Ideas I want to share but am to lazy to organize into a single cohesive argument. broken up slightly so it's some-what readable.
Consumer rights are nonexistent these days. There are literally 0 standards set for how to deal with shit like scalpers, Black Friday, the covid shit where everyone bought hundreds of dollars of excess of perishable foods; Letting all of it go to waste.
Valve had to do a rerelease of their steam controller because they forgot to account for the greed and desperation spawned by the brood mother of capitalism.
Not to mention right to repair and ownership of digital products like software. The United States also has very limited legislation on how companies are allowed to use their software on your machines.
The fact that terms of service are not required to be easily understood and can include legal wavers with implications on ones constitutional rights???
I am of the opinion that these behaviors are caused by the worsening economic state.
I do have some level of hope that the United states can bounce back from the trump administration. But not without some serious reforms. And I think trust busting, mandatory unionizing for wage labor, and publicizing healthcare, are all necessary.
Some say "my life is fine and I'm am average American" no the fuck you are not, I know because I'm you.
My life isn't too hard because I have loads of family who are all very intelligent and managed to secure stable and niche jobs that pay well. That plus a lot of dumb luck, will make life easy for you.
If you want think our generation (talking to you genz crypto bros) has it easy you are either in for a rude awakening or luckier than you thought. Now that doesn't mean you haven't struggled. I'm sure your life has its troubles (mental health or otherwise) and I'm sure that you experience a great amount of suffering.
But you are operating on a different scale, to you poor is not having enough money to go on vacations or have a good car or eat at restaurants, for some poor is eating less that 7 days a week. For some poor is not being able to eat at all this week.
That's enough about equity, if you don't know what equity is I'm sorry but I won't be explaining it here.
The average American should not HAVE to squeeze by. Budgeting did not used to be that hard. People weren't smarter back in the days when they did their taxes at home. They just didn't have millions of corporate lawyers overcomplicating shit.
I think people should not have to "game the system" to live a normal life with nice things. This scalping, stock trading app, gambling app, crypto scam shit. It's all evidence that our economy has gotten bad enough to incentivise dishonest behaviors in order to live happy lives. If you want to get a car that you like, you probably have to do or say some shit that likely (indirectly) harms people.
They may be dumb for listening to the gambling ad but does every gullible person who see the good in people deserve to get fucked over. Why is the ideal form of society one that produces jaded miserable 25 year old alcoholics.
(many of these semi rich car kids with gambling addictions are dumb, yes. They are gullible, yes. They will have been convinced that it is acceptable to put their comfort over others lives, yes. But they are not genetically evil. We can teach them to participate in society peacefully and kindly. Just because someone doesn't have a skilled trade they can participate in doesn't mean they shouldn't get to buy a nice car. We can make a society where even stupid crypto bros get to live their happy lives like dogs.
(If you think it's morally problematic for me to compare dumb people to dogs then you probably don't care enough about dogs.
(Btw I'm not talking about any kind of mental illness or anything, people with down syndrome or other neurological abnormalities can be smarter or dumber than the average American that is up to the same random chance that spawns average stupid people. (Talk about long winded political correctness, I'm a pro))
Anyways, I don't blame the shit heads* for fucking things up so they can have nice things. I blame capitalism for breeding that mind set.
*that mindset does cause capitalism, but the system was in place before them, not even our current billionaires (pedophiles not included) are to blame for their greed, they were raised to believe it was only fair.
They are not genetically evil. But we do need to understand that those ideas should be stomped out and those people should be made aware of the harm they cause and rehabilitated and or restricted.
That being said, systems can be put into place to stop these behaviors from being possible or profitable in the first place
Scalping is totally preventable. By companies or by legislative power.
I'm not going through the effort of writing legally comprehensive documents so fuck off
But in essence if you find that an item is being bought out en masse by resellers, that product becomes subject to evaluation and the company's/retailers selling them must apply appropriate limits to the number of an item that can be purchased by one person (I D verified) this sounds extreme and I believe it is somewhat.
However, we regulate weed in the same way to stop illegal sales. That's only because weed gives the govt tax money tho.
It's avoidable if no one has a reason to fist fight over pokemon cards in the first place.
How much money does it take to convince someone not to fight over cards. $20,000? $1,000? $500? $50? Sometimes even $10 is more than these scalpers are making. But people will fight another person for $10. (Buying $60 dollar packs and gaining at most $50 sometimes losing money across the board.
Now some of you more privileged car douche crypto folk I talked to earlier may have the urge to accuse these fighting folks of being just totally irrational.
But just for a moment what if we just tried to imagine that they weren't. What could drive you to fist fight over $10? Maybe starvation? Maybe your kids starving? Maybe sometimes it's easier to steal shit or fight folks than it is to find a job when you have a prison record.
Maybe people act a little less rationally when they think they might not eat tonight. Maybe, You get too mad to even think about calling or emailing a place for a job.
This country breaks people, what if you break. When you have to choose between letting they guy in the alley see his family, or letting your kids eat tonight, that will never be an easy choice to make.
But none of life is easy choices, when you care for your fellow man. It's a lot easier to make those choices when you don't care.
The difference between the guy in the alley and they guy in the Porsche. Is that they guy in the alley grew up caring. He didn't decide to steal 'till he was starving.
They guy in the Porsche? He never had to hold a gun. He was raised believing if you were stronger than the baby then you deserved the candy. If they were dumb enough to buy it then they didn't deserve to feed their kids with the money they sent you.
They use the law as a guideline, riding it and creating legal history with class action lawsuits for sport.
Unfortunately since most of these guys make enough off a couple hundred fools on their Instagram to live it up, they never even get in trouble. No legal history is created. No one protects the consumer.
No one cares about what goes on inside the money machine. They're just happy to get a check.
