Let’s be honest, our “free market” is a regular casino for the plebs that own about 10% of shares in their 401ks and Robinhood accounts, and an intentionally rigged casino for the oligarchs that own the rest, with marked insider information cards, and loaded market manipulation dice.

Gotta love when the bootlickers defend this economy, and market investment, as somehow inclusive, when 93% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans.

(Saved Fortune article) https://archive.ph/DW0A8

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Oh come on now.

Almost all people declaring or otherwise promoting their supposed genius are completely full of shit, Elon comes to top of mind, but there in fact are some savants for which quickly understanding and mastering highly technical domains just comes naturally.

These people are almost always far more interested in exercising their gift/curse and solving problems than in self promotion or feeding a greed disease. People like Elon unfortunately receive most of the fruits and accolades of the efforts of people like this. It makes me sick how selfish, self-important capitalist baffoon types literally rule the world by paying people that do solve mankind’s great problems a salary, then perverting their work to maximize profit and walking out on stage with it in a fucking turtleneck all but declaring “I made dis thing. Don’t ask me how it fucking works, but I made dis. Pay me. I’m God.”

It’s sad that humans largely tend to swoon over, and would much rather be led by charismatic narcissistic bullshit artists, usually dopes who never think before they open their gaping mouth holes, who have no problem declaring they know everything about everything than almost exclusively non-charismatic, high functioning geniuses that are almost always too neurotic to want to lead, which makes them even more desirable candidates to be drafted into it.

Much like Facebook, if you participate in LinkedIn, I question your judgement.

In addition to the others that replied to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist

The owners made an example of the journalist that broke the Panama Papers story.

I just wish there were a way to preserve these records in a format with enough longevity to survive until the next sapient species evolves after we destroy ourselves and the human habitability of the planet for a couple million years.

They could use the warning against indulging greed and willful ignorance, and we deserve to have others laughing at our species’ expense through time. We inherited paradise just to set it on fire eyes wide open. It’s an extremely low bar, but I hope the next global apex predator chooses to do better.

Imagine taking pride in this fucking gold plated cesspool we call the US.

It boggles the mind.

I hear you about the long arm of history, and I might even agree, but not just our society, our species was put on notice we are risking the habitability of our only shared, sole habitat in the medium term a century ago. Now it’s here, it’s accelerating, we are feeling amuse bouche of our reverse terraforming project, scientists are finding new runaway effects their conservative estimates didn’t account for, and still humanity collectively shrugs because we can’t disrupt our global economy short term even to literally have a future for our species. We, the US, are among the leaders in the world in terms of accelerating that destruction.

I likely would have more of an attitude of not for us, for our children if that weren’t the case. But physics doesn’t care that we are the slow learners and selfish fucks. I hold the shame and guilt in my heart for my son’s likely hellish future that I really can do nothing about short of becoming an ecoterrorist which for the record I’m not planning on becoming.

Time is no longer a luxury humanity possesses. We needed to take drastic, draconian, lifestyle altering changes decades ago, and we still aren’t willing to entertain such things today, with shattered heat and earliest cat 5 hurricane ever records.

I was part of Occupy, and it was mostly the fellow peasants being hurt from this system laughing us off the street. I made phone calls for Bernie’s primaries.

I still vote the least non-progressive out of harm reduction, and will vote for Harris, as I would have for Biden’s corpse, just as I did voting for his corpse the last cycle, and Clinton before when not many showed up. But I no longer have hope. That’s just so I can look myself in the mirror and say I did the right thing in the face of madness.

Good on you if you have hope, rage against the dying of that light. I’ve seen too much to believe that the nobility of the human spirit will prevail.

All the idiot Americans cheering about scapegoating single mothers as welfare queens since the 80s, never an utterance by anyone with power of all the DO NOTHING private investors that drop their chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino and demand all the profit for no labor whatsoever.

“Fuck you, I’m an owner, pay me.”

Prior to the Jack Welch Ronald Reagan betrayal, the model was correcly “customers first, employees second, investors third.”

Everything falls apart when you give every spare penny to the people who A) dont DO anything to make the money they demand and B) demand the companies they own sabotage their missions and futures to goose net profit for the current quarter so they can profit and walk away having severely damaged those company’s ability to do what they existed for, only to demand it of other companies.

This is an admisson of no future.

They’re throwing crew out of their boat full of holes to assure investors they’re ship shape… for the next quarterly profit report.

Their corpse will be long since picked clean of their patents, assets, and trademarks by 2030.

I mean they absolutely will when civilization collapses due to climate collapse and accompanying weather events, famine, droughts, and plagues.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/the-climate-is-changing-so-fast-that-we-havent-seen-how-bad-extreme-weather-could-get/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w

I take solace in knowing that they can build all the luxury bunkers they want, but they will one day come to realize they are their tombs, protecting them from the world and species they damned, including for any of their muh legacy nepo babies huddled underground with them, for a couple million years.

You fit exiled in the forest by all three.

Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.

Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.

“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”

The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.

Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter

I, for one, would like to hear Elon beg.

Oof. Oligopolies/duopolies shouldn’t exist, but here we are.