This is the result of all the "culture wars" we've had in recent years. At the beginning of it, companies hedged and pulled back if there were any sort of mass PR event due to them taking a stance in the Culture War Topic of the Day. As time went on and there was Culture War after Culture War after Culture War, either consumers got tired of tracking who was "bad" or companies realized they could get away with anything and it didn't seemingly affect their bottom line.
It's either that or companies don't really have to worry because there is essentially zero competition in the current economy with all the pro-monopoly administrations we've had for the past 16+ years.
For decades people have proclaimed that we can fix things in the next election...but that has never happened in all of my existence and do not expected to happen in my life time. It's pure carrot chasing
I read somewhere that this isn't exactly new/novel tech, that this has been around for forever its just that the medical industry never adopted it becuae of whatever bureaucratic reasoning usually inhibits medical solutions
I think another different perspective is that its not the fact that there are billionaires. The problem is that there are billionaires while the rest of world is decaying and getting worse. For better or for worse, billionaires doing the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" deal with society at large will prevent a lot of future problems for them.
With the way things are now, the corporations own the government. The 'government' is not some sort of impartial mediator that people have been lead to believe it is
I saw this coming from a mile away. Jobs just don't pay enough anymore, especially with inflation eating away at money faster than pay raises and housing becoming unaffordable for the majority. It's barely worth it to work. But that is what US capitalism has optimized for. Prioritizing the rich capital owners over the proletariat with tax cuts, regulation cuts, not enforcing monopoly laws, spending money on wars and bailing out the large companies etc.
> We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.
The birthrate across all western nations has been below replacement levels for quite a while. All nations will see population shrink in the coming decades (aside from labor importation)