This post about how wasteful the advertising industry is really highlights something I think a lot of people don't realise, which is that industry is not only incredibly, unfathomably inefficient but it's also run by idiots and it's a miracle that anything functions at all
Huge swathes of employees aren't producing anything and are completely redundant while the process to grow and prepare your food is often so precarious it almost doesn't happen; just look up all the recent recalls in your area to see what I mean.
My bf operates the machines that make milk bottles for a company that stocks not only supermarkets but fast food restaurants like McDonald's and they have only three of these bottle making machines, one for each quantity. There's one guy who has to fly in from out of state if the operators can't figure out a fix when one breaks down, which they do almost daily. Each machine is meant to have 3 people working it but more than once my bf has been the only person there, meaning he was running three machines single handedly. That's one person doing the work of nine people.
The whole operation is run on spit and hope, meanwhile offices are full of people whose jobs are just e-mailing each other back and forth. And this isn't a white collar vs blue collar thing either; the quantity of fresh produce that's just thrown away before it even makes it to processing is unreal. Animals too are slaughtered if there's a risk of disease outbreak and destroyed en masse. Cars are left to rust. And this isn't obscure knowledge! It's one of the contradictions of capitalism that we have to produce to excess but then destroy what can't be used
Like I think people just assume that there's some degree of proficiency, of efficiency, that there are systems in place to keep things running smoothly, and it's completely untrue. You know I'm very critical of the idea of supplanting capitalism for some other economic system which is still going to centre production above sustainability and human life but it's also true that simply cutting the superfluous work would decrease fossil fuel consumption by a lot
Like I saw a post that was like "advertising is really powerful they hire psychologists and everything" and idk how to explain that this is the kind of bullshit ad agencies sell to other businesses, like psychology itself is in the middle of a replication crisis even lmao. Ads aren't magic and a lot of the time, like that post I linked says, the people producing them are fully aware of the fact that they don't work. But they have to continue making them because making ads is also an industry!
