* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
* I would have dig deeper on that, but regarding the timeframe when the shutdown occurred, there wasn't a big effect on gas prices. That happened before due to the war with Ukraine and the reliance on Russian gas in general. [1] The idea once was to use cheap gas from Russia and at the same time build out renewables. The latter didn't happen, resulting in the mess Germany is right now.
* There were multiple tax reductions and I think some are in the talks now. Those were independent (and before) the nuclear shutdown.
* Probably. Nuclear should have been shutdown after gas, coal etc. I am with you on that. But the ship had already sailed long ago, before the last three plants were shut down.
Fair enough on the immediate consequences.. but shutting down these plants was a long term decision, so the long term consequences are still consequences. It is certainly true that no one predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine when Fukushima happened but Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas was well understood at the time. Which I raise only to point out that the bad things that did happen were foreseeable, the German energy system was subject to systemic risks and those risks were made worse by these choices.
It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.
I recognize that harvest windows are restricted, but a coop of local farmers having shared ownership in the bigger toys seems like it might make some economic sense.
From the article:
In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.”
Couple of things here:
- Where I farm we grow 40-50bu beans most years, rarely hit 180bu corn and, not cited as reference points above, wheat in the 60's, Oats around 130, and Canola in the 40's. All of which is to say $400/ac revenue is a pretty easy target to hit. Our costs, besides land values are essentially the same as farmer in Arkansas and things aren't all that bad for me, so what gives?
- Who honestly thinks that 25% of Arkansas farmers are going to go bankrupt in the next 3 years? (I don't know what report he is citing or the timeline so I just picked a timeline that seems reasonable.) My bet is no one.
I looked up Arkansas land values and good ground seems to go for under $5,000USD an acre, not much different from where I farm - is there some crazy extra cost that American farmers bear that I am unaware of? As a Canadian I hear American farmers whining all the time about how tough things are and I just don't get it. Things are not as good as they were in some recent crop years but overall profitability is not a big issue.
These monopolies, if they were so powerful, would be squeezing farmers so bad that land values would be dropping, not rising... but land values keep going up. Profits are being plowed into fixed assets, which means that there are profits - that's the economics of the thing, right?
OK, what secret information do you have from living in America that I don't have? I got people driving land prices up here too.. they have driven them up to roughly the same as Arkansas and I can still afford to buy land from time to time. Do explain.
It’s not secret , it’s published widely and I read it often. Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
You can’t compare the United States and Canada because we have different political systems. I mean, you guys get free healthcare. You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
> Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
Western Canada, maybe. Now try Ontario... It makes the I-states look like the land is being given away. Still, not hearing of any looming farm bankruptcies in Ontario.
> And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
It's almost as though comparative advantage is a real thing, and nations can be better off overall through specialisation and open trade.
> You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
But: isn't he paying for all that in his taxes instead of directly?
That doesn't really make sense, the vast, vast majority of farmland is not close enough to an urban area to be influenced by sprawl and get bid up to development prices.
Define "enough"? The article in question is about Arkansas and broad acre farming, there is 600+ million acres of farm in the midwest down to the delta 99% of which isn't close to a major population center. There is lots of pressure in areas of California and all up and down the west coast up to Vancouver.. but that is a trivial amount a farm land in the grand scheme of things (and specialized due to climate, water, and market access issues that don't apply to most farm land in the US or really anywhere)
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
The EU has always been on the side of free trade (agreements with Turkiye, Canada, Japan, Mercosur, the failed TTIP etc have been worked on for many years).
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
Is this an American thing? No one has ever in my life asked me "Who did you vote for?"
I have had plenty of people behave in a way that made it clear they assumed I agreed with them on political matters/issues that would have us voting the same way (sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly) but I have never been asked this question. Is it common or is it a contrivance in service of the article?
My experience may not be representative, but I think it's very uncommon to outright ask "who did you vote for" in the US. It's more common (although many people still find it impolite or inappropriate in many situations) for someone to bring up an issue that is important to them and that strongly suggests a preference for one of our two viable political parties.
The only scenario where I believe people might directly ask "Who did you vote for?" is screening for dating. I don't know exactly how common it is, but I've heard multiple anecdotes about that being asked on dating apps or first dates, because they're not interested in dating someone who voted for Trump.
Prior to Trump it wasn't really a thing, because both parties were still following the law and maintaining a functioning democracy, so people could date across party lines and just agree-to-disagree about taxes or whatever.
> Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available.
First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?
They remove things not germane to the purpose of the data they publish. For example, USGS seismic data is noticeably bereft of most seismic events that are not geological in nature or sometimes related to mining (though in some sources they often scrub the mining ones too). Events of military interest like weapons tests, some target getting blown up in the middle of nowhere that may never make the news, etc is removed.
There are a ton of artifacts that show up in other sensing systems that are indicative of interesting or sensitive things that are outside the scope of their purpose, and these too may be edited from the data.
The people deciding what constitutes an event that should be scrubbed is pretty opaque AFAIK. It is official policy and sensing companies that do a lot of work with the government seem to follow similar guidelines.
Due to the proliferation of crowd sourced and alternative sensing platforms, I would argue that this is increasingly an exercise in futility. Nonetheless people still view many of the US sensing data sources as authoritative for all practical purposes. There are countries with laws dictating that some alternative data they control must be treated as authoritative for all purposes for their country, but that US data is sitting out there.
Well, you could go to the website where they clearly state that some data is reviewed before publication and may be removed or modified. It is a frequently asked question. Or you could find an obvious counter-examples in the data, since it is public. The detection and flagging of anomalous events for review has been automated for decades, also publicly mentioned. I don’t assume everyone knows, I’ve been working with government sensing data for 20 years, but they are quite explicit if you look.
What they remove is a secret AFAICT but if you are an expert in the sensing modality it becomes obvious what should be in the data but isn’t. There are now businesses that specialize in differentially finding or reconstructing things that have been removed or modified in sensing feeds, so the effectiveness has diminished greatly.
Less flippantly, I literally went to the USGS FAQ to find this question https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-latest-earthquakes-map-show-n... where it says mining events are not reviewed, but if they are identified, they are still included! So ... I'll ask more explicitly:
Can you provide an explicit LINK to anything that supports your claim? Thanks.
Like others nearby, I’d like to see something more specific.
I’m willing to believe that in some silos (like relatively high-cadence seismographs) there might be some censoring. For example, it’s believable that siting of permanent stations is nudged away from some sensitive areas. Also, more believable in the past (say, 1980s) than the present.
Related, I’m sure that some sensors aren’t allowed to be flown over some areas (e.g., certain military bases) in the US.
However, you are claiming a broad based program of censoring US scientific data - gathered by the government or by government contractors. Like you, I’ve worked in this space for a long time. But I have not seen what you describe.
I wonder if we are working under different definitions of “censor” (see military base remark above)?
Your remarks caught my notice because I have personally worked with GNSS (lower cadence than seismograph) data, and personally know people who placed the sensors, wrote the data assimilation algorithms it uses, and set up the data pipeline. This data is not censored. (Although, famously, it was, before GPS was opened up.) I’m trying to find a way to rectify these two viewpoints.
In the past I've heard similar statements and had people point at 'cooked' raw data as evidence of editing.
'Cooked" generally means raw data with warts removed, the raw data is still available, the cooked data is what's on offer as the primary data of record - typically it may have had sensor errors and saturated bursts removed, undergone light smoothing filtering, and perhaps been geolocated to earth coords rather than retaining raw instrument attitudes, etc.
'Censoring' can mean 'no longer linked on public webpages for easy downloading' - generally the raw and cooked data is still on servers and accessable by direct FTP.
I'd be interested to know what specifically the GP actually meant by that throwaway assertion.
Is there a reason why national identity and being a high-trust society need to be linked?