this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Those seem incompatible to me.

(UBI means Universal Basic Income, giving everyone a basic income, for free)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How do you explain cereal being $8 a box, when it was $5 pre-COVID or the million other products that now cost more? There are recordings of board meetings that were leaked of board members admitting that they inflated prices or unnecessarily kept prices inflated because they knew people would pay it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why could that not have an explanation that is primarily about economic forces? They printed a ton of money around when Covid happened, and the distribution of wealth shifted significantly. I can buy that businesses could be eking out a little more efficiency by coordinating, but not that we are in a secret command economy and economics is basically all fake.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

the "printing of money" has fuck all to do with inflation, and mainly comes from pop-economics that is stuck somewhere around mercantilism.

Corporation simply realized that they are playing the prisoner's dilemma with prices, and are now going for the "optimal solution"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How do you figure you can increase the number of dollars in circulation, while shrinking the economy, and not have each dollar be worth less wealth as a result?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

because the value of money isn't tied to the amount in existence, never has, even the rare metal backed gang is just extrapolating the value axiom by one

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

How do you explain cereal being $8 a box, when it was $5 pre-COVID …

Two things:

  1. We shut down the economy, and supply got disrupted because the economy isn’t a thing you can just turn off for a period of time and have it come back on again

  2. We shut down the economy in non-equal fashion leading to some stores being forced to close while others were allowed to remain open. This led to reduced competition among those supplying the cereal. Competition works to reduce prices, and we killed the competition. The covid lockdowns were a government-enforced consolidation of the market. There are fewer players, each of which owns a larger share now.