I think the implication of the last panel is supposed to be that the apple seller can’t stop everyone, but if this was really an accurate satire, he’d chop down every tree, sue everyone that picked the apples, and then go back to selling his giant flavorless GMO apples for $5 a piece
The hell of it is, some people would still be happy to buy his apples. Look, I ain’t got time or health insurance to be fucking around climbing an apple tree, here’s some cash, apples pls. But that’s not good enough for the investors, who want guaranteed 5% growth every quarter, so now we’ve got to pour kerosene on the extra apples and force people to go hungry.
Why does it matter if an apple is modified or not?
Modifying plants for better yields, less water usage, higher resistance to pests, better taste, and so on. Seems like a great idea in my mind.
Either way this comic is bad. It’s stupidly easy to just plant an apple tree in your back/front yard, if you have one. Apples aren’t that picky about where they want to be planted.
They should have gone for a better analogy if they are trying to say something.
Why does it matter if an apple is modified or not?
In general, I am not opposed to GMOs. All those benefits would be great. But in practice, companies aren’t modifying the product to be better for the consumer, they’re modifying it to sell better, and cost less to produce. That basically means bigger, and less diverse, which actually ends up making them less resistant to pests and disease
Wait until you learn that we’ve been genetically modifying our food via selective breeding for as long as we’ve had agriculture.
the problem isn’t gmo. the problem is the profit motivation that will invite disaster.
I feel like this is a metaphor, I’m just not sure for what yet.
It’s a metaphor about 13yo kid trying to understand why people pay money for anything when you can get stuff for free. The only thing a kiddo comes up with is that some people are bad and will chop trees down. Then they go to lemmy.ml and post dumb shit.
I’m not 14 years old enough to get this
Hell yeah, this is the free gifts of nature in a nutshell.
[…] the “free gift of Nature to capital.” Capitalist exploitation and accumulation, as Marx explains, ultimately depend on capital’s usurping of nature’s gifts for itself, thereby monopolizing the means of production and wealth in its entirety
Probably better sources, but this is the first best one I found.
So… farming is a free gift from nature?
Close. Farming is labour, which is what gives economic value to the free gifts. The capitalists skim excess value from this process in the form of wage theft and other fuckery.
I’m simplifying, but yeah.
they cant stop all of us
And how many bottles of water did you buy this week?
My experience is that apple trees aren’t that thick.
Your apple mom is though, heyoo
There’s so much wrong about this picture. But let’s start from the obvious: that man shouldn’t be able to afford a suit.
The main question around this comic that makes it hard for me to derive a message is, who planted/cared for/owns the apple trees?
I’m reminded of a speech from Gus in Better Call Saul, where technically a tree from his homeland was wild, but he was the one that made the effort to water and care for it before a critter started stealing from it.
I wouldn’t follow ethics in business advice from a meth dealer explaining why he killed a wild animal.
