i’m all for not shaming people and everything, but we also do need to be conscious about what we’re buying and consuming.
You probably don’t need a macbook, and if you do need a laptop, there are almost certainly better options that are cheaper, and more repairable. Please don’t buy a macbook, they aren’t good products. (though now with M series macs they actually do work, kind of)
consumerism is not good, we shouldn’t be encouraging it. We should be encouraging conscious spending.
100% yes. And start shaming rich people for wanting us to eat bugs and live in coffins while they live in giant mansions and eat all the real food they want.
Bugs are a source of cheap protein too, and it’s more of a cultural thing that they are not prevalent in most western cuisine. And there’s nothing wrong with small apartments; there are more needed anyways, since people tend to live alone these days. If there were more small, cheap living spaces in the US, then the suburban carcentric design, where you can’t reach a grocery store without a car, would have real competition. Higher population density also helps out communities because of lower infrastructure costs.
I’m not rich, but there’s nothing wrong with different food and small living spaces.
Dude, i’m not a bootlicker for advocating for cheap available housing or additional sources of food. I’m also not a bootlicker for pointing out that the zoning in the US is completely fucked up, or that i would definitely have a better conscience eating a burger made with bug protein than one with the meat of an animal that had a short, brutal life, which also massively contributed to climate change (livestock is about a third of human-caused methane emissions)
I’m open for options, i don’t say to force them on people.
And to be clear, at least in german speaking europe, far-right groups use(d? i don’t actively follow nazi propaganda) fear of “bug burgers” to campaign against anything the left leaning green party did, so please forgive me when my nazi detector misfired.
To be more specific, there’s nothing wrong with those things being a CHOICE. The problem is with specific individuals telling people that millions of others need to cut their carbon footprint to near zero so that they, as an individual, can keep using their private jet without feeling guilty. And that attitude can go die in a hole. But you knew that.
Yeah, i agree on all of those points; but i believe not everything should boil down to personal choice, we have governments to steer things.
Subventions for livestock should be on the chopping block - the emissions from livestock are about 1/3 of all of human-caused methane, so we should really discuss if dumping prices for meat is the way to go, and thats still ignoring the ethical angle of the meat industry.
And reducing the amount of car travel needed for daily things like work (WfH as an guaranteed option where possible for example) or groceries (including the fight against food deserts, in which zoning laws have quite an impact) is also something that can be worked towards and would help against climate change.
Nevertheless, the absolute waste of energy and resources, the excess the rich are living in has to go, or everything else is a moot point.
No, I think shaming rich people for exploiting the poor is behaving like decent human being. I think if more people did that society would be a much better place.
(grin) Sometimes it’s fun just to throw live grenades into a room, right?
(metaphorically. Don’t try this at home with actual grenades. It does not end as well as you think. Unless you want to get out of the spring cleaning, of course)
Wat I get from toxic positivity is its okay to do rape if you carry a dagger around with you, and point out that you could be stabbing your victims in the chest and fucking them right in the heart and getting that sweet sweet rib pressure, so anything you do short of that is fine.
Do both. Most people won’t do the right thing unless they’re pressured into it. I don’t give a shit if you want a tablet, that’s your problem - I do give a shit if you buy a new tablet every couple years when the old one works just fine. Swap “tablet” for pretty much any non-essential thing.
Are you braindead or just illiterate? I straight up meantioned not caring about the occasional trinket so rubes like you wouldn’t need to think too hard.
Also, why the fuck would anyone work for a regime that is destroying the world for all future and some current generations, AND has thrown them away in a way we make a crime to do with our actual literal garbage? Fuck you if you want me to, y’know?
Or, sometimes people who are poor have to constantly buy new phones because they frequently can’t keep up with the payments.
When you lose service for nonpayment, you may have few options other that to buy a new phone (as part of a service plan) once you can afford it.
Still the point is that it’s an essential item and it’s kind of a jerk move to be judgemental about that when billionaires got richer faster than any other time in history through the pandemic.
Hello from your South superpower neighbor, Brazil. We have free healthcare, free higher education, acceptable welfare, loads of dumb people and cheap chinese products. On the plus side, at least our electricity is overwhemingly green.
I do give a shit if you buy a new tablet every couple years when the old one works just fine.
Me:
Buying a new tablet every couple of years: something poor people notoriously do.
You:
Swap tablet for phone, and the answer is yes.
So it sure sounds like you’re saying that poor people shouldn’t buy a new phone when their shitty phone breaks in a couple of years to me. Because the old one never works just fine on account of it being a shitty phone. Which you should know what with your apparent intimate knowledge of global poverty.
Weird how your insult doesn’t reflect what you’ve said so far.
Also, I have not insulted you once. Are you really unable to have a conversation without insulting people? Is this how you talk to people when you’re in the same room with them?
Because the old one never works just fine on account of it being a shitty phone
I used a Moto G, an entry-level phone, for 5 years. My next phone, also entry-level, I kept for 4 years. My current phone is a low-tier flagship, which I’ve also had for a while. Tell me again how is it that you need a new one every two years?
Which you should know what with your apparent intimate knowledge of global poverty.
I’m guessing you’ve never been hungry? I have, so I’ll take my experience with poverty over yours.
Also, I have not insulted you once.
Except you have, by implying I’m stupid enough to fall for your fallacious argumentation.
Sure, I was accepted by the Mayo Clinic gastroenterology department after sending them all of my medical records, was evaluated by three different medical professionals, diagnosed, and given a regimen of treatment that might lead to me being able to eat solid foods several months from now and they do that for people who just choose not to eat. And then there’s the multiple stays in my local hospital to get scopes and scans, the blood panels, the gallbladder removal, not to mention the thousands of dollars of medical debt… all because I am choosing not to eat. It’s something I’ve been doing as a hobby, like wood carving or pottery.
But congratulations, you read to the first sentence of the third paragraph of that post.
no but it’ll still run like shit, and be vulnerable to security issues. My android phone is 7 years old and can barely do the two things i need it to do.
And before all the people start chiming in with incorrect posts about how vegetables are more expensive, they are not. The cheapest and best forms of protein are from vegetables. You can save a lot of money and your health by eating more vegetables.
Meat and dairy are not essential, but food is essential.
The biggest problem is the supply chain and food deserts, I have 34 different grocery stores within a 1km walk of my house, this doesn’t even include the fresh market and the 50 something stall holders.
Meat and dairy will never be essential for me, I have so many options that are actually cheaper and easier.
But the shop that services the 50km radius around my dad’s place is lucky to have a tin of beans that isn’t Heinz in tomato let alone a tin of beans at all. I’ll talk about how cheap it is to feed my family on a $2/250g of dried chickpeas and $1 bag of assorted leafy greens, and my dad will send me a photo of the IGA shelf where the 400g tin of lentils is $4 a can and the tuna is $1.50, so I know what my dad’s having for dinner.
400g of cooked lentils is $4 at the IGA near my dad. That’s 2 RDI servings.
I can get a 400g tin for about 80c in the city where I live, but I can also get 250g of dried lentils for $2-3, which will easily give me 1kg of cooked lentils.
The tuna is only a 110g can for $1.50, one RDI serving.
Both the tinned tuna and tinned lentils contain a lot of water weight, which is why I’m focused on “per serving”, where the tuna is cheaper.
I’m not arguing that protein per gram per cent, the dry lentils are always cheaper, but they litteraly don’t sell dried lentils at the shop near my dad.
That’s what I’m saying, food deserts are strange places where import costs, supplier contracts and shipping logistics means that lentils are expensive and tuna is comparatively “cheap”. Just 250km away lentils are a pittance and tuna is a reasonable expected price. ($1.50 for 100g of tinned tuna is average almost everywhere across metropolitan areas in Australia from my quick look at swapping my postcode around on woolworths, small town IGA is harder to check because they’re independent, so I’ve only got my local metro IGA and my father’s remote IGA as reference. My local metropolitan IGA price matches Coles and Woolworths pretty closely, but it’s the wild west once you’re out malee)
The idea that food is the price it is and that’s the price to expect everywhere is how small communities in food deserts end up slipping through the cracks when grocery prices shift in either direction in larger population centres.
I have seen this same argument on Lemmy multiple times: poor people should be happy to live on beans and rice rather than have any form of animal protein, even if it tastes really good to them.
I’m not in favor of farming animals on an industrial scale, but I also hate this whole idea that poor people should be satisfied with bland, restrictive diets while the rich can eat whatever the hell they want.
I’m not familiar with food deserts, but wouldn’t it be possible to order dried and tinned foods in bulk every few months to get more reasonable prices?
It would be possible, yes, and hopefully those that can, do.
Buying in bulk will require you to have some money in savings to pay for a huge amount of groceries up front, not everyone can afford that.
It also requires you to have storage for bulk items, my dad does, but I know it’s not always possible, especially for those living in caravan parks.
It requires you to have transportation to and from depot yards, as bulk orders can’t always be taken to the post office depending on how big you are going, my dad does, but me for example, that’s why I left the country, I’m too blind to drive so I was pretty helpless in woop woop.
But the biggest reason it’s not always possible: Orders you make as an individual are subject to the same transportation costs as larger wholesale orders placed by local businesses. It’s the same single freight train coming in each month, you might save a few bucks cutting out the profits of the local grocer, but not by a significant amount.
As an individual, your order will be also be the first to get bumped for space if there’s any issues with the train. My dad orders a lot of his dried pantry staple food, since he has to place bulk orders for animal feed anyway, he might as well get his flour brought in with the same shipments. Over Christmas there was so much flooding across the lines that the grocery stores couldn’t get their order to feed the entire towns fortnight worth of food, let alone my dad getting his slab of tinned peas for personal use. My dad got given the same purchase limits as everyone else in town and he got what he was given.
It’s a food desert because there is simply no food, it’s a desert.
There’s industry, there’s economy, there’s housing and schools and possibly even a vibrant community. But as far as food goes, it’s a barren wasteland because the supply chain doesn’t link up to these areas, not for big corporations with stores in these towns, not for individuals trying to order groceries on line. The boats don’t dock there, The trains don’t stop there, the trucks don’t unload there.
Sometimes it makes sense - my dad lives in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, a lot of FIFO related work but not much for locals so it makes sense there’s no infrastructure to bring food in. I know towns in even more remote places that get all their food via a single sea plane (at least my dad’s town has a rail line), and when that sea plane needs maintenance, no one can get in or out of the town.
But most food deserts are geopolitical. The food exists, people are willing to get it there, but something (money, power, politics, war) means the food can’t physically get where it needs to be.
Even something as simple as a local farmer having a contract with a supermarket, and that supermarkets competitor being the first to build a store in the town, that could cause a food desert, as the local supermarket can’t buy from the local farmer, because that farmer is stuck in a supplier contract with a completely different supermarket that doesn’t even have a store nearby yet, and they may never get a local store, because look at how badly that current supermarket is struggling in that location, seems risky to open a new store there.
Thanks for the elaborate response. It’s interesting how different considerations are at such remote places. Here in Germany, a place is generally considered “in the middle of nowhere” when the nearest small town is like 10 km away, and a 20 minute drive to the next supermarket is exceptional.
The cultural differences between rural and urban regions here seem enormous already, I can’t even imagine what it’s like in the US.
cultural differences between rural and urban regions
It’s honestly fascinating how culture, transport infrastructure and public mobility effects our perceptions of urban/rural as well as distances in general.
In Australia we’re more likely to use time as a measurement for distance, because 20km in the country takes 10 minutes because you’re the only car for miles and you can blast 110km/h from end to end, but travelling 20km could easily take 40 minutes in city traffic. So “how far is the restaurant?” “15 minutes” is a perfectly normal conversation, but in some cultures giving someone a time when they asked for a distance would be baffling.
And I notice this doesn’t change based on mode of transport, I don’t drive but it’s the same conversation, you just might clarify the method of transport as if it’s also a unit of measurement.
Telling my cousins in the UK “when I visit in August, I’m going to visit Aunt Julie for breakfast, then take the train to see Uncle Bob, the next day I’ll head up to see Dave” and they get shocked with me “are you crazy, that’s 300km! You’re only here for the weekend”.
But growing up, my house was 70km from my highschool, travelling 140km per day was normal - and I never even left greater Melbourne! so 300km over a long weekend to explore a whole country is not “crazy”.
For the last 8 years I’ve lived in one of the more bikeable and walkable areas I’ve ever encountered, and my perception of distance has completely changed. It now feels “a big trip” to have to have to take motor transport anywhere. I had to grab a huge parcel from the post office for work, my boss just shoved me in an uber for the 2km, a 5 minute journey. we needed another pick up about 2km in the other direction. It was going to fit in a backpack so I jumped on my bike. Both trips took roughly the exact same amount of time and covered almost the same distance and the uber took less physical and mental effort, but the trip to the post office felt like a big planned errand, while zipping out on the bike felt like a fun side quest.
But once I’m in the car with my partner and we’ve already been driving for 10 minutes, suddenly distances in cars don’t exist to me and I revert to my pre-bike country perception of distances. it’s like “oh let’s get fish and chips from the store we like that’s 20km away, then drive 15km to the beach esplanade we prefer” instead of just cycling 8km to the local chippy and espie which is what I’d be doing without a partner who drives.
I don’t shame people for buying unnecessary things. But, I will think you are a little stupid if you are nearly starving but have a brand new car. You aren’t responsible for the system you live in, but you can at least try to make it a little better for yourself.
I’m not talking about people that just spend some money for something they like, quality of life is important. I mean people that will literally cripple themselves financially just for a status symbol. Especially if you have people that rely on you.
Can you point to specific examples of someone you have encountered in your daily life, someone who is nearly starving… but chooses to spend their money on an unnecessary indulgence? Because it sounds like you’re otherwise just perpetuating stereotypes.
I used to live in this weird apartment building that once had been fancy, so it had large common areas with fitted carpet; but now was “significantly less desirable”, and residents used to let their dogs shit on the carpet. It was the cheapest 1-bed flat I could find at the time. 2/3 of the cars parked outside were recent BMW’s or Audi’s. Everyone will choose how they spend their own money, but some fall for the glamour of consumerism more than others, and for many young men with jobs but no families that means the coolest car you can manage, even if you have to live in a damp hovel and wade thru dog shit to get to it every morning 🤗
Why do I need to provide personal anecdotes to prove the fact that there have been poor people that make bad decisions? It really is not that crazy of a concept.
Yes, I have met people who have ruined themselves financially for stupid reasons. But, that’s purely anecdotal. I could be lying and you would have no way of knowing. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to ask about my personal experience when you’re looking for proof. Here’s something more convincing: There are many stupid people, and many poor people. Naturally, there will be some amount of overlap. So, it is reasonable to assume that some of these people who are both stupid and poor will make stupid financial decisions.
Nearly starving is almost an impossible to do involuntary in the United States, so that’s poor criterion to use here.
But yes I know many people who fit the description, who go on trips, buy cars, expensive clothes to improve their image, when they don’t have the income nor the savings to support it.
A car is not a very liquid asset. I’ve know people with very nice cars who experienced a change in their economic situation and had to pick up from the food bank in a brand new SUV. I’ve known people to live out of a mercedes benz.
What if you need a car to get to job interviews? If you don’t get the brand new car, you can’t get to job interviews, so you lose the unemployment benefit because the government feels you don’t deserve it?
Or you need the car to get to the job because the public transport is so shit and unreliable that the car is the only way to get there without fail and if you rely on public transport then you risk getting fired if you are late again?
Sometimes people have reasons that might not be obvious but are there because of the system.
I was using “brand new” as in they buy a new car to replace the car they have. Not necessarily a shiny new, newest model up to date state of the art car, but a they replace the car they have with a new car.
Believe it or not there are people who would say “How can you say you are poor – you just bought a new car?” then tell The Daily Mail that illegal immigrants are using tax-payers money to buy new cars.
A new car is not that much more in a lot of places than a used car, especially right now. Plus, you can earn supplementary income with a new car that you might not be able to in an old car. In some markets you can’t drive uber without a very new car.
This is why the advice is basically not to judge so much, especially considering billionaires are literally making record profits off of food and medicine right now.
you can buy a new car two years ago when finances were good, and then suddenly, shit hits the fan, prices get fucked, you no longer have a job, and you can’t find one trivially. Suddenly you have no money, and a really nice car.
My family recently just traded in both cars for newer models, we’re doing alright at the moment, but it’s definitely a possibility.
They’re posting this on a platform where people like me read it. People who eat $1.50/loaf, bread sandwiches, to save money. This is just after clearing the threshold to qualify for food stamps this month.
$1.50/loaf is pretty cheap. You can find $1.00/loaf at Dollar Tree stores. The cheapest alternative would be to make your own loaf of bread. If you buy an expensive, organic loaf of bread, it can be over $5.00/loaf.
Yup - God forbid poor folks have nice things rather than funneling every penny they earn to the rich to satisfy their ever-increasing hunger for money.
The average person earns £1,000,000 in their lifetime, and I struggle to see the justification in anyone, and I mean anyone being worth 100s, 1000s, or even over 100,000 human lifetimes.
It's sickening to see hard-working people having to fight month after month to survive on meager earnings while some dickheads are out there buying megayachts that cost a human lifetime per year just to maintain.
Norway fucked up on eggs this year. They feared overproduction, so they made a subsidy for egg producers not producing… resulting in an egg shortage this Easter.
It seems that the Norwegian egg-business is always in trouble somehow. Just like farmers elsewhere complaining about the weather, it’s an endless moaning.
EU is pushing for a shorter shelf-life on eggs to be able to make a more rapid response against salmonella, and while Norway isn’t in EU and generally don’t have the salmonella issue, they still have to trade with EU. Fear of chicken flu is also lowering the demand for eggs.
Overproduction is bad because it can make the price go so low that it doesn’t make sense for anyone to do. Especially in a country like Norway where the cost of living is extremely high. They simply can’t compete, so the state offers money to keep the businesses closed while the free market can’t pay them, and to keep domestic production from competing too much internally.
It’s not uncommon to see this situation in EU, where it is sometimes possible to buy a plot of agricultural land and do nothing with it only to get paid by EU for leaving the land alone. The EU is a trade union, so the main purpose internally is to direct the trades to those who can do it best and cheapest within the borders. It’s a good thing though. In the 1990s there was a massive overproduction of all kinds of foods that would eventually rot up in stocks all over Europe. Overproduction is a cost if the goods cannot be sold.
Norwegian eggs are not exactly a big business, but I do believe it’s a net export for them, so I think the subsidy is made to keep the egg producers in business even if the export is lowering for different reasons. If they didn’t pay chicken producers not to produce, the producers would have to stop production due to low revenue from temporarily missed sales and eventually leaving Norway without a realistic capability of producing for their own market.
Anyway, it backfired at the Easter peak demand. It may still make sense later.
How is a government subsidy “dumb capitalist nonsense”? The capitalist model would be for a single entity to buy all the small farms that can’t stay in business during volatile market periods and monopolize the market entirely, with zero care to animal welfare, food safety, and customer prices (other than to maximize profits). Your comment is just just lazy “muh capitalism bad”.
Previous poster might be spamming his opinion, but in this case he’s right.
In this particular case the government is financing capitalists by giving them money to keep capitalising on something they couldn’t otherwise capitalize on. This happens on an otherwise free market, just to add.
What they should have done is to lower the purchase tax on domestic eggs. That would benefit both Norwegian consumers and also Norwegian egg producers.
Norway already has several sales tax brackets to do just this. F.i. they did it to hotels, going from 25% to 6% after the COVID pandemics for the benefit of both hotels and guests.
they were worried about producing too much, the price of eggs collapsing, the market demand being so low they couldn’t move product, and thus, losing money. It’s a big problem with industrialized farming. Localized farming helps to solve this issue.
i mean, that’s an option. Although after having done some reading, it seems like this was more in cohorts with like a million chickens being killed due to swine flue or whatever the fuck happens in industrial bird farming.
Either way, industrial farming is just not a very good system at handling anything even remotely shenanigan worthy.
Yeah chickens dying or quarantine concerns would be real shit, but ‘concerns of overproduction’ when a natural resource isn’t being wasted (the chickens were still being kept alive, right?) Is just so dumb to me.
it sounds dumb, but it happens. Apple farmers in rural america were about to lose their shit after producing way too many apples. The state of west virginia, iirc decided to buyback all of the excess. And donated it to foodbanks or something.
It’s literally lost revenue for large scale farming. That’s just how shitty it is.
Yeah they’re just like insects, we can grind them up into a fine powder and mix them into anything. They can’t argue with that because that’s what they want us to do anyway.
I’m a lot less concerned about watches than about cars (much bigger environmental impact) and real estate (very closely tied to a huge chunk of most people’s livelihood).
Weber’s company, Sunrise Farms, had to slaughter its entire flock of egg-laying hens — 550,000 birds — to prevent the disease from infecting other farms in Sonoma County
During the past two months, nearly a dozen commercial farms have had to destroy more than 1 million birds to control the outbreak (as of 27 Jan 24)
the current outbreak of the virus that began in early 2022 has prompted officials to slaughter nearly 82 million birds, mostly egg-laying chickens, in 47 U.S. states
In California, the outbreak has impacted more than 7 million chickens in about 40 commercial flocks and 24 backyard flocks
The prices went back down right after the federal government announced a price fixing investigation and a bunch of news coverage came out about how their claims were bogus.
No, what I care about (in this context) is other people making arguments that they can’t substantiate. I’m not spending my time trying to substantiate someone else’s arguments, I spend enough time doing that for my own.
I have no need to prove that I’m right. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The law of supply and demand is not real. When wealthy money addicts rip you off they pretend its a force of nature ripping you off. Behind every money transaction there is a human being with an address who made a choice.
There’s also a thing called price gouging where companies fuck over the public because they know they can. And then they keep the prices artificially high even after supply increases two, three, four fold over demand. Because they know they can.
Not that I am suggesting corporations are corrupt and would let people starve just to make a profit. Heaven forfend.
To be clear, price gouging is an example of supply and demand
Keeping prices high is an example of price fixing, not supply and demand. It requires companies colluding with each other because, otherwise, one company would just lower their prices to get more business and make more money
Raising your prices by a reasonable amount to meet extra costs is supply and demand.
Raising your prices by three, four, five or six times a reasonable amount is gouging and is not supply and demand. It’s gouging and fucking over your customers, especially those who need your products.
Eggs? You can offer to buy and sell stocks at whatever price you want. You just won’t complete any trades if you offer to buy at $1 and sell at $1,000,000 dollars per share. If “supply and demand” didn’t exist, you could become a millionaire in one trade.
Although, I suspect what this person means is: many markets are not free from price collusion. The stock market is very liquid because there are many buyers and sellers. You literally cannot corner the market because it would require too much money, and it’s illegal.
This creates quick movements based on news and sentiment. Food prices do not operate this quickly, but they do move based on available supply and demand.
Other markets have much more collusion. When there are only three producers, collusion is inevitable. If one seller raises the price and still finds buyers, the other two will follow without any communication between them. The solution is doing whatever you can to not buy what they are selling. Demand moves markets, not supply. They are raising the price because people are paying it.
the current outbreak of the virus that began in early 2022 has prompted officials to slaughter nearly 82 million birds, mostly egg-laying chickens, in 47 U.S. states
Queue to buy eggs kind of shortage? Food stamps to be able to buy kind of shortage? Or corporations using any reason to jack up prices kind of shortage?
I searched egg laying hen population by year. The end of 2022, after the culling, it was 377 million.
Based on the article another comment had, the 80 mil was total birds killed, not just egg hens, so it was likely actually less than the 17% I estimated.
The best part is they’ll raise prices due to “inflation” or whatever, then when supply increases…the prices don’t go down!
I’m honestly wondering what the end game is for these MBA asshats ruining everything. Is it really that many people so selfish and myopic that we have to suffocate on this one planet and never reach?
You know what the end game is, and if we could just cut to it while we still have a chance to at least kinda salvage the climate and biodiversity, that would be great.
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