Honestly that’s standard for a foreign national when appearing before government investigation committees, particularly one who doesn’t think they’d do well when grilled by people with way more experience in arguing the point, see Mark Zuckerberg not attending his invite to a UK parliament select committee hearing.

It’d be a bold and stupid play for him to show up and incriminate himself further, though it would have been entertaining to watch the moment of realisation that he’s in way over his head spread across his face.

Watch as Trump goes full Henry VIII and starts his own church purely to make raping pre-teens a religious practice and for the tax exemption.

It’s both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.

The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don’t care because arbitrary numbers went up.

Incoming Clarkson rant in three, two, one…

But who the fuck is actually introducing these bills? Which entity/organisation/individual/company are they getting the ideas from?

Sorry to be pedantic but strictly speaking “shareholder profit” isn’t the issue with capitalism because that would include worker-owned cooperatives which are not causing the same problems.

The issue is the legal obligation of a private or public company to make an increase in returns for shareholders year on year.

This is why decisions like downgrading quality, design by committee to appeal to focus groups, everything becoming a subscription service, and firing staff to reduce wage overheads in the last financial quarter exist.

Because it’s easier for the company directors / C-level executives to make these decisions which make line go up, rather than try to justify to shareholders why a steady or small dip in returns is necessary for longer term investment and growth.

This is compounded by the shortsightedness of companies only planning quarter to quarter then governments + central banks basing all economic decisions on GDP figures.

Because the easiest thing to make national line go up is to give tax cuts to the owning elites for them to shuffle even more money around in the stock and commodity markets, they buy up all the assets of the working class, the middle class, and the governments selling them off.

But funnily enough, centralising all the apparent wealth in the hands of a few silver-spooned arseholes is not a basis for a functioning society.

Words fail me right now, all I can think is: AaaaahhhAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

It’s how I talk to everyone when I’m not masking or following social scripts. It’s the most fun I get out of social interactions.

I’ve already adopted the transparent frame: nothing to hide, only my undivided attention if they’d like to geek out about their special interests or just want someone to listen.

Technically they haven’t paid for the feature yet, it just so happens that it’s cheaper to manufacture without having a second line of non-heated seats which makes me think “why not just include heated seats (and enabled) as standard?”

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? I’m only pointing out that if BMW wanted to have a heated/non-heated seat options it costs more to set up and operate a separate manufacturing line to support both options. That’s just a fact of running production lines.

Furthermore I’m questioning their business logic here with going with the subscription model because, as shown in the thread here, it only generates negative press, so why even bother with the subscription model and just have heated seats as standard. No subscription model for hardware BS needed, it makes the brand look more luxurious, and it’d be a great selling point in the dealerships to say “all these bad bois come with heated seats as standard”.

They can just adjust the baseline cost to include the heated seats if they need to preserve that margin.

Dozens!

You’re god damn right!

Any venue or building rated for say, to pick a random number, more than 20 people can get randomly inspected by a fire safety inspector.

And I want fire safety inspectors to be feared as much as Judge fucking Dredd. So when they turn up announced, the building management shits a mega-block in fear when they realise that skimping on installing a proper security setup and resorting to chaining/locking fire escapes has just cost them personally a month in jail with a criminal record, issued on the spot!

There’s simply no valid excuses for being this reckless with safety.

For fucks sake it’s the same goddamn lessons that keep getting ignored.

The only way would be to jail any building owner who breaks fire regulations like this.

Oh let’s absolutely piss off big tech, starting by removing anti-circumvention laws.

Once you’ve been, you’ll never want to leave.

Removed by mod

Yet another example of the bubble-wrapped child-safe world allowing evolutionary dead-ends to survive to procreate.

I’m sick of trying to educate people to see the bleeding obvious robbery of our lives when they’d rather blame their neighbours just because they have a different skin tone and it’s less effort mentally than trying to understand the situation with all the neuances. I’m sick of fighting and struggling for a better life for them as well because they don’t even want it. What’s the point of putting in the effort when these ignorant fools don’t even help and actively work against their own interests?

I’m mentally and physically exhausted, and I just want to sleep forevermore.

Look I’m just fed up with dealing with the slow burning of everything around me all because about a dozen people want extra zeros on their net worth and are tempting politicians to implement draconian laws with comparitivly miniscule bribes and I am obligated to spend 1/3 of my life and 2/3rds of my income satiating the desires of these bastards.

Fuck em. I’m done. I want peace, permanent peace.

Ahhhhhh just fuck off you useless cunts! Why don’t you fix the fact that we’ve got kids fucking starving in this country before worrying about if they’ve seen tits before they’re 18?!

It’s dumb shit like this that is really pushing me to KMS once my mother has passed on. I can’t stand sharing oxygen with these morons.