This belongs in the lemmy version of r/ihadastroke

Ooh la la

Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.

They will:

1. use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…

2. they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…

3. They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.

There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.

Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.

Capitalism in a nutshell.

It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.

Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.

Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.

You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.

They missed the other 3,000 billionaires on Earth.

I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.