It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.

That’s a misleading picture. Yes, the population of veterans did support Trump over Harris, but the population of veterans skews overwhelmingly male, white, and old.

Look at Pew’s 2023 survey. Among veterans:

• 28% are under 50, 36% are between 50-69, and 37% are over 70.
• 74% are white non-Hispanic.
• 89% are men.

Meanwhile, Biden probably won among active duty in 2020.

I suspect that if you surveyed veterans under the age of 50, you’d get a very different result. Or, if you surveyed the general non population but weighted it to be as old, white, or male as the veteran population, would the results be very different from veterans generally?

These narcissists would never agree to endure insults as part of a scheme. They’re also too incompetent to plan this kind of stuff.

There’s no plan here. It’s just always been an inherently unstable situation, with schemers who aren’t as smart as they think they are, all trying to achieve their own ends using ideas they don’t understand.

There are a lot of different ways to resist. I’m throwing my money and some volunteer effort at lawsuits to gum up the works, add friction to a bunch of the Trump administration’s decisions, and make them expend a ton of resources even to accomplish the things within their power (or that are inevitable).

I know people who are feeding bad data into the surveillance state, clogging immigration and DEI tip lines with plausible but ultimately incorrect leads that waste their time.

There’s a pretty serious boycott movement and it is making a difference to some businesses’ bottom lines.

There’s a bunch of other ways to contribute:

• Stirring the pot and feeding internal faction rivalries, like DOGE vs populist MAGA vs business interests. Elon Musk has lost a few prominent internal fights (China briefing at the Pentagon, hand picked IRS chief fired less than a week in, his NASA pick being withdrawn). These guys think chaos is a ladder, but chaos can swallow them up, too.
• Disruption with plausible deniability: blocking doors and driveways that look unintentional, jury nullification, firing Trumpers for pretextual reasons, wasting Trump supporting businesses’ time and money, pranks that cause Trumpers to gather in the wrong place, etc.
• Further escalation as situations warrant.

If things escalate to where property destruction, outright fraud or scams or other white collar crime, or violence is justified, it won’t be sudden. It will be a gradual build up, with legal resistance giving way to nonviolent disruption to property destruction and theft to violent resistance. But I think it’s worth exhausting the less disruptive options first, and be satisfied that escalation is justified at each step where that actually happens.

Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

I don’t think you’re wrong, I just don’t think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn’t really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.

Artificial demand creation isn’t necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.

And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that’s a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.

Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.

Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won’t be able to live.

If there’s a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they’re incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they’ve accumulated up to that point.

So no, I don’t think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.

This article does a lot of speculation from few facts but is truly compelling.

I appreciate the clarity the article uses in the factual support for the ultimate theory, building on each inferential step that seems pretty obviously correct. The stuff that’s actually presented as being fairly certain:

• The fossil record shows many lines of archaic homo sapiens whose physical features don’t share modern homo sapiens’ “juvenile” baby face characteristics.
• The dating of those fossils and the migration patterns of our known ancestors suggests that these archaic homo sapiens aren’t actually our ancestors, but were outcompeted by our branch.
• The anthropological record shows that these archaic homo sapiens weren’t as dominant as our ancestor branch, but were close and could hold their own. Apparently the ancestors of modern humans never lost territory, even if it took millennia to displace other hominids.
• These archaic branches had some limited tool use, and some evidence of trade and ceremonial burial.

The article presents theories about our branch being less violent, having less aggression, able to build lasting alliances with larger groups of tribes. But it’s grounded in some interesting facts that are interesting, in themselves.

Looking around the article actually posted, I’d place my bets on more control/restraint on violence, for the coordination to be able to form social networks that could overcome any threats of skirmish level, inter-tribal violence:

Paradoxically, low aggression may have been a massive advantage in intertribal warfare. Low aggression could have helped us to form big social groups – tribes of hundreds and thousands. And modern humans don’t just form huge groups, we’re unique among animals in being able to form peace treaties between different groups, and alliances between groups to defend or attack territory. What made modern Homo sapiens so uniquely dangerous might not have been a tendency towards violence and aggression, but friendliness, and the ability to forge alliances. The ability to create groups and social networks, and hold off fighting – at least, until we’re in a position to win – could have given us a decisive edge.

It’s an interesting article, worth reading in its entirety.

Mortgage applications are not yes or no. There is a checklist that if met, gets approved.

That’s just a “yes or no” with extra steps.

Yeah, my reading of this is that this poster took particular personal satisfaction from denying an application, but it didn’t cross my mind that there was any element of actual control or decisionmaking.

It’s like when someone cuts you off and then crashes their car. You didn’t cause the crash, and a crashed car is a much more severe punishment than simple rudeness would deserve, but you can still derive satisfaction from the sequence of events.

The amendments were passed/ratified in accordance with the rules within the Constitution itself. So it’s a philosophical distinction in the sense that the Constitution was not scrapped or discarded, and that any modifications came within the permissible framework that the Constitution prescribes.

A much stronger argument than 1993 is that the Constitutional system itself did break during the civil war, and the Union forcibly installed new state governments, through military conquest, to pass the Reconstruction Amendments. Arguably, that military and legal history did step outside of the Constitutional framework in order to preserve the Constitution, but the Supreme Court did rule in Texas v. White that secession itself was impermissible, and that the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution required the federal government to quash an insurrection and reinstate loyal governments.

It’s not a clean legal analysis, and lots of people had to kill or be killed to make it work in principle, but you can still see how it fits within the legal framework.

That being said, applying that standard to other governments shows that plenty of other governments have been in place for longer. In the UK, the relationship between parliament and the crown have evolved over the years, including periods of violence and usurpation and even the occasional regicide, but the basic framework is that truce of competing bases of power agreeing to share that power, or distributing that power (see all the independent nations that have emerged from that British empire), such that the government of the UK can truly be traced back far longer than the government of the United States.

I think the key to understanding the context is that GDP is a flow, not any kind of accumulation.

If Person A earns $100,000 this year, gets a 4% raise every year, will they be richer or poorer than Person B who earns $120,000 and gets a 5% raise every year, after 10 years? We have no idea, because we don’t know from the question what their starting wealth was, how much they save or spend, whether the stuff they buy retains its value or appreciates or depreciates, etc.

So Russia can have growing GDP, but can still be running its economy into the ground if the stuff they’re producing is getting destroyed, or has no lasting value.

About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.

Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.

Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.

A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.

Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.

And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.

The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.

The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.

Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.

About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.

So roughly:

• 41% of that generation of men were in the military
• 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
• 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
• About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam

“Simping for” is fundamentally different from being interested in the history of. In some cases, quite the opposite.

I spent some time researching the legal frameworks of American slavery, and a ton of time on racist laws between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in large part because I think that it is under reported just how racist the origins of a lot of our day to day lives are. So when I’m deep in the weeds on racist history, it’s often because I can see the parallels today and don’t want to reinvent the wheel on stamping out the pockets of racism I actually have the power to change.

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.