Ask Lemmy

Mod notice: This post is kinda in the grey area of being in breach of Rule 6, but it's a good question with decent answers, so it gets to stay.

Stay classy.

I'm looking forward to another great depression.

I'm noticing that the main people who suffered were city folk who all of a sudden had to give up consumerism for a bit.

Are you fucking kidding? People were scalping toilet paper during a plague, ffs

nope, they would be coralled and shot by drones and police officers, bombed to shit, and all called terrorists. made an example of, to keep everyone else in check. people seeking refuge from that system would either choose to suffer in it, die attempting to change it, or join those that enforce it.

its been that way for a while now. everyone is too undereducated and isolated via technologu to create a proper resistance force, at least with numbers that matter. even fewer are actively willing to do violence for moral reasons, due to decades of brainwashing by the systems of control to view "peaceful protest" as the only vehicle for change, anything more is considered immoral.

its very useful to have us think that way, as violence is the only historical cure for fascism.

No, primarily because nobody knows their neigbors anymore

Unequivocally no.

We live in an era of being able to buy things, sight-unseen. In that era, there was no way for an investor to bid without physically showing up, so if they did, and aggressively outbid everyone else, then they already have a noose set up for them.

Now? People don't need to be at the auction in person, there probably wouldn't be an auction to begin with. The Bank would hire a real estate agent, who would pass it off to whomever makes the highest bid. Simple as that.

I'd like to think we would, as communities, as a society, but in this society is also money hungry, faceless corporations that will do whatever they can to make a dollar. There are so many layers of obfuscation between the person who is buying the property, and the person who ultimately owns it.

I just can't see it happening with the Internet.

No. The auctions wouldn't happen in person but online. Some reit or foreign money or both will bid more than the locals could afford.

I'm guessing the noose wasn't only for the benefit of outsiders. Most communities probably had one or two selfish people.

Yes, but not right away.

We can see that during Trump 2.0 is taking longer but we are growing our opposition.

Remember the Muslim ban and the immediate reaction at airports in 2017? We're seeing similar things now (farther into the term) with reactions to ICE.

We've had worse depressions already. In 08 entire neighborhoods in Reno were totally abandoned, the whole economy seemed to be house construction and repair. At night whole neighborhoods would vanish, not a single light turning on. I knew guys in construction that suddenly couldn't get work and went around in crews and stripped foreclosed houses of materials to resell or use on lowball job bids, I knew a pretty well off contractor with an adult disabled son who turned to pushing pyramid schemes to try and stay alive basically. I ended up living in an abandoned house for months looking for work. Between the dot Com crash and the housing market bubble my family went from poor to middle class to hoping to survive winter. I remember my dad telling me in an interview they asked him why he changed careers twice and him just laughing like ''you haven't been in town long then'' boom and bust. That's been the nature of things. I still have health problems from getting pneumonia that year when I was basically homeless, I had a friend drag me to a clinic to get penicillin, the doctor had me wait around a few hours so he could have multiple med students come examine me, he had never seen anyone with that advanced of a case in his whole career. And I'm lucky, I know multiple people in their 20s like me at the time that died that winter because they refused to go to the hospital. They knew they couldn't pay and didn't want collections. I ended up getting a medical debt bankruptcy a few years later. You live through this and on the news they say things like ''economic recession'' and ''down turn'' maybe ''soft raise in unemployment'' like they guys who used to sign my paychecks were calling me asking if I heard about any work, standing next to me in the clinic line with sunken eyes.

I will say, at that time people were very open handed, you never needed to call someone to help you get your car out of the road, people would jump out and push you to the side, even put some gas in your tank to get home, I used to drive around with gas cans and a tow line especially in the snow, I used to have sand bags too, people would bend over backwards in a second when they saw your situation, it was a time of a lot of social closeness. And no one ever asked in you had a damm job. My god. No one ever said that shit. ''Get a job?'' Someone might shoot you for that.

Private equity will buy everything with no public sale.

No.
50% of voting Americans deify a pathological lying pedophile rapist treasonous traitorous insurrectionist diaper-wearing convicted felon.
So, "No".

Banks have auctions remotely now to prevent this sort of class solidarity.

California was populated by desperate people losing their farms and homes. See: grapes of Wrath.

Penny auctions happened, but they weren't the norm nationwide. The banks did forclose and people did lose their homes and sometimes abandoned them because the land was worthless during the dust bowl.

If America gets that desperate again, you will see pockets of solidarity and community and other examples of heartlessness and tragedy. We can't know how much unless it happens.

They wouldn't have penny auctions. They would be virtual so they couldn't be bullied into not bidding and the bidders would be global so they wouldn't give a shit about the person whose land it was.

...dude half of my neighbors want to see me killed because of things like me refusing to worship that dead neonazi that recently got himself shot in the neck.

They'd buy off my possessions just so they could see my reaction as they set them ablaze.

No, not in my country (US). People will not band together like that again, possibly ever.

It absolutely could not happen again, regardless of how organized the community was, because banks simply wouldn't sell the foreclosed property in an auction of community peers if they weren't getting good money for it, they'd auction it to REITs and corporations without them needing to set foot in an auction house.

Absolutely not. Americans are now scumbags to each other. Especially after how they monetized homes and turned them into reality tv shows. About how the take an affordable home and make it unaffordable. Scumbag Americans will fuck each other over.

Absolutely not, there'd be some TikTok influencer that would be like "Broooo you can get land so cheap!" and buy it all and sell it for massive profit.

The real question is: would they be allowed to do the same these days?

Spoiler: they won’t.

I would imagine they just auction them on online nowadays :/ cutting out any sort of human interaction.

Not in the same way. There is still some anti-eviction resistance that goes on today. It's rare and never successful in undoing evictions though. For the most part, I think the US is too individualistic, and the methods of preventing and breaking solidarity too refined for broad action to be successful. I imagine that during a depression, most desperate people would rather join the feds to feed their family by committing violence against others. Even now, ICE received 150k applications in a single week, and people aren't anywhere near as desperate as they'd be in a depression. The government would have to basically collapse, and even then we'd probably end up more like the poor countries ruled by gangs and warlords that dangle the possibility of escaping poverty in exchange for extreme violence.

Labor solidarity decreased under Hoover, and only started increasing under FDR with a lot of government support. I'm skeptical we'll ever have free and fair elections again, so I don't envision a pro-union government anytime soon.

No chance if possibly only because the government would immediately crack down and boot lickers would refuse to stand up to the capitalists and government.

blackrock would be there with their own paramilitary buying them up for the pennies

Honestly, this is why I fled suburbia for someplace more integrated and communal.

I looked around and realized that I barely knew who lived there, and nobody had my back. Likewise, if someone was in trouble, I would never hear about it. I'm not unfriendly by any means, it's just the whole tract-housing setup with no communal space is practically engineered to divide people up. Heap work hours and commute time on top of that, and all you know is someone keeps a car in so many driveways overnight; you never see any people. Everyone there really kept to themselves, as the environment made that easy to do.

I'm happy to say that I'm in a place now that would likely band together if it came down to it.

That noose only worked because it was a legitimate threat.

Penny auctions could happen today, but only combined with a similar legitimate threat. That’s the obstacle.

Nope, "Gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps".

The USA is no longer the USA because the core values of people who wear and live by the flag have changed. Sure, the core values of the people profiting off of them hasn't changed, but they have made sure to twist the values of the rest of society for the last couple of decades or so.

After decades of pushing individualism, not a chance.