Thanks a lot, Mr Bezos!
23/2/20 21:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsJeff Bezos Donating $10 Billion Barely Dents His Surging Fortune
Jeff Bezos obviously has no sense of irony. By vowing to donate 10 billion dollars for fighting climate change, he must imagine himself a true champion of the environment. In fact, that's only drawing the public attention to the ecological madness behind Amazon's business model. In this situation, to throw money around and claim you're fighting for the environment is just insanely hypocritical.
If you look at his business model, you'd be stunned by the sheer waste of resource. Even the tiniest gadget or piece of cable they sell you, is wrapped in dozens of meters of paper and nylon bubbles, and then put into a cardboard box the size of a washing machine. Even the tiniest hint of a risk for the item's integrity results in extra amounts of styrofoam that'd suffice to fill up a coffin.
The item/wrapping item must be somewhere around 1 to 10. The whole wrapping thing has become a fixation for Amazon. Once you open the shipment and get your purchase, you get a ton of garbage, enough to fill your entire rubbish bin at home. Have the environmentalist organizations who cheer Mr Bezos' generous donation today, ever done a calculation of the amount of plastic waste he's been dumping into the environment for decades?
And what about those deliveries. Every TV remote, every scented candle, every little bag of spices for your vegan recipe that you've read somewhere in the eco-bio- cooking book is delivered with a bus, whose stressed out, lowly paid driver has first traveled for 30 miles from his home to the Amazon storage in the city outskirts, and then another 100 miles while distributing the tiny-winy gadgets and items to your homes. And why do you need all that? Because you want the latest best-seller to end up at your bedside by the end of the day it was published, although you don't intend to open the cover by the time of your next week's holidays? Do you really need to get everything on the instant?
Is it so bad to just write whatever you need to buy on a piece of paper, or on your phone, and then go to the shop after work, or in the weekend? While we still have shops where you can actually touch the stuff you're buying, it's definitely worth the effort to use that opportunity - both for your own sake and nature's.
Hell, you may even meet a friend on your way there, sniff the air and check the weather, maybe spend a few minutes at the local cafe or restaurant having a chat. But no, we've grown so lazy and we've stopped moving to such an extent that we prefer to spend our day lying on the sofa, watching TV. Well fine, if you so much insist. Watch the floods and droughts on your TV while getting your junk food and gadgets delievered to your doorstep.
Besides, you can still go to the shop by foot or using the public transport, or by bike. You often don't even need driving your car there. Walking for 3 miles is roughly the same as spending half an hour at the gym. (Apologies to those who live in remote places and have no other option but drive around).
And let's think about this: do we even need all that junk stuff? One more toy for the kiddo, one more sports bag, some useless wifi gadget, one more sweater or tourism jacket... There's hardly any snow in winter nowadays, and the old jacket still looks fine, but no, we have to dump another one into the wardrobe that's already bursting at the seams. Why do we spend hours every day looking for more stuff to buy online?
Yep, it's all about this consumerist mania. We're so brainwashed at this point, we easily allow ourselves to get convinced that we want stuff we don't actually need. So Mr Bezos, thanks for your money, but you better do a few other things instead. Rather than throwing billions at problems, why not fix the working conditions at your storages first? The UK labor unions report an increase of work incidents in those. We've all heard the stories of poorly paid delivery guys who are constantly being monitored and pressured for performance by their superiors. Mr Bezos could also start a policy of first cutting the environmental footprint of his business in half, then in quarter, and then almost completely eliminating it.
And if he's left with any cash after that, he could then become the world's biggest investor in renewables and development research. Anything else would be just greenish smokescreen, spread by a man who's particularly fond of benefiting from the modern mania for hyper-consumption. One can't help asking themselves, does he really need the new 165 million dollar mansion he recently bought in California? Does he even have time to live in all the mansions he owns? But that's probably an issue he should be discussing with his shrink.
Jeff Bezos obviously has no sense of irony. By vowing to donate 10 billion dollars for fighting climate change, he must imagine himself a true champion of the environment. In fact, that's only drawing the public attention to the ecological madness behind Amazon's business model. In this situation, to throw money around and claim you're fighting for the environment is just insanely hypocritical.
If you look at his business model, you'd be stunned by the sheer waste of resource. Even the tiniest gadget or piece of cable they sell you, is wrapped in dozens of meters of paper and nylon bubbles, and then put into a cardboard box the size of a washing machine. Even the tiniest hint of a risk for the item's integrity results in extra amounts of styrofoam that'd suffice to fill up a coffin.
The item/wrapping item must be somewhere around 1 to 10. The whole wrapping thing has become a fixation for Amazon. Once you open the shipment and get your purchase, you get a ton of garbage, enough to fill your entire rubbish bin at home. Have the environmentalist organizations who cheer Mr Bezos' generous donation today, ever done a calculation of the amount of plastic waste he's been dumping into the environment for decades?
And what about those deliveries. Every TV remote, every scented candle, every little bag of spices for your vegan recipe that you've read somewhere in the eco-bio- cooking book is delivered with a bus, whose stressed out, lowly paid driver has first traveled for 30 miles from his home to the Amazon storage in the city outskirts, and then another 100 miles while distributing the tiny-winy gadgets and items to your homes. And why do you need all that? Because you want the latest best-seller to end up at your bedside by the end of the day it was published, although you don't intend to open the cover by the time of your next week's holidays? Do you really need to get everything on the instant?
Is it so bad to just write whatever you need to buy on a piece of paper, or on your phone, and then go to the shop after work, or in the weekend? While we still have shops where you can actually touch the stuff you're buying, it's definitely worth the effort to use that opportunity - both for your own sake and nature's.
Hell, you may even meet a friend on your way there, sniff the air and check the weather, maybe spend a few minutes at the local cafe or restaurant having a chat. But no, we've grown so lazy and we've stopped moving to such an extent that we prefer to spend our day lying on the sofa, watching TV. Well fine, if you so much insist. Watch the floods and droughts on your TV while getting your junk food and gadgets delievered to your doorstep.
Besides, you can still go to the shop by foot or using the public transport, or by bike. You often don't even need driving your car there. Walking for 3 miles is roughly the same as spending half an hour at the gym. (Apologies to those who live in remote places and have no other option but drive around).
And let's think about this: do we even need all that junk stuff? One more toy for the kiddo, one more sports bag, some useless wifi gadget, one more sweater or tourism jacket... There's hardly any snow in winter nowadays, and the old jacket still looks fine, but no, we have to dump another one into the wardrobe that's already bursting at the seams. Why do we spend hours every day looking for more stuff to buy online?
Yep, it's all about this consumerist mania. We're so brainwashed at this point, we easily allow ourselves to get convinced that we want stuff we don't actually need. So Mr Bezos, thanks for your money, but you better do a few other things instead. Rather than throwing billions at problems, why not fix the working conditions at your storages first? The UK labor unions report an increase of work incidents in those. We've all heard the stories of poorly paid delivery guys who are constantly being monitored and pressured for performance by their superiors. Mr Bezos could also start a policy of first cutting the environmental footprint of his business in half, then in quarter, and then almost completely eliminating it.
And if he's left with any cash after that, he could then become the world's biggest investor in renewables and development research. Anything else would be just greenish smokescreen, spread by a man who's particularly fond of benefiting from the modern mania for hyper-consumption. One can't help asking themselves, does he really need the new 165 million dollar mansion he recently bought in California? Does he even have time to live in all the mansions he owns? But that's probably an issue he should be discussing with his shrink.
