• Miller@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This doesn’t make sense, stocking up on food doesn’t make more food. There is x amount of food regardless if you buy it in one shot or at regular intervals. All this advice will do is manufacture false short term shortages. If there is real danger the advice should not be to stockpile but to dig up your garden and grow food.

    • horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      This doesn’t make sense, stocking up on food doesn’t make more food. There is x amount of food regardless if you buy it in one shot or at regular intervals.

      Yes, but it will help people weather the short-term crises that are inevitable. Imagine there are floods or fuel shortages or cyber attacks which cause shortages in supermarkets; your stockpile of pasta and tinned beans prevented you from going hungry for a week.

      • Miller@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Stockpiling by an individual is very understandable but it is essentially an antisocial act. You are removing resources from the common cache at a time of perceived crisis and which you might not require. The decision you are making is that your continued ease of living is worth the potentially unnecessarily increased suffering of others.

        • horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 month ago

          This is describing stockpiling before the crisis. If anything an inherently pro-social act; leaving resources available for others when the crisis hits RTFA.

          • Miller@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            What resources are left available after they have been depleted by a few stockpilers, magic resources?

            • horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 month ago

              Are you being intentionally dense?

              There is not a finite amount of wheat in the world, there is not a finite amount of beans. If people buy a bit more now, it signals producers to produce more of these things. And in the short term, generally speaking there is some slack in supplies of these things so buying a little bit more now doesn’t generally affect availability or prices to consumers. Slow and steady stockpiling is fine. It is called preparedness.

              This means that when crisis hits, you don’t need to go out and panic buy food because you have some at home stockpiled already; this means that people who really need what’s left on the shelves have a better chance of getting it.

              Do you want me to explain basic arithmetic next?

              • Miller@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                By your reckoning there should never be any shortages because the supply chain adjusts, but the system is imperfect and shortages do occur and are accentuated by unnecessary stockpiling, and in the extreme famines result which might have been avoided. You also need to look up finite.

                • horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  1 month ago

                  Got it, you’re a troll. Because stockpiling grain totally wasn’t the process which allowed humanity to settle, develop agriculture, and dramatically increase in size. It definitely causes famines, not an abundance and reliable source of food.

                  • itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 month ago

                    It’s so weird to me that people spend their time trolling strangers on a random corner of the internet. Like, do you really have nothing going on in life? Do you enjoy just being kinda annoying? I tell myself they are all ten year olds cause otherwise it is just too depressing to think about

                  • Miller@lemmy.world
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                    1 month ago

                    You are confusing crisis stockpiling by an individual with communal common storage. The thread is about incorrect advice for people to stockpile based on temporary perceived external threats, you yourself mentioned baked beans and pasta and now you are conflating that with humanity storing excess grain historically. Your argument has become desperate and absurd and so has that of your mini-me alternate username below. I think this article is false, governments usually expressly warn against stockpiling by the individual because of the false scarcity and price inflation it can cause. But all of that of course goes over your head because you buying up all the baked beans in Asda is the same thing as early farmers creating grain stores for winter.

        • Talcosis@lemmy.zip
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          1 month ago

          During a shortage, sure. Before a shortage, stockpiling means you don’t have to make the shortage worse.