This is an important point in general. The old story of “voting with your wallet” is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.
Comment on Consumer hardware is no longer a priority for manufacturers
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don’t, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.
It’s been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it’s been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
realitista@lemmus.org 12 hours ago
You can only vote with your wallet if there’s something in it.
tomiant@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Which is exactly why conservatives want to push that line of ideology, because in a democratic society we all have equal say, but under capitalism the landowning aristocrat class become de facto lords and kings. Which is exactly what we are seeing happening right now.
It’s the same bullshit they say about wanting “small government"- no, they want no government, not a democratic one at least, because that is the only thing keeping them from wielding their capital as a political tool, something it is already feebly equipped to do because of the power inherent in capital and unregulated ownership. Low taxes- same thing; high taxes are an equalizer that aims to create benefit for all of society together, low taxes, as conservatives always want, mean proportionally more for those who are already most well off.
On a long enough timeline, capitalism will always and causally turn into a form of feudalism. Shit, it IS feudalism, with extra steps.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Happening? don’t you mean happened? Most top politicans come from the same familys and schools and have done for significantly longer than I’ve been alive.
nforminvasion@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They’re probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You’re absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
and in our labor power with AI.
Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment.
nforminvasion@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Oh I absolutely agree. LLMs are not going to achieve AGI, not even close. I don’t think this AI will replace us, but the ruling class want it to so badly. And they’re looking for ways to develop AGI as quickly as possible or something like it. Still, in the background of all the chatbot noise has been real development on drone ai technology, mechanical robot advancements, and other machine learning.
The reason the wealthy are fine basically burning money to continue developing any form of AI is that they are so excited and ready to hunt us for sport. These people HATE us for just existing in their presence and on “their” world. They don’t care that OpenAI is a money furnace, it has already allowed them to get many of us hooked on AI psychosis, poison internet discourse with propaganda and disinformation, and steal trillions of creative works to hoard and eventually control all information. I think some of them are dumb enough to believe the bs about llms becoming advanced ai ready to replace all of us. But even if not, they still have gained so much out of it.
Still, don’t let yourself believe they’re not working on every possible means to develop ASI/AGI. The fact that we even still have a say over labor and can threaten that against them, is anathema to them. We should be slaves or dead. And we are running out of time to use that labor bargaining chip, after that is gone, only manpower and physical numbers are left, and they control all the militaries and firepower…
tomiant@piefed.social 5 hours ago
I always hated that fucking saying. No, you vote with YOUR VOTE. If you vote with your dollars the man with a billion dollars has a billion votes more than you do.
tomiant@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Yet another lie of capitalism- that demand dictates supply. If people want something, capitalism will solve the problem because greed will solve every problem, right? WRONG. It doesn’t take into consideration that scale and logistics and infrastructure and mass production all collude and interact in ways that can and will easily create isolated and unexpected functional consequences just like this one.
Capitalism itself is such a dumb and evil creation that the only thing that keeps it running is to have laws that limit its destructive power- unfortunately, since money is power, capitalism quickly supersedes rule of law and democracy, creating a system of government where feudal lords rule over what basically amounts to serfdom. Surely a more comfortable serfdom than in the 1300’s, but most certainly lacking the basic freedoms of a democratic society, and only so long as the lords so wish and comfort isn’t taken away at their whims due to opposition or otherwise.
Fuck this shit.
nforminvasion@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I am so glad to see someone else talking about this. Yeah, We’re going back to feudalism… And only the upper ranks of society will be able to afford goods and be able to engage in trade.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I mean, it’s very arguable that we’ve just been doing “feudalism with extra steps” for a very long time anyway.
To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the “priced out of anything bus bare subsistence” basket for most of the history of modern capitalism because only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower “localized” rate.
It’s really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it’s way home to the citizens of the West.
verdi@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 12 hours ago
Eat the rich!
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The whole economy reminds me more and more of the decline of the Roman Empire. Their biggest problem was that there were no consumers left to keep money in circulation and economy afloat. You either owned lots of land and slaves or you were a slave, meaning the only one you could trade with were merchants from outside the empire but as the empire expanded, those became harder to reach. War expenses spiraled out of control while the economy declined until it ceased to exist.
Now mega corps only trade with each other and threaten to replace all workers with AI and robots. Meanwhile the economy becomes stale, people buy less while politicians around the globe cut down the social sector, meaning people will have even less money to spare. Money won‘t circulate as much, slowing things down even further.
There are ways out of this spiral of decline but billionaires won‘t give up so easily. You can say many things about them but they are persistent as hell.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 49 minutes ago
That persistence is a type of sociopathy, though. It’s an antisocial personality disorder. Sure, they’re persistent, but they’re persistent at pursuing absolutely terrible things for personal gain that effectively means nothing considering they already have enough power and money to make Solomon blush. It’s a mental disorder where they need more and more and more while they have more than they could ever use in their entire lifetimes and in their grandchildren’s their grandchildren’s lifetimes.