uriel238

The problem is a combination of intrinsic psychological biases of those with means. Once they reach a certain threshold, they become driven to keep accumulating until they own everything. Gotta catch 'em all.

This threshold is likely different for everyone, and may not be related to other thresholds of accumulation, such as:

• When you have everything you want, except to upscale your stuff.
• When you make more money than you can spend on personal expenses, including renting Venice for a wedding.
• When you make more then you can spend on ther unrelated threshold where you can't possibly spend all your income without purchasing billion-dollar companies

Some capitalists are self aware enough to recognize the impulse is not sustainable, (also that profits are better had with happy workers) which often comes from having risen to wealth from more modest means. (But not always).

At any rate, rich dudes who drop billions into massive public improvement projects are rare, and when they do they tend to see it as revenue source, or at least something to exploit to improve their brand image.

So the next step for society is to discover a sociological technique that allows rich guys to think I have enough, to drop their surplus into the hands of the community (say the general fund of the local governing body)

That or accept that we are too simple a species to navigate some very imminent great filters. We may not count as a space-faring civilization that might encounter other space-faring civilizations.

This is not a new idea. Fourth International–Posadism opined that developing communism (or a refinement thereof) would be a prerequisite for space colonization. I'd argue changing from capitalism is a prerequisite for societal sustainability more than a couple of centuries from now.

The water would react similarly to alcohol. Yes, the puddle would be bigger but it would evaporate faster.

Qu'ils mangent de la brioche !

Maͣy iͥtͭ speͤeͤdͩ Oz' waͣy tͭoͦ tͭhͪeͤ guͧiͥlloͦtͭiͥneͤ faͣstͭeͤrͬ tͭhͪaͣn iͥtͭ dͩiͥdͩ, dͩeͤaͣrͬ Maͣrͬiͥeͤ Antͭoͦiͥneͤtͭtͭeͤ

A character in my cyberpunk dystopia novel I'm not quite writing yet, (working name Garden Gnome ) has realized that most of the clerical staff are bullshit jobs or the general clerical pool doing bullshit assignments, and realizes everyone's just courtiers or garden hermits, and so develops a run of performance routines (running to the copy machine just as it's finishing a job; standing on her tippy toes on the stepladder to access the high files, not getting jokes but saying something even funnier, etc.) as way to meet-cute her way into the upper-management secretarial pool.

If you're not in the office for actual work, then (for good or ill) you're there for your character.

This sounds like the kind of flirting I'd expect after seeing '80s and '90s teen angst movies. In retrospect screenwriters just don't understand how humans interact, or rather they just don't care and go for madcap antics instead.

I'm way neurodivergent, and was completely unaware of human interaction, so I was looking at Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire (etc. etc.) trying to decipher how all that works.

I became sexually active at 26 after folks from the kink community noticed my nerdy vibe, and they schooled me in some basic human interaction. (Note that I matrix-dodged a barrage of incel-to-fascist pipeline bullets thanks to some amazing strokes of fortune.)

After the fact, in recollection, I realized then that a lot of women in my young adult life were signalling me and I never knew.

I also realized my aunt was totally hitting on me when I was sixteen. That's all sorts of awkward to reconcile.

I was hoping at the No Kings demonstration at the California capitol, there'd be a pavilion giving away free tacos, and I'd volunteer to help make them. Alas, no one else acted on the idea.

Option two was to find one of the organizers and man a free water bottle station. But those didn't happen either. Demonstrators were just advised to bring snacks and water.

Only after the fact did I notice the local mutual aid orgs had very little online presence. So, yeah, I'm back to researching. If I do ever find the Rebel Alliance, then conversations will be had. For now, I'm looking at groups like Indivisible with limited success.

This reflects a fundamental of capitalist theory that doesn't come out in practice.

If management is aware of the human-ness of their workforce (they need to eat, excrete, rest, recreate, connect with their family, etc.) then they will perform better at their jobs. (In fact, sometimes one needs to force the workaholic graphic designer to leave her chair to get some coffee and lunch, even when she's inclined to stay focused.) The point of management is not just to rant at the layabouts to get back to work! but to understand why they're laying about, and addressing issues at the root.

And similarly, if you crunch your workforce (force them to work 90+ hour workweeks), their productivity will drop so far below so as to negate the extra hours. We have multiple studies on this.

And yet, all of the AAA video game development teams (and a lot of the indies) still crunch anyway, even knowing the 100% they have to give will be less than 10% of their normal productivity.

This is why government, in its mission to serve the public, needs to regulate companies regarding the treatment of its workforce, or move away from capitalism and integrate with the workforce directly, maximizing their productivity (according to data-driven science) by treating them like star athletes.

This meme illustrates by example one of the key failures of capitalism:

Upper management doesn't see itself as responsible for overseeing staff to maximize their productivity via data-driven methods (e.g. let them have human lives while they work)

Upper management sees staff as their courtiers and garden hermits there to emphasize how important the execs are.

Hence RTO mandates rather than letting them telecommute or giving them sweet workspace at the office.

There's a reason it's not the Trump Administration but the Trump Regime. He's using federal resources not to execute the law and perpetuate national services, but to serve his own interests. Trump is not enacting the duties of the office, but instead is looking to profit personally from his powers.

The White House has literally gone rogue, and is not at all engaging the responsibilities of government.

Think of him and his staff as organized embezzlers.

Curiously I'm having to deal with this very conflict. I want to join the resistance, but I'm (literally) allergic to sunlight (which precludes street demonstrations) and I'm a goblin when it comes to in-person social development, such as organizing.

The mutual aid groups in Sacramento are scarce, so it's difficult to ask them.

Do I make useful memes and infographics? Not sure.

Curiously, the nearest ICE hq is in San Francisco, and there are resistence movements there interfering with ICE action.

There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don't think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.

Bertrand Russell's attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.

I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn't understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It's difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it's a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.

It's not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R'lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.

It's like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.

It's also very squishy.