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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

America already feels like a corporation not a country to a large part of the working class. Further undermining the safeguards for labor will have a huge impact on the labor movement. The pendulum will swing mighty hard the other direction in response. This is a dumb move by corporate America.

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You're absolutely right.

And yet some people are still surprised by the political climate in America that is being created as a result. I keep saying that someone (I don't care who) needs to do something about housing, healthcare, and wages before there's even bigger trouble.

Dumb move by Amazon. First time after hearing criticism of them for over 20 years that I actually felt like I was wrong about them.

Amazon has been on the late stage capitalism warpath for awhile now.

They even have internal reports that they are going to exhaust the labor pool due to their hiring and firing practices at warehouses within a few years.

The latest news from the Amazon delivery side? They are looking to reduce the minimum hiring age from 21 to 18. That just screams trying to scrape the barrel of the nearly exhausted labor pool and they don't give a single fuck why they are in the predictament they are facing.

Will cause reasonable people do unreasonable things. Sometimes I wonder how lacking the aggregate critical thinking is of the folks at these orgs having these back room conversations, or that they’ve never opened a history textbook. I suppose the result of their positions, disconnection from median reality, and perception of risk.

"I put a dog in a corner, why did it viciously attack me!?"

It's very hard because I don't see how we would ever actually trigger any sort of revolution anymore.

I personally live way too comfortably to justify to myself the possibility of being arrested, hurt or even killed for anything I believe in. I hate myself for that, but the logical part of my brain simply won't let me do it. Even when I was making much less, I still had this same mentality.

For better or worse, the line that must be crossed for millions to actually get together and do something about it is much, much lower in this day and age.

If there's one thing that is clear to me, is that when many of the rights we have today, that were fought and conquered with blood, people had much worse conditions of living. People were already in terrible situations, so taking personal risk in order to fight for something better was not so far fetched.

Another aspect is that we now live much more individualized lives. We no longer have the communities we had before, nor the similar shared communities. Only individuals that actively seek like-minded people and causes to fight for, end up together. The vast majority lives in their own bubble.

P.S: dang, if you read this, can you tell me if I can even comment on anything with any "ideological" overlap anymore. I don't wanna break any site rules but it's really hard for me to know where you draw the line for this stuff. I just enjoy discussing these matters and I'm not trying to create flame wars or anything like that.

> America already feels like a corporation not a country

There is a concerning percentage of US citizens that actively wants this.

"He will run America like one of his business"

The problem with the idea that 'the pendulum will eventually swing back' is that it isn't true. History's graveyard has way more countries in it than are currently in existence. Every one of those dead countries/societies saw the pendulum 'swing back' every time except the last one.

They're feeling the squeeze for sure, Millennials don't feel invested in the market (because we have no investments due to multiple fleecings across the last 15 years), and Gen Z is radicalized beyond belief against capitalism.

The mood is that Boomers are only going to be "in charge" for so long, and when that tape runs out, things stop being so predictable. I bet they'll ratchet up as much of these alienating policies as possible just to ensure the overton window buffers out progressive action before they don't have the means to anymore.

A cheap but effective tactic for them to take.

The future sure does look more and more radical, going to be interesting to see what flavor wins out (reds or browns).

> Gen Z is radicalized beyond belief against capitalism.

This is a strangely heated way of describing it.

It's a strangely heated topic for them, far more than the previous two generations. I'm generalizing of course, this is just based on my own personal experiences with Gen Z, there's a lot of variability within any generation. That said, the identified causes of suffering have shifted inexorably.

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