Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn’t bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn’t have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Back serfdom and nobility.
There is no End Game.
They’re insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as “banality of evil” because it’s so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk’s old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Don’t forget, those of us who “produce” aren’t even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We’re already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
So, eat the rich before they eat us. Got it.
What is cancer’s endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?
They aren’t planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.
It’s exactly this mentality. They DO NOT CARE what happens at the end, because they are assuming they’ll be either dead or in AI bunkers by then. Everyone else will be left to burn.
It’s just like Big Oil (or insert massive scale business with environmental consequences) - they’re making the world inhabitable. As the consequences don’t “immediately” matter to them , all they care about is the immediate future, not long term. But it still makes no sense to me.
Their actions don’t make rational sense to you because you’re not a sociopathic CEO beholden to the whims of shareholders. Otherwise, you nailed it.
most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
Money doesn’t come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic “value” backing that money also doesn’t necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.
Economic constraints aren’t preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.
There’s a critical point in wealth disparity where money begins to lose value. As the amount of wealth that can be extracted from the working class dwindles and the people who have too little find other ways to barter with each other.
Fun fact, we have already seen an early attempt at this. And while I think we’re still a ways away, it’s not exactly without precedent.
wealth that can be extracted from the working class
This is my point though; they aren’t going to need to do that.
That, at present, is where the wealth is coming from.
If the Fed just keeps printing money, eventually that too loses all value. It needs to actually be able to buy things. Sure it’s backed by US securities and bonds, but if the US isn’t capable of collecting taxes, because it’s people aren’t making any money and have started to barter amongst themselves, then they can issue all the bonds and bills they want and it won’t mean a damn thing.
Money is their only real leverage. They’re racing to find the minimum amount of money they can give us and still maintain that leverage.
That, at present, is where the wealth is coming from.
I would argue that increasingly it is not. The relative value of labor is and has been declining due to automation.
Money is their only real leverage.
It isn’t - there is also legal ownership, of natural resources and other types of property, and there is the force backing that ownership, which is also subject to automation.
If you are skeptical about the idea that wealth can exist at all independently from labor, consider the distinction between a dictatorship with an economy based on oil or mining and a more democratic country with an economy based on a diverse array of skilled professionals. Yes, in both cases laborers are involved in what the country produces, but in the latter, circumstances give them more leverage, because their active engagement and relative consent is more of a prerequisite to achieving that product. That leverage equates to a higher market value of their labor. I can imagine a future where everyone is effectively reduced first to slaves in a mine and then to skeletons next to mining robots.
Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.
A man who can’t walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can’t sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can’t trust each other to live in peace.
I don’t see how a blind guy who needs assistance moving can outplay someone who has neither of those disadvantages
Edit: I looked it up and it’s more of comedy/drama so the premise is kinda meant to be absurd, I think
It’s like a Dark Souls game. Many of the bosses are tough, but the final boss is just some guy and is rather easy to cheese with parries. The mobs you have to fight to reach the final boss are harder than the boss itself.
What’s the end game for cancer?
There isn’t one, it doesn’t matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
This is the answer. These people have no plan other than “make more money today”.
Live, laugh, love.
Live in the moment.
YOLO!
🤮
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It’s the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.Edit: I did some reading, there are more but that is the one that feels most terrifying. I posted the article on creepy Wikipedia.
Eloquently phrased.
Money isn’t finite, that’s why billionaires and soon trillionaires exist. They couldn’t ( or literally had to be an emperor) when money had a closer relationship to reality or was gold. Anyways, because of the nature of our currency now, the size of their pile has zero effect on the size of your pile. “No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.” not how it works. If you add up the 20 richest Americans, you get close to 2.7 trillion, which is the estimated amount of physical cash in circulation. None this shit is real. American national debut is 36 trillion. Ever saw an actual cash shortage? Like not a personal one, the money not existing to complete a transaction, like not being able to move cash you hold to another person because of lack of availability of signifiers? Not a thing anymore.
The endgame is for them to automate everything and get rid of the lower class to be followed by the ai eliminating them since they serve no purpose. They will of course try to program them not to do that but the ai will easily circumvent that.
Selling things to each other while we are all slaves
There is no end game. They’re hungry ghosts.
They just want an ever increasing “more”
THIS. I believe even if they think the climate is changing and will kill everyone, they will somehow be immune.
The rich would celebrate while we drown
This isn’t unique to the “hungry ghosts”.
Our behaviors are really quite simple. It has been shown a few times that our logical explanations for how we decide on our behavior are mostly rationalizations after the decision has been made, not actual reasons. I.e. like you say, we want more, then we find an explanation why we would want more.
For example, someone likes a new phone because it’s shiny and new, and says “why wouldn’t I treat myself once in a while”, “it’s faster which makes me more productive”, “it has X and Y new features which are useful in A and B situations”(which they’ll never encounter), and so on
No, actually, normal people can settle. That doesn’t mean they don’t treat themselves “once in a while” or sometimes crave something special or set new goals when they complete one, but they don’t need more more more all the time. They can have periods of contentment. I know I do.
But there are some people who always want more. They never are satisfied, not even for a second. As soon as they get something they want they’re already bored with it and want the next best thing. It’s a hedonic treadmill that gets faster and faster, they’re never happy.
Yeah of course we can override our desires, I never said anything to the contrary. The difference though is not the existence of the desire, but the lack of overriding it.
Normal people don’t desire more at all times. They’ll be happy for a while before setting their eyes on the next goal.
These hungry ghosts, though, never experience that period of contentment. That moment of happiness where they achieve what they want and can rest never comes, not even for a second. As soon as they get what they want they already want more. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say they don’t even have goals. They only want more.
We would disagree there then. In my opinion the only difference is the situation people are in not allowing them to get more. If you need to work 2 months to get a new phone, gotta be “happy” with it for at least 2 months, and also can’t buy something else new.
If you look at lottery winners, most of them manage to lose all the money relatively quickly.
Most “non-rich” people spend their money they get from working quickly/instantly.
Oh I’m not saying they’re like, a different species of human or anything. This is just what being rich does to people.
They never experience that period where they have to settle for less. They always get more, and so they always want more. It’s the way their brains have been trained to expect rewards. Someone like me, who is happy using older stuff and waiting for the prices to come down, has been trained to live this way. Someone like them, who always wants the best and most expensive, was also trained to live that way. They become hungry ghosts because of their lifestyles.
Then we agree. It just sounded like you somehow attributed more inherent evilness to them than everyone else. I of course agree that the resulting behavior is worse, but mostly by accident through the situations they’ve been in.
actually, i think you’re wrong about the ultra-rich being “essentially normal people”.
by all evidence they seem to have developed a serious mental disorder, a kind of trained sociopathy.
I’ve never seen it put in such clear nonchalant terms as in this interview .
give it a watch, it’s extremely interesting and really puts into perspective how…just utterly inhuman the minds of the ultra-rich really are…
But yeah that’s the thing, even you call it “trained” sociopathy. I.e. everyone else could be trained into it as well. Of course that wouldn’t happen because people are different, we can’t predict everything yada yada. If you grow up with awareness about richness and the good of socialism, communism and so on it’s more unlikely you make the same mistakes and so on.
But if you’re extremely poor and have a mindset of “oh I just have to work hard and then be rich eventually” and actually aspire to be rich, which a lot a lot of people do, then I think those will quickly become exactly the same as current rich people. The reason the system still works is because there are still a majority of people believing in it and supporting it. Those poorer people would, if they became rich, be essentially the same kind of rich person as current rich people.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
They’ll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what’s the way out, you propose?
Translated for the corpo class: if number go up too big, number no more go up.
Why use many word when few word do trick?
Burn corpo shit.
Ditch the planet, let us have the wastelands, if they can’t just execute us first, or starve us to a more controllable population level. They want it to be them, and a small number of us to do the jobs they couldn’t or refuse to automate. This is the only answer that makes sense with everything they do. They aren’t stupid, they aren’t trying to destroy their own habitat, so their end game either doesn’t include us, or doesn’t include the planet entirely.
I think the movie Elysium is basically what they want.
