Publicly traded companies blow my mind a little bit.

It’s not enough to make steady, consistent profits. Give out reliable quarterly dividends and make it so your investors make their money back plus a little extra over time. Free money is not enough for the ownership class.

Growth isn’t enough either. Buying something for X and selling it for 1.1X so you make money even without a dividend isn’t enough for the investor class.

You have to grow infinitely. You have to grow faster than everyone else. You have to beat the projections. Make your product smaller and shittier & sell it for the same price. Lay off 10% of your workforce after record profits to cut costs. Force ads and subscriptions and data mining into every possible space. Undercut your smaller competitors until they fold, then jack up your prices. Break the law, fuck over your workers, buy out politicians, move your production lines to countries with no labor laws.

Being publicly traded actively rewards evil and anti-human behavior.

While NFA items are a different story, you’re generally allowed to manufacture anything you could legally buy in a store. So no suppressors / SBRs / destructive devices without the appropriate paperwork & tax stamps, no machine guns without all that and a time machine, and no fun allowed if you’re a prohibited person. Other than that, there’s nothing* stopping you from printing, say, a semi-automatic rifle with a 16 inch barrel or a glock frame.

*Federally. Also, I am a dumbass and not a lawyer, do your own research.

Because, goddammit, a better world is possible! A lot of the time shit sucks and everything is expensive and I wanna just go to bed and never wake up.

But most of my problems are problems millions or even billions of other people struggle with, and those don’t get solved by opting out of life.

What’s more, those problems are man-made. They’re the result of systems designed by mortal men just like me.

So, I stay alive. Because the only way to out-vote, out-number, overpower, and / or annihilate those bastards is to be alive.

Sounds like a good reason radically restructure (if not entirely dismantle) those companies.

We should make medicine to treat sick people. We should build houses to shelter the unhoused. We should grow food to feed the hungry.

The fact that most companies currently responsible for food and housing and medicine are primarily motivated by shareholder value instead of effective community service represents a structural conflict of interest.