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[Lord Shonus]

In two years, we will elect 30-odd Senators and 435 Representatives. Primary season for those elections starts in just over one year. Keeping the public eye on "it is their fault" is absolutely valuable. Not just for winning those elections, but because the members of Congress facing reelection are going to be very conscious of "if I take the blame for this, I'm going to be is so much trouble with the voters. With the margins being what they are, not that many have to flip to to turn a party-line Yes into a No.

[Robot Parade Leader]

Meanwhile the democrats are sitting their arguing about who did what wrong and different smaller issues while Musk basically is the "enforcer" (that's what the article called him) to make everyone all see the same way....

What exactly would you have Democrats do? For at least the next two years, Democrats have absolutely no power in any Branch of the Federal Government. About the only thing they can do is plan for the day when they regain at least one of the Branches, and pray that there is still a Country left to govern when that day comes.

This post really isn't a response to Folly exactly, because it seems all the Democrats are just sitting there saying they can't do anything at all.

Am I being asked what I think they should do? Because I think that's the question everyone is asking Democrats. What are they going to do and why are they worth anything?
They better come up with more than nothing or else what's the point of them existing? Democrats had better quit whining, victim blame game, saying people have privilege or whatever (that does not sell at the polls so call it something else or whatever because Trump is going to make that illegal soon if he can), identity politics and all the other failed theories that people won't vote for and start coming up with some actual real solutions or else they won't exist.

Quit running candidates party insiders want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yozvQ_Uv8k

Those people aren't the decision makers in voting. Quit putting up candidates because they check whatever stupid identity politics box. Nobody cares.All that's being done there is making another losing candidate. It isn't right or fair or anything but if they don't win then it doesn't matter.

They either need to band together under a simple common message that nobody is happy with but people can sorta live with (a compromise) or just throw in the towel.

They also better quickly change their philosophy to appeal to the average American voter if they ever wanna win any election ever again, because they aren't guaranteed to win anything, including two years from now. If they just sit around moping, pointing to polls ans spreadsheets and waiting for their next chance to get into power then they'll appear to be power hungry and not caring about people, which is exactly how they don't want to look. I'm pretty sure Trump wants them to look that way.

We're sick of polls, because they don't work. We're sick of spreadsheet future palm readings.

What's that? They lost all three branches of government? No, just of the federal government. So they just forgot about the state governments and the local? How about actually dealing with individual problems and solving those as showcases of what they can do?

Hey they've proven they can raise large amounts of money, so why not use that to actually solve some issues like some hunger and agricultural problems:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wine-vineyards-sales-decline-demand/

There's California, a big Democratic place that spent a lot of water during droughts for wine growers. Now that the market for wine has collapsed, they're actually destroying the food.

"Usually, the grapes growing in Garret Schaefer's California vineyard are destined to become fine wines — but not this year. Fifty acres or 400 tons of the grapes have been left to rot on the vineyard due to too much supply and not enough demand."

400 tons of grapes! Rotting. Just all the hungry people around couldn't do anything with that somehow? Because it can't be fine wine it can't be anything?

So we have a hunger problem, a nutrition problem, and a problem for farmers. Jesus, if Democrats were any good then they'd fund raise to buy those grapes up at a discount (because they're literally being destroyed or left to rot) turn them into raisins and feed people with them. If they had any organizational skills they could make it happen and then turn that into a massive PR point.
Do stuff like that a couple times and they'd have something to run on. I don't know, something like: "Helping farmers feed people healthy American Grown food." Jesus even, "Hey we're the ones who fed people when nobody else would" and use that as a distribution/strategic messaging operation.

Do the same thing with other foods or somehow some way find a way to get some baked goods to toss those on? Anything would be better than having 400 tons (from one guy's vineyard and how many more other places with how many other tons) of food going to rot.

I don't know. It's one idea and they need a lot more if they ever want anyone to vote for them in 2 years or otherwise.

If all the democrats are going to do is wait for 2 years without building up anything, then they've already lost when 2 years rolls around. Then Trump will win even more of a majority in congress.

We don't have to come up with something for the Democratic Party to do, because that's their homework.

Republicans: "We don't give a #$@^. We're doing whatever."
Democrats: "O no, we can't do anything. If we do we might offend _____."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-gloats-trump-announces-153323030.html
The Republicans know exactly what they want and how to get it so if the Democratic Party feels like existing it better get it's act together, fast.

[hector13]

Grapes grown for wine aren’t the same as the grapes grown for food, but other than that… kinda yeah? Using them for something, even if they’re not necessarily for that something, is better than letting them go to waste.

[Robot Parade Leader]

Grapes grown for wine aren’t the same as the grapes grown for food, but other than that… kinda yeah? Using them for something, even if they’re not necessarily for that something, is better than letting them go to waste.

Yes you're right, but when you're starving screw it. Something's better than nothing.

I'd rather eat a grape or raisin that "should've been wine" or whatever than not have anything.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics/

Somebody god damn feed people. I don't care who.

[McTraveller]

What I want to know is why you'd start growing 400 tons of grapes if demand was down. Sounds like a bad business decision if you ask me. How much wine does a ton of grapes make anyway? 300 bottles?

Or if demand tanked over the course of the growing season maybe, since, you know, wine is typically aged, why you wouldn't just cask them anyway and then sell them later?  I also don't know what that has to do with politics per se, other than it's likely due to some bizarre regulation.

It's also kind of silly, because with the threat of incoming tariffs, domestic wine should be able to sell competitively...  maybe this vinyard just makes really bad wine, like in that episode of Duck Dynasty or Top Gear.

Regarding election: I don't think the Dems did anything wrong particularly. It's like how you can play a perfectly good game in some sport and still lose if the other team is better or gets more favorable calls.  I think in this election the Republicans just got more favorable calls from the public.  The Dems seem screwed: their appeals to reality don't work, because the general population wants a belligerent negotiator instead of a cooperative one, they want to blame DEI for things not going well (instead of, you know, people just being lazy), they want to complain about other people getting handouts but then scream when they don't get a handout, they want to complain about inflation being corporate greed but somehow think that if a company is taxed less that company is going to magically start giving more of its now bigger profits away...

It's really hard to pick a winning strategy when it seems like the way to win is to basically make stuff up, as making stuff up seems to be what the people want. So if you have any integrity, you basically won't win... because a voting system doesn't pick the best candidates but the most popular ones.

It's depressing.

[Starver]

What I want to know is why you'd start growing 400 tons of grapes if demand was down.

You don't "sow grapes" to harvest later in the year. You cultivate vines for years on end which (conditions allowing) will produce more or less a given tonnage each year, regardless of your desire for less (or more!) in any year with an altered demand. There might be some changes in pre-season pruning that you can do, to adjust the eventual fruiting (the number of buds coaxed into being is key to how many bunches you get), but nothing so drastic. Tearing up rows of vines during a foreseen slump would also leave you badly prepared for when slump turns to hump, and you suddenly don't have enough mature vines and have wasted your stock.

That aside, sometimes things also do happen to change demand during a sub-season time period, leaving you with a sudden embarassment of riches (or with not enough decent crop to meet a surprise demand). This can easily strike an annual plant crop as much as a perennial one. Crop management can go to pot through all kinds of events, whether it be unexpected frost, unexpected lack of frost or just such a good year for everyone that (even with the same demand) prices are suppressed and you're left with a crop that it takes more to harvest than you'd get back in its sale.


I've no particular experience with viniculture, but tangentially know something of different agricultural specialities which seem to have a similar set of challenges.

[Folly]

This grape report is only a small sliver of the food situation. It's been reported for decades that the US is dumping multiple tons of viable food into landfills every day while people go hungry, simply because food is a business and not basic human right. Healthcare, which has been in the news recently, is in the same situation, where people die every day from treatable conditions because they cannot afford the treatments.

But what are politicians supposed to do about it? Should they announce that Capitalism is canceled, we're all Socialists now? Is that the philosophy that you think will appeal to the average American?

Nobody ever claimed that polls and spreadsheets were a magic wand that could guarantee victory every time. They're tools which help to move the bar, and politicians would be fools to ignore them. Even more foolish would be wasting resources campaigning years away from their next election. We are already seeing some state governments passing bills to Trump-proof themselves against the coming storm, and good for them. But for the Federal politicians, their best move right now is just to wait for Trump to screw everything up so that they can eventually campaign on a return to normalcy.

[lemon10]

Its a pretty standard capital investment. You think demand for your product will stay the same or go up, so you invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (quite likely from a loan) into increasing production, this investment will take years (or even decades) to pay off.

Except if demand goes down then you get screwed.
---
Specifically in this case demand for alcohol (at least in the US) has been going down because people are drinking less, including for specifically californian wine, so winemakers that invested in increasing the amount of grapes they could grow got shafted.

[martinuzz]

Trump lost a lawsuit in Europe. Truth Social brand is not owned by Trump, but by a guy from Luxemburg. Trump is not allowed to use Truth Social in Europe.

[McTraveller]

The problem with that thought process is: If you "forced" people to dump their unwanted produce onto the market, what would happen?

It's almost an ex-post-facto argument. If the vintner was more efficient at gauging the market, they wouldn't have produced the excess produce anyway. And the people who are at food risk aren't paying for food anyway (for whatever reason), so there is no "economic demand" for that food.

It's only sentimental because someone happened to make excess and there are people that could use that excess, you get "but why don't you give it to them!?"  If instead the producers were efficient and had no extra, what would the argument be?

It goes back to previous observations: in order to address many of these social issues you have to have people willing to overproduce with no direct benefit from that overproduction and simply give to the people that need it and don't trade back. This goes through the whole value chain: how do you distribute that otherwise wasted produce to the people that need it? How do you make sure it only goes to the people that would otherwise buy it? What about arguments that if you gave product A to people "for free" that they might buy product B with the money they would have otherwise used on product A, and so help producers of B?  You typically only get very "indirect" and hard to measure benefits like "a more stable society" but that doesn't show up on balance sheets.

I wish the world was as simple as "oh just give the stuff that would otherwise be wasted to whomever needs it", but it's just not that simple....

[Starver]

If the vintner was more efficient at gauging the market, they wouldn't have produced the excess produce anyway.

With literally decades of foresight, you mean..?

[McTraveller]

First off, it's a thought experiment.

Second, if the investment is on the order of decades, an efficient investor will indeed have done enough planning to not be adversely impacted by a single year of demand change. You don't start a decade investment that will wipe you out with a single bad year or whatever.

That's still tangential to the discussion of what a producer should do with overproduction. Why can't they sell at a lower price? Isn't any revenue better than no revenue? What systematic issues - tax law or insurance contracts most likely - are in place that if you've already had a crop, you're better off letting it rot on the vine than you are making a final product and selling it, even at reduced revenue? Why not stockpile (as previously mentioned) for a potential future year of low production due to weather or other disaster? What is preventing them from trying to ship it to those with food insecurity?

[Grim Portent]

In the specific case of wine grapes being left to rot on the vine, they are both barely palatable as food and require an excess of effort to harvest. Grapes are harvested by hand rather than with any industrial scale equipment, just the nature of the plant, so harvesting the ones you won't use is a much greater expenditure of money and time than harvesting extra potatoes or corn with heavy machinery is because you need to bring in workers to go out and gather them all in a certain timeframe rather than 1-2 guys with tractors towing machines over a field. They could probably be used as animal feed or turned into cheap wine, but the vineyards would need to spend money on gathering them in exchange for minimal if any return on that expenditure.


Better examples of food waste are things like oranges, apples, and general supermarket produce getting thrown away. Things that are relatively easy to harvest, edible from the outset and just in excess of what the food industry, as opposed to the alcohol industry, wants to purchase. There's a legitimate argument for various government and/or charity efforts to buy excess produce or near-expiry food products from producers or markets at below market rate and distribute them as part of food aid programs, but there's an annoying amount of effort involved that makes it difficult. Produce needs shipped, cleaned, processed into an edible form (juice oranges need juiced for example as they are often less pleasant to eat outright) and someone ultimately needs to foot the bill for all of that.

Food stamps (and other similar aid programs) wind up working better than trying to buy excess food off the agricultural industry because it just subsidises the needy buying food that is already in the system rather than having to set up a new distribution system to give them excess food produce. I can either buy waste oranges off a farmer, hire a bunch of trucks to haul them to a warehouse of some kind, send them out to locations where they are needed, and then distribute them to the people who need them but can't afford them, or I can just give the people who can't afford oranges some money to buy oranges that are already in a supermarket and offload all the intermediary costs to the private sector.

[Starver]

I got 504ed on my rather extensive response to McT, which is surprisingly not far off from yours, GP. Especially letting rot, unpicked, means zero income (zero additional expenditure[1]), while picking to more or less give away (token payment at best) still costs labour, equipment use, transportation, processing, storage, distribution, etc.

I briefly pondered if biofuel processors could make use of grapes (perhaps not as good as the specific biofuel crops, but there's got to be energy and convertible molecules in grapes), to make use of an otherwise unusable[2] glut. Or maybe it's just the wrong mix of compounds (and too much of a tendency to turn to alcohols, being the wrong kind of fuel- compounds for anything beyond first-generation biofuels).

Anyway, so much for what I did write.


[1] I did pose the question of whether this would encourage molds, blights and mites, detrimental to future crops for yourself and your neighbours' operations, so pesticide use would end up higher if you hadn't got a better idea how to keep a cap on that.

[2] To be honest, if it was practically usable then someone would be using it.

[McTraveller]

Dodging 504s... you guys are basically reinforcing my point, which I realize was more complicated than it could be. The reason people don't just give "waste" food to people that need it is because doing so has a cost.

Unless you are willing to legislate to spend tax dollars to pay to feed people that need it, people won't get the food they need.  Sadly, using tax dollars to give to those people that need something they need, instead of using tax dollars to give to these people, is not a Popular Choice, so it won't happen.

I guess maybe that's why people want to make it a "right", meaning they can they sue the government for failing to allocate funds for that purpose?  I think I might have just had an epiphany of what people might mean by using the phrase "X should be a right..."