One of the missing pieces that was mentioned by someone else is the purchase of residential properties by businesses being at all time highs.

WFH is efficient and makes sense in many cases. Private equity firms buying homes and holding them to sweat out the market far beyond what a solo landlord could or would, does not.

War is a racket

Maximizing the utility of labor? I’m alluding to using the components of the scenario in the most efficient way.

How would you express it?

Yeah I see your point and I’ve got amazing manners with human beings. It’s a view I personally reserve for companies. And the larger they are, the less I respect them enough to have ‘manners’ towards them.

Perhaps it’s the inability for people to treat corporations the way corporations treat people that leads to such a power differential.

I definitely have the unpopular opinion of disagreeing. As much as I’d like to employ manners with my grocery store, if there’s no corral within a 30 second walk from me, I don’t put the cart back. Most of my purchases are under 8 items and I usually don’t use a cart so I just carry everything by hand in the store and out.

My grocery store doesn’t care about manners on their end. It treats me like an economic unit and even makes self checkout the most reasonable option. They’d have me clean the floors as part of the checkout if they could. From a utilitarian perspective, it makes more sense for one person to gather all the carts in a batch rather than each individual going back for their individual cart.

The insurance rates thing is a legitimate point ( insurance is a racket, though. Fuck those guys too)

The book ‘Determined’ makes a great point on how schizophrenia victims have been mistreated throughout history.

I read somewhere that one of the effects is abstention from treatment. Essentially the idea that, sometimes, to do nothing is better than blasting the body with macro doses of foreign chemicals. This seems to be the case here.

Ahh yes, the freedom loving state. Texas. That’s right.

Yeah I feel you. To echo your last sentence, there’s that old study of money leading to increased happiness but only up to a certain point (I think it was like 75k USD pre-covid)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/rich-less-empathetic-than-poor-study-says.html

To add to this, there’s been evidence that as an individual accrues more wealth, their empathy response lessens over time.

My arm chair psychologist hypothesis is that: as the individual sees their quality of life increase, they look at other human beings in deplorable conditions, and their empathy response atrophies in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.

There’s a concept in the study of wealthy individuals which goes over their desire to hide impoverishment from their view.