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The only reason no one is nuking anyone is cause it's not profitable to plunder radioactive resources. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Is capitalism greed the only thing saving us from mutually assured destruction?

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[–] 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

This is semi-related so spoilers for the Fallout show: this right here is the reason I stopped being invested in the plot of Fallout. When they revealed that Vault Tec dropped the bombs that created the post apocalyptic setting I was dumbfounded. I can accept silliness and characters being nonsensical sometimes, but in that moment every person in that room was proven to be outright stupid. They tried to say that it would let them “corner the market” in the aftermath, but how could they not see that they were destroying their own marketshare too?

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Have you looked at what the US corpos are doing? Shooting themselves in the foot for short term profits is extremely believable.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Yeah, that crossed my mind, but I do think there’s a difference. US corporations shoot themselves in the foot to pursue short term profits because the people in charge believe they can get out of the business with that profit before those decisions come back to bite them.

    In the show though, they’re doing the opposite. They’re giving up their short term profitable corporations for some nebulous future “market monopolization” in the long term, despite there no longer being a market for them to monopolize. I think that makes them even more stupid.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    There is a tension that it is going to happen anyways some in the show, or at least anyways unless those corporations and the CCP come to equal terms (likely at loss of standard of living that they are both burning through the world to maintain).

    Its also a bit of the "effective altruism" mind virus where at the scale of forever it's a wash to have most of the planet destroyed today so that they each can have a playground for the "cool" futures they imagine leading humanity down.

    They are stupid, but it is also very based in real people.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Most of the vaults from Vault Tec have some kind of dark experiment going on, experiment that can only be performed when people are in the vaults and have a huge reason to stay in the vaults. A nuclear armageddon is such a reason. The corporation is, in my eyes and there are hints and clues in the games for that, only a facade not really interested in profits and market shares but in a bigger goal. Colonies on other planets could be such a goal, and the results from nearly all of the experiments (at least in the way planned) would be very helpful for planning and crewing generation ships and colonist groups. Having to rebuild society on a harsh and harmful planet (like the radioactive hellhole earth is in the fallout universe ) too would very much fit the criteria of an experiment to colonize other planets. If you can't rebuild on a broken earth, how could you on a harmful alien world out there?

    It all makes sense, in a twisted and insane way.

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