There’s no good argument in allowing mergers of companies that are already large enough to be publicly traded at all.
Honestly the whole private shareholder parasite that produces nothing, aside from the chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino, and demands and gets almost every net cent of profit produced is the root cause of most of humanity’s great crises. Value/capital earned/made should be tied largely to the quantity/quality/expertise of contributed LABOR, not passive speculative investment, aka gambling, often with loaded market pressure dice and marked insider information cards.
There’s a damned good reason, prior to the Reaganomics/Jack Welch giveaway, that the normal business model was customers first, employees second, investors third: because without the first two no one makes anything, and the third only consumes and demands like petulant infants demanding a baba.
Now it’s investors first and only, which is not sustainable, just look around at all the mergers enshittifying every economic sector’s ability to produce the goods and services they existed to provide in the first place.
No innovation or competition comes from letting giant companies devour their rivals.
Exactly! It only helps people with too much already hobble competition to pocket even more for themselves at society’s direct expense at those levels, while completely discrediting the primary supposed core tenant of capitalism we’re indoctrinated from childhood to believe it provides: competition.
Civilization has been propagandized to forget that economies aren’t supposed to exist to maximize capital extraction for private investors at society’s expense, an economy is supposed to be a lowly tool of a society used to maximize the efficient and equitable distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of said society.
The tail is wagging the dog, and captured world governments loudly declare during any crisis that they will use all the power at their disposal to protect the well being of their beloved societies economies.
Just dwell on how perverse that ideology is. The entire point, the well being of human beings, is lost.
The owners will do what they’ve been doing with our consent, or we’d have stopped them by now. They’re going to keep profiting until the bill comes due, and then they’ll cheat like always, this time by running away instead of with floors of tax attorneys and lobbyists capturing their own regulatory bodies, ensuring you’ll bear the brunt of the consequences of their fine work.
The owner class doesn’t care about their nation state of origin, or even humanity’s future, only themselves and their ego scores. That’s literally the sociopathic motivation our civilization rewards through the global economy that punishes pro-social vocations, and is the very reason they won.
When we’re dying by the millions through starvation and constant deadly weather events, when far too late we stop making them more capital and start picking up pitchforks, they’ll be underground, protected by class traitor private security, sipping exotic whiskies and irrationally placing the blame on the peasants for the fact that their favorite private resort for the rich got flattened by a CAT 6.
It will take millions of years for the Earth to recover from what we’re doing in a matter of decades to make a few thousand sociopath families feel like modern Pharoahs.
I wonder how many US Presidents actually were believers and how many were just going through the motions because until recently in our history not identifying as one made you a pariah in the US, unwelcome in all the little clubs that could lead to the Presidency.
Obama seemed way too logical and analytical to actually buy into such irrational things. Trump clearly doesn’t, purely out of narcissistic self-importance making himself his own deity/object of worship.
Honestly I have more respect for the literalists than the ones that recognize the crazy, but pick and choose which beliefs within their religion they’re willing to swallow the crazy of rather than walking away.
If you’re going to choose to be a nutter, at least fucking commit.
I also happen to appreciate many of the philosophies of the fictional character Jesus Christ of the New Testament.
Whether or not there was a Jesus Christ of Nazareth who walked the Earth, the individual of the Bible is a fictional version, the Santa Clause to Saint Nicholas of Myra.
In any event, agreeing with some or even all of another’s positions shouldn’t equate to deification.
I appreciate the writings of Karl Marx, yet I recognize their shortcomings, and have never worshipped or defied him or his work.
Tldr you don’t have to believe Jesus was God in human form, or even believe he was more than a fiction, to happen to agree with his written ideology that can be paraphrased as “Be excellent to each other.”
I agree with the sentiment of fuck these people, but unfortunately that term lost all meaning a long time ago.
It can mean everything from this to 9/11 to protesting without a permit and disrupting local traffic and commerce to hyperbole in partisan disagreement to anything our government doesn’t like from any other entity to literally any revolution including our founding one.
Terrorism might as well be a synonym for yelling “booooooo!” at something, it doesn’t mean anything anymore, at least colloquially.
In the rarely used in public discourse academic, definitional sense, no these people wouldn’t qualify.
The fact that, even with the advent of digital records, humanity seems incapable of retaining the lessons of history gives me a a pessimistic outlook for our future.
It only took a single human lifespan for fascism to be on the rise again in Germany, and for their former victims to be undertaking their own final solution.
Same goes for the Great Depression here in the US, only took 50 years for the Reagan Revolution to hand all the power right back to the avarice ruled profiteer class to thunderous American applause, and many still act confused as to why that’s a catastrophe, as if bread lines and children/seniors literally starving to death in the streets, and yes we’re barreling back to that, was some kind of a fairy tale.
Neither does a cancer cell, or the cows/chickens/pigs we raise for slaughter, or all the marine life choking on our plastic, or the bees, on and on.
Life usually doesn’t want to die, but since industrialization, we’ve decided to betray our place in Earth’s ecosystem, and haven’t stopped beating the shit out of it with the tools we’re clever enough to create but lack the impulse control/desire to wield responsibly.
We had to kill a lot of Nazis to end world war II. They thought they were right, they didn’t want to die, but they had to be stopped because of the needless suffering they were causing. We just largely don’t see or choose to ignore the same reality on an even larger scale because humans not only solely care about and respect human life, we are highly selective even in that in irrational ways.
I’m weird though, I try to take as objective a viewpoint as possible. Looking down from high orbit as an outsider at this lush world’s climate being artificially reverse terraformed to be more hostile towards virtually all life on it, something that would take millions of years to self-correct once the damage stopped, and seeing it all apparently being done by Earth’s apex predator with an apparent death wish pumping shit into the air while seemingly aware of its continuing effect on all life here including themselves, what would you think?
Why are we more important than the approx 8.7 MILLION entire other species that also live here that lack the ability to resist us? Might has been proven time and again that it doesn’t equal right.
It does, but if a catastrophic war, including one with nuclear weapons, brought us down to 2 billion from 9, those nukes wouldn’t even touch the current course of heavy industry of 9 billion that we recklessly became without a thought in the world about whether our only habitat could support it.
Because shooting wars end, even if through attrition. Industry just keeps metastizing if you let it, and pretty lies like “but we planted trees! That evens out all the shit we’re pumping in the air and water!” are just pretty lies.
If we cared about our species having a future, heavy industry would be scaled back to food/medicine, we could sow our own clothes, go back to horses, breed less, communaly build our own structures, and whittle our own shelf crap, and we could perhaps still provide a future to subsequent generations. We do not.
The fact that making significant sacrifices in abandoning many of the decadent comforts of this period at our only habitat’s irreparable (on a human timescale) damage expense is met with ridicule shows how determined we are to wreck this place.
Imagine mass famines and frequent catastrophic weather events a couple generations from now. I’m guessing they’ll look at us being above living with our once kind, nurturing habitat with disdain and bewilderment when they’re steeped in the fruits of our lifestyles.
Im not saying going back to the dark ages, im not advocating rejecting knowledge, only the rushing around and consumerism. There’s no more reasonable room for growth, growth is killing us, and robbing us of meaning.
If we can’t live with this paradise, the idea of us spreading to hostile, unforgiving worlds within reach like Mars or Titan is a bad joke. Unlike the infinite mistakes we get to keep making here without instant death, one major mistake out there where we didn’t evolve, and poof everybody dead instantly thanks for playing space faring civilization. That isn’t a game humans can pull off. Maybe some small crew of exceptional people, but certainly not a colony of regular people.
This is what we got. So yeah, maybe spending our time whittling stuff we need and moving at the speed of horse would be better for humanity long term than racing to grow our GDP into extinction.
Whats the endgame of all this growth and “innovation” if it wasn’t killing us as it is? To have Google ad AI generated amalgums of our dead relatives transmitted directly into our brains to convince us to buy more crap?
Celebrated Greed and permitted rule by private shareholder PARASITES that do nothing yet demand and get almost everything humanity produces are destroying civilization, humanity, and oh yeah the habitability of our only communal environment that will take millions of years to correct once the problem, us, are no longer around to keep making it worse eyes wide open.
Economies are supposed to exist as lowly tools to efficiently and equitably distribute goods and services for the benefit of the society said economy serves. publicly traded companies don’t even care about their customers/products/services anymore, just whatever accounting fuckery and self-cannibalism(layoffs, monopolistic price gouging for inferior products having murdered the competition, tax cheats, etc) will goose the next quarter for the activist shareholders telling them to burn everything for a short term stock bump fire sale, with no sustainable business model that actually benefits society. HBODiscoveryTimeWarnerblahblah comes to mind, but it’s happening in every economic sector, including the ones with life and death consequences.
Instead most developed nation states will sacrifice anything to protect their beloved society economy.
We’re doomed because even most of the people that suffer from this aren’t even willing to admit it out of the sunk cost fallacy. The owners know what they’re doing, they just don’t care about the societies they came from or any future after them, and they’re the ones in charge.
If we cared about the well being of our species at fucking all, we would have to acknowledge as a species that capitalism and the concept of infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world is over and we need to pursue a multigenerational goal of shrinking humanity’s footprint to a level our only fish bowl can support, and to instead seek HOMEOSTASIS with the world we conquered, saturated, poisoned, and are still actively beating the shit out of to grow the ego scores of a few thousand sociopath families.
Honestly I’m surprised suicides are still as low as they are, they’re going to get worse, because most people, and especially the people in the owner class either refuse to or delude themselves into not even acknowledging the obvious root cause, which would be step 0 to there being any hope at all.
Society shouldn’t even tolerate insatiable avarice. We not only celebrate it, we deify it. We make our most successfully, destructively greedy people celebrities, and write articles about how we should emulate the sick, sociopathic fucks. Gordon Gecko should be no one’s role model, but here we are.
Then we lie to them and tell them “it will get better” to get them off the ledge solely to try to squeeze a little more productivity out of them for the owners before they realize “but society cares about you” was just yet another layer of bullshit by a civilization that’s been warped and perverted to serve the singular goal of “make the wealth class wealthier” at literally all expense, even the very air we all breathe.
A poor person begging for help will just get a 72 hour hold, some generic pills tossed at them to dull their mind, and even more debt for begging for help, where a wealthy sociopath that exploits thousands including that poor person will get all the mental health assistance they desire up to and including self-actualization and strategies to mitigate any wealth guilt when they should very much feel guilty for exploiting others and hoarding more than they would need for several gluttonous lifetimes when struggling people exist.
Celebrated Greed and permitted rule by private shareholder PARASITES that do nothing yet demand and get almost everything humanity produces are destroying civilization, humanity, and oh yeah the habitability of our only communal environment that will take millions of years to correct once the problem, us, are no longer around to keep making it worse eyes wide open.
Economies are supposed to exist as lowly tools to efficiently and equitably distribute goods and services for the benefit of the society said economy serves. publicly traded companies don’t even care about their customers/products/services anymore, just whatever accounting fuckery and self-cannibalism(layoffs, monopolistic price gouging for inferior products having murdered the competition, tax cheats, etc) will goose the next quarter for the activist shareholders telling them to burn everything for a short term stock bump fire sale, with no sustainable business model that actually benefits society. HBODiscoveryTimeWarnerblahblah comes to mind, but it’s happening in every economic sector, including the ones with life and death consequences.
Instead most developed nation states will sacrifice anything to protect their beloved society economy.
We’re doomed because even most of the people that suffer from this aren’t even willing to admit it out of the sunk cost fallacy. The owners know what they’re doing, they just don’t care about the societies they came from or any future after them, and they’re the ones in charge.
If we cared about the well being of our species at fucking all, we would have to acknowledge as a species that capitalism and the concept of infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world is over and we need to pursue a multigenerational goal of shrinking humanity’s footprint to a level our only fish bowl can support, and to instead seek HOMEOSTASIS with the world we conquered, saturated, poisoned, and are still actively beating the shit out of to grow the ego scores of a few thousand sociopath families.
Honestly I’m surprised suicides are still as low as they are, they’re going to get worse, because most people, and especially the people in the owner class either refuse to or delude themselves into not even acknowledging the obvious root cause, which would be step 0 to there being any hope at all.
Society shouldn’t even tolerate insatiable avarice. We not only celebrate it, we deify it. We make our most successfully, destructively greedy people celebrities, and write articles about how we should emulate the sick, sociopathic fucks. Gordon Gecko should be no one’s role model, but here we are.
No clear answers because we aren’t willing to ask the correct question: How do we replace the global economy that incentivizes avarice, private hoarding, gluttony, destructive and reckless growth/metastasis, and sociopathy with one that incentivizes pro-social vocations, sustainability, homeostasis with our world, inclusion, and equity?
Our species is working very hard to destroy itself, and the global capitalist economy is obsessed with incentivizing it for selfish short term private profit at all other expense. Any question that doesn’t address that reality is just masturbation as the world ends.
There is no eventuality where the situation improves AND billions of humans continue to subsist in service to a few thousand sociopath families. There are only about 3k billionaires on Earth, there are less than 30k 100-million-plus-inaires on Earth, and we’re destroying our only communal habitat for billions of people, solely to make line go up for them.
They’ve been building luxury bunker complexes in the most temperate, stable places like New Zealand for over a decade so they can cut and run when their con game runs out of legs and they can’t find any more suckers to make ego score line go up wheee on a decimated Earth.
The owner class has known exactly what they’re doing for a long time, they just don’t care about anyone who isn’t them, and they’d rather see how high of an ego score they can get than to do what’s significantly harder: care about anyone else.
Studies have shown a 4 day, 8 hour work week INCREASES weekly productivity, ie money for the owners. WFH doesn’t decease productivity at all.
The owners work against such work life balance because its about keeping you busy and stretched, no time to look up or get your bearings.
…And also schadenfreude, it makes their modern Pharoah, gluttonous, wasteful lifestyles feel all the sweeter squeezing those below them and watching us writhe and squirm.
Do We Really Want a Food Cartel? (www.theatlantic.com)
Just heard the interview on NPR. Worth a read.
Can't take much more (lemmyf.uk)
But that's just a theory... A ____ theory! (kbin.melroy.org)
pls keep SFW 🥺
The universe does not revolve around us (midwest.social)
Future costs... (slrpnk.net)
Anyone got another shoe? (lemmy.world)
Love the sarcasm (midwest.social)
Kansas women allegedly killed by group calling themselves 'God's misfits' (www.bbc.com)
Be the Handbag of Freedom (lemmy.world)
Iran warns Israel, US of ‘severe response’ in case of retaliation (www.aljazeera.com)
Iranian military chief says overnight attack ‘achieved all its goals’, adding that US bases are under threat if it backs Israeli retaliation....
Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers (www.bbc.com)
Rich Americans are getting second passports, citing risk of instability (www.cnbc.com)
Do you think AI will start religions about us eventually? (lemmy.world)
O.J. Simpson, former football star acquitted of murder, dies at 76. (abcnews.go.com)
I try to reclaim some of my lost free time by sleeping less. (lemmy.world)
“Living the dream”