this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

One such thing would be a mechanical ruleset that adjusts the amount of wealth and assets a company can hold, according to employee headcount.

Expert here. That's a bad idea. Example: a small law firm, 10 employees including owners/partners/I don't care how they're organized. They have 3 bank accounts: their payroll account, their operating fund (where all their nonpayroll expenditures are made) and their client liability account. None of the money in that account is actually theirs, they just hold it while waiting for clients to cash their settlement checks.

Proportionally, at least at the firm I've consulted with, their client liability account is several orders of magnitude larger than either of the other accounts. Technically the money isn't theirs, they are just custodians, and the interest from that account is their bar association dues.

My point is, certain asset caps may look appropriate for one industry and simultaneously be absolutely disruptive to others.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

In that case, what would you believe to be an appropriate solution for your industry? I would like your viewpoint, it might refine my concept a bit further*.

*My approach is assuming a scenario that can be broadly be described as 'What if FDR failed to save capitalism?', or a total breakdown of the economic reality we know. That is the sort of thing that the Framers of America did when they made the Constitution. They formalized rules on preventing absolute political power, so I am looking for something similar regarding economic gaps.

[–] ShittDickk@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've thought a good one would be to have all publicly traded business allocate 15% equity to employees, and require a seat on the board for an employee elected representative. Employees should be allowed to vote to sell off a certain amount every quarter, and any stock buybacks would go into the employee pool until the 15% is reached again.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I have a feeling that this is different from Beeg's concern about client assets, but more about employee influence over the company? The idea of an equity limit might be a good addition to the Universal Ranked Income concept that I have cobbled together. Thank you. :)


In any case, my notes has two things about my own take:

1: Employees can vote for whether someone can obtain and retain their leadership position within their chapter and for higher rungs of the organization. Also, the pay grade of those leaders. Employees who are fired or retired from the company will receive 1:1 retirement pay over time, equal to the days and pay grade that they worked at the company, and can vote on any position of the company or those it has merged with. This essentially means that legacy employees can determine the leadership of the company, and cannot be made to 'go away' in a political sense.

2: Stocks when sold, have two components. The first is that they pay an amount over a fixed time, that is more than what they were paid for. It cannot be be sold nor traded, until it has been exhausted of this payback value. When exhausted of value, the share can now be traded to another individual for money, or returned to the company for the value it was bought at. The company cannot refuse the return, nor offer an increased price. A share returned to the company can be reissued, which allows it to start paying the fixed value again. Secondly, people who hold a share can vote for company leadership*. People within leadership positions at the company cannot own stocks from their own organization.

By requiring stocks to be held for a certain time before they can be traded, it makes it harder for stockholders to hoard and dispose of stocks when convenient. The gradual payout is a reward to people who buy stocks from the company. Presumably, the inability of stocks to have guaranteed value when they become tradeable will promote their return to the company.

*It is assumed that we are operating within an economic system, where there are absolute wealth and asset caps. There is only so many shares a person can possess, and holding shares can prevent someone from owning a yacht or bigger house - they have to lose the shares to make room within the cap for things they enjoy. This helps limit the influence of individual stock holders.

There's a few ways to account for it. i mean, if you are doing Net Assets (Assets-Liability), that's just Equity and having a limit on the total Equity a business is able to carry at specific sizes feels like it's incentivizing the wrong things.

It's kind of interesting to see the changes in investment rates that happened when the tax rate dropped from 90% on anything over a million in annual income. People would essentially buy losses (invest in businesses that were struggling) in order to keep from having to pay the government more. So struggling businesses got a little more capital to survive. Simply changing the top personal/corp income tax rate to something draconian at some arbitrarily high amount can have transformative effects on a society. that's where i'd start.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

As a more general principle, don't build nitpicky implementation detail into a strategy document. That's how you get brainfarts like the 3/5 compromise.

[–] survirtual@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What is it you're an expert of, here? Game theory? Or do you mean you're a lawyer?

If you're a lawyer, you are not an expert on formulating a society. We've let lawyers run things for a long time and look at where it's gotten us.

The system needs to promote positive, human centric outcomes. Maybe having clients with that much wealth isn't fundamentally a positive outcome? Perhaps that idea needs to be reworked as a part of the oncoming changes?

In other words, anyone dealing with a certain threshold of wealth needs to hire human beings in order to raise their cap. I like this idea a lot actually. The bigger the clients, the more they have to pay if they want legal representation. For billionaires, legal representation would cost an absolute fortune and provide income to thousands of people.

Honestly I haven't thought of this pattern but the more I think about it, the better it seems.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Maybe having clients with that much wealth isn’t fundamentally a positive outcome?

let's remove the ability of people to sue for damages when they're injured, that's ALSO a positive societal goal.

where do you think that money came from?

[–] survirtual@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Preferably, yes. Ideally, we are all insured by a single payer system and in the case of an accident, people are compensated via that insurance.

No legal bank account needed.

Next point?

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

oh, you want to argue. accidents are a very small subset of legal injuries

[–] survirtual@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I am not looking to argue. I just don't think there is a future for the law profession in a post-scarcity society. Disagreements will occur and negotiations will exist, but there are better ways to resolve them.

Ideally, lawyers, marketers, bankers, and politicians will no longer be needed. They can all be automated.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i mean, ideally everything can be automated. the reason we have lawyers is because there is (usually intentional) wiggle room in the law, and people sometimes need more than "society runs better if we honor our word" to act with integrity, follow the law, or put their shoppings cart back. some people need the stick of legal repercussions all of the time. automating politicians (unless you are going for a direct democracy, which no one has the time for) concentrates power in the hands of the people maintaining the automation. i agree with you on the other two, but i'm sure i could find justifications for human intervention in their processes if i tried. not to mention there's a certain amount of ingenuity and talent that AI can't duplicate. nearly everything i've seen that's AI produced lacks soul.

also, i'm not a lawyer, i am just occasionally an expert witness or forensic analyst for some law firms and have some lawyers in the family. I specialize in one federal and two state titles, but again, i provide analysis i don't practice law. my career has spanned four or five marginally related disciplines so not quite sure what to call me

[–] survirtual@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

AI can't run anything, but it can act as an advisor and analyst. It will need to be completely open sourced and transparent. It will also need to be local. Direct democracy doesn't work, a liquid democracy can. People have proven they do have the time with their social media use. The more active people can participate more directly, the less active can delegate their voice. Any and all votes can be revoked. All votes are of public interest and are open. If a delegated issue is in disagreement with someone's opinion they can granularly change their vote.

Executive roles don't exist via election, they are determined by delegated thresholds. Anyone occupying a role like that can be removed just as easily. Adjacent advisory or expert positions are filled the same way. Roles are divided into expertise and operate independently of other branches. A citizen can granularly choose their ideal people, and it contributes to them actually being the people. More preferred is they delegate to someone more knowledgeable than them that they actually know, and a delegation chain naturally selects the most qualified specialists.

With some imagination you can see how this could replace everything, because it is compatible with every system of governance that currently exists. The objective isn't to dictate, it is to give people a voice universally. If people want to delegate their way into a dictatorship, they can. They can also remove the dictator just as simply, and the world can transparently see what the people want & act accordingly.

With the cryptography primitives commonly available now, this is possible at this very moment. It is possible in an incorruptible way, that could likely persist for thousands of years. The only piece that relies on human trust is identity verification, but the branching nature of a liquid democracy allows for factions to exist, so the natural uncertainty contained within identity is irrelevant. Output is a better measure than identity. If a faction's output does not match their claimed identity people can isolate the collective and diminish their weight on an individual basis (I don't trust A's opinion on B, so I will weigh it less on C).

Anyway, just some food for thought.

only problem inherent in the current generation of AI is that AI being wrong is inherent to the mathematical model, but that's just a math problem don't worry they'll sort it out with another few billion dollars a year