Confer the right to a portion of the profits, distributed as dividends. Or anything else, really.

Tell me you know nothing about stocks without saying you know nothing about stocks.

A company can create classes of stocks that confer zero ownership in a company.

False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.

There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.

Multiple types of stock. One would be limited to employees, another would be open for purchase by anyone.

The key is in how the various stock types are structured. If control can be monopolized by a non-employee stock type, is the business truly employee owned? I would posit not.

Employee-owned businesses would be the thin edge of the wedge in favour of socialism/communism. It would be a “bridge system” whose purpose is to demonstrate the societal superiority of socialism/communism.

As such, I see your metaphor as being mostly inaccurate. The purpose isn’t to create more tigers, the purpose is to create more house cats. A house cat can still do damage to people, but at a much lower level than any tiger. House cats also provide many benefits even in a fully feral state, by lowering the population of vermin such as rats and mice, helping to blunt the spread of disease and crop/property damage.

Going directly from capitalism to communism is a bridge too far; not enough people know how to do communism correctly, and there would be far too much resistance by those whose greed is benefitted by capitalism and who control the public narrative through media and education (or lack of it).

In fact, as history has shown us, the only way to take that route in a single step is via authoritarianism - to force the population en masse - whereupon authoritarianism gleefully remains resident (as those who are corruptible remain in positions of power that they are loathe to relinquish), invariably employing violence to ensure compliance, and ending up royally f**king up the entire implementation.

With an intermediary like employee-owned businesses, we can both educate and expose, providing society with tangible, real-world, immediately-obvious benefits of communism that erodes resistance and shows people how to be communal in an effective manner.

And there would be other stages beyond that, gradually ratcheting society into a pro-communist state in a careful and thoughtful manner that allows us to build anti-greed, anti-corruption, and anti-authoritarian systems into the mix, to avoid outcomes such as pretty much every other “implementation” to date.

Depends if I have my shower directly before going to bed. If so, it’s 20, otherwise 4.

LOL 😂 I am also a software developer. 30 years in almost every sector of IT short of 3D animation and games development.

And no, AI hallucinates too gratuitously for me, and just pisses the hell outta me. It’s worse than a gaggle of juniors in terms of all the extra work it generates.

At least your quirks allowed you to create a track record that was seen as stellar by others.

My own Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s allows me to do impressive things. But without any significant ability to monetize those traits or for it to be visibly profitable to someone else, it’s been a much more impactful hell on my employability.

I’ve come to hate how capitalism only “works well” for the masses who stumble and fumble through life, but who can easily conform to the required soul-sucking shape of profitability for someone else. People are more than just how much profit can be squeezed from them, and can provide back to civilization a lot more than what the current capitalistic structures parasitize out of them.

There are other economic structures that are much more humane and planet-friendly, but as a civilization we have been indoctrinated into seeing those frameworks as being “irredeemably evil” simply because prior “implementations” used them as a veneer of legitimacy over despotic authoritarian regimes.

The paradox of tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral or legal standard, but as a social contract:

If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.

In other words: the intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.

Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.

I knew of an African-American named Le-a.

Not spoken as “ley-ah”, but as “ledasha”.

Because you are supposed to say the dash.

A German cookbook that I have first introduced me to the hub and spoke method of recipes. As in, it provided a base recipe at its most simplistic fashion, and then after that recipe, it listed ways you could modify that recipe for different kinds of dishes. Essentially listing points in the original where you could modify it in specific ways.

And this was no modern cookbook. It was printed back in the 60s.

And there are Florida ounces, which as a Canadian confuses me to no end.

Will any patriot of democracy with a functional stinger rocket please pay attention?

My own home was 2,000ft² when built. In 1972. That was the Canadian average at the time, as most homes built by developers were made with the same 15 (or so) floor plans with slight variations.

You’re thinking of the 50s. Those homes were indeed around 1,200ft², and there is even a pair in my neighbourhood the next block over

A quick way of estimating annual wage for a full-time position is to take hourly, double it, then move the decimal point to the right by three spots.

So for example, the BC minimum wage is $17.40. Double that is $34.80. Annually in a full-time job, that’s about $34,800 before taxes.

And 4× that is $139,200. Current median SFH prices for used homes sit at just under $1M in my podunk tourist town. All detached SFH, $1,200,000. New construction, $1,500,000.

I mean, really - who under 50 can actually afford those prices without intergenerational wealth to give them a leg up in life?

It’s not just low minimum wage, although BC’s is currently the third highest in Canada.

No, the problem is also “investors” that buy on spec only to sell at a much higher price just before completion, as well as “investors” that buy up 5, 10, 15 or even more homes for rental income. Both of these goose home values into the stratosphere and massively constrain the supply of homes that are affordable to those wanting to stop being renters.

Were it not for “investors”, homes would likely be half or even less than what they currently are.

America alone is going to be in immense economic pain starting some time within the next 3-9 months. Shipping into America from China is dropping off a cliff, with a nearly 40% all sources drop in port activity on the west coast at this time. Seattle alone has seen a 60+% drop in Chinese shipping.

2025 is going to be an absolute economic bloodbath for most any American citizen inside America.

It’s getting comparable… women are being charged with murder for totally natural miscarriages. Imagine ending up in prison for decades for something you had absolutely no control over.

And women are also dying from preventable issues with pregnancy, because it is illegal for doctors to remove fetuses even when they are a direct threat to the mother’s life (ectopic) or even totally dead in the first place.

America is becoming exceedingly hostile to anyone not white, cis, and male.

Stating the raw value of the house will only make naysayers throw inflation into your face.

The better way of saying that would be,

buy a detached SFH for only 4× annual minimum wage

Like, really drive it home how absolutely unaffordable homes are these days. In my corner of Canada, the median detached SFH is going for 28× minimum wage, and it’s 32× if it’s new construction. My own 1972 split level sold brand-new for only 4× the 1972 minimum wage.

He’s gone even further off the rez: “Tariff supporters are socialists”.

Like, no. It’s the exact opposite.