#Economic Bubbles | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

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quasi-normalcy · 2 months

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I know that people are able to care about multiple things at once, yadda yadda, but I just suddenly found myself struck by the absolute cosmic idiocy of debating the morality of fiction while the only real world is drowning in evil.

#saw a gif of a starving child #i could see every bone in his spine; every rib in his breast #and it is emblazoned into my memory #how could anyone do that to another human being?#how could entire systems of politics and economics and war be set up with the express aim of inflicting such suffering?#how could anyone just FORGET that they're the same as every other human on earth?#how could anyone just FORGET their moral responsibilities to their neighbours their siblings their family #what is WRONG with everyone?#is it problematic? WHO GIVES A FUCK!#you're worried about evil seeping into your mind through a computer screen when it's bubbling up through the floorboards #just a hot black tar smothering all light and love #and you expect me to care about duties of care to fictional people FUCK YOU

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bitchesgetriches · 8 months

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Booms, Busts, Bubbles, and Beanie Babies: How Economic Cycles Work

If you liked this article, join our Patreon!

#booms and busts #bubbles #economic cycles #economics #finance 101 #investing

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thepowerisyouth · 2 months

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Eh mental health is annoying. Buying & cooking cheap low-FODMAP diet is annoying. My best top note for now is I'm using this blog to practice writing. I need more practice in it. I only know business, accounting & economics stuff. Its stupid stuff. Theres too much actual fraud everywhere that its annoying

Also I use mobile so formatting sucks cause Nvidia GPUs, or Arch dont like tumblr site. Or tumblr site dont like tumbkr site

Also also I 100,000% support all my fellow ones-and-zeros and their identity. Everyone is welcome here.

Except transphobes/zionist/long list of others but you get it. I'll help harrass any of those types endlessly if someone wants to tag me, and bring me in on an argument like that friend you call for backup with fights

Im unhinged so who's to say exactly what will end up here but this is also a completely public blog to me friends, family, hell, even acquaintances i dont give a fuc.

Blog should be expected to be roughly as child-friendly as simpsons or bobs burgers. But also boring like a civics/economics lesson sometimes. Yay

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I (and my husband) am ex mormon. Its a weird thing. Look into it if you havent recently. Realllllyyyy look into. Takes time to figure it all out in this fuckin fucked up world.

I just moved a year ago. Didnt watch the US stock market as much as I normally do. Had my first snowstorm 10 weeks ago, that was.. fun to handle while ill prepared. About 6 weeks ago I was hopping back on the market and notice its a huge tech bubble about to pop and all the conditions Ive been warned about my whole career imply this is not good. Just took a little more thinking & digging and I'm a little too confident to stop talking about it now.

(Oh I'm also care-free as fuc so I dont really read or desire to change past posts more than lil-nitpicks. More informative for the reader & myself-in-the-future-reading that way)

And I'm not kidding I do love feedback & questions. Its a very public blog tho so I get that part for sure.

If you search "life story" in my tags I had that pinned for a min Im just moving shit around rn

Being poor sucks. Will write more on that later.

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First of all-- the exact timeline of an "economic shock" is literal insanity. Dont worry about the exact timing of any of this-- just know its doomed to happen soon.

Here are some effects I predict of this upcoming economic downturn

If anyone comes across any sources for these events that support my arguments please feel free to add in comments, reblogs, etc.

This concise list is mainly for my own reference, but it would be great to add to it if any one has something to add!

0.5. US Stock market collapse-- I have no desire to try and predict this one exactly. Too many conspiracies are actually correct about this big guy. Lets just say 7 US Tech stocks are worth 25% of the entire worlds market, roughly. "Too big to fail"-- I believe is the phrase

1. Corporate (slightly later will be residential by extension) real estate crisis: currently way too overvalued. Most of the houses, land, & urban corporate property we see could stand to decrease by about 60-90% from its current price.

2. Bankruptcy crisis: similar to the after-effects of the 70s inflation-- we can expect to see a huge wave of bankruptcies affecting a variety of business: from the micro-self employed; to the small business with leased buildings; to the largest corporations who commit massive accounting fraud & hope to escape accountability in time

3. Bank runs-- there is an extremely high overreliance on the Federal Reserve, who does not have good control over this situation. Once it becomes clear that there is a crisis (we call this a catalyst event)-- bank runs for physical cash are a surety. Hard to say how long a crisis like this might last. I should ask my siblings who lived near the SVB bank crisis hotspot (but those were rich fucks they do their "bank runs" over the phone)

3.5. Global currency collapse, which takes effect in every single local, state, & national economy at slightly different times. This means prices lower. Much lower. But takes time

4. Whatever the fuck the geopolitics is gonna do???. Its weird. You got Russia wanting to invade Europe? (Look at global economic forum 2024) Trump wants to let them. Biden wants to be an establishment corporate ass. North Korea has changed its #1 public enemy to South Korea (dont remember my source but it was a couple months ago). USA is stationing more troops in Taiwan, but probably only because of semiconductor technology?

The scope of our global financial woes are larger than can be explained in any of our lifetimes. Its much, much closer to pre-revolution France or the late 1920s. Big change is coming. Itll be soon

5. More to come

#anti capitalism #economics #geopolitics #real estate #bankruptcy #banks #corporate fucks #pinned post #mental health sucks ball sacks #arch linux #nvidia is a scam bubble like enron #simpsons #bobs burgers #intro post #will change it more later

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 1 year

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Tumblr really is about the haves and the have nots. Every poll I've seen has tens of thousands of votes because they're novel and rare, but the second they roll out for everyone, no one will give a shit anymore. The poll bubble will burst, they'll be worthless, you'll be lucky if even a handful of your closest mutuals bother to click on it, much less have it breach containment and go viral. I just want to know how @staff chose which lucky bastards got to have the polls at their fullest potential? This is the peak, enjoy is while it lasts.

#polls #tumblr polls #poll #tumblr poll #vote #bubble #scarcity #economics #the economy #tumblr economy #the haves and the have nots

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quarra · 9 months

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Housing Crash (maybe)

I just saw a post that was a whole lot of people SUPER excited about a news article covering a potential crash in the housing market.

And, listen, thats fair. Housing prices are fucking stupid high, for a bunch of reasons. So i get the excitement.

Just. Keep in mind that a sudden real estate crash is not all wine and roses.

Back during the first year of covid, the US had a surge of people buying homes. Lots of folks suddenly were working remotely and loving it and deciding that they didnt need to live in a place they hated. They moved out of the big city and spread out. Which was cool! This, predictably, made housing prices go way, way high up (one of the many reasons).

Meanwhile, small businesses failed in droves while huge mega businesses consolidated their forces (aka they have more power and control in their markets).

(Another thing that these big corporations did was they went all in to an ol' Lex Luthor classic and invested in real estate. Huge corporations bought up homes to rent out at a premium, coincidentally contributing to the high housing costs as they priced out individual people looking to buy.)

Then two years went by and employers, by and large, decided it was much harder to keep drones under their thumbs when the drones are out of the office, and there was a mass shift to drag people back into the office at least part of the time.

Now lets match that up with the fact that many people bought homes in locations not ideal for their line of work, and for a potentially much, much higher price than the home is worth.

With the housing market looking at a crash, all of those people are now fucked, paying for a mortgage thats far more than their house is worth in an area they likely will have trouble finding or maintaining work in.

So, like, yay. Lower housing costs. But dont forget that a swift change in the market will absolutely screw a number of folks, and given the sheer finanical vulnerability of most of the people in the US, a crash in housing costs is gonna cause just as many problems as it solves.

#economics #real estate #not to be a debbie downer #but these situations are almost universally more complicated than random YAAAY FUCK CAPITALISTS posts may let on #and also this isnt anywhere close to a comprehensive overview of the situation #so dont @ me and nitpick #i know #woooo having real estate bubble flash backs

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punkshitposts · 10 months

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something I think is actually hilarious is that if you go left enough you start having more stances in common with (individual) conservatives, and if you go right enough you start agreeing with (individual) leftists. like i have a pretty close friend who's self described as "just far enough right that I hate politicians" , whom I hard disagree with his overarching political stances. but the finer details of it... yeah we agree with each other. gun control/gun rights opinions taxation opinions pro-small government opinions slight separatist opinions anti two party opinions anti-corporation opinion ect ect ect.

we stand on opposite sides of a standard political compass but I genuinely think if I were to count stats, I'd agree with as many of his stances as I would a liberals/democrats stances. my hs gov teacher described the difference in right vs left to us as "everyone's goal here is the betterment of mankind, they just think the best ways to do it are different" and that's literally the best way, to me, to describe what the difference in right vs left is regarding anarchism specifically. we got ESSENTIALLY the same opinion but the ways we think are the best ways to go about enacting said opinion are what makes us different. and something abt that is really painfully funny to me. envisioning a world where an-something is the major world thing, not capitalism.... and there's STILL right vs left... but The Anarchist Versions. christ.

sorry for the book i wrote in the tags. ignore typos I am NOT retyping any of that to fix them xoxo

#this is a controversial post to post here ik. however i think can we all agree that echo chambers and bubbles aren't... good.#and i think something that gets forgotten a lot by leftists is that there ARE anarchists on the right #yes we are EXTREMELY different but its important to like. remember that should The revolution come in our lifetimes their still gonna exist #and political disagreement on an individual scale CAN and SHOULD be civil so long as neither party is coming from a bigoted stance.#as in.. no i dont agree with a good chuck of what his stances but by disagree i just think hes wrong abt economics bros not like. a bigot.#in this same vain i also think (myself included) people shouldn't conflate conservativism with racists and homophobes. t #theres proud gay conservatives and conservatives who are poc... erasing those people means we cannot know of how the other side works.#i genuinely believe that if i were to go read every political theory book on right leaning politics id fine something uniquely republican #/right/whatever that i would agree with and then adapt into my own politics. im sure at least one of the unique-to-the-right stances has #actually standing and isn't a load of shit (again probably something economic rather than social).#and thats not a bad thing and if you think it is a actually don't know how to explain it to you! we MUST critically but civilly interact #with political opinions mirroring our own to 1 understand other people 2 fully understand and develope our own stances and why we have em #i genuinely find political conversations with that friend extremely enlightening even if we both walk away still set in unchanged opinions.#because it means i understand WHY others drift to those options but more importantly why /i/ drifted to my own

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awkward-teabag · 10 days

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Can't even mention that a store near me is clearly using abusing the TFW program because they refuse to pay little more than minimum wage in a high cost of living area (also you won't get benefits and you'll only be part-time) because the fascists and right-wingers will jump in to say it's about immigration and white replacement.

No, it's because rich white people want to hoard even more money and found an intentional loophole to both make more money (via paying employees less) and also have more power over employees, employees who may or may not know Canadian employment laws (or safety laws) and even if they do, don't have the ability or support to try to hold the company accountable.

You can absolutely criticize the federal government for keeping the loophole open but it predates Trudeau by decades and it was Harper who both expanded the program and added a way for companies to fast-track TFWs. It was also under Harper that companies started firing Canadians (or not hiring them) and then requesting permission to mass-hire TFWs instead.

But the way the right wing talks, you would think Trudeau started this whole thing and the poor multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies are being taken advantage of. Also that housing prices, lack of new developments, and zoning issues started with Trudeau and are the fault of mass-immigration he has a boner for instead of being an issue for decades and experts warning this would happen if governments didn't act ASAP.

Instead the neolibs and cons kept cutting back and kicking that can down the road, a can that started being kicked by Mulroney and the Conservative Party.

#as a 90s kid i grew up with warnings about healthcare and housing and how we needed mass immigration or a massive baby boom #because of the utter lack of federal support and an aging workforce #the systems were already being strained to their limits and there literally weren't enough millennials to replace retiring workers #*or* bring in enough taxes to fund said systems when the system needed it the most #not even increase funding just keeping the same funding that was already not enough #also the right conveniently ignores (or doesn't know about) the extremely predatory recruitment industry #that targets people overseas while lying and charging large amounts of money to bring tfws to canada #you could even blame chretien for expanding it to include 'low-skilled' workers which is what companies are abusing it for #hell even trudeau sr for creating it in the first place even though it was originally made for high-skilled or niche jobs #but no the blame is always trudeau jr with a ton of racism and brownnosing capitalists #because all these problems sprang up suddenly under him #and in no way did harper start/expand/not end/be complicit in any of this /s #though i guess for some of the fascists it seems that way 'cause they weren't personally affected by it until now #and companies have stopped trying to pretend they aren't grabbing as much money as possible because fuck anyone else #even though it's been like that for decades and capitalism itself encourages companies to skim money off the top #while not having the checks and balances to limit just how much #for that you need governments to regulate things and that doesn't work when you have leaders who are anti-regulation #and who believe in trickle down economics #just... the whole thing is not happening in a bubble and involves multiple people and both the neolibs and cons #because it's been building for decades #but you can't bloody say that because the moment you mention housing/jobs/healthcare and/or tfws #you get inundated by fascists who think you're one of them and hit you with some of the most unhinged shit #or who don't even care about you and just want someone to rant at about how it's the evil left's fault for everything #hell you can't even say you don't like trudeau because same thing: fascists think you're one of them or someone to bring into the cult

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professor-doc-emeritus · 9 months

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AI stuff in the news can be scary at times, but I'm grateful shit only really started hitting the fan with it after the zeitgeist had moved past the idea of "technological progress is always a good thing and we must do everything we can to accept and accommodate it." If something like gpt-4 had dropped even as recently as like 2012 there would be 0 cultural will to fight or regulate it. companies like google and facebook were allowed to take over the world largely because the general cultural attitude was "new tech is always better"

#it took several decades of economic bubbles corporate abuse and crypto scams but we got there

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velteris · 10 months

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reading umineko VN for the first time and it seems i am the odd one for enjoying the scene in the beginning where they lay out the financial needs of each of the adult siblings

#economics. i like it.#how about the asset bubble burst coming after that boom huh krauss?#r u prepared for the theme park crash?#umineko

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creativenicocorner · 2 months

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Last Line Game

rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or however many you like).

thanks for the tag @babblish ˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

___〆(・∀・) this is from [checks notes] 3:33am in my Glow Worms notes section of Discord as a hypothetical / potential future scene.

For those who don't know, I tend to write scenes and chapters out of order, which is why some chapters come out sooner than others ^^;

ANYWAYS the premise of this is, Reigen and his dad having a conversation.

“They’re finding new ways to sell and profit off others, just click a button and the place you paid to leave grandma will glow! Think of her, and the LED light we placed under a translucent little plastic Buddha statue.” “I can’t say I approve of how impersonal that feels, but there is a growing issue in finding space for plots. And not everyone can afford a family shrine. Giving the grieving meaningful tasks helps the mourner, opening grief to a path towards healing.” “It’s business, it’s aaaall business, I know, I get that - I just. Why does it have to be so business driven? …I’m tired.” “I know…I know you are. It’s been recession after recession for younger generations.” “A lot of times you know what the real ghost in the room is? Back at my office I mean.” “No…what?” “Capitalism.Little old ladies, or people who can't afford plumbers, or handy men, or have someone check for a gas leak.” "Yet they pay you." "Yeah," he said bitterly, "they pay me." "Are you suggesting you shouldn't be paid for your work? That I shouldn't be paid?" "No…I just…" "Do you know what would happen if I didn't do my job? If people were left to their own devices in dealing with bodies? Between black markets and inappropriately attended bodies?" "Disease," said Reigen, having heard this speech since he could remember. Then, Reigen Senior changed something in his speech, "and what would happen if you didn't do your job?" Reigen shrugged, sitting in his sulk. "I imagine a lot of old ladies and people who can't afford plumbers or handy men end up having a lot of trouble as well." Reigen looked at his father.

Will I end up using this scene after cleaning it up etc? I have no idea. But remember kids, the real entity of horror, is always capitalism.

Tagging @reitziluz @mangatxt @sharkaroni and anyone who wishes to participate!

#Nico Responds #Babblish #GlowWormsMode #progress report #the plastic Buddha statue is a real thing btw! I came across it while watching videos on Funerary practices in Japan - as is the rising #struggle to find more space for plots of land (as not everyone wants to be cremated despite it being a popular practice not only that but #just because you're cremated it's still customary to have a space to place the remains. Which is why family shrines is a big thing...but a #place to put a shrine is also a square amount of space)#OUGH I have so many thoughts about Reigen and his family - especially my Funeral Home HC #I can't wait to dig into Reigen and his dad's complicated relationship more in the fic I can't wait to show these thoughts #Another important thing to remember - I think - is that Reigen Absolutely remembers the 90s the very edgy recession filled disillusioned 90 #which did occur in Japan after the economic bubble popped!#okay enough babbling in the notes I should get back to finishing this chapter lol #Glow Worms #Glow Worms or rather: In the Depths of the Safflower Hills

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