It's not just greenflation. Companies have realized that they can make more money focusing on the top 10% of consumers and just what the bottom 90 go to hell. If they had the slightest fear of competition then they wouldn't take that risk because a competitor might work their way up in the cheaper markets and then jump into the more profitable ones, but since we don't enforce antitrust law because we're busy freaking out about trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest you can kiss that goodbye.

During incognito browser mode. So that's fun. As usual we found out as part of a lawsuit and settlement.

Back in the '80s which kept the economy going and then we followed that with two huge economic bubbles that kept things going. There was also a lot more government assistance back then in a lot of ways that we don't think about. I'm not talking about food stamps I'm talking about heavy duty subsidies like the aforementioned infrastructure spending that made it easier to get jobs.

We were in a much better position to weather 12 years of Republican rule back then. The Republicans have been building up to this for 60 years, ever since Goldwater lost. Trump is the final form of the party. A pedophile pretending to be godly while openly admitting he will burn in hell and still somehow tremendously popular with the party.

It's not just about how terrible Trump is it's about how voters would let somebody like that have that much power. It's a sign that our civilization is near collapse. A fundamental breakdown in the institutions that have been protecting all of us for our entire lives.

It's the opposite. People here have mostly done okay for themselves. Most of us are well over 50 and we got the full benefit of the Great society and the New deal. For example the government paid for 70% of our college tuition.

I don't think anyone here believes that they are going to ever suffer any serious hardship. And that's why we have so many Trump supporters here. They keep quiet because this isn't a safe space and Trump supporters won't talk about it if they're not in a safe space. But I know they are there.

These are the same people that are learning the kind of terms typically associated with libertarians right now.

They always think they will get off scot-free and maybe some of them will. But the point is not all of them will.

To fix the problems Republicans inevitably cause with their trickled down lies and idiot moral panics.

We didn't get that this time. And we've had 60 years of right wingers sabotaging the economy.

The coming crash is going to be brutal and I don't think we can do anything about it.

The only possible fix would be to give the Democrats a super majority in the Senate during the midterm elections so they could completely undo and course correct decades of economic mismanagement and sabotage from Republican rule.

There is no way you can get people to understand that or to prevents distraction from whichever moral panic fits their fancy the most.

By 2028 many of the people here reading this will be homeless. Some of you might at least have a roof over your head if family takes you in. Good luck. It is as has been in America for decades now every man for himself. And we will continue to worship at the altar of I got mine fuck you

I do agree that incentives (and dis-incentives) are typically superior to other forms of regulation.

For example, a higher property tax for unoccupied buildings (or a tax break based on occupancy) might help get things moving.

Though, in the case of commercial property, that might not be enough. A root cause is Bank officers handing out loans like candy and basing the value of the collateral property on "anticipated rent". The owners are now afraid lowering the rent will trigger a re-valuation and the bank demanding repayment or starting foreclosure. Meanwhile, those officers know of the situation but don't want to rock the boat until they can get promoted far enough away not to have it come back on them , or better, make it to retirement first.

In truth, forced re-valuation is most likely the only way to break that log-jam at this point. The market isn't going to grow enough to actually make those turkeys rentable at current asking.

For residential, a grace period on some of those rennovations in exchange for actual occupancy may help.

So the CIA doesn't really work anymore. After 70 years people have gotten wise to their tricks. There were multiple efforts to depose South American heads of state that were less than perfect for the CIA and American interests (and by American interests I mean American corporate interests, not your interests). Those attempts failed.

That's why we're getting ready to go to war with Venezuela so we can take the oil and so Trump can distract from the Epstein files. In the old days we could easily depose a weak dictator like Maduro. The fact that we can't and that we have failed after two or three attempts is a sign of massive changes in foreign policy and what works and what doesn't.

This isn't like when the buggy whip workers could go work for the car companies. There's nothing replacing the jobs being eliminated. Sit down and try to make a list of them. You can't. This is pure automation. It's causing raw technological unemployment.

And we better figure out something because 25% is the magic number.

That's the unemployment rate that preceded both world wars.

While also getting that sweet sweet 30% like Valve does.

I kind of see gaming rapidly becoming unaffordable though. Back in the day it was affordable in America because you would see steep steep discounts on last generation hardware but I'm not really seeing that the same way anymore. I guess games do still get discounted so there is that but when you're looking at having to drop anywhere from $700 to $1,000 for a game console that you're expected to buy again every 5 years that gets tough.

The developers behind the outer worlds complained the sales were well below expectations but the game launched for $80.

We paid more for games back in the day if we bought them at lunch but the economy was a hell of a lot better back then.

They are fascist dictatorships with state-owned capitalist systems. That's kind of the problem. Any attempts to transition to socialism gets sabotaged by a combination of capitalists and violent psychopaths passing themselves off as socialist reformers.

I don't think anyone has actually tried socialism. The problem is the capitalists use violence to prevent a transition to socialism and then the socialists respond in kind and then it becomes a fight to see who's the best at violence.

The problem is people who are good at violence aren't good at running a country. They're just really good at violence.

Furthermore you need a strong command structure to win with violence and that lends itself to right-wing extremism which in turn gets you fascism and a dictatorship.

We watched that play out multiple times. Russia and China the most notable examples where the most violent psychopath ended up in charge.

I think some of the South American nations made a real go at proper socialism but America heavily interfered.

That said I live in the real world and I can't pretend that interference doesn't exist. That's why I'm not a socialist. You can't have that kind of system when you have people with this much money and power in the world. They won't allow it. And they will sabotage any attempt to do it.

You're mixing up hardware and software.

A better analogy is I want my car, the hardware, to work with my phone. I don't want 50 different phone operating systems that my car company has to build interoperability for so that the hardware I bought, a car, has to support 50 different variations on phones.

Competition is good but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There is value in standardization especially for complex things that require interoperability.

The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.

So right now if you're finding somebody on the left our main concern is to teach critical thinking skills that will create the next generation of voters that don't fall for the usual bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The southern strategy, woke dei moral panics whatever the hell. The basic tricks that the ruling elite use to kowtow a population.

If we can't pull that off we would at least like to teach the actual history of chattel slavery in America, who Christopher Columbus really was and maybe throwing some stuff about the labor movement. It would also be nice if we could have an economics course in high school that wasn't just capitalist propaganda. I mean when I took mine years and years ago it was literally slotted between health and driver's ed that's how unimportant it was as a learning opportunity. It was literally just nine weeks or so of me being told how great capitalism was and how supply and demand made my life better.

I'm not saying we go full socialist but I would like to teach children about a proper and functional capitalist system, especially things like the need for regulation and antitrust law.

Now if you want to massively increase the funding for public schools that we can have all of the above and your finer points of education sure let's do it. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're not up for that

Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.