It’s a metaphor about 13yo kid trying to understand why people pay money for anything when you can get stuff for free. The only thing a kiddo comes up with is that some people are bad and will chop trees down. Then they go to lemmy.ml and post dumb shit.
Hell yeah, this is the free gifts of nature in a nutshell.
[…] the “free gift of Nature to capital.” Capitalist exploitation and accumulation, as Marx explains, ultimately depend on capital’s usurping of nature’s gifts for itself, thereby monopolizing the means of production and wealth in its entirety
Probably better sources, but this is the first best one I found.
Better to think of natural capital and human labour being the two sources from which all value (in the sense of productivity) is ultimately derived. The soil is natural capital, the fertiliser is both (i.e. a mined and processed mineral resource), the rotation is human labour. Then the knowledge to reproduce this process in the correct manner is also critical.
Close. Farming is labour, which is what gives economic value to the free gifts. The capitalists skim excess value from this process in the form of wage theft and other fuckery.
None. I just buy a big (>500ml) durable non-plastic water bottle once and use it until it stops being breaks or something. Why don’t more people do this (genuine question, wondering if there are actual reasons)?
The main question around this comic that makes it hard for me to derive a message is, who planted/cared for/owns the apple trees?
I’m reminded of a speech from Gus in Better Call Saul, where technically a tree from his homeland was wild, but he was the one that made the effort to water and care for it before a critter started stealing from it.
Right? It’s obviously an orchard, not a forest, and obviously the apples are one of the popular commercial cultivars rather than some wild natural variant.
I think the implication of the last panel is supposed to be that the apple seller can’t stop everyone, but if this was really an accurate satire, he’d chop down every tree, sue everyone that picked the apples, and then go back to selling his giant flavorless GMO apples for $5 a piece
The hell of it is, some people would still be happy to buy his apples. Look, I ain’t got time or health insurance to be fucking around climbing an apple tree, here’s some cash, apples pls. But that’s not good enough for the investors, who want guaranteed 5% growth every quarter, so now we’ve got to pour kerosene on the extra apples and force people to go hungry.
but if this was really an accurate satire, he’d chop down every tree, sue everyone that picked the apples, and then go back to selling his giant flavorless GMO apples for $5 a piece
Only if he couldn’t figure out a way to rent apples to customers.
He would fence off the trees, and lobby his local government to require permits for picking apples, permits that have an issuing limit that somehow coincides with the number of apple stands he has. Picking apples without a permit would result in a fine of $10,000, or a year in jail.
Originally I thought the joke was that after chopping down the one tree, eventually he had a shitload of trees grow (from the fallen apples), but guess not.
Why does it matter if an apple is modified or not?
Modifying plants for better yields, less water usage, higher resistance to pests, better taste, and so on. Seems like a great idea in my mind.
Either way this comic is bad. It’s stupidly easy to just plant an apple tree in your back/front yard, if you have one. Apples aren’t that picky about where they want to be planted.
They should have gone for a better analogy if they are trying to say something.
Why does it matter if an apple is modified or not?
In general, I am not opposed to GMOs. All those benefits would be great. But in practice, companies aren’t modifying the product to be better for the consumer, they’re modifying it to sell better, and cost less to produce. That basically means bigger, and less diverse, which actually ends up making them less resistant to pests and disease
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