it's cool how so many industries in the US are on the brink of collapse if not actively collapsing and everyone is just complaining about them as if everything is normal and people are just lazy. healthcare, teaching, everything
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my wife was ready to stick out her school counselor gig for a few more years and then she was assigned yet more duties she was never trained for and/or can't perform because of osteo arthritis. the autism para rotation was the last straw
Everything that relies on a supply chain has become more vulnerable to error than ever. I am seriously considering becoming vegan or vegetarian again because I just can’t deal with some of the things I’ve seen w meat that hit the market. But then, E. coli from greens etc.
Container gardening works if you have a patio! We also have community gardens you can rent plots… orrrrr talk to an elderly neighbour who can’t work their yard & offer part of the haul!
Lol, was replying to @joshuajoy.bsky.social's comment, but yeah, apartments make it difficult - not impossible, though. I know of neighbourhoods that shared food, growing different vegetables
this is one of those situations where the correct solution is an impractical solution as there is simply not enough land for everyone to engage in subsistence farming
Exactly. It’s true that we could all probably produce *some* of our own food with varying degrees of complications, and it’s *also* true that it would be quite impossible for all 8.1 billion souls on this planet to produce enough food to meet their nutritional needs by themselves sans systems
Quite right. That being said learning to grow things indoors hydroponically instead of like, going to restaurants ‘n other consumerist shit like everyone else has been nice for me.
It’s a process wrought with failures, but the success’ are sweet indeed and maybe valuable skills for the future.
Oh, sure. But, it's not like all people everywhere would go through the trouble of growing their food - let alone that there are places where growing your own food is not possible because of the climate, or war, or - living in a small apartment.
And that collapse is being orchestrated by a very few capitalists who are buying legislators to enact policies that make them more money. They know it’s all going south, hence their escape plans to New Zealand, or sovereign yachts on the high seas—or Mars.
same in Germany. Everything is collapsing and nobody is doing anything to stop it. Especially healthcare, public administration and education is becoming borderline broken
My wife left teaching after 13 years. The stories from inside schools in three different states describe a failed institution. Parents have usurped control but parents aren't trained in pedagogy.
Come to Japan. The Japanese value education very highly. This is LMI Interact, which makes Harvard look like an amateurs! Japanese are so polite, so clean! https://www.debito.org/?p=2993 #japanlife #teachinginjapan
It could all work, too, if anyone had the slightest empathy towards the workers in these beleaguered industries. It doesn’t have to be like this. Except that one or two guys benefit.
I went to CVS the other day to buy some cough syrup. There was one employee and he was busy, so I used the self-check. It age-gated the syrup and I had to wait for 15 minutes for it to be authorized (I’m 39) while the employee explained to another customer that their photo printer is broke down.
I’m frankly impressed you were able to get your cough syrup off the shelf in the first place without having to wait for that one employee to come unlock the case for you
Yeah, I’m kind of shocked they don’t do that at my location. I live in an area with a number of lower income apartments, but it’s in a suburban area that’s like 80% white
My closest Target has taken that as an excuse to lock up everything that someone might want to buy. Too bad I won't be in the room when the district managers all surprised-pikachu face over their sales numbers for advil and toothpaste cratering.
Yep. That stuff doesn’t run out with no warning so I can just order it for pickup and never actually enter the store, which means I won’t ever impulse buy anything.
About 40 years ago every CEO realized that making money by doing finance is cheaper than making money by actually engaging in economic activity and since then the actual economic activity has all been aggressively sunsetting in favor of more creative financial instruments
yeah. and now all of that is slowly going away since we're at the end of two digital booms and interest rates are going up which means we have to either invest in manufacturing and domestic labor or just pour thermite on the entire economy
who wants to take bets on which one we end up doing
I explained the same thing about 10 years ago to friends in a neighboring country. Our government (the Netherlands) has exclusively focused on forcing everyone into higher education. Upping taxes and lowering wages to make sure someone working anything less than manager is "useless'.
But suprised Pikachu there are not enough people working retail, technician, garbage collection. Yeah geniuses, since those wages are now too low to have a life at all. Good job, we now have 17 million managers (the amount of citizens living here).
It makes my skills highly marketable. The first time I was highly overpaid to do a relatively inconsequential side job for a neighbor I was shocked. Now I routinely charge $50-$100 per hour for handyman work and no one even blinks.
oh man I wish I had a link on it but there's an entire labor crisis with electricians and plumbers because there's TONS of people going to trade schools and learning but then there's no actual jobs bc construction companies and building managers are outsourcing it to like five dudes.
This is a repeating cycle. Some industry sees a rise in pay/dip in supply then news & schools band together to tell everyone it's THE ticket to $$$. Tons of kids get suckered into loans and years of school for a degree that's worthless by the time they graduate cuz in a year labor supply exploded.
Yup. And with a shelf life of near 15 years, eventually you'd get the turnover you expect from you typical 2 yr product cycle (car avg) you have now. So killed the goose that would keep laying, all to get a few more eggs today.
InstantPot was a super famous and popular pressure cooker tool that is so well known that it has the same prestige as "a Dyson" but since they drank from the poisoned chalice of private equity they had huge losses last year because their growth wasn't exponential.
yep. one of the most criminal acts in finance capital is buying a company with debt, forcing the debt on the business, then scrapping it when it can't hit growth metrics.
Elon might be stupid enough to think he could run twitter better but at least he used banks to buy that.
you're not thinking like a venture capitalist. it has nothing to do with the product itself. everyone working in finance wants a Tesla or a Facebook, a single beautiful company that will grow exponentially year after year because the returns are so good. the product is immaterial.
That's just capitalism consuming itself in the pursuit of ever growing profits. Private equity is scraping the last bits of meat off the bones at this point.
honestly I've been telling ppl looking for a job to see if any local medical offices are hiring for support staff positions. like there's always been a shortage of front desk/billing/coding/etc and its especially bad now. my job sounds basic on paper but it's a huge boon in office efficiency
IME hospitals are getting real wild about “we need a shitton of coders but also we won’t hire someone with a decade+ experience unless they also have the degree we want, even though you don’t need the degree to get the certification”
Like a number of the jobs I applied to that “went with another candidate” are still somehow mysteriously listed as open
Real convenient for a hospital admin who don’t actually want to pay another salary but need to be able to let their current coders know “we’re trying to find more help!”
I specified "local" because that shit is much worse for national companies and sometimes regional, depending on how big it is. like a local [specialist/gp] office or hospital is not very likely to be faking needing staff. like when my office puts up listings we very much need that position.
My former employer is a locally owned hospital and they genuinely needed a manager for HIM but somehow nobody qualified ever applied so they doubled the department secretary’s responsibilities for a whole $1500 raise
There was a landmark study in NEJM 20 years ago that found US HCPs’ administrative costs were double or triple those of Canadian HCPs (depending what you include). Don’t know what the numbers are now. No shade to your job but the system is *incredibly* wasteful. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa022033
I manage patient accounts, the backend of parts of our med rec software, and add billing info for every doctor here. this means our billers & front desk are freed up (and doctors get paid faster lol). id try and find a more recent study, but there's a reason I said "local" offices specifically lol
annnnd "hey the job u just recommended that pays well and is in need of employees is incredibly wasteful" is an annoying as all fuck thing to reply with regardless. Do not "well actually" someone's helpful tip unless it's the kind of tip that will actively kill u.
this is especially annoying me rn bc we have a shortage of front desk/operator staff where I work so now billers MAs and other staffers sho work for the doctors are having to do a lot of stuff that takes away from pt care, which is stressing these already busy ppl out
They’re on the brink of collapse because in the quest for ever increasing profits, they’ve cut staff and resources to the point of being dangerous. Meanwhile, the media is talking about “quiet quitting,” if we don’t work more than what we got hired for to make up the shortcomings.
Not to mention this is a result of all of the “free speech” that we’ve normalized coming from the right for decades. Back when Fox started, a lot of us were like “hey so it doesn’t help to have a propaganda network” and now conservative media worldwide is just one big sabotage engine.
In my dept. we actually joke about how our job security is only solid because no one wants to get into teaching now. It’s some real “laugh so you don’t cry” stuff.
It's a systemic failure of institutions, largely as a result of late capitalism. Everyone sees what's happening, but they don't want to admit what it means. Instead, they attribute blame to other symptoms of collapse. There's zero leadership and no way to fix this without fundamental change.
Cuz everyones playing musical chairs with the economy, and are sure -theyll- get a seat when its done, willfully ignorant of the most likely possibility of all the chairs being a single bench that gets yoinked.
I'm both chronically ill and work in healthcare (technology/health informatics) and people have no idea how fucked we are. We've been aware of this pending for a decade, covid only accelerated it, and we've basically just let for profit medicine keep making it worse instead of acting.
What's super fun is our use of coding and data targeted towards billing has actively hampered both patient outcomes and medical research. (Our most complete datasets are claims, which are terrible representations of full clinical records. Imagine if all that effort went into better clinical data.)
Nothing makes me angrier than the ins billing practices we live under, especially as a disabled person. For nearly a fucking YEAR I had to lobby my ins company to pay my doctor for telehealth visits they agreed were covered! They'd confirm it was covered on the phone, then deny the visit every time.
They flat out weren't going to pay my doctor, probably because hes a tiny rural practice & they surmised he didnt have time to fight it & also help his patients. I had to get a state level consumer protection agency involved & start threatening to contact press before they would budge.
My spouse works in healthcare and I am an academic. From my perspective, both are suffering from what I call Walmartization. Fewer frontline workers means longer waits for customers and stressed employees. But that’s the sacrifice management is willing to make for more profits.
Ah but we have empathetic people who care about other humans keeping it together that we can exploit. Why would we fix systems when we have people with the human weakness of emotions acting as the glue of society?
Feeling weirdly conflicted about staying in my job as an adjunct community college lecturer. I feel like I'm allowing the exploitation of adjuncts to continue but I'm also supporting and educating a lot of marginalized students.
It’s so frustrating! It seems like most of the jobs that put you in a position to make the world a better place are also jobs in which you will be exploited. What an upside down way for things to be.
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In 6 months you have 250 tomatoes.
Plant those into 250 plants.
6 months you have 6,250 plants.
Plant them.
6 months you have 156k tomatoes.
Plant them.
6 mo you have 3.9MM tomatoes.
Sell them for $1 each.
but i feel like you probably already know that
It’s a process wrought with failures, but the success’ are sweet indeed and maybe valuable skills for the future.
It’s just now too much to hide “elsewhere.”
Bad education
Bad jobs
Bad Healthcare
Bad politicians.
Welcome to the modern day USA.
who wants to take bets on which one we end up doing
Dot jaypeg
- Mr. Green, my Econ prof.
1) worked
2) was popular
3) was engineered to last
Was a "market success story" that was actively killed by the market for being such all to extract more profit with engineered obsolescence
Elon might be stupid enough to think he could run twitter better but at least he used banks to buy that.
I've got one and I like it.
But the plateau of InstaPot vs a Dyson (higher unit per consumer and higher consumer base) is not the same.
Also, was InstaPot capable of companion products?
Real convenient for a hospital admin who don’t actually want to pay another salary but need to be able to let their current coders know “we’re trying to find more help!”