I can understand why an owner wouldn’t want to give away small parts of their company. What I don’t understand is why some people are willing to work as if they were part-owners when they’re just on salary. In a lot of start ups, the amount of extra effort people put in when they get options means the options easily pay for themselves.

Gee, what effect could a trillionaire, who frequently meddles in politics, in a country where money=speech, and therefore political spending is unlimited, possibly have on my life?

As someone from the exact opposite of the planet

Are you from space? Space in some ways is the opposite of a planet. Or maybe a black hole?

When I first graduated, I worked for a series of small start-up companies. Most of them ended up failing, which is normal for a small company. But, at least when I was working hard there I was given stock options so if the company had done well, I could have shared in the success.

I’ve always wondered why that isn’t more common. I guess the answer is that some people are willing to work really hard even if they’re not given a slice of the ownership of the company. I never understood that. If I own part of this startup, I’ll work hard to make sure it succeeds because then I’ll get rich too. If you’re just paying me a salary, I’m fulfilling the terms of my contract and that’s it.

Here’s where it’s really dangerous. The spending in the 2020 election cycle in the US was the highest in history. The $18 billion spent was more than twice as much as the $8.5 billion in 2016 and even more than the $14.8 billion from 2024.

If Elon Musk wanted to go dollar-for-dollar with every ad dollar spent in the US, on every congressional race, mayor’s race, and, of course, every presidential candidate from the moment they’re just considering running to the day of the election, he could do it without even noticing. Even if he converted all his shares to cash and put them in an ultra-safe savings account that only paid 5% per year, he’d be bringing in $50 billion per year. So, a $18 billion election campaign would be a small fraction of his yearly income (especially given that it only happens every 4 years). In fact, if he saved up for 4 years and had $200b to spend every time there was a presidential election, he could outspend everybody else by a ratio of 10:1 without difficulty.

Now, what do you think he’s actually going to spend to make sure that there are never any laws passed that threaten his wealth? And, if he doesn’t think he’s going to get the results he wants with his political spending alone, what else might he do with tens of billions per year outside the political system?

Remember, this is just his “pocket money”, this isn’t even dipping into his wealth so much that it actually might go down year-to-year.

If you do that calculation with $1 trillion, that’s $50 billion in spending money per year, or $137 million per day, $5.7m per hour, $95,000 per minute, $1,600 per second.

If you accumulated $1m per minute, or $60m per hour, guess how long it would take to reach $1 trillion? Well, $60m/hour is $1.44 billion per day, $10 billion per week, so it would be about 100 weeks or 2 full years before you hit $1 trillion. And that’s assuming no investments, nothing but taking the money and throwing the cash into a vault.

$1m per minute, and it’s still 2 years before you get $1 trillion.

Athletes are among the people who earn the highest salaries based on their abilities and talents. The top athletes earn more than the top Hollywood stars. The English Premier League has the highest total wage bill of any futbol / soccer league on the planet. Paying Manchester City’s wage bill costs £300m per year, the club with the lowest wage bill was Burnley at only £70m/year. Sum up every team and you get £2.7 billion per year, or $3.6 billion. That’s less than 1% of $1 trillion. If you took $1 trillion in cash and set it aside, never adding anything to it, you could pay the wages of all those clubs for centuries.

Or because school was actually well taught, back in the day, and Gen X learned that prior to capitalism there were other economic systems, like feudalism / manorialism, that were even worse than capitalism.

Capitalism may be bad, but it’s not the origin of all those terrible things. If anything, it took baby steps towards addressing some of them.

People who say “that isn’t because of capitalism” aren’t necessarily defending capitalism. They’re simply annoyed by the less well educated who want to believe that everything bad is because of capitalism.

Jobs paid enough so one person could stay home is how it worked

That’s a fantasy. In the 1800s and before there was so much at-home work to be done that it was a full time job for someone (virtually always the wife). She had to do the baking, cooking, mending clothes, cleaning, etc. all without any electrical appliances. That included no refrigerator or freezer, so shopping had to be done a lot more often. There were also no cars, so people either had to walk to do their shopping, or they used a horse. But, if they used a horse, then there was extra work related to keeping the horse alive and in good shape. Clothes were also a lot more expensive, so a lot more time was spent either making clothes at home and mending clothes that had holes, worn spots, etc. It wasn’t “to do chores and whatnot”, it was a full-time job involving more work than a typical a typical job from modern days.

Then there was WWI, then the “roaring 20s”, which is when electrical appliances first started appearing, and then the stock market crashed and the great depression hit. During the great depression, if either the wife or the husband could find work, they were lucky, and probably had to support the whole family. During the great depression, a lot of worker protections were put in place through the New Deal. But, the jobs weren’t there.

Then WWII hit, and for a while the US was manufacturing things for the rest of the world without being in the war itself. That helped the economy get going again. When the US joined the war, the economy was really going, but there was rationing in place so the workers who were earning money weren’t able to spend it. When the war ended, the US was in an incredibly strong position. Workers had savings to spend once rationing was removed. Every other country had had its industrial base smashed by the war. As a result, the US manufacturing was in high demand all over the world. For contrast, even though the UK was also one of the “winners” of WWII, rationing was in place until 1954.

So, high demand for industrial workers, worker protections left over from the New Deal era, labour-saving electrical appliances being available for the first time, cars everywhere… it was a unique set of circumstances that meant for maybe the first time in history a man could work a blue collar job and have a wife who stayed at home and just did “chores and whatnot”. That lasted a few decades. People blame Reagan for a lot of it, but really by the time he was elected that golden period for blue collar workers was already ending.

Also, keep in mind that strong protections for workers didn’t just happen. The government didn’t just decide that it would be nice to workers. Workers had to fight hard for those rights. The 8 hour day is the result of fights that were very violent. Bombs were thrown at cops. Supposed ringleaders were hanged by the government after show trials. FDR pushed for laws to protect workers because the alternative was rioting. If today’s workers want to share in the wealth, they need to riot, they need to be prepared to die. Nothing’s going to change if it’s just complaining that “this isn’t how it should be”.

Zen is a reskinned Firefox. Firefox depends on Google’s funding to stay afloat.

Everything else, other than Safari on Mac is either chrome-based or firefox-based.

The 2026 FBI recommends that you vote for Trump, or else.

NPR had some good bits about this.

Country music hasn’t always been the soundtrack of the Republican Party, according to music historian Lester Feder. He says President Nixon cemented the relationship during his years in the White House, and there’s a country album to prove it called Thank You, Mr. President.

https://www.npr.org/2007/02/18/7484160/the-conservative-evolution-of-country-music

In that case, Mexico and Canada can have their own final, and Mexico can win, as is tradition.

And then the only countries involved are Mexico, USA and Canada. Then Mexico beats the US, as is tradition.

This polling seems to work extremely hard to avoid noticing the elephant in the room: a company isn’t going to build a datacenter in the middle of Beverly Hills.

The data from the article seems to suggest that people in the top quartile of income resisted 14 DCs out of the 365 projects considered.

They then decided that that is a resistance rate of 14 / 365 * 100 = 3.836%.

Um. No.

The resistance rate is number resisted / number proposed for that income quartile. If only 14 were proposed in upper-income areas, and 14 were resisted, that would mean that the resistance rate for high income areas was 100%.

Could be 100x fewer, or 10,000x fewer. 5x fewer would mean that rich people and poor people resist DCs at the same rate, but that there are 5x fewer DCs in rich areas. But, my guess is that rich people would actually resist a lot more if someone dared to consider building a DC in their area… but that probably never happens, because why would a company buy up expensive real estate for a DC?

If Biden’s VP had been a staight, white man, he might have won. The US is a sexist, racist, generally bigoted place. If you ask someone on a phone survey if they would vote for a woman, many of them will say yes. They may not even be lying, they just believe they’re not sexist until it’s actually time to vote, and then they come up with some excuse to justify why they didn’t vote for the woman.

To be honest, I’m still surprised that Obama won. But, the whole Tea Party thing, and then Trump was all in reaction to a black man being elected president.

that during its 17 years of tracking presidents with YouGov

17 years. The survey started in 2009. So, the presidents included are Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump in his second term.

He’s the most unpopular president… out of 3.

I have no doubt that Trump is one of the worst, most despised presidents in at least modern history. But, I wouldn’t consider “modern history” to have started with the Obama presidency.

To be elected, someone needs to win the swing voters who aren’t rabid Republicans or rabid Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Obama’s presidency, and Kamala Harris’ run for office shows that a lot of those swing voters are racist and sexist.

Even if Fox News went off the air tomorrow, along with Newsmax and all the various right-wing podcasts and streaming junk, there are a lot of swing voters who won’t vote for a woman, or won’t vote for a gay man, or won’t vote for someone without white skin. Many of them probably don’t even think of themselves as bigots. They just think things like “I support women, and I had no problem with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but commander in chief of the military is different, maybe if she had military experience…” Or, they’ll think “I have gay friends, and Mayor Pete seems like a great guy, he’s really smart and caring, but I don’t think people who choose that lifestyle really have the right values to lead the country”. Or they’ll think “I don’t have a problem with it, but people in Washington will, and they’ll never get anything done as president.”

Of course outlets like Fox News are always going to go hard after every Democrat, even a straight, white, male, christian one. Maybe that will influence some swing voters. But, it’s more about energizing enraging their base. I don’t think your typical swing voter is a fox news addict.

Overall, the general shape of the system makes sense.

Everybody receives services provided by the government, so everybody should help pay for that government. The FDA tests to make sure food and drugs are safe. The NHTSA makes sure cars and highways are safe. And, of course, the big one, the military protecting the country from invasion. The standard deduction exists so that people only have to start paying taxes once they get their basic needs met.

Of course, I know that in the real world it’s much more complicated than that. The US military might actually make Americans less safe by getting involved in all kinds of conflicts overseas. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th would probably never have attacked if the US had a defence-only military. The FDA is being corrupted by an antivax nutjob, and so-on. But, the theory of everybody contributing taxes to pay for things provided for the common good makes sense. The real standard deduction is absurdly low and almost nobody can actually fully meet their needs with that minimal amount.

It also makes sense in the abstract that corporations don’t pay taxes on money that doesn’t get distributed to the owners. If a Mom and Pop grocery store is doing really well and Mom and Pop pay themselves huge salaries, they pay personal income tax on those salaries. If they arrange to do it through corporate dividends or something, then it’s the corporation that pays taxes. On the other hand, if the store is doing really well and they want to expand, it makes sense that the government not tax them based on their revenues if they’re re-investing those revenues into the business. If they’re investing the money into making a bigger, better store to serve their community rather than simply taking the money out as profits into Mom’s purse and Pop’s wallet that’s good for the community. Also, if Mom and Pop made $400k in revenue but spent $390k on expenses, and that includes the wages of some cashiers, it’s probably unreasonable to tax the revenue before the employees are even paid.

The problem is really in the various loopholes and ways corporations claim to be re-investing the money. We wouldn’t want Mom and Pop’s grocery store to be unable to expand because they’re taxed before they can even invest. On the other hand if Pop buys a Porsche SUV under the store’s name and claims it’s a grocery delivery van, that’s not fair. Other people have to buy their SUVs with after-tax money. In theory, if Pop is caught claiming that SUV as a business expense but using it for purely personal purposes, the IRS will go after him. But, of course, the reality is that companies get away with that kind of thing all the time.

I think part of the complaint here is based in the reality that corporations get away with lots of things, and that taxes are a real burden on the poor and middle class. On the other hand, I think there’s also a lot of financial illiteracy where people really have no idea how the taxation system works. They just see ragebait on social media and get angry because something about it seems unfair.