politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
The reason publicly traded companies continually raise prices is the pressure from Wall Street to continually make more money than you did last month, last quarter, last year.
Say you sell 1,000,000 hamburgers and make a 20% profit on it.
Unless you make more money next year, selling that same 1,000,000 hamburgers, Wall Street is going to punish you. They don't care that you're profitable.
You either sell more burgers or raise prices.
Yeah. They treat profit like a necessary business expense or a cost, and balance their budgets around it. Which perverts a fundamental of economics.
I'm starting to think the stock market is just a really awful bank that is sometimes also a ponzi scheme.
The stock market IS a ponzi scheme, and the embodiment or everything that's wrong with capitalism. It encourages greed and drives enshittification. It's a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy (like 90% of stock is owned by the richest 10%, and most of that is owned by the top 0.1%). Expectations of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is insane.
Most of the human population would prefer (and benefit from) less greed, less enshitification, cheaper housing, cheaper groceries, cheaper products — than the possibility to own a share of evilcorp.
Thank Jack Welch and Milton Friedman
A while back, Exxon set a record for any company in a quarter and everyone was going "Wooo!" and I was like "Well, gas prices are going up then... Think about next quarter and this quarter next year..."
And Leo Strauss.
Or lower content, or use cheaper content, or fire people and make the people staying work 10% more for the same salary, ... every year.
USA has a really wrong idea of fiduciary duty.
It is because enough people don’t bother to price shop.
They have to turn inventory or they will quickly go broke.
If you switch to the cheaper option they have to react. If you shrug and pay, they win.