someone: so what do you think is the solution to homelessness?
me, socialist:
Let homeless people occupy peopleless homes, build houses for use rather than exchange, 3D print comfortable houses in a day, convert corporate skyscrapers into housing and commercial malls into publicly-accessible community centers with living commons and entertainment
When you say it to people and they break
“But the money? … we can’t just? But, Money? We can’t just… help… people? Can we? The Money. We can’t just help people? Like that? We can’t just? Money?”
theres something that feels very colonial/imperialist about superfood fads
the idea that a rare and exotic grain or berry from some pristine Ecuadorian mountain or a salt slab from “the himalayas”(those are all mined in Pakistan) will suddenly cure you with their magical benefits is all pseudoscience. eating more fresh produce is definitely good but the “magical nutrients” of those superfoods are no different than common produce, and there’s no food that makes you slimmer that’s not how calories work, its snake oil. and it causes damage from overfarming and making a once staple food in a community inaccessible when its value soars, leaving them open to predation from food giant.
anyways i’m just tired of Bethany from facebook bragging about “discovering” the health magic of some new plant from cambodia or whatever, but in reality it’s advertisers making this shit tantalising to justify an insane price markup of a superfood and playing to that colonial mindset that things from a foreign far away land used traditionally by its natives is instantly mystical and cool so you want it. frankly it reminds of the victorian’s egyptomania craze when people believed in the health properties of mummies
I have a friend that insists that sea salt and pink salt are better than “regular salt” because its “less processed” and has more minerals.
I’m not paying double for salt because of “extra minerals,” I get enough minerals from tapwater. ITS ALL SALT TODD.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
The supposed different “generations” i.e. millennials/Gen X/boomers etc is just liberalism’s attempt to replace class analysis by framing the different generations as coherent classes with different interests. It conveniently fails to mention that there are working class & ruling class people in all generations.
By making all ppl of a certain age responsible for inflation & higher cost of living or w/e, the responsibility of the ruling class is obscured, to the detriment of the working class & to the benefit of the ruling class.
we all know capitalism is fucking evil but one of my favorite stories to tell from Retail Hell is that time my district manager got annoyed that 2 poor people were taking food out of the dumpster occasionally so he told us all to start pouring bleach over all the items we threw out so people couldn’t use them/it would hurt them if they touched it directly. never did that and absolutely have participated in “employee theft” by stealing bags of food from the dumpsters to donate to the local food bank but like. he really did just want us to directly harm people over food that was already in the literal trash.
when managers and CEOs get up in arms about “employee theft” they’re actually talking about people like me who don’t throw out the 30 pairs of shoes that we weren’t able to sell and instead bag them up and throw them behind the dumpster for retrieval/donation later. I once took home $450 of food and another night got $500 worth of makeup. Perfectly good electronics get thrown away bc the packaging was tampered with. We throw away food, cosmetics, and household products 30-60 days before their expiration dates (which are also kinda bullshit anyway). The whole retail model is structured around this idea of massive waste.
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