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Chicken tax
- acchow 9y agoAn excellent episode of Planet Money on this http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episode-632-the-chicken-tax http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episo...
- utternerd 9y ago...but, but, but, it protects us, and stuff!
- pc86 9y agoComments like this add nothing. This is not Reddit, please do not leave these types of comments.
- utternerd 9y agoI don't reddit, but I was giving my opinion as everyone does here. If you disagree with it fine, but I disagree it adds "nothing". It's pointing out the absurdity (with sarcasm) of these types of measures, touted as "protecting the people", if you disagree please cite why.
- pc86 9y agoYour other reply to onmobiletemp is great. The goal is to have all comments on HN that - so that half the comments aren't jokes, memes, and overly hyperbolic sarcasm.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- onmobiletemp 9y agoPlease save these comments for reddit and facebook
- c22 9y agoOr better yet don't post them anywhere. There's no reason Facebook has to be a cesspool.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago> no reason Policing costs money, annoys the rubes. Besides, how else are you going to find out what the servants are up to?
- utternerd 9y agoI will expound, these types of measures to "protect the people" are absurd, farcical, and generally do way more harm than good, causing ridiculous friction in the market that helps no one. This tariff only helps the inefficient.
- Marazan 9y agoThere was also the disgraceful Banana tradewar where arbitrary US tariffs on cashmere devastated the local economy of the Scottish Borders.
- robertcope 9y agoThis is why we don't get some of the cool trucks we see elsewhere.
- ethagknight 9y agoWhat prevented any of the big 3 from copying a European or Japanese light truck design as a means of taking advantage of the tariff? With 3 major manufacturers in America, Why did small truck and van development totally stall? If I recall correctly, prior to the arrival of Mercedes' Sprinter, the Ford Econoline brand of vans, along with their dodge and chevy competitors, were typically based on truck frame designs a decade or two older.
- linksnapzz 9y agoNothing prevented them; Detroit automakers either had substantial interests in foreign makers selling light trucks outside North America, or were in some cases selling small pickups and vans designed by their own foreign divisions. They simply did not feel that smaller/lighter trucks & vans would be profitable, or profitable enough. This goes off and on; often one of the Detroit makes will go years without having an entry in the small truck market. There are advantages to using a pickup-style perimeter frame to make a van, that said, unlike Ford & Chevy, the Dodge B-series vans were unitized from the '70s on.
- J-dawg 9y ago>Largely because of post-World War II intensive chicken farming and accompanying price reductions, chicken, once internationally synonymous with luxury, became a staple food in the U.S. These intensive farming methods basically involve treating chickens as protein factories with no regard for their welfare. Packing as many of them as possible into a small space and breeding them to put on weight so quickly that their legs often can't support their bodies. I wish more people would face up to the reality that cheap meat is only possible by mistreating animals in quite horrific ways. If we treated chickens properly, their meat would still be considered an expensive delicacy. Then again, if you treat animals well it's likely worse for the environment (more land required for agriculture etc) so there's really no escaping the fact that humanity needs to eat less meat.
- blackguardx 9y agoI think humane meat production would be better for the environment. Less concentrated animal waste means less runoff pollution directly. And there are additional indirect benefits as well. Less concentration also leads to less use of antibiotics, which isn't a traditionally environmental concern. But an unwanted side effect (like pollution) of mass antibiotic use is reduction in antibiotic efficacy.
- sleavey 9y agoI agree with most of your points, but saying that treating animals well is worse for the environment is pretty misleading. "Treating animals better" should include not feeding them growth hormones or pumping them full of antibiotics which enter the food chain via the meat and ground water. Treating animals well is good for the environment, and drastically reducing consumption or not eating them at all is especially good (think of Amazon deforestation to make way for cattle ranches).
- derefr 9y agoThe effects of antibiotics entering the water table pale in comparison to 1. the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant matter that must be used to feed free-range animals, and 2. the pollution from the processes required to create the fertilizer to grow said plant matter. You can think of an animal as a way to convert a whole lot of plant matter into a little meat. Growing plant matter for feed, itself, pollutes in various ways. A given animal might be less healthy eating corn than eating grass, but if it needs to eat 10x the weight in grass in its lifetime... that animal, raised that way, is now likely responsible for 10x the pollution.
- yuhong 9y agoThinking about it, if the US economy was still on the gold standard in the 1970s, it probably would have been declined when Japanese cars and other goods took over and would be very different by now. As a side note, one of the reason we got off it was government spending, which means as the more money NSA or Medicare for example spends more money gets printed (by increasing government debt).
- tmaly 9y agoEconomics is a big thing if you do not have a background in it, I recommend the book Economics in One Lesson. It was enlightening.
- galdosdi 9y agoThe chicken tax used to tick me off. Then I figured out the trick around it: get a /heavy/ truck instead. The heavy truck market is way better than the light truck market. It's kind of insane and unfortunately yet another way US federal regulations (eg CAFE) encourage ineffeciency