Not to mention that people in America and Europe aren't necessarily at "the bottom". A lot of today's wealth is built on the backs of poorer countries that make even less than we do, or nothing at all, or by exploiting them by coming in and privatizing something as basic as water.
There's more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don't really "own" most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don't last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.
What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but "have wealth" sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.
Since the current system allows the people who make the rules to be bought, I think we'd have to start over entirely from scratch for it to work at all.
“Free market” Capitalism is self-destructive. As the wealthy build and consolidate power, more and more resources get funneled to the top while the people at the bottom actually creating those resources go with less and less, and it’s unsustainable.
Being a billionaire is a moral failing. To have the ability to do something about all the suffering and death in the world, and to choose to do nothing borders on sociopathy. The systems designed to allow for billionaires to exist ensure that they don’t pay a fair share of their taxes, and they contribute nothing to society. They are leeches, feeding off the working class and giving nothing in return, when they have so much more to give than anyone else.
Been a fan of Mae's since the early 2000s, and this comic came after I'd started my transition, but it still absolutely blew me away.
Doge icon... Spez really does want to be Musk, doesn't he?
Has to be #1, or I think they would have replaced the mods on /r/pics by now. They've silently removed mods from other big subs without much, if any justification already, so them not doing it in this case makes me think something is wrong.
Threads is currently in the first stage of EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Best to stop it now before it goes too far.
From Wikipedia:
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Oh, hmm. I thought I’d checked it before today and it had its own sign-in. Hmm…
It would be nice if there was a desktop site/app like this that was instance agnostic, so you could use it to log into an existing account.
I think that if Apple let me install it in a walled off sandbox, away from everything else on my phone, I might give it a try, but as it is, it's not going on my phone.