No one needs to starve. No one needs to freeze. No one needs to die. There is enough for everyone. More empty homes than all the people without them, more food than grocers can even sell. The labor and the materials to end scarcity exist now. It is not a far-off dream. We can end scarcity in this life.
@And_Zoidberg it’s nightmarish. you stand hungry at grocery windows and know they’re just gonna throw it away and by golly when they do you hope they don’t lock the bins, or you’re gonna stay hungry. you find yourself without reliable shelter amid neighborhoods of FOR RENT signs in front of empty homes. normies cannot stop looking when they think you can’t see them; they pretend you do not exist when you can. warehouses of vital meds get stuck behind procedure and inaction, creating shortages.
@garbados let's do it
@vahnj let’s do this! ✊️❤️🍞❤️✊️
@garbados ok, how do you plan to achieve this?
@Wolf480pl How do you plan to ensure your neighbours do not starve? How will you keep them housed? It's not a question of how. How will differ for us all. The alternative is death. Every year it takes more of us while we are told this is the only way. Capitalist apologia concludes the only way forward involves leaving you dead of exposure in a city full of empty homes.
Why do you ask?
@garbados Because it's easy to say "we should fix the world" or "we should heal the sick, solve poverty, give everyone a job, and they'll all live happily after". Everyone can say it. But it's way harder to actually propose some way of achieving it. And even harder to actually do it. I want something I can act on.
@Wolf480pl here's a proposal: just give the empty homes away. just let whoever wants 'em, have 'em, if they're gonna live there. financial analysis says it's cheaper than cleaning bodies off the street.
proposals are meaningless unless there's labor and materials behind them. are you gonna put labor and materials into ending scarcity?
nobody's giving orders. it's our own lives on the line.
@garbados @jjg Do you guys have a good site to send ppl to? I mean I know already that we (in the west at least) waste over half of our food and so on. Don't have good links on empty homes, but I know china for e.g. has entire empty cities...
Thanks when you have time to link me up. If there isn't somthing comprehensive already, we should make one.
@gemlog it depends on the place. i can speak about the conditions where i'm at, but you can maybe look these up more local to you?
@garbados 10,800 housing units sit empty in Vancouver, most are apartments
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/10-800-housing-units-sit-empty-in-vancouver-most-are-apartments-1.2808161
Is one link I found. At least it is my province, but it's not exactly local to me as Vancouver is a 1,400km drive South of my town. I can't find any numbers like that for my town. Zero and near zero vacancy rate here for several years. Cold here a bit, so we also have dry and wet (you can be high) shelters and more in winter. More a logistics problem for a broader area I guess.
@garbados I need to die, tho
@garbados A realisation I had recently: idleness is not a capital crime
@shadowfirebird i can't speak for wherever you're at, but where i'm at, we have so much excess energy that we store it in the form of massive artificial lakes. see also: we have plenty of water.
scarcity of these things is real in many places, but it's often artificial to some degree due to prices and profiteering. even under scarcity, we can distribute goods more equitably than this nightmare.
@vfrmedia @garbados @shadowfirebird
No, not so much in the UK. But in a *lot* of other places in the world, and not all of them poor ones either.
@garbados its amazing to me that these land lots or buildings go untouched because there's no 'profit' in them. We could just utilize them for people and have them as group shelters
@garbados Artificial scarcity in the name of profit is one of the most egregious things about the modern world