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Start being an actual adult and start making your own shit.
The only way to free yourself from the slave racket is to stop being dependent on it to survive.
Easy mode: Learn how to cook, and cook clean whole foods. Stop buying processed junk garbage.
Hard mode: Get tools and equipment and learn how to build and fix your own shit. Difficult and will take time, but 100% worthwhile.
Both methods allow you to produce goods and offer services you can sell to other people, too. That way, those that actually can't make or do for themselves can turn to you and not shitty corporations for survival.
I actively enjoy cooking, but it's shocking and shameful how little a classic education does for one of the most fundamental aspects of living your life. Nearly every relationship I've been in I have the been the primary chef for, purely because I know the basics. Home Ecc should be a mandatory class because every single one of us needs to eat and should be able to provide a solid meal for ourselves (and it should also include finance education but that's a whole other thing). I don't put the fault on any individual person for not knowing, but it is a skill that EVERYONE should foster.
Check in to the American test kitchen YouTube for all sorts of advice, or go to the library and check out their extensive catalog. You'd be suprised how easily obtainable restaurant quality food is from your own kitchen.
This book absolutely changed my life, especially after I learned some of the easy shortcuts you can take to save time.
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Skillet-Recipes-Recipe-Classic/dp/1933615419
Absolutely changed my life, I'm not even joking.
I agree with you, but you can't do it for everything.
I see so many people just throwing money away it's crazy.
Like you said, cooking for yourself and your family. Don't eat out. Bring packed lunches to work. My family might get fast food once or twice a month max, the rest is all from the grocery store. Eating out is stupid expensive now.
When it comes to your cars. Learn to change your own oil, battery, and air filter. Dealers and repair shops charge stupid prices for this stuff and it's easy enough to do that you can do it in 15-30 minutes yourself. Remember to properly dispose of your fluids.
Learn to fix your own tech, tech jobs pay a lot which means that you as the customer will pay a lot to get your shit fixed.
Learn how to fix simple plumbing in your house, repair drywall, install/repair simple electrical stuff. When I see people in my local area paying handymen $500 to install a ceiling fan (not the electrical part like running wires, just hanging the damn thing), I about lose it.
Here it is illegal for anyone who isn't a licensed electrician to install anything permanent and electrical, such as a ceiling fan
My father was a freakin electrician and I helped him with many jobs over the years, but I'm not allowed to install a ceiling fan, even if there's existing wiring...
But who will know? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) Seriously though this is an example of how they do regulatory capture, and this sucks. At minimum, doing it without a license could make the property harder to sell, and that's nuts!
I don't think that's the initial point of OP.
The point is that quality of life and real income are in strong decline, and it doesn't seem like it will get better in any observable future, should policymakers stay the same.
Sure, there are easy methods to cut expenses or even make some beer money, but a)many have already implemented it, and b)everyone already could.
The question can be formulated as "how can we improve the living situation for everybody?". So that you wouldn't need to figure out how to live cheaper or get some side hustle as you see your income shrinks.
Yeah, lots of people in here saying "stop supporting corporations" as if it is not only easy, but simple to do.
Wanna cook whole foods? You growing your own or buying them from the Amish?
Wanna fix your own house (something I am currently doing), good luck finding a hardware/lumber supply that isn't owned by one.
Want to use the internet?
It isn't so simple. I think doing what you can with what you have is all anyone in the working class can really do. For some people it's more, others less.
In the end, it seems like human history is a series of people with wealth and resources screwing over others, with brief bursts of progress.
Ugj.
The point is, the change needs to be systemic, not just us choosing not to use corpo's products. It's impractical and often outright impossible, and personal choice never was the solution (that's not to say you shouldn't try if you really are able to).
Guess why there are all those financial gurus and politicians blaming people for "dumb spending", "lazy working" or "not supporting the causes with their dollar"? Because they know full well it isn't really feasible, but know this keeps us in the rat race while taking full blame upon ourselves rather than true villains.
Corporations (and in my personal opinion, capitalism itself, because it'll always try to find a loophole) should legally die or face very strong taxation and pushback. Stop supporting corporations on governmental level, and then we'll have a bet.
Honestly, if we all grew and shared our own food, that alone would be enough to turn the tide and improve our lives.
We could use the money we save from groceries and use it to buy land, and with that land take back economic power from corporations, politicians and the ruling class.
We could organize and pick representatives amongst us that aren't part of either party to take local offices and use their powers to change zoning laws to enable more housing to be built, and to allocate funding for such, and to pass laws banning anyone other than primary residents from buying the properties.
Assuming you want to do it legally. Arguably one individual could accomplish a lot more with the proper use of a .50 cal.
I'd argue you can't outplay corporations in their own game. If you start saving on groceries and make it a trend, they'll just find a way to cut your income once more. Because why paying so much if you can now get on with less?
Besides, the sum saved from sharing food is not nearly enough to buy any significant amount of land anyway, and you also need all the machinery and equipment to make it work, and even then this entire thing should be set at an enormous scale to combat the scale benefit of existing corpos (which would be very tough considering such scaling will cause immense oversaturation of the market and fierce price wars, to which independent businesses are not ready due to lack of reserves, i.e. corpos will just dump the price, see your community die off without money, and raise prices back up again the minute it happens, as they constantly do to manage competition).
Local representatives could work, but first something needs to be done with human perception of independent parties.
Honestly, .50 cal seems to be the most risky, violent, but most workable option. No wonder most such big changes were accompanied by bloody revolutions.
That's not true, people have been making their own stuff for thousands of years before these corpos came up and we can do it again.
And we can collectively set up our own nonprofits we all own and that actually serve us, too.
You just have to believe it's possible, which it is. And you have to believe in yourself. If you think those are lies, your worldview is just negatively skewed. People can and do make change all of the fucking time. It's time for our generation to be among them.
For those thousands of year people lived in extreme poverty, because "just making stuff yourself" is actually extremely inefficient. There's a reason industries started to centralize in the first place - the scale effect is huge, and we can't expect to beat well-coordinated, centralized entities by just "doing stuff for ourselves".
We need to organize and unite, but as I said, in a capitalist competition, unless you accrue capital bigger than the corporations (which is, well, problematic), you'll just die to a price war (unless you convince everyone to go starve).
The only way is to change the system, to put already existing production capabilities to serve general population. This means strikes. This means protests. This means instating the new government if need be. Those are exactly the methods that drove us to more equality and prosperity in the past, the thing you talk about.
We cannot move further in an existing frame, and "just believing your dream" won't change objective economic issues discussed in every economy 101. People who ignored basic economics for their idea ended up very poorly.
Making stuff ourselves and breaking free of the corporate vice grip is the only way we can make doing that viable.
Unless you thought corporations won't just stop producing until the people surrender.
The only way is to capture the means of production - they're only owned by corporations because some legal papers say so.
Corporations can and constantly do kill independent initiatives. It's actually super easy, and doesn't require anything but big cash reserves allowing them to wage price wars.
Besides, it is simply impractical to reinvent existing economy, and it will get to the same point over time. We can skip this and move directly into the factories that are already built.
That's impossible because it will require bloodshed in which millions of people will die, whereas a non-profit cooperative effort can provide people goods for free, especially when fully automated. And corporations can't beat free.
You might want a war but the rest of us don't, and we can solve our problems through peaceful means.
There are examples of peaceful transition to socialist rule - Alliende's Chile, for example. Ironic that capitalist rule was reinstated there by force in a coup led by CIA (which we know from CIA's own unclassified archives).
The cooperative can share food for free, but how will it obtain the equipment, fertilizers, seeds and everything else needed to sustain modern efficient agriculture, if it doesn't have money to do so? How will it pay its workers, or are they expected to only live off what cooperative produces? (Which means recreating entire parallel economy, something that is both not feasible with any donations anyone can make and is a stupid waste of enormous resources).
I do not want war, and I hope for the peaceful transition of power, but your "solution" ignores basic laws of economics - science that can't be ignored by "let's abolish money", because it's about resources first and foremost. You suggest that we somehow rebuild the essentially communist world from scratch - but do you understand we need the worth of entire world of resources given to us immediately for that? We cannot outcompete capitalists in a capitalist world by giving everything away, we'll quickly run out of money or resources. Thereby, we cannot grow in the economy, and will die off unless we completely overwhelm markets by the amount of goods bigger than one currently produced in an entire world, and attract everyone to work for us.
Buy the tools and equipment and you only have to triple the amount of stuff you buy so you can fix stuff or make it to sell it!
You can get tools cheap at flea markets, garage sales or Facebook Marketplace though. And they last for years.
Though remember I label it Hard Mode for a reason
What about the materials?
The same. You can even get wood for free sometimes if someone in your area cuts down a tree in their yard and curbsides the refuse.
It's not difficult. You just want to make it seem difficult to justify not having to put thought and effort into solving problems. You can't just buy your way out of everything.
Free wood that you have to store in a dry area for year or so to season then mill and plane it?
You can literally buy your way out of anything.
Look at the Kardashians, they bought themselves famous.
Then why are you here instead of buying stuff like a good corporate shill?
iT's hAaAAAaAAaRd
Sounds like we better wall the whAaAAaAmbulance because you have a fatal case of that shit.
In general:
Any difficulties a problem may have is our responsibility to come up with solutions for and overcome. That can never happen if people adopt the self-serving, cynical, negative attitude you are determined to pose on others here.
Now since you don't want to talk about the subject in good faith, you can go elsewhere.
You like quadrupled the length of this comment with your edit so I figured I’d respond again.
You can build your mattress out of people’s curbside garbage and I’ll keep answering however I’d like to.
I’m online shopping while I browse Lemmy, n00b.
What you are is being sent outside.
Go touch some grass and then you'll see it's possible to actually do for yourself. You won't discourage us from breaking away from your masters.
Can’t touch grass, too much snow.
I’m Canadian so we get four days of grass in August.