Their business was to to make robotic cleaners, not to get swallowed by a conglomerate. Like so many other businesses and entire economic sectors, it's more important to increase short term profit through economic schemes than by delivering a product or service, and the customers and employees suffer for it.
It's more than that, because Republican governors have been actively trying and succeeding in rolling back hard won child labor protection laws.
It's not just about not having the foreigns telling them what to do, it's because Republicans want children providing cheap labor to boost their stock portfolio. Here. Now.
Honestly anyone who would ask "where were they born" when considering whether to care about children getting hurt or killed is an unredeemable monster.
We don't have to coerce others directly, we appeal to the greed and powerlust of leaders of other markets, let their powerful do the coercion of their people and change their protections, and the global markets have a new workforce and resource market to exploit and extract value from. Everybody* wins.
Everybody that already holds power and/or meaningful capital anyway, and that's all that matters. Fuck the livestock.
One way or another, the global capital market must continue to grow/metastasize... on a finite world, with finite resources, and a sole, shared, COMMUNal environment we all rely on from one breath to the next. Yeah...
Our brand of rigged market capitalism truly found it's stride under Reagan's deregulation giveaway. We've been exporting/advocating/bullying other developed nations to do the same ever since. There are tightly, tightly controlled, adequately taxed capitalist economies that focus on how REASONABLE capital incentive can benefit society (the point of any economy, that we've abandoned) that can work, like the Nordic model, but now we're coming for that too, and we'll do to them what we did to the UK and are doing to France.
It's an easy sell. A faustian bargain. You just need a few people in the right positions of power. "Hey, YOU can live larger. You can live like a modern pharoah. Just sell out your countrymen. Do you like yachts? How about yachts the size of cruise ships?"
Don't forget, our capitalists have been hard at work infecting the rest of the world with OUR greed disease. We're the ones advocating other nations stop seeing their people as valued citizens and instead as capital livestock to be exploited mercilessly.
Child labor exists elsewhere out of desperate, struggling developing economies. We're worse imho, because we're doing it amid record profits, because its never enough, and our gluttonous pig oligarch owners ever demanding mooooaaaaaar, exploiting these kids whose schools they've already destroyed and stole the funding of through tax evasion and legislative tax policy capture.
We aren't human to them, we're capital livestock, which just makes our non-wealthy children capital veal.
Always remember what comes first in any national emergency. Whats the first thing our leaders always make clear when the chips are down?
"We will do everything necessary to protect our beloved nationsocietystruggling citizensECONOMY."
People don't matter here, only capital. If you are attached to meaningful capital, you will want for nothing and live in embarrassing decadence that would make pharoahs blush, if you aren't attached to meaningful capital, you are livestock for those that are. You are less than human in the eyes of the capital hoarders in charge.
As should charter schools, they're a market capitalist trojan horse to give what little funding is left in public ed to the rich. Some may claim to be "non-profit" but they all hire publically traded, FOR PROFIT charter management corporations. They steal the funding from public schools with each student to line wall street profits. And many of them advertise proudly how they preach greedy conservative ideologies.
Challenger Charter Schools advertises in my area literally with a student saying he was taught "to want friends that can take care of themselves." jfc
Pretty fake front end hiding the orphan crushing, for profit backend. The owner class uses charity and non-profit good will as just another vector for their con game.
This is the American enshittification we the US have been exporting since the Reagan giveaway to turn actual societies into piggy banks for the global rigged market capitalist owner class in their insatiable need for growth/metastasis, just as the US is. They only need a few people in the right positions to accept the faustian bargain of "You can live large, in decadence you'd never believe!... All you have to do is betray your countrymen and let us exploit them without mercy."
It works, sadly. There's always a few ambitious wormtongues in the right places willing to stab their neighbors in the back to get into the little sociopath club. The UK has long since fallen to this bargain, the French are fighting, but losing.
I fear for the last shining beacon of civilization when the market capitalist oligarchs succeed in destroying the Nordic societies with our unrestrained greed disease, then they can declare "there's no better way" without a prominent example to the contrary.
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it's the safest way one could go about it.
I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.
A non-profit in the same way OpenAI is a non-profit.
"Buy me senpai!"