Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.

They will:

1. use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…

2. they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…

3. They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.

There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.

Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.

It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.

Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.

Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.

I will speak of the dead how they were, not how I wish they were, and especially not how the dead wish they were spoke of if it has no basis in how they conducted themselves in life.

It devalues people that lived empathetic, caring lives, it devalues the lives of people who struggled their entire life but never used that as an excuse to exploit or otherwise harm others to play pretend some greedy/malicious/antisocial garbage human was a “great guy.”

Don’t speak ill of the dead? It’s nonsensical. There is no God, but judgment still should come for a person, by the people whose lives they touched for better or worse, and it helps no one to pretend everyone who died was awesome.

Maybe if the world called a notorious POS a notorious POS when they died and tossed their corpse into a dumpster, it would, I don’t know, show the living that how they live will decide how and if they’re remembered.

You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.

We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.

It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.

Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.

Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna90336

good thing we put so much effort into saving a billionaire with a deathwish while we let all these poor people die. Good thing so many peasants were more interested in a billionaire’s life than our brothers and sisters the billionaires oppress and exploit out of proud, insatiable, sociopathic greed.

Our civilization doesn’t value human life. It values capital. Capitalism turns us against one another.

These people have already consumed more resources than most people would in 20 lifetimes of reasonable consumption. They are one of the owners of the capitalist exploitation machine.

I know they have people tripping over themselves to save them from their own extreme tourism misadventure because money, but for me at least, it’s depressing as fuck to watch so many regular people, the peasants our global oligarchs oppress, sitting on the edge of their seat rooting for them while not giving a shit about the millions dying of exposure and police harassment in tent cities for the crime of not being good enough capitalists.

Sure, save them if feasable, but I wish the people the billionaires exploited and tossed aside that correctly lose hope and wait under a bridge to die for lack of options got even a tiny fraction of this attention, let alone assistance. Some peasants literally wish death on those struggling people for hurting their property values with their continued existence. If anyone still believes human life has significant intrinsic value, why do their lives not matter at all while we literally coordinate fleets to interve l to save people who signed and acknowledged the fact they were playing a deadly game? We clearly can’t “do both” as we never help the former.

I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

I’ve seen some here openly despair that leaving reddit didn’t do anything.

Spez, CEO of Reddit and former mod of the r/jailbait subreddit losing his shit very publically for days proves otherwise.

…And it’s also a reminder that the reddit community we loved has already been destroyed by ownership, anyone returning would be returning to a shadow that disdains its own users and works to disempower them with every update. They’re even undeleting user’s deleted posts. If they can’t respect users enough to be able to delete their own content, why enrich them?

My Daily Reminder that this is a gold plated dystopia.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what’s important starting out.