NXTR

A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.

On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.