iYuck: Sour Apples

[maiforpeace]

Capitalists are duty bound to maximise shareholder value. If that means poisoning chinese workers, thats just the way it is.

Then I would separate "capitalists" from the greater body of "businessmen". A storekeeper in the Old West, whose biography I read long ago, reflected that in 50 years of doing business with the people in his town he had never felt the urge to accumulate more wealth than he could use. His family was provided for and he left a modest sum behind him, in the form of life insurance, and was content.

And tradesmen and craftsmen. People who actually do something productive for their profits. Rentier capitalism is a term I've recently come across which separates the two. Here's an interesting blog-post about how capitalism has changed over time, and how "immaterial property", copyrights etc, are becoming to dominate western economies, possibly bringing us back to rentier capitalism.

Interesting...I saw a similar blog or article about this subject...they called it 'excavational' capitalism or some such thing. Capitalism that only takes and doesn't give back.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The modern capitalist isn't part of the community.

[Ronja]

Capitalists are duty bound to maximise shareholder value. If that means poisoning chinese workers, thats just the way it is.

Then I would separate "capitalists" from the greater body of "businessmen". A storekeeper in the Old West, whose biography I read long ago, reflected that in 50 years of doing business with the people in his town he had never felt the urge to accumulate more wealth than he could use. His family was provided for and he left a modest sum behind him, in the form of life insurance, and was content.

And tradesmen and craftsmen. People who actually do something productive for their profits. Rentier capitalism is a term I've recently come across which separates the two. Here's an interesting blog-post about how capitalism has changed over time, and how "immaterial property", copyrights etc, are becoming to dominate western economies, possibly bringing us back to rentier capitalism.

His other blog post on "Anti-Star Trek" was even more interesting IMO - and seriously hair-raising, too.

[Rum]

Capitalism, almost by definition is about exploitation surely? The Brits more or less invented it by importing dirt cheap cotton from the East and paying dirt cheap wages to mill workers to produce slightly more expensive clothes to sell back to the rising middle classes. It has always depended on seeking out cheap resources to exploit to 'add value' when it is flogged on. Fact is eventually either resources run out or else the differential in terms of exploitation gets smaller and smaller. In a way that's what is happening as the emerging economies play catch up with the old first world. We can't exploit their cheap labour any more and they are beginning to buy us out. I noticed just last week that a Chinese company has bought 20% of a British water company for example..

[PsychoSerenity]

His other blog post on "Anti-Star Trek" was even more interesting IMO - and seriously hair-raising, too.

Yes I bookmarked that to read through all of his Anti-Star Trek posts later. This is the kind of thing I've been thinking about for a long time, though the points about intellectual property are something I've only been growing to understand in the last few years. A decade ago I struggled to find anyone who even questioned capitalism. Most people I knew seemed to talk about it as if it was something permanent and everlasting, as if it had always been around, and it had beaten communism and would beat anything else that stood against it too. Nowadays I think a lot more people are seeing that something is not right. I struggle to believe it will last more than a couple decades more. Something has got to give.

[Pappa]

We keep buying into the shit.... we're all responsible for the consequences of modern Consumerist Capitalism. We buy things that are so heavily marketed and branded that we support the unethical labour practices required to make them profitable. We even buy stuff made by slaves, and we keep buying it even after we find out there's a chance that someone may have been trafficked and enslaved just to keep the cost of our chocolate bar nice and low. We know that all the major clothing brands and electronics brands farm their production out to export processing zones that have labour practices and labour laws that would make a Victorian chimney sweep weep with sorrow. But most non-branded items are the same too... do you know where your kid's school uniform was made? No, me neither. Admittedly it's almost impossible to escape the problem, as it's simultaneously ubiquitous and difficult to uncover without a lot of research. It leaves us in a weird situation where we've either got to boycott almost every product sold, or try not to think about it and continue being a part of the problem.

[maiforpeace]

We keep buying into the shit.... we're all responsible for the consequences of modern Consumerist Capitalism. We buy things that are so heavily marketed and branded that we support the unethical labour practices required to make them profitable. We even buy stuff made by slaves, and we keep buying it even after we find out there's a chance that someone may have been trafficked and enslaved just to keep the cost of our chocolate bar nice and low. We know that all the major clothing brands and electronics brands farm their production out to export processing zones that have labour practices and labour laws that would make a Victorian chimney sweep weep with sorrow. But most non-branded items are the same too... do you know where your kid's school uniform was made? No, me neither. Admittedly it's almost impossible to escape the problem, as it's simultaneously ubiquitous and difficult to uncover without a lot of research. It leaves us in a weird situation where we've either got to boycott almost every product sold, or try not to think about it and continue being a part of the problem.

Well of course it's impossible to escape, but you can still be mindful about where you buy things. It's pretty easy to do with food now. Also, I buy a lot of stuff online, so it's fairly easy to research stuff first. You do have to make compromises though...

You don't get as many choices perhaps, or it might be more expensive.

Over the years I've discovered brands that I stick with for items that I buy all the time because I support their mission to use quality ingredients or make conscious attempts to avoid slave labor.
So, for me, anyway, it feels a whole lot better to wear New Balance athletic shoes (an item I buy often enough) over Nikes.

The stuff can get wildly expensive though...my girlfriend and I were looking at coats produced in Bretagne, France, and a common wool pea coat (very nice, and high quality workmanship) was over $400.00

[Seth]

And that's why the world economy is in the shitter.

No, it's why the world economy isn't deeper in the shitter than it is. Left to the Socialists and Progressives, the world economy would have been bankrupt decades ago and we wouldn't have any Apple products at all, and would still be making phone calls with rotary-dial telephones and watching all two channels of television...state-run propaganda channels...we'd all be driving Yugos or Ladas, and nobody would know what a "personal computer" is.

Socialists, Progressives and most of all unions did this to themselves by demanding more than they are actually worth in the marketplace for labor and misusing the power of government to coerce industry into paying inflated wage/compensation packages. Well, capital flows away from taxation and high labor costs like water flows downhill, particularly in a global free-market economy. It's a fact of economics that Socialists and Progressives simply are incapable of understanding because any common sense or basic intelligence has been long ago bred out of them using socialist proletarian eugenics.

Chickens >>>> roost.

[Hermit]

And that's why the world economy is in the shitter.

No,

.

[Clinton Huxley]

Just to address one of Pappa's points - the Mini Huxley's school uniforms were made just down the road

But otherwise, you are basically stuffed. Seth's point is undermined by the fact that, in the West, the incomes of the lower and middle-income workers have stalled or are actually falling, while the wealth of the rich continues to accumulate at the same rate as ever. The problem is not the poor demanding more than they are worth, it is the rich being GIVEN more than they are worth by supine Govts.

Cue the usual billionaire's fan-boy stuff from Seth about how the rich are somehow another species of human, who magically secrete money that the rest of us should be grateful for....

[JimC]

It's so easy to read this thread on my MacBook...

[Clinton Huxley]

It's so easy to read this thread on my MacBook...

Over the poisoned bones of the Chinese dead! Good job my laptop was made in.....oh.

Carry on.

[Ronja]

One partial solution to the excesses of robber-baron style capitalism is prolonging the life of the things we use and also effective recycling.

Two examples:

All party dresses, fine shoes etc. that our kids have ever had have been bought second-hand. What's the point in getting something for the full price, made from new materials and likely in horrid conditions, if it is only going to be worn 1-3 times before the kid grows out of it?

Of the three laptops that we have, two have been bought second hand and refitted with Linux, which is much lighter to run than the newer Windows versions. Now that the hard disk of one broke, MiM made its load even lighter by giving up on Ubuntu and moving to Puppy Linux (files are saved on Dropbox, as before, and now also backed up locally on our newer Linux server). We also recently cleaned up the 5 year old Windows laptop, which I need due to my work, of anything and everything extra, to prolong its working life for 6-24 months still.

Yes, I will need a more powerful dual-boot laptop soon due to work reasons, but instead of buying it 2-3 years ago we have managed to get by until now, which is a consolation for both my conscience and my wallet.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And that's why the world economy is in the shitter.

No,

.

The wank fnoglet could do that automatically. Just sayin'.

[Clinton Huxley]

One partial solution to the excesses of robber-baron style capitalism is prolonging the life of the things we use and also effective recycling.

Two examples:

All party dresses, fine shoes etc. that our kids have ever had have been bought second-hand. What's the point in getting something for the full price, made from new materials and likely in horrid conditions, if it is only going to be worn 1-3 times before the kid grows out of it?

Of the three laptops that we have, two have been bought second hand and refitted with Linux, which is much lighter to run than the newer Windows versions. Now that the hard disk of one broke, MiM made its load even lighter by giving up on Ubuntu and moving to Puppy Linux (files are saved on Dropbox, as before, and now also backed up locally on our newer Linux server). We also recently cleaned up the 5 year old Windows laptop, which I need due to my work, of anything and everything extra, to prolong its working life for 6-24 months still.

Yes, I will need a more powerful dual-boot laptop soon due to work reasons, but instead of buying it 2-3 years ago we have managed to get by until now, which is a consolation for both my conscience and my wallet.

Making do and refurbing things?!! YOU are the reason for the global recession. Get out there and spend, spend, spend!!