Finance reporting never ceases to read like it's written by sociopaths.
The core of this piece is sound enough: if the US keeps interest rates high while other major markets are easing, investors will leverage the disparity by investing money borrowed from low-interest countries in the US. This surfeit of external cash will then boost US inflation.
But when you end up writing about job growth as a bad thing because it might keep interest rates high? #YouMightBeTheBadGuy
https://www.businessinsider.com/america-economy-recession-stock-market-crash-inflation-interest-rates-2024-6
@MLClark It might read that way because it is essentially by sociopaths for sociopaths.
It's largely about how to turn the earth's resources and human beings into sources of profit. "Good" is defined by how much can be squeezed out, and which things can be strategically restricted.
We're allowing our parasites to direct our collective society.
We have no business making fun of those ants with the cordyceps, and I think Last of Us may be a subconscious cry for help from humanity's unconscious.
@MLClark I tend to have what I suppose is a sort of Gaian model, where the whole Earth is a complex organism with different organs and parts, with humanity is one of those organs.
The Matrix was wrong.
Humanity isn't the virus.
Humanity is _infected_ with the virus(es).
If humanity is a collective "organ" of the ecosystem, like a collective being made up of "all humans", it's clearly been infected by meme-structures that are designed to give all the resources and control to a parasite.
@MLClark It's like we have a mental fungus on the overall mind and spirit of humanity, one that hijacks the normal life-sustaining functions we possess, to direct our efforts not towards feeding ourselves, or providing benefit to the ecosystem, but to funnel more energy, effort, resources, labor, wealthy, and control into the maw of what is eating and zombifying us.
I think that's part of why the zombie media craze. It's in our dreams tha we've been taken over by a malign intelligence.
@MLClark Elon Musk is up for a $45B (U.S.) compensation vote today by #Tesla shareholders.
This #NYTimes article argues that the company has stopped innovating because Elon is more interested in driving up share value than innovation -- a problem typical of many U.S. companies.
"Problem is, the performance was not for making high-quality cars or making affordable cars or making cars at scale. The performance was for pushing Tesla’s stock price up."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/opinion/tesla-elon-musk-pay.html
"The board promised Mr. Musk — at his urging — that if he made the board and the shareholders truly wealthy by boosting the stock price, by whatever means, he could have 12 percent of the company. Yet I believe this pay package helped drive his descent from visionary business leader to bizarre carnival barker. And that set of incentives and responses should not be validated."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/opinion/tesla-elon-musk-pay.html
@MLClark And then there's this bright light from #Ikea:
*****
In trying to fix its quitting problem, Ikea went full-steam ahead in addressing the most important issues to workers, Ring told the outlet, including better pay, more flexibility for employees, and integrating new technologies to make employees' jobs easier.
It paid off: Ikea's global quit rate fell from 22.4% in August 2022 to 17.5% in April 2024, Bloomberg reported.
@MLClark #Ikea Here's the original #Bloomberg article if you can get past the paywall.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-06-11/how-ikea-keeps-its-store-workers-from-quitting
@MLClark Interesting, ML!