“Here, live off of my garbage.”
That’s sort of what some European countries are doing with some African ones regarding “recycling”.
Like it or not, there are a fixed amount of resources on this planet. Letting the standard for quality of life drop or using it as an excuse is not a solution.
There are more than enough resources to go around. We don’t need to give them our scraps.
Our “quality” of life does need to change. We do not need a new phone every few years, we don’t need fast fashion, we don’t need 50 different varieties of plain salt chips on the supermarket shelves.
We can reduce, reuse, and repair much of what we already have and live extremely comfortably while giving more to others who have less.
I heard this becomes more true the more you upvote it. It’s so true you don’t even have to check yourself for confirmation bias.
“There are more than enough resources to go around.”
but also
“We can reduce, reuse, and repair much of what we already have” (there were more than enough resources to go around, but begin reducing, reusing, and repairing, don’t look for a contradiction)
but also
“Our “quality” of life does need to change.” (except for having to reduce, reuse, and repair everything, right)
but also
“We do not need a new phone every few years, we don’t need fast fashion” (it’s not changing the quality of life if you dismiss it’s value as a quality of life improvement)
As everyone knows, in a fixed resource systems, there is an infinite amount of resources to go around, but also reduce, reuse, repair, scrounge, scavenge, no reason, just cause, quality of life totally the same.
Hey, I’ve discovered this funny thing. Whenever I read an argument I don’t like, I just have to change the definition of the terms the argument uses to whatever is more convenient to my argument, and BAM, I’m f-ing right!
Rightio, have fun with your life.
Thats a whole lot of words to avoid just saying “you’re right”
That’s a whole lot of downvotes to avoid admitting people willfully sacrifice their ability to think critically just to group psychology promote what they want to hear.
Cope
Delusional, you’re losing and you know it
The storage unit business is still booming, growing at over 7% annually in NA.
We have so much shit we have to rent units offsite to store our shit.and there are legit hoarders, i know someone that is.
And that’s happening at the same time that the square footage per capita has increased dramatically. Not only are houses bigger now, but household size (number of people living in each house) has shrunk too. That’s how much shit we got.
Is this happening in rural areas? I feel like in cities and suburbs there are more people living in a household. Like roommates or multiple families, because of how expensive housing is.
Capitalism working as designed
What’s also weird is that if you want to get rid of perfectly good things nobody wants it or anyplace that might be able to use it makes it prohibitively difficult to get it to them. Got a functional fridge? Sure, you haul it out of your house, rent a truck, take it to the receiver - oh, and it can’t be more than 10 years old.
I find these posts that complain about waste kinda performative. While they’re not wrong, they ignore the logistical issues, both deliberate and indirect, of getting those things to the people that actually need them.
FWIW I’ve found that putting a “curb alert” for free good items with pictures and a location works pretty well. Some industrious person will usually pick something decent up 75% of the time.
The abundence argument seems written by people who do not produce anything.
I don’t think abundence arguments help the left. I raise fruit. I lose fruit to animals and weather. There is variability in the amount of fruit I produce. I often produce more than I can consume, but the logistics of getting the fruit to someone else doesn’t work out and the fruit rots. Some years I lose my fruit blossoms to frost.
I have family that work potatoes for a commercial operation. There were a bunch of potatoes that were too big to sell commercially. The operation left the potatoes to rot in the field. My relative bagged potatoes and brought them to family in the old gift economy fashion.
What is the abundence economy argument really about? Are you going to buy bird pecked fruit or C’thulu looking potatoes? Country folk trim off the bad spots. City folk often haven’t gotten their hands dirty.
I’m all for anarchy and communism. That means doing some real work and not just reaping the surpluses of capitalism. Chop some wood, it’ll do you good and be a good neighbor.
Abundance is just centrist rebranding of trickledown.
Yeah, you want waste in the food system.
If you don’t have waste in a good year, you’ll have famine in a bad year.
I have read some more comments. Looks like food pantries are mentioned which is further down the supply chain. Yes, canning and nitrogen warehouses exists. That is more infrastructure. I would assume all land and infrastructure is ideally community owned and operated.
Because the two thousand child raping and killing men who rule over us have deemed it so
We produce enough food to feed everyone, it’s just that it’s not profitable to do so because the rich are greedy ghouls.
The weird part is that the rest of us don’t simply devour those who are perpetuating this evil on almost everyone else.
Why doesn’t Ross, the largest friend, simply devour the others!?
Capitalism depends on violence and deprivation to keep labor desperate and exploitable.
Removed by mod
but where’s the profit in that?! /s
I call it The Treadmill. If you’re white, able-bodied, educated, motivated to play the game, etc. you can keep from falling off with what feels more or less like an easy walk. Until they speed it up. Or you get sick. Or stop playing the game.
Food insecurity isn’t always about lack of food, more like lack of logistics.
I agree about the furniture, electronics and housing part. But food gets spoiled rather rapidly unfortunately. Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
Stuff was tried and is being tried. For example, in my country, local supermarkets are giving away food that’s close to due date at a discount (mostly it’s 50%). It’s an easy way of buying food for cheap.
Bro trust me we have the means to feed and shelter every human on earth. Now ask yourself why don’t we?
Logistically it’s a nightmare, but local food offerings in supermarkets and farmers markets are useful in reducing resources usage.
That’s true
Logistically it’s not a nightmare. We already do it, we get crops grown in country A, shipped to country B to be processed before shipping them off to country C to sell. We could easily work out to send less to C and more to D, if we wanted to.
It’s a capitalist choice to not supply everyone.
Logistically, ie making sure the food is still fresh or good Legally (as in the US it’s illegal to give food to the homeless in some places) There are some CSR initiatives from supermarkets like Lidl but in a capitalist society it’s just not profitable for the supply chain. Maybe a nightmare is too dramatic, but highly improbable in current society as it stands.
Logistically a nightmare like having a “last chance” area where homeless and poor people can just take it before it gets thrown in the dumpster? Like, literally just allowing a space?
We put more effort into denying homeless people a place to exist than it would take to enable them to exist.
I know when I say “enable” people will immediately conflate that to “encourage”, but we’ve tried for decades to be as ruthless and unkind to homeless people and the numbers haven’t exactly plummeted.
I completely agree. Things like anti homeless architecture, shelter quality and the housing voucher system (and consequent rent gauging) are obscene.
Ending homelessness would take way way less money than the current system, but the capitalist elites need a threat to barely making ends meet workers so they don’t have time or energy to worry about their neighbor.
If it is something for the homeless people inside the same city, it’s fine. However, I was thinking about the scenario where food would get transported from the richer parts of the world to the poorer parts of the world. In that case, I do not see the viability of a “last chance” - part of the food would still get spoiled and thrown away, unless you want to feed the poor some spoiled food.
I’d rather see more people educated not to buy too much food in the first place, then direct the remaining to the poor (and even, if possible, produce less in the 1st place. Have fewer cows, less agricultural land and more wild terrain (forests and the likes) if possible).
Oh, for sure transporting food across the world is a disastrously inefficient way to solve it.
I may be wrong about this, but I dont think there are many (if any) food-poor countries that are that way because of a lack of local fertile land.
I don’t think waste and excess are really the issue, but rather misallocation of resources, like you mentioned, raising cattle (or growing coffee/cocoa) over primary foods for profit over basic needs.
Something-something-communism, I suppose.
Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
Having volunteered at a local food bank I can confidently say that it is absolutely possible to do. And not even that difficult, assuming there is a genuine will to do it.
Annoyingly, there are still far too many companies in the food supply chain whose mindset is that they would rather trash something than allow it to get into the hands of people who need it without them paying for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
We’ve had this technology for a fucking century now, food waste could easily be drastically reduced, this shit is on purpose
We have long life food, it still goes into the bin at your local supermarket.
Food insecurity is a capitalism problem. We can supply logistics to anywhere in the world if we want. We have more than enough to feed everyone. We don’t because profit is the motivation not humanity.
We don’t because it’s not free to do so. You have to pay people to produce food.
We should be intercepting the landfill
dumpster diving is a thing. food not bombs.
All that old growth wood furniture… It always makes me so sad knowing that it’s essentially a semi non-renewable resource
But it can be restored, reused, repurposed or made into something entirely different. Start woodworking and make the world a little bit better.
