I think infinite growth is possible, but it's easier to grow unsustainably than sustainably, so companies choose that. But something like art is a great example of how you can increase value without increasing resource consumption. With each subsistent piece the value increases with experience while still taking next to no resources.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This for real. I feel like some very recent history is being erased (on purpose) by those who want us to believe there's no way to reform our current system into something more sane and sustainable.

When I started my management career about 25 years ago, the prevailing mantra was to treat your employees well because while loss of expensive, experienced employees might net more in the short term, it degrades the long-term, sustainable growth of a corporation because you end up in a never-ending cycle of expensive hiring and training, which degrades your product and the customer experience and your brand.

Then we allowed this unfettered, competition-destroying consolidation of monopolies that allowed companies to stop caring about the quality of their products and the customer experience because where else are you gonna go when they have you trapped in their proprietary ecosystem? So why should a company worry about employee satisfaction and retention, if they're going to have customers anyway.

We need a new round of trust-busting and strong anti-monopoly legislation, consumer protections, labor protections. There is a way.

But here we are stuck battling impending fascism instead because the corpos would like to have their monopolies forever, please and thank you.