Well, yes.
If you‘re not profitable, you‘re nothing. As a business entity or a person. And the profitable ones take as much as they can and leave a lot of people out in order to accomplish that.
But then rich ppl couldn’t use us to fulfill their endless ambitions.
am·bi·tion
A strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.
Lost me at the end there.
Love me a post of a screenshot of a reply to a post of a screenshot of a highlight in a document 🤣 Y’all do realize this is our generation’s equivalent of a chain email called “Fw:fw:fw:re:re: LOOK AT THIS Fw:Fw: Huge Science News (copy)”.
Except a chain email doesn’t have random commenters who link to the original or archives of the original
True, we should all be posting and sharing this far more useful version! ;)
I will download this image and share it. I will do my part.
Link doesn’t work for me. Here’s a direct link.
The GOAT right here
“Fw:fw:fw:re:re: LOOK AT THIS Fw:Fw: Huge Science News (copy
The reason those existed at all was because of how massively popular they were from the standpoint of short, sensational bites of information. That has never changed, but our reach and methods for sharing that kind of shit has increased by light years.
Ok boomer 🤣
This makes rounds pretty often and it always gets mentioned in the comments that it doesnt figure in things like logistics and outlines a pretty bare-minimum living.
I think a much more achievable solution short and longterm is empowering womens rights and education to turn global population trend downwards, increase human rights and education in general to increase quality of life throughout.
Sadly that plan and the author’s plan are directly contradictory.
We will all bitch about this on here. Then I will try yo organize something locally for it and get no support. Its depressing.
If you’re actually doing ANY level of community organization, you’re objectively better than most people on here. At least take that with you.
And next time you do organizing, and you should do it again, learn the right lessons. Target the right people with the right message. Promote in the appropriate places, create the kind of stir, buzz or drama that would get media attention, and so on.
No great activist or anyone who has changed the world had success from start to finish. At least if you’ve done it before, you know how to start it again, and that’s a huge obstacle for most people, just knowing what to do once they get off the couch. Now keep adjusting from there.
Thank you for the encouragement. If we find any success I may start posting about it here soon. We need to create a proof of concept that not only shows how bad capitalism is, but also that a system based on meeting everyone’s needs works better
Sadly many people don’t have the time money and energy to support a movement.
Most people need support, and don’t have much to give.
But a lot of people DO have those things, and just need guidance and support and a way to make their idle energy or money do something good.
This is where being an activist has power. You are basically taking up the mantle of being a manager. You are connecting the right people to the right causes and organizations and direct needs of people to make a difference. If you can get even halfway decent at doing this, you can move mountains.
and don’t have much to give
people have their voice (and therefore, their vote) to give, though
You’d be surprised at the amount of people that think they are unable to make change.
Not a good take at all actually…
Okay, sure, but how does any of this get billionaires to their next yacht?
It doesn’t?
So yeah, that’s not going to happen.
I fucking wish they’d spend the money on yachts.
At least the yacht sales man would get the billions and use it to buy a house, so the home owner would get the billions and use it buy a car, so the car sales man would get billions and use it buy cocaine, so the drug dealer would get billions and use it buy food.
Billionaires buying yachts would actually feed the poor. But they don’t. They just hoard it in their dragon lairs for no good reason.
This sounds a lot like “trickle down economics”
And we all know that’s worked great in the past.
Yes that’s it. Trickle down doesn’t work because they don’t buy enough yachts.
The proof is: If they actually bought yachts for all their money, they wouldn’t be billionaires anymore. Billionaires wouldn’t exist if trickle down worked.
If they spent every available dollar they had on yachts, then trickle-down economics would work. But, obviously they don’t.
On the other hand, if you hand a poor person $1000, it’s going to be spent almost immediately. Debts will be paid off, essential repairs will be done, groceries will be purchased, family members in need will be helped. That money won’t “trickle down” because there’s no “down” from there, but it will quickly spread across the economy.
There is some value in giving a rich person, or a rich company money. Poor people aren’t able to make investments in the future because they have so many pressing immediate needs. A person or company might put some money towards something that won’t pay off for years or maybe decades. So, there’s some value in that. With too much money, investments are no longer smart because it doesn’t matter anymore.
I’m pretty sure if they actually bought that many yachts, you’d instead complain that they’re polluting the environment with all the yacht-buying and also they’d waste a lot of human labor on products which aren’t really essential to society at all.
But yeah, your view makes sense from an economics point of view. The rich typically don’t spend their wealth, but hoard it instead, which doesn’t cause workplaces and therefore workers don’t find jobs.
Link to the paper, the snippet is in the abstract:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
The basic-needs approach to measuring poverty sometimes yields dramatically different results from the World Bank method, depending on the provisioning systems that are in place. This is clear in the case of China, which we explored in a recent paper, and which provides an important example (Sullivan et al., 2023, Sullivan and Hickel, 2023). The World Bank’s method suggests that extreme poverty was very high during the socialist period, and declined during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, going from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, the basic-needs approach tells a very different story. From 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, extreme poverty in China was on average only 5.6%, much lower than in other large countries of similar GDP/capita (such as India and Indonesia, where poverty was 51% and 36.5% respectively), and lower even than in many middle-income countries (like Brazil and Venezuela, where poverty was 29.5% and 32%, respectively). China’s comparatively strong performance, which is corroborated by data on other social indicators, was due to socialist policies that sought to ensure everyone had access to food and housing at an affordable price. However, during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, poverty rates rose dramatically, reaching a peak of 68%, as public provisioning systems were dismantled and privatization caused the prices of basic necessities to rise, thus deflating the incomes of the working classes
you’re telling me China isn’t socialist??
maybe this Hickel guy is just a globalist imperial plant…
It is worth highlighting that the World Bank’s approach to poverty is convenient, from the perspective of capitalism, because it celebrates any increase in any form of production as a “solution” to poverty. Of course, for capital, the primary objective of production is not to meet human needs, or to achieve social progress, but to maximize profit, including by constantly increasing commodity production (Wallerstein, 1996, Wood, 1999).
And the core economies, including Denmark, cannot reasonably be used as a benchmark for development, because they have high levels of excess production and consumption, they dramatically exceed sustainable boundaries, and – as we described in the introduction – they rely on imperialist appropriation.
The UK has a GDP/cap of $38,000 (2011 PPP), representing very high levels of aggregate production and consumption, and yet 4.7 million people in that country do not have secure access to nutritious food (Francis-Devine et al 2023). Despite sustained GDP/cap growth in recent decades, most high-income countries have witnessed an increase in extreme poverty, as measured by the BNPL.
hmm 🤔
abs amazing paper 👏
For anyone interested compare & contrast macroeconomics vs welfare economics. The former’s primary goal is to maximize production/growth whereas the latter optimizes social well-being/Pareto efficiency.
you da real MVP here
living creatures that cooperate deeply will always outperform those that don’t, rugged individualism may look attractive but you’ll never reach the stars alone
I don’t disagree with you, but why, then, did evolution land on making us so damn greedy and selfish?
why, then, did evolution land on making us so damn greedy and selfish?
Evolution has always favored survivors.
But realistically, we’ve been shaped by culture and community even more than hardwiring from survival. A lot of things we think are set in stone are in fact products of social conditioning. In places with community and social consequence, people are far, far more charitable and have very different values.
It’s only been recently when we all started living in single-family homes and moving away from family and friends at 18 and chasing after individualist dreams that we started seeing this trend towards selfishness on a community level. There are always going to be some class of people who have the desire to accumulate power and wealth, but below those people have always been communities and societies, and it’s in those societies that power is often kept in check.
We actually aren’t that greedy and selfish when it comes to our immediate family or even a bit extended than that - our “tribe” if you will.
This makes sense. If your tribe thrives, you thrive. So you rub the back of those that rub your back.
But this kind of selflessness does not scale to the group sizes of modern society. People living in the same village or tribe before modern society would happily help a neighbour cause they know they may one day need the help of that neighbour themselves. People of today couldn’t care less about helping the people that surround them, cause people rarely live the same place for too long and you interact (greedily and selfishly) with an immense amount of people who you do not consider your “tribe”.
My point is that we are highly selective about who to be generous towards, and evolution definitely selected for that.
There’s always a boundary of cooperation. Like, the wolf pack that cooperates among themselves but fights other wolf packs for territory. Our closest neighbours in the animal kingdom, chimps, fight brutal wars between different groups. And, even among groups that cooperate on the surface, there’s often cheating behind the scenes. Like, birds are well known for forming pair bonds that last for life but apparently adultery among birds is very common. The best strategy for a society may be cooperation, but the best strategy for an individual in a cooperative society may be occasional cheating if you can get away with it. Even plants compete for resources like soil and sun.
A computer model of a civilization might show that the optimum result is achieved with 100% cooperation. But, we aren’t computer programs, so we need to find a society that’s as good as possible given the constraints of our animal nature. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we’ve created countries containing hundreds of millions of people who feel some sense of shared identity, and are willing to cooperate at least a bit with strangers from that same country.
On the subject of “reaching the stars”, the space race is the perfect example of competition. There’s no way that Sputnik would have been put into orbit, or humans onto the moon if it hadn’t been for a massive competition between the USSR and the USA. Within those two societies there was a great deal of cooperation, but humankind wouldn’t have “reached the stars” from cooperation alone.
Does forcing people to do what you want also count?
But how could people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk maintain their living standards?
Did anybody think about the billionaires?
Those morons don’t even appear to live particularly well honestly.
I’ve got a little motivational poster in my cubicle that simply asks ‘did I do my part to make the line go up today?’
I look at it when I’m sad and it cheers me up.
“No, I definitely didn’t.” ::smile::
Yes. You can provide no value at all and the answer is still yes.
The answer continues to be yes if the value you provide is in the negatives.
Shareholders deserve nothing.
Lol
Bravo
Idk if the paper addresses this, but supposedly the problem isn’t the amount of stuff, but rather its distribution on the planet and the logistics of moving it.
As someone who specializes in logistics, I can confirm that we could indeed distribute our resources equally across the globe and make sure every last human is provided for and even guaranteed basic rights to medical care and other services.
Physically and logically we could do all this. Our supply chain network is a miracle, it’s the most awe-inspiring thing we’ve ever built.
It’s the social and political will keeping us from having that world, and of course nations and borders and the cultures within who harbor fear, xenophobia, resistance to changes and defensiveness. We would need some form of unified governing body to ensure the right things make it to the right people fairly, and we are pretty far from people accepting that kind of power into the world.
If we all woke up with amnesia, maybe we could do it tomorrow. But right now we’re all swimming in the product of millenia of borders and spear-points directed at each other.
and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:
you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)
the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!
… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!
i guess that’s all distribution on the planet
we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently
so i guess we’d need 40%, maybe even 50% of the current global resources? what’s the point even
I would argue we don’t actually need data centers. At least the vast majority of them only exist to maintain bullshit nobody needs and most people don’t even want.
Food can be canned, and remain nutritious and safe for much longer than fresh fruits and vegetables can be.
The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.
I would argue we don’t actually need data centers
data centres were kinda just a stand in for a concept: spare parts and redundancy are necessary… you need spare parts for pretty much any machine that can’t be offline for longer than it takes to get replacements parts. that’s as true for farm equipment and hospitals as it is for tech
and you have to have extras to meet peak demand: restaurants have extra pans, crockery and cutlery to cover a full house and then some extra for example
but data centres do also provide a lot of good:
connected software has made supply chains much more efficient which means less food waste, supporting the original premise
websites support not for profits immensely to reach people and automate self service… eg homeless people are actually reasonably likely to have access to a smart phone and free wifi, so it gives them a platform to access resources very efficiently
provisioning of disaster relief as well as early warning systems are now heavily reliant on servers in data centres
even modern agriculture has a lot of automation involved which relies on a lot of connected servers and databases running in data centres
a huge amount of that “for 30% of the work we currently do” is certainly reliant on data centres
and as much as they do take a lot of energy, they’re actually very efficient too: compared to a similar amount of processing power running on individual computers (if we somehow managed to replace all servers with peer to peer software) they likely use a lot less energy because energy use is actually a huge factor in server design, and chips get more energy efficient per FLOPS (or ghz) the larger they get
The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.
and my argument isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s that waste is both inherent and necessary. we try and reduce it, but some of that waste isn’t just dumb shit like throwing away product to keep value high: some waste and redundancy are his inherent to feeding and providing for a planet of 8bn people
heck i’ll bet you have at least 10x as many toilet rolls in your house than are on holders (in use) right now… and you wouldn’t likely buy them 1 at a time as you use them… that’s redundancy too: more of these exist in the world than are currently needed
and that the “30% of the hours” figure is similar: some jobs have busywork that could be cut down on, but sometimes busywork waste is also necessary because staffing also needs to be redundant, or over-provisioned to meet peak demand
yeah i tend to think today that food waste is actually a good thing because it creates buffers and prepares us for unexpected food shortages (such as during a volcano eruption)
in Korea it was difficult to get aid to the villages on the front for obvious reasons. so some smartass thought, “if we can’t bring the aid to the people, let’s bring the people to the aid”.
we shouldn’t allow a simple problem like logistics get in the way of saving lives.
“A simple problem like logistics,” is a phrase only uttered by those who have never worked in large scale operations.
As someone with a decade in logistics… yup.
Honestly though, the biggest obstacles to the arterial flow of the supply chain are always political. Logistics is insanely complex, from an organizational perspective, but that complexity isn’t what prevents aid and food making it to sick, hungry people. If we wanted to, on a political level, unify and end world hunger, we could do it. We have the tools and network.
We don’t have the universal level of compassion and sense of prioritization for tearing down borders and creating a system to make the world better.
you have a great future in the field of logistics!
I guess you didn’t understand the hidden meaning behind my words that human life is a far larger goal than meeting logistical requirements.
that’s like saying that human life is a far larger goal than physics
you can’t just hand wave it away because you deem human life to be “worth it”. it exists and it’s a real problem, and it’s a complex problem even with unlimited money
that’s like saying that human life is a far larger goal than physics
no, it’s not. it’s literally saying saving a human life is a larger goal than logistics.
you can’t just hand wave it away because you deem human life to be “worth it”.
I can, because it is. If we don’t try everything to save a life and simply shrug the responsibility with the excuse of “sorry, but it’s just not logistically possible to save this person”, then what’s the point saving anyone?
it exists and it’s a real problem, and it’s a complex problem even with unlimited money
I think I see what happened here. you only read part of this chain. you clearly missed the part where I said,
if we can’t bring the aid to the people, let’s bring the people to the aid
logistics is a tool used to solve problems. stop using it as an excuse to let people die.
human life is a larger goal than logistics.
logistics isn’t a goal; it’s problem that you have to solve to achieve a goal
If we don’t try everything to save a life
human life does have a value cap: would you plunge the world into borderline starvation in order to save a single life? no? well then a single human life is worth less than the happiness of the entire human race… the bar is somewhere above that
you’re trivialising a lot of complex things… public health has similar questions where the value of life and health is measured in aggregate
sorry, but it’s just not logistically possible to save this person
literally what happens every day in public health… resources are not unlimited, and so you have to make choices and trade offs
you only read part of this chain
nope i read the whole thing, its just that
if we can’t bring the aid to the people, let’s bring the people to the aid
is still a logistics problem… public transport is a logistics problem, shipping is a logistics problem, air schedules are a tiny part of the air travel logistics problem
moving people and things to where they need to be at the time that they’re needed is logistics
logistics is a tool used to solve problems. stop using it as an excuse to let people die.
logistics is a problem space that you need to solve before you achieve outcomes: it comes before, not after and you can’t start without solving logistics problems
in terms of distribution of medicine and aid, it’s basically the only problem that needs solving: we have plenty of food, we have plenty of medicine, and not for profits aren’t wanting for these things… they’re wanting for ways to get it where it’s needed
That logic is flawed too. The only thing preventing people in most areas to have access to such goods is the lack of industrialization, which is enforced by capitalist western nations through corruption, coups, or other less obvious methods like IMF loans and neocolonialism.
Countries that escaped this subjugation and industrialized, such as China or the USSR, essentially eliminated extreme poverty and multiplied life expectancy 2- and 3-fold in a matter of decades. If India, for example, had followed the Soviet example of rapid industrialization or the Chinese one, hundreds of millions of lives would have been saved from poverty.
We don’t need to produce things in the developed countries and distribute them, we need to allow them to industrialize themselves and to produce their own shit without being exploited
How would you propose India would have achieved this as a multi party democracy that requires consensus building that would not be necessary in either the USSR or China? Particularly as a nation with 123 languages, 30 of which have over a million speakers. Would you say democracy was a poor choice for India?
How would you propose India would have achieved this as a multi party democracy
By not being a bourgeois democracy. It’s exactly what I’m saying. Having a bourgeois democracy in which all partied represent capitalists (with the exception of Kerala, the province in India with a communist party in power and first to eliminate extreme poverty) is a hurdle to development. If India had had a communist revolution the way China or the USSR did, hundreds of millions of lives would have been spared from poverty.
Perhaps. Theres no way to know for certain but one wonders whether India would have remained India if that were how things played out. My suspicion is there would have been civil war and India would have broken up into 3 or 4 nations.
Kerala achieved remarkable progress in human development with land reform, workers protections, environmental protections and investments in public health and education. But the Kerala of today struggles with lagging industrial output and unemployment. A large amount of economic investment comes from remittances. The people are educated, and healthy, but can’t find work in their home state so they leave to another state, the middle east or the West and send money home to their family from there. Reform is desperately needed for the state to become more business friendly.
Now if 70% of the population could read this.
I guarantee you that 50% of those would go out of their way to defend the interests of the rich assholes
They do it right here on Lemmy, a supposed bastion of leftism and social-minded causes.
It’s usually under the cynical framing of how “useless” it is to aim for a better world and better outcomes, but it amounts to the same thing. People have swallowed the nihilism-pill and rather see the status-quo endure than imagine a post-scarcity world.
Oh cool. Glad they provided a linked source that we can’t read.
Images of text posts still suck.
On one hand, thanks for finding it?
On the other, OC here ain’t wrong
Neither statement is incorrect. Not sure why anyone is bothered enough about this to down vote it.
I’ve read this before and the proposed ‘decent living standards’ will likely leave a lot to be desired.
Yeah I’ve read it before and 60m2 living space for 4 people is tiny, the clothing allocation is on the low end depending on work and climate and you didn’t include the number of times per week they say a person would shower… which was 2 times.
The water allocated really doesn’t go as far as you’d think. Most efficient showers are 9L/minute. Then you have your drinking water, clothes washing, food prep, cleaning, dishwashing… plants, pets. 50L doesn’t go far.
100kg of clothes washing a year is disgustingly low btw
Yeah 60m2 is absolutely tiny for a whole family
deleted by creator
You say “only 30%” like wars haven’t been fought over that level of taxation.
This would be a serious decline in living standards for the people actually doing all the production.
“The people doing the production.” Which ones are those? The ones mining resources for far less than this amount? The people living well above this standard are largely doing it off the back of exploiting people living far below this standard.
Seeing the chart that was posted from it, only if you’re approaching it from a really wealthy perspective. Keep in mind this is for literally every human on the planet-many of whom are sharing and still starving.
You don’t need a stove and oven and microwave and toaster and air fryer and induction cooktop and two and a half cars per person and the bicycle you don’t use or the exercise equipment and the slap chop and the ninja or the fucking second fridge in the garage where you keep all the sports equipment that’s degrading every day into uselessness that never gets you know, used. God forbid you share with your neighbors. They might have cooties. Have to buy your own shit, brand new, full retail, with the bullshit insurance package
I’ve been living on my bicycle for a few months now, and honestly. What a single person actually needs is so vanishingly small it’s disgusting we let anyone go hungry or cold.
It’s odd that schools and hospitals are listed by area and not capabilities though. I don’t give a shit if it’s a golf course sized hospital, I want them to have supplies, equipment, and people trained to properly use them.
Too hard to put an easy number on? What stats are disparate in a plastic surgery suite vs an inner city gunshot wound floor? Tbh, I’d rather be treated at the latter, they’ve had more practice
only if you’re approaching it from a really wealthy perspective
I disagree, I’m viewing it as someone whose family was living paycheck to paycheck in a developed nation. I’ve been poor, and my family has been poor. Some of my extended family are still poor… entirely due to their own failings. While I am much wealthier now I’m also generally frugal outside of a couple of hobbies.
Worldwide poverty is not the result of individuals ‘failing’ to share with their neighbours. Its not even a consumerist problem.
Ask yourself why some countries have been able to go from poor and undeveloped to wealthy developed nations, and others have failed.
It is an institutional problem stemming from those countries Governments, either due to conflict, corruption, lower economic freedom (ability to own, move and sell property, goods and labour), low trust in institutions and poor policies.
In only a few cases do we see outside drivers of conflict and natural disaster setting back these countries… they are the exception and not the rule.
… And?
We can always give a little more. Plus what do you think the other 70% is doing?
Plus what do you think the other 70% is doing?
What, do you think it’s just evaporating? What do you think is happening in the current economic model?
Your question betrays how deeply you don’t understand economics.
This comment made me chuckle.
Thanks. I need that.
they could have shared nothing at all, other people are often nice enough to search and post a link in the comments
Blocked :3
But the world exists to satisfy the every growing ambitions of the people who can gain control of those resources. They don’t exist for humanity, life or the planet, but for the egos of the powerful. /s, but not really
This is TERRORISM According to NPSM-7!
