Yeah. One of my favourite restaurants closed a couple months ago because they just couldn't justify charging more for food, but their suppliers sure could.
It’s not the supplier “bleeding them” the supplier has the exact same problem the restaurant has, inflation, if they don’t raise the prices they go bankrupt. It’s a vicious cycle of everyone raising prices not to go bankrupt which causes everyone else to do the same.
If you don’t think suppliers are using inflation to justify robber-baron price hikes, I guess you missed the part where companies are posting record profits.
Inflation drives all the numbers up. If money inflates to half the value but you maintain the same profit margins, you'll make record profits despite the finances having functionally remained exactly the same.
Workers are also making record wages. It doesn't mean much if you don't consider how much the money is actually worth, as we've all been discovering over the last few years.
so why not just lower the profit margins? also give me some of them record wages please, all I got was a bottle of champagne for all the work weve done and record profits but also raises in pay are frozen because of the turbulent times
Average hourly wage at the start of 2020 was $24. It's now $29, which comes to about $10,000 more each year, and is an increase of about 21%. That growth has been concentrated in the service industry, but the data is pretty clear regardless, and the general trend applies to basically all sectors. Inflation in that same time period is 18.1%, so it simply is a matter of fact that the average worker has greater buying power today than they did in January 2020.
That's an average, of course, and may not necessarily apply to you individually.
You got champagne? All I got was runaround, brand new policies pulled out of thin air, and creative counting to deny seniority benefits. Turns out, I’ve worked for the same place 30 years when it inflates their retention and longevity numbers for the oversight agencies. I’ve also worked there for only a year (started a new position last year) when it suits them to deny a published benefit. The completely mindboggling part? These two countings were in the same email.
Workers are not making record wages, maybe CEOs and the upper middle class are but nobody else is. Maybe this is specific to America? Nearly everyone I know across multiple wage brackets I struggling with the cost of living.
I think that’s exactly it. I don’t know for sure, but these numbers may be average wages. And if that’s the case, having the top % or earners earn more while the bottome stays the same would still increase the average And would increase the divide between the top earners and bottom earners
Wage growth in the US has been most pronounced in the lower end of the market. Growth-oriented businesses like tech are a lot more sensitive to interest rate spikes, since their entire model is to borrow a ton of money to pay highly skilled workers a lot to "disrupt" an industry and achieve very rapid growth.
That isn't necessarily contradictory with still struggling, since inflation exists. If you suddenly make 10% more money but everything costs 10% more as well, you are objectively making record wages, even though your buying power remains the same. Per that report, inflation-adjusted wages have actually grown on the lower end of the job market, so the average low-wage worker's buying power has actually increased, but general statistics don't always translate over to real-life experience super cleanly, and of course, a slight improvement from a bad financial situation doesn't suddenly put you in a good situation.
I know who is right because I’m not some bottom-tier employee parroting what I’ve heard. My job requires me to work with our finance team, M&A team, COO, and SG&A team as part of overarching strategy.
Huzzah for our current system of capitalism that insists a company is only doing good if each quarter has record profits. What’s bad with doing “good enough?”
This concept of greedflation has been disproved in recent meta-analysis. It should probably die. I’ll copy paste a comment I wrote in some other thread analyzing it.
I think everyone should probably listen to this great report from NPR that dissects this issue. The Tl;dr: is greedflation is not really a real thing.
The deeper answer to your question of, “can one party increase prices in a market?” is sort of basic economics, and the answer is, “Usually, no.” In a competitive market, the answer is no. In a monopolistic market (meaning one company controls most of the market, think like Google with browsers) with no government oversight, the answer is yes. Things get complicated when you add in government regulation or oligopolistic markets (markets where only a few players control the market). In those cases, it depends on how strong government regulations on price-gouging are and any anti-monopoly or anti-anticompetitive practice laws are, and also depends on how oligopolists behave. Sometimes, particularly in industries with few big players, the big players will make the same decisions independently. If they do this cooperating it will usually violate antitrust laws, but if they both decide they’ll be better off say, not paying workers as much, or charging super high markups, them that can happen. A lot of economic research shows that kind of “tacit collusion” happens in real life, like in the oil and gas industries. But other times oligopolies will behave very competitively, only uniting through lobbyist trade groups if at all (think Microsoft and Amazon in cloud software).
So that’s the facts, but here’s my economic musing: The reason it feels like greedflation is a thing is a combination of factors:
Inflation was very real, and very salient.
Corporations (as mentioned in the NPR piece) crowed about their “record profits” in the short term, and also mention them when they are absolute record profits, not just record profit margins (something not mentioned but very real - a company can make twice as much money but also have spent twice as much, making way “more” money but with identical margins)
In the US at least, we are seeing the highest numbers of industry consolidation and monopolies/oligopolies since the Gilded Age, so it feels like companies should be able to raise their prices if they want to.
Media coverage and online spaces have become extremely polarized, so “corporations bad” is a very easy refrain to find if you’re watching or reading anything remotely left-wing, and it has been parroted by many democratic politicians as well, because it scores cheap and easy political points (also, and this is just my opinion, it helps vilify corps more in the public eye to help get more support for better antitrust legislation and enforcement, the actual end goal. I don’t think senators like Bernie Sanders don’t actually understand what’s going on with profit margins, I think they’re using it to generate political will, but that may be my own bias creeping in).
Every place I used to eat pretty much. And they cheap out on cheap shit too, like fries and rice. I used to work at a restaurant and the owner always taught me to fill up the sides cause it makes people feel they got their money’s worth
I’m out of software the first chance I get. I hate it. Tech is no longer fun and inventive, it’s exploitative and designed to milk the most money out of every user.
I don’t even particularly care about the capitalist part. I just find that the new things are no longer fun, but terrifying and causing anxiety about the future. I used to love keeping up with the newest stuff, but I already feel like a Luddite after the last few years
Same. Streaming services reinvented cable. The open web is increasingly hidden behind paywalls. Instead of having the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips, you have 5 billion tiny creators begging you to sign up for their goat-fat candle-making course on udacity. You can’t look in any direction without advertisers stabbing you in the eyes and claiming that it’s their god-given right to scream their snake-oil sales pitch directly into your brain; and if you install an ad blocker you’re the one stealing food out of content creators mouths, not the ~5 people who control 50 % of the total wealth of humanity…
I’m with you. I’m so completely and utterly over working in IT. The industry used to be full of companies founded by people who loved tech, and were staffed by kids who grew up on Lego and Logo. Today these same businesses are owned by investors who don’t know the first thing about technology, and staffed by grown up kids who were told by their guidance counselor that IT was a high paying field. Nobody knows their ass from a hole in the ground anymore, and getting anyone remotely competent on the phone is like pulling teeth. If I could bail on this industry tomorrow and build picnic tables I’d never look back.
Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it'll just grow back later!
(But seriously, don't actually do this unless you're prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don't even try it on a VM or a computer you're planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don't expect, you'll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running rm -rf /could actually brick your computer. This shouldn't still be the case, but I wouldn't test it, myself.)
Fun fact, rm -rf /* does not need --no-preserve-root. It will happily start as technically, according to the preserve root check, /* is not root as the target is not /
It’s slightly different. Your shell will see the /* and replace it with all the directories under /, e.g. /bin /dev /etc /home etc. So the actual command that runs is rm -rf /bin /dev /etc /home etc.
It’s the same shit with the tankies on Lemmy. They write these essays like they are payed per character and link the dumbest shit you can imagine. My favourite being some dude on youtube saying “It was the CIA, CIA man told me, trust me it’s CIA man in trenchcoat, tiananmen square did not happen and if it did it was scary CIA man”.
This sentiment is very common around the world. Every time something goes wrong it’s not the government: “It’s the USA/Europe/Jews! AAAARGH! They fear us so much! That’s why they sabotage us all the time!” I hear this shit in my own family from time to time and it never stops being funny. I wish I could deep dive into an alternate reality like they do.
I mean tbqf Russia is explicitly a capitalist state and China is literally but less explicitly a capitalist state, no matter how many times tankies claim the PEOPLE'S billionaires are totally left praxis
I mean, the USA and Europe did fuck lots of shit up during the cold war, let alone before then. Totally fair if people from South America, Africa and Asia are wary of us. No excuse for including jews though
Yeah, sure, but there's a difference between not wanting other nations interfering in your country's affairs (which is completely fair) and supporting Russia engaging in a blatantly imperialist offensive war just because they oppose "the West". That's just hypocrisy.
Only midrange to high-end devices. Cheaper ones (which are very common especially in poorer countries) still use simpler LCD/LED screens.
LCD screens have a backlight that’s always on and consumes the same amount of power regardless of what’s on the screen. OLEDs don’t have a backlight; when the screen is dark, the pixels in that area are actually turned off.
Now that most of my pixels are a different color… we can, um… we fixed, erm… wait, what is that supposed to do again? Did we do a global climate change or nah?
So this is interesting… if you see a bunch of bananas, you’re not allowed to break one off? Here in the United States, it’s totally acceptable to do this. You can straight up go around and pull one banans off of 7 different bunches, and nobody will even look at you funny.
In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with US$28,000 of their father’s (Errol Musk) money
Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company’s early development prior to Elon Musk’s involvement.
Responding to a screenshot of a CNN headline that read, “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could help solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization,” Musk tweeted that if the U.N. World Food Program “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
WFP director David Beasley called his bluff, and actually outlined how the organization would use the $6.6 billion. Musk, who is worth approximately $239.2 billion, never responded to Beasley.
Hype is real. Feels like this is the place to be. Reddit 2011 vibes with the high quality discussions. It’ll only get better. To the fediverse and beyond!
Reddit user of 12 years here. God I hope this place takes off like Voat was supposed to. Reddit has just changed so damn much. I was honestly sick of the place since before the crazy app meltdown.
I’ve got high hopes for Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general. Voat’s issue was it was a haven for fascists and fascist sympathizers, and a centralized site made that the general vibe. The federated model makes it so they can do what they want in their own little corner of shit, and the rest of us can ignore them like they deserve.
I only worry about brigading. Where they plan to slowly infiltrate a small instance and in a flick of a switch the simultaneously try to take over, overwhelming the admin.
The only issue I have right now is that reddit is a good source of technical answers. Kind of like SE without the dismissive, condescending douchebag attitude that seems to be automatic there. Every single time it sounds like they are replying to someone that is actively bothering them. Like dude, you came on the website, checked the forums, and decided to answer. I didn’t send you a text or some shit.
Dig out the fucking birth certificate they gave you by default for free because surely you didn’t do something as stupid as throw it out in a selfish attempt to consign your children to this insane lifestyle choice.
I just literally looked at my birth certificate, and it took them an entire month after my birth to issue it. Took them even longer to issue me a SS number.
Try looking at yours. You just might find that the paperwork wasn’t printed out the same day you popped out either.
Edit: Partially edited to try to be more polite, but also…
The government had me so screwed up right after I was born, that not only did it take them a month to issue me a birth certificate, but they actually ended up screwing that up, and I actually have two birth certificates and two SS cards, and even two SS numbers no less (though the first one there is false).
Obviously I’m not about to share my private info, I’m just here to say that the government fucks up sometimes.
I also never said my paperwork was ‘lost in the mail’ as you suggested. I’m saying it took the government an entire month to issue my birth certificate.
In the meantime, I had no paperwork for the first month of my life.
The odds of it being a literal newborn yet to be issued a birth certificate are minuscule compared to the odds of sovcits just doing the sovcit shit. “Our youngest” can mean almost any age, probably up to 10yo if I were to guess.
The other comments were also arguing against sovcit, in fact, a lot of this community is screenshots of FB posts about sovcit stuff, that this community makes fun of.
I understand the point you were trying to make about it being possible they had a new born that was yet to be issued a birth certificate, and that’s definitely possible, but if a screenshot of a FB post ends up here, it may just be some unhinged sovcit stuff.
More stupid because the mother or child could have died without immediate medical attention if something had gone wrong.
Plenty of hospitals will accommodate something akin to a home birth setup where a woman can choose to give birth without any painkillers or an episiotomy and will even often allow midwives and doulas to attend. They just make sure the woman is in an environment where both her or her baby’s lives could potentially be saved in the event of something catastrophic.
Yeah my wife gave birth at a place like that, had midwives and nurses but was more of a home feeling setup, worked with the hospital and a fire department was right next door with an ambulance in case anything went wrong. They also didn’t allow any high risk pregnancies. I felt like it was a great compromise and my wife loved it. It’s totally doable in a safe way if you can find an above board place.
A birthing center is also a far safer alternative to a home birth. Probably just as safe as a hospital, if not safer due to the staff being more specialized (I’m not sure which has a better safety record in that regard). The point is, medical professionals need to be around just in case.
I read an autobiography years ago about a girl in the US who had grown up in fairly extreme poverty. She ended up going on to great things. I unfortunately can’t remember the name of the book but it was a really good read.
Anyway, one of the things that stuck with me was that home births with no hospital intervention were fairly common mostly because of cost but (and my memory on this is hazy) I think also this kind of “avoid the government” basis. They had midwives / nurses come on an unofficial basis.
Not sure I understand the problem. When my daughter was born it also took about a month (at least a few weeks) to get it, and since that was normal the hospital provided a temporary one exactly for that reason. SSN also came in mail around that time frame.
The insurance allowed to register without SSN and provide the SSN later as it was normal to not have it just when the child was just born.
I think there was an option to not get SSN when filling the document for birth certificate, but when searching why I wouldn’t want that I realized it was a bad idea.
I’m not exactly sure what the complication was from the original post either, but the lady said her husband just got a new job, and they’re trying to enroll their children for benefits.
Not sure what exactly she means by benefits, but taking the short post at face value, I interpret it as she’s trying to get her kids on the company insurance, but they’re being screwy about a newborn because ‘wE nEEd tO sEe tHE paPErWoRK’
Where does newborn come into this? It says “youngest”, which sure I guess could be a newborn, but my youngest is 22 years old.
It’s been a while since I had my kids, but it took about a month for the paperwork to be processed for them to get birth certificates. They never mailed them to us, but we were told that after a month we should be able to go to the country clerk’s office to pick them up.
Aside from that, when signing up for benefits from an employer, in my previous experiences I had X number of days to get my paperwork in for finalization. Even if this were a newborn situation, there’s enough paperwork from the hospital to generally appease HR types till the real one is available.
You’re assuming this child was born in a hospital. A lot of these nutty types will do a home birth either by themselves or with a midwife sympathetic to their ideals. In either case, the kid is born without any official documentation, which majorly screws them over later in life, especially if they later decide to join the civilized world.
That’s a very good point especially if they become sovcits prior to having kids. And it’s not like they’re bringing these kids to pediatricians or getting them their vaccines or putting them in school.
There was actually a Radiolab episode about this scenario. A kid grew up with insane parents and later joined the real world and was in a fucked up legal limbo status due to there being no record of their birth. They couldn’t prove they were even a natural citizen of the US. It’s been several years since I listened to that episode, but iirc their state senator/some politician ended up campaigning on their behalf to get laws made to cover these fringe cases so in the future, kids like these aren’t completely screwed. Not sure if the law ended up getting passed or not. Anyway, it was the first time I’d heard of people doing this kind of crap to their kids and it blew my mind. Utterly selfish and abusive.
I’m sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but when my daughter was born we filled out the paperwork in the hospital but had to go to the county health department office to get a birth certificate when it was actually issued. I think we may have had to pay a small amount for it too.
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