Probably depends where you are. in NZ, we already HAVE a bunch of hydro dams, so tweaking things to storage is probably more practical. In a country which were say... substantially dryer or flatter, Synthetic Gas might be the way to go.

And, after "they jacked them back UP again", was it illegal for anyone else to import dairy themselves? Were there legal or regulatory barriers from whomever had previously been part of the former "functioning [domestic] [dairy] system" from restarting their party of the system?

Starting a farm back up again takes a lot of capital. It takes TIME (during which, like, you need food). Land changing land is not like an instantaneous thing.

What you are describing sounds all well and good, assuming you are working in a frictionless economic system, where start up capital is available, etc etc.    But the system is NOT frictionless, and overseas companies had just demonstrated that they could and WOULD slash prices in order to break the domestic market (hence, investment in local infrastructure didn't just have to make sense NOW, it had to make sense in the knowledge of what importers would do in response)

As for other importers coming in and providing competition... I don't know. "International importation" seems to concerntrate the market into the hands of a smaller number of players. Economic theory may say that nice equilibria exist for "many sellers, many buyers", and it may say that bad equilibria exist for Monopoly pricing, but on the scales discussed here, I suspect we have a case of "Two or maybe three Importers", and there... even if there is no explicit cartel going on, I can easily see both sellers just deciding NOT to get into a price war with one another.

I remember when my younger brother was born, and this sensation of going from this scaredy hypochondriac 6 year old (who worried about poisonous spiders, house fires, earthquakes, etc), to a mindset of "Okay, but what will I DO if there is a fire. How will I get me and little brother out the window?". There was this really sharp sensation of "Oh, I'm responsible now." and an associated values system shift, which... I suspect is similar to what a lot of people are talking about here?

Pretty much all of my adult life, my baseline levels of "protection towards children" are pretty damn high... to the point where I stand up and move to a more protective position when I see children near ledges, (even random strangers kids).

Of course... I don't yet have children of my own, so is hard to compare to what other people are describing with respect to having kids, but based on my own personal experience so far... yeah, I'd say younger siblings definitely CAN have a similar trigger effect. 

So... in terms of "well intentioned" limits on letting things over the boarder, etc etc....

There's a story of some smallish island nation (Carabian somewhere?), which had a functioning Domestic diary system. They made a free trade deal with USA, incoming corporations bottomed out the price until no locals could compete, and then once the domestic market collapsed, they jacked them back UP again, (for massive profits).

There are like... legitimate reasons to deliberately favor local food production, even when doing so is "inefficient" in an economic sense. Preserving your own countries ability to produce food can be sensible self reliance, even if someone else could do it cheaper and more efficiently. A decade back New Zealand almost collapsed the entire Canadian Apple market. That's... probably not great, and I can understand govts pushing against that.

....

Of course IF your domestic supplies collapse (due to weather/factory malfunction, whatever), THEN it would be very stupid to keep those rules in place.  :|   And just because you are be protectivist of your local food supply chain doesn't mean you should hand it all to one corperation.  So... you know. The current plan still sounds kind of bad.

So, of tangetial relevance, but something I've been thinking about recently is... well the governance structure of a small company (dictatorship of one person over 3-8 people, who all have the option to leave), vs the same company several years/scale increases later.  (A company of millions of people which effectively acts as a large piece of infrastructure in the country it lives in, yet is still goverened by private interests)

It kind of feels like different governance structures are warrented... and should be legally mandated.
Like... I want small start ups to do what they want. 
I want Amazon to slow morph into a democratically run piece of infrastructure, as opposed to a monopoly, as it gets bigger.  I want medium sized companies to have a sort of semi-democracy, where the CEO/board steer the ship, but the staff are INVOLVED in the decision making. 

How do we do this?
Can a company set itself up with a governance structure which is explicitly designed to change with scale. Should the government say "You have more than a million staff. You are actually a government department now"? Or, like... maybe we don't trust governments? (I do, but I live in a country with high trust, not everyone has that, so whatever).

Thissss.... seems like a really really important point, and I kind of love it.  Thanks for posting. I'm now going to sit around and think about this for a bit.

I want to believe this. I really do. And like... extrapolating from fiction, extrapolating from my intuitive notion of the world I do.

BUT....

BUT.....

We are Godshatter. We are beings that were produced by a complex multidimensional optimization process over billions of years, where evolution created a bunch of weird ass heuristics and left those heuristics in play even after the ceased being relevant (to the blind idiot god), and we are made of those, and fell in love with them.

An AI is either.... going to ACTUALLY be good at optimizing for its goal... or it will be built of a bunch of very different whims and heuristics, which will lead... ?????????? I don't know.

I don't see any reason to believe that its desires will be compatible.   ... with that said I think that it DOES make sense to live our lives and TRY to build our civilisation so that a nascent AI doesn't feel obligated to treat us as a threat and an enemy. To... be the role model that you wish this godling might look up to. At least for a few seconds on its way past.