Tootfinder

Question of the day: Should I just sell/give away/get rid of most of my stuff, retire, and move to South America or something? Maybe there I could make myself a life worth living, instead of focusing on just surviving from one day to the next, in a place where the cost of living is quickly becoming unbearable.

With all the books unpacked, I finally got to read through Kirsty Mackay's "The Magic Money Tree" about the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and poverty in the UK, and loved the prints that came with it.
As always, she does a great job in combining documentary photography, scrapbooking and relevant texts (e.g. from parliamentary debates). Well worth your time if you can get your hands on it!
#documentaryphotography

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with
boos and jeers for supporting Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.
The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County,
where Iowans urged Hinson to
“stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.
“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “F…

“Stop Lying”: Voters Erupt at GOP Lawmaker’s Shocking Claim on Economy
Iowa State Representative Ashley Hinson’s comments were met with boos and jeers.

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

🪧 Trump to blame for high cost of living, Americans say in new poll
#inflation

Trump's shutdown snags Social Security increase
https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2025/10/social-security-cost-of-living-increase-announcement-has-been-delayed.html

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

"...the number of stories in national newspapers about asylum seekers or small boats or refugees. They found 542 in just the past month. And how many on the cost of living or essentials or living standards? Just 45."
Worried about rising bills and getting by? Keir Starmer has the answer: try chewing a flag!
| Aditya Chakrabortty | The Guardian

After two decades in Congress,
Darrell Issa’s career is all about serving the ultra-wealthy like himself
– and serving Donald Trump. It’s time to send him packing and take our country back. 
On the City Council,
Marni von Wilpert
flipped San Diego’s reddest seat blue.
Now, she’s ready to do it again – in Congress.
https://www.

Marni von Wilpert for Congress
Marni von Wilpert is running for Congress to tackle the skyrocketing cost of living, protect reproductive freedom, defend LGBTQ rights, and make Washington work for working families — not just the wealthy few. With a proven record of service, results, and winning tough races, Marni is the battle-tested fighter we need to flip CA-48 and finally send Darrell Issa packing.

15.4% #chocolate inflation! Terrible!
The more subtle thing is how white chocolate stuff is getting more common and dark rarer; I think that's actually due to the cost - that was noticable in dark chocolate easter eggs and bunnies being rarer this year, and I bet the same will be too of reindeers.

UK inflation remains at 3.8% but food prices continue to surge
While UK inflation held steady in August, the pace of price rises for food surged, increasing cost of living pressures.

This map of Europe showing housing cost, Copenhagen region just pops out compared to rest of Denmark... 😕
https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/living-at-great-cost

Trump to blame for high cost of living, Americans say in new poll | US economy | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/01/trump-inflation-cost-of-living-poll

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

By changing our diets now, we can avoid the food chaos that climate change is bringing #nutrition

By changing our diets now, we can avoid the food chaos that climate change is bringing
Climate change is pushing up the prices of the food that we buy and therefore changing what we eat. One-third of UK food price increases in 2023 resulted from climate change, according to research by agricultural economists. This extra cost contributed to food price inflation and the UK's cost-of-living crisis.

From Movement YVR
Cars expensive! Transit cheap!A new study finds that high transportation costs are driven largely by owning vehicles and people who live by rapid transit have a lower cost of living. We're absolutely shocked! (Just kidding, we aren't surprised at all.)The Metro Vancouver Housing and Transportation Cost Burden Study
Update just dropped, check it out here:

On the Bay Area regional transit measure: "A gross receipts tax [rather than sales tax] would ensure that the largest and wealthiest companies contribute their fair share to the infrastructure that helps make their record profits possible. This approach avoids placing an additional burden on families already struggling with the crushing cost of living in the Bay Area." #SB63
🎁🔗:

eggs were 27¢ a dozen in 1905 when the presque isle lighthouse keeper's house was built

Fascinating:
A feature in the Financial Times reveals some very rich people have started selling up and living in motorhomes.
Obviously, they’re ultra-luxurious motorhomes. The owner of a private equity firm interviewed has a 30-tonne behemoth with air conditioning and high-speed internet, a kitchen, dining room, two bathrooms, a “spacious master bedroom” and “a range of modern hi-tech appliances”. which cost
“around $2.7m” (£2m)
I read something else about ultra-high…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #TheCraigCharlesFunkAndSoulShow
Reuben Wilson And The Cost Of Living:
🎵 Got To Get Your Own
#ReubenWilsonAndTheCostOfLiving