Would you rather have 12 people from the street judging what kind of medical treatment is best for you, or just a single medical specialist?

Well, personally I would break off contact with my parents if they openly supported fascism, but other than that you can suggest they just read a book about economics or some such. Rich countries all have far higher taxes on petrol than California, and with good reason.

No hard proof, though the things there is proof for are more than sufficient for it to be absurd he is still in power.

Yeah, honestly the prospects aren’t looking great, though the problem is not so much “billionaires […] captur[ing] [the] political class” as much as unregulated social media algorithms capturing the lumpen proletariat.

Every large company wastes millions on overpaid executives.

If companies pocketed all gains from productivity boosts, a T-shirt would cost a thousand dollars or so. Not only that, but no one would think to start selling T-shirts for hundreds of dollars or less, despite them costing 10 cents a piece to make in a sweatshop.

Is that what happens?

You reference it, you cite it.

It’s right here in the comment chain.

Oh ho ho, they can and will.

Okay, but they don’t, profit margins are typically a few percent.

Riddle me this: why did Kmart (for example) declare bankruptcy? They just wanted to throw away free money?

Leaving aside city planning and public transport issues (in which you do sound defeatist), it’s also simply a matter of fuel efficiency. American cars are less fuel-efficient than European or Asian ones and adoption of EVs is relatively low because policymakers have deliberately followed terrible policies in order to win elections.

An economic system characterized by the private ownership of the means of production, and state regulation to protect the right of private ownership.

Strange, lived in capitalist societies all my life, yet none of these seem familiar (except climate change).

Let’s see who’s really behind that mask!

My university had an epic trolling department, naming one of the first-semester maths courses “LALA.”

Indeed. The obsession with petrol prices in the US is funny to me, as one of the reasons the US economy has fallen so far behind leading economies is precisely the too low prices of petrol.

They have some leeway, in euros it’s just shy of €2.50 per litre.

Over $10 in my state.

Head in the sand my dude. Canadian groceries were caught red handed colluding on bread price fixing.

Yes, I am aware there are cartels and other anticompetitive practices. I said as much in a comment on Lemmy not long ago - with some detective work you may be able to find it.

Companies charge as much as they can get away with and will always push the numbers higher. They’re not eating costs outbid the goodness of their heart, loss-leaders lead to more spending.

Obviously. And what they can get away with is profit margins up to a certain limit (assuming no monopolies, and at least moderately effective anti-cartel measures), that limit being the point where it becomes easy to enter the market or undercut a competitor, gain massive market share, and still make a lot of money.

They cannot get away with just endlessly taking all profits from productivity gains. These gains have been enormous since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and in most markets profits are on the order of a few percent of turnover, if that.

How does it work? Why don’t supermarkets just ask a million for a loaf of bread? More money and profits, right?

Now, I am aware there are cartels and other anticompetitive practices, but no single supermarket chain has a monopoly. There is competition, the margins in the business really are not that high, and supermarkets can and do lower prices to attempt to increase their market share. In fact, for products like bread supermarkets often deliberately sell them at a loss.

Would supermarkets like to put the savings of self-checkout in their own pocket? Absolutely. Can and will they, on the long term? No. If businesses would always pocket such savings, then margins in the entire economy should tend upward over time, and they simply don’t.

Do you use horse-drawn carriages? No? What about the horse breeders and cartwrights?

[…] is making customers do the job of paid employees for free.

So if everyone used self-checkout, groceries would be cheaper…

In US language, “liberal” is used pejoratively by people who call themselves conservative but are actually against conservatism to describe people who are not liberals, but are instead less conservative than the actual liberals, who are found primarily in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

Hope that clears it up.

When I was in high school, I had long hair and wore mildly offensive heavy metal bandshirts.

Absolutely no way that would have been possible in Japan.

In fact, dyed hair became an anime trope precisely because teenagers weren’t allowed to dye their hair.

There is a downward trend for sure, but these numbers suggest this pollster has some kind of systemic error, being consistently so far below the RCP average. Even if you think there’s some kind of issue with RCP (though it has an excellent historical record), Nate Silver’s average is at 38% at the moment.

He is now dipping into his base.

Is he, though? Ignoring the outlier poll in the OP, RCP’s poll of polls put him at 39% approval, still above his all-time lows. His approval was at 37% in late 2017, around the time it was revealed he helped the Russian military attack US targets.