Just another day in corporate America. Putting fake profits over employees’s well-beings, and customer safety and privacy.
The thing that gets me is they just want to get in on this $2Billion investment that keeps changing hands without changing hands. They really are just taking IOUs from… elsewhere? Because apparently, according to Jensen, that money hasn’t actually exchanged hands. Investors are just buying into the new Ponzi Scheme.
Mine was awful. I was 19. I look back at it and think that I could have been different, though. I should say she was abusive. But I also could have been more understanding and less obtuse. Would it have changed things? I wouldn’t bet money on it.
I’d tell my 19 year old self to lighten up. The things he cares about aren’t the things that matter to me now: looks, smoking weed, even “faithfulness.” Though, the last one would in a sense. But what really matters is that she treated me like shit.
You did, and that’s why your comment is at the top.
Way too long comment incoming:
I do want to comment on this being a cultural thing. I think @[email protected] could be right about where this… something I learned early in college in basically Sociology 101 and Psychology 101 was to not judge other cultures based off of my/our own values because they have a different value set. Here’s the thing, these value sets that other countries have - and fuck, even America apparently - and this “value” or belief or law specifically, really aid in the abuse of children and/or women.
For example, something we’ve seen for 40 years has been women in the Middle East (ME) standing up and dying for fair treatment. While I disagree with the use of messaging that GOP representatives are using against MEasterners this cycle - it is racist and I deplore it - this is what they are pointing to, and it is still a big problem that these women are fighting.
We’ve seen a similar fight in Japan recently. Women pushing for higher age of consent (AoC) and stricter standards around it, too.
This may help illustrate. I was an investigator of child abuse and ONLY investigated parents who abused their children. For this conversation, you have to understand that legal definitions and upholding them are at least partially about feasibility. For example here is how child abuse is defined and how an act meets it:
If all these are met, I could take the child and assign the case to family (not criminal) court.
*I added “reasonable” because sexual acts can count as discipline in a defense, but it would get thrown out. And yes, that is something I came across.
Here is the point I wanted to make:
In the state I’m from it USED TO be that there were 2 (technically ranges) AoC. 14-17, and 17-19. Anyone under 14 was off limits, anyone between 14-17 could have sex, and while 18 was the “legal” AoC, you could “get around” this at 17 because parents can’t report crimes against the “adult,” the child (who the law technically sees as an adult) has to. I use present tense because it’s still a thing.
On top of all of that, none of this really matters in a criminal sense. The paren could present a “no lo contesto” stating the evidence would clearly find them guilty and they don’t want to fight it. This would effectively just get the case to move on, but they wouldn’t take a “guilty” plea.
Also, with 100% of these cases of abuse I saw and dealt with (even death), parents didn’t go to jail. One that I was privy to was Tyreke Evans breaking his baby’s legs. He’s still playing football. He essentially TEXTED the mom to take the blame by manipulating her with threats. Police had that.
Aside: Now, I think it’s obvious since I wrote it, but what do you think the two ages of consent are?
If you feel gross after that, that’s expected.
My thesis statement no one is asking for at the end: I think it’s a cop out to say that “when we study another culture we cannot apply our own values.” The reason is we can study cultures, but still plainly see some things as disgusting. Like, I HATE the idea of incest in porn. I find the concept of “shota” and “loli” abhorrent. And I think it’s ok to see this all that way. Just because I see them in other cultures (even my own, really), doesn’t make them a net-neutral that we shouldn’t support the changing of.
Here’s the thing…
So, I do. I know exactly what I’m asking for. When the crash happens, people will die. Lots of people will die. Not just lives being wrecked. Not just people losing jobs. People will die.
Here’s the thing. We’re already seeing that. The alternative is that things continue to go up in price and people can’t afford basic necessities like insulin. At the current rate of inflation starting from 2022, a person with diabetes would spend >$2million in the next 50 years just on that. By 2070 that would be over $120K/year.
So my argument is, what’s better? Having people with money lose some of it and ultimately get bailed out, or let Americans die en masse so that the rich can keep their money?
As for my part about people dying due to a crash, yeah, that happens. But my argument is that we are dying already and that rate is going to increase because of the cost of everything. Would you rather keep everything together with duct tape and just hope the bottom never falls out, knowing that it will fall out, but keeping millions of Americans in poverty and kill them fast? Or would you want to embrace the crash knowing that now we can rebuild? Because that’s what happens in the economic cycle.
Because again, the things they warn us about; people losing homes, jobs, access to healthcare, etc. These things are already happening so that they can continue to make stock go up and keep their bank accounts fat. They’ve subsidized their massive salaries and stock portfolios by laying off hundreds or thousands of workers so they can (a) show a ton of profit or (b) use the money they “saved” by firing workers to jump into AI because this means they can pay themselves more. T-Mobile just laid off ~500 employees after many rounds of layoffs since 2023 in October and more have already been announced. Cisco laid off ~8000 people in less than a year between 2023 & 2024. The Federal Govt. has laid off how many in the last year? All in the name of profit. We’re already dealing with the things they warn us about.
So really, what are we afraid of? All of these things we worry about happening are already happening? The reality is that crashes don’t hurt most Americans, just the ones working in corporate (which I do). I know what I’m asking. But what alternative is there?
Edit: I should mention, yes, all the things you say we need are true. But my argument is that you are really still just asking for a crash. A correction/deflation, etc. that’s a crash if we want to “correct” the market as much as we need to.
As for the parts about housing inventory and NIMBY, yeah. I totally agree. But that doesn’t make me want a crash any less. Like, yeah, it’d be cool if housing were a little less, but with most American families bringing in $45-$60k/year, they need it to come down a lot, along with the cost of everything else. Which would happen with a crash.
What you said is how experts (not me) have proposed we make these changes. On top of that, we the people hold tremendous power to change these things, too. Ignoring that real lasting change needs to be made at a federal level, we can go to zoning meetings to change what is allowed in our areas. Does it seem like a tough ask? Yes. I understand that. But as of now, besides voting because our lives depend on it, we can get out there and make meaningful changes in our community.
As far as the economic changes. I think more people than you’d expect want it. The issue is us younger people making it to those places to make our voices heard. Just illustrate the point even if it’s not related, Minneapolis employees are having to take PTO or unscheduled and unpaid time off to get to these protests. And they’re lucky if they don’t get fired when they go. But we have a ton of people that want this change. It’s like the “Haves and Have-Nots.” The issue is that the people who have things have the capacity to make it to these meetings and make those local decisions. They’re also the people that are frankly in office at a federal level.
Believe me, as one of these have-nots that is trying to buy a house right now and isn’t able to put a ton of money in the stock market, the game is just different for me. I welcome a crash and so do the people around me at my age. Will some of us lose our jobs? 100%, but we are already seeing people lose their jobs to keep this bubble from bursting. So to us, the only people that would lose out are the rich people with a ton of liquid assets that would deflate in value, not us.
This has come to the forefront in America since Covid and has become the reason why a lot of American’s (younger Millenials and Gen Z) can’t buy homes, beyond Gen Z being unable to find gainful employment (1/3 in unemployed). I think stating holes in their argument like “there are good landlords out there” or “what about this specific instance” is literally arguing against a rule with exceptions. That’s not what this post is talking about. They are talking about the “corporations” who are just some rich older person or couple that are buying one, two, or three extra properties and renting them out. Frankly that’s the biggest reason why housing costs have skyrocketed.
The US Federal Reserve is trying to curb this by keeping the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) high, but Trump is putting pressure on him because lowering the PLR would look good for him on paper because it would look like he did something immediate to alleviate the economic pressure we’re feeling in America, directly because of him and his policies. BUT, that would be catastrophic to us “poor” (people making less that $240K/year; 90% of Americans), and I think you can see why. Yeah, if American’s with large savings accounts (years ago the figure was (0% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, so just imagine how it is now) all of a sudden saw that the mortgage on a house dropped from . . . lets just take the average cost of a “starter home” @$210K . . . $1,762.34/month to where it was prior to the pandemic at (~3%) $1,347.87, the rich Americans that were already buying those extra houses would just buy more extra houses and charge YOU, a poor American, that ~$1500/month and still charge you for any maintenance they have to do (depending on how your state renter laws are set up).
But even with all that, we still have the issue of how much houses cost. And because of the aforementioned “extra houses,” we have seen a skyrocket in the cost of houses. I won’t do a deep dive on it, but I will sum it up and link to a podcast you can listen to: an average home “should” cost ~$120K in today’s money, but because of the MASSIVE bubble created, that home now costs ~$400K. Why? because of people buying extra homes, and those same people who don’t have jobs being able to make it to zoning meetings to tell the planners they only want “big” homes in their areas to increase the selling price of their own home. That then has a cascading effect: let’s say this happens somewhere in California like a suburb of San Fransico. That means that people no longer can afford to live there so they move to let’s say Dallas. Now Dallas has less supply and more demand and the sellers jack up their prices arbitrarily because they want more profit. Then the buyer rents it out and keeps increasing rent prices so they can keep making more money.
This is what the X Poster is complaining about. Not an immigrant charging reasonable rent prices or “good” landlords, because the truth is, those aren’t the type of people typically renting out houses to poor people who couldn’t afford to buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M&t=1198s Here’s another video that’s kinda related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc
The truth about the “replacing everyone with AI” is even more boggling. Bezos didn’t “replace” anyone with AI when he laid off all those people. What he did was look at the cost of “salaries” vs the cost of “building an infrastructure” for AI, and decided gambling on AI was cheaper than paying the workers he’s employed.