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.

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.

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.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna90336

good thing we put so much effort into saving a billionaire with a deathwish while we let all these poor people die. Good thing so many peasants were more interested in a billionaire’s life than our brothers and sisters the billionaires oppress and exploit out of proud, insatiable, sociopathic greed.

Our civilization doesn’t value human life. It values capital. Capitalism turns us against one another.

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.

I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

Really?

The same reason Reddit fucked everyone over, the same reason for mass tent cities in supposedly prosperous nations, the same reason we’re terraforming the planet to be hostile to human life: metastasizing capitalism that entire societies now subsist to stoke the growth of, to its own slow, painful destruction.

An economy is supposed to be a tool to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of society. Yet we allow millions to suffer to protect the beloved economy. We were tricked into doing it ass backwards to benefit a few assholes at everyone else’s expense. That’s why data caps, microtransactions, regulatory/governmental capture, our decrepit K-12 system in literal ruin, sub living wages, etc are still a thing. You name a major problem here in the US, and I’ll show you something our hyper capitalist economy either causes, exacerbates, or stokes to keep the peasants at eachother’s throats to stop them from looking up and uniting against the problem.

Capitalism can be heavily, heavily, heavily regulated to be of service to a society. The Nordic nations do it, western Europe did until they caught the US’s insatiable greed disease. But without putting capitalism into a straight jacket, having a maximum income tied to a multiplier of the median wage, making corporations fund the society that provided the infrastructure for their success, and putting the needs of societal systems (utilities, education, social safetynet, etc) above the desires of the business community with the force of law, capitalism is a societal cancer that turns citizens against one another and gluts humanity’s worst impulses exclusively.

And since the American oligarch capitalists captured their regulators completely under Reagan almost a half century ago, the FCC either won’t indicate publically traded ISP greed, or won’t do anything about it. Greed won, and we all lost even though many are deluded into being grateful little capital batteries for their owners.

They sure like talking down to volunteer moderators as if they’re disgruntled employees and not the betrayed former free revenue generators that they were.

My bet is that most of them are waiting to see how Meta’s platform will actually turn out.

Man, the peasants just refuse to learn, don’t we? Maybe the wealth class won’t fuck everything up and ruin a good thing in the name of short term profit this time! 😑

At least Lucy had to lie to and reassure Charlie Brown to get him to try to kick the football again. It’s like people have already forgotten thr reason most of us are here is to escape a greedy asshole breaking our community in his quest to sell us all out to Wall Street.

Whenever the oligarch class discovers a new crumb the peasants made for themselves, they immediately want that, too. It’s never enough.

We can’t even escape the insatiable greed of our capitalist dystopia on a decentralized lifeboat 😔

Steve Huffman giving off serious Kendall vibes.

I’ve seen some here openly despair that leaving reddit didn’t do anything.

Spez, CEO of Reddit and former mod of the r/jailbait subreddit losing his shit very publically for days proves otherwise.

…And it’s also a reminder that the reddit community we loved has already been destroyed by ownership, anyone returning would be returning to a shadow that disdains its own users and works to disempower them with every update. They’re even undeleting user’s deleted posts. If they can’t respect users enough to be able to delete their own content, why enrich them?

My Daily Reminder that this is a gold plated dystopia.

If you want lazy action, I highly recommend a largely ignored gem. Orcs must die 3.

It’s nice looking, satisfying as hell, and you can pay as much or as little attention to it as you want.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what’s important starting out.