Really? Top voted comment on Hacker News? Yikes. Things have really gone downhill around here. Stick to tech, folks.
"During the early 1920s, for example, prices dropped a total of 20%. And during the worst years of the Great Depression, from 1930 to 1933, prices fell a total of 25%"
I mean, the title of the article was even : "Food Prices Soar Globally"
If you want to be a doomer, than at least compare it to the stagflation of the 70s, but honestly, that's probably not accurate either.
I, for one, appreciate it. This thing on HN where you have to beat around the bush and phrase your sentences objectively and in a general way, when everybody knows that you are just talking about a specific instance, saying things like "if you [x] then someone may respond [y]" when it is clear that someone literally said [x] so you can just say [y] in reply.. All that stuff is incredibly tiring to read IMHO. If you just want to call out someone's bullshit you should be able to do so in a straightforward manner and in a tone that corresponds with "calling out someone's bullshit".
If we could just be a little bit more honest here I think it would be an improvement.
Following up with your example: If someone simply states [y] then the context of where [y] came from is lost and the discussion turns into a person saying [x] and a person saying [y], which is a step too close to becoming Twitter.
While I agree it can sometimes be a bit tiresome to read and write, I say this significantly improves the overall quality of the conversations.
And in that vein, the most reasonable interpretation of the thread ancestor is "look, we've been through this sort of thing a couple of times in the last 7,000 odd years of recorded history - why does this all seem to be surprising to the people in charge and catching them unprepared?".
We know we've been here before, and it isn't that crazy to say the current state of the world looks like the prelude to WWI or WWII. Reading books like "The great depression: A diary" is a pretty decent idea. It would have been much more helpful if old mate had argued why there were similarities. Maybe with coaxing they would have. "Yikes. Things have really gone downhill around here. Stick to tech, folks." does not encourage anything half as productive as looking to the past for answers. There are bigger problems afoot in 2021 than tech.
But this is commonplace elsewhere on the Internet and you can see the results. Too often the argument deteriorates into ad-hominem mud flinging.
HN is pretty rare in its analytic culture. I appreciate it and enjoy the difference from Twitter, Reddit et al. enormously.
It is important to realize that we cannot really read the minds on the other side of the screen and a lot of our assumptions what somebody really wanted to say are just prejudice.
You should not be shocked by that, because every comment starts out as the top comment, votes only affect how quickly it drops. If you come back a few days later and the top comment is still confidently wrong, maybe you can be shocked then.
Edit: In Sweden we have/have had similar situations with temporary immigrants that for example pick berries for exploitative wages, but that’s because there’s no actual minimum wage per se - in the rest of society decent wages are ensured by strong unions (except in areas where demand is high anyway, like say for software developers).
I'll pay you minimum wage, but charge you exorbitant amounts for board and lodging and you have no choice because it's the middle of nowhere.
Or for the extra dodgy types, cash payments below minimum wage because they know international workers are less likely to know their rights and be aware of what the minimum wage is.
This, btw, happens all across the EU is my impression. Modern-day slavery very much alive globally even!
If farmers paid good wages they wouldn't need to rely on foreign labour and food prices would go up. This is a workable solution, but is is what people living in western countries want?
We have the same issue here in the UK with the NHS.. We pay NHS workers terrible wages so we need to import foreign labour because wages aren't high enough to attract domestic workers. In one sense it's great because we get better health care than we would otherwise afford and foreigners have an opportunity to get better pay in the UK (even if it's bad by UK standards).
I've found many people here get angry about what we pay NHS workers while also getting angry about NHS waiting times. If we wanted to we could increase wages which would either require resource cuts and lower output or higher taxes for the same level of care. It would also mean we wouldn't need to depend on foreign labour, but who benefits from this? By paying more foreigners now have less opportunity to move to the UK and British citizens have sub-par / higher cost health care.
Presumably, it's the same with agricultural workers. Sure you can pay more, but who benefits from it? The root "problem" is that labour is extremely cheap outside of developed countries. Developed countries can cut themselves off from that labour supply if they like, but I have no idea what the economic incentive (or benefit) of doing so is for either the workers or the citizens. Call it modern-day slavery if you like but these are consensual working relationships, which presumably wouldn't take place if they didn't benefit both the worker and the employer.
So long as labour remains cheap outside of the developed world a trade off will always exist – paying more will just mean higher prices for citizens and fewer opportunities for those living in the poorest parts of the world, but on the up side you can say you pay a fairer wage by your own national standards.
It would end supply of people who are willing to work for unlivable wages, thus making wages for low-end work to go up. The lowest rungs of society would benefit greatly from it, while everyone pay would pay for it (via increased prices).
The UK has done, it is known as Brexit.
Jobseeker agencies paid by the Federal government to 'place' workers, this doesn't factor in the jobs actually being suitable or useful mind.
The workers on unemployment are also required to apply for a quota of jobs or risk losing their benefits, even though there may actually be no new jobs to apply for.
(Australia's geographical isolation makes it difficult to attract seasonal workers, unlike throughout Europe where traveling for work is comparatively cheaper and easier.)
However, farmers have always benefited from the fact that people wanted the visa more than the didn't want to work — many workers are taken advantage of. Now that there are none of these workers, farmers are having to complete for labor like anyone else and that is costing more than they intended.
For example, people from Central America trek up at risk of their lives through dangerous drug lord territories to get to US states where they can work illegally for less than minimum wage, then send that money back to their families because they can make much more doing that than they could at home and may have no other choice.
The working and living conditions can be terrible, and answer is not to deport them or make their conditions worse; that hurts the host country as well as the workers and creates more division. Similar workers boosted the US culturally and economically because industry and governments embraced them for labor and taxes.
No locals will do the work because... Why would you. Living in a caravan for the whole summer and working 12 hours a day isn't a good deal. Maybe its worth it if you intend to move back to a county where you get much better purchasing power?
How can farmers meet the payments on their loans?
Reading 'The great depression: A diary' and looking at the world today just shocks the hell out of me. We are following it step for step and the crash is going to be devastating.