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I think this is a tough pill for some to swallow. With as much press as we've seen about Amazon abusing their workers, or Google infringing on privacy, or socia

I think this is a tough pill for some to swallow. With as much press as we've seen about Amazon abusing their workers, or Google infringing on privacy, or social media degrading our happiness levels, people keep going back. Most people just don't seem to care much (or at least, not enough to make any serious changes to their lives).

searchableguy 6y ago
People are pretty tolerant of things they think they don't have any control over. We waste enough food to eradicate world hunger a few times. Same for unnecessary pollution, corruption, prison system and many others. > An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one third of all food produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. > The amount of food lost or wasted costs 2.6 trillion USD annually and is more than enough to feed all the 815 million hungry people in the world - four times over. > According to the FAO, high- and low-income countries discard similar amounts of food — 670 and 630 million tonnes, respectively — but there is a major difference in where and how that loss occurs. > In low-income countries, loss occurs more often in the earlier stages. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 83 per cent of food is lost during production, handling/storage and processing, while just five per cent is wasted by consumers, according to the World Resources Institute. Conversely, in North America and Oceania, 32 per cent is lost in earlier stages, and 61 per cent is wasted by consumers. So yeah, food waste is still an issue although more restricted to developed countries. https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-environmental-impact-09122018 https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-env...
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  WRT food waste, not really in any practical sense. Maybe if you include food loss, but that’s a much more serious/difficult problem.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    The more you feed world hunger the more the hunger grows.
- jjk166 6y ago
  We produce way more food than the world needs, but where do we produce it? A 10 lb bag of rice may be very cheap to produce, but getting it to a remote village in the middle of a warzone is expensive. Even if the food is grown locally, if it costs 50 cents per piece of fruit to ship them to America where they'll sell for $2 each, that's still dramatically more lucrative than selling them locally for $1 each, which might be a day's wage. Even if you're producing food locally and people can afford to buy it, that could all change if social or political instability wreaks havoc on the local infrastructure and economy. Unfortunately, even in giving food aid to those who can't feed themselves for the prior reasons, you have now destroyed the market for local food production which justifies investment in the infrastructure that will keep them from starving should the aid ever dry up. Best case scenario, the farms exist but grow cash crops instead of food staples; worst case scenario the region loses the experience and the means to grow its own food and is rendered permanently dependent on aid. World hunger is a symptom of global poverty and underdevelopment, and reducing food waste won't fix those problems, it can even exacerbate them. Real progress will require systemic and complicated changes.
  - bena 6y ago
    Yes, hunger is currently a logistics problem, not a production problem.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    > World hunger is a symptom of global poverty and underdevelopment, and reducing food waste won't fix those problems, it can even exacerbate them. That doesn't seem true to me. A lot of food is wasted by your retailers, restaurants and households. They are within range of people suffering from food insecurity. > An estimated 43 billion pounds of food were wasted in US retail stores in 2010. 33 This is particularly disconcerting given that in 2016, 12.3 percent of American households were food insecure. 34 Most of the loss in retail operations is in perishables, including baked goods, produce, meat, seafood and prepared meals. 35 The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $15 billion annually in unsold fruit and vegetables alone. 36 Unfortunately, wasteful practices in the retail industry are often viewed as good business strategies. Some of the main drivers for food loss at retail stores include: overstocked product displays, expectation of cosmetic perfection of fruits, vegetables and other foods, oversized packages, the availability of prepared food until closing, expired “sell by” dates, damaged goods, outdated seasonal items, over purchasing of unpopular foods and under staffing. > US restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year. Institutions — including schools, hotels and hospitals — generate an additional 7 to 11 billion pounds per year. > Households are responsible for the largest portion of all food waste. ReFED estimates that US households waste 76 billion pounds of food per year. 45 Approximately 40 to 50 percent of food waste (including 51 to 63 percent of seafood waste 46 happens at level of the consumer. 47 In the US, an average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year (21 percent of the food they buy), costing them $1,800 per year. 48 In terms of total mass, fresh fruits and vegetables account for the largest losses at the consumer level (19 percent of fruits and 22 percent of vegetables), followed by dairy (20 percent), meat (21 percent) and seafood (31 percent). Production of food costs in many resources that take a long time to replenish. Even if you remove the world hunger angle from this, why are we producing food in excess? Obviously, there are some good reasons and problems but many countries pile up on excess buffer stock which is a solvable problem without requiring improvement to the storage and other handling infra, right? Same for retailers, consumers and restaurants. To certain extent at least. No one is perfect but the current trend is ridiculous. Check: https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/
jcadam 6y ago
I suppose, in a way. It's really easy to give up Facebook and Twitter. Which I've done. Giving up Amazon is different. They actually ship me real, tangible items I need. Items that I'd have to track down from different retailers who would more than likely take longer to get those items to me. I'm making an effort to get certain items from other sources (electronics from Newegg, for example), but I'm still a Prime member. Google is in between, I guess. I use DuckDuckGo by default. But, I admit, I sometimes do a "!g" when I'm not satisfied with DDG's results. But in all, I'm much more disturbed by what the Social Media giants have been up to than Amazon, Google, and Apple, so there's a bit more motivation in that regard.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  > Giving up Amazon is different. They actually ship me real, tangible items I need. Items that I'd have to track down from different retailers who would more than likely take longer to get those items to me. I'm making an effort to get certain items from other sources (electronics from Newegg, for example), but I'm still a Prime member. The other side of this is that Amazon's marketplace is filled with counterfeit products and is built on questionable labor practices. They are big enough to distort the entire market and make small businesses compete in unnatural/suboptimal ways in order to satisfy Amazon. The fast shipping and some of the cheap pricing is taking advantage of a public good (the Post Office) and it's unclear, especially recently, if Amazon is being given preferential treatment in their contracts. All in all, while it may be more convenient some of the time, the concentration of power and money is not healthy long term for a democratic country. It seems to me that a properly lead and funded Post Office and a dynamic, competitive marketplace of small and medium sized businesses would provide just as good an experience and doesn't have the risk of market capture or complex lobbying operations popping up.
- treis 6y ago
  Pretty much everything you buy on Amazon can be bought elsewhere. It might be inconvenient to shop elsewhere but the option is there. Of the big tech companies they are probably the easiest to avoid. Practically everyone will have an Apple/Google phone. You can de-Googlfy or de-Applfy but you can't do both. Facebook, yeah you don't need it. But if you want to see pictures of your nephew and that's where they're posted you don't have much choice. Microsoft you can get away from but pretty much anyone buying a computer has to pay the MS tax (or the Apple tax). Hard to avoid Office, LinkedIn, or GitHub at work as well.
danaris 6y ago
Boycotting companies this big is just not practical. As some tech journalists found a little while back (don't have the links, but it was pretty prominent), boycotting Amazon in all its myriad forms online is all but impossible—so much of the internet's infrastructure currently runs on AWS. The idea that the correct action for cases such of these is individual action like boycotts, deleting your Facebook account, or ordering goods (at 15% higher prices, with an extra week of shipping delay) from 23 different online specialty retailers or manufacturers instead of Amazon, is bullshit. It's the same logic that says the way to beat global warming is for you to turn off the lights in your bedroom when you leave, rather than fighting to make oil companies cap burning gas flares or whatnot. Demanding that people give up extra convenience or discounts in order to "send a message" to megacorporations that will never notice, let alone care, until significant double-digit percentages of all global users start doing this, during the most terrifying, emotionally draining, and financially unstable period in living memory is not merely ineffective, it's also deeply insensitive and morally bankrupt.

searchableguy 6y ago

People are pretty tolerant of things they think they don't have any control over. We waste enough food to eradicate world hunger a few times. Same for unnecessary pollution, corruption, prison system and many others. > An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one third of all food produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. > The amount of food lost or wasted costs 2.6 trillion USD annually and is more than enough to feed all the 815 million hungry people in the world - four times over. > According to the FAO, high- and low-income countries discard similar amounts of food — 670 and 630 million tonnes, respectively — but there is a major difference in where and how that loss occurs. > In low-income countries, loss occurs more often in the earlier stages. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 83 per cent of food is lost during production, handling/storage and processing, while just five per cent is wasted by consumers, according to the World Resources Institute. Conversely, in North America and Oceania, 32 per cent is lost in earlier stages, and 61 per cent is wasted by consumers. So yeah, food waste is still an issue although more restricted to developed countries. https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-environmental-impact-09122018 https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-env...

throwawaygh 6y ago
WRT food waste, not really in any practical sense. Maybe if you include food loss, but that’s a much more serious/difficult problem.
- xwdv 6y ago
  The more you feed world hunger the more the hunger grows.
jjk166 6y ago
We produce way more food than the world needs, but where do we produce it? A 10 lb bag of rice may be very cheap to produce, but getting it to a remote village in the middle of a warzone is expensive. Even if the food is grown locally, if it costs 50 cents per piece of fruit to ship them to America where they'll sell for $2 each, that's still dramatically more lucrative than selling them locally for $1 each, which might be a day's wage. Even if you're producing food locally and people can afford to buy it, that could all change if social or political instability wreaks havoc on the local infrastructure and economy. Unfortunately, even in giving food aid to those who can't feed themselves for the prior reasons, you have now destroyed the market for local food production which justifies investment in the infrastructure that will keep them from starving should the aid ever dry up. Best case scenario, the farms exist but grow cash crops instead of food staples; worst case scenario the region loses the experience and the means to grow its own food and is rendered permanently dependent on aid. World hunger is a symptom of global poverty and underdevelopment, and reducing food waste won't fix those problems, it can even exacerbate them. Real progress will require systemic and complicated changes.
- bena 6y ago
  Yes, hunger is currently a logistics problem, not a production problem.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  > World hunger is a symptom of global poverty and underdevelopment, and reducing food waste won't fix those problems, it can even exacerbate them. That doesn't seem true to me. A lot of food is wasted by your retailers, restaurants and households. They are within range of people suffering from food insecurity. > An estimated 43 billion pounds of food were wasted in US retail stores in 2010. 33 This is particularly disconcerting given that in 2016, 12.3 percent of American households were food insecure. 34 Most of the loss in retail operations is in perishables, including baked goods, produce, meat, seafood and prepared meals. 35 The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $15 billion annually in unsold fruit and vegetables alone. 36 Unfortunately, wasteful practices in the retail industry are often viewed as good business strategies. Some of the main drivers for food loss at retail stores include: overstocked product displays, expectation of cosmetic perfection of fruits, vegetables and other foods, oversized packages, the availability of prepared food until closing, expired “sell by” dates, damaged goods, outdated seasonal items, over purchasing of unpopular foods and under staffing. > US restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year. Institutions — including schools, hotels and hospitals — generate an additional 7 to 11 billion pounds per year. > Households are responsible for the largest portion of all food waste. ReFED estimates that US households waste 76 billion pounds of food per year. 45 Approximately 40 to 50 percent of food waste (including 51 to 63 percent of seafood waste 46 happens at level of the consumer. 47 In the US, an average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year (21 percent of the food they buy), costing them $1,800 per year. 48 In terms of total mass, fresh fruits and vegetables account for the largest losses at the consumer level (19 percent of fruits and 22 percent of vegetables), followed by dairy (20 percent), meat (21 percent) and seafood (31 percent). Production of food costs in many resources that take a long time to replenish. Even if you remove the world hunger angle from this, why are we producing food in excess? Obviously, there are some good reasons and problems but many countries pile up on excess buffer stock which is a solvable problem without requiring improvement to the storage and other handling infra, right? Same for retailers, consumers and restaurants. To certain extent at least. No one is perfect but the current trend is ridiculous. Check: https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/

jcadam 6y ago

I suppose, in a way. It's really easy to give up Facebook and Twitter. Which I've done. Giving up Amazon is different. They actually ship me real, tangible items I need. Items that I'd have to track down from different retailers who would more than likely take longer to get those items to me. I'm making an effort to get certain items from other sources (electronics from Newegg, for example), but I'm still a Prime member. Google is in between, I guess. I use DuckDuckGo by default. But, I admit, I sometimes do a "!g" when I'm not satisfied with DDG's results. But in all, I'm much more disturbed by what the Social Media giants have been up to than Amazon, Google, and Apple, so there's a bit more motivation in that regard.

arrosenberg 6y ago
> Giving up Amazon is different. They actually ship me real, tangible items I need. Items that I'd have to track down from different retailers who would more than likely take longer to get those items to me. I'm making an effort to get certain items from other sources (electronics from Newegg, for example), but I'm still a Prime member. The other side of this is that Amazon's marketplace is filled with counterfeit products and is built on questionable labor practices. They are big enough to distort the entire market and make small businesses compete in unnatural/suboptimal ways in order to satisfy Amazon. The fast shipping and some of the cheap pricing is taking advantage of a public good (the Post Office) and it's unclear, especially recently, if Amazon is being given preferential treatment in their contracts. All in all, while it may be more convenient some of the time, the concentration of power and money is not healthy long term for a democratic country. It seems to me that a properly lead and funded Post Office and a dynamic, competitive marketplace of small and medium sized businesses would provide just as good an experience and doesn't have the risk of market capture or complex lobbying operations popping up.
treis 6y ago
Pretty much everything you buy on Amazon can be bought elsewhere. It might be inconvenient to shop elsewhere but the option is there. Of the big tech companies they are probably the easiest to avoid. Practically everyone will have an Apple/Google phone. You can de-Googlfy or de-Applfy but you can't do both. Facebook, yeah you don't need it. But if you want to see pictures of your nephew and that's where they're posted you don't have much choice. Microsoft you can get away from but pretty much anyone buying a computer has to pay the MS tax (or the Apple tax). Hard to avoid Office, LinkedIn, or GitHub at work as well.

danaris 6y ago

Boycotting companies this big is just not practical. As some tech journalists found a little while back (don't have the links, but it was pretty prominent), boycotting Amazon in all its myriad forms online is all but impossible—so much of the internet's infrastructure currently runs on AWS. The idea that the correct action for cases such of these is individual action like boycotts, deleting your Facebook account, or ordering goods (at 15% higher prices, with an extra week of shipping delay) from 23 different online specialty retailers or manufacturers instead of Amazon, is bullshit. It's the same logic that says the way to beat global warming is for you to turn off the lights in your bedroom when you leave, rather than fighting to make oil companies cap burning gas flares or whatnot. Demanding that people give up extra convenience or discounts in order to "send a message" to megacorporations that will never notice, let alone care, until significant double-digit percentages of all global users start doing this, during the most terrifying, emotionally draining, and financially unstable period in living memory is not merely ineffective, it's also deeply insensitive and morally bankrupt.