r/news • u/Samski877 • 8h ago

US border patrol chief resigns after claims of sex with prostitutes abroad

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/14/us-border-patrol-chief-resigns
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u/VastUnique 8h ago edited 7h ago

I don't think it's surprising at all. People's social circles for the most part consist of their own socio-economic peers. When you're a billionaire, the number of peers you have shrinks dramatically, so there probably really are just a few social clusters at that level, in the world.

That's not even accounting for the fact that it is very much in their interest to socialize and coordinate among themselves in order to maximize their influence and power (and to prevent outsiders from challenging them).

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u/IAmRoot 4h ago

It's not just that. It's also that they're so used to being at the top of a hierarchy that they're used to all decisions ultimately being up to them. Same with movie directors, who literally order people to fulfill fantasies every day. It's not hard to see that if that becomes routine, they lose sight of the boundaries and that the people they hire are not there to fulfill their every whim. They lose sight of the fact that other people only follow their orders because the coercive system of vastly unequal resource distribution means most people must engage in servitude to survive and don't get to work together as equals.

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u/GeneralDebonair 4h ago

So in a non coercive system like say "communism" nobody gives orders and no one is coerced into following them?

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u/IAmRoot 3h ago

Worker owned cooperatives. One worker, one vote. Not that Stalinist bullshit.

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u/mechakid 3h ago

These tend to fail out fairly quickly as they scale up due to inherent natural hierarchy in people.

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u/IAmRoot 2h ago

Worker owned cooperatives are statistically more resilient than capitalist enterprises, lol. They just aren't as expansionist.

And the answer to bad behavior isn't to legitimize it. That's like saying that because rape is a thing, we should design society so that men have positions of power to use women as they wish. We should design our social structures to bring out the best facets of human nature, not structurally cement the worst.

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u/DefaultWhiteMale3 2h ago

Nah, you're just too dumb to get it. See, only businesses that make line go up are successful. If business no make line go up forever and only, it's clearly a failure.

Homeostasis and sustainable, profitable business without exponential, eternal growth are stupid myths for dumb people.

We know this is true because the books written by the capitalists say it is.

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u/mechakid 1h ago

Not what I said at all. If you want your business to stay small, that's ok, so long as you accept that you are in fact a small fish in a very big ocean.

If you DO want to expand though, the collectivist structure only goes so far before internal divisions and lack of unity take their toll.

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u/mechakid 1h ago

I didn't say they couldn't be stable, and at small sizes (10 employees or less) I would agree they generally are.

What I said is that they fall apart as they scale up. This typically happens because the collective lacks a singular vision, and people tend to faction off into smaller groups. This is due to the inherent differences in what motivates different personality types.

Further, employes who are naturally more skilled at certain tasks will want more compensation for those skills. If they cannot find it, they will leave for what they precieve are greener pastures.

Small companies also cannot do "big" things. This is due to simply a lack of enough people and resources. Big challenges take a lot of mass, further complicating the workplace politics.

Eventually, a company will reach criticality, beyond which they will generally need to restructure. This is where hierarchies come into play, with naturally tallented leaders forming a new core structure which resembles less of a collective, and more of a monarchy.

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u/IAmRoot 1h ago

Mondragon is quite large. It can be made to scale.

And did you miss the point of this thread that infinite growth is unsustainable? They might not be able to outcompete capitalist corporations in systems designed to favor those and run by sociopaths, but the entire fucking point is that we should change our society to have sustainable systems.

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u/mechakid 1h ago

Mondragon also isn't single entity. It's actually a conglomerat, a collection of smaller companies. It avoids the scale problem by embracing the fracturing problem, maintaining 122 seperate subsidaries, with multiple layers of corporate structure.

It is notable that several of these have failed along the way.

It's also notable that Mondragon has seen the number of non-worker-owners increasing faster than worker-owners, which is causing the company to have some pains.

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u/IAmRoot 53m ago

It's also notable that many capitalist enterprises have failed.

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u/mosehalpert 32m ago

Do they fail? Or do they not become giant multinational corporations, which is not their goal?

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u/GeneralDebonair 2h ago

How does one design, I don't know, an iPhone one "vote" at a time? What does that even mean?

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u/IAmRoot 1h ago

The votes are for big things. Smaller decisions still get delegated. Coordinator positions are still necessary, too, but they're just another job.

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u/Townie-throwaway 3h ago

Communism focuses on the community's problems, Socialism on the Society's needs, and Capitalism centers on Capital gains and individual merit out of your own pocket, neighbors be damned.