The Reform types will say it’s down to a few people on boats
This doesn’t make sense, stocking up on food doesn’t make more food. There is x amount of food regardless if you buy it in one shot or at regular intervals. All this advice will do is manufacture false short term shortages. If there is real danger the advice should not be to stockpile but to dig up your garden and grow food.
This doesn’t make sense, stocking up on food doesn’t make more food. There is x amount of food regardless if you buy it in one shot or at regular intervals.
Yes, but it will help people weather the short-term crises that are inevitable. Imagine there are floods or fuel shortages or cyber attacks which cause shortages in supermarkets; your stockpile of pasta and tinned beans prevented you from going hungry for a week.
Stockpiling by an individual is very understandable but it is essentially an antisocial act. You are removing resources from the common cache at a time of perceived crisis and which you might not require. The decision you are making is that your continued ease of living is worth the potentially unnecessarily increased suffering of others.
This is describing stockpiling before the crisis. If anything an inherently pro-social act; leaving resources available for others when the crisis hits RTFA.
What resources are left available after they have been depleted by a few stockpilers, magic resources?
Are you being intentionally dense?
There is not a finite amount of wheat in the world, there is not a finite amount of beans. If people buy a bit more now, it signals producers to produce more of these things. And in the short term, generally speaking there is some slack in supplies of these things so buying a little bit more now doesn’t generally affect availability or prices to consumers. Slow and steady stockpiling is fine. It is called preparedness.
This means that when crisis hits, you don’t need to go out and panic buy food because you have some at home stockpiled already; this means that people who really need what’s left on the shelves have a better chance of getting it.
Do you want me to explain basic arithmetic next?
By your reckoning there should never be any shortages because the supply chain adjusts, but the system is imperfect and shortages do occur and are accentuated by unnecessary stockpiling, and in the extreme famines result which might have been avoided. You also need to look up finite.
Got it, you’re a troll. Because stockpiling grain totally wasn’t the process which allowed humanity to settle, develop agriculture, and dramatically increase in size. It definitely causes famines, not an abundance and reliable source of food.
During a shortage, sure. Before a shortage, stockpiling means you don’t have to make the shortage worse.
I get the intent, but surely after the lessons of similar messaging to prepare for potential COVID lockdowns causing people to go nuts and buy every toilet roll and canned food in every store, they need to think of a better approach.
This is the better approach; getting people to stock up before the crisis ever arrives. It’s when people are unprepared and a crisis hits that panic buying causes problems. This advice is more likely to cause people to buy a couple of extra items each week to build up stocks than to get them to suddenly clear shelves in one go.
