I think the phenomenon is called something like “closing the door behind you.”

He also owns a significant portion of the company and makes millions when the stock price goes up.

An employee however makes a fixed income and may very likely be laid off after the next investors call to make that stock price go up.

Comparing the work ethic of a ceo and an employee is complete bullshit. By their own logic, a 1/1000th ownership in the company should in fact mean 1/1000th of the CEO’s work.

American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.

The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.

In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.

Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.

Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.

Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism, like what happened during the Dark Ages.

Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.

The human elements are being stripped away along with consumer protections. So services are becoming more and more like the tech sector (like YouTube, WhatsApp blocking) where for a long time, the situation has been that decisions get made by an algorithm and there is literally no one to appeal to about them.

Take banking as an example - with brick and mortar locations shrinking, it’s already so hard to get simple things done unless you download their app, agree to an unnecessarily long list of terms and conditions which can be changed unilaterally at any time, and your rights to sue are waived in favor of arbitration.

We as consumers are doing more of the work that was previously being done by employees and without getting paid for it. Think self checkouts - when it started, I was very happy that I didn’t have to talk to a person if I didn’t feel like it, but now I am essentially forced to use it because there are few to no cashiers. And I’m not getting paid to do the work for which an employee was previously getting paid, nor am I paying less for my groceries as a result of doing the work myself.

Why is Bhutan one of the most weird countries? Oh, WIRED.

I can see a company not wanting to invest resources in a social media platform without critical mass. But for a company that itself is trying to gain critical mass, moving away from a similarly situated privacy focused platform is idiotic. It signals to potential Proton users that the company cannot be trusted and it’s very hard to recover from that.

Not only is it perfectly legal but the executives would argue that they are bound by their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Layoffs increase stock price => shareholders make money => shareholders approve bonus for executives.

This looks like a marketing email because you agreed to share information with Shop Pay as the first line says. It may have nothing to do with your specific order shipment.

Not to say it’s not annoying to see another “please please download our app” message, but the pitchforks aren’t necessary yet.

Because a lot of CEOs these days only care about quarterly reports. When interest rates went up, companies cost to do business also went up, so to keep the red profit line going up, they had to cut costs somewhere. Labor makes up most of the expenses so layoffs and forced RTO happened.

These CEOs don’t care that they lose years of experience when employees leave. And by the time the lack of experience catches up to the companies shitting themselves, the CEOs hope to have moved on to something else with their massive stock rewards for “increasing shareholder value”. Even the Boeing CEO who wasn’t lucky enough to leave before shit hit the fan is going to get a golden parachute. So really no downside for them.

If I understand correctly from the article, you have to enter ‘OOBE\BYPASSNRO’ in command prompt during installation to prevent it from asking to connect to internet. If that’s the only way to set up a local account, that’s hardly an accessible option.

Wouldn’t it be possible to buy a new PC, open the box, and return it right after because you cannot set it up without internet?

If enough people do it, may be PC manufacturers will force Microsoft to add offline setups.