Yes. A key contradiction in capitalist economics is that the wealthy have a much lower marginal propensity to consume than the working class. Therefore the more wealth the rentiers capture, the lower the velocity of money. One way to recirculate that money would be to levy steep taxes against them. Another would be if they would just spend more money on labor.

Government revenues aside, for a functional capitalist economy the money has to flow vertically one way or another. It’s A or B, and they constantly bitch and moan about both. We cannot have a functional capitalist economy when these chucklefucks are dictating policy.

I’m sympathetic to communism myself, but that’s not hard to do when we’re living through the failure of late stage capitalism.

i wonder how many of these are run by an openclaw instance

i am itching for an opportunity to complain to someone about the Indianapolis bus system myself

Okay 🪄. Everyone who makes under 70k will never eat out again.

This eliminates more than half of the customer base of the restaurant industry, most of which promptly implodes. Millions lose their jobs. What’s worse is that all that restaurant spending gets redirected towards grocery stores. Grocery stores move far more product with just a fraction of the workers and they will be damned before they hand out raises to share their new windfall profits. This drastically reduces the velocity of money in the economy and drags us into a sudden contraction.

The storefronts those restaurants occupied, the ones that used to be central meeting points for their communities, become urban blight. Those workers, too, stop being able to pay rent or buy much of anything else, which deals a collateral blow to residential real estate and every business that makes consumer goods. The collapse of the restaurant industry and the sudden blow to landlords of all varieties takes a large tax base with it, and state and local governments that rely on sales and property tax see an immediate budgetary shortfall.

These so-called titans of industry cannot see, will never see, that the “wasteful” and “unthrifty” spending they hate is utterly vital. Their distaste for the poors experiencing such luxuries as participating in simple consumption blinds them to the fact that that spending is the economy.

ETA: Instead of the rest of us tightening our belts even more, the wealthy need to spend a lot more. Fund a literacy program, hand a million dollars to a small electric car conversion company, drop a cool 10 million on urban infill, fuck, build a pyramid. Anything is better than sitting on your wealth doing nothing but chasing rent-seeking enterprises like stock buybacks and cloud infra.

You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn’t forget about the social contract, they’re just confident that a little more won’t hurt.

Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can’t think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.

But that requires R&D, and that means hiring and paying more engineers! And maintaining multiple production lines! And paying people to work on those! Can’t we just make a law that all Americans have to buy an F-150 by the time they turn 30???

1. Lobby to become the default mode of transportation in the postwar period
2. Get dragged kicking and screaming towards efficiency
3. Successfully lobby to gut regulations and manufacture demand for SUVs and crew cab pickups
4. Stop building cars altogether
5. Help get a fascist elected who kicks off another oil crisis
6. Cry about China eating your lunch

Well unusually it could be made of anything else, couldn’t it? Think about a windmill made of cocaine. That would be highly unusual.

isn’t that just every hallmark movie

…

oh wait that was the joke

Better idea: nuke the lower age limit and let everyone vote.

You and I see eye to eye. Let them witness a better world and despair.

well now I have to add joco back into my regular rotation

Yeah, never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. I just wish he’d make more mistakes faster and that midterms came sooner.

Assuming there are midterms, which I hope to god there are. The alternative is very bloody, and while my teenaged self thought he was ready to die in a ditch for his ideals my thirtysomething self would like to have the joy of building a just society rather than the satisfaction of dying for the hope of one.

I wonder why that might be.

wouldn’t dems have to, like, win elections to do much more than they’re doing rn with temporary injunctions and whatnot? I’m not saying they WILL do more, I’m skeptical that they CAN.

…isn’t UpCloud Finnish?

E: looks like they didnt go through with it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-24/finland-shelves-plan-to-move-election-platform-to-amazon-servers

Helaas kunt u niet inloggen

I don’t know Dutch but I choose to believe this says “hey cunt youre not logged in”

so how long before people start spreading rumors to encourage stochastic violence? “I heard the governor’s daughter is going out of state to get an abortion in Maryland.”

ah fuck thats exactly what they want isnt it