there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”
and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”
the idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious
straight up, i think we need to start unironically using the term megacorporation
amazon, disney, pepsi, pretty much any company that owns enough subsidiaries that you’re probably touching five of their products at any one time without realizing unless you know very well where everything you buy comes from
that’s a megacorporation
and it’s bad, todd
WE LIVE IN AN OLIGOPOLIC KLEPTOPLUTOCRACY AND NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE
we care, it’s just hard to spell
what an incredible important yet entertaining post
So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”?
You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.
Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…
Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.
And then the Parker Brothers pushed her out and stole the game thereby demonstrating exactly what capitalism is
Do you ever think about how Jeff Bezos could feed literally more than a million food insecure people while losing an hour’s wage but you have to tell yourself no when you want to buy a coffee but can’t because that’s all your rent money?
doctors: GOOD NEWS EVERYONE we have found a treatment for diabetes it’s called insulin! people won’t die from this illness anymore if we just give them insulin isn’t this great news?
united states of america: how about we make it so poor people have either limited to zero access to this insulin?
doctors: but don’t we have enough resources to provide for everyone in need of such a medication?
the united states of america: yes!
doctors: isn’t that genocide
united states of america: YES
united states of america fist pumping and chanting ‘U’ ‘S’ ‘A’:
capitalism is genocide
i usually don’t add to posts i reblog but as a type 1 diabetic this makes me so fucking angry.
i have an insulin pump. each time i change the port (basically what connects it to my body, similar to an iv) i use about a third of a bottle refilling the cartridge. i change it every three days, so one single, 10ml bottle of insulin lasts me around nine days.
i had to look this up because my parents don’t like to tell me how much my supplies cost. (for reasons like this. i feel guilty for my t1d. i shouldn’t have to feel guilty about an autoimmune disorder i was born with.)
you know how much it is for that one, single 10ml bottle of insulin, for those without any insurance?
$328.
for nine days.
$328 for a nine days supply of the medicine that i literally need to survive. the medicine that once i become an adult and have to take care of myself, i will have to pay for. the medicine that unless, by some miracle, they find a cure, i will need to take for the rest of my life. $328 for nine days of my life.
Dumb bitch in the notes arguing planned obsolescence is necessary to keep costs down,
I thought planned obsolescence was to prevent your phone from just suddenly turning off and never working again? Like it’s meant to be an “oh, my thing isn’t working, I should invest in a new one soon.” Kind of thing?? Like shits gonna break either way, I just thought this let us know like a month earlier than it would otherwise.
I mean… that’s kind of what they want you to think?
Sure, throttling your phone’s cpu so that the battery doesn’t wear down faster is certainly… a thing that’ll extend battery life… but, uh………… Hey, why don’t we just allow customers to replace their old batteries, you know, just like batteries were originally designed to do?
This extends far beyond phones/computers/etc as well. I recall, there’s light bulbs that exist from around the time of their invention that can still burn to this day. But companies only manufacture light bulbs that degrade and burn out over a few years, so that they can keep selling more light bulbs and turn a profit.
There’s a lot of examples of this, really. But, no, the main purpose of this is simply to make people continually have to replace their old “““broken”““ products for new ones, when the only reason they break to begin with is because they purposefully build in deficiencies that cause the product to degrade over time. It’s capitalism, baby
My mom had one vacuum cleaner all through our childhood. That first generation of vacuum cleaners was made to a very high standard because the companies were trying to convince people who had never seen one to buy them. Now, unless you buy the very high end models, they break in five years.
Can confirm, once helped my dad paint a client’s house interior and needed to vacuume after due to all the sanding we did. Dad’s shop vac would have taken us hours to clean since it was made for small messes and not whole carpets. Dad dug out the client’s home vacuum (with permission) which was this ancient heavy metal kirby from the 70s and holy shit not only did it still work but it had the strongest suction I have ever seen in a vac and it was that day that really hammered into me that planned obsolescence was A Thing.
I can literally go to a junk mall, but a 1920s sewing machine, oil the moving parts, replace the rusted needle and sew on that damn thing for the rest of my life.
And if one part or piece breaks, literally takes the mechanical knowledge of a 3yr old with plastic tools to fix it. I can access every part of that machine and fix it with a screwdriver and needle nose pliers. No special screws so only a “””professional””” can fix it. No parts that can be “so hard to fix you might as well buy a new one”
Corporations CAN make functioning lasting products. They just choose not to.
My mom still has her Kirby from the 70s and it still works better than the one I just bought less than a year ago. I’m planning on having her give the damn thing to me in her will because it’s a Beast and will likely last beyond my lifetime.
If robots turn sentient in the future and have to steal parts, they’re going to be made of kirby’s, I’d swear it.
“Free market” capitalism does NOT care about raging forest fires, it does not care about endangering firefighters, it does not care about people dying due to lack of healthcare insurance. Unregulated capatilism cares only about making profits, apparently at any and all costs.
I’m not a communist but nothing is funnier than watching capitalists accuse communism of things capitalism regularly does. “People routinely go hungry under communism! You don’t own anything, everything belongs to someone else! You don’t have access to medical care!”
Like, people routinely go hungry under capitalism, and in reality it’s almost worst because capitalism’s one single advantage is that it generally produces excess; imagine having an excess of food and homes but still letting poverty and homelesness thrive because your economic system would supposedly crumble otherwise. Capitalists consistently attack communism for “stifling creativity” as if in America there is any creativity to be had when you have like three major conglomarates that own virtually everything in what basically equates to almost monopoly. They consistently attack a lack of access to medicine and education in failed communist states, but as we progress further and further into new stages of American capitalism, the private sector’s need to continuously produce capital at all costs means the utter destruction of public sectors like universal or low cost access to healthcare, leaving the working poor (a growing number that will virtually include everyone except the top 1% with the way it’s progressing) uneducated and ill, etc. They talk about how you don’t have property of your own, but in American capitalism there’s still a huge debate on whether or not your REALLY own anything digital you purchase vs. the copyright holders, and people are using their own cars for Uber/Lyft/etc. or their living spaces for Airbnb, just to make ends meet, and so on. Late stage capitalism and the damage it causes isn’t very distinguishable from the big Boogieman of failed communism this country has been peddling since WW II ended.
The worst part is that they eat it up, because the propaganda machine that is this nation’s ability to protect and promote the iron grip of the rich and power elite has done a number on them, and no matter how much capitalism begins to resemble their worst communist nightmares, they’ll never accept that this system is perfectly capable of the same atrocities.
Talking about communist state citizens having no access to medical care because there are no medical supplies and saying “See, communism don’t work” while turning right around and saying that it’s PERFECTLY REASONABLE for someone in America to either deal with potentially deadly illnesses or fall into thousands and thousands of dollars of debt is nonsensical. What good are those supplies created in capitalism if access to them isn’t made cheaper or easier? What good is advanced cancer treatment if only about 1% of your population can realistically afford it? How is that any different?
Anyway, the TL;DR of this is that if you “believe in capitalism” and “hate communism” because of how it functions in failed communist states, but don’t stress capitalism’s need to produce higher quality of life in a way that makes access to things like healthcare, education, etc. easier for everyone, especially those at the lowest financial rungs of the social ladder, what you’re REALLY supporting is the idea that the rich deserve to abuse and exploit the majority of the population because you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that one day too, YOU “will be rich” and you don’t want “anyone taking that power from you” (except you’ll never have it because the rich aren’t in the business of doing anything but setting you up for failure so you can’t compete).
this was put quite eloquently and i agree with it save for a little caveat:
i don’t like communism because i see what it’s done to my country when it’s been rampant here (i live in a former socialist/communist eastern european country) and i prefer capitalism because i believe in people – whether it’s from the lowest rung or the working class – and their ability to get themselves out of the gutter through sheer hard work, perseverance, dedication and focus
i’ve seen what communism and its ilk do to the economy and it is not a pretty picture so i am extremely distrustful of it
I’m not discrediting your experiences. In all honesty this post isn’t meant as a defense of communism, it’s more of making a point that whatever communism has been accused of, capitalism does too, but under different branding. It’s nice that you believe in people and ability to dig themselves out, but the reality is that digging one self out of a bad place isn’t really dependent simply on hard work; most of it is dependent on the systems of power at work. It’s been pretty much proven that people and their children and grandchildren seldom change their social position in capitalist societies: the rich and their families remain rich, and the poor and their families remain poor.
Basically, while I understand where you’re coming from, I take issue with the comment of hard work. The concept of meritocracy under American capitalism, for example, is virtually a myth. I hope this doesn’t sound condescending (not meant to be), but the equation is fairly simple here: in a capitalist society, capital is literally power, and the easiest way to accumulate power is by having power to begin with. In other words: people with capital will be able to amass more and more capital because the capital they have already is power they can exercise, leading to basically a loop of getting more capital and turning it into even MORE capital, and the working poor are not welcome into the loop. Ever.
This is what I mean when I say capitalism does the same things with a different flavor: the further into different stages of capitalism we progress, the less “hard work” matters and less likely anyone is to “dig themselves” out of any kind of hole. It doesn’t matter if you work seven times as much as the guy next to you when he has six people to carry his perfectly functional buckets of water for him and you have a single bucket with three holes in it. You’re not on an even playing field and already at a huge disadvantage that the system has formed in such a way that it won’t let you overcome it. That’s how capitalism works and how it perpetuates massive wealth gaps.
No. LABOUR made it. LABOUR made my phone, my laptop, the internet, this website, my clothing, my house, all social media, and everything else. LABOUR makes things, Capitalism doesn’t because economic systems don’t ‘make’ anything, they just determine who gets paid for making things.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
wupacing 