8,352 karma · joined April 29, 2015
After looking through their financials though, I don't even know. They made like 3B in EBITDA In 2020, but then had a very strange financial statment in 2021 and now they lost 3B in EBITDA in 2022.
It seems like up until 2020 they were making enormous amounts of money
If you want to study areospace engineering, or biology you go to one of the schools on team objective truth exists.
Or I guess you could do an electrical engineering at the objective truth doesn't exist university although I have a feeling enrollment might not be that high.
This process would be self correcting based on the quality of output of those universities over time.
My real answer is that 40 years of low interest rates, have shifted all power to capital (not capital as a group of human beings. to literal capital) and now the workers are mad at a system setup to screw them and scapegoating the people on the other side of that system who really aren't the ones who set this up either.
Like how to know exactly when they can seize people's money and stuff like that? That seems like an hour long class.
So if we we went from 8B to 80B I'd argue we'd go from 1B -> >50B in poverty. Maybe a lot worse than that.
This is obviously dependent on where you are born but especially true once you consider that the places left with high fertility have nearly perfect overlap with the places with high volumes of extreme poverty.
And this is only in the short term. Those people are generating plastic waste, consuming fuel, and many other things that are net negatives to the planet over time. So over the long term this problem just gets worse.
And what, I can get an extra 5 years in a nursing home where there's a decent chance I'll suffer physical and psychological abuse but will be forcefully kept alive in a stupor on a cocktail of drugs.
It's just unabashed justification for the interests of the top couple percent. They do in fact have it better right now by far than any other cohort in history.
On the other hand, I think as a country, an astonishing amount of people would be in a very bad spots if we head into an economic downturn.
Our society is broken
I'm sure the point is buried in there somewhere if I had another couple of hours
It's a fixed 4 dollar fee on 200. That's not the kind of debt that gets people in trouble. These people are much more likely to get nailed on the 20% APR portion which they finance on the card.
DogeElonMars coin has a market cap of 186M
Tesla still has a market cap of every other auto manufacturer in the world combined
Gamestop still has a market cap 20x of what it had 3 years ago.
Tech Companies that have never and will never make a cent of net revenue are valued in the billions.
So, does it sound like we are in a bubble?
https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-defin...
The analogy would be if a landlord created a shell company, and then only gave that company it's legal liabilities without any assets. That's what J&J did here and why this case is so obviously egregious.
If you could do that, it would be a get out of jail free card for all legal liability in all cases. It's essentially renouncing rule of law
So I feel bad for a small business owner who get's affected and just see them as collateral damage in the other issue
Imagine trying to pull this shit as an individual. You burn down some apartment complex and then just create an empty company and assign all of your liabilities to that company and say "you've got to sue them, I've got no liability here". You'd get laughed out of the courtroom. But this came pretty close to working for J & J.
When I see looters lighting businesses on fire or breaking windows, I tend to think back to stuff like this or civil forfeiture and say "seems fair". I think the establishment underestimates the extent to which normal people hold this doctrine and feel ok with an all means are justified attitude because they've heard too many stories like this where the law doesn't apply to powerful interests.
So painfully stupid and obviously dystopian. If people spent more time in VR then they do on mobile right now, it would be the defining health crisis / mental health crisis of those generations.
Thankfully this has no shot of panning out.
If I was doing something sketchy, and I wanted to setup a fall guy just in case, this is exactly the contract I'd write.
I'd either hard pass on this or just say: I'll work for you without the liability element at normal rates or I'm going to need like 5x rates to take on this liability.
And even if they said yes to that, I'd then get a lawyer to review the whole thing.
Imo, the reason things have gotten worse is finanicialization brought on by an extended period of low interest rates which causes societal surplus to flow to capital intsinve activities at the expense of everything else. To understand the reasons behind thisid recommend to look up Triffin's dilemma.
Basically it says, that any country that has a reserve currency, by nature of being forced into a structural trade deficit, will be forced to prioritize Financial activities over productive activities and that this force will increase the longer you hold the reserve currency.
Basically we used throwing the working class unfer rhe bus as a strategic lever at the end of ww2, but that didn't really start playing out until the 80s and has gotten much worse since then.
Now everyone is a nihilist because no one believes the game is fair anymore because we have structurally set things up so everyone in capital intensive activities gets obscene gains and everyone else fights for the scraps.
This has permeated beyond its first order effects where people embrace this system and actively encourage it without really understanding its causes.