You lost me at "infinitely more expensive."

I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

I'm from a US State that isn't Alaska, and I get money distributed to my county based on raw materials extracted here. In fact, that is where a lot of the money that paid for my public school education came from.

We also have Direct Democracy and can choose how we spend that money by direct vote. We may suck as much as politicians at those votes, but we do indeed get a slice of the pie that we control.

I'm sure lots of people in the world would enjoy having a similar setup, but they sure don't get it.

Look up the Opium Wars. The "West" didn't produce anything of value to the Chinese, but wanted their spices, so they got the idea to get the Chinese hooked on opium. The only problem was, opium was highly illegal in China. So "we" invaded and killed lots of Chinese until they relented and allowed opium sales.

Many of the places that "don't produce enough things of value" used to do so, before others stopped them. Or they do make things of high value and used to have a high standard of living, and then after political changes a small percent of the population suddenly "owned" the fruits of all their labor. So it is perhaps not just as simple as just, aww shucks, they don't know how to make anything.

It was totally fake. The starving people were mostly farmers. They had lost land ownership because the English were occupying their country and controlling everything. The main crops were grains, barley, wheat, etc. The potato crop was there because the land distribution was set up as a form of crop-sharing where the Irish grew grain on most of the land entirely in exchange for rent, and were allowed a small plot to grow 100% of their food. They weren't allowed to grow grain for their own use, either on their subsistence plot, or in plots that they could sell from for their own benefit. Potatoes were one of the only things that could be grown for food in the amount of (their own, nominally) land they were allowed to subsist off of.

When the potato crop failed, people literally starved to death while harvesting grain and turning it over to the English. If they ate the grain they couldn't pay their rent and would be banished to land that couldn't even support potato farming; almost certain death the very next year. Instead, the very noble and honest Irish people mostly died right next to sufficient food stores. Those that lived still had their land, though.

It was a crop failure, but there was never any actual shortage of food, even locally.

During the Irish Potato Famine there were shiploads of American grain parked off the Irish coast that wanted to unload and sell at the regular price they had expected to get, but the English government refused to let them sell at anything other than gouged prices that the Irish couldn't afford, on the theory that the highest possible price had to be the Real and True Market Price because of the great need, and that allowing traders to sell at the prices the Irish could afford would somehow be a give-away that would cause the Irish to stop working forever, and they'd need food aid until the end of time.

It sounds like hyperbole until you read the actual quotes from English leaders at the time.

The grain of course mostly continued to mainland Europe, and sold for fairly normal prices.

We can parse out from the other facts: We wouldn't need to pay farmers to grow extra food for the needy and then distribute it. We would only have to pay to distribute what otherwise is wasted. The political forces against that are against it even if it is free, because of the theory of Moral Hazard.

Sounds like you stepped in some right wing propaganda. You might want to wipe that off your brain.

They are indeed deforesting Malaysia to plant palm oil trees. But that is because palm oil is the main cooking oil in Asia. Those are food farms. Disgusting, unhealthy food, IMO, and a terrible ecological tragedy, but food nonetheless.

On the plus side, I bought a nice hardwood platform bed for $400 at the local furniture store. Solid as can be, it will likely outlast me. Made in Malaysia.

Just the used clothes already loaded for export that would be stranded at the port would probably provide material for a decade of clothing repairs. I can sew, I sometimes repair clothing, I buy second hand, and I still throw out (eg, recycle) lots of clothing. Without even any addition of cloth, I could keep myself covered for decades. 5 good pairs of jeans eventually becomes 5 warn pairs, the worst pair becomes patches and now I have 4 good pairs that are probably stronger than new in the high strain places.

Almost every American household owns a sewing machine and has somebody who can sew, even if it isn't done very often. Even more people than that know how to garden.

There is a surplus of available prison labor, they have a hard time getting businesses to use it and stick with it, for whatever reasons. It is certainly cheaper per unit of time. It is not guaranteed to be cheaper per unit of production, or more profitable. Also, businesses fail for lots of reasons. A recycling center failing is just an anecdote, it is not a data point.

In my area, recycling centers mostly use union labor, pay very high wages for the types of work done, and are profitable growth businesses.

Your thesis seems to be, "there is a crook who hates hippies and steals from them, therefore whole industries are fake."

Not only are there lots of such cars labelled as such, there are gas stations in my city that only sell biolfuel mixes. Mostly E85 and B99.9 but also E10 and B20. The E85 is made from fruit sugar waste. The B99.9 is make from recycled cooking oil.

See also: http://www.ethanolretailer.com...

Field corn is a gimmick used in the midwest as political pork, it is not what is being used in the self-supporting industry that is currently experiencing rapid growth. They can use the corn in that region because they grow vastly more than there is human food demand for, which is why so much of it is used in livestock feed. There is a surplus of food-grade corn, some of which will go to waste, that is grown because it is the best regional crop in a region awash in subsidies and crop insurance. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a real biofuels industry everywhere else, with other material sources.

In Oregon we're doing lots of biofuel, and none of it is food. It is all waste, mostly waste from food production and landscaping. The food waste is led by recycled cooking oils, but agro waste processing is growing rapidly.

We do use corn for biofuel. But what many people miss is that we're using corn waste; the leftover stalks, not the part that gets eaten.

It is true that States that get excessive ag subsidies sometimes have some silly and wasteful programs, such as converting edible corn kernels to fuel. But those projects are not and were never planned to be part of a real fuel economy; they're designed as "pork" for local business, and also to increase the engineering knowledge needed to build the more serious fuel plants in the future.

Try adding more than a smidgen of fact. You certainly found more than a smidgen of horse shit.

Using basic math to pretend you can solve complicated problems again, boy?

Being right on the Russian border makes it a serious hazard zone for random explosions. Probably one of the least safe locations you could have come up with right now. There is a significant danger of major artillery battles involving the exclusion zone. It isn't even safe to fly over, much less to put something dangerous on the ground.

And yes, the risk of moving it is most of the reason for opposition to Yucca Mountain, so moving it even farther doesn't really help for compromise. Now you're endangering Atlantic fishing.