psivchaz

I don't know the full history of corporate shenanigans, but it's my understanding that the beginning of it all was to help form businesses that no individual could afford to start. No single person should reasonably have the funds to build a factory with all of the expensive equipment and parts needed to make cell phones. So you get people together who think cell phones are a good idea, they all pitch in, and now you can afford to build it and they get to share in the profits when it succeeds.

I like the employee-owned idea, but it seems like it would be hard to get off the ground in industries that require huge upfront investments. Imagine you want to build a grocery store, but the land and the building and the initial stock all takes money so you have to ask the cashier for $10,000 up front before you can actually build the thing and later start paying them. I legitimately don't know, are there proposed ways to build these businesses but make them employee-owned?

I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It's like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.

Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don't think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.

It's way more professional than I could manage under the circumstances.

You can't take motive for granted. I would be willing to bet that police are operating under the assumption that it's related to his job. But you can't just rule out a personal grudge or something else. The writing on the bullets could just as easily be a distraction. It's probably not, but it could.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn't know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn't get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they're screwing over. And if I couldn't afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn't have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn't have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we've built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can't do anything or never know there's a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It's insane.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship... People who can't afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

Some of them, I assume, are good people.

I have a family member that doesn't get this (thankfully just the one). It's not that he voted for Trump, it's all the shit he says. The casual "haha jk" racism when I introduced him to a Hispanic friend of mine. The fact that he will loudly talk about some things specifically to upset or annoy people. The fact that he thinks politics is a team sport and Trump's win is a personal victory for him that somehow means he "beat" the rest of us.

I can confirm that it has not appeared to affect the functionality of those sites for me. Although... There are some sites with multiple fields that don't work and some that do, I've just assumed that the sites which don't work were down to poor code.

I just picked a state. Average infant daycare cost is $1172/mo. Maximum of 4 infants per caregiver, so a maximum of $4.688.

Health insurance here averages $400/mo, for an individual (some often paid by the employer).

Assuming they are employed, the employer is paying for federal unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance, state unemployment insurance. It was really hard to get solid numbers but based on my reading, we can estimate about 2% will go to that.

So we have $4296 left over. Assuming payroll and supplies and everything else costs nothing at all (which is definitely not accurate), and assuming we give the rest straight to the employee... Their gross would be $51,000 roughly.

The average daycare worker in this state makes about $33k/year.

And where's the list? Like if I could just find a list of like, "Congratulations on being a homeowner, do all this shit because if you don't the repairs will eat you alive" it would be handy.

I was in a position like this once. The first two or three months were great. TBH, I mostly played video games and cleaned the house. It felt like free money. By the six month mark, I quit to go to something else. It's surprising how mentally draining it is to just do nothing.

I think I took two things away from that experience: One, I think people generally have an innate need to produce something. We don't want to just sit around and entertain ourselves, we want to contribute. Two, I think the 40 hour work week isn't quite the right balance. Maybe 30 would be better.