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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Spzi@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldCapitalism
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    12 hours ago

    In contrast to a monarchy, where people cannot choose their leader, in capitalism people can choose from which company they buy, or even create their own.

    As another person already pointed out, these are obviously two different categories.

    The question then is, why do people choose the way they do, both when buying and when running a company? To me it seems, they don’t because of some external pressure (like monarchy requires).

    The point can be summed up as a question: Why don’t people run (more) non-capitalist services and productions, and why don’t they prefer them when looking to satisfy their demand?

    These non-capitalist things exist, it’s certainly possible. But as far as I know, they are all very niche. Like a communal kitchen, some solidary agriculture or housing project. Heck, entire villages of this kind exist.

    So the alternative is there, but it requires actual commitment and work. I don’t see how capitalism could be abolished in an armed uprising (in contrast to monarchy). But it can be replaced by alternative projects. Partially. Why are they so small and few?


  • Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

    It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

    Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

    Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

    This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

    This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.




  • making the shops pay more to use the payment service, so that the shops then increase the prices, so that you pay the same as before

    Just nitpicking because I enjoy these thoughts:

    When the shop increases prices, it has to do it for all the customers, including the ones without credit card. So a part of the cost is offloaded to other types of customers. While credit card customers should see a slight increase in price, it should not be as much as they saved previously. So still a net win for them, at the cost of others.

    As others pointed out, the real scheme is probably entirely different.




  • The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

    That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.


  • I like that it comes in a can, not a plastic bottle simply because it gets colder faster and stays colder longer.

    If it feels colder in your hand, it means the opposite of what you assume: It absorbs heat from your hand faster, so the stays colder shorter.

    Imagine instead you hold a perfectly insulated container. You could not feel wether the inside is hot or cold, or else the insulation would be faulty.

    So if you really want to have a drink that stays colder longer, grab something which does not give away how cold it is, quite literally.



  • I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.



  • This is not the way to go about that

    What is your way to go about that?

    If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

    Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

    Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

    I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.








  • An attempt to reconcile both views by comparing it to a structural collapse of, let’s say, a bridge.

    In the end, it collapses. Before that, the cracks begin to show. Before that, invisible micro-cracks form. Before that, pressure exceeds limits.

    Now, at which point in this story does “collapse happen”? Some use this to refer to the actual collapse, after the cracks began to show.

    But since collapse is inevitable after too many micro-cracks have formed (or maybe even earlier, since those are already symptoms of an underlying cause), some refer to this long, unspectacular build-up phase as “collapse happens”.

    I’m neither an economist nor a civil engineer. Bridges are complex, economies even more so. I still think these two views explain how the same term can refer to different things, or different phases of the same thing.