this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Jesus Christ, can we leave things alone that aren't infinitely growing
"Gentlemen, it's come to our attention that every one who could pay to use our product is paying to use our product. Unfortunately, it also means we're no longer growing infinitely like we promised the shareholders we would. How do we fix this?"
The infinite growth mindset is so fucking stupid. Like, you're still making an insane amount of money, what's the fucking problem?
Yup. Shareholders are the problem, who bought shares at price X and want to sell those shares at X+Y.
And they will do anything to get it.
Yes but what they stupidly never realize is Y is a signed integer not unsigned
Because stock bros be lazy AF. They can't even be bothered to buy and sell stock based off of who is and isn't doing well, so they utilize investment firms who offer safe and risky bets like ETFs and Futures respectively. Ultimately, everyone really just wants to buy one stock, have it make them money that exponentially makes even more money quarter after quarter forever, and then do whatever they'd actually do if money were no object (i.e. actually live life).
We don't live in a world where desire/need scales evenly with this desire for exponential, eternal growth. Therefore capitalists, who promise this impossible prospect to Wall Street, exploit human fears, desires, and needs however they can (union busting, lobbying, etc.) to keep growth up for as long as they can.
George Carlin probably put this concept best in what has to be one of the greatest bits of all time, on The Big Club. Although not directly related to this topic per se, it points to the truth of how this game between government politicians and capitalist corporate overlords is played. All the while, the majority of people, who are not in "The Big Club", are basically fucked.
Still I'm feeling tickles of admiration with nature seeing how these two seemingly unconnected things work together (human dream of making something from nothing without work, politicians being corrupt without realizing it).
Business people really are just monkeys chasing shiny things. They tend to be less developed emotionally and are often very insecure on top of the entitlement. All they have is the chase, nothing else.
The most useless degree a university can grant is one in business administration.
No. Money has to make money with those sweet sweet interested payments. It's baked in the system. How else are you going to maintain a small elite of filthy rich people?
Ever more wealth must be constantly created in the World purelly to service the interest on all that debt out there otherwise you would get defaults and banks failing.
It's not by chance that everywhere the "solution" for the 2008 Crash (that happenned due to over-indebtness mainly in the mortgage segment) was to lower interest rates to pretty much zero - it weakens the pressure on the entire system to constantly grow merelly to generate the additional wealth needed to pay the interest on the debt.
You'll also notice that as soon as interest rates went up just a bit bank profits mssivelly grew.
This!
Well, there are demands unsatisfied as long as humanity exists, so there is always space for good growth.
Only that is about infrastructure, or housing, or food production. Not chat bots.