Flippanarchy

There are places where the trash bins of supermarkets are locked so homeless people can't take thrown away food from them

So, here's a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it's produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.

The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.

The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn't time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it's completely rotten.

Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can't un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.

Always buy local, as much as you can!

Dumpster diving is fun and easy.

Soup kitchens work great, and I do not know how they avoid this shit. Perhaps they enthusiastically pretend not to be interested in mutual aid of any kind, just helping the deserving poor or whatever.

+Healthcare

HEALTHCARE and medication.

What is the point of automation and mass production when the prices of certain basic staples keeps going up?

Horizontal Integration Explained

Companies pursue horizontal integration for synergies like economies of scale or cost savings in marketing, R&D, production, and distribution. This can make manufacturing multiple products more cost-effective. Tiers of sale under a single distributor (economy and generic versus luxury or specialty) also afford the corporate entity to scale price to income and maximize revenue per customer.

The "organic" label is a good example of this in practice. Add a 50% mark-up on bananas by telling people the "regular" bananas are unsafe. Anyone who can't tolerate the professed risk (typically people with more disposable income) end up paying extra to the same distributor for what is functionally the same product sold at a premium price.

Automation and Mass Production are tools of monopolization in the capitalist economic model. The efficiencies of production are used to lock competitors out of the market, not to improve the consumer-experienced efficiency of production, distribution, or sale.

I mean, in Holland a loaf of bread is like €1...

https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi589882

IDK, Player Piano was released in 1952 and called out a world where increasing automation lead to an enriched and privileged engineer class and everyone else living in poverty and internal displacement. For a debut novel, it was pretty good.

You're not far off, but political propaganda prevents people from realizing it apparently.

The indus vally civilisation was very likely egalitarian

We've done this. The people in charge of the killing are the new kings.

Not saying it'll yield a worse situation, tho.

The indus valley civilisation was very likely egalitarian

It was definitely there with agriculture. Hunter gatherers had a lot of different ways of organizing their societies but early agrarian societies quickly developed a military caste and despotic governments.