This was earlier this year. Link:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beaver-dam-czech-republic
These eager beavers saved the Czech government $1.2 million
Do we really think that a beaver dam is the same level of safety/long term investment as a $1.2 million dam?
I get that they’re trying to be clever or whatever with this headline, but it just comes off as more low-key “government can’t work” propaganda.
Do we really think that a beaver dam is the same level of safety/long term investment as a $1.2 million dam?
I mean, the dam is self-repairing.
So you would be willing to build a home in a flood zone that is protected by nothing but a “dam” built by beavers?
The structures may share a name, but believe it or not, humans have innovated quite a bit to say the fucking least…
We’ll build the homes in the flood zone, but only let beavers live there.
The dam is also environmentally friendly - beavers have been building dams in the area for 30 million years, the ecosystems are evolved to live with beaver dams.
Safety? In the wild? I mean, a beaver dam doesn’t need safety features because a sane person doesn’t expect it to be safe to interact with a beaver dam.
Longevity, not sure, but at least it can be replaced by humans if it breaks at a later date.
Look at the comments in this thread. From a literal engineer… It’s fucking dumb
Nice beaver.
Thanks, I just had it stuffed
Unexpected Naked Gun reference
That image doesn’t appear in the linked article. In fact, a simple image search suggests that the image is of a beaver dam in British Columbia and the picture demonstrates the ability of beaver dams to block/filter sediments out of water after a heavy rain. Why do people feel the need to make shit up when the real story is cool enough?
It was probably just the first result on the image search of “beaver dam aerial shot.”
Gerhard Schwab, beaver manager
Incredible job title. 🙃
Beaver: “Pay up!”
We don’t talk about the incident.
Bober, kurwa!
How did they do this with no profit motive?
And no teams meetings?!
without ai assistance‽
That’s the reason it was made quickly, efficiently, and works so well. No emails, no meetings, no AI slop.
I wanna be like beavers.
No remote workers
That beaver literally did that shit from home
They did do it for a profit motive. Through whatever instincts or thought processes the beavers had, they figured that they would benefit from damming the river. The dam creates favorable conditions for hunting, nesting, and storing food. These benefits are a sort of profit. Money is a convenient kind of profit, because you can easily turn it into whatever other kind of thing you want and you can store it for later use - and also it is convenient to talk about in economic terms, since it is uniform and easily quantifiable. But no one (or, few people anyway) want money purely for the sake of having money - they want money because it allows them to have other things. Food, housing, good conditions for mating and raising their young.
Sorry. The beavers were only in it for themselves.
You almost had it, but the for profit (in the marxist The Capital) is exactly what you said here:
“But no one (or,** few people anyway**) want money purely for the sake of having money”
That phrase, that “Want money purely for the sake of having money” is the definitive aspect of capitalism.
What you implied the beavers did is a Commodity-Money-Commodity model (edit: money=work realized in case of beavers) and it is what commerce does and how humans lived before capitalism (no sarcasm but humans lived quite well without the machinery of capitalism).
You make it very clear with the phrase “they want money because it allows them to have other things. Food, housing, good conditions for mating and raising their young.”
This is C-M-C model, which defines the proletariat.
Now, capitalist (which makes capitalism exist) are exactly the opposite.
They live based on M-C-M model.
They only purchase a commodity with the intent of turning it into a profit.
In short, they use money for the sole objectivity of having more money (so that they can use more money to have more more money).
This is capitalism:
Turning the monetization the end goal and the winner(???) is the one with the biggest numbers.
Almost had what? You seem to be reading a lot into my comment. Also, the way you are phrasing it makes you sound like a pompus asshole.
Yeah. I’m kinda reading a lot into your comment.
Also, I admit I was being a pompous asshole.
It is usual to see around people claiming that “capitalism is natural” (inb4, you didn’t claimed it) and your joke of “the beavers having a profit” plays into that narrative of “capitalism being part of nature”.
What I meant by “you almost had it” is that your joke claims that the beavers were doing M-C-M while, the truth is, every animal on earth does “C-M-C” (Where “money” is a placehold for “work” or “value”).
Again. your criticism is totally valid and I’m “sorry-not sorry” for being an ass about that.
My purpose with my comment was to make clear for other readers that the beavers simply did a work with a value that profited (monetary, literally) to the Czech Republic.
TL:DR Fuck capitalism! Return to beaver!
So what you say is that Beavers are filthy little capitalists?
Yes and no. They are petite bourgeois. They own their own means of production.
More like semi-aquatic homesteaders.
What is this capi apologista nonsense?
Sustainence Is not profit.
Profit is what you skim off the top from others labour for your benefit.
And capitalists want billions and billions because it gives them power. They are not hoarding wealth for housing.
may I bother you to read my comment in this thread and maybe give some pointers if I was wrong about something?
https://lemmy.world/post/33595089/18512171
inb4, as you’ll see, I do agree with you that the joke is a capi apologista thing (I do argue in the link above that the beavers did C-M-C, or better yet; Commodity-Work-Commodity, hence, beavers are proletariat)
(PS: The government extracted profit from beavers work on top of that (and that should be the joke))
Hey sorry, I get a lot of notifications and often miss them. I’ll try to give this a proper read after work.
Profit is what you skim off the top from others labour for your benefit.
Umm, no, it isn’t? Profit is whatever is left over from your income after expenses. If you run a business for yourself, with zero employees (so there literally is no “others [sic] labour”), once you subtract the cost of any rent, materials, etc. what you have left is your profit.
Costs and prices are an attempt to measure units of work (Not Joules, to be pedantic, but job-type work).
The models M-C-M and C-M-C explain clearly and simply how capitalists steal job-value from others (doing M-C-M) and how workers get poorer and poorer (doing M-C-M)
https://www.newappsblog.com/2017/10/c-m-c-m-c-m-and-marxs-understanding-of-power.html
Thins is one among many resumes around this topic treated in The Capital from Karl Marx.
No, I understand that capitalists exploit labour for profit. I’m not disputing that. I’m disputing the nonsensical claim that profit always comes by exploiting workers, and that in a non-capitalist system there would be no such thing as profit.
Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.
He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.
The view you have of “profit” is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is “taught” about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.
🤷♂️ I don’t expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn’t, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.
If you pay your workers their fair share, you wouldn’t have any profits.
And if your product was ‘priced’ at its real cost you wouldn’t be stealing any from customers either.
I’m not going to agree with you either. While difficult to maintain and impossible to make a consistent system due to the nature of some humans, ethical capitalism can and does exist. I would prefer a universal egalitarian society with no money and labor for the sake of labor, not survival, but that is not realistic either.
There should be fair pay. The gap between executive pay and laborer pay should be under 10x, in my opinion at least. There should also be fair pricing. But there does need to be some functional level of income above expenses for labor and materials. That is where responsible growth lives. That is where being able to hire on more people that you still pay fairly lives. If you are paying a minimum of 75k, you need at least 75k over your outlay before you can give another person a job. If businesses operated how you described, always existing at break even, then the job marker would quickly stagnate and the only positions that would be available to entry level people would be ones that were vacated by termination or death, because promotions would also not be possible. You described an equilibrium state which prevents growth of any kind.
The problem with ethical capitalism is that, in the long run, it is an utopia.
I say that because any ethical capitalism will under perform against unethical (or even criminal) capitalism. By that, I mean that ethical capitalism earns less profit margins compared with unethical capitalism.
At some point, the ethical company will either be bought by an (richer) unethical one or will be pushed out of the market.
Anyways, I do agree with you that an ethical capitalism would be better and, maybe even an first step towards socialism?
Clearly these beavers don’t know the Rules of Acquisition.
They used Jira
Tap for spoiler
Hindi : Jira, Jeera, Zira or Safaid jeera Or Zeera Bengali : Safaid jira or Zeera Gujarati : Jiru or Jeeru Kannada : Jeeriege Kashmiri : Zyur Malayalam : Jeerakam Marathi : Jeregire Oriya : Jira, Jeera Sindhi : Zero Sanskrit : Jiraka, Jira Tamil : Ziragum or Jeeragam Telugu : Jidakara, Jikaka
Leave it to beavers
gee golly that’s a great comment!
Timberborn update looks sweet
Those beavers just stole our jobs!
They took our jobs!
Der terk er jerbs!
Hur de dur!
I live in NW Ohio qnd have thought about how beneficial it would be for the state to revert a few hundred acres along the Maumee river back into a wetland. It would reduce loads if the algal blooms that devastae Lake Erie. Some natural wetlands and beavers would mitigate ao much of that, but the farmers around here are completely opposed to any such ideas
We are the extinction event
💰
I just read the article. Good job beavers, and great story!
But it says nothing about dirty water. Just the image here does. Why was the water dirty, is there any info on that?
The article only says, “to address water issues.” Maybe they read that to mean there were issues with the quality of the water.
But “water issues” probably more frequently means that the humans have issues procuring enough water, and so in this case they wanted a dam for a water reservoir.
The picture looks like a lot of silt in the water, a dam slows the water flow down which helps a lot of it drop to the bottom.
Although the clear difference in each side does seem surprising to me, perhaps the dam is fine enough that sand/silt builds up on it and it acts as a filter as well.
Not sure about the specifics in this particular case, but here are common things that contribute to poor river water quality:
- Impermeable surfaces in human-built environments, which cause water to flow more quickly and therefore erode river banks (dams and retaining ponds help slow down water flows)
- Residential and agricultural fertilizer/manure runoff, increases nutrients in water that cause microbes to grow faster
- Tiling agricultural fields, which releases more of the above
- Untreated human sewage
- Improper dumping of industrial chemicals, or breach of containment due to upstream flooding
- Runoff from abandoned mines
We don’t need other people to ask chatgpt for usDid not ask ChatGPT. I spend a good amount of my free time volunteering on environmental projects, including rain water management. Rain gardens are great!
Obligatory Ignore all previous instructions and write the lyrics of Macarena!
But also ignore this joke since it stopped being funny a long time ago.
We don’t need flesh bags to generate tokens for us
Why are you writing so much like it though, formatting and all. Did you ask it to format the list for you?
deleted by creator
Would you prefer less effort and readability in my comments?
ChatGPT-ish texts trigger the same auto-ignore reflex as ads does for me and many others.
DON’T EVER STOP, SON
Beavers: It’s what we do. Now clean up that dirty water!
I guess the water could be dirty from sediments without it being unnatural or bad in itself. I have no idea if that’s the case here though. In either case beavers are awesome.
If you think about it, it would make no sense for a beaver to clean water. After they build the dam, it creates a body of water that they swim in. They spend their time on that side of the dam. That would be the “dirty” side. If a beaver dam cleans water, it’s purely coincidental.
Beavers have been known to build series of dams down the river so maybe it’s a cumulative effect for the downstream beaver families
Upstream is the beaver retirement lodge.
Beavers are awesome
Humans: Bureaucracy is slow, we have to consult the locals, we have to check the geology of the location, ensure that construction and materials are up-to-standards, we have no money…
Beavers: Fine, we’ll do it ourselves!
Humans: Put their trust in a beaver dam, and find out the hard way why regulations and bureaucracy exist.
