Welcome to the Stockyard of Unaffordability

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The herd here in The Stockyard of Unaffordability isn’t cheered much by the cost of a TV dropping $50 while everything essential to life has gone up by $500 or $5,000.

Welcome to the herd jammed into The Stockyard of Unaffordability, where prices keep rising and it gets more crowded as those who reckoned they were always going to be able to afford their free-spending ways end up here.

As I have endeavored to explain in recent posts, asymmetries of scaling and risk create extremes that undermine our standard of living and quality of life:

1. Asymmetric scaling of credit generates self-liquidating credit-asset bubbles that pop, devastating the economy: Why Credit Creates Bubbles That Break the Economy.

2. Asymmetric scaling of AI malware and slop are making an AI Depression inevitable: Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control

3. Asymmetries of risk, resources and wealth generate mutually reinforcing crises, i.e. a polycrisis with no easy resolution: This Polycrisis Is Unique

4. Recency bias (the Fed always rides to the rescue) and asymmetries of credit / speculation generate rosy projections of limitless expansion of wealth, until the bubbles all pop at once: Paging Nostradamus: You Have a Margin Call

5. When asymmetries of risk, credit, etc. create extremes that break down, this leads to Model Collapse, the collapse of the status quo’s understanding of how the world supposedly works: Iran, En-Lai, Napoleon, Mike Tyson and Model Collapse

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

6. All these realities are obscured by the perverse incentives to flood every nook and cranny of media with sensationalized click-bait / slop: Perverse Incentives Have Created a Runaway Media Monster

Meanwhile, the asymmetries of credit that benefit the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else are jacking up prices across the entire economy, a trend that is boosted by geopolitical risks and scarcities.

The bill from the veterinary clinic went from $150 to $1,000 because private equity bought up all the clinics to assemble a local quasi-monopoly. The same thing happened in rental housing: once the dominant owner jacks up rents, all the small-fry owners follow suit, a dynamic that ratchets rents higher.

Here in the The Stockyard of Unaffordability, people can no longer afford rent, healthcare, childcare, senior care, higher education, insurance, vehicle repairs or a pet. But TVs that deliver adverts 24/7 got a few bucks cheaper because the TV manufacturers now make more money selling ads than they do manufacturing TVs.

The herd here in The Stockyard of Unaffordability isn’t cheered much by the cost of a TV dropping $50 while everything essential to life has gone up by $500 or $5,000. All the bogus statistics don’t change anything in the stockyard: prices have leaped by 40+%, and they’re not dropping back to previous levels. So what difference does it make that prices are now (smirk) rising by only 3%. Uh, yeah, sure, whatever.

All this is driven by limitless greed thriving in a culture of moral decay. The greediest sociopaths now control the system’s gearing: finance, the open auction of political influence, legal protections for the most rapacious corporations, Anti-Progress / erosion of quality, endless increases in prices, junk fees and property / excise taxes, and so on.

If you’re feeling squeezed, we’ve got a credit card offer with a low, low interest rate of 21%. So go ahead and spend, take control of your life… by becoming a debt-serf here in The Stockyard of Unaffordability.

Want to park your vehicle at the trailhead for a family hike on public land? That’ll cost you $30 now. The meter maid just left a $90 ticket on your windshield, and if you don’t pay on time, the cost soars from there. The screen just went out on your laptop, the replacement costs $450. There’s a couple of things wrong with your vehicle, we can patch it up for $1,200 but getting it done right will be $4,500. And so on.

Here in the stockyard, all the glowing slop about AI, soaring stocks and the great economy are like calling botched cosmetic surgery natural beauty. You’re joking, right?

The majority now crammed into The Stockyard of Unaffordability have discovered that democracy is unaffordable now, too as the Financier Oligarchs and Tech Overlords “own” the machinery of democracy just like they own the data centers and the cartels that control every sector of the economy.

As our immiseration mounts and the herd becomes increasingly restless, three things to consider:

It’s harder for bad things to happen when you have no debt. Ergo: sell now and liquidate debt.

Greed is a wonderful motivator but fear works much faster. Ergo: expect panic to self-reinforce to non-linearity, where events become unpredictable and second-order effects manifest in unexpected ways.

“My definition of self-reliance: the less you need, the easier it is to get what you need.” CHS (7/26/25) Ergo: waste nothing, get lean in every sense of the word.
Self-Reliance in the 21st Century

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/03/welcome-to-stockyard-of-unaffordability.html