I have seen so much more porn on a single night of reddit than I have the entire time I’ve been on lemmy. I feel this is just a weird psyop to scare people away from the “degenerate leftist place!”
As an outsider, please take these helpful suggestions:
The logging-in process is messed up. For the longest time I couldn’t log into any of the mobile apps (even though on the desktop it worked fine). The error messages were mostly not helpful.
Even now, I still get error messages that ask me to pick a language for some reason. This is after I’ve already typed up a comment and I am trying to post it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but you could see how it would be a PITA when on mobile and all you wanted to do was write a short response.
Still no real idea what “instances” are and no idea if I am missing out on entire subs because I am on .world. No clue. Do people on .world only see this? 🤷
The layout on the website is barely passable. The link to go see a comment that was posted for you is just in an awkward location. I’m almost never sure what sub a post is coming from because the name of the person, the language it is in, and some other stuff is all fairly indistinguishable. Like seriously, there has to be someone on the Lemmy team that has some kind of graphic design background who could pipe in and spice up the UI a little.
There are random hangouts for seemingly no reason. Is it because of how much the Lemmy population has exploded over the last few weeks or problems with a link or what? Some feedback would be super helpful.
Why so many subs (are they called subs here?) with zero content. Not even like old content… literally go there and nothing is posted. At all. That is not conducive to growing a sub. If there are squatters who came here and loaded up on a bunch of sub names just to say they have them, and are not doing anything with those subs, then take the name back. No one is going to post a comment to a sub with zero threads. This is only hurting the community.
People say it usually takes a couple days but mine took like 10 days (probably because many people started asking for data request after the API announce) so don’t worry if it takes long. Good luck.
I was expecting a bit of a wait even before you shared your experience, but they’ve already fulfilled my request-- it finished about 4 hours ago. So, they turned it around in less than 24hr! Maybe they’ve streamlined the process.
I probably ran into a busy time since I assume a lot people were requesting their data because of the news about API. I even sent them an email after waiting a week. Nice to hear you got yours in a normal time.
I really confused the person monitoring the self checkout on one occasion several years ago.
I paid with cash, and was supposed to get something like $2.17 back in change. The machine gave me the seventeen cents just fine, but instead of two dollar bills, I got a one and a ten.
It took a couple tries to get the worker to understand that the machine gave me too much back.
Steal a bit of food for today, didn’t see anything and the food bank may just be too far. If I’m on the ball, I’ll try and pick up the tab. You touch the earbuds or lego, though, I’m finna report it.
I’m a grocery store worker and I’d rather just lower our stock count by 1 than have to go stand lookout at the exits of the store. Big chain supermarkets budget for theft and it doesn’t affect the workers.
I understand the whole “why should I pay for things when they don’t” dilemma but people stealing non-essentials likely suffer in other ways
The dilemma isn’t why should i pay when others don’t. It’s “do i want to live in a society where people steal?” Because if the answer is yes you have no right to complain when people steal from YOU. Sounds like people on here don’t want to be stolen from but are okay when people steal from others especially a faceless corporation. Grocery stores have thin margins though and have to raise prices for shrinkage, inflating an already inflated index. For what so someone can have some electronics they don’t need?
Private property is not the same as personal property lmao.
Also grocery stores are hiking prices to make more profits for execs, not “because of theft”. I actually think stealing from grocery stores is a bad idea for simple practical reasons (the cost of being caught is way higher than what you save by doing it), but I don’t think its unethical <.<
Yes i am absolutely okay if people steal from a faceless corporation because one of the parties is people and the other is, again, a faceless corporation
Go for it if you’re anything like most people in the country the money coming in from your taxes vastly dwarves what should be coming in from corporations and rich people.
Corporate taxes are low but the majority of filings are done at an individual. Every corporation distributes its income to shareholders by dividends or capital gains which are claimed on individual filings.
In a nut-shell, if you believe stealing is okay under certain circumstance due to some subjective morality you hold, you cannot condemn others holding the same belief based on their own subjective mortality.
For example you believe stealing is okay because the target is a corporation. Maybe someone else believes stealing is okay if it’s from someone outside their cultural group. You say, “hey it’s not right to steal from someone just because of some subjective value that you hold!” But it’s a contradiction because you believe stealing is okay based on your own subjective morality regarding corporations (which are recognized as people under law). Same goes for people that steal from the government, their parents, etc.
This isn’t a slippery slope argument, this is a question of ethics. What I’m saying is stealing is unethical, and not by contrast immoral.
Stealing from corporations is ethical because they are inherently unethical and function off the exploitation and suffering of its workers and the enviroment. Individuals do not inherently function that way. I think we have vastly different worldviews here and wont come to a consensus. I think stealing is wrong if the person stealing has power over the people they are stealing from. If its the people without pwer stealing from those with it, well, that’s just another step closer to equity. Until there are systems in place to better achieve that equity, i wont blame anyone for stealing from something that runs off of exploitation. Understand where I’m coming from? Ethics are pretty useless to me when those ethics are determined by a broken and volatile society only concerned with keeping certain people on top.
So is it okay to steal from your slightly richer neighbour? What about stealing from your parents who have more wealth than you and are not sharing it with you?
What if people on the street rob and steal from you? Does it matter if it’s by violence?
I don’t care that people steal food from a corporation that had 26 lanes only two of which are open. No, I don’t steal but I also make enough money that I want for nothing.
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
Of course inflation is natural. Unless we are all gonna share the same $100 forever it has to happen at least without some sort of perfect foresight so the correct amount of money can be issued.
What isn’t natural is somehow people are convinced they should be held hostage by business.
When somehow we are convinced taking out a loan that you have to pay on for eternity (selling stock) that is not natural.
When somehow limited resources (our time) has less value then an unlimited resource (money) that is not natural.
It sounds like you’re saying why you think inflation is a good idea, not why it’s natural.
Why not share the same $100 forever? As the value of $100 increases, we can just divide it up into smaller and smaller bills.
We should be trading our limited time for another limited resource, not an unlimited one. At the time of the trade they’re always equal, but labor in the past should be worth more than that, not less.
Dividing $100 into smaller and smaller pieces is the exact same thing as making money which causes inflation? If you divide it into 200 parts of fifty cents each and you only need 199 then someone has an extra fifty cents.
You can say that the War In Ukraine was not natural (definitelly man-made and entirelly avoidable) and the imposition of Sanctions on a oil producing nation was not natural (it was a choice, even if the only reasonable one), plus all the increase in the money supply and decrease in the cost of debt from ZIRP which devaluated money (hence inflated the currency-denominated value of things) were also not natural.
However the effects of those things were natural consequences, and that includes Inflation, which came in via increased energy prices, increased realestate prices (cheaper debt and the rush up the yield ladded of “investment” money pushed those up) and just the straightforward devaluation of money.
However it seems that most of the inflation, at least beyond a certain point (this stuff was already happenning before the War) was not from the natural effect of those other things but rather companies taking advantage of the situation to, in a cartel-like fashion (not actually a Cartel in legal terms because they didn’t get together and agree to do so) pumping up prices in tandem to increase profits.
Grocery stores are pretty much the definition of a perfectly competitive industry. The profit margins are always between 1 and 3%. The only reason they raise prices is because they have to.
I wasnt disputing your margins report but that it makes for perfect competition. Why are you assuming low margins necessarily lead to better competition? With low margins, volume dictates the winning business in the unregulated marketplace. Big businesses monopolize and then one day have more leverage over their margins than the marketplace itself. Not a problem when antitrust laws are enforced but those laws have had their teeth pulled for the last 30 years.
Your question isn’t a bad question though so I’m gonna answer it in good faith. Basically when regulators look at whether industries are competitive a huge factor they look at is whether firms have pricing power and their market share. There are a couple other things they look too like purchasing power with suppliers.
If you look at a firm like Facebook (META) it has both high margins (>30%)and between Google has 80% market share in online advertising. That’s an industry that is oligopolistic and possibly a case for antitrust measures.
In a nut-shell the question is “how much of the pie is consumer surplus vs producer surplus.”
If you look at grocery you’ll see the market share is really broken up so yeah they’re doing a lot of volume but you have a lot of choice. Volume itself doesn’t really tell us anything about competitiveness.
As you’re thinking about this ask and still disagree ask “what would a good objective measure be for competitiveness?” We need some actual quantifiable metric, so what would your counter-proposal be then?
Whole Foods has to be. The few times I have been there I was disgusted by the prices. Mother fuckers, I just want some apples. I don’t need certified that some old hippy said they were all natural.
I haven’t specifically looked at While Foods but I’m guessing the higher-priced premium products cost more at wholesale and therefore don’t produce better margins.
Grocery prices spiked by 35% in my area over the course of three months. It wasn’t because of theft, they claimed it was because of inflation (bullshit).
Right after they jacked up the prices, theft went up. So you’ve got it backwards, actually.
You know what the geniuses in corporate office did about the increased theft? Spent $18k per store to install railing to fence the customers in.
Right after they did that, theft went up again.
Prices have fuck all to with theft, and everything to do with the idiotic decisions made by the greedy retards at the top.
That’s not at all how prices are set in a Market as per all the applicable theories of Economics (and in practice).
Any profit-driven sellers (i.e. all except maybe a mom-and-pop shop with soft hearted owners) will charge the most that they think buyers are willing to pay, so if for example a seller becomes a local monopoly in an essential good, they’ll pump prices up because customers have no other options (with nothing on the cost side pushing it) and will act similarly when cartels are formed.
Cost pressures will only push prices up in a market with actual competition when it affects every seller (for example if input prices go up, certain taxes go up, or there’s an event that most sellers can use as an excuse to up prices, such as widespread news of inflation) or it the cost pressure is so large that it will bankrupt a seller that won’t raise prices.
This theory of yours, the “if companies pay less taxes they’ll raise salaries” and other such Economically-ignorant theories that ignore basic market principles and causality seem to be immenselly popular with people with certain political-faiths who have never actually run a business or worked with Markets.
I suggest you read some books about Behavioural Economics.
But yeah, most of what you see out there from Economists is really Politics, not Science.
However those observations about price making are also from Finance, and those are immensely pragmatic people (as they put real money on the line) - you might disagree with their morals (what morals, eh?!) but they certainly are putting their money where their mouth is.
A. Those experts are beaten out by random stock picker software over long term.
B. The entire industry requires the government bailing them out, regulating their small competition out of business, huge infusions of cash via the Fed, and a complex legal structure that pretty much limits your investment options to stocks and bonds or your mattress.
C. For people who claim to be able to predict the future they sure need other people’s money a fair amount. Pensions, managed market accounts, 401Ks, trusts. If you really could best the market you would never team up with anyone since all they would do is open you up to liability
D. When those wall street scumbags do take over the management of a company the company consistently fails. It turns out pledging to Skull and Bones after daddy got you into an ivy doesn’t mean you can run a retailer or a tech company. Who knew? Remind me how Toys R US, Sears, and Fluke multisystems are doing.
E. There is a link between growth in finance and poverty for everyone else. Which makes sense since it sucks away people from productive work to unproductive work. As Wall Street grows in the US incomes for everyone else have fallen.
Economics is bullshit lies that aspires to the accuracy of astrology. Economists are shills with zero integrity. Financial bros are conmen.
But thank you for your reading suggestion. If I ever want to read up on mathematical models that have no connection to the real world based on a sociopathic paraody of humans I will. Everything you want to know about the types of people who become economists can be understood if you know who their hero is. Homo economis a being of pure self. Is there any in particular book you can recommend? If so what chapter is titled “fuck the diabetics, let them mortgage their house for insulin”?
Behavioural Economics is exactly the only part of Economics that actually works like a real Science with actual experimental validation of theories (with properly conducted experiments).
Using mathematical models doesn’t make something false (or true), it’s the lack of real world validation that does. Believing otherwise is believing Physics has “no connection with the real world” so things like artillery rounds won’t fall were the Newtonian Physics formulas predict they will.
But yeah, most of the rest of Economics is self-serving bollocks, especially the closer you get to politically-significant monetary management (i.e. central banks).
It’s not by chance that the only time a Behavioural Economist won the “Nobel Prize” of Economics (which is not a real prize set up by Alfred Nobel but in fact the “Swedish Central Bank Prize for Economics in Honor of Alfred Nobel” which is very purposefully misrepresented as a genuine Nobel Prize) was for “Nudge Theory” which is about how to push the masses to favour certain financial choices (i.e. manipulation) and is minor next to the bulk of that guy’s work, which proves without a doubt the irrationality of humans in economic matters (people don’t behave at all as the Homo Economicus that is the human model that serves as foundation for the whole Free Market Theory bollocks, but he was hardly going to get even a fake-Nobel from the Swedish Central Bank for disproving Free Market theories, now was he?!)
IMHO, your take on this is too simplistic and as a consequence you’re throwing the baby with the bath water.
Alright your argument has swayed me. At some point I will look into behavioral economics. Maybe it is the lone island in the sea of bullshit and lies regular economics is. I am a hard empiricalist materalist, engineer so I have to be. Any of us can tell you 2 + 2 equals 5 for unusually high values of 2.
I have listened to the freakonomics podcast. I think they do a decent job on small stuff like why are there so many mattress stores but they are all empty or why are all you can eat places a thing if homo economis is the model. Anything beyond that stuff I don’t think much of. Their abortion crime link has been disproven.
In the meantime I am still going to consider any economist talking about tax, bailouts, trade, debt to be shills with less integrity than a snuff film maker.
I’ll copy the response I used when someone else responded the same way:
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
If you think about it, there are on average 30 to 80 million sperm in a typical ejaculation. So I’d find Hitler’s dad on the street, bump into him and jiggle his nuts a bit. Surely that’d be enough to change history.
So naive… your bump was precisely necessary for the single unlikely Adolph sperm to make its way to the front of the line. You were always the nut-bumper that caused Hitler.
It’s become like a hobby of mine to not pay for a single item every time I check out at Walmart or Kroger. Fuckers have their margins higher than ever and their starting pay is $12-14/hr. If they want to reduce theft then they can hire people to actually work some of the 20 empty check out lanes they have.
guys look at me! I am very smart because I steal from walmart to rebel against the evil capitalist overlords! time to get validation for my actions from reddit!
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