this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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You're not using your bed right now. Are you letting a homeless person sleep in it?
That's not a contradiction. Your, my, and everyone's bed is for sleeping in. The beds in that store are for accumulation of wealth. This displays the harsh efficiencies of capitalism, because the people in the most need for a bed cannot afford to have one.
I belive the beds in a store that sells beds are either to be sold or to help you choose a bed. They are not "fuck you, see how many beds i have" beds
It'll probably be sold at a discount too since it was for display
For probably still more money than street sleeping homeless guy can afford of we are being honest.
Right but equally it's not the mattress company's job to accommodate the homeless person. It's not like they didn't have to pay an inflated price from the manufacturer so if they sold it for the price of the materials they'd probably make a loss.
No of course not. I'm not saying that the homeless guy should be in the store, I'm saying it's out of his reach even for the floor model.
100%. I have yet to see somewhere that sells display furniture/appliances at full price, usually they knock some off due to shop guests messing around with it, wear and tear
Ew, they would sell you a display bed? Seems, unhygienic.
I mean I don't even wanna know how often the average person changes their sheets, let alone their mattress. My parents have mattresses in spare bedrooms older than me.
Honestly though, display beds aren't as scary to me as hotel beds
SPARE BEDROOMS?!! By this you mean they have beds to spare and yet are not allowing unhoused individuals to sleep in them?? How very dare they. Guest rooms should be illegal. Everyone with a bedroom to spare gets a mini homeless shelter in their house.
I mean... that is what early Christians would do. They were radically giving and selfless. They would unironically feed and shelter the homeless.
It was as shocking then as it is now.
How would you ironically feed and shelter the homeless?
Gen Z volunteering.
Never been on tiktok, huh?
The Romans never crucified anyone for saying "screw the poor."
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism works. It very much is a "fuck you look at our expensive shit" society.
To that homeless person, yes that's exactly what a mattress store is.
That's what everything everywhere is. Many folks in communist countries lack things others have too.
Only in a hypothetical utopia could all persons have all things equally.
Especially because unless you've solved the limited resources problem, then even in a utopia you're still going to have to have something like money, and therefore you will still have things that some people have that other people don't have.
What essential resources are so limited that we can't provide them to everyone based on need?
Define 'limited.' Because limits include trained manpower, right? There's only a certain amount of that. Our ability to provide certain drugs for everyone who might need them are limited by the number of people trained to make them. This is true of virtually any industry. It is as limited as the number of people who can make it usable. And that is usually not an 'anyone can do this' issue.
Labor of any stripe is abundant. In an economy that doesn't prioritize profit, people would be able to pursue specialized jobs that they want to contribute towards. For example, after the modernization of the USSR, they had the most doctors of any country in the world and healthcare was made accessible for millions of people. Our growth as a society is limited by the amount of cooperative labor we have available, but it's not a limited resource.
In contrast, capitalism is reliant on a reserve pool of labor to keep wages down. If someone remains in the reserves for too long, they become homeless because every aspect of life has been commodified.
I'm not talking about labor, I'm talking about specialized labor. Which is limited not just to numbers but to numbers willing to be trained in that field.
Which specialized labor do you think would be in short supply in a non-market economy?
I gave a specific example already.
Pharmacology? It's a science like any other. Pharmacists talk constantly about how their wages are actively being depressed because of intentional understaffing. The hypothetical you're presenting is a reality under capitalism.
Most pharmacists dispense drugs, they don't make drugs. You are being disingenuous.
That's due to supply chain efficiencies to make labor and medication cheaper to make. Pharmacists are trained in making medicine.
No it isn't. It's due to training. You can't just walk into a production facility and start making Zoloft. And there is absolutely no guarantee that you will get enough people trained to know how to make Zoloft to keep up with demand. Because that, in part, is based on people's willingness to work in a Zoloft production facility.
So unless you're talking about forced labor, that is an example of supply not necessarily meeting demand.
Zoloft is mass manufactured in vats that produce thousands of pills each. Unfortunately the pharmacists that created Zoloft for Pfizer probably didn't see a lot of benefit from it. Zoloft saw supply chain issues in the pandemic because of "just in time" supply chain practices.
I feel like you're imagining boutique drugs in this conversation. Boutique drugs are made onsite, typically in small pharmacies that specialize in making that drug, and are made for extremely rare conditions. I think people would flock to the field to solve all sorts of conditions that effected them or someone close to them
Which things? Because all historical sources show that the bottom 10% had all the bare necessities for life. They didn't have luxury apartments, but they had a roof. They weren't eating steak every night, but they had more caloric input and healthier diets than US citizens.
Hit me
How do you feel about a CIA report on behalf of the department of agriculture? https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf
I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll edit this comment if I find more relevant information, but so far I’ve only found one paragraph related to food inequality, and it seems to disagree with you:
The problem isn't lack of shelter. There's enough shelter available for the homeless. They just choose not to use it because it comes with rules like no drugs and (often) no pets.
No there's not enough shelter available for the homeless. Shelters have occupancy limits and especially in the US most states do not have enough space. Some states have less than half the beds needed to shelter their states homeless population. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/#homeless-assistance-in-america