The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

Re:The world is awful. The world is much better. The world c... by darth_avocado on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @07:20PM (#39282857)

> only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.

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Re:The world is awful. The world is much better. The world c... by PeterisP on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @09:05PM (#39283593)

This is generally true for primary production like agriculture, however, agriculture is something less than 5% of our effort, and for the majority of our economy we have the opposite effect where economies of scale enable much greater efficiency - i.e. more or better goods/services for the same amount of labor - than it could be possible with a much smaller population.

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Re:The world is awful. The world is much better. The world c... by kwhitefoot on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @11:58AM (#39290955)

That economy of scale comes from a few billion people. A large fraction of the world's population neither contributes to it nor benefits much from it.

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Re:The world is awful. The world is much better. The world c... by matthewfelgate on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @03:35AM (#39286015)

This is a real stupid argument.

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