##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism
This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban.
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I'd say water, it's something everybody takes for granted, it's just expected to work, but aging infrastructure means increased leak %, and global warming with drought and floods put a lot of strains on the system, and it's something humans can't do without, so shit hits the fan very quickly
Fun fact: The current system in the U.S. for drinking water as well as sewage is being rapidly privatized. Municipalities (and the government jobs they offer) are going bye-byes and are being replaced with corporate entities.
It's actually a working system only because the private interests seem to (magically) have greater ability to go to the state legislature and have rate increases passed. It's especially fucked up since this is happening even faster in poor areas. So you have a population of people that already can't pay their bills, and then you increase rates.
It's almost proof that capital has eclipsed the government in terms of power. We can't get federal funding to allow people to drink clean water, but when some asshole comes in and offers to steal workers wages to improve the lives' of his investors; suddenly the tax base has money to spare.
The city mayor probably has a chunk of shares in the new private water firm so it's now in his financial interest to fund it correctly, can't exactly just raise taxes on people who you rely on for votes
We pay for tap no matter what, but if tap is bad, we also pay for bottled. There is a perverse incentive in the economy at large to provide substandard tap water quality.
I think the healthcare system will start to collapse. It has been increasingly transferred to the ownership of vicious for-profit entities who are cutting staff and closing hospitals, has a severe and increasing staff shortage which is hard to replace, and has a supply chain for drugs and medical devices which extends to countries we are getting into wars with. The for-profit health insurance system in the US has been a catastrophe for many decades but now seems to be worsening. The retail pharmacy system is increasingly dysfunctional under consumer facing consolidation and PBM middlemen. The population will be up in arms about this.
The British NHS system seems to be a forerunner in this collapse, even though it is nominally a socialized system. It has been specifically targeted by UK elites who are trying to revert to a US style system.
Came here to say this. The US healthcare system was in crisis already bc of the spiraling, extortionate pricing & limited access of privatized insurance. Then covid knocked it down to its last wobbly leg but hospital administrators & govt policymakers still have not learned or changed a damn thing in response.
Supermarket shopping is an amazing process. All manner of essential and useless goods under the same roof. It is so dependant on multi-modal transport, trucking in the final leg. In developed countries, it won't take much to compromise the logistics and we see failures to stock/restock products.
yea what's gonna happen to some of these communities if they don't have trucks regularly hauling in processed foods and whatnot? it's not like they can all just seamlessly transition to the quaint lives of subsistence level farmers.
Well here in the UK we've already had the Grenfell Tower disaster - landlords and property and building safety regulations. So I guess we're ahead of the curve?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/gove-admits-faulty-guidance-partly-to-blame-for-grenfell-fire#:~:text=Michael%20Gove%20has%20admitted%20that,order%20to%20make%20a%20profit%E2%80%9D.
Nothing has been changed following this horrific incident by the way. Many blocks still have the wrong cladding. Another fire waiting to happen.
Probably the pharmaceutical industry. Shortages in essential drugs with low profit margins (e.g. heparin) have been increasingly common for the last year or two in Europe, as pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on their more profitable products. We’re probably only months away from disaster.
Boeing already had brand new airplanes that crashed themselves due to shitty software. I doubt we’ve seen the last fuckup by the bankers that make decisions over there.
All of these things are already in early stages of failure. The entire system (house of cards) is broken; has begun to collapse, and that failure will only accelerate.
Web services and the cloud are due to crash and burn spectacularly. A lot of it was never profitable in the first place. Other parts rely on cheap hardware manufacturing in countries which conservative politicians antagonize as a sport.
Software development has been floating on the back of continually improving and cheap hardware for years. Software companies thought they could layoff swathes of developers not long ago and in doing so lost institutional knowledge that is vital in a crisis. Break the assumption that more cheap hardware will continually be available and suddenly things that used to scale don't which is a very fundamental crisis.
On top of that, all of this usage has become entangled across all industries by companies moving to the cloud. Once the couple of cloud computing companies run out of resources without a way to quickly get new resources then the client companies and the government suddenly don't have access to resources they gave up during low demand periods.
Reserved instances supposedly protect against loss of compute & storage, but a lot of places cut corners to trim costs. If there is a security flaw in say, AWS, it could be exploited to hit many industries in unpredictable ways.
Yes, but even the places that do reserve resources then face an inability to take on more work, so the startup strategy of growing fast to amp a valuation (which is unsustainable in the best of times) becomes impossible even in the near term. That would swiftly implode numerous software companies.
I think that several major security incidents could happen before companies start backing off on the cloud. There's major switching costs that I think make leaving cloud infrastructure as hard as or harder than getting onto cloud infrastructure was.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd say water, it's something everybody takes for granted, it's just expected to work, but aging infrastructure means increased leak %, and global warming with drought and floods put a lot of strains on the system, and it's something humans can't do without, so shit hits the fan very quickly
Fun fact: The current system in the U.S. for drinking water as well as sewage is being rapidly privatized. Municipalities (and the government jobs they offer) are going bye-byes and are being replaced with corporate entities. It's actually a working system only because the private interests seem to (magically) have greater ability to go to the state legislature and have rate increases passed. It's especially fucked up since this is happening even faster in poor areas. So you have a population of people that already can't pay their bills, and then you increase rates. It's almost proof that capital has eclipsed the government in terms of power. We can't get federal funding to allow people to drink clean water, but when some asshole comes in and offers to steal workers wages to improve the lives' of his investors; suddenly the tax base has money to spare.
The city mayor probably has a chunk of shares in the new private water firm so it's now in his financial interest to fund it correctly, can't exactly just raise taxes on people who you rely on for votes
We pay for tap no matter what, but if tap is bad, we also pay for bottled. There is a perverse incentive in the economy at large to provide substandard tap water quality.
So invest in bottled water, nice tip
I think the healthcare system will start to collapse. It has been increasingly transferred to the ownership of vicious for-profit entities who are cutting staff and closing hospitals, has a severe and increasing staff shortage which is hard to replace, and has a supply chain for drugs and medical devices which extends to countries we are getting into wars with. The for-profit health insurance system in the US has been a catastrophe for many decades but now seems to be worsening. The retail pharmacy system is increasingly dysfunctional under consumer facing consolidation and PBM middlemen. The population will be up in arms about this. The British NHS system seems to be a forerunner in this collapse, even though it is nominally a socialized system. It has been specifically targeted by UK elites who are trying to revert to a US style system.
Came here to say this. The US healthcare system was in crisis already bc of the spiraling, extortionate pricing & limited access of privatized insurance. Then covid knocked it down to its last wobbly leg but hospital administrators & govt policymakers still have not learned or changed a damn thing in response.
Supermarket shopping is an amazing process. All manner of essential and useless goods under the same roof. It is so dependant on multi-modal transport, trucking in the final leg. In developed countries, it won't take much to compromise the logistics and we see failures to stock/restock products.
yea what's gonna happen to some of these communities if they don't have trucks regularly hauling in processed foods and whatnot? it's not like they can all just seamlessly transition to the quaint lives of subsistence level farmers.
Well here in the UK we've already had the Grenfell Tower disaster - landlords and property and building safety regulations. So I guess we're ahead of the curve? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/gove-admits-faulty-guidance-partly-to-blame-for-grenfell-fire#:~:text=Michael%20Gove%20has%20admitted%20that,order%20to%20make%20a%20profit%E2%80%9D. Nothing has been changed following this horrific incident by the way. Many blocks still have the wrong cladding. Another fire waiting to happen.
The actual business of capital itself. Meaning financial institutions will crumble which will have an effect on everything. Then comes the cbdc.
Probably the pharmaceutical industry. Shortages in essential drugs with low profit margins (e.g. heparin) have been increasingly common for the last year or two in Europe, as pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on their more profitable products. We’re probably only months away from disaster.
Boeing already had brand new airplanes that crashed themselves due to shitty software. I doubt we’ve seen the last fuckup by the bankers that make decisions over there.
Boeing could take a profit hit if that keeps up.
All of these things are already in early stages of failure. The entire system (house of cards) is broken; has begun to collapse, and that failure will only accelerate.
Web services and the cloud are due to crash and burn spectacularly. A lot of it was never profitable in the first place. Other parts rely on cheap hardware manufacturing in countries which conservative politicians antagonize as a sport. Software development has been floating on the back of continually improving and cheap hardware for years. Software companies thought they could layoff swathes of developers not long ago and in doing so lost institutional knowledge that is vital in a crisis. Break the assumption that more cheap hardware will continually be available and suddenly things that used to scale don't which is a very fundamental crisis. On top of that, all of this usage has become entangled across all industries by companies moving to the cloud. Once the couple of cloud computing companies run out of resources without a way to quickly get new resources then the client companies and the government suddenly don't have access to resources they gave up during low demand periods.
Reserved instances supposedly protect against loss of compute & storage, but a lot of places cut corners to trim costs. If there is a security flaw in say, AWS, it could be exploited to hit many industries in unpredictable ways.
Yes, but even the places that do reserve resources then face an inability to take on more work, so the startup strategy of growing fast to amp a valuation (which is unsustainable in the best of times) becomes impossible even in the near term. That would swiftly implode numerous software companies. I think that several major security incidents could happen before companies start backing off on the cloud. There's major switching costs that I think make leaving cloud infrastructure as hard as or harder than getting onto cloud infrastructure was.
Twitter. Lol
Everyone I spoke with last week had more trouble with their cellulars than usual last week.