I don’t mind having a lot of different hot sauces. What I mind is “financial innovation” like debt-backed securities, and “tech innovation” like tracking people as they browse the web.
The point is we’re getting “innovation” at the expense of people. That person says they have no teeth because they can’t afford dental care in America since for-profit healthcare is another feature of capitalism.
I find it beyond infuriating that dental isn’t even considered healthcare per se. It requires entirely separate “insurance,” all of which is hot garbage. I need my wisdom teeth out, because they never fully erupted and now they’re rotting in my gums. I shred my cheeks eating because I can’t afford the $5,000 they quoted me for an oral surgeon. My dental “coverage” only pays out a max of $2,000 annually so I just deal with it and pull out the chunks as they break off.
$5000?!! That is insane.
In the UK, dental care isn’t free (unless you’re below 18, a student, unemployed, pregnant, have been pregnant in the past year, or there is a serious risk to your wider health), but it still caps out at £307 for the most serious dental work. Most people here are furious about it costing anything at all.
Though getting prompt dental care has been way harder after the COVID backlog…
And $5,000 isn’t even out of range. Kids needed a couple fillings? $1,000 with insurance. Grandma needs a root canal? $1600 with insurance and Medicare.
It’s a huge fucking racket and the fact that it still exists decades after Obamacare is extremely frustrating
This is one of the forms of alienation Marx talked about. Products aren’t made because they’re good or needed, but because they’re profitable
Well, the point is also that it’s not useful innovation. Profit is prioritized, not utility. Sometimes that results in useful innovation, but frequently it results in potentially useful innovation being avoided because it’d cost too much with a low chance of return on value.
But there are plenty of other capitalistic societies where health care is covered for all like Canada. You can reign in capitalism and manage it and have socialism in the same system. The issue in the USA is not capitalism, it is out of control capitalism.
It’s cronie capitalism. We don’t actually have a free market and we don’t get actual competition.
Exactly. Blaming the issues we are seeing on Capitalism is not blaming the root cause.
I never understood why everyone blames capitalism, when almost all of the places they spout as being great…are built with capitalism money…
Right and further, when you look at the people complaining about capitalism and ask them if they shop ethically…you know making sure their coffee beans are fair trade, their clothes makers are paid a living wage, their veggies are picked by those fairly compensated etc etc let alone slave labour in the mix, they almost always look like a deer in the headlights. They say they hate capitalism but they seek the lowest price therefore they reinforce the behaviour they hate.
Nailed it. I don’t eat fast food anymore because of the cost. I’ll order out from a local restaurant because it’s a few bucks more than fast food at this point, and I usually get my meal quicker. Panda Express? Nope… I’m going to the local Chinese place and getting double the food for the same cost and the Chinese immigrants there are awesome people who make bangin’ food.
we have capitalism in europe, but also healthcare. this just proves america bad, but not capitalism bad.
Healthcare in Europe has been eroded for decades. In my country healthcare basically covers very bad conditions,.such as cancer, chronic conditions, such as diabetes, or degenerative conditions, such as MS.
Often, medical intervention fails to take into account quality of life or the psychological consequences of illnesses.
For instance, my late father was diagnosed with a lung cancer and he was sent home without a pain management protocol.
So, long story short: capitalism bad in the long run.
Not true at all. Your country is just sold to the highest bidder. Don’t pretend you are a democracy. Don’t pretend you are a capitalism society.
Please admit you are a slave of your corporate masters and that they need you toothless. It’s called a corporatocrazy (sic.).
Europe has 418 hotsauces (incl from USA and Cuba) and nobody needs to have toothpain (but replacing them with expensive implants may require more money as average person has)
Corporations being in control of a nation is the ultimate goal of capitalism. So I think I will call the U.S. a capitalistic society. One which has come very close to reaching that goal.
Capitalism is an economic system. Extreme capitalism leads to corporatocracy like the US, which makes it a political system.
I don’t even think we disagree on anything… You are just confusing words/symantics
Nope, not true. Capitalism in its base is just the fact you are free to exchange with others.
Businesses should not be allowed human rights. And especially not to influence politics (even if through third and such parties like lobbyists and superpacs)
That’s not what capitalism is. People have been exchanging things long before the 1600s. Capitalism is about allowing private interests to own a state’s productive capacity for the purposes of profit.
Hahahahahahahahaha no.
You are conflating commerce with capitalism. They aren’t the same things.
F u tanky moron. Extremists are always bad Left wing as much as extreme capitalism.
I’m not a tanky.
You’re still conflating capitalism and commerce.
They’re right though. Freely trading goods and services is commerce, and an economy based on commerce is a market economy.
Capitalism is specifically a market economy where the means of production are owned privately by an investor class, who increase their wealth exclusively by “profit”: a discrepancy between the value the workers in a company contribute, and the compensation paid to those workers (Price- Cost [including wages] = Profit).
There are non-capitalist market economy models. Like market socialism, in which economic production is still generated by private companies in a free market, but those companies are owned by the workers themselves rather than by non-employee shareholders.
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You’re wrong, and you don’t know you’re wrong.
If you care at all that you might be wrong, you would read David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and learn more about this.
But you won’t, because this is the Internet.
My take away from that book is that we should fight the oligarchy to demand the re establishment of a Jubilee.
You seem unclear on what capitalism is.
Capitalism isn’t necessarily EXTREMIST. I can be limited, actually it IS in ALL COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. however, in some shithole countries like the US of aholes, it’s limited in the wrong ways because of lobbyists and meek population being distracted by bread and games.
Speak for yourself. The Netherlands still has seperate dental insurance, and even those don’t cover everything, fixing your teeth can still cost a lot here, and minimum wage people stopped going to the dentist.
You can easily afford getting an extraction in Holland. Not in us.
and one mega corp owns all 27
And it’s PepsiCo.
A publicly traded company with 64% of shares owned by Nestle
So much innovation 😍
Do you have a reliable source to back up any of this? 🤔🤔
Search engines exist. Pretty easy to find facts from a large number of different sources. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jul/14/food-monopoly-meals-profits-data-investigation
That’s assuming that those brands aren’t just one or two actually different sauces from the same couple of suppliers
It’s Nestlé all the way down.
A lot of them used to be different businesses. But capitalism gotta capitalism and the largest companies bought out all the smaller ones like Agar.io for rich people.
Same with media too. Remember when Marvel, Lucas Films, and 21st Century Fox all used to be their own things?
Innovating exciting new ways to replace ownership with rentals/subscriptions and giving you less while charging you more
Mhm. Ask all the scientists whose work has been suppressed by corporations claiming IP but not doing anything with it because it competes with their main product lines. Ask those whose work would be of wide public interest but is paywalled by the for-profit journals they’re required by their institutions to publish in.
The ‘capatalism breeds innovation’ thing is a massive lie. In reality, brilliant people drive innovation, and capitalism beats them to death then scavenges their corpses.
eta: This applies to the military version of this argument, too. No, the military doesn’t drive innovations and achievements; it hides them from the public so that society is constantly two or more decades behind what’s possible. Again, people are doing it, but we’re not allowed to benefit from many things until they have no real strategic value. It’s bonkers to think about. Even more bonkers to realise we’re paying them to do this to us.
🍿 🥤 🍬
I’m ready for the show to start
Turns out it was just a circle jerk. But I guess that’s a show, too, though. So, hooray!
To be fair, you could enjoy all 27 brands of hot sauce without teeth.
Or without a mouth!
I think a lot about how venture capital spends billions on companies that send gifs over the Internet, and how that money could have been spent on, say, anything useful.
Is innovation fundamentally/inherently a good thing? Are things that drive innovation fundamentally/inherently good?
I’m starting to feel like 98% of what we call “innovation” is really just trial and error as capital owners try out methods of extracting the wealth of the working class. Like some dudes in suits said “lets make 5 new hot sauce flavors and make this profit graph go up”, or “This year we’ll see if big bags and platform shoes are more effective at increasing profits”, or “this new drug will allow people to eat like shit and still live long enough to continue to consume”.
The remaining 2% of real innovation are things that help people and fix damage caused by the other 98%.
While you can debate if “the good ol days” were better…innovation has completely changed the would multiple times in the last 30-40 years. We are likely in the most innovative time in human history and not just for multiple hot sauce flavors.
Completely changed the world in ways that I now am forced to trade most of my life for survival money, have little access to many of the innovations, and that have caused massive irreparable damage to the planet we all share.
My claim is that about 2-5% of those innovations, the basic science, the innovations that enable those with poor vision to see, the victims of accidents to heal, those that enable us to share high quality audio and video reproductions, and speak to friends and family too far travel and a few others are the good ones and the rest are unneeded waste that causes more problems than they solve that came about to take our money.
This is why I like Solarpunk, it’s about the simple life using technology that helps and discarding the rest. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should when it comes to technology and innovation.
Because of a few with high ambitions and low empathy, we are all forced into a rat race. Having a desire for innovation does not mean it’s ok to force others to innovate.
You are saying you have little access to these innovations, on the Fediverse, probably wirelessly on a touch screen? The world was extremely different 30 years ago, but the slow transition may have made it not so easy to notice.
Cell phones, and not anything close to the modern type, are only 50 years old. Internets closer to 30… Social media/Fediverse is a little more than 20…
Also, if you think people weren’t working to survive before modern day, I recommend you learning a little more about history. We are generally in some of the easiest living times, even if it feels the hardest. Everyone’s stories different though, so your time could be harder than thousands of years of people before you so I’m not trying to take away… but just speaking in generalities.
But 100% agree we should be focusing on the planets health.
“Innovation” is not necessarilly improvement and “New” is not necessarilly better, and I say this as somebody who has spent most of his career at or near the bleeding edge of Tech.
I even get the feeling (from myself and from comments I read sometimes) that techies who do or did bleeding edge stuff and with a few years behind their backs, like me (so, not the bright-eyeds naive young ones who haven’t seen much yet and which the industry uses as fuel), are less prone to be technology early adopters than the average person exactly because we’ve seen a lot of brand-new innovative glittered turds sold on hype, not on genuinelly being a good thing.
Just be glad you didn’t die from eating the the pink sauce.
Why would you bring craft hot sauce into this mess? They don’t deserve that
Capitalism for things you want, Socialism for things you need
Business opportunities like dentures and anti acids are only the beginning!
Image Transcription: Twitter
swizz keats @iluvbutts247
~capitalism breeds innovation~ yeah for sure bro i love having 27 brands of hot sauce and no teeth
