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#consumerism
sparksinthenight · 2 days
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If the economy NEEDS workers working in degrading, dehumanizing, dangerous jobs where they have very little power, then you need to get a different economy. Any world that relies upon the exploitation and abuse of the workers needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. We can make a society where no one has to work a job that’s physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, emotionally, or environmentally unhealthy or unsafe for them. We need to create that society.
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shirazzart · 3 days
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FACE REVEAL!!!! i did a presentation today about capitalism and consumerism in the hunger games, pretty proud of how it went:-)
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hussyknee · 1 year
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disease · 11 months
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a collection of “potato chips shaped like hearts” ranging from $900–$7,000 currently on eBay...
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itscolossal · 1 year
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Embroidered Snacks and Mass-Produced Food by Alicja Kozlowska Chew On Consumerist Culture
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third-nature · 6 months
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Right-wingers: "Capitalism is all about innovation and consumer choice and opposing stagnant uniformity!
90% of inhabited capitalist America:
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headspace-hotel · 11 months
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against the logic of the lawn
Imagine a box.
This box is sealed with tape or adhesive, which shows you that it has never been opened or re-used. It is in pristine condition. Apart from that, the box could hold anything. It could contain a Star Wars Funko Pop, a printer, a shirt ordered from some sketchy online vendor, a knockoff store-brand cereal, six individually wrapped protein bars.
As a Consumer ("the" Consumer) this is your fundamental right: To purchase a box that is, presumably, identical to every other box like it.
When you Buy Product, it arrives in a box, entire of itself and without context. It has not changed since its creation. If and when Product does change—whether it is broken, spoiled, used up, or eaten—you can Buy Product that is identical in every meaningful way to the original.
It's okay if this doesn't make sense yet. (You can stop imagining the box now.)
Imagine instead a suburban housing development, somewhere in the USA.
Imagine row on row of pristine, newly built houses, each constructed with small, meaningless variations in their aesthetic, all with beige or white vinyl siding and perhaps some decorative brick, all situated on identical rectangles of land covered with freshly unrolled sod. This is the Product that every consumer aspires to Buy.
I am not exactly—qualified, or entitled, to speak on the politics of land ownership in this country. My ancestors benefited directly from the genocide of Native Americans, which allowed Europeans to steal the land they lived on, which is where a lot of wealth comes from in the end, even today. However, I have eyes in my head to see that the act of colonizing a continent, and an economic system that formed as a supporting infrastructure to colonization, have embedded something almost irreparably dysfunctional into the dominant American culture's relationship to land.
This dysfunctional Thing, this Sickness, leads us to consider land to be a Product, and to consider a human upon the land to be a Consumer.
From this point of view, land is either locked into this relationship of control and "use" to varying extents, or it is free of human influence. People trying to reason about how to preserve Earth's biosphere, working within this framework without realizing, decide that we must "set aside" large areas of land for "nature."
This is a naive and, I would reckon, probably itself colonialist way of seeing things. It appears to be well-validated by evidence. Where human population is largest, there is less biodiversity.
But I find the broad conclusions to be strikingly unscientific. The plan of "setting aside part of Earth for nature" displays little curiosity about the mechanisms by which human presence impacts biodiversity. Otherwise intelligent people, perhaps caught up in the "bargaining" phase of climate grief, seem taken in by the idea that the human species gives off a magical anti-biodiversity force field, as if feeling guiltier will fix the problems.
(Never mind that lands managed by indigenous folk actually have MORE biodiversity...almost like our species' relationship to the planet isn't inherently exploitative, but rather, the capitalist and colonialist powers destroying everything.......)
Let's go back to the image of the new housing development. This image could be just about anywhere in the USA, because the American suburban home is made for universal interchangeability, where each little house and yard is static and replaceable with any other.
Others have written about the generic-ification of the interiors of homes, how houses are decorated with the most soul-killing, colorless furnishings to make them into Products more effectively. (I think @mcmansionhell wrote about it.)
This, likewise, is the Earth turned into a Product—razed down into something with no pre-existing context, history, or responsibility. Identical parcels of land, identical houses, where once there was a unique and diverse distribution of life. The American lawn, the American garden, the industry that promotes these aesthetics, is the environmental version of that ghastly, ugly "minimalism" infecting the interiors of homes.
The extremely neat, sparse, manicured look that is so totally inescapable in American yards originated from the estates of European aristocracy, which displayed the owner's wealth by flaunting an abundance of land that was both heavily managed and useless. People defend the lawn on the basis that grass tolerates being walked upon and is good for children to play, but to say this is *the* purpose of a lawn is bullshit—children are far more interested in trees, creeks, sticks, weeds, flowers, and mud than Grass Surface, many people with lawns do not have children, and most people spend more time mowing their lawn than they do doing literally anything else outside. How often do you see Americans outside in their yards doing anything except mowing?
What is there to do, anyway? Why would you want to go outside with nothing but the sun beating down on you and the noise of your neighbors' lawn mowers? American culture tries to make mowing "manly" and emphasizes that it is somehow fulfilling in of itself. Mowing the lawn is something Men enjoy doing—almost a sort of leisure activity.
I don't have something against wanting a usable outdoor area that is good for outdoor activities, I do, however, have something against the idea that a lawn is good for outdoor activities. Parents have been bitching for decades about how impossible it is to drag kids outdoors, and there have been a million PSAs about how children need to be outside playing instead of spending their lives on video games. Meanwhile, at the place I work, every kid is ECSTATIC and vibrating with enthusiasm to be in the woods surrounded by trees, sticks, leaves, and mud.
The literal, straightforward historical answer to the lawn is that the American lawn exists to get Americans to spend money on chemicals. The modern lawn ideal was invented to sell a surplus of fertilizer created after WW2 chemical plants that had been used to make explosives were repurposed to produce fertilizer. Now you know! The more analytical, sociological answer is that the purpose of the lawn is to distance you from the lower class. A less strictly maintained space lowers property values, it looks shabby and unkempt, it reflects badly on the neighborhood, it makes you look like a "redneck." And so on. The largest, most lavish McMansions in my area all have the emptiest, most desolate yards, and the lush gardens all belong to tiny, run-down houses.
But the answer that really cuts to the core of it, I think, is that lawns are a technology for making land into a Product for consumers. (This coexists with the above answers.) Turfgrass is a perfectly generic blank slate onto which anything can be projected. It is emptiness. It is stasis.
I worry about the flattening of our imaginations. Illustrations in books generally cover the ground outdoors in a uniform layer of green, sometimes with strokes suggesting individual blades of grass if they want to get fancy. Video games do this. Animated shows and movies do this.
Short, carpet-like turfgrass as the Universal Outdoor Surface is so ubiquitous and intuitive that any alternative is bizarre, socially unacceptable, and for many, completely unimaginable. When I am a passenger in a car, what horrifies me the most to see out the window is not only the turfgrass lawns of individuals, but rather, the turfgrass Surface that the entire inhabited landscape has been rendered into—vacant stretches of land surrounding businesses and churches, separating parking lots, bordering Wal-Marts, apartment complexes, and roadsides.
These spaces are not used, they are almost never walked upon. They do nothing. They are maintained, ceaselessly, by gas-powered machines that are far, far more carbon-emitting than cars per hour of use, emitting in one hour the same amount of pollution as a 500-mile drive. It is an endless effort to keep the land in the same state, never mind that it's a shitty, useless state.
Nature is dynamic. Biodiversity is dynamic. From a business point of view, the lawn care industry has found a brilliant scheme to milk limitless money from people, since trying to put a stop to the dynamism and constant change of nature is a Sisyphean situation, and nature responds with increasingly aggressive and rapid change as disturbance gets more intense.
On r/lawncare, a man posted despairingly that he had spent over $1500 tearing out every inch of sod in his yard, only for the exact same weeds to return. That subreddit strikes horror in my heart that I cannot describe, and the more I learn about ecology, the more terrible it gets. It was common practice for people in r/lawncare to advise others to soak their entire yard in Roundup to kill all plant life and start over from a "blank slate."
Before giving up, I tried to explain over and over that it was 100% impossible to get a "blank slate." Weeds typically spread by wind and their seeds can persist for DECADES in the soil seed bank, waiting for a disastrous event to trigger them to sprout. They will always come back. It's their job.
It was impossible for those guys to understand that they were inherently not just constructing a lawn from scratch, and were contending with another power or entity (Nature) with its own interests.
The logic of the lawn also extends into our gardens. We are encouraged to see the dynamism of nature as something that acts against our interests (and thus requires Buy Product) so much, that we think any unexpected change in our yard is bad. People are sometimes baffled when I see a random plant popping up among my flowers as potentially a good thing.
"That's a weed!" Maybe! Nonetheless, it has a purpose. I don't know who this stranger is, so I would be a fool to kill it!
A good caretaker knows that the place they care for will change on its own, and that this is GOOD and brings blessings or at least messages. I didn't have to buy goldenrod plants—they came by themselves! Several of our trees arrived on their own. The logic that sees all "weeds" as an enemy to be destroyed without even identifying ignores the wisdom of nature's processes.
The other day at work, the ecologist took me to see pink lady's slipper orchids. The forest there was razed and logged about a hundred years ago, and it got into my head to ask how the orchids returned. He only shrugged. "Who knows?"
Garden centers put plants out for sale when they are blooming. People buy trees from Fast Growing Trees dot com. The quick, final results that are standard with Buy Product, which are so completely opposite the constant slow chaos of nature, have become so standard in the gardening world that the hideous black mulch sold at garden centers is severed from the very purpose of mulch, and instead serves to visually emphasize small, lonely plants against its dark background. (For the record, once your plants mature, you should not be able to SEE the mulch.)
Landscapers regularly place shrubs, bushes, trees and flowers in places where they have no room to reach maturity. It's standard—landscapers seem to plan with the expectation that everything will be ripped out within 5-10 years. The average person has no clue how big trees and bushes get because their entire surroundings, which are made of living things (which do in fact feel and communicate) are treated as disposable.
Because in ten years, this building won't be an orthodontists' office, in ten years, this old lady will be dead, in ten years, the kids will have grown, and capitalism is incapable of preparing for a future, only for the next buyer.
The logic of the lawn is that gardens and ecosystems that take time to build are not to be valued, because a lush, biodiverse garden is not easily sold, easily bought, easily maintained, easily owned, or easily treated with indifference. An ecosystem requires wisdom from the caretaker. That runs contrary to the Consumer identity.
And it's this disposable-ness, this indifference, that I am ultimately so strongly against, not grass, or low turf that you can step on.
What if we saw buying land as implying a responsibility to be its caretaker? To respect the inhabitants, whether or not we are personally pleased by them or think they look pretty? What creature could deserve to be killed just because it didn't make a person happy?
But the Consumer identity gives you something else...a sense of entitlement. "This is MY yard, and that possum doesn't get to live there." "This is MY yard, and I don't want bugs in it." "This is MY yard, and I can kill the spiders if I want to."
Meanwhile there is no responsibility to build the soil up for the next gardener. No responsibility to plant oaks that will grow mighty and life-giving. No responsibility to plant fruit-producing trees, brambles, and bushes. None of these things, any of which could have fulfilled a responsibility to the future. Rather, just to do whatever you damn well please, and leave those that come after with depleted, compacted soil and the aftermath of years of constant damage. It took my Meadow ten years to recover from being the garden patch of the guy that lived here before us. Who knows what he did to it.
The loss of topsoil in all our farmland is a bigger example, and explains how this is directly connected to colonialism. The Dust Bowl, the unsustainable farming practices that followed, the disappearance of the lush fertile prairie topsoil because of greed and colonizer mindset, and simple refusal to learn from what could be observed in nature. The colonizing peoples envisioned the continent as an "Empty" place, a Blank Slate that could be used and exploited however.
THAT is what's killing the planet, this idea that the planet is to be used and abused and bought and sold, that the power given by wealth gives you entitlement to do whatever you want. That "Land" is just another Product, and our strategies for taking care of Earth should be whatever causes the most Buy Product.
It's like I always write..."You are not a consumer! You are a caretaker!"
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thoughtportal · 11 days
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incognitopolls · 23 days
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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thisischeri · 8 months
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A taxonomy of corporate bullshit
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Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
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There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial, and Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen's new book Corporate Bullsht: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* provides an essential taxonomy of this dirty six:
https://thenewpress.com/books/corporate-bullsht
In his review for The American Prospect, David Dayen summarizes how these six lies "offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest":
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-10-27-lies-my-corporation-told-me-hanauer-walsh-cohen-review/
I. Pure denial
As far back as the slave trade, corporate apologists and mouthpieces have led by asserting that true things are false, and vice-versa. In 1837, John Calhoun asserted that "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually." George Fitzhugh called enslaved Africans in America "the freest people in the world."
This tactic never went away. Children sent to work in factories are "perfectly happy." Polluted water is "purer than the water that came from the river before we used it." Poor families "don't really exist." Pesticides don't lead to "illness or death." Climate change is "beneficial." Lead "helps guard your health."
II. Markets can solve problems, governments can't
Alan Greenspan made a career out of blithely asserting that markets self-correct. It was only after the world economy imploded in 2008 that he admitted that his doctrine had a "flaw":
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/greenspan-admits-flaw-to-congress-predicts-more-economic-problems
No matter how serious a problem is, the market will fix it. In 1973, the US Chamber of Commerce railed against safety regulations, because "safety is good business," and could be left to the market. If unsafe products persist in the market, it's because consumers choose to trade safety off "for a lower price tag" (Chamber spox Laurence Kraus). Racism can't be corrected with anti-discrimination laws. It's only when "the market" realizes that racism is bad for business that it will finally be abolished.
III. Consumers and workers are to blame
In 1946, the National Coal Association blamed rampant deaths and maimings in the country's coal-mines on "carelessness on the part of men." In 2003, the National Restaurant Association sang the same tune, condemning nutritional labels because "there are not good or bad foods. There are good and bad diets." Reagan's interior secretary Donald Hodel counseled personal responsibility to address a thinning ozone layer: "people who don’t stand out in the sun—it doesn’t affect them."
IV. Government cures are always worse than the disease
Lee Iacocca called 1970's Clean Air Act "a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America." Every labor and consumer protection before and since has been damned as a plague on American jobs and prosperity. The incentive to work can't survive Social Security, welfare or unemployment insurance. Minimum wages kill jobs, etc etc.
V. Helping people only hurts them
Medicare will "destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance" (Republican Senator Milward Simpson, 1965). Covid relief is unfair to people that are currently in the workforce" (Republican Governor Brian Kemp, 2021). Welfare produces "learned helplessness."
VI. Everyone who disagrees with me is a socialist
Grover Cleveland's 2% on top incomes is "communistic warfare against rights of property" (NY Tribune, 1895). "Socialized medicine" will leave "our children and our children’s children [asking] what it once was like in America when men were free" (Reagan, 1961).
Everything is "socialism": anti-child labor laws, Social Security, minimum wages, family and medical leave. Even fascism is socialism! In 1938, the National Association of Manufacturers called labor rights "communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism."
As Dayen says, it's refreshing to see how the right hasn't had an original idea in 150 years, and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates. Right wing ideological innovation consists of finding new ways to say, "actually, your boss is right."
The left's great curse is object permanence: the ability to remember things, like the fact that it used to be possible for a worker to support a family of five on a single income, or that the economy once experienced decades of growth with a 90%+ top rate of income tax (other things the left manages to remember: the "intelligence community" are sociopathic monsters, not Trump-slaying heroes).
When the business lobby rails against long-overdue antitrust action against Amazon and Google, object permanence puts it all in perspective. The talking points about this being job-destroying socialism are the same warmed-over nonsense used to defend rail-barons and Rockefeller. "If you don't like it, shop elsewhere," has been the corporate apologist's line since slavery times.
As Dayen says, Corporate Bullshit is a "reference book for conservative debating points, in an attempt to rob them of their rhetorical power." It will be out on Halloween:
https://bookshop.org/a/54985/9781620977514
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong
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viridianriver · 9 months
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Vengeful Consumption Part 1: A Step Past Ethical Consumption
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Y'all asked for it on my last Ethical Consumption post! Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to do some ~economics talk~ to make this one make sense.
Isn't it dumb for a company to sell something at a loss? You'd think - but it's not always that simple!
There are two big reasons companies sell things at a loss that I like to exploit - and I'll use Uber and Amazon as case studies to explain! This post will focus on Uber, and exploiting an understanding of startup business models and long-term economic trends, and my next post will be on Amazon, and the exploitation of short-term price fluctuations due to large-scale algorithmic pricing models.
But the shit those two companies are doing - and the ways you can exploit that? Is pretty standard, and you can apply this knowledge to any company!
UBER'S Business Model : Disrupt -> Replace -> Monopolize -> Profit
Disruption - Startup founders love to talk about the disruption they're doing. To "shake up old industries" or "bring customers better prices / service." But that's only step one of their business model - and the benefits to consumers are short lived. The rest? The CEO's don't brag about as much - at least in public.
Replacement - After disruption is replacement, where the company aims to put the competition in that market out of business. Uber did this with the taxi industry.
Monopolization - This is the end goal of any tech startup - to control the majority of the market - or as close as possible. Uber currently has 72% of the ride-hailing industry market share, and to put Uber and Lyft together? 98% of the American ride-hailing market.
Profit - After eliminating competition, the company (monopoly or duo-opoly in the case of Uber and Lyft) raises prices to higher than they were ever before, and finally starts turning a significant profit.
How Can A Company Operate At A Loss For Years?
Investors, babey!! Basically, finance bros throw millions or billions of dollars at companies that are currently losing money, making a bet they'll someday start making hella money, and pay them back later (plus more) with a "return on investment". It's a total gamble though - 90% of startups fail.
And how do these finance bros have billions to throw around? Well, they're being invested in by an even bigger fish (who's probably playing with some of your money right now if you use a bank, or have any retirement savings) But that's a whole other LongPost.
That way, the Disruption / Replacement / Monopolization stages of the startup are paid for by insanely rich people who are gambling that they'll become insanely richer off you, the end user, if they succeed.
So what do Uber's finances look like?
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The blue line, Operating Cash Flow, is what we usually think of when we talk about business finances. The money made off the product or service being sold, minus the money spent to operate the business. And up until 2022? Uber was consistently hemmoraging billions of dollars a year. Usually you'd think of that as a failure, but no - things are working as intended. Let's see the other lines.
The yellow line, Financing cash flow, is what Uber was being given by venture capitalists investing in it. Up until 2020-2022, they were pretty consistently raking in billions a year here.
The red line, Investing Cash Flow, is money spent or made when Uber is investing in other companies. So just like how the venture capitalists are putting money down now, hoping for a return later? The red line is Uber putting money into other companies now, hoping for payback. So far it's been negative, but unless they made some damn stupid investments, I'd expect it to go positive eventually.
And the green line, Net Cash Flow, is the total of all the above revenue (money in) and expenditures (money out). They were making bank (while also losing bank) before the pandemic, but that ole global infectious disease screwed up their ~infinite growth mindset~ oh no.
So to summarize all that nerd talk? Uber's been propped up for years by rich guys gambling that it can succeed at monopolizing the market, so that once it does, and hikes prices, they can get even richer.
What's that mean for the rest of us?
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Well, Uber doesn't share its current pricing algorithm let alone historical ones. But to get a feel of price, I plotted the relative frequency of Google seaches for "Uber Expensive" in Pink.
And to note a few trends? A dip in 2020 when nobody was riding for obvious reasons. But more importantly?
A huge spike in 2021 and 2022 - Just as Financing Cash Flow tapered off and Operating Cash Flow became positive. And this is NOT a one - off or coincidence, this was exactly what I expected to see.
Because the low prices at the start? Subsidized by investment money, and with the sole purpose of obtaining a monopoly (Or as close as they could legally get)
But when that dries up? They need to increase fares to increase their Operating Cash Flow, aka the money they make off all of us. Now that they own the market, they can set prices as they please.
I'm always a bit saddened when I see people going to corporations to complain about prices, as if they're doing anything but wasting their breath. We are nearly entirely beside the point in their business model. I've worked in this field - all these startups consider themselves answerable to their venture capital investors, not their users. All they need to provide for you, is the bare minimum level of service to not drive you away. And that's not hard to provide in a monopoly.
So we're getting fucked.. Are you finally gonna tell me how to fuck em back?
First off, don't fuck startup bros, it ain't gonna be pleasurable. But yes, I'll tell you.
Basically, if a company is in it's Disruption / Replacement phases, they're going to be throwing around insane discounts to work towards monopolization. Go ahead, hop on the latest trends. Take that 4 dollar Uber ride. Take that $20 off coupon. Take that free trial (Just remember to cancel!) They're losing money to gain a monopoly.
Just don't stop supporting the businesses the startup is looking to replace either - they'll need your support! But if you take a couple free perks too? No shame IMO.
But keep an eye on the company's financing / investment cash flow. You can track it here. And when it starts to dry up? They're either close to monopolizing a market, or close to going bankrupt. Either way - know their first cash cow's been bled dry, and you're the next cash cow.
So that's your time to bounce! Delete the app and tell your friends to do the same - play your part in screwing them out of that monopoly - and move on to grift the next grifter!
I promise you as an insider in this world, nothing you say or do will make these companies sweat as much as just deleting the app when they need your money most.
(legal disclaimer below the cut. because these bitches are litigious.)
(It's just my fucking opinion bro)
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text
belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the
author's employer, organization, committee or other group
or individual.
This text is for entertainment purposes only, and is not
meant to be referenced for legal, business, or investment
purposes.
This text is based on publically available information.
sources may contain factual errors. The analysis provided
in this text may contain factual errors, miscalculations, or
misunderstandings.
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radicalgraff · 3 months
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“I want you to spend a lot to prove that you love your family.”
Anti-consumerist Christmas posters seen around Concepcion, Chile
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she-is-ovarit · 10 months
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It's all connected. Corporations began marketing gay pride themed merchandise. An increase in "I-identify-as" populations began to flood gay bars and events, where outward appearance (marketed as "gender expression") became heavily emphasized.
Commercial visibility and marketability does not equal human rights progress.
Ability to consume does not equal citizenship to an oppressed group.
Biology, (referring to sexual orientation and sex) is not a brand you can buy into or boycott out of.
Corporations selling rainbows do not reflect our values.
The churning out of new "all inclusive" pride flags to pledge allegiance to is not indicative of liberation.
A historical homosexual slur being sold by the multi-billion dollar media obfuscates predominantly lesbian relationships ("queer women", "queer relationship") and retraumatizes many gay and lesbian people.
Gay pride only extending to people able to purchase detracts from the meaning of gay pride and distracts from the struggles of the most vulnerable. It positions the most privileged within marginalized and oppressed groups as those who represent the whole.
And associating body modification, aestheticism, and "expression" with self identity turns the lived experiences and material realities of entire subgroups of people into niche market categories that people who aren't even a part of these groups can identify into and out of based on social trends.
Biology becomes devalued, overshadowed by the social and manufactured "genders". Infinite genders means infinite target audiences. Lived, material realities of certain groups of people become materialism.
Human rights movements are becoming human rights industries, with the wealthy more directly capitalizing off of the exploitation of the poor, of the homosexual, of the female, of the immigrant, of the dark skinned, of the mentally ill, of the disabled, of the sick, of the marginalized and oppressed.
Don't buy into it.
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doesnotloveyou · 4 months
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ther are other places besides Starbucks to get coffee, some better, some cheaper, some honestly far superior
Please pick a place you genuinely prefer not just "if i don't have time/money for Starbucks". if you only drink at starbucks, this poll ain't for you
This is US centric bc Starbucks is almost more iconic than McDonald's here
*local places can be any establishment that serves coffee, even if it's not what they are known for
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bitchesgetriches · 1 year
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On poverty:
Starting from nothing
How To Start at Rock Bottom: Welfare Programs and the Social Safety Net
How to Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year
Ask the Bitches: “Is It Too Late to Get My Financial Shit Together?“
Understanding why people are poor
It’s More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich
Why Are Poor People Poor and Rich People Rich?
On Financial Discipline, Generational Poverty, and Marshmallows
Bitchtastic Book Review: Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado
Is Gentrification Just Artisanal, Small-Batch Displacement of the Poor?
Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights
Developing compassion for poor people
The Latte Factor, Poor Shaming, and Economic Compassion
Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Stop Myself from Judging Homeless People?“
The Subjectivity of Wealth, Or: Don’t Tell Me What’s Expensive
A Little Princess: Intersectional Feminist Masterpiece?
If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford to Dine Out
Correcting income inequality
1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap
One Reason Women Make Less Money? They’re Afraid of Being Raped and Killed.
Raising the Minimum Wage Would Make All Our Lives Better
Are Unions Good or Bad?
On intersectional social issues:
Reproductive rights
On Pulling Weeds and Fighting Back: How (and Why) to Protect Abortion Rights
How To Get an Abortion
Blood Money: Menstrual Products for Surviving Your Period While Poor
You Don’t Have to Have Kids
Gender equality
1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap
The Pink Tax, Or: How I Learned to Love Smelling Like “Bearglove”
Our Single Best Piece of Advice for Women (and Men) on International Women’s Day
Bitchtastic Book Review: The Feminist Financial Handbook by Brynne Conroy
Sexual Harassment: How to Identify and Fight It in the Workplace
Queer issues
Queer Finance 101: Ten Ways That Sexual and Gender Identity Affect Finances
Leaving Home before 18: A Practical Guide for Cast-Offs, Runaways, and Everybody in Between
Racial justice
The Financial Advantages of Being White
Woke at Work: How to Inject Your Values into Your Boring, Lame-Ass Job
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander: A Bitchtastic Book Review
Something Is Wrong in Personal Finance. Here’s How To Make It More Inclusive.
The Biggest Threat to Black Wealth Is White Terrorism
Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality
10 Rad Black Money Experts to Follow Right the Hell Now
Youth issues
What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans
The Ugly Truth About Unpaid Internships
Ask the Bitches: “I Just Turned 18 and My Parents Are Kicking Me Out. How Do I Brace Myself?”
Identifying and combatting abuse
When Money is the Weapon: Understanding Intimate Partner Financial Abuse
Are You Working on the Next Fyre Festival?: Identifying a Toxic Workplace
Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Say ‘No’ When a Loved One Asks for Money… Again?”
Ask the Bitches: I Was Guilted Into Caring for a Sick, Abusive Parent. Now What?
On mental health:
Understanding mental health issues
How Mental Health Affects Your Finances
Stop Recommending Therapy Like It’s a Magic Bean That’ll Grow Me a Beanstalk to Neurotypicaltown
Bitchtastic Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Your Big Brain
Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Protect My Own Mental Health While Still Helping Others?”
Coping with mental health issues
{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Self-Care
My 25 Secrets to Successfully Working from Home with ADHD
Our Master List of 100% Free Mental Health Self-Care Tactics
On saving the planet:
Changing the system
Don’t Boo, Vote: If You Don’t Vote, No One Can Hear You Scream
Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less
The Anti-Consumerist Gift Guide: I Have No Gift to Bring, Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum
Season 1, Episode 4: “Capitalism Is Working for Me. So How Could I Hate It?”
Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights
Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality
Shopping smarter
You Deserve Cheap Toilet Paper, You Beautiful Fucking Moon Goddess
You Are above Bottled Water, You Elegant Land Mermaid
Fast Fashion: Why It’s Fucking up the World and How To Avoid It
You Deserve Cheap, Fake Jewelry… Just Like Coco Chanel
6 Proven Tactics for Avoiding Emotional Impulse Spending
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