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yep. also people wont do any work if they dont have to because all their needs are met. this is why all rich people are retired.
this is why all rich people are retired.
Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society.
Functionally retired.
You see it all the time among Tech plutocracy, with Bezos’s Venice Wedding and Zuck’s endless home construction.
ok but elon musk works like 100 hours a day, so
And is still homeless
Aka the entirety of formula one (or any major sporting league really)
And don’t want us to have a 4-day week or work remote.
Having good health care means you just consume as much medicine as you can. I get vaccinated every day, I own 500 pairs of glasses, and all my teeth have been root canaled
I get vaccines for diseases that don’t even exist… Everyone has the small poxs vaccine but I also have medium poxs and even large poxs vaccination.
I will say one I don’t recommend is I got the mumps vaccine so I figured I should get a dumps vaccine… It just made me really constipated.
/s this is a joke, yes get your vaccines but only ones for real diseases…
Unironically did get my son the measles shot three months early, because he was starting daycare.
He still needed to get shots at 1 year and 18 months, but it let me sleep a little easier
Good idea with the spread these days.
This reads like an excerpt from a Roald Dahl book.
Jokes aside, “great pox” is siphilis. I don’t know if there a medium pox…
If you have both does siphilis and small pox does it become mega or epic pox?
I’d rather not find out!
I’ve gotten 17 fresh new hip replacements since I was 8.
I didn’t replace them, I just added them. I now have 19 hips. They don’t lie.
I do chemo recreationally
Something interesting about this is that Bourgeois neoclassical economics manages to acknowledge that people won’t simply consume greedily, even if things are free.
Marginal Utility asserts that people will only consume commodities such that they satisfy some want or need. If I’m hungry, I’ll buy a banana, maybe a bunch to have later.
But my hunger won’t drive me to buy 800 bunches in one go, because that many bananas has a deminishing return in their marginal utility to satiate my hunger.
If that’s true, it doesn’t require market mechanisms for the distribution of goods and services to continue being true. Re: your healthcare example
With food, in particular, the value is in the supply chain not the ability to horde individual commodities. I don’t want 800 bananas, but I do want a banana stand on my corner where I can get fresh bananas daily.
In theory, markets are supposed to organically generate these social amenities and price them at the prevailing wage rate for the community, such that individuals bid into/out of existence goods and services through a pseudo-collective “expressed demand”.
In practice, choke points in the supply chain create opportunities for arbitrage and price fixing. So goods that should be cheap and abundant - like fruit - suddenly become expensive and scarce when a single enormous conglomerate (like the United Fruit Company) holds a vertical monopoly on the commodity.
This artificial scarcity is then used to justify price-rationing of the commodity. And pretty soon you’re selling people $500 Bijin Hime strawberries in a Japanese mega-mall, while working class people can’t afford basics.
There’s actually limits on the frequency you can do stuff. From somewhere that has mostly feee healthcare.
I think they’re being sarcastic
Talking to a lot of Americans that is what they think though.
I know this is a joke but… Communism doesn’t mean “free stuff”. Probably the opposite of what this joke implies, it’s communal ownership. You wouldn’t waste water if you felt it was your water. People waste water when they feel it’s someone else’s water (government, landlord).
I know it’s not really your point, but I don’t think this is about homeowners. I’ve never paid for water (or behaved like this) in a rented apartment. Unless you have a well, you often do have to pay for municipal water if you own the property. Even with a well, you’re paying for any filtration based on usage.
I wasn’t talking about homeowners. I just reused the water example. In an ideal communist society, you’d still need a way to prevent people from overusing the communal resources.
If one cut out the profit motive, people may be less inclined to waste some resources. i.e. not growing unneeded food in the desert. It would not reduce some wastage due to other motivations. i.e. I won’t have access to this tomorrow, so I shall use it for non-productive usages today.
I keep thinking of one of the old videos I saw.
“…I dunno, maybe we should get rid of all of the landlords!”
“But who would we then pay rent to?”
I was, like, holy shit, things are so much more complicated than I even realised, everything is based on some dumb suppositions or some shit.
Not that I’m a proponent of capitalism as the default economic model (I’m very much not) but I dislike this particular argument because it misrepresent the function of capital.
Large projects require upfront investment that is beyond the means of individuals or even groups of individuals (e.g. 100 prospective tenants cannot afford to build and office building; you need someone able to front the equivalent of X years rental costs), and those investments need to be managed by specialists. Whether those specialists are independent or employed by a central governing body, you still need capital and you still need effective oversight to prevent corruption and exploitation.
What we need are guaranteed public offerings, with a rising baseline over time, that leave opportunity for capital investment in luxury upgrades. The guaranteed public offerings prevent gross exploitation by the capitalists, and the capital investments provide the innovation pressure and luxury offerings that incentivize those inclined to seek said luxuries without exploiting the public offering system to do it.
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What
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What
(a bunch of us are pretty sure they’re a bot, they’ve been doing this kind of insane word salad all over the place and none of it has made any more sense than this)
I’m not spewing any kind of “insane word salad” here. I’m just questioning what you are doing.
So let me reiterate.
What
Mmmhmm.
Head on back to r/iamverysmart buddy, they are missing your vast intellect.
You are sick.
When someone says “human nature” I hear “unexamined biases necessary to keep unexamined to support my dog shit ideas” and they are always dog shit.
Humans will take more than they need of what’s free, if there’s a way to turn it into profit for them. If profit is allowed to be a way to secure power and control, there will always be be a desire to hoard for oneself.
Capitalism rewards hoarding and profiting, and also rewards making the in group as small as possible.
Other factors can cause hoarding as well to be clear, such as fear of scarcity/needs not being met.
This is an excellent insight.
If you’re not allowed to do profit then who would do trade and why? Nobody likes working in retail, nobody likes being a plumber. Markets can and should compensate and reward people fairly, the problem is some people are allowed to take too much, and even small profit can be made at the expense of others, will you have an investigative unit that decides when people have used enough water?
If you’re not allowed to do profit then who would do trade and why?
Because one can’t possibly own or learn everything so you’ll have to trade some thing you have for something you want. Skills, food, stuff, art, tools, music.
Are you arguing against a medium of exchange? Bartering is just less efficient trading.
A medium of exchange is entirely unrelated to profit that bartering still enables.
And while we’re at it, since it’s difficult to get everything you need in exchange for something they need, it would help to have a universal token of agreed upon value for us all to trade with. /s
And your point here being…?
Are you implying that currency is a product of capitalism or that currency only exists under capitalist societies?
Lol, I’m no historian but I almost sure that currency has existed in basically all big societies way before capitalism was a thing…
It was implied by the parent comment they were responding to when it brought up trading non-monetary things. Is the lack of reading comprehension (here & here) willful?
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Yes, capitalism is when money exists. Good point.
I love working in retail. I was a contract analyst for some years (very boring, highly paid and painstaking insurance work), now I work in a bakery as a barista, and I’m dragging my feet about finishing my masters because I don’t really want to stop working there.
Sometimes people are shitty, but it’s clear work that doesn’t stress me out at home and I’m glad to provide my community with bread.
I can’t really imagine plumbers hate being plumbers- it’s work that they train years for, with very transferable skills if they wanted to switch to anything else along the way. Do you have any evidence that plumbers hate their jobs?
As others have pointed out, profit is not the reason for trade, and profit is not the reason for currency to exist.
Understand that you are coming from a place of having grown up under capitalism and anytime you questioned it, or anytime you saw it questioned, those were the responses. “Of COURSE we need to profit! Why would LITERALLY ANYONE do LITERALLY ANYTHING without profit? We’d all still be cave people like those DAMN DIRTY COMMIES”
But my brother in Christ, you’ve never profited before! The owner class profits. The owners get to take all the wealth generated by the workers, and fucking keep it for their own power! It’s that simple. We don’t get it, they do. The profit we generate for them doesn’t protect us. It doesn’t enrich us. They can take away our wages at anytime, they can manipulate their markets and often gamble with our nest eggs. They set up systems where they can rob us of any money we did not allow to remain under their control (civil forfeiture), they allow us access to the illusion of wealth in exchange for all of wages for the rest of our lives. And they don’t even take good care of us to do it.
It’s all a scam brother, whether or not it’s a good system doesn’t matter if it’s allowed to be captured and manipulated. It’s a trap, don’t be a sucker.
Meanwhile people living in literal deserts are draining the water table to grow lush green lawns and fill swimming pools …
And powering chatbot training datacenters
Saudi Arabia has to grow their Alfalfa somewhere
I legit had a roommate who would sit in the bath with the water running for hours because he didn’t have to pay for it
He will pay for it, but so will everyone else when the rent goes up to accommodate. People really think that our whole economic system could change without changing attitudes toward consumption. You can’t really have one without the other.
That sounds like a symptom of depression, not a consequence of free utilities
He was studying in the bath.
Watch out for Moaning Murtle
Maybe that’s the reason he gave, but I’d bet it had more to do with his mental disorder.
I think he’s an outlier
And if Showers Georg here does it in an apartment block of 100 and not one of 8 then it probably won’t even be noticeable as part of the overall bill. Statistically there’s probably also someone in there that bathes twice a week, or families that use just as much water over the course of the month.
Yeah I agree with the post but it doesn’t take into account trolls which unfortunately do exist.
Did you do the same thing?
No
Your tap water is free?
In Ireland it is, but our neoliberal governments are constantly trying to push wildly unpopular charges.
Is it free or is it paid through taxes? If it’s paid through taxes how much does it cost you in taxes? Also, are there any other fees that aren’t “paying for water” but functionally are?
For example, I pay approximately $50 per month for water, but if I wanted to be cute I could say I only pay $7.00 per month because the rate is $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. The other $43 dollars are in fixed meter, availability, and stormwater charges (basically the basic price needed to ensure infrastructure is maintained no matter how much water I use).
It would be paid through taxes, just because people don’t get a bill specifically for a certain service or utility they assume it’s free.
Noone thinks that.
OP did literally just say that though
That’s what I would assume as well. I would be curious to know how much in taxes it costs each person, but they probably don’t get that level of detail in their tax breakdown and progressive tax structures probably mean some people pay proportionally more than others. Just doing a quick look ~80% of water public utilities are provided by Irish Water, a government run utility program. In the 2025 budget they had €2.2 billion in funding for projects and €2.5 billion for water service. Ireland has a population of ~5.4 million people so the monthly per capita cost would be ~€72 per month in taxes.
This is so wrong. I don‘t know where you live, but at least in Germany tap water is not free. Of course everyone drinks roughly the same amount of water, but most water is consumed in other ways where it totally matters to price it. For example taking a bath consumes much more water than showering. People have private pools where one fill-up can easily double the water consumption of a year.
The water pricing is actually progressive so the more you consume the more you have to pay per amount. This allows cheap prices for the average consumer and discourages to overconsume.
Water is precious and shouldn‘t be treated as an abundance.
Idk of this happens in Germany but in the U.S. some landlords, mostly smaller ones, will fold the water bill into the rent. So it is effectively “free” in that you are not charged by the amount you use.
In Germany that’s not a thing. You get billed separately for utilities by the landlord, and they have to show how they calculate your share from the building totals.
To add on that: I am pretty certain (not 100% sure) that it is illegal in Germany to make a profit with the utilities bill. Though some landlords try tricks to do it anyway.
But that kind fucks with rent prices no? Especially if the guy who consumes a lot of water left the building and the next person consumes next to nothing, its just an overpriced rent.
🤷♀️
It’s funny how billionaires all seem to have 10 houses isn’t it?
Poor dears and their scarcity mindset, overcompensating. Always needing more. Always egged on by the fear of loss and insecurity, and fear of those with less, wanting what they have.
I mean, if I had, essentially, unlimited money, and there were places in the world I liked to visit repeatedly, and I don’t mean “for a weekend” but months or seasons at a time? Hell yeah I’d buy a house there.
At a minimum, one Southern Hemisphere, one Northern Hemisphere. Never see Summer again.
Meaning “presence in blood.”
A man had free water in his house. This is what happened to his brain.
A Lemmy user watched 100 Chubbyemu Videos in one night, this is what happened to his/her hippocampus
is the powerhouse of the cell.
I think all human needs are abundant enough to be made free, I think the rich need to be heavily taxed until there effectively are no billionaires,
but as a counterpoint somebody somewhere is running the tap at all times in a Starbucks or an ice cream parlor during a drought even when it’s not free.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/starbucks-massive-water-waste
They needed to be heavily taxed thirty years ago.
They need to be butchered now, for the damage they have done to the earth. They and their heirs must be exterminated to the last. If there is one survivor, all our futures are forfeit.
Good luck trying to convince a majority of that, but also they can reproduce faster than you can kill them. There will always be opportunists and assholes as long as mankind exists, better to stop them from forming than strike them down as they come about.
There’s like a couple thousand billionaires, maybe a couple million of the ultra-wealthy. You wouldn’t need a majority
In the last US Election they elected a Billionaire president and immediately started stripping away regulations. You’re not just dealing with Billionaires, you’re dealing with all of the people who support them.
Don’t even get me started on the less free nations run by autocrat billionaires like Saudi Royalty, Xi Jinping, and Putin.
The people who support them are problems. They are not problems that can only be solved with extermination.
How do you pre-judge a person before they are born?
By assuming that person will be human and have human needs and wants based on the instincts crafted from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, with about 8 billion living examples to work with and the tangible results of about 110 billion past examples.
All humans are assholes, they all have selfish desires, the key here is to plan around that so that the most beneficial thing for the individual is what is beneficial for all of us, and that is already almost always the case even though it’s not always obvious to them.
Some humans are assholes. See above.
That’s because Starbucks is a corporation; they only care about making their number go up. People don’t really behave like that.
A corporation is just a group of people.
Yes, but people acting for their own livelihoods don’t follow the same patterns as people acting to maximize wealth. This is a systemic problem, not (or at least not necessarily) a human nature problem.
If humans naturally stopped at enough then billionaires already wouldn’t exist.
Read ‘Cadillac desert’
It’s orders of magnitude worse.
Starbucks wastes water by leaving the taps running in its worldwide stores all day. The Starbucks officials defend that practice by saying that the purpose is to clean utensils and meet health standards.
Well that was a short article that ended abruptly and offered no further details about anything.
For me it’s 4 paragraphs, it was the top search result, and it cites BBC which is a much longer article quoting multiple other sources.
Yes I quoted the fourth paragraph which was the only paragraph that contained any information. The first few paragraphs were fluff and it was a very short article. I’m happy you say that BBC went into more detail in the original article. That’s great.
I dont pay for sewage and I crap as much as I want, too.
You definitely do pay for it in your taxes
You absolutely monster
I mean yeah but theres a silver lining because people are extemely wasteful with water where its easily available. This is solved by raising awareness and education which is obvious but its important to remember the whole picture. A functioning society is a delicate balance of a million different factors. I am an optimist tho and believe that one day well find that balance.
This is solved by raising awareness and education
Not sure that’s possible. Despite decades of trying, they continue running marathons everywhere for raising awareness of breast cancer, because apparently people still aren’t aware. If it hasn’t worked for breast cancer, then how will it work for water? Giving up on humanity might be the best move here.
Can I summarize to clarify your point? Fun runs haven’t solved breast cancer, so it’s probably best to give up on humanity? Is that accurate?
nope
Are people unaware of the general idea of “breast cancer”? I had assumed the presence of informational campaigns were either for encouraging testing, or a way to fund-raise with a nebulous goal.
They call them breast cancer awareness walks/runs, not support campaigns or fundraisers. Campaigns for the latter would be a good idea as soon as they nail down awareness. 🙃
Pretty sure they meant through the public education system
