I get the impression that many companies don't care about the product or consumer anymore. That seems bizarre, but in a world where money is made up, maybe it makes sense.

Companies don't think.

Employees are thinking "I like my job/it pays the bills/my coworkers are fun/it's an interesting problem/the nerd rapture is here"

Bosses are thinking "This gets me fat stacks"

Investors are thinking "This will get me stupidly fat stacks, and if it causes social problems I won't bear the cost"

Also everyone is thinking "me not doing this just means it happens anyway but I don't benefit"

Read Marx, like I'm not shitposting. If you want to understand why these traps happen and why capitalism keeps going here read Marx. You don't need to 100% agree with him but the economic analysis is invaluable.

Other companies.

Once you and competition have been optimized out of the economy it’ll all be b2b.

The middle class isn't a natural state of things. You have to work at it to maintain a middle class.

Most of these people want to move back to a feudal self set up again. Where 'the economy' is just the nobles and rich merchants trading among each other. They don't actually care if that economy is overall less prosperous, so long as they are one of the big fish in the tinier pond.

So right now we're seeing rich people eat other rich people, fighting over who gets to control the dwindling remains of civilization that will remain after their decisions wreck the world.

Top 10% ofc. Poor people don’t spend a lot anyways.

I look at things like the car market, where the top end is basically being floated by oil princes, trustfund kids and early crypto investors. Even have mass production companies like Mercedes starting to focus more on "handcrafted limited release" cars they can make 30 of, and flip at a few million each.

The wealthy seem to seriously believe they've amassed enough money at the top that they can sustain the economy without anyone else participating. And unfortunately, it's looking more and more like the data supports this belief.

A lot of folks just make their money because the line goes up, then instead of spending that money they borrow more using their old money (stocks) as collateral. So long as the line goes up those people have basically a continuing stream of income and credit.

Whenever it stops going up long enough for them to care they will start to introduce their version of UBI which will probably be something like Mr Lee's KongBucks because every single one of these fuckers seems to have gotten the exact wrong message out of the novel Snow Crash.

Think? (chuckles) No, no, we don't do that here.

You’re thinking past the quarterly earnings report, that’s what cucks do. Line go up, mother fucker. Infinite growth, FTW, bitch!

/s

This is like asking ‘how did the slave owners make money if slaves couldn’t buy anything?’

The wealthy already control 50% of the market. They don’t need us. And they don’t want us. They want us to be slaves.

They don't. Companies think as far as the next quarter, that's it. Negative externalities do not exist for these people.

It's an entire system built on perverse incentives, and those perverse incentives are all about keeping the stock price going up. Companies operate for the benefit of shareholders. Not for profit or growth or stability; those are just means to an end. The end is line go up.

The mega wealthy are literally building bunkers to ride out the collapse of civilization. That's their long term play; emerge as kings of the ashes.

Companies all think they'll be the ones to do it first, do it best, so they'll get all the profits from having no expenditures while all those other dumb companies will be the Rubes paying wages to workers who will buy their profit.

Yeah, some "doomsday prepper" consultant was asked, "how do I ensure my security doesn't turn on my in a doomsday scenario," the answer was "well, don't have the doomsday scenario."

concrete truck doesn't care how many explosive collars are inside bunker

well actually it would be universe 25 not elon musk infinite abundance it is instead infinite slavery. the lower iq eat it up as good for them and pump the stonk.

And unfortunately for them, it doesn't even work that way. The capitalists who better use labor to build on top of AI will beat those trying to make all labor obsolete. Meanwhile, they do little to automate jobs that they literally rely on. No food? No energy? No modern supply-chains? These fuckers don't even realize how fragile it all is, as they've grown up in the same era of stability that we have. Just like the middle class was blindsided by the return to feudalism, they'll be blindsided by world war, the collapse of free trade, and the fall of America as the center of the global economy.

It won't be all that bad for them, but they'll drop the luxury bunker fantasies as not enough people die and local powers begin to vie for regional control. They'll lose to more grounded rivals if they try to pull some naive bullshit.

Communism gets rid of wages in fact it gets rid of money all together.

For some odd reason, this description makes me think of some of the bad guys (e.g. Todd Pharo) from the Horizon games.

The rich that are in on it are conning the rich that are cultists. The end result is further centralization of wealth as they cannibalize each other until the real feudal action starts

It's not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.

It is wages they're after. How much profit there is can be greatly increased by not having to pay any workers.

Automation only really increases productivity. The principles of scarcity and capitalism will ensure that people always have work. Even if robots could fully take over all current jobs, new ones will emerge as capital seeks more busywork. The only way to actually make a fully automated world is through collective ownership of such automation production and a total abolition of private speculation.

Of course, we could realistically strive for a partially automated world where we need to put in less and less labor as more essential work gets automated, but that won't happen. Global capitalism adds a competitive drive to maximize development so states and companies don't get bullied by rival empires and businesses. It's a prisoners dilemma and none of the states or capitalists have any motivation to deescalate. So instead all those with power race to the bottom; buring humans as fuel, pillaging the environment, and making sure we never reach a post scarcity world.