“Logistics”, an 857-hour movie, tracks a pedometer from shop back to factory

It's an insightful video, however it doesn't mention the possibility that workers can be exploited through unfair wages, work hours or conditions, so that the various parts of the pencil industry can cut higher margins. Choosing an economic system vs another isn't enough.

It depends on what someone means by “capitalism”. Some people use a definition which is more specific than just “trade”. So for example we tend to see firms owned by individuals who are materially separate from most of the workers, and some people see this phenomenon as part of what we ultimately call “capitalism”. Control of firms by a small number of people can lead to choices which are good for the leadership but bad for most of the workers. If you have a larger economy made up of firms with this structure, then you can see a great number of choices made that benefit a small number of people to the detriment of a large number of people. Essentially, this arrangement has a tendency to enrich a minority, concentrating capital in a way that perpetuates this cycle. Eventually you end up with a whole lot of people living in desperation barely able to survive while a small number of people are unfathomably wealthy.

One might ask if such an arrangement is good for society if most people are left struggling to survive.

However this is all based on a rhetorical question: does “capitalism” the word include this arrangement of firms? Is unrestricted free trade likely to lead to this arrangement of firms? Would a different structure of firms, like cooperative ownership, alleviate some of those problems? You could still have “trade” in an economy of cooperatives. But would that still be “capitalism” or would this be considered something else?

People are divided on whether it should be called something else. But a lot of people who think we should “move beyond capitalism” do not want to eliminate free trade, just the societal norm where most firms are controlled by a small number of people.

Pollution - shipping basic goods around the globe 3 times to make the simples itema creates a lot of unnessesary pollition.

Fragility - one byte from a bat, one lockdown in China and United Kingdom runs out of toilet paper.

It's a one-sided view.

Capitalism has many problems. The video only highlights a possible advantage.

Ask Germany how trade with Russia is working out currently.

It’s all comparative advantage and win-win scenarios until you find yourself dependent on despicable foes for your food, energy, and basic necessities.

The vulnerability created in those situations may actually encourage bad actors to declare war opportunistically.

Capitalism is an obsession over capital at the expense of everything else. If going to war serves the interests of capital, then it will be done without any questions.

You can't transport oil on a container ship though.

unfortunately its not for sale, but we are actively looking for a place to host it as a VOD again. Send us an email if you want to be notified if and when its available again. (email in profile)

Sounds great! Our email is in our profile.

So far we have chosen not to because we consider the core of the work to be the continuous length of the film. A torrent would enable timelapses and short versions. But we will think about it.

Youtube has commercials which we would like to avoid, but we had not considered twitch. Perhaps that's a good idea. We have livestreamed it before, but it's quite a commitment to keep a stream running 24/7 for 37 days.

Great idea, thanks!

Since several of you have asked how to watch the movie, we spontaneously decided to stream the first 21 hours of Logistics on Twitch. Since it will soon be night here in Sweden, we will not be able to keep track of the stream. We're keeping our fingers crossed that it works. Unfortunately we will not be able to stream the entire film this time, but hope to do so later.

The stream is live now at https://www.twitch.tv/logisticsartproject

Really great suggestion -- @logisticsfilm you should consider it!

Also https://ubu.com/ might be interested to host/distribute it and it's a great fit as well.

Possible privacy issues?

Yeah, you should definitely find a way to stream it from a third location. You have the same problem as the lofi girl stream: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKfPfyJRdk

Before their problem with content ID last month, their stream had been uninterrupted for two years.

Well, I wouldn't say specialization was "avoided" more so it was just incredibly difficult due to it being a planned economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ministers_of_the_So...

This may provide some insight. I don't want to claim to be a USSR historian, I've just done some light research on another topic that crossed paths and I fell down a well for awhile lol.

The problem was that they were so centralized, it made innovation incredibly difficult. Simply put, if there were problems, even if people had solutions, it was damn near impossible to get anything implemented.

Maybe they're humans with agency? Just a thought.

I feel this line of thinking leads to no where.

What is "in isolation"? I'd honestly be shocked if the majority of people buying this pedometer were buying it due to an ad of any sort. Seems more likely they simply needed a pedometer. They needed one because they wanted to count steps... etc, etc, eudemonia

Czech workers during the communist era used to say “If you’re not stealing from the state, you’re stealing from your family” (“Kdo neokrádá stát, okrádá rodinu”)

> congrats, you just invented capitalism.

No, thats not capitalism but trade. You need to read up on what actually is capitalism and how accumulation of useful resources (wheat, cocoa, spice) is different from accumulation of money. Basically: it only makes sense inasmuch as you can consume the accumulated stuff, so a million ton of wood logs won't matter as much as one million ton of coins.

> This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition.

You're still thinking in a capitalistic world and you don't seem like you can't get out of it. The whole point of alternative economic systems is to produce enough for everybody. Such that needs are provided by the community. If everyone has what they need, why would there be a price on anything ? Why would more-than-enough wheat trade against more-than-enough wood ? It doesn't make sense. Trade happens because it's a way to solve scarcity, but the whole idea behind anarchism is to understand what is needed and make sure there is no scarcity there.

> In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force? Do you force the farmer not to grow anything?

In anarchism, all decisions are taken by everyone. No one forces anything on anyone. I know, it's a hard concept to grasp, but communities can think and decide what's best for them.

The farmer can grow whatever they want, but if it doesn't benefit the community then they are on their own. It's all about what is good for the group and what makes us go forward, together.

>Someone responded, “congrats, you just invented capitalism.”

What? That isn't capitalism. Where is the obsession over owning all the land, all the farms, all the factories? These people aren't interested in capital, they just want to trade.

>Since eggs go bad and produce is heavy, maybe we could invent a durable “value storage” or “token” or “fiat” to trade instead.

Egyptians simply deposited grains at grain banks and obtained something akin to clay tablets. Those clay tablets had an annual storage fee because grains spoil. They had no capitalism because the nature of their money made them willing to trade without charging any extra fees that come from the superiority of money over goods.

The fact that we started with a system like that and had almost no trouble for thousands of years means the modern capitalist is more ignorant about the nature of money than even people 4000 years ago.

Or rather the opposite is the case, people are fully aware of the nature of money and how making it superior over eggs gives the money capitalist the ability to extort concessions from the farmer. Since money is necessary as a medium of exchange, the money capitalist can always refuse to trade until the economy is about to collapse because all the spoiling goods in the economy are going bad and producers refuse to replenish their stock until the people are suffering from starvation and then become ready to accept debt under even worse conditions. To prevent this from happening, you are going to pay that fee ahead of time, you are going to constantly borrow new money into the economy.

>This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition.

The government declares a single currency to be legal tender, that is effectively a state enforced monopoly. I honestly can't comprehend how people like you stick their head in the sand.

>In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force?

Grains spoil, so that just means money must spoil and the easiest way to make money spoil is by eliminating the zero lower bound cash, either by abolishing cash which was introduced by force through the government so undoing it requires no additional force, alternatively the government can issue cash with an expiration date, which again just dials back the amount of force being used to issue risk free, perfectly liquid and costless cash.

>Do you force the farmer not to grow anything

Why the hell would I need to tell anyone to do anything? Telling the farmer to not grow anything is what the money capitalist does because that is how he gets to extort the farmer and break his spirit.

By the way, by money capitalist I mean anyone holding money liquid and immediately spendable without paying for that privilege and for the harm they are causing to society at large

I am honestly frustrated by comments like yours. Abolishing capitalism requires no force, no revolution, no deaths, no jealousy, no redistribution, merely a free market that actually lives up to that name, not a capitalistic market labeled as free market. In fact, capitalism itself leads to the abolishment of capitalism, hence the only problem that we need to solve is, once capitalism ends itself, how do we keep it that way instead of it devolving into a depression or another world war?

That article is actually a little shallow. The Ever Given had close to nothing to do with any issues at US ports (the majority of the Asian traffic to the US goes to west coast ports). Larger ships are good in terms of economics of scale. That card was over played a bit in the past it seems, so. There are still huge fleet of smaller ships out there, feeder vessels, connecting smaller ports to those served by the huge vessels. We are currently working, in container shipping, in hub and spoke system. Whether or not that is better then direct lines is a good question, there benefits to both models.

And calling container lines a cartel is strong claim. In fact, for years prior to Covid container rates were so low that companies were barely profitable. There can be the argument made that those low rates contributed to the bankruptcy of Hanjin. Cartels usually don't result in low prices.

That being said, the container issues, and there were a ton of those prior to Covid, during Covid and now that need to be solved, are a logistics issue. Serious enough to have impacts on supply chains, but not enough by themselves to screw things up to the degree we see right now.

>> The game in the business is to acquire market power and then use mega-ships to offload costs onto others and block new entrants.

That sentence could use detailed explanation, because as it is it doesn't make any sense to me.

Yeah there was a viral video awhile back where this young woman on a family farm was sitting in her tractor talking about how everything worked. The tractor has more computer screens than my desk ever had and a GIS system.

> That extends to most people that make things; they know who it goes to and how it gets there, but the person who gets it doesn't know where it came from and how it got to them.

People who make things seriously, at least. People who think groceries come from the store and haven’t thought past that will still be able to cook a meal while a more serious home cook or a good professional chef knows more about where their ingredients come from. But this only goes a couple levels deep at most. The chef might know where the farmer’s fertilizer comes from (I think that’s part of what’s implied by “organic food”) but the farmer will definitely know. But for petrochemical fertilizer, there’s a whole petrochemical supply chain before that which the fertilizer manufacturer will understand even better than the farmer.

Sort of...Green Acres seemed more to exploit that difference to create an absurd environment in general. (Filmways had a lot of trained farm animals around anyway.) The recurring joke was that Eddie Albert had an idyllic vision of being a lawyer retiring to farm life, and all of the objectively insane things people there did made perfect sense to everyone except him, including Eva Gabor.

Some how-stuff-is-made videos do get wide play despite the algorithmic silos. The ones that do best are the ones that are rather peaceful & mesmerizing. That grabs the people interested in the technical aspects, the people who get ASMR tingles easily, and the people who fall into the /r/oddlysatisfying crowd. Those 3 groups often make for a large audience.

> It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK

This is a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home. Then, the de-shelled shellfish is valuable enough to get a spot on the next full ship heading out again.

Not nearly as crazy sounding.

> a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.

And you say this from your vast expertise in global economics?

Things evolved this way because a whole globe full of individual actors thought they made sense, based on prices. If they cease to make sense, those same actors will start doing something else because the prices they see will change.

It could take a while, but so would having another meeting of the Global Planning Committee.

> efficient

Economists and market fundamentalists keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

I'm being serious, and I do this when possible. My non-gardening relatives will sometimes even drop off a pile of unusable produce for such purposes when visiting.

Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.

What do you propose as an alternative?

It is kind of odd how we ship grains and soybeans farmed in the rain forest to a factory farm in the US and then end up with huge poo lagoons that in theory would have to be shipped back to the farms in the rain forest to act as fertilizer. Instead people just abandon the land and continue with their slash and burn agriculture on a different plot of land.

Right. In a system where people feel forced to work crazy hours in the middle of the ocean; in a system where someone else pays the externalities of petroleum; in a system where the raw materials for a freighter can be dug up by people who may not need to understand why anyone would need bananas shipped to them; in a system rich people have shaped so that it feeds them whatever exotic fruits they desire... only in such a system can shipping bananas to be thrown out be considered "cheap because economies of scale".

Economies of scale means individual suffering turns into statistical noise.

Because the environment is so much less polluted and working conditions are so much better in non capitalist countries?

The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste. The only industrialized alternative to capitalism was notoriously even more wasteful.

Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.

When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system. That’s how a carbon tax would work. It turns out that the intuitions of would-be central planners are often completely wrong.

The truth is, lots of people do ask themselves if it’s really worth it to ship bananas from Latin America to Europe. They work for the fruit company and their decision is based on the costs and benefits. If there are costs that they aren’t considering, then the solution is to incorporate those costs into the price system, not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.

People did ask themselves. They found, yes, it's worth. You might disagree, but I don't I think the number of rotten bananas a process produces offers any meaningful answer. At best it's a baseline and by itself about as useful as "x people die from y every year". What about it? Is that number supposed to be good or bad and what is the bigger context?

Doing stuff causes other stuff to happen. People die in car accidents, but a lot of death is prevented because we have cars, but then people also die because of pollution or get depressed because of noise pollution, and it keeps goin from there. It's hard. Let's be empathetic with each other, and good, and also think a lot about what is going on.

Petrol does not, in fact, “grow” on human timescales.

A lot of people would care, that’s the issue. Even if you personally have achieved an enlightened state where you’re perfectly able to voluntarily forego trying to do and acquire things that are contributing to an unsustainable society, it doesn’t mean that you can extrapolate from that and construct a stable system where everyone else does the same.

Human beings are greedy and shortsighted, and they especially want to have more than the people they surround themselves with. Any sustainable solution will need to take this into account.