My parts horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw

Indeed, you have caught my point. You mentioned a "value proposition" with regard to food. For most folks in the world, peanut butter is peanut butter. The difference between a Daewoo and a BMW is more evident. Why pay more (so goes the thinking) when the "end" product is the same? :rolleyes:

consumers see retail-level prices, as we agreed above. I'm arguing that they'll behave accordingly, and I think my argument has greater basis in economic history. For example, if YOU, chunts, bring home $1040 per month ($6/hr. 40hrs./wk., in other words, about the fed. min. wage, gross, not take-home) you can be feelin' "green" and believing "sustainable" all you want, you simply will not be able to afford preservative-free, pesticide-free, organic, "clean" food...not enough of it to live for 30 days. Not on top of rent, bus fare, utilities, etc. Why? the cost on the shelf is higher.


I myself quit shopping at Kroger sometime last year, and do 90% of my shopping at Wild Oats (Whole Foods-type grocery.) For the same items, in the same quantities, my grocery bill went up. And not a little bit. Now, higher-quality food is tastier, so I feel compelled to eat less of it, so I've lost some weight and feel better. But I don't eat so much less that it makes up for the increased cost-on-the-shelf of shoppping for better food. Did you see the Morgan Spurlock flim on tryign to live on min. wage? I can't recall the name right now, but it's eye-opening.

Um, OK. basically you've said that "clean" farmers need not compete against big corporate farmers because big corporate farmers grow industrial grade food and so they aren't making any money either.
Well, you'll get no argument from me on the double-insanity of U.S. Interior Dep't. policy and U.S. Foreign Aid Policy. Some econ. wonk at U. Chicago about a few years ago did some math and discovered that if the USA just ended foreign aid "incentives" to influence unfriendly countries to try and like us (e.g.-Saudi Arabia, Egypt) and gave money, but not food aid, to the starving nations and killed domestic farm subsidies, within 5-7 years we'd be an exporting nation again. We'd be exporting food. Farmers here grow useful, healthy things, Africans and S. Americans get food to eat, and Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe starve. The problem is an artificial, gov't-induced imbalance in the free market.

I think not. A man might be appalled at conditions and animal treatment in , for example, a commercial chicken/egg farm. That does not conflate to having the wherewithal to do something about it. Free range chickens cost more to raise. (I'm not an expert on the chicken industry. But I buy chicken. And eggs. And the good stuff costs extra.)

That's right. You can't. But you seem to want to. Certainly, we can track economic behaviours these days. But attempting to influence that behaviour with economic means (and even ethical means, though I think financial motivators are far stronger than moral ones; sorry to be cynical) have met with historically very limited success. Look at the price of gas. never mind what it is in Europe. Relative to what it has been here in the past, prices have jumped at several multiples of inflation over any rolling 5-year period in the last 15 years. All the forcasts from the 80s predicted that at any taxation over about $0.33/gal or prices over $1.75/gal, national consumtion would drop drastically. Didn't happen. Much of that increase is in the form of higher taxation. And yet, gas purchase behaviour hasn't really changed much. Even some political progressives are beginning to worry that the level of taxation necessary to get folks to cut back on gas would have severe detrimental ripple effects on our economy. Because we can't seem to ween people off slowly, it'll happen, BOOM, all at once, and that would be bad.

Believe it or not, there is an ethical limit to amount of intervention a liberal/democratic gov't can or should impose on its citizens. Jefferson said something to the effect that this gov't (the Constitution-based USA) would survive only so long as individual people wanted to be good (he said upright and Christian, I believe), but you get the idea.

Don't they taste like chicken? Everything tastes like chicken, if you just open your mind.

Bro, I *tried* to kill the thread two pages ago. The posts mutated to pre-historic proportions to survive the new, more hostile environment. This thread is like Unicron, eating other happy, peaceful threads to harvest their energon. Now, in order to extinguish this thread, we'll need to burn the BikeForums servers with nuclear fire. Bummer.

ORLY? I think you could make a good case for the idea that changes that happpen without anyone noticing are what got us into this mess. Case in point: the Illuminati. Also see: The Skulls and the Cigarette Smoking Man. They change all sorts of stuff. No one notices. And voila--problem. :D

Pirate welfare and Ninja subsidies
 

And no one said "Boo" about my online news submission.
Humbug.

Dear Thread, please die.

I believe it deserves a harty "BOO" and a trailing "Yah!"

wow...good job on stealing our logo and making some change, its rough but i still think its funny.

Sorry about the stealing. I'll be glad to remove the image if you'd like.

And don't worry, I haven't acctually made any money.

Don't lie. You made opportunity cost aka sweat equity. Your humor using a copyrighted work isn't your own, it's the copyright owners! pay up for t3h funneez or seem us in court! :p

I have a bike, why would I ride the bus? really though, I see your point, and I think it's often true, but it's not some kind of dogma. I have a friend who would tell me about the looks he'd get buying a $10 bottle of olive oil with food stamps, and he's like "what, just cause I'm poor I gotta eat like ****?" there's an attitude (and even an expectation by society) that they do, but I don't buy into it. everyone has a right to be healthy.

nope, that's not what I said. I said industrial *farmers* don't make any money (just over cost, when you factor in the subsidy). the companies buying and processing the corn make a **** ton of money. and small, "clean" farms make a little money, but they do make money, because they aren't competing directly with the big players. but you are right about the imbalance.

people want to be good, corporpations don't. and in many cases corporate charters nearly force people to make decisions in the interest of shareholders they wouldn't make normally. I agree govt should have some limit, but they do have a pretty clear role of regulating companies when their practices threaten our health.

no dont worry about it. we are actually going to put that logo up as pdf on our site so everyone can download it and print there own stickers and what not. no worries

No, they don't. It's not in the ten cmmandments. It's not in the Constitution. Health is a condition (under the category of "being outfitted" if your an Aristotelean philosopher), not an entitlement. Props to your friend for buying good oil with his food stamps. Did he have a family? My position is based in part on my understanding that many (if not most) recepients of welfare/foodstamps are families, esp. single moms w/ children. Health is not something the gov't owes one. Health is a choice, or rather, the result of a series of choices, which fall under the aegis of free will.

In principle, I think this point has merit. However, the way you phrase it seems pretty dangerous to me. the danger lies in the idea that "regulating", "threaten" and "health" can all be defined very broadly. Broadly enough to derive policies from such a statement that could do real damage to the sustainability of the nation as a free society.

I really think we (esp. we Americans) need to reexamine our attitude toward the corporation. I have a harder and harder time seeing companies as the enemy of individual happiness. Clearly, their directors occasionaly screw the pooch, and we rightly respond by jailing such men. Companies don't make a thing worth doing, but they do make it able to be done. At least with a lot of things.