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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

    Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

    You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

    And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

    Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.


  • This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

    From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

    If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

    Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.



  • “Privacy” means two different things depending on the audience. For me privacy means that my information is not being used to advance some organizations commercial interest. For others it means that my information will never be shared with a government.

    Don’t advertise to me

    Or

    Don’t narc on me

    I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf. Especially if I have been using their service to commit crimes in my country. If you are doing things your government would prefer you didn’t, hire a good lawyer and consult with them about what should be sent via email (spoiler, it’s nothing). The mafia doesn’t send emails, or put anything in writing, if you do crimes, you shouldn’t either.



  • There is no world where a 3rd party ticketing company should be able to own, or develop exclusive relationships with a venue operator.

    The promoter, act, and venue operator should negotiate how tickets will be distributed when they draw up contracts. In this fucked up reality, the ticketing company owns the venues and controls all access to tickets and their distribution.

    TM would still do tons of business in that world. They actually offer a compelling product to acts, venues and promoters, but they should always be in competition with the act and the venue box office.

    TM and live-nation should be competitors but they have been allowed to form a vertically integrated monopoly. THIS is the actual shit the FTC was built to combat.




  • Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

    OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

    Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.




  • I have received a somewhat unusual vaccination and my antibodies were valuable to a drug company for a while. They were paying 120$ for plasma for a while and you could go 2x a week. The plasma center, like most, wasn’t in the best neighborhood and the cash was doled out be an ATM like machine when you were finished. Well 120 took a hell of a lot more “kachunks” that 15 did and by the time you got your cash there was a whole room full of pissed off desperate folks staring at you. Not that fun.

    I have had to sell plasma to make ends meet in my life and I know what those people must have been feeling watching some kid in nice clothes get paid 10x what they were for the same unpleasant procedure. Fucking rough. I used the money to buy a house. They would be lucky to get a groceries out of the deal



  • Wall Street investors gave him the money. Him knowing that they would be dumb enough to give it to him is the reason he got it. Which is a weird way of “earning” money but it kind of is.

    Despite our feelings on the company, Wall Street ate that shit up, thus his equity package is worth all that money. Why did Wall Street like Reddit stock so much? I sure don’t fucking know, which is why I never thought to ask them for hundreds of millions of dollars for a company that loses money hand over fist.





  • So many different ways to cope with the horrifying idea that companies need us more than we need them. For this rare moment, just a sliver of time, we workers are not forced to prostrate ourselves at their feet. Instead of understanding that labor is a market and right now it’s a sellers market, they are inventing cultural changes to explain their sudden loss of fortune and power.

    Millions of American workers died or became disabled due to a virus that we failed to handle responsibly. Millions more left the workforce to care for children or family members. All the while, demand for goods and services stayed strong. More work to do and fewer people to do it, gonna have to pay more for labor. It’s so fucking simple.

    It’s not that I don’t care about work, it’s that I don’t care about YOU! I have other options my dude, cough up or I will find somebody who will.