The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture
I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense
Police
Cops (1989) ruined america, taught us to trust these ass holes and they royally fucked us over.
Not making light of everything before 1989, but even after all that shit, the show painted them in a decent enough light to where people spill their guts and trust them, just because they have a uniform and they took full advantage of us.
Police propaganda goes way back before Cops (1989). Dragnet started in 1951 and inspired dozens of police procedurals that made cops look like street smart scientists who studied at the intersection of crime and humanity. In reality they are just a disappointment. ACAB
I wasn’t alive during that, but I remember the cop propaganda from the 90s well.
Airbnb. I used to think they were a perfect business. Saw a gap in the market, created a decent product, invested in their users (back in the day they would even send a photographer to take good photos of your property).
Unfortunately the consequences turned out to be awful.AirBNB would work better if the owner was required to live in the property 160 days out of the year. Where it went wrong was in letting corporations buy up housing and use it to skirt hotel taxes and regulation.
AirBnB is almost directly responsible for the surge of housing prices in my local town, and they should die in a fire.
🌈.°`E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N’°. 🌈
Yeah, I’m pretty torn. In my small community (on an island), housing and rent are insanely expensive, and also pretty scarce. There are people who have full time jobs living in tents in the woods or in their cars (in Alaska) not because they can’t afford a place to stay, but because there are no places to rent.
It’s also a major tourist spot, and the population more than doubles regularly on days during the summer, and for those that fly in, the hotels book up quick. So there’s a huge AirBnB market. Which means houses are getting bought up and then set up as AirBnBs instead of renting to residents, so housing becomes even more scarce. So I hate AirBnB.
But… I just bought a 4 bedroom house, where one of the beds is in a built in 1-bedroom apartment, with its own kitchen and everything. We wanted a 4bedroom house so we could have a guest room for people visiting, as well as just have extra space for us. Well, once I retire, one of our plans is to rent that out as an AirBnB during the times we don’t have guests staying. It doesn’t deplete housing in the area (we wouldn’t be renting it out anyway), and it helps pay our ridiculous mortgage.
So I hate it… but if it’s used properly/ethically, I feel like it could be pretty good.
This is actually I think how Airbnb was originally supposed to work… You rent out a room or an in law suite that you aren’t otherwise using. Or maybe your condo in a resort town when you’re not there. Unfortunately became so lucrative that you can make more money doing that than renting. I stayed in one in a ski town recently that was clearly at least two separate apartments before and had all been combined to house large groups. Felt kinda crappy about that, and it goes to show how it eats up the housing stock
Jk Rowling. She was (I think) the only billionaire to ever debillonaire themselves without dying (i.e., she donated so much wealth to charity that she was no longer a billionaire).
But then she decided to dedicate herself to making trans people’s lives miserable…
I’m curious which charities she was donating to before she turned into a massive cunt. Cause all she donates to now are hate groups.
Good question, I never actually looked into it. According to her Wikipedia page:
She established the Volant Charitable Trust in 2000, and co-founded the charity Lumos in 2005. Rowling’s philanthropy centres on medical causes and supporting at-risk women and children. In 2025, Forbes estimated that Rowling’s charitable giving exceeded US$200 million. She has also donated to Britain’s Labour Party, and opposed Scottish independence and Brexit.
Can she just die already? I normally don’t wish death on anyone. Just people that do extremely evil things.
The United States government and the United States citizens.
Growing up I was taught about all these checks and balances. How the government is slow and that’s good because it makes sure people get what they really want. Come to find out in just one presidential term, this one guy just executes executive orders left and right and just gets things done.
I thought U.S citizens would vote in their best interests but they would glady vote for a facist who’s against their best wishes.
Google. It was once a good search engine. Now I find myself getting only the most irrelevant results based on my keywords and more often than not an advanced search turns up nothing of value
It went downhill when they got rid of search within results, I don’t know why they did that
Me neither! Really frustrates me when companies remove good features for no apparent reason
They had a reason; money. It’s always about money. The worse the results, the more time you have to spend searching for what you want, the more revenue they can generate.
You can usually trace all decisions a company makes, good or bad, back to money.
Corey Doctorow’s podcast Understood: Who broke the internet? does an amazing job of explaining this. It’s only like 5 episodes and worth everyone’s time.
Institutions. Courts. Media. Religion. Law Enforcement. Politicians.
The institutions are captured. The courts, media, and politicians are corrupt. Bought and paid for. Law Enforcement are just class traitors. The enforcement arm of Capital. Protecting the interests of the ruling class and taking a bludgeon to the people. Religion is a tool of control. Used to control the ignorant and guide their ire.
Idk I’m starting to think dystopia began when we figured out agriculture
Most life eats other life to live. It’s been a bad time from the very beginning.
When aristocracy discovered mercantilism and mutilated it into capitalism.
Ironically this take is entirely self-validating, since this is the primary mechanism for that degradation.
vaguely gesturing at everything
Google. Do no evil
Republicans. When I was a child, slogans like “fiscally responsible”, “family values”, “smaller government “ sounded like good things. Republicans always claimed the moral high ground. But they’ve spent my entire adult life proving it as manipulative bullshit for personal greed and power, holding themselves above the law, the worst in humanity, rising to our current flirt with fascism.
Many moons ago I thought Israel was just defending itself. For two decades now I’ve come to believe they are the problem, and are now committing wanton genocide
America.
And my dad.
Apple, and a number of the other big tech companies as well. Shit used to be easy to use, repair, customize to your liking, etc.
Now they don’t want you to be able to fix a damn thing, plus all too many services and features and stuff have gone to the subscription model.
Fuck all with that, give us our stuff back and let us just use what we paid for.
Right To Repair!
You have to go back like 30 years to get to a pro-repair Apple
More or less yeah. Though back around 2013 or so, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by how they designed their Mac AIO desktops, they actually were somewhat repair tech friendly.
The front glass was magnetically attached, so it only took a suction cup or two to start disassembly, and basic screwdrivers to remove the screen and get access to the motherboard, hard drive, RAM, DVD drive, etc.
And yes you could replace or upgrade parts as necessary, none of this newer soldered on storage shit they do these days.
I’ve lost a lot of respect for companies that solder on important parts that should rightfully be fairly easy to replace or upgrade.
Plus, now the big companies have taken to forcing encryption on the storage devices, effectively locking the drive to the system. Well isn’t that just cute for the backup operator that’s trying to recover your late grandmother’s family photos…
The original iMac G5 was designed to be repairable by the customer. You could even call Apple support and do free part exchanges under warranty.
Yeah it’s pretty bleak, although there have been some moves towards right to repair in recent years.
Respecting companies is always a bit fraught though. Even the ones you like are only doing it to profit off of your niche. It’s thanks to us that they even have a profitable niche to serve
I’m gonna say Tim Cook.
The way he signaled his authority was by sending out an email to the entire company announcing that he was expanding the company’s match program for employees who wanted part of their paycheck to go to NGOs. I thought that was a classy way of saying, “I’m in charge.” I had a lot of respect for that.
But his leadership with the App Store and regulators has been abysmal. He led Apple to make all the wrong moves, ensuring a (now active) fight with regulators instead of just making some small concessions voluntarily. It was completely unnecessary, but he just couldn’t help feeling entitled for Apple to do whatever it wants to make money. I still believe there are people in leadership positions who would choose to do the right thing, but the buck stops with Cook.
Apple might be worthy of my respect again when he’s gone.
Apple have always done what they wanted. In the Jobs era the biggest Apple Store in the world was on Regents Street in London, and Apple paid the local council vast fines each month because Jobs decided that the required illuminated fire exit signs would have ruined the carefully designed interior.
Wow, that’s terrible.
Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.
Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.
Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn’t throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.
For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you’re out of luck.
Grown ups.
