jemorgan @ jemorgan @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

You must be one of those goofballs who thinks millennials can’t by houses because they keep buying coffee.

See sport, enormous percentages add up way faster than tiny ones. Pissing your pants over how bad your feelings are hurt when you see a scary bad man in a truck while you are eating meat 10 meals a week and driving your Corolla to and from work instead of biking is just shitting even more on the current, and every future, generation.

Sad how many people put their personal feelings ahead of objective data, and hold back meaningful progress in the process.

I’m not apologizing for anyone, I’m suggesting that we would be better served by focusing our efforts on major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions instead of getting personally butthurt over a globally tiny number of individuals who are contributing an extra fraction of a percent of global emissions relative to their peers.

My guy I can only imagine how hard it must be to go through life completely illiterate.

“The belief that climate change is unstoppable reduces the behavioural and policy response to climate change and moderates risk perception.”

Who in this conversation do you think is claiming that large trucks don’t emit more greenhouse gasses than electric cars? That’s an impressive strawman you’ve got there. It looks really good right next to the goalposts that are speeding towards the horizon.

And I’m happy to hear that you’re done debating with yourself in a conversation that you can’t seem to keep up with.

That absolutely does not negate any of the points that I made but god bless you for trying buddy.

New large trucks actually get way better gas mileage than older ones.

Homie I’m trying to explain what you’re obviously not understanding about this, and you keep responding with arguments about how you’re correct to not understand or something?

Guy said “don’t be hyperbolic about the 1.5c goal because if people feel hopeless they are less likely to act.” We shouldn’t be acting like the scary life threatening consequences of climate change are unstoppable. That is one narrative, you silly goof.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14693062.2018.1532872

The chuds driving jacked up pickups aren’t contributing very much to global CO2 emissions actually.

The tendency of individuals to place far more blame on passenger vehicles (of which medium and heavy trucks constitute less than 1/4th in the US- likely far less elsewhere) as a contributor to global warming than they are actually responsible for actually had a name; The Transportation Fallacy.

Exact numbers vary by year and country, but it seems like passenger transportation accounts for about ~7% of global CO2 emissions. To put that in perspective, the same source indicates that we can remove the same amount of CO2 by eliminating food waste as we would by taking every passenger vehicle on earth off the road.

The auto manufacturing lobby wants you to sell your current working vehicle and buy a Tesla or a Prius, even though the carbon debt of manufacturing that vehicle won’t break even with an IC engine for ~300,000 miles. And even when it does break even with your current vehicle, if everyone on earth did the same thing, it would barely dent our global emissions.

They want you to feel satisfied about doing your part in a way that earns them revenue, instead of focusing your energy on things that will cost the energy lobby money but actually have an effect.

Sorry, long rant, but I wish more people realized how convenient of a scapegoat the type of car someone drives is. Yes, a more fuel efficient car is better than a gas guzzler, of course. But that’s such a small part of the problem, yet it gets such a huge amount of the mental energy that people spend trying to reduce personal emissions. Eat less meat, push for nuclear power generation, make sure your home is well insulated and uses efficient appliances, fight for working from home where possible, switch from grass to native plants. Drive less. The chuds rolling coal are idiots, but they’re a very, very small part of the problem. So many better ways to spend our energy.

Did you even read the article, Mr/Ms climate scientist?

He’s asking people not to talk like the world is going to catastrophically end once we hit that 1.5 degrees milestone, because it’s making people feel hopeless and apathetic, which is actually slowing our efforts to change.

And he’s totally right. If the government told people a meteor the size of Texas was going to impact earth in 12 hours, there would be effectively zero effort to stop it. If you tune in to a lot of the conversation around climate change from people who are not climate scientists, but who want to leave a better world for their kids and believe climate scientists, they feel hopeless. It feels like a foregone conclusion that we are going to go over the 1.5 degree goal (probably because it is), and if we think the biosphere is going to collapse when it does, it is really, really hard to take action.

It’s not saying to undersell the risks, he’s saying to be truthful about the risks. We can definitely still salvage complex life on earth with optimistic, consistent effort, but recent media coverage has been giving the impression that it’s too late. This is bad and counterproductive.

Keep on fighting the good fight brother/sister.

Well doesn’t that just make my pants a little tighter in a way that I’m 100% down for

Do you have any more details on this?

I think people get excited because hypothetically, growth should accelerate. The more people are using mastadon, the more mastadon becomes a viable alternative to shitter

Alright I’m sold, I take back what I said.

Do we have Lemmy bots? Sounds like a cool idea for a really annoying bot haha.

Yeah, because sadly I can’t just silently unsubscribe from all the whiners who have to make sure to let everybody know that they’re not going to stay subscribed to a community lol.

And also, I just care about you buddy I don’t need to justify that. You have an awesome rest of your day.

Just so you know, you don’t have to announce if you’re leaving a community. Just go. Nobody cares

This is a really good point, and I’m glad that someone who’s got a decent understanding of basic economics is replying to me.

The 95% profit margin was definitely to make a point, as you pointed out. And as you said, according to conventional thinking on capitalism, market forces should push that down to a fair equilibrium.

I think that the issue I was hinting at is that there is a fair amount of contemporary thinking that provides pretty convincing arguments that the nature of capitalism necessarily tends towards consolidation and monopoly over time. The classical model of a baker charging too much on an island, so someone else opens a bakery, doesn’t really work too well when we’re talking about telecom companies and media conglomerates. Once a high-tech segment has consolidated enough, it becomes impossible for anyone other than large companies to enter the market. And when those large companies are actually owned by a larger parent company, we start to see the failures of the classical market forces to produce a ‘fair’ equilibrium due to monopolization.

We definitely aren’t at the point of total failure yet, but in my opinion the trend line isn’t hard to spot. And I think the bigger issue is that due to regulatory capture, there’s not much we can do to patch the sinking ship.

Of course the market forces that are naturally present in a purely capitalist economy require there to be workers and employers.

In the scenario that you described, are you suggesting that instead of 10,000 people working at TSMC, we’d have 10,000 semiconductor factories that are built, operated, maintained, cleaned, and supplied by 10,000 individual people?

We can use an even simpler scenario. I believe that you’re suggesting that instead of the way that the food service sector currently works, it would instead be possible under capitalism for all food-service workers to individually sell served food to customers, presumably from their own kitchens.

In that scenario, what happens when Bob McDonald offers 10 of his friends to come work in his kitchen for an hourly wage, and they’re able to produce better food (due to specialization) for a lower price (due to lower overhead per worker)? Bob (and the countless other people who will undoubtedly copy his success) will outcompete the slower, more expensive kitchens. Individually owned and operated kitchens will be driven out of business. Then small, 10-person kitchens will start to struggle against larger kitchens and chain kitchens that have been able to spread the costs over multiple locations.

Before long, it will be impossible for a Sally Jones to open and run her own kitchen alone. In order to just break even, Sally’s prices would be significantly higher than the food sold at Bob McDonald’s chain. The cost of her premises will be higher relative to the amount of food she can produce on her own, the cost of the ingredients themselves will be higher because of bulk purchase prices vs retail, the cost of preparing the food will be higher because she doesn’t have access to an industrial onion chopper that can peel and chop a 50lb bag of onions in 30 seconds.

Market forces make it impossible for an individual to compete, due to the economies of scale. This is the same reason that over time, corporations under capitalism merge and restructure as they tend toward a monopoly.

I might be totally misunderstanding what you’re suggesting. If what you meant was that instead of the 10,000 TSMC workers each having their own chip foundries, that they’d all still work at the same factory, but that they’d have collectively funded and built the factory, and that they each individually work for themselves at the factory and share in the money they get from selling chips, then I’d agree that that’s an awesome system. It’s still not really possible under capitalism, because if that’s what you’re describing, it is actually called socialism.

I think this answer misses the mark a little bit with regards to the context of what it is about capitalism that causes so much controversy.

People who critique capitalism aren’t usually advocating for an economic system completely devoid of private ownership (though some are). They’re often raising issue with a certain type of capital ownership.

Say you’re the owner of a sprocket manufacturing corporation, and I’m a worker. You yourself don’t work, you just inherited a sprocket empire from your grandfather, who founded that sprocket empire using funds from selling his emerald mines that were worked by slaves.

I put in an honest days work 5 days a week, and in those 5 days, I produce $2000 worth of sprockets. It costs $10 per week to maintain the sprocket machines, $10 per week for electrical power to cover my sprocket making activities, $30 per week to repay the loan that was taken to build the factory, and $50 per week in other miscellaneous expenses needed to allow me to make sprockets.

That means that of the $2000 worth of sprockets I produced, $1900 of profit was generated.

You pay me a salary of $500 per week, and collect $1400 per week from my (and each other laborer’s) work.

The point of criticism is that you’re accumulating wealth, which other people had to work to produce, without doing any work yourself. You’re simply a parasitic freeloader on society because of an arbitrary concept of “ownership” over something that you don’t use personally.

Some responses to these criticisms include the following:

“You should just negotiate for a higher salary, or go work somewhere that’s paying more.”

This is the example from classical economic theory, and there are a whole handful of reasons that it doesn’t work. The voluntary exchange between a worker and a capitalist (meaning one who owns the means of production) isn’t actually (fully) voluntary. A worker who finds his working conditions unsatisfactory can’t reasonably just choose not to work. The threat of financial ruin, homelessness, and starvation act as a metaphorical gun to the head of the laborer giving the capitalist a significant negotiating advantage.

Add to this the fact that it’s been theorized and demonstrated that capitalism tends toward regulatory capture and monopoly, and you have a situation where the means of production become more and more concentrated in the hands of a group of elites, while the workers’ bargenaining power becomes weaker and weaker due to less competition in the labor market.

“The capitalist deserves the profits that they extract because of [this work that they’ve done]”

If the owner of the factory is functioning as a floor manager, they should be paid a fair salary for being a floor manager. If they’re working as a director, they are entitled to a director’s salary. These critiques of capitalism aren’t saying that there should be no hierarchy in an enterprise (though some alternatives to capitalism do call for that). Just that the only people who are entitled to the wealth from something that’s produced are those who are working to produce it.

This same thing goes for other forms of capital ownership too, by the way. Landlords are a classical example. I’ve heard it claimed that landlords are entitled to their rents because many of them work so hard at repairs and managing their properties. They’re totally entitled to be compensated for any labor they engage in, but the wealth that they extract from tenants far exceeds the value of the labor that they supply. Which is kind of the whole point of rental property, if “investors” couldn’t extract a passive income (income in excess of work performed), they wouldn’t be buying homes and then renting them out.

So comcast is evil and everything, but that policy kind of makes sense.

Comcast is trying to set up widespread hotspot coverage. In order to do that, they need participating hotspots in each of their customers homes.

If I were in charge of making something similar, I’d do the same thing.

I love you