this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I honestly thought financing pizza was a joke until I looked it up. Like wtf that's some predatory shit

Edit: this one is funny though: https://www.businessinsider.com/hell-pizza-company-letting-customers-buy-now-pay-when-dead-2023-5?op=1

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's like the government just stopped caring to protect us at all. Every regulatory system has been broken. You are being sold carcinogens every day and there is no help coming. Have a nice day!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

It’s unfortunate, but even without the boomers we might be speed running into a brick wall.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right?! It's just tricking people into spending money they shouldn't.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's like 99% of what marketing is.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Which is one of the many reasons why advertising should be illegal with very few exceptions.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s vile what we consider normal.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Absolutely.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Next they will have Pizza Mortgages and their logical counterpart, the Reverse Pizza Mortgage.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

" If you own your pizza, you could qualify for a reverse pizza mortgage!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did anybody at all read the article?

666 people are enrolled in a trial system so that their pizza debts are collected from their estate when they die.

No interest rate or fees.

So.......

Basically free pizza for life. It's not predatory, And it's insane to me that people post articles, even in a comment, without reading them. Because if you had read the article "predatory" would be the furthest thing for your mind. It's just a gimmick promotion to increase sales

I definitely wish I was one of those 666 people

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Shit, if everyone signs up for that what's to stop them from going bankrupt before you have to pay? Also, what stops people from altering the will after the fact?

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

You know your life has gone to shit when you have to finance a pizza.

But most importantly, whichever corporate honchos thought preying on the ultra-poor was a decent thing to do and authorized this scheme should know they're worthless human beings.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My wife and I were talking about this earlier. Boomers who managed to save cash were able to put that money into fixed income assets at incredibly high interest rates during the eighties. A 5 year CD in 1984 paid 12%, at renewal in 1989 it was, 9%, then 6.5% at the next renewal in 1994. In 1999 rates started their race to the bottom but stocks skyrocketed. So if you amassed cash in the eighties and nineties through fixed income, you had a great position to capitalize on the dot com boom, buy cheap during its crash, buy cheap real estate after the 2008 financial crash, capitalize on the market rebound, etc. All mostly for free because of timing.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All easy decisions, in hindsight. In reality quite a few missed out completely on all of those or lost significantly. It's all just some sort of gambling in a casino. I'm sure in hindsight it will be clear which opportunities you missed out on in your time. The big difference is being able to save to start off with, because wages were relatively a lot higher for simple jobs than they are now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's why I started by highlighting the fixed income stuff like five year CDs. I remember my mother and grandmother putting their money in those and bonds and how well it served them into retirement. Those weren't hindsight. Back then, working families put their money in savings. Sure there were Wall Street cocaine yuppies making insane money but, at least in my household, that was just the stuff of movies.

I'm not fully disagreeing with you. I just think both aspects made a difference. Higher wages and a feasible way to save your money without having to partake in the casino was key. I look at millennials and zoomers and I see none of that. Low wages, higher cost, and the only way to save for retirement is by betting everything you've got on a system that's heavily rigged against you as a retail investor. As Gen-X at least we had the chance to make our own wealth by creating an entire new industry. My younger siblings and my children would have had none of that, if I had siblings or children. /Rant

EDIT: The eternal battle with autocorrect

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah. People could also get rich now on crypto, but that's easy to say in hindsight, it was all a gamble, and just as many people lost a whole lot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

covid crash happened only a few years ago and looking back it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Of course at the time there was a very real possibility that society was collapsing and there wouldn't be a stock market in a year or so.

everything's easy in hindsight

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Domino's barely even puts sauce on the fucking pizza anymore. Fuck the economy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Costco pizza is the best. I just wish they had more variety.

Also I wish I could just order on my phone and then pick up when I'm done shopping, rather than having to queue for 15 minutes to order and then wait another 15 while they cook it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Costco pizza is the best.

Man, idk what kind of pizza options you have in your area, but I'm sorry that none of them are good.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Costco pizza is fire. If you dab some grease off and try to ignore the feeling of your arteries actively clogging, it's pretty damn good

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Oh I can get better, but not that much for that price.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Don't fuck it... That will bring a worse bastard to live.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"You will own nothing and you will be happy about it." -1100 c.e. The Feudal System

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Feudal peasants actually got a decent amount of time off, because the landlords understood that they had to keep the masses happy. Medieval peasants had an average of like four months of vacation time a year. Basically, the ruling class knew that the only thing stopping the peasants from marching up to the castle with pitchforks was the peasants’ own sense of civility.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

And by "vacation", you mean "Time spent working not to pay taxes"

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As if advertisement wasn't already the most insidious part of everyday life, now they're also laughing at us and the capitalist hellscape they've put us in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Not really capitalism if they got the government's economic and political support against competitors. I'd really call it Neomercantilism more than anything

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

...............thats literally what capitalism always does. manipulate the government for economic and political support. Thats like capitalism 101.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's the interest charged? If they're charging 0% of interest then it could be a good decision if you have an account that pay interest over thar time. Obviously, it also assumed that ypu were already going to buy a pizza anyway.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

6 weeks of interest at 0.25%apr compounded daily on a ten dollar pizza is 0.34 cents, or 0.0034 dollars. Might not be worth it, but ymmv.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

My APR is 4.26 at Discover, Ally, and Sofi... that's like 17x the pennies!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you're catering some huge event (...with pizza, apparently), it would absolutely make sense.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Today's Behind the Bastards is about how Christianity was eaten by capitalism. The super far right propaganda campaign like FOX news and PragerU started before WWII when pastors were all far left champions of the poor. (Contrast today.)

Seems relevant.

FDR's New Deal was meant to stop the Great Depression from turning into a socialist revolution (We were watching the early USSR play out).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Interesting, I've always wondered how American Christianity managed to be so right-wing despite being based on the idea of a rebellious, anti-materialist, proto-socialist, proto-hippie Middle-Eastern figure.

I'm not religious but was raised Christian so the contrast between their interpretation of Christianity and the "teachings of Christ" are baffling.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Medieval Christianity was already very removed from that figure tbf.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

If you look as religion as padding for the ego instead of an idealistic pursuit, it makes all the more sense.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cardboard? Are you talking about the pizza, or the build quality of a lot of new houses I’ve seen?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The pizza mostly, but that also fits.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Born to early to experience a capitalist free post scarcity solarpunk utopia

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