But isn't that a sort of stressor? I remember a conversation between me and Droski about housing years ago. He pointed out that square footage of housing has been increasing such that it explains a lot of the background (pre-COVID nonsense) raise in price. We don't have starter homes anymore. They are not built. Likewise our baseline vehicles are more and more "luxury" oriented. The average consumer is being oversold on everything. Same thing with even McDonald's. You go in for a burger. Suddenly you are adding extras and ending up paying twice as much than you intended but getting "a better value." One can just compare two things as-available in their times, and that is a valid perspective, but also we must consider how much crap we are being shoveled. Could do this with all the streaming services and broad band stuff too. Could do this with the constant designed obsolescence of tech, like phones.
If you’re saying we consume too much. I agree. But that’s what our whole Ponzi scheme is built on. what lead to bigger houses is cheaper loans due to artificial low rates and people over building. The other factor is we sold our rural areas for our fiat currency so that killed manufacturing and made agriculture policy be to get massive or get out. That’s been great for the handful of mega food processing manufacturers and our pharmaceutical companies as we’ve gotten sicker from killing medium to small farms increasing the distance from farm to table and eating more highly processed foods. plus it’s weakened national security as making food production and processing a monopoly that has little resiliency in the system.
It is always striking how similar yet different our perspectives are. Like, ya, I agree on most of this. So much can be traced back to not keeping and supporting the medium to small farms.
If you’re talking about why things are so messed up in a very broad sense, I agree, it’s super complicated and not just Covid/inflation. If we’re talking about why people are pissed right now and why consumer sentiment has soured, I do think that is largely Covid/inflation driven. Hell if housing affordability was the same as 2013-2019 people probably would only have a slightly negative outlook in my opinion.
Can’t do that with fiat currency though as increase cost in equipment and land squeezes out those farmers, especially with regulations that makes it hard to sell products at retail prices instead of wholesale.
I think it is boiling over. Not the feather that broke the camel's back-- it is more than a feather-- but sort of a final straw. You could put student loan repayments starting back up as part of it too.
You can't regulate them the same way, no. Part of good regulation is making sure it is right-sized and sensible. For example you could funnel products within a region through a co-op and that is where things are evaluated. Let farmers hold each other to a standard. Or mark things into zones on a county or supercounty level and if there are not problems, there are no problems. If there are, find the problem areas and figure out how to get them up to level. It doesn't need to be a soul-crushing knee cap breaking operation to make sure things are safe for the consumer.
Well yeah it goes against the ag industrial complex which gives the pharmaceutical companies plenty of patents and long term drug users for lifestyle diseases. if a man was crazy enough, he’d think it was tied together
Well this doesn't line up with the McDonald's hypothesis- consumer sentiment is the lowest with the highest earners. But perhaps it does map to what I was suggesting about "security" and the future:
Well based on that, that isn't true. See the rise after COVID and then the fall? They clearly didn't see something coming, they are responding the same as the middle earners.
lots of links to Palestinian schools, not Hamas schools, teaching to hate and kill Jews. Link after link after link.
I can show you link after link after link of white dudes doing Nazi shit. Doesn’t make all the white folks Nazis
