Who says the leather jacket has to be too big?
Knolls
Lol =) That's a cute piccie. I'm not convinced the kid is having as much fun wearing the jacket as the parents are from watching him wear it
But certainly, it fits just fine !
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If you want to talk ideal, it would be great to tie in related industries. For example, if no one is buying cars and motorcycles, then the demand for gas would go down. Or deal with subsitute goods, where demand for beef, pork, and lamb would all come from the same pool and more supply in one would reduce the demand for the others.
Knolls
Yes, along the same vein, I figure that if there was a worldwide textile shortage, real life companies could address the issue by using wool (or hemp
) instead. I'm not neccesarly for realism at all costs, or realism just for the heck of realism. Typically, games making this or that more and more realistic are just adding layer after layer of code and game mechanics, and after a while like that, it eventually takes the most analytic and determined players to understand all the resulting interactions, and elaborate a strategy from there.
However, where there is an issue, and a new feature is to address it, I think it's good practice to try and have the feature going in the general direction of realism -
or at least, of strong coherence with the rest of the game's own universe-, rather than running in the opposite direction. I'm not sure about car sales going down or being stagnant, negatively impacting the gas demand. Because you could imagine people just using their old cars (and amusingly, probably needing more gas to drive these heavy steel oldies around, than to run a brand new, lightweight composite, modern injection technology -maybe even hybrid- gas efficient car). In practice though, it might encourage new companies to go elsewhere than in the gas buisness, or older companies to diversify more and deal a bit in cars to support their gas sales, which I personaly see as a good thing.
On the paper, and for realism purposes, I definitely like how you suggest to tie the food industries together, and consider that if people are hungry, there is a demand for "food", whatever food is available, really. But in practice, I feel that would precisely go against the whole deal for diversity I was elaborating upon above. If producing one good can satrisfy the demand for others, soon everyone would just be producing one or two products, and satisfying all other demands with it. It wouldn't encourage people to go into niche products as the demand and potential profits raised, because it wouldn't even raise the demand in the first place.
Also, as much as I think that a global food shortage would get people ready to eat just about anything, I believe as well that after 2 weeks of eating just pasta (or sausages), people would like to also have a bit variety. Then the demand for other food products would raise, rather than tend to be satisfied just because they're not hungry anymore. On the contrary, when they're not starving, people can get very picky, you know
My point is that the demand should be affecting prices, take for example sausages - no one is selling them because they simply dont sell. But if the supply&demand thingy would affect the rate at which sausages sell in the stores, or their price, if you want, certainly more people would decide to sell sausages instead of, say, chickens. 
