They’ve put a lot of work into locking people into an ecosystem. To pick one example, if you’ve got a Logic project you want someone to be able to edit, even if you manage to migrate it with all of the required stuff, they’re still going to need a Mac to open it.
To borrow a phrase from Steve Hofstetter, I’ve never flown a helicopter, but if I saw one in a tree, I could still be like “dude fucked up.”
that is also how it’s always been explained to me
But do the extremely rich really get to rest and enjoy their spoils the way you think? Just look at someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, they just keep working even though they already have far more than they can spend. Gates is especially funny because he’s working full time on figuring out how to spend his fortune. Almost like having all that money just became another problem that now requires solving.
Bro, I LITERALLY just said I don’t give a shit about rich people problems. You can fuck all the way off trying to get me to sympathize with them. “Oh but it’s hard to spend all that money!” Then don’t fuck over the working class to accumulate so much money you have to work to spend it all! Or do the ethical thing and let the working class eat you. I might keep arguing with you but this is the last this particular stupidity is going to be dignified with a response.
Okay, see what you just did there? You went from “being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it” to having an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit, and I’m willing to bet you’re not thinking of living next to skid row either. And then you want to be able to save money on top of that, too.
Ah, I should have clarified. American cities are built wrong and need a redo. Please refer to this educational content. I do sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the reality that cars and car-centric infrastructure is destroying our mental health, our finances, our cities, and our world, so that’s on me. The point is, what I described is a reality in several of the dozens of places that aren’t the USA, and the fact that it’s not a reality here is the direct result of the actions of people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and just to throw another one in there, Charles Edwin Wilson. Look him up if you don’t know him, but he ranks just under Henry Kissinger in terms of worst people in American history. Just to reiterate, if your goal is to get me to feel sympathy for the owner class, give up now.
This poses an interesting question: what if this is in fact the most self-stable and therefore sustainable solution in the long term?
Then humanity is fucked.
Is it really preferable to sleep in a palace surrounded by armed guards because you are worried about assassins, just so you can own 50 nice cars you’ll barely ever get to drive?
Oh, boo hoo, won’t someone think of the poor rich people, having to pay extra to keep their disgusting riches safe from the people they fucked over to get them. I’m sorry, I’ve been trying not to contribute to the toxicity I see in these threads, but come the fuck on.
Besides, I don’t think people envy the rich and powerful the way you’re describing, I think people envy the idea of being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it, and they begrudge rich people’s wealth and power on the grounds that they use it to influence politics and deny a decent standard of living to the working class. I don’t want a mansion and fifty nice cars, I want an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit and stuff to do, and then to also save more money at the end of the month than I did at the start. Most people are similar: their specifics might be different, but the broad strokes are the same, especially the last bit.
True. A distressing amount of the time, you can make far more money from a problem existing than from solving it.
I don’t think most people are selfish to the point of it being harmful. I think the problem is that a small number of people are, and those are the people who are in charge of things, where their selfishness can do way more harm.
As others have mentioned, though, a lot of behavior is heavily influenced by the incentive structures people live within. This can apply in very obvious ways: for example, when trying to get from point A to point B, people will use the mode of transportation that makes the most sense for that trip, which is heavily dependent on the infrastructure that exists between those two places, and that’s why the Dutch will bike five miles, the Spanish will catch a train across the whole country, and people in Houston will drive across the street. It can also apply in more subtle ways, though, and that’s where capitalism comes in. To pick one example, companies that are owned by their workers are more stable and better places to work than traditional privately owned or shareholder-owned companies, but it goes far deeper and gets far more complex than that, too.
People are responsive to economic incentives. If the incentives favor doing good things, then good things happen. Otherwise, you get what we have now.
$20? That’s amateur stuff. Buy my $999 course and you’ll learn from a master how to apply capitalism to problems!*
*For legal reasons, note that I did not say “how to apply capitalism to solve problems”
…All of them? That’s literally how all of them work.
My car is a bicycle. Specifically it is a 2017 Masi CX Comp.
Why own a Ford when I have my Chevrolegs?
when shagging for my country, no sacrifice is too great
hey babe, let’s rawdog, i jizz pfizer
that’s the joke
They claim to be on track to make another profit year in 2024.
I’d give better odds to me becoming the king of Thailand in 2024.
He used to be a right wing billionaire who loved spreading his propaganda. He still is, but he used to be, too.
What you’ve been failing to consider, which I think I may have been taking as read to my detriment, is that the way our cities are organized plays a big role in determining which mode of shipping is more effective. The denser of a center you have, the more businesses you have concentrated in one place, the more you need capacity and the less you need flexibility. That inverts as things get more spread out and stuff needs to get to more different places. When you have a city organized around its rail infrastructure rather than a sprawling car-dependent mess, that rail infrastructure absolutely kills at supplying the place, significantly reducing the severity of the last-mile problem.
I will also note that even the most anti-car places still rightfully allow for delivery vehicles, and neither I nor I think any other person who doesn’t like cars would begrudge that. I personally just think that pretty much any shipping done by big rig when it could be done by rail is a missed opportunity.
Here are a few additional links for you to consider:
Trucking is heavily subsidized
The interstates are increasingly a metaphorical financial albatross around our collective neck
Saying dense urbanism with plentiful public housing is a “communist fantasy” is literally too dumb to dignify with a response.
Meet me in Vienna and I’ll buy you a beer.
All of those are phenomenal arguments for heavily reinvesting in our freight rail.
sentences that sound made up but have actual meaning