I grew up on a farm and lived around farmers. This is my lived experience.
I saw first hand farmers tear up a barley fields to plant wheat when the price got high enough.
Farming is a game of speculation. Planting last year's cash crop can be a successful strategy just like buying APPL today will likely yield good returns. Yet, it's a very hard market to predict with a lot of luck involved. Maybe only a few chase the cash crop and you win big. Maybe everyone does and you lose. Maybe there's a natural or political disaster that pumps up your crop.
There was nothing insulting, condensing, or dismissive about my comment. Highly speculative markets, like food, have booms and busts that can swing wildly. That's bad for something like food. The free market does not work with crops.
I'd argue that this should be refined to something like "farmers that speculate heavily struggle in an under-regulated free market".
Financial stability in highly volatile markets depends on appropriate planning, saving, and distribution. I say this from the investment perspective, but I would venture to guess that it also applies to hard goods like food-stuffs.
The nature of farming is speculation. It's inescapable. In a completely free market there's no way to guarantee success. Even with the best planning and saving you can't know what the rest of the market is doing and because of the long tail, you are locked in to harvesting and selling your crop no matter what.
You can speculate and be the farmer that always plants and grows wheat. You'll see booms and busts based on that. You can also switch up what you are growing based on your best guess about demand. Both strategies can be successful.
Funnily, one way to make farming less risky is a futures contract. And, if you know anything about futures commodity trading you know they are some of the most risky forms of trading.
It's true though, these regulations exists because speculation and profit-chasing in agriculture is what lead to the dust bowl and worsened the great depression. We really, really don't want a repeat of that.
The amazing thing about people failing to learn from history is that everybody thinks they're too smart to (a) learn history or (b) follow rules enacted to prevent the disasters of yesteryear.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. We've already asked you a whole bunch of times not to do this. Eventually we ban accounts that won't stop.
Sure, but I think you should strive to run your community in a way where you’re policing the “I don’t endorse X, but I don’t understand why more people don’t do X” that this comment espouses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773488
You’re busy policing this while people are out there saying “Destroy their things and firebomb their houses”. So is it just that I made a mistake in my phrasing? Should I just frame the same comments in the style “I would never endorse X, but I don’t understand why others don’t do X”?
I can do that easily without LLM assistance if you like. But if you want your community to be exclusively endorsers of violence against enemies of a chosen tribe, then you should ban me so you can keep your little tribe of Ted Kaczynski fanboys.
This is one of those cases where the word "but" negates everything that precedes it.
If you think we haven't been moderating the type of posts you're talking about, you haven't been tracking HN moderation lately*—which is fine, why should/would you? But in that case you shouldn't be taking snarky swipes at the mods based on galactically mistaken assumptions.
More importantly, you shouldn't be pointing fingers at others instead of taking responsibility for your own bad behavior. Even if you were right in what you said, it wouldn't justify your breaking the rules. Moreover you have a longstanding pattern of doing this and we've been cutting you slack for years.
I saw first hand farmers tear up a barley fields to plant wheat when the price got high enough.
Farming is a game of speculation. Planting last year's cash crop can be a successful strategy just like buying APPL today will likely yield good returns. Yet, it's a very hard market to predict with a lot of luck involved. Maybe only a few chase the cash crop and you win big. Maybe everyone does and you lose. Maybe there's a natural or political disaster that pumps up your crop.
There was nothing insulting, condensing, or dismissive about my comment. Highly speculative markets, like food, have booms and busts that can swing wildly. That's bad for something like food. The free market does not work with crops.