Mastodawn

Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑1d ago

Mark Holtom (aka Kingbeard)

"A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways. He does not get fat.
Healthy people are neither needed nor useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the country's GDP (gross domestic product).
On the contrary, every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself."
Choose carefully: cyclist or McDonald's? It is worth considering.
P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles.
P.P.S. If you have read this far and still don't get it, this post is SATIRE. Reread it with this in mind.

Ralf Mohr 1d ago

@MarkHoltom
I like that 😁

Felix 🇨🇦 🇩🇪 🇺🇦1d ago

@MarkHoltom Perfect example of #underconsumption

https://theconversation.com/understanding-underconsumption-core-how-a-new-trend-is-challenging-consumer-culture-235417

#anticonsumerism

Understanding ‘underconsumption core’: How a new trend is challenging consumer culture

‘Underconsumption core’ is a trend that challenges overconsumption by encouraging people to maximize the utility of their purchases and buy only what they truly need.

The Conversation

Harald Werner 1d ago

And what now? Ban cycling?

Und was jetzt? Radfahren verbieten?

stepardo 1d ago

@HaWeCom @MarkHoltom

Subtiler. Einfach X tote Radfahrer pro Jahr produzieren und die Infrastruktur überall extrem diskriminierend gestalten.

Eigentlich beschreibt das den Status Quo ganz gut.

Cabbidges 1d ago

@MarkHoltom Retooted for the last line! Yep, walking is definitely the worst. I do it every chance I can :D

Erik Sandblom 🌻1d ago

@MarkHoltom That’s a nice quote, but there is more to it than that. The money saved from cycling will typically go to other things like going to the hairdresser or restaurants more often.

https://bikeportland.org/2012/07/06/study-shows-biking-customers-spend-more-74357

Study shows biking customers spend more

Survey results suggest that patrons who arrive by automobile do not necessarily convey greater monetary benefits to businesses than bicyclists, transit users, or pedestrians. — From TR News articleDoes your mode of transportation have any relationship to how much you spend at restaurants and bars? T

BikePortland

Gosseynaj 1d ago

@eriksandblom @MarkHoltom Yes, and also you buy more shampoo 😁

funbaker 1d ago

@eriksandblom but this doesn't fill the pockets of the car manufacturers etc. 💩 @MarkHoltom

Mensch, Marina 1d ago

@funbaker they can build bicycles to earn a living @eriksandblom @MarkHoltom

@eriksandblom @MarkHoltom most importantly. The spend on cars largely going out of the local community and off to multinational companies whereas the spend by cyclists is mostly on local companies and services.

Erik Sandblom 🌻1d ago

@jessta @MarkHoltom Yes. Thank you for pointing this out. It is important to consider, not least when someone says we need a new freeway to ”stimulate the economy”.

jcriecke 23h ago

@jessta always baffles me when city council preferences car companies to local companies

Mathieu Perona 1d ago

@MarkHoltom This is the reverse case of the broken window fallacy. What cyclists do not spend one way, they spend in other areas.
To the best of our knowledge, the net impact of cycling on GDP is positive, because cyclists are more productive (because healthier).

Sepia Fan 1d ago

But they spend their money the wrong way. Nothing goes to big business like car companies, construction industry (suburbian sprawl!), banks, pharma and healthcare etc.

And they lead a less resource intense life - that's not okay from a growth paradigm perspective.
Seriously, that's bad for capitalism.

Mathieu Perona 1d ago

@stekopf @MarkHoltom
Sorry, but this is not the way growth accounting works. Economic growth is producing more with the same amount of inputs, or less. When I avoid filling my car fuel tank and buy an album on Bandcamp instead, I create growth: there are less market-traded inputs for an additional copy of the album than for a tank of gasoline.
Notice the same holds if I replace the album with an Amazon Prime subscription.

Mathieu Perona 1d ago

@stekopf @MarkHoltom There are many good reasons to cycle (full disclosure: I either bike or skate to work), but fighting capitalism is not one of them. Capitalism as perfectly integrated bicycle as a mass transportation mode in the past, and can perfectly do so again in the future.
In the current setting, I'd wager that switching from car transportation to biking increases growth (because of the healths benefits).

Sepia Fan 1d ago

@MathieuP @MarkHoltom

Your point is, if I don't spend my money for a car (+ its ecosystem) then I spend my money otherwise - with a similar result?

My point is, if you don't spend your money for a car (+ its ecosystem), then you don't need so much money to make a good living.

If you travel more, buy a house etc., then you set the saving off. Then there is no effect on growth.
But if you decide to just work less (or not more, if you don't have a car yet) then this has an effect on growth.

1/2

Sepia Fan 1d ago

My "anti-capitalism" narrative was not related to my first sentence "But they spend their money the wrong way.". It is releated only to the "less resource-intense life" from the 2nd paragraph. ;)

And ofc cycling can work in capitalism - that's not the point. But it reduces the recources you consume for a necessity of life, transportation.
But the times you probably are referring to we were on a lower GDP level - or looking at 🇳🇱, they are not cannibalising a car industry with promoting 🚲.

2/2

Mathieu Perona 1d ago

@stekopf I understand.
Cycling can fit in a degrowth lifestyle. My concern is that the initial quote of the thread implies it causes a reduction in growth, which is false unless you, as you aptly point out, consciously integrate it in a change of your consumption habits (empirically, most people will not work less, but consume other things).

Sepia Fan 1d ago

Yes, consumerism is strong in our society.
We need a change in lifestyles - changing to a less expensive travel mode can help question other problematic (overly expensive, extractive, harmful) habits.
But it's a long way.

Jack of all trades 20h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

"Economic growth is producing more with the same amount of inputs, or less."

This is a curious definition of growth. Wouldn't it suffice to end the sentence at "more", i.e. "economic growth is producing more"?

Jack of all trades 20h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

What some people may take issue with in regards to the input is that economics often only concerns itself with money, as you hinted at by adding an adjective "market-traded". The input being a unique ecosystem being destroyed or a non-renewable resource cannot be reduced to a monetary valuation though.

Jack of all trades 20h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

How can you be sure there are less inputs for a copy of a Bandcamp album or an Amazon Prime subscription than for an equally-priced amount of gasoline? The digital world has a very real physical footprint in terms of materials and energy.

Mathieu Perona 10h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom We are taking marginal costs here. The overwhelming share of digital goods footprint is at the hardware fabrication and disposal stages.

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

Not only that. Energy is also a very important input, which comes back nicely to the gasoline for a car vs digital subscription example.

It's hard to avoid news like these nowadays:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/21/why-electricity-prices-are-surging-for-us-households.html

or:

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai

Or even a cursory browse of @gerrymcgovern feed will give you a good idea of how much input the digital world requires.

Why electricity prices are surging for U.S. households

Electricity prices are outstripping the pace of inflation by a wide margin — a trend likely to continue in coming years, experts said.

CNBC

Mathieu Perona 9h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern You are confounding total and marginal costs here.

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

No, I'm arguing that deriving a marginal cost for digital goods is not as straightforward as one could wish. Unless we externalise pretty much everything, which would make your original point about "less inputs" moot.

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

To give an example of what I mean:

If 10 more subscribers to Amazon Prime causes Amazon to run an additional server, is that part of their fixed cost or marginal cost of the new subscriptions?

If 10 more people are streaming movies every day causing the ISP to upgrade their routers is that part of their fixed cost or marginal cost of the new subscribers?

Etc.

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

While it is obvious that more energy is needed to move a car than to stream an album over the internet, it becomes much less obvious once the whole system is taken into account. Just like roads have costs, so does the internet infrastructure. Storing and streaming data requires data centers, routers, switches and cables that not only need to be constantly powered, but also periodically replaced.

1/2

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

In fact, diesel-powered trucks visit data centers every day to replace old and broken equipment.

Given all that, can we be sure that $100 of digital goods requires smaller resource input than $100 of gasoline?

Our world becomes increasingly digitized and yet our resource use is only going up. How would you explain that?

2/2

Mathieu Perona 9h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
Firstly, because I have recent lifecycle analysis under my eyes. We are talking differences by one or two orders of magnitude, there.
Secondly, the increase of resources consumption at world level is overwhelmingly the effect of development. In the Western world, resource consumption per capita is stable or decreasing in most countries (the US are, as for health, the embarrassing outlier).

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

"We are talking differences by one or two orders of magnitude"

Could you share a link to that research?

"In the Western world, resource consumption per capita is stable or decreasing in most countries."

That is surprising. Is this accounting for trade?

Mathieu Perona 9h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
For energy use, this chart (not trade adjusted) is a good place to start : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart

Energy use per person

Measured in kilowatt-hours per person. Here, energy refers to primary energy using the substitution method.

Our World in Data

Mathieu Perona 9h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern And this one is trade-adjusted, if I am not mistaken.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring

How much energy do countries consume when we take offshoring into account?

How do energy footprints compare across the world when we adjust for the goods that we import from overseas?

Our World in Data

Jack of all trades 8h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

This is energy only, and the claim was about all inputs.

It may be hard to find good estimates from the production side, so we may as well look at the waste side:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-accumulated-in-oceans

Europe went from 2.11m tonnes of plastic waste ending up in the ocean in 2000 to 5.05m tonnes in 2019.

Similarly, according to:

https://globalewaste.org/statistics/continent/europe/2015/

Europe went from 15.6kg of e-waste per capita in 2015 to 17.6kg in 2022.

Plastic waste accumulated in the oceans

The amount of plastic waste that has accumulated in the oceans since 1951. This is calculated as the running total of plastic flowing into the ocean each year.

Our World in Data

Jack of all trades 8h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

I live in Europe and wherever I look I see more *stuff*. There's no way we are using less resource inputs per capita than 20 or even 10 years ago.

Mathieu Perona 8h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern I think we have little grasp of how inefficient cars were when we were young (I live in France).
A current BMW consumes half as much as a 1990's Ford Sierra.
There has also been bounds in energy efficiency of most home appliances and heating devices.
You'll also notice that there is more stuff, but most of it is so much lighter than it used to be.

Jack of all trades 8h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern

Yes, but there were less cars when I was young. The playground next to my parents' house has been converted into a parking lot. 🙁

The car sizes also changed drastically. Our family of five drove on vacation in Fiat 126p. Now my two parents drive alone in Toyota RAV4.

The lighter stuff may still have a bigger environmental impact / material input. Just ask yourself: how many kilograms of raw materials must be mined to produce a single cell phone?

Gerry McGovern 6h ago

@jackofalltrades
A single cell phone? Last time I checked up, it was about 60 - 90 kg of mining waste for that 140 grams of specialness. And about 14,000 liters of water. Not to worry, we've only made and dumped about 16 billion of them since 2007.

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

Gerry McGovern 6h ago

@jackofalltrades
Excellent points. Bigger and worse. Lighter and more throwaway. Planned obsolescence and all that. Driven by the corrupted concepts of innovation and efficiency.

There's more materials in a modern tire than there used to be in an entire car. What that means is that tires are toxic time bombs, with a car’s four tires generating one trillion toxic nano particles of dust for every kilometer driven. But, heh, innovation and efficiency!

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

UkeleleEric 5h ago

@gerrymcgovern @jackofalltrades @MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom yeah, the average car is also a LOT heavier, as well as bigger (and electric vehicles are the worst, as they are both heavier and don't become lighter as the fuel is used up) causing more damage to roads, which have to then be repaired. And they even take up more space when parked...

JackPearse 6h ago

@jackofalltrades @MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern But what I discovered is: people buy more and more stuff because of two main reasons:
1. Tik Tok was instrumentalized to create another „Status“ society so that so that you have to buy shit to compete with peer pressure
2. Industry sells not finished shit. So you buy it, you discover it’s crap, you buy another one, to try wether that works as expected, and so on.

K_L_Cooper 4h ago

@jackofalltrades @MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom @gerrymcgovern
WTF⁉️⁉️⁉️

Mathieu Perona 10h ago

@jackofalltrades @stekopf @MarkHoltom Economics commonly separate growth in (i) increase of inputs and (ii) increase in the efficiency of the use of inputs (aka technological progress). The latter is the interesting par of growth in this context.

Jack of all trades 9h ago

@MathieuP @stekopf @MarkHoltom

Both are interesting, because at a high level they go hand in hand. In fact, it could be argued that our whole civilization is one big rebound effect. The more efficient we get at using resources the more we use them.

UkeleleEric 6h ago

@MathieuP @MarkHoltom I agree, but I took the whole thing as a tongue-in-cheek 'rant'

Alex von Kitchen 1d ago

@MarkHoltom that healthy people bit feels rather ableist, like you're blaming my disability on my lack of cycling (personally the link is the other way, fyi)

Likewise the bit about maccas ignores the influence of food deserts and poverty

Queer Like The Slur 1d ago

@Dangerous_beans @MarkHoltom it's genuinely impressive* how many aspects of passive eugenics have been jammed into one relatively short, mostly plagerised toot.

*pejorative

Queer Like The Slur 1d ago

@Dangerous_beans inb4 @MarkHoltom starts accusing us of being his ex wife's solicitors

Queer Like The Slur 1d ago

@Dangerous_beans @MarkHoltom despite being old and plagerised, this toot has excellent timing.

It's a very concise encapsulation of the RFK jr Make America Healthy Again philosophy: advanced lifesaving medical systems, including all specialists, should be replaced with good old fashioned wholesome food and outdoor exercise.

It feels nice and crunchy in the brain, like fascist rhetoric so often does.

@coolandnormal @Dangerous_beans @MarkHoltom yeah, the RFK-style rhetoric is really dangerous, harmful. Strong bike networks are critical infrastructure as well - even benefitting those who don’t cycle

Misuse Case 1d ago

@Dangerous_beans @MarkHoltom Thank you. I cycle daily but I have high blood pressure anyway.

Arratoon 1d ago

@MarkHoltom Where’s that quote from?

Queer Like The Slur 1d ago

@arratoon @MarkHoltom the actual origin is unclear. It's very popular on LinkedIn and Facebook, has been for many years. It's attributed to several different people, no one owns up to actually writing it. Like a less successful equivalent of the classic "one marijuana in the butt" post.

Arratoon 1d ago

@coolandnormal @MarkHoltom Yeah, while the sentiments might be nice, I’m calling shenanigans.

Mark Holtom (aka Kingbeard)1d ago

Words attributed to General Director of Euro Exim Bank

This must have been written by AI. It doesn’t make a point or make sense. Quoted from where, I ask.

Marcus Reynolds 1d ago

@DziadekMick @MarkHoltom

Maybe it’s not a quote

@DziadekMick @MarkHoltom I can't find any reputable fact checkers that have done the legwork on this one. It starts appearing on social media in early 2020 mostly attributed to Sanjay Thakrar, CEO Euro Exim Bank (who is real but isn't the CEO: https://theorg.com/org/euro-exim-bank/org-chart/dr-sanjay-thakrar)

Dr Sanjay Thakrar - Head Of Global Strategy And Leadership at Euro Exim Bank | The Org

Dr. Sanjay Thakrar worked at Euro Exim Bank as Head of Global Strategy and Leadership since August 2022.

THE ORG

@phlash @MarkHoltom

Whoever started this has wasted their time. It’s rubbish.

For example, Cyclists have cars too. Their accident rate is a *drain* on the economy. The NHS wouldn’t need to employ in those numbers even if it had the money.

It’s a pointless f/ing post that has made me annoyed.