It Will Be an Election Unlike Any We’ve Lived Through. Are the Democrats Prepared?
newrepublic.com
Like it or not, 2024 has arrived. We’re in for 11 months of hell. But the outcome is far from preordained.

The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules.

So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
    01·
    10 months ago

    you discount learning to grow crops as something that doesn’t help and can only be done on a $300k piece of land but also acknowledge the land alone isn’t what gives it value

    You don’t need to know a ton about agricultural science to understand concepts like “units per sqft of productivity”. In fact, these are more business-minded questions that someone interested in investing in farmland might ask, particularly if they were sold on some modernist “Vertical Farming” application of the science and wanted to sink $300k into a quarter acre with the hopes that it could be maximally productive.

    But then that’s where you run into serious problems. Understanding the agriculture at a professional level is very different from understanding it abstractly from the financial perspective. Suggesting that people just get a professional education in both things becomes even more untenable than the original “buy land and make it agriculturally productive” pitch originally sounds.

    if we check the CPI food items are rising faster than most other costs

    Because the underlying energy, fertilizer, and water costs are rising faster than most other costs. So the real brain-buster move is to invest in these things, rather than trying to compete with Tyson in raising chickens.

    Also sustainable and urban agribusiness demand is growing.

    Its always growing because its routinely failing. The boom-bust cycle of agriculture technology companies tracks with the rest of the tech sector. And, like the tech sector, you’re far better off investing in Cargill or Archer Daniels than going long on Eden Green Technology.