According to…that woman with a book about his wealth? Article says 70 to 200 btw, not 200. Sources elsewhere guess much lower (tens of billions).

US GDP is 27.72 trillion. That’s the movement of money annually.

Yes, Putin’s in charge, with his one hundred million dollars (sarcasm, not exact figure) and zero sway over the entire Western economic establishment.

If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.

Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?

Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.

Increase the number of participants in an economy, increases both supply and demand for labor, long story short. “Immigrants taking our jobs” is the stupidest talking point in human history.

Both.

There’s no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who’ve been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term “antisemitism” being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as “semitic”.

I only see one country bragging about influencing U.S. election outcomes, and it’s not Russia. You guys constructed Pepe Silvia-level theories about Russian influence and ignored the domestic corporatocracy and entire U.S. empire in favor of the media’s chosen explanation of “Russian influence”. As the saying more or less goes, nobody is immune to propaganda, including you. Modern propaganda narratives include accusations of propaganda leveled at the propaganda narrative’s scapegoats.

History will look back at the American empire and judge all its complicit civilians equally. It’s Democrat vanity that makes them think they’re not in the same genocidal boat as Republicans. You may think of yourselves in another class, but your politicians were complicit in the same crimes.

Had that same conversation with a coworker many years back. He pitched the “time is money” theory. Really, I’m salaried, this is off-hours work, I actually find it interesting and enjoyable, and save a fortune doing it, so that theory doesn’t apply very well.

Just practically speaking, hard work alone doesn’t cut it. You need to figure out how to get enough money out for the labor you’re putting in. Goes without saying, for many people that’s impossible, especially with no financial wiggle room. On top of whatever inequalities are inherent to capitalism, the government’s also gone out of their way to completely rig the rules of the game.

Right, so up until the point the USDA PLC programs get exhausted (afaict ~$25B/yr), they compensate for the difference between the price floor (not sure if we’re above or below that now) and market price. But that’s a subsidy to the farmers, not an effect on the market price - the expense comes to taxpayers. And sometimes, they scoop up surplus through CCC, then remarket it elsewhere, an indirect/artificial market mechanism, which can include exports.

If that’s what you were saying re: USAID cancellation eventually raising food prices, you have quite a few leaps of logic in there.

No, I’m still not really sure what you’re trying to say. Your original post was about the price to consumers.

And as for the relationship between farmers and distributors, that really depends on the specifics of the purchasing agreements they enter into.

That’s the part where it gets really interesting. The right mindset when approaching those tasks means doing the research to do the job professionally, yourself. You meet that threshold, and actually start going through and reworking what was already done - you start to notice all the little shortcuts and weird decisions and bodge jobs that the professionals in the past did. And now, armed with the knowledge and basic tools to do the job - you’re not talking about $200 to pay a plumber to come out and fix one leaky elbow on your pipes - you know how to isolate it, drain it, cut it, deburr it, flux it, solder it, and clean it up, for like $3.00 in parts (and for what I said specifically, a minimum of maybe $50 in tools - cutter, blowtorch/propane, deburring tool, flux brush, emery cloth). For example. And for what could be a $5000 job, you can do it yourself for maybe $1000 in materials.

There are actual methods that the professionals have developed to be certain they did the job correctly - you just have to learn them.

It depends on the market. If producing less food with the same resources costs more, prices will rise–especially on large commercial farms, which dominate the U.S. agricultural sector.

The part you quoted from what I said was in reference to an agricultural buyer being lost. There are other reasons to anticipate the costs of inputs increasing, but I’m going through analyzing factor by factor (descending analysis) and all of a sudden we’re jumping back up to the top to talk about something else.

Re: grocery chains (not USAID) and futures contracts - not sure how this ties in either, we’re talking about USAID, which AFAIK does procurement through a bidding process for direct purchases, not via futures.

I’m not sure what your main point is here. I was responding to you grouping together a labor shortage and a demand shock as - from what it sounded like - a reason to expect high prices. But demand shocks lower prices on the consumer side of food production, as opposed to raising them, because the food at that point exists, and whoever has it needs to sell it, more desperately than they were before.

True, well, I mean, take the effects I described and apply them to the respective agricultural sectors. We will very likely see price increases in fresh produce and some price decrease in corn, soy, wheat, dairy, etc. (I say “some” because the actual global demand for food hasn’t decreased, rather, the purchasing power has been decreased because some subsidization has been lost due to USAID absence).

It’s all doable with some basic tools and a little bit of willingness to endure suffering, that’s my point. And for the more specialized ones, wading through documentation and codes enough to do a job correctly (can’t emphasize that enough). Framing, roofing, plumbing, electric, siding, insulation. Can save a fortune and know exactly how well the job was done.

Try fixing something major, with dramatic improvements to your quality of life.