I’ve only been lifting a couple of years, but I just wanted to piggyback on this comment to provide real life testimony about the magic of a lifting belt for squats.
I always had mind body connection problems on my squats. Doing an honest to God proper form back squat requires you to really be present in your mind for the lift, especially when it’s heavy. I would often have issues with my core “collapsing” on the upward portion of the back squat.
Then I tried a lifting belt and ust having that extra bit of resistance from the belt to “press” against while squatting really helped to correct some form issues for me.
OP mentions ankle mobility issues, which I don’t think a belt would specifically help with? But as a PSA if you’re squatting within 20% of your 1RM and haven’t tried a weight belt I really recommend picking one up and watching a couple videos on how to use it. It really changed squatting for the better for me.
This is probably obvious to most lifters, but if you’re like me and just never thought about it, go give a belt a try.
The greed is baked into capitalism, though, because it’s fundamentally baked into humanity. This is what happens with the unregulated pursuit self interest, and that’s what capitalism encourages.
Because markets inherently aren’t “free”. Real competition is an illusion because capitalism doesn’t account for all the non-capitalist levers (e.g regulatory capture, cronyism, collusion, political lobbying, etc) that businesses will pull to serve their own interests.
Capitalism is an incredibly naive approach to economics because its ability to account for human behavior – the fundamental driver of economic systems – is rudimentary at best. And that’s just one of its problems, really.