The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "A) It’s not a small amount of money lost to theft, and
B) Locking up baby food does NOT cause children to starve.
But why is baby formula often locked up? That question became far more interesting than I thought before I researched this lousy meme.
▪️When thinking of high-theft retail items, the first things you’d think of would probably be electronics, designer clothes, liquor or tools. Few outside the retail industry would think of baby formula.
▪️Yet, in the National Retail Federation’s 2018 crime report, infant formula ranked the 3rd most targeted item in the US! Only designer clothes & laundry detergent were stolen more. In their 2020 survey, formula was tied for 6th, beating out items like cigarettes and cell phones...
Retail theft reached an all-time high of $61.7B in 2019, up more than $10B from 2018. Which means that baby formula theft is likely in the hundreds of millions, if not higher (no exact data exists). The NRF survey attributes the rise to lax law enforcement, changes in shoplifting laws & decreased penalties... As for baby formula theft, it’s so big that there have been entire organized theft rings targeting it for decades. Police busted the “Hernandez Group” in 2010, who stole $2.5M in formula from Safeway stores in CA and OR. Feds carried out “Operation Milk Money” the same year, busting a ring in NJ...
▪️Infant formula is surprisingly (and unnecessarily) expensive. A 30 oz can typically costs over $30, with specialty formulas going for 2-3X that or more. For dehydrated milk and some vitamins. Just 3 companies (Abbot Laboratories, Mead Johnson & Gerber) control 98% of the market... This is due to a combination of strict manufacturing regs & huge gov’t subsidies. 57-68% of all infant formula in the US is purchased with gov’t funds through WIC, the welfare program for infants and children. ️This effectively eliminates price sensitivity for the most price-conscious buyers of formula (and also why locking up formula doesn’t result in babies starving). For low income mothers needing special formulas for medical reasons, Medicaid covers it, again eliminating the price sensitivity... formula became expensive, but still had a small margin for retailers, as the baby formula cartel companies enjoyed the markup. Small retailers, who can’t buy in bulk like the big box stores, have an incentive to purchase formula from “outside sources” to improve their bottom line... Of course, those stealing formula aren’t doing so for their own use. Many are drug addicts looking for a quick buck"
Meme: "Friendly reminder when you see locked up baby food, a company would rather children starve than to lose a small amount of money to theft."
Robert Reich Makes 36% More Than Average CEO and Gets $40k for a One-hour Talk Vs. Average Worker Pay of $46k/year - "Professor Reich took time off from his hectic one-course, two-hour a week teaching schedule to berate and excoriate American CEOs and Harvard Business School in a post on the Harvard Business Review blog for allowing “a pay gap between CEOs and ordinary workers that’s gone from 20-to-1 fifty years ago to almost 300-to-1 today.”...
'In 2013, the BLS reports that the average pay for America’s 248,760 chief executives was only $178,400'...
at the same time that Reich complains about the excessive compensation of a small group of a few hundred highly paid CEOs, he actually makes 36% more than the average CEO in the US for lecturing a few hours a week (see chart above). Even considering additional work preparing lectures and grading papers or exams, it’s probably safe to assume that Professor Reich is putting in 50-60 hours per week like the majority of America’s CEOs for his very generous pay of more than a quarter-of-a-million dollars per year. In addition to his annual CU-Berkeley salary of $242,613, Professor Reich is also a popular speaker on the nation’s lecture circuit, and he commands a handsome speaking fee of $40,000 for a one-hour talk (including Q&A) plus first class travel for one or two people from California, hotel accommodations for up to two nights, ground transportation, meals and incidentals... So we have the former labor secretary complaining about a pay gap between CEOs and average workers, when he gets almost as much in compensation for a one-hour talk as the average American worker earns working full-time for an entire year (see chart above)! If he gives only six speeches a year, his annual income approaches half-a-million dollars a year, putting him solidly in America’s “top 1%” by income – a group the “class warrior” frequently criticizes... in any discussion of CEO pay we should remember that the average CEO in America earned only $176,400 last year (not multi-millions of dollars), received an increase in salary less than the average worker, and earned only about 5 times more than the average worker (not 300X more)."
Meme - "Idc how many times someone explains it to me will NEVER understand why we can't just print more money"
Meme - "A gift from an evicted tenant, she sealed the fridge with blue tape and left all the stuff in there for months, fridge was unplugged"
Damn slumlords not maintaining their properties!
Meme - "I just sent this months rent in"
"i haven't received anything?"
"april fools!!!"
"here is a photo i took of you sleeping this morning"
Toronto condo tenant drives a Lamborghini but doesn't pay their rent - "the landlord claims the monthly fee of $5,000 has not been paid for over ten months... He says that it's not the first time he's encountered tenants with high-end entails and luxury cars defaulting on rent. "When Leonard and Natalie Waldman were being evicted from their Highland Crescent house, they were driving BMWs"... "Last month, I evicted a tenant from a house at Yonge & St Clair — they couldn't pay the $3000 a month in rent for close to four months before they voluntarily agreed to leave. Part of the application against them was the unsafe charging of their Tesla.""
Meme - "I found a way to make leitists stop bitching about land lords
100 Worst Landlords in New York City
*Jewish names*"
Meme - "My annoying landlord
I pay this bitch $1800 every fucking month and all she do is complain about is "making too much noise walking around" so I brought a dog whistle and blow it all hours of the day & night now I complain how much her dog barks and keep me up"
"That is the ultimate petty move and I applaud you"
"This is great"
People Actually Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality - The Atlantic - "in his just-published book, On Inequality, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that economic equality has no intrinsic value. This is a moral claim, but it’s also a psychological one: Frankfurt suggests that if people take the time to reflect, they’ll realize that inequality isn’t really what’s bothering them. People might be troubled by what they see as unjust causes of economic inequality, a perfectly reasonable concern given how much your income and wealth are determined by accidents of birth, including how much money your parents had, your sex, and the color of your skin. We are troubled as well by potential consequences of economic inequality. We may think it corrodes democracy, or increases crime, or diminishes overall happiness. Most of all, people worry about poverty—not that some have less, but rather “that those with less have too little.” Frankfurt argues, though, that we aren’t really bothered by inequality for its own sake. He points out that few worry about inequalities between the very rich and the very well off, even though these might be greater, both absolutely and proportionately, than inequalities between the moderately well-off and the poor. A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live. Therefore, “equality” can’t be what we really value. Some of Frankfurt’s arguments get technical, but it’s not hard to think of cases where a mistaken focus on equality makes the world worse. My favorite example here is from the comedian Louis C.K., where he describes how his five-year-old’s toy broke and she demanded that he break her sister’s toy, which would make things equal... In research I’ve been involved with at Yale, led by then-graduate student Mark Sheskin, we find that younger children actually have an anti-equality bias—they prefer distributions where they get a relative advantage over equal distributions where everyone gets the same. For instance, children prefer one for them and zero for another child over an arrangement where everyone gets two. This finding meshes well with what other psychologists have found—and which many parents have observed: When treats are being distributed, children will complain bitterly if they get less, but are entirely mellow if they get more. Other primates behave similarly... in a small society, a wannabe dictator can be ignored or ridiculed by everyone else, and if he doesn’t get the message, he can be beaten up, expelled from the group, or killed. But this is a harder trick to pull in a society of millions where interactions are no longer face-to-face and where the powerful have guns and gulags... we don’t find a smidgen of evidence that humans or any other species naturally value equality for its sake... when asked to create a perfect society, respondents choose one in which those in the top fifth have about three times more wealth than those in the bottom fifth"
The left get around this by saying inequality is unfair
Do rent controls and other tenancy regulations affect new construction? Some answers from long-run historical evidence - "The (re-)introduction of tenancy regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent controls promise short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This study presents new long-run data on both rent regulation and housing construction for 16 developed countries (1910–2016) and finds that more restrictive rental market legislation generally has a negative impact on both new housing construction and residential investment. This is especially true for strict rent controls and housing rationing measures in the post-1960 period. Tenancy security can on average also dampen construction activity. The negative effect is overall less significant and strong in magnitude than expected and may have been offset by exemptions for new construction, by compensating social housing construction and by a flight of new construction into the owner-occupied sector. Still, on average, rent controls came at the cost of less construction activity."
Rent Control Effects through the Lens of Empirical Research: An almost Complete Review of the Literature - "Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solution, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? To answer this question, we need to identify the effects of rent control. This study reviews a large empirical literature looking at various aspects of rent controls. We conclude that rent controls are quite effective in terms of lowering housing rents or slowing their growth, but they also lead to a wide range of adverse effects affecting both landlords and tenants."
Meme - "Gen Z be like "If you can't tip, don't eat out!" then proceed to shoplift"
They hate "big business" and love "workers"
Video shows loss prevention officers struggling with shoplifting suspect outside Winners store in downtown Toronto - " A security guard can be heard on camera saying that the man was “shoplifting” and that he is “under arrest.” “This has nothing to do with you… we are loss prevention,” Tee is told before they all disappear inside the building. “The man is begging in the video. He seems like he needs help,” Tee said. “I don’t know what happened in the store before he was outside but he really seemed like the victim of the scenario.” She said she does not understand why loss prevention officers would have the authority to use that kind of physical force on a shoplifting suspect. “Many stores have policies in place where loss prevention isn’t allowed to physically touch anyone,” she added... Tee said she hopes the video sparks a more in-depth conversation about what is appropriate conduct for security guards. “Even if someone is stealing, they are still a human being and they deserve to be treated like a human being. Objects can be replaced,” she said. “I was really shook up having witnessed this violence in broad daylight.”"
Comment: "This was the least excessive "excessive force" video I've ever seen."
Basically shoplifting is okay
Meme - "U.S. Soldiers Killed in Taliban Firefight"
Leftist: "they knew what they were signing up for."
"Officers Shot, Killed During Arrest"
Leftist: "Yup, same. They signed up for it."
"The first payment on the student loan you signed up for is due at the end of the month."
Leftist: "UNFAIR!"
Canceling Student Debt Would Be an Insult to Trade Workers - ""I know guys who worked hard to get a construction operation running. Some had to take out a loan on a big old diesel truck. Why would we forgive the cost of a degree but not the cost of a lease payment?" It's a good question. "For some reason," continues Rowe, "we think a tool that looks like a diploma is somehow more important than that big piece of metal in the driveway that allows the guy to build homes that you…are in." The political class does focus on subsidizing college. "Now everybody is armed with a degree. What kind of world is that?" asks Rowe. "Everybody dreams of being in the corner office, but nobody knows how to build the corner office?" Lots of good jobs in skilled trades don't require a college degree, he points out. "The push for college came at the expense of every other form of education. Shop class was taken out of high school. We have denied millions of kids an opportunity to see what half the workforce looks like." It's a reason America now has a shortage of skilled trade workers. Yet, plumbers, elevator mechanics construction managers, etc., make $100,000 a year... "Forgive student loans" really means workers must pay for privileged students who don't."
What British landlords can learn from Finland’s disastrous rent controls experiment - "With interest rates rising and landlords selling up in droves, Britain is facing a deepening rental crisis. Prices of renting across the country are rapidly rising as the supply of properties shrinks and the cost of maintaining a let climbs. The crisis has prompted some politicians to opt for rent controls – Nicola Sturgeon announced a temporary ban on rent rises on existing lets in Scotland in September and the Scottish Government plans to introduce a 3pc cap on rent rises from April. The Welsh Government has committed to exploring rent controls and London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for powers to be able to set caps in the capital. When Finland faced a similar rental supply crunch in the 1990s, policymakers did not introduce more regulation. Instead, they scrapped it altogether in a move that has been hailed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a housing policy success story. The experience of Finland’s rental experiment offers lessons for policymakers in Britain as they confront the same problem – and suggests that the current approach being championed by Sturgeon and Khan may be the wrong solution. Finland was historically a country of rent controls. Waves of restrictions were imposed, first after Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917, then during World War II, and then again during the 1960s, says Harri Hiltunen, chief executive of Kiinteistöliitto, the real estate association of Finland, and a former government housing adviser. Every aspect of the private rental sector was controlled by the Government and there were strict rules to limit evictions. By the 1990s, rental supply was crumbling. Even in Helsinki – where higher prices meant landlords arguably had the most incentive to stay in the market – the number of rental properties fell by 11pc between 1975 and 1985, according to Census and Statistics Finland. As supply declined, the rent controls also effectively stopped working. “We had a black market”... Because these rents were illegal, landlords simply did not declare them to the tax office... A secondary market also sprang up, whereby companies would lease buildings from landlords and then sublet properties to their employees, says Hiltunen. “That was another way to bypass the regulation.” Landlords who obeyed the rules were often unable to raise rents enough to pay for maintenance, Hiltunen adds, prompting more and more to sell up. Then in the 1990s, Finland was hit by an economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “A lot of Finnish construction companies had built dwellings that they were not able to sell,” says Hiltunen. In response, the Finnish Government lifted rent controls for new contracts in 1993 and then for all existing contracts in 1995. Once the restrictions were lifted, rental supply bounced almost immediately. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of rental properties in Finland jumped by 45pc... Economists now view the country as having one of the most liberal rental markets in the world. As in the UK, Finland’s private rental sector is made up primarily of individual, small-scale buy-to-let investors... The black market has disappeared and the vibrant market forced investors to improve their offerings. “Landlords and rental housing companies had to develop loyalty programmes so that their tenants would stay,” says Hiltunen. “They had to upgrade their services because there was competition.”... in Finland, the jump in rental supply did not have a negative impact on the wider housing market... “House price growth in Finland has been moderate. It had a pandemic surge but it was not on the scale of Sweden or the UK,” says Daniel Kral, of Oxford Economics. A Finnish house building boom has been key. Between 1996 and 2022, Finland has roughly doubled its housing output. The number of completed dwellings has surged from 21,000 to 41,000 a year... In some areas, there is an oversupply, says Hiltunen. Some landlords who have leases that state they will raise rents each year in line with inflation have found they are unable to because supply outweighs demand"
Liberals don't love the poor - they hate the rich
TTC eyes bus integration with other GTA transit agencies | The Star - "while transit providers from neighbouring municipalities can run buses in Toronto, under provincial legislation they can’t offer local service within city limits... Better cross-border service would particularly benefit lower-income communities on the edge of the city... ATU Local 113 president Marvin Alfred said the union won’t support the plan, which he warned would “threaten the integrity” of Toronto’s transit system and “provide the TTC with a convenient excuse to cut TTC routes and outsource service to other transit agencies.”"
Leftists love low income communities, public transport and unions. So the solution is for the government to spend even more money paying off the union
My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month : canada - "Some rich asshole bitching about housing can get the fuck to the back of the line."
"The modern interpretation of class warfare is: The proletariat = anyone who makes the same or less than me. The Bourgeoisie = Anyone that makes more than me"
Meme - "Covered everything but the logo
Edit for the smooth-brain commentors: She didn't get a Mac because she needed a laptop. She got a Mac because she wanted the brand. She could have gotten any great laptop for a much lower price. Same with the boots. Same with the coffee. She's just a hypocrite, simple as that. We're not saying she should abandon technology and go all Ted K. Just that buying for the brand is dumb and anything but "smashing" capitalism. There is a big difference between in the system because you gave to, and going out of your way to support it by buying overpriced things for the brand. It's not hard to understand. Think."
"Smashing capitalism with a $1200 Mac and $7 Starbucks drink"
Meme - MrBeast @MrBeast: "Twitter - Rich people should help others with their money
Me - Okay. I'll use my money to help people and I promise to give away all my money before I die. Every single penny.
Twitter - Demon"
Liberals just hate rich people
Meme - "I cleaned those toilets. I deserve to own the means of production *McDonald's uniform*"
Lenin’s New Economic Policy: When the Soviets Admitted Socialism Doesn't Work - "What was Vladimir Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe early in 1921? Free markets... The next time you hear a democratic socialist declare that his system hasn’t been tried yet, reel off this list for starters (for more, check out the recommended readings below): Ancient Rome’s Republic began its deadly experiment in democratic socialism in the 2nd Century B.C... The Pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts famously tried another version of democratic socialism seventeen centuries later... After World War II, Great Britain voted the democratic socialists into power and turned the country into “the Sick Man of Europe.” Margaret Thatcher administered a strong dose of capitalism 30 years later, before the patient would have expired. Scandinavia adopted the welfare state version of socialism around the same time as Britain. Economic decline set in as it took hold. But Norwegians, Danes and Swedes learned much from their mistakes and reversed many of them. Today, their economies are among the freest in the world. New Zealand found itself mired in the doldrums of democratic socialism by the 1980s but recovered dramatically through drastic reductions in government"
Damn CIA!
Meme - Batman: "When the lower level goons pay their debt to society, Wayne has many employment and rehabilitation the services to get them back on their feet."
Liberal woman: "You should be giving all that money to government!"
Poison Ivy: "Loggers were clearing dead wood from the forest, so I burned their organs inside out with by acidic pheromones."
Liberal woman: "Yass! Stopping the 1% and saving the Earth!"
Choose Your Own Adventure books spread conservative, neoliberal ideology to 1980s kids, according to a historian of capitalism. - "A historian of capitalism exposes how Choose Your Own Adventure books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”... the books don’t let you make one big choice. I was totally blown away when I found out that all of the books—I didn’t remember this, at all—assume that the “you” who’s reading the book is white, and almost always a white middle-class boy. They totally could have kept [the protagonist] neutral, you know? They didn’t have to have it be a white boy."
Leftists don't believe in agency, and they hate anything fun they don't control
Of course there's the usual lying. From the covers you can tell that the protagonist isn't always a white boy. The Treasure of the Onyx Dragon features a girl protagonist, for example
I'm sure a leftist game where you didn't have any agency and weren't the hero would be a smash hit
Meme - "The government is racist and corrupt.
They're in bed with billionaires and corporations.
So, we should tax billionaires and corporations.
And give that money to the government."
Meme - "CAPITALISM"
"INFINITE GROWTH *huge spoon*"
"FINITE RESOURCES *small bowl*"
These are the same people who bitch about wages not going up
Harvard Economist Raj Chetty Creates God’s-Eye View of Pandemic Damage - Bloomberg - "An analysis of the patents filed by 1.2 million Americans found children of the top 1% are 10 times more likely to be inventors than equally smart kids from other backgrounds. If talented women, minorities, and children from low-income families could invent at the same rate as well-off White men, Chetty and his co-authors estimated, these “lost Einsteins” could quadruple innovation in the U.S."
The tabula rasa delusion strikes again
Max Coplan on Twitter - "Employing people based on their ability to perform a job ostracizes those with little or no skill and has no place in an inclusive society"
Meme - Apple retail union memes @ARUmemes: "Fun activity alert
1. Ask a manager how much in sales your store did this year
2. Divide that number by how many employees there are at your store
3. That's a lot of money
4. You and your coworkers deserve more of that money"
Not understanding the difference between revenue and profit: this is why these commies only earn minimum wage