• Donkter@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Monkey pays to live. He pays in the form of the daily labor of foraging, avoiding predators and finding shelter. It’s just not converted to the generalized form of money and then back to the basic needs of the monkey like we do it.

    Labor is the basic unit of wealth. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  • xenoclast@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    More like paying to prevent someone from assaulting you and taking all your stuff. Literally all of society is built from this foundation. Monkeys will just fuck each other up.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Technically we pay for all the shit that makes living on earth less brutal than what the monke has to put up with on a daily basis

    Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food

    Also we have beer! No seriously archeological evidence suggests beer was the main selling point of settled civilization for a lot of groups, so much so that it was the money until someone in turkey figured out you could use weird metal disks for that instead.

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Let’s go back to the beer economy, where your money goes bad eventually if you don’t drink it. Elon Musk would have the largest reserve of rotten beer in human history. He deserves it.

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        As satisfying as that would be parabley speaking, it’d also ruin our ability to organize commerce and infrastructure at a grander scale than a single region that happens to have a good breadbasket to get the beer crop from.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Fr, capitalism sucks absolute ass and there are better systems we can revolve around.

      BUT if it’s between capitalism and going back to having to forage, scavenge, fight nature itself on a daily basis and all the other crap all other animals have to deal with…mmm yea I’ll stick with capitalism lmao

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food

      Easy to say when you’re ensconced in the imperial core. But I wouldn’t want to be living on the periphery. Humans are far crueler and more destructive than any natural predator.

      A jaguar won’t double-tap your house with a missile strike, to make sure it kills everyone inside and then any neighbors who rush in to help. An orca won’t spend six years running caricatures of you in a tabloid newspaper, in order to build up enough bigotry and fear against your neighborhood that there’s no push back when local politicians green light it for “slum clearance”. No chimpanzee ever worked at Abu Ghraib or Vladimir Prison.

      What humans do for money is far worse than what any predator has ever done for a meal.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        That’s because they’re not capable of doing those things, of the animals you listed, I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities to do so.

        Especially Orcas, what you listed would be an easy day for them, they’re a bit of an asshole.

        Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal that their capabilities will allow for because that’s the only way to survive in the wild.

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness

    • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I think we tend to greatly underestimate how much the average wild animal’s life completely sucks. Predators. Disease. Food shortages. Injuries that never fully heal. Teeth…you know what happens to teeth if you never brush them? A lot of animals are just scraping by. You know how most animals have pretty big litters, and quite often too? Yet their population stays roughly the same? Consider the implications of that fact on the survival rate for an average animal.

      • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I’d add is that I think it’s in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal’s life sucks shit. In the US at least there’s enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          I know this is a joke, but for real outdoor domesticated cats kill 1.3-4 billion songbirds a year… and most of those cats are being fed by humans.

          They really do need to stop working so hard, and humans really need to start thinking about the ethics of letting their cat out to slaughter the wildlife around their home for no reason.

          • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            I keep finding dead things in my yard because of this. There are at least 3 “neighborhood cats” that someone lets run wild. They’re definitely fed, groomed and collared, they have somewhere to go at night. Do you know of any techniques to reduce the impact short of just letting them come into my house during the day?

                • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  Maybe not. The bars on our cage are too small for cats to actually get at the rats, and they don’t try. The rats are unbothered by cats being around. Obviously we close the bedroom off when it’s ratty playtime.

  • pb42184@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I’ve thought about this. Have the “Agriculture was a trap!” people ever designed like a hunter gatherer Eden? Like not historical reenactment. We have tech be a human and use it. But like buy a few hundred acres and plant a shitload of fruit trees with modern fertilizer, use GPS to navigate it, live in a badass modern tent…

    Not for me, but those people seriously seem to have the option right there

            • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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              7 months ago

              Not where I live. It’s illegal to sell human things. Organs, blood, plasma… If it comes from a human, you basically can’t buy or sell it.

              • Malfeasant@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Technically you can’t here either, they call it a donation, but they pay you… Not sure exactly what the loophole is. I’ve never done it, but I used to work with a guy that did it as much as they’d let him.

                • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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                  7 months ago

                  You make a donation, you receive a gratuity/tip.

                  It’s pretty minor as a difference, functionally it’s the same as selling it.

                  I don’t know that I have that loophole here. If I find out that we do, I’m “selling” all the plasma/blood/whatever the hell I can live without, as frequently as my poor body can take it.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    7 months ago

    TBH if Orangutans knew they could pay to conserve their own habitat and buy more food then they’d probably be working jobs, too.

      • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Adam Smith was much more critical of capitalism than he is given credit for. For example, Adam Smith was critical of rent seeking and landlords. It would be somewhat accurate to replace Orangutan with Adam Smith in this meme.

        • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          Yes Capitalism is supposed to be pro-worker/anti-rich

          Hence my comment about people still paying to live before adoption of capitalism

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Capitalism is pro-worker.

            Capitalism is based on voluntary exchange. It is defined by the so-called “free market”, which is word for “a situation in which nobody cooperates economically without their own consent”.

            • Zacryon@feddit.de
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              7 months ago

              And that’s the problem, because everyone is coerced to do that if they want to survive. And those, who own the means of production, the capital, the companies, are those who have the power to exploit those who don’t. And they do.