Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Tack on December 12, 2016, 03:11:06 pm

Weirdly I have this feeling that businesses only do unethical crap in order to beat other businesses. Makes me wonder what would happen if a business "won". I feel like capitalism rampant enough that a business owns a country would just turn it back into socialism.

You mean when a business gets monopoly?  No competition or anything? 

There might be some problems, I'm pretty cynical.
Arbitrary price hikes, need to increase bonus for CEO and/or increase dividends (Epi-Pen currently has monopoly and the price was hiked up to 600 in the US, while it costs 70 in the UK.  Also, US interwebs are glowing testimonials to monopolies.  US ISP tend not to offer comparable service in the same areas, each one mostly sticking to their own fiefdoms.)
Selective maintenance, why spend too much money on that?  Just as long as it doesn't effect the 'important' people/places, everyone else can coast by with works-most-of-the-time.


But yea, this is in the context of modern capitalism.  The company is beholden to the shareholders/owner and their duty is profits/dividends. 
There are cases of shareholders/owners that look further then immediate self-enrichment though...  It shouldn't be considered the norm.

Maybe it might be better if you nationalize companies instead of giving them a carte blanche monopoly...

Speaking of, I rather wonder which is worse for the health, a glass of cola or a glass of vodka.

I'd like to believe doctors are mostly genuinely invested in providing quality healthcare over pure financial considerations.

Yes, at the end of the day a doctor needs to turn a profit just like anyone else in order to survive. That doesn't mean they're going to compromise their standards doing so. After all, there's clear penalties for malpractice, and whilst they're not used liberally except in the most obvious of cases, the amount of time and effort invested to earn a medical degree simply doesn't stack up against whatever small sideline profit you can make abusing that qualification.

Plus the workload tends to push away anyone not genuinely invested in providing healthcare for more than simple monetary compensation. If you wanted big money, go into business instead. Less years of your life invested into study, less debt, and less dealing with broken messy biological functions.

Quote from: TheBiggerFish on December 12, 2016, 05:37:58 pm

Did you do cost of living?

1000-2000€ a month.

Significatively more expensive than here (about 4 times as much), but even then my profits would be massive.

Meanwhile, it appears that the lid cannot quite stay on in Germany. The lid intended to avoid a backlash against migrants overall, when some migrants are found complicit in sex crime and, recently, murder. Naturally, that lid creates more scalding steam than the pot would do by itself.
I shall make a confession. It rather revolts me how the first concern in the minds of (some) state and media authorities seems to be how to hide and negate the possible fallout from the crimes of certain groups, and to ensure nothing can risk upsetting the current arrangement. That the safety, the very lives, apparently, of native citizens are, in effect, worth less than the warm, self-indulgent feeling of false generousity one gets when one calls for the borders to be open and everyone allowed in to stay, no questions asked.
The worst of it is that it is not working. It will only bolster the importance and range of these 'false news' sources. It would appear that they come in flavours False and 'False'. Demonstrably untrue or not aligned with the correct and proper narrative. In their fright and worry to not frighten people into the arms of reactionary elements, they fail to see that the silence and the defensiveness does that quite splendidly on its own.
Now, I do not intend it as a boot particularly aimed at Germany's rear, as it were, for I was taught to not throw stones in glass houses, and policy in Sweden is no better. None at all, and I believe part of the reason why this upsets me so is that it strikes so close to home. It is something I have had to see up close, and it is sickening, infuriating, and does more to boil one's blood than what any of the clowns, that government and media are so afraid of helping, could manage on their own.
I am just fed up with it. I really am. I am a horrible old xenophobe, or so I have been told, but a degree of xenophobia is evidently warranted in these times...