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We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
by Telaneo 3mo ago
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
- pj_mukh 3mo ago“We have enough excess in society” How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
- XorNot 3mo agoThe world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
- anovikov 3mo ago...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
- pharrington 3mo agoIn the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
- pj_mukh 3mo agoJust a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number). Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
- Zababa 3mo agoThis assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoBut individual grocery stores throw out a lot of food each day. So the problem isn't distribution, it's that nobody bought it.
- Telaneo 3mo agoThe other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it. Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem. Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting. Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell. I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
- pj_mukh 3mo agoYes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this. I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess". And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines. [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
- Telaneo 3mo agoHousing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that? Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
- butlike 3mo agoBy the fact medicine has an expiration date on the bottle. You can have so much of it you don't have the chance to use it all before it expires.
- theflyingelvis 3mo agoIt almost seems as if you are trolling. Surely we can, at least, agree that the excesses you mention exist only because of those who produce.
- bestouff 3mo agoA society where just stating this is called trolling is such a sad society. I pity you and you brainwashed siblings.
- inigyou 3mo agoit's a very common trolling tactic to imply a controversial thing while overtly saying a less controversial thing
- Telaneo 3mo agoHave I said anything to the contrary?
- daishi55 3mo agoThey are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
- 3mo ago
- kakacik 3mo agoDon't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't). Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life. Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
- lostmsu 3mo agoSwitzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
- hackingonempty 3mo agoWhatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year. https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-economy/national-accounts/gross-domestic-product.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...
- qwytw 3mo agoSwitzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.
- reactordev 3mo agoDo you know how tone deaf this is? Some people literally can’t afford their medication and you are saying “meh, we have too much already”
- Telaneo 3mo agoWe have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess. Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system. And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
- hogehoge51 3mo agoYou are failing to analyze the system corectly. "Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint. The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus. Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc. The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow. In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus. what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
- Telaneo 3mo agoWe are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
- nate_meurer 3mo agoNo, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
- Telaneo 3mo agoThere are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
- nate_meurer 3mo ago
- germandiago 3mo agoWhat you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like. That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why. It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals. Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
- Telaneo 3mo agoI have no idea how you've come to the conclusions about what I've written that you have.