Sooo… Consumer prices on rice products will come down then? </s>

I understand the economic theory, I am honestly just a jaded ass at this point. It will be great if supply prices come down and restaurants don’t pay as much for the rice, but consumer prices will always be downward inflexible, so they will just pocket the extra profit and we are still shafted. Some places may lower prices to attempt to compete more, but not by as much as their margins increase.

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.

For a microsecond I thought that said “microbeards” and I was very confused.

Loved by cops, maybe, in places that aren’t major non-FL/TX cities. In control of the military, not so much. The general sentiment of most service members I come across is “our oath says ‘foreign AND DOMESTIC’ and requires I follow lawful orders.” They recognize that ordering the military to suppress protests with force or not upholding an impeachment order by Congress is not lawful. Also, once the vote is in, if he is impeached in the Senate he is no longer president and thus no order he gives is lawful, no matter what it is.

I was did/heartened when I heard psychologists speaking out about how much more difficult their jobs have gotten since so many of the stresses people have been dealing with have moved to externalities rather than internalities. It is REALLY hard to help someone cope in the usual ways because the problems are real, we our lives and livelihoods are under existential threat, and we are relatively powerless in the face of it all. No amount of affirmations are going to make any of that better.

I doubt Jan 6 would be allowed to happen again. 1. The police and military would be ready and waiting. 2. The rest of us will be ready and waiting.

So Bonobos have more capacity to judge the topical authority of people than most people do. Very interesting.

Wait, I thought I heard that they don’t get laid?

I 100% understand this. Like, truly. DEI is about forcing companies to hire the best candidates regardless of attributes which have no berring on the job such as race, gender identity, creed, color, etc.

If they are saying that DEI is not a thing anymore, then let it not be a thing. DEI also protects white men from discriminatory hiring, so I say let them see that it is important.

When it comes to political corruption, corporate greed, religious extremism, racism/Nazism, etc. I tend to favor rather extreme responses. They actively reject the concepts of safety, discretion, empathy, compassion, and tolerance; so they get none of those things from me. Yes, many of those ideas do carry collateral damage, but I have always leaned towards utilitarianism. A little discomfort now to ensure a better later is an acceptable price to pay.

I keep hoping to hear companies say they just won’t hire white men for the next 4 years. And I am a white man looking for a job.

You assume that the governments of which you speak are not assisting intentionally. These companies did not write the EULA legal frameworks that allow them virtual carte blanch to take and do whatever they want just because the population is trapped in the endless cycle of coercion that is our life.

Why do all of these companies decide they are so tired of existing?

No biggie. Even though it is satire, the analysis is sound. Given the amount of fatty acids that are stored in tissues in the body or expelled as “solid” waste, paired with the offset of dairy cows, so long as the waste is managed properly and not just left to aerobic decomposition, there should be able to be well in excess of 80x the volume if CO2 removed from the atmosphere as there is methane/CO2 released post-consumption. As long as whatever mega food conglomerate who starts making it uses atmospheric CO2 and doesn’t burn limestone to obtain concentrated quantities quickly.

I definitely understand that. My commentary is mostly satire based in fact. Hence the FBI at the end.

Luckily methane, while a potent greenhouse gas, breaks down in the atmosphere quickly. It does break down into CO2 and water, so the question quickly becomes: “are the farts of Midwesterners more potent than the amount of CO2 taken out of the atmosphere by making butter?”

My quick guess is luckily, no, they are not. Some amount of the butter will be stored in fatty tissues which will be sequestered 6 feet underground in a cement box eventually. Most will be shat in liquid or semi-solid form into a toilet to be processed by waste management. As long as they are responsible and compost it into nitrate rich fertilizer we should stay very comfortably ahead of the FBI (Fart to Butter Index).

Also, for anyone who thinks that carbon bound up in fatty acid chains in butter is released back into the atmosphere through metabolism, I will direct your attention to the population US Midwest and Great Plains. These people have been proving that you can effectively sequester butter for many decades.

I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying “sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility.”