cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37920401
Also companies are realizing that when people are broke they stop buying luxury stuff and only buy essentials. Like housing. Food. Utilities.
So they are now buying up all the housing. Food production (thanks for tarriffs. All farmers are selling their land) and they are buying power and water companies.
They figure they will drain us one way or the other.
Also companies are realizing that when people are broke they stop buying luxury stuff and only buy essentials.
Last time I heard, broad consumer spending decreased but luxury spending is going strong. Increased luxury good demands along with AI bubble is what keeps the US economy out of full blown recession thus far. And as we know, those bubble might pop.
A fox on chicken island would kill every single chicken and then starve.
That is debunked. But The Tragedy of The Commodities!
Came here for the “Smoked Pikachu”, left depressed.
Henry Ford (fuckhead though he was) figured out that if he paid his workers a higher wage, then other companies would have to pay higher wages and he would sell more cars from more profit.
Henry Ford figured it out‽
This one hurts
It’s pretty easy, we take a large chunk of what we’d pay them then put that into marketing and payment schemes so then we basically create a tax and subscription model that they willingly sign up for.
This. Plus the remaining profits are taxes, too.
This isn’t the reality. The spending shifts income brackets, it hasn’t gone away.
It is the reality, though. Much of consumption is in the lower and middle class; luxury goods make up a smaller proportion of the economy, including the parts of the economy which are controlled by capitalist elites.
As consumption in the lower and middle class dips, the accumulation of wealth in the upper class does not fully replace the consumption of the lower and middle class. The supply and demand curves are vastly different for the goods being purchased and consumed by the upper class, and the elasticity of demand is much greater.
Put another way, a rich man buying a 10k bottle of whiskey every week will not replace the ~1,000 workers who cannot buy their weekly 100$ bottle of whiskey because of the increased wealth extraction from the working class. The rich man is already drinking as much whiskey, and as fine a whiskey, as he wishes to; more disposable income will not increase his consumption the way it will increase the consumption of the now-more-impoverished working class folk.
While anyone with a basic understanding of economics can realize this, the problem is actually that we’re missing the second illness hiding in the first. The system is bad, but it works when everyone plays by the rules. However, adding someone who is invested in their self interest instead of the system leads to the action we currently see. These people know what their doing, they know it’s unsustainable, but they also know that if they milk the system for what it’s worth they can make out like bandits and leave the wreckage for someone else.
The dumb, out of touch statements we hear from these people aren’t there to convince us, they’re there to convince their peers who are equally out of touch. It doesn’t matter if every gamer knows that subscription services are the killer of games, you just have to convince a dozen dumb rich people that people want it and you’ll get to gut the kingdom for everything and retire before you have to pay up.
Hence investments in free products.
I’m pretty sure corpos have taken this into account a long time ago. And came up with some model that still ensures maximum exploitation AND maximum profit.
Could it be supply and demand curves?
Perdonal debt.
IMO I don’t think they’ve worked the model beyond “this still works for the next quarter”. IE it’s mainly betting on, other companies paying enough that their workers can buy their products. But of course if their methods are working those companies will be less profitable and thus either go out of business or be aquired.
or perhaps the government assisting the people with food stamps etc… which of course they are voting to cut to give themselves bigger tax cuts.
The only possible way this has any long term capacity is if this is a short term game that they intend to massively change when they hit a certain point and all competition is completely out of the market. IE all industries move into a seperate monopoly, and then just become their own government.
I don’t think they are really thinking that far ahead though. economy works on short term numbers, and they are just doing what’s best for them until the next quarter, without considering that 5 years down the line they could be destroying themselves.
You’re giving them far too much credit for thinking ahead.
supply and demand baby.
Best if you control both.
They know. It’s just the working class people they’ve fooled that get confused by this contradiction.
If capitalism was that simple, Keynesianism wouldn’t have gone away in the 80’s
Either that or there was a powerful group of people having an interest in ending Keynesianism.
The interest group that both propagated Keynesianism and ended it was the exact same, what changed their attitude was the profit rate boom from WW2 finally drying up and that economic philosophy no longer being sustainable as a result.
Please let me pay 70% income tax. - Milton Friedman
More like
Hmm these people don’t want to work a 996 to afford my enshitified garbage, better fund lobbying to starve them to death and if that doesn’t work I’ll make sure to fund propaganda to stoke racial tensions then just in case they get wise as a last line of defense why not fund the modern day Gestapo
The funny thing is treating your workers well enhances their performance and productivity so the company literally gets their money’s worth.
This is a known factor between paid farm workers and prison slave labor (or immigrants exploited once they’re locked in), the coerced worker does a shit job while the well-treated laborer is worth the extra expense.
It’s a pattern that recurs from the mailroom to the upper management, so it doesn’t make rational sense why the c-suite doesn’t endorse deluxe benefits packages and accommodations for their work force.
They just like the sound of ruling with a hammer, and having an entourage, so our execs run their businesses like tyrants.
It also might provide for short term profit gains, but those run out very quickly for the shareholders, encouraging them to sell off.
Source: Macroeconomics 101 circa 1986 plus research into why AAA game companies still crunch their dev teams.
Well. Yes and no.
Most labor jobs benefit most from young bodies.
So it’s in a companies best interest to get rid of older people. It’s cheaper to replace them than keep them healthy.
If the bottom line is to maximize profits over sustainability.
So it’s illegal to fire people for being old. But if you work them hard and their body can’t do the work you can fire them for low productivity.
The corps are literally designing a system to reduce life span to keep production up with little investment on their end.
By promoting birth rates , they intend to make jobs more scarce to reduce wages.
By removing social services and criminalizing homeless , they intend to do forced prison slave labor.
But they are not very bright. The very things that keep people desperate to take low wage jobs decreased birth rates.
So. Not going to work out for them.
There’s a wide age-span of ability for labor, typically. A twenty-year-old laborer is not necessarily going to outperform a forty-year-old enough to be choosy. And then there’s the matter of skill and experience: even the most trivial roles are benefited by workers who actually know what they’re doing. The rank-up may not be the two-to-three years that differentiates ordinary seamen from able but even a year of experience is often a big difference.
At the point you’ve simplified a task so that it can be done by exploited or truly unskilled labor, you might have simplified it enough to be automated.
I was imagining as a for-instance, picking fruit on the field for fancy produce (that is produce sold to the consumer, not cycled into meal or processed food). Harvesting of this kind of produce benefits from both skill and care for the worker. So again, rudimentary farm-work is not an ideal venue either for prison or trafficked labor treated as slaves.
Unless you don’t care about the quality of your output, in which case, automation may serve better.
Yes you are on point. The person who wrote the project 2025 book is an idiot.
His reductive simplification of how to control workers and reap the rewards is just so obviously wrong.
They say in the book that they will keep Americans uneducated and working labor. But what labor ? Picking some fruits and veggies is almost the only only low skill job out there.
Running machines, even filling orders and delivery requires knowledge and skills.
Project 2025 says they will bring in h1b people for all the skilled work.
They are ignorant about how many skilled workers are needed to run a country or any given industry.
They basically say they will work the immigrants hard and give them no protections. They can’t complain about wage theft, or the government , or sexual harassment cause if they do, they will get deported.
Like bro. So you will threaten them with deportation back to their country that provided them with their education? Oh it must be so much worse over there than in this dystopian U.S the heritage foundation has planned.
Ain’t no skilled workers flocking to work in Russia or North Korea.
They aren’t going to be coming here.
They also say kids will be forced to work and teen girls will have forced pregnancy.
These people are sick and also stupid.
Teen pregnancy more likely to end in miscarriages, unhealthy babies, and permanent infertility of mother from complications.
They just literally know nothing about anything. That project 2025 book is full of nonsense that a 12 year old could have written. A 12 year old with very little understanding of how the world works.
