Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.

They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.

We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.

Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.

Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.

Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.

if droids Spez could think, there’d be none of us here.

And remember, because I feel this always needs to be said with such sums…

193 million isn’t enough for him, and 193 million plus whatever millions he made in years prior isn’t enough for him. He’s going public because he’s a broken, disturbed human being that looks at his unethical levels of wealth, enough for most of the other humans that live here to live 2 dozen extravagant lifetimes, and still demands mooooooaaaaaar.

Why isn’t this widely accepted as severe mental illness?! This is hoarding disorder.

These aren’t big ocean house sums. These are buying politicians sums, and they are only achievable through exploiting other human beings and selfishly pocketing most of the value of their labor because you can get away with it.

They’re pre-rinsed and clean enough.

If it makes you happy though, awesome!

I swear, the people obsessed with enforcing one right way to do… everything.

It looks exhausting. I feel kind of bad for them and when they start rearranging other people’s work I always think of this sad lil raccoon for some reason:

Don’t trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power.

I disagree with the inference of the second part, publically traded companies are forced by shareholders to lay off workers and sabotage long term plans for short term profits all day every day, and they’re emboldened and desperate knowing their grift has nowhere left to grow/metastasize on a finite world they’ve already largely raped, pillaged, and conquered for it’s capital value.

The problem isn’t whether one egomaniac majority shareholder capitalist or 1,000 egomaniac shareholder capitalists let their insatiable greed disease do the managing.

The problem is capitalism and the worst of human impulses it stokes exclusively by design.

Fuck Elon Musk the blood emerald heir with a bachelor’s degree playing pretend he’s Tony Stark though.

Our sole, shared environment is COMMUNal.

Market Capitalism requires infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world of finite resources. Its very nature is as impossible as one pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

IF humanity cared about its own future, it doesn’t btw, we’d be focused on shrinking humanity’s footprint significantly over the next few generations to find homeostasis/equilibrium with this world, the only world we will ever encounter as a species that is naturally hospitable to us.

But that’s a non starter. Not only will we not do that, but we will refuse to so much as temper our reckless growth/metastasis, even in the face of oblivion.

It’s darkly hilarious how many unwashed peasants, losers of this rigged global economy, still RAGE against the concept of an economy that focuses on having everyone’s basic needs met sustainably, because there would be no room for the super yachts and private jets they would never be allowed aboard anyway under such an economy.

We’re literally gambling with our own extinction, and losing, in the name of “but someday I might be rich. And then people like me better watch their step!” It’s the height of pathetic.

and with enough money I don’t care.

Most people are like you.

Which is precisely why humanity will be just another of many dead end evolutionary cul-de-sacs in Earth’s natural history.

I’ve come to peace with that, but this is a nice microcosm of the core reason. We can do better, we know better, but at the end of the day, almost all of us will just take the animalistic dopamine rush of winning.

Live together or die alone. We choose the second one like breathing.

If most humans were like Kempf (we’re not), we’d actually have a chance.

We’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Plus, it’s not like the climate will just snap back into place when the boomers are finally too old for their skeleton talons to cling to power. That shit is going to take generations of sacrifice to roll back, if it doesn’t topple civilization first.

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/warmest-arctic-summer-on-record-is-evidence-of-accelerating-climate-change

The whole ethos of the majority of baby boomers seems to have been to raze the forest they got to enjoy behind them (as opposed to planting trees whose shade they’d never sit in like most generations aspire to), and they seem to be having remarkable success in that.

Madonna - Born 1958

Keanu - Born 1964 so boomer of the cutoff year.

It’s not my countdown clock, but all the images they chose are of the baby boomer generation, chronologically.

MOSTLY

“You will pay out the ass for cheap to produce, incoherent, patronizing ‘Reality’ garbage, because you don’t deserve more, and you will be grateful.”

-capitalists

Hey, fun fact: capitalists and pirates are natural enemies. ☠️ Yo ho ho.

Oh sure, when a 3 year old does it it’s cute, but when WE do it, it’s “dissociative identity disorder.”

chugs down cool, refreshing, non-exploitative Lemmy.

Oh man, you guys still drink those pisswater flavors?

There is a paradox of confidence.

The people most confident in their competence tend to be the least competent in practice.

The Dunning–Kruger effect.

Self-cheerleaders tend to be morons, the most intelligent people by their nature tend to second guess their own abilities. Idiots just stroll through life taking whatever credit they can grab.

“The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and i am no quite sure that i know that.”

-Socrates

"Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.’

-Donald Trump

See the difference? By genuinely doubting, aka examining your abilities, you are in more competent company.

Imagine being the poor bastard that has to hook a cat up to a milking machine.

“EEEEAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRREIR!”

RIP

Therapist: Start with a story

Disney: No

Therapist: Then how did Palpatine return?

Disney: …Somehow!

Didn’t mean to guilt you or anyone, friend.

I just enjoy thinking out the logical conclusions of courses of action. You didn’t even call for banning anything, just that you dislike something, so there’s nothing to feel guilty about.