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Or make healthcare accessible. Make housing accessible. Make food accessible. We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because mon

Or make healthcare accessible. Make housing accessible. Make food accessible. We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it. It’s arbitrary, as much as markets would want us to believe otherwise. As a species we choose to let them have that power, and with it they will kill us all (seriously)

yardstick 3y ago
As long as resources are limited there will be money or an equivalent mechanism for valuing and controlling those resources. Resources can be anything from land, food, knowledge, political power, etc.
- phatskat 3y ago
  We are not short of housing or food. Artificial and market scarcity don’t make it so.
  - yardstick 3y ago
    Both of those require resources. Or are you going to grow your own trees and build a log cabin yourself? How much time will that take? Can you build it by yourself or will you need someone elses help? These are all resources that are not unlimited, and there are trade offs whatever way you allocate said resources. Edit: also power, water, wastewater, internet for a house are services run using limited resources
    - phatskat 3y ago
      First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing. Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the fast food joint because then they’ll just make extra food, so instead you end up tossing tons of perfectly good food. I’d help my dad pick up “old” food from grocery stores for a local shelter and they had to still only take some because the volume of usable food being tossed was too much for one shelter. There’s plenty of food. Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? If, for instance, every vacant property that has working power/water/sewage/internet was filled, would that be too much strain? Would the system that was planned for that capacity buckle under the weight of what it’s made to bear? I don’t buy it.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        > Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? Overall you're right, but you also might be surprised at how fragile and insufficient our infrastructure is. There are many documented cases of problems with power delivery when sudden spikes in usage occur. There have been a few articles about it just this summer due to the record breaking heat. Internet services routinely oversell their service on the assumption that most people won't use what they pay for, and any customers who try to use every bit they're paying for will have their service disconnected. These restrictions are artificial too, people and companies pocketing millions (if not billions) in profits could easily improve their systems to meet higher demand but even though they are swimming in money and have everything they need they won't tolerate earning a penny less, and they act like they're dying when their profit increases if it doesn't also increase at least as much as it did last quarter. They just push all the costs to consumers and taxpayers who are already struggling under the unending greed of countless other people and companies. That's why the idea of giving people food, housing, and healthcare scares the shit out of some people. They know that somehow, they'll end up paying for it, even when the reality is that often their lives would be much better anyway. The truth is that it shouldn't have to cost the people who can least afford it.
        phatskat 3y ago
        It is fragile and a lot does need to be done to make it more resilient - the incentive isn’t there under the current capitalist model. For example, in the US, power companies can’t make a profit from anything except doing new construction[1]. This is why we had the Camp Fire - a PG&E system had faults with no incentive to get fixed that eventually failed and led to a devastating wildfire. We can do these things, but the people most capable also happen to care the lease. [1] https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E - Some More News - The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies
      - c22 3y ago
        All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with. I believe there will come a time where it is no longer necessary, but this will require levels of cooperation, education, and coordination that we are not nearly prepared to handle as a species. For what it's worth, I worked for a while at a fast food joint that did allow employees to take food home, or to make extra of it and just consume it on premises during lunch break. Leftover food was frozen and donated to a shelter twice a week. This place is still in business and as far as I know still operating with these policies. Cynacism aside, I don't even think the place is that unique. If you look around you will find lots of groups motivated by something more than just the mighty dollar, perhaps even most enterprise. This despite the corrosive effects of capitalism you're fretting over.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    on a global level, no. On a state level, especially a state like Califonia, it's more questionable but still feasible. Unfortunately, this is more of a city level issue where a disproportionate amount of people are in the large metropolitan cities of San Diego, San Franciso, and Los Angeles. It probably can be handled if we could move them to other counties, but other counties don't want to inherit that burden. Even if a few did they very likely lack the infrastructure and staff to really support something at scale (not necessarily ALL of these homeless, simply enough to start having the population decrease faster than new ones are created.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  We are not resource limited. A B2 bomber costs 2 billion and we have 20.
  - yardstick 3y ago
    What’s the debt level at now? 30+ trillion?
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      But that's just a made up number. The pentagon has failed 5 audits in a row. Money is not real.
iancmceachern 3y ago
It's not or, its and. and make healthcare accessible.
drekipus 3y ago
Http and the internet is also a made up concept that has not actual value outside of what we place in it. Conversations get no where if you're going to talk nonsense. We don't (feed and house everyone) because the people who grow and distribute food need to get paid. Australia has public healthcare and public housing. I myself am a beneficiary of that, as my parents were homeless. I got out of the cycle because there's things there that helped me. But I am 1-in-a-1000 case. It's not "give them more" that's needed, there's many factors in play. Drugs, mental illness, and even the mentality and language around it. Everyone I knew in homeless shelters as well as my family (except me) were either completely ignorant of how money works, or staunch communists who didn't believe in working for the man, with drugs and illness mixed in.
- fragmede 3y ago
  The point in saying money is a made up construct is that, well, yeah, communism. With infinite possibilities of products and 8 billion players, capitalism, as a way to distribute the collective output of humanity just makes sense. But where there's misery, destitution, and hopelessness, money's just a made up concept and we could make things so much better just by flipping a couple of bits in a database somewhere to create money out of thin air and fund soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Of course we won't and can't actually do that because so many reasons, but if you look past money, and see that its just some system we came up with one day, I fantasize about other solutions to the problem of distribution with the technology we have available to us today, that we didn't have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    We're well on our way. Look at the data for poverty over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
graeme 3y ago
In Canada we have free health care and a similar homelessness situation as in the US. USA 17.5 per 10K Canada 10 per 10K Americans like to think that universal health care solves every problem but it really doesn’t. It’s a good system and helps many things but not a panacea.
- phatskat 3y ago
  Your healthcare system doesn’t (from my anecdotal experience knowing someone in Ontario) cover that much mental health. She could effectively see a therapist a few times of year before it became an out of pocket expense. If we want to address homelessness that’s related to mental health we need much better access. We also need housing, food. We need things that are doable but we don’t do them because capitalism doesn’t allow for it.
  - woeirua 3y ago
    There is a strong belief in some circles that outpatient mental health care can cure most people. It cannot, and that is one of the fundamental flaws with the community based treatment model. First, many conditions can only be managed with current therapies. Second, there are many people who are so far gone that they can no longer even effectively treat themselves. Leaving them in the community to slowly die, strangled by their own minds, is not humane. Especially when we know that intensive inpatient mental health treatment can drastically increase quality of life for many of these people. Do we need more safeguards? Yes. But inpatient mental health treatment needs to be viewed as a first line treatment in some cases, rather than a treatment of absolute last resort.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Mental healthcare coverage in Canada is pretty abysmal. It's barely covered at all unless you're in a crisis situation, which is not very different from many US states.
  - graeme 3y ago
    That’s fair. Though to be clear the following are covered: * Family doctor or clinic visits for mental health * Psychiatrist visits * In most provinces, medications Talk therapy through a psychologist is what is generally not covered outside of work insurance. That’s a big gap, but also not quite right to say “not covered at all”.
fragmede 3y ago
In response to baby formula getting stolen, supermarkets put it at the front under lock and key. Which is an entirely logical conclusion under our current system and culture. But something is clearly wrong with how we distribute resources when helpless infants can't get what they need.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  So is the point of clarification around the baby formula thing there was actually an article oh few months ago a while back anyway that pointed out that most of this baby formula that was being stolen wasn't actually by needing mothers but was actually part of a massive international crime syndicate that was stealing it and then reselling the goods. It turns out that when it's easy to steal things that people need organized crime will get low-level people like drug addicts and petty criminals to steal the goods for them who then give it to an intermediary middleman who then moves it to the person at the top that then resales it online and they're able to have fantastic prices because they have no no unit cos. In fact in many cases a lot of stolen goods tend to end up being part of organized crime not homeless or needy people that need things. People who need things generally we have a robust social safety net that includes things like food stamps and housing assistance in many parts of the country already.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ec109685 3y ago
  Government SNAP benefits provide poor kids baby formula and other necessities. Mothers do not have to steal it. It’s easy to fence is the reason it is locked up.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    Such 'benefits' are yet another lock and key; another hurdle that people in need must jump over. It's baby formula. You are just reiterating their point.
c22 3y ago
Determining value is the value of money. Without it we might get too busy making paperclips and forget to feed people all the same. It's a crude system, more ad-hoc evolved than intelligently designed, and definitely historically manipulated at every chance. Nonetheless, anyone who lobbies for the dissolution of our monetary systems can't be taken seriously unless they also are arguing for a suitable replacement of this functionality. In the past, systems that relied on the opinions of a small group or single individual to determine the value of different types of production to society have failed spectacularly so the solution will need to be more robust than that.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  People are starving in the streets. I think this is a more spectacular failure than chandeliers produced by weight.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Fewer people are starving than ever before, all because of capitalism. What alternative are you proposing? You are always welcome to donate food to the hungry, as many of us do.
    - freeone3000 3y ago
      Ah yes, when I give food to the poor I’m a good person, when the person who profits off of the sale of food (record profits in 2022!) is morally neutral.
jmye 3y ago
Why do you think healthcare isn’t accessible and to whom do you think it is inaccessible? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not for the reasons you think or the people/places you’re talking about.

yardstick 3y ago

As long as resources are limited there will be money or an equivalent mechanism for valuing and controlling those resources. Resources can be anything from land, food, knowledge, political power, etc.

phatskat 3y ago
We are not short of housing or food. Artificial and market scarcity don’t make it so.
- yardstick 3y ago
  Both of those require resources. Or are you going to grow your own trees and build a log cabin yourself? How much time will that take? Can you build it by yourself or will you need someone elses help? These are all resources that are not unlimited, and there are trade offs whatever way you allocate said resources. Edit: also power, water, wastewater, internet for a house are services run using limited resources
  - phatskat 3y ago
    First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing. Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the fast food joint because then they’ll just make extra food, so instead you end up tossing tons of perfectly good food. I’d help my dad pick up “old” food from grocery stores for a local shelter and they had to still only take some because the volume of usable food being tossed was too much for one shelter. There’s plenty of food. Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? If, for instance, every vacant property that has working power/water/sewage/internet was filled, would that be too much strain? Would the system that was planned for that capacity buckle under the weight of what it’s made to bear? I don’t buy it.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? Overall you're right, but you also might be surprised at how fragile and insufficient our infrastructure is. There are many documented cases of problems with power delivery when sudden spikes in usage occur. There have been a few articles about it just this summer due to the record breaking heat. Internet services routinely oversell their service on the assumption that most people won't use what they pay for, and any customers who try to use every bit they're paying for will have their service disconnected. These restrictions are artificial too, people and companies pocketing millions (if not billions) in profits could easily improve their systems to meet higher demand but even though they are swimming in money and have everything they need they won't tolerate earning a penny less, and they act like they're dying when their profit increases if it doesn't also increase at least as much as it did last quarter. They just push all the costs to consumers and taxpayers who are already struggling under the unending greed of countless other people and companies. That's why the idea of giving people food, housing, and healthcare scares the shit out of some people. They know that somehow, they'll end up paying for it, even when the reality is that often their lives would be much better anyway. The truth is that it shouldn't have to cost the people who can least afford it.
      - phatskat 3y ago
        It is fragile and a lot does need to be done to make it more resilient - the incentive isn’t there under the current capitalist model. For example, in the US, power companies can’t make a profit from anything except doing new construction[1]. This is why we had the Camp Fire - a PG&E system had faults with no incentive to get fixed that eventually failed and led to a devastating wildfire. We can do these things, but the people most capable also happen to care the lease. [1] https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E - Some More News - The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies
    - c22 3y ago
      All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with. I believe there will come a time where it is no longer necessary, but this will require levels of cooperation, education, and coordination that we are not nearly prepared to handle as a species. For what it's worth, I worked for a while at a fast food joint that did allow employees to take food home, or to make extra of it and just consume it on premises during lunch break. Leftover food was frozen and donated to a shelter twice a week. This place is still in business and as far as I know still operating with these policies. Cynacism aside, I don't even think the place is that unique. If you look around you will find lots of groups motivated by something more than just the mighty dollar, perhaps even most enterprise. This despite the corrosive effects of capitalism you're fretting over.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  on a global level, no. On a state level, especially a state like Califonia, it's more questionable but still feasible. Unfortunately, this is more of a city level issue where a disproportionate amount of people are in the large metropolitan cities of San Diego, San Franciso, and Los Angeles. It probably can be handled if we could move them to other counties, but other counties don't want to inherit that burden. Even if a few did they very likely lack the infrastructure and staff to really support something at scale (not necessarily ALL of these homeless, simply enough to start having the population decrease faster than new ones are created.
iancmceachern 3y ago
We are not resource limited. A B2 bomber costs 2 billion and we have 20.
- yardstick 3y ago
  What’s the debt level at now? 30+ trillion?
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    But that's just a made up number. The pentagon has failed 5 audits in a row. Money is not real.

iancmceachern 3y ago

It's not or, its and. and make healthcare accessible.

drekipus 3y ago

Http and the internet is also a made up concept that has not actual value outside of what we place in it. Conversations get no where if you're going to talk nonsense. We don't (feed and house everyone) because the people who grow and distribute food need to get paid. Australia has public healthcare and public housing. I myself am a beneficiary of that, as my parents were homeless. I got out of the cycle because there's things there that helped me. But I am 1-in-a-1000 case. It's not "give them more" that's needed, there's many factors in play. Drugs, mental illness, and even the mentality and language around it. Everyone I knew in homeless shelters as well as my family (except me) were either completely ignorant of how money works, or staunch communists who didn't believe in working for the man, with drugs and illness mixed in.

fragmede 3y ago
The point in saying money is a made up construct is that, well, yeah, communism. With infinite possibilities of products and 8 billion players, capitalism, as a way to distribute the collective output of humanity just makes sense. But where there's misery, destitution, and hopelessness, money's just a made up concept and we could make things so much better just by flipping a couple of bits in a database somewhere to create money out of thin air and fund soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Of course we won't and can't actually do that because so many reasons, but if you look past money, and see that its just some system we came up with one day, I fantasize about other solutions to the problem of distribution with the technology we have available to us today, that we didn't have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.
- drekipus 3y ago
  We're well on our way. Look at the data for poverty over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

graeme 3y ago

In Canada we have free health care and a similar homelessness situation as in the US. USA 17.5 per 10K Canada 10 per 10K Americans like to think that universal health care solves every problem but it really doesn’t. It’s a good system and helps many things but not a panacea.

phatskat 3y ago
Your healthcare system doesn’t (from my anecdotal experience knowing someone in Ontario) cover that much mental health. She could effectively see a therapist a few times of year before it became an out of pocket expense. If we want to address homelessness that’s related to mental health we need much better access. We also need housing, food. We need things that are doable but we don’t do them because capitalism doesn’t allow for it.
- woeirua 3y ago
  There is a strong belief in some circles that outpatient mental health care can cure most people. It cannot, and that is one of the fundamental flaws with the community based treatment model. First, many conditions can only be managed with current therapies. Second, there are many people who are so far gone that they can no longer even effectively treat themselves. Leaving them in the community to slowly die, strangled by their own minds, is not humane. Especially when we know that intensive inpatient mental health treatment can drastically increase quality of life for many of these people. Do we need more safeguards? Yes. But inpatient mental health treatment needs to be viewed as a first line treatment in some cases, rather than a treatment of absolute last resort.
sudosysgen 3y ago
Mental healthcare coverage in Canada is pretty abysmal. It's barely covered at all unless you're in a crisis situation, which is not very different from many US states.
- graeme 3y ago
  That’s fair. Though to be clear the following are covered: * Family doctor or clinic visits for mental health * Psychiatrist visits * In most provinces, medications Talk therapy through a psychologist is what is generally not covered outside of work insurance. That’s a big gap, but also not quite right to say “not covered at all”.

fragmede 3y ago

In response to baby formula getting stolen, supermarkets put it at the front under lock and key. Which is an entirely logical conclusion under our current system and culture. But something is clearly wrong with how we distribute resources when helpless infants can't get what they need.

kneebonian 3y ago
So is the point of clarification around the baby formula thing there was actually an article oh few months ago a while back anyway that pointed out that most of this baby formula that was being stolen wasn't actually by needing mothers but was actually part of a massive international crime syndicate that was stealing it and then reselling the goods. It turns out that when it's easy to steal things that people need organized crime will get low-level people like drug addicts and petty criminals to steal the goods for them who then give it to an intermediary middleman who then moves it to the person at the top that then resales it online and they're able to have fantastic prices because they have no no unit cos. In fact in many cases a lot of stolen goods tend to end up being part of organized crime not homeless or needy people that need things. People who need things generally we have a robust social safety net that includes things like food stamps and housing assistance in many parts of the country already.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ec109685 3y ago
Government SNAP benefits provide poor kids baby formula and other necessities. Mothers do not have to steal it. It’s easy to fence is the reason it is locked up.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Such 'benefits' are yet another lock and key; another hurdle that people in need must jump over. It's baby formula. You are just reiterating their point.

c22 3y ago

Determining value is the value of money. Without it we might get too busy making paperclips and forget to feed people all the same. It's a crude system, more ad-hoc evolved than intelligently designed, and definitely historically manipulated at every chance. Nonetheless, anyone who lobbies for the dissolution of our monetary systems can't be taken seriously unless they also are arguing for a suitable replacement of this functionality. In the past, systems that relied on the opinions of a small group or single individual to determine the value of different types of production to society have failed spectacularly so the solution will need to be more robust than that.

freeone3000 3y ago
People are starving in the streets. I think this is a more spectacular failure than chandeliers produced by weight.
- nradov 3y ago
  Fewer people are starving than ever before, all because of capitalism. What alternative are you proposing? You are always welcome to donate food to the hungry, as many of us do.
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    Ah yes, when I give food to the poor I’m a good person, when the person who profits off of the sale of food (record profits in 2022!) is morally neutral.

jmye 3y ago

Why do you think healthcare isn’t accessible and to whom do you think it is inaccessible? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not for the reasons you think or the people/places you’re talking about.