Super-Fun-Pak Comix by Ruben Bolling for April 16, 2026 | GoComics
A humorous look at perverse incentives. Fuck capitalism!
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Ooo, they’d love this over on /c/LeftyMemes
I remember being taught economics in high school and accepting all of the concepts they taught me without much critical thinking. Things like supply vs demand curves, completely rational economic entities, and all sorts of other idealized notions of financial decision making. I felt like it was all true and the discrepancies I saw were just random noise in the data.
Then, in college, I participated in an economic study where you won $20 if you ended with the highest total fake money of anyone in the room. The original study had a series of variants of runs where you either give $1 to each person in the room, or keep $2 for yourself. Since only the top player got anything, I kept it all the whole time and won. Professor called me up and used me as a poster child to show how the study exposed the inherit rational selfishness of the average person. I pointed out that if he had run the study as originally designed, I would have given the other people $1 every time, but since they changed the rules there was no reason to. He got so angry at me.
Kind of opened my eyes a bit as to how none of what I learned actually holds up. Kroger will raise prices during a worldwide pandemic because they know people will think it costs them more money to source food and accept higher prices, and when the pandemic dies down prices still remain. If you aren’t paying for an app then the developers are making money by selling your data, but if you do pay for an app they are doing the same thing. If you want to watch something without advertisements then obviously you have to pay for it, but if you pay for it you still have to watch advertisements anyway.
So you think the rational consumers continue to use these products because they have no choice, but in almost every instance they do have a better choice, they just don’t engage their brain at all. For example, cartridge razors cost a lot of money. Last one I bought was like $70 with four head replacements. They are always adding another blade, for maximum closeness! What’s the alternative? They’ve long since perfected the safety razor designed back in 1880. You can get one for $20, and a pack of hundreds of replacement blades for $5. I tried ten different blade brands and shaving cream setups, and every single one got a closer shave with less razor burn than the dozen cartridge razors I tried, even with no shaving cream at all. They’re cheaper, more effective, take up less space, and require less trips to the store. So why doesn’t anyone use safety razors? A combination of marketing and the fact that they just don’t feel like trying it, even after being told all of this.
Nothing is rational on either side. Companies charge whatever they feel like, consumers operate on a hair trigger, no one is ever held accountable because “You can’t really blame them” when of course I can. Life is chaos, and we live in a madhouse.
This wasn’t intended to be a long rant, I swear.
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My old comment somewhere in my history was something like:
Macroeconomics on its way to ruin Microeconomics in literally every aspect
Also hilariously the first thing you learn in marketing is that having the impossible better, cheaper, and indestructible product will not guarantee you successfully sell said product.
RIP to instapot.
I feel this watching people sending money to OpenAI after everything, even after serving an openly fascist regime
As someone who’s owned two different safety razors, I can say that they’re not all the same. I can’t say anything about your $20 one, but with the first one I bought I kept cutting the shit out of my face every time I replaced the blade no matter how slow or what angle I went with. Then I dropped it on the counter one day and the handle broke at threads. Whoops.
I decided to buy Henson saftey razor, the one that advertises via YouTubers (enter this code, get a free 100pk of blades blah blah blah.) I almost never cut myself with it at all.
But yeah, fuck those cartridge razors and their plastic crap. All they do is clog up with crap between the blades that is a pain in the ass to get to rinse out. A good safety razor rinses out with a quick splash under the sink.
Yeah, the razor definitely matters. My rockwell razor has different bottom plates to slightly alter the angle so you can hone in on a better shave. Some experimentation helps a lot.
The best way to win the game is to not play.
Reddit had a lot of issues and I am glad I left, but one sub I really liked and wish Lemmy had was r/anticonsumption. You make a great point about razors, but that already relied on the assumption that you have decided to shave.
That is not to say that shaving is bad, but to recommend that all individuals think about it. WHY do they want to shave, and how much time and money do they want to put into that? How much of it is mere societal expectation, and is that really worth it?
Look at the Got Milk campaign as another example. That was not promoting any particular company, just the concept of consuming dairy, and led to disastrous health, environmental, and economic consequences in the US today.
Supply and demand must be one of the worst lies ever told, it absolutely does not hold to scrutiny. Yet companies love using it to distract from their crimes.
Just monopolize and do what you want. Bleed them dry.
Supply and demand aren’t lies, it’s more the free market is a lie, which allows the supply side to be manipulated to create false scarcity. It’s competition that’s supposed to bring prices down but the governments that are supposed to regulate the markets to allow competition instead use measures that look like they’ll make the bug players play fair but actually make it difficult or impossible for new players to enter the game.
Yes and no but isn’t it interesting that everyone buys suvs (because of the demand!!) if all you can buy are suvs?
That’s what I mean by lie. The whole context and responsibility or influence of the consumer.
Yeah but it’s consumer choice, they have cheaper gas efficient sedans on the lot. People just choose the big loud truck instead, at least here in the US.
to show how the study exposed the inherit rational selfishness of the average person.
If that’s supposed to be a reference to Kant, your professor was severely misinterpreting it. If not, it’s probably referencing some later theorist who was in turn referencing Kant (and severely misinterpreting it).
The rational egoist thought experiment imagines a society composed entirely of perfectly rational, completely egoistic people. Kant argues that they would all agree to abide by certain rules, in exchange for the guarantee that everyone else abides by those rules as well.
Being perfectly rational, they know that this is best for themselves; and being completely egoistic, they agree to it not out of altruism, empathy, or abstract ideals, but because concretely, it benefits them to do so.
The thought experiment is not:
- Intended to describe reality
- Intended to describe how things should be
- Intended to encourage people to be selfish
What it is intended to do, is provide a rational basis for an argument that everyone should treat others the way that they themselves want to be treated.
Kant builds upon this thought experiment to describe the categorical imperative: “act only according to maxims which you believe should be universal.” In other words, don’t do things that you’d be upset if someone else did!
It is effectively a secular basis for the same thing as the “Golden Rule”: not “because Jesus said so,” but because “life is objectively better when we treat each other this way.”
Of course, people who don’t care about philosophy typically cut me off before I’ve got more than a sentence and a half out. So then they assume whatever the rest of it is supposed to be, based on their own ignorance, bias, and predisposition. So they hear me talking about “rational egoists” and think I’m arguing in favor of narcissism, or they hear “categorical imperative” and it either sounds like gibberish to them or they think I’m trying to be domineering. Neither of which are the case, but they never let me get enough words out to explain it to them, and even if I do, they only half listen and still make assumptions anyway.
It’s why talking about philosophy in person never goes well. Even in a philosophy class (most people there are just there for the elective anyway; they think it’s all bullshit and act all smug towards anyone who takes it seriously).
At least online, I can get all my thoughts out. Maybe people still don’t read it all, but they can, and that’s better than when I get interrupted in the middle of my second sentence in person and then no one knows what I was going to say, and anyone then gets to impose their own assumptions about what my point ultimately was going to be.
Of course, even online people will ignore critical points and take things out of context, and sea lion and strawman their way to scoring points. But at least on the fediverse most people recognize that and the downvotes usually reflect. Usually.
Anyway, I digress. I guess it was my turn to rant.
One of the main reasons I hate this species. Philosophy is CRITICAL.
Without philosophy, we have no why, only how. It all loses meaning quick, when you end up working for a human slaughterhouse.
Username does not check out!
But anyway, it’s the same species that brought us philosophy, and it’s the same species that rejects it. Humans aren’t monolithic, and philosophers have always been sidelined and ridiculed (read Book VI of Plato’s Republic to see how he describes societal views of philosophers at the time; it’s not much different from today).
But these days, there’s this overcorrection of anti-elitism, and absolute inclusivity at the expense of basic standards. You barely need to be literate to get into college, and you can easily get a passing grade without ever engaging with the material. And anyone who takes it seriously is viewed as an elitist ans a try-hard.
It really degrades the value of the discussion, in the one place where people should be able to expect to have an intelligent philosophical discussion: in a philosophy classroom.
Without philosophy, we have no why, only how.
We wouldn’t even know how. All of the modern sciences are predicated on earlier philosophy. Science itself is predicated on philosophy of science. Enlightenment-era science were known at the time as “natural philosophy.” The scientific method was first developed by philosophers. Empiricism itself was first developed by philosophers.
There is literally no academic discipline that doesn’t go back to philosophy, if you trace it back far enough and don’t simply stop when you reach the point which you’re predisposed to think of as “the beginning.”
To the shaving rant: I’ve eventually bought an electric shaver. No shaving cream needed, easy to store and to wash, no replacement heads needed unless the current one breaks. My skin also gets less irritated from dry shaving.
Economics 101 is like physics 101. It absolutely works (assume no friction, assume perfect knowledge, assume all mass is in a single point, assume rational actors, assume assume assume)
Physics 101 has good predictive capabilities, Econ 101 doesnt, very dissimilar.
Economics 101 predicts scalping and surge pricing but people still act like it’s some weird abberation rather than the free market actually being free.
It also predicts that Keynesian economics lead to a more prosperous nation than neoliberal austerity because the diminishing returns of capital investment make “high highs and low lows” worse on average than stability; which explains why gdps of the western world have grown so little compared to China’s in the past 20 years.
It also predicts tragedies of the commons, i.e. how capitalism will always ruin everything for everyone, even the people that “win”, and the only solution is to make sure capitalism doesn’t touch the commons because it will find a way to murder them; which explains why the Earth is becoming uninhabitable.
If they taught you Keynesian economics in econ 101 you can consider yourself lucky
One of the benefits of having social democrats in government, I suppose.
(I forget sometimes that “101” is literally a USAmerican college thing and not just international shorthand for “introductory”).
I, for one, enjoyed your rant. And long as it was, the paragraph separation helped a lot and is appreciated.
All hail Homo Economicus
Nice link; thanks for sharing!
Simple economic models assume perfect information on all sides and rational decision making by all market participants.
However you should have also talked about how price is set in monopolies, duopolies, oligopolies, and barriers to enter a market.
Of course economists know things are more complicated than is taught in an introductory course.
Would you expect to learn quantum physics or general relativity in a physics 101 class?
My degree was in economics (though I didn’t stay in the field and moved into information security instead). Econ 101 is basically a bunch of thought experiments that are designed to get people thinking about very broad economic concepts, but it’s all very, very abstract and largely doesn’t apply to anything connected to reality.
In higher levels, it starts to resemble reality, though my professors constantly reinforced the lesson that there are multiple ways to interpret data and that no matter how complicated you make the model you’re using, it’s still a massive oversimplification of the real world.
Unfortunately, people take intro micro/macro and think that’s what economists actually think when in reality they’re essentially learning about the very, very general oversimplifications. The amount of math it takes to start going through the actual models gets overwhelming, and it’s unlikely a first or second year undergrad would be able to handle it unless they’d already taken calc 1 and 2, and ideally some additional statistics classes.
There’s also been a massive shift in the last decade from theoretical models to much harder quantitative experimentation, so the field as a whole is trying to be less theory-driven and more data-driven. I sometimes wish I’d found the math more enjoyable, because it’s been very exciting to see some of the results coming from experimentation.
Great to hear. Marxist theory is a huge oversimplification as well. It’s still very popular though.
As a trans woman who values a close shave. I mirror your points on the safety razor. Capitalism’s just been trying to sell us garbage cuz they perfected that tool ages ago.
This is the ENRON swindle in a nutshell during the California energy crisis back in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electricity_crisis
Well, at any given moment production and demand must be equal on the energy grid, so maybe this wasn’t the most ideal example.
Exactly, so the price rises to price out quantity demanded until it falls to the supply.
Someone about to get a very angry call from a grid operator.
Exactly. This would result in a partial blackout, if there’s no other provider increasing their production.
In a real world electricity grid, there are always some fluctuations, load balancing, and also redundant generators, that turn on on demand.
You also can’t just turn most types of powerplants on and off easily or quickly.
Demand for electricity also isn’t constant. Some industries will select the time they use the most electricity according to price and supply.
Prime example: water pumped storage. When there’s superfluous electricity it pumps water uphill, if there’s more demand, it generates electricity.
So when the price is very high, the demand will drop, except the inelastic demand. So if this guy pushes up the price and demand falls, he might not make more money overall.
You can easily observe this in the real world as well. If things get too expensive, people change what they buy. Chocolates with Easter design was really expensive this year in Germany, demand fell immensely. The supermarkets are still full with it a huge discounts.
no, if you turn off the generator, you don’t make more money; other companies who also produce electricity make more money.
Good thing electricity supply isn’t a monopoly in most towns . . . Oh wait
Twist: you secretly own those companies too
yeah but even in that case, the CEO of the first company has a fiduciary duty to make that company make as much money as possible. intentionally crashing one company sothat other companies’ stock goes up is a gross violation of duty and can and will be punished as such assuming there’s any shareholders who only own shares of the first company.
Musk / Bezos / any CEO: HEHEHE you said “duty”
(They don’t give a shit)
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