[addHoax]

The red flag inherent to venture capital is venture capital.

Society recently felt government accountable to the range and gradient of human conditions was immoral so it changed the rules to let private power pick and choose and private power is pricing everyone out of homes and food, which is apparently quite moral.

Nevermind the state of reality we leave behind for the future; we’ll be dead. Those old religious metaphors about hell on Earth must be made so! Buy cars! Fly! We were promised this! Again the epitome of moral behavior.

Humans fairy tales run the world.

[carom]

>private power is pricing everyone out of homes

Last time I checked it was the government preventing me from building more dense housing as well as requiring parking minimums.

[cobertos]

It's not so black and white. It's both. Local governments are the gatekeepers but they allow outside interests with sufficient power to rewrite their zoning laws.

A local twp near me as expressed in their meeting minutes let's outside interests redline and rewrite their zoning laws, given enough capital and sway. It's very specific to the municipality, the mechanisms and processes they have in law to change the current ones, and the local base it is comprised of.

[a2tech]

Anyone with money and persistence can get variances in the local government. Try to be a regular person and get things done--you'll rapidly end up giving up.

[blitzar]

> Last time I checked it was the government preventing me from building more dense housing

Mega-corp didnt have problems with getting approval (and a healthy cash grant to build it) for the exact same application. I wonder what they did differently?

[bobthepanda]

Simple: they actually benefit from the status quo. If only a very limited land supply is available for densification (say like maybe 5% of the city) then that land supply is fairly easy for a few players to corner.

[blitzar]

And they "left" a Cadillac with $200,000 cash in the boot on the driveway of the person making the planning decisions.

[laurex]

Not exactly disagreement but venture capital funded colonialism and slavery; the ”recent” incarnation of corporatist/scale at all costs SV VC may be just an extension.

[unity1001]

> Society recently felt government accountable to the range and gradient of human conditions was immoral so it changed the rules

The US did. That mentality is not present in the rest of the world.

[mrosett]

> pricing everyone out of homes and food

The food part couldn’t be more wrong:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

[swagasaurus-rex]

This is an article from three years ago lol.

I see bottled water being sold for $6 for a 12 pack when it used to be $2 for a 24. Convince me that isn't price gouging. It's literally plastic and water.

[CharlieDigital]

> Convince me that isn't price gouging. It's literally plastic and water.

Not that I fundamentally disagree, but your example is probably not a great one.

First is that fuel costs were abnormally high for several months and water in plastic bottles isn't exactly cheap to transport.

Second is that plastic is sourced from oil and guess what? It's been quite expensive until the recent leveling off.

Third is that as some regions of the US start to run out of ground water due to unusually long drought conditions, the availability of local water sources also dries up and thus requires buying more expensive sources of water or bringing that water in from further away.

[swagasaurus-rex]

These issues affect everything a grocery store sells. Crops are water dependent, food is heavy and bulky to transport, and it's all wrapped in plastic.

Previously the food industry competed on price. Supply was disrupted which any econ student would tell you increases prices. But the second order consequence was that these companies no longer competed on price, for a short time. They could justify price increases because everybody including their competitors were doing it. Since the grocery stores set the price, they determined that luxuries like 'bottled water' could go up higher since their price-sensitive customers rely more on necessities. Once supply stabilizes, these companies might start competing on price again. But in a free market, as long as their competitors keep their high margin items expensive, they can do so too.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

To provide another perspective, it's worth noting that the example given contrary to "gouging" doesn't account for the practice occurring in multiple industries given that it only looks at food as a share of an individual's disposable income ("the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food").

[oh_sigh]

Bottled water is a bizarre example to pick for price gouging of food, since water is available for essentially free for almost everyone in America. When it has a cost it is measured in $/kilogallons not $/liter

[sqeaky]

I suspect it was picked because for millions of American's tap water is not safe to drink.

[oh_sigh]

If that is the case, it's still a horrible example because the example prices are literally 12x higher than what you can buy water for.

[refurb]

Please list the millions?

Unless you mean temporary boil water orders of which Canada has several dozen active right now.

[sqeaky]

The entire city of pittsburg has ongoing lead in tapwater scandals. To a lesser extant so has the entire state of Milwaukee.

That is already millions, but...

Flint still has problems. Brady Texas has radium, Washington DC has intermittently had Lead. It is entirely on well owners to test and maintain their own water. New Jersey leads the country in BPA in water, some of which is safe, but the advice is to check with each municipality if it is safe....

And so on for all kinds of places and reasons. We just don't take tap water seriously as a country even though it wouldn't be a hard problem for us to solve.

[bombela]

At least a thousan here.

Palo Alto Park Mutual Water Company, deserving about 600 houses, in the middle of the Silicon Valley. Water is not potable.

I have an extensive filtration system for making it potable. It is expensive, but the convenience is worth it as I can afford it. My neighbor has to go out refill 18L jugs for his drinking supply.

[xboxnolifes]

And VC is much older than 3 years.

[yogaBear]

The rich can buy more reducing supply, raising prices.

Rich industrialists buy up raw materials, package it, and sell it leaving less raw material (or lightly refined like flour from wheat, sugar from cane) for the masses to get cheap.

We pay to cover the industrial cost of the work to package cereal rather than the cost of flour and sugar.

It’s simple arithmetic and a bunch of philosophy, platitudes, and euphemisms justifying it.

A friend of mine is a collections agent who just signs computer generated letters just to role play our socioeconomic game. Give them an equivalent UBI, and we don’t have to provide them a work computer to go along with their personal gadgets.

We produce way more than we need to to satisfy the job LARP.

[halestock]

This sounds like it was written by a (bad) ai.