Capitalism is like a program with a glitch. Resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So theres a feedback loop of the people with the most capital gaining more and more capital.
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
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The glitch is a memory leak and the lack of necessary shared resources causes the whole system to slowly, eventually and completely crash.
The guillotine is a fantastic garbage collector, but it seems to trigger randomly. I'll raise a bug report.
Then we must have had a feature regression for a few hundred years, because I haven't seen a ~~guillotine~~ GC trigger for a very long time now.
I often think of it like blood. Blood has to be continually flowing for a body to live. It's right and natural that there should be more of it in some places than others. The parts of the body that work the hardest usually need a lot of blood. But if blood starts pooling anywhere, you've got a problem. Or really, you've got two problems: there's not enough blood everywhere else and the blood in the pool turns sour.
Nah, taxation and distribution via social programs and infrastructure development are supposed to be the balance, but the devs only listened to the power gamers and removed the game balance in their benefit while ignoring the actual player base.
if your CEO had to work half as hard as you they would have a panic attack
And they would most certainly not have enough time to shit post on Twitter day and night, or be a good father to nearly a dozen kids.
Dude, this is depressingly true even on the smallest scale. I work for a guy who employs 6 people. He owns his business. We had him come out on site to help us one single time last summer and almost had a heatstroke doing what the rest of us do every day. But he's the one who makes the phone calls and signs the checks so he makes a lot more than us.
I still would rather make a living doing this than working for a faceless corporation, but there are some aspects of capitalism you just can't escape.
In all fairness, this doesn't sound like an exactly fair comparison. If it's a small business with only 6 people (7 including the owner) then he's a lot more exposed financially than a larger company. It means he doesn't have any of the protections that a larger or incorporated company would benefit from. If anything major goes sideways, then he's finished. The workers can, in theory, pick up and go find a new job somewhere, but the owner could be financially ruined (this happened to my dad and he never recovered. Although to be fair to him, he busted his back working alongside everyone else, sometimes even longer than them).
The amount someone gets paid isn't always a direct ratio for how much physical effort they put into something.
I don't know your boss or anything, so I'm not trying to contradict you, I'm just pointing out something that came to my mind.
You make a solid point. He assumes the risk and that's why I'd still rather work for him than a big corporation.
The point I was making was just that the actual value of our company is created by us and we see a much smaller percent of the profit than he does. That compounded by the fact that he physically cannot hold the company up by himself comes off as condescending from our perspective sometimes.
He's also a bit power trippy about it too. Like in that "boss vs leader" meme, he's definitely the boss. Your dad sounds like a leader.
I see where you’re going here but you have the wrong target, CEOs work ridiculously fucking hard, we’re talking 80-100hrs a week. Especially for publicly traded companies — the FCC and general corporate structure makes it basically impossible for them not to be doing ridiculously a lot all the time.
No, the lazy fucks who have more money than god are chairmen and board members. All of the idle involvement, none of the crushing fiduciary responsibility.
I always love when billionaires say they know so much because they read so many books. How the eff do you have so much time to read books? 8 hours a day I’m working, and the rest of the time I’m moving my kids from place to place. You think I can focus on a book in my hour of downtime?
A lot of billionaires do wake up at 5AM.
I'm confident that a lot of them -- probably most of them -- do indeed work very hard, in every sense. Whether effective at their tasks or just fucking lucky (hint: it's the latter) the ones we know about do put in the hours. Hording wealth is their profession, hobby, and entire life all wrapped up in one.
But if the average lifetime earnings of the typical American is around $1 mil you would need to work 1,000 times harder than them, saving and investing every bit you earn and not spending it on anything including necessities, to just barely qualify as a billionaire in America by the time you retire. The average American works somewhere around 35 hours a week, so was the minimum billionaire working 3,500 hours a week? I suspect not.
There's no point or value in calling a billionaire lazy. It may or may not be true, but it ignores the point. It does not matter how hard anyone works. You don't get to a billion ethically.
I fucking hate these posts so much, they are obnoxious and misguided. Whether or not a CEO wakes up at 5am every day, or works as hard is completely irrelevant to solving the wealth inequality issues we face. We are allowing an absolute minuscule fraction of the population to gather wealth and allowing them to use their wealth to assert control over politics and the economy. Focus on that, not fantasies about how much smarter and harder working you are than CEOs.
While not often billionaires, if there's one thing I've learned from watching Undercover Boss is that most bosses wouldn't be able to handle the workload that they expect their min wage employees to on a daily basis.
And that's on top of the struggle that nearly every one of those min wage employees are going through in their life, which is infinitely more difficult than the problems of a rich person.
I don't think that all billionaires are lazy, but I also don't think they could do the work of their lowest paid employees.
Absent the coercion brought on by the threat of starvation, illness, and homelessness, most people wouldn't be able to handle a lot of minimum wage jobs. They wear down your body and soul. But having a gun pointed at you and your family is a hell of a motivator.
Who cares, though? Laziness is not the problem with billionaires. I wish for everyone to live in a world where they can get away with being "lazy". Where they can pursue their passions and refuse to do the tasks that make life a drudge. Not wanting to do thankless and brutal tasks for low pay is normal and healthy and refusing that bargain is what we ALL ought to be able to do.
The wealth hoarding is the problem. Even if every single billionaire was provably the hardest worker in their company, even if we KNEW that being a top 1%er in wealth absolutely mapped to you being a top 1%er in grit, it doesn't change how I feel about the injustice of the vast inequality.
I pretty much agree with all points.
The key part of the picture for me was they can "wake up whenever they want," which is true. But yeah a lot of "business guys" are natural workaholics. It's like most of their socialising and esteem and actualisation, all wrapped into one.
Of course they still shouldn't exist. They could do just as well as millionaire workaholics.
Why would anyone wake up at half 5 if they didn't have to? You only wake at half 5 if you have to. You may find the odd person who likes being up that early but 99% of people would want to get up at a proper time.
The difference is that workers have to get up at 5am to keep their housing, food, healthcare, etc. Billionaires get up whenever they want, and some might want to get up at 5am.
I have a dog and 5 cats, and they don't fuck with the time change
Well, some of them are psychopaths, and definitely outside of the middle 99% of societal norms. There are also those who think getting 4 hours of sleep per night doesn't affect their judgement, but who are they to say? I think we had one off those in the White House, but such claims are as suspect as any of the others (like being wealthy.)
5am is not that early.
It is if your second job, which you need because your soul-crushing full-time job doesn't pay the bills, ends at midnight.
The reality of the struggle which too many people face every day can't possibly be relatable to any billionaire on this planet.
The 24 hour clock is relative. And 5am is early, relative to when you go to sleep. Also, the sun's not out. For most people, that's too early.
Those people serve society whereas billionaires do what they wouldn't, milk it for all that they can.
The wealthiest people that I know (definitely not billionaire range) work a lot more hours compared to me, but most of them consist of consulting, meetings, traveling, and virtual meetings while traveling- it seems like they’re constantly on the phone. They’re happy to interact with lower stature people to get a feel of how people generally feel about the times and politics. They’re also generous, but not too generous- they get anxious around really poor people. They fly A LOT too- if you’re flying a domestic flight between cities you’re probably sharing a cabin with a super rich person. Definitely not a billionaire with a private jet though.
What they don’t tell you is that the scope of failure when your job is “meetings” has a lot more leniency.
If you tell someone to do something, and some other team two levels below that has to do it, you have an incredible amount of buffer for blame. Now, if you’re an Elon telling people to make gullible wing doors or make a truck out of stainless steel or not to use lidar, that’s kind of on you. If you’re telling people to overvalue your real estate to conduct illegal business and enter fraudulently into contracts, that’s also on you.
For the most part, though, there’s so many levels of indirection between the c-suite and what actually gets done that it’s really hard to give credit or blame for anything but “leadership.”
This is I think the case mostly for bad leaders. Good leaders share credit and take the blame. This is why your examples are good ones. Elon isn't responsible for the site instability, that was the old management that allowed bad infrastructure (neverminding Elon firing 80% of the staff, only retaining those held hostage by their H1B, everyone with the slightest clue knowing that was inevitable, and that previous to Elon's management twitter had been rock solid for 5-10 years.) It's not Trump's fault the economy crashed, unemployment went through the roof, supply chains fell apart, that was all COVID! Which of course had nothing to do with his complete and utter mismanagement of it in spite of having a playbook literally written for him. But he will take 100% credit for operation lightspeed, which he apparently came up with all by himself in between genius ideas like shoving a light bulb up your ass, drinking bleach, or just closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and going "la la la" because the real problem was that we testing for COVID, not that COVID existed and was killing people.
It's something I am honestly surprised that people don't see through immediately. I have a massively, and I can't overstate this enough, massively less important role, and this behavior wouldn't be tolerated. If I went to my boss and said something like "I'm sorry we missed the numbers this quarter, Johnson really fucked me" I'd probably be fired right there. Good leaders have to own their decisions. If you empower someone who fucks up, it's still your fuck up. If a toddler shoots someone, you don't go "man that kid really should know gun safety" you say "wow which adult was entirely irresponsible/negligent?"
The only value high level leaders provide is in the decision making, and they own all of them. Like, no one on earth is or ever will be qualified to be president. You have to be an expert in fields it takes people entire lifetimes to be good at. Your job is to assemble a team of experts and smart people, and hopefully when they present you with different options you choose the best one. But you the leader still choose, and that's the whole role. If you also want to abdicate responsibility, literally what is the point of CEOs? Especially ones paid a few bajillion dollars more than the rest of us?
I had a chuckle at “gullible wing doors”.
I think that someone could charge $5 per month for an autocorrect that corrects the default autocorrect and make enough to retire in comfort.
I definitely work more than my employees. I don't allow them to do more than 40 hours a week while I do 55 to 60. I don't crawl on the floor laying cable or lift servers all day but it is still work...
The majority of my bosses worked a lot more than me, to the point where I don't even know how they stayed awake. At my current job, the workplace is falling apart because the upper management refuses to work long hours like that while us lower staff deal with the aftermath. I love bashing on rich people, but a lot of them (semi-rich) worked hard to get where they are and in a way deserve it. You sound like a good boss- I wish more places understood that taking on more responsibility means more dedication and more hours instead of getting to boss people around.
Shit, it's 4am for real
No, but billionaires are visionaries, or something.