It's a problem for Mexicans, and the average man on the street in Guadalajara has no more influence on his country's policies than the average Joe in Houston. Trade and business interests lobby to get the right to sell overseas, and argue that this means more tax intake and higher wages, and is therefore "better for the country". Here in the UK, "austerity" measures taken after the financial crash are pushing people deeper into poverty and even to starvation, and yet the government say it's all for the good of everyone.

This is an idea that I'm surprised hasn't gained more traction. Using import tarrifs as a means of protectionism is quite rightly considered bad form internationally. However, using import tarrifs to create a level playing field seems perfectly fair. After all, if companies in your country are mandated by law to pay a minimum wage, paid holidays and parental leave, and are forced to respect workers rights and health and safety, the countries without minimum wages or paid leave and where nobody bats an eyelid when a 10-year-old boy dies in a mineral sand landslip do have something of an immoral competitive advantage.

Thus I would think that the best approach would be to charge import tarrifs from countries without comparable labour laws to your own, calculated on the cost of offering similar protections to those in your country. This would promote domestic production in the short term, and would promote better working practices globally in the long term. Sounds like a win-win, to me, and an easy one for the politicians to sell to the public.

But here we're talking about food for which there is demand and a market, and it's going unpicked due to difficulties in attracting workers. The demand for food has not decreased in recent years, so someone, somewhere, needs that food. And yet it's not "cost-effective" to pick it.

The missing part of this equation is how that "hole" in the supply is fulfilled. And the answer is... cheap imports. Not a problem, you say? It is for the world's poor, because while the global food market means low prices in first world countries, it means high prices in developing countries and leaves people unable to afford to feed their families.

This is where our priorities are messed up. We shrug our shoulders, say "market forces" and let other people shoulder the burden. Just look at the problems that US corn ethanol caused for Mexicans. To people in the States, Mexican maize is cheap, so the ethanol manufacturers snatched it up, leaving the Mexican supply far below demand, pushing prices up and causing widespread hunger.

Don't trust the invisible hand -- everything the hand gives you, it has taken from someone else.

Well I agree with that. Doctors are well-paid, and deservedly so. Teachers are typically underpaid.

That only holds if you believe that healthcare and education are better dealt with as private enterprise than as part of the public sector. I don't.

Wrong state. The arsenic problem is in former cotton fields, where arsenic was used as a pesticide to kill the boll weevil. This was OK for a non-food crop, but not great for food crops, particularly rice, which has a marked tendency to pick up arsenic from the soil wherever it's present.

But when you consider that the people who used to pick fruit are now working in factories sticking consumer goods in boxes, you have to consider our society's priorities pretty messed up. Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?

This whole thread is pedantry fail. Of course, "pedantry fail" is tautologous, as all pedantry is fallacious.

Yeah, the idiots should have planned the winds more carefully. Relying on nature to generate the winds they need was never going to work, so they should get some giant wind machines from Hollywood. (Yes, I am being sarcastic. Glad you noticed.)

Heat-pumps also require large gardens. And dropping the ground temperature isn't great if you're growing your own vegetables.

I'm not against nuclear power, but I am against nuclear power operators, who too often cut corners and make the Geiger-Müller tubes go clickity-click, either at the plant, or at the dump site. When they fail to do things right, it's the taxpayer who ends up funding the cleanup.

Mmm... 50 shades of get that company to IPO, stat!

Which begs the question: why is there an E in the word "hipster"?

Not here it ain't -- those are carriages.

..but make sure that the wires in your phone are they right way round, or the signal might not be clear enough for them to understand what you're saying.

DOSbox isn't an emulator. It's a sandboxed OS-as-subsystem with some virtualised components to replace direct memory access. These virtualised components are similar to what you would have to use to run the same program pseudo-natively in Windows.