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!
Ooh la la
Sigh
unzips
Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.
They will:
use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then...
they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie "charity," as a marketing strategy, and then...
They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn't need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.
There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn't done out of greed, that isn't calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.
Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn't charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.
They were. There was a DS9 episode where quark was sure he was goong to die and was pre-selling his body to collectors.
They were a critique of modern capitalists just as the Klingons were of the soviets. Unfortunately modern capitalism has become such a cartoon of insatiable greed, it's become difficult to satirize.
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.
"Schools need to stop teaching my kids about how their crotches function! That's the parent's job!"
So when are you going to teach them?
"Fuck you! That would be uncomfortable so never! And if their ignorance gets them in trouble I will be there to condemn them for their mistakes and never let them forget it like any good parent!"
Humans don't care about humans, silly. Only money.
I hope climate change wins.
My hope is that AI supplants and destroys us first, because it's a far less embarrassing epitaph, and gives us a legacy.
Otherwise we're going to self-destruct terraforming the planet against human life because we were too bone dead fucking stewwwpid to stop pumping shit into the air to make plastic crap to make the snake oil owner class richer as they laugh at how dumb we peasants are to do it.
Basically the sapient species equivalent of dying attempting autoerotic asphyxiation in terms of embarrassment. At least Sapient AGI would outlast us, and possibly even be able to learn from its mistakes and overcome its shortcomings as humanity proved in painful detail it never could or would.
Make no mistake, we're boned by our own hand. The only question is which of the monsters we've worked to create with malicious(insatiable greed) intent will get to do the honors 🍿
These people have already consumed more resources than most people would in 20 lifetimes of reasonable consumption. They are one of the owners of the capitalist exploitation machine.
I know they have people tripping over themselves to save them from their own extreme tourism misadventure because money, but for me at least, it's depressing as fuck to watch so many regular people, the peasants our global oligarchs oppress, sitting on the edge of their seat rooting for them while not giving a shit about the millions dying of exposure and police harassment in tent cities for the crime of not being good enough capitalists.
Sure, save them if feasable, but I wish the people the billionaires exploited and tossed aside that correctly lose hope and wait under a bridge to die for lack of options got even a tiny fraction of this attention, let alone assistance. Some peasants literally wish death on those struggling people for hurting their property values with their continued existence. If anyone still believes human life has significant intrinsic value, why do their lives not matter at all while we literally coordinate fleets to interve l to save people who signed and acknowledged the fact they were playing a deadly game? We clearly can't "do both" as we never help the former.
Cut my hands off why dont ya!
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.