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seawaspSo we begin again...
One of the common perceptions of the Right and Libertarians is that Democratic Socialists/Liberals want to "destroy" all capitalist elements.
This is, put bluntly, stupid. The fact is that most of us are dependent on a high-technology civilization, and very few of us really want to go back to a "simpler time" in which everyone had to work 18 hours a day to survive. We LIKE having stores where we can purchase stuff we want, we LIKE having diverse types of entertainment, we LIKE being able to get food that comes from around the world at reasonable prices.
But what we ALSO like is the idea that this will still be available to our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, etc., and that their lives will be, if anything, BETTER than ours.
For this reason, we do not like specific, modern behaviors that have become endemic to modern corporations. Most of these boil down to one thing: the modern corporation has stopped SERVING ITS CUSTOMERS, and is almost entirely focused on SERVING ITS STOCKHOLDERS, even when the desires of the stockholders progressively damage their market -- either short or long term -- for the sake of profit that ONLY benefits shareholders and neither the market, nor the general public of which the company should be a part.
Examples of this "enshittification" are widespread; the degeneration of Facebook is directly due to it not being concerned with serving the users, and instead concerned with turning its customers INTO the product -- specifically for benefit of the stockholders. Elon Musk, whether he's a genius or just an idiot playing one, is not doing the work of ten thousand people. He's just as replaceable as a CEO as a janitor is replaceable by another (perhaps moreso, because a janitor has to handle a certain level of physical labor that a CEO isn't required to do). Yet his companies use his flashy marketing tactics purely to drive up stock prices on speculation, and for that he demands fifty billion dollars -- when he could get a mere twenty billion and give every single worker at the company a hundred thousand dollar bonus, which would do wonders for the morale, work ethic, and likely overall productivity and quality.
Red Lobster's troubles a few years ago weren't due to accidentally miscalculating the cost of their "endless shrimp" special -- after all, they'd done that one multiple times over the years. It was due to the fact that a company that purchased the chain realized that the restaurants were, technically, separate entities from the land they were on, and so started charging rent to restaurants for the land they were already ON -- and had never had to pay for before. This gave a major uptick in income for stockholders and the company, but very nearly destroyed the chain.
Similar "vulture capitalism" techniques have been steadily eroding the availability and quality of healthcare in my area and many others, squeezing assets out of hospitals and other healthcare providers, literally closing hospitals and demanding 100% usage of beds at all times, when this is directly counter to the way any decent hospital functions.
This kind of thing is also why companies consistently fight against safety and environmental regulations. Such regulations are for the workers and the general public, and require some reduction in profits for the shareholders.
We on the Left would be a lot less against companies if they recognized that THEY ARE PART OF THE WORLD, not separate from it, and that therefore, yes, just like a family wants everyone to clean up the room when they mess it up, we want the companies to deal with any potential problems THEY are part of.
That means working WITH us to find ways to reduce carbon emissions, rather than spending almost as much money DENYING the climate problem as it would cost to fix it -- and making that fix more expensive. It means not making us have to FORCE the companies to make reasonable changes in behavior that would make everyone safer, instead of spending money in Washington to get rid of safety regulations.
WHY THE HELL SHOULD WE HAVE TO FORCE YOU NOT TO KILL PEOPLE? It should be a perfectly NORMAL thing for a company to say "huh, this procedure will cost us a little more, but we'll do it because it'll kill fifteen hundred fewer people per year than the current process", instead of trying to argue that you can't afford to NOT kill people because you might not pay out a big dividend this year.
A poultry plant should be PROUD of its safety record and in being able to always pass a health inspection, resting assured that if there's an outbreak of salmonella it won't be THEIR doing, instead of trying to break health inspection rules and make it legal to have kids working full-time in dangerous circumstances.
There are changes that can -- and should -- be made to corporate law to promote this. Stockholders should have some vested interest in the success of the company AT WHAT THE COMPANY DOES. (failing that, they should have a share in liability, but I suspect they'd REALLY rather not go down THAT path).
Now, there *ARE* a few exceptions to the "we don't necessarily want to wipe out the company" concept. The most prominent example is health insurance companies. The creation of a proper and functional universal healthcare system will -- of an inevitable necessity -- lead to and effectively require the destruction of the healthcare insurance industry as it currently exists, and any companies that survive that event will be smaller, and operating in much smaller areas (say, in cosmetic surgery insurance rather than general healthcare). The current healthcare industry is something like 50-75% PARASITIC -- it drains resources from both people and healthcare providers without actually providing any useful service at all. By necessity, that industry has to go.
Another example -- for-profit prisons. This is no more or less than legalized slavery, as the prisoners become the commodity being bought and sold and even used for labor. It's a vile and inexcusable industry and has no business existing in a civilized society. The entire penal system needs to be revamped, but that particular aspect must go entirely.
But for the most part, we still want our supermarkets, our computers, our cars, our air-conditioners, all of the fun elements of NOT having to be scraping a living out of obdurately resisting nature. We just want the companies involved to think of how we can ALL have this now... AND in the future. And to accept that if they won't do it voluntarily, that it's hardly a surprise or shock that we'll force them to by safety and environmental regulation.
One of the common perceptions of the Right and Libertarians is that Democratic Socialists/Liberals want to "destroy" all capitalist elements.
This is, put bluntly, stupid. The fact is that most of us are dependent on a high-technology civilization, and very few of us really want to go back to a "simpler time" in which everyone had to work 18 hours a day to survive. We LIKE having stores where we can purchase stuff we want, we LIKE having diverse types of entertainment, we LIKE being able to get food that comes from around the world at reasonable prices.
But what we ALSO like is the idea that this will still be available to our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, etc., and that their lives will be, if anything, BETTER than ours.
For this reason, we do not like specific, modern behaviors that have become endemic to modern corporations. Most of these boil down to one thing: the modern corporation has stopped SERVING ITS CUSTOMERS, and is almost entirely focused on SERVING ITS STOCKHOLDERS, even when the desires of the stockholders progressively damage their market -- either short or long term -- for the sake of profit that ONLY benefits shareholders and neither the market, nor the general public of which the company should be a part.
Examples of this "enshittification" are widespread; the degeneration of Facebook is directly due to it not being concerned with serving the users, and instead concerned with turning its customers INTO the product -- specifically for benefit of the stockholders. Elon Musk, whether he's a genius or just an idiot playing one, is not doing the work of ten thousand people. He's just as replaceable as a CEO as a janitor is replaceable by another (perhaps moreso, because a janitor has to handle a certain level of physical labor that a CEO isn't required to do). Yet his companies use his flashy marketing tactics purely to drive up stock prices on speculation, and for that he demands fifty billion dollars -- when he could get a mere twenty billion and give every single worker at the company a hundred thousand dollar bonus, which would do wonders for the morale, work ethic, and likely overall productivity and quality.
Red Lobster's troubles a few years ago weren't due to accidentally miscalculating the cost of their "endless shrimp" special -- after all, they'd done that one multiple times over the years. It was due to the fact that a company that purchased the chain realized that the restaurants were, technically, separate entities from the land they were on, and so started charging rent to restaurants for the land they were already ON -- and had never had to pay for before. This gave a major uptick in income for stockholders and the company, but very nearly destroyed the chain.
Similar "vulture capitalism" techniques have been steadily eroding the availability and quality of healthcare in my area and many others, squeezing assets out of hospitals and other healthcare providers, literally closing hospitals and demanding 100% usage of beds at all times, when this is directly counter to the way any decent hospital functions.
This kind of thing is also why companies consistently fight against safety and environmental regulations. Such regulations are for the workers and the general public, and require some reduction in profits for the shareholders.
We on the Left would be a lot less against companies if they recognized that THEY ARE PART OF THE WORLD, not separate from it, and that therefore, yes, just like a family wants everyone to clean up the room when they mess it up, we want the companies to deal with any potential problems THEY are part of.
That means working WITH us to find ways to reduce carbon emissions, rather than spending almost as much money DENYING the climate problem as it would cost to fix it -- and making that fix more expensive. It means not making us have to FORCE the companies to make reasonable changes in behavior that would make everyone safer, instead of spending money in Washington to get rid of safety regulations.
WHY THE HELL SHOULD WE HAVE TO FORCE YOU NOT TO KILL PEOPLE? It should be a perfectly NORMAL thing for a company to say "huh, this procedure will cost us a little more, but we'll do it because it'll kill fifteen hundred fewer people per year than the current process", instead of trying to argue that you can't afford to NOT kill people because you might not pay out a big dividend this year.
A poultry plant should be PROUD of its safety record and in being able to always pass a health inspection, resting assured that if there's an outbreak of salmonella it won't be THEIR doing, instead of trying to break health inspection rules and make it legal to have kids working full-time in dangerous circumstances.
There are changes that can -- and should -- be made to corporate law to promote this. Stockholders should have some vested interest in the success of the company AT WHAT THE COMPANY DOES. (failing that, they should have a share in liability, but I suspect they'd REALLY rather not go down THAT path).
Now, there *ARE* a few exceptions to the "we don't necessarily want to wipe out the company" concept. The most prominent example is health insurance companies. The creation of a proper and functional universal healthcare system will -- of an inevitable necessity -- lead to and effectively require the destruction of the healthcare insurance industry as it currently exists, and any companies that survive that event will be smaller, and operating in much smaller areas (say, in cosmetic surgery insurance rather than general healthcare). The current healthcare industry is something like 50-75% PARASITIC -- it drains resources from both people and healthcare providers without actually providing any useful service at all. By necessity, that industry has to go.
Another example -- for-profit prisons. This is no more or less than legalized slavery, as the prisoners become the commodity being bought and sold and even used for labor. It's a vile and inexcusable industry and has no business existing in a civilized society. The entire penal system needs to be revamped, but that particular aspect must go entirely.
But for the most part, we still want our supermarkets, our computers, our cars, our air-conditioners, all of the fun elements of NOT having to be scraping a living out of obdurately resisting nature. We just want the companies involved to think of how we can ALL have this now... AND in the future. And to accept that if they won't do it voluntarily, that it's hardly a surprise or shock that we'll force them to by safety and environmental regulation.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-10 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-10 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 05:26 pm (UTC)Facebook's users are, emphatically, not their customers. Your customers are the entities (people, companies, govenments, etc.) which give you money in return for ... well, for something you provide to them. In the case of Facebook, the customers are those who pay to have their advertisements put in front of audients likely to purchase their products. In other words, Facebook users are the product it sells.
This has been the case for a long time. Broadcast radio and television (with the semi-exception of NPR, PBS and like entities) in the US sells audients to advertisers. That is how they make their money; that is pretty much the only way they make money.
And so it is also for Facebook, for Google, and for many other Web companies that give their services away for free or for cheap. They aren't making money from those services. They're making money from using them to attract audients for advertisers; and they are much more efficient than broadcasting, because their algorithms allow them to focus the advertising on likely buyers in a way far more effective than "People who watch The Beverly Hillbillies are likely to be interested in Winston cigarettes." (Example from real life; I am old enough to remember when shows had specific sponsors, and TBH's was Winston. But anyway.)
None of which, of course undermines your basic argument.
I am also old enough to remember when factories were proud to have their "XXX days since last workplace accident" sign get to three digits and stay there. (I also am young enough to remember a sign in a software company I worked for: "29,219,293,829 days since last velociraptor incident.")
We really need someone to write, and to make a huge best-seller of, a modernized versiono Frank Norris's The Octopus. I'm not sure how much good it would actually do, but it's worth the try.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 08:05 pm (UTC)Broadcasting is a different animal, though. I don't have an "account" with the local NBC affiliate or their central company. They have no way of knowing whether I watch or not, or what I watch, or how much.
FB has a direct line on my existence and they are providing a service to me, which at first was quite useful and practical. They are much more akin to the water or power company than they are to broadcast entertainment. That is why I consider myself a customer, and that what they've been doing is akin to my water company throttling my access to water, and letting other people pay them to put crap into what's left.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 07:31 am (UTC)As SMBC pointed out, stupid is a feature.