If you own the company (or a lot of shares), you gain wealth by doing literally nothing if the company’s value increases. On top of probably just keeping the profits. Plus the “use my stock as collateral, give me a low interest personal loan, that’s not taxed as income lol” wealth back.

I’m not talking so much about the petit bourgeoisie that’s working hard every day making donuts to sell. I’m talking about big C Capital that buys something and just takes the profits.

The CEO at my old job can’t code. He can’t do UI design. He doesn’t do sales or customer service. He sometimes talks to other rich assholes to fundraise, but mostly he makes questionable decisions and hurts morale. But if the company goes big, he’ll get filthy rich and the people who actually built the thing will not.

That said, higher taxes on the wealthy (plus closing loopholes like the loan thing) would help. So would universal basic income.

It’s funny because conservatives cry about “welfare queens” that just take money for nothing, but it’s the rich who can do that. If you have a few million, you can just coast on investments. Little to no risk. Once again, projection.

You could also have salaries 🤷

The problem to solve is a handful of people who aren’t really doing much work get most of the profits. There may be other solutions.

How would you quantify ongoing projects where workers come and go and each of their specific contribution might not be easy to measure?

Probably some sort of collective ownership, profit sharing, with negotiation and consensus building. Other people more well read than me have spent a lot of time thinking about this. My starting position is that the standard capitalist model of “I pay you $10 to make a widget, and I sell it for $1000 and keep all the profits” is not okay.

Do they all also assume financial responsibility for any failures or lawsuits?

Do the owners assume financial responsibility now? I think that’s what LLCs and other corporate structures are for- to shield individuals from liability and responsibility.

Taking things too seriously, don’t most plants benefit from their fruit being eaten as part of their lifecycle?

Also it’s not like the workers typically get the long tail of profits. Most labor is only paid a salary, and the “owners” get to keep profiting. Workers should be entitled to the profits of their labor.

I found a setting that alleged to enable snoozing, but it doesn’t seem to work. This is an older android phone though.

It would be helpful if my phone had a built in snooze function. Sometimes I get a text and I want to snooze it for an hour. Just dismiss the notification and remind me later.

mostly I avoid a lot of the big drains (social media, other than lemmy) and tell people I’ll get back to them within 24 hours.

I tell people I have a 24 hour response window. Barring exceptional circumstances, I’ll get back to a message within 24 hours. Often faster, but that’s not guaranteed.

It’s another manifestation of separate rules for the rich and everyone else.

Yeah I think a lot about the guy I knew that took a job at palantir. When asked about working on questionable stuff, he just shrugged. He was always nice to people he knew personally, so far as I can tell, but bigger picture stuff didn’t seem to matter to him

The video games in my house were downstairs, and one time I did a “Can I go downstairs?” instead of “Can I play video games?” when I knew they didn’t want me playing more games. Thought it was a clever loophole. Only worked the one time, but got jokingly referenced for the next ten years.

As the other person said, it really depends on what people mean by “strict”.

My parents were “strict” in that they enforced a bed time. Now I have better than average sleeping habits. So that worked out.

But I’ve also read about “strict” parents that, like, take doors off their kids rooms, or read the kids private messages, or other nightmares

I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people

Tinfoil hat theory would be that the evil leaders of real life (the ceos, the billionaires, etc) are planting the seeds so that if their plans fail and a revolution comes, they won’t be summarily executed

This one is appealing in that they refund the fee even if it’s from some other bank. So you can go to the ATM at the corner shop that charges $3 to withdraw, and get that refunded at the end of the quarter. Most banks don’t have fees at their own ATM, but this is no fees anywhere. For rich people.

I think i meant smart phone. Apparently cell phone adoption was in the 60%+ range in 2005

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

Oh yeah I forgot about that. One of the banks here refunds ATM fees if you have a minimum balance of $2500 (and waives the monthly fee if you have $25,000). Like, my guys, the people who don’t have money need that fee waived a lot more. But the bank just wants to make money and that means appealing to rich people.

Sometimes I get mad about how we in practice have basic income for the rich. If you have a few million dollars, you can park it in zero or low risk investments (eg: high yield savings, bonds) and get free money. Then you can just fuck off and pursue your dreams. No risk. Lots of reward.

But if you’re poor? Well you better take any job for any salary or you’re just a parasite blah blah blah. All pain, some risk, little reward.

All other things aside, 20 years is a long fucking time. 20 years ago we barely had cell phones. The iPhone was 2007 I think.

My monthly food bill is typically around $120.

• A lot of beans or other canned vegetables: $30
• Bread: $5
• Peanut butter, $8
• bananas: $10
• rice: $10
• Other fruit that’s on sale: $10
• Some fresh vegetables (usually onions, broccoli, peppers): $10
• Flour: $10 (may last more than a month)
• yeast: $5
• Seasonings: $5 (also lasts more than a month)
• Cheese: $5
• Tomato sauce: $5
• Pasta: $5

I got laid off a while ago so I’m trying to make my dollars go farther. When I had a well paying job, I’d also buy more stuff, but nothing too crazy. I miss hummus the most, I think. I never buy soda.

The other day I was with someone and we decided to order food like old times, and it was like $40 for two of us. I was like, fuck, that’s a third of my whole month’s budget right there. But I don’t want to live like a monk all the time.

At one of my past jobs I wanted to institute a “put a dollar in the jar” rule every time someone made a useless bug report.

“The site is down” -> dollar in the jar.

“I’m trying to access the site via the public internet in firefox 136.0.3, and I’m getting a 500 on [request], and then the whole page is blank. Here’s a screenshot.” -> good

Sometimes people don’t know. Sometimes they don’t care. But if there’s no consequences, people aren’t going to change. And if they’re not going to change, at least we can do a team lunch every week with the jar full of money.