hesh

Neat

That you are conscious is all you truly know

Had no idea they still performed

At the time it was popular

try Busuu

use SponsorBlock

Remember when we had local stores instead of Walmart, and small town economies were alive?

Glad we traded that for free shipping and oligarchy.

In Ohio: welcoming
Outside of Ohio: oh no

I love Minneapolitans

+1 for this as I encounter it regularly. I would also just prefer no refresh so I can keep my place in the feed, that would be more important than ensuring the feed immediately reflects the block.

Leave gen x out of this. This dude and his cronies are boomers.

Good thread, since I hate a lot of “new” things. It’ll be good to read about the good ones.

I’ll add: GrapheneOS (and other custom phone OSes) giving us a choice besides being tracked by the big corpos.

We all think about it. Some just think about thinking about it more

Maybe so. To be clear I agree that doing all of those things is necessary, and don’t expect everything to change because I canceled my Prime account. But I also believe, at least for myself, that it would be hypocritical to believe those efforts are righteous while simultaneously paying money directly to the oligarchy when I have other options.

It is ridiculous, and we shouldn’t have to worry about all this. Sadly the alternative is accelerating everything bad. So it’s up to those of us awake to the issue to do whatever we can.

Fair, but the only way to combat that would be to have more shopping options: Different stores with different suppliers instead of fewer stores with more centralized suppliers. And the only way to make sure those options exist is for people to vote with their wallets and keep them alive, instead of giving in and shipping at Amazon. The problems you’re describing seem to me to be directly caused by not voting with your wallet in this way.

Bezos has oligarch powers because Amazon has control of such a huge portion of the market. If we all shopped at 20 million different stores instead of the same one, we would not recreate the same oligarch power. Breaking up monopoly power by keeping market share from consolidating under one set of owners is econ 101. The way things are today is not the way it has always been, or the way it naturally must be. The level of inequality today is orders of magnitude worse than it was even earlier in my lifetime. We lost more and more control by allowing these mega corps to runaway without guardrails.

Before big corp stores like Amazon and Walmart came along, towns had a lot more small business that helped the local communities thrive. Then the big stores (using unfair leverage) put them all nearly out of business, with average Americans unable to resist the subsidized low prices and free shipping then turning their back on their neighbor’s store. What followed was the decimation of small town economies and the ability for working people to earn a decent living. Meanwhile, the centralization of all that profit and power in a few hands has allowed the creation of the oligarchy we have today. So what would life be like if every American stopped patronizing Amazon and started funding their local community? All of that would start to become undone, and we would begin to regain that lost prosperity and wrest control over our politics away from billionaire oligarchs.

If you don’t see that mega corps like Amazon are a bigger problem for society than the individuals in your town there’s a lot more to go into than I can right now. Perhaps I can come back to this later. PS. All this debate is in good faith!

Cuz Bezos directly funds the regime with those profits

EDIT: On top of the fact that Amazon is an unwieldy giant monopoly conglomerate, and giving them money is already antithetical to free markets to begin with.