It'd be a shame of people had a key to unlock their apartment's washer/dryer payment compartment to do their laundry without having to pay.
Allegedly. Parody. Unactionable.
The people that are responsible for financializing our basic necessities of life and accelerating climate change have names and specific ways in which they operationalize the transfer of wealth from our pockets to theirs.
I wonder if the recent anti-Chinese rhetoric coming from our Democrats and Republicans alike has anything to do with the fact that China has overtaken the USA by GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity.
America cannot exist without an unbeatable foe.
China, USSR, Taliban, Al Qaeda, "radical Islamic terrorism," Communism in general, etc. etc. etc..
Absolute trillions wasted on these attempts to reign supreme have only enriched multinational conglomerates.
In the past EIGHT years (from 2012-2020) Chinese wages have DOUBLED.
The average Chinese worker has TWICE the income they did eight years ago.
In USA the MINIMUM wage has not even kept up with inflation and has remained unchanged since 2009.
It's going to take years, maybe generations, for us to truly understand the devastating impact that COVID-19 has had on us even beyond the ~538,000 Americans that have died.
Our social threads have frayed in ways that can't possibly be re-assembled back to he way it was before we were all fractured.
Distance, silence, isolation, and downright loneliness are in themselves risk factors that greatly impact our physical and mental health.
In fact, some non-pharmaceutical treatments for conditions such as depression involve socialization and the breaking of patterns including solitude.
Our socialization has been limited to things we have to do out of necessity, most poignantly in America, the workplace.
In the case of Borden Dairy, they have 3,300 employees. The company says it can't afford it's debt nor it's pension obligations. Filing for bankruptcy is a way to negotiate using the courts in order not to pay those pensions.
They say that it's due to a drop in milk consumption and some are even saying that milk alternatives are to blame. But there has only been a 6% drop in overall milk consumption since 2015. That's just over 1% per year? Please. That's not the reason.
For those that don't know, shipping vessels run on a very very low grade form of fossil fuel called "bunker."
Bunker fuel is the heavy, dirty remnants left over from the refining process. From crude oil they make gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc. What's leftover is the cheaper fuel used for these ships.
When you start to think about how many goods and commodities are traded worldwide FROM countries that can produce cheaply because of low labor standards and lax environmental regulations TO countries that consume them. How do they get there? Shipping vessels.