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It's wild to me that people see problems like this, and think to themselves "Yeah, it's okay that we overwork people for no money, but there's no other way to t

• gjsman-1000 3y ago
  I challenge you to walk up to the nearest farmer, look at their (edit for clarity: accounting) books; and not realize that what you are asking, is just as impossible as asking 3 engineers to write a competitor to Windows. I know enough about their lives to know that your armchair quarterbacking is an absurdity.
  • jiggawatts 3y ago
    I guess that settles it then: modern slavery is a-okay.
    • gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Reminder that the median income for the US is $31K per year. If they earned only $24K per year, they are doing better than 25% of earners. Welcome to America. Where SV folk would scream slavery if they lived as a quarter of the nation does.
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • xracy 3y ago
        oh, well, I guess since everyone is doing it, that makes it okay, and we can't imagine a better world. Let's call it a day, accept our lot in life, and move forward. I hate the sentiment that because things are bad somewhere they should be bad elsewhere. Every time I bring up benefits that I have that others don't they start by saying "you shouldn't have those" instead of saying "I should have those too." It's like we're playing a weird game of the prisoner's dilemma, but there's not actually any benefit for the person defecting.
      • seanp2k2 3y ago
        Just for some perspective, the low-income limit for a single person in SF, Marin, and San Mateo counties is $104,400 for 2023, and not much lower ($96k) for Santa Clara county where much of “SV” exists. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/low-income-median-levels-18164328.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/low-income-media...
        • b112 3y ago
          There really should be a very fine tuned 'wage vs cost of living' number, which takes effort to look at grocery cost, along with housing cost, including buying a house, electricity, basically all basics. Maybe some blended rate, where you look at "buying housing for a family of 4 + rented apartment for a bachelor" and blend, to get living costs. When I did research compared to where I live, I discovered a person makes more living near Ottawa, ON, making $70k USD/year, than someone making $250k/yr US in .. say, Palo Alto. This was of course primarily due to housing costs, although this was in 2020. Things have changed dramatically in most of Canada (re: housing) in the last 3+ years. Of course yes, most certainly, if you buy + pay off a $3M USD house/land vs a $300k USD house, you have more money to retire on. You could theoretically move to a lower cost area, and retire with style. Yet who wants to (potentially) leave their kids who might settle in the region too, and additionally, all their friends, associates, etc, etc. Any yet buying doesn't take into account "What if a person just rents for their entire life", which can happen. Nor does it take into account things such as property tax, and other associated housing costs (water tax, etc). To give an idea of the massive cost differences, just the property tax on a typical $3M Palo Alto home is 4x my mortgage on my $250k house. My mortgage is $800 USD per month. Palo Alto monthly property tax on $3M home? A little over $3000/month. Paying 4x as much just in property tax, compared to my mortgage? Well, that money is gone, gone, gone in terms of 'life savings', and is pure additional cost. For the record, my property tax is about $120USD/month. Let's call it 25x more for Palo Alto property tax. Again, there have been dramatic changes in Canadian housing pricing in the last 3 years. There are also differences in how peoples are taxed. For example, I probably pay more federal and provincial income tax, and a little less property tax, with money tricking down from those levels to the municipal level. Yet, I also get free health care (quality debates and issues not relevant, just a point), $10/day state funded day care, and pharmacare coming soon. So it's really hard to equate across national borders in terms of living costs, but I guess my point is living costs can be so dramatically different. I suspect that making $100k in Palo Alto makes a person much poorer than someone making $25k in rural Arizona.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • alistairSH 3y ago
    That’s why there needs to be government intervention. No single farmer is going to do the right thing because market forces are driving them to thin margins and poor behavior.
  • xracy 3y ago
    please reread my comment. You have missed the point of it, if you think I'm asking farmers to fix this.
  • belorn 3y ago
    There are multiple problems, some which are real problem with the industry and other that are problem more inherent with that kind of farming. Farmers who do human smuggling and steal labors passports in order to force people to work for nothing are a problem both about regulation and enforcement (and ethics). It the exact same problem in construction, cleaning, prostitution, and so on. Those industries can exist without human smuggling, and the bad actors only serve to make it worse for everyone. Berry farms in Scandinavia do however have a problem with distribution. Most farms are located very far away from the consumer, with the distributor taking more than the major portion of the profits. The accounting can quickly look a lot better when a farming do not need to sell to gross distributors for 1/10th of the value of the product. Solving cheaper distribution and storage are possible, but is more similar to the issue of creating a competitor to Windows. Margins for farmers do not need to be that thin, but creating storage and distribution chains are complex when dealing with such perishable goods.
  • patcon 3y ago
    Isn't the farmer the wrong person to ask? As in, the margins are razor-thin because the competitors (merged conglomerates operating) are operating vertically-integrated at scale, driving prices so low that only they can skim enough to profit from participatong in the market. So the farmer has no variables to change because the problem is not in their jurisdiction, but rather the government's, no? (i.e. breaking up giant agri-businesses, or taxing them and redistributing to subsidize small operations) But I recognize there's also geopolitics of food, so there are many layers I don't understand :)
    • spiderice 3y ago
      Why should we be subsidizing farmers that can’t do it as cheaply as these conglomerates you mention? It seems like in other industries we say “tough luck, find a different job” if you can’t compete. Genuinely wondering what the difference is here.
      • jterrys 3y ago
        Because usually you try to prevent race to the bottoms.
        • eszed 3y ago
          Technically that should be "races to the bottom". There are multiple races, not multiple bottoms. A race to the bottoms, however, does sound like a wholesome family activity. (Apologies for the grammar nerdery; I mainly want to make the joke.)
          • jterrys 3y ago
            No it's cool. I respect it. Thank you for correcting me :)
      • hughesjj 3y ago
        I mean, first, we've been subsidizing farmers since the dust bowl/great recession. As to why consolidation of our nations food supply into a small cohort of conglomerates is a bad thing.... I mean do I really have to expand on that one? I'm all for setting price minimums on agriculture IMHO. We have such an excess of food already that, combined with food banks and stamps, I'm not concerned about people going hungry. Most of the expensive shit is from processing and logistics seems to be the biggest issue with food scarcity (there's a reason meals on wheels exists)
  • DanHulton 3y ago
    I don't feel that you're replying to what the parent poster is actually saying. It's not about asking farmers to make these changes by themselves and without any sort of extra compensation. It's that we really should be looking at the entire system. If farmers couldn't afford to pay reasonable wages _and_ turn a profit, then, at the system level, the externality of those lost wages is being paid somewhere else _by_ someone else. We're just not recognizing that externality or worse, it's being hidden. And frequently in situations like this, where people aren't being paid livable wages, they turn to theft and other crimes. So one of the "externalities" we're talking about here is an increased crime rate. We then pay police to try to curb that, who are remarkably inefficient at reducing crime, so we have to over-pay to try to achieve that goal. If, instead, we formally recognized that externality and addressed it at the source -- for instance, like the parent poster suggested, by subsidies (which would almost certainly be cheaper than the increased police budget that addressing that externality would otherwise demand in our current climate) -- then farmers could pay reasonable wages and keep or even increase their margins to a comfortable level. It's not in our best interests to keep farmers poor or just scraping by either!
• badpun 3y ago
  US is the largest food exporter in the world. It would make sense to start with no longer subsidising exports, and putting more subsidies into food that is actually consumed in the country. This would kill the export part of the industry (whose main beneficiaries are rich people owning large farms), while increasing wages of farm workers. Also, the US's Midwest has one of the best lands in the world for farming, there's zero need to farm in the deserts from the country's (not the rich farm owners') perspective.
• CM30 3y ago
  Exactly this. If your company cannot afford to stay open if it hires a certain number of staff, then it simply cannot afford to have that many staff and should hire less (and find a way to do that work with tech or what not instead). If it can't work with less staff and isn't practical to run, then the business itself isn't viable and should probably close its doors. That's true of everything from banks to shops to restaurants to tech companies and farms; if they're not viable businesses, then either the proprietor pays to keep them open out of their own pocket, or they shut down and make room for companies that are viable. And yeah, if society values the work enough but it isn't profitable to do, then the answer is that the government or some other organisation funds it, not that people get exploited or rules get relaxed to make it 'viable'.
• scotty79 3y ago
  The problem is that to provide farmers with livable wage the people would need to pay a lot more for food, so they would need to have money to pay for food. I hope that with universal basic income we will be able to bring back market forces to food production instead of relying to artificial incentives for the farmers.