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Cake day: 2026年5月27日

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  • Aneorthisio@lemmy.mltome_irl@lemmy.worldMe_irl
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    23 小时前

    Something I realized years ago.

    There are many “dystopian” works of fiction where the characters actually get housing and enough food for their needs provided by the government free of charge in exchange for ideological compliance or at least pretending to. In these settings the government functions as a totalitarian entity micromanaging all aspects of existence, so the “freedom” to starve to death is effectively eradicated along with other freedoms.

    By decoupling survival from labor market participation, or more accurately, by making the labor market an extension of the state, the system achieves a level of physiological stability that is undeniably attractive to anyone who has ever experienced the existential dread of housing insecurity or food scarcity in the current system.

    In many dystopian settings, such as the works of Huxley and Orwell, the terror comes from the watchful eye of the state and the fear of punishment for deviation. In our current system, the terror comes from invisibility and abandonment, being ignored by a system that definitely has the resources and the means to feed you (roughly half the food produced today is being wasted) but refuses to do so unless you prove useful can definitely feel more dehumanizing and dystopian than being strictly micromanaged by an overbearing authority.










  • Taxi (2004) was inspired by the French movie of the same name from 1998, and Just Visiting (2001) was based on Les Visiteurs (1993), they are both hollow, sterilized versions of the originals and made the fatal mistake of thinking they could just swap out the setting while keeping the plot, something that almost never works.

    The original Taxi is a gritty, high octane love letter to the sun drenched city of Marseille and the broader French Riviera, it thrives in the collision of two distinct worlds, a taxi driver hailing from the low income suburbs of the city and the fancier world of career law enforcement, uniting against a common enemy in a chaotic investigation.

    Les Visiteurs is a genius satire about the collision of medieval religious values and modern consumer society, making equal fun of spirituality and materialism through its various characters.

    Just watch the originals with subtitles.





  • When you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, this is just the latest instance of ever expanding credit being converted into assets, just like housing, and reflected in everything down to groceries.

    The structural problem lies in the very fact that we have, since 1971 and the end of the Bretton Woods system, fiat currencies backed by nothing tangible or physical, allowing for limitless expansion and by extension inevitable devaluation.

    That money has to go somewhere to avoid being eaten by the very inflation it created, holding onto a resource that can be infinitely replicated, like currency in our present system, is a guaranteed loss.

    The goal of fiat fueled VC bubbles is never to generate immediate, honest profits from selling a product to consumers, the goal is asset inflation and capital preservation.

    The system is not broken, it is in fact working exactly as intended.