the return

But investors, they want to know that when they put money into something, they will get 7% more money out of it next year. They don't care what the company does, they don't have any idea how the industry it's in works, all they know is they want number to go up and if number does not go up then they will burn the whole thing to the ground.

It's illegal for them not to. (by legal precedent, not by legislation.)

If shareholders - investors who own stock in a company - believe that the company is not doing everything possible to increase the value of their shares, they can sue. For-profit corporations are required to make "line go up" - as in, not just profits increase, but returns to the people who own the company increase, their number one priority, and if they don't, they can be held liable for not doing that duty.

The biggest problem is actually that they literally cannot increase forever, because we live on a finite biosphere with finite resources and finite numbers of people engaging in any company. So once they've done the most they can by normal routes like "sell more good/service" and "raise prices of good/service" and even shitty things like "buy competitors of good/service so we can raise prices" and "pay workers less," they . . . still have to keep making more than they did last year. So they start shrinking their staff, laying off as many people as possible, even if it means the company isn't functional anymore, producing their good/service as cheaply as possible, even if it means it actually becomes unusable or dangerous, and eventually, when the investors have sucked every drop of potential profit out of the company, they sell it, walk away, and buy shares in some other company.

I am absolutely convinced that the single law that would do the most good in this country would be making it law that instead of considering shareholder return increase their first priority, for-profit corporations must consider their top four priorities in equal measure: (1) the quality of the good or service they offer, (2) the working conditions and retention of their labor, (3) the environmental impact of their business, and (4) stability/non-decreasing returns to their investors.

So if the workers could show that they had sacrificed retention/labor conditions in order to increase profits by laying off so many employees that they were understaffed, they'd have a case against the executives; if the community or EPA could show that the company had sacrificed environmental impact to raise the quality of their service by using materials that poisoned the air/water around the factory, they'd have a case; and even if the shareholders could show that the company had sacrificed returns on their profits to the point of decrease or something, they would have a case. (Because if you cut out shareholder profits at all, it wouldn't stand a chance of even making it out of the first committee in Congress, and because "Every year the company makes less money than last year even though our customers are reliable and we haven't made huge improvements to our facilities because our CEO has sixteen executive assistants and keeps hiring his friends" is actually a fair complaint, if it ever happened.)

I think Innuendo Studios has a video about this, and how Capitalism has always been this way...

Ah. Here it is. Under 15 minutes. Proper closed closed captions, very little direct eye contact (brief still photos). And it's how Conservatism has always been this way, but how that conservatism is built on the accumulation of wealth for wealth's sake.

An azure-winged magpie (灰喜鹊).

Mountain Scops Owl (Otus spilocephalus), juvenile, family Strigidae, order Strigiformes, Sattal, India

me: i dont wanna hear it man. last week it was slutweed, the week before that it was the jpeg weed that kept clipping through the paper, just give me the normal shit

dealer: aw come on man i got the cocomelon weed👶 i got the analog horror weed👁 i even got the pizza tower weed🍕 dont worry its not just oregano😉🌿

me: do you even sell normal weed. are you some kind of fucking trickster spirit.