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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:

    Every customer gets rocks for dessert.

    Every customer pays for it.

    Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.

    I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.





  • I also absolutely hate this “abundance” narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn’t that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn’t exist, it’s that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can’t make money selling things to people who can’t afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can’t actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.