TheDemonBuer
@TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
- Comment on okay.. 1 week ago:
There’s am awful lot of medium size companies staffed by regular every day people for every fat cat evil corporate overlord.
The only reason that medium sized company exists is because it hasn’t yet had the opportunity to grow into a behemoth, or it hasn’t yet been taken over by one. But that’s the goal of every firm, small, medium, or large: ever increasing profits, over all else, even over human well being. Some firms are just better at achieving that goal, often because they were first into an industry. These massive corporations didn’t start out massive, they grew from much smaller firms. The executives at giant corporations aren’t exceptionally evil, they’ve just demonstrated enough acumen for increasing profits to catch the eye of some giant corporations board chair (that and maybe they both went to the same business school and play golf together). And since ever increasing profits is the goal of every firm, every firm has to try and capture as many markets as possible, and that means the small and medium sized firms will be captured eventually, unless they are able to grow into a massive corporation themselves.
- Comment on UnitedHealthcare CEO's murder sparks online outrage at health insurance industry 1 week ago:
People’s reaction to a health insurance CEO being assassinated:
- Comment on Bloomberg: Sony Interactive Entertainment working on portable PS5 3 weeks ago:
The switch and the steam deck have really changed the game.
- Comment on Working-Class Men Are Not Okay 2 months ago:
We live in a society that generally looks down on working class people. Not all working class people, equally, though, as not everyone who sells their labor is culturally or socially in the same class. A professional athlete making tens of millions of dollars a year can’t really be counted in the same social class as a factory worker making $50K a year. That being said, very, very few people get rich by earning a wage. Generally speaking, if you want to get rich you have to have access to capital.
And getting rich is the goal. One’s position in the social hierarchy is closely tied to their wealth and income. For this reason, there’s a strong incentive to NOT do work that doesn’t pay a lot. Unfortunately for all of us, much of that work is absolutely essential for the functioning of any modern society. So, there’s a disconnect. The incentives are skewed, away from some of the most essential work and toward some of the least essential work. I think the long term effects of this could be disastrous, as we see more and more shortages of workers in essential fields.
But fear not, the capitalists have anticipated this and they have a solution: immigrants. Just bring people in from other countries to do the essential yet low wage, low status work. I don’t really think that’s a solution at all, and is more or less just delaying the inevitable.
- Comment on Just a reminder... 2 months ago:
I don’t think the decisions that led to our current monetary system were made arbitrarily, not at all.
- Comment on Just a reminder... 2 months ago:
The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system. The Fed tries to keep this under control by not allowing the rate of inflation to go much beyond about 2% a year. The recent inflation issue we’ve been having wasn’t about inflation suddenly happening where it hadn’t been happening before, it was about the rate of inflation increasing beyond the Fed’s 2% target. When they talk about inflation getting back under control, they’re talking about the rate of inflation getting back to near 2%. But make no mistake: prices are still going up - they have to, that’s how the system works - and they will keep going up every year, seemingly indefinitely. For this reason, a cost of living raise equal to at least the rate of inflation is absolutely essential, otherwise workers are getting a pay cut.
But this is further complicated by the fact that the core inflation numbers are very broad. Housing costs are exploding. Core inflation would be much lower if not for rising housing costs. But the way housing costs increases are measured is by averaging housing costs across all markets, meaning the cost of housing in low demand areas is averaged with the cost of housing in high demand areas. This means that if you live in a high demand area, the core inflation rate doesn’t necessarily capture the true cost of living in your area, and that the cost of living in your area is going up much faster than the national average. Therefore, many workers need an annual cost of living increase that is much greater than the national inflation rate.
As far as I know, there is no national law requiring companies to give cost of living raises every year. Many companies do, but many don’t. A mandatory, annual cost of living raise is something that unions can negotiate, once again showing the value of unions.
- Comment on Profits are the surplus labor value stolen from the working class and the community they live in. 2 months ago:
They need our labor to make their profits. Fuck their profits.
- Comment on EU consumer groups slam 'manipulative' video game spending tactics. 3 months ago:
Of course parents not taking appropriate precautions doesn’t absolve the companies of responsibility. Unethical behavior is unethical behavior, even if there are things consumers can do to protect themselves from it. After all, the precautions wouldn’t be necessary if the companies didn’t engage in this behavior in the first place, so these precautions aren’t really solutions only mitigations.
- Comment on Minecraft *Movie Edition* 3 months ago:
The irony is, something like this probably would have been a lot less expensive to make, while also appealing more to fans. It’s funny how so many people in the movie business are not very good at, you know, the movie business.
- Comment on Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) - Undercover Frisbee Assassination Scene 3 months ago:
Classic schlock.
- Comment on The State of the Unions, Labor Day 2024 3 months ago:
Every corporation should have a worker advocate, a consumer advocate, and a community advocate on their board of directors. It is ridiculous that only the investors get to make the decisions, currently. Investors only care about one thing: maximum return on their investment. They don’t care how the company is run, they don’t care how many employees get laid off, they don’t care if the company is benefiting the community, they just want the value of their shares in the company to go up, and/or to receive the highest possible dividends at the end of the year. They want passive income, they want the value of their asset to go up so they will be wealthier. That’s it. It’s unacceptable that only the investors are given a vote, and that others, who are also deeply affected by how the company operates, don’t.
- Comment on Watching ml and world argue in every thread be like. 3 months ago:
Sorry, you’re all getting techno-feudalism.
- Comment on Black Myth: Wukong launches to almost 1.5 million concurrent players 3 months ago:
The level of paranoia is kind of crazy.
- Comment on Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Outer Wilds 3 months ago:
One of the many games just sitting in my steam library, waiting to be played.
- Comment on Geoff Keighley: No Silksong in Gamescom. Team Cherry are still cooking. 3 months ago:
We just got a leaked image from inside Team Cherry:
- Comment on Dallas Black Dance Theatre fired its entire company of dancers, after they unionized 4 months ago:
That should be illegal.
- Comment on The Labor Movement Is Giddy About Tim Walz Becoming Harris’ VP Pick 4 months ago:
It’s funny how quickly opinions have (seemingly) changed regarding unions. For decades, both parties were pretty hostile to labor unions. Now, everyone wants to show how pro union they are. It’s been quite the dramatic 180°.
- Comment on NCSoft president: "The games industry's evolution towards acceptance and diversity is ongoing" 4 months ago:
I think greater access to game development tools has been a very good thing for the industry. These days, I’m generally much more interested in what’s coming from indie developers than any of the big companies, with a few exceptions. I think that’s the best way to increase the diversity of games and game developers. Greater access to game development resources will help to democratize the gaming industry.
- Comment on 90% of billionaires are men, and only 15% of female billionaires are self-made 5 months ago:
Not everyone cares that much about becoming a billionaire. Or, maybe many women are just more interested in marrying a billionaire than acquiring the wealth themselves.
- Comment on 90% of billionaires are men, and only 15% of female billionaires are self-made 5 months ago:
Wealth is just another dick measuring contest, for some men. I think it makes sense why women might not be as interested in something like that. That doesn’t mean that women don’t care about money or being successful in business, only that many women might measure success differently.
- Comment on Universal basic income is 'straight out of the Karl Marx playbook,' financial guru Dave Ramsey says 5 months ago:
I’m sure Dave Ramsey has never read Marx, and I’m equally certain he is proud of that fact, so how can he claim to know what Marx did advocate for or would advocate for? I’m not a Marxist, nor an expert in Marxian theory, but I have read and studied some Marx and based on what (admittedly little) I know, I don’t see a connection between Marxism and universal basic income. In fact, I think Marx would have been opposed to UBI, maybe even viewing it as something that would strengthen the capitalist class and weaken the working class.
- Comment on U.S. workers are less satisfied with nearly every aspect of their jobs than they were a year ago, survey finds 6 months ago:
If you’ll notice, I used past tense. I have made a number of changes to my life over the past several years. One of the first things I did was quit my job. My life now isn’t perfect, but it is improved. I drink less and I don’t smoke pot any more. I also don’t eat out hardly at all. I learned to cook and now I prepare nearly all of my own meals. I don’t know that I’d say I’m happy, but I’m certainly less miserable.
- Comment on U.S. workers are less satisfied with nearly every aspect of their jobs than they were a year ago, survey finds 6 months ago:
Jobs suck. That’s not news, everyone has known that for a very long time. Sure, some jobs suck less than others, and some people genuinely enjoy their job, but generally jobs just suck. That’s why they have to pay you to do them. But it takes more than a paycheck to make a job worth it. There was a time in America where the average person could work a job (albeit, often a sucky one) making a decent wage working only 40 hours a week, take a vacation every year, own a home, have a family and a community, all the things that make working a sucky job worth it. Over the last fifty years or so, many or all of the things that make working a sucky job worth it have slowly become less and less accessible to many people.
I am one of those people. I worked full time. It sucked, as many jobs do, but after putting in a full day’s work I didn’t go home to a wife and kids or a life that made me feel happy and fulfilled. I would drive my hour commute, which I hated, pick up take out or fast food, come home and watch TV, play video games, smoke pot, and drink. I’d go to sleep, wake up the next day and do exactly the same thing. I did that for years. I was absolutely miserable. People can’t live like that.
- Comment on Suicide Mission - What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane 8 months ago:
Just one of the many, many examples of what you get when you build an entire society around the idea that making a profit is more important than anything else.
- Comment on CFCs 8 months ago:
I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.
