ligoxi
Crew Member
Posts: 197
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Post by ligoxi on Jan 6, 2022 13:41:44 GMT
This question is for ylee or anyone else who can answer. I had a discussion with a guy that believes the increase in prices is on purpose. Do not want to elaborate on his arguments but i do not find any logic behind this. He said for instance that the increase in wood prices in a night in the us cannot be explained since not all us citizens at once decided to fix or created ie wooden fences and that in the us wood can be found anywhere since us is actually a huge forest... Ofcourse our devs have more important things to do than answer this. I just asked since ylee works in the construction industry. Feel free to ignore my question. |
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Post by ylee on Jan 6, 2022 13:58:13 GMT
I am not really qualified to speak on economic issues. I do not know enough about the subject nor do I have much faith in most economic models/theories. So any opinion I might have and I do have a few would just be speculation with little facts, data or theoretical justification. Even I would have little trust in any opinion I might have on this subject. I do however tend to disregard conspiracy theories, not that things like that have not happened in the past. But in general, almost all such ideas are wrong or at least misrepresented.
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Post by deepspeed on Jan 6, 2022 20:34:38 GMT
The prices of wood and other materials have a lot to do with natural disasters in the US. Of course capitalist companies are always looking to take advantage of people however they can and part of the price increases are for no other reason than to make rich men richer (that's what capitalism is all about, after all), but there was also a materials shortage due to the fact that several large hurricanes destroyed billions upon billions of dollars worth of homes and businesses all across the southern coasts of America in the last few years, including my home area. These storms turn the area into something that looks like the Fallout game universe. Rebuilding after that kind of disaster takes a huge amount of materials and puts a strain on those construction materials industries. Supply and demand. Couple this with the fact that the Federal Reserve (the unconstitutional, non-federal private business who creates and manages US dollars in circulation) have been printing money at rates never before seen in history, and you start to see the full picture. Any other country who prints money at this rate has always suffered hyperinflation and seen the currency devalued to practically nothing overnight. See Venezuela for example. The only thing preventing the collapse of the American dollar in the last 15 years is the fact that our currency is also the global standardized currency used by governments around the world in trade. Those multi-trillion-dollar debts which countries owe to each other are measured in US dollars, so we have to keep the US dollar alive and stable otherwise it will cause massive disruptions to trade and stability across the entire globe.
In order to keep it stable, we simply lie about its value. We rigged the system to make the dollar appear stable when it is far from it. And that ridiculousness is only going to work for so long. It is slowly catching up to us and the US dollar is losing value more quickly than ever while wages are not going up at all. The only thing propping up our economy is the unheard-of rates which we print money and dump it into circulation. And we give that newly-created money to rich people and big businesses who waste it for funzies, and we never use a dime of it to help the poor people who actually need it, because that's how you make the economy appear to be stable when it isn't. To put that in perspective, we have probably printed more money from thin air in the last 6 years than all the money which ever existed in human history before those last few years. You can't do that kind of thing if you want a currency to be stable. But we do it to make it appear stable when it is not.
And as for America being "a big forest", not anymore. There were times when it was like that. But that was back when Mark Twain was alive. Now we've paved so many roads and cleared so many forests to make room for mini-malls that we have only a fraction of the forests we had before. And Western America is also full of a lot of desert areas which don't grow timber quickly at all. The places like the Big Thicket which used to be amazing forestland are now only about 40% forested thanks to selfish people and poor conservation efforts. We had to make room for all those dollar stores and fast food places and then build landfills to dump all the useless wasted junk from the dollar stores and fast food places... And that means natural resources are more rare now and will cost more. Good for big businesses, bad for everyone else.
TLDR: the world is having a lot of disasters lately and America's economy is run by crazy selfish people and that's at least part of why life is so crazy around the world today. |
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kev392
Crew Member
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Post by kev392 on Jan 7, 2022 5:42:44 GMT
That was so good I read it 3 times... |
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