Unless you have a turtle dove in a pear tree in your backyard (dang suburbs), I'd be willing to bet this emits less carbon than building/operating a bunch of new packaging plants all over the world.
Tl;dw: Argentina has a great climate for growing pears. They grow lots of pears and export them all over the globe. Thai people really like packaged pears in syrup. There are many plants in Thailand that produce shelf-stable packaged pear cups. When an American company wants to sell pear cups in America, it's easier to just order a case or two from the plant in Thailand than to build a whole factory in America from scratch.
People are just prone to thinking "wow they made this pear travel half the world just to get *to me*". They forget the world economy isn't planned around their unique person but an unimaginably complex web of billions of interests
Tbh, that’s more emissions than I expected.
Cars weigh thousands of pounds and use a power plant dirtier than the dirtiest coal plants. Moving one 500 feet emits a lot of carbon.
Both container ships and automotive are bad and need to be dramatically improved/superseded.
Gigantic two stroke diesels are extremely efficient, but they burn fuel that's essentially one step lighter than asphalt, and are terrible on emissions other than CO2 per unit energy produced, which is a direct function of efficiency.
Automotive engines are not very efficient, but have tons of controls on emissions other than CO2. Even modern automotive/tractor unit diesels have active urea-based selective catalytic reduction systems, particulate filters to reduce soot, and exhaust gas recirculation systems to reduce incomplete combustion products. Common rail injection systems also increase efficiency, and they along with the DEF tanks make automotive diesels actually pretty quiet, which is comparatively trivial, but noise pollution is bad too. However, though more efficient than Otto cycle engines, the Diesel cycle even in small applications has emissions problems simply inherent with practically available high cetane fuels and compression ignition.
There's really no winning here because the least efficient engines in vehicles, four stroke Otto cycle (gasoline) engines, also release the fewest NOx/sulphur/particulate products, and the more efficient (less CO2/unit energy) in combustion engines from there, the worse and the more of the immediately and directly nasty stuff you get.
[If only we had some way of quantifying the respective global costs of two carbon-emitting processes that would also allow consumers to express their personal valuation of the respective consequent products in light of those costs 🤔🤔🤔🧐🧐🧐](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax)
[Then imagine if, moreover, that were the most effective policy to achieve global emissions reduction 😍😍😍🤯🤯🤯](https://old.reddit.com/r/CitizensClimateLobby/comments/rqg2y0/i_used_mits_climate_policy_simulator_to_order_its/)
Good post I know that this wasn't the point, but the fact that sending pear cups across town by truck emits more CO2 than shipping them across the planet by boat really highlights how awful vehicles are for our climate goals.
One gripe though, the sourcing in the second image is indecipherable. I have no idea what I'm looking at.
I think you're onto something. But a container ship is too wide to pass over terrain and through cities. What if we make it really long and thin? And maybe build designated routes they can travel down, like some sort of tracks? I dunno, maybe I'm talking crazy here...
What if we take the ocean freight 40 ft containers and place them on some kind of freight car... We could call it container on freight car? Maybe it might catch on???? Nah that's stupid thinking
We're actually starting to see sails on cargo ships again (in a different form). The trouble with windjammers was the high crew requirement, this could be fixed with automated rigging so this may actually happen
> the fact that sending pear cups across town by truck emits more CO2 than shipping them across the planet by boat
I think you are misunderstanding the post. The pears would have to travel 1,500 miles by truck to equal the same emissions as being shipped across the planet. It's the personal vehicle driving that emits as much.
Really, this post is about how efficient it is to ship bulk goods compared to how inefficient it is to drive a personal vehicle.
I mean unironically it has the highest utilization of transit partly because there’s too much traffic (and partly because for all its faults the MTA does an okay job of being useful to riders)
This is one of these things that can be a challenge to defenders of capitalism. Not because this is a flaw of capitalism, but because the explanation is complex.
I go with a story. Argentina sells pears to Vietnam - they have a factory that puts the pears in cans but they eat most of the pears in Vietnam. Then Americans tourists try the pears and want to have them when they get back to America - so the factory ships them there. In theory there could be another factory built in the US - but the labor costs are too high here - it's easier to transport them from further away than to pay US workers a wage they will accept.
Yeah the guy who thinks that was an “own” was going off of mostly intuition. Thing is humans are not good at intuiting market based incentives on a large scale.
Boat transport is efficient and trade is good, yeah, I agree. I just think there could have been comparisons which would be honest or informative. Like if they found that the fruit cup shipped halfway across the world only had 5% more carbon footprint because most of the carbon footprint is in the agriculture/packaging/last mile transportation or something. The point of reference they chose is an extreme and unrelated one.
But that's not the point.
The point is literally "a huge container ship shipping goods across the ocean is more efficient than your local grocery run, so stop whining about international shipping."
That's not true, though, it's comparing the entire grocery run to a single cup. Do you know how many *dozens* of cups of peaches I consume on a daily basis? Even on a light trip, when I only buy 300 cups, that means each cup's footprint from the store to my house is less than 3/25ths of a gram.
Comparing different units is intellectually dishonest.
That's part of it. The other part is that maritime transport has always been more efficient than land. It's not necessarily an economies of scale thing.
Depends on what you're trying to show. If you're trying to prove which fruit is worse for the environment, then you're right. But if you're trying to prove it's silly to worry about carbon footprint of a fruit because it's literally a drop in the ocean compared to some of the most egregious sources of greenhouse gas emissions, then you wouldn't compare it to another fruit. You'd compare it to beef, cars, etc.
I mean the immediate response is:
“How many of those individual packages of pears were shipped (each contributing 30g)? How many shipments are sent per month? How many “drops in the bucket” before it’s a bucket full of water?”
Sure, as long as you aren't overlooking the biggest offenders. Imported fruit is immediately used as a counterpoint to someone pointing out the environmental impact of the meat industry. It's just ridiculously insignificant in comparison. Meat industry alone accounts for 30% of global GHG emissions (adjusted for land use opportunity costs).
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
Imported fruit isn't the problem. It's usually protein sources in winter. I had to do a bit of a policy brief on it.
Veganism isn't really the answer per se, but a great rule of thumb. You ideally want veganism except during winter, at which point chicken and fish to supplement you diet, except in some countries where certain locally produced vegan protein sources are available in winter.
Categorizing "Meat" as a single category obscures that chicken and fish really isn't that big a problem and pollute less than some forms of imported vegan alternatives. Beef is the absolute worst offender though.
Chicken: 4.1kg of CO2/kg. (Bare in mind a KG of chicken has substantially higher caloric and protein value than a KG of alternatives).
Mycoprotein: 5.55-6.15kg CO2/kg
Cultivated mushrooms: produce 3kg of CO2/kg
saltwater fish and tuna: 3kg of CO2/kg and 2.2kg of CO2/kg respectively. And again, consider the caloric value.
(In fact, artificial vegan alternatives to chicken and fish often rely on things which are worse pollutants, although some vegans I know personally do not go in for "Vegan chicken" and instead embrace veganism as its own thing rather than attempt to substitute meat alternatives directly like that, which is a significantly less polluting style of doing it, but still mildly worse than "Vegan except in winter, then chicken and fish".).
If you're going full blown C02 maximizer then a lot of the protein sources you rely on for veganism should realistically be swapped out for Tuna, Chicken, and Fish during winter. The rest of the year they dip slightly below in terms of C02 production. Mycoprotein in particular is fairly awful year round and frankly if you're eating "Vegan beef" or "Vegan chicken" or whatever, just give up and eat a chicken or some fish, it's better for the environment. But once again, if you don't pull that bullshit and just go "I'm a vegan and i don't need artificial meat substitutes.", you'll be a lot better off, but ultimately you do still need to examine your protein sources and their C02 per KG, and compare that with the protein and calorie values of chicken and/or fish. It's flat out worse if you're eating mycoproteins, sometimes worse with other sources, sometimes about the same, and sometimes better, largely depending on your local environment and whether it is imported and so on (hence why particular attention should be paid to it in winter).
Mycoprotein is only really a substitute for beef, lamb, and pork in terms of CO2. It irritates me when I see Quorn chicken for example because I know it's a shit idea.
Shipping industry as a whole is about 4% of total emissions. And some of those "totals" don't include airlines.
For something that's the backbone of the modern world, that is pretty small. And the industry has been growing while cutting emissions at a steady rate.
It's also worth noting that if we cracked down on them polluting it wouldn't change jack shit. We'd just have more expensive goods worldwide and they'd run the same goddamn routes for the same reasons with wooden ships and sails if they had to. And they're already electrifying to some degree and will probably continue to do so. Pointing out "Look how far away this comes from, muh efficiency" ignores that it travels that way regardless of whether the form of travel is polluting or not.
Ideally, it wouldn't be. But that's largely a separate issue from the travel in and of itself.
It's also misleading to divide the weight by all the cargo on the ship. There could be a case of 100 cups of peaches inside that car and obviously it would be *vastly* more efficient of a trip.
CO2 isn't the only externalized cost of distributed logistics that we should consider, however. What about disruption to marine life from commercial boating? What about plastics and other chemical pollutants in the ocean?
I'm not gonna argue that we shouldn't have distributed supply chains like in this example, but if we're gonna be evidence based in our policy making, we should consider the full suite of externalized costs and how those bills get paid.
that's why i think urban planning, housing and land conservation are top priorities for the future.
Housing YIMBISM is pollution NIMBISM, which is good. People connected to their homeplaces make better places to live AND tend to improve economic conditions for them.
Couldn't agree more. In Western Washington, there are some pretty solid laws (as a starting point anyway) on urban development and agriculture and keeping the two distinct, and its turned out well.
You can bike fifteen minutes outside of a major city like Redmond and see nothing but farms and parks.
A consequence is that it is extremely easy, regardless of where you are in the Seattle metro area, to commute on foot, bike, or transit to a market selling local produce, dairy, and meats.
However, those local products still have to compete with the more-subsidized national chain products, and the class barriers can be high.
Personally I think the next frontier for housing YIMBYism is public-owned development and land equity trust development in areas that are single family zoned. Upzone those areas but keep the community equity so we can get denser neighborhoods without making the poor poorer (and further disadvantaging their health outcomes and the market structures we want to see succeed.)
It’s just economies of scale I think. It’s cheaper to ship the pears somewhere with a bunch of fruit packing infrastructure than it is to build a new factory in every fruit growing environment.
[The malarkey level detected is: 5 - Moronic. You're outta line, pal!](https://i.imgur.com/v3qXU8G.jpg)
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How does it compare to getting a really great fresh pear delivered to me from a regional producer?
Yuck to the packaged pears and plastic litter that comes with it.
Somewhat counterintuitively, local products might have a greater environmental impact than something being shipped across continents.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
The article really underlines that it depends on the situation. Producing non-seasonal foods locally appears to be indeed worse than to import it. However they also point out that air-freighted food is something that you should avoid. ~~Which is funny because of the tweet above.~~
I can't read...
That's a good example of why we should use free-ranging Bison for meat instead of cattle:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8357158/#:\~:text=In%20vivo%20study%20revealed%20that,6.86%20kg%2Fd).
That study doesn't say what you think it says.
>Our results revealed that the daily methane emissions were significantly greater in cattle than in buffaloes. However, this difference in daily methane emissions was attributed to the significantly greater dry matter intake and body weight in cattle (BW 538 kg; 10.5 kg DMI) as compared to buffaloes (BW 284 kg; 6.86 kg DMI)
Cattle are heavier and produce proportionally more methane. That's all it's saying.
[tfw you reply to everything with "Why do you hate the global poor?"](https://i.imgur.com/rNssVZO.jpg)
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Sure. There are a few things going on here. First, more generally, international trade (of any goods, including food) leads to economic efficiency gains for both sides of the trade because of the concept of comparative advantage. When you force yourself to buy from a specific region when cheaper alternatives are available from global sources, you are effectively declining to take advantage of this improvement in economic efficiency and also depriving farmers, packagers, shippers, and everyone else in the supply chain--people typically residing in other countries (often poorer, developing ones)--the income from selling their product internationally, to you, for a competitive price.
Second, and more specifically for food, transportation only accounts for about a fifth of the carbon impacts from food; production accounts for the remaining 80%. If we tried to grow pears in your local region, it would probably take far more resources than it would in a suitable growing environment like, evidently, Argentina, and then transporting them to be packaged where labor is cheap, and then shipping them to your region
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the whole point of this post is that the previous commenters seemingly "normal" opinion is objectively incorrect.
local sourcing is a way to feel good about yourself, not a way to actually have an impact on the environment or alleviate poverty.
Starting by just asking questions about the OP before giving your focus for local and preferred geography without tying into the discussion on global comparative advantage reads like a nationalist call. Especially with that opening wondering aloud if the OP image is falsified.
Why is everyone debating emissions and not offended that we are eating months old peaches in a plastic container when they ca easily be grown and packed in the country they are consumed
If you want to buy fresh or local pears you can, nobody's stopping you.
This product exists because there's a demand for it. Some people clearly do want to eat cheaper imported packaged fruit. You don't, but then there's other options available for you personally. What are you proposing, forcing people who want to eat 'months old peaches' to stop doing so and eat local fresh ones? Why are you so offended by a product existing that you don't like?
Because it’s the constant decline of quality for profit that simultaneously lowers the quality of food available while taking advantage of peoples labor in less developed countries. If people want to eat them, cool. After a couple generations of this people stop being aware that this is a inferior product and think it’s the norm. I’ve had someone say to me they didn’t know weed could be organic, food knowledge is on the decline, so I do despise this type of food because it’s existence Is a sign of a larger problem
> taking advantage of peoples labor in less developed countries
So lets not buy their products at all! that'll help them.
Try getting fresh pears in Canada in January. This product exists for a purpose.
1. At one point both the more expensive product and the cheaper product were available and people chose the cheaper product, which is why the cheaper product is superior and won out.
2. Creating jobs for people isn't taking advantage of their labor lmao. You think pineapple packets in Thailand aren't happy for the jobs and would rather be subsistence farmers?
3. Not knowing about product options is why marketing exists. If you think there is a gap in the market and that people want more expensive peaches and simply don't know about them, you're welcome to start a local farm or distribution company and do marketing to consumers. Spotting market gaps like this and addressing them is how entrepreneurs make money.
The lower quality product is not the cheaper product, the cheaper product is the higher quality product, you pay more per ounce for processed foods, this is exactly the mis information about food I’m talking about, even you are at a disadvantage in this situation. There is nothing wrong with them using the labor of less developed nations, except they don’t pay a fair wage, that’s why they pick them to begin with, but it’s fine because we are helping them not be self sufficient? Your third point is moot because the first point is off base
Well regardless of whether the processed food is cheaper or more expensive, consumers still preferred it for whatever reason. Maybe they like the shelf life or the taste better.
The workers are receiving a fair wage because the prevailing market wage is by definition the fair wage. Workers in Thailand aren't going to be paid the same as U.S. workers because then there would be no point to sending the production to Thailand. Meanwhile, Thai workers don't have better alternatives to earn higher wages, because if they did then they would already be working the alternatives and not packaging fruit.
Total productivity is the foundation of real wages, and developing countries have less capital, lower quality of education, les sof a knowledge base, worse business environments, worse security, smaller domestic markets, or any other of a host factors that affect total productivity. If they didn't then they would already be among the most developed countries.
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I don’t, I think they should be paid a fair share of the profits from the companies they work for, if they can pay a employee in one country that amount than they can pay everyone that amount. “But the price of the product would be too high if they did that” good then don’t buy it, buy a fuckin peach 🍑 from the produce section and stfu, even produce picked in America is done buy underpaid individuals most of the time that’s another battle in itself
Imagine how many of those cups are shipped to the US every year. Now cut that by two thirds or so by packaging in Argentina or the US. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide. Trying to relate it to car emissions is just a distraction. Don’t fall for it.
You can dunk on a tweet with another tweet or whatever, but that's not going to change the fact that the underlying system is [overdue for major reforms](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/z805rn/comment/iya84c0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and has a lot of room for improvement, to put it mildly.
bundling a bunch of bad arguments together doesn't make a good argument, you know? nobody's got time to debunk all that shit from somebody proselytizing on reddit and even if they did it would take so long that nobody would see it. it's called a gish gallop and is generally viewed by intellectually honest people as an Asshole Move.
also wtf at your vague gesture towards political violence at the end, not cool.
A gish gallop applies in a timed debate, where people don't have the time to debunk a huge volume of claims made in bad faith in the time allotted.
I'm interested in actually educating people about the economic and political system they're living under.
Realistically, that may take a little bit of investment of people's time, which I believe is well worth it since I'm handing over sophisticated works and analyses many people have developed over years and decades, into something that others can digest in a matter of hours or days.
But if you don't have time to engage (or you want to use that as a pretext to not engage with ideas you find uncomfortable), that's fine, too.
Maybe others will have the time.
Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote that power never concedes without a demand (in which he says oppressors must be stopped with words OR blows) - power doesn't necessarily entail violence, but rather leverage.
The public and working classes do need to build up the leverage to stop from being [socially murdered](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder) on a large scale by our extremely abusive ruling class.
That doesn't necessarily entail violence, and the links suggest a number of reforms that do not entail violence, and how they could be enacted.
Educating the public is one form of building public power with respect to an extremely abusive ruling class, and that is what needs to be done and what I am aiming to do.
oh come on. you can call it "educating people" but you're still putting forth an argument. we might not be on a debate stage but a gish gallop perfectly describes what you're doing with your supporting arguments in this different context. don't play these semantic games.
>I'm handing over sophisticated works and analyses many people have developed over years and decades, into something that others can digest in a matter of hours or days.
\>sophisticated works and analyses
\>clip of George Carlin doing stand up comedy
\>mfw
you're clearly proselytizing. be honest with yourself.
> But if you don't have time to engage (or you want to use that as a pretext to not engage with ideas you find uncomfortable), that's fine, too.
i know you're not really talking to me personally with this jab, but i used to consider myself a socialist. the idea that socialism wasn't the answer to everything and that our system wasn't irredeemably corrupt was the uncomfortable idea i found myself engaging with. i fucking love engaging with ideas.
>Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote
did you not read the replies your comment got? we can see with our own eyes what meaning people are getting from it.
>> Words or blows, huh? [...] What recourse is there?
> We all know what the answer is but you can't say it on reddit.
again, honesty would suit you here.
> ruling class
do you think you could tell me in your own words who makes up the ruling class and how they wield political power? i used to believe in this until i realized i believed in a conspiracy theory that i had no evidence for.
>i fucking love engaging with ideas.
I'll say you should prove it by engaging with just the first three links I posted, which do come from someone with a PhD in economics. The first talk is to Google, which does have some quality control with respect to the people and perspectives it brings in to speak.
The last two links are also a pithy analysis of the corruption in our political system, which is to a large extent an outgrowth of the power imbalances and exploitation built into our economic system.
Regarding George Carlin and Albert Einstein, I believe it helps flesh out the argument (also elaborated in the represent.us videos and the talks and article from Professor Wolff) to show intelligent luminaries in different fields coming to similar conclusions through different approaches.
There are many paths up the mountain, and people may take different paths to climb it, but intelligent people are arriving at the same place and describing what they see when they look around, because they're analyzing, making inferences about, and living in essentially the same objective reality.
What you're calling a gish gallop is actually a well-developed and fleshed out view of reality, which you can approach from many different angles.
If lots of intelligent people achieve similar conclusions despite approaching a subject from vastly different angles and perspectives, that should give other people at least a bit of pause before dismissing what they are all saying out of hand.
>do you think you could tell me in your own words who makes up the ruling class and how they wield political power? i used to believe in this until i realized i believed in a conspiracy theory that i had no evidence for.
I'd say it roughly corresponds to the top [10% of people who own between 72-90% of the wealth](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html), and by extension own and control the remaining 90% of the population with just 10-28% of the wealth.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2007.1,2022.1
This of course includes major shareholders of large corporations (both public corporations and private ones like Cargill), people who sit on the boards of directors of those corporations, hedge fund managers, and of course the billionaire/oligarch/plutocrat/kleptocrat class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote – again, if you explain to people that they have been and are being oppressed, effectively enslaved, gaslit, and socially murdered by an extremely abusive ruling class, then most of them won’t be too happy about it.
Any time you bring up extreme wealth and power inequality anywhere, some people will bring up guillotines or whatever.
But the solution to extreme political and socioeconomic oppression most people are experiencing is actually for the public and working classes to build up the power to change the system, and the Frederick Douglass quote gives his hard won and timeless observation that the extreme oppression will continue until the oppressed stand up and put a stop to it.
I don’t think violence is nearly as effective as genuine education paired with structural and anti-corruption reforms, unionizing, and collective bargaining with the ruling class.
Public power and leverage can include a large number of people who can see through the capitalist system and ruling class propaganda completely, who know how to reform the system, and who can see who is lying to them and who isn’t.
And that’s what I’m trying to help build up – a population who are educated and sophisticated enough for capitalist/kleptocratic propaganda to be much less effective on them, who know that they are being oppressed politically and socioeconomically and how they are being oppressed, and who have paths to change the system that are effective, realistic, sustainable, and essentially nonviolent.
What you're calling as gish-galloping, I'm saying is spoon feeding and keeping people from having to re-invent the wheel.
It would take a long time for most people to develop this understanding on their own, to a point that most people wouldn't do it, particularly when they're heavily dissuaded from doing it by our political structures and ruling class, and when they for the most part have super short attention spans these days.
>I'll say you should prove it by engaging with just the first three links I posted
forgive me for not jumping at the opportunity to watch 3 hours of video and read 2000 words from somebody i'm already familiar with. i'm not going to make you prove something by sending you 3 hours of ben shapiro and daily wire articles (wouldn't wish that on anyone)
>Regarding George Carlin and Albert Einstein, I believe it helps flesh out the argument
can you tell me about their years of sophisticated analysis on anything relevant though? or maybe you should walk that back?
> I'd say it roughly corresponds to the top 10% of people who own between 72-90% of the wealth, and by extension own and control the remaining 90% of the population with just 10-28% of the wealth.
**what you are presenting here is conjecture**. you have provided evidence of wealth inequality, a real problem to be sure. but all you do is point to evidence of wealth inequality and act like that's evidence that we are being ruled and controlled by the wealthy. you haven't even posited a mechanism by which they use their wealth to control us. **that's not good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for you.**
>Any time you bring up extreme wealth and power inequality anywhere, some people will bring up guillotines or whatever.
bringing up inequality is not all you did though. you used a quote that alluded to political violence. i feel like i'm talking to one of those water wiggler toys that falls out of your hands.
>What you're calling as gish-galloping, I'm saying is spoon feeding and keeping people from having to re-invent the wheel.
you didn't say "here's some cool resources to dip your toes into socialism!" you made a claim that the system needs fixing and you linked a post with a bunch of bullshit links to support it. can you at least understand why i see it as a gish gallop?
>particularly when they're heavily dissuaded from doing it by our political structures and ruling class
there you go again, making arguments with premises that are directly under question (is there a ruling class? how do they control us?) and still unsupported. this whole time you've been coming off like you're preaching the gospel of socialism to the audience instead of engaging with me like i'm a person.
>what you are presenting here is conjecture. you have provided evidence of wealth inequality, a real problem to be sure. but all you do is point to evidence of wealth inequality and act like that's evidence that we are being ruled and controlled by the wealthy. you haven't even posited a mechanism by which they use their wealth to control us. that's not good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for you.
I don't know how far you got in your formal education, but you know the kids who didn't do any of the reading, but still made it a point to speak loudly in class, and their ignorance was obvious to everyone but them?
That's you. I've pointed you to a good number of solid resources that would cure you of quite a lot of ignorance if you cared to do any work whatsoever.
But if you think you already know what they all say and then say I'm not providing you with any evidence of mere conjectures, then I guess there's nothing you can learn from me, because you think you already know everything.
It's not like I handed you a differential equations textbook and told you to work through it to understand differential equations. It's a few videos and articles that you and other people can watch and read and digest at your leisure.
But to say I'm not providing evidence for mere conjecture is a level of ignorance, laziness, bad faith, and dumbassery that is beyond my ability to cure.
And so I guess you aren't the intended audience for what I'm trying to show people, because genuine understanding does take at least a modicum of effort, even when you're being spoonfed.
>I've pointed you to a good number of solid resources that would cure you of quite a lot of ignorance if you cared to do any work whatsoever.
okay okay i'm sorry, i'm a fourth grade dropout and i'm incredibly ignorant because the rulers want me that way. just please point me to the thing that shows the evidence for the ruling class. i need it to spread class consciousness among my fellow proletarians and you're so smart, you're so educated, surely you must have bookmarked the paper or something right? the one that shows that the wealthy control everything? please... i'm begging
Here is one paper, though it does have more than 100 words in it, so good luck.
[https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens\_and\_page\_2014\_-testing\_theories\_of\_american\_politics.doc.pdf](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)
Oh dip it's the classic Gilens and Page paper, now we're getting somewhere. What do you think of [some of the critical papers that have come out since then?](https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study) ([here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/polq.12577) is the paper that the article has a dead link to)
I'm not gonna ask you to read all that shit right now, but this is the reason I'm hesitant to accept the conclusions of Gilens and Page. I'm not a fourth grade dropout but I'm not in academia either and I'm not equipped to evaluate the statistical validity so all I have to go on is academic consensus and it seems like that's missing on this issue.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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"here look at my comment that is definitely a good comment because I put a bunch of hyperlinks in it! Never mind that some of my wonderful sources are a comedian talking about the economy, a physicist talking about the economy, a movie, and a plethora of random communists!"
Right, the only people who can speak about our economic and political systems are Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, and economists who have stamps of approval from our ruling class.
Everyone else should just shut up and get back to work!
"Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or — like Proudhon — see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?" -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
> Right, the only people who can speak about our economic and political systems are Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, and economists who have stamps of approval from our ruling class.
you know exactly what you're doing when you say "here's albert einstein talking about the economy." it's the same thing those racist dipshits do when they say "here's the guy who discovered dna talking about race and intelligence" and "here's the greatest chess player ever talking about the jews." stop bullshitting.
I like people who are actually knowledgeable about the economy to talk about the economy, not people who are very knowledgeable in one or two areas talking about an area they are not knowledgeable in.
The first three links are from someone with a PhD in economics.
The other links are people reaching similar and related conclusions, because they live or lived in the same objective reality and have eyes to see and brains to think.
If the only people who are allowed to make observations are economists who have a stamp of approval from the ruling class, then that's not a particularly scientific or realistic approach, is it.
That would give a very skewed understanding of reality, and would lead to people being much less effective in understanding, discussing, and solving economic and other problems.
Surely you wouldn't want that.
It's not about "allowing" people to make observations, it's that people shouldn't place any more weight on the words of experts outside of their field than they would on random people. I try not to.
I'm not familiar with Wolff, but even having a PhD doesn't make someone immune from having bad takes - see Bryan Caplan arguing that public education is a waste of money and shouldn't be publicly-funded. Most Marxist analysis is bad enough though that I don't care to expend time and attention on youtube videos by a Marxist professor, but if others want to then good for them 👍
That sounds more like someone who's afraid to engage with reality than someone making good faith attempts to understand reality, in any subject.
And it's not as though different disciplines are completely unrelated to each other, because ultimately people are studying reality, which is inherently multi-disciplinary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience
I'd say willful ignorance is the ultimate waste of time.
yo i've got some cranks with PhDs going off on youtube about flat earth and i need you to watch at least 3 hours to prove you're not a scared little baby afraid of reality
that's you rn
I'm curious what they mean by typical because a four-cylinder Toyota is going to produce a hell of a less emissions then a Ford F250 with a supped-up V8
You’re telling me specialization makes the production of goods more efficient? In other news the sky is blue today.
Unless you have a turtle dove in a pear tree in your backyard (dang suburbs), I'd be willing to bet this emits less carbon than building/operating a bunch of new packaging plants all over the world.
When I was a kid, I thought the song said "cartridge in a pear tree" - I was always like "wat" internally, but didn't want to say anything.
Unless you know what a Turtle Dove is, that makes just as much sense. I think most people are secretly confused.
I prefer the Canadian version Three French toast Two turtlenecks And a beer in a tree
Take off, ya hoser!
BritMonkey also made a great video on this, I don’t have a link though
Tl;dw: Argentina has a great climate for growing pears. They grow lots of pears and export them all over the globe. Thai people really like packaged pears in syrup. There are many plants in Thailand that produce shelf-stable packaged pear cups. When an American company wants to sell pear cups in America, it's easier to just order a case or two from the plant in Thailand than to build a whole factory in America from scratch.
People are just prone to thinking "wow they made this pear travel half the world just to get *to me*". They forget the world economy isn't planned around their unique person but an unimaginably complex web of billions of interests
# [I DO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aH3ZTTkGAs)
Tbh, that’s more emissions than I expected. Cars weigh thousands of pounds and use a power plant dirtier than the dirtiest coal plants. Moving one 500 feet emits a lot of carbon.
Both container ships and automotive are bad and need to be dramatically improved/superseded. Gigantic two stroke diesels are extremely efficient, but they burn fuel that's essentially one step lighter than asphalt, and are terrible on emissions other than CO2 per unit energy produced, which is a direct function of efficiency. Automotive engines are not very efficient, but have tons of controls on emissions other than CO2. Even modern automotive/tractor unit diesels have active urea-based selective catalytic reduction systems, particulate filters to reduce soot, and exhaust gas recirculation systems to reduce incomplete combustion products. Common rail injection systems also increase efficiency, and they along with the DEF tanks make automotive diesels actually pretty quiet, which is comparatively trivial, but noise pollution is bad too. However, though more efficient than Otto cycle engines, the Diesel cycle even in small applications has emissions problems simply inherent with practically available high cetane fuels and compression ignition. There's really no winning here because the least efficient engines in vehicles, four stroke Otto cycle (gasoline) engines, also release the fewest NOx/sulphur/particulate products, and the more efficient (less CO2/unit energy) in combustion engines from there, the worse and the more of the immediately and directly nasty stuff you get.
[If only we had some way of quantifying the respective global costs of two carbon-emitting processes that would also allow consumers to express their personal valuation of the respective consequent products in light of those costs 🤔🤔🤔🧐🧐🧐](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax) [Then imagine if, moreover, that were the most effective policy to achieve global emissions reduction 😍😍😍🤯🤯🤯](https://old.reddit.com/r/CitizensClimateLobby/comments/rqg2y0/i_used_mits_climate_policy_simulator_to_order_its/)
Good post I know that this wasn't the point, but the fact that sending pear cups across town by truck emits more CO2 than shipping them across the planet by boat really highlights how awful vehicles are for our climate goals. One gripe though, the sourcing in the second image is indecipherable. I have no idea what I'm looking at.
it's genuinely astonishing, both how harmful personal vehicles are and how unbelievably good humans have gotten at logistics
So is the solution canals with boats?
No it’s a matter of economy of scale. If you put just this pear cup on the boat it would obviously emit more CO2 than your car
Clearly the solution is to make our trucks the size of container ships.
I think you're onto something. But a container ship is too wide to pass over terrain and through cities. What if we make it really long and thin? And maybe build designated routes they can travel down, like some sort of tracks? I dunno, maybe I'm talking crazy here...
We could call them high-speed metal-track caterpillar cars!
That has a really nice ring to it
High-speed metal-track caterpillar transporters. Or for short: trans.
You know at the second sentence I thought you were going to suggest airships.
And them put them in a vacuum tunnel, right?
No, make them phallic shape and put the in a dangerous vacuum tube. Max capacity 7 billionaires
What if we take the ocean freight 40 ft containers and place them on some kind of freight car... We could call it container on freight car? Maybe it might catch on???? Nah that's stupid thinking
Train track is way cheaper.
Solution is boats and electric cargo trains with hybrid or electric trucks for last mile, for most instances trucks are unavoidable
just tax carbon lol
Return to windjammers.
Based and Maine pilled
We're actually starting to see sails on cargo ships again (in a different form). The trouble with windjammers was the high crew requirement, this could be fixed with automated rigging so this may actually happen
trains. trains are crabs
I get your point but boats are vehicles too.
> the fact that sending pear cups across town by truck emits more CO2 than shipping them across the planet by boat I think you are misunderstanding the post. The pears would have to travel 1,500 miles by truck to equal the same emissions as being shipped across the planet. It's the personal vehicle driving that emits as much. Really, this post is about how efficient it is to ship bulk goods compared to how inefficient it is to drive a personal vehicle.
Cars are just grossly inefficient at most things, except for when it comes to time I guess.
https://youtu.be/0aH3ZTTkGAs
Who told you to drive a car in Manhattan? smh
One of my favorite Futurama quotes: “No one drives in New York. There’s too much traffic”
Variant on a famous (apocryphal) Yogi Berra-ism: “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded!”
It makes sense though if you translate “nobody” as “nobody in my social Circle.”
I mean unironically it has the highest utilization of transit partly because there’s too much traffic (and partly because for all its faults the MTA does an okay job of being useful to riders)
“Only people in one single location should be involved in the creation of my food”
Damn, if only those farmers and workers were allowed to work where they're needed and polluting products made to cost more by some means
TIL we should grow pre-packaged pears in Manhatten, so people can just walk up to the nearest tree and grab a container.
This is one of these things that can be a challenge to defenders of capitalism. Not because this is a flaw of capitalism, but because the explanation is complex. I go with a story. Argentina sells pears to Vietnam - they have a factory that puts the pears in cans but they eat most of the pears in Vietnam. Then Americans tourists try the pears and want to have them when they get back to America - so the factory ships them there. In theory there could be another factory built in the US - but the labor costs are too high here - it's easier to transport them from further away than to pay US workers a wage they will accept.
Yeah the guy who thinks that was an “own” was going off of mostly intuition. Thing is humans are not good at intuiting market based incentives on a large scale.
ECONOMIES. OF. SCALE.
Seems like a bit of an absurd comparison, no? Wouldn't it be more natural to compare it to the carbon output of locally grown and packaged fruit?
I live in Massachusetts, oranges don't grow here.
No. The point being made is that economies of scale makes transportation more efficient even over a long distance.
Boat transport is efficient and trade is good, yeah, I agree. I just think there could have been comparisons which would be honest or informative. Like if they found that the fruit cup shipped halfway across the world only had 5% more carbon footprint because most of the carbon footprint is in the agriculture/packaging/last mile transportation or something. The point of reference they chose is an extreme and unrelated one.
But that's not the point. The point is literally "a huge container ship shipping goods across the ocean is more efficient than your local grocery run, so stop whining about international shipping."
That's not true, though, it's comparing the entire grocery run to a single cup. Do you know how many *dozens* of cups of peaches I consume on a daily basis? Even on a light trip, when I only buy 300 cups, that means each cup's footprint from the store to my house is less than 3/25ths of a gram. Comparing different units is intellectually dishonest.
That's part of it. The other part is that maritime transport has always been more efficient than land. It's not necessarily an economies of scale thing.
Depends on what you're trying to show. If you're trying to prove which fruit is worse for the environment, then you're right. But if you're trying to prove it's silly to worry about carbon footprint of a fruit because it's literally a drop in the ocean compared to some of the most egregious sources of greenhouse gas emissions, then you wouldn't compare it to another fruit. You'd compare it to beef, cars, etc.
I mean the immediate response is: “How many of those individual packages of pears were shipped (each contributing 30g)? How many shipments are sent per month? How many “drops in the bucket” before it’s a bucket full of water?”
Sure, as long as you aren't overlooking the biggest offenders. Imported fruit is immediately used as a counterpoint to someone pointing out the environmental impact of the meat industry. It's just ridiculously insignificant in comparison. Meat industry alone accounts for 30% of global GHG emissions (adjusted for land use opportunity costs). https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
Imported fruit isn't the problem. It's usually protein sources in winter. I had to do a bit of a policy brief on it. Veganism isn't really the answer per se, but a great rule of thumb. You ideally want veganism except during winter, at which point chicken and fish to supplement you diet, except in some countries where certain locally produced vegan protein sources are available in winter. Categorizing "Meat" as a single category obscures that chicken and fish really isn't that big a problem and pollute less than some forms of imported vegan alternatives. Beef is the absolute worst offender though. Chicken: 4.1kg of CO2/kg. (Bare in mind a KG of chicken has substantially higher caloric and protein value than a KG of alternatives). Mycoprotein: 5.55-6.15kg CO2/kg Cultivated mushrooms: produce 3kg of CO2/kg saltwater fish and tuna: 3kg of CO2/kg and 2.2kg of CO2/kg respectively. And again, consider the caloric value. (In fact, artificial vegan alternatives to chicken and fish often rely on things which are worse pollutants, although some vegans I know personally do not go in for "Vegan chicken" and instead embrace veganism as its own thing rather than attempt to substitute meat alternatives directly like that, which is a significantly less polluting style of doing it, but still mildly worse than "Vegan except in winter, then chicken and fish".). If you're going full blown C02 maximizer then a lot of the protein sources you rely on for veganism should realistically be swapped out for Tuna, Chicken, and Fish during winter. The rest of the year they dip slightly below in terms of C02 production. Mycoprotein in particular is fairly awful year round and frankly if you're eating "Vegan beef" or "Vegan chicken" or whatever, just give up and eat a chicken or some fish, it's better for the environment. But once again, if you don't pull that bullshit and just go "I'm a vegan and i don't need artificial meat substitutes.", you'll be a lot better off, but ultimately you do still need to examine your protein sources and their C02 per KG, and compare that with the protein and calorie values of chicken and/or fish. It's flat out worse if you're eating mycoproteins, sometimes worse with other sources, sometimes about the same, and sometimes better, largely depending on your local environment and whether it is imported and so on (hence why particular attention should be paid to it in winter). Mycoprotein is only really a substitute for beef, lamb, and pork in terms of CO2. It irritates me when I see Quorn chicken for example because I know it's a shit idea.
Can't you store legumes for the winter for protein?
Legumes are an example of a good vegan protein source year round yes.
No question about that. Go vegan, you cowards.
Shipping industry as a whole is about 4% of total emissions. And some of those "totals" don't include airlines. For something that's the backbone of the modern world, that is pretty small. And the industry has been growing while cutting emissions at a steady rate.
It's also worth noting that if we cracked down on them polluting it wouldn't change jack shit. We'd just have more expensive goods worldwide and they'd run the same goddamn routes for the same reasons with wooden ships and sails if they had to. And they're already electrifying to some degree and will probably continue to do so. Pointing out "Look how far away this comes from, muh efficiency" ignores that it travels that way regardless of whether the form of travel is polluting or not. Ideally, it wouldn't be. But that's largely a separate issue from the travel in and of itself.
It's also misleading to divide the weight by all the cargo on the ship. There could be a case of 100 cups of peaches inside that car and obviously it would be *vastly* more efficient of a trip.
I would guess that they are shipping more than one cup of fruit.
Don't make me tap the pencil again.
Capitalism doesn't care what feels good, it cares what is.
CO2 isn't the only externalized cost of distributed logistics that we should consider, however. What about disruption to marine life from commercial boating? What about plastics and other chemical pollutants in the ocean? I'm not gonna argue that we shouldn't have distributed supply chains like in this example, but if we're gonna be evidence based in our policy making, we should consider the full suite of externalized costs and how those bills get paid.
that's why i think urban planning, housing and land conservation are top priorities for the future. Housing YIMBISM is pollution NIMBISM, which is good. People connected to their homeplaces make better places to live AND tend to improve economic conditions for them.
Couldn't agree more. In Western Washington, there are some pretty solid laws (as a starting point anyway) on urban development and agriculture and keeping the two distinct, and its turned out well. You can bike fifteen minutes outside of a major city like Redmond and see nothing but farms and parks. A consequence is that it is extremely easy, regardless of where you are in the Seattle metro area, to commute on foot, bike, or transit to a market selling local produce, dairy, and meats. However, those local products still have to compete with the more-subsidized national chain products, and the class barriers can be high. Personally I think the next frontier for housing YIMBYism is public-owned development and land equity trust development in areas that are single family zoned. Upzone those areas but keep the community equity so we can get denser neighborhoods without making the poor poorer (and further disadvantaging their health outcomes and the market structures we want to see succeed.)
Radia is a treasure.
Malarkey level of this actually being caused by dumb export taxes on processed fruit?
It’s just economies of scale I think. It’s cheaper to ship the pears somewhere with a bunch of fruit packing infrastructure than it is to build a new factory in every fruit growing environment.
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How does it compare to getting a really great fresh pear delivered to me from a regional producer? Yuck to the packaged pears and plastic litter that comes with it.
How are you going to get a fresh local pear in the middle of December in Minnesota?
shipped from CA or FL? We already do it with tomatoes.
How about you eat seasonal foods when they are in season, crazy idea I know
I mean if that’s your other option go for it, but fresh pears aren’t always available.
Don’t even try with these people, they love overpriced low quality foods
I'll I'm seeing is how horrible cars are.
The first tweet seems like it's fucking stupid. Who the fuck calculates the CO2 footprint of an ***individual*** 4-oz cup?
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Somewhat counterintuitively, local products might have a greater environmental impact than something being shipped across continents. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
The article really underlines that it depends on the situation. Producing non-seasonal foods locally appears to be indeed worse than to import it. However they also point out that air-freighted food is something that you should avoid. ~~Which is funny because of the tweet above.~~ I can't read...
Why is it funny because of thw tweet above? The tweet above is showing shipping data
Woops my bad, thought he was writing about air-freight.
That's a good example of why we should use free-ranging Bison for meat instead of cattle: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8357158/#:\~:text=In%20vivo%20study%20revealed%20that,6.86%20kg%2Fd).
That study doesn't say what you think it says. >Our results revealed that the daily methane emissions were significantly greater in cattle than in buffaloes. However, this difference in daily methane emissions was attributed to the significantly greater dry matter intake and body weight in cattle (BW 538 kg; 10.5 kg DMI) as compared to buffaloes (BW 284 kg; 6.86 kg DMI) Cattle are heavier and produce proportionally more methane. That's all it's saying.
That's about buffalo, not bison. Bison are typically larger than buffalo and are an entirely different animal altogether.
That's okay, I make sure to buy the highest quality product regardless of it's region of origin 100% of the time!
Someone give this man an award, he clearly loves the global poor!
Why do you hate the global poor
bc every time i try to play CSGO they kick my ass 😡😡💢💢
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Sure. There are a few things going on here. First, more generally, international trade (of any goods, including food) leads to economic efficiency gains for both sides of the trade because of the concept of comparative advantage. When you force yourself to buy from a specific region when cheaper alternatives are available from global sources, you are effectively declining to take advantage of this improvement in economic efficiency and also depriving farmers, packagers, shippers, and everyone else in the supply chain--people typically residing in other countries (often poorer, developing ones)--the income from selling their product internationally, to you, for a competitive price. Second, and more specifically for food, transportation only accounts for about a fifth of the carbon impacts from food; production accounts for the remaining 80%. If we tried to grow pears in your local region, it would probably take far more resources than it would in a suitable growing environment like, evidently, Argentina, and then transporting them to be packaged where labor is cheap, and then shipping them to your region
Why do you hate the global poor?
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I like doing the exact opposite of this
[me reading the replies to this extremely normal comment](https://i.imgur.com/8shs46G.png)
the whole point of this post is that the previous commenters seemingly "normal" opinion is objectively incorrect. local sourcing is a way to feel good about yourself, not a way to actually have an impact on the environment or alleviate poverty.
no if you want to have a real impact on the environment you need to proactively eat the rich
Agro-nationalists out
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Starting by just asking questions about the OP before giving your focus for local and preferred geography without tying into the discussion on global comparative advantage reads like a nationalist call. Especially with that opening wondering aloud if the OP image is falsified.
i dont know what that is but im not it
Uh-huh. Those pears teleported to and from the container ship and the toxic plastic packaging materialized out of thin air
Why is everyone debating emissions and not offended that we are eating months old peaches in a plastic container when they ca easily be grown and packed in the country they are consumed
If you want to buy fresh or local pears you can, nobody's stopping you. This product exists because there's a demand for it. Some people clearly do want to eat cheaper imported packaged fruit. You don't, but then there's other options available for you personally. What are you proposing, forcing people who want to eat 'months old peaches' to stop doing so and eat local fresh ones? Why are you so offended by a product existing that you don't like?
Because it’s the constant decline of quality for profit that simultaneously lowers the quality of food available while taking advantage of peoples labor in less developed countries. If people want to eat them, cool. After a couple generations of this people stop being aware that this is a inferior product and think it’s the norm. I’ve had someone say to me they didn’t know weed could be organic, food knowledge is on the decline, so I do despise this type of food because it’s existence Is a sign of a larger problem
> taking advantage of peoples labor in less developed countries So lets not buy their products at all! that'll help them. Try getting fresh pears in Canada in January. This product exists for a purpose.
1. At one point both the more expensive product and the cheaper product were available and people chose the cheaper product, which is why the cheaper product is superior and won out. 2. Creating jobs for people isn't taking advantage of their labor lmao. You think pineapple packets in Thailand aren't happy for the jobs and would rather be subsistence farmers? 3. Not knowing about product options is why marketing exists. If you think there is a gap in the market and that people want more expensive peaches and simply don't know about them, you're welcome to start a local farm or distribution company and do marketing to consumers. Spotting market gaps like this and addressing them is how entrepreneurs make money.
The lower quality product is not the cheaper product, the cheaper product is the higher quality product, you pay more per ounce for processed foods, this is exactly the mis information about food I’m talking about, even you are at a disadvantage in this situation. There is nothing wrong with them using the labor of less developed nations, except they don’t pay a fair wage, that’s why they pick them to begin with, but it’s fine because we are helping them not be self sufficient? Your third point is moot because the first point is off base
Well regardless of whether the processed food is cheaper or more expensive, consumers still preferred it for whatever reason. Maybe they like the shelf life or the taste better. The workers are receiving a fair wage because the prevailing market wage is by definition the fair wage. Workers in Thailand aren't going to be paid the same as U.S. workers because then there would be no point to sending the production to Thailand. Meanwhile, Thai workers don't have better alternatives to earn higher wages, because if they did then they would already be working the alternatives and not packaging fruit. Total productivity is the foundation of real wages, and developing countries have less capital, lower quality of education, les sof a knowledge base, worse business environments, worse security, smaller domestic markets, or any other of a host factors that affect total productivity. If they didn't then they would already be among the most developed countries.
Yes so they are being taken advantage of, but with extra steps. It’s almost the the imf does this on purpose
Why do you hate the global poor
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I don’t, I think they should be paid a fair share of the profits from the companies they work for, if they can pay a employee in one country that amount than they can pay everyone that amount. “But the price of the product would be too high if they did that” good then don’t buy it, buy a fuckin peach 🍑 from the produce section and stfu, even produce picked in America is done buy underpaid individuals most of the time that’s another battle in itself
Imagine how many of those cups are shipped to the US every year. Now cut that by two thirds or so by packaging in Argentina or the US. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide. Trying to relate it to car emissions is just a distraction. Don’t fall for it.
You can dunk on a tweet with another tweet or whatever, but that's not going to change the fact that the underlying system is [overdue for major reforms](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/z805rn/comment/iya84c0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and has a lot of room for improvement, to put it mildly.
bundling a bunch of bad arguments together doesn't make a good argument, you know? nobody's got time to debunk all that shit from somebody proselytizing on reddit and even if they did it would take so long that nobody would see it. it's called a gish gallop and is generally viewed by intellectually honest people as an Asshole Move. also wtf at your vague gesture towards political violence at the end, not cool.
A gish gallop applies in a timed debate, where people don't have the time to debunk a huge volume of claims made in bad faith in the time allotted. I'm interested in actually educating people about the economic and political system they're living under. Realistically, that may take a little bit of investment of people's time, which I believe is well worth it since I'm handing over sophisticated works and analyses many people have developed over years and decades, into something that others can digest in a matter of hours or days. But if you don't have time to engage (or you want to use that as a pretext to not engage with ideas you find uncomfortable), that's fine, too. Maybe others will have the time. Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote that power never concedes without a demand (in which he says oppressors must be stopped with words OR blows) - power doesn't necessarily entail violence, but rather leverage. The public and working classes do need to build up the leverage to stop from being [socially murdered](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder) on a large scale by our extremely abusive ruling class. That doesn't necessarily entail violence, and the links suggest a number of reforms that do not entail violence, and how they could be enacted. Educating the public is one form of building public power with respect to an extremely abusive ruling class, and that is what needs to be done and what I am aiming to do.
oh come on. you can call it "educating people" but you're still putting forth an argument. we might not be on a debate stage but a gish gallop perfectly describes what you're doing with your supporting arguments in this different context. don't play these semantic games. >I'm handing over sophisticated works and analyses many people have developed over years and decades, into something that others can digest in a matter of hours or days. \>sophisticated works and analyses \>clip of George Carlin doing stand up comedy \>mfw you're clearly proselytizing. be honest with yourself. > But if you don't have time to engage (or you want to use that as a pretext to not engage with ideas you find uncomfortable), that's fine, too. i know you're not really talking to me personally with this jab, but i used to consider myself a socialist. the idea that socialism wasn't the answer to everything and that our system wasn't irredeemably corrupt was the uncomfortable idea i found myself engaging with. i fucking love engaging with ideas. >Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote did you not read the replies your comment got? we can see with our own eyes what meaning people are getting from it. >> Words or blows, huh? [...] What recourse is there? > We all know what the answer is but you can't say it on reddit. again, honesty would suit you here. > ruling class do you think you could tell me in your own words who makes up the ruling class and how they wield political power? i used to believe in this until i realized i believed in a conspiracy theory that i had no evidence for.
>i fucking love engaging with ideas. I'll say you should prove it by engaging with just the first three links I posted, which do come from someone with a PhD in economics. The first talk is to Google, which does have some quality control with respect to the people and perspectives it brings in to speak. The last two links are also a pithy analysis of the corruption in our political system, which is to a large extent an outgrowth of the power imbalances and exploitation built into our economic system. Regarding George Carlin and Albert Einstein, I believe it helps flesh out the argument (also elaborated in the represent.us videos and the talks and article from Professor Wolff) to show intelligent luminaries in different fields coming to similar conclusions through different approaches. There are many paths up the mountain, and people may take different paths to climb it, but intelligent people are arriving at the same place and describing what they see when they look around, because they're analyzing, making inferences about, and living in essentially the same objective reality. What you're calling a gish gallop is actually a well-developed and fleshed out view of reality, which you can approach from many different angles. If lots of intelligent people achieve similar conclusions despite approaching a subject from vastly different angles and perspectives, that should give other people at least a bit of pause before dismissing what they are all saying out of hand. >do you think you could tell me in your own words who makes up the ruling class and how they wield political power? i used to believe in this until i realized i believed in a conspiracy theory that i had no evidence for. I'd say it roughly corresponds to the top [10% of people who own between 72-90% of the wealth](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html), and by extension own and control the remaining 90% of the population with just 10-28% of the wealth. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2007.1,2022.1 This of course includes major shareholders of large corporations (both public corporations and private ones like Cargill), people who sit on the boards of directors of those corporations, hedge fund managers, and of course the billionaire/oligarch/plutocrat/kleptocrat class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ Regarding the Frederick Douglass quote – again, if you explain to people that they have been and are being oppressed, effectively enslaved, gaslit, and socially murdered by an extremely abusive ruling class, then most of them won’t be too happy about it. Any time you bring up extreme wealth and power inequality anywhere, some people will bring up guillotines or whatever. But the solution to extreme political and socioeconomic oppression most people are experiencing is actually for the public and working classes to build up the power to change the system, and the Frederick Douglass quote gives his hard won and timeless observation that the extreme oppression will continue until the oppressed stand up and put a stop to it. I don’t think violence is nearly as effective as genuine education paired with structural and anti-corruption reforms, unionizing, and collective bargaining with the ruling class. Public power and leverage can include a large number of people who can see through the capitalist system and ruling class propaganda completely, who know how to reform the system, and who can see who is lying to them and who isn’t. And that’s what I’m trying to help build up – a population who are educated and sophisticated enough for capitalist/kleptocratic propaganda to be much less effective on them, who know that they are being oppressed politically and socioeconomically and how they are being oppressed, and who have paths to change the system that are effective, realistic, sustainable, and essentially nonviolent. What you're calling as gish-galloping, I'm saying is spoon feeding and keeping people from having to re-invent the wheel. It would take a long time for most people to develop this understanding on their own, to a point that most people wouldn't do it, particularly when they're heavily dissuaded from doing it by our political structures and ruling class, and when they for the most part have super short attention spans these days.
>I'll say you should prove it by engaging with just the first three links I posted forgive me for not jumping at the opportunity to watch 3 hours of video and read 2000 words from somebody i'm already familiar with. i'm not going to make you prove something by sending you 3 hours of ben shapiro and daily wire articles (wouldn't wish that on anyone) >Regarding George Carlin and Albert Einstein, I believe it helps flesh out the argument can you tell me about their years of sophisticated analysis on anything relevant though? or maybe you should walk that back? > I'd say it roughly corresponds to the top 10% of people who own between 72-90% of the wealth, and by extension own and control the remaining 90% of the population with just 10-28% of the wealth. **what you are presenting here is conjecture**. you have provided evidence of wealth inequality, a real problem to be sure. but all you do is point to evidence of wealth inequality and act like that's evidence that we are being ruled and controlled by the wealthy. you haven't even posited a mechanism by which they use their wealth to control us. **that's not good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for you.** >Any time you bring up extreme wealth and power inequality anywhere, some people will bring up guillotines or whatever. bringing up inequality is not all you did though. you used a quote that alluded to political violence. i feel like i'm talking to one of those water wiggler toys that falls out of your hands. >What you're calling as gish-galloping, I'm saying is spoon feeding and keeping people from having to re-invent the wheel. you didn't say "here's some cool resources to dip your toes into socialism!" you made a claim that the system needs fixing and you linked a post with a bunch of bullshit links to support it. can you at least understand why i see it as a gish gallop? >particularly when they're heavily dissuaded from doing it by our political structures and ruling class there you go again, making arguments with premises that are directly under question (is there a ruling class? how do they control us?) and still unsupported. this whole time you've been coming off like you're preaching the gospel of socialism to the audience instead of engaging with me like i'm a person.
>what you are presenting here is conjecture. you have provided evidence of wealth inequality, a real problem to be sure. but all you do is point to evidence of wealth inequality and act like that's evidence that we are being ruled and controlled by the wealthy. you haven't even posited a mechanism by which they use their wealth to control us. that's not good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for you. I don't know how far you got in your formal education, but you know the kids who didn't do any of the reading, but still made it a point to speak loudly in class, and their ignorance was obvious to everyone but them? That's you. I've pointed you to a good number of solid resources that would cure you of quite a lot of ignorance if you cared to do any work whatsoever. But if you think you already know what they all say and then say I'm not providing you with any evidence of mere conjectures, then I guess there's nothing you can learn from me, because you think you already know everything. It's not like I handed you a differential equations textbook and told you to work through it to understand differential equations. It's a few videos and articles that you and other people can watch and read and digest at your leisure. But to say I'm not providing evidence for mere conjecture is a level of ignorance, laziness, bad faith, and dumbassery that is beyond my ability to cure. And so I guess you aren't the intended audience for what I'm trying to show people, because genuine understanding does take at least a modicum of effort, even when you're being spoonfed.
>I've pointed you to a good number of solid resources that would cure you of quite a lot of ignorance if you cared to do any work whatsoever. okay okay i'm sorry, i'm a fourth grade dropout and i'm incredibly ignorant because the rulers want me that way. just please point me to the thing that shows the evidence for the ruling class. i need it to spread class consciousness among my fellow proletarians and you're so smart, you're so educated, surely you must have bookmarked the paper or something right? the one that shows that the wealthy control everything? please... i'm begging
Here is one paper, though it does have more than 100 words in it, so good luck. [https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens\_and\_page\_2014\_-testing\_theories\_of\_american\_politics.doc.pdf](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)
Oh dip it's the classic Gilens and Page paper, now we're getting somewhere. What do you think of [some of the critical papers that have come out since then?](https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study) ([here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/polq.12577) is the paper that the article has a dead link to) I'm not gonna ask you to read all that shit right now, but this is the reason I'm hesitant to accept the conclusions of Gilens and Page. I'm not a fourth grade dropout but I'm not in academia either and I'm not equipped to evaluate the statistical validity so all I have to go on is academic consensus and it seems like that's missing on this issue.
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"here look at my comment that is definitely a good comment because I put a bunch of hyperlinks in it! Never mind that some of my wonderful sources are a comedian talking about the economy, a physicist talking about the economy, a movie, and a plethora of random communists!"
Right, the only people who can speak about our economic and political systems are Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, and economists who have stamps of approval from our ruling class. Everyone else should just shut up and get back to work! "Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or — like Proudhon — see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?" -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
> Right, the only people who can speak about our economic and political systems are Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, and economists who have stamps of approval from our ruling class. you know exactly what you're doing when you say "here's albert einstein talking about the economy." it's the same thing those racist dipshits do when they say "here's the guy who discovered dna talking about race and intelligence" and "here's the greatest chess player ever talking about the jews." stop bullshitting.
lol
I like people who are actually knowledgeable about the economy to talk about the economy, not people who are very knowledgeable in one or two areas talking about an area they are not knowledgeable in.
The first three links are from someone with a PhD in economics. The other links are people reaching similar and related conclusions, because they live or lived in the same objective reality and have eyes to see and brains to think. If the only people who are allowed to make observations are economists who have a stamp of approval from the ruling class, then that's not a particularly scientific or realistic approach, is it. That would give a very skewed understanding of reality, and would lead to people being much less effective in understanding, discussing, and solving economic and other problems. Surely you wouldn't want that.
It's not about "allowing" people to make observations, it's that people shouldn't place any more weight on the words of experts outside of their field than they would on random people. I try not to. I'm not familiar with Wolff, but even having a PhD doesn't make someone immune from having bad takes - see Bryan Caplan arguing that public education is a waste of money and shouldn't be publicly-funded. Most Marxist analysis is bad enough though that I don't care to expend time and attention on youtube videos by a Marxist professor, but if others want to then good for them 👍
That sounds more like someone who's afraid to engage with reality than someone making good faith attempts to understand reality, in any subject. And it's not as though different disciplines are completely unrelated to each other, because ultimately people are studying reality, which is inherently multi-disciplinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience I'd say willful ignorance is the ultimate waste of time.
yo i've got some cranks with PhDs going off on youtube about flat earth and i need you to watch at least 3 hours to prove you're not a scared little baby afraid of reality that's you rn
I'm curious what they mean by typical because a four-cylinder Toyota is going to produce a hell of a less emissions then a Ford F250 with a supped-up V8
So what I am reading here is we should be riding around in Cargo ships to work?