Meanwhile people living in literal deserts are draining the water table to grow lush green lawns and fill swimming pools …
And powering chatbot training datacenters
Saudi Arabia has to grow their Alfalfa somewhere
I legit had a roommate who would sit in the bath with the water running for hours because he didn’t have to pay for it
That sounds like a symptom of depression, not a consequence of free utilities
He was studying in the bath.
Watch out for Moaning Murtle
He will pay for it, but so will everyone else when the rent goes up to accommodate. People really think that our whole economic system could change without changing attitudes toward consumption. You can’t really have one without the other.
Maybe that’s the reason he gave, but I’d bet it had more to do with his mental disorder.
Did you do the same thing?
Yeah I agree with the post but doesn’t take into account trolls which unfortunately do exist.
I think he’s an outlier
And if Showers Georg here does it in an apartment block of 100 and not one of 8 then it probably won’t even be noticeable as part of the overall bill. Statistically there’s probably also someone in there that bathes twice a week, or families that use just as much water over the course of the month.
Meaning “presence in blood.”
is the powerhouse of the cell.
A man had free water in his house. This is what happened to his brain.
A Lemmy user watched 100 Chubbyemu Videos in one night, this is what happened to his/her hippocampus
yep. also people wont do any work if they dont have to because all their needs are met. this is why all rich people are retired.
this is why all rich people are retired.
Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society.
Functionally retired.
You see it all the time among Tech plutocracy, with Bezos’s Venice Wedding and Zuck’s endless home construction.
ok but elon musk works like 100 hours a day, so
And is still homeless
Aka the entirety of formula one (or any major sporting league really)
And don’t want us to have a 4-day week or work remote.
Having good health care means you just consume as much medicine as you can. I get vaccinated every day, I own 500 pairs of glasses, and all my teeth have been root canaled
Something interesting about this is that Bourgeois neoclassical economics manages to acknowledge that people won’t simply consume greedily, even if things are free.
Marginal Utility asserts that people will only consume commodities such that they satisfy some want or need. If I’m hungry, I’ll buy a banana, maybe a bunch to have later.
But my hunger won’t drive me to buy 800 bunches in one go, because that many bananas has a deminishing return in their marginal utility to satiate my hunger.
If that’s true, it doesn’t require market mechanisms for the distribution of goods and services to continue being true. Re: your healthcare example
With food, in particular, the value is in the supply chain not the ability to horde individual commodities. I don’t want 800 bananas, but I do want a banana stand on my corner where I can get fresh bananas daily.
In theory, markets are supposed to organically generate these social amenities and price them at the prevailing wage rate for the community, such that individuals bid into/out of existence goods and services through a pseudo-collective “expressed demand”.
In practice, choke points in the supply chain create opportunities for arbitrage and price fixing. So goods that should be cheap and abundant - like fruit - suddenly become expensive and scarce when a single enormous conglomerate (like the United Fruit Company) holds a vertical monopoly on the commodity.
This artificial scarcity is then used to justify price-rationing of the commodity. And pretty soon you’re selling people $500 Bijin Hime strawberries in a Japanese mega-mall, while working class people can’t afford basics.
I do chemo recreationally
I’ve gotten 17 fresh new hip replacements since I was 8.
I didn’t replace them, I just added them. I now have 19 hips. They don’t lie.
I get vaccines for diseases that don’t even exist… Everyone has the small poxs vaccine but I also have medium poxs and even large poxs vaccination.
I will say one I don’t recommend is I got the mumps vaccine so I figured I should get a dumps vaccine… It just made me really constipated.
/s this is a joke, yes get your vaccines but only ones for real diseases…
Jokes aside, “great pox” is siphilis. I don’t know if there a medium pox…
If you have both does siphilis and small pox does it become mega or epic pox?
I’d rather not find out!
This reads like an excerpt from a Roald Dahl book.
Unironically did get my son the measles shot three months early, because he was starting daycare.
He still needed to get shots at 1 year and 18 months, but it let me sleep a little easier
Good idea with the spread these days.
There’s actually limits on the frequency you can do stuff. From somewhere that has mostly feee healthcare.
I think they’re being sarcastic
Talking to a lot of Americans that is what they think though.
I know this is a joke but… Communism doesn’t mean “free stuff”. Probably the opposite of what this joke implies, it’s communal ownership. You wouldn’t waste water if you felt it was your water. People waste water when they feel it’s someone else’s water (government, landlord).
I know it’s not really your point, but I don’t think this is about homeowners. I’ve never paid for water (or behaved like this) in a rented apartment. Unless you have a well, you often do have to pay for municipal water if you own the property. Even with a well, you’re paying for any filtration based on usage.
I wasn’t talking about homeowners. I just reused the water example. In an ideal communist society, you’d still need a way to prevent people from overusing the communal resources.
If one cut out the profit motive, people may be less inclined to waste some resources. i.e. not growing unneeded food in the desert. It would not reduce some wastage due to other motivations. i.e. I won’t have access to this tomorrow, so I shall use it for non-productive usages today.
I mean yeah but theres a silver lining because people are extemely wasteful with water where its easily available. This is solved by raising awareness and education which is obvious but its important to remember the whole picture. A functioning society is a delicate balance of a million different factors. I am an optimist tho and believe that one day well find that balance.
This is solved by raising awareness and education
Not sure that’s possible. Despite decades of trying, they continue running marathons everywhere for raising awareness of breast cancer, because apparently people still aren’t aware. If it hasn’t worked for breast cancer, then how will it work for water? Giving up on humanity might be the best move here.
Pretty sure they meant through the public education system
Can I summarize to clarify your point? Fun runs haven’t solved breast cancer, so it’s probably best to give up on humanity? Is that accurate?
Are people unaware of the general idea of “breast cancer”? I had assumed the presence of informational campaigns were either for encouraging testing, or a way to fund-raise with a nebulous goal.
They call them breast cancer awareness walks/runs, not support campaigns or fundraisers. Campaigns for the latter would be a good idea as soon as they nail down awareness. 🙃
Water isn’t free, though?
At my last place water was included with rent. Technically not free, but not metered, so using more didn’t cost more.
Where is water not metered??
If you’re on a well, it’s just a small electrical expenditure
If you’re not, it’s just a small water bill expenditure. None of which are free.
I mean it was, just not for me. It was a townhome in a row of connected townhomes with an HOA. Water was paid by the HOA, and an estimate was budgeted into the HOA fee, which was passed on to me through rent. The point is that what I paid was not affected by my usage.
Right so the water was meteted and being paid for–it wasn’t free.
Not for me though. Using no water at all would not have decreased my payment. Using 10x as much as normal would not have increased my payment. I did not have the option to opt out of or reduce the HOA fee.
Functionally, that’s “free”, so far as it affects usage habits. Kinda like universal healthcare, “free” at point of service.
Whatever you say bud.
The same thing I’ve said from the beginning?
In your situation the cost was likely built in and your were paying more than it cost. If you ever exceeded the cost, your agreement would have changed.
Your situation is increasingly less common…it’s basically a legacy thing where landlords don’t have separate meters for their tenants.
Was going to say- I’ve always had to open my own account with the water company to provide water to my apartment. Definitely not folded in.
I don’t think they had any meters on individual units, they had no way of knowing who was using what, so no basis to change the agreement. I’m not saying it’s common, I’m just saying it’s a situation that exists.
they had no way of knowing who was using what
I think u/MyMindIsLikeAnOcean’s point was that the landlord would change things if the cost got high enough. For example, water usage of $10K per month would prompt the landlord to get those meters added.
For example, water usage of $10K per month would prompt the landlord to get those meters added.
Our more likely, raise everyone’s rent to cover the excessive water use.
This thread is the funniest shit.
I’m new here; seems like a lot of people are taking this seriously even though it’s obviously a sarcastic post. Am I doing it wrong or are people just getting wooshed?
Yeah, lots of people seemed to miss the point entirely
I don’t like this argument because it concedes the premise that communists want to make everything free, which we do not.
I keep thinking of one of the old videos I saw.
“…I dunno, maybe we should get rid of all of the landlords!”
“But who would we then pay rent to?”
I was, like, holy shit, things are so much more complicated than I even realised, everything is based on some dumb suppositions or some shit.
Dude, to have autonomous and critical thinking is not that common. There are a lot of people living because of yes and like zombies, they don’t care about almost anything on their lives, they work because they feel cold and hunger but nothing else. TBH they deserve to be treated like cattle, because they are.
What
tl;dr There are a lot of people that deserve to be treated as NPCs, fcking the other people in the process.
What
(a bunch of us are pretty sure they’re a bot, they’ve been doing this kind of insane word salad all over the place and none of it has made any more sense than this)
I’m not spewing any kind of “insane word salad” here. I’m just questioning what you are doing.
So let me reiterate.
What
Mmmhmm.
Head on back to r/iamverysmart buddy, they are missing your vast intellect.
You are sick.
Not that I’m a proponent of capitalism as the default economic model (I’m very much not) but I dislike this particular argument because it misrepresent the function of capital.
Large projects require upfront investment that is beyond the means of individuals or even groups of individuals (e.g. 100 prospective tenants cannot afford to build and office building; you need someone able to front the equivalent of X years rental costs), and those investments need to be managed by specialists. Whether those specialists are independent or employed by a central governing body, you still need capital and you still need effective oversight to prevent corruption and exploitation.
What we need are guaranteed public offerings, with a rising baseline over time, that leave opportunity for capital investment in luxury upgrades. The guaranteed public offerings prevent gross exploitation by the capitalists, and the capital investments provide the innovation pressure and luxury offerings that incentivize those inclined to seek said luxuries without exploiting the public offering system to do it.
When someone says “human nature” I hear “unexamined biases necessary to keep unexamined to support my dog shit ideas” and they are always dog shit.
Well, in some apartment complex the water is included in the rent. It assumes everyone uses roughly the same amount but of course some uses more then others. Often the water consumption decreases when the apartments are updated and have to pay for their own water.
One specific case that was in the media a couple of years ago. He lived in an apartment where the water was included and he had a tortoise. He tortoise liked warm water so the guy filled up his bathtub and had the tortoise in it, and in order to keep the water warm he let the warm water flow continuously. Of course this resulted in a huge water bill for the company which owned the apartments and they sued the guy. If I remember correctly the court ruled that he used such a vast amount that he should have known it was not included and he was forced to pay back all the water.
And why would there not be a limit to free water
Its like ‘but anarchism is so corruptable and exploitable!’ When liberalism is being owned by fasch and the biggest centralized statist communist powers either dissolved from corruption or turned shitlib.
The reactionaries can only complain about themselves and replace nouns to slander us.
