markr @ markr @lemmy.world

Posts

3

Comments

426

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sure. And to the extent that the sole proprietor has to compete with corporate chains their business almost has to be as shitty to their employees.

The current system has a shit tonne of rules about how to do capitalism. It is not a free for all or an anarchy. It might be developing into a neo feudal system, with fascist oligarch clans running various nation states, but still lots of rules for running the beast.

A proprietor of a restaurant is not a capitalist, he’s a shopkeeper. An owner of a restaurant chain that is expanding constantly, a Macdonalds, a Starbucks, a corporation that has to demonstrate perpetual growth to satisfy its investors, that is a capitalist.

The current wave of enshittification is driven also by the fact that much of the current system is ‘built out’. How do you grow profits when you can’t expand your consumers? You enshittify. It helps if you are an effective monopoly, but isn’t required. If the consumers aren’t growing all the competing producers are highly motivated to enshittify together, and they do. Of course it also helps if the same huge investment funds are major stakeholders in the producers.

This idea, ‘there is no alternative’, is a keystone of the neoliberal ideology. It is a delusion. It is the mistake of thinking the current system is a fact of nature, somehow an inescapable feature of human civilization. We know that this system has not always existed, and was not always universal. We also know, if we just open our eyes, that it has failed and is collapsing. So. Regardless of the validity of the concept that there is no alternative, we had better imagine one.

The boomers were adjacent to the two generations that started the neoliberal disaster. Reagan and Thatcher and Friedman etc weren’t boomers. The Clinton and Bush jr crew enthusiastically joined in, but they didn’t start it.

Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.

YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.

Oh FFS, the capitalist system shreds 'free' markets with abandon. Monopolies eliminate competition. Regulatory capture eliminates anti-monopoly regulations. Capitalism is the perpetual accumulation of more money by investing in the production of more commodities. It collapses when it cannot evolve to expand demand, as it did in the 1930's. As it is doing again now., although rather slowly, as it has learned how to use governments to mitigate financial collapse. It does indeed use 'markets' for exchanges, but it only cares about 'free' markets as an ideology. It's motivating force is accumulation. The 'greed at the top' is the system itself, not some bad apples.

A system based on perpetual growth has reached the limits of that growth and is now actively and manifestly shredding the planetary ecosystem., This isn't a question of anything other than the survival of human civilization. Your political views are irrelevant. The system is at its terminal point. In some other timeline we reformed the postmodern capitalist system and regulated it to prevent ecocide. That is not this timeline. That's because, concurrent to the shredding of the ecosystem, the culture of end stage capitalism, a culture evolved to make us all obedient consumer-workers, has further evolved to make us delusional, psychotic, fascist, it has shredded the collective unconsciousness of humanity and resurrected fascism as a way to defend the system as it self-destructs.

Would it be a false equivalency to claim that sea-lioning, Gish galloping, and goalpost moving, are all just different manifestations of the same trolling strategy?

It’s a new audience for old trolls.

That might be true, but in my experience many religious people get personally offended by any criticism of their religion. For example, discussing the idiotic contradictory ethically challenged or obviously false sections of holy texts is very offensive.

nah, he's trolling. I recognize the user from other posts.

The new fuckhead in charge is fixing that. HBO, (or now officially Max because Cinemax was always HBO’s trailer park cousin,) is in the enshittification wringer.

Fox promoting the RFK-gerbil is pointless. That demographic is voting in the other primary.

So you’ve never participated in the administration of an election. Ok.

Lol. You do understand that you are living in a mass psychotic delusion engineered by very wealthy and powerful people who are using you and your equally delusional peers to destroy what’s left of our republic to safeguard their huge accumulating piles of loot from an equitable tax system, right?

He’s unlikely to appear before the GJ. Instead an indictment from the GJ is likely already in the hands of the prosecutors.

If it was the left assaulting congress and Biden attempting to coerce election officials the indictments would have been out within weeks of the enactment of martial law after Jan 6.

A client that aggregated like communities would be nice.