Antiwork @lemmy.world

1y ago

Make it make sense

133 comments

Rich people are just better, and because they're better anything they do with their money is automatically better. So they should get all the money and if you want to be a good person just get rich like them.
- The ol’ more money = better than theory
  
  David Cross, my love!
- Oh so that's why I'm such a terrible person. This checks out.
- It's funny because it's really close to the truth:
  Rich people are just better [at getting other's money], and because they're better [at getting other's money] anything they do with their money is automatically better [at getting other's money]. So they ~~should~~ will get all the money and if you want to be a good person [at getting other's money] just get ~~rich~~ better [at getting other's money] like them.

It's actually about power and leverage, not lifestyle. Rich people don't actually spend most of their money on personal luxuries, they spend it on acquiring more wealth, which translates into more control over resources and people's lives. Regular people don't actually spend most of their money on luxuries, they spend it on maintaining their place in a world someone else owns.
The narrative that it is about what level of material status someone is living in or deserves is a distraction. It wouldn't matter at all if the rich started living more spartan lifestyles. They still have the wealth and power, that will manifest one way or another as control over other people's lives, and that's what they're really there for.
- The point is that if that money is used to pay employees properly, the wealth/power balances evaporate, and we'll have a much fairer society society where our democracy isn't undermined by monied interests.
  
  if [yacht money] is used to pay employees properly, the wealth/power balances evaporate
  Several issues with this. As other comments have pointed out, the specific money in question here isn't actually very significant. But say you expand what's considered to all company profits. A company won't voluntarily pay more for a service of a given quality than they have to, because its existence depends on being better at profit seeking than other companies. If they do have to (maybe because of a regulation) pay more than the market rate, the priority is going to be reorganizing the business to employ fewer people, overwork the people who are still employed, or otherwise arrange themselves so that as much of the profits as possible are still going to the owners. The power dynamic between employer and employee remains the same, because their relative negotiating power is largely unchanged, and so would be the balance of wealth.
  
  welcome to commnistium
  Just a joke
- Many other distractions, like skin color, religion, sex orientation. Poor have one advantage and that is the numbers, at least in democracies. So you need to gerrymander them in any way you can think about.
  
  No, having superior numbers is not necessarily an advantage. Crowds have unpleasant effects due to scale, when you'd want to organize them on some issue or even just inform them.

The difference is that when you say “I can’t pay my employees more” most employees begrudgingly accept the pay they get anyway. But when someone says “I can’t pay my rent”, the landlord evicts them.
If not paying your employees more actually resulted in having no employees, they would be equivalent. The only practical way to make that happen is unionization.
- It's bizarre seeing that disconnect in real life.
  At my last job, the wages were stagnant for years. The company held meetings to boast that they were making record profits, the highest increase yet. The following month, they refused to raise wages because it would be too expensive.
  Somehow, they were shocked when practically everyone who was skilled left. They couldn't get new people in the door, either.
  They ended up having to raise everyone's wages. (YAY union!)
- You're so close to hitting the fundamental truth here.
  A landlord evicts someone who cannot pay rent because there are other people who can pay rent.
  Employees leave if an employer pays too low if there are other, better-paying options available.
  As there are typically, though not always, more available workers than available jobs at a given pay rate, the workers lack the employer demand necessary to set pricing wholesale.
  The reason wages have been rising lately is because employers have been unable to find workers at previous salaries. There are most definitely businesses that have folded because of this - the business model for those companies did not account for higher wages, and raising prices was not possible in the interim.
  That's the actual interplay between these market forces, and yes, the reason that unionization is effective (and often necessary) in raising wages. It's why collective bargaining is an essential control on labor markets
- Correct. In one example the tenants are against the actual contract they need more than the landlord. In another it's the other way around with business owners and employees.
  It's about negotiating power. Life isn't perfect. Everybody has their own idea of humanism, fairness etc (albeit often similar to many other people). From that point to synchronize you either walk away, negotiate or use violence. The latter should cause immediate removal of the initiator from the society, though that doesn't happen IRL - IRL that initiator is sometimes rewarded by various cockroaches. Walking away or negotiating is what normal humans in general do with varying results.
- They accept it because what else can they do? A lot of them aren't in unions and even if all of them quit, how are they going to find new jobs?
  
  The thing is that it hurts the employer just as much as the workers if everyone quits, so if you unionize first, then threaten to stop working, then you've got someone who can negotiate with the employer so that you don't have to quit and you get paid enough to not make you want to quit.
  
  If the corporations are making record profits, that means theyre hiring, it means you can go work for a rival.
- Both wages and prices are those most advantageous to the owning class as most oppressive to the working class.
  The purpose of the post is to challenge the austerity narrative, of the immiseration of the working class being natural or necessary, more than simply desired by the greed of the owning class.

It's Murphys golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules

They think they got rich by sacrificing lattes and avocado toast. Therefore... you can be rich too!
- I still remember reading a blog by someone explaining how easy it is to become rich like them. Step 3 or 4 was "Rent out the downtown condo your mother gifted you when you got married and continue living at home working at your parents non-profit" because obviously everyone gets a free condo when they get married.
  As much of a joke as it sounds, the person was completely serious.
  
  Mitt Romney's wife shared this lovely story of when they were in college, they didn't ask anything from their parents. They'd come visit and got them a nice dinner, that was it. Ann Romney had to order carpet samples and sew them together so they didn't have to walk on bare floors. Sometimes, they were so stripped of cash that they had to sell stock to get money. They had to sell stock. SELL. STOCK.
  She probably thought it was an uplifting story.
- Rationalizing something that just happened to you in life's lottery is a very common thing for humans.
  I mean, some people here thinking that they are not "rich" because of being honest, cause all the "rich" are dishonest bastards, is of the same root.
  I agree that both are wrong and also that being that disconnected from the reality is bad. It's just that there are much more categories other than rich/poor in which many of us got the longer stick.

Because they can afford to pay the propaganda bots to mass post shite all over the internet

Shareholders are leeches on society. Every dollar they earn was snatched from the workers that earned that dollar. We should focus on incentivising people that work for a living - not the lazy cunts that just own shit.
- And unfortunately businesses have abdicated their responsibility for their workers retirements to the market. Many of us are now shareholders by way of our 401Ks.
  
  They steal our retirement, I think it's fair we steal their companies and resources.
  
  Personally I sleep much better at night knowing I'm in control of my own wealth and retirement planning. I wouldn't want my retirement to be in the hands of a pension plan administered by my employer or a third party.

They can afford to give the employees a bigger wage, they just don't want to because the employees are willing to work for the current wage.
- Willing takes out all the nuance. Forced to do so because of market forces, available jobs, location, skills, other responsibilities...
- The illusion of choice

Your landlord can't pay the morgage!

Well.... you see...

ELKG: "Trickle down economics" is a lie, but there is a truth that nobody speaks "Trickle down memes". Billion dollars of capital spent making movies that fill all the meme networks. And audiences who removed and complain if one CGI scene has the slightest distortion, who removed about production quality at every opportunity. They are addicted to the billionaires who fund their "Trickle down memes" that they copy/paste to every social media website for decades.
EL_Toddler: The Population of society is addicted to the images, faces, voices of the rich and powerful - even when they are incredibly ugly icons - they can't stop speaking about their distinct orange skin color and the power that comes with political power and media stardom - "you can grab them by the pussy" power.
That power comes from the population, The People, who can't resist repeating the memes. Worked for The Church in Europe in 1450 when the population was similarly meme-addled until a priest in Germany upset the meme apple cart and translated The Meme Book to German from Latin. A new printing press in Germany helped that too, even if The Church funded the first printings.
Remember kid, Tricke down Economics is a lie, Trickle Down Memes and images of the politicians, religion symbol memes, orange skin color images, they TRICKLE DOWN and that is REAL POWER over The Population! A population who can not resist taking an image of a famous orange person and repeating it hour after hour on their meme copying machines they hold in their hands or sit on their desk.
P.S. In polices, repeating a name alone, campaign signs that just show a couple colors on meme symbols and signs - work well on the population. This is proven with statistics of voting results vs. money spent on spreading the name. People generally do not go into issues and validate the performance after election that the politician is honest and delivers... name recognition by shear trickle-down of meme signs in yards, endorsements by other meme icons of society, and repeating their image and name in other places is what it takes.

If You have 2 Apples, You can't eat 3.

Lots of bootlickers are simply not understanding the intended message, of challenging the austerity narrative promulgated by the ruling class, which supports their selfish interests of private accumulation by oppressing the working class.

They don't care, you do. Change will not come from them, only from you.
- The problem is that if it doesn't come from them then there will be no change.
  
  That's not true. Labor laws today are much, much better than 100 years ago, and not because billionaires decided to be good.
  
  This is the fundamental issue. Our society is set up so that there is a negative correlation between the probability someone will have control to direct society and their suitability to do so.

ELIIK: Some people have more, and they can do more things.
Pretty much what my parents told me about money when I was little & they said no to the junk foods I wanted.

Supply and demand. There are many workers and relatively few employers, so it's much easier to find a cheaper worker than a more generous employer.
- The broad discussion is based not on a misunderstanding of labor organized as a salable commodity, but as a challenge against such organization.
- People need to learn to leverage this. Increase your skillset and be scarce. And better hurry to reskill before they substitute all the low skill jobs with automation

I was curious, so I pulled some quick numbers about Jeff Bezos.
Bezos has what I think is the biggest yacht in the world. It cost $500 million, according to the NYT. I am not intimately familiar with yacht ownership, but from 20 seconds of Googling I found a rule of thumb saying the yearly costs can be expected to be about 10% of the purchase price.
Currently, Amazon has over 1.5 million employees. That means Bezos' yacht money could have given every employee a bonus of about $333, and the maintenance cost could give everyone a permanent raise of about $33 per year.
It's a drop in the bucket.
Of course there are other ways you could slice this. According to Amazon's own PR piece from 2018, they had about 250K employees earning their minimum wage of $15/hour. That money would go a lot further if concentrated toward the lowest-earning employees.
- I hate this bullshit logic of "But this one person's salary would not give everyone else very much!" Bezos is not the only one that should be making less. All of the chief officers should make less. All of the regional presidents should be making less. That money would absolutely be more than simply a drop in the bucket. I do agree that it should be concentrated to the lowest paid workers.
  
  Just looked it up, and the regional VPs at Amazon are making an average of $190,000/yr. That's not chump-change, but it's definitely firmly in the "US" side of the "US vs THEM" equation. It also means if you cut all regional VP salaries in half, it won't amount to more than 0.1% of Bezos' typical earnings.
  Even Amazon's CTO only (yeah, "only") apparently has a total comp package of about $300-500,000/yr.
  Here's the list of the problem folks. And to clarify something that helps your point on the "But this one person's..." I GUARANTEE if executive compensation were capped based upon some multiple of individual compensation, they'd find the fucking money to give people raises.
  If a CEO can only make 100x what workers do, that's still unreasonable, but I guarantee those guys making $20M/yr will find a way to up the average salaries of workers as close to $200k as they can manage. And if we weren't at-will employment in the US, they wouldn't be able to just do it by laying people off.
  So yes, taking money from just Jeff Bezos the people in that list will have the very effect you and I want... everyone making more.
- That yacht isn't the only unnecessary thing he owns and Amazon has plenty of other overpaid executives as well.
  
  For sure.
  I also would prefer for that money to be taxed to high heaven and put toward high-value social services, like, say, school meals.
  I think my last comment came off with the wrong tone. To be clear: fuck yachts in general and Bezos in particular.
- You seem to like math how about taking the profits and seeing if they can cover all the welfare they recieve and tax breaks.
  I know Walmart can cover all the welfare it's employees recieve
  
  I think wal mart is the biggest employer of people receiving Earned Income Credit in the US. Therefore the American taxpayer is effectively subsidizing wal marts wages expense.
  I point this out to people and their response many times is to kill the EIC, rather than raise minimum wages. Infuriating and frustrating beyond belief.
- You're not wrong but yacht is just symbolic of the wealth imbalance. It's hard to watch these billionaires cruise around on yachts while children in America are denied lunch in school because socialism is bad.
- Bezos is a poor example as his super yacht is relatively cheap for him compare to most yacht owning CEO's (and his company has tremendously more employees than most of those CEO's companies do.) The equivalent of a yacht for Bezos would be his space rockets.
- I don't get how people can misunderstand your comment so completely. Can't people read anymore or what?
  
  Actually, I get it. It sounds like I'm arguing against the general point, which is that income inequality is fucking bullshit. And it is bullshit.

That's a strawman argument. Yeah, if you can't pay your employees what you owe them, then you go to jail. At least that's how it's supposed to be in the ideal "capitalism". And we are comparing ideas, not real implementations (cause then somebody wouldn't have any working examples to present).
- The argument is not giving a strawman, but rather identifying one given previously.

Most people that are a little better off than the average person mostly only buy one Yacht and one Spacecraft.
So the comparison doesn't make sense as this is a one time purchase and not something you buy every day (upkeep a factor though).
Then again, you probably aren't the sharpest tool in the shed if you are the type of person who regularly pays good money for a piece of vegetable between two slices of bread.
On the other hand, that applies to all people who use Twitter to cry into the void...
- Zero is fewer than one.
  
  Millions of dollars fewer, in the cases of yachts and spacecraft.

I’m not digging this anti-science streak running through progressive movements lately.
It’s to the point where “capitalism bad” is also “space bad”.
- They're not protesting NASA or any other public space agency. It's the private ones owned by billionaires they have issues with.
  
  Just about every rocket launched for a NASA mission was built by a private firm.
  You are implying what I am outright saying, that there is a growing anti-space sentiment growing within progressive movements.
- Where does this silly notion come from? Elon Musk also said something like anti-science, anti-merit, anti-human thing and he's not an original thinker. I've read some longtermism papers, but have yet to come across this exact wording. Where did you hear it? (Please don't say Elon, tell me you at least have the primary source...)
- Tell me you're a shill without telling me you're a shill.
- In my ideal society, we have a state captured by the need for innovation and invention. We cannot solve our problems fast enough, and the state is driving science and technology at blazing fast speed. Joking a bit, of course.
  I see Progressive is more like a political adjective. Someone who's jumping to Capitalism Bad is probably a Soc. Dem. Or a Communist. But even a Liberal could be Progressive. Those bold argument types are probably never gonna have real power anyway. Don't let a rotten apple spoil the bunch.
  Space ia very divorced from Capitalism. Capitalists don't pony up the funds for it, the public does. The state collects taxes for it.
- The objection is against the personal thrills of the immensely wealthy paid by the labor of their immiserated workers.
  No objection was given against projects that promote the common welfare.
- Yes, the left has the anti-science streak, not the side that has wholly embraced evangelicals, promoted anti-vaccine nonsense and climate change denial and believed in trickle-down economics.
  
  My dilemma is that when the right is so anti-science, the left should be a bastion for it. We can’t afford the rise of anti-technology sentiment on the left. The streak was always there(crystal healing, the OG anti vaxxers, anti gmo), and now is the worst time for a comeback.
  A rich person using government funds to fulfill NASA objectives is not the same as a rich person owning a yacht, but these quips now frequently equate and attack both.

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