Microblog Memes

I got you.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Capitalism isn't "when people get paid for working." And people getting paid for doing a job isn't the problem highlighted in this post. In any case, there are any number of ways people might be motivated to do something useful.

Historically, people have worked due to real scarcity in order to meet their basic survival needs. We don't face such scarcity in the modern, developed world.

I've often conceptualized UBI or other such schemes (e.g. negative income tax) to provide a basic, spartan standard of living. If you want luxury, you need to work for it. Of course what constitutes "luxury" might fluctuate over time. And in times of greater abundance, UBI might be more generous while being scaled back in times of scarcity. If too many people opt out of working and only collect UBI, then real scarcity may indeed become and issue requiring such programs to be reduced.

But the point here is that we produce FAR more than what people actually need. This "must work and produce for the sake of it" leads to a lot of make-work in the form of things like artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, or people producing and selling solutions in search of problems. The amount of actual fucking trash produced is mind-boggling. Something like fast fashion that produces low quality apparel only intended to be worn a few times has an enormous impact on our environment.

Imagine a world where we worked towards quality and making sure that actual needs were being met rather than being fixated on highest profitability at the exclusion of everything else. A more collaborative society instead of a hyper-competitive "winner take all" freak show.

Supply side Jesus says put your faith in the wisdom of the CEO.

We need more military! Cut social security!

I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.

Story of 2010s Germany as well.