Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
like I went to taco bell and they didn't even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don't get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
in dodge v ford the supreme court ruled that publicly traded companies must put profits first above their workers and the the build quality of their products.
That's a bad take. The case actually affirmed business judgement rule: the idea that the guy running the company knows how to run it better than the shareholders. It's part of why post-war America is considered the golden age of American manufacturing: Publicly traded companies invested in their employees and wages exploded across the board. A 100 year old court decision isn't the primary driver on a problem that's really only developed in the last forty or fifty years.
The other part being that we got rich helping everyone else rebuild from getting their cities bombed to shit while we only lost Pearl Harbor and didn't have any large scale infrastructure projects to recover from.
When you can be the supplier to everyone else, you can make big bucks.
I think it's come about due to the state of universities and the stringent belief that a pursuit of knowledge above all else would somehow land you a good job. You've got to want to do the job or genuinely enjoy the work first.
Just consider that the same people in the Middle East who are matchmakers and run big data collection corps also run the whole breakups shake up.