but a lot of the demand can be met by buying used stuff

Firstly, the covid pandemic was a multi year event.

The initial shocks happened in the first 3 months.

Secondly, publicly traded companies were enriched greatly from that time. Also it wasn’t conscious degrowth or a lack of ability, it was supply chain issues that caused products not to be available for purchase.

Yup, that’s why the control here is in the consumers’ hand and again, it’s sort of like reducing your consumption so it starts hitting the metrics enough for corporations to realize the risks.

I already barely buy shit. I’ve always said “if the economy hinged on my purchasing habit, the country would go bankrupt”.

well, you’re already part of the movement:)

should all buy less and be more mindful of where our money goes. I think we should buy locally and promote businesses that you agree with on levels beyond the value of the good or services they offer as often as possible. However, I don’t think we can effectively protest this way unless it was a true lifestyle change for a large portion of the country.

I’d disagree, we saw it with COVID how vulnerable corporations are. They’ll always focus on stock buybacks and stuff like that over recession-proofing. Also, this is quite an equitable movement. Those who can’t afford new shit are already contributing to it.

We could even make an app that shows stephen miller, steve bannon, or one of the dogeshits talk whenever people got tempted to buy shit.

Ask yourself what that means to business contracts which depend on those laws to be guaranteed,

Agree. If they feel the rules of engagement can be changed unilaterally, we can show that this can go both ways.

n the strike is over. If the company can anticipate well enough, they’d raise prices when the demand comes back and come out ahead in the long run.

You have to use/consume less, and for an extended time period, not just change when that purchase happens.

But yes, with that caveat, use less, and choose the lesser evil when you do need to buy something. The individual effect is small, but small things add up.

The mitigation is to focus on used goods so it is much less painful. Unlike gas, people don’t need that new TV, or that next phone, gaming console, their Nth streaming sub and use alternative (wink) ways to consume entertainment media.

Yup, delayed consumption would be the most likely outcome, but that’s not necessarily a problem if people can apply this pressure in a meme-like fashion. It’s sorta like the gamestop squeeze.

Also the immediate personal pain could be mitigated by buying used stuff.

yup, trump’s a symptom not a straight up cause. his demise is expected to be the least consequential of this “elite” trio, as he is already getting sidelined without consequence. Old, virile trump would have fired musk a month ago.

yup. but putin was young. trump is old and aging fast so the direct applicability to the US is limited. at this point that’s the only nice thing. putin’s old, trump’s old, xi jinping is old. At least twp of them go out of commission in the next 5 years.

True, and this is a very sad statistic. It would be great is we would actually work on mental health in this country.

It’s 99% the guns though. The US has shitty mental health safety net, but not worse than in Eastern Europe, the murder rates (which is driven by gun violence) are much lower there. If you exclude firearm deaths it drops to similar rates to that of Europe. I personally think that increasing fines and punishment for bad gun ownership is the way to go.

They lay the blame, and lay the groundwork, to wreck shit next time while shifting blame from themselves.

Yup. The funniest thing is how important the national debt becomes with a democrat at the helm, but how irrelevant it is with a republican presidency.

All of that, combined with the “perfect” storm of tRUmp, really sped it up.

Agree, trump is a symptom not necessarily the direct cause.these all happened because of citizens united and the influx of infinite money into politics that was bound to tip the balance away from actual citizens towards corporations.

the only thing that is going to end this war. It’s called ‘Mutually-Assured Destruction’.

The IDF wouldn’t drop a bomb on their own citizens because their prime ideology is jewish supremacy, plus they have the military might without it. Hamas, OTOH would have no qualms about it. I can’t figure out if you are sarcastic here, but mutual destruction is exactly what would happen, so if you’re saying that nuclear annihilation is the only way to stop this war, then you might be right, but generally that’s the least favorable outcome.

I thought you put it together already. Hamas’ willingness to sacrifice Palestinians is only second to IDF. They’d drop that bomb without hesitation if that meant the final defeat of Israel.

On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.

they didn’t overthrow biden’s “tyranny” either. Instead of the overthrowing tyranny bullshit, guns have a great track record of killing kids and helping depressed men end it all.

Genocide?

Because of this:

Every single European country with a shared border with Russia has mandatory military service (that red exception on the map is Latvia, which also reinstated it in 2024). This is how much Russia is trusted.

so what would you think hamas do with nukes?

y on online outreach and have to be proactive IRL spreading messages that it really is a class war. There’s no better time than now, no more apparent point in history than today, it’s just pulling those people away from the propaganda for them to realize it. Somehow, We The People, need to convince the Boiling Frogs.

If you look at the stats on what proportion of US population can read beyond 6th grade level you can predict that there’s nearly zero chance pulling these people out of their bubbles.

On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.

I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.

’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.

to date, that 400,000,000 pew-pew stick and freedom rod are proving super effective against tyranny. Civil was is becoming more and more likely though.