Late Stage Capitalism

Brought to you by rich boomers who bought a new car every 2 years. True story.

What if, bear with me here, what if people just don't have as much disposable income after the dramatic transfer of wealth to the rich class we've been seeing?

The economy is collapsing and the lower classes are feeling it already. The rich investor class isn't seeing it because the tech industry has been propping up the market with their investments going all-in with unrealistic expectations for AI technology. We are currently experiencing a K-shaped recovery where the richest are on a spending spree while the poorest are cutting back their expenses. How much more obvious must it be that this is what's going on?

You want the general population to start wasting their money on useless crap again, you'll have to give them more money to work with.

Yes, these people are truly insane. I recently read the following headline:

Rheinmetall shares: Fear of peace shocks investors

(Translated from German, source | Rheinmetall is an arms manufacturer)

They can pry my Galaxy S4 with removable battery and IR blaster out of my cold dead hands. (Thank you LineageOS, because Samsung dropped updates for it a decade ago.)

Nah, the 12 dead laptops undef my bed I use for hardware salvage and experiments are device hoarding. The multiple disassembled game consoles in my closet is device hoarding. None of it is sorted, the retro stuff isn't sorted, the new stuff isn't sorted.

I'm device hoarding. The average consumer is absolutely not.

Can we get a headline about bazillionaires hoarding wealth?

“Costing the economy”

Thankfully wealth hoarders aka. billionaires pouring money into offshore bank accounts, unaffordable real estate, government bonds, and inflated stocks are all in our benefit. Only us peasants are being selfish.

i refuse to upgrade, because newer phones are objectively a worse experience than older ones. They keep removing features in the name of "innovation" while putting more stuff in there that the market is actively telling them they don't want.

If you want people to buy a new phone every year "for the economy", the $1800 phone must be reduced to $50, and the quality stays at flagship levels. The citizens are not here to make the oligarchs wealthy. Fuck your economy.

In the meantime EU is forcing manufactures to use replaceable batteries, provide updates for 5 years and spare parts for 7 years.

Seriously, I remember the days when buying the newest model of phone every year was seen as near parody levels of hyper-consumerism. It was lambasted, mocked, looked down on.

I saw the phrase the other day and thought the same thing. They should be complaining about the manufacturers "feature hoarding".

Work productivity? That's a strange way to say "shareholder value".

In an age where phones get seven or more years of software support theres very little reason not to use your phone until it breaks

Hoarding - i do no think this word means what you think it means. This is the opposite of hoarding, this is reducing the amount of objects you possess

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hoarding

Money hoarding by billionaires is literally destroying the entire world

You see, here's the thing.

When this whole smart phone thing started, smart phones sucked. They ate a lot of power, so the battery didn't last, they were slow, both in computation, and loading data, the screens were pretty trash (dim, low res, huge bezels).... Everything needed improvements.

Now-a-days, my phone, whether new, or a couple years old, has an all day battery life, it's pretty quick and snappy, apps load quickly, data appears almost instantly on it, the screen is bright, with minimal bezel area.... Nothing I care about changes.

So why am I upgrading? Slightly better camera? Slightly better everything else? Stuff I don't perceive has been "improved" and I don't actually give a shit.

My reason to upgrade isn't there. Currently, my reason to upgrade is: this phone will no longer get upgrades, I should get something that will.... For security. That's it.

So why in the actual fuck, would I bother doing it if I don't have to? AI? No thanks.

Maybe if any of the good features coming out today wasn't paired with the monkey's paw that is:

• it's behind an app
• it's a subscription service
• it's planned obsolescence
• I can actually fix it with third party vendors
• it's selling your data

Maybe then consumers would actually get excited by new developments. All these trends are doing is turning the new generations into luddites.

Oh, man...they must absolutely love my Dad. He buys a new phone every 6-9 months. He has dementia and thinks every new phone is "broken" because he doesn't remember how they work anymore.

Hoard cool cars in a secret garage never to see the light of day ever again? Collecting.

Keep your phone for 5 years until you're forced to upgrade? Hoarding.

Rough housing with your cousins at Thanksgiving? Horsing.

Weren’t these the same people saying that we should stop buying new iPhones and avocado toast?

It's funny how thrift and frugality will ruin the economy for everyone but gambling with other people's homes and retirement funds is good business sense.

It's TERRORISM to NOT Update your Technology every year according to Trump's NPSM-7!

Blue checkmarks fund Nazis…

I've been costing the economy for decades now

Photographers are the worse. They are still buying lenses from 1930 and all the decades between then and now. Just because glass still works regardless of how old it is.

So it's got some fongus dirt...opens it up, washes the glass and puts it back together!

So its got a scratch or the fongus ate the surfaces... No problem! Now it has character! Need more character? Add jelly! Its great for porn! Oh, I guess its good for porn in many ways. Jelly.

"AI feature that I will eventually disable"

Jokes on you, the reason im not upgrading is that I cant disable it. So im holding out on my current devices until they die of natural causes (last smart phone lived 8 years and my FP4 should last 10), or I find a replacment I fully control.

(Just got rid of my last windows device a few weeks ago, still got the one for work, but it can be done).

Hey, it was thanks to these kinds of people that I was able to buy a literally new Galaxy S24 for $300 like a month after release.