flightandsundry:

sinesalvatorem:

catsandcuriosity:

youngblackandvegan:

chillogicalparadox:

watermelioness:

social-cap1tal:

Fun fact: There is no scarcity of food, water, or housing. It’s just distributed excessively to certain people.

I beg to differ but okay…

Nah, it’s true. Just off some quick research, rich countries waste 222 million tons of food per year, which is nearly equal to the amount Sub-Saharan Africa produces in a year. (Source)

In 2009 everyday in the United States, leaking pipes lost an estimated 7 billion gallons of drinking water. (Source)

And in also in the United States, in February of last year, there were about 3.5 million homeless people, yet 18.6 million vacant homes. (Source)

You can “differ” all you want
But facts are facts

GET EM

Fuck, people

Most of this isn’t them being distributed to the wrong people, it’s being distributed in the wrong places.

The reason there’s not much water in the desert but a lot of it in (real) lakes isn’t because capitalism’s bad, man. It’s because the wrong things are in the wrong places at the wrong times.

That wasted food? It’s food going stale because it couldn’t make it to consumers. The water leaking out the pipes? That’s because moving water is actually difficult and not because some Greed Gremlin is licking all the extra water off the pipes. The homeless people who aren’t in the vacant homes? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that most of the homeless people are in cities and most of the abandoned housing is in small towns.

Logistics is important.

Logistics. Is. Important.

Logistics 👏 Is 👏 Important

If there’s one thing I could teach everyone in the world, I think “moving things around is actually hard” might be that thing. Hard on a scale you can’t imagine until you try to do it.

There are millions of trucks on the road around the world trying to make things function and the complexity of their work, all rolled together, is staggering. If they couldn’t all find a way to be in the right place at the right time in under 30 minutes or your money back – well, tbh, people would start dying.

And they don’t do it for the love or the honour or the heroism. They keep us from starving cuz they want that dolla dolla bill, yo. People figure out ways to move corn from one side of the globe to the other because they’re greedy. These people are doing an important job and we want them to do it better and better over time. Until, eventually, the spice flows everywhere.

Which is why I get pissed off every time people forget that this is an actual job. That this is a problem people try to solve. When they say the problem is just that some people have too much.

Because you know what happens when we stop working on the problem of moving things around so we can instead point fingers at the people who are eating too much?

That’s when people starve.

I still think one of the most simultaneously unintentionally hilarious and horrifyng things I’ve heard someone say was when in a chamber debate a ( thought to be somewhat talented)  member said of the motion on socialism (to which she subscribed) that she believed much of economics and finance had been deliberately arranged so as to be so needlessly complex as to obscure the workings of capitalism and stifle criticism, that she couldn’t see why it wasn’t as simple as “we’ve this much food, and this many mouths to feed, let’s just divide it up”.

It suddenly became crystal clear for the first time to many in the chamber how famines start.