Food should not be a commodity
(midwest.social)
A404 to 
Flippanarchy
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.
I mean, in Holland a loaf of bread is like €1...
https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi589882
That would be actual bread. They talk about the sugar filled kind.
I think we built civilization to do more stuff like attend consorts
So we could make value for shareholders
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.
the capitalists would say that we did, in fact, gain all these capabilities so they could enrich themselves by letting food rot.
plant-based, sure.
Food, water, housing.
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.
+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.
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.
I guess it's only in my state because I get mine on the 13th I think of every month.
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.
"If you're disabled, you're better off getting a job that pays $10k over the US median annual income than collecting disability."
What a worthless take.
I mean fuck me for setting my standards further than being in poverty forever. By the way, college certification courses aren't hard to pay for with payment plans and SaaS/cloud computing isn't a bad one. Even hvac is bumpin' and that's one that autistics can excel at. You could sell an infrastructure or build it and it's less than 15,000$ 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 thsie careers and build them up instead of keeping them on fucking poverty jeez us man.
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.
Housing, healthcare, clean water and food security are all human fuxking rights
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.
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.
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.
Right! It's not like Liberals
NVM
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?
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/
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"
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.
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.
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.
dented can ruin the seal
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
UBI or collectivisation solves this.
Just need enough combined will to realise either.
You’re not getting it - we invented all that so a few mentally ill monkeys could hoard all the bananas and let around 10 billion other monkeys suffer, starve, and toil for their pleasure.
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
The start. When was that?
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.
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.
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 $1,800/MO to everyone in the entire country. Which means you'd have to make that figure smaller because not everyone makes enough to cover that a month.
So that means that if every worker reached that 3865.0306748466257668 every 9 months by paying 429.44785276073619631 a month in extra taxes...... Holy fuck it would take months......
You're right.....
No that can't be right.... Omg.....
Money is made up. You know that money is made up, right? That’s only a limitation because society chose for it to be.
It would take 13.24 years taxing the 429.44785276073619631 extra to the working people of the US to have enough money saved up for everyone in the country (current population of 350mil) for 25 years based on the 1,800$/MO income that would be dispensed.
So, no, you don’t at all understand that money isn’t real.
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.
It’s so one dude can eat 300 twinkies in one sitting
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.
