Bonus:
Thank you. Every time someone says “The Economy™” as something that should drive policy instead of being an effect of it, I get a little twitch.
Why should I give a shit about their economy anyway?
When articles mention “The Economy” it just means rich people’s money.
That’s “the stock market”.
No that’s rich people’s feelings.
Cause whenever it gets fucked, it usually impacts people like you and me.
Because that’s how the rich like it. The poors feel the effects, while the rich maintain or grow what they have.
And yet whenever you try to bring this up you get folks from all sides of the political spectrum losing their shit.
There’s a million questions involved in this statement. Who does the work required to grow and raise food? How do they survive? Is housing provided? What about the people working at the processing plants and truck drivers? Store clerks and security guards, etc. etc.
Perhaps socialism really is the solution.
Big Mac used to be 3.19 back in 2012, now it’s 6.09 but I don’t make double of what I did back then
Yeah but think of how cheap TVs that you don’t need are.
But no matter how much ketchup I use, I can’t cover up the bitter taste of the TVs lcd panel.
That spy on you and sell your data and then get so slow with updates after a few years you need a new one. And have advertisements baked in
Golly gee, if only there were a way to prevent that by, say, just choosing not to connect your TV to the wifi.
I’ve never seen so many complaints about a self-inflicted problem.
This isn’t going to be an option in the near future. With Amazon sidewalk and other projects setting up open networks, your TV is going to automatically connect to a network whether you like it or not.
I never said I had that problem, I have never connected my TV to the internet. But those are issues with modern day TVs, you can’t argue against that
No thanks, when companies are doing their hardest to reserve and implement innovations like this, I’ll stick with my dumb 2012 TV til either it or I croak.
When I worked there in the late 90s, a Big Mac MEAL was 3.14 after tax.
I worked in Drivethrough checkout a lot and a lot of those prices are burned into my mind, half the time I was not near the register when taking orders and giving totals when it was slow.
Inflation is underreported. They say it’s 3% annually when it’s actually 4% annually, so they can get away with it more easily if they only give you a nominal 3% pay increase.
They’re doing this by throwing food in the basket together with TVs and consumer electronics.
Since consumer electronics get cheaper constantly, that lowers the amount of total inflation. But food costs increase more than the total inflation. And that’s what we should actually consider as the “proper” inflation, since it defines our cost of living increase.
I use this simple formula:
Fisrt count the number of years Trump is in office, then multiply that by 0.5. Now multiply that by the price you would normally guess the cost to be.
So if Trump is in office for 5 years, and you think something should cost $20 it turns out to be:
(5*0.5)(20)=50Making that thing that should only cost $20 actually cost $50
How does this formula account for the fact that I can’t do math? Bet you didn’t think of that.
In this case everything costs 50 unless it costs 100! Ez pz
You could be lucky and that the $50 thing in a 2 for the price of one sale, then it’s only gonna be $79.95
100
Meet Zoidberg, homeowner!
100!
Oh…
I shouldn’t need to sound like a 90 year old at my age.
“When I was a kid this was a dollar!!!”
They were saying that because it was weird to them. Inflation as we know it didn’t really start until Nixon.
so many things are going on that seem to violate the bullshit i learned in economics school that i am having trouble processing this reality as real, even though i know it is. it’s unsettling
Which school of economics did you learn?
bullshit mostly. i was a micro guy not a macro guy.
the thing is that a lot of economics that you probably learned actually was true in the 20th century. just that the laws of physics - which we always thought were constant, unchanging, unyielding - are suddenly changing; and that’s hard to deal with.
it’s like, we always assumed that energy is always conserved. we can move it, burn it, consume it, but then it’s gone. it doesn’t come back. now we have renewable energy, and it’s breaking people’s brain. conservatives in the US still think that renewable energy cannot possibly work and must be a scam because energy is always conserved, it cannot be generated anew.
even back then the best macro model we had (that was anything quantifiable) was only 40% accurate so what i learned was only a bit true.
It’s one banana, Michael! What could it possibly cost? $10???
Yes.
Money isn’t real, and humanity will keep enslaving itself until we equally distribute the products of our labor.
Food and housing didn’t cost money until we decided it did.
We can decide to change things again.
This is also why we could decide billionaires own nothing.
It doesn’t need to be equally. Some people wanna distribute based on need. And some people think if you work extra, you should get a little extra in return.
No, we have enough resources to provide for everyone. Money isn’t a game to be won, it’s a tool for human beings to extract what they need from human societies.
We have to break that capitalist conditioning.
There will never be a fair system as long as we keep creating different tiers of privlage.
You’ve never heard of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”?
You should look into Leftism my dude
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
This phrase is the basis for enforcing an equal society, not an excuse to establish a different type of economic caste system.
Doctors will still exist without our society disproportionately rewarding that behavor.
Engineers will still exist without our society disproportionately rewarding that behavor.
Sanitation workers will still exist without our society disproportionately rewarding that behavor.
There is no situation where a caste system results in a more equal society than just equal wealth distribution.
This phrase is the basis for enforcing an equal society
This is the basis for having an equitable society. If someone needs insulin to stay alive, they have a greater need and receive greater resources so the quality of their life doesn’t diminish. Some people have needs so great that with an equal share of resources they would just die as their equal share would be insufficient to their needs. Should dialysis patients just die or also have their needs seen to while maintaining a reasonable quality of life?
There is no situation where a caste system results in a more equal society
This is a weird tangent you went off on that’s unrelated to my comment
“behavior”.
Big name stores will all move to personalized surveillance pricing. They will track your phone when you go into a store. Cross reference the fingerprint of your device to a database full of data on you that they’ve bought from a databroker. And then use that to jack up the price on the e-price tag if they know you really need that product. Plus they even will change the price on their website when you double check the price.
Fooled them, I already don’t go into stores. I order everything online. …… where. … they. …. Probably …. Already …. Do … that
Aight time to stop careyng my phone around to stores.
Only paler lists anymore.
I went to Lowe’s the other day and bought a couple of drill bits. While there, I looked at some cabinet pulls – didn’t buy any or even picked any up, just walked past them and looked at them. That night on Amazon I got ads for drill bits and cabinet pulls. I assume it was something linking store footage with my phone data, but who knows. Maybe I got the neural implant already and the implant makes you forget you got the implant.
Probably not video, just pinpoint geofencing on your phone.
Or it could be recency bias. He was there he saw something he then saw an ad pop up and subconsciously linked his visit there to visit there. At best Amazon or any other advertiser tracking your phone could only see the general area they’re at they don’t know that he’s by a cabinet and they definitely don’t know and they definitely aren’t accessing surveillance systems to provide personalized ads.
Thats likely too. I will say, as someone who works in telcom, the whole Geofenced ads and cpupons idea was something being pitched like, 10+ years ago. I don’t know if it ever panned out, but it was pushed. The other part was getting say, your Lowes app to ping you with a 5% off coupon for that thing you have been standing in front of pondering for ten minutes.
Maybe I got the neural implant already and the implant makes you forget you got the implant.
or, the far more likely option, life is just a dream and that’s why things appear when you think about them.
Bought a brand of iced tea I never had before in the drugstore one day with cash, no points card or anything, got an ad on Instagram half an hour later. I had microphone and location turned off on Instagram, and location turned off on my phone altogether as I only turn it on when using the maps app.
Once glanced at a carton of soup broth in the store, just like you, got an ad on Facebook for it that night. Again location and microphone off, and I didn’t even touch it. I don’t use face recognition or biometrics or voice assistant stuff at all ever.
Once was cleaning up my desk and found a business card for my old manager. I tapped it against the keyboard for some reason of my desktop computer. This was a paper business card, and I only worked for her for a bit, and she popped up as a suggested friend on Facebook that day. I had never looked her up and hadn’t thought of her in years.
So what’s all that about?
This is an article from 2012 that explains how they do this without needing your phone
I get this is just a shit post but this really gets at the unreality that has been manufactured for us. a lack of stability that makes everything just a little bit more unbelievable.
https://theonion.com/u-s-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation-realizes-money-ju-1819571322/
Time to share this antiquated “news.”
My hair ties were only $0.96 for a 30 pack before summer. The fucking things are $6 now!
alright i thought I wasn’t racist but today i realized i don’t like gray people. that’s disturbing as fuck.
Tariffs?
Minimal wage hasn’t been raised since 2009 in the US
Also systematic monopolization of everything by like five companies. With no realistic possibility of price competition, prices will go up until people decide to stop buying things altogether
People keep making the point that in the worst of the depression, they were giving away tableware to just get people in the stores.
The CEO of McDonalds is currently lobbying the White House to raise the minimum wage. Saying there’s a “two track economy” and point out stratification. Curious.
They’re noticing they squeezed us too hard, not just as consumers but as a class. To the point where it’s eating their sales now. So they’ll adjust it just high enough that we keep bleeding for them.
Breadcrumbs.
I’ll do my part to reject consumerism. Just don’t buy non essentials unless it helps me spend even less money later. Like the £40 on canning stuff, for a couple gallons of chutney now that cost less than £5 to make and would have been like £50 or so to buy.
Still got more jars to fill, jam next I think.
If only those elections weren’t uncontrolled fund raisers…
What’s worse is that the guy that was meant to be in horrid poverty in the christmas carol, earned more, adjusted for inflation, than bernie sander’s proposed 15 bucks an hour…
let alone the current minimum US wage.
The consumerist haven in which people no longer can afford to consume…
No wonder that the first greasy monkey that offers change is put in
And the poverty line hasn’t been adjusted since the 60’s iirc. No president wants to be the one that tells everyone we have so much more poverty now!
From what I read at the link below that doesn’t seem to be the case. They took a baseline of the poverty threshold in 1978 and adjusted for inflation every year. However that line seems to have been set suspiciously low to begin with.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines
Those are some ridiculously low numbers… So to be considered in poverty, you have to earn less than 26k jointly for a household of 3. I don’t think you’d have a house for a household at all at that amount. Barely. Making ends meet with just food, actually you’re probably going hungry every other day at that amount.
Well yeah, then we would have inflation! /s
And it was only raised by like 15 cents or some shit
And also the kidnapping of farm workers
Money is just pieces of paper and digital numbers. It’s only worth anything because we say it is.
it’s worth noting that the usdollar is worth something because the military says it is. if you don’t pay your taxes in dollar, you go to prison where you get anally raped.
however, the military gets its strength through the legitimation by the people (democracy), so in the end, yes, the will of the people causes the political will, which causes military strength, which causes the value of the dollar. it’s a longer chain.
Yeah, at this point it just some random number you briefly see on the checkout screen.
