クルド語の学生 @Concerned_Catgirl@witches.town

@Concerned_Catgirl if you have a cis friend it's ok you're not cisphobic

@Zero_Democracy queer transhumanists: I can't wait to have a modular plush body with hundreds of choices in hot-swappable bits <3 <3

straight transhumanists: my SexDoll 3000 now knows how to heat up a Hot Pocket for me

Nothing will ever be as erotic to these people as the idea of converting Soylent into Java at maximum efficiency.

#CarloGiuliani, anarchist & history student, would have turned 40 today. Instead, at 23, he was executed by the state--shot to death & then run over by riot police at the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa, Italy. #NeverForget #InMemoriam 🏴

@SuzanEraslan this is something we see often, where the food of the poor gets appropriated and turned into upper-crust bourgeoise shit. Lobster, bacon, chicken wings, even sushi all started out as “this is the downtrodden making do” and then someone in power discovers that it’s Good Actually and takes it for themselves, mostly through marketing and price inflation.

The conflation of desire and need into demand is wildly unethical— you can’t shove sold out, limited edition sneakers and fresh water into the same category and expect to have any claim to ethical behavior. It’s entirely anathema to compassion.

The owner of Amazon is the richest single human being on earth. He didn’t need the cash. He didn’t need it to distribute to laborers who were fulfilling the order. The company simply saw an opportunity to exploit desperation and went for it.

Supply wasn’t even an issue— there was plenty of water sitting in their warehouses. It was just demand that increased. Not desire but actual NEED.

Shipping, which she had already paid for with her Prime Membership, was now $1,000 (YUP) and the storms wouldn’t hit for a few days. Demand, of course, was up— people expected to be without water and were stocking up— but raising prices in order to have those in severe need cover additional costs to the retailer PLUS pad their pockets, was entirely unethical. Yet no one suffered any consequences but those who just did without fresh water for days.

This is just a single example of hundreds where capitalism’s so-called basis for pricing doesn’t line up. I could list tons of them, but I want to get to how using demand as a metric is itself unethical because it leads to hoarding and monopolies.

For example— when hurricanes hit parts of Florida last year, a friend of mine with family there attempted to send them a case of water from Amazon Prime. What had previously cost $36 was now over 10x that price.

The price increased because of demand for the vegetables, but *so did supply.* Go back 25 years and try to find collards out of season or literally anywhere outside the American south, and you couldn’t find them no matter how much cash you had. But, hit up a farmstand in winter in Tennessee, and you could take home bushels of them for cheap. Demand increased supply AND price, while stripping the lower classes of a cheap way to get nutrients.

But it’s easy to see how supply restrictions are artificially imposed. What is less often addressed is how demand is a totally indistinct as to be useless conflation of desire and necessity, two things that are diametrically opposed.

For example, kale, collards, and other tough, leafy greens, which now range anywhere from $3-6 a bunch, used to be a food predominantly eaten by the lower classes. Suddenly they become hip, and the price shoots up.

Supply is an artificially enforced idea because we live, predominantly, in a post-scarcity world.

Food is transported from one area to another, and thrown out in multiple tons daily in highly capitalist nations, while people starve not just in “the 3rd world” but down the street from those throwing out food in capitalist cultures.

On the other end of the spectrum, designer clothing is only limited in supply by design, not by natural forces.

Capitalism dictates that pricing is determined by an inverse relationship between supply and demand— if supply is high and demand is low, then prices will fall, whereas conversely, if supply is low and demand is high, prices will increase.

There are major problems with letting artificially created phenomena— and supply and demand are both— determine the value of something, however, with no consideration for human labor and other production costs.

A friend of mine reposted some musings by an artist on Instagram today, and among the questions that they asked was “Can capitalism be ethical?”

“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has become such a reflex thing to say that it’s become meme-ified into a joke, but there’s a very serious truth to it, as well as a very serious shortfall in the truth that it tells. There is also no ethical production or distribution under capitalism.

Today I quickly put together this tool that has been doing pretty well: find a working Sci-Hub domain.

http://whereisscihub.now.sh/

Tip: http://whereisscihub.now.sh/go immediately redirects you to a working domain.

#OpenAccess

Information wants to be free.

But potable water, nutritious food, clean air, habitable shelter, elements-protective clothing, life saving and improving medicine, and time, precious, precious time want to be just as free.

"my magnum oops"

"you mean magnum opus"

"no"