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[Helgoland]

Ah, good ol' anti-corporatism. You do realize that letting half the world starve makes no sense for them from a business perspective, right? Price discrimination is a thing - they'd mostly just sell to them  at lower prices.

[martinuzz]

That only works if there is enough product to sell

[Loud Whispers]

Ah, good ol' anti-corporatism. You do realize that letting half the world starve makes no sense for them from a business perspective, right? Price discrimination is a thing - they'd mostly just sell to them  at lower prices.

Look at the East India Company to see where the logic of market competition stops working, when the market is strangled by very few people into dominance. Arable land was diverted from producing food staples to producing indigo dye, opium poppies and cotton, and when natural disaster struck destroying much crops the EIC raised prices on rice and ignored the millions of people starving to death

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Their profits increased considerably

This is the thing about corporations. They are not people, but are entities that seek profit and are good at seeking it. They have neither souls to be damned or arses to be kicked, so what would obviously be immoral to a businessman is perfectly ok for a corporation, starving millions to death is not an issue for a corporation.

[Maximum Spin]

Look at the East India Company to see where the logic of market competition stops working, when the market is strangled by very few people into dominance.

You uh
You know that was a government-protected monopoly, right

[Helgoland]

Also the thing with GMOs is that they're really more like intellectual property - production capacities are easy to build up and don't require much land or extraordinary amounts of resources. It's a different situation than with the East India Company.

[Loud Whispers]

You uh
You know that was a government-protected monopoly, right

In so far as they protected them from the French, else they were autonomous to the extreme, right down to having their own private army with which they dictated their own foreign policy. Hence why when the USA declared independence, they copied the flag of the company.

[Reelya]

Look at the East India Company to see where the logic of market competition stops working, when the market is strangled by very few people into dominance.

You uh
You know that was a government-protected monopoly, right

Free markets are government-protected. Without government protection, you have the guy with the bigger guns making a monopoly. The East India Company dominated trade across international borders, and that was enforced by armed might, not "government protection".

If you want a vision of what a pure non-government-intervention free market actually looks like, look at drug cartels. The threat of government fucking you is the only thing that stops people from just shooting or blowing up their competition. Because you know that in a truly "free world" the person who shoots first wins.

In fact, in a city in India that sprang up basically without a government, what's forming is a corporate monopoly  "government" that runs everything, not a competitive market. Basically the company that you rent an apartment from has their own private police and fire, sewage. If you're not renting from them, you're fucked basically. Live in your own sewage, peasant. Also, live in everyone else's sewage because the company couldn't be fucked to put pipes in: they only care that the sewage is no longer on their property, so untreated sewage gets pumped into the closest river. John Stossel on FOX Business criticizes most of India for having too much red tape related to hygeine and safety regulations. Well ... there's a reason for that! Basically without any government control you end up living in corporate/monopoly controlled and owned gated communities, surrounded by a sewage moat.

We need elected government because without it, things devolve into a form of neo-feudalism where you have a small number of corporations controlling all land and running their own private armies to protect their interests.

[scriver]

Link is bork

[TD1]

Oh....dear. Someone send a consolation card to Zelda.

[Reelya]

Link is bork

tnx, fixed

Note that the city in the link basically didn't exist 15 years ago (it was a farming region, the city is new), and has no government at all. So the normal excuses for why slums form, e.g. that capitalism hasn't raised those people out of the pre-existing slums yet or that too much government regulation keeps people poor don't cut it here. Gurgaon shows that the formation of the slums is in fact part and parcel of unrestrained capitalism. Gurgaon sounds cool if you've got money, everything is private-for-profit and air conditioned etc, but it's a disaster waiting to happen. All the buildings run on diesel generators, they suck up more and more groundwater which is running out (and most of that is wasted watering golf courses so that the rich residents get a nice view) and dump their sewage straight into rivers to save on pumping and treatment.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/05/urban-india-gurgaon-water-electricity

Gurgaon's inhabitants may live in glass towers and luxury residences but they have the same problems as the slum dwellers. The roads are potholed, electricity is intermittent, and there are no pavements or parks, only vast shopping centres surrounded by parking lots.
...
To believe the advertising, these condominiums with bucolic names ensure instant happiness thanks to their water-supply systems, electricity generators, parks, party venues and markets, all protected by walls.
...
Just a few metres away lies the village of Chakarpur, which has been spared by the property developers because cheap labour has to be found somewhere to provide the residential complexes with drivers and cleaners.

[scriver]

Gurgaon sounds like what happens when you feed an Eevee mouth water.

[Reelya]

Haha nope, it's what you get when

Gurgaon sounds like what happens when you feed an Eevee untreated sewage.

ftfy

[Rolan7]

I had to wire money today, which was scary enough, but the agent warned me like 5 times to call and confirm the wire information.  Apparently they've had multiple people scammed.  I assumed they'd, you know, found the information leak and were just being safe.

...No.  The ONLY email I got contained maliciously fake instructions to some place in another state.  And the phone number was off by a digit.  Fortunately I looked up their real phone number instead of trusting the contact info on a potential fake.

They've clearly got an active backdoor in their system...  hoooo boy.  At least the scammer didn't give a working number to "confirm" the fake data.

[Yoink]

I wrote a poem and posted it on Instagram.
That's... that's... th-that's like, real life, man! O____O'

[Yoink]

UNRELATED STRESSSSSSSSS

STRESS WORTHY OF A DOUBLE POST
NOT EVEN INTERESTING STRESS, JUST ABYSMAL FAILURE THAT I CAN ONLY MOSTLY BLAME ON OTHERS AND AN ARDUOUS TASK AHEAD TO TRY AND FIX IT
ERRRRGGH