https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/capitalism-isnt-working-us-politicians-child-labor

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Why do vaccines need to be made by private companies for private profit at all? Why not publically funded research at universities and agencies that charge reasonably for use, where that capital is either turned into more public research or other commons? Other than the fact that we starved public research almost to death to cut private industry for private profit’s taxes.

Also private industry does NOT belong in basic utilities everyone needs AT ALL.

There should not be a single power plant or utility that’s for private investor profit. It’s too important to have any allegiance other than serving the citizenry full stop. There should be no private investor in a position to advocate sticking it to captive customers (or our sole shared communal habitat), who need any common utility like elec-fucking-tricity, to increase their quarterly private profit expectations. But here we are.

The base game is prettier and more stable in my few playthrough hours with the update.

I miss mods, but this was a significant improvement to the base game imho, especially base visuals, and mods will come.

Honestly the last time I launched the game in an unmodded, un-community patched state, a couple years ago to be fair, it crashed every half hour or so for me from runtime errors, so this feels like a more stable bedrock on which to build.

Just one Bethesda fan’s perspective.

Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.

Land/capital shouldn’t be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society’s expense as it is.

Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they’ll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it’s quarterly private profit expectations.

“Why is my food not a live small mammal for me to take instinctual pleasure in dismembering YET AGAIN?!”

I mean, why not?

Because with the apparent exception of Vietnam, billionaires run the show in the society they live in. They use their capital, which is just an expression of power, to change laws, buy courts, shift responsibility to their corporate entities that receive a cute lil meaningless fine that costs less than the profit of the crime instead of prison time, and here in the US they even literally OWN and PROFIT off many of our prisons. That’s the primary reason billionaires shouldn’t exist, because it’s close to impossible to put a check on such insane levels of power, which again, at those quantities, is what capital becomes, raw power. You can’t have a functioning representative democracy where people can grow so wealthy that their power over society extends beyond their single vote.

Most of the peasants in the world are subject to their respective judicial systems and prison systems largely configured to protect PROPERTY rights over human rights by design of those they work for, and guess who that is?

There are beautiful exceptions, the Nordic nations come to mind, but sadly my country, the US, has been spreading its greed disease for decades. We toppled south American rigimes daring to make something better to keep their markets open for our capitalists to rape using our military industrial complex, and we’ve been converting Europe with our greed disease a little at a time(YOU can live larger than you’ve ever dreamed, foreign legislator, just betray your countrymen for our profit!), the UK has fallen to it, the French are fighting it but losing, etc.

I’m against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.

I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.

The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.

Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you’re holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn’t us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.

We love to think we’re not, but we’re still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.

We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.

Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.

Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.

Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.

The fact that making significant sacrifices in abandoning many of the decadent comforts of this period at our only habitat’s irreparable (on a human timescale) damage expense is met with ridicule shows how determined we are to wreck this place.

Imagine mass famines and frequent catastrophic weather events a couple generations from now. I’m guessing they’ll look at us being above living with our once kind, nurturing habitat with disdain and bewilderment when they’re steeped in the fruits of our lifestyles.

Im not saying going back to the dark ages, im not advocating rejecting knowledge, only the rushing around and consumerism. There’s no more reasonable room for growth, growth is killing us, and robbing us of meaning.

If we can’t live with this paradise, the idea of us spreading to hostile, unforgiving worlds within reach like Mars or Titan is a bad joke. Unlike the infinite mistakes we get to keep making here without instant death, one major mistake out there where we didn’t evolve, and poof everybody dead instantly thanks for playing space faring civilization. That isn’t a game humans can pull off. Maybe some small crew of exceptional people, but certainly not a colony of regular people.

This is what we got. So yeah, maybe spending our time whittling stuff we need and moving at the speed of horse would be better for humanity long term than racing to grow our GDP into extinction.

Whats the endgame of all this growth and “innovation” if it wasn’t killing us as it is? To have Google ad AI generated amalgums of our dead relatives transmitted directly into our brains to convince us to buy more crap?

It does, but if a catastrophic war, including one with nuclear weapons, brought us down to 2 billion from 9, those nukes wouldn’t even touch the current course of heavy industry of 9 billion that we recklessly became without a thought in the world about whether our only habitat could support it.

Because shooting wars end, even if through attrition. Industry just keeps metastizing if you let it, and pretty lies like “but we planted trees! That evens out all the shit we’re pumping in the air and water!” are just pretty lies.

If we cared about our species having a future, heavy industry would be scaled back to food/medicine, we could sow our own clothes, go back to horses, breed less, communaly build our own structures, and whittle our own shelf crap, and we could perhaps still provide a future to subsequent generations. We do not.

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We were warned, too.

Our God here in the US is Mammon, even though he usually goes by other names; rational self-interest, the invisible hand, etc.

Mammon would never let genocide get in the way of glorious profit.

👍

You’re saying if someone said that, you wouldn’t think more or less of them or their positions?

You’d be neutral to such a declaration in dealing with such a person? Because I would do my weather best never to go near or interact with such a person again if I could help it. I would tend to disregard the opinions of a vocal Hitler fan.

I wouldn’t be like “who cares, Hitler is dead, if you enjoyed accounts of his work, you do you. It will have no bearing on my impression of your policy positions.”

That’s why government should restrict individuals making enough money to warp society or the commons beyond their single vote through things like progressive taxation that incentivizes instead reinvesting the money that would be taken as profit taxed at 95% beyond excessive thresholds into the business/employees/community. We had reasonable tax rates once, though even then enforcement was lacking, then we let the foxes buy the hen house rule makers in the 70s and 80s without dragging them out in the street as we should have for attempting it, and now this country needs to collapse before there can be any hope for the people.

Hoarding capital is antisocial, and should be illegal. Illegal large scale capital hoarding should be punishable by incarceration, as greed is more effectively destructive than even hatred.

Letting individuals collect hundreds of millions/billions of dollars in capital when others struggle to survive makes as much sense as allowing individuals to tinker with atomic bomb tech in their garage. Capital is power over others. If making enough to own 3 houses, 6 cars, and a boat aren’t enough incentive for someone, if they need enough for their own space program, they need therapy, not enablers.

Hypothetical: Someone you know unironically, unjokingly says they believe Adolf Hitler was an amazing leader, does it effect your opinion of the person you know?