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.

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.

Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.

They will:

1. use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…

2. they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…

3. They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.

There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.

Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.

This isn’t a court making a ruling.

These are members of the owner class asserting dominance to their capital batteries.

The republic fell decades ago to the owner class.

All economic policy has been dictated by the oligarchs in the name of trickle down lies since Reagan, political bribery has been effectively fully legalized since Citizens United, all branches of our government have been completely captured by the wealthy interests the government was supposed to keep in check for the societal well being. Social wedges are being clicked on and off to keep the capital battery peasants, us, at each other’s throats so we won’t fight back, and they own all mass media for propaganda and all means of institutional violence to protect themselves from any retribution for running the table ans dehumanizing the non-wealthy.

This is all history. Without revolution or collapse, things will not be allowed to improve. Any scientific/technological advancements will be used solely to further enrich those that have almost everything and whose unquenchable greed cannot be satiated.

Automation could be used to free humanity from menial labor, instead it will be used to increase capital output whole causing mass homelessness and threaten people into lower wages with zero governmental pushback.

AI could be used for the same, but will be used for the above, and also used (its already starting) to monitor the humans doing things AI cannot and report any facial tick, posture, hand motion, that indicates less than optimal productivity to the owners.

I wish we’d fight back, but as I said, their first defense is division through stoking wedge issues. Everyone fixated on social issues that are caused by, exacerbated by, or intentionally stoked by our economic prison. Peasants raging at peasants over symptoms inside an economic prison as the wardens, the people that own you, laugh at their battery’s lack of recognition.

They learned a lot from slavery and jim crow. It’s far easier and more effective long term to manipulate us into undermining one another with false promises and propaganda than any chain or ordinance.

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.

You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.