Why *is* everything going to shit?

Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren't in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they're in it to make money. Their actual 'business' is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.
You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.
Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there's no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we'll basically just suck it up because it's still healthier than soda.
Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.
The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.
- There's only one thing I would alter in your statement. You said:
  ...and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product.
  I would say, "and to focus on shareholder profits over ~~making a good product~~ anything else, including life itself.
  It's more profitable for a health insurance company to deny someone's claim than to pay for their healthcare in the US. The insurance company won't care if that ultimately leads to the person's death - they have to answer to their shareholders.
  It's more profitable for Nestlé or Google to siphon water from countries in the global South than it is to have sustainable practices that don't exacerbate climate change. So what if that means that millions of people will die in the years to come? That's their problem for being poor.
  We need to bring about the kind of change that has politicians recognize that there is more to human life than a dollar amount, and that poverty is not a moral failing on the part of the individual. But until that happens, poverty is akin to a death sentence.
  
  Ok but what you are asking is to crash the market, that will lead to more harm than good. Any better less drastic idea?
- I wouls just add that it's all about making profits and increasing them year per year, but always focusing on the short term. To the CEOs, shareholders and other directives, it doesn't matter if the company goes bankrupt 10 years from now, as long as they suck in all the profits they can now.
  Even if the company is very successful, with a very good product(s) and they could just go into easy-ride mode continuing to provide those products. They only want to make as much money as quickly as possible and once they get their hands on the company, the enshitification for the sake of quick profits ensues.
  
  This is why I feel bad about any company releasing their “best product ever”, because it’s all downhill from there. The only thing left for the shareholders to do is cut costs, worsening the product.
- The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.
  I mean, sure, that will solve some things. Not climate change, though. I think we can aim for a little higher, but when I say that perhaps seeking infinite growth in a finite planet might lead to an environmental catastrophe that's somehow controversial.
  
  Human greed is infinite.
  
  That's why Elon musk wants to go to Mars. The galaxy is virtually infinite.
- Ohhhh Naked is watered down Odwalla. Can't believe I never made that connection but it all makes sense now. Used to love Odwalla, kind of like Naked if I missed lunch or something
- Odwala and Naked are different companies. Odwalla was bought by Coca Cola and then closed in 2020. I think full sail bought it and is reopening it. Naked was started in my hometown and eventually bought by Tropicana, still up and running.
- It boils down to companies only trading on their value and not paying a dividend. Without a dividend, a company has to grow to provide value to its shareholders - with a dividend a shareholder would profit simply from the company making money.
- See also: craft brewing
  
  Almost every single time.
  I have a couple of important exceptions but I dare not mention them by name lest they be bought and ruined tomorrow.
- What you describe is the basic structure in our economy that drives this, but the answer to why the enshittification has been accelerating, is technology. Advances in technology, particularly information technology, progressively enable corporations to be more efficient at all this, including more efficient at gaming the political system and manipulating users and customers.
  If you look back nostalgically at some time decades ago when things were less bad, it's because things were less efficient and humanity was more likely to sometimes get in the way of the machine that we've built having it's way with us.
- Thank you for the nostalgia blast.
  I do remember loving odwalla, specifically the carrot juice. But this was more than a decade ago, when I was still in high school.
  Never remember them rebranding as naked juice. Although I do remember picking up naked juice on two separate occasions wondering how the taste would be. Two times was enough to learn the taste wasn't worth the price.

- Long answer is read Marx, understand how capitalism leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to price gouging and collusion to prevent competition, and poverty exists because wealthy people suck up all the capital from a society. Imagine a billion dollars. That's a thousand million. Then hundreds of billions by 20 people.
  We're in late stage capitalism and the enshittification is accelerating.

Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net) has a number of stories now on the concept of “enshittification”. Basically businesses start off being good to customers but eventually get to a point where, if they’re dominant the drive for endless profit results in them turning to squeezing suppliers, customers, everyone.
Tech enables new forms of exploitation.
- And the bad economics right now enforce simultaneous enshittification in a huge amount of products. I guess that might also be a big point to why it's so apparent right now.
- There’s got to be a more scholarly name for that trend which has existed long before the invention of the word “enshitification”. What is it?
  
  Degradation

Cause 1% of people own 99% of everything. That's never going to not be a shitty situation.
But also shit has been bad for marginalised groups since like forever. Now we're all just getting a taste of that as our masters pull the ladder up from under them.

Is capitalism dying or will it just get more and more ruthless until like 10 people have 99.999% of the wealth? Is there a difference? Either way it seems like humanity will have to make a choice soon whether we want to keep propping up a system that has fundamentally failed them.
- Laissez-faire economics and libertarian ideals (a-la Atles Shrugged) destroy society. I don't know that anyone has nailed down a good balance of personal liberty, social justice, and (individual) wealth; I suspect one of the nordic models is closest, but fuck if I know.
  What I'm pretty sure of is that countries with laissez-faire models are like virulent diseases. They're aggressive and successful, until they kill the host and collape. To compete, other countries have to adopt similar models. I think the host in this metaphor is the planet, but we're seeing some indication that the social immune system in the US is responding, with a resurgence on union activity. And it's possible that one of nature's balancing tools (diseases such as COVID, SARS, etc) will help with the environmental impact; I don't see that as a global community we're doing so well at managing our environmental resources responsibly, so if nature doesn't cause a great purge, we may simply extinct ourselves and moot the issue.
  Edit: Whilst I'm preaching.. I believe capitalism is the best economic system we've found. I believe some tools in capitalism have unintended, and deleterious consequences. In particular, the stock market, and usury. Both are tools that generate money directly from money ("investing" and "interest"), and both IMHO are responsible for most of the excesses of capitalism.
  
  Nordic models are a mix of social democracy and corporatism. Definitely not free and definitely not the answer.
- https://youtu.be/piwpkQh_YvI
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/piwpkQh_YvI
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Most of these businesses operated at near unsustainable levels with almost negligible interest rates on loans, and now they're panicking because their business model is shit and they're trying to recover however they can by enshittifying everything.
- I think it's cultural. An entire generation has now been raised to believe that capitalism is inherently oppressive. Therefore they unconsciously or consciously believe that they must oppress their customers as part of the money-making ritual. And since capitalism doesn't inherently produce that oppression, they have to add it in the form of products getting worse.

It's cyclical and it's been happening for thousands of years. It's part of our human nature.
We all work together and build systems, societies and civilizations and do great things. We become wealthy and then slowly concentrate that wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people. Eventually the majority of the wealth is controlled by a very small group of people and everyone else has nothing. The system at this point can not sustain itself and collapses. Then the whole human system restarts again from the bottom.
It's happened many many times throughout human history.
We are just at the height of one of those cycles.
- Maybe this can change in the software space with the advent of foss.
  It kinda is I suppose, even if very, very slowly.
- Entropy. Plain and simple.
- I think the overall picture is accurate, wealth typically concentrates in good times, and spreads out in bad ones. However, we in the West are still nowhere near the all-time highs of inequality, and while it's cyclic it's not in a predictable way like that. I don't think it's even clear that highly unequal societies must become unstable.
  
  The trouble is that we can't apply the same speed of development or collapse to our civilization as to those in the past.
  We have nuclear weapons, mass communications, global internet and interconnected multinational financial systems that all work at real time speed all across the world at the mass level and individual level.
  We are capable of developing in so many ways at such great speed compared to the past .... but we are also capable to destroying ourselves instantly through nuclear warfare, or within a century through our ignorance of climate change.
- What exactly do you mean by system collapsing and restarting? How does it look?
  
  Oooh! I got this one! There’s an excellent YouTube channel called “Fall of Civilizations” that show all the different ways this happened in the past.
  https://youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations
- Theres something about the human mind as we take more shits throughout the years everything starts to hear, look, smell, taste and feel more and more like shit as the time passes.
  Which perfectly explains why my greatnana who lived to be 100 thought it was absolutely hilarious that she shat herself when she tried to blow out her candles on her birthday cake.

Zero interest rates meant that speculative investing (for the purpose of selling later for more money, not for any dividends a company might pay from any profits) with lent money (aka leveraged investment) was pretty much a risk free proposition since loans with zeto interest rates cost no money to maintain. (You and me don't have easy access to loans for investing from the money markets but the kind of investor we're talking here does)
Interest rates go up and that lent money now has significant costs associated so investing with lent money (and nowadays that is most of investing done at professional levels) now has to produce enough returns to pay the interest on the loans hence all the pressure for companies to generate profits.
(Note that money from the money markets is typically on much shorter terms - and loans usually are rolled-over into new loans on maturity - than consumer loans, so interest rates on those respond much faster to changing base interest rates than for consumer loans)
(Also the companies themselves also have loans that they now need to pay interest on, which adds a more direct pressure to start having a positive cashflow)
As for central banks raising base interest rates to combat inflation, the idea is to literally make people have less money available (I kid you not: people are supposed to be made poorer) so that they don't buy as much, and that reduction in Demand will cause prices to fall.
Edit: I was thinking about this and realised I had moved the ??? around but not clarified it all. Specifically, how do we go from "speculative investors having less cost-free money" to "companies which have eternally been in 'investment phase' (i.e. losing money whilst promising they'll one day be the greatest thing since sliced bread) being forced into trying to actually have profits". Well, for the stock price not to fall too much (which might lead to a rush-to-the-exits, a feeback-cycle were the more money that exits the less the worth of the stock, so the more money exits) and as speculative investors are fewer and/or have less money to invest, they have to appeal to more traditional investors, the kind that judges a company's worth by their (stock-)Price-to-Earnings ratios (which, by the way, is a ratio that the smaller it is the more appealing a stock is to buy), so to have good P/E ratios without the Price side going down, the Earnings (basically Profit) side has to go up, hence the need to generate some profit (notice that the P/E of a company without profits is INFINITY), which is what pushed them to try and come up with profit NOW to hold their valuations and sometimes even at the cost of future profitability.
This also links with another element I forgot to mention early: the "climb up the yield scale". In simple terms (as much as possible) - most of the money out there not in the hands of States is owned by two kinds of entities - Pension Funds and the Rich (which, given the extremelly uneven distribution of money actually own more money than everybody else combined) - and they're not just putting it on a bank and getting Savings Account interest on it, they're looking for ways to make money from money. Now, back in 2010 when Central Banks "rescued" the Economy through their Zero Interest Rates Policy, that money which was mainly parked in the safest of investments (Treasuries, Investment Grade Corporate Bonds) started getting puny amounts of interest, eventually even losing value (remember how the Treasuries of many countries started having a negative yield - i.e. you paid those countries money to hold your money?!) so they started going up into riskier and riskier asset classes seeking a higher yield (i.e. higher returns on their investments), up and up into Junk Bonds, Stocks, Realestate, Tech Stocks, Startups and even really exotic asset classes like digital "coins" (I very much doubt there would ever have been a Bitcoin mania without all that money seeking yield due to ZIRP), all of which is the "climb up the yield scale".
Now the "climb up the yield scale" sounds like the opposite of what would make companies which are mainly speculative investments try to make profits because it is exactly that: the rise of baseline interest rates reverses that trend - it makes safe financial assets more appealing (holding Treasuries now actually pays interest, not cost interest, and just up the risk scale investment grade corporate bonds also pay more) which is pulling all that money down (remember, rich people and pension funds: they're usually quite averse to losing money, i.e. more risk averse that, say, Investment Banks, especially old-wealth) and out from the higher-risk and more speculative investment classes, noteably Startups (and further down Tech Stocks and even Realestate). This again puts pressure on companies which were so far profitless to produce profits: it makes them look safer hence retain some of the investment which had before climbed the yield scale when the safest of investments had ridiculously low (even negative) returns.
There are actually yet more ways through which higher interest rates feed into speculative companies trying to put on a pretty face by actually having profits, but this post is more than long enough already ;)

I personally think that everything has always gone to shit. But in the downfall, new things will take over until that goes to shit. Or maybe because there are new things the old things will go down.
Take the example of video stores. They used the be the best thing ever. Rent all the movies you would like to see for a small fee per movie. Then downloading and streaming came along. Streaming was cheaper and more convenient. Result: video renting business went to shit.
Then the streaming services started to raise their prices. It started going to shit. Soon new ideas/companies/services will swoop in and the cycle will repeat again.
- Yip. Everything is always going to shit, but manure makes good fertilizer.
  
  That is an awesome sentence. I will use that one some time.

So just to answer the parts that didn't make sense to you...
Basically, interest rates were so low that investors would throw huge sums of money at companies that might one day pay off huge (called moonshots. Basically, everyone wanted a piece of the next google.)
This was fine because with low interest rates, there weren't secure guaranteed other investments those investors could be making.
But now, investors can, fairly safely, put their money into t bills (basically, lending it to government which is traditionally exceptionally safe) and get a decent return.
So investors are ready to pull their money out unless they see some sort of return. Hence, a site like reddit is now trying desperately to monetize so as to turn a profit or to go public, sell shares and reward the initial investors.
The central banks bit... Typically, the way to fight inflation is to slow the economy down by raising interest rates. When interest rates are high, it costs more to borrow so it's harder to get capital to start a business, grow business etc which slows the economy and, in theory, slows inflation.
Happy to clarify!
- Thanks! I guess, I posed this question badly as most of the other folks came here to philosophize or rant.
  If you're doing those moonshots and a company isn't profitable, does that mean you don't get paid out in the meantime? You just keep your money in there, because the company's valuation rises, which makes your x% company ownership worth more, right?
  Right, and with inflation, we just need to slow it, i.e. stretch it over a longer period of time, because we have automatic processes in place to adjust for a certain rate of inflation over a fixed period of time (like for example work contracts that include an automatic pay raise every year).
  
  I guess, I posed this question badly as most of the other folks came here to philosophize or rant.
  Not really, that's just how this place is.
  
  does that mean you don't get paid out in the meantime?
  Usually, yup. Investment deal structure varies but generally that's the case. You can sometimes borrow money to buy out an original investor, which is what I think what part of your earlier explanation bit meant.
  Right, and with inflation, we just need to slow it, i.e. stretch it over a longer period of time
  Basically, yeah. We kind of just accept there will be some degree of inflation... I don't recall any arguments as to why zero inflation would be bad but I think inflation's existenxe is just a fact of economic life. So we want to spread it out in an orderly fashion so those processes you correctly listed can quietly do their thing.

Worldwide economic growth is coming to a halt and what we're seeing is the ripples it causes.
- The tail end of this ripple is large corporations death grip on increased profits every quarter. But the reality is that at some point you can not successfully grow profits past the peak without destroying everything. We are in the initial phase of the destruction onslaught.
  
  This sounds most right to me. Apple, at times the most valuable company on the planet, had to introduce a "services" category to keep Wall Street happy (because they still need growth). That's where enshitification happens.
  It's not enough to make a ton of money. You have to show that you'll make even more tomorrow. The knock-on effect is that everything keeps getting worse for customers. This is the end result of our financial system.

I think as we get older we just notice more and more. Things are bad but relatively things are also good. Take the bad and the good. Others here are explaining the economy stuff, that explains housing and our tech woes, blah blah blah
Stay informed, fight the good fights, but also take the small moments to stop and think about the positives in your life too. Your family, friends, what you find solace in. There are a lot of negative things, and social media really likes to focus on the negatives, but remember your personal positives too.

Everyone giving you simple one-word explenation is most probably wrong.
- "that's capitalism" is the new "the devil did that"
  
  This is like reprimanding every weather effect as immediately climate-relevant ('but it rains', 'winter exists'). Whole empires shattered because of over-simplification and maladaptation, visible in the knowledge display of some contemporary heirs and politicians.

But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???
Few, if any, of the big tech companies were playing out any kind of dividend to investors. It was more that they were content for companies to maybe someday make money as opposed to actually making money,
- That assumes dividends are the way stock players make money, which is, to put it rudely, boomer thinking. The company doesn't need to pay you a dividend if your stock goes up 30% YOY because of your 'infinite growth', you get your money from selling the stock. This is why the markets are so fucked, because the big trading algorithms that drive day to day trading push companies to overextend and in some cases believe the lie that is infinite growth so their short term investors can reap rewards over a few weeks, then move on to the next company, leaving the first one holding the bag for their own actions.
  Doesn't help when companies that resist this trend suffer from activist investors that use their media influence to say that a long running company is 'suffering' when it really is just consistently growing slowly and safely. Pushing for restructures and endless inflation. It's the 80s all over again, just rebranded.

This lead to lots of people investing in companies. As long as those companies paid out more money than those low interest rates, it was worthwhile. But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???
I'm not an economist, but this is how I understand it works. If interest rates are low and your company can deliver 2% returns to investors, more people will invest in your company rather than leaving their money in the bank. Your company can ALSO borrow money from banks at near-0 interest and deliver a 2% return on that borrowed money (I'm probably over-simplifying, here, but I hope not by too much....). Basically, after building and selling more of your product thanks to the borrowed money, your company will have enough to return the money they borrowed from the bank and then some. If interest rates are 5%, your company now needs to be much more profitable for the whole thing to work.
This is why I understand most companies (even big and solid ones) have what is considered a "healthy" amount of debt. As long as your company can earn enough to repay that debt and keep something, not taking that debt is considered a lost opportunity.
If you're a start-up, though, you're almost by definition not profitable to begin with. You need money in exchange for a promise of big future profits. Access to that money becomes a lot more challenging with higher interest rates, so you might not be able to operate at a loss for long enough to turn profitable.
EDIT: as I see a lot of discussion on speculation, stock market and such. While these elements do exist and magnify the effects of the higher interest rates, I think the basic mechanism can also be explained without them. Low interest rates are a way of pumping "free" money into the economy, when you stop doing it, the economy goes to shit in various ways. For instance:
You have no job but own a car. You plan to drive to the countryside, buy $100 worth of potatoes and resell them in the city for $110. You estimate that gas will costs you $4. You have only one problem, you don't have $100. But hey, interest rates are super-low! You can borrow $100 from the bank and give them $101 back after selling your potatoes, so you're good to go! In the end, you're $5 richer, as you've spent $105 and earned $110.
WAY #1 things go to shit: if rates had been higher, you wouldn't have even be able to start your business (low interest rates attract more new businesses to the market)
Now say you want to do this again. Your net worth is no longer 0, you have $5! Can you buy $5 worth of potatoes and go on without borrowing any more? Not worth it, you would barely be able to cover your gas costs. So, even if your business is overall profitable, you still rely on borrowing. Given your earlier success, if anything you will probably want to try borrowing more and go for $200 worth of potatoes this time! Note that in this example you started with an owned car; if you'd had to buy one, it would take you years to repay the car and start actually turning a profit.
WAY #2 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you will have to shut down your business. You will still have earned some money, but you can't continue
Fast-forward a few years, your business is moving about $1M worth of potatoes You buy them for $1M and sell them for $1.05M, earning a cool $50K. From your years in the potato business, you have accumulated $200K in cash. Now, if you want to buy your $1M worth of potatoes, you still rely on the bank to lend you money. OR at this point, you could scale back your business and only use your cash reserves to buy potatoes. You would buy for $200K and make $10K every time. But rates are still so low and demand for potatoes is still very high, so why wouldn't you borrow and make a $50K profit instead? Or, by borrowing $2M maybe you could buy a field and start growing your own potatoes (since the farmer started raising his prices).
WAY #3 things go to shit if rates get higher now, you might still have a sustainable business, but you will need to scale it back and probably cut some costs. Maybe not too shitty for you, but probably not great news for the people you've hired to help you ("guys, due to difficult market conditions, our business has now 5 times less profit and we have to downsize")
And I haven't even touched on how an unexpected event, let's call it Schmovid, can leave you with $1M in potatoes that you've already paid but nobody can buy any longer. Your $200K savings have been wiped and now you're $800K in debt with the bank. You're starting to recover and.... NOW the borrowing rates get much higher.

The problem is that money is permited to generate money. So the more you have beyond the threshold to sustain yourself the more you can generate without labour. The business with no interest loans accelerates things but it isn't the problem. It is that the system rewards idle investors at the expense of those whose labour actually generates value.
Capitalism wasn't fine until someone broke it. The core concepts behind it are flawed.
- I've said this plenty of times but it bears repeating, the problem isn't capitalism or the type of social structure, the problem is people. Capitalism is a simplistic and ultimately ineffective solution, because it doesn't account for the human problem.
  People will always try to game the system. We need a system that recognises and accounts for that.

Capitalism, its bubbles and inflations.

Companies are competing with each other to maximize profit. If there aren’t new markets for them to grow into, companies can only grow by reducing cost and bringing in more revenue. As such they make shittier products while also pushing prices as high as they can go. This is an unfortunate consequence of how capitalism works.
- But there are new markets to grow into, as more and more people ascend into higher and higher levels of economic opulence.
  
  Yes and no. Increased consumption can stimulate an economy but there are are some limitations. This is usually only true if the economy is simultaneously building a middle class. There are also hard limits on improvements to technology and resource extraction. As such capitalists can’t always find ways to entice people to consume more. That leaves them with raising prices and suppressing wages if they want to increase profits.

Because rich people want to make more money.

Neo-liberalism

lemme tell you about a special gorilla from Cincinnati

Our societies have been built around our economies. The underlying premise of our economies is that they must always grow in the long term to sustain itself and generate returns.
Permanent growth is not sustainable. Nothing in this universe just grows forever without significantly changing state. Not even the universe itself or imaginations do that.
Resources are finite and at some point, the costs outweighs the returns. The choice then is how quickly to shrink. A sudden collapse is the most dangerous option but possibly the fastest before returning to growth, a slow shrink is less destructive but for a much longer duration and it may not be fast enough to prevent outright collapse. This is where we are right now, and why banks are tinkering with rates.
The question for me is: Will tinkering with our economies slowly be fast enough to outpace our outstanding environmental debts and the interest accruing on that.

Very generally, you use the central bank rate to control the money supply. You increase it to remove money from the economy.
Even money is affected by supply and demand. Too much money in the economy is one of several things that can cause inflation -- for example because a surplus of money means people value money less and goods/services more. As a result, the value of goods/services as measured in money goes up.
Sadly, these are macro-level problems. Personally having a surplus of money sounds great, but the actual amount of extra money I made during Covid was not that much -- but give that much money to 100 million people and you're going to have inflation (I live in Vietnam where the economy was not seriously impacted).

There isn't an easy statement that explains why things are getting worse.
The housing market, for instance, was being affected by low interest rates. Low rates make being a slum lord more profitable than other forms of investment. This caused a massive amount of investment in the housing market by rich people and corporations, and normal people were priced out.
The banks that failed did so because they either invested in dumb things (crypto) or in long-term bonds. Those bonds lose value as interest rates rise, and SVB invested far too much into them.
There's all kinds of reasons
- Yes economics is the study of how people determine what is valuable and how valuable things are divided. People are complex and irrational so it's difficult to come up with a simple explanation of economic trends.

Greed, deregulation, and at least in my country, the powers that be don't give a shit about the plebes, but have incentives to destroy the world to feed their already overflowing bank accounts.

Simple, the world already ended and we are feeling the slow burn.
Too many humans on the planet to be sustainable. People will start dying en masse in my lifetime, that's just mother nature correcting things as she always has.
We were on borrowed time since humans discovered agriculture and the fun is over now.
- Alright, Thats all bullshit.
  The planet can easily support our population. Hell, the planet could support double our population.
  The only reason why everything has gone to shit is the Rich and their greed. They've bought off governments to continue destroying the planet in their draconic lust for larger piles of gold to sit on, and adamantly refuse to change course for fear of it taking even a single, meaningless coin from their horde to do it.
  We have more than enough food to feed the whole planet, but capitalism has decided its more "cost effective" to burn half of it to maintain shareholder prices.
  There would be more than enough water available for everyone, but cleaning its to costly so lets just find another aquifer to drain and pollute.
  The climate would have been fine, if corporations and their dumping of terratons of pollution into the air wasnt handwaved away as "Well, its consumers fault, if they just skipped meals and stopped using paper, none of this would have happened".
  More time and money and research has been spent on how to let the rich and corporations escape blame, than has been spent on trying to prevent these problems that scientists have been warning about for over 100 years.
  
  I somewhat agree.
  The thing is that even if we did everything perfectly, the human race would still reproduce until it is unsustainable. It is in our nature.
  We are supposed to be animals, but at some point (discovery of agriculture) we detached from the food chain and defied mother nature. It is not possible to be sustainable from this point onwards.
  Personally I believe that human conscienceness was a mistake in evolution. If I could press a button that would kill billions of people including myself I would do so without hesitation.
  Recommend reading the thoughts of Pentti Linkola.
- I guess you’ve never tried to breath in Delhi or Shanghai

Based on what you've posted here alone:
Companies that don't have to be profitable is not quite the case to make. They have to either provide a service valuable enough to gather continual revenue from investors or subsidies to exist... or they have to have a plausible promise of becoming profitable. Easy money really lowers the bar on how plausible that promise needs to be.
Ripping up on that E brake by hiking interest rates has a twofold effect: first it raises back the bar on how useful a service or profitable a company is or aims to be for investors. Secondly it has an overall effect on the economy, including profitable companies with strong investments since all loans are subject to the interest rates. So while that can produce the intended deflationary effect, the whole economy has to recalibrate.
And that's where things tend to feel like they're going to shit.
- Yeah. Raising the bar on how profitable a company has to be is the middle step here that connects raising interest rates to shittier stuff for us.
  Before, in the era of free money, you just had to be good at looking shiny to stay afloat, and companies that didn't look shiny got left behind. Now you have to be actually functional.
  We've arrived at the future we were borrowing from for the last 15 years.

Too many reasons to list so I’ll add another
Stocks are only ever allowed to go up, if they go down you risk death
Covid caused massive increase in some stocks, now those companies need to find new ways to create revenue from the base they had prior to Covid to out match the base they had during it
Some companies had drop in stocks during Covid, they need to make it up to their shareholders so they don’t lose confidence

Race to the bottom.

We are living in an universe with multiple possibilities.
We are the most powerful and capable animal on known universe. We set the rules. Considering we treat others animals with cruelty, forced labour, enslavement and mass murdering, we definitly rule with power abuse. Then, elites are doing to us just same we do with less capable living beings.
Justice is important, not?
- Considering we treat others animals with cruelty, forced labour, enslavement and mass murdering, we definitly rule with power abuse.
  Am I wrong for thinking that it’s not something “we” do, but in this case, also something being done by the elites?

Planet Money has a lot of good podcasts about this.
If you’re curious about the problems that surrounded low interest rates, this is a good one.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/14/1170103587/interest-rates-mortgage-summers-blanchard

pay out investors from money that other investors gave them
But nobody would base a serous business on such a premise, would they? This sound like a ponzi scheme!
- That's how every bank works. If every customer tried to withdraw their money at once they couldn't pay.
  
  I knew it! Better keep it under the mattress.

Because you're online way too much

I'll keep it short : Greed

DRS GME

There was a global supply chain shortage due to COVID. This meant that the demand for everything backed-up. This was compounded by people having more time at home and potentially more money to repurpose from services to goods, so the shift also drove up demand. When there is more demand for goods than the amount available, the cost of goods sold goes way up until you reach a threshold where people are forced to buy less or go broke. This is the elasticity of demand. Their is a point where certain goods are no longer appealing in price or affordable in general. It’s really bad when these are mandatory commodities like food.
This runaway inflation is always dealt with in the same way. The central bank raises interest rates for their notes/loans that they make with the banks across the country. This makes consumer and business loan interest rates rise, which makes them less appealing and also staves free cash flow, so people have less money to spend from loans, but potentially their salaries might be affected as well. This has the benefit of forcefully lowering demand. Whenever demand goes down, the cost of goods will start to go down. During the lull of demand, the supply chain can catch up as well. This is not the first time interest rates were raised to fix runaway inflation. Over time, interest rates will go back down again. It is cyclical.
One difference though is that the government is also in a cycle of under-regulating and over-regulating business. At the moment, we were promised more monopoly-busting and cracking-down on driving up prices in a collusive manner to fight the fed’s deflationary tactics and attempt to make windfall profits. Meaning, whole industries are not supposed to band together behind closed doors and agree to not lower their prices. That is called collusion and is supposed to be illegal. As long as that keeps happening, interest rates will keep getting hiked. The current administration seems to have more of a tolerance for this than they should. If things are going to shit, it’s due to this type of corporate cronyism with the government.
Additionally, you have outside actors like China who are buying up land and businesses and contributing to the turmoil in clever ways like making housing and food less affordable.
Source: Am MBA.

Your post is obviously mainly about interest rates, which wasn't clear from the headline. Why do you think higher interest rates equal "everything going to shit"?
- I was just quoting the hyperbolical question of the person I wanted to explain to, somewhat taken out of context. I didn't expect this question to get so much attention, otherwise I would've given that title more thought, too. I hate doomeristic titles, too.

What do you mean by “everything?”
- Apparently just banks and loans from his post
- I guess, most specifically the offerings from mega-corporations. I was quoting a hyperbole there, I did not mean to actually talk about everything.
  
  I figured that. Just curious if you had some specific examples of things that have gone to shit.

But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???
There's a bit of this, but it's not the main way everything ever worked.
The hiking interest was to combat inflation by discouraging people from borrowing and spending, but the reduction in spending can also push some companies out of business and start a recession. The economy isn't booming but we don't have a global recession yet either, so I'm not sure I'd even say they're "going to shit" at the moment.

Different entities rely on each other too much, so when a number of them have gone down, it began to drag the rest down, like a human tower that could no longer hold itself up. It doesn't help people think nothing needs to change about their economy, like maybe add a few rules on how it works, no reform needed. But no, apparently it's perfect.

I'm not sure the explanation is true. It basically says that "lots of people" invested in Ponzi schemes. That's usually not the case. Stock returns or dividends are based on the operating profits, not the balance from new investors. It would require that companies deliberately fake their financial statements, and while that probably happens, it's definitely not the explanation for why "everything" went to shit overall.
It's true that the low interest has caused people who have money to place them in investments and that this may have overinflated the value of some companies, or that the money is placed in more risky companies.
The second part is also true. Central banks are increasing the interest rates in an attempt to bring inflation down.
Overall, the idea is right that inflation, interest and investments are tied together, but it doesn't really explain why everything is going to shit.

- Negative, feds controlling the money supply and interest rates is not capitalism. That is antithetical to a free market
  
  The means of production are privately owned and used to generate a profit. This is the late stage of that. Don't try and spout some "actually" bullshit. We did trickle down economics. We did neoliberalism. We're at the final stages and it's all pointing to fascism. Dumb fuck.

Because 2013 happened. And 2013 was bullshit. I'm sure Adobe Creative Cloud, iOS 7 and the Xbox One would gladly explain that to you. Oh, and I forgot Vine. I mean, it was really good, but it basically led to Musical.ly, which led to TikTok. YouTube also got rid of the customisable channel page, instead giving us a simple banner instead (I said instead 3 times now). And did I mention fingerprint scanners on phones? I'm sure you all remember Facebook Home. You don't? Well, you're better off not remembering it. Also, they killed Brian Griffin only to ressurect him from the dead all of a sudden. And finally, Office 2013. There's nothing wrong with it, it just looked like garbage.
All of this led to the dystopian lifestyle we're currently living in.

The final, consumptive or "catabolic" phase of capitalism.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/01/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
- Capitalism: imminently about to collapse under its own weight for the last 150 years
  
  It's very adaptable, I imagine it will continue to adapt. But those processes are clearly occurring, and the extent of the inequality being generated is bizarre.

All of the "grrrrrr human nature bad!" people are blissfully unaware for how long ruling classes or even the same lineage of family in areas has ruled over humanity, siphoning off the joy and labor of society for their own diamond back scratchers.
In the modern day, any form of help or assistance that could be used for the well-being of the people is instead commodotized and/or trivialized to maximize profits. Public spaces, works, and goods are all basically non-existent, so your reliance for community is based on local word of mouth or the internet, however an increasingly car dependent society limits the ability of people to have accessible common places to meet up. Social media companies have been taking increasing efforts in making their apps shittier which imo is a strategic move to deplatform minority voices who have been gaining social media presence.
I think for a while the internet was still untouched enough to be a nice escape, but it really feels like every aspect that was a nice reprieve or break from the rest of the world has been invaded.

The world is becoming globalized, and that is (and will continue to) spin the world into chaos, until everyone is treated equally

Actually this is because quality of engineering goes down. Noone seems to be able to design a good user interface. My theory is it's because the new generation of designers are rised on Facebook and Twitter. They never saw a good, clean UI in their lives.
- That's a statement that obviously comes from someone who has never worked in this sector.
  The real issues here are:
  Most companies are far too cheap to actually employ a designer. The Windows 8 flat design was made that way, because they saved on designer costs and the flat design meant that managers could do the design themselves using Powerpoint only.
  Companies pay for features. UX is usually not a feature but an afterthought.
  When the design looks so outdated that it starts affecting sales, companies bring in contractor designers who have no clue about the product and tell them to "please fix the design". Since they are only on the product for a very short time, they have no idea what the non-obvious requirements are. Instead they focuse on making everything look pretty and modern, because that's what they are paid for. Their customer is the clueless boss who thinks shiny is gold, not the person using the product in the end.
  Also:
  UX design is a real job with it's own requirements and education. That's not something a programmer will "just pick up". This needs to be learned.
  Managers tend to have their fingers a lot into UI/UX, because that's what they can see. Most of them have no clue about technical stuff, so they generally leave the programmers alone to do their job when it comes to logic, but they mess about a lot with the visual stuff. Generally speaking, if you ask a manager about a complete rehaul of the logic, they only ask about how urgent it is and how much it will cost. But when it comes to the color of a button, they will have a lot to say about that. And this shines through, as many managers honestly have no clue about what they are doing. There are rare exceptions to that rule, but that are usually managers with a technical background. Managers who just have a business degree are poison for software development.
- As a UX designer this is some of the dumbest shit I have read in a while. There are countless things that can lead to a shitty interface and most of it has to do with money/intervention from other stakeholders which is out of our hands.
- You'd be surprised how much engineering goes in to designing a product to be as cheap as possible without being literal garbage. It seems like everything sold on Amazon is right on the line these days.

Everything isn't going to shit. The sky is still blue, food is growing, people have good lives.
The current economic issues are cyclical in nature, due to our form of global capitalism, we have 7-10 year up swings and down swings.
- I don't think this is really true, and maybe it's even a little naive.
  For example, 50 years ago earning a "living wage" was much more achievable.
  Also, issues we're presently facing like war related sanctions, china's instability, and climate change have never occurred before, so how can they be cyclical?
- When do you think the last time there was an up swing?
  
  Depends on where you live. Many countries have been on an upswing for the last 10 years. Better access to resources health care technology. Net improvement for the human race.
  If you're talking about an American perspective there was an upswing in 2010 to 2020.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- I don't know why you're being downvoted, I was going to say the same thing. "Everything" is quite the exaggeration, most people are just fine without junk tech companies. Things are more expensive and they'll probably keep getting more expensive because they've been out of balance for decades. Food, gas etc. should be more expensive, we've just been blessed with cheap labor and subsidies. Climate issues aside we're all going to be just fine