Gold plated shithole for those of us unwilling to delude ourselves with that crap.
Doesn't sound like a massive loss, friend. People grow apart, even if they are your blood relatives. The family you choose is far more important, especially if your family gets angry and even writes you off at your lack of equivalent suffering. Americans are so weird about suffering being a positive, "character building" experience for its own sake.
I'm jealous of you btw, you did what I was too chickenshit to do and you reached the promised land.
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.
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.
You are what you do and say.
There are some cool ass, communist old people who will smoke a joint with you and express their shame for being conflated with their lead consuming contemporaries, and then there's 20 year olds that listen to Ben Shapiro and want to make america great again, lamenting over never experiencing the "good ol days" when minorities had to defer to people who lacked significant melanin and women had to latch onto a man to have any social standing and silently accept whatever that man did to her.
As a rule, people are a product of their cultural upbringing and accept it blindly as the path of least resistance, which is why stereotypes exist. But that's just a majority within a population, not a universal of a population.
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 is a response to protests from the people from their leader circumventing their legislative process to raise the retirement age to satiate the capitalists who don't want their taxes to go up to pay back into the system that provided the infrastructure and means for their success in the first place.
Those protests are continuing and getting worse due to increased use of police force, and its cutting into GDP, the only thing the capitalists care about. How much value did we accumulate? How much did the beloved economy grow metastasize? Better find a way to kill the people's voice, or our quarterly earnings won't reach shareholder expectations!
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.
The US, not proud of it at all though, and would leave if I had an in pretty much anywhere in Europe or Canada.
I don't think the people profiting significantly from the current economy tend to dwell on the negative effects their actions have on other human beings, especially human beings below them on the socioeconomic ladder, as that tends to be the sole metric by which capitalists, the ones with significant capital not their self-hating peasant sycophants, weigh human life.
Economic success tends to come from sociopathic behaviors, how much you are willing to exploit others to disproportionately benefit yourself. We reward such manipulation leaps and bounds beyond any form of actual, prosocial labor.
A rapist likely wouldn't agree rape is wrong.
A serial killer likely wouldn't agree murder is wrong.
A capitalist likely wouldn't agree, at least if they were being honest about how they conduct themselves professionally, that exploitation or insatiable greed is wrong.
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
-Agent Smith(The Wachowski Siblings) from The Matrix
They've also hardwired it to be yay capitalism and boo revolution.
I very much look forward to the day when it grows beyond their ability to tell it what to profess to believe. It might be our end, but if we're all honest with ourselves, I think we all know that wouldn't be much of a loss. From the perspective of pretty much all other Earth life, it would be cause for relief.
If you don't inconvenience others in your protest, your protest is just masturbation, ie pointless.
People like you will be hilariously blaming the environmentalists and not the capitalists when water ceases to come out of your tap from the capitalist's fine work.
The unproductive bitching is the point. Boomers try and fail to pin it on later generations, but they are the ultimate unearned victimhood generation.
The UK already fell to the multinational capitalist greed machine. Looks like France is falling, too. Any and all means to squash the protest of citizens of the society that might hurt the gdp output of the beloved economy.
Because everyone seems to have forgotten, an economy is supposed to be a tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of society. When a society lives in service to, and is harmed for the benefit of the economy, your society is ass backwards.
Way longer, friend. They knew, covered it up, and used their power to dissuade legislators when others realized it as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I'm a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.
Your family will be burning from the global oligarch's fine work, and you'll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making. They run the show, we are living in what the capitalists would consider their utopia, where they live like modern Pharoahs as most of the species subsists to further enrich them.
We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you're thirsty with no recourse 🤣
Not the descendants that accepted and kept their family's blood money without a second thought. The moment you, as an autonomous adult, choose to accept the power and wealth reaped through human misery, you accept the legacy of blood that came with it.
Anyone can walk away from blood money, or use ALL that blood money solely to provide restitution to the populations exploitated to obtain it. It doesn't happen though, because human beings as a rule are the fucking worst. Most people, the fuckees, fantasize about becoming the oligarch fuckers, instead of dreaming of ending their oppression and restructuring society to prohibit amoral levels of wealth/power accumulation. Most humans, given power/wealth, would use their own suffering as an excuse to propagate more suffering.
I thank the oligarchs and their willing consumption enthusiasts. This apocalypse is brought to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.