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Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business
by Nasrudith 3y ago
Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business models was based upon borrowing from the future. That is infamously basically the digital start up business model: offer unsustainable goods to build a user base under the expectation that it will pay back later. Much goodwill was based upon the assumption that it will do so, goodwill which helped fuel the growth in the first place. With a structure like that there is hardly anywhere to go but down. Maybe it could establish its own market section when at a large enough scale but that is unlikely.
Calling it parasitic is to operate under naive assumptions that free lunch is somehow the natural state of being in a fundamentally entropic and uncaring universe. The enshitification is the result of a devil's contract as that which livestock effectively enter: to be fed crops, and protected in the now in exchange for later certain doom. There were always the "wild" alternatives of free software and DIY but they aren't popular at all in comparison.
Because to continue the metaphor, the wild can hardly feed itself. There is no salary paid for maintaining your own Mastodon or message board, hell it doesn't even pay for its own server bandwidth let alone salaries for the work involved. Traditional message boards are pretty much extinct, choked out by spammers and lack of interest.
- rgbgraph 3y agoFinancial engineering as a discipline is insane. Literally the definition of insane: seriously mentally ill and unable to live in normal society [0] -- so detached from the "normal" reality most people live in, and taken hold like a schizophrenic about things that only exist in one's own head. Shareholders are rent-seeking parasites. They have put down an initial investment to purchase some asset, and now consider themselves given the right to lord over those who labor for that asset, while providing little in value (no different than absentee/"hands-off" landlords). It would be one thing to actually loan a set amount of money, with a set payback period that ends sometime in the future. It is another to declare oneself a relative God Emperor, and shackle others for entirely one's own benefit, in perpetuity. To continue the metaphor, the wild can no longer feed itself, because of a set of people taken hold by delusions have irreparably destroyed the wild's ability to. No different than someone buying a cat, and keeping it locked up in a house all day. Yes, food and shelter is provided -- but a cat would be able to achieve those for itself, were it not for a chain of man-made events that landed it in such a predicament. The cat would've either not been born and never landed itself at the mercy of others, or would've been born in the wild, and lived without a sovereign ruling over it. [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/insane https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame...
- lotsofpulp 3y agoDo you have a better system in mind?
- rgbgraph 3y agoOutlaw modern-day corporate trafficking. You cannot buy pieces of a person; corporations are legally people; you should not be able to buy pieces of them. Remove the corporate veil. All liability will rest upon a corporation's guardians. Bankruptcy, and civil and criminal suits, will personally affect the officers and shareholders of said corporation (and their assets). The same way, if your child goes out drinking and driving, the parents are now liable for any people slaughtered along the way; or if your dog goes out and mauls some child, it will be put down and you will face restitution for damages.
- yellowapple 3y ago> Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Investments are not loans. Loans entail finite returns from finite input. Investments entail infinite returns from finite input. Its that infinity that makes investor-ownership parasitic in a way that loans ain't.