Due explicitly to market behavior unless regulated otherwise, exactly. Most people who build companies do so to make money. When you accumulate enough capital/power, it just becomes good business to use that power to cannibalize your competition if you’re able.

What is good for modern business, profit exclusively, becomes explicitly detrimental to the society that provided the infrastructure and conditions for that business to succeed in the first place, which is why such behaviors need to be but are not prohibited.

At this point, our society exists to grow our beloved economy, when the reality is an economy is supposed to just be a lowly tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of society and it’s citizens.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html

Most stakeholders of American society, its citizens, are not meaningfully among the shareholders our society labors to benefit. The most maddening part are all the exploited Americans who would literally die defending the current system and their own exploitation and that of their family in the name of tradition/blind faith/sunk cost fallacy/the schadenfreude of “I suffered so you should too”/ etc.

Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing capitalists (not to be confused with the capitalism sycophant, self-hating peasants that don’t hold significant capital and never will but call themselves capitalists) despise more than actual competition.

The goal of unchecked, unregulated capitalism is to end capitalism, ie competition.

That’s why entire industries merge into a single entity to create a monopoly, as the regulators the oligarchs captured decades ago that were supposed to prevent such anticompetitive behaviors sit back passively with their rubber stamps.

The We may only be fucked short term but we’re doomed long term if we stay in charge of ourselves instead of building something more benevolent than ourselves to protect ourselves from our own baked in inner darkness: greed, arrogance, apathy, selfishness, narcissism, schadenfreude, gluttony, etc.

Human beings are the worst at far off threats and warnings. Climate change will have to kill a significant, at minimum double digit percentage of the species before we even begin to consider changing our lifestyles. Even then, we don’t retain lessons. It only took a single human lifespan for the Israelis to go from being the most sympathetic of victims to the unrepentant victimizers, for repentant Germany’s far right to re-emerge, and even for the former saviors like the US and UK to literally court fascism. As a species, we can barely learn and we absolutely cannot generationally retain hard lessons. That used to be fine, until science provided us with tools that make our significant shortcomings destructive on a truly global scale.

We’re aggressive monkeys with nuclear/biological/chemical weapons, and evolution is far too slow to compensate for that recipe for disaster.

Wow, legislating like this is a society that cares about its own future instead of a piggybank of resources to be exploited for private profit by our oligarchs.

How very un-American. It’s like he doesn’t even care what this will do to billionaire ego scores. Not much, but maybe something perceptible on an earnings report! They’ll never piss down those golden showers of prosperity they’ve been promising for half a century if we don’t give them ALL the value society produces!

It was always a lie by the capitalists to pawn off accountability for their insatiable greed driven decision to continue to terraform our only planet to be hostile towards human life for short term profit.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

No amount of peasants separating cans and bottles or using cloth diapers would have changed the temperature of today, that was just a way to shift blame from the perpetrator with the bully pulpit to powerless individuals like us.

Should we recycle and consume a lot less? Of course, but never forget, that empty, purpose sapping, depression/anxiety causing consumer lifestyle isn’t simply a choice we get to make, it is pushed on us all day every day at every level both through culture and through mass media the oligarchs fully own and through scholastic indoctrination through policy manipulation as the oligarchs own our politicians. We are raised from the cradle to conflate consumption with meaning. We are taught as children that a thriving consumer economy helps everyone when it really only helps a tiny sliver of the population at everyone else’s expense.

The capitalists, not the self-hating peasant capitalism sycophants, the people that hold significant capital, will continue to blame their victims, even when they have to retreat to the luxury bunker compounds they’ve been building in places like new Zealand to protect themselves exclusively from the damage they’ve knowingly inflicted on the human race.

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-inside-luxury-bunkers-ultra-rich-prepare-for-doomsday-2022-9#tech-billionaires-are-building-luxury-doomsday-bunkers-according-to-a-tell-all-book-by-douglas-rushkoff-1

And watch, their descendants will emerge a generation or 2 later, fully believing they were the ones who were wronged, expecting to lead the remnants of humanity once again. We’ll be dumb enough to let the sociopath’s progeny do it, too. I’ve yet to see my species collectively declare that enough’s fucking enough when the capital hoarders fuck us all over.

This was a bad decision, as this is just a larger scale version of the “should free speech let you yell FIRE in a crowded theater that isn’t on fire” public safety question.

Free speech needs to have limits when it comes to public safety. The scientific community, including medical science, has effectively DOUBLED the average human lifespan and greatly increased quality of life for that lifespan in the course of a couple centuries. Their community’s consensus findings and recommendations should be above reproach. They have more than earned their bona fides. They have given mankind greater miracles than any imaginary deity we’ve ever invented and worshipped in our thousands of years of recorded history.

Letting idiots shout “do the opposite of what modern medicine says!,” lacking any credible evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence their extraordinary claims would require, during a major pandemic is just as destructive as the fire analogy but on a massively larger scale.

A lot of admittedly unintelligent people, but people nonetheless, are dead because of malicious conspiracy idiots that were literally ready to die on the “don’t tell me what to do, ‘experts’” hill and wanted to convince gullible idiots to unknowingly join them in their suicide by duuuuhhhh.

That’s the thing though, the Republicans already broke that machine by refusing to consider Obama’s appointment, with no repurcussians of any kind.

At this point, obeying rules and norms and not doing what you can get away with in federal government to achieve your goals just makes you a sucker.

Ooh La La, Someone’s Going To Get Laid In College…

It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.

Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.

Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.

I will switch if something better comes along that is decentralized.

The profit motive poisons everything and turns it to shit. I won’t join a social again if it can be purchased to turn me into another metric on a spreadsheet for someone to sell.

We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.

It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.

Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.

Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.