#monopoly
Ginny:You’re a lying, cheating, piece of shit! You’re not the person I married!
Harry:Fine then! We’re getting a divorce! And i’m taking the kids!
Neville, pushing the monopoly board away from them: …maybe we should stop playing
The rules for monopoly are written vague on purpose to cause disputes between friends.
Like this person thinks the creators of Monopoly have a primary goal of destroying friendships
The rules for monopoly are written vague on purpose to cause disputes between friends.
The biggest culprit for rising prices that’s not being talked about is the increasing economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few giant big corporations with the power to raise prices.
If markets were competitive, companies would seek to keep their prices down in order to maintain customer loyalty and demand. When the prices of their supplies rose, they’d cut their profits before they raised prices to their customers, for fear that otherwise a competitor would grab those customers away.
But strange enough, this isn’t happening. In fact, even in the face of supply constraints, corporations are raking in record profits. More than 80 percent of big (S&P 500) companies that have reported results this season have topped analysts’ earnings forecasts, according to Refinitiv.
Obviously, supply constraints have not eroded these profits. Corporations are simply passing the added costs on to their customers. Many are raising their prices even further, and pocketing even more.
How can this be? For a simple and obvious reason: Most don’t have to worry about competitors grabbing their customers away. They have so much market power they can relax and continue to rake in big money.
The underlying structural problem isn’t that government is over-stimulating the economy. It’s that big corporations are under competitive.
Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. The result is a transfer of wealth from consumers to corporate executives and major investors.
This has nothing to do with inflation, folks. It has everything to do with the concentration of market power in a relatively few hands.
It’s called “oligopoly,” where two or three companies roughly coordinate their prices and output.
Judd Legum provides some good examples in his newsletter. He points to two firms that are giants in household staples: Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark. In April, Procter & Gamble announced it would start charging more for everything from diapers to toilet paper, citing “rising costs for raw materials, such as resin and pulp, and higher expenses to transport goods.”
Baloney. P&G is raking in huge profits. In the quarter ending September 30, after some of its price increases went into effect, it reported a whopping 24.7% profit margin. Oh, and it spent $3 billion in the quarter buying its own stock.
How can this be? Because P&G faces very little competition. According to a report released this month from the Roosevelt Institute, “The lion’s share of the market for diapers,” for example, “is controlled by just two companies (P&G and Kimberly-Clark), limiting competition for cheaper options.”
So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that Kimberly-Clark announced similar price increases at the same time as P&G. Both corporations are doing wonderfully well. But American consumers are paying more.
Or consider another major consumer product oligopoly: PepsiCo (the parent company of Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and other brands), and Coca Cola. In April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices, blaming “higher costs for some ingredients, freight and labor."
Rubbish. The company recorded $3 billion in operating profits and increased its projections for the rest of the year, and expects to send $5.8 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2021.
If PepsiCo faced tough competition it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. In fact, it appears to have colluded with its chief competitor, Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%.
And on it goes around the entire consumer sector of the American economy.
You can see a similar pattern in energy prices. Once it became clear that demand was growing, energy producers could have quickly ramped up production to create more supply. But they didn’t.
Why not? Industry experts say oil and gas companies (and their CEOs and major investors) saw bigger money in letting prices run higher before producing more supply.
They can get away with this because big oil and gas producers don’t face much competition. They’re powerful oligopolies.
Again, inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.
Since the 1980s, when the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.
Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn.
The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JPMorgan is the largest.
It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to four today, which now control 80 percent of domestic seating capacity.
It let Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merge, leaving America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft, Boeing.
Three giant cable companies dominate broadband [Comcast, AT&T, Verizon].
A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry [Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck].
So what’s the appropriate response to the latest round of inflation? The Federal Reserve has signaled it won’t raise interest rates for the time being, believing that the inflation is being driven by temporary supply bottlenecks.
Meanwhile, Biden Administration officials have been consulting with the oil industry in an effort to stem rising gas prices, trying to make it simpler to issue commercial driver’s licenses (to help reduce the shortage of truck drivers), and seeking to unclog over-crowded container ports.
But none of this responds to the deeper structural issue – of which price inflation is symptom: the increasing consolidation of the economy in a relative handful of big corporations with enough power to raise prices and increase profits.
This structural problem is amenable to only one thing: the aggressive use of antitrust law.
“Draw the squad” Monopoly edition except it’s some of my BElves and WoW dads.
Poor little Mestvin, who jailed my baby boy??
“Perverted purple motherfucker with a blood fetish”
So i forgot Tsukiyama’s name so i searched google and-
Google gets it. Google is good.
“Perverted purple motherfucker with a blood fetish”
i just saw two people have the pupils of their eyes contort into red heart shapes & then they ran into a room together & slammed the door shut the door & sounds of shrieking monkeys & bongos started emanating from the room, does anyone know what this was
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about movie franchises and how they can be awesome if done right or terrible if done wrong. Today I want to expand on that theme and talk about some other trends that studios have been using to try to cash in.
The first trend is the reboot, which has a spotty track record. There are some franchises that have been rebooted with much success and critical acclaim. The ones that jump immediately to mind are The Dark Knight trilogy reboot of the Batman franchise and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies. Both of these reboots took well known and well traveled characters and storylines and breathed new life into them which led to commercial and critical success. However, there are plenty of reboots that fail to achieve the success of their predecessors, both at the box office and from the critics.
Things get even more insane when franchises get rebooted multiple times. The Spiderman franchise had some success with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and then the reboot did pretty well with Andrew Garfield. Now there are rumors that Spiderman will be rebooted yet again with another new star. James Bond has been re-cast so many times I’ve lost count and, other than the recent Daniel Craig movies, it hasn’t been a boost to the quality or success of the franchise. Hollywood will try to squeeze blood out of a stone and every last dollar out of a potentially lucrative franchise.
The second trend in Hollywood is the remake, which is slightly different than the reboot. A remake is when a well-known film is copied as the framework for another film but many of the settings, characters, and plot points are changed or updated. A recent example of this is the remake of the 1982 classic musical movie Annie, which was (quite unnecessarily) remade in 2014 with a new plot, new characters, and several new songs.
Remakes can sometimes be great. Ocean’s Eleven is a remake of a “rat pack” film from the 60’s and it’s one that I enjoy considerably. The Coen Brothers remake of True Grit is another that I thought was well done and added a new dimension to the John Wayne starring original. But the remakes that match or exceed the original films they are based on are rare, and too often they lose what made the original films so special and loved.
The last trend I’m going to talk about today, and the one that I really can’t stand, is the trend towards increasingly absurd adaptations. It’s not uncommon for TV shows to be adapted to films, and sometimes with a lot of success. Batman was a television show first. 21 Jump Street was a television show first. There would have been no Serenity without the television show Firefly. And of course the wonderful films of the Monty Python comedy troupe would not have been possible without the television success of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There have been plenty of duds too, but it’s not the worst thing that Hollywood has done.
But the trend is spiraling downward recently with more and more absurd adaptations. Disney turned a relatively popular theme park attraction into the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which is sadly still continuing long past it’s expiration date. Video games have been adapted into several films, none of which were as good or as popular as the games they were based on. In recent years, sanity has been stretched to the point where board games like Battleship, Monopoly, Candy Land, and the Ouija Board have been adapted into films or are at some point in the development process. I’m just waiting on movie studios to adapt crappy television commercials or cell phone games into movies. It’s going to happen.
It’s hard to generalize and say that reboots, remakes, and adaptations are a good thing or a bad thing. When done with care and craft they can be great to watch and successful financially. However, as I said in part one of my thoughts on movie franchises, I think that the lack of creativity and over-reliance on proven commodities is one of the reasons that people aren’t going to the movies as often. Plus there is more competition for our time and money with the increased quality of television and online entertainment. Angela will have more thoughts on that in the next few days.
One of my friends commented that there seems to be a wealth of huge blockbuster franchises and an explosion of low budget independent films but the “middle class” movies are getting squeezed out. I don’t have exact figures, but my initial reaction is that he’s on to something. I know studio executives want to try to minimize risk and maximize profits by creating films that can be cross-marketed and have a wealth of merchandising opportunities, but the primary reason for making a movie should be because it’s a good movie. When movie studios figure that out, maybe they will see the business grow.
Starbucks is shutting down Kismet, a local Turkish cafe under the claim they serve espresso
Spoilers: they don’t. It’s Turkish coffee.
In the center of Alderwood Mall in Washington, there’s two kiosks.
One is a creation built from the ground up (Literally. They had to install the plumbing and electric themselves.) by a married couple from Turkey. They had a restaurant before immigrating here, and chose to set up shop in a region with a huge middle eastern population. Achma, simit, baklava, Nutella Bomb (Bomb of Izmir remix), börek, and whatever baked goods they’re giving a whip up are worked on as they chat with you. Turkish coffee is brewed and served in beautiful little cups, Italian sodas prepped, and with a baked good of choice enjoyed at the wrap around counter. The place has become a tiny cultural island of familiarity, where friends and families gather to chat, eat and drink.
The other is a duplicate stamp fast food kiosk by a bloated multi-billion dollar corporation that’s already shut down one of its three (3) locations within the mall, leaving yet another unoccupied dead space.
For years, it’s ignored Kismet’s presence while it made the usual hard climb from startup. But it’s gotten popular. And they don’t like it.
And so they walk up to Brookfield Properties who own the mall, and whip out the contract of no one else on the property serving espresso (yes. they have that. insidious isn’t it?) demanding that the Turkish coffee shop close. Here’s the screamer though: They. Don’t. Serve. Espresso. But Brookfield won’t squirm under the thumb of the megacorp unless it’s made loud and clear what a big mistake that is.
If you would like to help, even signing the petition will carry this forward. Reblog and share it too, and let’s see if we can’t give Starbucks a well-earned kick in the groin.
Please give this petition your signature. These kinds of stores are so important and especially because they are immigrants!
Monopoly: into the monopolyverse
These mf character designs