[lm28469]

Every week my office restocks on bananas from Latin america

Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore

So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash

This is a simple example

It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness

[orangecat]

So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash

Along with millions of other bananas that got eaten. You're arguing against economies of scale here, and you'll need to show your work rather than dismissing long-distance trade as "madness".

[rakoo]

That's the thing. Under capitalism the only way to measure something is money. Millions of tons could be sold, profit was made, so it's OK to throw away a few tons.

Environment, living and working conditions, resources and materials being taken from non-renewables sources, all of those are unimportant under capitalism, all of those are unimportant with capitalism and are the reason why no one asks themselves whether it's really worth shipping fruits from the other side of the world. Sometimes even by plane.

[jstummbillig]

People did ask themselves. They found, yes, it's worth. You might disagree, but I don't I think the number of rotten bananas a process produces offers any meaningful answer. At best it's a baseline and by itself about as useful as "x people die from y every year". What about it? Is that number supposed to be good or bad and what is the bigger context?

Doing stuff causes other stuff to happen. People die in car accidents, but a lot of death is prevented because we have cars, but then people also die because of pollution or get depressed because of noise pollution, and it keeps goin from there. It's hard. Let's be empathetic with each other, and good, and also think a lot about what is going on.

[philwelch]

The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste. The only industrialized alternative to capitalism was notoriously even more wasteful.

Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.

When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system. That’s how a carbon tax would work. It turns out that the intuitions of would-be central planners are often completely wrong.

The truth is, lots of people do ask themselves if it’s really worth it to ship bananas from Latin America to Europe. They work for the fruit company and their decision is based on the costs and benefits. If there are costs that they aren’t considering, then the solution is to incorporate those costs into the price system, not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.

[imtringued]

Imperfection of humanity? A lack of resource extraction taxes doesn't have anything to do with humanity at large. Any hypothetical society could implement them today and the topic would be over. There is not much more you could do, frankly.

[agalunar]

This may be a bit pedantic, but I think it's worth discussing.

> The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste.

The fact that no economic system yet implemented at scale has eliminated waste does not necessarily imply that waste is unavoidable; we'd need to convincingly show that no such economic system could be possible. Similarly, I don't believe we can conclude that capitalism minimizes waste among all feasible, stable economic systems.

As far as balancing exploration and exploitation goes, it might be argued that we should focus on reaping the benefits of our current economic system and deprioritize the exploration new economic systems, but it's too much at this point (imo) to assert that exploration is futile.

My other thoughts:

• "Capitalism or central planning" is a false dichotomy; there are economic systems besides capitalism that have free markets.

• The goal of capital holders in a capitalist system is not efficiency (in the colloquial sense), but profit – planned obsolescence is perhaps the perfect example of this.

• I agree with you that central planners can be catastrophically wrong, and my current opinion is that incorporating externalities into the pricing system (through taxes) is a good idea. It can be difficult to correctly identify, distinguish, and price externalities; I wonder if a benefit of more local economic systems is that there are fewer externalities (by which I mean, actors experience more of the effects that they cause and impose fewer incidental effects on third parties), which would reduce the number of things we need to manually identify and correct.

[rakoo]

> Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.

This myth has been proven wtong again and again. It assumes that everything is available through a market; if my city doesn't have good cycling infrastructure, where do I put money so it improves ? Where do I find a more efficient justice system and how is its price ?

It assumes that all decisions are taken rationally based on a thorough analysis of the situation. The mere existence (and efficiency) of advertising, and the luxury sector, show that a not insignificant part of decisions are not taken based on self-interest.

It assumes that everyone has enough money to "vote with their wallet". I don't need to tell you how out of touch this assumption is when there is a whole class of people considered poor, aka not able to buy whatever they want/need.

> When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system.

If you take into account how much a system like planet Earth provides and give it a realistic cost you realize it doesn't work. Take the ISS: it's cost around 100 billion dollars and provides the bare minimum for ~10 persons. That means that planet Earth costs at a minimum 10 billion dollars per capita, and that's far from covering it all.

The only thing you can do is have a central system that puts limits on capitalism, by introducing taxes and such. Which exactly means it's not able to handle everything.

> not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.

I hope the arguments people are giving are not making you believe that the only alternative is a central authority acting on feelings. That would be a complete misconstruction of the opposing POV.

[lm28469]

> The only industrialized alternative to capitalism was notoriously even more wasteful

Or eating locally grown stuff that doesn't need to be shipped form the other side of the planet, but when you say that people think you're the mad man... I'm telling you, the whole system is mad, you're just too deep into it to realize, the dissonance would be too strong

[philwelch]

What exactly is your basis for thinking it’s crazy to ship things from the other side of the planet? What cost benefit analysis have you done to come to this conclusion? Or are you just appealing to your own amateur intuitions?

If there’s an ecological cost that isn’t being accounted for, the solution is to adjust policies so the cost is reflected, e.g. via a carbon tax. And I’m sure if we had a carbon tax, we would eat more locally grown food because it would be more cost effective. On the other hand, different parts of the world vary widely in terms of what can be grown there and how efficiently it. It’s a complicated problem that can’t be solved top-down, and certainly can’t be solved by some armchair hippie going “the whole system is mad, man!”

[Cederfjard]

By what system would you ensure that people only eat locally grown food, though?

[missedthecue]

Are you under the impression that Ecuadorians never discard brown bananas?

[kqr]

Right. In a system where people feel forced to work crazy hours in the middle of the ocean; in a system where someone else pays the externalities of petroleum; in a system where the raw materials for a freighter can be dug up by people who may not need to understand why anyone would need bananas shipped to them; in a system rich people have shaped so that it feeds them whatever exotic fruits they desire... only in such a system can shipping bananas to be thrown out be considered "cheap because economies of scale".

Economies of scale means individual suffering turns into statistical noise.

[fallingknife]

Because the environment is so much less polluted and working conditions are so much better in non capitalist countries?

[kqr]

I don't know if there's been a good example of an actually non-capitalist country yet. I'm not a historian, but all examples I can think of have a small class of people owning the means of production. They aren't always the bourgeoisie but sometimes a political elite or dictator's following.

What I can say is that on a more local scale, the non-capitalist systems I've had experience with have been much more pleasant than the ones where a small set of people held most of the power over production.

[fallingknife]

So if there are no examples of non-capitalism to compare too this makes the claim of 'x is caused by capitalism' all the more ridiculous.

[kqr]

There are two ways to make causal claims: by empirics and by theory. That is a theoretical claim, not an empirical one. Ideally we should have both.

[robocat]

Can you name a mostly capitalist country? Most countries have a significantly socialist element, greater than 30% of the economy.

For example, the government sector makes up a third of New Zealand GDP. https://www.statista.com/statistics/436523/ratio-of-governme...

Also if you look at how you “spend” your own time you might find that a lot of it is not on purely capitalist hours, but instead time is spent on hobbies, sports, children, friends, family and other pursuits that would be regarded as non-capitalist.

Edit: I would be regarded as a capitalist within New Zealand (I am a successful founder, I don’t much believe in agricultural/industry subsidies), but I would be regarded as on-the-left in the US (I’m generally supportive of government health systems and social equality).

[lm28469]

They're virtually all playing the capitalist game, slapping "communist" in your country/government name isn't enough

[AlbertCory]

I actually see a food bank "gleaner" regularly at my Safeway. Bananas with any black spots at all are considered unsaleable, although they're perfectly edible.

So long before they turn all black, they're taken to the food bank and given away to whomever wants them at their central location. If a banana does make it all the way to black, it means someone bought it and then didn't eat it.

There is actually competition among the food banks for supermarkets' unwanted food. One will go to the supermarket manager and ask for their unwanted food and get told "Sorry, we're already giving it to Second Harvest."

It isn't only produce. The gleaner regularly fills up his car with breads, milk, and lots of other stuff.

[hypertele-Xii]

This is a failure of your office, not of the logistics network. The bananas arrive just fine, why does your office stock so many they go bad?

I eat plenty banana and almost never throw any away. And when I do, the reason is never "because I didn't eat it in time".

[bm3719]

You can take them home to add to your compost bin. Then you can put this excellent and free compost in your garden.

[delusional]

In that case we shipped literal dirt around the world so that he could put it in his garden. Is that any less absurd?

[imtringued]

It is kind of odd how we ship grains and soybeans farmed in the rain forest to a factory farm in the US and then end up with huge poo lagoons that in theory would have to be shipped back to the farms in the rain forest to act as fertilizer. Instead people just abandon the land and continue with their slash and burn agriculture on a different plot of land.

[spookthesunset]

What do you propose as an alternative?

[_hcuq]

Eat locally grown food?

[karaterobot]

This may come as a surprise, but there's plenty of wastage in locally shipped produce too. It's not so much the distance as the act of picking things and putting them into boxes, and taking them out of boxes again that does it.

[jimbobimbo]

So, no banana for you, eat potatoes instead?

[lm28469]

You haven't tried the vast majority of fruits, veggies, meats, fishes out there and I'm sure you don't feel like you're life is miserable because of it

[lm28469]

I don't know if you're sarcastic or not, because this is exactly what I mean by using a monetary scale. It's free to me but it still is an incredible waste of energy, time and ressources

[bm3719]

I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting.

Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.

[bitwize]

Blackened bananas can also be frozen and used later to make banana bread.

[kortilla]

The economies of scale make this nearly no different than you wasting a locally grown banana. Very little energy was spent on that particular banana to get it do you.

[drexlspivey]

Alternative: You’ve never eaten a banana because they don’t grow in Europe. How does this measure in the absurdity scale?

[lm28469]

Who cares, I haven't tried the majority of fruits, vegetables, meats out there, I'm fine

Life isn't a race to consume everything as much and as fast as possible

[Cederfjard]

A lot of people would care, that’s the issue. Even if you personally have achieved an enlightened state where you’re perfectly able to voluntarily forego trying to do and acquire things that are contributing to an unsustainable society, it doesn’t mean that you can extrapolate from that and construct a stable system where everyone else does the same.

Human beings are greedy and shortsighted, and they especially want to have more than the people they surround themselves with. Any sustainable solution will need to take this into account.

[philwelch]

It’s not like each individual banana was artisinally grown in a flower pot. They literally grow on trees.

[lm28469]

And petrol grows in the soil so I guess we're all right then

I took a single banana as an example, now think about the millions of animals we slaughter every year which end up straight to the bin etc.

It's like cars, a single car is fine, 1.4 billion cars are not, I think most people just don't comprehend the scale of it all

[philwelch]

Petrol does not, in fact, “grow” on human timescales.

[yellow_postit]

I can recommend “The Fish that Ate the Whale” [1] — this race against time for bananas is a tale told over many different phases of shipping.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166586-the-fish-that-a...

[onos]

I don’t like the waste but I also like bananas. Not sure what to make of your example.

[karaterobot]

I apologize for my ignorance: under what economic system do a small fraction of bananas not get bruised during shipping? Sign me up!

[MRtecno98]

Yeah it's called efficiency, which you can never have 100% of