Thistlewaite
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My friend works for Amazon but has done for years.
Billionaires are evil
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My friend works for Amazon but has done for years.
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There are loads of stories on here or out there...https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse
or if you want a read, you could try Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain – review
or if you want a read, you could try Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain – review
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Meanwhile, in today's news, the rich get richer the poor get poorer ‘A sweatshop in the UK’: how the cost of living crisis triggered walkouts at Amazon
There are plenty of self made multi millionaires and even some billionaires out there, who've made it because right from the start, they saved, then invested.
That's something that doesn't come natural to many people which is why we have private pensions that can't be cashed in until 55.
There's going to a fair few of those people who have private pensions, who've become anywhere from "comfortable" to "rich".
If you have a problem with the fundamendal basics of capitalism, the notion that they who provided capital should be rewarded, it's worth noting that 69% of UK adults have a private pension. Good luck telling them that their pension is stolen profits.
Are there billionaires out there who are absolute bastards? You bet. Jeff Bezos really needs to sort out his attitudes to his workers, especially the ones that work in his warehouses. A shit load of those jobs aren't sustainable to the worker - no human would be able to do those jobs for 10 or 20 years.
That's real exploitation of the labour market from a company that doesn't really have any real competition - ebay and allibaba wouldn't even come close.
Should we moan on about those types of billionaires or even millionaires, absolutely.
Boycotts are easy. But investing is a different issue. For example, sometimes it's better to be on the inside and hold CEOs to account at AGMs.
Musk is a different animal because we can't really argue that his workers are exploited by the same standard as some of Amazon's workers. They aren't really complaining about much with the exception of some allegations of racism on the shop floor. Tesla doesn't have a HR department and that is a topic of conversation in it's own right considering what his motives could be for that.
I can understand why people critisize the rich for being rich, but the more richer you are, the more secure you are. It's not just about wealth, it's about security and that's the way these people think - they are constantly doing risk analysis and they are constantly looking to make themselves more secure.
It's possible to hold that belief and still believe in a fair society, that has a decent welfare state (at least until there's a better solution than the welfare state) and believe that certain people or other entities exploit others and should be stopped from doing so.
Workers co-operatives sharing the profits? Absolutely! Great. We're free to do that, anyone can start up a workers co-op. But we can't snatch businesses from those who risked their capital. That's unfair. Risk your own money on your workers co-op.
Capitalism has been more sucessful than communism, because capitalism is better at getting people off their arses to do mostly good things.
The system is still sub-optimal. Big business, the banks and governments collude with each other to our detriment, because power is to decentralised, creating all sorts of games that have to be played out.
I don't have much time for the tories, I don't trust them. But replacing them with a government of different colours doesn't really change much.
It doesn't matter if a government is Labour, the Lib Dems, Tory or Green. Whoever is in power, will collude with the big business and the banks to get "results", a lot of time with good intention, but blinded to the damage that they are doing.
Heck the regulators do just that and when do we ever get a say?
As for feeding starving kids. There are many problems in this world. Governments don't always have the resources to sort them, no company, not even Apple has the resources, no billionaire, not even Bezos has the resources. Anything they chuck at it would be a token gesture.
Companies should focus on their core mission and ensuring that they aren't being evil in achieving what they are supposed to achieve. What they should stop doing is trying to solve all of societies problems, or percieved problems, but if it doesn't set worker against worker, worker against boss and boss against worker, it winds up being a cabal of corporates putting political pressure on a government, for the government to take notice, without anyone actually involving normal people. Coinbase's CEO worked that one and told all the activsts amongst his staff to pack it in or leave.
Musk wants to create a colony on a different planet. Gates wants to take over this one. If the people allow the continued centralisation of power, Gates might just succeed.
And speaking of Gates, that's the real problem. With Musk it's Mars. With Bezos it's money. With Gates, I seriously believe that man wants to have every single man, woman and child on this planet under his thumb - it's about power with him and there is no man more dangerous...well arguebly Xi Jinping, the Chinese President.
Whatever the solution is to fight men like Gates, it's going to be nudging ourselves away from the direction of travel the centralisation of power. Anything and everything to decentralise power, rather than attacking Gates directly.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
jesus that's a great turd of a post.
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Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
'Decentralise power' here just means bitcoin/blockchain etc. All the little people will be able to make lots of forex gains or something apparently.
You're right. Best to centralise power further so that the only people the governments listen to are billionaires at Davros.
The little people will be able to actually politcally organise without having to worry about infiltrators running off with all of their funds or the government confiscating all of it.
If you can't control your own money, you only have freedom of speech as long as you're not a threat.
Who the fuck is saying that? Let me know and I'll have a go at them!
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
so lots of people are made complicit to an extent. does that make the system right? especially when most people's pensions are going to be fuck all, state or private.
yeh you know that's only actually going to happen if you own a fuckton of shares - someone with but one will never be able to really hold the ceo to account, will they, they'll be given at most a roughish ride for the duration of the meeting
i think you'll find amazon workers have a range of complaints wider then you suggest
the richer you are the more you've shat on other people
er because capitalism has gone all-out to shit on communism, and indeed Communism
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
there's enough food in the world to feed everyone
Right. Wrong. That's a bit too binary? Another binary question oh my!
My argument is that it's nuanced. There's a lot I don't like about the system, but just because enemies or perceived enemies leverage the fact that money, information and power are intertwined, when we make the same realisation and fight back accordinaly, then normal people can become much more effective at organising.
I never claimed it was a silver bullet, but other shareholders would be present at the meeting and thus influenced. To be clear, I'm NOT saying that everyone is morally obliged to get shares in those companies, I'm just saying that there is nothing wrong with people who at least try that tactic.
I don't doubt that. My English has let me down, I could have made it clearer looking back on my comment, I was actually referring to Tesla employees not Amazon's. The point being that Tesla employees are better off than Amazon's.
If that's what you believe, but I believe that people are going to be more concerned about the future. And besides, what you describe is human nature. Either side is so scared of the other prevailing, so some are always going to take things a bit too far.
You can't argue that my views on this are exotic. Well you could but you'd be way wrong.
If you can't change my mind, then whose mind can you change?
I believe in critisizing the system, because if we can't critisize it, then how can we improve it?
It appears we have a fundamental disagreement about the fundamentals of capitalism.
It boils down to whether people who aren't workers should be allowed to own in whole or part an business which has workers producing.
I believe they should for at least two reasons.
1) Workers are free to risk their own money starting up a workers co-operative.
2) Workers (and anyone else) should be free to part own other businesses for their own financial security.
Even right now, especially in the US, there is too much centralised government, where the government is buying shares in companies, inflating their share price.
That isn't fair. It isn't democratic. It's corrupt. A bad business should go to the wall.
I know. It's not a problem that can be solved by turning anyone upside down and emptying their pockets. And no, I don't propose we do nothing.
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I don't understand how getting all emotional solves anything.
You don't like billionaires. Yep I get it, a lot of people think the sheer amount of wealth they have is immoral, but that's a bad starting point to bring about fairness, especially given how they made that much money and whether their business is actually having a postive impact against the rest of us and the planet.
The real problem is the centralised power of corporates especially given how a small number of people have a lot of power over those corporations.
If we want to live in a world where for example big corporates don't control our food supply and small farmers and smaller distributers do, then people will need decentralised technologies to do so.
I don't understand what your problem with crypto is. It's many technologies that already exists, put together to make something that amounts to more than the sum of the parts, to enable people to organise and be whatever they want.
For example, a DAO (Decentralised Autnomous Organisation) that is in effect a workers collective.
When a DAO is created, the rules are there for all to see and the whole thing is limited just by our imagainations and regulations.
It's all about finding a combination where workers get what they want, as well as investors.
Workers might not have the capital to start something up, but a DAO can be programmed to take investment, repay investors over time, while buying back shares from the original investors to resdistribute to workers...heck maybe even reward repeat customers with shares.
Thats the job of the tech - as humans we argee between us rules that thing should enforce and we go into the whole thing knowing that thousands of computers will enforce the rules and keep it fair.
I'm awfully sorry if it finds something better than your ideological ideals but hey, with freedom comes innovation.
Nothing "cultish" about "Hey everyone, you're free to try whaterver you want!"
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NoXion
You remain unbroken, for your fight... is Eternal
No billionaire is self-made. They all got rich by exploiting people, no exceptions. How can I say this, you may ask? Because all billionaires are ordinary human beings, just like the rest of us. There is no such thing as an individual human who is billions of times more productive than the rest of the species. All of their wealth is made off the backs of others.
This includes those billionaires whose ownership encompasses socially useful and necessary tasks, such as steelmaking.
No, they will need technology, period. Whether that tech is decentralised or not will depend on the specific uses to which it is put. Thankfully humans are clever beings and invent things all the time. You're putting the cart before the horse when you privilege technology over political economy like you're doing now.
It's a speculative commodity with no inherent practical purpose, which only has value because a bunch of libertarian nerds specifically built it up as a get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme for fools to buy into and be left holding the bag. Crypto and many of its fans have pretensions about it being a currency, but that's just PR bullshit because in order to be a currency it would have to be stable enough to be a reliable store of value, but that would go directly against its real function as a speculative commodity. All of which would be bad enough by itself, but then there's the whole environmental angle where crypto as a whole consumes more electricity than entire frigging countries. All because a bunch of dickheads want to make to some money. Fuck off.
Oh, and on a personal note, crypto miners fucked up the GPU market in the pursuit of their greed. That gets an extra "fuck you" from me.
Funny how it is that all that the people in crypto want to be, is richer version of themselves.
Yet this isn't what we see happening. Instead we see a scene filled with impossible dreams, if not outright scams.
Even if you was right, so what? If you were to be right, it's a symptom of a much deeper problem that comes into being somehwere after the right of people to invest their capital and have a share of the profits.
Because without the person who starts up the business, there is no business.
There is NOTHING to stop you starting a private business with a bunch of workers sharing the profits amongst the workers and also deciding how much of the profits goes to what. As a matter of fact, the workers in such a business need day to day transparency to make sure some cretin isn't leeching off their profits ... if only there was some kind technology that would enable them to do that?
Centralised technology requires a centralised organisation to run it.
Such an organisation can be compromised from the outside, by being bought up, bribed or even outright nationalised by a government of any poltiical colour, esepcially one that is in the pockets of the corporates.
So no, the only way it can be done in such a manner that is transparant and robust, is through decentralsied technology.
People can just build build build in confidence that it can't be destroyed or fucked over by an outside entity or infiltration.
There are far more better ways for me to make money by doing all sorts than being sat here explaining to you how blockchain tech can help normal regular people.
- Of course there are loads of scams. It's a permissionless economy.
- Scammers get caught, they are leaving an immutable trail of forensics that will be around forever!
- AFTER taking into account the market cap, in percentage terms there is less laundering going on in crypto than in the traditional finance system.
- Bad news travels fast, you're not going to read on the BBC website about all the good projects within crypto ecosystems.
It doesn't help us understand the truth if you decide to be so emotional about it.
If you take the most simple crypto out there, bitcoin - it cannot be confiscated. 12 words in head, a store of wealth in the head.
That's a practical purpose. To argue that something like ethereum doesn't have a practical purpose is absolutely laughable, it's right up there with mobile phones and the internet for the number of uses, including people reclaiming their own data away from corporates, you know, privacy!!!
Please stop banging on about crypto being used as currency. I've told you many many many times that one is arguing for crypto to be adopted as currency as some kind killer app. Crypto doesn't need to replace any currency (Whether it ever will is a debate I don't really care for).
There's a difference between "Greed", "Let's make some cash" and "I want to help secure the Ethereum network"
Bitcoin uses an algo whereby GPU mining isn't efficient. It's Ethereum miners who were buying all the GPU cards, because Ethereum's algos are done to prevent specialist mining which would centralise the mining into the hands of people who can afford expensive hardware. Anyway, you're point is now moot because Ethereum is moving over to PoS so won't be using GPU mining come mid September.
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There were no surprises in there for me, it makes me angry and want to cry. A programme like that needs showing on BBC1 or ITV at primetime, say 19.00 or 20.00 for many many people to watch it, but how many would watch it, how many would care and how many would find it too hard hitting?
This is becoming, but has not got there yet, the ultimate in greed culture. It's cynical, patronising, condescending, bullying, emotional blackmail. To say it's an ugly, sickening culture is an understatement and I am sure many would say, which was alluded to in the programme, if you don't like it, can't hack it get out, you are not welcome here.
It is nothing new though. We all know about slavery and people being worked to death or beaten to death on a whim. Salomon Bros were one such company who participated and thrived in this greed culture whilst employees died. Salomon's paid, they paid well, they threw money at you and the expected their pounds worth of flesh. I remember being told that there were no clocks in offices because they did not time watch, they just got on with the job. If it wasn't them that started the lunch is for wimps culture, they embraced it with every breath in their body. We didn't starve because they had trolley's full of food brought in every lunchtime, then in the evenings they had takeaways delivered. Getting taxi's home after work was pretty much routine. I saw the dealers and the like who were broken by the pressure. they were having mental breakdowns and or triple bypass's by the time they were 35 or 40.
Here's a snippet of the culture from Michael Lewis's book Liars poker...
"Because the forty-first floor was the chosen home of the firm's most ambitious people, and because there were no rules governing the pursuit of profit and glory, the men who worked there, including the more bloodthirsty, had a hunted look about them. The place was governed by the simple understanding that the unbridled pursuit of perceived self interest was healthy. Eat or be eaten. The men of 41 worked with one eye cast over their shoulders to see whether someone was trying to do them in, for there was no telling what manner of man had levered himself to the rung below you and was now hungry for your job. The limit of acceptable conduct within Salomon Brothers was wide indeed. It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mould people's behaviour into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive."
Coming more up to date, we have middle of the road companies refusing to recognise unions, offering zero hours contracts and just heaping more pressure on staff.
How is everything used where I work; well it is reaching these levels and worse. Our calls are monitored, as is our time, for whatever reason, we are away from our desk, I don't think there is a day in the last year ( we work 24/7) when overtime wasn't necessary.
I am well enough off to not kowtow to this culture and am refusing to do so. I have been pulled about this and other aspects of my job ( and my work environment) by my supervisor and for actions I have taken. They are starting to realise that I won't bow to their needs and be bullied. They know it would be tough but not the end of the world if I walked away. The amusing side of this is they don't ever have enough time to complete my one to ones because they simply don't have time. Our time of sick is monitored with limits being set before recriminations set in. But an employer can expect something in return for their money. Do you think I could ever be a supervisor, laying down some of these unwritten laws?
Moving forward, I guess we will be assessed for our health and fitness to be able to "perform" to the best of our ability in order that we have no excuses for failing to meet targets and his assessment will form part of our job application/interview. We will also be "guided" on our health and diet regimes because it is in "our" interests. There is no reason why we could not have microchips inserted just under our skin.
Am I angry? Need I go on? Why don't people care more and take a little action to prevent these practices? I work in a profession that is all about caring, yet our employers make the right noises but don't really care about the staff yet on the other hand, my fellow staff members/carers really don't appear to care about the rights and conditions of others.
What can you do, get old angry and bitter or try and be a little pragmatic which is tantamount to condoning what's happening. ( well you did ask ).
Thistlewaite
Member
What a powerful post that was.
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I could go on. You could read my posts about my current job and how its the best job with the worst management and my quite "protests".
I could go on about the philosophy of this. Should I be pragmatic. The "Buddhist" in me doesn't want to forever bang on about stuff like this or lecture people. The most powerful way of dealing with
things like this is for people to learn the facts for themselves, but they don't, for all manner of reasons.
There are many far superior brains than mine who are on record who say that to do nothing is to condone it (which is even worse?) eg
Einstein "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing".
I see Truss has now come out and said we are a bunch of lazy bastards. Presumably she wants us all treated like Amazon employees.
fuck her, fuck amazon. Is there worse to come, probably. Will I see it, no, fortunately not, but sadly my children and to some extent, my wife probably will.
We are off to hell in a handcart I tell you, so sayeth chair person tag.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
We're fucking doomed. Or are we?
Yes, and they're grown commercially not in greenhouses too. They don't need greenhouses, which is what I said. And dude you're the one who keeps trying to correct me, not the other way round :D What started this was me saying: anything can be grown in the U.K. now if it’s more cost effective...
www.urban75.net
Pretty sure it's a follow up of the article above.
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Douglas Rushkoff. Sun 4 Sep 2022
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cybershot
Well-Known Member
Sounds like everything in the film 'Don't Look Up'We're fucking doomed. Or are we?
Yes, and they're grown commercially not in greenhouses too. They don't need greenhouses, which is what I said. And dude you're the one who keeps trying to correct me, not the other way round :D What started this was me saying: anything can be grown in the U.K. now if it’s more cost effective...
Pretty sure it's a follow up of the article above.
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Douglas Rushkoff. Sun 4 Sep 2022
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
This is a chilling article about billionaire preppers and how they are designing their shelters and how the expect to run things after SHTF:
Rest of the story here:
www.theguardian.com
The fact that they're considering using shock collars to keep their workforce in line after SHTF, should be a clue as to how they think about the world and their will to power. I've never subscribed to the idea that billionaires are inherently evil, but that's an evil plan under any definition.
Rest of the story here:
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
The fact that they're considering using shock collars to keep their workforce in line after SHTF, should be a clue as to how they think about the world and their will to power. I've never subscribed to the idea that billionaires are inherently evil, but that's an evil plan under any definition.
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That's all fantasy. Will we ever see the population reduced to just a few dozen people surviving. If we did, would they really want to be part of a world where nothing exists anymore. Would they be happy living out their natural confined in a locked cave. Would they want or need servents. Just so many things about preppers that's just mad. I think you would be better off moving to slab city.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
I've spent a lot of time at gun shows talking to people and the "lone wolf against the world" idea seems to be a common fantasy. But, as you suggest, it just isn't sustainable. You aren't going to have any real security without community. Also, it's dangerous the ultra-wealthy are thinking this way. Essentially, they're admitting that they consider the rest of us expendable, if we can't be controlled. What motivation do they have to mitigate climate change, food insecurity, or any other problem if they have a ready escape plan?
editor
hiraethified
He might just be a multi-multi millionaire or perhaps a billionaire, but what's not in doubt is that he's a complete cunt:
NoXion
You remain unbroken, for your fight... is Eternal
I wonder for how long a group of six very hungry Navy Seals could mortify a billionaire parasite's soft body, until he hands over the combinations? Hell, if it comes to it, they could kill two birds with one stone, and cut off bits of the cunt's flesh and eat them in front of him.
These people would literally rather become Hitler in his bunker before even considering releasing the crazed death-grip of their psychopathic greed, even just a little bit.
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