Sometimes it’s “reaction formation”. They like a thing. That makes them uncomfortable. They instead go hard in the other direction - they hate the thing it’s horrible and bad and the worst.
Sometimes they’re just… basic, and need the world to fit into simple boxes. Anything else stresses their brain.
Failing businesses is irrelevant to the argument that labor is entitled to a fair share of what it creates.
Your analogy to generalizations and an old timey Godwin’s law is laughable.
The capitalist system “works” at tremendous cost to many people. Many such systems work. Chattel slavery would “work”.
And you haven’t clarified why you’re so eager to defend this system. Are you a capitalist? Do you employ people while keeping the bulk of the profits?
I don’t think I can take you seriously
VC funding isn’t free money. Usually you have to have alredy prospering business for anyone to even talk with you. Companies like WeWork or more recently AI companies are extremely rare exception.
lol. Many people get funding for their companies because of their connections. Zoom famously got funding even though the investors thought it was stupid to try to address what they saw as a solved problem, but he was their friend so they gave him a few million dollars.
The last business I worked for started with his daddy’s money, which (surprise) came from previous capitalist exploits. The first one was similar.
Why not?
Capitalists have done incalculable harm to our environment, society, and individuals. They don’t need your defense. They have almost all the money and power.
I can’t tell if people who do that kind of thing are lazy and malicious, actually stupid, or stressed beyond their capacity to be decent.
I do think a lot of people are actually only semi literate, and asking them to write is legitimately difficult and embarrassing for them.
Many people operate primarily on the emotional level. That’s a polite way of saying they’re stupid. Idiots. Like a child who’d rather have 4 shiny pennies than one tiny dime.
If we’re not going to round them up (which, give me the infinity gauntlet and…) then we need to appeal to their idiot emotions. Find something they consider in-group, and frame whatever reasonable policy they’re opposing so their benefits are foregrounded.
VC funding.
Also why are you so invested in defending capitalists?
The owner also gets a wage and benefits while the process is running.
And much of the time, they’re spending VC money. Minimal personal risk.
And even so, that doesn’t justify the owner keeping almost all of the proceeds. I don’t care if they put their life savings into it. Labor built it.
But on the flipside, it’s hard for me to stay concentrated while at home.
While I believe that is true for you, I don’t believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.
The office is super distracting for many people.
The laid off workers also suffer the loss, typically.
Furthermore, I don’t think “he gambled” compellingly makes this system fair or good.
Oh, I read your thing backwards then.
I can’t imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).
Can’t relate to it. And I’m a very social person that likes interacting with people.
Every day I’m a little surprised there’s no news story of some workers beating their “no, you have to come into the office” manager to death. They’ve got means, motive, and opportunity, and it’s extra funny because if they’d been allowed to work at home they wouldn’t have at least two of those.
But really we’re ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.
Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming “you made this possible” until they can’t even cry anymore.
Working from home doesn’t appeal to the emotional needs of fragile managers.
I wonder about this a lot, too!
Some cursory searching shows a variety of causes. Maybe from a young age they were repeatedly taught that being wrong made them bad and stupid and unworthy of love, and that’s deeply wound around their subconscious now.
It’d be just sad if it wasn’t causing incalculable harm to society.
Some people have such a fragile ego, such brittle self-esteem, such a weak “psychological constitution,” that admitting they made a mistake or that they were wrong is fundamentally too threatening for their egos to tolerate. Accepting they were wrong, absorbing that reality, would be so psychologically shattering that their defense mechanisms do something remarkable to avoid doing so—they literally distort their perception of reality to make it (reality) less threatening. Their defense mechanisms protect their fragile ego by changing the very facts in their mind, so they are no longer wrong or culpable.
:shrug:
Keep track of your spending. Find simple and cheap things you like. There’s hours of entertainment at the free public library. There’s free meetups all over.
I had a friend that ordered food delivery for every meal. That’s like $25k/year on food, in $35 chunks. Don’t do that. Don’t aspire to that.
Use thrift stores, buy nothing groups, freecycle, yard sales etc. I got most of the furniture for my first apartment for $230 (inflation adjusted) when I first moved out. Couch, table, chairs, dresser. The couch didn’t survive the next move, but everything else is solid.
You can probably salvage an old computer by putting Linux on it rather than shelling out for a new one. I saved my friend a lot of money reviving their ancient laptop like that.
Some people have this idea that spending money frivolously or conspicuously is cool. They’re assholes and fools.
Keep in touch with friends. Most of my jobs I got because I knew someone. The job process is broken, run by idiots and slop machines.
If living with your parents isn’t driving you crazy, don’t worry about it. Save the money.
Most people don’t like when their ego is threatened. They’ll make up any excuse to protect their flimsy sense of self worth.
It’s easier to just go “I guess I was wrong” but most people are emotionally fucking cowards.
That’s one of the core injustices of capitalism.
Rich person says “Build a thing”
Workers design, research, and build the thing.
Rich person keeps the profits.
No. Don’t think I was even invited to any.
I’m not close to anyone from high school. I haven’t talked to anyone from that era in years. I wasn’t my best self back then, and I don’t really want to relive it.
Other answers are good.
I expect there’s a lot of racism, too. A lot of people don’t want those people to have nice things, even if it means personally suffering.
If you build a nice train system, you might have to see those people on your day to day. In a car, you’re isolated and feel safe.
But mostly I expect it’s because of the massive highway system that was built without corresponding passenger rail.
100%. I think a lot about one of my friends when trying to think about that kind of user. Smart lady. Advanced degree. Has her life together. Would absolutely not want to try to install an OS. Wouldn’t even know how to start.
But I’m confident if I handed her a Linux laptop, she’d use it just the same as a Mac or Windows machine.
If the business fails, the workers lose their income and their shares are just as worthless as anyone else. The workers should have shares. (Or some other mechanism so there’s not a handful of fat cats living a life of luxury due to the labor of many others)
The person who started the business can always go work somewhere else. It’s not like he’s put to death. And if the concern is that “someone who loses their money might suffer and die” then we should fix that problem more generally, because there are many other ways to end up there.
That wasn’t the question or the point. A fairer system off the top of my head is profit sharing with a union. But that wasn’t the point.
If someone says “X is bad for A, B, C” saying that Z isn’t better is not a rebuttal. We haven’t gotten that far. We’re trying to reach agreement that X is bad. Then we can talk about replacing or fixing it. Maybe Z does suck.
It’s a common mistake. Someone will be like “windows sucks” and someone will be like “well apple is expensive”, just blazing by on that express train of thought. Take the local train.
So you have generational trauma skewing your views.
Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this economic system. And let me remind you of all the people fired because their employer didn’t like what they said, where they risk falling into poverty and worse.
The way capitalism manifests in the US is a set of tiny tyrannies. Your boss tells you when you can piss, what you can wear, what you can say in public. Maybe you don’t care because you are the boss. You give your people time off?
And the dream is for you to make it so big that you don’t have to work anymore. Your business expands. You buy out or out compete everyone else. You sit back and let other people work. Then you raise prices, lower wages, and buy a private jet.
The end state of capitalism is a rich asshole who doesn’t work, and a shitty world for everyone else. Maybe it takes years. But enshittification is pretty widely understood.
Maybe a worker owned collective would enshittify, too. But as a small consolation, you’d at least have thousands of rich people instead of a billionaire.
Now, I wrote this on the toilet so it’s not the most coherent or polished. I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth even though we disagree.