> It's simply not economical to recycle most if not all plastics a.t.m..
"It's simply not economical to build a sustainable system right now"
Well too bad then, I guess humanity has to commit suicide because it's the path that consumes the less amount of paper bills with made up numbers on them
The rhetoric on this gets dialed up to 11 immediately, and I don't think it benefits anyone but a very small group of people to do so. This report suggests that views on plastic recycling should be reconsidered, it does not suggest that humanity is going to come to an end unless we _immediately_ solve this problem.
> because it's the path that consumes the less amount of paper bills with made up numbers on them
I don't think people who work for an hourly wage are likely to agree that the numbers are made up. They may have a certain arbitrary quality to them when you consider them at scale, but they aren't made up for the majority of people alive.. and the difference between them means a lot to many people on this planet.
This is what this rhetoric ignores. Single use plastics are an issue. We should reduce them; however, acting as if they are only in use for profit motivations is insane. The next time you go to a hospital, or a dentist, or open up a pack of dental floss consider what else you might use to protect that equipment, those instruments, or your own hygiene products and foods.
We could go back to using waxed paper, but it's inferior for shelf stability, it's not compostable or recyclable, and it's made from paraffin wax which is a petroleum product.
I never go to the hospital, but I sure see my supermarkets tomatoes wrapped in three distinct layers of plastic every day... the other day I even saw pre-sliced apples in plastic bowls with a plastic lid, wrapped in a plastic packaging with a smiley feel good vegan mascot printed on it
We of course need plastic to some extent but we're so far from any kind of reasonable usage
My grandparents didn't have nearly as much plastic and their food was just fine, if anything they ate much less plastic wrapped processed junk, most of what we use it for really isn't necessary or even desirable
> My grandparents didn't have nearly as much plastic and their food was just fine
Did they grow up in the western world? Have you asked them about food borne illnesses and safety and how that's evolved over time? More importantly, have you asked them their opinion on this particular matter?
> the other day I even saw pre-sliced apples in plastic bowls with a plastic lid, wrapped in a plastic packaging with a smiley feel good vegan mascot printed on it
I can't account for where you shop but you should be willing to consider the use of plastic outside of this narrow environment. I assume these foods were brought to your store? How do you suppose they were conveyed there? How far did they come to get there?
Another thing to ask your grandparents.. how do they feel about their grocery options today?
> how do they feel about their grocery options today?
They can barely afford them with their pension
> How do you suppose they were conveyed there? How far did they come to get there?
Yeah it's shipped from overseas, but that's no argument for using plastic, if anything it's an argument for both stopping shipping basic food from 5000km away AND stop plastic all at once. The status quo being fucked up can't be used as an argument to let it rot further
The surplus wealth created by capitalism is the only reason why people have the luxury of giving a damn about the environment in the first place. Maoist China destroyed its forests to make charcoal for low quality iron and killed most of their birds in an attempt to slightly boost grain production. The Soviet Union drained the Aral Sea to grow cotton. The residents of Easter island completely destroyed their environment. They all cared about "short term profits" as much as any capitalist. They simply weren't as good as executing it.
Glad we agree on something. The only use of overly broad and overly vague criticism of capitalism is for an aspiring dictator to motivate the proletariat to overthrow the status quo.
This is standard anti-capitalist logic. Somebody is doing something bad. They're participating in the overwhelmingly dominant economic system of our time (capitalism). Therefore capitalism must be the root of the problem. It doesn't matter that non-capitalists have historically done similar things.
Curiously, they never use the same logic when referring to positive effects of capitalism like a boom in life expectancy and reduction in poverty. That's simply an inevitable consequence of technology. It doesn't matter that the only reason people have the economic means to acquire such technology is due to capitalism.
> Curiously, they never use the same logic when referring to positive effects of capitalism like a boom in life expectancy and reduction in poverty.
Bullshit. I am perfectly happy to give capitalism credit where it works well, and so do most people other than extreme leftists.
Meanwhile, people defending capitalism seem to do this much more often: Capitalism does something good -> all hail capitalism, for it can do no wrong; something bad happens under capitalism? Literally anything else is to blame, specially communists.
I think you may need to unlearn this conversation style before you can participate meaningfully. Vocalising your stereotypes and memorised emotional responses isn't worth much.
Pretending you don't understand what someone means when they talk about profit vs self-preservation in a conversation about environmental concerns is also a conversational style that is not particularly useful.
No. It was a generalised statement attempting to predict how capitalism would react to this particular situation. I wondered what was behind that statement.
> Can you give an example of where someone has prioritised their own profit over their own survival?
Clearly they weren't saying, given the mugger's choice between "your money or your life!", capitalism would have you choose your money. This is about causing environmental destruction for the sake of profit, something that businesses have done and continue to do, endangering our long-term survival as a species. Saying that you don't know what the original poster meant is baffling.
I could, as you seem to have done, totally reworded the original quote to mean something that makes sense to me, but I was curious to hear if the author had anything in his/her mind. I'm pretty surprised at the responses.
Here was the original quote, specifically not talking about the environmnet, but rather as a principle to apply to the environment, for reference:
> If profit and self-preservation are at odds, profit wins.
Why would I bother writing an in-depth explanation of a simple and observable fact.
Capitalism is a system that optimises for a single variable. It is self-evident how this means that any time another variable is inversely proportional to profit, it will minimise this variable. There is also many trivial examples of such cases: Preserving the environment costs money. Therefore, capitalism will do its job and optimise economies to maximise environment pollution.
If you had any worthwhile counter-argument, you would have stated it by now, instead of pretending not to understand my point.
> Capitalism is a system that optimises for a single variable. It is self-evident how this means that any time another variable is inversely proportional to profit, it will minimise this variable.
This isn't what I understand capitalism to be. As I understand it, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services centered around personal property. There is no single variable. Individuals engage in trade freely, and each individual evaluates the value of that trade individually. Each individual uses their own set of values in evaluating the net value they get out of the trade. Under capitalism there is a near infinite set of variables as each market participant is carrying their own set of values into every trade.
> As I understand it, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services centered around personal property.
Not really; that's just a free market, which is linked to but not the same as capitalism.
The core principle of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. It's just that most of the capitalist societies we know do free-market capitalism specifically.
And there absolutely is a single variable: Profit. It's the one and only variable capitalism optimises for, and anything else requires some form of intervention by tying profit to some other variable (e.g. a carbon tax to make greenhouse emissions more expensive, thereby making it more profitable to avoid these emissions); but that's always just an external force steering the market (thereby making it less of a free market), so it's not capitalism itself optimising for environmental preservation over profit.
> Each individual uses their own set of values in evaluating the net value they get out of the trade
On a small scale, this might be true; but we don't live in a world where most capital gets moved around by small businesses with owners that act based on their moral convictions; we live in a world of massive mega-corporations that shouldn't be expected to follow any moral principles, and that's exactly what we observe: they will do literally whatever they can get away with as long as it increases profit.
At the end of the day, CEOs answer to shareholders, and the only thing they care about is how much money they're making and whether they could be getting into legal trouble for it (to some extent, at least).
"Another drawback of capitalism is that it often leads to a host of negative externalities, such as air and noise pollution. Negative externalities are costs paid for by society and not the producer of the externality. A factory dumping waste into a river or emitting smoke into the air is a problem shouldered by the communities that the factory is in, and not the business itself."
I'm not suggesting that negative externalities aren't a thing under capitalism. I'm suggesting parent's definition of capitalism is incorrect. When you define capitalism as a free exchange of goods and services centered around private property, you can see how that quote is misleading at best.
Current humans, on average, place disproportionate value on the things that directly impact them. When they enter into trade under capitalism, they carry that bias with them. This leads to outcomes where individuals (the business in that example) make a decision to improve their standing by dumping waste into a river. But this isn't a shortcoming in capitalism, it's a shortcoming in human nature.
In order for your counter to be complete, you'd need to provide an example of another economic/governing system that humans organize under successfully avoiding those negative externalities. Without that, I don't understand how humans would avoid falling into the same traps under different structures. For example, your quote tells me nothing about how a central planning board under communism responsible for agriculture wouldn't decide to let pesticide run off into a water source in order to deliver the crop yield expected of them. That board is still comprised of humans who are carrying their biases into their interactions.
Right now, at best, my understanding from this conversation is "humans do this under capitalism, therefor humans do this because of capitalism" which isn't a compelling argument.
> In order for your counter to be complete, you'd need to provide an example of another economic/governing system that humans organize under successfully avoiding those negative externalities.
That's a text-book whataboutism. You can't just dismiss the inherent problems with capitalism by just pointing out that other systems have the same or even different problems. That's not the point here. So no, nobody needs to point out a better system.
> For example, your quote tells me nothing about how a central planning board under communism [...]
Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.
> Right now, at best, my understanding from this conversation is
Yes, you're entirely missing the point because you're trying to defend your world view. Somebody points out a problem with capitalism and your first reflex is "well communism is bad too", which tells me all I need to know about your motivation: 0% intellectual honesty and 100% crony belief.
So here's what the actual point of the conversation is: "Capitalism encourages people doing this, that is a problem"
There is no "because", there is no "as opposed to" and there is no "therefore", simply the statement of a problem. One person might see the solution in replacing capitalism with communism, another might suggest imposing additional restrictions on it. But right now, we're just talking about acknowledging a problem instead of completely shutting down and crying about how it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault...
> That's a text-book whataboutism. You can't just dismiss the inherent problems with capitalism by just pointing out that other systems have the same or even different problems.
I’m not sure it’s whataboutism. You’ll need to help me get there.
My stance is that this happens under capitalism. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a problem to solve at the capitalism layer of society. And I’m trying to tease that apart.
I’ll try to restate to help. Let’s start with the argument “capitalism incentivizes this.” I don’t disagree with that. My definition of capitalism was incorrect, as a sibling comment pointed out. My definition is closer to free market capitalism. So I’ll use the siblings definition: “Private ownership of the means of production operated for profit.”
If the single variable is maximizing profit, as you argue, we have to understand why anyone would be incentivized by profit. What value does profit offer an individual? I’d submit that, for most operating under capitalism, it’s what you can do with that profit. I’m sure there are exceptions where folks are racking up points like a video game, but I’d hazard a guess most view profit as a medium of exchange. So they aren’t motivated by profit, they have their own set of incentives for accumulating that capital. I’d also argue most market participants also have non-profit motives (I.e. operating in line with their personal values or directly exchanging goods/services without going through currency as a intermediary, like travel being a perk of the job).
Incentives exist in every system. The things people want to use capital for under capitalism exist when you remove capitalism. Humans still want good food, shelter, and shiny bobbles. If you substitute capitalism for another form of self-organizing, and the problem doesn’t go away, I have a hard time understanding why we’d call out capitalism by name.
I don’t see this as a condemnation of capitalism, but as a problem with how individual humans make decisions. My current mental model for this problem, that I’m asking for your help in updating is: “this is a thing humans do, we’ve (mostly) always done this across time and cultures when societies get big, how do we get ourselves to stop?”
Given my understanding that this is a problem intrinsic to humans on average, the problem is with incentives and how to address individuals making decisions in their own self interest on a small scale (under any form of self organization) not being in line with keeping our ecosystems from collapsing and our societies healthy.
> But right now, we're just talking about acknowledging a problem instead of completely shutting down and crying about how it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault...
No one is doing this. It seems impossible for you to avoid mischaracterise what's being said, so I think it's best to leave this.
Except me, in my first comment, which started this conversation in the first place. Stop trying to convince me of what I'm arguing about, it only makes you look even more like you have no clue about the topic.
> completely shutting down and crying about how it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault it's not capitalism's fault...
I'm saying no one is doing the above.
As I've already said, I don't think you're able to do this. Let's stop.
"But this isn't a shortcoming in capitalism, it's a shortcoming in human nature."
If you can't get wealthy dumping waste into a river under a different economic system the incentive is gone and it shouldn't happen.
"I'm suggesting parent's definition of capitalism is incorrect."
Maybe, but you made up a definition of capitalism.
Capitalism is not defined as a free exchange of gods. Definitions vary but most of the definitions talk about profit as a motive. Your folksy definition leaves out things like ownership of the means of production, capital and labor.
At any rate, your argument amounts to "I declare discussion of capitalism to be limited to this definition I made up." Encouraging people to argue what words mean in the dictionary just seems like derailment.
Giving an example of what you mean is a very simple thing to do. You're saying capitalism will do badly with the environment, as it will always pick profit over survival.
I'm asking for a previous example of this principle that you're stating will apply to the environment.
It does not happen often on an individual scale. In capitalism the timescales of cause and effect are so distant that many people will not even see the consequences in the grand scheme of things.
A simple example would be companies maximizing short term profits to their own demise. Like the online ad business, managers are happily ignoring the fact that bot armies are inflating their numbers. I'm really curious how Google is going to handle that in the future.
"It's simply not economical to build a sustainable system right now"
Well too bad then, I guess humanity has to commit suicide because it's the path that consumes the less amount of paper bills with made up numbers on them