We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets.
Based on stats from IFAD [1]:
> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.
Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.
That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
That depends on each miner's energy costs, so long as (variable cost of energy - revenue from coins) < fixed costs. It's still negative cashflow either way, but the monthly losses have to be weighed against the cost of going insolvent and losing the hardware.
> I would say that "positive rights" is a fairly modern concept
Not really. “To no one will we sell, deny, or delay right or justice” in the Magna Carta has long been interpreted as much a positive right requiring the Crown to actually provide for justice rather than just a negative law to refrain from abusing it. There's also several clauses requiing royal justices to hold assizes in the counties and set procedures for hearing disputes which is a duty to maintain legal machinery. Heirs, widows, and wards were promised specific legal treatment, such as a widow’s immediate right to her marriage portion and inheritance, and limits on abuse by (non-state) guardians which are affirmative entitlements within feudal law.
Even Rome had the grain dole (the bread of “bread and circuses”).
Have you been living under a rock for the last quarter century?
It doesn’t take planes, ships, or missile launchers to defeat the US military. The average American gun owner is better equipped than the insurgents that have defeated our armed forces.
Define defeat here. I think everyone in this thread confuses actual defeat with indifference and political risk. If the US military could be defeated so easily America would cease to exist, no? It just loses interest and moves on. Nobody attacks the US because they would lose.
Defeat is failure to achieve strategic goals. (The fact that you’re even asking that question is a strong signal that you have no idea what you’re talking about, and that you think rhetorical questions are a substitute for critical thinking)
Anyone who thinks America would cease to exist due to foreign military action is a fool. Canada and Mexico do not have the logistical capabilities and no one else has trans-Pacific/Atlantic force projection.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
FWIW GovDeals does not care as long your scraping load is reasonable, at least they didn’t years ago when I asked them. They prefer personal scrapers (i.e. buyers looking for deals) stick to precise searches but they were okay with properly throttled site wide scraping if its a public site.
They make money not by optimizing per item profit or by exploiting information asymmetry, but by getting as many eyeballs on their site as possible to drive demand (and thus drive auction price up). They’re happy to be scraped as long as scrapers don’t bring them down because their core competency is giving municipal and state governments an aggregated platform and making the process easier from a bureaucratic point of view.
If you do the work of marketing for them (especially for free!) that’s a plus in their eyes. You’re not a competitor because they do the work of actually dealing with government departments like handling payments and paperwork.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
Based on stats from IFAD [1]:
> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.
Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.
That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...
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