14 ms·

So the entire freighter journey is shown in real time, to show how “crushing” (a word used in the article) capitalism is? Because before capitalism, there were

So the entire freighter journey is shown in real time, to show how “crushing” (a word used in the article) capitalism is? Because before capitalism, there were no freight ships, or what?

iforgotpassword 4y ago
Before "capitalism" (globalization really I guess), you were eating apples from your neighbor's garden, wearing shoes made by your town's shoemaker, not from half around the world.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  This is not correct, the ancient world and the ancient Mediterranean especially saw food get transported by sea. Rome.had to import much of it's food, for instance, as did Athens.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Well you're not wrong, but that was still the exception, and on a smaller scale. So maybe food wasn't the best example to get my point across. Like you said, they had to, it's not like some clever Roman said "hey you know what, I'll just buy cheap stuff from overseas to make more money and then fuck our farmers." Nobody sent locally harvested produce for processing to a country half around the world and then back. Or look at when ancient Rome and China did trade. That was for luxury goods, not for basic household items the average Joe would buy.
- cptnapalm 4y ago
  Expand that to things like olive oil, wine, lumber, jewelry, and the like, you'd have to go back before the bronze age.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Not sure that’s the strongest take you could have made. Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically. Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs. It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task). This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about. Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been. There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones. We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases. I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      > It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK This is a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home. Then, the de-shelled shellfish is valuable enough to get a spot on the next full ship heading out again. Not nearly as crazy sounding.
      - iforgotpassword 4y ago
        I think it's still as crazy sounding! We send shellfish around the globe and back to get them de-shelled. Not because they do it better, but cheaper. And for the company doing it it makes sense, since they benefit, and the now unemployed countrymen get compensated by the government, ie. taxes, ie. everyone. And yes, of course there's always one more step that leads you to where you got in the end. Nobody established a new shipping route and built a new dedicated ship just to start de-shelling in China. It's like when you look at some complex software that has a batshit crazy architecture, spaghetti code, 5 different code styles, hacks and is half procedural half OOP, and whatever else you consider a crime. But then you look at its history, how it's almost 30 years old, started procedural on a different OS, how its requirements vastly changed and extended over the decades in ways nobody could possibly anticipate, and suddenly, most of the crazy things don't seem so crazy anymore if you know the story behind the individual "crimes" committed. But thst still doesn't mean that looking at the whole picture can't reveal a batshit crazy codebase that you wouldn't touch with a 5ft pole if you can avoid it.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    But this was still sustainable, what happened in the last century on the other hand....
- yunohn 4y ago
  You could do that in the modern day too, if the West decided to stop their exploitation of developing/colonial countries. Instead, they’ve decided that minimum wages at home need to be X $£€ and X/100 everywhere else, so they can offshore everything. Nobody is forcing the West to make shoes in China!
tpmx 4y ago
Trade is capitalism. It's how we push forward. It's inevitable, but some people do hardcore roleplay that it's not. The world is worse for that.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  People trade under socialism and communism, too. Stone age tribes trade. Families trade. Communes trade. Everybody trades.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    > People trade under socialism and communism, too. In trivially provably less efficient ways.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      > efficient Economists and market fundamentalists keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        Economists know what words mean.
        tpmx 4y ago
        They also know that free trade is superior to planned economies, soviet union style.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        Planned economies haven't worked in the US, either. For example, before Reagan deregulated the airlines, the airline schedules, routes, and fares were set by the FAA. The result is airliners often flew nearly empty. Once that was deregulated, a titantic shift occurred, such as the emergence of the hub-and-spoke system. Airplanes have been packed since then. The FAA bureaucrats proved incapable of efficiently setting routes, schedules, and fares. In the 1970s, the Energy Department decided a gas station's gas allocation. They did this for every gas station in the country. The result was simultaneous gluts and shortages of gas. Reagan deregulated that with his very first Executive Order, and the gluts, shortages, and gas lines disappeared literally overnight. Planned economies just don't work.
lm28469 4y ago
Every week my office restocks on bananas from Latin america Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash This is a simple example It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness
- bm3719 4y ago
  You can take them home to add to your compost bin. Then you can put this excellent and free compost in your garden.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Blackened bananas can also be frozen and used later to make banana bread.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    I don't know if you're sarcastic or not, because this is exactly what I mean by using a monetary scale. It's free to me but it still is an incredible waste of energy, time and ressources
    - bm3719 4y ago
      I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting. Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.
  - delusional 4y ago
    In that case we shipped literal dirt around the world so that he could put it in his garden. Is that any less absurd?
delusional 4y ago
Observing the absurdity of something doesn't necessarily mean you have a more desirable alternative. I can observe that it's absurd that my apples were shipped halfway around the world without saying "so i don't want them". Capitalism is absurd, what it makes humans do is absurd. It's also useful and has some worthwhile properties.
Seattle3503 4y ago
It makes about as much sense as saying watching paint dry defines the experience of having decorated walls.

So the entire freighter journey is shown in real time, to show how “crushing” (a word used in the article) capitalism is? Because before capitalism, there were no freight ships, or what?

iforgotpassword 4y ago

Before "capitalism" (globalization really I guess), you were eating apples from your neighbor's garden, wearing shoes made by your town's shoemaker, not from half around the world.

Manuel_D 4y ago
This is not correct, the ancient world and the ancient Mediterranean especially saw food get transported by sea. Rome.had to import much of it's food, for instance, as did Athens.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Well you're not wrong, but that was still the exception, and on a smaller scale. So maybe food wasn't the best example to get my point across. Like you said, they had to, it's not like some clever Roman said "hey you know what, I'll just buy cheap stuff from overseas to make more money and then fuck our farmers." Nobody sent locally harvested produce for processing to a country half around the world and then back. Or look at when ancient Rome and China did trade. That was for luxury goods, not for basic household items the average Joe would buy.
cptnapalm 4y ago
Expand that to things like olive oil, wine, lumber, jewelry, and the like, you'd have to go back before the bronze age.
- dijit 4y ago
  Not sure that’s the strongest take you could have made. Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically. Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs. It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task). This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about. Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been. There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones. We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases. I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    > It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK This is a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home. Then, the de-shelled shellfish is valuable enough to get a spot on the next full ship heading out again. Not nearly as crazy sounding.
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      I think it's still as crazy sounding! We send shellfish around the globe and back to get them de-shelled. Not because they do it better, but cheaper. And for the company doing it it makes sense, since they benefit, and the now unemployed countrymen get compensated by the government, ie. taxes, ie. everyone. And yes, of course there's always one more step that leads you to where you got in the end. Nobody established a new shipping route and built a new dedicated ship just to start de-shelling in China. It's like when you look at some complex software that has a batshit crazy architecture, spaghetti code, 5 different code styles, hacks and is half procedural half OOP, and whatever else you consider a crime. But then you look at its history, how it's almost 30 years old, started procedural on a different OS, how its requirements vastly changed and extended over the decades in ways nobody could possibly anticipate, and suddenly, most of the crazy things don't seem so crazy anymore if you know the story behind the individual "crimes" committed. But thst still doesn't mean that looking at the whole picture can't reveal a batshit crazy codebase that you wouldn't touch with a 5ft pole if you can avoid it.
- lm28469 4y ago
  But this was still sustainable, what happened in the last century on the other hand....
yunohn 4y ago
You could do that in the modern day too, if the West decided to stop their exploitation of developing/colonial countries. Instead, they’ve decided that minimum wages at home need to be X $£€ and X/100 everywhere else, so they can offshore everything. Nobody is forcing the West to make shoes in China!

tpmx 4y ago

Trade is capitalism. It's how we push forward. It's inevitable, but some people do hardcore roleplay that it's not. The world is worse for that.

WalterBright 4y ago
People trade under socialism and communism, too. Stone age tribes trade. Families trade. Communes trade. Everybody trades.
- tpmx 4y ago
  > People trade under socialism and communism, too. In trivially provably less efficient ways.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    > efficient Economists and market fundamentalists keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Economists know what words mean.
      - tpmx 4y ago
        They also know that free trade is superior to planned economies, soviet union style.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        Planned economies haven't worked in the US, either. For example, before Reagan deregulated the airlines, the airline schedules, routes, and fares were set by the FAA. The result is airliners often flew nearly empty. Once that was deregulated, a titantic shift occurred, such as the emergence of the hub-and-spoke system. Airplanes have been packed since then. The FAA bureaucrats proved incapable of efficiently setting routes, schedules, and fares. In the 1970s, the Energy Department decided a gas station's gas allocation. They did this for every gas station in the country. The result was simultaneous gluts and shortages of gas. Reagan deregulated that with his very first Executive Order, and the gluts, shortages, and gas lines disappeared literally overnight. Planned economies just don't work.

lm28469 4y ago

Every week my office restocks on bananas from Latin america Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash This is a simple example It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness

bm3719 4y ago
You can take them home to add to your compost bin. Then you can put this excellent and free compost in your garden.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Blackened bananas can also be frozen and used later to make banana bread.
- lm28469 4y ago
  I don't know if you're sarcastic or not, because this is exactly what I mean by using a monetary scale. It's free to me but it still is an incredible waste of energy, time and ressources
  - bm3719 4y ago
    I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting. Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.
- delusional 4y ago
  In that case we shipped literal dirt around the world so that he could put it in his garden. Is that any less absurd?

delusional 4y ago

Observing the absurdity of something doesn't necessarily mean you have a more desirable alternative. I can observe that it's absurd that my apples were shipped halfway around the world without saying "so i don't want them". Capitalism is absurd, what it makes humans do is absurd. It's also useful and has some worthwhile properties.

Seattle3503 4y ago

It makes about as much sense as saying watching paint dry defines the experience of having decorated walls.