Food should not be a commodity
2d 23h ago by lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/A404 in flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com from lemmy.dbzer0.com
When we can't feed everyone, that's weakness, and it is sad.
When its a choice, that's power, and its fun!
Exactly, can't be won't.
To make more food to stockpile and force people to buy or watch rot you silly billy!
Seriously though. Its one thing to want to sell the food, I get that people gotta get paid, but the fact that in a lot of places we just throw away the unsold food to rot in the rubbish is ridiculous!
Like seriously, we're just gonna throw away this food rather than even attempt to give it to those in need, and fire anybody who tries, cause it might slightly eat into profits?? That's just psychopathic levels of corporate apathy.
There are places where the trash bins of supermarkets are locked so homeless people can't take thrown away food from them
Most supermarkets have compactors.
Nutrition cubes
So, here's a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it's produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.
The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.
The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn't time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it's completely rotten.
Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can't un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.
Always buy local, as much as you can!
Okay, that's true for fresh produce with a minimal shelf life. But we also do that for shelf stable (like dried, canned, jarred) foods which can much more reasonably be donated after their display date.
And that's assuming some sort of centralised donation scheme, and not just mandating the stores donate to a local foodbank or such - which would make it a bit more feasible to donate some fresh produce.
As far as "buying local", there's no reason why we shouldn't be seed-bombing food plants everywhere. Destroying the soil to grow a field of peppers for example, to mass produce and mass distribute them across the world, is not sustainable. Why should food even be "bought" local or not? How are we not lining the streets with fruit trees? Why are urban environments packed full of shrubs and bushes that aren't growing food? Why are we using lawns to just grow trimmed grass? Why aren't we utilizing natures impeccable clockwork of self-maintaining edible gardens and forests? We have all the food energy we need raining down from the sky, why aren't our rooftops being used? We could be living in an abundance of food, all local, all free. Human societies have done that for thousands of years both before and after the so-called "agricultural revolution." We know it's possible. We figured out how to turn deserts into forests by just digging a bunch of semi-circles and waiting for a bit.
But we don't because number go down instead of up. There's no money to be made in that, so even the most altruistic of investors will be deterred from the lack of monetary ROI and not the ROI of a better world. It's like the world is stuck in Dark Ages Europe, where people couldn't imagine how the world could function without the Christian god, the gospel, and the divine leadership of Kings and Queens. Now we're in a dark age where people can't imagine the world functioning without money, economic models, and the divine leadership of investors and CEOs. Thinking otherwise makes you a heretic, and considering how they used to burn thousands for the heresy of atheism much like we kill thousands for the heresy of environmentalism.
We credit the Enlightenment era for getting us out of this braindead mindset, yet little has really changed. Whether you call it capitalism or socialism, we're still draining water tables and making land uninhabitable, then turning the land into gravel and call it "development" or "productivity". The whole universe is open to this sort of insanity. We really need to go back to the ideas that inspired the Enlightenment and opened European minds to something other than their death-cult religions, like the indigenous critiques of Native Americans.
I'm an atheist to people who believe in money - I just go one God further.
Dumpster diving is fun and easy.
Isnt eating food from dumpsters unsafe?
Meat/eggs/dairy, definitely.
Vegetables, maybe, depending on what else they've touched.
Dry/canned goods, probably not unless they're wet (e.g if it's in a cardboard box or paper package and it's damp, it's not worth the risk - if we're talking about grocery store waste then for all you know that was water used to wash the butcher's work station or mop the floor).
Bacterial contamination is your primary concern, and after that mold. Salmonella could just end your life.
Caveat on canned goods: avoid bloated cans if they contain any meat. Bloated fruit cans contain alcohol.
Oh yeah, good point, avoid any cans that look bent, dented or expanded.
Are dented cans a concern? I thought it just meant someone dropped them
The problem is that the seal around the end of the can might be broken in a not-obvious way. If air can get in, bacteria can start to grow inside.
TIL good to know
dented can ruin the seal
So you're saying bloated fruit cans are the ones to look for? Got it, thanks!
Provided the seals are intact, it's unlikely they contain anything worse than alcohol.
If they contain any meat at all, assume they're a biohazard.
But good luck finding them at all. Most places that sell canned food have compactors nowadays, and it's been that way for some time.
The excess is also insane. When people can't afford or won't afford the high beef prices, will the corporations who make it produce less or take it to market to be used in more sustainable products? As a society we've moved to not just make sure enough food is available but that everyone has an opportunity to purchase anything they might want. With fresh foods that means guaranteed waste, which means higher prices to make up for that waste.
My great grandparents ran a grocery store in a very small town. My grandfather ran a butcher counter that he got regular deliveries for and everyone in town knew the schedule, once the meat was gone, that was it until the next delivery. They grew produce in the summer and always canned any excess. There was always enough food for everyone who cared to buy it, but there wasn't so much that everyone could get everything at any time.
Unsold food that is given away creates a liability if it causes problems. Food banks are the middle man in that respect, where they can toss things that aren't going to stay good and provide for people with the rest. So here's where government, regulation, and socialism comes into play. Companies should be encouraged with money to do something other than toss that food. Better systems should be in place to move that food to the food bank. Better regulation there to make sure that the food is being examined well enough. More places for all this to happen.
This ignores fixing the real problem, profit driven consumption, societies where people aren't able to provide for themselves, etc.
So by itself you aren't going to get unsold food to the needy, the risk and cost is too great for companies.
Idk how widespread it is but I've volunteered with organizations that get massive shipments of unsold food that's then repackaged by them and then given out or sold at a substantially lower cost, so this does happen. This is backed by federal laws limiting the liability of donors, and at least in my state there are also laws limiting food waste to incentivize participation in such programs.
Make it easy for the corpos. Criminalize destroyed food. The financial disincentive needs to be very punitive like some percentage revenue first offense. Then jail time for execs and boards. Those companies may need to hire community coordinators to deal with the near expiring foodstuffs to avoid the criminal liability. Capitalists might assume people would stop buying food and just wait for it all to be near expiring, but the reality is, those with means will take the convenience of a purchase over a long, uncertain wait, potentially queuing hours or even the night before the food banks would open. It might depress prices as they get desperate to trade some of the remaining margin before being required to give it away. Oh no, what will we do if the rich people are slightly less rich!
Actually, this is completely false for US based companies.
They limited liability in 96
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Good_Samaritan_Act_of_1996
Correct to say that’s the law the lawyers you pay will have to cite to defend your company in a suit? Which a big corporation we would hope would treat as a cost of doing business, of course.
Imagine some businesses are ignorant of the law and some are super paranoid about even baseless litigation.
Do you think industrial safety standards that companies spend tonnes of money on maintaining every year just popped out of thin air or the good will of companies?
Hell no. The mega-corps at least would be chucking children into factory machines 7 days a week like back in to early 20th century if they thought they could get away with it.
If you want companies to do something they're otherwise not incentivised to do, you regulate it into existence. Force their hands just like Governments did in the past, and have now become increasingly less willing to do because of blatant corruption.
The easiest path in my mind is a one-two combo...
Firstly you give minimal liability to the food donor, so as long as they made a good faith effort to check the food wasn't bad before handing it over you can't be sued (I.e. if you're giving a batch of cans, you'd check them for defects like bloating or cracks/dents).
Secondly, you create criminal liability for throwing away non-defective shelf stable foods (such as dried, canned and/or jarred foods) for companies over a certain size (to prevent from screwing over small businesses that may not have the logistics to ensure consistent donations).
Those two things create a pathway by which donations can be made with minimal risk, and disincentivise the route of least resistance (aka. Throwing it all away).
50s Prediction: In the future, robots will do menial tasks so you can focus on arts, family and science!
Actuality: You lost you job as an artist to AI. Enjoy a lifetime of debt and poverty. Maybe you can find some menial way to sustain yourself just enough to barely live.
IDK, Player Piano was released in 1952 and called out a world where increasing automation lead to an enriched and privileged engineer class and everyone else living in poverty and internal displacement. For a debut novel, it was pretty good.
But even Player Piano gave the masses UBI.
TBF I read it in early college (for fun not as an assignment) and I'm significantly past college age.
Food, water, housing.
+Healthcare
+Education
All of which we can already provide for everyone forever indefinitely… if we stopped making profit the only point of value to these endeavours.
I could grow food or even aquire water, but what the fuck am I supposed to do about medicine?
I can't reconstruct an entire civilization's worth of cutting-edge medical tech and knowledge.
HEALTHCARE and medication.
Totally agree, I thought of it 2 seconds after posting and then saw everyone else mentioned it when I scrolled, so I figured the comment section had it covered.
First : The US government would give people cases of water based on your social security number like they do with snap which currently, can make some people depending on your social security number, wait as far as two weeks into the month for food stamps. So imagine how that would play out with water. By the way that's a way (☝🏻 not THE way, A way) they ration food in communism, they use things like your birth date or state identity (social security) and then ration it that way. Imagine toilet paper being given to you in rationed quantities based on your social security number.
Second: I only agree water and the ability to have a tent without being detained should be basic human needs. Food is a survival thing. You earn food by either by killing your own food or buying it. Water in the other hand it's around but we as humans worry about parasites and shit because we need to so maybe we just start talking about lifestraws more often.
I think that laws surrounding the inability to live life without relying on the grid are exhausting and I think that we're all just meant to be kept down.
In your opinion, should disabled people and poor people who get too sick to work just fucking die?
Second comment: the othertthing no one talks about is how much of an addiction it becomes. If you get the max amount from disability that near 2k a month minus health insurance and food. You have no generalized savings, unless you're on section 8 due to how much rent you'd have to pay if you weren't. You can have assets with disability but regualr SSI which limits assets and you'd have to keep all your money on cash because if you go over a certain limit in savings which you can't even have a savings account really because of the limit and no work based income it's harder to get a, "regualr bank account," unless it's at a credit union. You also can't own a car on SSI but you can on disability.
Life isn't great on these services you're very limited and you're better off, if you're able to getting a career that pays at least 75k$ a year and lower expenses on luxuries.
Yes, the system as it is now sucks. You speak as if that is mandatory and unchangeable.
Again, in your opinion, should disabled people and poor people who get too sick to work just fucking die?
No but if there comes a time when they're able to get vocational training and contribute, they should.
That is not what I asked, way to twist the question lol. Why is it so hard for you to say that no, disable and sick people should not be left to die? That's a weird thing to not be able to do.
from a previous comment: . So there’s 350mil people in the US. There’s 163mil working individuals. It’s 6.3E11 to provide $1,800 month which means if you divide that by the amount of workers you get 3865.0306748466257668. So I’m willing to guess that’s how much a month it would cost to the workers of this country to provide $1,800/MO to everyone in the entire country. Which means you’d have to make that figure smaller because not everyone makes enough to cover that a month.
So that means that if every worker reached that 3865.0306748466257668 every 9 months by paying 429.44785276073619631 a month in extra taxes…
It would take 9 months to gain the amount of money it would take to make everyone in the US a recipient of 1,800$ a month. Now it would take about 14 years to save up for 25 years worth of being able to give everyone in the US 1,800$. Which means if that money was held in a trust and redistributed in 14 years, it would then not be able to cover the cost of bare minimal goods and services for everyone in the US because within that time frame there will be more births, inflation will occur and the cost of living adjusts. That means that less people can have that money from the trust because now you have to account for those adjustments. Which means that even if you did have enough money to give everyone 1,800$ for 25 years, the amount of time needed to accumulate that would make it so that the very same 1,800$ is worthless.
That's currently how social security works. There's an amount of money in a trust that's made up of tax payer dollars that redistributes that money to those who can not take care of themselves. They do a COLA (a cost of living adjustment) annually and give people more every year if you're receiving from the government which means that's less money for the next person that needs it.
The current problem is, that the very same money in the trust is running out.
Which is why I said, it's not a possibility to be able to give everyone an income or keep everyone alive. There will be casualties and that's usually do to societal needs not being able to be met by the fact that there simply isn't enough to go around for everyone.
Man. That's a lot to avoid just simply saying "No, disabled people and poor people who get too sick to work should not just fucking die"
I said No. There's no twisting of the question, I am also saying if you're able to support yourself at some time in your life with the help of vocational training which is usually offered through disability services that most states have in place; Then why not attempt it.
I'm not heartless of course I don't think people who can't take care of themselves shouldn't be left to die but there's so many people that are on sucking that government teat, that the systems in place are over worked and understaffed and underpaid and the trust set aside is declining at record pace because there's too many people. Plus, we have a mentally declining president that's cutting programs for those in need: why? idfk....
"If you're disabled, you're better off getting a job that pays $10k over the US median annual income than collecting disability."
What a worthless take.
I mean fuck me for setting my standards further than being in poverty forever. By the way, college certification courses aren't hard to pay for with payment plans and SaaS/cloud computing isn't a bad one. Even hvac is bumpin' and that's one that autistics can accel at. You could sell an infrastructure or build it and it's less than 15,000$ to get there. Hvac can get to Six Figures but SaaS/Cloud Computing is a high starter. Mri techs aren't bad either those are high paying low cost certification profession.
Set your goals higher than a bui. How about we help those who are in poverty get into these careers and build them up instead of keeping them on fucking poverty jeezus man.
Okay, so you are more able-bodied than some people. Awesome for you. Not everyone is capable of what you are, even with extensive support. Telling those people to get off SSI, go to school, and get a job isn't helpful. In fact, it mostly just further erodes their self-worth because everything in our fucking society is tied to what value a person can produce for capitalism.
Everyone deserves to be able to live, even if they can't work.
Really someone learning a valuable skill errors their self worth how? Maybe by a dead end job market but that's their fault then for not doing research on the job market before spending money on furthering your life and btw Affirm has payment plans that are affordable for nearly every earning bracket for college courses.
Leanring a skill that can help you earn money and get you out of poverty is what fucked up?
You know what's nuts is every time I've mentioned that subset on reddit I'd get a mixed reaction so I leave those groups put due to the obvious answer of they deserve it.
I think if you're physically able to work but have something with your mental health setting you back in life and you're constantly trying to make the effort to integrate into society by going to vocational training and supplementing income by working the hours that you possibly can that your condition allows then you should be able to keep your benefits. I think if you're like stunning half the day, non verbalaand can't wash yourself yeah check and housing for life homie!!!!.
I think if you can work you should work.
I guess it's only in my state because I get mine on the 13th I think of every month.
What is the point of automation and mass production when the prices of certain basic staples keeps going up? You are really going to tell me we can't get a loaf of bread down to 1 dollar?
What is the point of automation and mass production when the prices of certain basic staples keeps going up?
Horizontal Integration Explained
Companies pursue horizontal integration for synergies like economies of scale or cost savings in marketing, R&D, production, and distribution. This can make manufacturing multiple products more cost-effective. Tiers of sale under a single distributor (economy and generic versus luxury or specialty) also afford the corporate entity to scale price to income and maximize revenue per customer.
The "organic" label is a good example of this in practice. Add a 50% mark-up on bananas by telling people the "regular" bananas are unsafe. Anyone who can't tolerate the professed risk (typically people with more disposable income) end up paying extra to the same distributor for what is functionally the same product sold at a premium price.
Automation and Mass Production are tools of monopolization in the capitalist economic model. The efficiencies of production are used to lock competitors out of the market, not to improve the consumer-experienced efficiency of production, distribution, or sale.
Thanks for the post and the link. Great explanation.
The short answer is that any benefit arising from the decrease in manufacturing costs through technology, scaling, etc. is considered the property of the manufacturer. You though those cost savings should be passed on to the customer. They disagree. Perhaps an even split? NO.
I mean, in Holland a loaf of bread is like €1...
That would be actual bread. They talk about the sugar filled kind.
Remember that a portion of the sale of every loaf of bread goes to make the stock-holder douchebags richer.
A dollar might be a little optimistic today - I say this because a basic loaf of bread I bake at home, which I do a lot, costs me around $1.10. Of course a bakery buys bulk ingredients at lower cost, but they also have to pay employees and I don't.
I've seen several basic loaves for like $1.19 recently. They're starting to catch on to the fact that there's not much left to extract, and a hungry man is an angry man.
I always buy the Aldi wheat bread at $1.29/ loaf.
What is the point of automation and mass production
Profits for the few, enslavement for the rest.
the prices of certain basic staples keeps going up
It's very hard to enslave people who are free and have their needs met.
we can’t get a loaf of bread down to 1 dollar?
Capitalism can not exist with the violent deprivation of basic human needs.
Liberals absolutely loath the hungry and starve people for entertainment. They hate the fact that anarchists adore their comrades and feed ourselves for solidarity.
Tell a liberal to open a canteen, and see how they send cops to destroy free food caravan.
Soup kitchens work great, and I do not know how they avoid this shit. Perhaps they enthusiastically pretend not to be interested in mutual aid of any kind, just helping the deserving poor or whatever.
Thankyou for piercing my complacency. They really do not give a shit about anything but property values, do they?
¯\(ツ)/¯ I simply lack cognitive dissonance and the flaw to introspect.
I guess I was born to care for my fellow intelligent lifeforms.
What is your opinion on conservatives?
read my description.
DNI is burned into my brain as Do Not Inventory...
What does it mean in the context of your profile?
Also, I fucking hate retail
Gonna chime in here, I am pretty sure DNI stands for "do not interact"
I appreciate you. Thanks!
👍
You can infer from the criticisms that they feel its not worth distinguishing between two groups willing to subject the poor to infinite cruelty to uphold their own privilege under capitalism.
Not an anarchist, but I doubt any anarchists here would disagree with Kwame Ture's banger of an essay on the subject: https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/
We were forced to build it by people with ambitions for power who were willing to kill, torture and starve us into compliance. Our civilizations are all descended from slaver societies.
Housing, healthcare, clean water and food security are all human fuxking rights
I wonder what percentage of people actually disagree with this in the US. I bet it's a very small percentage.
Edit: like definitely less than 50% of people, probably closer to 25% or maybe even as small as 10%
Please don't ruin this for me, I need my hope for humanity to come back.
You're not far off, but political propaganda prevents people from realizing it apparently.
And if you go back to the original community structure it was the family or tribe - where the whole point was group survival, not luxury for a few while the majority scraped by.
... and then the violent imposed capitalism.
Kill the rich, save the poor. Taxation, is not enough for the current era. There must be justice for the crimes committed. Once they are dead, then we can figure out how to run the world without capitalism. Untill then, the elimination of the ultra-rich by any means should be the goal. Everything else is noise.
We've done this. The people in charge of the killing are the new kings.
Not saying it'll yield a worse situation, tho.
"I'll do it again. Gif"
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That's why anarchism should be the goal, or at least a confederation. Power should never be concentrated.
It's a good goal, but not in a competitive world where you can be occupied/exploited.. We had a series of small successful small societies all around the world and they were crushed by colonialism.
Eh, the smaller European nations are extremely competitive (BENELUX, Scandinavia, Switzerland), no risk of being conquered by neighbours because a good common foundation has been built.
I agree. That's why I think anarchism would only work if everyone in the world share the similar values and culture, in others words "like minded" enough to trust each other. But that will take a really long time to happen.
The most successful anarchist society I've seen in media is the Fremen in Dune. They all get along despite having local quirks from their own immediate community on both southern and northern halves of Arrakis. But this then runs into trouble of being vulnerable to interplanetary invasion. Which then leads the requirement for a universe-wide cultural harmony to allow for a universal anarchism.
We don't really have a choice since the alternative is planetary destruction.
You can hope to opt-out your society at best, but then the rewards for remaining societies to go full-bore capitalist are greater.
You can't beat the system and the human race is doomed. Cephalopods are the future.
While you're figuring out how to run the world without capitalism, which opportunistic individuals, agencies, and countries are going to be exploiting the massive power vacuum you have created? I think change is needed, but at least have a fucking plan before suggesting something that affects your multivariable social credit score at the NSA. You're not helping anything or anyone and you're actively harming yourself. All data is collected and compiled. There is more going on than you are aware of, and if you are not aware there is a decentralized autonomous organization of secret police described at an eighth grade reading level in the New Testament, you may wanna freshen up on your Knowledge base.
Y'know, the Illuminati existed to help guide people waking up to the half-truths into the occult while catching those people who just wanted to burn the church to the ground. There's mechanisms in place to catch the bad apples, and if you're mouthing off with this, you are probably fucking yourself in some way you are not aware. I say this as someone that could be a fed. I might be a fed. I may be a fed. And you are incapable of discerning the truth despite me saying this, y'understand? Dazzle camouflage. You are likely under investigation. But I only know you from one comment. Imagine what someone reading your messages thinks of you. :)
Hey look a "scary" noise. Come get me. Come kill me. My whole town will rebel against you.
I'm too well known locally. You cannot silence me quietly. Why should I be afraid of death? Why should I be afraid?
Also feds have ALREDY been to my home. I have no weapons. I have no chemicals. I have no means of actually dishing out death.
There is no secret police. Humans can't keep secrets. You do not scare me and you never will. But boy do I smell fear on you.
My mission is education, bro. I love you. I don't want anything to happen to you. You should really read the New Testament to UNDERSTAND what is says.
See, the thing about language is that semiotics is too preliminary of a means to co-enceptulate knowledge, for it's just symbols. The passage of the 0's n 1's encoded in the tramsmutae in communication are primarily defunct, by default. What that means is there has to be a lateral form of processing to one's linear processing. There's one's logic/Adam, and one's intuition/Eve, and Eve is the one who gets Knowledge first, which is wisdom encoded in passage. You have absolutely no idea what the nature of the surveillance state if you thought I was an enemy. I'M YOUR SAVIOR RETARD! I WANT YOU TO SAVE YOURSELF FROM YOUR OWN DUMBASS!
A messiah is a repurposed pariah, one guaranteed thing in society. Jesus wasn't good enough for his step-dad. Moses was abandoned. Me? Well, I'm just a class 11.2 retard, which is an obscure literary reference.
What's hiding right in front of your face? Dazzle camouflage is what ensures I can speak freely and even if you choose to be my enemy, you can't hurt me worth a damn. You might be hurting yourself, cuz we might have planned around you planning around a consciously, deliberate retard, like me!
Damn, you the religious kind of noisy. I'm not gonna came after you. You are not worth it.
I'm not religious, bro.
And you're telling us to watch what we say? lmao.
No. I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm telling you everything said is consumed by an eldritch beast in the NSA basement to reduce you to thirty-six axises of a social credit score. Where you go is up to you. And remember, at some point in the future, we figure out retrocausality. But I'm just a caster of lots, according to Revelation 22:15. I know nothing is random. I also know what this object is for, being ordained in the occult:
Bruh, that is just an ancient sewing tool. It's been proven. Chill.
What Jesus called his Father, the Buddhists call the Ālaya-vijñāna, or storehouse consciousness.
No, sewing wasn't invented yet. That is a pedagogical object meant to teach what Indra's Net is an analogy for, similar to a diagram in a textbook. That's why they're found amongst valuable objects, not just strewn about.
You are not a featherless biped on an Earth. You are a pocket of consciousness and the Earth is inside you. Everything you experience is self-contained within your neurons, right? Well, these words must be inside you, yea? So, a refracted reflection of me is inside you.
"Occult" just means "hidden." It benefits the decentralized autonomous organization of secret police described in the New Testament at an eighth grade reading level to upkeep a lie amongst the fools of the world because in the occident, we engineer our culture to control those people who cannot think for themselves.
he is saying that the feds are likely scraping the fediverse and we should be more careful about what we say online
Ding ding ding! We have a bingo!
Bro over here thought the people on the internet were like him
UBI or collectivisation solves this.
Just need enough combined will to realise either.
Hierarchy was there right from the start so I don't agree that we were ever on the same page as to why we do anything.
The indus valley civilisation was very likely egalitarian
That's certainly a historical gap in my education tbh.
They never teach about egalitarian civilisations at schools. I wonder why 🤔
I'm aware of the omissions of 90's Alberta public education 🤭 Being made to stand for anthem and Christian prayer every morning was also pretty creepy. Special needs were bullied heavily and segregated from general school population. The Eugenics programs had only just ended there in 1990. I didn't even know about residential camps until it became an international scandal. Embarrassing to find out at the same time as the rest of you.
I've been mainly focused on the history of languages, medieval period, and the Canaanites as of late. Indus Valley Civilisation makes the list now. I guess Bill got it wrong, damn. Still a catchy vid.
It was definitely there with agriculture. Hunter gatherers had a lot of different ways of organizing their societies but early agrarian societies quickly developed a military caste and despotic governments.
Agriculture seems to me to be the point where humans first started saying "this stuff, that stays in one place and is useful, is actually just mine/ours". How that's done varies tremendously over time and space, but it's hard to imagine the concept of "ownership" in the way we now understand things, without agriculture. And it's easy (for me anyway) to imagine the idea of "property rights" springing pretty naturally out of beginning to understand cultivation.
And by that, I really do mean, we doomed ourselves to fight over the very things we fight about today, starting then lol.
Yeah. When you’re breaking your back out in the fields all year and you’ve just barely managed to fill your granary with enough food for the winter, you’re not going to tolerate a band of marauders coming through and stealing all the food. Property was a matter of life and death for the entire village.
We’re all descended from these agrarian cultures (except for some of the indigenous folks who hail from hunter gatherer communities). These strong property rights are deeply rooted in our cultures.
Yep, couldn't agree more really, the ways we're built to think were useful and basically essential for all of human history.
But now things are very (eh, somewhat) different and we're doing a shit job of updating our understanding of "how to be people". Mostly (by my measure) due to the way our technology changes much much faster than human-scale "how to be" wisdom.
I agree about hunter gatherers. I was coming at this from the perspective of when civilisation started "in a dank river valley near you" as Bill Wurtz put it with a few small huts beside the field owner's bigger stick figure hut :p
Yeah you can tell how bro this place is by how nobody has mentioned patriarchy...
No offense, lemmy <3
The start. When was that?
Remember the countries that voted in the UN against food being a human right ? The USA and Israel.
Genocidal zio kids grow up starving people.
Yeah these two would vote against air being a human right.
the capitalists would say that we did, in fact, gain all these capabilities so they could enrich themselves by letting food rot.
I think we built civilization to do more stuff like attend consorts
No we obviously built agriculture so we could have futures trading
plant-based, sure.
Because dragon gold
Food should not be a commodity
Would you prefer it was a luxury?
For profit. Who cares about people?
The shareholders disagree. And their opinion is the only one that matters
So we could make value for shareholders
That is kind of what civilization was built for, yeah. Slavery, consolidation of power, etc aren't new.
when you read/listen/watch about inventors from the industrialisation period, they were often—if not always—motivated by profit and not philanthropy.
was "civilisation" ever a goal or just something that happened? A hypocrite idea of moral progression?
when you read/listen/watch about inventors from the industrialisation period, they were often—if not always—motivated by profit and not philanthropy.
Because they also wanted to eat.
Beyond a certain point, they would have no trouble eating. It's more like, once the machine of expansion really gets going, and you've poured your life into it, stopping would be hard. You like expanding your business. You're good at it. You're not an idle rich loser like all those other dilettantes at the club!
Elon's most obvious trait is the gaping void of insecurity that can never be filled. If he isn't the genius who will one day prove everyone wrong, who the fuck is he? He is constantly grasping for that warm feeling of having made it, and he is incapable of it. He is a machine built of suffering, his own and many, many others.
One thing I feel almost sorry for him about is that he really wants that Tony Stark public image back, but at this point it's never going to happen again, and he can't accept that.
All that money and such a miserable man. He could've invested in a therapist.
Food, shelter and warmth are the only things we need. And we have more than enough for every single person on earth. Boy oh boy did we ever reveal our shortcomings as a race. Even barn rats look out for each other.
Water.
Yeah and water might soon become the one thing we don't have enough of
It was implied with food but you are correct.
Who is "we"? What "race"?
No thanks on this vague distraction from the actual blame.
The human race, I presume. Even though humanity isn't a race. English is so fucked up.
You are correct. I want everyone to have everything (or at least the opportunity).
We? Fucking humans. Earthlings. God the divisiveness has eaten deep into your brain.
It already is, dumbass.
Note: It's a right in the sense of "it should be available to buy", but not "you can get it for free"-kind-of-right.
Uhh it starts with I can't believe anyone would think implying there are a lot of people who don't think it is a right. Your or the UN's declaration that it is right means nothing if people don't agree to it. Besides, the devil is always in the details.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/09/united-nations-right-to-food-us-hunger
A right can be positive or negative. Saying you have the right to buy food without money is pointless. A positive right would mean someone would need to provide you that food if you can't afford it. What type of right and is it provided if needed is the crux of the issue.
So the issue is: we industrialized because we wanted to sell more food while paying less people for working. Not because we wanted to make the world a better place.
Industrialization and AI are actually very similar. Both were pushed by rich people who wanted to pay less for producing more.
And just like industrialization, push to use AI is lowering quality of everything. Because quality things cannot be mass-produced.
Quality things can be mass-produced but you don't have to renew them as often and you quickly reach saturation of the market and thus your sales plumet.
So they prefer enshittification and planned obsolescence...
You mistake quality with durability.
We could have things that are aesthetically pleasing instead of just endless gray boxes. We could have machines that have functionality more tailored to our needs. But that wouldn't be as easy to automate in production.
Industrialized ag happened because the large majority of people don't want to do the hard work of farming. All of you here want to make a 6+ figure income sitting in your comfortable home office. Rather than working 10-hour days sweating in the hot sun to grow your own food and provide for its storage.
You wanted those pretty lights and shiny baubles the urban life provides. So, because so many people want to get that nice cushy life, you have fewer people needing to feed more and more people that can't provide food for themselves. So what is the end result?
Capitalism can not exist without the violent deprivation of basic human needs.
Fr, where do people think their clothes come from?
nah, that's where you're wrong. We industrialised agriculture to make trillionaires while the rest of us die.
Then what SHOULD be a commodity, smart-ass? Since you're the king of commodities?
Toilet paper
My bidet allows me to build a stockpile for hoarding!
More like commode-ity, amirite?
Luxuries. Human needs are well understood, finite, and easily provided absent violent control.
Lock-and-key grain agriculture exists precisely TO suppress people. Grain agriculture spread not because bread is a miracle and we all love it and need so much of it, but rather because grains have a predictable harvest and consistent size and weight that makes them useful for taxing purposes for states -- and it makes populations grow because it requires you to be sedentary... which also useful for states in many situations. States and hierarchies are the problem.
The state hoards all of the land
Food is a human right in the means of availability in stores. You still gotta pay for it. We can't just be animals and hunt and kill our food especially in the city, so industrialized food is what we got. You either deal with the potential of being killed while killing your meal or you suck it up and go to the grocery store. Either way youre stressed af and never truly satisfied.
Water on the other hand should be a basic human right and people should be charged half for their water bill. Like we can all fight and kill each other but at the end of the day how are we gonna do that if we can't get water? We're still animals. We still need water.
Basic clean water, healthy food, healthcare and housing should all be guaranteed human rights as a baseline. If you want better versions of any of them then you have to work for it.
Fair. Though, who's gonna pay for the water, food, healthcare and housing? Paycheck or protection for the people? Feed the struggling and struggle more on the what 16$/hr and then beg for a raise because of more taxes that you wanted or what? It's naive to think that it's a possibility to feed, house and medically care for everyone without having some kind of a forethought otherwise you're stuck with negative hindsight. I don't know how to be more rational about this.
Seems easy to me. Taxes have to be high enough so that everyone gets those minimums we discussed. They cannot be lower. And all government spending should go to fixing the basic human rights first before a single penny is allocated to anything else.
I'm happy to pay a higher tax rate.
Whatever works so that no one has to be homeless or hungry.
Okay so doing the math and I hope I'm right and this is without Ai because I know how much you all hate it. So there's 350mil people in the US. There's 163mil working individuals. It's 6.3E11 to provide $1,800 month which means if you divide that by the amount of workers you get 3865.0306748466257668. So I'm willing to guess that's how much a month it would cost to the workers of this country to provide $1,800/MO to everyone in the entire country. Which means you'd have to make that figure smaller because not everyone makes enough to cover that a month.
So that means that if every worker reached that 3865.0306748466257668 every 9 months by paying 429.44785276073619631 a month in extra taxes......
Money is made up. You know that money is made up, right? That’s only a limitation because society chose for it to be.
It would take 13.24 years taxing the 429.44785276073619631 extra to the working people of the US to have enough money saved up for everyone in the country (current population of 350mil) for 25 years based on the 1,800$/MO income that would be dispensed.
So, no, you don’t at all understand that money isn’t real.
I understand it's just paper with cloth fiber that has no value unless we put that value to it. Yes, I understand money is a valueless idea but you take it away Humans are gonna wanna trade something whether it's your skills or your philosophical babbling, they're gonna want something in return. You take away one thing you replace it with another. So if someone asks you to cement their driveway you're gonna want something in return, you might want food, their time back or now you get one night in their home.
It's always something.
Man, capitalism has really fucked you up.
I'm just saying you can take away money and you will not have a free society where everyone is just in some utopia being accepting of one another there will still be murder and people will still want something in return. Whether it's your time talking to someone or providing a service like building a house, someone is still going to want your pile of rocks for that.
If you want to hunt and gather shit move the hell to the Appalachians other than that pay for your goods and services.
Okay smart ass, would you do work all day for free? Free as in, absolutely nothing in return or would you at the very least want to be able to feed yourself so you'd work for food, right? Oh shit what if you worked and you want food but you need a new shirt but you need to collect a bunch of fruit to trade for that shirt and that shirt was needed to keep doing your work, now you're collecting fruit but what if it spoils first so you have to find the best spot that won't spoil except that territory is controlled by a person who wants 2 sticks for every hour they keep your food unspoiled, what then?
There's always something.
Please refer to my previous comment.
I just realized this says : Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation ...... I had no idea this is what I was on. I just read about the fediverse and decided to join because I no bullshit got banned from Reddit for asking: Why don't we castrate billionaires to prevent generational wealth? and they banned me because they thought I was calling for violence. My appeal got denied. So this is funny to me. I'm a social capitalist with libertarian socialist views. I don't agree with society but I think the only way to change society or have any kind of effect on it is from dismantling it from within. I'm also straight up for the halting of production to destroy society and watch it collapse.
At the same time though I also know we would need a currency no matter what or trading for food or shelter; That's why it's like we can even go as far back as thinking how would a cave person think: they need skin of animal, you have skin of animal I give you food oog boog we trade.
It's always something.
Capitalism is fucking retarded.
I don't disagree but if you're raised in the US and live in it, it's what you got. The collapse of East Germany (autocorrect wtf, we listen to the east Germany anthem when we feel like we need hope don't tell me west) and the German mark was good enough to show when one satellite fails in a major way it shows the flaws of the whole. Socialism is using other people's money to solve problems that never will be solved and every country that has attempted it in a heavy way has failed or ruined their economy.
Capitalism is at the very core, controlled greed that everyone can bite into and never have to give any of it away because you earned that. We even tell people who are disabled they earn that money to make them not feel bad and they don't earn it, they receive it. Even then, even if you receive money, you're still able if you did it right to hoard money.
But I guess if food wasn't a commodity then I guess if I owned a farm and had cattle for meat that means it's a fuck all and you can take my cattle because food isn't a commody?
If there was no value to the things we have we wouldn't have a controlled trade system to be able to have some kind of a civilized way of living without that controlled trade system Farmer Frank killing you with a pitchfork for stealing his cattle, is more a possibility than going to the grocery store and buying meat.
God damn, dude, you are such a fucking waste of time. Go hail your almighty dollar and fuck off, you subservient cunt.
Go write your thesis on how it’s easier to gobble boot than to ever even try in the slightest to think outside of the system you were indoctrinated into somewhere else, then feel free to fucking choke on it. You’re a fucking propagandist.
I’m a social capitalist with libertarian socialist views.
Socialism is using other people’s money to solve problems that never will be solved
Excuse me what
a social capitalist with libertarian socialist views.
Are Libertarian Socialists the Same as Anarchists?
An anarchist by definition stands against all authority without exception, while a socialist by definition is simply someone who feels the means of production should be collectively owned. So, socialism is narrowly focused on economic issues, while anarchy is explicitly concerned with any and all social issues.
When a socialist also identifies as a libertarian, they're indicating that they're critical of the traditional authoritarian socialist states that have been so prominent in the world (the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, etc.)
But while libertarian socialists might reject one-party states, that doesn't mean they reject states entirely. A lot of them will support democratic states or other democratic forms of government. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all forms of government.
Generally someone who chooses to identify as a libertarian socialist rather than an anarchist is making a deliberate choice to use non-committal language that implies they're willing to accept certain forms of authority. If they opposed all authority as anarchists do, they'd likely call themselves an anarchist.
There are various forms of libertarian socialism that promote a supposedly "libertarian" state, while there are other libertarian socialists who reject the state form, but embrace other forms of authority.
Communists are a famous example of libertarian socialists who embrace various forms of authority including majoritarianism but stop short of supporting a full-blown state. But the form of government they do support greatly resembles states on a smaller, more localized scale. Communists wholly advocate for government, majoritarianism, hierarchy and are probably best described as direct-democrats or socialist monarchists. Anyone claiming communists are anarchists doesn't understand communism or anarchy.
While a few anarchists might also choose to identify as libertarian socialists in polite company, the majority of libertarian socialists aren't anarchists, so anarchists would be better off avoiding the "libertarian socialist" moniker since all it really says about a person's politics is they like socialist economics but have an aversion to vanguard parties. Anarchy is a whole lot more than economics.
To identify as an anarchist is to take a strong stance against all authority, while libertarian socialism, democratic socialism and other such milquetoast labels take no such stance, leaving the door open to all kinds of authority, with the only real concern being democracy in the workplace.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-are-libertarian-socialists-the-same-as-anarchists
I’n familiar with Libertarian Socialism, what I’m perplexed at is a different matter.
…why are you a Libertarian Socialist if you think “Socialism is using other people’s money to solve problems that never will be solved“?
Because that same hopelessness adheres to US capitalism. I care more about destroying the system from within.
Nothing says "I understand maths and economics" quite like giving every number to 16 decimal places.
We just made a trillionaire. You’re fucking joking, right? Is it really more important to you for one person to have more than they can even comprehend than for basic human needs to be met in a world where we have everything required to support the needs of everyone across the board and still have excess? Because if so, that’s as pathetic as it is stupid and heartless.
Whatever we save for the future for this population size will not cover the future population. So no matter what you will never have enough to feed, house and provide medical care for everyone.
We do, though, we currently have that capacity. It’s just barred by capitalism, ego, and crippling stupidity.
Do you mean redistribute wealth from billionaires? I think it's been pretty well established, that will never happen.
So relative to this population size is what saving for the future using the previously given equation would give. Meaning you could save more in less time but that's more taxes. Then you'd have inflationary rates making it so paychecks only match the rising cost of goods......
We don't have the ability to do it for everyone.
It's because it's not a right that we "built civilization". You have to work for it. The natural state of wanderer-gatherer can't support 8 billion people.