• SovietBeerTruckOperator [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    I work retail, a large hardware store specially. All our customers are bored boomers buying fancy ass grills and over priced yard equipment to make their 3 acre plot look nice. The fucking hardware store recently opened a section that sells like fancy jams and sauces for dinner parties. The whole economy is re-gearing to just jerk off petite-bourgeois.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      I’ve kind of noticed this restructuring too. A lot of ads I’ve been getting have all been “for your business” and every slop is just some dumb business tech or how to hire ’the unicorn’ faster.

      Even once I had the opportunity to visit my more successful brother in a major city and a lot of the ads on public transport are the same way, that by being within a city, ads assume you must be rich.

      • stink@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 days ago

        DC ads are literally just pictures of missiles and jets with a company’s logo next to it.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    I have noticed a slow shift in advertising the last 15 years. Big increases in adverts for things normal people can’t afford. Cruises, insurance aimed at people who collect luxury cars, shit like that.

    But more than anything I noticed a LOT of ads are now aimed at businesses and landlords, weird when thats only a small percentage of the population. House insurance ads telling landlords to keep their home safe from their tenants, finance ads telling business owners they can save by switching to whatever book keeping software. There’s so much of it now.

    I’m not sure if this is just because I wasn’t an adult 15 years ago, but I swear it wasn’t this bad.

  • CredibleBattery [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Gregg Hudson, 53, renowned medium-business owner of a paint and chemical company you’ve never heard of and is yet somehow essential for the functioning of the MIC, goes out and buys exactly 5368 bottles of BBQ (xtra sweet) sauce every week.

    Gregg’s paint coats the body of the GBU-39 glide bomb, it fell in an apartment in Tehran ten hours ago.

    Gregg is hoping they use the ‘‘Big One’’ in Fordow, also covered by AmeriCoat-Tek™ buy American 's special coating; it would really help his sales.

  • WoodScientist [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Some say that if AI really does take off, that ultimately companies would be forced to still hire workers or support some sort of UBI. After all, who is going to buy their products if they have no employees? This data indicates the flaw in this thinking. As the economy automates, more and more people will simply be shut out of the regular economy entirely. You could absolutely see an economy where the 1% own all the raw materials and the automated factories that produce everything. And the 1% uses the output of those factories primarily to sell to other 1%ers. The economy can function just fine with the top 1% owning and consuming everything while the bottom 99% is homeless. Sure, historically that kind of madness would be solved by pulling out the guillotines, but that’s what the robot soldiers are for…

    • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      It would likely be more than 1%. If I had to guess, you’d have the top 1%, among them the top 0.1% of course. Then you’d have also the top 5-10% who would be high level servants of the 1%, such as the politician class, the military generals, and also vital designers, scientists, engineers and a few artists. These would include the software writers, debuggers, designers for the robot soldiers, for the robot factories, for the AI itself. Those who maintain the machinery at the highest levels would be compensated with a PMC type lifestyle to keep them loyal and prevent them from having an interest in joining an uprising and sabotaging the robot armies or the robot production. Beneath them and supervised by that group you’d have some amount of low level techs, repair techs, mechanics, junior programmer types who assist a bit who would live on the edge, constantly in threat of being pushed out into the homeless masses if they cause problems or don’t meet performance targets.

      Among those latter group you’d also have the prostitutes, the sexual “entertainment” of the rich that is, a few of which would be elevated to socialite status in the top 10% but most which would be kept precarious to allow abuses and higher exploitation of them.

      Of course personally I think if it gets to that they either engineer or allow a natural plague to run its course and kill large swathes of the population. Other ideas would be say gutting health and environmental regulations and pouring poison into the water and soil and food of these lower dregs and the land they inhabit to cull them. That or nuclear war perhaps or simply counting on climate change to murder off a lot of them.

      Of course this doesn’t solve capitalism’s problem which is sooner or later the capitalists will still eat one another as they seek to maintain a rate of profit and can only extort each other. The problem I suppose is this may happen after they’ve disposed of most of us.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Unironically, this is why some lesser porks have supported Bernie, and arguably why it seems like the wealthier citizens tend to be more left-leaning.

      It kind of checks out: “How am I supposed to have customers if no one has any money?” Contrary to what redditors believe, capitalism needs to be saved from itself over and over again and some capitalists recognize they cannot have too good of a deal.