• SCB@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      How do the robots own the means of production?

      This is just capitalism with slave labor you don’t have to feel bad about.

      • nkiru@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I live in the SW USA, and until very recently, we had to pay the fire dept a monthly fee to be able to call them to come to our house in case of fire.

    • sverit@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Absolutely. Binding any basic need to profits is atrocious if you think about it.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      There’s a little bit of nuance here, “for profit” isn’t the same as “for greed”. Organizations of any kind - corps, non-profits, governments - have to remain essentially “solvent” or “profitable” to even operate - they can’t function just perpetually burning through resources. A medical org, even one that’s a “corporation”, can run a profit but not be governed by greed.

  • littlecolt@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Every day when I get off work and I go to a local gas station, I see them throw away a bunch of prepared food that passed shelf life. Thus is a chain, so hundreds of locations do this every day. Tons of food per year, tossed in the trash because it sat in the heat box too long.

    Imagine how many people could eat that food. It makes me upset.

    • K Vinayak @lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      May be they are avoiding getting sued. If someone gets sick. Especially junk food, which is unhealthy to begin with

      • Dadd Volante@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        This has been long debunked. Laws have passed that protect owners from this.

        I used to work in a sandwich shop that made it’s own bread fresh daily. At the end of every day the owner started donating the leftover bread and explained how it’s an urban myth.

        People just don’t like to share.

  • protist@mander.xyz
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    11 months ago

    There are serious ethical problems with a capitalist system, especially when it comes to the necessities of life, but there’s also ample evidence that other economic systems in practice have been just as bad of not worse regarding food security, eg follow the history of the USSR from the Holodomor in the 1930s to empty grocery shelves and bread lines in the 1980s

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I view the problem as us treating a tool as a system of government. Capitalism is an incredibly powerful tool for increasing efficiency (real capitalism as in a healthy free market, not monopoly bullshit). But we should be using that tool to our benefit, not having that tool use us. We can use it as a tool without it being our basis of society. Also, capitalism is not self regulating. That’s a bullshit myth created by elite monopolists. Unchecked capitalism leads to monopolies and monopolies are the antithesis of capitalism. We used to know that. We used to bust monopolies. We need to learn when and when not to use capitalism. Certain things need to be monopolies. Like transportation and the power grid. Since healthy competition cannot prosper we cannot make them capitalistic. We already need to recognize that capitalism is a tool for us to use. It’s ok to break capitalism in special circumstances for the greater good, because the good of the people is more important than perpetuating capitalism. I think abolishing it leads to apathy and inefficiency, but worshipping it leads to inhumanity, and we’re not even worshipping it properly because again, monopolies are not capitalism. Like all things in life it’s about balance.

    • lauha@lemmy.one
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      11 months ago

      I cannot comment on communism as there has not been a true communism in the world yet, but dictatorships sure have been bad.

    • Glitchington@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Okay but like, at least understand why the shelves were empy. Behind the Bastards had a great podcast on the matter. Bad science is bad science, no matter how you trade.

      • protist@mander.xyz
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        11 months ago

        What Lysenko did and the magnitude of it was enabled by and is inextricable from the Soviet systems of government and economy:

        Lysenko’s success at encouraging farmers to return to working their lands impressed Stalin, who also approved of Lysenko’s peasant background, as Stalin claimed to stand with the proletariat. By the late 1920s, the USSR’s leaders had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by the Communist Party to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko’s: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community. Due to close partnership between Stalin and Lysenko, Lysenko acquired an influence over genetics in the Soviet Union during the early and mid twentieth century. Lysenko eventually became the director of Genetics for the Academy of Sciences in 1940, which gave him even more control over genetics. He remained in the position for more than two decades, throughout the reigns of Stalin and Nikita Khruschchev, until he was relieved of his duties in 1965.

    • sverit@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, the problems are just different. A mixed form would be ideal, where basic needs would be handled socially and the rest may compete in a capitalist way. The difficulty is where to draw the line exactly.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Crown corporations/co-ops/worker owned companies for essential needs, capitalism for all non essentials.

      Tada!

    • disinterested_a_hole@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Are you the least bit aware of what caused the egg shortage? There was a super virulent strain of avian influenza (bird flu) that has the potential to infect wild birds and to jump to mammals. You know, like people. The same thing triggered the pandemic in 1918 that killed anywhere from 1% - 5% of the world population.

      So to avoid that happening again, they had to destroy (slaughter) millions and millions of egg laying hens, which yes, caused a shortage of eggs relative to normal.

      https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=105576

      There are real issues that need to be addressed with capitalism and workers rights. This isn’t one of them and you hurt the real arguments by not educating yourself.

      • ZzyzxRoad@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I think the “send profits soaring…700 percent” was the point there.

  • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I really don’t get why we don’t have “meal bars” or “human food” yet. Something that covers all basic calorie and nutritional requirements, can be mass produced, and easily stored at room temperature. Like “dog food” but for humans.

    The real choice should be a normal meal or a “meal bar”, not a normal meal or starving.

  • Kes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 months ago

    Food production is one of the very few things the US government has been handling well. We give out tens of billions in subsidies to farmers every year to artificially inflate the food supply and have a nationwide SNAP program to help low income families afford food. As a result, we produce far more food than we actually need and far more than we would in a free market, allowing the US to be a major exporter of food globally and ensuring we have enough redundancy built into our food supply that the US will be the last country to starve in a famine

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Remember that time they had too much milk and were like “Lets make cheese!” And then they had too much cheese so they out it in a cave and slowly gave it away for decades.

  • MrShankles@reddthat.com
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    11 months ago

    Under “-isms”: “-isms” must manufacture “it” to justify their existence.

    'There is a man, a certain man And for the poor, you may be sure That he’ll do all he can Who is this one, who’s favourite son

    Just by his action has the traction Magnets on the run Who likes to smoke, enjoys a joke And wouldn’t get a bit upset if he were really broke

    With wealth and fame He’s still the same I’ll bet you five you’re not alive If you don’t know his name’

  • Gxost@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Anything is done to make profit. Otherwise people wouldn’t have desired a salary increase. Not selling food is not profitable, so food producers don’t want people to starve, they want food to be sold. People can starve if they have no money, which should be solved by the government, or they can starve because there is no enough food in the country or region, which should be solved by the government too.