Patreon is profitable. He doesn’t have to fire anyone to continue operations. He just wants more money.
If he cared about them as beautiful people, he wouldn’t fire them.
It’s one thing if you’re bleeding cash and have to cut. Another when you discover a cheaper way to do things and don’t want to retrain and grow in new ways where you’d need people.
Businesses don't exist in a vacuum. If you discover a cheaper way to do things, and don't do it, a competitor probably will, and you will then find yourself in the "bleeding cash" scenario (or, more likely, starving for cash).
Generally, but this is also an exaggeration we tell ourselves about the cut-throat world of business. In reality, you don't have to be number one in any given metric to be profitable.
I had a prius and every time I started it up, it would display a big warning prompt that blocked out the rear view camera. So you had to tap ok before backing up. Every time.
My current car shows this once per driver. I always thought toyota engineers were stupid for designing such a system.
Toyota is terrible at this. Various Toyota's we've had required you to either agree to obey traffic rules, warned about data costs when connecting your phone, or a variety of other things. Super annoying and distracting. As soon as the car starts moving, all the parts should be doing their job. That's no time to nag the driver.
I wonder if these things are designed by people who do not drive. So they just implement to spec without thinking through whether the change produces the desired impact.
Slaves generally get room and board, and always have the opportunity to quit (although the other option is often death, so slavery is preferable.)
I'm not trying to be facetious, I'm trying to tell you that your criteria are not meaningful, and you're pretending like they're obvious. It's why many US slaves moved directly from slavery into sharecropping for the same masters. The only thing that changed was the paperwork. Now they were renters, who could quit (with no assets and no means to feed themselves.)
I once ham-fistedly tried to allude to a similar concept. That slaves were at least "kept" while today's wage slaves have more responsibility, and de facto less freedom due to 'The Matrix' that is our financial and legal system that benefits so few.
We have lords of land. A monetary system based mostly on trickery hidden behind boring math that inexorably erodes the purchasing power of what we receive as compensation for our finite time alive.
So let's just jump to the interesting bit: how do we fix it? Got any ideas?
The solution has always and will always be to respect the laws of thermodynamics and rising entry.
Demurrage [0]
Consider the following: You have a zero lower bound constraint on the interest rate in your economy. The real interest rate falls below zero. What happens? Deflation. Deflation ends up forcing the real interest rate into the positive range even when the nominal equilibrium interest rate would be negative to reach a real interest rate of zero. So in the deflation case, equilibrium simply doesn't happen.
If equilibrium is not possible below zero, then the currency must be operated in the positive interest range. Hence you need eternal inflation to force the interest rates back into positive nominal territory. Since positive nominal interest is still a net inflow of money from consumers (interest is priced into consumer prices) to money holders, the end result is that money flows to those who already have money and way from those who need to fulfill their basic thermodynamic maintenance even in the case where the real interest rate is 0%. Turns out lying about thermodynamics doesn't work in the end, so you get the worst of both worlds: inflation and inequality.
Another way to conceptualize it is that cash is a guaranteed 0% bond and the real interest rate can be negative due to thermodynamics. The government is obligated to pay the difference between the 0% interest rate on money and the real interest rate in the physical economy. It's like the savings that should normally be effected by thermodynamics turn out to be financial garbage and the government obligated itself to buy off the garbage. Of course what happens is that more people produce financial garbage in response to the government's minimum price floor. Eternally rising government debt is a foregone conclusion and it has nothing to do with political incompetence (ok not introducing demurrage or abolishing the ZLB is a form of incompetence, but its a binary matter of doing it).
If you want debt loads to shrink, then borrowers need a form of leverage to reduce the durations of debts. If the contract says the debt must grow over time and holders of money have no duration restriction on their holdings then you would have to be stupid to not expect this output. Note again, its the duration of the positive balances being decoupled from their negative counterpart. The interest payments are just a side effect that accelerates the problem.
Oh and those who obsess over non-money financial assets: Money is a utility and a monopoly. Capital markets have various types/forms of formal agreements based on contracts. People with money would never accept conditions that are worse than the conditions on money, so in the end the capital contracts are just mirroring properties of the money that the original investor is handing over. Debt contracts have fixed terms and payment schedules and liquidation preference/rights upon bankruptcy, whereas most investments do not have that, which is why a risk premium is added on top. An economy without ZLB money but conventional capital market contracts are mostly be fine since thermodynamics/reality are reflected through failure of the investment.
I have a cat who pushed the Roomba out the door where an elk smushed it, turns on the gas fireplace when I’m out of town because he’s an environmental terrorist and stopped shitting in his box when I just put a litter robot in his room. I assume the Dalek would meet some impossible-to-predict horribly fate before the 17-year old cat does.
Yeah I was thinking exactly this. Also I don't think it can reach my dryer.
I am happy this kind of thing is being worked on, I just don't think this is gonna be it - they really talk around what it does but "folding clothes" isn't enough. $8k to handle a complete laundry cycle (including ironing) might be interesting.
There’s a definition independent from 1st/2nd/3rd world [0] and the US’ income seems to clearly make it developed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
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