• Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    But a B-List actor told me it would trickle down half a century ago, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe we’ll catch a dribble

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      And he was right. You get a trickle down. He didn’t mention the industrial strength wealth pump going up with the business end stuck in your wallet.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    The reason billionaires exist is because people like you and me are overcharged for everything we purchase so they can accumulate the surplus.

    The reason why we don’t do anything about it is because we evaluate that we get good value for our money in most situations.

    What is that evaluation based on? Our past experiences…

    But the only experiences we have to evaluate what our money is worth is us being charged enough that the rich people at the top accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth.

    We never have an experience where those leeches at the top aren’t present to artificially inflate the price of things so we can actually realize how much we’re supposed to be able to get for our money!

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        We wouldn’t be underpaid if things were priced according to their actual cost because the actual cost of things is based on the low salary that people make!

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Yet we produce more than ever per hour. So by that account either prices should decrease over time to reflect that, or our wages should be going up. :D

      • Frog@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        And we are paying taxes. The only money they give to the government is directly to the pockets of judges and politicians to make decisions against our best interest and to make them richer.

      • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve tried Temu a few times. The quality is such garbage even calling it Chinese crap doesn’t do it justice. It’s basically from doorstep to landfill.

        • Landless2029@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yeah I didn’t think Chinese knockoffs could get any worse.

          Many products on there basically copy photos of a product and replicate how it looks with the cheapest materials possible.

          I got a few good deals but understand it’s NOT going to be high quality tier stuff

          So I buy things I’m willing to just toss if it’s no good. I do a refund and they’ll tell me to keep it. Then it goes into the trash.

        • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It’s literally the same drop shipped stuff on temu. You can order from “local warehouses” and it’s literally the same products. Amazon USES drop shipping. They don’t own it.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            Sometimes it is, other times it isn’t. You won’t know until you test your blood heavy metal levels. If you’re touching it or if it touches what you’re eating, it may not be worth finding out. And no I’m not comparing noname sponges from Amazon. I’m comparing noname sponges from a local retailer or brand name stuff like 3M ScotchBrite, etc.

            • Captain Poofter@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Ok but the 50 dollar mp3 player on amazon is literally the exact same drop shipped 23$ mp3 player on temu. It’s the same. Drop shipping doesn’t have some factory stock being good and some factory stock being bad. That’s not how drop shipping works. It’s literally the same products available from the same warehouses just on different storefronts, for different prices.

              • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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                3 months ago

                Absolutely can be and in those cases you’re getting the same thing good or bad or anywhere inbetween. Dropshippers, including the rebranding dropshippers (like Volta cables) are pure exploitation. They do very little “service” for the money they take.

              • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                3 months ago

                Drop shipping doesn’t have some factory stock being good and some factory stock being bad.

                White label producers also have range of options, often including quality. They’re usually going to be the same case because changing that would need new molds and molds are expensive but you can cheap out a lot when buying electronic components and probably don’t even have to re-program the pick+place machine, just throw in a reel of say bargain-bin reject flash chips in the machine instead of the good stuff.

                And, of course, the cheap options might actually be the better one. It’s literally impossible to tell, as a consumer.

                When it comes to Chinese products my advise to avoid all white-label stuff.

          • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            I think this says more about how far Amazon has fallen than a statement of quality about Temu.

            I’m not using either if I can help it.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        6 for 75ct. Eurocent, so in USD it’s a whopping 81ct. Tax inclusive. Available in both scratchy and gentle.

        If supermarkets get away with charging those kinds of prices there’s two things to do: a) Raid each and every HQ to see whether you can nail them for collusion, b) price controls.

  • blazera@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Its a built in feedback loop. Under capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So its naturally going to concentrate.

    We need hard caps on wealth

  • Intrama@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Perhaps my first controversial post here. Hmm. No, I’ll be decent. But seriously? Fuck the elites. Fuck them hard.

  • mle@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    I was asking myself, how much money do you need to have, to be in the top 1%?

    So for context, according to this article, you are in the top 1% worldwide, if your net worth is above ~872’000.-, that is 19 million US Americans.

    With 94’000.- you are in the top 10%

    • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      The top 10% includes the majority of people in the western world. We have been lied to by the select few above us that we have more in common with them than we do with the bottom 90% in the rest of the world.

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        In terms of lifestyle we definitely do. To go from a retail worker living in a typical US apartment to a jet-setting billionaire with a superyacht is a big jump in quality of life but it’s FAR less than going from a dirt-floored shack in central Africa to the apartment in the US.

        Both the retail worker and the billionaire can enjoy healthy food, clean drinking water, access to medicine, electricity, a shower any time, a smartphone with unlimited data, a home PC with unlimited internet, Netflix, Amazon, Uber Eats… These are all luxuries beyond what even a king from two centuries ago could dream of, and they’re available to anyone on a minimum wage retail job and a bit of budgeting skills.

        Meanwhile the poor shack-dweller faces unimaginable grinding poverty, no running water, no medicine, rampant disease, war, slavery (conflict minerals) and prostitution.

        The problem with billionaires isn’t how luxurious their yachts are. It’s how much power their wealth gives them and how unaccountable they are for it. Heck, you can probably see posts on Lemmy every day about the stuff Elon Musk is doing.

    • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Right. I wish they would start using the more accurate figure of .01% for articles like this. The 1%-.011% are successful upper class households, none of which are Billionaires. The .01% is all the billionaires.

  • uis@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Twitter mob: Protect rich minority at all cost! Feed the billioners!

      • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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        3 months ago

        Richard Nixon’s head : I promise to cut taxes for the rich and use the poor as a cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel!

        [audience applauds]

        Philip J. Fry : That’ll show those poor!

        Turanga Leela : You’re not rich!

        Philip J. Fry : But someday I might be rich, and people like me better watch their step!

  • lennybird@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Nah but it’s the poor woman and child fleeing crime & poverty from south of the border who is the problem!!! /s

  • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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    3 months ago

    I think the idea of cryptocurrency is funny, since it’s just “I’m not playing your make believe money anymore, so we’ll pay our own make believe money since you are obviously rigging the system”. Kinda makes sense if adoption keeps up and the planet isn’t on fire

    • thejml@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Thing is, the poor aren’t running bitcoin miner farms. Crypto doesn’t change anything but traceability of the funds, letting the rich get even richer.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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        3 months ago

        Yeah riding the bubble let a couple of nerds and early investors maybe take advantage of a little economic mobility, like, incidentally. But those days are long passed now. Like you said, it’s rigged in favour of entrenched capital, just like everything else now.

        • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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          3 months ago

          BTC is steady last few months at 60k, if you purchased last year, your investment is up 3x. If you bought 2 years ago at the peak, you’re up a few %, which still beats international inflation

              • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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                3 months ago

                I guess some people have that stance, but it’s a currency. It’s supposed to be boring and not thought about much. It’s not like most people care about antique and rare coin collections, but some people do, most people just spend and save their money

                • symthetics@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  Calling it a currency is generous. I know it’s meant to be, but let’s be honest - you’re not buying the majority, or probably even any, everyday goods or tech with your BTC are you? Most people certainly aren’t. And most BTC owners certainly aren’t. They’re holding to the moon.

            • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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              3 months ago

              No, it’s like any other currency minus it has a fixed supply. So use it, since inflation is eating away any currency with a limitless supply

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                3 months ago

                But deflation pushes people not to spend their money and crypto with a fixed supply is in fact deflationary since the accessible supply goes down as people lose access to their wallet for one reason or another.

                Also, crypto value and crypto prices of items are based on the comparable fiat value so yes, getting in at the right time makes a huge difference.

                In the end crypto bros just make it so there’s still rich people at the top, they’re just not necessarily the same ones.

          • symthetics@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Yes if you meet those criteria and cash out right now. Most people I to crypto will hold though.

            Why? Because that’s the narrative pushed on the community over and over and over - hodl never sell.

            Why? Because if everyone sells, all the people manipulating the market like Tether and their buddies lose their money. Fair play to those that can make a bit of money, but unless you’re already rich, are running the market, or fine with creating a shitcoin to rug people, crypto is not going to make most average people rich at all.

            Just another way for the already wealthy to fuck you over.

            • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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              3 months ago

              Most assets work that way, if everyone sold Nividia stock then it would tank as well. Most things outside of food and shelter only have value due to our collective belief. Diamond and water paradox is constant in society

                • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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                  3 months ago

                  I think an asset is anything that can be converted to liquid, so that depends if you think crypto is liquid or not, which probably depends on location

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        3 months ago

        That’s a common misconception. Most cryptocurrencies (except XMR) actually increase the traceability of funds compared to traditional payments. Bitcoin really isn’t that great for privacy as some crypto enthousiasts say. It’s one of those ridicolous “advantages” that prove that most are just hypemen with no idea about how it actually works. </rant>

      • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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        3 months ago

        Traceability might be nice since the black market is estimated around 20T USD. Cuts out bad actors which means no fraud, and no hidden inflation since we can see the quantity compared to USD which the Federal Reserve doesn’t even know

    • symthetics@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      But the ultra rich are actually playing with that too and fucking over every single person that invests thinking they’re going to be ‘financially free’

      Adoption will never happen because block chains are shit at everything except being a Blockchain.

      Let’s fix the system we’ve got instead of inventing a new one that’s worse in basically every way.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      It doesn’t solve any of this. The people who invented BTC did not understand whay money is and how it works. Especially how it’s created. If we lived in a world with BTC alone and we’ve reached the point where no more BTC can be created while the world economy was growing, we’d keep creating money by reducing prices and using smaller fractions of BTC to pay them. Of course all of this would be much less practical than adding more units of BTC so if the world lived in this universe, a consensus would be reached to amend BTC to allow for further expansion of the BTC supply. And this doesn’t even touch the ability to create money via debt which doesn’t even require a currency.

      BTW I’m not saying crypto is useless. I think BTC for example will be with us for the foreseeable future but it would likely always be used as an intermediate currency that is then converted to one fiat or another through a floating exchange rate. The exchange rate would take care of the inherent problem I described.

      • aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub
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        3 months ago

        I think the creators had some knowledge of how currency worked, since there has been movements to make digital money in the cryptopunk scene for 20+ years before BTC. Also, you don’t need a degree to be an economist, a library card works just as good

        Having a fixed supply might reduce astronomical debts but still allow for smaller debts or ones that are collateralized. But yeah, day to day life would be drastically different. No credit cards for sure, but also no compound interest, because can’t have compounding interest on anything with a fixed supply or it will acquire all of the resource (or at least attempt to)

  • lnxtx@feddit.nl
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    3 months ago

    Tax Reform Act of 1986

    The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was the top domestic priority of President Reagan’s second term. The act lowered federal income tax rates, decreasing the number of tax brackets and reducing the top tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent.

    Name and shame: Ronald Reagan