I was one of the 10,000 #ProtonMail backers mentioned in https://youtu.be/gFZ1peR9SiY and have since personified sunk cost with a >6 TB Visionary plan. But if #Proton dilutes that vision, I will be ahead of you in the line to migrate and unsubscribe.
So, super fancy, exclusive restaurant catering to wealthy diners rips off its customers, harasses and steals from its employees, then washes its hands by gifting real estate to a proselytizing Christian organization that provides housing and meals to people who have been pushed down, abused, and displaced by the kinds of people who endure a waitlist of up to year, jet to a dining destination, and pay $500 for dinner. Can’t help but think this illustrates the capitalism circle of life.
The Willows Inn, a super fancy, fine-dining, farm-to-table, restaurant on a remote island near Bellingham, WA, that the New York Times in 2011 labeled "one of 10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride,” had a precipitous fall from grace in 2022. Now, the property is selling, and the proceeds will benefit Lighthouse Mission Ministries, a shelter for the unhoused.
In its heyday, as it topped the culinary world's best restaurant lists, fraud and abuse festered behind the scenes.
Employees alleged a nightmare environment of sexual harassment, bullying, misogyny, and racism.
The Willows Inn paid $1.37 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for wage theft.
Turns out, the restaurant's "farm-to-table" claims also fell short. Some of the supposed locally sourced and foraged food actually came from random grocery stores and even Costco. At $500 a plate, that’s not what you bargained for.
To make amends, the former owners, Tim and Marcia McEvoy, donated the property to Bellingham’s Lighthouse Mission, a Christian organization that provides shelter and services to the unhoused (and only hires Christians). The property, reportedly worth about $2.4 million, has accepted an offer and is expected to change hands soon.
Only accusing the "big companies" for doing all sort of "unethical" things, is like only accusing mass murderers for the killings that they do. Every crime is a crime. Big or small. Small companies do similar shady practices and abuse people or destroy the environment.
But best is to look at the system that creates these entities instead of accusing companies or people.
As long as the underlying practice on this planet is to TRADE or else you are fucked, then this is what we are going to do and prioritize. Thus the evolution of companies and billionaires, waste, pollution, you name it.
"Microsoft Paint is getting new image generation powers with a new tool called Cocreator. [...] Cocreator can generate images based on text prompts as well as your own doodles in the Paint app."
The way tech companies push "AI", I don't know. I was hoping this is just another tech hype that I can wait out, like with Bitcoin and Metaverse, but there just seems no end in sight this time.
States and corporations have almost unlimited power over the life of simple individual. A madman on top of state hierarchy could kill 100 000 of innocents and get away with it, while you may have a prison sentence because of a comment in the web. If you, like us, anarcho-mystics – think, that this is unfair -Turn your mind into a weapon! Check our pinned posts for techniques. #anarchism#equality#capitalism#state#power#politics#corporations#paranormal#resistance
It's fun to blame Red Lobster going down because of all you can eat shrimp, but no one really emphasizes this bit:
"A private equity firm bought the chain ten years ago from Darden Restaurants.... The firm, Golden Gate Capital, funded the deal partly by selling Red Lobster's real estate.
That meant the chain had to start paying rent. That's now a major financial factor in Red Lobster's bankruptcy filing"
VC again leaving a trail of destruction behind them
What's the chance* that GOP MAGAts will come around to banning vasectomies now that the young'uns are choosing to sterilize themselves rather than face the Big Government overreach of abortion bans?
I mean, how can you enslave child-bearing folks under the boot of capitalism if they refuse to create a steady labor supply?
*The chance is very likely slim to none since the patriarchy by definition values men's rights. But still, capitalism also requires an underclass, and forced birth plunges many into that category without regard to gender.
I guess making money somewhat honestly by having customers that actually pay for a service with at least some guarantees of privacy and safety is not as lucrative as having an open platform network where people are tricked into giving out all their data while they are spied upon for whatever reasons.
Don't fool yourself: It's mostly just about family connections and pure randomness.
#Capitalism#Liberalism#Philosophy#MoralPhilosophy#Inequality#Poverty: "Rawls thinks agents designing a society from behind the veil of ignorance might nevertheless allow some inequality, in exchange for greater economic efficiency. But in navigating such tradeoffs they’d be guided by the principle that inequalities need to earn their keep by (a) making the better-off positions available to every qualified applicant under conditions of meaningful equality of opportunity and (b) only allowing inequalities, even inequalities that satisfy condition (a), when whoever is worst off would still be better off than they would be under a more equal alternative.
The resulting loophole for acceptable inequalities is much narrower than many readers of Rawls over the decades have realized. Rawls himself, who certainly wasn’t a radical firebrand by personal inclination, had reluctantly come to realize by the end of his life that even a form of capitalism modified by a generous welfare state couldn’t meet his demanding standard.
Meanwhile, one of Rawls’s most important critics, the Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, argued that even this loophole was too large for it to be appropriate to call any arrangement that passed Rawls’s test “justice.” Cohen acknowledged that economic efficiency matters, for much the same reason Rawls thought it did — the standard of living of even the lower classes — but he thought we should keep a more demanding notion of egalitarian justice as our north star."
[USA] Walmart Is Still Putting Ebenezer Scrooge to Shame
Infamous for its starvation wages, Walmart just posted staggering first-quarter profits. The surge is a result of its strategic shift toward catering to affluent shoppers while its full-time workers continue to rely on Medicaid and food stamps https://jacobin.com/2024/05/walmart-living-wage-medicaid-snap/