“You don’t like an athrocity? But what about that other athrocity on the other side of the globe? Check, mate. I am very intelligent.”
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Lemmy try not to blame capitalism challenge/s
It gets tiring huh.
Now is time to upgrade to linux haha
Oh shit… Where did I leave my knee socks?
Indeed, capitalism is tiring unless you’re part of the owner class.
Heck, did I lose?
Please see image, it’s really that simple /s
You don’t benefit from it, so why are you defending it? You don’t think you’re going to be a millionaire one day, do you?
Yeah you’d think most of our societies problems are a direct cause of late stage capitalism cresting a system where only profits matter and once its not profitable to feed or house someone then they are left to starve and go homeless or something. Haha I’m so glad that’s not the case, haha…
Lemmy try not to give a correct answer to a problem…chalenge for some reason
Why? I’m not going to avoid pointing to the source of a problem just because people don’t want to hear it.
I bet whoever’s sleeping there is doing so because they can better pretend they’re in a bedroom. It’s shameful we’ve let things get this way.
That’s an odd bet. Personally, I’d bet whoever’s sleeping there is doing so because that spot provides overhead shelter and has 3 walls that aren’t exposed to the elements.
Not necessarily, though I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on them. It’s an alcove doorway in a well-lit area; those are always popular if there is no hostile architecture/sprinklers/etc.
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But the shareholders need to be able to extract a return in return for no work - we couldn’t give others a shot at dignity.
can I get the image without “capitalism” written on it?
Even Communism has a capital C.
i don’t understand what point you’re making. i think the image stands well enough on its own.
Sir, this is a Lemmy instance.
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Lemmy. Huh. It gets tiring aftet a while.
Go outside then.
Just a statement about how we have the resources readily available yet unobtainable to some.
It’s a critique on capitalism, where we have the technology and products to improve our quality of life but restrict access to them for a considerable percentage of humas. You’re welcome.
Even in a utopian communist society there would be showrooms for products, to help people select what best meets their sleep/medical needs. Those beds would be unused too.
It is a separate issue, that the showroom is not responsible for, that resulted in a homeless person not having a bed.
Systemic issues have systemic solutions. If you try to apply a local solution to a systemic problem, you just kicked the can. (As in, letting homeless people use the showroom beds).
The systemic solution is not a utopian communist society, but a system which provides beds for those who need it. The picture highlights this problem.This is not a critique on the showroom, or the store owner (which is how you interpreted it), this is a critique on society. You were the one who muddied the waters (and assumed that someone is proposing a communist society, another argument fallacy). The point is not “letting homeless people use the showroom beds” but rather “letting homeless people use beds”.
I didn’t muddy anything. I handled multiple points. The second point in my comment is the one you are discussing.
Further, it is not “another argument” fallacy when “capitalism” is written on the photo. The prominent differing economic model is communism or like systems, where needs are systemically met before profits are considered. So it is implied one can discuss other economic models by the presence of “capitalism” in the source material.
The part where you did actually muddy the waters is that you assumed that the picture depicts problems in a “showroom - homeless person” context, which is clearly not the case (as you contradictingly say yourself and even recognize when you said: “when “capitalism” is written on the photo”). The picture clearly criticizes capitalism as a economic system, but you wanted to make the showroom the focus point of the photo. That is muddying the waters. You dismiss the original critique. Or at least that’s how I read your comment. The difference between “I was talking about multiple points” and “muddying the waters” is not that big.
On the other part, yeah, fair enough. I would compare it to a “utopian socialist society” rather than communistic, but sure whatever. I mean there are countries in the world where taking this picture is very easy, and some (socialist) countries where it’s take a bit of effort to find a situation like this to photograph in the first place (most nordic european countries, for example).
The whole point of the image we are both commenting is a critique on capitalism. You are moving the point slightly towards “critique on showroom owners”.
However let’s not get sidetracked here. In a utopian society there would be showrooms, yes. But the person would not be forced to sleep outside without a bed in such a society, be there showrooms or not. That is the point. Capitalism allows this, a socialist society doesn’t (just look at the countries with least homeless people and you’ll see)
None of which I contest. I discussed 2! things.
You are fixating on the first.
I am fixating on the thing that relates to this picture. It seems to me (honestly, I don’t mean to come off as an ass) that your 2nd point of discussion is very much my “muddying the water” point. I don’t want to discuss that point, as that was totally irrelevant here. If I understood correctly, your 2 points were: (I’m paraphrasing, but) “I don’t understand, why showroom owners should let homeless people sleep inside their premises” and “every other economic system besides capitalism also has these qualities”
Right? And I think I have provided arguments against both of these. What am I missing?
Considering we have multiple people suggesting that the homeless person should, in fact, be allowed to sleep in that bed, I think that a lot of people are interpreting it that way.
No. In utopian society there wouldn’t be the person who doesn’t have a bed.
There’s always going to be people who fall through the cracks in your safety net because they for some (usually mental health related) reason just can’t integrate into the framework of society. You can offer help, but even without conditions attached there’s going to be people who will refuse it.
I don’t think the issue in America is that we’ve tried the best we can but some have slipped through the cracks. More along the lines of we’ve tried nothing and we are all out of ideas.
Ok? That’s not contested in my comment.
But there is the assumption that bed showrooms need to be filled with inventory so that people can decide what bed they want to buy while others don’t even have a bed.
I’m not communist because I think skill and effort should be rewarded. But I guess you could say I’m basic need communist in that I think society should do their best to ensure everyone has their basic needs met and rewards those supplying those basic needs beyond their own basic needs.
Luxury options and upgrades should be waiting until after everyone has the base version. And that base version should be efficiently and effectively designed, not designed deliberately to make the user want to upgrade.
The idea is that a socialist/communist utopia wouldn’t concern itself with the pursuit and hoarding of capital. So the “showroom” wouldn’t really be a concept. We’d have catalogues and stores, but the fancy aspirational dressing that comes with the wastes of space known as furniture stores would be less prevalent.
Then you missed the point.
According to all the kids here, yes.
“kids”
You are not superior for not having empathy for homeless people
Do you think the homeless need our empathy or do they need something else?
I certainly think they will get nothing if people don’t have empathy for them.
You’d be surprised by how far just caring can go. And by that, I mean genuinely, empathically, caring.
You’d be surprised by how far just caring can go. And by that, I mean genuinely, empathically, caring.
Depends a lot on who is doing the caring. For instance, if a homeless person has infinite empathy towards another one, not a lot will happen. If a particurarily unskilled politician has a lot of empathy, what they do with it might be a net negative.
So I kinda disagree with the sentiment here. Empathy alone does about as much as thoughts and prayers. Empathy isn’t even required in order to help a lot of people. You can be the driest, most temperature-room person on the planet and do good things.
You would still need to the wherewithal to identify that help is needed. Be it empathy from within or external, if no one cared it would never reach even the lukiest of warm persons desk.
Hey its the sole free thinker and adult on all of lemmy!!!
You’re not using your bed right now. Are you letting a homeless person sleep in it?
Why are you so intent on defending the ruling class? You aren’t in their group. You’re a broke ass like the rest of us and you never will achieve anywhere near enough wealth to forget that.
So just because the “ruling class” is shitty and there needs to be change, we should just be allowed to make stupid, embarrassing statements that show a complete lack of understanding of society or economics?
Is there like an Uber for this?
Don’t give Airbnb ideas
Don’t worry, if people don’t have homes because they don’t have money, they wouldn’t have money for a bed uber either.
It’s a GrInD eCoNoMy oLd mAn.
Grindr is uber for warm, lubricated holes.
I think that’s just called splitting rent with someone who works nights
That’s not a contradiction. Your, my, and everyone’s bed is for sleeping in. The beds in that store are for accumulation of wealth. This displays the harsh efficiencies of capitalism, because the people in the most need for a bed cannot afford to have one.
So beds in the store are for accumulation of wealth but then when someone buys them they’re for sleeping in? Deep
Who are the people in most need for a bed? Isn’t that need relatively equal? I mean, I guess when I was younger I didn’t really need one, but now I’m a wreck without one. I know some guys with copd that only sleep in chairs, so maybe their need is on low end.
The people without beds, followed by the people that need to replace their beds, followed by people that want to receive a bed for any other reason.
Just because I have a bed doesn’t mean I don’t need one. If I didn’t need it I wouldn’t keep it
I’m not wanting for beds. But am in need.
Ok, how would this prioritization of resource distribution prevent you from getting the bed you need?
I do understand the sentiment but the thing is a lot of homelessness isn’t because people don’t have money not exactly. They may have support systems that they can make use of but if they have other problems they may not be inclined to use those support systems.
You can’t just blame capitalism for homelessness, not exclusively.
Which systems do you have in mind? Because homeless shelters are not a solution to homelessness.
But mattress stores are?
Where did you extrapolate that from?
You kinda can. Capitalism provides no incentive to help this man (actually, it provides a disincentive because the time and/or money needed to help this man could be spent on more profitable endeavors). The support structures that may exist are not capitalistic, are disincentived, and obviously not adequate.
Personally I blame it for the bulk of it in my country. We have a massive housing crisis caused by housing unafordability.
The middle class here mainly invest in rentals (not stockmarket) and then use them as AirBnBs that sit empty half the time.
Meanwhile whole families are living in garages or worse, cars. People who are sane and ordinary and work are living in substandard shitholes.
The beds in that store are for accumulation of wealth
…selling people beds so they have beds to sleep in. Beds that aren’t riddled with bugs thanks to the store not being a homeless shelter.
You’re assuming selling beds is the only method to distribute them. That’s simply untrue.
Best method we have found so far. If you want cookie cutter efficient ass state made beds you can move off to the… Well, every state who has tried has collapsed so you’re shit out of luck.
You mean like the still-existing and highly complex gift economies of natives all across the globe that have no homelessness?
Move there then.
- the indigenous economies that I identify with and would be interested in participating in were destroyed by the British 1000 years before I was born.
- I’d rather not be a colonizer in an indigenous economy.
You mean people who sleep on mats on a dirt floor? Sure. Some of us want to lessen our back pain. You do you.
Come on now, indigenous people exist in the 21st century and have modern amenities. They just also keep their indigenous economies.
and most children in most places
I belive the beds in a store that sells beds are either to be sold or to help you choose a bed. They are not “fuck you, see how many beds i have” beds
To that homeless person, yes that’s exactly what a mattress store is.
That’s what everything everywhere is. Many folks in communist countries lack things others have too.
Only in a hypothetical utopia could all persons have all things equally.
Which things? Because all historical sources show that the bottom 10% had all the bare necessities for life. They didn’t have luxury apartments, but they had a roof. They weren’t eating steak every night, but they had more caloric input and healthier diets than US citizens.
historical sources
Hit me
How do you feel about a CIA report on behalf of the department of agriculture? https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf
The problem isn’t lack of shelter. There’s enough shelter available for the homeless. They just choose not to use it because it comes with rules like no drugs and (often) no pets.
No there’s not enough shelter available for the homeless. Shelters have occupancy limits and especially in the US most states do not have enough space. Some states have less than half the beds needed to shelter their states homeless population. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/#homeless-assistance-in-america
Especially because unless you’ve solved the limited resources problem, then even in a utopia you’re still going to have to have something like money, and therefore you will still have things that some people have that other people don’t have.
What essential resources are so limited that we can’t provide them to everyone based on need?
Define ‘limited.’ Because limits include trained manpower, right? There’s only a certain amount of that. Our ability to provide certain drugs for everyone who might need them are limited by the number of people trained to make them. This is true of virtually any industry. It is as limited as the number of people who can make it usable. And that is usually not an ‘anyone can do this’ issue.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism works. It very much is a “fuck you look at our expensive shit” society.
It’ll probably be sold at a discount too since it was for display
100%. I have yet to see somewhere that sells display furniture/appliances at full price, usually they knock some off due to shop guests messing around with it, wear and tear
Ew, they would sell you a display bed? Seems, unhygienic.
I mean I don’t even wanna know how often the average person changes their sheets, let alone their mattress. My parents have mattresses in spare bedrooms older than me.
Honestly though, display beds aren’t as scary to me as hotel beds
SPARE BEDROOMS?!! By this you mean they have beds to spare and yet are not allowing unhoused individuals to sleep in them?? How very dare they. Guest rooms should be illegal. Everyone with a bedroom to spare gets a mini homeless shelter in their house.
I mean… that is what early Christians would do. They were radically giving and selfless. They would unironically feed and shelter the homeless.
It was as shocking then as it is now.
For probably still more money than street sleeping homeless guy can afford of we are being honest.
Right but equally it’s not the mattress company’s job to accommodate the homeless person. It’s not like they didn’t have to pay an inflated price from the manufacturer so if they sold it for the price of the materials they’d probably make a loss.
No of course not. I’m not saying that the homeless guy should be in the store, I’m saying it’s out of his reach even for the floor model.
If anything this guy is a lot less in need of a bed than someone who hasn’t trained themselves to be able to sleep in a doorway (to wit, me.)
ROFL!
agreed, it’s pretty funny that someone thought that was a contradictory statement
So… you think they should just- give beds away? Thats hilarious!
Look kid, capitalism sucks. No one with a functioning brain is going to argue against this point. But going full bore extreme to the opposite side is just a fucking stupid.
You’ll understand this when you grow up
Infantilize me all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m college educated and in my late 20s. Explain to me why we can’t distribute beds to people based on need. If we can, then please explain why we have to have homeless people.
Because beds won’t fix their problem. How do I know this? Because almost every state in the country has beds available for them. They don’t want them. Because with those beds come rules. And they don’t want to live by those rules.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. Show me homeless shelters that are overbooked and full.
And they don’t want to live by those rules.
Those rules tend to kind of suck, to be fair. Certainly, if I was homeless, and had a dog, I wouldn’t really want to stay in any homeless shelter that banned me from keeping pets, if I didn’t absolutely have to. It’s really funny to me that people try to defend policies against drug use, or against holding drugs on the basis of addiction or something. I dunno, I thought it was a pretty common opinion to just want drugs to be legal since we all drink coffee and monster energy and IPAs anyways, and at this point I’d rather have heroin, or cocaine sprinkled honey buns, if for nothing else than to spice things up a little. Withdrawal symptoms are a sometimes lethal bitch, and that’s gonna be much harder to surmount outside of a shelter, than inside one, though, would be the main point of contention. IME homeless shelters tend to be populated on the usefulness of their service relative to putting up with “actual” homelessness. If your shelter is less useful than being homeless for most people, then most people will choose being homeless over your shelter.
And that’s not even really getting into the nonprofit shelters that basically require religious indoctrination on the half of the homeless, which is super scummy, or how lots of homeless shelters are super “out of the way”, and eliminate the homeless’s ability to be self-sufficient, or to seek help from whatever meager support network they tend to have. Or how homeless shelters are full of homeless people, and thus, suck to live in for everyone involved, relative to owning your own tent, where you can just move all your shit somewhere else in the event that you don’t like someone. Or how means-tested support programs tend to usually waste a ton of their budget testing the means of their applicants.
Overall I think even probably if you lived in like a communist utopian whatever whatever society with 0.1% homelessness and 99% employment or whatever, you’d probably still have, at the very least, a warehouse where you kept some excess beds, or where people could see which bed they wanted, that sort of thing, so it’s not like this picture is really illustrative of that much beyond just the plain visual irony of it, sort of in a similar genre to other pictures of, say, homeless people camping out underneath a huge trump billboard saying he’s building a new hotel or high rise or something. I dunno, this is the sort of shit you see on tiktok side by side with memes saying that jimmy fallon looks like the pink bug from backyardigans.
Tell me you don’t know anything about the homeless situation with telling me. Homeless shelters are not a solution to homelessness.
No, they do not all have beds available, the space is extremely limited. In the US some places have less then half the beds needed for their states homeless population. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/#homeless-assistance-in-america
Go ahead, prove me wrong. Show me homeless shelters that are overbooked and full.
I mean you did ask 🤷♂️
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In a wasteful system there’d be some factory churning out obsolete mattresses to fill a warehouse that nobody needs because there’s a quota to be met.
Meanwhile the workers can’t eat enough because resources were allocated by a bureaucrat last year who’s got no personal incentive to see either system work smoothly.
Abolish property and let the guy walk 2 yards and be in a warm clean bed.
Since it’s raining downvotes by the StateCaptialistBotBrigade:
https://youtu.be/XeoynLwP3u4 <– this is the explanation why
The real capitalist crime is that a mattress sells for such ridiculous prices that they charge thousands of dollars for a chunk of foam and some springs.
Most mattress stores print money, and only need to make 4 sales a month to stay in business.
They are insanely overpriced. Why doesn’t everyone just buy cheap beds from Costco and IKEA?!
Wasteful is the wrong word. Waste implies this is some kind of poor planning, inefficiency or oversight.
Capitalism truly is all about efficiency, literally at the expense of basic humanity.
This isn’t unintentional waste, this is intentional separation of the poor from resources. This is intentional artificial scarcity. The fact that many are literally separated from and thus lack a bed (or a roof, or food, etc) is what makes a bed a more valuable commodity for those with enough capital to purchase one from the private owner class through vendors like this one. If basic twin beds were publically available or subsidized, it would lower the capital value and profit potential of the swankier beds. And that is something the owners won’t tolerate.
Under unrestrained market capitalism, there need to be people dying in the streets, otherwise people won’t appreciate the capital value of purchasing what they need to live.
We Americans cast our sub-optimal capital batteries out to die of exposure. This is by design. If, as an American not born into wealth, you refuse or are unable to generate value for the owners directly, you will still have an important economic function you will be forced to fulfill: a capitalism scarecrow, meant to scare the wage slaves back to work on Monday, making money for the owners in exchange for minimal subsistence.
We could house and shelter all our fellow Americans, it isn’t a matter of resources or space. We choose not to, and we also antagonize our powerless homeless as the villains selfishly lowering our property values by continuing to exist while destitute. We don’t, because market capitalism incentivises cruelty for profit, and we refuse to reign it in for fear of slowing its self serving growth/metastasis at the expense of the society it is supposed to serve.
This is an image of our economy’s and society’s
wasteintential, greed incentivised cruelty. We Americans are a cruel people far more interested in getting more than our neighbors than entertaining being part of a society.This should have more up votes. Well said.
Depends on your definition of waste. Capitalism produces a lot of waste, arguably part of what has gotten us into this pickle with climate change.
Capitalism itself doesn’t define that as waste. It defines the damage it inflicts on the commons, the earth, and the poor in pursuit of profit as an externality.
Externalities of course being Orwellian double speak for “lol not my problem you fucking suckers 🤑.”
But perhaps China is indeed Capitalist.
China’s economic system is very much capitalist these days.
Rest of the world moves their dirty manufacturing over to China
Rest of the world: “How can you pollute like this?”
That was indeed a mistake in many levels. Nevertheless, China is responsible of China’s pollution output, nobody else. Unlike you seem to imply, the chinese are not unthinking animals, but regular people – with even higher than average IQ compared to west according to some studies. They were perfectly capable of making good decisions instead of bad ones.
And in fact, they seem to be in the process of making such good decisions now. The Economist believes that their CO2 levels will peak this year and start to go down in the near future due to China’s investments in clean energy.
https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/27/will-china-save-the-planet-or-destroy-it
China made their decision based on the rules of the game, as set by the dominating economic power of the world (i.e. the US). They could’ve turned down being the world’s manufacturer, but they wouldn’t have had a clear path to get to where they have come to this point. Now that they have economic power, they’re better able to make some changes. Like you pointed out, China is making huge investments in clean energy. Granted, a huge driving force behind that is their lack of domestic petrol production and their desire for energy dependence, but they’re still the leader when in comes to investments in clean energy. It’s embarrassing how far behind the US is and even more embarrassing when you take that graph from before and adjust it to per-capita emissions. A real letdown from the richest country in the world.
Why do you think that China’s per capita carbon footprint is higher? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “Manufacturing all of the toys and treats that Capitalism is selling”. But also yes, China is capitalist. They weren’t really ever communist by definition. Just like how North Korea isn’t a democracy, despite calling themselves one.
I think it’s slightly insulting towards chinese people to think as you imply that they’re unthinking animals who are completely guided by what the west does. They are smart human beings just like everyone else (or smarter if you believe some IQ studies), so they should be able to make responsible decisions.
And as I point out in another reply, they seem to be in process of making good decisions right now. This has a good chance of absolving their guilt if they keep progressing like that.
Actually, that graph isn’t adjusted to per capita. If it was, the US would be on top.
Would this homeless person have a home if the bed store didn’t exist? Or what is the actual alternative that you’re looking for?
If you give away the beds, the bed store does not exist, and people who can afford beds wouldn’t be buying beds. Then the people who might have worked in the bed store don’t have jobs and they perhaps are also sleeping on the street.
In case you don’t understand what “metaphor” or “visualization” means, nobody is saying that this exact store is a reason for the homelessness.
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Fair point, friend.
I upvoted you, Im sorry others didn’t.
I think this post struck a nerve.
You know what’s so sad about something like this?
The conservative seeing this will opt to blame the individual. This conservative will most frequently espouse themselves to be a Christian nonetheless. “Jesus-like” in aspirations and idolatry.
And yet, they’ll have the knee-jerk reaction to this image that is saying, “Well they put themselves in that position.”
“It wasn’t the happenstance of birth locations,.”
“It wasn’t the culmination of external forces and externalities building to this moment.”
“It wasn’t the fact that their life was harder than my own.”
“Or perhaps my life was hard and I’m using the survivor-bias fallacy to justify kicking the ladder out from under me.”
The conservative believes there are lesser people who deserve what they get coming. It’s seemingly incomprehensible to them that we humans are quite literally of the same species, and that you must come to the conclusion one of two possibilities: Either (1) We are all a blank slate from the start and thus products of our environment. Nurture comprising the vast majority of what influences us. Which means those left out on the streets; those who take drugs in an ideal state of mind don’t want to be there, but are already too far broken from past experiences to reconcile their immediate choices (and need saved; protected; rehabilitated by the same outside forces that put them there in the fist place). Or (2) It is genetic, which means there is a predisposition incompatible with the inherently-flawed system we’ve built for ourselves. They’re a circle in a square system, and it’s thus just the same not their choice. And so again, the system should adapt and accommodate them just the same to promote a healthier society overall.
THAT would be more Jesus-like. Not the lazy cop-out that casts them off as degenerates. Such people lack empathy and cannot comprehend the bigger picture.
