Horrors of late capitalism

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

It's now a problem that is recognised by your own politicians.
We all were shocked when Michelle Obama had to present a program to fight obesity in your country.

Friends of mine have their cousin living in LA. So they often travelled to the US. They told me that people in New York look "normal", but more they travelled to the center or to the West, more they had seen massive amount of extreme fat people.

Living in the Midwest, I can tell you that a lot of our women seem to naturally tend towards heftiness, especially as they get older. People are less concerned about appearances here than they are on the east and west coast as well. So they don't do diets and go to the gym.

One thing, is that we have pretty cold winters, and people tend to eat more during the winter months, and gain weight. I am guilty of this myself. I like to eat calorie laden "comfort foods" like pizza and chili when it's cold out, and a lot of it.

Not to mention drinking some good whiskey with nice cheese and crackers before bedtime while reading a good book. Nothing like going to bed when it's zero degrees Fahrenheit outside with a belly full of food and the warm glow of alcohol pulsing through your blood. Aaaaah....

And the tables are positively groaning with food for the holiday get-togethers at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some people gain a bunch of weight from the holidays alone.

And people with slower metabolisms don't burn that weight back off when summer comes, unless they make a serious effort at diet and exercise, which is too much work for most people.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

A few weeks ago I've listened an agronomist telling that our modern agriculture has almost exausted potassium resources.
I don't know this branch, but according to him, it's very problematic.

Its more the phosphate component of fertilizer that's an issue, but as with oil, it turns out that as the price goes up you find that there's far more recoverable potassium phosphate than anyone ever knew.

Basically its always been so cheap that no one bothered to look for it . . . if the price goes up, people do look for it, and they find lots of it.

Phosphate mining itself is a messy business, so there are lots of available resources that we don't want to mine-- but we could if we had to.

Originally Posted by xyzde69

It's now a problem that is recognised by your own politicians.
We all were shocked when Michelle Obama had to present a program to fight obesity in your country.


It seems that in Mexico the problem of obesity is even worse.
Children drink too much soda and get diabete at 8 years old.

Affluence bring obesity, nearly everywhere. For most of humanity, most places, most times, starvation was the problem. We're wired to "not starve". Being thin meant being cold in winter, and also less likely to survive. Its a real struggle to choose not to eat . . .

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Basically its always been so cheap that no one bothered to look for it . . . if the price goes up, people do look for it, and they find lots of it.

I'm surprised that here people don't ask you the question.

Why the price goes up ?

Feel free to mention all the causes and the consequences.

Let me give you two hints.

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.
— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.
— Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Living in the Midwest, I can tell you that a lot of our women seem to naturally tend towards heftiness, especially as they get older. People are less concerned about appearances here than they are on the east and west coast as well. So they don't do diets and go to the gym.

Were people living in the Midwest in the early XXth century as fat as the actual generation is today ?

It seems that food manufactures have promotted crap food full of hidden sugar and salt instead of super healthy one surrounded by plastic instead of eco-friendly and reusable packaging.

That's typical horrors of Capitalism.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Were people living in the Midwest in the early XXth century as fat as the actual generation is today ?

Probably fatter, judging from old historical pics. Even 40s - 50s era nude models had more pudge than girls from later decades.

Remember, homes weren't heated as well in the old days. And there were no heated automobiles to drive around in. Those long heavy clothes people wore weren't just for show. And the fatter you were, the toastier you would feel during wintertime.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

I'm surprised that here people don't ask you the question.

Why the price goes up ?

That's basic market economics: you have a supply curve and a demand curve. If demand increases and nothing else changes, price will go up. Similarly if supply falls and nothing else changes, price will go up. With a lag -- varies for the particular commodity-- higher prices bring more supply to the market. Higher prices also reduce consumption-- when gas is expensive, you drive less. When fertilizer is expensive, farmers use less of it (a good thing, mostly-- we use too much fertilizer because its so cheap; its possible and indeed desirable to use much less than we do).

This is easily seen in oil: if price goes up, folks start drilling again, operating wells which were unprofitable at lower prices, exploring new areas, investing in new technology and more supply comes onto the market, and then price falls. The response of supply to change in price depends on the particular industry-- some kinds of production ramp up very quickly, others can take much longer. Restarting an oil well in Texas is a matter of months; finding new oil in deepwater and getting drilling going could be a decade or more.

Despite claims that "all the easy oil has been found" -- oil prospecting and extracting technology has changed radically in the last 15 years. We're producing huge volumes of oil from formations we didn't know existed until recently, and extracting a lot more oil from existing formations that we thought were played out.

With fertilizer, production is increasing faster than demand. You can find a review of market data at the International Fertilizer Association, here:
https://www.ifastat.org/market-outlooks

Here's a useful summary, if you don't want to read through all the data:

Originally Posted by Fertilizer Outlook 2018 – 2022

World fertilizer market conditions in 2017 were relative weak, generating poor margins for the fertilizer industry. Demand was not high, while supply was plentiful.
Global fertilizer production and trade in 2017 reached record levels for virtually all products, with a few exceptions in the nitrogen segment. These conditions were exacerbated by soft demand in industrial sectors. On the supply side, as expected, massive capacity expansions occurred in 2017, especially in large exporting countries.

{snip}

Based on a modest 1.3% average annual growth in global demand, compared with 1.6% growth in supply, fertilizer markets will remain widely supply-driven while different structural imbalances will exist between the three main nutrient segments.

In the case of phosphate and potash fertilizer, price has been steady for a long time. There was a big spike in prices about ten years ago (mostly the impact of Chinese demand entering the market) followed by a lot of new supply, and then the price crashed and has stayed steady since.

Here's a 25 year chart of the price history of DAP (Diammonium Phosphate), priced in $US per ton.



If there _were_ shortages of fertilizer, price would go up. As it turns out, its slightly higher compared with a decade ago, and supply is growing faster than demand.

Originally Posted by xyzde69

It seems that food manufactures have promotted crap food full of hidden sugar and salt instead of super healthy one surrounded by plastic instead of eco-friendly and reusable packaging.

That's typical horrors of Capitalism.

Yes it is one of the "horrors of Capitalism" that we produce far more food than people need. I prefer that to Communism, which routinely produces starvation . . . both intentionally as punishment for political enemies and unintentionally due to incompetence.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Yes it is one of the "horrors of Capitalism" that we produce far more food than people need. I prefer that to Communism, which routinely produces starvation . . . both intentionally as punishment for political enemies and unintentionally due to incompetence.

Shame on you as Yxzzzzzzzzzz has pointed out many times in his dormant "Communism, how it could be really brilliant if everyone will let me run the world as I see fit" thread, they were ALL due to the actions of fake communists not real communists

[laberbacke]

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

Don't worry-there are plenty more of that type waiting in the wings-just itching to seize the opportunity...but of course said opportunities don't occur that often...

Let us keep in mind that a certain "stable genius" is never further than 50 feet away from the launch codes to 10.000 thermo-nuclear warheads, and launching these nukes at a moment's notice doesn't even require a two-man rule.

As per Woodward's book, Trump almost prompted a preemptive North Korean strike with an ill-advised tweet last year, that thankfully didn't make it from his erratic mind to his twitter page thanks to the adults in the room intervening in time.


Most of those adults have been fired or left since then.

to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The President alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Shame on you as Yxzzzzzzzzzz has pointed out many times in his dormant "Communism, how it could be really brilliant if everyone will let me run the world as I see fit" thread, they were ALL due to the actions of fake communists not real communists

Communism would only work under a united world government, but even a much less regulative system of power allocation like capitalism isn't scalable enough to achieve such a government at our current technological level. It may work in a post-scarcity economy like the Federation in Star Trek, but before anyone invents the matter-energy replicator, I'm afraid Marx will continue to be filed in the "road to hell is paved with good intentions" column of macroeconomics.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by laberbacke

Let us keep in mind that a certain "stable genius" is never further than 50 feet away from the launch codes to 10.000 thermo-nuclear warheads, and launching these nukes at a moment's notice doesn't even require a two-man rule.

In point of fact, we have less than 7000 nuclear warheads now. The Russians actually have more.

The president can't just push a magic red button and have the nuclear missiles leave their silos. There is a procedure to follow, and he really can't act alone. If there was shared madness between Trump and all his cabinet members then there would be real cause for concern.

The "two-man" rule works further down the chain of command, and the Air Force guys in charge of the missile silo are the guys that follow that. But they cannot choose to launch at all without weapons release from civilian authority, i.e. the President and his staff. it didn't used to be that way, but at some point it was realized that an overzealous military general (like Macarthur) could start world war 3 all by himself. Not a wise plan.

[laberbacke]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

In point of fact, we have less than 7000 nuclear warheads now. The Russians actually have more.

The president can't just push a magic red button and have the nuclear missiles leave their silos. There is a procedure to follow, and he really can't act alone. If there was shared madness between Trump and all his cabinet members then there would be real cause for concern.

The "two-man" rule works further down the chain of command, and the Air Force guys in charge of the missile silo are the guys that follow that. But they cannot choose to launch at all without weapons release from civilian authority, i.e. the President and his staff. it didn't used to be that way, but at some point it was realized that an overzealous military general (like Macarthur) could start world war 3 all by himself. Not a wise plan.

There is no two-man rule with the man on top of the command chain, no one could disobey or veto an order given by the President. This entire insane system of no checks and balances whatsoever rests on someone, anyone in the chain of command disobeying a direct order by their superior officer.

Why do you think even liberals are desperate for Jim Mattis to keep his post? Because he is the first one in the chain of command who has to confirm the President's orders (without having any right to disobey), he, a man whose entire being is grounded in carrying out orders and obeying the chain of command - is the best shot we have to avoid the extinction of our entire species, if this senile narcissist should decide to go out in style when Mueller comes for him.

[SanteeFats]

Readth and heedth if ya'll chooseth.


https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/g...weapon-launch/