• PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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    3 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.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      3 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

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      3 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.

      • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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        3 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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 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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        3 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.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities

          If you reduce other species to aesthetics, sure. Big Orange Man ultimately behaves the same as Smaller Brunette Man. But there are a bunch of sociological elements you’re leaving on the table. Different species organize and interact with each other and their peers very differently. The Chimpanzees and Bonobos have night-and-day different social hierarchies and organizing principles, despite only minor variances in genetic traits.

          Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal

          But then what? We’ve long since solved the problem of the next meal. You don’t need to send a man to the moon looking for the next meal.

          If anything, we’ve seriously lost sight of solving for “the next meal” on a long term scale, as we engage in the kind of industrial activity that degrades and collapses our arable biome.