this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
929 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
57453 readers
4586 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Profit is the portion of revenue that is stolen from workers and given to shareholders. Profit is bad. Revenue is good.
Unless you use that revenue to do stock buybacks, then it’s not considered profit but you still get to steal it from the workers. That way you can cry about unprofitability while all your shareholders and c suites crank up the exploitation of workers and consumers chasing “profitability” until the business collapses.
Which is crazy, right? If a stock sale allows an investment in a business, a stock buyback should be a paying off of that debt, freeing more revenue in the future to be used explicitly to pay workers who generate that revenue. How the fuck that is justified in instead enriching the value of other investments still held by other investors shows the selective use of the analogy by corporate interests and that the whole house of cards is just bullshit.
For the most part, it's not given to the shareholders, either. Dividends are pretty rare these days (which is when stocks largely went from being an ownership investment to - mostly - a form of gambling)