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#art

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Have you heard of the tragedy of the Champion of Kirkwall?

+ Bonus

The og post that made me go insane

#it matters that it was there

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"a vampire and a bear walk into a bar..."

#halstarion #dave jones #neil newbon

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Is It Inflation? Or Is It Greedflation?

It’s a paradox. Inflation is dropping but prices aren’t coming down. How can this be?

Because corporations have enough monopoly power to keep them high.

Here’s just one example that will make you fizz: Pepsi.

In 2021, PepsiCo, which makes all sorts of drinks and snacks, announced it was forced to raise prices due to “higher costs.” Forced? Really? The company reported $11 billion in profit that year.

In 2023 PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digits and announced plans to keep them high in 2024.

How can they get away with this?

Well, if Pepsi were challenged by tougher competition, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which – surprise, surprise - announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi, and also kept its prices high in 2023. The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging.

We’re seeing this pattern across much of the economy — especially with groceries. Inflation is down. You see, the rate of inflation measures how quickly prices are rising. Prices are now rising far more slowly than in the past couple of years. And while supply chain disruptions really did make it more expensive to produce a lot of goods, the cost to produce them now is rising even more slowly than prices.

But consumer prices are still up, allowing most corporations to keep their profit margins near a 10-year high.

They can get away with overcharging you because they have monopoly power — or so few competitors they can easily coordinate price increases.  

If Pepsi and Coca-Cola had lots of competitors, they wouldn’t be able to raise prices so high because someone would make cheaper substitutes, and consumers would buy those instead. But Pepsi and Coke own most of the substitutes!

This isn’t just happening with Coke and Pepsi. Take meat products. At the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30% more for beef, pork, and poultry products than they were in 2020.

Why? Near-monopoly power! Just four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. So of course, it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases.

And this goes well beyond the grocery store. In 75 percent of U.S. industries, fewer companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

So what can we do?

Well, it’s largely flown under the media radar, but the Biden administration is taking on this monopolization with the aggressive use of antitrust laws.

It’s taken action against alleged price fixing in the meat industry — which has been a problem for decades.

It’s suing Amazon for using its dominance to artificially jack up prices — one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation.

It successfully sued to block the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, which would have made consolidation in the airline industry even worse.

But given how concentrated American industry has become, there’s still a long way to go. Inflation is down. But many people don’t feel it because prices are still high, and in some cases are still rising because of continued price gouging.

This is where you have more power than you might think.

You might not be able to break up big corporations, but you can keep up the pressure on our government to fight corporate monopoly power.

And help spread the truth by sharing this video.

#economics

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#amazing

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#don't make me root for the evil corpos #omg

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Drawn for the Bloodweave Brainrot's Art/Fic Swap; in response to tuffgreg's incredibly beautiful fic "cutting through the cracks of the concrete". On the day of their wedding, Gale gives Astarion a Sunwalker's Gift.

#bloodweave #art

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If they made Terminator 2 in 2018 John Connor would teach the T-800 to make bofa jokes

#classics

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🌞 and 🌑 type of romance. 🔥 and ❄️ type of romance. need I go on

#shadowheart #lae'zel #bg3 #art

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"If a pig catches both a human influenza A virus and an avian influenza A virus at the same time, it can spark a process known as viral reassortment — a genetic exchange in which flu viruses swap gene segments." "Those swaps can introduce dramatic changes, producing a new virus with certain properties of a non-human strain coupled with the capacity to infect and spread between people." "The death rate in humans may be upwards of 50 per cent, World Health Organization data suggests, though it's possible that milder infections are getting missed, skewing the case fatality ratio. Still, in a population that's never been exposed, the global impacts could be dire." "More human cases could also be happening under the radar among farm workers who've moved to the U.S. from abroad, don't speak English as their first language, and may be hesitant to seek medical help, he added." "So I think there's probably underreporting on both sides," Armstrong said." "If [H5N1] gets into a population where there's constantly animals going in and out … it might not ever leave."

I've been watching this develop for the past several days, and apart from being terrified most people will not take this seriously (I've seen a handful of people already shout conspiracy on social media and it's alarming to see, as always). What I wanted to point out is that pandemics are going to continue to be our 'normal.' I watched a great video on YouTube a while ago (I believe it was by Vice?) that touched base on how this is going to become our new reality because of multiple factors (such as our proximity to animals, and environments/etc). It was when Covid hit and they did a piece debunking some of the misinformation floating on the internet. If I can find it I will post it here because it was informative and relevant to pretty much any world crisis we will see around any virus that spreads among a human population.

This post isn't trying to fear monger anyone, I just hope more people are aware of what is happening because this is important to talk about. There are already cases (of cows getting this bird flu) in the US, and I won't be surprised if there will be instances in more countries around the world. As usual, keep washing your hands/keeping good hygiene practices, masking up (and if you aren't I hope you consider it), and taking precautions if you do happen to visit/work or go near a pig or poultry farm too:

I'll keep track of this here of course, but please stay informed folks. And also FU to any governments who will try to minimize this or try to diminish the severity until it's too late and community spread happens like Covid because their actions are influenced by capitalistic interests.

#they'll just let it kill us #and call it something else

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As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women’s spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our “deviancy from the norm”? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman–and especially, especially by trans wlw–has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.

#this is why they call it a 'community'

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#listen to people

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This site: What the fuck is with all these animated shows getting terrible live-action remakes? We should start remaking live action media as cartoons to balance the scales.

The monkey's paw: *curls one finger*

#people would die

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nowhere else

#tumblr

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Yeah, except try to use the word "commission" on a tweet and look what happens to your messages/notifs. Sometimes using code isn't to get more people to see it, it's to get less bots/scammers/people with no shame flooding into your account 🤷‍♀️

tiktok porn is so so funny.

why even try at this point

#socmed #also #we didn't call sex 'lemon' back in the day #due to algorithms #they didn't exist #we used it cos disney would sue you #for making their IP boink

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i cannot stop laughing at send no pee

#tumblr #also #OP if you're like 32 #go see a urologist

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Reference

#astarion ancunin #other ppl's ocs #art