The fear in non-US nations is that the US will not respect the agreements and refuse to hand over the gold if requested. Given all the Trump admin is doing, I don't think it's unjustified
It's incredibly beneficial. However many people dislike it and want to be facing the direction they are moving in, so best case is probably a train-style 4-seater. Which 2 seats facing forward and 2 backwards.
This can more some of the incredibly polluting meat (beef) industry to countries where the pollution is lower due to less intensive methods over a larger area, which is a win-win.
This is a boon to any European manufacturer and machining company.
But there is a cap: you can only bring down trade with a country to zero. This might inflict some pain in the immediate, but eventually trade is simply directed elsewhere - and you lose any leverage you have.
This is a boon for any European manufacturing and tech company. Not "just" German car manufacturers but especially machining and pharmaceutical companies.
Farming is already incredibly subsidized in the EU, and has an outsized political capital for their importance based on historical momentum. This is also primarily bad for the beef industry, which is produced in the EU using very intensive and polluting (ammonia) methods which are also bad for animal welfare. They deserve no sympathy.
> Farming is already incredibly subsidized in the EU
As it should be if we don't want to wake up one fine day in the middle of a global war with no food supply because of a naval blockade and have our children starve to death.
Mercusor nations only get lower tariffs up to a certain amount. For meat that's roughly 1.5% of EU production. That is no threat to Europe's strategic capacity.
That would happen anyway as the EU is a net importer of fertilizer.
Fortunately there's around 800kg per capita worth of food storage in the EU, so should a war break out we're not all immediately dead - just vegetarian after a period of slaughtering all the livestock that can't be fed.
We can always eat bugs that the EU authorized for human consumption. I would at least. Cricket farms are more sustainable than cattle or pig farming. I like to think of them as grass shrimp.
This kind of incentive should not block trade. If we need sufficient production capacity for security reasons, it’s ok to subsidize it, but the product should still compete on the market and surplus can always be donated to UN. There’s enough starving people on this planet.
Right now the current system is totally inefficient, with a lot of food waste, and a lot of ruined landscapes and soil because of pollution and intrants
We need on the contrary to produce less globally, but more organically, and to reduce waste and produce locally
On the contrary, it's quite apparent today that globalization and free borders have largely failed the people, and that some amount of protectionism should be put back in place
No, it is not apparent. Globalization has driven economic growth in a lot of countries, both developing and developed. There’s steady increase in HDI everywhere, decrease in extreme poverty, less hunger, better education etc etc. Nothing of that would be possible in postcolonial protectionist world. What you are talking about as reasonable amount isn’t protectionist, it’s just a sane set of domestic policies (welfare, education, industrial policy etc) that help countries to survive and grow in globalized world. There’s a difference between gatekeeping local markets and steering local industries for better competition and consumer protection. The latter just sets strict rules, but still allows global players to participate. Automotive sector has plenty of examples like that.
We're speaking of the effect ON DEVELOPED COUNTRIES WORKFORCE, it mostly has failed the people, with jobs sent overseas, and lower quality goods, full of pesticides, coming in. All that for what? Just overconsumption that mostly ends in the trash. A new world IS possible
If you want to use national security as a justification for subsidies, you need to be careful with what you are subsidizing. Only essential things should be subsidized. Non-essential things can be left to the market, or at least their subsidies require other justifications.
From a national security perspective, it is essential to provide basic nutrition to people when international trade is disrupted. Having access to food people enjoy eating is not essential. The viability of existing agricultural businesses is not essential. The preservation of cultural traditions related to food and agriculture is not essential. And so on.
It's also important to consider where the subsidies should be directed. Here in Finland, the explicit justification for agricultural subsidies has always been the assumption that food produced in "European countries that still have a strong farming industry" might not be available during a crisis.
Most of Europe has long reached a population density that makes it effectively impossible to achieve self-sufficiency, so this argument is pointless.
This is going to be a good agreement if it is policed well enough that Mercosur countries are effectively forced to raise their food-production standards (because accepting imports doesn't automatically mean they can ignore regulations on suitability). Europe gets cheaper basic staples and sells LATAM more services and value-added products.
I'd rather help our Latin "cousins" get out of poverty, than having to deal with the insanity of US culture wars.
Shipping food across the globe works great along with green deal. Such food quality is also questionable in many ways because transportability must be #1 priority.
As another commenter pointed out, beef is especially interesting. On one hand EU cries about greenhouse gas and how we should eat less meat. On the other hand goes to reduce price and increase production of beef which such moves. Pure hypocrisy.
I wonder if someone will double down on checking how Brazil is protecting its rains forests? Or will it just look the other way while Europeans eat cheap food that was grown in what was rain forest very recently?
If anything, deepening economic relationships will strengthen European influence over complex issues.
As for transport - enough of this stuff is already transported across the ocean (from LATAM but also South Africa, for example) that I doubt there will be much of a change.
The eu is a net exporter of agricultural products, what you are saying is plainly false.
The problem is rather the inputs, mainly from mineral sources, used for the production and imported from countries such as Morocco or Russia (before the war). Mercosur doesn't solve any of those problems, and will decrease the EU food autonomy as farms will disappear due to the LATAM dumping.
Meat is incredibly bad for food security. If this scenario happens we will have to stop nearly all meat production and become forcibly vegetarian, like some countries did in WW2.
You only need to control 2-3 chokepoints to hugely impact shipment - especially of perishables. The Panama Canal + Caribean + Gibraltar and you get no food in Europe.
Most beef in the EU is a byproduct of the dairy industry. Beef meat comes from culled dairy cows, and a lot of production is done on land that isn't suitable for other uses (mountains, for instance). The EU has also the highest norms in the world regarding food production, and they are tightly enforced, unlike LATAM where a lot of cattle is grazed on deforested land with no regulation regarding chemicals.
What you are saying is very misleading if not plain false.
Restricting the analysis purely to economics is a big mistake, imho, like it was during the Brexit referendum in the UK.
Even in France agriculture is a very small percentage of the GDP and jobs. But what has happened is a demonstration of the loss of sovereignty with the EU effectively imposing something against the wish of the country. So the significance is political, and we'll see if that has tangible political effects or not.
Amazing, we sell them our gadgets and in return we get growth hormone beef and other agricultural products which don't even meet 1980s EU regulations, big win indeed
God forbid we subsidize food too, it's only like the #1 priority when it comes to sovereignty after all, we should definitely not produce locally and rely on foreign countries for our food autonomy
How come folks seem to focus on beef, while IMO the real stakes are in obtaining access to important minerals. Lithium, nickel, copper, graphite, niobium, etc. are often listed. There's a nice breakdown on EC pages:
You are just fearmongering based on lies. "Hormone raised cattle", and shit like that.
South America likely has the best beef in the world (I can speak from experience having lived on both sides of the pond). Good that I might have access to real meat here for once.
> 100% definitely use antibiotics and hormones banned in europe for safety reasons
No it's not. South American meat, particularly from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil is phenomenal. It's just the perfect geography and climate for cattle.
You are just crying for protectionism. If a less than 2% quota over the European production threatens you, it speaks more about your inability to do your job properly.
Yes of course, and the energy or minerals lobbies don't have any kind of agendas of course. They're obviously working for your well being and not serving their interests
Also, one of the most corrupt country in the world will obviously play by the rules
It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.
Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.
Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What service do they provide? That’s what I was speculating about. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they’re pure parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be stronger and would ultimately outcompete.
We have all the skills to do all the things without these power systems so what are they for?
I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. I mean power of the sort that makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us into doing hard things.
My hypothesis is that we can’t self generate that due to neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history in a much slower world that rarely changed.
Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects. Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.
Managers are here to accommodate the need for cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy.
Put two people with a lot of expertise in different domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a problem you have.
That's three people. You'll get at the very least four opinions about each and every step.
Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of people.
You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in routing information from brain A to brain Z.
Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach management - they either teach the mechanism of some administration, or ways to get rich consulting.)
Problems occur because we conflate management, supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc...
P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas attached to nerd in the real world ?)
The WIDGET model of "working geniuses" is one possible answer, it does explain a lot of team dynamics in my experience.
Since no one has all six working geniuses, and you're only a genius at two, it takes a collection of people, proportional to the work that needs to be done, of each type.
> I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions.
Middle management is also an admininstrative and managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario, coördinating work among a huge amount of people within enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of effort. That's really the natural job description for PHB's.
They have blank cards. They're a minor pain to set up in their UI, you have to get the audio files from somewhere, and you have to print a sticker so it's a bit of work but very doable.
While they only had positive samples, the AIs sometimes reported cancer in the wrong location, meaning a double whammy: It failed to detect the cancer, and misdiagnosed a non-cancer.
From the paper:
> Two cancers had abnormality scores greater than 10 but were not correctly localized and were therefore categorized as AI-missed.
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