In France, already 10% of the population depends on food-banks. In 2023, the largest non-profit providing meals and distributing food sent a distress call saying they were close to bankrupcy as the number of people in need is going up fast while donors have less and less to give being themselves crunched.

France's richest family, the Arnault, largely responsible for turbo-charging the trickle up trend in the country by buying political influence, rescued them by making a big donation.

The leader of the non-profit, who had been vocal about impoverishment of the population and growing inequalities because of the oligarchs, cannot say anything anymore: now he can't keep going without these oligarchs good will.

That's the plan. It's being executed right in front of us, in the open.

They expect those people to starve (‘and decrease the surplus population’) or accept company scrip for ‘cheaper’ food, thus recreating large-scale chattel slavery.

I don't think there is much of a coherent plan tbh. I think they think they're moving towards Curtis Yarvin style techno-feudalism, but Yarvin is an idiot and so are the oligarchs pushing for that. They have been lulled into complacency by the status quo their predecessors engineered to make revolutionary movements unlikely to gain traction (basic social safety net, reasonably affordable food, a general sense that the state represented the people even though in reality it's been captured by capital for some time, etc.) while undermining the elements of that status quo that weren't already collapsing.

It's madness. They think they can just do whatever they want and people won't resist, while systematically dismantling everything that stopped people from resisting. This will not go how they think it will. Thankfully they're mostly surrounded by sycophants who tell them all their dogshit ideas are genius actually, it's like Putin in Ukraine. They will overplay their hand due to false encouragement from their subordinates, and it will be what destroys them.

According the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that may not necessarily be the case. Agriculture and retail trade, the stuff you mention laypeople purchasing, contributed nothing to less than nothing toward economic growth in the first quarter of 2026. Cars and maybe sofas fall into the durable goods manufacturing category which was the fourth highest contributor.

The top three contributions came from information, the federal government, and professional/scientific/technical services. I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the finances of those sectors and I'm not an economist so take my words with a couple grains of salt, but to me those things mean an increase in data centers, federal spending (and my guess is not on things useful to a layperson), and services that often end up being business to business transactions.

Obviously there is a place today for companies to sell to the masses, but the comment you responded to was discussing economic growth, and at least to my eyes it looks like most of the growth is indeed going to sectors primarily controlled or benefited from by the wealthy while sectors supported by the masses either contributed less or shrank the most out of any sector in the case of retail trade.

If that trend continues long-term because of a decreasing population then I think that's fine, but if it continues due to a lack of investment because of low profitability, then I think there will be (more) issues.

Probably hyperbole on mycodesucks, but the whole AI bullshit alone generated over USD 1 trillion dollars in GDP. USA's GDP in 2024 was a bit under 30 trillion. Having like 8 companies account for 1/30 of the ENTIRE MONEY SPENT of a country is absolutely nuts, as well as a good reminder of how disconnected to reality GDP alone is.

I grabbed the first result, but you can find the same information from whatever source you like - it was big news:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html

The top ten percent drive half of all consumer spending. The corporations and the rich no longer see the bottom 90% as a profitable market - they see them as a resource and a liability.

When you realize it's not incidental, but the actual plan, it all makes sense.

A bit exaggerated, but 70% of OpenAIs revenue is from a handful of enterprise customers. The other tech giants, spearheaded by Nvidia, are shifting their entire business model towards enterprise customers, which is largely why consumergrade hardware is incredibly expensive if not directly unobtainable.

They are probably counting all the exchange of funny money on the stock market and things like the xircular AI buying (Microsoft invests a zillion dollars in OpenAI who then uses that zillion dollars to buy Azure compute cycles from Microsoft).