fitthefirst

[fitthefirst]

This thread gets better every time I see it.

Source

Video of Tama

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

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if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it. 

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spider-man: far from home (2019)

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YES

is anyone else just going through life like “yeah i just gotta get past this last difficult week and then it’s smooth sailing from there!” but like… every week

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Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

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Co-signing as someone who is scared to shit of this thing.

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One company bought all the retail outlets for glasses, used that to force sales of all the eyewear companies and jacked up prices by as much as 1000%

If you wear glasses, you might have noticed that they’ve been getting steadily more expensive in recent years, no matter which brand you buy and no matter where you shop.

That’s because a giant-but-obscure company called Luxottica bought out Sunglass Hut and Lenscrafters, then used their dominance over the retail side of glasses to force virtually every eyewear brand to sell to them (Luxxotica owns or licenses Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace); and used that to buy out all the other eyewear retailers of any note (Luxottica owns Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical) and then also bought out insurers like Eyemed Vision Care and Essilor, the leading prescription lens/contact lens manufacturer.

Controlling the labs, insurers,  frame makers, and all the major retail outlets has allowed Luxottica to squeeze suppliers – frames are cheaper than ever to make, thanks to monopsony buying power with Prada-grade designer frames costing $15 to manufacture – while raising prices as much as 1000% relative to pre-acquisition pricing.

It’s even worse for lenses: a pair of prescription lenses that cost $1.50 to make sell for $800 in the USA.

LA Times columnist David Lazarus wrote a column about skyrocketing eyewear prices and was approached by Charles Dahan, who once owned one of the largest frames companies in America, Custom Optical, which supplied 20% of the frames sold at Lenscrafters prior to the Luxottica acquisition. Dahan describes how Luxottica cornered the horizontal and vertical markets for eyewear and pushed out or bought out every other company (Oakley refused to sell or lower prices, so Luxottica boycotted it from its retailers, forcing the company into such a precarious position that it Luxottica was able to buy it for a fraction of its peak book-value just a few years later).

This is a good example of how decades of far-right ideologically driven antitrust malpractice has hurt everyone. After all, glasses aren’t just a fashion item: they’re a necessity for people with poor vision, a prerequisite for driving, walking, cycling, reading, getting an education or doing your job.

Luxottica grew through acquisition, by buying up its competition. This was banned under classic antitrust law, until the Reagan years. This pattern has been repeated in many other domains: beer, whiskey, retail pharmacies, and so on. In every one of those domains, we are getting screwed, as are small businesspeople and the families they serve.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/luxottica.html

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It's a 35 page document, how in the fuuuuuuuuuuck...

As the tragedy of Brexit reaches its season finale, most people across the UK are slowly starting to hear what we Irish have been screaming at them for over two years: that the success of this great act of national sabotage is inextricably bound up in the complications of Northern Ireland. It’s therefore worrying that the people running the show clearly haven’t done their homework. Dominic Raab has become the latest politician to admit an embarrassing lack of knowledge when it comes to the six counties across the Irish Sea. Appearing before the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, Raab was asked by the unionist MP Lady Sylvia Hermon, “Have you read the Good Friday Agreement?” He replied: “Well, I haven’t sat down, and started from the beginning and gone through it.” So, that’s a no then.

The ignorance of senior Tories on the subject of Ireland, the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement is astounded. These are not the people who should be negotiating Brexit.

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“female-presenting nipples”

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Me @Netflix after watching The Haunting of Hill House

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“Both sides” journalism needs to die.

A journalist’s job isn’t to create false equivalencies.

A journalist’s job isn’t to be a stenographer for the police.

A journalist’s job isn’t to promote corporations.

I’m not a journalist, but I thought their job was to report the truth and the facts.

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Mark Zuckerberg lost $119 Billion dollars on the stock market today (7/26/18). This is the largest loss of wealth in a single day in modern stock history.

This will literally not change his lifestyle or effect his livelihood at all. He is still a multi-billionaire.

If I worked every single day, for the rest of my life, at $15/hr - which is more than twice the national minimum wage - I would never make even 1/1000th the amount of just the money that Zuckerberg lost today.

If I worked every single day, for the entirety of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed (200,000 years) - at $15/hr - I would still not make one tenth of the amount of just the money he lost today.

And he is still a billionaire and will lose literally zero luxury or well-being from what happened today.

You want to know how absolutely grotesque modern wealth inequality is?

There you go.

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