snayan

Do you have any visibility into why or how only is viewed negatively by some populations? I am still struggling to connect that dot, and I am a native english speaker. But I suspect that may be part of the problem? Are their some languages where the translation of only isn't parsed quite the same or something?

I don't think anyone is saying it's untoward, just sycophantic to keep entertaining the tantrums.

While this may be the prevailing POV in the present, it certainly wasn't always this way. Expressive individualism is an anomaly in the grand scheme of human history.

It's literally a card game. You can argue the utility and use case are stupid, or wildly less than the cost would suggest, but it's silly to say there is no utility, even if most collectors don't play the game.

Yes, but that is a problem independent of the discussion in this thread.

Are they getting harder to distinguish because AI videos are finding their soul, or because non-AI videos are losing their soul?

Yeah, our psyches evolved in times when the environment was relatively stable for your entire lifetime. Rate of change in the environment just keeps increasing, and our wiring just isn't made for that. Our internal prediction engine is less and less able to model the future based on the past. Painting with broad strokes here, but I think generally this is the upstream cause of a lot of the increased mental health issues we're seeing.

I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.

Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.

Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.

Yeah, that's a fair point but it still seems like a huge delta.

And my rabbit hole over the last couple days has led me to spend a bunch of time looking into Fonterra, which is the farmers processing Coop that happened in NZ when they got rid of their quota system. It's turned NZ into the largest milk product exporter on earth, and their whole strategy is processing milk into more shelf stable products. Cheese and Butter is about 20% the remainder is skim milk powder, whole milk powder, whey protein, and caseins.

Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients, all of which have massive demand on the global markets. Whether we do much of this in Canada, I am not sure, but, feels like a missed opportunity if not, and likely partially caused by a lack of necessity to innovate due to the artificial moat.

Eggs, haven't looked into but presumably similar to milk in that it can be processed into shelf stable powders.

But, on the poultry front, beef, pork, etc, are all in the 92% of farms group, managed by subsidies, so, while chickens have a shorter lifespan, I don't see why we can manage cow and pork farms with subsidies, but not chicken.

Agreed on all fronts. But, if we're entering an era where we have to be less reliant on our trade relationship with the US, we need innovation to compete, and the status quo of Oligopolies in so many fucking industries really needs to be confronted imo. Doubt it'll happen, but it's an increasingly ugly situation.

Yeah, I know that's a colossal elephant to deal with. I mean, I would hope that whatever reforms could lower costs enough that if you did a model similar to Australia, and had a temporary levy to pay for the buyout, the end cost to consumers, even with the levy, was lower prices than prior to the change. That was the case in Australia.

And I know nothing about the market, but I can't imagine it's overly liquid, the fact that all farmers would receive cash for their quota, would definitely be attractive to most. It's already heavily financialized and borrowed against.

And then, you could even do something like NZ did where all the dairy farmers got together and created a coop for processing, NZ is now the largest exporter of dairy in the world! If some of the quota levy went to getting this off the ground, you'd help the farmers retain a bigger piece of the pie with vertical integration of the supply chain. And, hopefully also compete globally and become net exporters, increasing the size of the pie.

I dunno, I have no idea what the fucking solution is, but after spending a bunch of time in the weeds of this shit over the past couple days, I am like, we have created a monster, this can't be the most effective way to achieve the underlying goals of the program.

Yes. I am well aware of this. I just find it hard to believe that dairy, poultry, and eggs are some special snowflake type of farm that requires the quota and supply chain management, while every other type of farm, we can manage with direct subsidies.

For reference, there are about 190k farms in Canada, 8% of those farms are dairy, poultry, and eggs whose viability is ensured with supply chain management. The other 92% of farms, are managed with direct government assistance (AgriStability, AgriInsurance, AgriInvest, and AgriRecovery). The latter costs the government $1.5-$2 billion most years. While the recent report on supply chain managed farms suggests the cost born by Canadians to be around $10 billion. Even if that number is off by an order of magnitude, we're looking at $1 billion for 8% of farms, and $1.5-$2 billion for the other 92% of farms.

All I'm saying is it seems like the solution to help ensure viability in dairy, egg, and poultry farming is wildly inefficient and merits a look from first principles. Is there a solution to achieve the same outcome at a lower cost? The world has changed drastically since the policies were implemented in the 1970s.

I admit I am far from an expert, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading about this shit out of curiosity in the past couple days. Broke my brain when I saw the numbers around the costs born by canadians in the checkout aisle due to supply chain management.

That's just a convenient talking point for our government. The model in Canada is effectively a regressive tax on consumers in the checkout line. It conveniently allows for our government to talk about how they don't subsidize farmers, and have a clean budget on that front, but I would prefer to see a model that was actually funded by government taxes such that it could be a progressive tax born more by wealthier Canadians rather than lower income ones being hit hardest.

I also have doubts that our current model is the best way of achieving the goals we had in mind when the programs were created in the 1970s. I know the error bars are quite sizeable, and it's not quite apples to apples, but recent studies that suggest our supply chain management in dairy, eggs, and poultry, costs approximately $244pp per year in higher costs. That's over $10billion per annum Canada wide, equivalent to 2% of the federal budget! I have been discussing this with someone in another thread for days, and the more I look into it, the more I feel like we really need to take another look at the implementation of this program. Dollar amount breaks my brain.

Hah, no worries brother. Yeah, I agree keep bovine growth hormone the fuck out of our supply. And yes, its poultry, eggs, and milk products wrapped up in the $10 billion.

I agree generally that just looking at cost often misses the bigger picture, but it's the magnitude of it here that gets me. $10 billion is equivalent to 2% of the federal budget!

We spend a similar amount in the budget, $10.7 billion, to ensure the viability and sustainability of all our crown corporations with the exception of CMHC! So, a national railway, a national postal service, a public broadcaster, museums, infrastructure entities, finance institutions, housing institutions, export support, tourism, bridges, agricultural finance, and thirty other random Crown things… All made viable for approximately the equivalent of the cost born by Canadians to support chicken, egg, and milk producers.

And, it's not like this is our entire food supply. Massive error bars here, but based on the average consumption numbers for Canadians in the egg, poultry, and dairy categories, which, the dairy part is admittedly quite fuzzy... But my back of the napkin math suggests that's somewhere between 10-20% of the caloric/nutritional needs of Canadians, so it's not like it's securing the majority of the food supply for Canadians, we're very much still dependent on the global food production.

Ultimately, I believe what it comes down to, is that a different system that would likely be more effective at achieving similar outcomes, would force some level of support onto the federal government and hit the budget. Whereas the current system allows the government to say, we've created a system that doesn't depend on government subsidies! Yes, we've done that, but it's effectively a regressive tax that hits consumers at the checkout.

Anyhow, I am not an expert on food supply, so I don't know what exactly a better solution would look like. But, we're currently all in on a system that was developed in the 1970s, and it has a feeling of 'too big to fail'. That to me, is a recipe for horrible inefficiency, and given the magnitude of the numbers, I can't help but feel that we'd be well served to take a deeper look at the situation and consider whether there's a better way to achieve the outcomes at lower cost to Canadians. Hell, even if we determine, nope switching over to a subsidy model paid by the government would cost the exact same amount for the same outcome, at least it would achieve a more equitable outcome for Canadians in switching from a regressive to a progressive tax.

Yeah, I actually think we're relatively aligned here. I'm not saying burn it all down, free market, fuck the goals.

I'm just saying, and I know this is an estimate, but if you take the $244/annum/pp estimate from studies as to the cost of supply chain management... you're looking at about $10 billion per year.

Broadly, I think the goal of our supply chain management is to preserve a robust domestic dairy, poultry, and egg industry, maintain emergency production capacity, support rural communities, smooth out extreme price volatility, and ensure farmers can survive downturns.

I'd just be very surprised, if we asked ourselves, ok, how can we most efficiently achieve the above, and actually tried to solve the above problems from first principles today, we'd land on the current solution. It just feels like we should be able to achieve a much better outcome for $10 billion dollars, or we should be able to achieve the equivalent of the current outcome for far less than $10 billion.