2017-04-30: Working on LandCoin
2017-04-21: The perils of abundance...
http://fortune.com/2016/04/29/cheese-inventory-usa
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The U.S. Is Facing a Cheese Overload
Jonathan Chew
Apr 29, 2016
The U.S. will not be running out of cheese anytime soon, as inventories are at their highest levels in 32 years.
That's according to the latest data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show cheese stockpiles in March were the highest for the period since 1984. More than half of it was made up of American cheese, reported Bloomberg, while Swiss cheese stands at about 2%, and the rest is labelled as "other."
The reason lies across the Atlantic Ocean. Dairy product exports from Europe have been increasing over the last two years, and cheese prices have been steadily falling in tandem. The result is a global oversupply in milk and dairy products.
That means the U.S have taken advantage of dropping prices and the weakening euro to buy up more European-made cheese—imports of EU cheese rose 17% last year, reported Bloomberg, and combined with an overproduction of milk by America farmers to combat similarly low prices, and it has resulted in extra cheese.
"It's been difficult for them [U.S.] to export, given the strong dollar, and they're sucking in imports," Kevin Bellamy, a global dairy market strategist at Rabobank International, told Bloomberg. “Where the U.S. has lost out on business, Europe has gained.”
The worldwide glut in milk, however, is hitting European farms hard. Dairy farmers from Germany to Ireland are facing huge losses from low prices, and the European Milk Board has called for EU policy-makers to set up an effective program that will restrain milk production in exchange for financial compensation."The deficit situation will continue, with the only increases being in debts and number of farms closing, but not in urgently needed investments in farms," said Romuald Schaber, president of the European Milk Board, as reported by Dairy Reporter.
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2017-04-17: Posted to https://Facebook.com/groups/LVTGame/permalink/703508909831841
To answer questions of how this concept might extended to the goals of an LVT Game implementation:
1. Imagine each cell in the grid represents 1 square foot of Land.
2. Instead players choosing one of 16 colors for each cell, they instead choose to apply various types of Capital, such as part of a wheat field, part of flour mill, part of a bakery, part of a road, part of a house, etc.
3. There must also be a way to represent the Labor needed to accomplish those goals for each cell.
4. There must be a way to draw borders - similar to how we use property rights in the real world, but maybe not necessarily using traditional property ownership.
5. A way to enforce these borders throug an internal system of 'law', including cops and jails, etc., though I think it might be best to allow the players to create that part of the system themselves instead of imposing it [but am still unsure on this point].
2017-04-10: Working on BreadLandia and LandCoin.
2017-04-07: Thinking again about snowdrift.coop and how we can do it differently by changing the order of operations, putting the hlaf ceta (bread eater (consumer)) in control.
2017-04-07: The Conquest of Bread [Peter Kropotkin - 1892], derides Artificial Scarcity while promoting Worker Ownership. But the problem is much deeper. Owners seek scarcity, even when they are workers, for scarcity increases profit, and for what other reason is production if not profit?
The solution to this conundrum has eluded economists, political scientists and community builders for centuries.
2017-04-05: Idea: Use Bastiat's "Parable of the Broken Window" to show how Property for Product eliminates the unnatural desire for artificial scarcity.