ObjectivityIncarnate

If the weather is too shitty to bike, why would I want to put a delivery driver in those conditions.

I mean, I really don’t want to bike in the rain, but that’s no big deal for someone in a car, lol.

The fact that even with the fees charged to the restaurant and to the customer, the majority of these apps still aren’t even profitable, lol.

Yes. Those people consider things like this part of the “cost of living”, not the luxury that it is.

On average, people have more of an issue overspending than they do underearning. That’s why even among people making six figures, 1 in 4 of them live “paycheck to paycheck”, which people assume to mean ‘barely make enough to make ends meet’, but what more commonly means ‘deliberately chooses not to save/spends every dollar earned’.

Okay, now it’s $74. Now what?

This seems reasonable, honestly.

No, the explanation that involves conspiracy is not the simpler explanation.

He’s not the president.

Doesn’t make sense to compare a rate of an outcome (without even knowing how often that outcome was sought) with an individual attempt whose outcome is not even known yet.

When Mangione IS actually given the death penalty, this ‘argument’ will actually amount to something. Dumb until then.

Despite the current wealth inequality

It’s not “despite” the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).

After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.

Someone’s always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can–cash money simply can’t do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.

Looked it up:

McDonald’s double cheeseburger hasn’t been a dollar for over 15 years (started in 2002, and in 2008, the McDouble replaced it, which had one fewer slice of cheese). And the McDouble itself stopped being a dollar in 2013, over a decade ago. Bit more than “a few years ago”–I think Covid screwed up everyone’s perception of time more than usual, lol.

That said, I get lunch at work several times a week at Wendy’s and always pay less than $5, not too bad all things considered imo.

Yeah, the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else literally does not matter at all, when it comes to ‘motivation for revolution’.

The overall level/amount/condition of poverty is what matters. And let’s be real, things are not nearly as bad in the US today as they were in France before the French Revolution. Not even close.

Fact is, if you magically bumped everyone up so that no one was making less than $75k a year, the wealth gap would be essentially identical to what it is now, because the gap between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the gap between 75k and hundreds of billions. But no one would be suffering in poverty, so would anyone care about the wealth gap, then? I seriously doubt it.

The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.

It’s not that deep.

People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more ‘corporately controlled’ before deciding to join a new platform.

we can’t know how many also choose to escalate because of these outlets.

But we do know that in general, porn doesn’t elicit that kind of escalation into real life. If this particular category of porn did cause that, it’d literally be a total outlier.

Same with other media, too. Rape porn lovers aren’t statistically more likely to rape irl, violent video game lovers aren’t more likely to be violent irl, etc., compared to the general population.

So I think it’s pretty fair to hypothesize that, if anything, it would reduce the incidence of real-world offense. Just look at the massive negative correlation between the proliferation of porn (thanks to the Internet), and the overall incidence of rape.

Also, I’m familiar with one bit of evidence out of Japan that apparently showed that child molesters consume less porn than the average citizen, which I was definitely surprised to learn, but once you think about it in the context of the stuff I mentioned above, it actually makes perfect sense.

In all likelihood, fictional ‘simulations’ like LLMs will directly reduce the incidence of CSA, if anything. If that’s the case, I can’t oppose such things in good conscience–it’d be pretty narcissistic to put my personal disgust over even a single kid not getting bad touched.

Hell, I don’t even want to ban users guilty of piracy.

Yeah, if someone shoplifts from a store, the punishment/penalty should not involve confiscating the car they drove to the store, lol.

sacking hundreds of actually productive employees.

If they were “actually productive”, sacking them would hurt the bottom line, not help it.

You lot are constantly talking about how workers are uniformly short-changed on their labor by their employers, underpaid for it and therefore being a profit source for employers, but you never explain why any business would do layoffs like this if that was the case, lol. Do these people who got laid off make the company money or not?

70% of that $2.4 million should have been taxed

It’s literally post-tax income already, lol.

That is one horrendous logo, lol

are there even any counterexamples?

Actually, there are a large number of billionaires whose primary assets are literally property.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2023/10/04/the-richest-real-estate-billionaires-in-america-2023/

I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.

But the real question is, do you think they should be? 'Cause I’m with you if you say no. Unrealized gains should not be taxed at all, it makes no sense.

He does take an income ($100k, very modest compared to others even in the same company: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-warren-buffett-only-gets-174730982.html ).

And why shouldn’t he continue to own things that are becoming more valuable over time, exactly?