Due explicitly to market behavior unless regulated otherwise, exactly. Most people who build companies do so to make money. When you accumulate enough capital/power, it just becomes good business to use that power to cannibalize your competition if you’re able.

What is good for modern business, profit exclusively, becomes explicitly detrimental to the society that provided the infrastructure and conditions for that business to succeed in the first place, which is why such behaviors need to be but are not prohibited.

At this point, our society exists to grow our beloved economy, when the reality is an economy is supposed to just be a lowly tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of society and it’s citizens.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html

Most stakeholders of American society, its citizens, are not meaningfully among the shareholders our society labors to benefit. The most maddening part are all the exploited Americans who would literally die defending the current system and their own exploitation and that of their family in the name of tradition/blind faith/sunk cost fallacy/the schadenfreude of “I suffered so you should too”/ etc.

You are what you do and say.

There are some cool ass, communist old people who will smoke a joint with you and express their shame for being conflated with their lead consuming contemporaries, and then there’s 20 year olds that listen to Ben Shapiro and want to make america great again, lamenting over never experiencing the “good ol days” when minorities had to defer to people who lacked significant melanin and women had to latch onto a man to have any social standing and silently accept whatever that man did to her.

As a rule, people are a product of their cultural upbringing and accept it blindly as the path of least resistance, which is why stereotypes exist. But that’s just a majority within a population, not a universal of a population.

Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing capitalists (not to be confused with the capitalism sycophant, self-hating peasants that don’t hold significant capital and never will but call themselves capitalists) despise more than actual competition.

The goal of unchecked, unregulated capitalism is to end capitalism, ie competition.

That’s why entire industries merge into a single entity to create a monopoly, as the regulators the oligarchs captured decades ago that were supposed to prevent such anticompetitive behaviors sit back passively with their rubber stamps.

This was a bad decision, as this is just a larger scale version of the “should free speech let you yell FIRE in a crowded theater that isn’t on fire” public safety question.

Free speech needs to have limits when it comes to public safety. The scientific community, including medical science, has effectively DOUBLED the average human lifespan and greatly increased quality of life for that lifespan in the course of a couple centuries. Their community’s consensus findings and recommendations should be above reproach. They have more than earned their bona fides. They have given mankind greater miracles than any imaginary deity we’ve ever invented and worshipped in our thousands of years of recorded history.

Letting idiots shout “do the opposite of what modern medicine says!,” lacking any credible evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence their extraordinary claims would require, during a major pandemic is just as destructive as the fire analogy but on a massively larger scale.

A lot of admittedly unintelligent people, but people nonetheless, are dead because of malicious conspiracy idiots that were literally ready to die on the “don’t tell me what to do, ‘experts’” hill and wanted to convince gullible idiots to unknowingly join them in their suicide by duuuuhhhh.

…Until at last, I threw down Reddit and smote its ruin upon the mountainside.

That’s the thing though, the Republicans already broke that machine by refusing to consider Obama’s appointment, with no repurcussians of any kind.

At this point, obeying rules and norms and not doing what you can get away with in federal government to achieve your goals just makes you a sucker.

Ooh La La, Someone’s Going To Get Laid In College…

Meh, lets not.

In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.

Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.