The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers.
They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.
They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.
When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.
Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork!
He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.
Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em!
Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.
Make a deal with big ag to cap food price growth in exchange for allowing ANYTHING they do to farmers. They can squeeze as hard and in as monopolistic a manner as they please on that end.
Kill two birds with one stone.
Farmers have a lot of equity that corporates could be given in exchange for lower food prices.
Prices aren't everything. Excessive pesticides can make cheap produce have negative health effects and thus a worse value. Poor soil chemistry can make cheap produce less nutritious and thus a worse value.
~78% of farmers voted for him. They are directly responsible for their own outcome in this regard.
Canada supplies 75-80% of US potash imports, and potash is a non-substitutable input in agriculture; without it, crop yields drop significantly. China no longer buy soybeans from US farmers, and instead now sources from South America; they have made a token 12M ton purchase, as they promised.
> Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.
> “So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide [My note: farmer suicides are 3.5x-4x the general population]. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.
> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.
This is entirely self inflicted, which to me, is wild and a case study for history. This was a collective choice, intentionally made.
Why do these rural states (several of which have a total population less than that of major metro areas on the coasts) have two senators?
The senate is an antidemocratic institution. The compromise that every state gets two senators made sense when we were a weak, newborn and vulnerable nation, with a total population of less than 3 million people. Not anymore. The founders likely didn't want people like Ragland to have the vote anyway. They were not salt of the earth farmers they were largely plantation and merchant and legal elites. Ragland is the dumb mob rule they feared.
Maybe the 17th amendment was a mistake. At the very least, why stop there? The constitution is not sacred, as established and as written, the founders would have given Ragland less representation.
Perhaps in the spirit of actual democracy and modern reform, it is time to revisit the idea that every state gets two senators. Given what is really going on here is these states vote against their own interests and then rob blue states to cover up the shortfall. Why are blue states tolerating it?
It would be one thing if it was just about money, but it's not. These populations are being deputized in a culture war that tells them to hate you while they take your money. They need a reality check.
Meta-answer: whenever you ask a question "why...<crazy thing> is done in the US", the answer will turn out to be "something something slavery" or the related "something something racism".
This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history.
The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're here now.
There has (now) been a 50+ year trend of declining living conditions and real wages. People are getting loaded up with debt essentially to make wealthy people even wealthier. Everything has been getting worse.
This was the turning point of the 2016 election. Trump's talk of being an outsider (he isn't), draining the swamp (he didn't) and talking to actual voter concerns was what propelled him to the nomination. And the victory because Hilary Clinton was such a dogshit bad candidate who thought she could win running as a generic corporate Democrat. You know who else run with populist messaging? Bernie Sanders. A nontrivial number of people who voted for Bernie in the primaries voted for Trump in the general. This might confuse you if you think of this as a purely Democratic-Republican divide. It wasn't and it isn't.
So why do farmers keep voting for Trump even though he now has a record of screwing them over? Because he speaks to their interest and their problems where Democrats don't talk to them at all.
2024 was a textbook example of how to intetnionally run a campaign to lose the biggest lay up election in history. No real policies. Ordinary people do not care about tax credits for small businesses. That doesn't help anyone who is struggling to afford rent and food.
So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country? The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.
The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
> So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country?
If there are less voters like this over time, yes, I put forth that will help the country (~2M 55+ voters age out every year, ~5k per day). Whether the country is worth saving, we can save for another thread. If someone won't change their mind, nor their vote, you've arrived at an impasse. You can only wait for time to work. Again, very unfortunate.
> The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.
"They made me do it." is not an argument. You vote for the chainsaw, you get the chainsaw. My understanding was that conservatives held personal responsibility as a core belief. Am I mistaken? Better luck next election cycle.
I take no pleasure in discovering that this is reality. It brings me great sadness. "We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." -- Maurice
No candidate is owed votes. Candidates must earn votes. If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did. And what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes and simply say "Trump bad" (which he is). That's not a policy platform. And people, rightly, rejected it.
If that creates problems for you (and, let's face it, it creates problems for everyone but the billionaires at this point), you should direct your anger at the candidates not the voters, particularly when the candidate was dogshit with no policies.
Old people dying isn't going to solve this problem. They're being replaced by young (particularly male) voters who are disenchanted, disenfranchised, disempowered and disillusioned because they have nothing to hope for as society is crumbling around the and they have no future.
If you want more people to vote for your candidates, they have to offer them something. It's really that simple.
People not voting for someone who doesn't speak to their issues and offers them nothing is quite literally the least surprising and most predictable outcome.
> what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes
Do people really believe this? That there are no policy programs from Democratic candidates? Nothing on healthcare, childcare, eldercare, education, housing, energy? Just no promises at all?
I ask because that is obviously false, but it seems to be a common misapprehension. I'm wondering what candidates could do beyond talking about their policies at length (which they do) that would get people to believe that they have policies.
> That there are no policy programs from Democratic candidates?
Does increasing ICE funding count [1]?
> Nothing on healthcare, childcare, eldercare, education, housing, energy? Just no promises at all?
Literally none of those things. The Democratic Platform is "Trump bad" and to be a nicer, gentler face on fascism.
> I ask because that is obviously false
What policies do Democrats actually stand for?
This is so obviously true that you need look no farther than the NYC mayoral election. Zohran Mamdani came from nowhere to win the the Democratic primary on a fairly simple platform of universal childcare, cheaper food, faster and free buses and freezing the rent (on rent stabilized apartments). Those are all concrete policies. Less than one month into his administration and we hvave a pilot program for childcare [2].
And what was the Democratic Party response? Democratic Party leaders (eg Schumer, Jeffries, Booker) would not endorse him, despite him winning the primary. Some tepid endorsements came late. Instead the Democratic Party with a wink and a nod ran a spoiler candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who previous had to resign in disgrace from being governor after multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
Think back to what Kamala ran on. Not stopping the genocide, not even calling it a genocide (both positions of which were highly popular with the base, even more than a year ago), a tax credit for small business, having the "most lethal" (her words) military and an immigration plan that was indistinguishable from the Trump 2020 immigration plan, including building the wall that the Democrats had previously campaigned against. She mentioned "price gouging" one time. That was hugely popular because it was the one thing that went to the affordability crisis. But she never mentioned it again because Wall Street didn't like it. Nothing about healthcare or the cost of rent or education. Not a thing.
> I'm wondering what candidates could do beyond talking about their policies at length (which they do)
Who talks about affordability, housing, healthcare and inflation "at length"? There are a handful of Congresspeople who do (eg AOC) but it's not a party position and certainly none of the out 2028 presidential wannabes talk about it.
Here's a little test for you. Whenever they talk they'll usually say that someone (usually Trump) is bad. Maybe they'll say a certain situation is bad (eg high rents). Whenever a candidate or ap olitician does that, the very next thing out of their mouth should be a solution. "Yes rents are high and I'm going to tackle this by doing X, Y and Z." Every problem should be followed a solution. If you don't hear a solution, it's just empty platitudes.
But the Democratic Party doesn't do that. They don't like making promises because then they can't be held to promises they never made.
> ... that would get people to believe that they have policies.
Progressive policies are poular. Democratic pooliticians are not. One of my favorite examples of this is Missouri. Trump won the state by 19. There was a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage, an obviously prograssive policy. It won by 15. So this progressive policy outperformed Kamala by 34 in a deep red state. Put another way, 17% of the voters who voted in 2024 in Missouri showed up to vote for Trump AND to increase minimum wage.
This isn't a messaging problem. The Kamala campaign spent over $100 million in Pennsylvania and didn't move the needle. It's a platform problem.
> If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did.
Voters aren't immune from failure. Voters fail when they stay home and don't bother to vote at all, when they remain ignorant/uneducated, when they vote for a party/team instead of the candidate, etc.
It's tempting to let voters off the hook when candidates lie to their faces but ultimately it falls on voters to be aware of the track record of the candidates, be educated on the issues, and use a little critical thinking. I certainly can't feel too bad for them when they reelect a candidate who already screwed them over once already. Everyone knows the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again."
Hard disagree. Voters are never at fault. It is incumbent upon the candidate to give the voters something to vote for.
> ... they stay home and don't bother to vote at all
Because they had nothing to vote for. Candidate's fault.
So what you've touched on is what's called "lesser evil voting", an idea that it is the voter's responsibility to engage in harm reduction. For too long the Democratic Party has relied on this to do nothing by just being a gentler face on fascism. Some might say you're rewarding that behavior by turning up to vote for them anyway, even when they offer you nothing. Millions stayed home in 2024 because they were offered nothing. That's the only power voters had and they exercised it. And I said at the time that the Democratic Party will learn nothing and change nothing as a result of a devastating loss in the easiest lay up of all time.
> Voters are never at fault. It is incumbent upon the candidate to give the voters something to vote for.
It's the voters job to vote for the person they want in the position. If you're prepared to ignore the reality of the deeply broken two party system that means writing in someone. The end result is the same as not voting, but at least it's a clearly deliberate act and can't be dismissed as or assumed to be laziness, apathy, or equal approval of either candidate.
> an idea that it is the voter's responsibility to engage in harm reduction.
If you refuse the responsibility for doing the least harmful or most beneficial thing for yourself and the country, who do you think is going to do that for you?
> For too long the Democratic Party has relied on this to do nothing by just being a gentler face on fascism.
Even if every election was strictly a choice between a fascist and a gentler fascist (and that's not remotely been the case) do you think that it doesn't make any difference which one wins? Do you think that there will no difference in the amount of death and suffering that results? Even if you were only given the choice between there being more or less death and suffering for yourself and others in your country do you really think the smartest move is to not bother to make any effort whatsoever to reduce that harm?
> Some might say you're rewarding that behavior by turning up to vote for them anyway,
I understand your frustration with the party, but you don't have to vote for them either. You can write in someone else. You can write "Fuck all of you" in capitol letters across the entire ballot. That at least would be a protest! If you don't even show up you're not saying anything except that you're fine with them doing whatever they want with you.
I mean, pardon the analogy, but if I were locked in a room with two rapists who wanted to fuck me in the ass, I like to think I'd at least make some effort to defend myself. If I couldn't or failed do that I'd hope that I'd at least voice my displeasure. I sure wouldn't silently bend over and present my asshole willingly to the meanest rapist in the room because I didn't want to "reward" the gentler one. I wouldn't just close my eyes and open up for whoever got there first. That's just giving up.
> Millions stayed home in 2024 because they were offered nothing. That's the only power voters had and they exercised it.
That wasn't an act of power, it was the opposite. The only power voters have is their vote, and everyone who stayed at home didn't even make an effort to use it. They gave up the only power they had leaving themselves powerless. If I were some evil fascist trying to rule over a population it's pretty much the best outcome I could hope for. It'd be the people giving me their permission to do anything I wanted because nobody even cares what I do. An actual vote for me in one election is a vote I could lose in the future. No vote at all would mean I'd already won.
> And I said at the time that the Democratic Party will learn nothing and change nothing as a result of a devastating loss in the easiest lay up of all time.
Which only shows how stupid the "do nothing" strategy is. Why should they change anything if no one cares about the outcome anyway? You can't make the democratic party be what you want them to be by letting the country get destroyed out of spite. Maybe you can't change them at all, but if you have any chance to do it, it'll be by voting for people in that party who most represents what you want it to be. It's either that or enough people have to vote outside of the party and we know the obstacles to that.
Democracy in the US has been a joke. It's a two party system where both options suck. There is a massive amount of voter suppression. There is open corruption and bribery by the rich and by corporations. Inaction isn't going to fix any of those problems. Voting actually could.
When Trump ran for president, nobody wanted him in power. The republicans didn't want him. They had their own preferred candidates. They didn't want him so much that they pretty much got everybody they could think of to run against him. The wealthy didn't want him either. They'd been making money hand over fist and they liked things the way they were. Trump threatened to mess with the system they'd built for themselves.
Everybody pretty much saw him as a clown. They weren't even wrong about that really, but in the end he got the votes. Maybe that wouldn't have happened if so many on the left didn't just stay home, but because it did we know that (at least back then anyway) voters in America actually had the power to change things. The ones who used that power were not the ones who stayed at home and pouted. The powerful establishment lost because people voted for something different. Something stupid, yes, but different and the result was (and has been) chaos. In my opinion Sanders should have been the left's trump. It was working too, although he was being actively undermined by the party. Today, it's candidates like Mamdani who I'm interested in watching. It doesn't matter if it has to start more locally than nationally, as long as the "fascists" getting votes get gentler and gentler.
There's a non-zero chance that America gave up the power to vote by electing a dictator. That's always been an option after all. Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with, but if the USA is lucky enough to still have the option to vote for who ends up in power I strongly suggest that people take it.
You must be young because nobody who lived through his campaign would say that.
He was anti-war. In 2007-2008. Only a few years when the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the Iraqi War Resolution, something that helped sink Hilary Clinton's 2008 bid. He ran on universal healthcare. He ran on renewable energy. He ran on increased LGBTQ rights.
He won Iowa by 9 doing this. To a war hero. Kamala lost by 13. To a convicted felon who had a track record of screwing over farmers.
Completely agree. Trump is selling the wrong solutions, but many people hear a truth when he tells them they are getting screwed. Democrats insist that business as usual is great and simply extort voters: "It votes for a broken healthcare system, a broken electoral system and increasing income inequality or it gets the orange fascist again."
Biden / Harris also essentially offered voters the Trolley Problem. If you don't pull the lever Trump will fund genocide. If you do pull the lever, we will also fund genocide, but maybe less genocide.
If your campaign can be described as an instance of a classic ethical dilemma, maybe the problem isn't the voters? At the very least, if Democrats 2024 campaign rhetoric is to be believed, funding genocide was more important to them than maintaining U.S. democracy.
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords
Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.
Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.
You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.
UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.
There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.
You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.
These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.
Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures
We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.
There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market
Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.
The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.
We can have our fresh family farms back, but you're paying double for your food. We have the system we have because people value cheap/affordable over everything, regardless of what they upvote on the internet.
This is like the education or gun debates, or basically any quality of life message you might have. It's almost impossible to get your message heard. There will always be some non-reason why everything is oh-so-different in the US. It's very frustrating to live here with all the matter-of-fact head-in-the-sand know-it-all bloviating.
Meanwhile our teachers are suffering enormously, our education is terrible, our roads are terrible, we are poisoning ourselves with substandard food, we have extremely expensive but relatively poor healthcare to deal with the problems that creates, we have no time off and are labor slaves where maximum effort for minimum pay is the norm, and half the country has become violently oppressive to the point of absolutely thriving off the suffering they perceive inflicted on others. And still, we know better - of course - because we are Americans.
There are some very wealthy people who have spent massive amounts of time and money making things they way they are. They've got things set up in a way that benefits them. They go to great lengths to keep Americans convinced that the way things are can't be changed and it's an uphill battle trying to convince Americans otherwise. Even if most Americans wise up they'll still use the resources they have to stop the changes we want from happening. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it won't be easy.
I've lived in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Just being honest about my experience here, but the cheap stuff (like potatoes) are cheaper in the EU but the expensive stuff (like beef[0]) are more expensive.
When you take quality into account it’s no contest. You literally can’t buy American beef in the EU because it is so contaminated with hormones and antibiotics.
This is a pretty common claim, but in the US you can buy similarly 'pure' beef and it's still cheaper. I prefer the EU approach for general food production, requiring every stage of the process be clean enough that you don't need to chlorinate chicken, for example. But, Americans do have access to the same quality food at much lower prices (and they earn more besides).
That’s not really true, but we’ve incentivized mass scale farming. I know farmers who can sell produce at competitive prices growing in Upstate NY, but they only get a couple of harvests of most crops, even with advanced techniques that let many crops get planted in March.
The government spent lots of money to turn the California and Arizona deserts into the garden of America. New Jersey planted subdivisions.
A better way to do this to remove the transportation subsidy for big businesses. Trucks do most of the damage to roads (4th power of weight) but consumers bear the brunt of road maintenance. If big vehicles paid their fair share of oil taxes for roads, it will even the playing field for local farmers and businesses.
> if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
Maybe. The subsidies that we always hear about is a portion of insurance premiums paid by the government. Presumably if the government pulled out of the subsidy, the risk/reward of insurance would tilt towards not having it. Many farmers already forego having insurance even with the reduced price.
Which would mean nothing until something bad happens. But when something does happen, that means some big farms could collapse. But it would also mean small farms are just as likely to collapse right beside.
I expect you are ultimately right: That once the collapses occur, it would be hard to rebuild a large farm before it ends up collapsing once more, leaving farms unable to ever grow beyond being small again. But is that what you imagine for small farms?
Of course, that's all theoretical. In the real world, the government wouldn't let the food supply fall apart like that. If farms didn't have insurance, it would simply come in and bail them out when destructive events occur. It is a lot simpler, and no doubt cheaper (the subsidy is offered on the condition of being willing to give production data back in return), to implement a solution ahead of time rather than panicking later.
I'm for subsidizing agriculture that improves long term soil quality and abundance. i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.
It's tricky to implement any subsidy in a way that's not exploited by big companies. But a place to start would be not subsidizing synthetic fertilizer and pesticides or anything that degrades soil long term, to encourage farms of every scale to focus on natural long term soil improvement.
> i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.
From what I'm seeing out there, the big row croppers are largely leading the pack in bringing sustainable improvement to soil quality. It has become abundantly clear that, even if you aren't concerned about the soil, that these modern practices are actually leading to higher yields, improved efficiency, and ultimately greater profitability. — It is small farms that are often struggling to adapt, lacking sufficient capital and/or cashflow needed to transition away from their old tools and methods.
Not true - the fix is to start enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act, and every other piece of legislation already on the books which was written and passed by congress for the purpose of eliminating private monopolies. Walmart and other monopolies are using their monopoly power to put small businesses of all kinds out of business and raise prices at the same time. Here's some info on exactly how they do that: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secret-scam-drivin...
> Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.
People shop where they can afford to shop. Walmart is famous for not paying people enough to shop anywhere except walmart. The fix is to make sure that people earn a living wage and to actually enforce the Robinson–Patman Act and aggressively go after price fixing. Suddenly walmart's prices won't undercut the mom and pop places and they won't have to charge as much to just barely survive. Opening a store that isn't part of some massive chain would stand a chance at being profitable and affordable. More competition leads to more innovation and more opportunities.
That's not to say that rich people don't enjoy a deal, but poor people shop where they can afford. I try not to go into Walmart, but when I have its hard not to notice that the people shopping there don't look very wealthy (In fairness, people with money who buy things at Walmart tend to order online). Even Walmart admits this (https://www.businessinsider.com/wal-mart-says-food-stamps-ar...). 1 out of every 8 Americans is on food stamps, Many of those not on food stamps are struggling to stay off of them. A lot of Americans would love to pay a little more to shop at nicer places.
Dang. What are the good options here (without throwing people under the bus)? IMHO, the patents on seeds has been an immense pain to the midwest and should be made void with a phase out plan that starts with the most common seeds (which are causing legal havoc by mixing into neighboring farms via wind).
Can you elaborate on the "immense pain"? I don't disagree that monopolies in big AG are a huge problem, but last time I saw someone make this point, I looked into it, and there were relatively few cases of big AG suing small farmers over stuff like this. My understanding of one of the main cases that gets referenced in these discussions was where a farmer bought roundup ready seed, promised not to use it to breed, per standard EULA, then bred with it, and intentionally selected offspring to breed further which showed the roundup ready trait. Am I missing something?
While some farmers certainly did as you described (and while personally I disagree with the whole concept, leaving that aside for now), others just caught wind drifted seeds on their land.
The issue was that Monsanto et al would often put the onus on small farmers to prove they didn't deliberately breed the seed. Being civil, the issue became more "balance of probabilities" versus "beyond reasonable doubt". When you have Monsanto's army of lawyers, and a "generous" offer to "settle" for a licensing fee and agreement to purchase, then many of those small farmers rolled over. Often the ones that ended up in court were those who did actually have either sufficient resources, or were sufficiently pissed off to "stand their ground".
I'm not a farmer myself- I just live in the midwest and hear small farmers complain about it all the time. There's a constant threat of legal action they feel about these seeds with patents making it into their fields, and they have no real capital to fight even frivolous patent lawsuits.
It's not just that; being a very small undifferentiated supplier in a volatile commodities market with very high fixed capital costs, unpredictable/uncontrollable production capacity and long production lead times is a very difficult business, regardless of the industry.
> The sticking point like always will be media playback (read: DRM/widevine). That is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die. If Kagi can legally and technically solve the widevine integration on a non-standard Linux webkit build, they win. If not, it will be a secondary browser for documentation reading only.
I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them. Hopefully, that day is sooner than later.
It's pretty frustrating that peacock (and all xfinity streaming) doesn't work and you can't get 1080p or 4k on most other streaming platforms.
Hmm good point. The issue is also the distinction between widevine L1, i.e hardware-backed DRM and L3 (the software backed one).
Correct me if I'm wrong but to stream 4K, studios require a hardware root of trust and a verified media path. They need a guarantee that the video frames are decrypted inside a trusted execution environment and sent directly to the display without the OS kernel or user space being able to read the raw buffer.
AFAIK Windows and macOS provide this pipeline at the OS level. OTOH, ChromeOS gets 1080p/4K not because it has massive market share but cause the hardware and boot chain are locked down by the almighty Google.
On desktop Linux, where you have root access and can modify the kernel or compositor to inspect memory, there is technically no way to guarantee that secure path to the studios' satisfaction. Am I right in this assumption?
Unless the DRM providers change their threat model, which sounds unlikely to me. Or distros start shipping signed and locked-down kernel modules that prevent the user from being root, which is again unacceptable to most (me included), we will likely be capped at 720p for some time now.
Yes. I tried using Chrome on Linux just to watch movies that I purchased on Youtube at HD/4K and watched as the stream was limited to 240P. IMHO regardless of what Google says in their ToS they have already broken the trust agreement by not providing what I paid for. Regardless of what the studios want, all this does is push me back towards piracy because once again the industry fails to understand that piracy is a accessibility problem, not a financial problem. If I pay for 4K then regardless of where I want to watch that movie it better be in 4K, that's what I paid for. Google hides behind their ToS to get around the fact that they sold me a product then failed to deliver.
> ChromeOS gets 1080p/4K not because it has massive market share but cause the hardware and boot chain are locked down by the almighty Google.
ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux underneath just very stripped down and Googlefied. It's the same BS that Bungee pulled with Destiny 2 and Linux. If you so much as dared to run Destiny 2 on Linux you would be banned. Stadia used Linux but because Google controlled the platform they allowed it to be played there.
These are the games they play to make other platforms that aren't MacOS/Windows appear like they are incapable but in reality it's just corporate greed and grift.
I don't think there is a difference. They can need or want or demand and it doesn't matter. They don't have the right to weaponize my computer against me to fulfill their goals.
As far as I understand, on the mobile implementation not even the OS can access the buffers. So even with root you can stream L1 content but not screen record it
As do HDCP strippers. Judging by the availability of 4K Netflix content on torrent sites, I do believe the only people being prevented from watching their content are paying customers acting in good faith.
This is the way. Widevine is a cancer that only serves to lock down the browser market to a small handful of web engines that have been approved by Google. If your browser isn't based on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari you're out of luck.
Most people will not use a browser that can't open youtube videos and they know and exploit this with extreme precision.
If you are already paying for the streaming service that offers the content and they restrict you from watching because of your OS are you harming the industry by downloading it? Nothing is stopping you from buying a 4k webcam and recording your computer monitor.
You're already paying the monthly fee to stream it, you're just streaming it in a more friendly way. Granted if you cancel the service, you should delete the content.
Many won't though and that's the problem but that problem is caused by the fact that you're being restricted in the first place.
There are still other, non-trashy ways to record your screen. Motivated actors have no problem with such restrictions, as happens with everything. It is for exerting control over the normal users' behaviours and habits.
This isn't even a strictly Linux problem. On Windows, Edge has by far the best encrypted streaming playback using their PlayReady DRM. Many services like Netflix will only do 4K for Edge. Chrome is often 1080p, and Firefox was 720p last time I tried it.
Same situation on Mac where Apple's Fairplay DRM enables 4K playback in Safari, but Chrome and Firefox have the same limitations as on Windows.
Last time I tried to use Firefox on Windows as my daily driver, video playback was one of the biggest gaps that made me go back to Edge.
> I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them.
The entirety of personal computer viewing doesn't have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them.
Fundamentally higher resolution playback happens on platforms like Windows and MacOS because they have closed, signed driver stacks, same as anti-cheat in games. Not because of the browser. So it will only ever happen if someone forks Linux to a more restricted, closed browser stack and offers that as a product (which is basically how a cable set-top box works in practice).
> I'm hopeful that some day Linux will have enough users where the media companies can't ignore them. Hopefully, that day is sooner than later.
Does YouTube and Netflix work? That's the lion's share right there. A lot of users probably don't even care about the other streaming platforms. I'm probably being too optimistic, but I think the upcoming Steam machines will have a significant adoption of the linux desktop. Microsoft is certainly working 'round the clock to alienate their users.
If you're using a "common browser" on Linux (Firefox/Chrome) Netflix should work, just at 720p for most of the content. If you're using a minor Chromium based fork the customized Chromium package provided by your distro it probably doesn't have Widevine by default.
The same is true for running a vanilla Chromium build on Windows, the big difference is the quality of content you can get on Windows can be higher than 720p in the mainstream browsers (as long as the rest of the system is compliant as well).
One correction to my message above: apparently Chrome on Windows is still 720p for Netflix, it was Edge that had 4k support. Or you can install the Netflix App on Windows too.
I agree it's a bit silly, but I think a lot of people don't really care about quality so long as they can watch it. I guess that'd also explain how Netflix gets away with such low bitrates for even the "high quality" versions of content.
I don't think I've seen Netflix comment on this since a long time ago, but back in 2018 it was:
- 15% PC
- 10% Smartphone
- 5% Tablets
- 70% TVs
In terms of viewing hours https://www.statista.com/chart/13191/netflix-usage-by-device.... So definitely most viewing on TV, but still something like 1/3 of households with TVs don't have a 4k TV at all (as of 2025) in the first place. Hard to definitively say more since Netflix & others don't seem to publish the numbers often.
I'd love to find out I'm wildly wrong though and have a bunch of people willing to push Netflix to have higher quality content... but so many people don't even seem to pay for the premium plan with 4k (anecdotally, Netflix doesn't seem to publish numbers on that) that I'm not holding my breath as I sit here with UHD Blu-Ray quality instead :D. It seems like most people just want something quick to turn on in the background than something to really sit down and bask in every detail of.
Yeah, and that leads to the DRM'd content in YouTube (like Movies & TV) not working for me in Kagi on Linux. Unless you're saying I've done something wrong and it really is working for you... in which case I may have some tinkering to do to find out what I did to break it :D.
One correction to my message above: apparently Chrome on Windows is still 720p for Netflix, it was Edge that had 4k support. Or you can install the Netflix App on Windows too.
Most of this article seems unnecessary in 2025 and is very specific to Arch.
For most distributions you can simply install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers and you're good to go.
There is generally no tweaking or command line changes necessary for Nvidia to work on Wayland, including multi-monitors with different resolutions and refresh rates.
In Arch, the current NVIDIA driver automatically sets KMS and the kernel command line and hyperland changes are no longer needed. Basically it just works now.
How does the distribution make this an issue? You can always freeze drivers and install old ones. I get that it might not work out of the box, especially with rolling-release distros like Arch, but you also don't want rolling-releases for an older machine.
I know it's also me that's the issue. But I just want a Linux distro that works. I've had enough of people saying "Nvidia has been getting so much better recently!" and "It's completely usable now!" when the newest drivers break my whole experience. I would use arch, and have tried about 5 times, but it's too complicated to get the driver I need and I won't even bother at this point. I've just accepted the fact that I'm going to use Mint until I get a desktop. Maybe I'll try to get help on a forum somewhere but idk, I think I would need personal help.
This is perfectly valid. But I would add that Arch is not that distro. Even though projects like Endeavour and Manjaro are trying that I don't think it'll ever be the case. You have rolling-releases and even though they've done a great job you're never going to be the most stable because of this.
But I think Pop is the best distro for this. System76 is highly incentivized to do exactly this and specifically with nvidia drivers and laptops (laptops create extra complications...). I can't promise it'll be a cure-all but it is worth giving a shot. I would try their forums too.
I totally get the frustration. I've been there, unfortunately. I hope you can get someone to help.
CachyOS just works for me. Highly optimized Arch working flawless and without hassle.
I know my ways around Arch, and in the about two years using CachyOS I never needed to intervene, with the exception of things like changed configs/split packages. But those are announced in advance on their webpages, be it Arch itself, or CachyOS, and also appear in good old Pacman in the terminal, or whichever frontend you fancy. It's THE DREAM!
What's lacking is maybe pre-packaged llm/machine learning stuff. Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF? But at least Ollama is there. LM-Studio also has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR, or otherwise. But these are my only complaints.
> has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR
I don't think I'd call the AUR "compiled by yourself". It's still a package manager. You're not running the config and make commands yourself. I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary? That doesn't work very well for something like llama.cpp. You'd have to deliver a lot more with it and pin the versions of the dependencies, which will definitely result in lost performance.
Is running `yay -S llama.cpp` really that big of a deal? You're not intervening in any way different for any other package (that also aren't precompiled binaries)
> Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far.
> Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past,
Yaourt is an aur helper?
> Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?
Sorry?
>>> I know my ways around Arch
Forgive me, you said this earlier and I think I misunderstood. What does this mean exactly? How long have you been using Arch? Or rather, have you used Arch the actual distro or only Arch based distros?
I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
I have used plain Arch in the past, for several years, no derivatives.
At that time there existed an AUR-helper called Yaourt, which I made heavy use of. But often in haste, sloppy. Which lead to many unnecessary clean-up actions, but no loss of system. Meanwhile I had to use other stuff, so no Arch for a while. When the need for using other stuff was gone I considered several options, like Gentoo, but naa, I don't wanna compile anymore!1!! (Yes, Yes, I know they serve binpkgs now, but would they have my preferred USE-flags?) Maybe Debian, which can be fucking fast when run in RAM like Antix, but I had that for a while, and while it's usable, Debian as such is bizarre.
Anything Redhat? No thanks. SuSe? Same. So I came across CachyOS, and continued to use that, from the first "test-installation" running to this day, because it works for me, like I wrote before. Like a dream come true.
Remembering my experiences with Yaourt I abstained from using the AUR. And that worked very well for me, so far. Also the Gentoo-like 'ricing' comes for free with their heavily optimized binary packages, without compromising stability.
> I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
Yes.
Are we clear now?
Edit: I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.
No rollback necessary, ever, so far. Same goes for pacman cache.
After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc.
I've used Yaourt too. Things are a lot better these days. Yay is the standard. But I think the biggest help of helpers is updating.
Yes, we're clear now, but are you surprised by my hesitation? Because having that experience would imply you've had a lot of experience compiling things the long way. Running makepkg -si isn't that complicated. It's as easy as it gets. There's no make, no configure, no cmake, no determining the dependencies yourself and installing those yourself too. I don't get the issue. Take too long? Not happen automatically?
> I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.
lol yeah I'm sure they're not needed. Not hard to recover usually and yeah I agree, things are stable these days. I can't remember the last time I needed to chroot (other than an nspawn). I only snapshot data I care about these days and it's usually backed up remotely too. I've learned my lesson the hard way too many times lol.
# /etc/systemd/system/pacman_auto_update.timer
[Unit]
Description=Update automatically because ain't nobody got time for that
Documentation=man:pacman(8)
[Timer]
OnCalendar=weekly
Persistent=true
# Optionally wake system up to upgrade
#WakeSystem=true
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
After=network-online.target
# /etc/systemd/system/pacman_auto_update.service
[Unit]
Description=Update automatically because ain't nobody got time for that
Documentation=man:pacman(8)
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman -Syu --noconfirm
Joking aside, I do use a version of this except I just run -Sy and I do it daily. I find it does help speed things up.
> Gimme binaries
Definitely not going to happen on Arch and this runs completely counter to what you claimed to like about CachyOS. Distributing binaries is not going to result in a very optimal system... Which is what caused those red flags to be raised in the first place
>>> After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc
Btw, I don't suggest doing this. If an update breaks your system then you don't have the versions cached to roll back to. I mean you can download again but your cache gives you a good hint at what did in fact work.
I'm perfectly at ease with initiating them manually, as I see fit.
For me that means automatically tracking dependencies of things like USE-flags in Gentoo's Portage, or Exherbo's Paludis.
And the possibly resulting conflicts. Arch and its makepkg and the stuff in the AUR has simply no provisions(that I'm aware of) for that. It's all manual, IMO. AUR-helper, or not.
> Definitely not going to happen on Arch and this runs completely counter to what you claimed to like about CachyOS. Distributing binaries is not going to result in a very optimal system... Which is what caused those red flags to be raised in the first place
Says you. I counter that with my years long experience(on CachyOS), limited to the stuff they DO deliver as binary. Obviously carefully tested by people who really know what they do, on much faster systems than I have, before delivery to the general public.
> Btw, I don't suggest doing this. If an update breaks your system then you don't have the versions cached to roll back to. I mean you can download again but your cache gives you a good hint at what did in fact work.
Never needed it, neither on plain Arch in the far past, nor the two years of CachyOS now. Should something bad happen I can boot some rescue-image from whereever, and fix it that way. It's just a waste of space.
Edit: Please don't suggest Nix(OS) or Guix. They give a shit about optimization in the name of 'reproducible builds', and go for the lowest common denominator because of that. Which is understandable, given their goals. But they are unaligned with mine.
Ho-hum, so I gave this yay-thing a try, as a binary, out of CachyOS repos, and let it run an outstanding update of 77 packages, mostly new Plasma/KDE to 6.5.4 from 6.5.3. It even discovered some things which I must have installed manually via makepkg from the AUR, mainly i7z(probably during discovery, when the system(s) were 'new' to me), some microsoft fonts, and even Hexchat, which I've forgotten about, because I switched to KVirc when Hexchat began to crash. It doesn't do that anymore, at least not during autoconnect to EFNET & Libera Chat. Didn't test further. Did reboot with the usual insane brazenness of kill -9ing Firefox from within htop beforehand, to have it reliably restart my session, with all its windows and tabs in there. Yay -Scc, erasing all btrfs-snapshots, and so on.
Closing all other apps, terms, filemanagers. Klicking restart. Hands off. Very quiet and fast boot. Sddm appears. Login. Plasma is there. FF reloads as it should. Everything else works. Still ultra-smooth.
So Yay!?
(Squeekily screaming: *Oh my gawd!1!! Nao my (almost) pristine binary system iz tainted!1!!*)
Edit: Hrrm. When Hexchat began to crash... So I've told shit about no app ever crashing. But that was a general problem on Distros which updated the underlying substrate faster than others, IIRC.
It was just 'bitrotten'.
Very annoying at the time because I've been used to it since a long time, and had it heavily customized and themed, but (binary!) KVirc came to the rescue, so I've forgotten about that. Sorry.
Almost true. Some versions of the drivers, yes. Other versions, no. I didn't notice this until a few months ago but every now and then I'd have things like external monitors not working or one of them not waking from sleep on its own. So after like a week of banging my head against the wall on what configuration file I must've changed to break something, I found massive amounts of posts saying "I updated the driver and the following is now broken" so as a desperate attempt I backdated. Fixed everything. Immediately told apt to never update that driver ever again. There are still issues sometimes (like if the computer has been up for a few weeks the driver fails to allocate memory on display plug in), but in general it's usable.
I recommend everyone not update those drivers unless they're not working, and don't be afraid to downgrade. Almost every version has people saying on their system something doesn't work.
I had Nvidia up until a year ago or so. Every single time I had to do any kind of maintenance it was because of their drivers.
Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.
Half a dozen of NVidia cards in more than a decade on on Win/Lin. No major problems so far.. I had to install / remove drivers manually but only because I needed exact versions for some other software. Intel on Win/Lin works fine too.
What? The main difference between distros is the package manager. I don't see anything here that's distro specific other than editing the pacman config to enable multilib, which to be fair is default on with many distros.
But Systemd? That's on most distros these days. I'm pretty sure it is on all of those in the top 10.
Also, the OP is using CachyOS. You can tell b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶a̶n̶o̶ from the neofetch logo. But, I'll mention that if you checkout distrowatch, Arch based distros are incredibly common. Over the past 12 months the most downloaded distros are CachyOS (Arch), Mint (Deb/Ubuntu), MX (Deb), Debian, Endeavour (Arch), Pop (Ubuntu), Manjaro (Arch), Ubuntu, Fedora, Zorin (Deb/Ubuntu).
That said, you don't have to do any of this for either Endeavour (which I use) nor Manjaro (my old distro of choice). Along with Pop, one of the main motivations for these distros is Nvidia support. Really I don't expect most people to even be facing those problems these days. On Endeavour I've only run into one Nvidia problem over the last 5 years and it was when a beta driver conflicted with the most recent kernel. Super easy fix once I realized the problem.
On a side note/friendly reminder:
anyone that's using linux these days with an Nvidia card I suggest making sure your /efi partition is >1GB (at least 2GB but give it some headroom. Disk is still cheap). If you're putting the drivers in the kernel (you should), like done here, those are going to take up a lot of space. (If you get a space error, run `sudo du -ch --max-depth=3 /efi | sort -hr` to see the problem. You can, usually, safely delete any of the `initrd-fallback` versions and rerun `sudo reinstall-kernels`. They'll be built again but this will usually give you the headroom you need)
You can do that now, and for at least the last year.
Very few games don't work anymore, and most that don't are using kernel level anti-cheat or are generally hostile to users anyways (Fortnite and Destiny 2 could work, but they actively block Linux).
I main Fedora with an Nvidia 3080 and haven't had issues for quite some time now.
Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.
The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).
I would posit that in this scenario it is Valve who has the deeper pockets. It's a privately owned company and not beholden to the whims of a quarterly driven revenue cycle, and it's a matter of life or death for the organization.
In contrast, gaming is essentially a side show for Microsoft. The resources required to push Valve off it's pedestal would have higher returns invested elsewhere.
The Steam Deck is basically the successor to the Steam Machines. The actual hardware didn't go that well, but they laid the foundation in software for what we have now.
So, in a way, the Steam Machines were a great success.
Also, Valve has (for better and worse) far more power and control in the gaming ecosystem than most companies Microsoft has to deal with.
I figure if it's good enough for login.gov [1], it's good enough for my sites as well.
I also find devise pretty simple to get setup and use. It's so easy to mess up some small thing while writing your own auth. I've always pretty much trusted myself to at least get devise setup properly.
The Treasury's systems were just hacked, in some capacity, last week.
If you put the money the government steals from your paycheck for "Social Security" into your own private investment account and invest it in the S&P 500, after a 40 year career you would have about 4x the income that Social Security will pay you for the same malinvestment in their broken system. That's now. In the future, we will probably have to net pay Social Security when we retire.
The FDA put candy on the food pyramid, as a part of our daily diet.
The F-35 Lightning project was managed by the government, and, as a result, the United States will likely lose the next major nation state war we enter. But, because of that selfsame government's other skills, the United States will likely be bankrupt and gone before that happens.
Everything the government does is worse; no, the worst. If the government does something, that's a really good reason to look at alternatives.
I'm not saying GitLab is poorly designed, but a poorly designed website will be slow on the fastest of languages or frameworks. It's not necessarily a Rails or Ruby problem here.
I never thought I’d be saying this, but I order from Walmart+ whenever I can - it’s often cheaper than Amazon and often has same day delivery.
The other places I check are Best Buy for anything new and Newegg. They often are equal to or beat Amazon’s pricing, and returns with Best Buy are easy.
Walmart+ has a Paramount+ subscription I’ve logged into exactly once - to claim some $10 new signup deal.
I don't have walmart+ but walmart has the same $35 free shipping thing as amazon. And I usually get walmart stuff much faster than Amazon, unless there's a third party seller involved.
They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.
They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.
When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom.
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