Politics

Oh definitely, there's that tipping point that will force change haha. I wonder once people our age and younger generations start getting into politics, if we will fall to the same fates of corruption or if we will finally start making strides to reform it. Or, well, if it's too late for any of that regardless, but I wouldn't say that's a reason to succumb to evil.

The issue right now for American governments, and I assume others, is that we are so heavily tied to corporations. Corporations fund the government and the individual politicians, corporations are legal entities and it's just clear that it's an oligarchical corporatocracy and the sheer fact that a company that owns 300 companies which all own 300 companies are all legal entities which can buy in to lobby for more power than any American individual... To get corporations out of politics seems dauntingly inseparable.

That said, to sustain nearly 350million people on an already failing infrastructure designed to funnel food into deserts while the cost of producing wheat and corn products goes down all while raising the prices (presumably because funneling food 1,500 to 10,000+ miles is expensive)... It seems obvious to switch to more sustainable solutions. Why are we trucking food and boating food instead of having more local farming operations, as one of a hundred thousand other things we can pretty feasibly accomplish.

Our biggest hassle here is the one we are already facing -- food deserts and living in inhospitable places. Southern California gets all of its water from Northern California and the goes and farms, or fulfils contracts for water to Universities that are making green grass. In the desert. Utah is 2 cities surrounded by desert (I'm exaggerating, but am I?). Oregon is a series of forests, grasslands (due to human destruction) and now a few concrete jungles (our major cities). Every town on the outskirts of these are struggling because they do not produce what the community needs, so many of them struggling are farmers supporting the alt-right. Meanwhile, Oregon is the number one U.S. producer of blackberries, hazelnuts, peppermint, cranberries, rhubarb, grass seed, florist azaleas and Christmas trees, and 80% of our agriculture is exported with half of it being to foreign countries (which is fine to me IDC). Meanwhile, we also have the highest number of ghost towns where towns and cities have lost their industry and now no longer exist or have literally 15 or less people living there. I imagine that this is less of an issue in the E.U. since it's so small by comparison (in terms of ~3 of our larger states is equal to ~1 country).

It just seems odd that our priorities are so focused on exporting when our local towns could really benefit from having farms that produce food that go to them and then having an industry to work in. Since they currently don't have either...

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but it is so interconnected, I mean just 100,000 tons of hazelnuts are needed for the demand of Nutella alone and that's fulfilled by multiple different countries from a company based in Italy and they utilize satellites to view palm oil deforestation damage...

That's the kind of world we live in. Satellites for chocolate spread. Oil fracking to get gasoline for chocolate milk from Nestle. I just don't know how we get not only the U.S. government on board (although realistically we are the primary problem -- the E.U. is far better in so many ways) but it being a global issue... Like, it's a byproduct of our globalization and so how do we fully reintegrate local production when people will kill for Nutella, or do kill for some burgers.

I just hope we figure out how to move forward. We've sort of done worse than stay the course, we've somehow put out even more power consumption and pollution in the last decade.