A loving relationship. 🥲
Communism
Guns? They’re cool and all but with people being who they are I’d rather everyone didn’t have a right to own one.
Roads without speed bumps.
A communal farm. The entire village works on the farm rotating responsibilities & shares the produce equally.
Crack cocaine. I know I can keep it together. But people who can’t handle their drugs ruin it for everyone… Smh
I want a set of smart glasses with an AI function to replace billboards and other adverts in my vision with artworks. Without being a walking spy cam.
Seems like if it could do full XR maybe it could work via positioning without a camera, particularly at a distance where accuracy won’t matter so much (make it larger+closer). Mapping every billboard would be a community effort. Art selection, too… though I wouldn’t trust people to not put their own self-promotion up either.
It also wouldn’t help with branded trucks.
Eugenics.
Humanity could legitimately be a super species with control of genetic information being able to eliminate hereditary diseases and select for maximum health and performance. The problem is human nature can, would, and will immediately co-opt such technology to amplify socioeconomic stratification and be racist.
I actually think it’d go way deeper than McRacism and even “class,” interestingly.
This is an odd one. Genetic testing of parents and embryos to eliminate serious hereditary disease and other similar issues is already a thing. You’ll have to clarify what you mean when you say that Eugenics would be nice to have.
I’m thinking more like the movie Gattaca. Like, direct health and virility markers can be selected for and/or engineered in to create the best possible humans. Because that basically is the final frontier of human evolution- we can only control our environment so much, and the last thing we have yet to control is our own building blocks.
In theory we could be testing for genetic markers for everything: intelligence, strength, temperament, immune response, life expectency, disposition towards addiction or cancer or color blindness or depression, and breeding up the average. It’s not at all clear how practical that would be even in a perfect world, where the lines of nature meet nurture and stuff like epigenetics has an impact, and there’s no ethical way to pursue that.
Regulated capitalism. Communism.
People always will corrupt them both because people are imperfect and mostly naive or corruptible.
This is why I’m an advocate of stateless market socialism via cooperatives. Theyre tried and true, and who doesn’t want their workplaces democratically controlled? Multi stakeholder models don’t have to mess with your retirement or university endowments. I believe it is the requisite to dismantling capitalism.
Which is basically what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in The Communist Manifesto. Until there’s unlimited resources Communism isn’t viable because of greed.
But you’re right late stage capitalism isn’t any better, just no official book.
Free food. We throw away billions of pounds of food because if it doesn’t sell, they toss it.
Literally nobody should ever go hungry.
We can’t have this because companies see giving away products as lost profits, and politicians see it as some handout.
Making sure a struggling human eats a warm sandwich does not change the billionaire eating lobster truffle caviar.
What are you really saying though?
Here charities do sell a lot of this food, where it’s possible and viable to do so.
You can’t sell food which is out of date because there’s a high likelihood it will be harmful.
Yes, there is a lot of food waste, but IMO that’s the inefficiency of logistics rather than greed or trust.
A major part of the “inefficiency of logistics” is caused by greed. It costs too much to distribute… because it doesn’t make them enough money to do so.
Yes it costs money to distribute free food. Obviously no business is going to do that. That’s not greed.
While some of the food waste is because of logistics, the majority of it is not, and one could argue that food shortages are because of logistics; they are one and the same.
When you have food deserts and grocery stores gauge how profitable they are by how much food they throw away, then it’s more than “well the food went bad”.
I agree that there is the liability argument to be made that no company wants to deal with regarding food. That’s why they spend the effort to recall products when they find something wrong with them, en masse. That’s why in places like Wal-Mart, responsible associates take damaged food products like dented cans and give them to claims to be proceeded. Because nobody deserves to buy that kind of stuff.
However, there should be a point where if a grocery store or Wal-Mart for example, know that food product isn’t selling as fast as they thought or that they just aren’t seeing sales for it. Then yeah, they could do something about that than just mindlessly tossing it, like they could strike deals with food banks and charities to give those out with the understanding that they are about to go bad soon.
I think this is pretty much what happens. That’s how food banks get food.
it’s not that simple.
food has lots of costs of transport, storage, etc, those all get saved when you toss unsellable product.
also if you give stuff away for free, the market price would collapse. people would just wait to get it for free and then never buy the fresh product.
the issue with what you are talking about, is that while a single business might do this, it doesn’t scale.
unless you make food production and distribution a controlled market and that has a boatload of new problems.
It really is that simple and already happens at a modest scale in the US. Businesses that want to put their unsellable food to good use have many options to do so without taking on additional cost.
It’s a large chunk of how food banks and shelters are supplied. There are also non profits dedicated to collecting edible food that would be thrown away otherwise and distributing them.
‘market price would collapse’
that’s fucking retarded.
People prefer fresh food. People will pay more for it.
I have survived by dumpster diving, and I prefer to buy fresher food.
Nobody waiting for the handout of still edible but kinda sad food can afford the fresh shit, otherwise they would have bought it.
Market price, get the fuck outta here
also if you give stuff away for free, the market price would collapse. people would just wait to get it for free and then never buy the fresh product.
Accessible media piracy has not caused people to stop paying for media. They buy new cars. They use meal delivery apps despite that they are many times more expensive than other ways of getting food. People would absolutely keep buying food even if they had the option to get everything they need at a food bank for free. The only effect might be somewhat reduced sales and lower profits, but there would still be a large consumer base that is willing to blow money on stuff like convenience and status.
Tossing food might make those listed costs disappear… if it’s tossed, or rather never harvested or collected, at the source, like on a farm or tree. Wait no even then there’s costs associated.
Just kidding, stopped reading at “market.” That word’s a near sure sign that someone’s definitely swallowed a lot of somethin that ain’t food.
cool, then why don’t you work for free then? since the market and money are just all made up concepts that don’t exist.
and clearly material reality has no limits or restrictions.
by the way, nobody is stopping you from giving away ever penny of your own to feed hungry people… but you aren’t doing that… i wonder why…
Oh yeah, nobody ever volunteers for anything. Like the red cross. Or as firefighters. Or ten thousand other organizations that contribute to the common good, whereas your contribution seems to be ‘more people should starve to death so the prices of these oranges don’t tank’
topic: What thing would be nice to have but can’t have it because we can’t trust people?
Proceeds to post something of something valuable if only we can trust people
Commenter demands how to make it work and rages
Proposing an individual solve a systemic problem is disingenuous. They’re saying that society could fix the problem if it cared to; we are choosing to let kids go hungry as a culture because it “costs too much,” as if the starving child isn’t a too-high cost that we’re already paying.
They’re saying that we need to reevaluate our society’s social priorities, and you’re saying they should give up everything themselves if they care so much— as if that would solve the systemic problem instead of creating another starving person.
systematic problems exist because of individual choices.
you are society. you are traffic, etc.
it’s pathetic, lazy, and shitty to be like ‘someone else should solve this problem, but i can’t do anything about it’.
when you absolutely can. you can absolutely volunteer or donate to a food pantry.
instead of wringing your hands on the internet about this ‘ideal world that should be’ while you do nothing to contribute to it. because it’s easy to sit on your ass and day dream. it’s a lot harder to go do the boring unrewarding work of actually making the world a better place, because when you do that you quickly realized how insignificant you are and how the ‘need’ never ends.
further, if you want to talk about systematic issues of hunger, then you shoudl do that properly and in detail instead fo this high concept moralizing shit. you should actually get into the gritty of how food is produced, shipped, and the numbers involved, but oh no, that’s WORK, that’s difficult and scary. we can’t do that.
The irony is half the idiots who think there should be no world hunger, also don’t understand the implications for what that would require, like a massive expansion of resources, of monoculture, and factory farming. all of which have huge negative externalities.
but again, it’s EASY to sit here and bitch and downvote and idealize and distort a complex reality into a feel good tag line. and it feels good.
understanding how our food supply worlds and the tradeoffs in how it’s structured and the incentives for what things it produced an dhow they are distributed doesn’t feel good. and further, hunger has little to do with any of that and a lot more to do with power and corruption. but hey, why understand any of that when you can just blame grocery stores and farms as selfish evil greedy devils or something, when most of our food supply is a product of government policy.
Bro, it’s a asklemmy post.
You answer the question with words.
Who blamed grocery stores and farms? I said it was a SYSTEMIC issue, which implies the SYSTEM is to blame, and that we should change that.
Nobody said it’d be easy, just that it’s worth doing despite all the FrEe MaRkEt bloviating.
But keep fighting those straw men, you’re so good at it. Meanwhile, I think we can absolutely afford to feed everyone because it’s demonstrably true.
For someone who started their spiel with “it’s not so simple…” you sure throw out a lot of extremely simplistic suggestions and examples to try and prove your point. Irony.
Also, you think I work a “job”? I suppose in your small simple world anyone who doesn’t clock in and clock out is either homeless or uber rich and successful. Amazing what capitalism can do to brains.
like convince weirdos on the internet they are superior beings because they think ‘capitalism bad’ when they don’t understand how anything works in the real world? because it’s complex and difficult and that hurts their feelings?
anyway, keep daydreaming if that what gets your rocks off.
Buddy, you think people you talk to have to have a high opinion of themself or something?
Pause the ad hominem train for one second even, lol, and maybe consider that most of us “weirdos” are perfectly satisfied just getting day to day with a clear conscience.
And please stop projecting I beg you it hurts both of us more you think 😵. Like do you actually think your juvenile attempts at vitriol isn’t stuff I’ve seen 200,000 times, like 20 years ago? A w k w a r d.
If you actually care about other people even possibly considering what you have to say instead of just laughing at your monologues, try stating only constructive stuff (conservatives hate this one trick!).
You sure hate mondays, huh?
Community sheds.
Imagine a house-sized (or larger) lot in the neighborhood thats just a shed. You go in, theres a few lawnmowers, a chainsaw or two, all kinds of power tools and hand tools, hoses, a couple of printers. Whatever you might imagine in a hardware store that isn’t bought and immediately consumed, it’s in there, because some neighbor saw the need once, bought it, and stored it. One day you, say, realize you need a voltage tester, and you don’t own one, so you go to the community shed, realize one isn’t in there, buy one, use it, and then put it away in the community shed. No one else in the entire neighborhood needs to buy one, they’ll find it in the shed.
So handy, but it relies on trusting your neighbors. Trusting them to return things, but more than that, trusting them to bother to contribute, help to keep it organized, and to replace things when they break.
Makerspaces and tool libraries, my friend. They are real. Not as common as I’d like, but the more people who know the concept, the more might help put one together. Incredibly helpful
Some places have tool libraries which work the same way.
Tool libraries are a thing, lots are setup by the community hall.
I mean…
We have governments for a reason, there’s nothing stopping a local government from making a “tool library” where someone who needs a tool can go, get documentation or maybe even training, and check the tool out.
Since it would be an actual government program, we could even have a city worker staffing it.
Like, there’s actual good things we can do with the money we seize from billionaires via taxes.
However you start talking gas powered tools like chainsaws and mowers, and there’s going to need to be a maintenance budget.
There are many maintenance items on electric tools, too. Chainsaws need oil and sharpening, weed whackers need string. All tools need minimal cleaning, etc. Sure, it can be way less than an ICE tool, but it exists.
There’s a lot more issues with an unsupervised and unlocked shed of chainsaws…
I stated the most obvious one, you pointed out a less obvious one exists.
We could keep going forever, listing out every single issue and why this is a bad idea…
But no one will read them, so it’s best to state one clear reason that everyone can understand
Naww I actually fully agree with the idea that it could (and should) work in an ideal world. Just that such a plan would still definitely come with some intrinsic cost/effort, even beyond keeping the shed a viable shed.
Also, people DO have access to chainsaws, so if you’re afraid of loons getting chainsaws… you might just be a bigger coward than you are smart…
Also, people DO have access to chainsaws, so if you’re afraid of loons getting chainsaws… you might just be a bigger coward than you are smart…
Not really sure what you’re talking about honest, but you don’t seem like you’d be receptive to anymore help
my city has bike repair stations that are like this.
after a few months, all the tools are stolen or destroyed. now there are a ton of shitty bike repair stations around the city that are all broken.
What we need is to replace the tools, fix up the stations, add a friendly sign that it’s a community space, and station a sniper on a nearby rooftop.
We couldn’t have such a thing here because the surrounding cities round up and dump all their crackheads and methheads here, meaning nothing that isn’t nailed down can sit outdoors without being stolen within the hour. They’re a plague here and the police are completely and utterly useless.
Communist! Terrorist! Anti capitalist!
This is my garage more or less. I call it Steve’s communist hardware store.
Idk if it’s so simple. I’m a part of some community efforts along those lines and inventory management still needs done. Not to say “your dream is impossible”, quite the contrary. Recognize the radical template that the library gives us!
I would want a community printer!
Lots of makerspaces have 3-d printers! and regular printers too
Your local library doesn’t have one?
Only the central one, a good 20 minutes away.
The planet?
a livable planet
I’m prepared to get raked over the coals because this is a hot topic on the fedi, but Communism
It sounds great on paper. It’s never worked though, either because domestic power corrupts, or foreign influence destabilizes it for their own ends.
In fairness, the same can be said about the free market and democracy. No matter what system you live under, rich assholes will throw you and your grandma into the grinder to make an extra dollar that they won’t even spend.
I don’t think that means we shouldn’t try to do better. The common thread behind corruption everywhere is that it’s driven by rich assholes, so maybe that’s the place to start excising the disease from.
Socialism has always worked. Power is not a supernatural corrupting force, nor is socialism especially weak to corruption as compared to capitalism. Socialism has been a tremendous advancement everywhere it has been established, even in the face of foreign siege. The idea that all systems are the same in effect is an abstraction that is entirely unrelated to the material reality of socialism as compared to capitalism.
Sorry, I’m gonna be that guy; this is one of those thought terminating cliches that people love to repeat, but it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny.
Everything you just described is a problem with literally any political system, as you yourself acknowledged. You literally shot down your own argument, in the same breath as you made it, and then left the falsehood hanging out there anyway. Why? If you’ve already determined that your case against communism, specifically, is actually just a case against all forms of corruption in any political system, so why would you even post this?
And to dig further into the underlying premise, the idea that Communism “can’t work because people can’t be trusted” is genuinely ludicrous. Let’s set aside the arguments about political corruption, because you already disposed of those yourself, and consider the other framing this is usually given; that any form of commons will be abused. That people are lazy, or selfish, and so sharing is impossible. This sounds intuitively correct, but it simply isn’t true.
First off, communism actually requires less trust in people, not more. Communism says “Let’s share resources equitably. Let’s make sure people actually have what they need so that no one person can take too much.” It’s capitalism that says “Let’s give everyone the freedom to take as much as they can and then blindly trust that somehow a few individuals won’t climb their way to the top and horde everything for themselves.” The whole “People are greedy” argument is an argument against capitalism, and it’s the exact problem that communism solves.
Then there’s the “People are lazy and no one will work” argument. We’ve actually tested this. Multiple countries have run trials of UBI, and in every single case, employment actually went up. When you pay people to do anything they want, including not working, it turns out people actually want to work. People like feeling useful. People like having things to do, and contributing to stuff, and feeling like they’re making a mark. The claim that everyone is inherently lazy is thoroughly debunked bullshit peddled by right wing news networks, with no basis in reality.
There’s this adage, “The tragedy of the commons”; “commons” referred to land and other resources that were held in common good. Most typically, a “commons” would be a piece of land in a village where everyone could graze their animals. These eventually went away, and the saying supposes that it did so because of a fundamental human failing; a thing shared by everyone became everyone’s responsibility, and so it became no one’s responsibility. Everyone left the care of the commons to someone else, and so the commons died uncared for.
This adage is complete bullshit. Commons existed for hundreds of years without issue. They went away when we started allowing wealthy capitalists to buy and enclose those common lands and start charging rent for them, or building on them. The people who shared the commons did so without issue for generations. It was allowing a greedy few to do whatever they wanted that killed them.
You’re right, we should try to do better. So maybe be the change, and stop repeating right-wing propaganda. They’ve got enough people on their payroll spreading these lies for them, you don’t need to do it for free.
I actually support socialism, I think it’s the only way we’re going to get see an equitable society. I would have assumed putting it in a thread about things that are “nice to have” showed that support, but I guess that wasn’t clear.
I do talk about how foreign influence causes things to collapse. I’m not sure about the statistics, but I would think in most cases communism has failed because of intervention from capitalist society. This is a condemnation of capitalism, not communism.
The people who can’t be trusted are the “rich assholes.” The vast majority of us are not rich assholes, so I really don’t see how your rant about the tragedy of the commons applies. We both agree that the tragedy of the commons is a fallacy.
If you tear down the people who generally agree with you, you’ll have a much more difficult time building that better tomorrow.
You say you support socialism, but then you define it as something we “can’t have.” That’s still perpetuating a falsehood no matter how you frame it. And throwing in a true statement about foreign influence doesn’t negate the lies you’re repeating.
If I say “Israel is evil because Jews are all money-grubbing subhumans, and also they’re committing genocide in Palestine”, the truth of the second statement doesn’t negate the blatant anti-Semitic falsehood of the first. It’s just wrapping up a lie in a truth.
I’m not accusing you of actually being some kind of secret alt-right troll here, but I am calling out the fact that you’re unwittingly doing their work for them with this kind of rhetoric.
This isn’t tearing you down. It’s challenging you to be better. If all you can see in that is an attack, that’s your own insecurities talking, not me.
24/7 supermarkets, an internet where people could be more open, more night activities, legal drugs
“We had 24/7 walmarts and $1 mcchickens. We had it all”
Do this not exist where you live?
Not in my area either. There were a lot of 24x7 Grocery stores pre -2020.
I am not sure that they reduced hours because of not trusting people though. I am sure they reduced hours because people get a lot more delivered.
There was one Walmart by us that would try to be open 24/7, it would last a month before something would happen and they would go regular for 6-8 months before trying again.
So I do see that being a legit reason for some.
I bet they can’t keep it staffed.
The location was right off the main highway, so I think it was the thefts. Dunno if it was the police telling them they couldn’t or whatever.
The ones further in the communities don’t have as quick a getaway and less secluded?
A lot of stores like Walmart do their stocking and cleaning at night, so there are generally some staff there anyway. So, the cost for Walmart is usually just a couple of cashiers to handle the nighttime traffic.
During the Covid years, all our 24-hour groceries changed back to a 12-hour model
You can’t even get fast food after midnight here, fuck third shift workers amirite?
Ours all changed to 24 hours to give people more time to shop and for people to be able to distance… Most are back to regular hours now, but 24/7 have always and do still exist.
We used to have a very small handful of 24/7 supermarkets before covid. Now I think we have one in the entire city of 1.6million. Everything closes before 8pm. I think its just a mix of people not wanting to spend money because everything is expensive and violent crime. There is to many random assaults caused by drunk people.
