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vinyl7

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This is the result of all the "culture wars" we've had in recent years. At the beginning of it, companies hedged and pulled back if there were any sort of mass PR event due to them taking a stance in the Culture War Topic of the Day. As time went on and there was Culture War after Culture War after Culture War, either consumers got tired of tracking who was "bad" or companies realized they could get away with anything and it didn't seemingly affect their bottom line.

It's either that or companies don't really have to worry because there is essentially zero competition in the current economy with all the pro-monopoly administrations we've had for the past 16+ years.

I think another different perspective is that its not the fact that there are billionaires. The problem is that there are billionaires while the rest of world is decaying and getting worse. For better or for worse, billionaires doing the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" deal with society at large will prevent a lot of future problems for them.

I saw this coming from a mile away. Jobs just don't pay enough anymore, especially with inflation eating away at money faster than pay raises and housing becoming unaffordable for the majority. It's barely worth it to work. But that is what US capitalism has optimized for. Prioritizing the rich capital owners over the proletariat with tax cuts, regulation cuts, not enforcing monopoly laws, spending money on wars and bailing out the large companies etc.

We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.

I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 3 months ago

The goal of art isn't to be perfect or as realistic as possible. The goal of art is to express, and enjoy that unique expression.

AI? If everyone is broke because all the jobs got automated, who is buying the products to supply revenue to the companies

Does it matter if you're already a rich oligarch with generational wealth? All these ceos have enough money to last several decades beyond their life span, it doesn't matter to them is the slave class croaks

It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist

Taxing the rich means that there are fewer people with absurd money, which means businesses won't have many customers at such high prices. It's like McDonalds charging $5 for a quarter of a potato. They're hoping that the lost sales from the poors at such a high price is made up by fewer high priced purchases by the rich.

If even the rich couldn't or didnt want to afford $5 quarter potatoes then they'd have to lower the price