Factory farming is propped up purely based on government funding and censorship of the negative aspects of it
No, it became the norm post-Borlaug because its efficient as fuck.
If the cities vanished, right now, 75% of the population vanished and food demand dropped accordingly, do I believe that rural farming would go back to yeoman farmer America?
No, I don't.
Oh, you'll see SOME reductions of the extremes. Fewer feedlots, fewer high density hog enclosures. But will farmers stop using glyphosate? No. Fuck no. No chance, as long as the energy industry is there to produce it.
Why? Because it's efficient. Spraying isn't free. They're not doing it because they feel pressured by demand to do it. They're doing it because if they don't their yields drop. In other words it costs less to buy spray then the drop in yield would cost them if they didn't spray. It's a completely cold economic assessment, cost of spray vs cost of lost yield.
THAT WON'T CHANGE.
At least not without a total collapse in the energy sector. Or a precipitous drop in demand and prices such that it's no longer economical to spray.
Good.
Supply chain collapse, and or extended down comms
Realistically this won't happen without a collapse of the energy economy. Oh, we can have shortages, or complete runouts. But the system keeps churning as long as people can get food, which is predicated on energy. Fuel to move food around, and electricity to keep it cold (and/or make it hot). If people can't buy clothes, widgets, or shit from ikea, modernity doesn't end, people just go without shit they probably didn't need anyway.
Loss of communications is itself not sufficient to trigger a total failure of energy and food distribution. Because those systems operate partly on MOMENTUM, whether bureaucratic or mechanical. Piggly Wiggly opened decades before they had computers in every store and they did fine. Hell, the store I worked in as a kid only had a proper actual computer to track video rentals. Whenever we got a truck, we gave the driver our (on paper) order for the next shipment. Literally sneakernet.
Now, as for your point about a biological attack... unlikely to happen. Explaining WHY it's unlikely to happen would require going into pages about R0. Oh, you can make deadly biological agents. But they generally have to be deployed in the same fashion as chemicals. They're paradoxically TOO lethal to actually spread in the wild. LIke, literally, a virus that deadly is not likely to be that transmissible.
You could pick up a handful of dirt and there are deadlier viruses in your hand then man could think up. But they're too deadly to be effectively weaponized on a large scale, you have to keep manufacturing it, it's R0 in the wild will simply be too low.
Spanish flu is the sweet spot. You really can't expect more from a readily transmissible virus. There are deadlier, they don't spread anywhere near as fast or easily. There are faster spreading, they aren't as deadly. It's a biological balancing act.
I have no horse in that race.
Yeah I'm still trying to figure out what race you're running.
My perception is that you want to return to a pre-Borlaug yeoman farmer America. But you're being evasive on how the fuck that would happen.
That hasn't even happened in fucking South Africa. WAR IS NOT ENOUGH to bring that kind of backslide. It's too slow.
If you want Amish America, great as that may sound, you need to explain what you are envisioning will happen to make it so. Because I don't see any way of that happening short of OVERWHELMINGLY catastrophic instantaneous damage that knocks out the energy economy on a global scale. War alone won't do that.
You missed my point entirely.
You assume that there would be an infrastructure collapse to the point where the energy economy cannot sustain post-Borlaug farming.
That won't happen unless the disruption happens so instantly that the energy sector doesn't have time to backslide to Victorian era technologies that could sustain it (like bringing back coal gasification for example).
You don't get the yeoman farmer back unless the entire energy sector is an instant smoking crater. And even that will only be temporary.
I think people who think like you do get too hung up on the performative, de jure aspects of governance, rather than focusing on the de facto reality on the ground.
You haven't spent enough time out in the corn.
The previous nullification battle was marijuana. It is now the case that, in many states, the federal government has been shown to be completely toothless. The laws are still on the books, but you can go buy an ounce openly, on a credit card even.
The next hurdle will be firearms. I believe in the next ten years the reality on the ground will diverge radically from BATF rules. In 2040, there will be states where you'll be able to procure suppressors, SBRs, and open bolt full autos openly. The laws will still be on the books, but local law enforcement cooperation will be zero in the red states.
Assuming Washington hasn't already given up the ghost at that point and admitted that the country as a whole has become ungovernable.
That's not going to happen.
Do you know what the reality of "agrarian culture and economy" looks like today?
It's a neo-baron sitting fifteen feet in the air on a bigass harvester that weighs as much as a locomotive and costs about a million dollars. It drives itself and he's just there to sip coffee and listen to the talk radio, and push the brake if a deer gets in the way (or maybe not; corn heads can handle ingesting smallish animals).
Hundred years ago a farmstead was measured in acres. Nowadays it's in square miles. Typical farmer today can work a knight's fee worth of land with just a couple helpers with CDL's to drive the grain trucks.
I know there are whole TOWNSHIPS worth of land (essentially, baronies) under single ownership out in Nebraska. At that scale, it isn't even about the grain, they're usually feeding pigs or chickens.
Obviously this is just the stay decision, not a permanent injunction.
But the language in the stay shows very clearly that the court is likely to ultimately rule against the government.
"On the dubious assumption that the Mandate does pass constitutional muster—which we need not decide today—it is nonetheless fatally flawed on its own terms."
Basically yeah.
The Quebecois have some anger issues. They're not quite on the level of Irish Republicans, but they're getting there.
OP, Quebec has a lot of the same problems of the American rust belt, with declining industrial towns. Forestry and mining has been in a long downturn and the best kids leave for better jobs in Ontario. Throw in the fact that they speak a different language and the result is a really cantankerous province that feels abandoned and disrespected by Ottawa.
And they're not too fond of Americans either. South of the St Lawrence you won't see much hostility, but once you get north of the A-40 you'd better know how to pronounce "Oui."
which should have been the national anthem
You mean Rocks and Trees.
Universities, particularly land grant ones (created by lands designated in the Morrill Acts of 1862) are often partially exempt from building codes. They have to meet federal standards, but they often can shrug off municipal rules.
we should've had NEW businesses enter and malls expand
No.
Malls have been a dying segment of retail since the early 00's. US capacity was overbuilt and there was an emphasis in malls particularly to "slash and burn", building new malls that cause old ones to fail.
To understand retail you have to take a more comprehensive look over a long period of time. Prior to the 50's, retail consisted of local businesses and catalog order. Catalog could get you anything, eventually.
After WW2, with efficient manufacturing and distribution, malls and chain department stores appear. This is because it became practical to produce so much surplus and deliver it so efficiently that you could offer all your wares at multiple locations. Catalogs held on though until the 90's, although increasingly as a service to the underserved markets.
Malls escalated this further, offering chain businesses the ability to have more locations with smaller footprints. But malls came with some pretty serious transportation and socioeconomic implications and effects. As Chris Rock put it: "Every town got two malls: they got the white mall, and the mall white people used to go to." It's funny of course because it's true and everyone knows it.
Big box stores, the old mid century department stores, evolved in two distinct varieties. The first was discounters. Walmart epitomized this, leaning hard into reducing margin costs. They were successful in this and Walmart has frankly done more to reduce poverty than it has to create it.
The other direction was the category killer. This would be your Toys'R'Us (and Toys'R'Us was profitable without the debt of the leveraged buyout) or Home Depot, etc. They focus in one sector and try to dominate, and this model too is pretty successful.
But the internet is the new player. The internet is like Sears Roebuck of old, but with one key difference. It can get you stuff pretty damn fast. Delivery to your door in a couple days is usually an arrangement people can accept to get exactly what they want.
Retail has to cope with that, and it's difficult.
There was one compelling argument I recall from a few years ago that said it wasn't impossible that such a distortion could exist, it's just impossible to cause the conditions to bring one into being where it didn't previously exist.
Either way the burden of proof on whether it's possible is on the advocates.
I don't buy the dyson sphere bullshit, btw. It's a giant pipe dream that fails on the simplest of observations.
The only technologically advanced life, in the galaxy, at this time... very probably.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of planets that host complex multi-cell organisms, and potentially millions that host micro organisms.
But Earth had complex life for well over a billion years without fostering an intellect arms race.
You mean every 12th. And every month has a Friday the 13th.
And the Cotsworth Calendar is actually cool and we should totally adopt it. Here's how it works:
There are 13 months of exactly 28 days. At the end of the year there are one or two leap days that operate on the Gregorian system. The leap days are considered to be part of a "14th" month that is generally treated as a holiday, and/or lumped into the preceding month for purposes of billing.
From an accounting and scheduling perspective it would be much simpler to have fixed length months with a holiday leap. It would eliminate the "three check month" phenomena that hits most employees roughly quarterly, where the difference between biweekly pay and monthly bills results in a sudden jump or drop in cash on hand.