What happened to the left one’s eyes in panel 5?
Inflation
They are closed, to denote a humorous state. It is a common thing in comics, to help convey emotional states without access to high enough resolution in their faces to see it naturally - e.g. an upturned corner of a mouth to indicate a smile could also have done it, except they have no mouths at all to work with here!
I love when my clients do this. They can’t afford to openly refute their logic when my rates go up but that’s the beauty of B2B
*and then do nothing but complain about the government instead of the corporations actually responsible?
The only thing that will correct this behaviour is breaking the back of consumers and finally hitting a recession.
Oh it’s not just inflation, add global warming too as “excuses to hide behind”
I was watching BBC news yesterday. Thames Water (the corporation that owns the water in London (yes the UK is fucked when it comes to public utilities…)) has issues keeping the actual water clean to use.
What was their excuse? They can’t blame the Tory government that let corporations dump toxic waste into the rivers, because that same government basically owns the BBC and also let Thames Water fly under the radar for a few years when their own QC was pushed on the backburner.
So what do they say? Global warming. Global warming is the reason that the water in the UK is so bad.
Okay.
New Thames cholera outbreak when? Party like it’s 1854.
Add yet another John Snow in for us to tell he knows nothing, and I’m in.
Let’s add PFAS to the conversation. Greed of capitalism had no boundaries cause enough money for most would bring well being as well, right ? Right ? We’re doomed. But let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
They profited immensely while poisoning the earth, and now they’re going to charge us to clean it up. And they’re laughing at us while they do it. They think this is great fun.
That’s quite a statement but I mostly agree with it.
It is worth reading the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
Not evenjust that. The way this started was that there were some cases where Covid shutdowns.and things started leading to reduced supply/increased costs, so prices for stuff went up. Companies started massively abusing that to raise prices everywhere and keep them up. That led to inflation, which provides smokescreen for more price gouging, leading to more inflation.
“Supply chain issues” is what keeps getting bandied about. True or not it’s just another wonderfully convenient corporate excuse for constant price-jacking.
Yeah. There are no more excusable supply chain issues. 98+% of that is gouging (which may actually be in the supply chain itself, but still)
So then why wouldnt other companies not raise their prices and take a huge portion of the market share?
I might have my tin foil hat on but I think large companies collude to not undercut each other too much. Late stage capitalism things.
The issue with that is that all companies have done it and it would literally be impossible to hide price fixing on big corporations like this. And they are competitors, they would gladly take their money.
This is absolute fairytale nonsense. This is only the stuff we know about:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing_cases
Every market from Tuna to CDs. Companies want your money, and they know unions work. It’s so common Matt Damon was in a movie about a famous example.
Oh yeah a handful of cases over decades indicates a conspiracy in virtually every market around the world… Or maybe the governments printed trillions of dollars (and other currencies)… If you think the prices going up right now is due to “greedflation” then you are a conspiracy theorist and a government shill all in one.
Sure, that makes total sense, if greedflation were only happening in the US. It’s a worldwide problem.
Yeah the government is paying me to post facts on lemmy from my toilet. That is totally a real and normal thing to think when confronted with new information.
I am not saying you are the one spreading the propaganda, you are just part of the group believing it.
Cable companies all do it.
How do you know?
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275
The internet has made real time collaborative price fixing possible.
Except that its illegal and it would be a very provable thing.
It’s only illegal if it hurts someone the law sees as worth protecting.
Lol
Because we don’t have anything resembling a free market at all. Large established businesses just buy the regulations they want, to keep out competitors. And if they do poorly they get bailed out.
I agree to some extent, but they are still battling against one another for the business, so they cant just raise prices or they lose market share, typically.
What they can do is cooperate with the other viable competitors to raise prices together in a way that benefits each of them without the risks of competition. They’re not actually comfortable competing with an entity that might bully them out.
That is price fixing and can end them up in jail and is super obvious when on a large scale. Why couldnt it be the government just printed a bunch of money and that caused inflation?
they have, in norway there’s the Kiwi chain that has kinda steamrolled the market by just… having things people can actually afford?
It’s not a guaranteed cheat code, it didn’t really work when lidl tried it here in sweden, but it can absolutely work.
Good for them. In the US, if prices were not going up due to government monetary and other policies, places like Walmart and Amazon would keep there prices low and put the smaller chains out of business (like they did with many others).
Half the market at a 10% margin is better than all the market at 3%.
Maybe, maybe not, it would depend.
Pffft what are they going to do?
Make it bad enough, and people will start developing a parallel system of production and forms of currency that are not based on the current ideologies. That’s how capitalism came to be, and how it will disappear again.
lol nope. we’ll just get out the guillotine
Yup, and that’s why I’m buying bored apes.
.world
Oh no you might be serious
That’s human nature, just try things and see what doesn’t work until finding something that does.
Which only works presuming the current system doesn’t attempt to undermine or break down the new system. Unfortunately that is almost always what happens and is why things like changing to capitalism required actual revolution in a lot of cases.
That’s why decentralized systems are important. We’re talking about changing things right now; how are they going to break down Lemmy?
that’s… not actually hard though. for a state level actor like Canada or amazon.
Why haven’t they broken down bittorrent?
that’s actually hard.
and I didn’t say they would. I said it wouldn’t be hard for them.
Why would they not do something that’s easy and beneficial to them?
because they don’t know or care, and there would be non-zero social cost, still larger than the benefit.
Lemmy isn’t exactly changing a great deal. It’s not replacing industry or agriculture which is what really needs replacing. If they wanted to shut down lemmy or make it difficult they probably could. They clearly don’t care.
For me at least, it’s replacing my use of the social media industry. Nobody is immune to propaganda, so replacing platforms is an important early step.
Not to say the whole pipe is free yet; we still need decentralized DNS, mesh networks, etc.
I suspect that our existing manufacturing and agriculture hardware will be inherited by workers unions and cooperatives some time after we can talk about that freely.
we still need decentralized DNS, mesh networks, etc.
Imagine if we created a decentralized network that spanned to globe connecting all our little networks together. It should be based on protocols that are open source and standardized wherever possible and should be compatible with many different devices from different vendors. If we are lucky it could enable worldwide communication and even commerce. Since it is made of smaller networks working together we should call it the Inter-network, and the protocol, well maybe we should call it internetwork protocol. Since that’s a bit clunky maybe people will start calling it the internet, or net for short.
Oh wait all of this already exists.
The internet is literally the largest mesh network ever created. DNS system uses root servers and TLD servers spread all over the world, and each organization is responsible for hiring or building the DNS servers for their websites. Its already decentralized to the nth degree, the only thing is a lot of it is owned by corporations.
I was actually facepalming so hard when I read this reply. Maybe pickup a networking book next time before jumping to conclusions about how international infrastructure works.
I have. There is a difference between mesh networking and major ISPs. Instead of being verbose and sarcastic, we could discuss this in earnest.
There is a difference between mesh networking and major ISPs.
Well yes one’s a network technology the other is a type of businesses. The big ISPs form a mesh network together. What about the current internet core isn’t a mesh network?
What’s you criticism of the current DNS system? Afaik the root servers are run by a non-profit who also assigns names and IP addresses. Seems fine to me.
Instead of being verbose and sarcastic, we could discuss this in earnest.
You made extremely radical claims without explaining anything. What did you want me to say? I could have just said “the internet is already decentralized, read a book”, but that wouldn’t make my point nearly as well as to what an achievement of cooperation the internet actually is.
They don’t go after lemmy. They go after the users. There are several ways, the easiest of which is to make using a federated network an implicit crime.
Like how downloading or talking too loudly about tor or tails puts you on a watch list.
They don’t even have to follow up on that more than a couple times for the chilling effect to drive people away from using it. Without a large enough user base, we’re spread too thin to affect change.
If the current system ever identifies federation as a threat, it’ll happen.
Literally everyone is on a “watch list” to the point that that term is now very dated.
I agree that them going after you on an ISP level is also a problem, for which we need more decentralized mesh networking as well. But in practice, sharing albums has also pissed off corporations for a long time and they’re still unable to stop that.
