Gotta say, Larson knew his ants.

I swear even before this stuff I’ve noticed quality slipping. The same kinda cost-cutting that makes simple things like packaging work less well than it did when I was a kid (how often does a bag of something’s zipper just rip off and make it impossible to close the thing??)…I could swear I’m starting to see that cost squeeze hit the quality of the products. Finding bones in chicken more often, various grossness in deli meat more often. To say nothing of the reports of nasty conditions at plants that keep coming up.

Maybe it’s all the children working the meat packing plants these days, I’ve always said children make terrible butchers! Should be exciting to see how much more interesting all our food products get in coming years.

All jokes aside, I recently went in on a quarter cow with a friend, from a local rancher. Not an option for everyone, I realize, but I’m starting to buy more locally. I hate to be doom and gloom, but the institutions keeping us safe are being dismantled, visibly, in front of us. And they were not exactly thriving before, either.

Wow, what a write-up, this is lovely.

I’ve also been in a lot of the situations you’re describing and ultimately became the person providing shelter and stability for others, too (of course it’s far more complex than such a simple statement, as you know).

We’ve never made those arrangements permanent, it’s always been phases of some years where people who’ve needed it most have come and then gone when they’re ready. To be clear we’ve never kicked anyone out, nor (many years earlier) have I been kicked out, nothing like that. I just suspect the genetics in my family make it very difficult for us to be told how to live by another for long, no matter how reasonably or gently, lol.

For instance my pops having to ultimately be subject to my rules (I just mean in the ways you described) was eventually too much for him and he made the necessary steps to move on, and the relationship stayed healthy.

Like you said there’s lots of different ways to do things and the most important part is that everyone’s dignity is preserved, and everyone involved is prioritizing each other person as best they can in addition to their own needs, which is hard to do.

I’d be open, perhaps, to a more unconventional long-term arrangement with several of the family members in my life (including chosen family), especially as the world gets harder and harder, but I’m also content to be a temporary place of calm and respite for folks as I can.

And like you said, the mutual give and take that’s involved is everything. With the right people, anyway - I have to acknowledge there’s a broad swathe of folks I’d never want to live closely with and who I expect would be largely uninterested in compromising and prioritizing the well-being of others. Quite unfortunate for folks who grow up surrounded by too much of that.

Yeah, but I’m still glad to see those over the sprawling parking lot retail district approach we’ve been using everywhere for decades in the US. Maybe we’ll do a better job on the revision when the ones you described start to fail lol, one can dream!

Also gives a solid advantage to the small mom and pop over the soulless profit machine, I like this idea :)

I empathize with the pessimism and understand where it comes from, but I fail to see anything useful added by this comment. If anything it feels like the opposite of help, it feels like encouragement to give up.

Grift. It’s all scam, all the time.

It’s funny, this kinda stuff reminds me of the best parts of the (largely bygone) punk rock and hacker subcultures. Feels like almost the specific overlap between the two. And lately it feels like there’s been more and more of that, like the condition of the world is causing those ethos to reawaken, to recapitulate their evergreen salience, maybe even to combine.

Probably projecting a bit, to be fair. I feel I’ve internally stayed an old punk rocker and hacker, and feel those old flames reigniting, despite the indignities and compromises that come with middle age and spending eventual adulthood trying to survive in corporate America. Not so punk after all, lmao

Edit: minor grammar

:(

Yep, this is what’s going on. As is usual with Trump, there’s no actual ideology or goal, it’s all scam all the time. When you can unilaterally announce at any moment of any day that you are about to grenade the global economy, that’s going to have a guaranteed response from the markets. Predictable as the fuckin sunrise. Especially because everyone rightly knows Trump truly doesn’t give a shit about the consequences and absolutely might just do it.

Then he says some wildly different shit a different day, with again 100% predictable market movements (even announcing on Truth Social ahead of time to buy, which is truly beyond the pale), and everyone he knows gets even richer, again. That grift will wear out and stop working and he’ll switch to something else.

And again, and again, and again. All scam, all the time. I mean, plebes like us are aware of multiple concurrent grifts the guy is using the presidency for. Imagine what we don’t know about! It’s kleptocracy of the highest order.

Any interesting patterns in the users being systematically targeted for downvotes? Wondering if this is personal grudge or enemy action, basically.

You’re not really engaging with my points or questions so I’m gonna move on. I understand how the current situation works quite well, having been involved in many businesses in many different roles throughout my life. Most of us agree the way things work today is awful. I was here to explore fruitful changes to make to the status quo. Not to be told how one can, in fact, seek risk through the joys of sole proprietorship.

Cheers, have a good weekend.

That’s a super naive understanding of how it works to “setup a business”, outside of I guess a sole-proprietor tiny little situation.

And regardless - let me ask you, why must it be all or nothing? Under your scenario, I either take all of the risk myself by founding the business, or I am strictly paid in dollars by someone who did, and nothing in between - but why? What’s the argument that this is a good way to do things? Am I not taking some risk by buying into the company I work for? Why is that only an option for the very top of the company? Because “risk” is a misnomer that focuses on the wrong part, and actually it’s freaking great to have a true stake in your place of employment?

I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to start a business, or to work and scrape and get lucky and transition into the ownership class in some small capacity. I’m saying having only a few people have true skin in the game for any business is frickin stupid, a bad way to do things, likely to produce half-hearted efforts from employees, and guaranteed to produce the extreme wealth inequality we see today.

Edit: bit more detail on my preferred approach

Thank you, very useful to have someone who has done it in the thread. Would you agree that being born into one of the wealthy families in America would dramatically reduce the difficulty and risk of everything you’ve described above? All that stuff sounds so much easier if you’re rich enough to pay others to do a bunch of it, and rich enough to still be fine (even still rich, usually!) if it doesn’t work out.

What if instead of zero profits, all employees are paid in part via some amount of ownership stake in any company?

My issue with the “we take all the risk, tho!” argument is that I’m never even allowed to take the risk, too. For example, my current company is small, compensation has grown disappointing after we were acquired by VC, and there is no pathway for me to begin purchasing any kind of ownership stake. We’re just the labor, despite all of us having been here longer than the new owner, in many cases having been here to build the thing the new owners bought.

So it must be pretty damn attractive, actually, for those at the top to continually offer that to one another, while withholding it from anyone below executive leadership. I’m pretty tired of hearing it as a justification when those “taking all the risk” end up doing so goddamn well, and the rest of us are locked out of it in the first place. It’s just abusive language we’ve all internalized.

Edit to add: ya know, it was probably easier to swallow and originated in the prior eras, where a steady paycheck was a safe and stable way to go through life. These days being an underpaid wage slave is far riskier than being any kind of investor. I don’t think “all the risk” is even meaningful or remotely accurate anymore.

“Shoulda kept me in, now look what ya did, there’s folks even shittier than me who’ve been waiting for this opportunity”

True or not, these are the words of a guaranteed abuser lmao

Sounds like a RINO to me lol

I called this shit from the beginning, that the tariff bullshit was just a legit-seeming way to make the market do stuff he could easily predict (by directly causing). Didn’t realize he was literally communicating, nakedly, when to buy and sell though. Fucking WILD. And I promise before long he uses that exact mechanism to do the opposite thing and fuck all the folks who get used to listening to such announcements.

And nothing will be done. Stock market itself is such a fuckin scam, and I say that as a dude with a 401k.

Edit: actually, to add, one thing I didn’t notice initially is that these naked manipulations, with some ability for randos to profit too during the ride, that really has the Musk stink all over it. Same shit he’s gotten away with often, just now with the goddamn US President as the mouthpiece, scamcoins and all. Truly bananas, where we’re at.

I mean, “theft” implies depriving someone of something, to me. But I don’t want to bicker about definitions if your position is more about morality of taking something for free than about the definition of theft.

For myself, I’ll happily pay for things that provide fair value and a fair agreement / relationship. That includes donating to stuff that is offered for free - there are a handful of content creators and other services (Internet Archive, Signal, etc.) that I directly support, every month. And by the same token, I don’t feel bad at all about enjoying something, for free and against their wishes, from a company or publisher that only offers unacceptable (to me) terms.

To me those are perfectly consistent. My dollars go to individuals and publishers that produce the kind of media ecosystem I think is good for us. Because - we must be clear - it’s not a level playing field, and the shift away from consumer ownership is a plague of exploitation inflicted upon us. It’s now metastasizing away from strictly digital domains, now to physical hardware, which is outrageous. Roku, for instance, can update your streaming device overnight and force you to accept their new terms, in order to keep using your device. This is not hypothetical, it happened (may have gotten company wrong).

Do you think the companies enacting policies, particularly ones prohibiting ownership outright, are operating from an ethical or moral framework? I promise they don’t believe in anything like that. They screw us precisely as hard as the courts, and the court of public opinion, allow. And they’re always trying to move that line in their favor.

Why do you care about pirating? Who or what are you standing up for, I guess I’m asking?

Oh, yeah that makes sense too. Bad premise all around I guess.