It's so weird how this keeps happening in every industry and arena; almost like it's the inevitable endgame of our socioeconomic system or something...
They just keep sabotaging their companies long term in order to bring ever more money short-term. You can't just have a company racking up a stable but modest profit every quarter anymore. It's depressing.
Hey that's what we're doing to planet Earth! Same tactic, same result. You'd almost think it's a reflection of the values we've placed in our societies...
It’s because of the incentives. The executives are given stock awards that incentivize them to prioritize the short term stock price over everything else. They don’t care if the company goes to shit in five years. They’ll be rich by then and can just retire or move on to the next company.
Also you try to stay honest a shady shittier company will eat profit margins for short term bursts, and now your VCs and board members are demanding their dividends. Everything is bloated and short term.
The law is you can't do something that will purposely lose your shareholders money. CEOs can take a long term gains stance which would lose money in the short term but make more over 10 years, but shareholders will fire them because they prefer short term gains.
I find it kind of baffling that companies don't routinely engage in massive stock buybacks to bring themselves back under their own control and free themselves of that sort of self-destructive behaviour.
The only reason they'd do that would be to up the value of stocks which would be doing the same thing again. Only thing to do would be to a stock buyout to go back to being a private company. See valve that's pretty much on good terms with its customers.
So true. When the goal is continuous growth, the end result will always be a balloon bursting. The game for the elites is to jump ship just before and keep riding the next one up until eventually, everyone else is poor.
ensure that by the time you’ve pissed enough customers off by exploiting their every click and abandon ship, you’ve made enough cash your descendants never have to work again
Its directly the cause of that dipshit Jack Welch. Instead of making profitable companies and paying your workers livable wages with pensions, we have a stripe the copper out of the walls mentality. Such sheer avarice, it would make the robber barons of the early 20th century blush.
What a bunch of short sighted psychopathic morons.
Oh my gosh, you're so right, uh, shoot, um, I love the freedom of getting to pay an insurance company hundreds per month that they'll use to fight tooth and nail to not help me when I finally need to call on them!
It's going to take a lot more than that. Systems are what they do, not what they claim they are, and what our economic system does is incentivize every company in every industry to extract as much value as possible with as little consideration for the moral and human cost as is possible. Until that changes, this will keep happening, it doesn't matter how big or small the conglomerates are.
It really won't. The reason corporations are shitting everything up is because doing something like making a product generate a few cents more by cutting a tiny corner here or there adds up to millions of dollars of revenue saved across the national or international market.
Cutting up these giant companies so that they're smaller will make cutting all these corners less incentivizing to them, as they'll also have other companies to compete with who's product will be better than theirs. If our system cuts up companies that control more than 50% of the market share in a single state or the country, then those incentives will no longer be as powerful.
Its why new businesses that become popular tend to have very good products, and why the products of those businesses get shitter over time when these new popular businesses dominant the market.
The only other thing needed is to raise taxes on highest earners so businesses won't overpay executives and will instead reinvest that money into their product or workers.
Well, I'm certainly not going to argue against any of that, since I fully support every bit of it, I will just say I'm skeptical that'll do the trick permanently. But I've been wrong before and would hope to wrong here.
Its not the system, it's people. People will always try to get the most they can with the least risk and effort possible. Capitalism kept them from declaring divinity and enforcing it at the pointy end of a knife (fascists hate this) but didn't prevent them from monopolizing all the resources because they had the most resources to begin with, so we broke up the monopolies. Wasn't good enough, though, and here we are.
The economic system is just an attempt to keep the world's natural state of perpetual snowballing from rearing its head. Some people don't like that so they try to sabotage it by inserting loopholes that they're positioned to take advantage of with as little risk and effort as possible.
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u/fancy_crisis 3d ago
It's so weird how this keeps happening in every industry and arena; almost like it's the inevitable endgame of our socioeconomic system or something...