Adalast

True, but what did Valve actually delist on Steam? I frequent the AO section and everything has appeared to be business as usual in there. I had honestly not even heard about the pressures on Steam until I saw the stuff about Itch.

Time to start lobbying governments. EU/USA legislation stating that outside of legal violations, a payment processor is not allowed to refuse a legitimate legal transaction.

There are examples of Ethical Capitalism in the market. Arizona Iced Tea, Costco, and Valve are all companies that I would say are as close as we are going to get to ethical capitalists. Neither Arizona Iced Tea nor Valve are publicly traded, which means that there is only one way to buy them, and neither are interested. I'm pretty sure this is a key to Ethical capitalism, an end to trading on companies.

Honestly, there is probably only one change that needs made to being even traded companies in line, and that is to make a mandate that a successful company is one that provides the best work environment and a great product, not the one with the largest market cap.

I'm not going to agree with you either. While difficult to maintain and impossible to make a consistent system due to the nature of some humans, ethical capitalism can and does exist. I would prefer a universal egalitarian society with no money and labor for the sake of labor, not survival, but that is not realistic either.

There should be fair pay. The gap between executive pay and laborer pay should be under 10x, in my opinion at least. There should also be fair pricing. But there does need to be some functional level of income above expenses for labor and materials. That is where responsible growth lives. That is where being able to hire on more people that you still pay fairly lives. If you are paying a minimum of 75k, you need at least 75k over your outlay before you can give another person a job. If businesses operated how you described, always existing at break even, then the job marker would quickly stagnate and the only positions that would be available to entry level people would be ones that were vacated by termination or death, because promotions would also not be possible. You described an equilibrium state which prevents growth of any kind.

Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.

He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.

The view you have of "profit" is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is "taught" about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.

🤷‍♂️ I don't expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn't, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.

We don't talk about the incident.

Reminds me of the ST:Next Gen episode where the colony finds the silicon based life and the crystal ends up calling humans "sacks of mostly water"

Seriously. I was so surpeiced when I learned that porn in Japan is serialized and you only need to know the serial number of a porn to find the exact one piece you are looking for.

Nah, we just both have the same parent.

I like to spice up my time with spreadsheets by doing them in Pandas. That way they can be theoretical and it is like mathematical roleplay.

Awww, thank you. I feel seen.