That is the gist of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc's take-away (though with great pains taken to convey that he doesn't condone it). Extralegal solutions become more and more attractive the less and less just the "justice" system appears; whether it's right or not, that's just the truth of it, and I suppose we're lucky that only one of the three recent "get 'em back" instances that come to my mind involve shooting someone dead in the street. (The other two being the UNH CEO's execution and the burning of that paper warehouse.)
The novel maneuvers "Reckless" Ben Schneider took were... amusing, at the very least.
The idea is that the houses are being bought by the government because they were erroneously valued by the owner under market rate. That presumably gives them room to come down from "market rate" to actual market rate (the rate it sells at on the market).
The only way to end up with a loss is a coordinated attack by owners and potential buyers: to intentionally understate the value, and then to hold off ANYONE attempting to purchase before the market sale price is below the compelled price. So multiple rich people lose their houses in a naked gambit to bankrupt the government. I mean... I guess it could happen? But at that point, it's open class warfare.
Laymen here: my guess would be that the financial and social resources corporate representatives have access to (both personally and through the entity that has a vested interest in them not going to jail) make the prospect of prosecuting them for criminal misconduct unappetizing. It would be a lot of time and money to send people with a lot of powerful friends to jail for a handful of years, at best. As a prosecutor, what's better for your career: that, or spending significantly fewer resources putting street-level criminals in prison for 5, 10, 20 years?
Before trying to explain why you think business executives aren't being prosecuted for criminal conduct, can you first point to a reliable source of data that indicates that this is actually happening, and isn't just a myth reinforced by online echo chambers?
Anecdotally, most of the large corporate scandals that involved actual criminal conduct that I'm aware of did result in prosecutions and, often, convictions of the culpable parties. For example, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff, and Elizabeth Holmes all went to jail.
I should state that this reply is mostly for other people reading our comment thread, as I can think of no adult American who would present your argument in good faith.
I know that it was originally coined for BS1, but I think its application to BS:I is an interesting case. That was a game about American violence, and featured gratuitous amounts of violence... though it only works from that birds-eye view, right? In terms of the ground-level story, it feels distinctly weird - maybe even grody - to be mowing down hundreds of people, literally tearing their faces open with a mechanical device, in the process of trying to save the Disney Princess deuteragonist (who actually calls you out on your actions early in the game).
Except... the game is ALSO about how time, and the shifting (lost) priorities and understandings of an ideology, are often at the source of violence disconnected from reason. The game is full of people doing things divorced from the original rationale, a veil of manufactured righteousness thrown over it all (patriotism, revolution, a debt that must be repaid), and taking their behavior to an extreme because they don't really understand the true core of why they're doing what they're doing. Kind of like... playing a game that attempts to say something meaningful and sophisticated about society, but that's built on the bones of a gameplay loop that originated with full-throttle demon-slaying action. (Well, actually, Nazi-slaying. Hmm...)
...I don't know how clear I'm being, but the gist of it is that I think Infinite knew what it was doing a lot more than people give it credit for. It's kind of a jumble on purpose.
>I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power.
I am CPA, former auditor, and a self-taught programmer. I am in a director level finance & technology role at an American, private-equity backed portfolio SaaS company. I have worked with all kinds of finance professionals.
I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.
There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.
It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.
It may seem glib, but if there are good ones out there, they're not typically "private-equity backed portfolio SaaS companies". IME (3 times now) this is where good companies go to die. I'll reluctantly take the naked (but aligned) greed of the VC startup over PE from here on out; it's one thing to implode on the launch pad but I can't watch PE destroy real value any longer.
I'm not commenting on the the particulars of different ownership and operational business models. Certainly private equity backed portfolio company structures deserve their fair share of criticism; the balance of incentives they create can certainly be net negative for the business and its customers in the long run, however I think it's a separate conversation.
My point is just that there are lots of people that wake up every day and make serious, sustained efforts to exercise due care in their professional duties.
I'm not quitting the site myself, but the kind of cynicism evinced in the comment is toxic. If your response to the very ideas of accounting, law, healthcare and journalism is to wave your hand and nonspecifically declare that they couldn't possibly be respectable, you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people, even if you understand yourself to be doing it in a wise and savvy way.
It seems more to me like an acknowledgement of the realities on the ground, which is the first step to actually fixing things.
To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.
That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.
Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.
Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.
Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.
Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.
The first profession listed was "accounting", yet you don't seem to have any concerns about accounting or accountants. I think the first step towards rebuilding trust in the institutions that have been destroyed is to be specific about the problems and their solutions, rather than laughing at the idea that anyone in any industry could be good in 2026 America. Indeed, as you touched on, this whole thing is Trump's schtick; his supporters are so willing to excuse his misdeeds because they've come to believe that everything everywhere in the US is corrupt and unworthy of respect.
> supporters are so willing to excuse his misdeeds because they've come to believe that everything everywhere in the US is corrupt and unworthy of respect.
Yes, and his WHOLE THING that got him elected was that he was going to "fix it".
He got a lot of independents too.
The problem, or perceived problem, predates Trump and will not end when he is gone.
I erased the extended response I'd written because, as I tend to, I got to the end of writing it and realized that it would be fairly disrespectful to dump a screed on someone when a concise witticism gets my sentiment across. I still have it, if anyone is curious to read it, though.
Suffice it to say, it was not a response to "the very ideas" of those fields, but to their state "In America, in 2026". GP suggests that people working in them automatically assume a sort of virtue just because they overpaid for an advanced degree, and I reject that, in light of how they've operated for most of my life.
>you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people
This is, ironically, my own point about what GP said.
it's evidently a dig at Trump and Republican morals, although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years.
Thus the poster is evidently indicating that:
The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class.
Journalism has been undermined because major media outlets have been purchased by rich people who only allow the media to publish pro-conservative, pro-rich, talking points.
Healthcare is a larger stretch for their dark joke, but the governmental agency that sets the rules for healthcare research and what are the socially approved recommendations is run by RFK Jr. who is a well-known anti-vaxx guy, also the U.S has left WHO and may not get access to WHO data anymore, and last year the CEO of an insurance company got shot basically for denying insurance claims for healthcare, indicating some level of corruption. There may also be more dark joke levels in regards to healthcare if one is a female.
Accounting is also something of a stretch, but there are governmental shenanigans where common accounting practices are involved that indicate corruption and that might make you feel like "accounting, what a joke" /strawman quotes there
That, at any rate, is what I suppose can only be meant by the somewhat obtuse phrase dark joke in 2026.
On edit: no wait, CEO of United Healthcare got shot at the end of 2024.
> ...although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
Speaking as a USian:
If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).
I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.
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