discrimination abounds

I have two thoughts here
1) I'm not sure this is something that "should" require legal sanction and action to prevent someone from doing it. I can see an argument against it, but price discrimination doesn't necessarily raise a moral issue in a competitive business like a restaurant. If some place I feel is overcharging me because I'm not of their faith (or any faith in my case), I would stop going there as I would not feel welcomed and suitably entertained in my choice of dining to keep going. They must have great pie or BBQ pork or something if I felt compelled to complain.

I might have the same objection if they're offering a senior or military discount and the place is mostly frequented by seniors or active military personnel. Which is to say, it's not that likely to encourage a legal reaction versus a market response to abandon it in search of other options.

2) It's a terrible business practice anyway. Which is why I don't know that it should require legal sanctions.

People may complain if they aren't seen praying or could lie and claim they were to get a discount, it isn't really something the employees is necessarily trained to recognize (what routine counts here: out loud, bowed heads, clasped hands, etc, how do they tell the difference between someone who is "faking", or someone taking a nap in front of their soup or salad, and someone "actively" praying), and I'm not entirely sure it's a strong element of religious faiths to pray ostentatiously and "publicly" anyway (in a religious setting yes, a meal seems more like a maybe with different rules when at a restaurant versus at a home). So it may counter various social conventions of other Christians, much less other faiths or the lack thereof to suggest this as a method of providing a discount.

Plus, people may wonder, if you are able to give a 15% discount on what many local Christians may assume is virtually every meal, then that leaves the question of why the prices were that high that the diner can afford to surrender a 15% revenue reduction. Or whether that's now built into the prices charged, in the same way that the "free" chips or "free drink refills" at a Mexican place are built in the price of the burrito.

The economic reaction I have is to wonder how long this diner could stay open while using this practice, or how much they were ripping off their customers before instituting it. Meanwhile, the discrimination reaction I have is pretty minimal. Okay it's a form of price discrimination. Are they refusing to hire atheists? Are they refusing to serve atheists as customers? What of the other faiths besides Christianity? Did Buddhists get a discount for meditating in front of the salad? These are the mechanical questions that occur to me well before arriving at some idea that this is awful and should be legally stopped. It is dumb. People do dumb things all the time. I don't worry about people doing dumb things that aren't necessarily exclusionary. I worry about people doing dumb things that are necessarily exclusionary (like refusing to vote for atheist candidates, or not hiring job candidates, or refusing service entirely, refusing to allow children to date or marry atheists and so on). Yes this is a form of discrimination, but we have a long way to go yet before this is one of those front line battles. This is like bunting when a team is down to one of the last outs and needs a 3 run home run to win anyway. We're so far behind the eight-ball here that this is something barely visible on the radar as a fix.

More to the point, it seems like the reactions could be one of the following scenarios that this is ultimately counterproductive
1) Christians are annoyed by the threat of a lawsuit and reverse boycott, encouraging the practice to continue elsewhere
2) The business was aware of #1 and did it on purpose to attract local attention on the theory that any news is good news
3) Atheists portrayed themselves as aggrieved and petty (whether or not the grievance was legitimate, the visibility of the situation did them/us little favor in public perception). This was a pretty small form of discriminatory behavior. 

This is the sort of thing to get me into the street

Farm subsidies! Get out the pitchforks men! Kill the monster!

Essentially they're getting rid of a subsidy, once intended to be temporary and then made permanent (the danger of any supposed short-term government spending), and now they're replacing it by creating an insurance programme. Something that most every farm already has privately. And which the government, for some reason, helps pay for already.

This too was a major problem:
"But Dr. Smith, the Montana State economist, said the cost could be much greater because the plan used recent high crop prices as its benchmark.
“If farm prices move back towards what are widely viewed as more normal levels than their current levels, farmers will be compensated for going back to business as usual,” he said."

Why they couldn't pick an indexed price over several years rather than an inflated price (in part caused by subsidies), I'm lost there.


I note also that an idiot Senator from OHIO is involved. Thanks. I shall be picketing your office at the next election, especially if this farce passes. As it undoubtedly will.

On another matter

Nothing says "Independence Day" quite like sushi.

Signs of the times

Death to cheesecake!

Or at least: keep away our competition. We are businesses and don't like the free market dammit.

That there is not a more concerted effort by libertarians to point to BOTH major political parties and to see that BOTH (not just Republicans and not just Democrats) are in the pocket of major businesses and exist largely to generate rent seeking opportunities for their own collection of interests (including unions) and that there is not therefore a "free market" party or a party associated with the free market among them is disappointing.

Other random thoughts of the day, or other things that should not be said aloud by other people

Random thoughts
1) Dane Cook and Daniel Tosh, not funny. Don't get it.

2) John Mayer and Coldplay, not good. Don't get it.

3) Thai food, good. Need to get some of it.

Things that should not be said that I see said all the time.

1) Global warming, not happening (what to do about it is a legitimate debate concerning foreign policy and international economics, whether it's going on, not so much)

2) Evolution, not happening

3) Muslims, all of them, evil. (Same applies to atheists, all of them, immoral).

4) History channel, has actual history on it.

5) Cable news stings of child predators prove this is a serious and wide spread problem and that your children may be in danger

6) Vaccines, not good.

Domestic tranquility

Men as performance artists .. in the kitchen. And more or less everywhere else (taking out the garbage, doing homework, making speeches, and having sex). That actually makes a good deal of evolutionary sense, at least the male part of that. I'm not sure where it doesn't become a "sensual act from which to derive pleasure" either however. I mean, I prefer better cooking and tastes and so on, and if I must do it myself, I'd eventually figure out how.

Finally! Somebody learned how to actually do this properly. The article makes heavy use of these "manners" people who somehow presume that it is incumbent on us, the gift receiver, to pretend to like useless or hideous items, or to object to gift cards procured in their stead. The high rate of consumption for gift cards in the modern world (something like a third of all holiday dollars), would suggest that we're moving toward a more efficient transfer for gifts. An idea like this, maybe integrated with wish lists and other ideas, would greatly simplify getting ACTUAL gifts for the gift giver. Which to me, the problem is being a gift giver in the first place and having to ask yourself: what will this person not despise, truly need/enjoy, etc, and then coming up empty. Presuming that we will fail in that mission, merchants have savvily marketed gift cards (over simply gifting cash to one another). This is simply the next logical step to avoiding the "shopping" madness that is the day after Christmas. Known also as the day of return. Ideal gifts are things that the other person will use and enjoy, and that you won't. But unless you are very much more a people person than I am, I will find it pretty hard to presume to know very much about most people. Even family members and long-time friends, and their possessions, their private entertainments, and so on. Not to mention that in general people (sometimes secretly) prefer receiving experiential gifts to "stuff", and this is even harder to come by as a giving tree item.

Rated R . I'm not a big fan of government censorship, so the MPAA's rating system is a vital market alternative to this. It has a generally transparent system: show a lot of flesh and drop a few f-bombs and we'll stamp a hard R on the bottom of the screen. That's fine, so far as it goes, presuming we're all aware this is what we're getting as a value set. But in real terms, what we, as consumers, or really as parents of consumers, are opposed to is particular items (generally sex and language, and I guess depictions of smoking and drug use now too, but not so much worrying about drinking and violence). It would better and more useful, particularly in a technical age, if this information was far more transparently available. As noted, HBO (and other premium movie channels) put this sort of thing out there. You'll usually see when some movie or show is being shown on TV without as much censorship some wording which describes that you're about to see human blood and guts and people screaming "foul" language at each other, or some such.


I'm fine with that. We as consumers will tend to want to filter out what we're consuming as entertainment, and be prepared if we have more sensitive tastes to avoid certain products (as we might look at a list of ingredients on a menu to avoid certain dishes). I'm not fine with a universal set of "avoid this". In the same way that I/we wouldn't be fine if particular palate and taste sets for food were imposed writ large. Quite simply there are lots of things depicted in a movie universe, on a kids show, on the news, whatever, that I'm "opposed" to, or would prefer people not watch. I don't get to impose that demand on the rest of you. I don't quite see why this approach which defines certain words as out of bounds (for no apparent reason), or presumes that violence is more acceptable than sexuality, and so on, gets such preferential treatment either. A more efficient response would divide out these markers and give each their own market of "objectionable" content ratings, so to speak. That way people could consume more freely violence or sex or whatever without being encumbered by other relative value sets which object to certain words, or certain depictions (say, Islamic prohibitions on the prophet Mohammed, and so on). We in effect have this for premium movie channels (and to a lesser extent TV programmes en masse), but it's not caught on for movies so much, where we have much more of an open market as opposed to government censors working at the FCC to protect us all from the word "fuck".

Random bits of mostly new years

Wrestlers as sex offenders! Beware oh brave souls and protect ye children from this scourge upon them. I have some issue with the existence of these sex offender lists to begin with (along with lots of other useless lists the government keeps and updates, like no-fly lists), but basically it's because we end up putting people on them who don't belong there: college kids doing puerile pranks to each other, people who were drunk and urinated somewhere they weren't supposed to, teenage kids having sex with each other (consensually), and so on.

These are not people who are likely a danger to the public. And neither is a wrestler who uses the body's physical openings provided to their advantage during a match. But of course, that's not what the keepers of the mighty list would have us do and believe.

Be fruitful...

Taking that one a little literally are we, church goers?

I'm kind of with Bering here that "we" are being out-bred and that might be a problem, but Bering should also take some instructive habit that tolerance within a diverse civil society seems to be also, for now, evolutionarily advantageous. That is: that it produces a stable society that doesn't waste valuable resources killing and conducting purges and so on. Besides, somebody has to run the various machines and other elements of a modern technological society for these religious busy-bodies who don't understand magnets. We should also be consoled by the fact that the birth rate has declined across the globe anyway, particularly as it has grown richer, but even in rundown places like Togo it's dropped by almost half. There may still be more breeding going on within the ultra religious community, but even there it's still somewhat less than before.

Dispelling myths one at a time Water, water everywhere! Or at least, it would help if people were aware that yes, in fact, water IS everywhere. And therefore you don't need to dose your innards in it.

A note

"morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs."

"I’ve always regarded this as a bizarre and chilling sentiment that ought to make us seriously doubt the character of anyone who utters it. Because insofar as it tacitly makes a claim about people’s incentive to behave morally, it amounts to an admission that the speaker simply cannot fathom why someone would treat others with consideration and respect"

A recent debate has once again illuminated that this is a common thread, particularly within the evangelical religious community. Apparently it's impossible to sustain basic human decency once you abandon religious dogma, and the rejection of absolute religious certainty as the only source of truth leads people to... I guess start having sex with livestock and shooting the neighbours infants after tossing them skyward or something. I have no idea how one draws the conclusion that a pro-choice (or rather a pro-abortion) position follows from "believing" in evolution, rather than believing in creationism. Because this does not follow logically without a series of other assumptions. But apparently once that "dark path" is accepted, all sorts of things are suddenly made possible that are otherwise somehow closed (based apparently on the assumption that all religious belief has the same moral flavors wrapping them up)

Given that many of the people I've encountered in the born-again/evangelical type of Christian do seem to have rather sketchy pasts (bouts with abusive use of drugs, alcohol, violence, etc), it does seem more accurate to question the person who would make this statement, this idea that only through religion is morality made possible. Based on my understandings of anthropology, the chicken in this case came first anyway. Morality, in the sense of the organisation of human societies with a set of basic rules of conduct, precedes religion. Religion simply represents a set of codified rules, and often those of a particular region, and of a particular time (and based on that time's understanding of the world).

Stripping aside these contexts, and attempting to make these types rules universal doesn't work very well. With good reason: it's not universally "moral" not to eat pork, or shellfish, or drink alcohol, or engage in pre-marital sexual relations, and so on. These are cultural cues and mores. There are arguments for some of them, some better than others, but they're not applicable to everyone. Not everyone benefits under a society with these sorts of rules (not even the pigs and shellfish, which benefit from their utility to human beings as food by becoming more populous).

As a result, when I start seeing people claim that (their particular brand of) religious piety is the only source of moral conduct, I usually know to avoid meeting this person in a dark alley.

DoA

This is the absurdity of many government policies. We will push something that we now also want to tax.

Perhaps we should stop using government money to be pushing things we want to tax or view as negative before considering whether or not we need to tax them to actively discourage them. And this essentially all the department of agriculture does.

We do note that the push for dairy products is partly funded through mandated fees on dairy production (taxes in effect), but it would seem like dairy producers could just as easily compete to push their own products without giving the money over to government agencies. The reason they don't want to is that the government guarantees a level of profit, rent seeking behaviors take over. When government agencies are described as "willing to make bets on behalf of" anything in regarding a specific industry, we of the general public should be very concerned.

Besides which it gets worse than simply taking fees to advertise products that aren't healthy. There are price controls from paying farmers to slaughter their dairy cows. And this is considered at least a marginal improvement from buying up excess supplies of milk products (and other farming production) as we did for decades.

And all of this is going on while the rest of the DoA is advocating that we eat less cheese and fatty food. This would be very confusing if it wasn't such an expected result of the public's amazing and persistent concern for "the rural farmer", a mythical hardy and independent figure in our history who, for the most part, no longer exists in a meaningful way to providing our food supplies. The belief of the public is still that we must pay farmers so that they will grow enough food. But we're in fact paying them NOT to grow foods or, as we used to, paying them for growing TOO MUCH food. When the public believes one thing is going on and the exact opposite is in fact, it's not that hard to sell them on the idea that instead of ridding ourselves of these troublesome price controls from pre-Depression era (and this one is clearly all Hoover's fault, not FDR's), we should apply punitive taxes to discourage our consumption. All while the government will, on with its other less visible hand, continue encouraging that consumption.

We see the same logic applied in tobacco (which we subsidize and), in coal and oil (which we subsidize and tax), in corn syrup (which we subsidize and wish to tax) and so on.

So as I was saying...

The law bumps online poker in Washington from a misdemeanor to a Class C felony. This is the same category as child molestation, arson, and kidnapping.

Since we all know that gambling online is just like burning houses down and accosting children.

This would be part of that "great big problem" for me to vote for a Republican/conservative, but in all fairness, their overzealous moralizing written into law is backed by sterner stuff. Namely...

Keep in mind, gambling is legal in Washington State. They have casinos and a lottery. The lottery serves the state's interests, as usual, for throwing schools (and teacher's unions) a little extra cash. And the casinos, well they have their own interests. And those interests are connected with a percentage take by the state... so well. If they say they'll lose business to all this unregulated internet traffic, so much for that.

In other news. Apples are like oranges. That analogy should now assume a very different character.

Blue drink

What the fuck is juice?

"I don't know if I'm ready to deal with a poor population base that's suddenly healthy and strong" - That's a funny way to look at paternalism. I like it...

In praise of

Mental distractions and social lubricants.


"When you have constantly charging brain, you need to shut it off sometimes in order to breathe and live. It's no wonder so many brainiacs self-medicate in this way. The key thing, as always, is moderation."

since this always comes up

how to use food stamps?

Apparently not on soda, if you're in New York. But then all kinds of other "crap" is perfectly fine to purchase, why not ban that stuff too?

Since I favor a negative income tax and letting people spend those resources on food (and by extension, health care) as they see fit, I don't see what the problem is if people knowingly and wantonly "waste" money on what amounts to far more expensive sugary drinks and fattening foods. There is some heuristic value to buying food that tastes good and delivers to us some desired pleasure after all, even if it comes at a particular price to our health. What concerns me is that they're not aware of the actual cost of those items and unpersuaded that they could make do with some cans or bags of frozen beans or peas once in a while or some such instead of a bag of chips. Far simpler than banning food stamp use on soda would be things like this

1) Soda taxes or some other "junk food tax" to factor in the social cost of providing additional health care to over-consumed goods of some sort. New York has already been moving on that one. The trouble with this is that I'm sometimes skeptical that most of these goods are actually causing a great deal of unpaid social costs. What they're actually doing is translating wages into health insurance. Which is no fun for healthy people, but healthy people don't seem to account for a majority of the population. There's actually another problem with this though...

2) Price in things like water rights at market rates rather than through food subsidies and price controls. If water is expensive rather than too cheap as it often is in parts of the country, things won't be grown that are less efficient with more water, and things such as industrial scale meat production might be curtailed. And if corn isn't subsidized, and sugar isn't price controlled, fewer things might include "corn sugar", as they want it to be known as now. What we'd end up doing is taxing something we were already spending money on anyway through the subsidies or price controls. It might be, as a matter of public choice theory, harder to end the subsidies than it is to tax, but the most efficient result possible, in so far as making cheap crappy food "less available" to poor people, is likely to do neither. If there's still a demand for cheap crappy food at that point, there are other more persuasive steps that can be taken in a less invasive or less powerful sense than mandated responses through the authority of the state and its social safety nets.

Wait, we do what again here?

We regulate sandwiches, but those fellows over there regulate the meat.

This is absurd. It's yet another reason to just do away with the USDA as far as I'm concerned. One set of rules and one set of regulators to enforce them for the same product (or scope of products as with pizza or broth or even water) is fine. Having two agencies overlooking the same product at different points in its development to point of sale is not a system designed to catch mistakes or to operate with any redundancy.

It's just a waste of time and a pointless drag on the market transfer of goods between producers and consumers.

The list of complaints and grievances

What widely accepted practice, custom or societal norm do you regard as irrational, absurd, offensive, silly, nonsensical, counterproductive, or morally wrong?

Obviously, I look at organised religion as one of the first most significant contributors here. And nationalism.

But some of the responses given airtime so far were much smaller, and probably much easier to change despite their ingrained natures.

1) "God bless you". Yes. This must stop. It's a sneeze. We should not be thanking people for their contribution the air supply with more infectious germs and airborne particulates of mucus. People look at me funny when they sneeze and I ignore them already, as they expect some politeness. The politeness is that they cover their mouth with a cloth or the crook of their elbow or some such. I don't have to do anything polite there. Sorry. We don't have a publicly agreed upon notion to congratulate people on flatulence or profound belching abilities and so on. I don't see why we should be messing with people for sneezing. Perhaps we should have more jokes about sneezing and farting in combination and people would get the point.

2) Funerals. I think I understand conceptually that most people have a compelling need to say good bye to people when they are gone. I'm not fond of doing this when they are alive. I generally don't "have to", my brain is like a tape recorder when it wants to be, it's pretty easy to slip into a eidetic recall such that the absence is not so unbearable, and generally I don't see people very much anyway nor be aware that MY presence might be missed. So one can imagine how fond I am of needing goodbyes when other people become an inanimate piece of meat and bones sitting in a box dressed up...for whatever reason. Principally, it seems some sort of basic ceremony and a gathering of people who knew the person is fine. A party to celebrate the effect that person had makes sense. Personally seeing a person soon after the moment of their death was far more profound than seeing them later sitting in coffin pumped full of chemicals and dressed up. I expect seeing someone die would be even more so. Why we expend so much energy and money on boxes for our deceased compatriots is beyond my ability to comprehend. Just burn the remains like the Greeks or the Vikings did. The concept of creating things to just put them in the ground with a dead person also seems silly. I can respect an offering or a token of esteem, I think, with the idea that this was a person who impacted your life and you might want to surrender something of value to yourself to be sure that impact was respected by you. But spending money on a suit and a polished piece of wood with cushions inside... not so much a good idea. If we have to bury people, at least use a simple box of wood and don't screw with all the chemicals injected into the body and makeup and so on. They're dead. We should see them as dead and not as living, or ideally not at all (again, just burn the remains. Or feed it to wild animals in the Diogenes' instruction). It's far easier to find ways to remember them as they were when living and to "say goodbye" in some ceremony or through association with others if needs be than to expend a tremendous economic value on death.

3) Cursive hand writing. Why, in an age of computers, would anyone still need to learn script form handwriting? We're supposed to use it for signatures, I'm told, but I just use a scribble that looks like it has letters in it somewhere personally. "Is that your signature" is kind of a useless question for me to answer, they don't look alike. One could also ask what we're still signing with a pen, since we can pay bills with electronics. I might gather that studying calligraphy might be a useful mental framework, an appreciation for the art of words and writing perhaps. But here we could simply select more diverse fonts for our written compositions and allow those few people who want to specialize in this obscure love of writing in a visually artistic way to develop those fonts for us. Fortunately I was never graded on "handwriting". Mine is terrible.

4) Seven "deadly" words. Enough said. I do share some idea that these are lazy intellectual words at times. But fuck it. They do get the point across to people much easier. And I hardly see any need for shame at their use. Much of our (popular) humor is crude as it is with or without the inclusion of these sacred code words that dare not be uttered in polite company.

Update: Another good one shows up


And this would be another one...

Why is it

that when you get free food, suddenly you're not as hungry as if you paid for it.

At least, there's food still left there when you're full. It's very odd.

Chocolate

Things I'd rather know, but not

Heroin edition

And eating edition.

people are better

When they're not terrified.

We seem to have a limited amount of such energy to spread around. Being pissed off or afraid takes resources. Best to preserve it for things that we actually need it for.

The usual culprit stealing this away is some random stranger. The creepy old man on the internet.

The far more usual culprits: other teenagers. And family members or other adults with high levels of accessibility to a child (teachers, priests, coaches, etc). And basically, if you or your spouse isn't planning on doing anything to the kid (physical abuse included), it's probably safe to let them run around on the internet with little more than a quick lesson on the decorum of the net. Or lack thereof. And the same basic instilled fear of strangers that our culture seems to want to foster in its generations (although given the random likelihood of tolerance I have for new people, I'm guessing that this might be a useful thing to instill in people, if for no other reason than that it filters out a lot of crap and makes it easier to pay attention to decency and interesting finds).

Next complaint though was really funny. Shared their email. Shared their first name. Posted photos of themselves (already a fairly low percentage of teens overall doing this, of all things), and then giving out a phone number. Of these things, I'd say only the phone number is even mildly disturbing. An email can be changed or abandoned. People can be blocked and filtered out as spam. A name. Well you're supposed to be polite and introduce yourself. This doesn't say your full name was given. Photos, that's pretty much what most people (not me) use the book of faces for. And that includes teens that get on it. Basically the phone number could be a raw deal but unless it's a listed number, I still don't see how creepy guy X is going to do something terrible with it. All of these things, a name, a photo, an email, and a phone number are very commonly already known to the most common person likely to do something terrible to a child. They're given out freely or sometimes even controlled by the person committing the acts. Maybe a little caution is advisable toward strangers. But we don't need to go overboard. People, despite their somewhat rampant scum-baggery toward one another in most fields of life, aren't really running around abducting and abusing other people's kids (people and kids they don't know). Save the resources worrying about people who might go cruising the city and internet for children to molest and put them toward the kids who are actually at risk for such things (ie, kids who are raised in abusive or degenerative environments) to give them some extra resistance and help.

It's kind of like this fear. Which I remember from my youth when I attempted to trick or treat a couple of times. One guy has been charged in decades (and that long after I had given up the tradition of dressing up as some random creature once per year. I should probably consider dressing up more often as some random superhero or creature just to mess with people). Yet we were truly terrified all the same.

say what?

Food must be cheaper, it costs less

Except for that part where we're all paying for it with taxes so the government can buy it, pay people not to produce it, and generally manipulate the price of food (upward usually, especially obvious with sugar prices and the subsequent invention of corn syrup).

"But of course you know the Agriculture Department has long been criticized by some activists for emphasizing the interests of farmers and growers over the interests of consumers, particularly by subsidizing certain foodstuffs which aren't necessarily the most healthy and disadvantaging locally grown food, organic food and things of that sort.

So I just wanted to ask you about that. Do you think that that's true, first of all, and do you plan to address that balance?

Sec. VILSACK: I really don't think it's true. I think that the reality in America is that we need both, because there's a demand and need for both. I would say consumers do benefit from the way in which we structured our farm programs, at least as of today, because of the fact that our food is less expensive than it is any place else in the world. Folks in America have a great deal more discretion of what to do with their paycheck."

- Yes, the part of the paycheck they get to keep. The part that they had to hand over to the government however then goes to make food "cheaper", by which I mean that some foods are cheaper and some foods are not, based on which foods can buy off the relevant political agencies. There was a chart that shows the cost of foods purchased by an average American in various major cities. Detroit, long regarded as one of the least healthy cities in the country, pays the least for its food, and much of it is groceries rather than people eating out. "Cheaper" food is therefore hardly better in terms of discretionary income being spent on food , at least as it relates to health outcomes. Simply making food cheaper isn't really going to help people who have no experience cooking with fresh ingredients or vegetables anyway, but moving the prices of meat or corn or sugar upward by removing the underlying subsidies (and trade tariffs/barriers) would result in people spending MORE money on food, which I think based on what people spending more money on food shows is not necessarily less healthy an outcome for consumers. You could then worry about people who don't have enough money for meat and corn syrup in some other more productive way than making that kind of food really cheap relative to things that go unsubsidized (most vegetables for instance) and instead of doing things like any of the following:
1) subsidizing fresh vegetables (which is just a vicious cycle of people with their hands out asking for money from the public instead of competing for it with their efficient production of goods and services in the open market)
2) taxing soft drinks (which essentially means we'd be taxing our own subsidies)
3) imposing more government controls over water use or the production of agriculture generally

Pretty much any economic or independent policy advice on the entire structure of food subsidies is to end them because they are horribly inefficient, introduce massive distortions in prices and markets, not to mention unfriendly to other countries (for instance a number of countries which we send food aid toward which could, if we had unsupported prices, compete to grow their own food to sell to us or anywhere they pleased). And yet we have these politicians, indeed, the very politicians in charge of agricultural policy, who exhort the great blessings of agricultural subsidies so skillfully that the public at large (at least in Ohio's recent election as an example) was entirely willing to extend greater magnificence upon this decaying edifice and seek to arm these government boards with ever more price configurations and controls. It is not often that the world seems sane, but this is one instance where I can think of nothing more demonstrative of its tendencies toward insanity.

I also don't understand the importance of "buy local". That may be true if local produce is cheap or superior in some way (taste for example). But what if buying it from a thousand miles away is cheaper because they have more efficient farmland? Or it's a better product? Or a product that cannot be grown where you live, like say, a pineapple? What if the local farmers rely on subsidized water prices that are price controlled to be artificially low and are draining the aquifers in order to irrigate crops (and raising your own water prices)? What if the local farmers are employing illegal immigrants, or types of pesticides, or genetically modified crops that people seem to disapprove of abstractly (until they have to pay more for goods at the checkout). I figure if buying local is so important, people will do it on their own.