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fat (Jacob Thornton) has a great metaphor that makes this simple to understand. Cute puppy dog syndrome.

Someone adopts a cute puppy. A bunch of people like playing with it and feeding it. It gets really big like Clifford. More and more people want to play with it. Not enough of them want to put in the work to feed it anymore. The person who adopted it gets burnt out trying to do so.

We’re incentivized to take as much and give as little as we can get away with (companies especially) “because profit.” If you’re like “but socialism is worse!!1!” just know that you can either parrot that line or fix the problem but not both.




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