Welcome to the Stockyard of Unaffordability

The herd here in The Stockyard of Unaffordability isn’t cheered much by the cost of a TV dropping $50 while everything essential to life has gone up by $500 or $5,000.

Welcome to the herd jammed into The Stockyard of Unaffordability, where prices keep rising and it gets more crowded as those who reckoned they were always going to be able to afford their free-spending ways end up here.

As I have endeavored to explain in recent posts, asymmetries of scaling and risk create extremes that undermine our standard of living and quality of life:

Chaos Theory: Two Essa... Robert P. Murphy Best Price: $15.61 Buy New $7.00 (as of 04:50 UTC - Details) 1. Asymmetric scaling of credit generates self-liquidating credit-asset bubbles that pop, devastating the economy: Why Credit Creates Bubbles That Break the Economy.

2. Asymmetric scaling of AI malware and slop are making an AI Depression inevitable: Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control

3. Asymmetries of risk, resources and wealth generate mutually reinforcing crises, i.e. a polycrisis with no easy resolution: This Polycrisis Is Unique

4. Recency bias (the Fed always rides to the rescue) and asymmetries of credit / speculation generate rosy projections of limitless expansion of wealth, until the bubbles all pop at once: Paging Nostradamus: You Have a Margin Call

5. When asymmetries of risk, credit, etc. create extremes that break down, this leads to Model Collapse, the collapse of the status quo’s understanding of how the world supposedly works: Iran, En-Lai, Napoleon, Mike Tyson and Model Collapse

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

6. All these realities are obscured by the perverse incentives to flood every nook and cranny of media with sensationalized click-bait / slop: Perverse Incentives Have Created a Runaway Media Monster

Meanwhile, the asymmetries of credit that benefit the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else are jacking up prices across the entire economy, a trend that is boosted by geopolitical risks and scarcities.

The bill from the veterinary clinic went from $150 to $1,000 because private equity bought up all the clinics to assemble a local quasi-monopoly. The same thing happened in rental housing: once the dominant owner jacks up rents, all the small-fry owners follow suit, a dynamic that ratchets rents higher. Overdiagnosed: Making ... Woloshin, Steve Check Amazon for Pricing.

Here in the The Stockyard of Unaffordability, people can no longer afford rent, healthcare, childcare, senior care, higher education, insurance, vehicle repairs or a pet. But TVs that deliver adverts 24/7 got a few bucks cheaper because the TV manufacturers now make more money selling ads than they do manufacturing TVs.

The herd here in The Stockyard of Unaffordability isn’t cheered much by the cost of a TV dropping $50 while everything essential to life has gone up by $500 or $5,000. All the bogus statistics don’t change anything in the stockyard: prices have leaped by 40+%, and they’re not dropping back to previous levels. So what difference does it make that prices are now (smirk) rising by only 3%. Uh, yeah, sure, whatever.

All this is driven by limitless greed thriving in a culture of moral decay. The greediest sociopaths now control the system’s gearing: finance, the open auction of political influence, legal protections for the most rapacious corporations, Anti-Progress / erosion of quality, endless increases in prices, junk fees and property / excise taxes, and so on.

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