jools posted:Lykourgos posted:
It's alright everyone, I've started growing radishes in my garden. Just brought in a bucketful today. Going to pickle some and eat the rest over the course of this week. Food crisis averted.
this is unbecoming of a man of quality fyi
is it ok if you get a demure girl in a sundress to do it for you, maybe while wearing a floppy hat
jools posted:no, you need slaves. read your classics.
just enslave women and force them to wear sundresses and big floppy hats. achievement unlocked
jools posted:no, you need slaves. read your classics.
what part of what i described suggested that she wasn't. read your patriarchy threads
SariBari posted:We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.”
In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.
oday, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months—just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. Low corn yield in the U.S., the world’s most important producer, has helped keep prices high.
“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”
Yet the cost of food hasn’t quite yet risen to the catastrophic levels reached last year. Around the time of the riots cum-revolutions, we saw the food price index soar through 220 points and even push 240. This year, we’ve pretty consistently hovered in the 210-216 range—right along the cusp of danger. But CSI expects a perilous trend in rising food prices to continue. Even before the extreme weather scrambled food prices this year, their 2011 report predicted that the next great breach would occur in August 2013, and that the risk of more worldwide rioting would follow. So, if trends hold, these complex systems theorists say we’re less than one year and counting from a fireball of global unrest.
But the reality is that such predictions are now all but impossible to make. In a world well-warmed by climate change, unpredictable, extreme weather events like the drought that has consumed 60% of the United States and the record heat that has killed its cattle are now the norm. Just two years ago, heat waves in Russia crippled its grain yield and dealt a devastating blow to global food markets—the true, unheralded father of the Arab Spring was global warming, some say.
And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse. Because of climate change-exacerbated disasters like these, “the average price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices,” a new report from Oxfam reveals. That report details how the poor will be even more vulnerable to climate change-induced food price shocks than previously thought. After all, we’ve “loaded the climate dice,” as NASA’s James Hansen likes to say, and the chances of such disasters rolling out are greater than ever.
This all goes to say that as long as climate change continues to advance—it seems that nothing can stop that now—and we maintain a global food system perennially subject to volatile price spikes and exploitation from speculators, without reform, our world will be an increasingly restive one. Hunger is coming, and so are the riots.
im a complex systems analyst, you never know what mood im gonna be in or whats on my mind
jools posted:Lykourgos posted:It's alright everyone, I've started growing radishes in my garden. Just brought in a bucketful today. Going to pickle some and eat the rest over the course of this week. Food crisis averted.
this is unbecoming of a man of quality fyi
Do you even read xenophon
Limited involvement in agriculture is gentlemanly fyi, also see prince charles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht8W30gkVac#t=24m30s
cleanhands posted:SariBari posted:We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
im a complex systems analyst, you never know what mood im gonna be in or whats on my mind
Lykourgos posted:jools posted:Lykourgos posted:It's alright everyone, I've started growing radishes in my garden. Just brought in a bucketful today. Going to pickle some and eat the rest over the course of this week. Food crisis averted.
this is unbecoming of a man of quality fyi
Do you even read xenophon
Limited involvement in agriculture is gentlemanly fyi, also see prince charles
not picking the plants yourself, surely
jools posted:anyway prince charles is not a "man of quality", his cackhanded experiments in architecture, a pursuit fit for only for the toiling mason, proves that
does he actually mess around with architecture, i thought he was even more removed from it than that, where he would just comment in the vaguest terms on urban design & planned projects
jools posted:Lykourgos posted:jools posted:Lykourgos posted:It's alright everyone, I've started growing radishes in my garden. Just brought in a bucketful today. Going to pickle some and eat the rest over the course of this week. Food crisis averted.
this is unbecoming of a man of quality fyi
Do you even read xenophon
Limited involvement in agriculture is gentlemanly fyi, also see prince charlesnot picking the plants yourself, surely
have you even read the Economist?
"Lysander, it seems, had gone with presents sent by the Allies to Cyrus, who entertained him, and amongst other marks of courtesy showed him his "paradise" at Sardis. Lysander was astonished at the beauty of the trees within, all planted at equal intervals, the long straight rows of waving branches, the perfect regularity, the rectangular symmetry of the whole, and the many sweet scents which hung about them as they paced the park. In admiration he exclaimed to Cyrus: "All this beauty is marvellous enough, but what astonishes me still more is the talent of the artificer who mapped out and arranged for you the several parts of this fair scene." Cyrus was pleased by the remark, and said: "Know then, Lysander, it is I who measured and arranged it all. Some of the trees," he added, "I planted with my own hands." Then Lysander, regarding earnestly the speaker, when he saw the beauty of his apparel and perceived its fragrance, the splendour also of the necklaces and armlets, and other ornaments which he wore, exclaimed: "What say you, Cyrus? did you with your own hands plant some of these trees?" whereat the other: "Does that surprise you, Lysander? I swear to you by Mithres, when in ordinary health I never dream of sitting down to supper without first practising some exercise of war or husbandry in the sweat of my brow, or venturing some strife of honour, as suits my mood." "On hearing this," said Lysander to his friend, "I could not help seizing him by the hand and exclaiming, 'Cyrus, you have indeed good right to be a happy man, since you are happy in being a good man.'""
do you even lift?
read it all
"For myself, I marvel greatly if it has ever fallen to the lot of freeborn man to own a choicer possession, or to discover an occupation more seductive, or of wider usefulness in life than this."
go forth and grow a radish
Edited by Lykourgos ()
daddyholes posted:that shit is stupid
have fun starving while I study economics and reap a bounty of radishes
daddyholes posted:'study', cute, i have a job
Any worthwhile job involves studying.
Sorry about your bad job
Lykourgos posted:daddyholes posted:that shit is stupid
have fun starving while I study economics and reap a bounty of radishes
you see a future in ecumenical futures as some sort of celebratory epicurean excess. Just remember the best sage of Roman culture once stated that:
"The chilling care comes next. Your love's not around, for a change? But still her image Is, and her sweet name echoes in your ears. But we ought to flee these shadows and scare off The food of love, and turn our thoughts to another-Shooting the juice into any available body, Not holding it all in for a single lover, Saving up for ourselves sure pain and sorrow. If your feed the sore it'll put down roots and fester And blister over and drive you mad with trouble--Better write off the old wounds with new business, Stroll after a street-strolling trollop and cure yourself, Shift your thoughts to another while you can!
Lykourgos posted:have fun starving while I study economics and reap a bounty of radishes
we dont have radishes in the colonies. we have sugar beets. they grow in clay and taste like candy. every day is wonderful in this land of opportunity!
daddyholes posted:sorry about your no job
excuse me I am employed full time as a nobleman, weighing American souls against each another and deciding who has sinned. a most noble endeavour; Rhadamanthus for Asia, Aeakos for Europe, and Grumblefish for the Americans.
tpaine posted:you are the most boring man alive
No, I am the greatest and all of the ancient people would agree.
My people need freedom, we tryin' to get all we can get
All my peripatetic philosophers can suck my dick
Tellin' me white man lies straight bullshit