I looked at reddit today. Mod issues? Jfc, idk how anyone uses reddit anymore with how much clickbait and bot posts there are.

Found OOP’s profile here. I’ve never seen Poe’s Law more in effect

$20,000 worth of low-fee S&P 500 index fund

Are… are you high? “Consumerism” and “capitalism” are completely different terms, used in completely different contexts. And I have never once heard someone use “consumerism” in a positive light. This is conspiracy bullshit

Yes. Everyone is a consumer. Most people are producers. When we talk about “consumers”, we are just talking about people in their capacity as someone who buys things. It doesnt mean that is their whole identity. It’s just a useful shorthand. And yes, we can talk about producers and consumers as far back as trade goes, which goes all the way back to pre-history.

it goes against the spirit of capitalism

What you describe is not the spirit of capitalism. Of course, the cow farmer is free to sell his milk at under market value if he wants… but there is nothing about the spirit of capitalism that says that he should or that he must. Far more in line with the spirit of capitalism would be that the cow farmer, say, charges his neighbors low prices via handshake deals to keep things friendly, and then raises the price that he sells milk at on the open market in order to optimize his profits along the demand curve. And then, said farmer would likely expand his milk production operations in order to increase his profits more. Or else the chicken farmer might buy some cows of his own to cash in on the market demand for milk. The important part is that no one has to keep milk prices low out of the goodness of their hearts, because high milk prices are a good thing. They signal to the market that there is an untapped potential to make money if they just produce more milk. And that competition is what keeps milk prices low. The spirit of capitalism isn’t keeping milk prices low so that everyone can keep buying one handful of milk at the price they are used to. The spirit of capitalism is make more milk.

allowing companies like apple to inflate their profit margin from something reasonable to “whatever the consumer is willing to pay.”

In an open market, the price will always be set by what the consumer is willing to pay. Apple’s markup exists partly because of low-information consumers (“I heard iPhones are better, so I have to pay this price”), luxury buyers (they are buying because of the brand name, and often, because the price is outrageous, as a signal that they are part of the upper classes), and fomo (“I’m not cool if I don’t have the green dot!!!”). But it is also because Apple has a legitimate claim to being better than their competition - mainly because they remove options from their customers’ pool of choices. Searching for an android phone, you have an endless ecosystem of manufacturers, models, designs, features, and prices. If you are an iPhone user, you have only a few options. On android, you have a different flavor of operating system for basically every different phone you buy - often filled with each manufacturer’s bloatware. On an iPhone, you have iOS. And android’s PlayStore is full of garbage, trashy apps that try to scam you by impersonating other apps. iPhone users have the app store, which verifies the quality of every app that appears there. In a very real way, iPhones are the better phone because they allow their users to not think about their phone - which is the whole point behind Job’s “It Just Works” slogan from so many years ago.

Coin flip on them still being tap water from a warehouse two blocks away.

Source? Because I doubt this very much. Bottled water, much as the companies selling it to you would like to say otherwise, is a commodity. And as a commodity, it benefits from economies of scale. Coca-Cola, eg, is going to bottle all of their water in a few massive bottling facilities across the country. Generic brand grocery store water is going to follow the same logic - the store will either own or contract out their water bottling to a company with just a handful of facilities across the country which specialize in bottling water. Is it just tap water? Yes. But the bottling facility chooses the tap water they use carefully - after all, no one is going to want to buy water that has too much sulfur or calcium. And while they’re at it, they’re going to make sure the tap water is actually safe to drink. Sure, multinational corporations would like to actively kill you so they can make money on your funeral expenses - but they hate getting sued even more. And if you poison 10,000 people with unsafe drinking water, that’s a hell of a class action lawsuit - which is why corporations have armies of lawyers dedicated to ensuring that this doesn’t happen.

saw a 2 litre of soda for a buck fifty at a Walmart in rural Idaho an equivalent water on the other side of the isle was three bucks

I just checked. A gallon of water on Amazon is $1.37. And that’s with the convenience of being delivered straight to your door within 2 days. At basically every grocery store I’ve gone to, water is about $1 per gallon. I don’t doubt that there are some places where this is true - but I’ve never seen it.

I will also note that neither I nor no one I know has ever been noticeably affected by drinking either tap water or bottled water. To the best of my knowledge, the problem of toxic drinking water only exists in a few places in the US, and those places are well documented.

The US is quite literally unraveling at the seems but the rich and powerful don’t want to do anything about it.

Ah, yes, the doomer rhetoric. Wouldn’t be Lemmy without it. This is the worldview of the terminally online. Go out into the real world, and you’ll see most people are doing pretty okay. Sure, they have worries and challenges - but almost everyone is clothed, fed, housed, and drinking clean water. The economy is getting a bit worse, but most people still have jobs and can afford the basic necessities. Try going to an actual developing nation with an actual non-functioning government, and there you’ll find… well you’ll actually find that people are still doing mostly okay. Because at the end of the day, people are generally resilient and will find solutions to problems the government fails to solve. A good, functioning government can help out a lot, and I’d certainly prefer that the US government was better… but the US isn’t some kind of failed state. That’s just doomer nonsense.

Then people on lemmy will have to find some other topic to doom about. But I have faith in their abilities to solve this problem!

I assume this is a joke, but people don’t just die and disappear off the face of the earth. When someone dies in a climbing accident, people find out, and the death is documented in climbing accident journals.

You can buy bottled water. It is still cheaper than soda.

I once had a conversation with a bariatric surgeon about weight loss. She was convinced that exercise was the key to sustainable weight loss. I disagreed, saying I thought diet was far more important, noting that most americans ate like trash. She seemed a bit offended that I was disagreeing with her, a doctor specializing in weight loss, about this topic. She was more understanding when I told her that I’d lost a lot of weight simply by cutting out soda. Her look then morphed to something akin to confused horror as I told her that, as a child, I had consistently drank an average of 6 cans of soda per day, every day, and I estimated that this was pretty standard for everyone I knew growing up.

I remember hearing about this, so I tend to avoid yardsaling my climbing gear all over the parking lot. But at the same time, I don’t really worry about it. If leaving nylon on asphalt actually caused a strength reduction to the point where the gear would fail, we’d hear about a lot more climbing deaths due to snapped ropes - which we don’t.

Me, imagining your mom walking into your childhood bedroom after you move out and finding the walls covered in gay porn

Most? I am highly skeptical of this claim. Iirc, lgbt people make up about 10% of the population. Depending on your interpretation, it could be far more, but let’s say 10%. “Most” of 10% would be 5%. Are you really claiming that AIDS killed a whole 5% of the population in the 80s? That would be… a lot

You are correct, housing next to good transit is more in demand in the US than other housing. But

1. There is not much good transit in the US. Being next to a bus stop doesnt count if the bus takes 45 minutes to get anywhere.

2. YES. THERE IS NO HOUSING TO BEGIN WITH. Much of the time, when US cities build things like light rail stations, they build them along highways or industrial parts of town. The idea is that people will drive to their suburban homes, park at the light rail, and take the train to the city downtown. Is this a terrible assumption to make about peoples commuting habits? Yes. Is this a terrible way to design a transit system? Also yes. But to mess things up further, higher density housing is often banned around these valuable transit stops. Instead, they build high speed roads and parking lots (so walking from existing homes or businesses is not desireable or feasible) and then mandate that the area must be single family homes or office buildings or warehouses or whatever.

3. You are correct that housing built near transit would likely be in demand. But housing prices are brought down when more housing is built in general - the housing that is built doesn’t, itself, need to be cheaper.

Ok, well I’m not trolling and I’m decently smart, but I hope you sleep well.

This is true. But at the same time, shy guys should realizing that complaining about how “women should make the first move” will accomplish literally nothing, ever.

First of all, most women get asked out all the time. Why would you go to the store to buy milk if someone delivers it for free to your doorstep every day? Asking someone out is (1) scary and (2) takes effort - if someone already has a ton of suitors, they have no incentive to do the scary hard thing.

Second of all, what do women like? Say it with me - women like ✨CONFIDENCE✨. Like, for example, the confidence displayed by saying hi to her and asking her out on a date. “Man asks out woman” is one of the most common tropes in the dating dance, and a lot of women like doing that dance. They like a man being a man, and herself being a woman, and each of you playing your roles. Of course not all women are like this, but a lot of women are. Yes, including left leaning, feminist, lgbtq±supporting, Trump-hating women. Complaints about how “women should make the first move more because that would be more fair” will fall flat on their face with these women, because they don’t want to do that.

And third, suppose your complaint is successfully filed with the bureau of women’s dating behaviors, and the board approves your request. Now all women must ask out 5 men per week. Who are they going to ask out? Do you think that it will perhaps be the men who are confident - ya know, the trait everyone has agreed women universally like? Do you think they are going to ask out the guy who is eagerly making his way through the party, meeting everyone with a huge smile and flirting all the pretty girls? Because that’s what I think would happen. Even if women were asking more men out, the shy guys who make this complaint would never benefit from this phenomenon because women want to date the guys who can ask other girls out, even if they choose not to exercise that option.

“Here’s some good advice to help you in hard times”

Lemmy: no, you don’t understand, this spilled milk is the worst thing that has literally happened to anyone, and it’s all because of CAPITALISM!!!

If you aren’t sleeping well: sleep better

And when climate change is solved, it will only be reported as increased gas prices and laid off oilfield workers.

Global rates of childhood hunger have seen a general downward trend. Unfortunately, the article doesnt list which countries these increases are seen most dramatically in - but my guess is that this is intentional, and the increase is seen mostly in countries where rates of poverty and hunger are dropping. Fewer people are starving to death because of improvements in global food delivery, and that means that they have more access to potato chips and chocolate cake. Certainly increasing childhood obesity isn’t a good thing - but it is better than it was before.

THIS IS PROGRESS!!! We should CELEBRATE THIS! The perfect is not the enemy of the good. We aren’t where we want to be, but we are further along the path, and we should be happy about that.