this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Quick, quick, fire everyone before the shareholders realise the entire techbro industry is overvalued by at least 50%!
We're not a bubble, again, honest!
This has more to do with interest rates and meeting year over year profit increases.
(Sub)Companies like Twitch also have the added mess of being increasingly unmonetizable.
Everyone and their mother loves to mash "enshittification" into their keyboards and grin. But almost all of that is because those companies have been operating at a loss or near loss for years and need to actually find a way to monetize. And the "easy" routes like advertisements and subscription models tend to be rejected with entire communities and industries built around bypassing that.
Like, on reddit, people were actively paying third party randos to bypass the ads on reddit. And on twitch, people lose their minds over getting an ad during a streamer's sponsored stream that is a giant ad for a different company.
I literally just turned off Tyler1 after a 2:30 ad started. That's a fucking commercial break.
50? Idk the biggest techbro firms NEVER made any money ever. Fucking Spotify is yet to be profitable. Who exactly are they planning to sell more service to?
50 is generous.
You operate on the assumption that just because a company isn't claiming profits it's not growing in value, that is just not how the game is played anymore.
Now, sure, the game they're playing, "Go into debt to buy everything in sight and claim you're operating at a loss despite increasing the value of your holdings exponentially" was literally outlawed for being a major factor in the collapse that lead to the Great Depression, but they've surely learned from that, right?
If a company makes a profit and they don't spend it, they're liable for corporation tax on it. It's in their best interest to spend it on growing.
It's just the more you spend, the more likely you are to hit diminishing returns. If you have shops in two towns, you can build another in a third town and make more money. Easy. If you already have enough shops to serve all the towns, building another might just take sales from your existing shops.
The corporations don't like this so now it's time to fire everybody and run a shit service with a skeleton crew instead, while jacking up the prices and hope your customers don't notice they're paying more for less.
That only became a thing recently with the ability to buyback stock preventing stock dilution, the low cost of buying and selling stock, and a shit bond market.
And if there isn't a competitor on the horizon, why invest in R&D?
I understand the sentiment but there should be limits to how much you can spend befor having to pay taxes. As an individual I pay taxes on 100% of my income, regardless of what i spend. wft!
It's an interesting idea and I agree, but at the same time how would you oversee it?
The only way I could come up with was to have all your earnings going into a government held account, and they tax you as you withdraw from that. Maybe even let you invest money into stocks and shares and so on, with no tax owed until you actually withdraw it.
You could pay in $100k a year for a bit, live a frugal lifestyle, then retire early and live on the account, paying barely any tax.
Similar to a pension, I guess, only you'd be able to take money out at any time.
Yeah I'm sure there could be a bunch of possible viable ways to implement this. It's already implemented for the common man, I don't see why it couldn't be done for companies. Using companies and boards of directors as a shield from taxes and responsibilities must end.