What in the orphan crushing machine is this shit?!
https://maritime-executive.com/article/bananas-ahoy-as-overboard-containers-wash-ashore
The cargo company should be prosecuted for littering. Unless they can convince some benevolent locals to go help them clean up the spill.
Members of the British government have been calling for strong efforts to ensure the shipping company and its insurers will pay the costs of the cleanup. Seatrade, which operates the vessel, said its insurers are fully engaged in the process, and in the meantime, volunteers are scouring the beaches, aiding in the cleanup (and possibly taking a few bananas home as a reward).
Oh goodie, the insurers are fully engaged! I’m sure they will help clear the quickly rotting food off the beach just as much as the volunteers who are physically there doing actual work.
God I hate pencil-pusher culture, it’s so weird 😂
Thanks for the quote! I realise I replied snarkily - I’m not mad at you of course, just at the quote
its insurers are fully engaged in the process
I am now imagining an insurance office where suddenly an alarm goes off:
The lights turn red, a siren howls, and everyone jumps up from their seats and runs to a garage where black vans are wating with the engines running.
They drive to the beach and frantically start picking up bananas, in a race against time and decomposition.
“The guards were on the river bank to make sure the poor didn’t take the fruit from the river, when that was too expensive it was collected in a pile and doused in kerosene. The hogs were burned as well all for the sake of profit” -grapes of wrath
I honestly think about it to this day. We didn’t give milk to the homeless during covid. Farmers dumped it all for profit. We don’t grow food to feed We gro food to make profit.
Interesting that the owners want to punish you for “stealing” their bananas, but let me guess… they aren’t going to fucking clean them up themselves, are they?
Their source for it potentially being illegal comes from the daily heil so I would ignore it
this reminds me of the famous quote in the grapes of wrath
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
I never thought I’d ever defend UK laws, but if you take something that doesn’t belong to you, isn’t it generally frowned upon in most parts of the world? This seems pretty normal to me
Morally nobody is being deprived of value because the goods aren’t saleable and thus no effort will be made to collect them. They are rather insisting that others who would have enjoyed them should simply let them rot. So first you are arguing for moral evil for no purpose. Next it is normally the case that goods that are abandoned on purpose eg making no attempt to collect the bananas cannot be stolen.
Lastly such a threat is absolutely insane.because it is a threat to go after private citizens with the power of the state to punish people for what normally isn’t a crime, wasting the publics resources hurting people for doing something that was never morally wrong.
Does this still make sense to you?
Sure, I understand the moral arguments, but it’s very common to have legal consequences when taking something that doesn’t belong to you — regardless of morals.
Of course it would be morally better to give everyone permission to take the bananas. It sounds like that hasn’t happened though, so it seems very simple to understand that there would be legal consequences for taking them.
How is this not obvious? Did I miss some critical detail?
You are missing everything basically.
Normally its actually legally impossible to pursue charges against someone for picking up something you deliberately abandon. Furthermore the act of doing so would in the best case involve spending thousands to tens of thousands of the people’s money to pursue such charges. Threatening to burn the people’s money and hurt people to keep people from eating food that has been abandoned is absolutely crazy.
Ohh I didn’t know they abandoned the bananas deliberately. Yeah that’s an important detail
Did you think they were going to gather them up and take them to the store?
No.
The British people really would benefit from all collectively refusing to vote for their mainstream parties and instead voting for independent anarchist parties which try to get rid of as many laws and government institutions and also nationalize anything the people will be better served by, under collective ownership. All it really takes I think is to just talk to people. Tell them to stop voting for those parties and if they can’t resist then to stop watching the news media which fills their minds with anxiety.
instead voting for independent anarchist parties which try to get rid of as many laws and government institutions and also nationalize anything the people will be better served by, under collective ownership.
Once the laws are gone/things are deregulated, the corpos will likely take over. Nationalizing sounds good, but likely won’t end well without regulations, imo.
Nationalism is anticorporate if you do it correctly. I am by no mean a fascist, (I’m trans) and I have moderate views on immigration. Also you can just ban the stock market and the collective ownership of companies and also limit their limited liability and go to a hard, Inflation proof currency to plug up the other holes. Corporations cannot compete with small businesses without lobbying for lower tax rates then the working class and relying on low interest loans to buy assets and brands which artificially boost their value in the speculator markets. What I’m asking for is a real free market, where corporations and the people pay the exact same tax rate, so it’s fair for everyone. This alone would bring in a good bit more revenue for the state and also simply taxes by getting rid of the micro taxation and property taxes on single property owners and stuff.
Right now Blackstone is holding 60,000 properties in the U.S market, and somehow are paying little property tax on that while working class people who have seen their wages desitigrate over the past 20 years are paying 10s of thousands in property taxes in many cases.
We have the power to nationalize things like the real estate market through wise tax policy, if we choose and this would actually take a ton of pressure off the working class. Just that alone could free up hundreds of dollars/pounds per month for many workers. It could get the average age of buying a first home back down below retirement ages.
“if you do it correctly” holds a lot of weight to this argument. I’d be worried of anyone who wants to start from scratch, instead of building on the current foundation.
You make good points, though. I’m just more skeptical than you.
I don’t know anything about British courts, but I doubt that any court is going to find anybody guilty of any major crime for collecting bananas washing up on the beach, for which the corporation that lost them got an insurance settlement to cover the loss. That’s salvage, and salvage rights are long established.
I’ve seen Oliver twist, they are ready to sentence people to jail for this crime.
Anyone that eats the bananas they find on the beach won’t need the law to punish them
What’s the matter babe, you’ve barely touched your sea bananas!
