as depressing as it is to say, i think it's a bit like the year is 1906 and we're complaining that these new tyres for cars they're making are bad because they're no longer backwards compatible with the horse drawn wagons we might want to attach them to in the future.
exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?
the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.
I'd be willing to buy that if she had died while diving in an unexplored cave system, for instance, working to bring us knowledge and insights about nature that we didn't already have.
But there was nothing left to discover on that mountain peak, except how much frostbite sucks.
>My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence.
Evolution just means change, and it includes genetic drift. In common parlance, 'evolution' generally implies improvement, but that's not the technical definition.
I’m not sure if it encourages saving but I can’t think of another way to tackle the debt that is more fair to people starting out and that incentivizes people to participate in the economy.
It’s not a fair situation to anyone — honestly it is a sad scenario. To be clear a special assessment does not imply that a higher wealth person pays a higher percentage of their wealth. I am not advocating for that.
It should be pointed out that people who currently work hard aren’t rewarded the same way people were when a lower tax environment existed. Do you think that is fair , if the taxes were raised significantly to cover the debt ? Specifically debt that the government accumulated before you even entered the workforce.
They have been conditioned to become greedy. That’s how the system works.
You need to continually show growth. Actual profits don’t matter, it has to be expressed as growth.
The first one to blink loses as money flows out of the stock. So right now everyone is squeezing their business to avoid showing flagging growth. Jacking up prices.
Because investors only need growth, it doesn’t need to be sustainable - if there’s a general market correction that’s fine but you don’t want to be the one starting it.
Look at google. Ads is clearly on its last legs as a growth model but but aggressively pushing all levers like a cable company adding more and more ad breaks, they create the impression that things are still growing while gesturing at AI in hopes investors see the future growth there. No metric here measures the advance to the tipping point where customers abandon you to an alternative and they are not used to there being alternatives.
The current earnings season doesn’t show business health, they show greed dynamics.
> did companies only just become greedy in the last two years?
No, but their greed was kept somewhat in check by consumers who'd rightly feel ripped off if they saw a company suddenly jacked up their prices. Before the pandemic companies generally didn't collude to all raise their prices at the exact same time.
When the pandemic first hit, companies lost a lot of money which they wanted to claw back somehow. There were some legit supply chain issues, but companies who were not affected by them said "We know our prices are sky high, but supply chain issues! We're all in this together!" and consumers bought the lie. Long after the supply chain issues improved companies still used them as an excuse. I don't blame consumers here. Things were going on that were totally unprecedented and giving companies some slack seemed perfectly reasonable given that surely we were all suffering.
Then as inflation started to soar it was all the news talked about and companies again said "We know you're going into debt to buy groceries, but it's not our fault! It's this damn inflation! We're all in this together!" and fewer consumers were believing their bullshit since by then the news was already talking about how those same companies were pulling in record profits and making money hand over fist, but since every company was doing it, consumers had little choice but to pay up or go without (which isn't always an option).
Companies have also tricked a lot of people with the narrative that the pathetic amount of disaster relief people got during the pandemic is to blame for inflation. I'm surprised how many people I see who are convinced that the $1000 checks people got to help pay off the record amounts of debt families went into to keep rent paid and food on the table is the real problem. This helped to deflect attention away from the fact that companies have been price gouging.
Lately they've been trying to use that same trick for everything. Some companies had to increase egg prices because of bird flu. The news reports it's the worst outbreak in almost a decade! Consumers are primed to expect egg prices to rise. The largest egg supplier in the country wasn't impacted by bird flu in any way, but they still raised their prices because they had an excuse and made over 700% more in profits. Cal-Maine Foods made a killing by ripping off the public who were already struggling and being taken advantage of. They got away with it entirely.
So companies were always greedy, but they didn't always have convenient excuses to point at to deflect the public's anger. Now they know they can lie to the public and collude to raise prices openly without fear of any repercussions.
The scapegoating scheme actually started a little bit before the pandemic with rising gas prices (notice how many companies increased their prices and told the public it was all because of gas prices but didn't lower their prices after the price of gas dropped?). They made money on that, and the pandemic was just the next major excuse. I suspect it's going to continue with companies looking for any and every excuse to jack up prices at insane rates.
It's not just misleading — it's lazy. And honestly? That doesn't vibe with me.
[/s obviously]
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