Doesn't sound like a massive loss, friend. People grow apart, even if they are your blood relatives. The family you choose is far more important, especially if your family gets angry and even writes you off at your lack of equivalent suffering. Americans are so weird about suffering being a positive, "character building" experience for its own sake.
I'm jealous of you btw, you did what I was too chickenshit to do and you reached the promised land.
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.
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.
Wow, legislating like this is a society that cares about its own future instead of a piggybank of resources to be exploited for private profit by our oligarchs.
How very un-American. It's like he doesn't even care what this will do to billionaire ego scores. Not much, but maybe something perceptible on an earnings report! They'll never piss down those golden showers of prosperity they've been promising for half a century if we don't give them ALL the value society produces!
This is a response to protests from the people from their leader circumventing their legislative process to raise the retirement age to satiate the capitalists who don't want their taxes to go up to pay back into the system that provided the infrastructure and means for their success in the first place.
Those protests are continuing and getting worse due to increased use of police force, and its cutting into GDP, the only thing the capitalists care about. How much value did we accumulate? How much did the beloved economy ~~grow~~ metastasize? Better find a way to kill the people's voice, or our quarterly earnings won't reach shareholder expectations!
It was always a lie by the capitalists to pawn off accountability for their insatiable greed driven decision to continue to terraform our only planet to be hostile towards human life for short term profit.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change
No amount of peasants separating cans and bottles or using cloth diapers would have changed the temperature of today, that was just a way to shift blame from the perpetrator with the bully pulpit to powerless individuals like us.
Should we recycle and consume a lot less? Of course, but never forget, that empty, purpose sapping, depression/anxiety causing consumer lifestyle isn't simply a choice we get to make, it is pushed on us all day every day at every level both through culture and through mass media the oligarchs fully own and through scholastic indoctrination through policy manipulation as the oligarchs own our politicians. We are raised from the cradle to conflate consumption with meaning. We are taught as children that a thriving consumer economy helps everyone when it really only helps a tiny sliver of the population at everyone else's expense.
The capitalists, not the self-hating peasant capitalism sycophants, the people that hold significant capital, will continue to blame their victims, even when they have to retreat to the luxury bunker compounds they've been building in places like new Zealand to protect themselves exclusively from the damage they've knowingly inflicted on the human race.
And watch, their descendants will emerge a generation or 2 later, fully believing they were the ones who were wronged, expecting to lead the remnants of humanity once again. We'll be dumb enough to let the sociopath's progeny do it, too. I've yet to see my species collectively declare that enough's fucking enough when the capital hoarders fuck us all over.
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.
I don't think the people profiting significantly from the current economy tend to dwell on the negative effects their actions have on other human beings, especially human beings below them on the socioeconomic ladder, as that tends to be the sole metric by which capitalists, the ones with significant capital not their self-hating peasant sycophants, weigh human life.
Economic success tends to come from sociopathic behaviors, how much you are willing to exploit others to disproportionately benefit yourself. We reward such manipulation leaps and bounds beyond any form of actual, prosocial labor.
A rapist likely wouldn't agree rape is wrong.
A serial killer likely wouldn't agree murder is wrong.
A capitalist likely wouldn't agree, at least if they were being honest about how they conduct themselves professionally, that exploitation or insatiable greed is wrong.
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
-Agent Smith(The Wachowski Siblings) from The Matrix
If you don't inconvenience others in your protest, your protest is just masturbation, ie pointless.
People like you will be hilariously blaming the environmentalists and not the capitalists when water ceases to come out of your tap from the capitalist's fine work.
Gold plated shithole for those of us unwilling to delude ourselves with that crap.