Finance innovation has outpaced technical and creative innovation. So most companies are dominated by financial engineering.<p>Any firm with offices located across the world are making cash just moving it around faster than you can make it with a product. And profitably. Taking advantage of exchange rates, interest rates, tax rates, subsidy, tariff differences etc etc is a more sophisticated process these days than anything you see in a factory.
The "Ugh, Capitalism"[0] articles always seem to assume that capitalism started in the last 20 years or so. Which is obviously false. If the company lost its culture of safety that's definitely bad, but of course that culture developed under capitalism in the first place. How does a constant factor (capitalism) explain a change?<p>The finance industry is a much larger part of the US economy than it has been in the past [1], which does seem like a problem and likely the cause of many of these issues. I'm not sure about the right solution, but it's definitely not to end capitalism.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism" rel="nofollow">https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism</a><p>[1] <a href="https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-the-u-s-economy-harms-workers-and-their-families-threatening-a-strong-recovery/" rel="nofollow">https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-t...</a>, Figure 1
It's pretty amusing the article rather undercuts it's own point by having an ending that makes no sense as the writer didn't bother to fact check who said the closing quote until after publication.<p>Journalism and the commentariat are in a pretty consistent state of always being so bad there's nowhere left to fall to.
They used to tell stories about breadlines in Russia where there was no bread, and I think we’re getting to the point where if we had no bread because capitalism said there would be none, we’d still be waiting in line to preserve the illusion.<p>When the system is a farce that doesn’t reflect its own justification, the problem keeps spreading. The trash doesn’t get picked up because the Trash System is more efficient when it runs lean and mean. But, the trash doesn’t get picked up.
There is a fundamental issue with our civilization and species: we have a scant few actual adults. I mean non-immature, non-self exclusively serving individuals who both care about others and have the capacity to do so beyond their immediate family. Until this issue is recognized en masse, it is going to continue, and as our AI and related automation technologies advance, life is going to significantly degrade for anyone not within the elite economic class.
MOLOCH -> "It is, in its way, a statement of purpose: not just the assurance that every person, place, and thing is now or will become food for its rightful devourers, but that those doing the eating also think of it as junk food."<p>Funny, in history, people fed children to Moloch.<p>Now Moloch has become a symbol of capitalism.<p>And now, in the analogy, people are junk food. Because life is cheap, people aren't worth enough to spend money on their safety.
As far as I can tell, the whole Boeing situation is a minor and interesting case of a moral panic / groupthink episode. A flight on one of these grossly unsafe Boeing planes still seems to be safer than a daily bus commute to work (and may the heavens help those death-seeking lunatics who travel by car!).<p>As for why products are getting worse, the west appears to be in a multi-decade energy crisis interlinked deeply with our manufacturing processes being uncompetitive. The actions of management in manufacturing companies are being driven by the regulatory environment around energy and production.