The Persian Empire arguably trumped them all, however, when it created scaphism around 500 B.C.E.
This ancient execution method was also known as “the boats,” as victims were placed in two hollowed-out logs or boats before their suffering even began.
With their heads and limbs sticking out and their bodies trapped inside, the victim was force-fed milk and honey.
Their uncontrollable diarrhea filled the boats as executioners poured honey over the victim’s face — and vermin arrived to not only feast upon the prisoners, but enter their bodies to fatally eat them from the inside out.
The most interesting thing to me is both quoted descriptions talk of vermin and worms “springing forth” from the excrement. It was once thought that things like worms, insects, even mice and rats, would just spawn from various kinds of filth.
It was long thought that the Greek God Glycon was a work of fiction for similar reasons. That was until an artifact of Glycon worship was found and later other prints.
We know there were hundreds of Greek underworld gods but only 3 names fully survive today.
Much of what was written has been lost for various instances of destruction.
Like most of these “oh my God so brutal” execution methods, scaphism probably never actually happened or is at least exaggerated. Ctesias wrote the only first-hand account of the punishment ever being delivered and his credibility among modern historians is a bit… questionable. Plutarch’s own writings on scaphism were lifted straight from Ctesias, as well.
Even if scaphism did actually happen like Ctesias wrote, it’s not like it was a normal thing.
even if it happened only one or twice, even if it didn’t happen at all - someone had to think about it in enough detail to create a torture method beyond most people’s imagination
6 days with 1 john is probably a lot less work than 30 1 hour sessions with varying johns. Also getting a discount when buying in bulk is pretty common with most goods. Not sure if it’s so with sex work in real life tho.
It’s definitely way less work. If you get hired for an hour, you’re pretty much expected to be fully engaged in, if not sex, then at least being entertaining in some way. With the type of sex work she did, she was never getting paid for time spent sleeping or eating (and definitely not hanging out and shopping), unless that was someone’s kink, I guess. I had a series of sugar daddies in my early 20s, and don’t let anyone tell you that’s not sex work, and I definitely made less per hour than a more traditional prostitute, but I also put in a lot less energy. Plus, it came with a lot more perks.
Also I don’t think people realize how much time a (skilled / knowledgeable) sex worker spends vetting their clients. They’re one of the easiest and therefore most common demographics targeted by people who literally just wanna rape-torture-murder someone for varying to absolutely no reason. As a result a lot of sex workers have shared blacklists, some ask for references, some do background checks, some don’t work alone, etc. Only having to do that once or even not at all once the john is well-known is a huge time-and-effort saver, even if you ignore the fact that it’s just literally safer to take a chance on one man murdering you instead of five.
The only institution that performs more criminal and social background checks than the ATF and intelligence apparatus is America’s network of communicating sex workers.
I’m genuinely not sure if this is in jest or not. The way I know this is common is that it’s a common thread across human interest pieces about sex work. I grew up with those rare fundie parents that were big on education so anything they got weird about I just read about and they were more or less fine with that, so I just started reading about sex and have since gone on numerous multimonth ADHD hyperfixation learning binges about various aspects including both anatomy and physiology and the psychological and cultural ones. A good couple of them have either centered on or referenced sex work in some way. I don’t think I’m brave enough personally but it’s definitely fascinating.
Ya know how therea books of short stories by authors or a collection of authors?
You should totally do that with the numerous multimonth ADHD hperfixation learning binges you have gone on.
But just write like just write out from memory as if it was a short story.
Could collect from others like yourself and create anthologies of remembered knowledge. Like reviving or recreating an oral history like many people did in times of old
I’ve been making obsidian vaults/notebooks actually! Earlier this year I made one about tarot cartomancy and what I guess you could call Christian Esotericism (connecting myself to many of the cultural traditions while eschewing most of the traditional bodies of authority) and right now I’m working on a basic/informal intro to DBT for people struggling to access talk therapies due to poverty and/or rural living.
Sex workers do sometimes offer reduced effective rates per hour for extended time.
Usually you’re not gonna be allowed to offer for those unless you’ve spent time with that worker already and they’ve decided you can at least be trusted enough to not go psycho with enough time on hand.
By the time you’re talking about overnight service, either they know ya and they like ya enough to spend an evening with you, or they’re advertising the package openly because they’re pretty confident that they can bring anyone who tries something funny down harder than a meteor, that kind of work makes folks stronk, and they ain’t afraid to use that if you’re fuckin’ around.
Yes and no; it’s the result of comedian Keaton Patti forcefeeding a bot a bunch of data and then acting as the editor of what it spews out. Made a whole book that way too!
No but they absolutely do say, “Wow you look really pretty today” but have no idea why.
Men treat you nicer when you wear makeup.
The other day my coworker said, “you look different. I don’t know what it is, but you look great. I think you’ve been getting a lot of rest” nope. Just wore makeup that day
My husband, many times, has been looking at me, admiring me, and complimenting me on how naturally beautiful I am without realizing I just filled my eyebrows in that day and have darker lashes rather than blonde lashes.
Just because men have the privilege of ignorance doesn’t mean they aren’t attracted to made up faces.
Lol they’re just trying to be nice - they see the effort and wanna let you know.
My husband, many times, has been looking at me, admiring me, and complimenting me on how naturally beautiful I am without realizing I just filled my eyebrows in that day and have darker lashes rather than blonde lashes.
Your husband can’t help it if you don’t rock your real natural self from time to time. You know damn well you try to avoid not wearing any makeup at all and use some to feign “natural beauty”.
Lmao. I’ve worn makeup only like a dozen times in the past year for big events and he compliments me all the time regardless. You’re just illustrating what I said in my original post, most men have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to makeup.
Cause it’s really difficult to apply a subtle hint of makeup to enhance existing features. Men (usually) don’t get a ton of practice at it, so they use a heavy hand.
People that say they hate makeup USUALLY just hate heavy, poorly done makeup.
People that say they hate cosmetic surgery USUALLY just hate heavy, poorly done plastic surgery.
I hate when people feel they need to apply makeup they don’t want, and hate when people feel they need surgery to look good, but there are definitely people who do both for the right reasons, and do them well, and people DO notice the improvement, they just don’t always notice why.
I do feel bad that makeup isn’t more normalized for men. That said, the more you practice, the less noticeable it is! And if you go for a practiced natural look, it will probably not be noticeable to other men! For what it’s worth, makeup is almost always going to be immediately noticed by people who do makeup
I believe the post is specifically about long eyelashes, fake eyelashes.
That said, my wife has worn makeup twice in 18 years. I love her for being herself, but I complimented her on how nice she looked those two times her sister did her makeup because I’m not a complete jerk and have some idea of how to be kind when someone has spent an hour trying to look nice. I also attempted to make it clear that I preferred her without makeup, maybe something along the lines of, “I love how naturally beautiful you are.”
Just because some women consider men to be ignorant doesn’t mean we are.
I personally chucked it up to artistry. Makeup is to put it literally is drawing on your face and thusly it’s art. I’m a artist and yea I’ve had people male and female see one of my photos or drawings and ask me how I made this or that thing look cool. I’ve even had people say my photographs look nice because I take a lot of pictures, and well I suppose that’s a pretty blunt way of saying I practiced. If you don’t study a art form you won’t know what separates beginner artists from veteran artists. Tbh the only reason I know anything about makeup is because I sketch and making human CGI models is basically doing makeup for someone else and even then I understand that a lot of my terminology might be wrong and you can’t just simply make someones nose smaller or make them have a bigger mouth.
Enhancing make-up of course anyone might like. The issue is there is a lot of excessive makeup that to me looks terrible. Ofc, people aren’t just wearing it to impress me, but you’re giving the impression that any guy who complains about make-up doesn’t understand and is just a hypocrite. I don’t know any guy who actually likes eye shadow, long nails, or lipstick.
I’m a guy who really likes all of those, and heavier make-up looks in general. I wouldn’t ever expect someone to wear them just for me though. I see makeup as something that’s 90% for the person wearing it, and making them feel good about themselves. Same goes for lighter or no make-up looks. The confidence from feeling good about yourself is far more important than whatever “look” you go for.
As a man, I agree. I think it’s more that if it’s noticable make up, it’s probably too much, and that’s the only kind most men notice. I personally don’t care about the things you mentioned, however I do appreciate eyeliner and hair dyes (as long as it isn’t damaged to a crisp). Otherwise, just generally looking healthy and hygienic is important.
My wife has worn makeup maybe twice since we have been married. She naturally has skin that women pay a lot of money to try and emulate. Your ancetotal evidence isnt good for much.
All iOS browsers have to use Webkit (or did last time I checked). So there’s not much of a point of running Firefox on iOS. It’s basically the same browser no matter what browser it says it is.
I still firmly believe there is at least one sane engineer there who’ll discourage this, knowing this will drive the last few tech-savvy users and their family members and close friends away and I will die on this hill
Google is in the process of undermining the effectiveness of uBlock Origin and other adblockers on Chrome and other Chromium browsers. I believe that change comes into effect this year.
But even before those changes were announced, uBlock Origin’s creator and main dev has stated that uBO is most capable on Firefox.
A bit of this, but also the desktop web UI doesn’t mark them as read when you click on the permalink. You need to explicitly mark them as read and I’m too lazy to do that 😬
dark mode on OLEDs, light mode with near-minimum brightness everywhere else (except discord because somehow their light mode is just completely fucked up) because astigmatism
I’ve seen people lose their shit over babies with pierced ears and young children getting tattoos. There’s all sorts of dental work you go through as a kid that you have functionally no control over.
Even had someone chew me out because a foster kid I was taking care of got a haircut (three years old and she’d literally never had one before).
At some point, it is the parent’s duty to take care of the child, and that extends to medical decisions with profound long-term consequences. I get wanting to change the culture, but the degree to which people exaggerate the harm of circumcision struggles to eclipse the degree to which it is defended.
Cutting off your legs also makes them easier to clean.
There is some substantive utility to legs that doesn’t extend to the bit of flesh around the tip of your dick.
Correlating ear-piercing with decapitation, and holding a picket in front of “Forever 21” with a big sign that reads “STOP MURDERING CHILDREN” and a picture of a tunnel drill going through a baby’s forehead.
If this is /s its verry funny and asys somthing interesting, im frustrated that the thread has fallen into a false dichotomy,
Its not ‘not okay’ in the same way its ‘not okay’ to cut off someones leg because thats unamniguiosly being crippled. (Good spoof though!) its amniguiosly immoral.
Yeah a better analogy would probably be female genital mutilation but americans generally aren’t familiar with that.
The real issue is consent. I get that parents consent for their children, but that doesn’t mean the parents are correctly predicting the kid’s preferences.
It’s just a strange practice that we do in america, not due to religion, but due to … reasons? Cleanliness? “I want my son’s cock to look like mine?” it’s weird as hell, but accepted for some stupid reason.
circumcision is a harder to understand, wrapped in the cloak of medical hospitality to be blunt, its a different form of female genital mutilation.
I believe its a remnant from old Christianity (Judaism?), where it would mark and/or purify the child in some way. If I’m not mistaken, the god of Abraham communicated that things like sacrificing lambs and other rituals isn’t useful as a sign of good will.
but yet this literally unholy practice remains to this day.
to be absolutely fair, mom said yes, telling me the doctors said there was some kind of health benefit, somthing about infections.
I mentioned in another comment how circumcision dramatically reduces the rate of spread of STDs. That is, at least from my perspective, the primary (and original) incentive to circumcise. Significantly less of an issue now, because you can just get a condom. But in areas where access to a consumer profilactic isn’t readily available or one in which STD infection is high, it would make a great deal of sense to perform the surgery as a preventative measure.
Same as giving your kid vaccine shots or putting them in the NICU for the first few weeks of their life or demanding that they wash their hands regularly.
I don’t think this is the original reason, but it has been found to happen. Also, your risk of penile cancer goes to almost zero, as well as fewer and less serious complications related to the foreskin (or its absence). Going fully nude while circumcised is a dangerous game, though.
Here’s what the CDC had to say about their original statements and a rebuttal to criticisms about circumcision. It only obliquely mentions genital cancer, but this article specifically discusses that.
circumcision dramatically reduces the rate of spread of STDs
Source? Most of the world doesn’t circumcise, and they don’t have a higher prevalence of STDs than places that do. As long as you practice good hygiene, there should be no issues.
That is, at least from my perspective, the primary (and original) incentive to circumcise
No it wasn’t. It originated thousands of years ago as a Jewish religious ritual, that had no biological or scientific basis. It was popularised in the US about 100 years ago as a way to reduce sensation in the penis in order to stop teenage boys from masturbating – by Dr Kellogg, for the same reason he invented cornflakes. He was hyper-religious and fixated on stopping boys corrupting themselves by masturbating. The hygiene myths came later and have been debunked.
It’s an outdated practice based on bad science and beliefs that should stop. That’s not to say anyone should feel bad for having done it when we didn’t really know better, but there’s no reason to continue doing it now.
I agree with all that except for one thing. Kellogg did not invent corn flakes to stop people from masturbating. He did mention once that a bland diet could be used to deter masturbation, but there is no coorelation to corn flakes.
He did, though. I currently live less than an hour from his museum in Battle Creek, Michigan, and there are lots of things about him that aren’t widely shared on the internet.
Did you know that one of his biggest accomplishments was a foster home for orphans that was destroyed by fire? Running that foster home was what inspired his obsession with a bland diet and with circumcision. He was very strict with their diet, believing certain grains would purify the soul (first oatmeal) – the original, unadulterated grains that were mentioned in the bible. The boys in his home weren’t accepting of his extreme version of Christianity, and he thought that was mostly because they were corrupting themselves bodily. He thought all boys weren’t receptive to Christianity because they were too into their own desires, and he could fix that. First by diet, and when that didn’t work, by cutting off the part of their penis that distracted them by making them feel good, thus tempting them from god’s word. He was a doctor, so people listened.
This is all Wikipedia dedicates to that part of the story:
Kellogg was outspoken about his views on race and his belief in racial segregation, regardless of the fact that he himself raised several black foster children.
So it’s understandable people are downplaying that part of his life. If you live near here, you know the details the internet has mostly forgotten.
We really need to stop chopping up infant boys based on the ideas of a bigoted religious fundamentalist.
Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)
By all means, you should still wrap that shit. But if you’re living in a rural community or one that has a strong stigma against contraception, or you’re just in a place where the disease is rampant and you need a secondary precautionary policy, this will have a meaningful impact on disease spread.
The majority of US citizens do not fall into those categories, and for that reason I see it as an unnecessary procedure that is more cultural than scientific.
As far as I am aware there is only one study done in Africa that showed that there is a correlation between circumcision and a reduced chance to get HIV.
But that is the only study and only HIV, not all STIs.
Also this is moot in most of the world where you have access to condoms.
Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)
By all means, you should still wrap that shit. But if you’re living in a rural community or one that has a strong stigma against contraception, or you’re just in a place where the disease is rampant and you need a secondary precautionary policy, this will have a meaningful impact on disease spread.
Foster kid is a different situation but in general seriously don’t bring someone else’s kid to their first haircut. Thats an important moment for parents. It’s a major milestone, especially with girls. That original in-utero hair behaves different.
Three years isn’t that weird. I know a girl who was 4 for her first. She had the most gorgeous, long curls. It was really hard for her mom to get rid of those.
Know a couple boys who were each three too. They look like totally different kids once they lost all their baby curls.
What’s even funnier to me is how people will full on rage when someone brings up female genital mutilation while in the same breath saying circumcision is fine
The main problem is that people tend to intuitively think of the least invasive form of male circumcision and the most horrific form of female genital mutilation.
the most horrific form of female genital mutilation.
Is there any other kind in regular discussion? When people refer to FGM, they’re not talking about labiaplasty (which would be a more appropriate comparison).
labiaplasty (which would be a more appropriate comparison).
How are you coming to this conclusion?
The foreskin has more nerve endings than the glans, and double that of the clitoris. The labia in contrast has much fewer nerve endings, which is why sexual stimulation is not easily accomplished with simply stimulating the labia. Possible? Yes. But not nearly to the same degree as clitoral stimulation.
Edit: Given the lack of elaboration, I’ll have to assume the conclusions reached by a gut reaction of “skin is skin” which is not at all how this works.
A labiaplasty is not equivalent to removal of the foreskin. It would be like removing the clitoral hood. Educate yourself before sharing your thoughts please.
People will defend the most batshit insane things just because they’re used to it.
But I also think there’s an element of (understandable) insecurity to it.
If they concluded that mutilating the penises of babies is wrong, then that makes their penis “wrong”, and society is really weird and judgemental about penises. There’s a huge amount of pressure applied to men about their genitals.
We constantly talk about big dicks and “big dick” energy. Casually saying someone has a small, soft, or ugly dick is seen as a scathing insult, we constantly mock people for it, both in life and in media. Comments about their penises is something used to build up or knock down men. It’s used to make them feel powerful and manly, or weak and emasculated.
It’s no wonder people rally so hard against those who want to see an end to male genital mutilation. The very victims of it typically don’t want to feel like their dick is “wrong”, because society at large has told them that if their dick is bad, they aren’t real men.
I think it’s important that circumcised people realize that their body isn’t wrong, but rather the procedure is wrong (without a medically necessary reason).
I refused circumcision for my son (25 years ago, US hospital), and had to remind the staff several times because it was just assumed it would be done. I stopped them 3 times during different shifts when they were about to take him from our room for the procedure.
Then when it came up in conversation when he was an infant, people would say to me ‘you should have done it’, because he would get infections (he never did), or he’d be bullied in gym showers (he never did to my knowledge), or whatever. My take was it should be his decision, not mine.
The pressure was really intense, though. It’s weird how interested people can be in someone else’s infant’s penis. We’ve never talked about it, but reading stories from other men, I assume he’s happy being uncut, and I’m glad I didn’t do it.
e: for anyone reading this days later, I did ask my son for his opinion prompted by this conversation, mostly because of responses I got elsewhere in this thread that made me question my decision:
Me: Hey man, so feel free not to answer this if it’s too personal, but I was having a debate about circumcision and another parent challenged me saying I’d made the wrong decision. So yes/no/I don’t want to talk about it cuz that’s weird, do you regret my decision?
Son: I don’t, and none of my partners have, either. I only get thumbs up and compliments. I hope that wasn’t too personal.
Me: Not at all. Thank you for giving me your and your partners’ review!
So yeah, it’s not just my assumptions. And no regrets.
I actually think about the ignored psychological effects of dealing with that level of physical pain so soon after being born a lot.
Birth is already a traumatic experience for both mother and infant. But to then immediately, with no anesthesia, cut an extremely sensitive part of the infants body off? That has to leave some kind of mental scarring.
I was born with a genetic condition affecting my collagen (Ehlers Danlos), which meant my bones were overly soft and, since I was breach til moments before birth, my legs were bowed pretty severely. This was in 1971, and the treatment at that time was the doctors literally bent my legs into position manually and then braced them for my first few years. That’s not how they deal with it nowadays, because they learnt it was horribly painful.
I don’t remember that initial experience, obviously, but my mother tells me several years later when I was a young child and having problems walking, she took me to the doctor and they finally worked out that I was in excruciating pain all the time. They asked why I hadn’t said anything and I told them it was because everyone was always in excruciating pain, but nobody else was complaining about it, so I shouldn’t either. I’d been in pain since birth, and just figured it was normal.
That experience prevented me from getting proper care and made my early childhood hell. I still have emotional trauma from it. So yeah, early pain is not benign.
It is. You can always cut something off later, but you can’t just put it back once it’s gone.
Based on this conversation, I actually asked him:
Me: Hey man, so feel free not to answer this if it’s too personal, but I was having a debate about circumcision and another parent challenged me saying I’d made the wrong decision. So yes/no/I don’t want to talk about it cuz that’s weird, do you regret my decision?
Son: I don’t, and none of my partners have, either. I only get thumbs up and compliments. I hope that wasn’t too personal.
Me: Not at all. Thank you for giving me your and your partners’ review!
I’m assuming you mean gym showers and not gym shorts. I still don’t get why someone would see someone elses penis in a gym shower. Unless they peeked into the stall or somathing, but that would be sexual harrassment.
My middle school gym locker room had completely open showers. Like the kind you see in prison scenes on TV. No dividers. No curtains. Just an open room with a bunch of shower heads
Bit of an overreaction. Same-sex facility sharing has been a staple part of human society for thousands of years. We seem to have done okay so I’m not too worried or “horrified”. I guess it’s just not something you’ve come across so it seems unusual to you.
Depends I guess. They’re cheaper to do the open style so in poor schools and sports facilities you tend to get them.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to go to decent schools and not played sports outside of well funded institutions then you probably wouldn’t have come across them.
Not just in poor schools. My area is pretty affluent, but the school was built in the 1940s, and that’s just how it was back then. I went to that high school for a year (I’m 54) and never saw the boys’, but the girls’ was wide open. I assume the boys’ was too.
If you never got circumcised, you’d likely be saying “I prefer uncut. Looks a bit weird with a piece missing.”
I’m willing to bet if you surveyed, say, Israel or Saudi Arabia, on what looks better between chopped and natural, they’ll say circumcised. And if you surveyed, say, Australia or Spain, they’ll say uncircumcised looks better.
That wasn’t the original reason. It was to stop masturbation. The whole cleaning thing was a later rationalization when they realized how fucked up it was.
If you go back to the beginning of this procedure, how(/if) people cleaned themselves looks very different from. Our modern world.
Because of that it seems it being a health issue is a lot more likely for the origin of circumscision as a regular societal practice. Even if that was not the main reason but one of the supporting reasons people allowed it to become normalized. The history of hygiene(or the lack there of) is horrifying.
I mean Lysol was developed as a feminine hygiene product… We have done some very questionable things because of snakeoil practices even in relatively modern times (which i think religion is one of the OG snakeoils)
What are we doing today that will look as crazy to the people of the future as circumcision does to many of us right now I wonder?
Not striking per se, but if you piss them off they could start turning away the majority of applicants so they don’t have to deal with society’s more desperate. The corporates already do that anyways, though.
Record high prices coinciding with record high profits and plunging cost of good sold, followed by even higher prices. They are testing to see what the pain thresholds are. All that’s gonna happen is that business will start to collapse as consumer spending plummets because people can barely afford to survive. Will the system autocorrect or collapse? Will the government ever enforce consumer protection laws ever again? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Occam’s razor says the more simple/plausible explanation, that a huge increase in the monetary supply causing higher prices through supply and demand, is about a thousand times more plausible than tens of thousands of corporations simultaneously deciding to coordinate to fix prices despite that it’s in each of their best interests individually to break with that scheme. With no actual evidence of a concerted attempt across the entire economy to fix prices (not to be confused with a couple corporations having board meetings where someone bragged about raising prices).
Or, in simple terms - it’s not that every single other good in the entire economy has suddenly become worth more as the result of some overarching conspiracy. It’s that they printed a bunch of money and it’s now worth less.
I would recommend anyone who still believes the “greedflation” thing spends an hour reading some articles critical of the theory. Not really looking for a debate about it tbh.
No, just the last word. There’s a lot more to it that clearly explains why it’s a systematic failure that led to this, and it’s a lot more complex that just over supply of cash. You can’t stop looking at other facts once you’ve researched just enough to find an answer you’re comfortable with.
Your previous comment was basically a massive industry wide conspiracy theory though, so their response of a more sensible answer to give you something a bit more concrete to go on was pretty reasonable to me.
Not a conspiracy theory but the inevitable conclusion of a system left unchecked by regulation for too long. We have slowly rolled ourselves to the edge for decades yet have been able to maintain a very precarious balance, until a worldwide pandemic kicked the cart and set it rolling down the hill.
Did the entire planet have too much cash and an urge to spend it all at once? Yes. That only explains the flashpoint where prices exploded. Demand was at an unprecedented high from the world coming out of lock down at the same time that supply was at an all time low thanks to the pandemic. (There’s a lot more to all of this of course, but there are going to be countless PhD thesis written about this macroeconomic clusterfuck and this isn’t one of them.) So far, this all makes sense. Where things go sideways is when supply stabilizes, cost of goods sold start to go down, and yet prices continue to rise. Remember how the fed thought that information was going to be a short, temporary spike that didn’t require intervention? This is why. They expected the system to autocorrect, but it didn’t. Prices continue to rise. People have less money. Prices continue to rise. Interest rates skyrocket in an attempt to cool the economy. Prices continue to rise. Consumer spending slows but prices rise.
Corporations are literally geared towards maximizing profits. It’s not a conspiracy if they are working as intended. The failure, IMHO, is in how we have chosen to manage our economy. Complete deregulation and a slew of other choices have brought us here. Not a conspiracy but also not as simple as “too much money” or “too much cheap credit”. So, amending my original comment, yes it is in part inflation but it isn’t just inflation.
PS: Credit card debt in the US surpassed $1T. We’re running on literal borrowed time and every business around us is trying to find new and creative ways to squeeze every penny we don’t have out of us, by design, without a check or a balance in sight.
It is specifically a conspiracy theory that there’s a price-fixing cartel across the entire economy. You can give rhetoric about unchecked capitalism and all this, but the fact still remains that we’re talking about hundreds to thousands of companies that would have to opt into this scheme (drawing the line fairly arbitrarily at “the ones that comprise most market share”).
I raised this point already - individual corporations are incentivized to break with a price-fixing scheme because it increases market share. Consumers don’t want to pay exorbitant prices if there’s any alternative. Didn’t hear a response.
You keep saying “across the entire economy” but not every sector of the economy was equally affected.
Also, there is good competition in some sectors (where it’s easy and cheap to produce the product and the supply chain isn’t very complicated) and definitely not others. Look at gas prices, which were involved in a lot of the inflation and its secondary effects. You can save a few cents here or there by shopping around, but otherwise the price is relatively similar (and relatively high) everywhere you look in an area.
In some sectors there’s basically no competition at all. My Internet bill rose, do you think that’s because of the money supply or because there’s essentially no competition amongst telecom providers basically anywhere in the country?
A huge part of inflation is still rising rental rates. In my city about six companies own most of the large apartment buildings that people live in. Something tells me they’d have no problems raising rents between the six of them just because they easily can.
Company A raises prices and reports record quarterly profits. Company B is aware of this because both the price raising and quarterly profit report for Company A are public. Company B raises prices too so that they can get also get more profit. Company C either does the same thing, or there is no company C because rubber stamped mergers and acquisitions for decades have allowed a handful of companies to dominate every industry, sometimes multiple industries.
None of this is a conspiracy. It’s Econ 101 level “how things work.”
Econ 101 covers supply/demand curve, i.e., how markets create prices as an equilbrium between consumer/producer, and how a company arbitrarily spiking prices will cause them to lose market share because their customers don’t want to pay more for the same thing.
I’m sorry you’re under the impression that the economy is controlled equally by tens of thousands of corporations. Its much more like 2 dozen control nearly all money that presently exists. They wake up everyday and fix prices. They’ve been doing it a lot ever since 2008 and the utter downfall of consumer protections. I also have no fucking clue what you mean when you say that not fixing prices is in their best interests?? Like, you realize that by price fixing they make billions of dollars more than they should be? How tf is making even more money not in the interest of a corporation? They literally profit off of wars. Any possible thing that increases the amount of capital they generate is in their own best interests. Even employing children, or slaves. Capitalism is designed specifically to be exploitative of as many people as possible to generate as much capital as possible.
I’m sorry you’re under the impression that the economy is controlled equally by tens of thousands of corporations. Its much more like 2 dozen control nearly all money that presently exists.
There are 8 million businesses in the U.S. We have problems with monopolization, but to the level where a cross-economy price fixing scheme could possibly be implemented, we are not at that point. That’s an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof, not something to just believe dogmatically because you don’t like capitalism.
I also have no fucking clue what you mean when you say that not fixing prices is in their best interests??
You could start by just asking me. This is basic game theory. Market price of a good is 10 dollars, ACME and BLLC corp meet and fix prices at 15 dollars. ACME corp goes to market at 15 dollars, BLLC corp goes against the secret agreement and goes to market at 10 dollars. BLLC gets ACME corp’s customers as long as they retain their price at 15. Now take the same example and spread it across hundreds, thousands of companies, keeping in mind that this level of coordination would leave behind proof, witnesses, and take an extraordinary level of coordination. Non-participation in a price fixing cartel for a minority company could mean capturing the entire market, and anyone who was participating would immediately be incentivized to exit it.
This is what is being posited, versus the dirt simple explanation that more money has been printed and has thus decreased in value. And we know a ton of money was printed.
Price-fixing cartels aren’t impossible, however, they do become completely impossible to create or maintain at a scale like that. There is simply way too much competition. It’s an extremely elaborate, poorly substantiated theory to explain something there’s an obvious, well-substantiated explanation for already. I don’t know how you guys think about applying the scientific method, but to me, that ain’t it.
Keep in mind we’re not talking about simply “6 companies dominate a single industry”. The burden of proof for “greedflation” is simultaneous price-fixing behavior across the entire economy. Across essentially all corporations.
It’s an established phenomena. But, just because it’s established as a concept, doesn’t mean it’s prevalent, or especially not that it could be used to explain simultaneous increases in prices across the entire economy.
Here’s an introductory article on price leadership:
Breaks it down into “barometric”, “collusive” and “dominant” categories. Going through each one -
Barometric being the phenomena where all the firms in a space look to the dominant firm for indication on what to do with their prices. Assumes heavy market concentration in the dominant firm and a marked imbalance to analyze market trends or predict upcoming cost shifts on the part of other companies. Does not make any sense in a space with several near-equally sized entrants in the market exist with similar capabilities for determining prices and macro conditions.
Collusive being where they have actually agreed to fix prices together. This is of course illegal and requires ongoing coordination across basically every major company in the economy. This is mostly what we’ve been talking about in this thread and requires extraordinary proof, because the level of coordination required to make this happen is extreme, especially across not just one industry, but every industry. Or, to be fair, at least the basic industrial/manufacturing industries upon which all other industries depend.
Finally there’s the “dominant” category. That’s where a single dominant firm (or cartel of multiple firms) is setting prices - particularly, setting them downwards - and other smaller firms are forced to lower their prices to survive. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with upwards price-fixing, because less dominant firms become more competitive as a result, not less.
Here’s what it looks like from a business perspective: if I am a meat packing company, I need to go to the farmers and buy the pork that is going to be processed by my factory. The pig farmer says I will sell you my pork for four dollars a pound. I asked for him to sell at two dollars a pound, but he simply refuses and sells to somebody who paid is willing to pay a higher price.
Now, I can do two things to lower the price:
I can collude with all of the other meat packing companies and refused to buy pork at four dollars a pound, and we set our willing price at two dollars a pound. If we get enough other companies to collude together as a cartel, then we can force the prices down. This is generally illegal.
The second option is through consolidation: first, I get enough money to buy up all of the other meat packing companies. Then when I go back to the pig farmers, they only have one buyer to sell to, which is my business. So I get to set the prices, which will be at whatever price I stipulate. Walmart is famous for doing this.
No… Not to my understanding. Inflation, while an average, is not equally rising across all things. It is possible for the few that control food to raise prices together. Same with clothing and other industries. I think it’s also exacerbated by the shipping fiasco during covid and the fact that corporations always want more profit. As a general rule, any time prices rise for any reason, and shipping can make everything rise together, if people still pay that price, it will not be lowered.
Yeah, so we barely touched on the actual shortage issues from COVID in the thread here. That is for the most part a short term phenomena, and prices can actually resume prior levels after disasters and such like that, while actual monetary supply increases are typically permanent. And yeah, some industries (like energy) are pretty fundamental and can affect prices in a lot of other places, and there was additionally the energy shortage triggered by the Ukraine invasion. All these factors can cause price seeking and instability, but the key thing to point out is that that’s transitory, because after some time the costs of goods reequilibriate. But if you’ve increased the money supply 50%, then the price increases become permanent.
If you’re going to bring in Occam’s Razor, it’s probably less tenable to argue the ‘a conspiracy is more complex than the alternative’ argument when there’s obviously a set of shared motives driving labor costs down while at the same time pushing up profit margins. The fact that profit margins are up does a lot of damage to the ‘it can’t be greedflation’ theory
argument when there’s obviously a set of shared motives driving labor costs down while at the same time pushing up profit margins.
Well, just because they have shared motives doesn’t mean they’re going to act in concert with each other. They’re competitors. One’s market share loss is another’s market share gain.
The fact that profit margins are up does a lot of damage to the ‘it can’t be greedflation’ theory
It might help to clarify what “it” we’re talking about here, or for that matter, what exactly we’re referring to with “greedflation”. To be totally clear, companies will raise prices when the market will bear it, and when they have a monopoly or cartel, that can be nearly indefinitely. The thing I’m objecting to in the first place here is the notion that that’s just universally the case across the entire economy, which strikes me as ridiculous and a way for the government/central bank to deflect blame for monetary inflation. And to your point - for any highly competitive market, it’s a very elaborate explanation versus just that supply and demand has caused prices to increase because the supply of money has gone up, which is a very simple and fundamental phenomenon in econ. As a rule of thumb, the more diversified the market is, the less likely that is to be the case.
We did see a big supply shock when Russia partially cut out of the global energy market, causing the market to chase after oil from the remaining producers, causing an increase in price. That’s not some new phenomenon, that is also just basic supply and demand. It does cause price shocks, even if their costs didn’t go up, even if labor didn’t see the benefit. That’s not, however, some permanent state of “inflation” like monetary inflation which is just never reversed for the entire remaining lifetime of a currency - supply shocks are transient (at least until the fossil fuels actually run out).
The problem with consolidation is that companies that gain a majority market share are operating at the lowest of margins, so there is little room for new competitors to move into that market space.
Since these companies already own the market, it is too expensive for another company to enter that market space while competing successfully. The larger and more established companies already have economies of scale that are tilted in their favor. The only way for a new company to compete successfully against an entrenched business is by leveraging new technology or huge investments to bring their cost lower than their competitors.
And we’ve seen that happen in the past with agribusiness, they get large investments and just buy up all the other companies and put them under their own umbrella.
The loan on my van is paid off, The bank is paying me interest on my savings again, I have a years worth of costco rice stored, and the campsites by the river where i live in my van is empty because everyone too broke to go on holiday. Life is sweet. (No part of this comment is hyperbole)
Mechanically, not upgraded, no. But it was an empty van with an aluminium roof rack when I bought it, and I did the fitout myself. Awning, solar panels, batteries, inverter, fridge, shower, ventillation etc.
There is inflation I agree, but I think a significant percentage is from price gounging, around 30%. I saw a study detailing this that I could find and link if you want.
If you’re wondering how it can happen simultaneously accross whole countries and much of the world, you can look up the concept of “price leadership.”
No, it’s inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods. Caused partially by years of central banks across the world injecting new money into financial markets and partially by the massive dump of new money into the consumer economy in 2020-2022.
100%. I don’t know why anyone expected anything different - we’ve been printing and printing and printing money for the last 10 years. Chickens are home, roosting.
That’s fucking moronic… The US government has had that money printer running since Nixon… It’s just garbage all around regardless… even though they are and have been some slightly less garbage parts
This particular theory is far too prevalent. Corporate executives are tugging themselves silly at the sight of people blaming the government instead of the people who paid them.
Prices are going up because people are willing to pay higher prices than they were. We still have not found a new ceiling. It’s not “all the money printed by Trump” that caused a giant spike in inflation (that only played a small part). It’s record profits in a variety of industries convincing anyone and everyone to charge more.
To be fair, of the 44B, they’d use 30b to blow up children’s hospitals, give 13b to some rich fucks, 800m would disappear and the rest would fund something nice
Have you ever looked at US federal spending? 27% goes to healthcare, 21% goes to social security, 13% to income security, 13% to defense, then the rest is split between education, veterans benefits, transportation, and regional development/other.
I know people like to meme the government spending, but the majority goes to healthcare, elder care, and veterans.
I can’t wait until Snowden resurfaces and shows us how much of that 27% healthcare actually goes to healthcare and how much is skimmed to line people’s pockets.
Fritz Haber invented synthetic fertilizers he also developed chemical weapons during ww1. Whats your fucking point? Lots of good things were created by terrible people and lots of terrible things were created by good people.
Or someone triggers this remotely after it has been off for like 2 years. You sit on Monday morning meeting. You get up to the screen to present your new project and boom.
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