About half the houses around me decided a couple years ago to swap out their external lighting with these green lights. Apparently this was some dumb Facebook thing that was supposed to be "supporting our troops"? I was really hoping this was some temporary thing they would back away from, but years later, nope. Man does this look stupid AF to me... like some bad Halloween decorations, but year round.
You know, just in case you need to defend any comments you may or may not be making about abysmal people dying of late.
Honestly, if they're good businesses (profitable and growing), then they're not achieving their basic goals.
These basic aspects of society are too important to be driven by profit motives. With the private prison system, every criminal means profit, and you want repeat business. With insurance, every denied claim is profit. With education, the incentive is getting paid (and financing) not educating the population.
They're all deep roots of suffering in the US; I can easily see why so many people are leaning into Democratic Socialists.
EDIT, COMMENT: People keep saying on comments that a market drives efficiency, only profit can do that, and I call bullshit. Our medical expenses in the US are 3 times higher than the next most expensive country, and our results are ranking 20th to 40th in the world depending on what you're comparing about our societal health. That's absolute dog shit, and anything -but- proof that our for-profit healthcare system is efficient, it's the total opposite. What else in your life do you pay 3x more than anyone else to rank 30th in results, and call that a success? The only thing our system has proved efficient at, is making a bunch of insurance people rich AF, and making sure most people don't actually see a doctor when they need to.
Honestly, if they're good businesses (profitable and growing), then they're not achieving their basic goals.
These basic aspects of society are too important to be driven by profit motives. With the private prison system, every criminal means profit, and you want repeat business. With insurance, every denied claim is profit. With education, the incentive is getting paid (and financing) not educating the population.
They're all deep roots of suffering in the US; I can easily see why so many people are leaning into Democratic Socialists.
The VAST majority of our societal problems is the expectation that a successful company needs to grow, or increase profits by 10-15% every single year.
You can have the best product, restaurant, service, whatever... and you scale up over the years until at some point the relentless pressure to pay off shareholders or backers eventually drives you to run your own venture into the ground. Cool, you found a way to get 10% more profit from the cereal you sell. What about next year? And the year after that? Ooh, how about we lay off a shitload of people? Can AI do what that department does over there?
Apply that same logic to insurance, private prisons, education, Healthcare, etc... nauseating.
Enough is raaaaarely enough for a company. Once in a while you find a company that stays private and honors its legacy, but it's super rare.
"Enshitification" isn't some mystery. It's what happens when every company is expected to endlessly squeeze more value out of workers and customers to satisfy shareholders.
It's also the heart of inflation. Public companies aren't content to simply make money. They have to make more money than last year, every year. Prices go up, products get worse, portions get smaller, support gets outsourced, and somehow we're supposed to celebrate it as "growth."
And 80% of people don't own stocks anyway. We've organized entire industries and made countless sacrifices as a culture to benefit the relatively small number of people who do. It's a treadmill we put ourselves on... and the megawealthy who live with this as a personal goal are so much worse.
Infinite growth is called a cancer.
If nothing else, this dude is helping the enemy...