These new age faux-buddhist-CEOs are the stupidest people. Fucking Steve Jobs could have lived to be 3000 years old but decided he'd rather try and cure his cancer by eating kale and carrots.
“The best solution is to change the way people eat, the way they live, the lifestyle, and diet,” Mackey says. “There’s no reason why people shouldn’t be healthy and have a longer health span. A bunch of drugs is not going to solve the problem.”
What a pretentious fucking asshole, I say shoot him to the moon
A bunch of drugs is not going to solve the problem
Like this ghoul isn't going to shell out for the best medicine humanity can produce to stretch out his miserable life like butter over too much bread
when the rich say shit like this it always reminds me of that story about ghandi saying his wife shouldn't take drugs bc god would save her and then took drugs later in life for his own illness.
Remember Steve Jobs?
I could imagine this Mackey guy being as full of himself as Jobs and die early because he thought this alternative medicine is gonna help him more than any normal doctor.
Idk, he seems much more of a straightforward cynical operator than the kind of billionaires that believe their own hype. But we'll see, fingers crossed.
A bunch of drugs is not going to solve the problem
This fucking asshole can get unlimited opiates and benzos to fill the gaping void within him which have a minimal health impact, meanwhile we commoners are limited to alcohol, fast food and tar.
Saying something that gets you the wall sure is gonna get rid of your cancer real quick. I think he's on to something
Americans are not taking as good care of their own bodies as they ought to be, Mackey says: “71% of Americans are overweight and 42.5% are obese. Clearly, we’re making bad choices in the way we eat,” he says. “It’s not a sustainable path. And so, I’m calling it out.”
Yep no systemic problems here, just coincidentally millions and millions of individual bad nutrition decisions. pERsOnaL rEsPONsiBiliTY! Fuck allllllllllllllllllllll the way off dude.
Why don't people just shop at my healthy store where everything is marked up by 20% and shredded cheese costs 8.50?
why buy shredded cheese, the anti-caking agents suck. in my opinion grating cheese only takes a moment and it tastes and melts better enough to justify the time
in my area, whole cuts of cheese costs more than the preshredded stuff. which is weird since you'd think it'd cost more to add potato starch and shred it, but i've never claimed to understand capitalism
I dunno cellulose is pretty cheap. Much cheaper than cheese. And you're getting as much as 4% sawdust.
Ever since I saw... something... cheese graters are a from reminder of what I saw.
Funny how Whole Foods aren’t spread out across the entire country and in poor urban areas.
My friend's been working at Whole Foods for years. When she started at cashier, she learned about the quota system, and the goal was to service about 30 patrons an hour. Of course, you have no control over who stands in your line, whether it's a jogger who popped in to buy one sports drink or the hermit out to stock his bunker with a 3-month surplus. One of her first days, she had a sweet old lady who was very conversational and needed a bit of help. Also wrote a check. The kindest, sweetest person we'd all love to care for. But in industry language, "nightmare fuel." Engaging with the older woman got her verbally reprimanded.
Ever been at a drive-thru and they ask you to "please drive forward and back up so it triggers the sensor, we get in trouble if an order takes longer than 3 mins"? It's happened to me at least twice.
I've worked in retail management, and the goal every day was to beat the "LYs" (Last Year's totals). If we were short, it was a game of roshambo over who would put a purchase on their credit card (to be refunded later) so we could jump the hurdle and avoid getting bitched out about what we did wrong and how we can do better. Every single day.
The entire conceit of capitalism is built on the foundation of competing, lying, narcing, and being dicks to each other. I fucking hate it.
I've never heard anyone talk about this, maybe it's well known, but it seems to me that comparison through competition is an incredibly dubious proposition. Outside of games, which are a whole different thing, establishing competitions based on real world outcomes, like productivity or profits, will quite obviously alter the behavior that's being compared. Meeting the criteria becomes the goal, not actually doing the thing the criteria was implemented to measure. So capitalists talk about how, in order to be competitive in the market, you'll need to constantly innovate to have the best product, and keep your prices low enough to not lose customers, but of course, since the comparative metric we use to determine the outcome of economic competition is profitability, finding a way around these obligations, which are a drain on profits, is where all of the innovative effort goes. Same for your experience, even competing with your own stores prior sales, the very act of implementing comparative metrics to establish a competitive structure, even with yourself, immediately has an effect on how people behave, which kills any possibility of comparing the thing you set out to compare. It would be like trying to study animals in there natural habitat by just moving in with them, you just being there would radically alter the thing you were trying to observe.
Does that make any sense?
Yup, plays right into the trope of :capitalist: taking 95% of the pie and engineering society to fight each other for the last slice. :capitalist-laugh:
Somewhat similar and humorous. Cobra Effect.
The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi.[3] The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
establishing competitions based on real world outcomes, like productivity or profits, will quite obviously alter the behavior that’s being compared. Meeting the criteria becomes the goal, not actually doing the thing the criteria was implemented to measure.
You mean Campbell's law or maybe Goodhart's law?
The entire conceit of capitalism is built on the foundation of competing, lying, narcing, and being dicks to each other. I fucking hate it.
You know this man has written books and started a foundation saying the world will get better if we all do a capitalism on purpose rather than by accident, right?
Neolib nonprofit: "if only we had a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"
Man who owns health food chain says buying his product and not raising his taxes is good. More at 10.
Whole Foods CEO: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to healthcare. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"
Do not, my friends, become addicted to not dying. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
“This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health,” Mackey wrote. “We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health.”
This is the final stage of American hyper individualism. What does "Freedom" even mean here?
"Freedom" rhetoric implies two things: freedom from something, and that there is a material difference between American QoL and every other place on earth because of that freedom. Freedom by itself means nothing. It's not like the US is the only country in the world where you can make choices. "Freedom" is a meaningless dogwhistle that Americans instinctively react positively to when used by politicans. It means nothing, really. But the public is scared of some spooky spectre alternative.
In the US context, "freedom" traditionally can only ever include negative freedoms, freedoms ensured by the absence of some active authoritarian force. Of course this is a framework in which the tyranny of the capitalist over the worker isn't tyranny but the exercise of freedom from any checks on that tyranny. Positive freedoms, encapsulated by FDR's "freedom from want", only emerged much later in the US political lexicon: freedom from poverty, hunger, illness, illiteracy, etc. don't count because in the classical liberal/right-"libertarian" framework they require government coercion of capitalists to pay higher taxes, higher wages, etc., i.e. they require an implicit violation of the capitalist's negative freedoms.
"Freedom" in America just means freedom for business owners to do whatever tf they want.
This dude is literally just a huckster telling people that they'll live longer if the shop at his store. Just dressed up in modern self-help guru language. Absolutely zero credentials other than "I do the big money".
The fact that someone thought that asking the CEO of Whole Foods about healthcare would provide any kind of meaningful insight is just the most pathetic, simpering, neoliberal hero-worship bullshit that says more about them than it does about John Mackey.
I was ready to excoriate CNBC for even interviewing this guy, but then it turned out to be those absolute piss drinkers at Freakanomics Radio. I cannot describe how much contempt I have for those court jesters.
I fucking despise those shitheads. Had a 'friend' who was really into them talk to me about one episode where they examined this mentorship program where successful students were paired with kids from rundown inner city areas. Apparently these kids from inner city areas did worse than their peers. The takeaway apprently being don't bother with these programs and not that a radically different set of skills is needed to survive these childhoods because conditions are so appallingly bad. He seemed genuinely shocked when I suggested that. Seems like just an awful pit of the worst lib takes.
I used to listen to them a lot, but even before I self-identified as a socialist I could tell that something wasn't kosher about how they did their stories. They always took these really narrow looks at problems and used that limited amount of information to draw out these conclusions that were always just obviously incorrect if you took other factors into account.
The story that I remember is exactly like yours; they were wondering if just giving people money would actually improve their lives (as opposed to other more complicated methods of assistance), so they looked at some experiment that had been done in the 1800's and came to the conclusion that since 19th century farmers couldn't effectively make use of a direct cash stimulus it wouldn't work today, ignoring the fact that we live in an entirely different economy, society, and even geography. I remember listening that and just thinking to myself, "what the fuck are these guys talking about?"
There are a shitton of studies that show unconditional cash transfers work as well or better than conditional programs. Giving people money is good. It gets them to invest in businesses, education, etc.
Disheartening that the ultra-wealthy are able to say this shit in public with the worst reprisal they have to fear is some Twitter thread they won't read.
This man should be forced to live on food stamps and medicaid for the rest of his miserable life.
I ate more vegetables and did more exercise and got hit by a train at full speed. I just got right up and kept walking.
Fuck this motherfucker. As someone he eats healthy (i'm vegan and cook a lot), it has cured none of my actual health conditions.
Xi, please,,,
I could eat nothing but kale and do cardio 10 hours a day but I'd still have T1 diabetes and need insulin.
The scary thing is this guy thinks he's actually making a good point here.
Side note; diabetes is an amazing radicalizing tool
The history of insulin has been helping radicalize my family. The fact that the scientist released the patent for $1 and yet we still have companies murdering people by restricting access to insulin is so beyond fucked up most people can clearly see it.
Tim Faust once mentioned that M4A would be an entry point for public health campaigns such as "eating healthy" and "living well". You can imagine that once the government is on the hook for the vastly untreated epidemic of diabetes, obesity, stress, mental health and environmental racism, they'd change their tune pretty quick. This is why a lot of corporate opposition exists to M4A. It doesn't just obliterate the billion dollar healthcare industry; but it also would force the government to price in the externalities of profit-making in american currently offloaded to the average American's body.
went to go check on Tim Faust to see what he's up to and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
EDIT: after further research I've learned it is Travis McElroy from MBMBAM. I thought it was fucking v*ush
That kind of makes it even more bizarre, is Travis even as left as the V-Man? And he's with everyone else in the image lol. Who the hell made that image
Well if the fucking government would allow Auto-pilot Teslas out and free to roam the streets, and allowed our dear friend Elon to force cities build private tunnels throughout our cities for only those Teslas, and the people had the freedom to buy those products, then they wouldn't need healthcare to cover silly things like car accidents.
