Americans love nothing more than to wallow in their own filth while pointing and laughing at their neighbors.

I am smart. You are dumb. That’s why we’re in this mess together.

the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach

You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of “man on the street” pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.

But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business’s core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.

The Network didn’t change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn’t cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn’t cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.

Big companies already have elected boards.

Big boards of shareholders consisting of the CEOs of other companies. Its how you get industry cartelization.

Why do CEOs reciprocally sit on each other’s boards?

The reciprocal interlocking of chief executive officers is a non-trivial phenomenon: among large companies in 1991, about one company in seven was in a relationship whereby the CEO of one company sat on a second company’s board and the second company’s CEO sat on the first company’s board. We develop hypotheses to distinguish whether this practice furthers the interests of shareholders or the private interests of the CEOs. Using a sample of large companies, we employ a probit model to test these hypotheses. Our empirical findings are that these reciprocal CEO interlocks primarily benefit the CEOs rather than their shareholders.

Very often, a CEO will receive stock in-lieu of compensation. This makes them a major shareholder of their existing firm. Firms will also use stock in-lieu of payment when negotiating contracts between firms, particularly in M&A and other consolidation agreements.

Consequently, you’ll have a guy like Michael Dell, whose primary wealth comes not from owning shares in Dell Computers but in Broadcom Semiconductor Company. This came about because he received 22M shares from Broadcom in exchange for his controlling interest in VMWare, a company he obtained by trading his Dell stock to the original owners.

He sits on Broadcom’s board and the former CEO of VMWare sits on his board. When Broadcom skyrocketed in valuation (currently in the $1T range) during the Crypto/AI induced chip shortage, Dell’s net worth skyrocketed with it.

We actually DO have a shortage of overpaid CEOs, as much of the entrepreneurial web of small businesses and local special interests have been bought out or bankrupted by corporate expansion and conglomeration.

The days of petite bourgeois middling millionairehood are coming to a close. The fat dodos trundling around Middle America with their second homes and their Sea-Do outlets and their small patch of land dedicated to not growing alfalfa have all been clubbed and devoured. You’re either at the top of the food chain or you’re someone else’s dinner.

deregulation made the fire as bad as it is

The California water system is a dense web of legal contracts between public and private interests. Bad policy made the fires worse, as the central valley was transformed from an ecological paradise into a dried up scrubland. But the idea that California ever really had regulations to prevent these wildfires is naive.

one of the things deregulated in the LA area was the building of homes in high fire risk areas

Fires are running straight up to the Malibu coastline. High risk areas have been expanding with the repetitive droughts and the large agricultural developments of cash crops. You’ve got buildings going up in flames that were perfectly safe to live in 20 or 30 years ago.

Nothing the California state government had done up to this point was preventing the degradation of the local ecology. They’re just at the end of their rope.

Its not the Republican-ism that comes first. You have to sell people on the “I’m exceptional” mentality first, then insist they’re being exploited by their inferiors. Malibu celebrities are a target rich environment for this kind of delusional elitism.

Expect a lot more Californians going on Joe Rogan and making up tall tales about how the fire was caused by poors and illegals stealing all the good firefighting water, while the state refused help for some arcane bureaucratic reasons related to The Fairness Doctrine.

What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.

Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.

There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.

Its most aggressive at the higher tiers, because promotions are a tool of employee retention and “flattening” the management stack is a good way of pushing out the experienced, expensive older employees. You’ll also see a lot more outsourcing of department rolls, as C-levels opt for lowest-bidder contractors you can hire/fire inside a business cycle than big teams of veteran staffers who sit on the payroll thick or thin. That means fewer mid-level managers, as the actual process of team management is sent overseas or subcontracted out to temporary management firms.

McDonald Douglas and Yahoo both executed on this strategy back in the 90s to great effect. Stock valuations boomed, because they were able to create the illusion of cost cutting without impacting quarterly revenue. All it cost them was mountains of technical debt. And then nothing bad happened to either company.

Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Driving Californians (particularly the wealthy and well-connected Malibu celebrity class) insane with rage and paranoia, then pointing them at the milquetoast liberal stand-ins for Far-Left Radicalism, will do to California what it did to New York, Texas, and Florida.

Just a matter of time before the right-wing propaganda machine crushes the brains of the enfranchised class. I’m already hearing my mother-in-law blame the stupid Los Angelinos for raising her own home insurance rates. And more than a few coworkers are smugly insisting this is what a DEI fire department gets you.

Old enough to remember when you could get to the “end of Twitter”, because you’d swiped through all the active posts of the day.

I’m old enough to remember Nintendo suing GameGenie for making the test codes on their games more broadly accessible. And Apple suing indie firms that made 3rd party peripherals for their devices. Don’t forget Microsoft’s unholy war on Netscape Navigator, as they deliberately tried to sabotage the popular third party web browser from working via various Microsoft updates. Hell, I think you can find case law in the 1920s on Ford Motor Company fighting spare parts manufacturers and trying to box them out of the industry. Corporate dinosaurs fighting to keep startups from interfacing with their products is a tale as old as time.

Historically, Facebook/Google/Twitter/et al were focused on integrating with common systems, because they were the underdogs struggling against firms like Microsoft and Comcast who were trying to maintain their Walled Garden. Now they’re kings of the hill, pushing competition off their doorstep.

Its sleazy and toxic and ultimately bad for the industry as a whole. But its nothing new.

Cuban social media is completely out of control. We should invade immediately

Nope. If it’s bad, it’s because of outside agitation and enemy propaganda.

America is exceptional, it can’t do anything wrong except stop being American

They banned sending US Citizen data to adversarial nations

create data collection regulations

Americans simply cannot grasp the difference between Not Collecting Data To Begin With and China Bad

TikTok was one of the few places I could actually watch live journalism from Gaza documenting the genocide

Undermining your trust in the US media and political leadership. Ergo, Evil Chinese Propaganda.

Because China is bad. They are using my TikToks to genocide the Uighurs and invade the Taiwanese.

But hey, as a Centrist, the Left can’t discern me from someone like Bush 43 or a raging MAGA freak because anything right of far left is a legit fascist.

:-/

How about you solve the problem before you create it by not being sloppy and bumbling your way into an obvious trap every bully has pulled since the dawn of time?

There is an argument that politics is the art of representing the aggregate interests of ordinary people on their behalf. And what a successful politician needs to succeed is a rapport with the community such that they can channel the socio-economic demands into the bureaucracy efficiently.

Unfortunately, we live in a country where seats are heavily gerrymandered, information on candidates for leadership is either highly censured or ludicrously unreliable, and singular individuals are expected to represent populations on the scale of 300k to 40M at the national level.

Socratic Rhetoric isn’t the issue here. You’re not engaging in an Ivy League debate between peers. You’re talking entirely about the ability to manipulate public opinion at a national scale. A lot of that boils down to mass deception, demagoguery, and pure tribalist politics.

There’s nothing you can say or do that won’t result in the opposition calling you a foreign infiltrator or a degenerate loser or a reactionary terrorist. You’re trying to play chess with a stampeding bull.

You can see it plain as day in the last election’s rhetoric. Democrats insist that a simple Republican Majority is enough to end democracy nationwide. However, they also believe Republicans can trivially block any liberal initiative from the legislative minority.

I suspect what you’re seeing is the increased frequency of vulgar American bigotry showing up in mass media, thanks to the unfiltered exposure of their behavior.

But I have to point out… this isn’t something new in the American psyche. Keep in mind that America has always been a deeply hateful and bigoted place. Go back to the years following 9/11 and look at how many mosques got burned. Consider that Congress banned French Fries in the cafeteria because the French PM wouldn’t toss in with our genocidal Iraq invasion.

Go back further than that, and you’ve got horrifying police violence aimed at African Americans, Latinos, and East Asians going back… centuries. All endorsed by a parochial upper class that funneled money to Apartheid South Africa, Nun-raping Contra Rebels in Nicaragua, and Fascist Mafiosos crawling all over the Mediterranean during the Years of Lead.

Our mass media has been overflowing with bigotry from modern day Steven Crowder all the way back to Father Coughlin’s antisemitic rants during the Great Depression.

America is a deeply rotten country full of awful people. And while we’re hardly alone in that regard, we export so much of that vileness abroad that its hard for outsiders to ignore.