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Things weren't great before covid, but during that time the corporations just decided fuck it, gougefest, and we're never going back. Consumers will suffer, and they'll keep buying because they'll have no choice. Win win!
I want everyone to realize that they won’t do it just for a dollar, they will do it for as little as a penny. Yes, that’s right, if you die they won’t care because they got a penny and hundreds of thousands more people lived who will keep buying their shit.
This only ends when we fight back.
Definitely busts the myth that more regulation leads to higher prices.
You would think, but when those regulations come BACK and they crank the prices because of it, it's just going to reinforce the myth for those idiots.
It would if it cited its sources... Though my understanding (if we're even thinking about the same regulations, sigh), is that several things did go down and many more have improved over inflation.
But sure; meme makes me feel good = evidence.
And this is why libertarianism is bullshit.
Libertarians are like cats. They're so confident of their independence, but who cleans their litter box?
those rules are written in blood
I pine for the day when more people take advantage of any opportunities available to them to interact with corporatist politicians and their executive funders.
Luigi Mangione did nothing wrong and I hope that more people copycat him when possible.
Not only was it nothing wrong it was just and rightouse!
He solved the railroad problem. Pull the lever, and then clear any arguments of bring partially responsible for murdering someone by shooting them.
That's if he actually did it though, which he didn't, because we were hanging out that night stomping spotted lantern flys.
America is the land of entitlement. People are too selfish to give up their lives for the greater good.
"Failed system"
Works exactly as designed
shrug
The reason why those rules existed because companies where doing exactly that.
The sad part is this is literally incentivized to cut every corner you can, because if you don't the other seller is. The free market will solve it guys we just made the FDA for fun, not after 50 years of this problem not being solved - maga, somehow.
We write about "paperclip optimizers" as if they're some future AI problem, but in reality we run them every day to make ends-meet while the people who own them just focus on the compulsion to have more paperclips with no regard for societal consequences.
Modern companies see the paperclip optimizer and say "yeah, these guys are doing it right."
This reads like they're more pissed that products didn't get cheaper, than they are that companies lowered food standards immediately after regulations disappeared.
Remember this anytime some lassaize faire dipshit talks about regulations not being needed because 'the free market regulates itself'.
Same for monopolies. Which now exist in virtually all major industries thanks to deregulation or weakened regs.
It's a pretty good analogy for how people are willing to look the other way with respect to environmental protection and workers rights for cheap consumer goods tho.
I think the point is that the excuse to remove regulations was that they were making it too hard on businesses and increasing costs. So removing the regulations should have made it easier and reduced costs. This line of thinking is obviously insane though as no company has ever reduced prices they've already proven people will pay just for the hell of it.
The corporations were cutting corners with food production long before, it's just easier to do now.
Line must go up, even if planet on fire and everyone dying of diarrhea produce.
This is incomplete. They maximize profit now. They will always kill the goose that lays golden eggs, they will skin the sheep instead of shearing it, they will destroy a market for the sake of more profits this quarter, and they will be surprised when revolution occurs.
I learned a new word recently, Financialization (from Abdul El-Sayed! on YouTube).
It's a term for things businesses do to make line go up that doesn't actually produce anything or make things better. It includes processes that should be illegal such as stock buybacks and private equity.
In the aughts, I lived in San Francisco during the rolling blackouts. Enron, you see, got overvalued, and it borrowed a lot of money based on that value. So when the market started wanting to correct, it engaged in shenanigans (which had something to do with turning off California generators and then forcing California to buy power from Texas at inflated prices) because Enron needed the value, but didn't have it, and was going to crash and its owners were going to get busted for shady dealing.
In the Trump era, we've undone all the laws we made from both the dotcom bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis, and the AI bubble is imminently about to collapse.
I'm tired of having to learn new things/words just to have some function in society.
How about this: smashilization.
It's for when I hulk out over annoying bullshit that no dog would put up with but humans are supposed to put with just because some rich person said we have to even though they wouldn't be able to put with it for more than 30 minutes without crying.
Whereas, I love new words. They literally delight me.
It's not about the mere sum of syllables. Rather, someone figured out a new concept, they saw a recurring phenomenon, framed it and gave it a name. And by doing that, shared with the rest of us the means to recognize and identify it.
Naming a demon doesn't destroy it, but is a solid first step. Once we recognize a problem we can brainstorm for solutions or at least recognize it's a failing of the larger paradigm.
Financialization and enshitification, for example are symptoms of the late stage and imminent collapse of capitalist societies, something Marx predicted more generally in Das Kapital.
You can hulk out about the leverage misused and abused by the owner class over the working class, but they have armies, so it's better to lay low unless you're willing to sacrifice yourself.
The more effective solution is to get organized and leverage the will of the people to force the owner class to capitulate and surrender their ill-gotten gains. But that isn't easy. We're struggling in the US to organize the twelve million people necessary to make a general strike effective, or, if we want to be dramatic, marching on the White House to great a risk for an anti-riot response.
We have words for those things too.
But yeah, it sucks to feel alone and helpless in the face of billionaires who can just bribe officials and take things. A lot of us are feeling it.
Things that got cheaper:
- Labor
- Small businesses
- Commercial property
- Office space
Congratulations. If you own shit, you got a discount toward owning more shit.
For the working people, you’re basically liquidating your way of life.
And then have nothing to spend it on, but they did their goal, like a mindless AI drone.
The regulations were removed because corporations wanted to cut corners and increase profits.
I would argue that pure capitalism produces a toxic profit - one that doesn't help humanity, be it the short or long term. Kings of centuries past may have been wealthy compared to their peasants, but the ordinary people of today have many more options for finding joy in life.
Our billionaires are preventing us from developing a society that would enrich every single person - including themselves.
We also learned about some once sheltered near monopolies, their white labeled lettuce to just about all fast food restaurants and their special relationship with a certain president...

Well, yeah. There is a reason regulations were there in the first place...
Starting to get a bit tired of these posts with screenshot of text with no source or anything.
Are we upvoting Ai generated crap here? On the other hand, even if it was a twitter post, it wouldnt really be higher quality either.
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