If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?

Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn’t suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they’re in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they’re really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.

Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.

People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.

So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.

That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn’t understand the explanation.

The program has the information, but that doesn’t mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the “upgrade” text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.

Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn’t survive WW2.

Okay then. If you appreciate talking that way, then either delete your account or shut the fuck up.

Ah yes, the C bugs in the kernel libraries. We’ve all seen them.

That still wouldn’t excuse him from accusing others of lying.

They’ve had decades to adapt to Republicans being blatantly disingenuous. At what point does it stop being “not equipped to deal with” and does it start being “chooses not to deal with”?

Private media are owned by shareholders that want as many unfair advantages as possible. They want to be slightly left of center to appeal to the “reasonable centrist” crowd, but they want the center to be as far to the right as possible so their taxes are low and their assets unregulated. Moreover, they want the presidential election to be as close to 50-50 as possible so both candidates are desperate for bribe money and and willing to pay further favors.

If the Democrats win by a landslide, what is next? What is the new political center, and what does that mean for the stock market? Even in the face of fascism, corporations and shareholders keep playing both sides, because if Volkswagen and BMW and Ford and Siemens and Kodak and IBM and Bayer and the Associated Press and Hugo Boss and Fanta/Coca-Cola and all the unnamed German millionaires that hid their cash and pillaged Jewish artifacts in Switzerland and politely surrendered to the western forces made it through being Nazis with a profit, why expect worse from Trump?

ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.

Maybe they’re going for something similar to RDJ’s Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.

That proves too much. Boomers and the Silent Generation are better than people born 50 years before them, because Boomers and the Silent Generation (again, as statistical trends) refused to beat their children and decriminalized interracial marriage and homosexuality. Why wouldn’t Millenials be capable of similar moral progress?

Sure, I’m not denying that, but what matters in a democracy and even a corporation isn’t the purity of each generation, it’s the relative fraction of different groups. Going from 60% petty dictators to 20% is far more important than going from 20% to 0%, especially when it’s just one demographic among several.

Foelly

The difference is that Millennials seem to be disproportionately tired of responsibility while Boomers hoarded it. What sort of Millennial wants to go through the effort of maintaining a home owners’ association or of showing up at town halls to complain about new developments? Just give us some mtg cards and a runescape membership and you can have the White House.

Abrogation of responsibility is still messy selfishness, but it’s easier to work around for people who do want to be productive. Those in power are more than old enough that Millennials not replacing them in large enough numbers means reasonably middle-aged Zoomers get those positions instead.

That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.

Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.