(Thread IKs:
skooma512)
|
roffles posted:I’ve been seeing Klarna ads everywhere and apparently even FAST FOOD is something you should be taking a loan for. if apple can lock all their customers into their own financing platform they’re gonna make bank. very cool economy When I saw the Klarna ad for doing a payment plan to buy a pizza, that's when I think I fully realized just how over this country is. There's no way an empire could sustain fast food financing as a viable necessity and still be recognizable inside of a decade.
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 00:51
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 22:14 |
|
|
meanolmrcloud posted:?? if financing literally everything can be normalized behavior, then the misery can really skyrocket. seems like a fine way to dominate? Oh for sure, but like, for how long? That bill comes due eventually, right? Like no matter how many layers of mediation and obfuscation and rent-seeking gets imposed between a human being and human needs (food, water, shelter, medicine), ultimately the physical reality of those needs has to meet and be consumed by the physical human at a constant rate in order for the whole train to keep sputtering along. If people get crushed out of the system by, essentially, school lunch debt at a pan-societal scale, I don't see how the system can realistically continue to thrive, profit, or exist. Maybe a shorter way to put it is that nobody can buy your stuff if they're dead or impoverished, so pushing towards a system that can only produce those two outcomes for a geometrically increasing percentage of the population seems... untenable.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 01:06
|
|
|
Mr Hootington posted:They are reorienting the economy so it will work if large swathes of people can no longer consume. What would that even look like? There's only so much smoke and mirrors you can use to get rich dickheads to trade $100,000 monkey jpegs back and forth without the economy just idk not meaning anything? Everything, everything, is really just a luxury appendage bolted, Frankenstein style, onto the same basic torso of that basic bottom floor of Maslow's hierarchy. You can't invert that pyramid, right? Like, lotus eating can't really be an economy without people growing, harvesting, and delivering lotuses, and all those people need food, shelter, etc. I'm sure automation can handle it to some degree, but I don't know if the elites are actually terribly interested in a world where the only people who consume anything are them and their shrinking cohort, and the only thing they consume is various forms of valueless, zero calorie, gilded frosting that arbitrarily costs eleven million dollars an ounce. Edit: Koirhor posted:a rising lol lifts all lmaos Thread title
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 01:28
|
|
|
Thorn Wishes Talon posted:he's doing great, much to the chagrin of leftist cosplayers I have never gone from knowing nothing about a poster to having a bone deep recognition that they're wearing a diaper and a helmet as fast as I have with this goon on this one page alone, goddamn
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 08:32
|
|
|
On the topic of extremely grim portents for the future of the educational system of the United States https://twitter.com/Steinernomics/status/1640850693878693889?t=0igRAT7HoJlyYMC6rWluAA&s=19
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 17:46
|
|
|
SlimGoodbody posted:On the topic of extremely grim portents for the future of the educational system of the United States, this little thread feels pretty bad
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 17:46
|
|
|
So I had a fun thought that maybe someone who is not currently skullfucked with COVID, as I am, could verify. It is an open secret that the powers that be were not interested in presenting the full books on COVID deaths. As the pandemic wore on, more and more corners got cut, whether by regulatory bodies changing the definition of "COVID deaths" to exclude "people who died with both COVID and a fig leaf co-morbidity" or by red states who straight up stopped reporting them because it was politically inconvenient for them to exist. The numbers also didn't count the people who died for lack of emergency care due to filled up ICU beds as COVID related, despite COVID being the reason those needs were occupied. So my suspicion is, if we take the average for annual deaths in this country from the years before the pandemic, and compare it to the annual deaths during the pandemic minus the number ascribed to COVID, we ought to see a notable jump that is yet otherwise unaccounted for, which would be especially interesting considering we probably saw significantly fewer things like car accident deaths because there were fewer people on the road during lockdown.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2023 00:42
|
|
|
Cops truly are just erotically addicted to their own depravity and vulgar dominance first and foremost.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2023 07:24
|
|
|
Justin Tyme posted:Strange how a country whose gdp has been constantly increasing and whose corporations are posting record profits and who mints its own currency somehow is having all these problems keeping its basic welfare programs solvent This is so succinct, it's exactly how I'm going to phrase this rhetorical to every dumbass I get in an argument with on Nextdoor going forward Edit: Griz posted:that's weird, the sausage biscuit here is the only remaining cheap breakfast item at $1.19. a single hash brown is fuckin $2.49 Yo what is up with this, I was at the grocery store and saw that a bag of potato chips are like $7. Potatoes are one of the primo dirt cheap carbs of this country after corn. To my recollection, they are not expensive. Did something happen to potatoes? Are we in a potato famine? SlimGoodbody has issued a correction as of 04:37 on Apr 2, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2023 04:26
|
|
|
Wow, drat. The potato is the cornerstone of the American treat regime. If we somehow botch our supply of corn syrup, all bets are off in this country.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2023 05:30
|
|
|
Gorson posted:Unironically this, was at the grocery store yesterday and there were maybe 10 1lb packages of beef in the cooler at a minimum of $6.50/lb. There used to be piles of them. I don't know if this is a supply problem or them putting the number out they think they're going to sell at that price, but it doesn't really matter. It's over. A thing I'm watching with nervous curiosity is what happens once potatoes, beef, etc become expensive enough that even the fast food mega franchises which rely on them can no longer offer them at a price that feels worth it to people. What happens to these sectors when even 20% of their user base decides it's not in the budget to spend $10 on a mediocre burger and fries "value" meal whose primary initial draw was that it was supposed to be negligibly cheap?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2023 09:45
|
|
|
I haven't been in this thread for too long but I think it is very funny that it seems to reliably switch back and forth between coming to a dialectical consensus on geopolitical economic realities and violently disagreeing on  every three or four pagesAnyway I second the suggestion for that one goon to find other leftists to organize with in their area. I've been doing food security mutual aid in my city for several years now and not only has it helped with the crushing weight of late capitalist neoliberal despair, it's earned me a gaggle of wonderful leftist pals and comrades who I love to death. Also seconding that joining a leftist group is a blast cause it means you'll get to witness incredible drama. Every leftist group at least partially crosses over with every other leftist group in the area, so you'll hear about it when the punk anarcho-communist flophouse that did weekly sandwich drops to the homeless camp has a complete meltdown because a member of the vanguard polycule made out with someone's ex who got accused of being an unprincipled communist, and everyone demands that everyone else do a self crit lock-in to prove who was right and who was wrong, but no one is willing to do it, and then they find out they're all getting evicted anyway because the treasurer spent all the group's money on drugs and gacha phone games.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2023 22:56
|
|
|
I thought the reason microplastics were bad is cause they hosed with your endocrine system, but I freely admit to not being a doctor of plastics medicine
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 01:43
|
|
|
SlimGoodbody posted:A thing I'm watching with nervous curiosity is what happens once potatoes, beef, etc become expensive enough that even the fast food mega franchises which rely on them can no longer offer them at a price that feels worth it to people. What happens to these sectors when even 20% of their user base decides it's not in the budget to spend $10 on a mediocre burger and fries "value" meal whose primary initial draw was that it was supposed to be negligibly cheap? Rectal Death Adept posted:https://twitter.com/Fxhedgers/status/1642648773640998913?s=20 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 04:07
|
|
|
i am harry posted:i would pay to see a graph that plots consumption of mcdonalds hashbrowns and price of mcdonalds hashbrowns over the last four years That's gotta exist in some McDonald's sales reports somewhere, though I doubt they're necessarily public. Mola Yam posted:love to remember the chimpmunk underage porn massacre Mr Hootington posted:He hasnt posted for 2 years and he shouldn't have died on the chipmunk porn hill. Gonna need this goonlore
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 04:53
|
|
|
Mola Yam posted:someone posted alvin and the chipmunks porn. got removed pretty quick and that should have been the end of it. Ok yeah that's insanely fuckin petty and stupid
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 07:37
|
|
|
actionjackson posted:i meant to post this here first instead of capitalism.png but gently caress it i had to see it and now you do too This is just Moloch worship in slow motion. Feed your infant to The Beast.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 22:35
|
|
|
Cuttlefush posted:soychrist What would the opposing, correct Chad be in this instance
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2023 22:49
|
|
|
So weird I wonder why the people in power killed that guy 🤔
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 07:36
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Paul was a victim of what we would nowadays refer to as "fake news" and "an op" Reading PKD's VALIS rn and this is making me have Thoughts. Edit: spelling, even though my dickass already got roasted SlimGoodbody has issued a correction as of 20:46 on Apr 4, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 20:22
|
|
|
Noblesse Obliged posted:only thing democrats will be doing about this is reminding us that sex work is work. 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2023 21:21
|
|
|
Willa Rogers posted:Tell your lib friends & family to stop donating to PP. https://twitter.com/lucperkins/status/1642944353646657561?s=20 God I hate liberals. GET A BRAIN! MORANS!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2023 01:52
|
|
|
My undergrad econ professor gave us extra credit for managing a $20 kiva.org portfolio lol she was so bullish on that sketchy poo poo. She was a nice enough lady, but every time I asked even the most basic left-perspective question to interrogate she econ gospel she regurgitated, her response was invariably something like "yes, but our system won't make sense if we look at it that way so we interpret it in (X completely opposite way that handwaves the structural contradiction)." Like the worst one I remember was when we were talking about opportunity cost and the value someone places on their billionth dollar versus on, say, their 10th. I asked why the system views the utility and value of someone's galactic excess exactly the same (or more, if you actually examine our incentive structures) as the first dollar needed by a starving man, and no joke her response was that, well, every person's individual assessment of value is private and unknowable, so from a utilitarian perspective it's actually impossible to know whether or not a billionaire is getting more satisfaction and sense of utility from their ten billionth dollar than the starving man is getting from that fifth dollar which guarantees him his first meal in two days. Econ is a fake science for sociopaths.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2023 21:05
|
|
|
Willa Rogers posted:What were you doing politically when you were 20 yrs old? Working full time at Blockbuster and going to near constant rager house parties at my buddy's checked-out parents' huge house, watching the Daily Show, and not understanding why we still had political parties in this country when it was obvious that the Republicans were the bad guys and the Democrats were the good guys!! Just vote for only Democrats and all our problems go away!!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2023 01:35
|
|
|
The class dynamic is the more important one, between class and generation, HOWEVER, there is the very real issue of a humongous percentage of Boomers being irretrievably propagandized shitheads who, despite never really owning much capital, will ruthlessly defend the privilege of the ownership class to dry-fist into prolapse any kind of labor power, worker solidarity, or reforms of the status quo until it dies and gets kicked into a gutter to rot, at which point said Boomers will proudly give themselves a gold star because they think a boss somewhere likes them. I will simply pay this in four consecutive interest free 40 year installments with Klarna
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2023 22:14
|
|
|
I am not especially bullish on Boomers either, but if Thorn is coming down hard in agreement with you on something then that's a clear sign you should interrogate the value of that belief
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2023 22:23
|
|
|
Zodium posted:mao's right [doomsday economics] mao's right Willa Rogers posted:
Always worth remembering that olds are considered a heavily conservative bloc largely because being poor and being a worker with no capital is a death bottleneck that only leaves suburban fascist vampires alive. Rest in solidarity, comrade. I don't know whose generation will live to see capitalism die, but I appreciate you carrying the torch of socialism through those years where it was very unpopular to do so. My generation couldn't have picked it up without you. 🫡
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 00:17
|
|
|
mastershakeman posted:i just had to help my friend figure out the ACA website, they still hide the plan view w/o making an account because they dont want people just able to see financial numbers! he's potentially switching jobs to a startup that doesn't offer healthcare and trying to figure out the math on it ACA really is such bloodless psycho neolib bullshit. A bunch of dead eyed ladder climbing robots getting in a windowless room with flickering fluorescent lights and nodding in perfect unison as the grayest man on earth says "As we all know, the most beloved and satisfying American pastime is theorycrafting the ideal multi-year insurance outlay."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 00:36
|
|
|
Would any of you kind, smart goons be able to point me towards how to understand those all caps tweets about markets and unemployment and stuff that get posted in here? I wanna be better at participating in the thread but I never got any kind of formal education on that stuff and I grew up very poor so my parents also didn't know dick about stocks and markets and whatnot.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 02:23
|
|
|
Thank you all for the thoughtful responses! (Except Thorn!) I suppose I should have narrowed down what I meant, as I am thankfully already familiar with Marxism, dialectical materialism, Dick Wolff Da Based God, and sorta like the broader ideas of how and why ""'the economy""' and debt and line-go-up all have the logic they have. I tend to already look at politics and econ stuff from the perspective of "what are the lying dunces at the podium of capital trying to pull over on labor, and what dumb, incorrect formal exercises are they engaging in to avoid addressing the root causal contradictions that are ruining the world." I know the game is rigged and I have a fair sense of how, why, and by whom. I think these things aren't actually all that mystifying on a basic reality level, but the profiteers of capital have invented a hundred thousand techniques and languages and financial instruments to mystify it and to magic extra zeroes out of the ether by, like, collecting a hundred instances of people betting on how a dozen bets will be bet on and putting them all in the same manilla envelope and calling it a sure thing (SOMEONE'S gotta win in that envelope!) and selling it to people as an investment and then ten years later the economy chokes on its own vomit again. I more meant, like, literally how do I read a tweet like this: https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1643954369795072005?t=_tbuivdl5mG4C5rTHmD1mA&s=19 Do they think that's good? Do they think it's bad? What do the abbreviations mean? They've chosen to convey this information, I am trying to discern what that info is, why they are conveying it, what they think it means, and what it actually means. Or like, a tweet like that will say MONEY MARKETS $123, WAS $133, EST $154 and like idk what a money market is but I know I've heard that term a lot lately. I don't know if it's good that they're up or down or different from estimations (or who thinks it's good, and why, rather).
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 10:04
|
|
|
I tried community college when I was 20, penniless, had no car, was working a full time min wage poo poo job, and was living on a friend's couch/homeless and, wouldn't you know it, all of that chaos, difficulty, stress, malnourishment, undiagnosed depression/anxiety, and total abdication of adult help and direction in my life for the prior seven years lead to me having like five chain panic attacks and dropping out; a shocking and unexpected outcome! Many years later, my wife finished grad school, got a good, stable job, and told me I should try going back to school if I wanted. It was terrifying and hard for someone who felt he didn't have what it took, but I managed to get scholarships and financial aid to do 2 years at a great local community college and transfer UC Davis to finish my last 2. Managed a 3.8 GPA throughout. Graduated with zero debt, a degree in a field I enjoy (digital media/cinema/videography), and a better understanding of myself and the world. Unfortunately, I graduated directly into the pandemic, so I couldn't get a job for a year, but then I got a great one in my field, and consider myself very fortunate. I couldn't have done it without my wife being an incredible partner who basically said "I'll hold our life together while you do this, as long as you can do it without accruing debt." Not having to worry about rent, food, and transportation really made me understand why kids whose parents have money can easily get into and subsequently breeze through college, while the poor and disenfranchised rarely make it. Not having to worry about immediately servicing massive student debt also meant I could be a little more patient in getting a good job instead of needing to immediately take the first job in any field that would give me money. Anyway that's my story, school shouldn't just be free, they should pay students to do it because it's very challenging and is socially a net good!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 23:05
|
|
|
Deadly Ham Sandwich posted:He's been working on repealing the 13th amendment. Lol I commented on an Instagram reel that my wife was my inspiration and hero because she's the best person I know and I got so many furious Andrew Tate guys in my replies over it and none of them could manage a way around my ironclad rebuke of "I am happily married to a beautiful woman and every day is a joy, you are single and getting mad underneath Instagram posts, why would anything you say about relationships have value to anyone"
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 01:16
|
|
|
UBI as proposed by Silicon Valley VC types is gonna be the kind where every single other social welfare program in the country is eliminated, but hey, at least you get $1,000 a month. Oh, also, now that everyone has a guaranteed $1,000/month, you're never gonna guess how much rent at every single rental unit is going up by.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 09:30
|
|
|
I didn't mean to imply all social welfare programs are bad or destined to be hoovered up by landlords, but that UBI specifically has the word "universal" in it, meaning every person in America is getting it. So if your average cretinous greed hog landlord in this country knows that every single potential tenant in the United States has exactly $X,XXX dollars guaranteed going into their bank account on top of whatever the prior income expectations of employment were, their midwit rear end is going to think "I know I can ask for that much more in rent, because if they could afford $1,800/month before they got $1,000 UBI then they can afford $2,800/month now!!" I think the concept of UBI has merit and there are a number of good arguments as to why we need to look at it as an option moving forward, but this country is so uniquely broken, deregulated, and predatory that I just don't see how the attempt to ease the burden of modern living for a struggling family isn't just instantly devoured by the trillion dollar a year machine that sits on top of our country and was specifically designed to crush struggling families for all the juice they contain and siphon it upward to cool off the family crushing machine. Obviously the answer is not that we should stop giving welfare, but rather that we desperately need to be imposing hard limits on how much profiteering is allowed. We need a new social contract where human rights and basic needs are divorced entirely from the market.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 19:08
|
|
|
Oh buddy I am highly in favor of taking landlords to the beach
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 19:17
|
|
|
webcams for christ posted:somebody should write a manifesto about this, or maybe jot down some ideas on this subject in a small red book or something, just spitballing here 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 19:41
|
|
|
Yeah California has a bit of a bully pulpit that it doesn't use very much but is definitely of measurable impact. We're a big enough economy, with a large enough population and physical space footprint, that when we actually make some kind of declaration about how products have to work if you're gonna sell/use them in CA, manufacturers have to get in line because it just isn't economy feasible for them to create branching product lines wherein some of their output conforms to California law and some don't. Like I think it might have been California that actually got the critical mass point going for all cars to have seatbelts. This is one reason I keep hoping against hope that we'll actually get a California state socialized medicine bill passed like we keep flirting with. We're big and influential enough to maybe thumb the scale for other states to follow suit. I have idly wondered if it would be useful to create a union of states willing to enact universal state healthcare to pool costs, coverage, and bargaining power until the federal government takes the hint and federalizes the program.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 21:37
|
|
|
atelier morgan posted:after being homeless for a long time (thrown out by parents multiple times) and at best working under the table i got one bottom barrel job with the state i clung to for a decade before i broke me enough i can't work anymore (well, i could work, if anywhere was willing to accept 'its a crapshoot whether she'll be able to work on any specific workday' rather than sticking to a schedule or plan and that's just not compatible with capital) i can't avoid accepting financial assistance but homelessness makes the act of doing so pathological as well This is rough as hell, I'm sorry it's like this. It makes me sick that this country is a greased waterslide for anyone in this country who deviates from any perfunctory norm. Have you looked into local food Mutual Aid groups? I do a lot of work with food security Mutual Aid in my city and there are a lot of people who really care and are doing incredible legwork to keep food in people's pantries by quickly redistributing any excess the network locates. I hope you can find something like that which might make your life a little easier! Reach out to your area DSA, I bet they'll have a Mutual Aid working group that could point you in useful directions!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2023 01:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 22:14 |
|
|
RealityWarCriminal posted:the infinite scroll on social media should be banned Yeah, I think there was some uniquely insidious poo poo about the way TikTok weaponizes the endless scroll algorithm, but lol at every reason the media/gov gives for why it has to go, as if every single complaint isn't something also being done by every major American company with any kind of digital footprint. Even the endless TikTok scroll algorithm is being replicated by other platforms as best as they can manage it. This whole thing is just a bad paint job to cover up some truly deranged dying empire surveillance state poo poo to get out ahead of coming unrest and social collapse.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2023 22:03
|
|