One problem with #capitalism, especially around publicly-traded companies, is that there is really nothing that prevents a group of rich people from buying up a popular company, saddling it with debt to the purchaser’s company, then bleeding it dry of cash, slowly ruining its products, and then selling the corpse for parts. This often nets the buyer a tidy profit, but leaves employees without a job, and customers without a product they love.
What possible countervailing force exists in a capitalist system to stop this? Absolutely nothing. Everything is above-the-table legal. All buyers need is enough money to purchase the company outright. Then squeeze, profit, discard.
Capitalism assumes people will try to profit by providing goods and services that customers are willing to buy for a premium. This assumption is often used to justify the glorification of capitalism, but this assumption is obviously false. The greatest profiteers in capitalism are “financial engineers” that produce nothing of actual value.
Hank G ☑️ likes this.
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What's causing this damage? Could it be the beneficial mites? - All For Gardening
I had a small infestation of mites and thrips a while back, so i added beneficial mites to take care of it. I think i'm pest free by now, but i stillGardener (All For Gardening)
Loops community: You may notice a bunch of new notifications, we now generate notifications for Video/Comment/Reply shares/boosts, and backfilled missing ones ✨
America is Flying Blind on Immigration
apricitas.io/p/america-is-flyi…
Interesting analysis
America is Flying Blind on Immigration
Nobody Knows How Many Immigrant Workers Have Left the US Amidst Trump's Mass Deportations. That's Incredibly Bad.Joseph Politano (Apricitas Economics)
i feel stupid because when dealing with api design and such i try to find plain language words for the verbs.
ex. 'projecting' from a repository/archive, calling the records from a projection 'reports,' and importing them is 'debriefing.' like the whole goal is to read the sentence and actually understand what it is without needing to go through mathematical decryption.
idk
Eurovision in collapse over Israel as Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands & Slovenia withdraw. Iceland will decide Wednesday whether to join the boycott as its most famous musician Björk has urged. Earlier this year Germany said it would withdraw if Eurovision ousted Israel.
BTW TIL Germany supplies 29% of Israeli arms and the US 70%.
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If Germany withdrew because Israel was booted, I would not be upset.
🤬 I'm not watching, anyway.
Israel is a terrorist state.
In #HomeAssistant, I know I could make a dashboard show certain cards depending on a specific user's location. This works perfectly in a simple single-user setup, so it shows certain cards/sections on the dashboard depending on that one person's location.
But when we're tryna make it a multi-user setup, isn't it possible to make it so that the dashboard shows certain cards depending on the logged in user's location (and not specific user's)? That'd be much more helpful and accurate, so we could make the dashboard only show things that may be relevant to them based on the location of who's logged in?
🚨 OFFICIEL.
Ça se murmure dans les couloirs les plus importants... L'attente touche à sa fin. 🏛️
L'application EPOC arrive bientôt. Même en haut lieu, on ne lit plus que ça. Soyez prêts pour la révolution. 📱🇫🇷
#innovation2025 #Tech #Scoopz #Politique #MissFrance #solidarite
The Wee Writing Lassie’s 300 Books in a Year – Book 254
The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov Goodreads Blurb: A millennium into the future two advances have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Detective Elijah Baley is called to the Spacer world Aurora to solve a bizarre case of roboticide.
weewritinglassie.home.blog/202…
The Wee Writing Lassie’s 300 Books in a Year – Book 254
The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov Goodreads Blurb: A millennium into the future two advances have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positr…The Wee Writing Lassie
Tech-themed works, continued…
Vlogger (2018).
#tech #technology #YouTube #video #vlog #videos #CharacterDesign #graphics #design #artwork #2D #vector #cartoon #illustration #illustrator #cute #picture #DigitalArt #digital #experimental #style #art #artist #arts #arte #designer #GraphicDesign #minimalism #ArtLovers #FineArt #painting #drawing #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon
For #AncientSiteSunday this fabulous aerial photo of the Acropolis at #Athens - a site I would love to be right now!
📷 Christos Kapoulas
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Guess what? quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/…
(In this case Plato did at least say something a bit similar, though certainly not the same.)
I promise I'm not just googling every quotation you post, by the way. Only the ones that seem like obviously modern writing and are then attributed to Aristotle or the Buddha or whoever.
Hegseth defends decision to kill survivors in Caribbean strike
The nearly two dozen strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific have come under bipartisan scrutiny.The Japan Times
Jens Oliver Meiert 🇺🇳 🇵🇸
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •@drahardja, I wonder if individualism has exacerbated what some people think they can do while making others believe they’re too weak to stop them.
What doesn’t help, either, is our fog of ethics: We benefit from a much stronger sense of ethics of responsibility, where we ingrain to act more responsibly and also encourage to demand more responsibility.
Simplified, but without a sense of collectiveness and unity we won’t unlock other “quick” solutions.
Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Jens Oliver Meiert 🇺🇳 🇵🇸 • • •@j9t I usually frame this in an “or else what?” mentality. People do something slightly evil. What happens? Nothing? They do something more evil. What happens? Still nothing? Well, they’ll keep doing worse things until they feel resistance.
There must by a force that counters an evil progression for it to stop. What is that force in capitalism? Norms don’t stop evil unless there is punishing action when norms are broken.
humancode.us/2024/12/28/or-els…
Or Else What
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FreediverX
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •Diane
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •I think the european nobles interest in developing capitalism was created by their efforts to impose colonialism on the world.
Royals investing in companies that go off and loot a foreign land looks quite similar to wealthy investors buying a healthy company and draining it of all its wealth.
Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Diane • • •Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •The idea that #capitalism is a system beneficial to society is entirely predicated on the idea that people will primarily try to make a profit by offering products and services that others need. This premise is as bogus as the now-debunked school of Rational Economics, in which people were assumed to make only rational, self-preserving, long-term-beneficial choices. We now know that people make all kinds of irrational choices based on fashion, addiction, deception, convenience, and any number of other factors.
It’s even more patently obvious that the profits-for-public-benefit assumption that undergirds Capitalism is equally false. The greatest profiteers in our capitalistic societies are pretty obviously people who can extract the most labor without paying, put up the tallest barriers, invent the trickiest financial sleights-of-hand, and most effectively destroy representative governments.
The FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION of Capitalism is a lie. The system DOES NOT WORK.
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Dave Rahardja 🎄 and Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦 reshared this.
Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •I think in the micro- to mid-scales, where competition is strong and barriers to market entry are low, the correlation between profits and benefits provided can often still hold. But it fades away quickly with scale and monopoly. Even small-scale companies in modestly-sized metro areas quickly become detached from this correlation when they become even slightly dominant, or when “financial engineering” comes into the picture. The shift from “honest business offering products and services for profit” to “extractive capitalist enterprise” happens quickly and at shockingly small scales. Anyone who has bought a second house in Silicon Valley as “investment property” has entered this game: they have taken an incredibly scarce resource that people need to live, and turned it into a barrier for passive extraction of the value of labor.
#capitalism
Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •I believe that every step we take farther from making a profit by selling desirable goods and services has an exponentially harmful effect on society, and requires exponentially more stringent regulations.
One step removed may be something like lending money at an interest. Two steps may be raising capital by selling shares. Three steps may be options or futures trading, then purely gambling on markets, and so on. The further removed an activity is from actually offering goods and services, the more tightly regulated and discouraged it should be.
To encourage this, we must guarantee a minimum standard of living for everyone. Universal basic income and universal healthcare will return tremendous power to workers to negotiate better work conditions (which is probably why we don’t have them in the US), which will lead to an ability for the masses to refuse to take part in extractive, capitalist enterprises.
Mastodon Migration
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •This is a great observation. The further we get from the base model of making something from bits that cost less than what you can sell the thing for, the more corrupted the system becomes.
Would add the corollary that it is actually hard to profit from making real things and much easier to make nonsense things that don't work at all, but can be hyped and generate fortunes through pump and dump equity Ponzi schemes (aka financial engineering).
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Lightfighter
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •Dave Rahardja 🎄
in reply to Lightfighter • • •@Lightfighter But that’s just it: *it doesn’t have to be that way*. It is only that way because these extractive behemoths have to keep growing ever faster, and they are running out of willing consumers to fund that growth.
Why do these companies have to even exist?
Lightfighter
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •Dave Rahardja 🎄 reshared this.
Mark Loundy
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •𐁂𐀑𐀐𐁐
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •〽️ɪɢᴜᴇʟ
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •Howard Chu @ Symas
in reply to Dave Rahardja 🎄 • • •