this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
630 points (96.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36159 readers
795 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

They keep raising prices, stating that it's due to inflation, but then they keep having record profits.

Meanwhile, the average American can barely afford rent or food nowadays.

What are we to do? Vote? I have been but that doesn't seem to do much since I'm just voting for a representative that makes the actual decisions.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] reddig33 237 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (12 children)

Cutting back on spending is the only thing I know that works. When consumers don’t buy things, the prices come down.

For groceries this means splurging less, avoiding things you don’t need (drink tea instead of soda, don’t buy snacks and chips). Fruits and vegetables are definitely still cheaper than prepared foods in many cases. Even when frozen. And they can be used to make a meal stretch, along with beans and rice.

Buy cheap bar soap and store brands of basic things.

Coupons aren’t really a thing anymore, but you can use the app for stores like the grocery, Target, Walmart, to “clip” deals and save.

A lot of the high prices right now are just greed. They aren’t tied to actual supply chain or labor issues. A grocery store in France just told PepsiCo to take a hike because their prices were so outrageous.

If you want the government to get involved, I encourage you to write your representatives about enforcing existing anti-trust laws. The mega mergers and buyouts are driving prices up because of less competition. Kroger wants to buy Albertsons for example. That just means more layoffs and higher grocery prices.

Hope this helps.

[–] Serinus 112 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The biggest thing is to be aware of how much things should cost, and just refuse to buy them if they're gouging.

Can I afford $13 for a case of Coca-Cola? Sure, I absolutely can. I can afford $24 a case. I'm just not willing to pay that. That same case was $7 in 2019. You can't tell me their costs have doubled.

And even if I believed their costs doubled (and I don't), that doesn't mean their prices have to double. They're not entitled to growing percentage profit on a larger number. Just because they made 20% on that $7 case doesn't mean they deserve 20% on that $13 case. 20% of $7 is $1.40. They could absolutely take $2 profit on $10 and be happy with it. But they won't. Because people don't pay attention and they can get away with it.

There are enough barriers to entry and cooperation among would-be competitors that they can charge basically whatever the duck they choose.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

I too choose this man's duck.

[–] _number8_ 41 points 11 months ago (3 children)

cutting back spending is hard when it's one of the main ways to feel joy; you already have to spend on groceries and bills anyway, and it feels that much more stark and grim denying yourself the fun foods and nice convenience items to save like $10, then your rent goes up $50 because they said so, and so what's the point anyhow...

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This is why I pirate a lot of my media. Aaarrrr.

At the very least I can be entertained while I am cutting expenses.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

While I personally do appreciate the level of detail and amount of options provided in this reply, the more straightforward and longer-term solution is to eat the rich.

[–] reddig33 28 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Taxing the Rich might help as well.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
[–] captainlezbian 116 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Voting is necessary but not sufficient.

The big other thing is to build external power. That’s not like militias per se (though with the rising fascism it’s not a bad idea), but rather stuff like gardening, learning to do repairs, and practicing mutual aid. Reduce your and your community’s dependence on the corporations. And make it an issue people around you care about.

[–] superduperenigma 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Learning to do repairs yourself has never been easier thanks to YouTube. There's also a ton of sources for replacement parts online these days, many of which provide repair videos for the more common parts. My dishwasher broke a few months ago; $60 for a new intake pump and a few hours of my time and it's working as if it's brand new. My TV died out a little over a year ago; $35 for a new power supply (probably could've repaired it for a few bucks if I had just replaced a capacitor or two) and less than an hour of my time and it's right as rain. Most repair jobs are a lot less daunting than people assume they are.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (28 children)

Unions! Rising prices are irrelevant when workers are paid fairly.

load more comments (28 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] SCB 100 points 11 months ago (18 children)

Unironically the answer is "shop less."

Prices on goods rise when demand for goods stays sufficient to support the price going up. The less everyone buys, the less things will cost.

Prices for goods have almost nothing to do with the price of rent, but the mechanisms there are the same - it's just that you have to encourage building rather than "live somewhere less" because the second option really isn't tenable, for obvious reasons.

If you want rent to come down, campaign for, vote for, or even run for office to be the candidate that will change zoning laws and encourage building multifamily housing.

load more comments (18 replies)
[–] Witchfire 81 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Cry and hope for a revolution. Since the Supreme Court decided money is speech, we have no power. Representatives don't care about their constituents unless a message comes with a "charitable donation". The rich are seemingly immune to laws, but somehow there's a surplus of money available to fuck over the little guy. This is a failed country of the corporations, and for the corporations.

[–] lovely_reader 32 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Not to promote violence, but I'm afraid nothing is likely to change until people are pushed far enough to do more than hope.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Stop buying their shit. Obviously there's things you need to live and that's fine but stop wasting your money and making them rich by buying all the ancillary shit.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] Windex007 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Short answer: get paid more

Medium answer: become unionized so that you can bargain collectively for more pay instead of individually. It's like forming a political party with your labour, and then voting for yourself

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Unions are a very good answer to this. They aren't a complete solution, but they are a big step in the right direction. And they're something almost everyone can do.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago

Join a union and demand more money to pay for it.

[–] xkforce 48 points 11 months ago (2 children)

France has the right idea about what we were supposed to do.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Protest about every single issue then vote for the most milquetoast president possible, with a side helping of fascist Russian-puppet as a runner up?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Or get out the guillotines which soon get turned on your allies (and innocent poor people), then after that collapses get taken over by a fascist dictator, who undoes most of the progressive changes you made and rampages across Europe, killing millions of people (including French people).

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] hperrin 47 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Eat the rich. Bring back the guillotine.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago

The only solution is to demand more money and buy less. Buying less will decrease demand and cut their profits, having more money will cover inequity.

This pretty much already happened with the “nobody wants to work” bullshit. People moved to better jobs, and jobs that could no longer pay a living wage either raised wages or closed their doors. Workers need to keep demanding more, unionizing, and raising wages to keep the money in their pockets. The people complaining are complaining they can’t have 4 car garages when the employees can’t afford rent. Fuck those people.

[–] africanprince99 42 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Plant a vegetable garden. Build a rain catchment system. Build a solar power system. Read books instead of consuming other media. Buy only local. Start a consumer or retail cooperative. Don't participate in wanton consumerism.

Voting in the US doesn't yield desirable results because of the gerrymandering and the voting system; however most changes which directly affect people are made at a grassroots level so participate in activities at a grassroots level.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (4 children)

vote for people who are in favor of regulations

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (6 children)

While it isn't magic, there is a newfound pressure on the Democratic party to finally break some meaningful ground.

Unfortunately one of the biggest obstacles had been the radically conservative Supreme Court.

Simple arithmetic tells us that if just two Supreme Court Justices were to suddenly disappear from our reality, and re-emerge in another, the court would lean more progressive to allow debt relief, bodily autonomy, and hopefully more.

While there are many ways to suddenly remove people from our plane of existence, there's no proven way to have them re-emerge in another. Obviously it would be illegal and deeply unethical to suggest such removal without the safe relocation to another plane.

So I guess just learn to kiss fascist ass 🤷‍♂️

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] scarabic 37 points 11 months ago (7 children)

You may not like the answer but you need to continue working the political process further upstream and more deeply. It’s easy to just vote for the president every 4 years and then think the system doesn’t work. But it’s too late to have any kind of effect that late in the process. Find more progressive candidates to support and vote in your primaries to support them. Volunteer and help them get out the vote. And do this even if the candidate you like is across the country somewhere, because having more progressive candidates overall helps move the Overton window and shift the party over time. And when you’ve lost the primary and don’t have a progressive choice, do the least bad thing and keep the regressive candidate from winning. You may spend all your life doing all this only for some limited victories and a small net shift if any, but that’s the lot of one person among 300 million. It’s a hell of a lot more impact than the vast majority of people will have. And it’s just the beginning of what you can do. Join a union or run for office yourself and make a more direct impact.

Of course we all live with limitations but few of us are doing as much as we could actually do. I know this well because I have some blue collar friends busy with jobs and kids who still do about 400x more than I do.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] CADmonkey 34 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I think food riots are just a few years off, really. Maybe when enough stock is stolen and enough stores trashed they will learn, but I expect they will try to be heavy handed, sending in the local WalMart Defense Team (a.k.a. the police force closest to a given walmart) to handle it, but there are definitely going to be problems with that considering some people go to walmart armed.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Thieve from big corpos. Don't feel bad about it. They don't.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] A_Random_Idiot 31 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Molotovs are always an option.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] SpikedPunchVictim 30 points 11 months ago (6 children)

If you want to live through 80's dystopian books on this subject, we all need to start learning how to hack; compromise these company's networks, take down their supply chain. In the end, we're enabling them. We can either give up because there are too many of them, or educate ourselves on their weaknesses.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] GrammatonCleric 30 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Eat. The Rich.

They don't move much, I love fatty cuts 🤤

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Siegfried 29 points 11 months ago (6 children)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not buying things is probably the most accessible course of action. I haven't bought a carton of eggs in probably over a year now. Yes, I heard prices went back down. But you know what? Fuck 'em. Companies can't just price-gouge and then pretend everything's cool.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] randon31415 25 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Seek out the competitors to near monopolies? I heard somewhere that all glasses are built and sold by one company (that then sells them to a bunch of different companies so it looks like there is competition), and they can charge incredible markups. There probably are very small companies that make and sell glasses that don't have the economies of scale or ad budgets to get the word out. If enough people bought from them, the monopoly would have to lower prices to their "kill competitors" level to steal back the market-share (or just buyout the little guy). Once dead or absorbed, they can go back to incredible mark-ups, which means we can start the cycle over again and find a new little guy to support.

That or support the maker movements so that anything we need we can just make ourselves (3D printing, bio-hacking, hydroponics and seed banks, general lathe and mill loner libraries, open source software, etc...)

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (6 children)

You need to be the example you want to see in this world. Buy ZERO Corporate.

That’s it.

Delete subscriptions. Replace your music collection with pirated MP3s. Same with movies.

Learn to cook.

Obviously you’ll have to buy gas. Nothing is perfect.

Make a start.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] NeoNachtwaechter 24 points 11 months ago

What are we to do?

Pay. AFAIK you don't have any other rights.

Vote?

Yes. Never vote for a rich person anymore :-)

[–] whenigrowup356 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

General strike/protest? Get enough people making noise on the street and people will have to listen. With a presidential election coming up, Dems won't be able to fully ignore it either.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] nbafantest 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

One thing I've noticed is that people I know have 2 problems.

  1. they might not know what things should cost. If the prices rises, I notices it right away. I shop at the same grocer and know the standard price of everything I buy. I notice a price increase when I pull it off the shelf. Most my friends don't notice a price increase until they check out.

  2. My friends that do notice a price increase never substitute or change their meals. They will still buy the same meals. Even if the stuff they need go on sale every other week. I've found that usually most my stuff I can still buy on sale at least 1 or 2 times per month.

These two problems mean that our generation doesn't really put much pressure on stores to keep prices low.

Rent: Housing costs in America are entire caused by a supply shortage due to limitations on supply. We can literally build as much housing as we want and set the market rate at anything, but since the 60s America hasn't built much and the little we have built has been expensive single family homes. This is a choice voters have made for 60 years, but voters can also make other choices.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I work for a huge bank that's investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don't plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.

Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they're pretty sure they're going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It's a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.

It's not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, "systemic risk" but that's a very large topic that I'm not going to cover here.

The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.

...but why now‽ Why haven't they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they've been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don't have anyone living in them.

Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).

These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They're also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.

This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don't need as much maintenance as they used to. They're so much cheaper to maintain en mass.

So how do we fix this problem? There's all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:

  • Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
  • Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won't get into to stay brief)
  • Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
  • Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).

Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.

There's lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It's a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they're straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there's various loopholes which I won't get into).

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Buying clubs, when you and all your neighbors and friends buy directly from producers can cut out a lot of the graft. This lowers prices, connects you to your neighbors, and lowers the divide between the rural and urban. There may already be buyers cooperatives local to you. Some even give food based on volunteering.

My favourite theory of revolution is where these clubs start to encroach into housing and medicine. Eventually you have an economy based on mutual dependence and responsibility.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Cornpop 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

if you see someone stealing food...

...no, you didn't!

[–] samus12345 21 points 11 months ago
load more comments
view more: next ›