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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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I don't know why, in these discussions, "it's all the fault of corporations!" is treated as though it was a serious argument.
Corporations do one thing: they give us what we want. What we demand, a lot of the time. The fundamental problem is us, corporations are just the abstraction we use to fulfill our needs and desires. Before there were companies, people fought and scrambled for wealth and then displayed it as lavishly as possible, it's just that the means of acquiring and then using that wealth were different. Read up on Romans hosting banquets where slave boys were fed to eels for entertainment while guests fed on flamingos stuffed with hippo brains with a garnish of tiger testicles or whatever, or the Chinese or Indian or Mesoamerican equivalent, and then explain again how all our problems are due to modern corporations.
Yeah, no. When you go to the grocery store to pick out the lettuce for dinner, did you specifically ask for the single use plastic it’s wrapped in, or was that the only option presented to you?
The idea that we as consumers are choosing the only option available on the market is flawed. This extends to the times another option is available, but is two to three times as expensive, such as milk being available in glass but even after factoring out the deposit the milk itself costs double.
When you hook your house up to the electricity grid, are you given a choice of where your power comes from? No. Hell, the majority of the time you’re not even given a choice of what company you get that electricity from.
And before you go in on the “there are other options” I’m just going to flat out ask you what the cost difference is. If I’m living paycheck to paycheck, there’s no way in fuck I’m buying solar panels, or collecting and processing my own rain water, or buying the expensive foodstuffs wrapped in the sustainable packaging.
Pretending the consumer has a choice is a bullshit narrative pushed by corporations that want to pass the blame down to the people who really have no direct way to effect things beyond recycling what they can. Hell, some communities don’t even have recycling.
I chose to go to the grocery store rather than a farmers market.
Farmers markets are not universally available. The closest to me is a 40 minute drive, and while the prices are… usually good, what exactly am I to do during the winter?
It’s a good solution, when it’s available, but by no means is it a silver bullet against the issue of corporations taking shortcuts to save money in the short term, and costing everyone in the long.
Are you kidding me? Not have crops from a country 10s of thousands of miles away deliver deliver super cooled fresh produc at the cost of our planet.
You eat the preservatives like we used to. We should absolutely be getting more produce as locally as possible and as in season as possible.
We live in a collective society so trade and import is totally fine and will happen but everything we want all of the time is not currently sustainable.
Farmers markets don’t operate during the winter months here. Not using a crop for thousands of miles away has no bearing on the fact that I literally can’t utilize a farmers market for 4+ months of the year.
And if you’re really suggesting I buy and preserve/store 4 months worth of food you truly don’t understand what it means to live paycheck to paycheck. You’re essentially saying to throw money at the problem.
You're seriously claiming that doing some pickling or salting in the fall is just too hard and expensive, when people have been doing it for millenia? Salt is under $1/lb in the US, and you can get next-day delivery of pickling jars to your doorstep. Your ancestors would be rolling on the floor laughing at you.
Some pickling and salting? I support a family of 4. Some anything isn’t going to last 4 months, good god. I literally need over a years worth of preserves to last between farmers market availability in the winter. Not to mention the time it would take to process it all.
Look, I’m glad you live in a self sustainable world where you can get months of food for cheap, and have the time to preserve it all. Good on you, you’re doing great.
The idea that millions of people are in the same position is just… insane.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't pickle everything I need for the winter. That's a shitload of work. I go to the grocery store and buy food like everybody else, and just try to make reasonable choices while I'm there.
I just don't fume the whole time about how Safeway is destroying the planet, and suggesting that everything would be great if only they were gone. I deeply appreciate the fact that we've built such an incredibly efficient system of food distribution, and that I can get all the calories I need and more in the form of fresh fruit & veggies even in the middle of the winter, even if I also acknowledge that we really need to tweak it to reduce the damage it's causing.
Point is, corporations aren't generating 99% of global emissions. We are producing 99% of global emissions, by choosing to buy mangos and pineapples from Whole Foods in January instead of pickling carrots and asparagus in September. You can't get rid of the corporations and then live off of tropical fruits without generating any CO₂.
Also, for the record, my grandparents supported a family of 10, and they lived through the winter largely on pickled and canned foods. In the fall, all the wives would get together and pack vegetables into jars every weekend. That was already a huge improvement, because a lot of what they pickled came from the grocery store: their grandparents could only pickle what they could grow. There was a whole room in the basement full of pickles & canned food. It was totally doable then, and it's only gotten easier in the intervening decades.
I mean, here you go: reusable produce bags for you to bring with you to the store, provided by a corporation.
Yes, milk in glass bottles is more expensive: those bottles are expensive to produce, heavy and delicate to transport, and they need a whole infrastructure to collect and return them to the plant. If we insisted on glass bottles instead of cardboard or plastic, things would be more expensive. The problem is that we, the customers are cheap motherfuckers and will, on aggregate, always go for the cheapest option. So that's what companies offer us. If the government banned single-use plastic or cardboard milk cartons, corporations would shrug their shoulders and offer that: they don't care, they make a profit either way, but as long as plastic is an option, corps know that's what we're going to buy because it's $1 cheaper...so that's what they offer us.
Yeah, I'd be totally fine with the government finding ways to break up monopolies like this--including natural monopolies, like power and internet (where infrastructure requirements limit competition). Here's the thing, though: if hydro, wind and coal were all options, and coal was 20% cheaper, what would people pick? We're the problem. Luckily, we're getting close to solar being more efficient than any fossil fuel for power (thanks to greedy corporations rushing to develop the tech for sale).
Right. And in a world where those were the only options, you'd eat less food or live in a smaller home. Making them the only options doesn't make them cheaper, and in some cases, where supply is limited, it will dramatically increase prices.
You want to main exactly the same quality of life you have now, make no sacrifices, and for that to somehow be totally green and sustainable. That's not realistic.
Blaming companies is lazy and self-serving. We're the problem. We've always been the problem. Corporations can't make minor adjustments, at no cost or inconvenience to us, and save the planet. That's ridiculous, and it's a self-serving myth, making them a scapegoat for our sins.
The irony is, it’s exactly the opposite: https://harvardpolitics.com/climate-change-responsibility/
Yes consumers do in fact add to climate change and pollution, of course they do. They still drive their cars, they still take long showers, they still run the AC with a window cracked because reasons.
But the idea that the corporations are just innocent little victims being forced to do bad things with a gun held to their head by consumers is bloody ridiculous.
I'm not saying corporations are innocent. I'm saying they're doing what we demand.
Corporations are just a bunch of people working together, seeking profit. That's it. They're not more moral than the people who work there--and if they're too moralistic they'll fail, because people aren't willing to buy their more expensive products.
I have a lot of problems with corporations, how they're structured, the laws that apply to them (and more importantly, don't). But they're not the core problem, and blaming them is a cop-out. It stops us from taking responsibility, and in the end we're the program: corporations can't even exist unless we're enthusiastically buying and using their products.
I agree with you up to like 80%. We absolutely are the problem. We want produce you can't get in the winter, we want specialty fruits and crops at nearly impossible times, we want and want and want.
And so yes a lot of this current hell is a misery in our own making that we refuse to put down all the things we have collected and decided makes our existence that much better.
But also corporations are also run by people with wants and not all of those decisions are being made with consideration of what the masses want anymore but what the people at the top want. More money, more of the profit share, more cheap labor.
Yeah. Everyone wants stuff. And the masses won't accept the ideas of less easily. But it doesn't help that the top doesn't want equal or fair rules for what they want to do anymore either. So society does what the people want but it doesn't mean that there isn't also a small group doing specifically what they want with a lot more power and no fucks to give about how they do it.
What the people at the top want is money, and the way to get it is by giving the masses what they want.
I agree it results in weird incentives. But blaming corporations exclusively (which is a popular opinion these days) is beyond stupid. We need to acknowledge that we are the root of the problem. The solution to corporate abuses is just for us to make laws to reign them in. In the end, they're just an abstraction.
I'm very suspicious about the motives of people who act like corporations are the only problem. Either they're incredibly naive, or they're just looking for an easy way to ease their own conscience.
They think they solved the singular truth to problems. We secretly suck at problem solving whole being really good at pattern recognition as the hairless apes we are.
It's just an easy wrong answer to come to when you want it to be an easy answer.
But just assuming you could regulate the companies after getting the people to agree is singular focused too. Things are a complicated mess of everyone wanting something different. And using what they have to do it.
And that's so tough to comprehend. No easy answers.
That's bullshit, corporations sell you what they tell you you need, and convince you that you need to change the phone every 2 years, that you need anew car every 5, and that you have to eat the new organic bullshit nutrient rich superfood.
you are not as free to think as much as you think you are (and neither am I... I am not cooler than you)
All of those things are things that are very easy to say no to? I swapped the battery on my phone, I don't have a car but "my" car at my parents house is from '99. I eat food that I like. I'm not saying I'm impervious to bad decisions, or even that these are always bad decisions, but the people who buy a new phone or car every few years its because they like to.
Exactly. It's just people don't want to take responsability for the decisions they are able to make.