alt Hacker NewsIf the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
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> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
Governments are also actors in this, and have incentivises on a different scale than "how much money this year?"; this remains true even when those governments are literally dictatorships, though as history has shown neither businesses nor governments (democratic nor dictatorship) are correct at all times, so it's nice we've also got super-national aid programs.
> If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan?
Stockpile food communally NOT through a big corporation making a tidy profit?
An African subsistence farmer makes what? A dollar a day. The average American makes $60k+ annually.
So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour?
Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar.
The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic while the poorest starve.
"Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
There is another option than individuals vs corporations though: The government could and should provide for it's citizens. That is what a welfare state is all about: useing the taxes it collects from its citizens for the common good.
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).