I think you misspelled “capitalist.”
I don't think being a capitalist requires being shady, nor that being some other economic system would stop some people being shady.
Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.
People also do sometimes use brands or other company identifiers when deciding who to purchase from.
This is because it doesn't really matter. We could just mint a few trillion dollar coins if we had to to make a payment on it. We probably would only get 1/2 the inflation we did coming out of the pandemic as a lot of that was geopolitics that's already priced in now, though corporate greed is another matter. We also could just revert a bunch of the tax cuts from the last 20 years or so, and probably make a dent in the deficit if not get to a surplus again.
My limited understanding is that economists are divided around if too high a debt percentage is what led to Japan's stagflation, but from what I've read the US had that since the 70s already in real wage terms, so would it actually be a change to most people? And it's not like Japan is some failed hellscape - it's a huge economy with a pretty decent standard of living from what I can tell.
I still maintain so much of this is driven by thinking there isn't some limit here - like we talk about "tiny" GDP growth compared to developing economies without realizing that if you start at $1, it's easy to have 500% growth in a year, but each year the absolute amount of growth needed to hit that percentage goes up. The US only managing to grow 1% on a what, 30 trillion GDP is actually 300 billion, which is a huge absolute amount. That's like an entire Merck, Costco, or Adobe each year added enmasse.
Dismissing the allegations because of who made them was always ad hominem. It's also a pretty bad look to hold faculty and the president of the university to noticeably lower standards than the students.
Ivy League schooling is a four year adult daycare and networking camp to secure old money connections. There’s nothing educational about it.
What are you basing this on? I have somewhat deep insight into one Ivy League school and can tell you much of it is quite rigorous, well beyond the local community colleges. This is based on family and friends that have gone to one or the other as well as some employees.
don’t think that our cities should be catering to them as much as they do right now with parking minimums.
I actually agree with this in general. I'd just like to see some more park and ride or nicer big parking garages in the small cities to acknowledge that anyone from the surrounding communities has to drive to get to the city and then needs to put that car somewhere while shopping, eating, whatever. Though for the park and ride we'd need a lot more bus service from there to the city, which I guess is hard to fund.
I'm not sure the rural places are actively hostile to people without a car - they're as accessible as they were in the 1800s if you don't have a car - a lot of hoofing miles to get somewhere. It's a lot more practical there with a car, but I see plenty of people walking and biking where I live though usually for exercise. I'd like to see more uber / lyft but I have to guess they don't proliferate for the same reason busses don't go out there - not enough people using them to make it cost effective. Things like Casino complexes out in the boonies with enough draw do run special busses from cities.
Suburban is actually much worse - I've never seen people walking in a lot of places because that would be a death wish, same with bicycles. While I personally think Suburban is kind of the worst of both worlds, for some reason a large number of people like it but that is indeed enabled by cars.I imagine a lot of suburbanites would move to the city if cars were to go away. At least if the city was affordable.
I'll just repost the parent post to show how irrelevant this is to this specific thread:
I don’t think the issue is the daily basis. It’s the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don’t want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won’t work for them several times a year. It’s the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.
Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.
Right, my point isn't that the businesses will die because there's no rural or suburban customers, it's that urban customers will less and less run into rural or suburban customers, leading to potentially way less interactions between different ways of life. I guess it probably doesn't matter if rural and suburban people shop at Wal-Mart and never see a bodega and the reverse is true for urbanites, but if you never meet in a bar or whatever it means even more social bubbles than we already have. I'm not sure the idea of off street parking minimums were a smart policy though.
I think in some ways this will further separate the urban from the rural. Basically everyone I know works hard to avoid businesses in cities that don't have easy parking when you have to drive in 30 miles or more to get to them. But then again, maybe for much larger cities it works, at the cost of there being different shopping and eating locations for people who live in the city within walking distance and those who need to drive. Not sure how much the "social mixing" actually helps cohesion given existing rural / urban divides, but I can see this leading to people who basically are even more in 2 completely different countries. Of course, IDK how you fix this - NYC has park and ride set up, but the vast majority of third tier cities do not, or run one bus (that no one who can possibly avoid it wants to ride) twice a day, one in and one out.
I really think we need a different immunity standard - i.e. a civil level of burden of proof that misconduct occurred gets you fired at the least. Preferably potential criminal liability yourself similar to medical malpractice things. I.e. if you honestly believed you were doing your job and things go south, sucks but no punishment. If you're drunk or negligent you get large fines and fired I would hope. If you're intentionally killing people like the "Angel of Mercy" trope, you go to jail.
Here it's like if you were doing your job and the police faked things, or people lied, or just the evidence was ambiguous and you got it wrong, for the prosecutor it's maybe a learning experience. If you just are not paying attention to the cases you bring and / or let bias get in the way and are wrong maybe you get fined and or fired. If you're actively breaking rules (the law?) withholding evidence that the defense should get, or other stuff like that, you should get brought up on charges.
Hmmm, nice, but I have no 3D printer or ability to custom program a keyboard chip.
That might be your framing of capitalism, but I'd argue it's one that takes into account the reality of greed and tries to harness it to run the system.
Government actors - kind of what I think of as a common alternative to capitalism - also act shady and like to hide who they are for many reasons not related to money but instead to power. They have just as much incentive, driven by a potentially similar base human desire, that are orthogonal at best to capitalism if not it's opposite. I suppose you can argue that non capitalist governments, or governments in non capitalist or capitalist societies do not have shady politicians, but that seems like a very difficult argument to make.