#logic of capitalism!

[theconcealedweapon]

Rich People: "I want to price gouge and plan obsolescence without having to worry about competition. Government, enforce my patents."

Rich People: "I want firepower to uphold my enormous wealth. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to protect my property from thieves and trespassers."

Rich People: "I want a source of cheap labor. Government, enforce laws against victimless actions in order to put people in prison so I can exploit them as slaves, then brand them with criminal records so they'll take any low wage job that's offered to them in the future."

Rich People: "There are homeless people existing who are not generating profit for me. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to arrest them for loitering, and use taxpayer money to build hostile architecture."

Rich People: "Homeless people are eating food that my business discarded, which doesn't generate profit for me. Government, hire police officers with taxpayer money to guard the dumpster."

Rich People: "Marijuana is competition for me as a pharmaceutical CEO. Government, ban marijuana."

Rich People: "I build weapons. Government, create wars and buy my weapons with taxpayer money."

Poor People: "I can't afford what I need to live. Government, financially assist me, require my employer to pay me more, or limit rich people's ability to increase prices."

Rich People: "Stop relying on government for everything and taking people's freedom!"

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Anyone ever noticed how so many leftist memes lack...restraint?

The memer had to add the capitalist pig with a speech bubble, because apparently just mocking the "bad" decision wasn't enough.

They had to also imply that any Yank who disagrees is nothing but a brainwashed sheep.

Seems a biiit like projection.

Also, what does this have to do with credit vs. Cash?

[infamouslydorky]

Fucks me up jobs expect workers to show up despite wild circumstances. I remember at a former job having to traverse sub zero temperatures just to walk to my job because they refused to close the building. I remember having to work front line in covid as an immune compromised individual with no vaccine produced yet and when concerns were expressed, my superiors responded with "when workers get infected, these parts of the building will be closed". God forbid you lose a family member. You're expected to show up anyway.

Today my boss told me to contact an office to confirm if a doctor has his papers in order. I say: they won't pick up, and he asks why, to which I responded: THEY WERE IN DIRECT LINE OF MILTON, YOU KNOW, THE DEVISTATING HURRICANE PART 2?? WHY WOULD THEY PICK UP???

[capitalism-and-analytics]

[akajustmerry]

what’s your favorite taylor swift song 😘

you're probably asking this as some sort of gotcha or hostile irony but one thing about me is that I am not an unreasonable hater and do have a favourite ts song. it's 'last great american dynasty' tied with 'love story', because I'm not made of stone and love a good pop song. none of that changes the fact she's a nazi-fucker billionaire who single handedly contributes more to green house gas emissions than most individuals on earth and me hating her for that btw 😘

[avaisnerdytoo]

heh, Morty playing Fortnite in the new season sneak peek.

Also fun Jerry faces:

[girderednerve]

i have been listening to plastic capitalism (vanatta, 2024). i'm like a third of the way through but here are my thoughts so far

okay just for background plastic capitalism is a history of the credit card industry & related regulation which runs from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s. this is the book i said has dissertation voice, so it is pretty dense, but i like it. okay moving on

one thing i have seen people say on here & elsewhere as a sort of yardstick for the recency of women's liberation (such as it stands, yikes) is that "women couldn't get credit cards until 1978." this is an interesting sentence which has become fascinating to me with more context

credit cards developed out of two major antecedents: travel cards (e.g., diner's club, introduced in the 1950s for jet-setting executives, & accepted at nightclubs, bars, airlines, & so on) and revolving credit plans offered by major retailers, which operated more like store accounts. the idea of attaching one's credit to a card came from the latter context, and they were the far more common credit offering. these cards were intended very explicitly to be used primarily by women

the people who pull out that 1978 date aren't wrong, though! women were the target audience for department store accounts, retail charge plans, early bank charge cards, but those creditors specifically targeted middle-class housewives & issued credit in their husbands' names (very 'you do the shopping & he gets the bill,' pearls & a red lip in the department store)

the 'credit cards for women' thing is interesting because if you are into the history of credit cards the big breakthrough in 1978 wasn't access for women, it was marquette v. first of omaha. marquette is the case in which the supreme court decided that a credit card transaction would be governed by the laws of the state in which the issuing bank was chartered, rather than the state in which the transaction physically took place. it sparked a sort of regulatory race to the bottom for a lot of states, as they tried to attract larger banks; this is why citibank's head office is in south dakota, despite the titular citi being located in (where else) new york. south dakota had no consumer credit law, and new york had a relatively low interest cap. hmm.

there's a real friction around consumer credit, because the postwar american lifestyle relied (among other things!!!!) on access to cheap consumer credit, but being a debtor is, speaking very generally, a disadvantaged & stigmatized social position. so on the one hand there's a precariousness attached to being in debt, but there's also the atomic-age glow of convenience & affluence attached to credit [sidebar plastic was a novel & exciting material when bank of america began issuing its industry-defining bankamericard in 1958]. why should women want credit cards in the first place? well, because they're now a requirement for full participation in the modern economy. this is why you see a sort of warm & fuzzy posture around signing people up for bank accounts & credit products, even though many of them will undoubtedly incur fees or have other problems as a result: they are being included! they are being offered Opportunity™

the framing which treats credit as a pathway to future success is more or less predatory marketing, but in the 1960s when these regulatory fights were being hammered out, there were a lot of civil rights activists who accurately pointed out that black people were systematically denied access to good credit. there is a wrinkle here where many black people were denied good credit because they had first been violently denied remunerative jobs or capital ownership, which had the very secondary consequence of damaging their creditworthiness, but it is very true that 'creditworthiness' is a subjective trait which was assessed by racist white bankers. it is also very true that people who need cash quickly & cannot access traditional forms of credit from a bank are pushed into riskier & more expensive forms of credit (pawnshops, payday & car title loans, etc.)

related to this tangle is one of my favorite regulatory bugbears, i.e. the thing where the united states does not have a federal usury statute & instead has disclosure laws [pattern in consumer protection more generally]. vanatta has a whole bit on the legislative history of the truth in lending act of 1968, & the two main arguments for disclosure instead of a federal ceiling on revolving credit were: 1) efficiency, in the sense that some freshwater economists wanted the market to regulate itself & in the sense that traditional state-level usury laws tended to have all kinds of bullshitty carve-outs for different kinds of lenders, so it was a huge mess, and 2) placating jim crow segregationists who resisted any attempts at all to expand federal power on principle. states' rights! so that's the background.

the weirdo fragmented state-level financial regulation was a deliberate outcome of the new deal's financial interventions. the new dealers wanted to expand credit to stimulate demand (as per the ideas of my man john maynard), but they had concerns about credit & wanted to limit it by keeping it tied closely into the traditional community relationships around local banks. this is a weird idea to me because i hate bankers but i did not become an adult until the twenty-first century. vanatta doesn't talk about antisemitism or cultural ideas about bankers at all so far, which is fine because the book can't be about everything, but i am very curious about it now. anyway that's the background for why marquette happened at all: on purpose, most financial regulation in the united states occurred at the state level, which is incredibly stupid but then here we are #laboratoriesofdemocracy

i should really read mehrsa baradaran's how the other half banks next. writing that down so i remember. i want to know more things about informal credit, the gray economy, regulatory failures, things of that nature

mastercard [well, the bank card network that became mastercard] was founded in buffalo because visa [well, the bank card division of bank of america, which became visa] had a very specific franchising strategy in mind & they didn't care about upstate ny as a market. those clowns #upstatepride

[theconcealedweapon]

There's a post going around Facebook of a liberal college woman who became a conservative after her conservative father told her that since she studies all the time and has a 4.0 gpa and her friend who parties all the time has a 2.0 gpa, she should give 1.0 to her friend so they can both have 3.0, and she thought that was unfair. Her father then said that she's right that it's unfair, and that it's a demonstration of what liberals want. He said that liberals want to take from those who work hard and give to those who don't so they can be equal, while conservatives want people to keep what they earn.

Are conservatives really that clueless? They're the ones supporting a system in which the working class work long hours and barely make enough to survive while their boss and landlord get to collect money for doing nothing.

A better comparison would be if she was expected to give 3.0 of her gpa to someone who does no work and just owns something that she used to study, so she is left with a 1.0 while the other person gets to have a 250.0 gpa after receiving a lion's share of other people's gpa also. Then when she complains, she's told to "just work harder" while the freeloader with the 250.0 gpa gets to strut around like they earned it. That's the economic system that conservatives want and that's what's happening now.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

The original twitter account (commiedamion) seems to have been suspended. I did find an archive.

[graciehart]

hello I feel awful 😄

[thomasthequeer]

Feeling emotional about ofmd again pals ):

[capitalism-and-analytics]

[starlingstalk]

I don‘t wanna live my life actually I just want to draw. Wdym I have to do anything else but that? My body, my mind, my soul, it‘s there as a vessel for my art. Don‘t make me go work please :( I wanna be a free spirit aka sit in my bed 16 hours and draw then fall asleep then repeat. Like I‘m not even kidding. I dont wanna be a part of this economy.

[jewishbarbies]

if you’re one of those people that think katniss would be fighting for palestine in the pro hamas way and be on your side, while simultaneously cheering on the murder of children as long as they’re “the enemy’s” children, you’re gonna wanna re-read those books, bud.

[asaconservative]

As a conservative, I refuse to support any economic system that involves taking from those who work hard and giving to those who don't.

And that is why I despise capitalism.

[theconcealedweapon]

Right Wing Dipshits: "No one ever leaves capitalism for socialism. They only ever leave socialism for capitalism."

Right Wing Dipshits: "Immigrants come here and get free food, free housing, and free healthcare."