scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 1 day ago:
Because they take investment.
Privately held companies can sit around earning the exact same amount of profit forever.
But if you are publicly traded on the stock market, people are walking up and injecting money into your business. They expect a return for that investment. And that means that the part of your business they’ve bought has to be worth more in the future in order for them to sell it for more than they bought it.
Therefore: growth. Owning 1% of a $100k business isn’t with as much as owning 1% of a $200k business. So if you own 1%, you want it to go from $100k to $200k.
If you aren’t taking outside money, none of this is a problem. Unless the owners just want a raise, which most people generally do over time. If nothing else, inflation is constantly eroding the value of money so you need to grow a little just to stand still. Most people don’t want to make do with less and less over time.
- Comment on Are Street Racers "bad people"? 2 days ago:
Once I actually stated meeting people in life who go out to the track, I saw street racers in a new light. I never admired them in the first place, but I started seeing them as absolutely pathetic, once I became aware of how easy and popular it is to take your car out to a track and actually push its limits and/or compete with others.
A lot of people like to go to the firing range, too. But you don’t see them doing target practice walking down the sidewalk. That’s essentially what street racing is.
- Comment on Which career to pursue? 1 week ago:
My advice is to Target either healthcare or the trades. What you need is a medium-skilled career that will earn well, so you can write as a hobby. You can do very well as a carpenter, plumber, sonograph operator, or other medical technician. These are trades that have professional skill training courses you can take. It’s not necessarily a college program.
But forget writing. If you write well that will always help you a little bit but the fact you have written two short stories doesn’t even belong in a conversation about what job to get.
And forget coding. It doesn’t sound like it’s for you and it’s a very unstable field right now because of AI. We don’t know what it will be in 5 years.
Get into the trades. You’ll always have good work. You won’t be tied to any one area.
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 1 week ago:
Just yesterday I was coaching someone on how to turn their demands into requests, so I guess yeah.
- Comment on Do all American stores have greeters? 1 week ago:
In most stores, greeting is just a task that all staff are trained on. The store has to be over a certain pretty large size before that one task becomes an entire person’s job. They also fulfill other functions like giving directions that make more sense at larger stores.
- Comment on what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace? 2 weeks ago:
I work somewhere that has two centers. One of them is not a place that speaks much English. The other is in the US. And then there are people scattered throughout the world.
All major official communications are done in both English and the other language. They will even redub CEO announcements that were in English for the people at the other center.
- Comment on what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace? 2 weeks ago:
I once worked somewhere that required English for written things, because you never know who might need to read them later. But spoken conversations or even meetings in another language was okay.
- Comment on What is it called when you believe the U.S. political parties shouldn’t exist? 3 weeks ago:
Direct Democracy, perhaps? One way to not have these parties is to not have representatives at all.
I’m not sure there’s a name for thinking the parties shouldn’t exist. If you tell us what you think SHOULD exist we can probably tell you what labels apply to that.
- Comment on Has Charlie Kirk ever changed his views on a subject during a debate? 3 weeks ago:
He didn’t actually DO anything, just gabbed in the internet. That kind of influence does not last. But there will always be some hateful asshole to take his place.
- Comment on Who are the "middle class" supposed to support in the class stuggle? 4 weeks ago:
That’s a really good way of putting it. We have the wealthy, the poor, and the poor who’ve been given scraps by the wealthy and are complicit in protecting them. The “middle class” believe they can gain more in scraps than they can by revolution. And so it continues.
- Comment on do you apologize, even if it's not your fault just to make the other person feel validated? 4 weeks ago:
There’s an expression I am comfortable with and I wish more people could be.
NOT “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Rather: “I’m sorry I made you feel that way.”
You can say this to someone without accepting blame for intending to hurt them or trying to hurt them. It’s just an acknowledgment that your actions had a consequence. Some people think that they have no responsibility for unintended consequences of their actions, and that only what they intended matters. Of course it’s important what they intended, and where they were coming from, but they can also accept that perhaps they didn’t think of everything or fully appreciate what their actions would do. We all make that mistake.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s why I said we need flexible and short term housing. The trick is to make renting serve the needs of renters, because those needs do exist. Today it’s more about serving the profit margin of owners.
When I rented out my property, for example, I felt it was my responsibility, my job, to offer a residence where everything worked. I maintained the place meticulously and paid for every repair. However if you simply scan reddit you’ll see thousands of posts from renters who, for example, have a broken down refrigerator and will have to pay to fix it themselves. I find that disgusting - the landlord holds the renter responsible for anything that happens while they are there. So the landlord gets their monthly debt service paid for by the rent, plus profit, plus they enjoy to market appreciation, PLUS the renter is on the hook for all maintenance? Fuck that.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 4 weeks ago:
It’s true that it everyone is in a cash position to buy a house, but that’s made worse by housing being so expensive. And housing is expensive in part because of the hoarding and rent-seeking behaviors of landlords and investors.
If people don’t have cash to buy houses, I’d look at that as a problem for lenders. Someone else renting out the house doesn’t necessarily have to be the only solution. I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate renting because we need some very flexible housing / short term housing.
But if we imagine a world where renting is incredibly restricted, perhaps to 4-unit apartments and up, instead of every single residence on the market, I think we would see a more affordable market where more people COULD be in a position to buy a house.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been a landlord and I know how it works. The liquidity problem you mention is real, but so is rent seeking. Landlords may help make housing available, but they absolutely do not help make it affordable. Quite the opposite.
Think about payday loans services. They help make money more available, but they make it as expensive as they can. No one believes they are providing a valued service.
It’s possible to offer loans and rental housing at really reasonable rates, but that’s not what we have in our society. Investors and the wealthy buy up all the property, creating scarcity, this causes a price bubble which shuts out many buyers who get priced out. Then the renting begins, and I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I couldn’t afford to rent the house I own.
- Comment on If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties? 4 weeks ago:
If the property is giving you any kind of return, you’re extracting profit, so the property is less “affordable” than it would be if the resident owned it.
- Comment on ‘A new frontier of potential abuse’: Is it legitimate to charge someone flying to a funeral more than a leisure traveler? 4 weeks ago:
As always: “if a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is ‘no.”
- Comment on How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027) 4 weeks ago:
You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.
/s
- Comment on How did it come to be that only two companies supply all of the world's PC graphics chips? 4 weeks ago:
In tech it’s often a bad thing to have 37 of something. How many phone operating systems can app developers reasonably serve? Does it benefit consumers to have 19 different graphics chip standards?
- Comment on what does it mean being nice to your coworkers to you? 5 weeks ago:
Okay I was like “that sounds like a terrible method” but the R is for “recreation,” and “dreams” is more like life aspirations than what did you dream about last night. This makes more sense now.
- Comment on what does it mean being nice to your coworkers to you? 5 weeks ago:
I try to imagine what it must be like for a neurodivergent person who doesn’t value small talk to get through everyday interactions, and here’s what I came up with.
Imagine that everyone else wanted to dance with you for 3 minutes as soon as they saw you. All day people are rushing up to your desk and busting moves and pulling you up out of your chair to dance with them. You just think “wow what is this point of this shit - can you all just calm down and do some work?”
You aren’t a very good dancer and you protest that you don’t want to do this, and no matter what you try everyone is just saddened or offended that you can’t dance. It’s not your fault you can’t, and you don’t see why dancing should even matter.
- Comment on XC Running: Does anyone else's parents do this? 5 weeks ago:
I’ll try to be generous and imagine that she thinks it’s easier on you to hear bad news from her than to go out and actually fail.
That’s the only remotely humane explanation I can come up with. But this is not at all what I would do. If my kid was enthusiastic about something, I would help them, let them fail, and tell them if they did their best and let them know they can keep trying.
I never tell my kids they are bad at something. I will tell them if they haven’t been practicing enough, or if others have practiced more than them. But that’s to help them understand that it’s about the effort you put in, not “how good you are.”
It does sound like you have a habit of rushing in with grand ambitions. “I’m going to make it to nationals,” etc. My kids do this as well. They learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube and then suddenly they’re out to break the world record. For whatever reason, it’s no enough for them to just solve the cube for fun, or just work on improving their own times. I guess it’s because kids don’t yet have fully formed self-esteem and are always looking for outside validation to prop them up.
You might benefit from thinking about what you get out of the sport and competition specifically.
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 5 weeks ago:
No it doesn’t hurt. I’m really just trying to answer your question. Why don’t we have better names? Because they’re for the clinicians, who need the terms to be precise, not easy to pronounce. And literally nothing is easy enough for a patient with dementia or Alzheimer’s to remember.
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 5 weeks ago:
Do you have much experience with people with Alzheimer’s? It’s not a question of keeping the spelling simple. And anyway what is this scenario where any damn thing depends on their ability to spell their clinical condition?
- Comment on Pandering to conservative Americans 1 month ago:
Christianity loves to pretend it’s still a downtrodden little secret society, with their sneaky Bible verses in tiny print and their fish symbols and such. It’s hilarious fantasy play, because they are a global hegemony and spend a lot of time persecuting others.
- Comment on Why do i tip my bartender $2 per drink and per bar food order but 20% when I order food from a waitress? Am I tipping wrong? 1 month ago:
You’re right. Setting them on the same minimum wage and removing their tips WOULD net them less money. However just governing them with a higher minimum wage doesn’t mean that’s exactly what they would earn. If they lost all their tips they would all look for other jobs and the employers would have to start paying more in wages. It was probably the right move, legislatively, though it would cause some short term pain.
- Comment on How would one exit a black hole? 1 month ago:
Well your information is preserved in the universe and that’s all any of us can really lay claim to anyway.
- Comment on If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked? 1 month ago:
Casey doesn’t have bad dreams because she’s just a piece of plastic.
- Comment on If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked? 1 month ago:
Our modern life involves a lot of reading and writing and sometimes very technical work. But the work of surviving on planet earth is a little less vision intensive: farming, cooking, childcare, handcrafts. Depending on how bad your vision is you might even be slow and shitty at these, but people can adapt to a lot and figure out how to perform tasks they’ve done before, even with poor vision. Look at the blind: they can be functional. Yes there are things like hunting which you could. not. do. with poor vision but that’s why we live in tribes. Someone younger with better eyes will do that while you shell nuts all day.
- Comment on Why people say they have a "boy cat" or a "girl cat" but when the cat grows up, they don't call is a "man cat" or "woman cat"? 1 month ago:
I think for most people the answer is that pets are not considered peers. They have gender but we will never consider them on a level with human adults - maybe on a level with human babies or young children. We love and prize them, but we don’t give them equal rights and respect. Just like with children.
It probably doesn’t help that we also spay/neuter them at birth, which not only prevents them from ever becoming repressive viable adults, but also affects their hormones permanently.
FWIW I personally have two human kids and I refer to our German shepherd as the 3rd grownup in the house. I do say “good boy” but I also say “hey man” and call him “old man.”
- Comment on Why people say they have a "boy cat" or a "girl cat" but when the cat grows up, they don't call is a "man cat" or "woman cat"? 1 month ago:
Right but why is that your opinion of how those words work? Because the only strict differentiation between man/boy and woman/girl is age.