Humans self describe as intelligent. That always stuck with me.
Humans are so naturally stupid that they almost make AI seem intelligent.
Rugged individualism strikes again.
Well clearly it’s the fault of everyone noticing the problems because like 100 years ago no one noticed the problems and so clearly they weren’t happening because no one noticed and if they were happening someone would have noticed so if people just hadn’t noticed they never would have happened and then no one would have noticed them which of course then means they double wouldn’t have happened
It’s just common sense if you think about it from that perspective
Can we stop buying from them please?
That’s the best part! You can’t!
Thanks to the consolidation and vertical integration of the largest multinationals, as long as you choose to live — no matter how careful and conscious your purchases — a significant proportion of it will still funnel to most of these corporations.
Outside or raw materials, a cell phone, and maybe a car where are you forced to support corporations?
Clothing, food, shelter, software, electronics, medicine, fuel, consumable goods like batteries and much much more. These are just off the top of my head.
Food, shelter, hygiene prodcuts, clothes, furniture, fucking everything.
Yes, some of these things aren’t technically necessary but you did include phone and a car, so I am assuming we’re not just talking about base subsistence.
Unless you become a cave hermit or somehow manage to source everything from self employed artisans and cooperatives (and vet their material sources), you will support corporations even if you try to reduce your consumption as much as possible.
Pretty much all industries have been captured by massive corporations at this point, and vetting all companies and their supply lines is literally not possible to do.
Think with your head instead of just saying what feels right for once, please.
Meat is one of the bigger polutters. Meat industry is subsidized by the state. Plant based diets are still cheaper. The vast majority of people still choose to eat meat and actively mock vegans. Just go look at beef (worse meat for the environment) consumption stats in the US.
That’s just one example.
People say they want change but won’t take it where they can, because deep down it’s a lie and they just want someone to fix the problem without them having to do anything.
being vegan doesn’t stop the growth of the meat industry. it certainly doesn’t shrink it.
You could buy from other company. But if you are buying the same product the pollution fingerprint would be similar on most cases.
You could just not buy the products. But if you buy things is to improve your quality of life.
So the best course of action is not to make people have less quality of life. Instead push for less people on the planet so they can afford more pollution per person.
This always gets me. They are producing stuff that we the people buy. They aren’t out there just for the fun of things. Inb4 Lemmy’s famous misreadings, yes it is an issue, yes we need regulation (which we will have to start again from scratch, hopefully in 4 years), yes we need renewables. But this simplistic “it’s just 100 companies” is misleading AF.
I’ll GLADLY buy the alternative that doesn’t do those things. When it exists. One day.
You seem like you have a consumption problem. Outside of a car, heating, and cooling nobody is forcing anything down your throat.
You choose and desire to buy whatever product you’re talking about.
I think the idea was “reduce consumption”. As a society we buy tons of stuff, way more than 50 or 100 years ago.
When planned obsolescence isn’t the cornerstone of the modern market, we might have the choice to consume less. Currently you cannot buy any product that hasn’t been intentionally designed to create as much waste as possible. That is on the companies, since they are legally people.
Corporate death penalty needs to be levied against the largest corporations before they kill us all with their greed. We don’t need them. They need us.
Except you’re wrong. In case your next reach is “It’s not the billionaires fault.” These companies could be easily be made more efficient if the billionaire class were forced to change but the government is too weak and corrupt to allow that to happen. We have wealth disparity that has surpassed American’s last gilded age. The billionaires don’t care about climate change because they already won they’re richer then us who cares if humanity goes extinct, they beat us.
Those 100 companies have made it so it’s incredibly difficult not to buy from them.
Groceries? There’s like 10 companies that own all of the food supply. Good luck figuring out which one’s have child labor, and a horrendous environmental impact. They’ve very purposely masked that image.
Oh wow, everything is recyclable! No, those companies just slapped that logo on all of their products so we can ignorantly wish-cycle their garbage. Most of it ends up in the landfill.
Don’t want a car? Our cities are very deliberately designed to require cars. There is a very strong private agenda against good public transportation.
Then there’s the pollution. These companies pollute so much more than we know. Whether that’s dumping forever chemicals into our water, or taking private jets everywhere. It’s not like the label on your T-shirt tells you that.
Finally find a good company? They’ll buy it up, lobby against it, or coerce them out of business. Just look how many companies Luxottica has destroyed.
There’s layer after layer of obfuscation to hide what these companies are doing. It’s not just a matter of picking Product A over Product B. We rarely have much choice, or the information to make better choices.
Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.
Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.
Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?
Then there’s all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that “it’s people’s fault” when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.
Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it’s a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we’re all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don’t even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.
As you said, plenty of countries are better in terms of public transportation, but most people still insist on driving cars even in places with good public transportation coverage.
And the biggest counter to the “it’s not a personal issue, it’s companies who don’t give options” is diet: eating meat is far worse for the environment as well as more expensive than a plant based diet; but people hate the idea of eating less meat and they love to mock vegans.
Meat eating is actually a very cultural thing.
In India, for example, there is an area where most people are vegetarian and have been so for centuries.
My point about how people are psychologically pushed to consume also applies here.
Further, excessive meat eating (and the average meat consumption in most Western countries is at those levels) is actually bad for one’s health and life expectancy, so even from a pure individual selfishness point of view people aren’t doing what’s best for themselves, which would indicate there’s more to it than merelly individuals being selfish.
That said, I agree that people should eat less meat, it’s just the expectation that they’re informed enough (at various levels) to do it that I find unrealistic.
It’s another of those things which in order to change needs to be pushed as education to all of society, while what we really have is massive economic interests pushing in the very opposite direction.
