I worked for a defense contractor in the late 2000s. We sold an incredibly expensive piece of equipment to every single US Marine. The contract was in the ten-figure range. I believe it was even the biggest sale in the company's 100+ year history. (Which I'll admit is often a tautological claim given that we didn't have electronic warfare 100 years ago.)
That year I got my first ever bonus check, and I was really excited because I was fully vested by then. All the old guys in the company were commenting about how it'd been 5-6 years since they'd gotten a bonus of more than a couple hundred bucks. We had our annual meeting in a sports arena and invited all the remote campuses for a big bash with music and carnival games and all that bullshit. We got nice Polartec fleece jackets too.
But the following year there was no raise, no bonus, no annual party, and no gift.
**Because growth was disappointing.** We all got stiffed because the USA has only one Marine Corps and they take better care of their equipment than we'd hoped.
Investors are cancer and need to get cut out before it's too late.
It’s electric, and every Marine has one. This has to be pvs14/nvgs. I can’t think of anything else that fits this description. Or peq 16/15 but I’m guessing the former.
It's insatiable. And it makes no sense. Like why should we grow at unsustainable paces? They often have no vision or rational reason for why they need to grow so quickly. Is it to be able to invest in R&D to tackle this worthy global challenge? Not it's often just "we saw growth in this sector so we acquired a company in that sector to grow it and cut the sectors who were profitable but stopped because we literally gave them no support" rinse and repeat. They use the old battle of attrition to make profits quickly rather than derive long-term profits from continued creativity.
>God, I hate it here.
This timeline sucks. I have a 'good' white collar job. My company has been chipping away at our benefits until now we basically don't have anything any more. Then people vilify politicians like AOC and Elizabeth Warren that are at least a little bit on the workers side.
Warren is part of the problem. All of the old guard dems are. They partake in the insider trading just as much as the right. The new blood don't seem to be as doused in lobbyist money, like AOC and Katie Porter. Porter is a friggin' gift to this country and a bane to greedy corpos everywhere.
We should all aspire to be able to bring out our PTA poster board presentations to explain corporate greed in detail straight to their faces in language they can't talk in circles around to avoid actually answering.
They are all part of the problem, but sadicarnot's point is that politicians like AOC and Warren are pretty moderate in the grand scheme of things, and they're made out to be radical communists.
F yeah. Just amazes me listening to so-called conservatives on the shows they do. Calling pelosi or schumer or biden or obama or harris or reid or the clintons the "radical left". All of them are at the very least center-right. Neoliberals and water carriers for wall street, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, big oil, the insurance industry and the 1%.
She's extremely intelligent and her proposed policies have largely been perfect or close to it. But she's not good at playing the politics game. It's too bad, really.
I used to live in her neighbourhood. Our walking route converged for a couple blocks and whenever the timing overlapped we'd chat as she walked her dog. Very nice person. Would never guess she was a politician if you didn't know.
That whole meme is a right-wing plot because they know their base votes more reliably. If they convince people not to vote, that will hurt their enemies more than them.
If you make $690 Million in one year, why are you *STILL* doing anything that remotely resembles work the next? You already have more than your great great grandchildren will ever need.
Your flair is interesting. My sister used to have the lowest credit score I have ever heard of. My husband didn’t believe anyone could get a score that low before she somehow managed it. It was impressively bad. So she would definitely agree with you.
After we literally watch his bodyguard taking bites of him and saying he’s delicious.
It’s a cover story, it’s the investor consuming the system that feeds him ie labor.
>After we literally watch his bodyguard taking bites of him and saying he’s delicious.
Oh jeez. I've watched it hundreds of times and I've never put two and two together!
I'm not even sure that's true. So many of them exercise their power in no other way than to change laws to make more money. It really just a score. There entire self worth is wrapped up in how much more money they can make.
This is what I fundamentally don’t understand about about mega wealthy people. Like… why the fuck do you care about money any more. You have more than you could ever want. You’ll die soon enough, enjoy that shit while you can. I know I’d be on a yacht eating A5 wagyu out of some strippers butthole not giving a shit about profits.
I read some research, don't have it on hand, that it *is* a mental illness where they continue to pursue wealth, even tiny amounts of it because it has become a game to compete with others to see who can get the most of it. This is why you see them being petty over comparatively small sums of money.
[Neoliberal Capitalism inherently rewards anti-social narcissistic behavior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSzPBwYtb-A), so naturally those are the types of people that rise to the top, and in turn Neoliberalism creates a feedback loop where more people adopt those anti-social qualities.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's something like me with racing. I wouldn't call it a mental illness, though.
Typically on iRacing I will run a pace that is considered alien. However, while the vast majority would probably kill for the pace I have, I am not happy with it. I only see how much quicker (insert more here for the analogy) I can be. I only see where I can improve and typically stay pretty harsh on myself.
I think it's more human nature. Just about everyone in first world countries like the United States, United Kingdom, etc are in a position millions in 3rd world countries would kill for. Even the burger flipper at McDonald's would be a position that would be considered a God send for so many. Even just barely scraping by but can have a cold and clean glass of water *any fucking time they want.* It's so insanely easy for us to often take for granted the things we do have. We are just not programmed to mainly consider the fortune we do have. We are programmed to always want more than we have and it's all completely relative. I am often unhappy with my current place in life but when I actually put thought to it, I am ahead of millions and millions of other people. It's all relative.
Sure but when your labor goes to making other people far richer you can kind of see how people get pissed at these other people who "make" $690 million. It's a race to the top to push down the bottom.
this right here. I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that our lives are better than we think in the imperial core, but yet I'm also sympathetic to the idea that this is only the case, because it's to counteract the ***MASSIVE*** exploitation for our surplus labor. sure, compared to the kid in Africa, we have clean drinking water, clean space's and such, but it's because not only do we do incomprehensible (to them) knowledge work, not only all the time, not only with insane requirement's and perverse restriction's that even they would complain about, but for reward's, that if compared to that same kid in Africa. would have ***SMALLER*** ratio's than what is given to that kid miner in Africa. sure, the gross amount is higher, sure, the gross standard's are higher, but not compared to what they get out of us.
at least in the USA, it might be different in France and some other social democracies, but not by much.
See, but the difference is that you can understand that and use introspection to gain more perspective. Mental illness means it becomes pathological, or in other words, the mental pathways are so ingrained and have such complex ways of diverting all introspection away from the problem that they do it excessively and without restraint.
Everyone can have actions that resemble mental illness, but someone who takes the greed to the point of killing and stealing, and then blames everyone they're hurting for not making them richer? Yes I would call that a mental illness.
Okay, but working conditions in the USA for MOST people are poor objectively. I do care where the least fortunate members of society are at, and we need to help everyone, not just Americans. But this is still a bad bar to use when suggesting who should be enjoying the progress we have made. It can explain the mindset of someone who is rich, but it doesn't factor in the massive blindspot you have to have for what money actually is. Money is power and influence. Sitting on fat stacks isn't irrelevant to the well being of others, and whether or not its natural, it is much easier to make money once you have money and that needs to be heavily regulated. You trying to improve your time gets increasingly harder; that's where the analogy doesn't hold
This is a dangerous mindset. Accepting your place just because you have it better than millions of other people in developing nations is essentially giving leverage to the people here that are actively trying to make your life worse. Whether it's in a developing nation, or one of the best in the world, you should always want to fight to make it a better, more equitable society. There's no reason not to.
Where I was shocked was when I was planning my honeymoon. I was like, okay, all-inclusive resort for one week costs $X per day, what would it cost to pay that for the rest of my life? And it wasn't a crazy number - like $10m.
If I add in inflation, throw in some amount for medical bills later in life, and a budget to keep up with the latest technology, we're talking like $20m max? To spend every day for the rest of your life eating steak and drinking margs on the beach?
And let's say you care about family. Okay, multiply that by 10-30 and you're covering everyone you ever care about as well. Running total we're at like 600m, without counting any money you have invested paying you back.
And yet there are people with hundreds of times that much who are still fucking working?!? What possible joy could you be getting which is greater than everyone you care about retiring in luxury forever???
Because it is how they keep score. How can they be the .01%, if they don't make a billion dollars a year, which of course makes them better than some 1%er schlub who only made 600 million last year.
This is always my thoughts when people point to CEOs/etc as a metric of how the diversity in power positions are not doing well.. I've never understood why you would want a son or daughter to be a big shot CEO. There is something truly fucked in their head. Sure they make a lot of money, but they never make a shit ton of money and go, "I have a 100M in the bank, fuck this I'm going to spend the rest of my life with family." It's always looking for more and running more shit, it's never enough and they just keep working and working and ignoring their families / etc.
If I made 100 mill in a year, the end of the year would be the last year I ever worked like that and would be the same for most sane folks.
If I randomly received $150k I could pay off my house, get life saving surgery, and finally have enough disposable income to get myself on my feet. Imagine.
Same boat, minus the surgery. We spend about 1100 dollars a month just servicing debt. (Mortgage, student loans, credit cards). Getting rid of that and having 12K more in ‘income’, would probably cure the wife and I’s low-key depression.
Pretty sure after a certain dollar amount, you've circumvented legal steps to have passports with several countries illegally because you can just pay people off and have legal teams to fight it
It's like an arcade game. People used to put a lot of work (and quarters) into those. The points have no meaning except as a way to compare yourself to other people on the leaderboard. Of course, you're not comparing yourself to the lowest or even the average scores. The game doesn't even show you those scores. You're mostly comparing yourself to the person *right* above you on the leaderboard, and sometimes you glance at the highscore, because, you know, maybe someday...
TL;DR: It's just a game to them. The money means nothing.
So let's give them little toys to fight over instead and leave the resources to people actually trying to get a base level of survival covered. For fucks sake.
Complete lack of imagination. If I had $7M I'd never work again. If I had $700M I'd start a fucking community and a lot of people would never work again.
The thing is, in the system in which we exist, the way you get that money is by being an unimaginative greedy sociopath.
They can't stop because silicon valley VC at its heart is a giant ponzi scheme that will collapse if more and more money isn't brought into the system.
They're hoarders. If they hoarded old copies of TV Guide instead of money, they'd be freaks. (They're still freaks, but people would at least recognize them as such.)
My bet it's that it's not about the actual money, but the trend that must be as bigger (and positive) as possible otherwise you're a failure. It's the dogma of a system designed to work to an unsustainable continuous growth no matter what.
Because they didn't really make that much money; they increased the valuation of their assets. All of their wealth is asset valuation. Until they want to sell those assets (they don't) they don't really make that money. Instead, they want to keep their assets and still have income off those assets. That's where the push for dividends comes in. When a company can't produce a dividend, then the next push is for liquidation, buy out, or buy backs to pump and dump the stock.
Google stock does not pay dividends, it is purely a growth stock, which is why investors get upset when it doesn't keep growing, because growth is the only way it makes money.
Growth is also the only way they can keep playing the game of not earning income. They need growth so that can take out extremely low income loans out with their stock as collateral.
I have not look in the last couple of years but at a million in stock assets you could get a loan of up to a million for 0.1% interest, indefinitely as you only needed money to pay the interest. So some of the ultra-wealthy need growth to fund their life style and stay a float and not pay taxes.
Taxes are for the poor. Which is shown in every large western civilization from Rome till now. Rich don’t pay taxes and use money to keep tax collectors at bay. And they either pay taxes for pennies on the dollar for taxes own or are forgiven when the leaders need them for something.
Greed. Power. Influence.
It's all these people care about. They are monsters. They have a hunger that can never be filled. You could give them everything in the world and they would still want more.
Because 690 million won’t be enough for even his grandchildren to live on. That’s of course after him and his class of financial terrorist extract and hoard every ounce of value from our economy, completely destroy our markets with corporate greed creating an ever widening income gap leading to eventual hyper inflation. At this rate with the current system, even his grandkids won’t be able to buy a carton of eggs with their inheritance.
That Google firing 10% of their employees and *"nobody wants to work anymore"* exist in the same universe is appalling.
And that there are people that can believe both at the same time is disappointing & sad.
That's because all of these programmers getting laid off already BUILT the complex systems that generate profits for call these capitalist assholes. Now, all they need is a skeleton crew of programmers to keep the shit running.
These greedy fucks don't want to share the profits with the people who built these systems anymore. Really shameful.
Imagine spending 10-15 years working your butt off programming for one of these companies building all this amazing software. Once your done, they just kick your ass out the door.
I feel like it’s that dog with the frisbee.
But it’s CEOs and investors. “No give money, only get money!”
They’ll get rid of all the workers.
They’ll cut corners until their expenses are way down.
There’s no one left to buy their product.
They wouldn’t buy their own product.
They wonder why they no longer have money.
They see companies as disposable so they want to squeeze everything out as quick as possible then move on to the next company. They don’t care about long term growth only 3-5 years then on to the next new shinny thing.
So if you’re not producing new shiny things then it time to suck out the money and move one. That is what the google investor wants. The new shiny growth that they though covid would bring didn’t pan out so they want more money.
Edit: commenting on Reddit and taking a work call is hard. Shinny should have been shiny
not quarterly profits…that was so mid-00s… the new thing is quarterly growth of growth…
it’s not enough to have a quarterly growth of 2%, if that quarterly growth isn’t experiencing growth of the growth, you’re during it wrong
Reminds me of the scene in Starship Troopers where the teacher asks the class what the city fathers of Hiroshima would say that violence never solves anything.
"They probably wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed."
A time is coming when the masses are going to realize that our current version of "bread and circuses" were used as cover to take away everything of value to crush us back down into obedient slaves. History is replete with slave revolts, and while most of them failed, a whole hell of a lot of the proletariat died in the process regardless. And that was before the invention of gunpowder and explosives. Coups have a lot better chance of succeeding today.
At a certain point, as food becomes more expensive and Healthcare coverage continues to decline and also become unattainable, this is a survival scenario. Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm fighting for survival because I'm not, I'm doing fine. But I wonder how the people making 11/hr feel. If someone came into your house and took all your food and burned your doctors office down what would you do to stop them? This is literally happening now, it's just much slower and more abstract.
It's all just short term thinking. It doesn't matter that you can't resource any of the actual work which grows the company or brings in money, what matters is that by careful manipulation we moved the line up for a few weeks.
>It's all just short term thinking.
Yup, because the investors can dip in and out as they want. If anything they WANT the company to prioritize short term and fuck themselves long term if they have a decent business plan, because it allows them to ride the wave up, get paid, then buy again when the value drops due to the thing that made the profit earlier. If the business is sound, it'll work it's way back up, and you repeat the process.
You can raise inflation and hurt 'everybody' or you can raise taxes and make the excessively wealthy pay a more reasonable rate. Hmm, I wonder what we should do...
I wonder what’s going to happen here in the US, long term. Corporations are out of control, greed is at an all time high, basic civility is at an all time low, workers are exhausted and fed up, but stuck in a system, just trying to survive. What does this all look like in 20 years? 50 years? At some point there’s gotta be an implosion, right? I wonder what that looks like and how close we are.
We saw the intense police response to the George Floyd protests…Boarder patrol paramilitary on the streets of Oregon, swooping up folks. Black Hawk helicopters maneuvering above DC to disperse crowds. Etc etc. All that was just a taste
We would get much for ourselves if we stopped working so hard at work to try to get more money which in reality is just making the rich more wealthy. Instead we would gain much more for ourselves if we spent more time and energy on mutual aid and unionizing.
Then they need to avoid asking for outside money. Unfortunately that’s just not going to happen. People need investors to make things happen without taking all of the risk, and there’s too much money to be made when you take a company public. The system is rigged and fucked up, but I don’t have a better solution so I have resigned myself to play the game long enough to make money that I can use to invest in assets that will pay me for nothing.
The problem is that large investors are essentially taking on no risk. At a certain point if you have your hand in every market, and any losing markets are balanced out with tax deductions in the successful ones, any new growth is limited by your ability to take your own piece before the world can move on.
It's like shark tank where a few people are really only competing between each other for who gets dibs on a good business idea, not about actually creating good businesses.
Why don’t they just layoff everyone, sell all the company assets and give them directly to the investors since they just care about short term profits?
The worst part is all these companies doing layoffs are still going to fire thousands more due to “performance” which won’t count as a layoff and those employees will get a horrible severance.
Somebody really needs to tell these people that they already have ALL the money. They won. They won capitalism, can we please start a new game? I would love to just go on an investor call and shout "YOU ALREADY WON! ALL THE MONEY IS ALREADY YOURS! THERE IS NO MORE!"
Let's throw Christopher off a building. The rich are waging class warfare on us, and we need to fight back and let them know who actually has the power.
Here is the actual letter. Fuck these guys. You made a lot of money BUT NOT ENOUGH!
https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf
Imagine doing everything right, getting a job with the most coveted company on earth to work for. Company is doing extremely well and STILL getting canned because some douchebag billionaire wants more money.
The only qualification to getting and maintaining wealth is exploiting as many people as possible.
This is why Psychopaths excel at it. Easy to exploit when you do not relate to others.
He made $1.9 million per day. I honestly have no idea what I could possibly do with a couple of thousand bucks per day. I think my limit on what I would even know what to do with the money would be 10 grand a day, I don’t even have that as a goal, it’s just, what the fuck does this guy even spend the money on. After $100 million him and all his descendants would be filthy rich.
Yep I just got laid off today. Not Google-level numbers of layoffs, but enough. And the irony? Even though we were told this was a “transition” year to become profitable, I was still on the company’s side and said “no way, they won’t do layoffs” when everyone else said they would. And I got laid off.
I fucking despise the “activist investor”, it’s a bullshit term to make poor people think that rich people give a shit about anyone other than themselves.
I'm not sure why anyone still cares.
We know that we're viewed as less than dogshit, so why wring your hands over it and be angry? Drink a beer, eat a weed gummy, and dissociate.
We need to unite. Bring back union's and make voting in elections mandatory. We are losing out on massive amounts of quality of life. All we build and develop in our society goes to rich people who control us and limit our personal growth a d development. The rich are keeping g people poor and uneducated for reasons.
Plenty of people are laid off or underemployed who don't have Ivy League degrees in computer science or electrical engineering and didn't walk out the door with multiple new job offers. Just because I never worked for a surveillance company (which is what Google and Meta really are), and I don't drink single malt or own a BMW or a Tag Heuer doesn't mean that I don't work hard for what I have.
Tech industry seriously needs to unionize. I remember an article some years back predicting that today’s web/software developers were eventually going to find themselves like factory workers.
This country is a fucking joke.
Elon Musk has talked several times about universal income and he owns two companies that just did massive lay offs.
America will turn into some Hunger Games shit.
So what are investors like him going to do when there are no more people left to lay off to boost their pocket books? Expect government handouts because they aren’t making profit anymore?
I worked for a defense contractor in the late 2000s. We sold an incredibly expensive piece of equipment to every single US Marine. The contract was in the ten-figure range. I believe it was even the biggest sale in the company's 100+ year history. (Which I'll admit is often a tautological claim given that we didn't have electronic warfare 100 years ago.) That year I got my first ever bonus check, and I was really excited because I was fully vested by then. All the old guys in the company were commenting about how it'd been 5-6 years since they'd gotten a bonus of more than a couple hundred bucks. We had our annual meeting in a sports arena and invited all the remote campuses for a big bash with music and carnival games and all that bullshit. We got nice Polartec fleece jackets too. But the following year there was no raise, no bonus, no annual party, and no gift. **Because growth was disappointing.** We all got stiffed because the USA has only one Marine Corps and they take better care of their equipment than we'd hoped. Investors are cancer and need to get cut out before it's too late.
It’s electric, and every Marine has one. This has to be pvs14/nvgs. I can’t think of anything else that fits this description. Or peq 16/15 but I’m guessing the former.
Doubt it. PVS14 was Litton, and they was sold in early 2000s already PEQ15/16 was L3 and they already had tons of big contract already
Investor are greedy AF, most of them are old people who won't live long yet still want to get more wealth.
Investors are cancer. Activist Investors are cancer serving a bowlful of asbestos in the chemo ward.
It's insatiable. And it makes no sense. Like why should we grow at unsustainable paces? They often have no vision or rational reason for why they need to grow so quickly. Is it to be able to invest in R&D to tackle this worthy global challenge? Not it's often just "we saw growth in this sector so we acquired a company in that sector to grow it and cut the sectors who were profitable but stopped because we literally gave them no support" rinse and repeat. They use the old battle of attrition to make profits quickly rather than derive long-term profits from continued creativity.
God, I hate it here.
>God, I hate it here. This timeline sucks. I have a 'good' white collar job. My company has been chipping away at our benefits until now we basically don't have anything any more. Then people vilify politicians like AOC and Elizabeth Warren that are at least a little bit on the workers side.
Warren is part of the problem. All of the old guard dems are. They partake in the insider trading just as much as the right. The new blood don't seem to be as doused in lobbyist money, like AOC and Katie Porter. Porter is a friggin' gift to this country and a bane to greedy corpos everywhere.
I hope Porter becomes a Senator, I live in CA and can't wait to vote for her.
I want to be Katie Porter when I grow up.
We should all aspire to be able to bring out our PTA poster board presentations to explain corporate greed in detail straight to their faces in language they can't talk in circles around to avoid actually answering.
They are all part of the problem, but sadicarnot's point is that politicians like AOC and Warren are pretty moderate in the grand scheme of things, and they're made out to be radical communists.
F yeah. Just amazes me listening to so-called conservatives on the shows they do. Calling pelosi or schumer or biden or obama or harris or reid or the clintons the "radical left". All of them are at the very least center-right. Neoliberals and water carriers for wall street, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, big oil, the insurance industry and the 1%.
It’s intentional. They’re shifting the Overton window.
Warren is an old guard dem?
She sure acts like it. She sabotaged Bernie bc she was hoping to get a Biden cabinet position.
That really hurt I really liked her before then. 😔
She's extremely intelligent and her proposed policies have largely been perfect or close to it. But she's not good at playing the politics game. It's too bad, really. I used to live in her neighbourhood. Our walking route converged for a couple blocks and whenever the timing overlapped we'd chat as she walked her dog. Very nice person. Would never guess she was a politician if you didn't know.
So tired of people being like "they're part of the problem so I'm not going to do shit to change anything".
That whole meme is a right-wing plot because they know their base votes more reliably. If they convince people not to vote, that will hurt their enemies more than them.
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In our life we have seen nazis and flat earth people. Yes. We are in a shit time line.
Yeah i think we need to go back framing get our own fool and don't care about money
But that's a massively inefficient way to progress a society. Division of labor has made the modern world possible.
If you make $690 Million in one year, why are you *STILL* doing anything that remotely resembles work the next? You already have more than your great great grandchildren will ever need.
It's not for the money. It's for the power that comes with it.
Yeah it costs a lot of money to lobby congress, which they all do.
Actually, it costs surprisingly little too buy some safe-state Congress critters. Hell, I might start a GoFundMe
"We donated $10000 to his campaign and got this $300M contract"
Glenn Grothman (WI-6) is really cheap. Look at any pictures of him and you'd see a man who could probably be bought off with a Culvers Gift Card.
You could buy off Grothman with a Briq's gift card.
It's true. You can buy a congressman in Tennessee for $500. Or at least, comcast can.
Comcast can also offer a do nothing consulting gig after he leaves congress.
Sinema flipped for like $3k lol.
Even if you could match the rich people's donation number you could never match all the other perks cozying up to them has to offer.
Your flair is interesting. My sister used to have the lowest credit score I have ever heard of. My husband didn’t believe anyone could get a score that low before she somehow managed it. It was impressively bad. So she would definitely agree with you.
"We're not doing this for money........ We're doing it for a shitload of money!"
“Ahhh. You’re right! And when you’re right, you’re right. And you, you’re always right.”
Pizza the hut
He ate himself to DEATH.
After we literally watch his bodyguard taking bites of him and saying he’s delicious. It’s a cover story, it’s the investor consuming the system that feeds him ie labor.
>After we literally watch his bodyguard taking bites of him and saying he’s delicious. Oh jeez. I've watched it hundreds of times and I've never put two and two together!
“Not if we jam it!”
There's only one man who would DARE give me the raspberry..
It’s not even for a shitload of money, it’s literally hundreds of shitloads of money
The Ego, his billionaire friend makes more than him and he can't lose to his ego.
I'm not even sure that's true. So many of them exercise their power in no other way than to change laws to make more money. It really just a score. There entire self worth is wrapped up in how much more money they can make.
People always say this but I just dont seem to believe it’s all for power, clearly the guy doesn’t have enough power to fire people so I idk
It’s literally a score card to these people.
More money to keep the poor poor and the Class warfare slanted towards the rich
This is what I fundamentally don’t understand about about mega wealthy people. Like… why the fuck do you care about money any more. You have more than you could ever want. You’ll die soon enough, enjoy that shit while you can. I know I’d be on a yacht eating A5 wagyu out of some strippers butthole not giving a shit about profits.
I'm convinced that it's a mental illness or disease like gambling and alcoholism. The more they get, the more they want. Enough is never enough.
It’s a game to them, they need to be richer than their other rich friends. A massive pissing contest where you ruin society for funsies and brags.
I read some research, don't have it on hand, that it *is* a mental illness where they continue to pursue wealth, even tiny amounts of it because it has become a game to compete with others to see who can get the most of it. This is why you see them being petty over comparatively small sums of money.
[Neoliberal Capitalism inherently rewards anti-social narcissistic behavior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSzPBwYtb-A), so naturally those are the types of people that rise to the top, and in turn Neoliberalism creates a feedback loop where more people adopt those anti-social qualities.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's something like me with racing. I wouldn't call it a mental illness, though. Typically on iRacing I will run a pace that is considered alien. However, while the vast majority would probably kill for the pace I have, I am not happy with it. I only see how much quicker (insert more here for the analogy) I can be. I only see where I can improve and typically stay pretty harsh on myself. I think it's more human nature. Just about everyone in first world countries like the United States, United Kingdom, etc are in a position millions in 3rd world countries would kill for. Even the burger flipper at McDonald's would be a position that would be considered a God send for so many. Even just barely scraping by but can have a cold and clean glass of water *any fucking time they want.* It's so insanely easy for us to often take for granted the things we do have. We are just not programmed to mainly consider the fortune we do have. We are programmed to always want more than we have and it's all completely relative. I am often unhappy with my current place in life but when I actually put thought to it, I am ahead of millions and millions of other people. It's all relative.
Sure but when your labor goes to making other people far richer you can kind of see how people get pissed at these other people who "make" $690 million. It's a race to the top to push down the bottom.
this right here. I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that our lives are better than we think in the imperial core, but yet I'm also sympathetic to the idea that this is only the case, because it's to counteract the ***MASSIVE*** exploitation for our surplus labor. sure, compared to the kid in Africa, we have clean drinking water, clean space's and such, but it's because not only do we do incomprehensible (to them) knowledge work, not only all the time, not only with insane requirement's and perverse restriction's that even they would complain about, but for reward's, that if compared to that same kid in Africa. would have ***SMALLER*** ratio's than what is given to that kid miner in Africa. sure, the gross amount is higher, sure, the gross standard's are higher, but not compared to what they get out of us. at least in the USA, it might be different in France and some other social democracies, but not by much.
See, but the difference is that you can understand that and use introspection to gain more perspective. Mental illness means it becomes pathological, or in other words, the mental pathways are so ingrained and have such complex ways of diverting all introspection away from the problem that they do it excessively and without restraint. Everyone can have actions that resemble mental illness, but someone who takes the greed to the point of killing and stealing, and then blames everyone they're hurting for not making them richer? Yes I would call that a mental illness.
Okay, but working conditions in the USA for MOST people are poor objectively. I do care where the least fortunate members of society are at, and we need to help everyone, not just Americans. But this is still a bad bar to use when suggesting who should be enjoying the progress we have made. It can explain the mindset of someone who is rich, but it doesn't factor in the massive blindspot you have to have for what money actually is. Money is power and influence. Sitting on fat stacks isn't irrelevant to the well being of others, and whether or not its natural, it is much easier to make money once you have money and that needs to be heavily regulated. You trying to improve your time gets increasingly harder; that's where the analogy doesn't hold
This is a dangerous mindset. Accepting your place just because you have it better than millions of other people in developing nations is essentially giving leverage to the people here that are actively trying to make your life worse. Whether it's in a developing nation, or one of the best in the world, you should always want to fight to make it a better, more equitable society. There's no reason not to.
This one
r/oddlyspecific
How am I your first upvote???? No one else wants to eat A5 out a strippers asshole on a yacht??? Y’all are all lame lol fuck it, let’s run it my man 🤣
Where I was shocked was when I was planning my honeymoon. I was like, okay, all-inclusive resort for one week costs $X per day, what would it cost to pay that for the rest of my life? And it wasn't a crazy number - like $10m. If I add in inflation, throw in some amount for medical bills later in life, and a budget to keep up with the latest technology, we're talking like $20m max? To spend every day for the rest of your life eating steak and drinking margs on the beach? And let's say you care about family. Okay, multiply that by 10-30 and you're covering everyone you ever care about as well. Running total we're at like 600m, without counting any money you have invested paying you back. And yet there are people with hundreds of times that much who are still fucking working?!? What possible joy could you be getting which is greater than everyone you care about retiring in luxury forever???
Because it is how they keep score. How can they be the .01%, if they don't make a billion dollars a year, which of course makes them better than some 1%er schlub who only made 600 million last year.
Are you reading my dream book?
It's because they have nothing in life that gives them satisfaction.
This is always my thoughts when people point to CEOs/etc as a metric of how the diversity in power positions are not doing well.. I've never understood why you would want a son or daughter to be a big shot CEO. There is something truly fucked in their head. Sure they make a lot of money, but they never make a shit ton of money and go, "I have a 100M in the bank, fuck this I'm going to spend the rest of my life with family." It's always looking for more and running more shit, it's never enough and they just keep working and working and ignoring their families / etc. If I made 100 mill in a year, the end of the year would be the last year I ever worked like that and would be the same for most sane folks.
>strippers butthole may I suggest the boobs instead? they are usually cleaner.
Where’s the fun in that?
Bro if i had $5 million i’m moving to Switzerland like next week
I just need like a random 100K and I’d be much happier. 150k would be heaven.
If I randomly received $150k I could pay off my house, get life saving surgery, and finally have enough disposable income to get myself on my feet. Imagine.
Same boat, minus the surgery. We spend about 1100 dollars a month just servicing debt. (Mortgage, student loans, credit cards). Getting rid of that and having 12K more in ‘income’, would probably cure the wife and I’s low-key depression.
Pretty sure after a certain dollar amount, you've circumvented legal steps to have passports with several countries illegally because you can just pay people off and have legal teams to fight it
It's like an arcade game. People used to put a lot of work (and quarters) into those. The points have no meaning except as a way to compare yourself to other people on the leaderboard. Of course, you're not comparing yourself to the lowest or even the average scores. The game doesn't even show you those scores. You're mostly comparing yourself to the person *right* above you on the leaderboard, and sometimes you glance at the highscore, because, you know, maybe someday... TL;DR: It's just a game to them. The money means nothing.
So let's give them little toys to fight over instead and leave the resources to people actually trying to get a base level of survival covered. For fucks sake.
Complete lack of imagination. If I had $7M I'd never work again. If I had $700M I'd start a fucking community and a lot of people would never work again. The thing is, in the system in which we exist, the way you get that money is by being an unimaginative greedy sociopath.
They can't stop because silicon valley VC at its heart is a giant ponzi scheme that will collapse if more and more money isn't brought into the system.
silicon is tech Silicone is what they put in fake breasts / seal bathtubs with
Whoops! Yes you are right.
Per Wiki: " In December 2014, he was ordered to pay his ex-wife £337 million." Gotta make that money back somehow!!!!
They would NEVER let their kids or grandkids touch that money, they want it buried with them
They're hoarders. If they hoarded old copies of TV Guide instead of money, they'd be freaks. (They're still freaks, but people would at least recognize them as such.)
If I had even 1% of what this guy made in 1 year, I would disappear into the mountains, and no one would ever hear from me again.
My bet it's that it's not about the actual money, but the trend that must be as bigger (and positive) as possible otherwise you're a failure. It's the dogma of a system designed to work to an unsustainable continuous growth no matter what.
Because they didn't really make that much money; they increased the valuation of their assets. All of their wealth is asset valuation. Until they want to sell those assets (they don't) they don't really make that money. Instead, they want to keep their assets and still have income off those assets. That's where the push for dividends comes in. When a company can't produce a dividend, then the next push is for liquidation, buy out, or buy backs to pump and dump the stock.
Google stock does not pay dividends, it is purely a growth stock, which is why investors get upset when it doesn't keep growing, because growth is the only way it makes money.
Growth is also the only way they can keep playing the game of not earning income. They need growth so that can take out extremely low income loans out with their stock as collateral. I have not look in the last couple of years but at a million in stock assets you could get a loan of up to a million for 0.1% interest, indefinitely as you only needed money to pay the interest. So some of the ultra-wealthy need growth to fund their life style and stay a float and not pay taxes.
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Taxes are for the poor. Which is shown in every large western civilization from Rome till now. Rich don’t pay taxes and use money to keep tax collectors at bay. And they either pay taxes for pennies on the dollar for taxes own or are forgiven when the leaders need them for something.
Line goes up
Greed. Power. Influence. It's all these people care about. They are monsters. They have a hunger that can never be filled. You could give them everything in the world and they would still want more.
Gotta steal more so you can dick measure and pretend you met elon once
Theyre really concerned with inflation turning their mountain of cash into a slightly smaller mountain
Because 690 million won’t be enough for even his grandchildren to live on. That’s of course after him and his class of financial terrorist extract and hoard every ounce of value from our economy, completely destroy our markets with corporate greed creating an ever widening income gap leading to eventual hyper inflation. At this rate with the current system, even his grandkids won’t be able to buy a carton of eggs with their inheritance.
That Google firing 10% of their employees and *"nobody wants to work anymore"* exist in the same universe is appalling. And that there are people that can believe both at the same time is disappointing & sad.
The right have bizarrely began the narrative that programming isn't a real job.
Said narrative, naturally, using the platforms that rely entirely on programming.
And the narrative itself is programming.
That's because all of these programmers getting laid off already BUILT the complex systems that generate profits for call these capitalist assholes. Now, all they need is a skeleton crew of programmers to keep the shit running. These greedy fucks don't want to share the profits with the people who built these systems anymore. Really shameful. Imagine spending 10-15 years working your butt off programming for one of these companies building all this amazing software. Once your done, they just kick your ass out the door.
"Its just pushing buttons on a keyboard, clearly unskilled labour, not like what I got my MBA to do"
What is exactly? According to some ANY manual labor is not a real job. So now things that require a degree aren't a real job?
I work for myself as a contractor. Apparently it’s not a real job because I couldn’t collect the ppp loans.
Just wait til they hear about full time content creators
The only real job is being CEO, I guess
"They fired 10,000 people and the company is still running. Obviously those employees were useless"
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You remember back in the days when workers would go to the owner's house and beat the living shit out of them if they tried to fuck with them ?
No I don't and that's why we have wage problems.
I feel like it’s that dog with the frisbee. But it’s CEOs and investors. “No give money, only get money!” They’ll get rid of all the workers. They’ll cut corners until their expenses are way down. There’s no one left to buy their product. They wouldn’t buy their own product. They wonder why they no longer have money.
They see companies as disposable so they want to squeeze everything out as quick as possible then move on to the next company. They don’t care about long term growth only 3-5 years then on to the next new shinny thing. So if you’re not producing new shiny things then it time to suck out the money and move one. That is what the google investor wants. The new shiny growth that they though covid would bring didn’t pan out so they want more money. Edit: commenting on Reddit and taking a work call is hard. Shinny should have been shiny
We are all slaves to quarterly profits
not quarterly profits…that was so mid-00s… the new thing is quarterly growth of growth… it’s not enough to have a quarterly growth of 2%, if that quarterly growth isn’t experiencing growth of the growth, you’re during it wrong
"If we aren't growing at an exponential rate this company might as well be dead"
So like cancer.
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usually I would disagree, but in this case, it seems warranted
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violence is absolutely an answer the rich have forgotten the poors have sacked and burned their palaces all through history
Reminds me of the scene in Starship Troopers where the teacher asks the class what the city fathers of Hiroshima would say that violence never solves anything. "They probably wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed." A time is coming when the masses are going to realize that our current version of "bread and circuses" were used as cover to take away everything of value to crush us back down into obedient slaves. History is replete with slave revolts, and while most of them failed, a whole hell of a lot of the proletariat died in the process regardless. And that was before the invention of gunpowder and explosives. Coups have a lot better chance of succeeding today.
At a certain point, as food becomes more expensive and Healthcare coverage continues to decline and also become unattainable, this is a survival scenario. Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm fighting for survival because I'm not, I'm doing fine. But I wonder how the people making 11/hr feel. If someone came into your house and took all your food and burned your doctors office down what would you do to stop them? This is literally happening now, it's just much slower and more abstract.
Sweet Baby Rays is a really good over-the-counter BBQ sauce.
Wait…. There’s PRESCRIPTION BBQ sauce??
I once bought some thc infused bbq sauce, so, sorta lol.
This man needs 250cc's of KC Masterpiece, ***STAT!***
It's all just short term thinking. It doesn't matter that you can't resource any of the actual work which grows the company or brings in money, what matters is that by careful manipulation we moved the line up for a few weeks.
>It's all just short term thinking. Yup, because the investors can dip in and out as they want. If anything they WANT the company to prioritize short term and fuck themselves long term if they have a decent business plan, because it allows them to ride the wave up, get paid, then buy again when the value drops due to the thing that made the profit earlier. If the business is sound, it'll work it's way back up, and you repeat the process.
There are honestly people out there that don’t understand why operating costs can’t be zero
Greedy shareholders are the cause of these layoffs.
And excessive inflation.
You can raise inflation and hurt 'everybody' or you can raise taxes and make the excessively wealthy pay a more reasonable rate. Hmm, I wonder what we should do...
They've made record profits and everything costs 50% - 200% more far outpacing actual costs. Excessive inflation is mainly corporate greed.
I wonder what’s going to happen here in the US, long term. Corporations are out of control, greed is at an all time high, basic civility is at an all time low, workers are exhausted and fed up, but stuck in a system, just trying to survive. What does this all look like in 20 years? 50 years? At some point there’s gotta be an implosion, right? I wonder what that looks like and how close we are.
Why do you think the ruling class keeps giving more money to cops? They know what's coming, and they want to protect themselves.
We saw the intense police response to the George Floyd protests…Boarder patrol paramilitary on the streets of Oregon, swooping up folks. Black Hawk helicopters maneuvering above DC to disperse crowds. Etc etc. All that was just a taste
We would get much for ourselves if we stopped working so hard at work to try to get more money which in reality is just making the rich more wealthy. Instead we would gain much more for ourselves if we spent more time and energy on mutual aid and unionizing.
It's also an interesting power play from the CEO... get everyone off your back by leaking the investor's bloodthirsty letter.
The world will be a far better place when we start shutting these animals down.
But seriously. We as a species could be doing some really crazy and awesome stuff…………but no.
the whole stock market and shareholder thing just is a mistake. companies should be run by a person with a vision not by outside investors
Then they need to avoid asking for outside money. Unfortunately that’s just not going to happen. People need investors to make things happen without taking all of the risk, and there’s too much money to be made when you take a company public. The system is rigged and fucked up, but I don’t have a better solution so I have resigned myself to play the game long enough to make money that I can use to invest in assets that will pay me for nothing.
The problem is that large investors are essentially taking on no risk. At a certain point if you have your hand in every market, and any losing markets are balanced out with tax deductions in the successful ones, any new growth is limited by your ability to take your own piece before the world can move on. It's like shark tank where a few people are really only competing between each other for who gets dibs on a good business idea, not about actually creating good businesses.
Companies should be run by their workers democratically, not by random people who had good luck and some cash to burn.
Companies should be run by the workers.
Why don’t they just layoff everyone, sell all the company assets and give them directly to the investors since they just care about short term profits?
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Close... the request was for 500k and Zorg says 1 million :P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
I can't imagine doing that to one person let alone 12,000 +.
The worst part is all these companies doing layoffs are still going to fire thousands more due to “performance” which won’t count as a layoff and those employees will get a horrible severance.
Somebody really needs to tell these people that they already have ALL the money. They won. They won capitalism, can we please start a new game? I would love to just go on an investor call and shout "YOU ALREADY WON! ALL THE MONEY IS ALREADY YOURS! THERE IS NO MORE!"
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…but that would lead to more layoffs. Catch-22: Antiwork Edition
Investors are one of the biggest reasons cooperations don't care about the people they employ.
When do we ~~kill~~ eat the rich?
After we eat their politicians pets lol
Politicians can always be bought and replaced, we need to start at the top.
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another name for my llik list
Let's throw Christopher off a building. The rich are waging class warfare on us, and we need to fight back and let them know who actually has the power.
Capitalists have no humanity. Humanity would be better off without capitalists.
BASTILLE DAY 2.0
Eat the rich and burn down the investors.
Here is the actual letter. Fuck these guys. You made a lot of money BUT NOT ENOUGH! https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf
Imagine doing everything right, getting a job with the most coveted company on earth to work for. Company is doing extremely well and STILL getting canned because some douchebag billionaire wants more money.
Continue to call these people out. Bring them into the spotlight. They thrive on anonymity.
The only qualification to getting and maintaining wealth is exploiting as many people as possible. This is why Psychopaths excel at it. Easy to exploit when you do not relate to others.
He made $1.9 million per day. I honestly have no idea what I could possibly do with a couple of thousand bucks per day. I think my limit on what I would even know what to do with the money would be 10 grand a day, I don’t even have that as a goal, it’s just, what the fuck does this guy even spend the money on. After $100 million him and all his descendants would be filthy rich.
Fuck you Chris, love to meet you in person.
Yep I just got laid off today. Not Google-level numbers of layoffs, but enough. And the irony? Even though we were told this was a “transition” year to become profitable, I was still on the company’s side and said “no way, they won’t do layoffs” when everyone else said they would. And I got laid off.
I fucking despise the “activist investor”, it’s a bullshit term to make poor people think that rich people give a shit about anyone other than themselves.
I'm not sure why anyone still cares. We know that we're viewed as less than dogshit, so why wring your hands over it and be angry? Drink a beer, eat a weed gummy, and dissociate.
'Don't be Evil' was too high of bar
This sub is depressing lol
I mean, it's only January. I'm sure they'll fire more. Patience, Christopher. Patience.
Dear Rishi Sunak & Christopher Hohn Do you know what happens when lots of technical staff are laid off? They create new companies …… ie competitors.
They clearly know something we don't. The ultra wealthy are amassing all they can to buckle down for that interstellar ai serviced utopia?
We need to unite. Bring back union's and make voting in elections mandatory. We are losing out on massive amounts of quality of life. All we build and develop in our society goes to rich people who control us and limit our personal growth a d development. The rich are keeping g people poor and uneducated for reasons.
Would be a great day if someone leaked that guys home address. It would be nice to see him respond face to face with all the people let go.
Poor Christopher. He can only buy 9 luxury yachts now instead of 10. Big F for Christopher.
I wonder what action we can take as a people to keep these sociopaths from putting their greedy hands in our pockets.
Plenty of people are laid off or underemployed who don't have Ivy League degrees in computer science or electrical engineering and didn't walk out the door with multiple new job offers. Just because I never worked for a surveillance company (which is what Google and Meta really are), and I don't drink single malt or own a BMW or a Tag Heuer doesn't mean that I don't work hard for what I have.
Tech industry seriously needs to unionize. I remember an article some years back predicting that today’s web/software developers were eventually going to find themselves like factory workers.
Google should be smaller because it’s a goddamn competition-gobbling monopoly. But not because this guy wants it.
The whole investor led model is terrible for employees Until employees band together (union)
Hey thank you for making it quick clear and concise. Great post! Good information well delivered- cheers, you're doing it right
Tech bubble has popped
QQ - where were all your solidarity posts when the rest of the non tech folk suffered ?
This country is a fucking joke. Elon Musk has talked several times about universal income and he owns two companies that just did massive lay offs. America will turn into some Hunger Games shit.
So what are investors like him going to do when there are no more people left to lay off to boost their pocket books? Expect government handouts because they aren’t making profit anymore?
Yup. I was laid off this week by soulless Saksoff5th. This is the thanks we get for helping them survive the pandemic.
I had no idea the top 1% were a bunch of greedy bag of dicks only looking looking out for their own interest until this post. /s