My work is sporadic, but it pays me well enough that I don’t have to do side work between jobs. My 60 year old mom is convinced that I need to have another job or some other form of income for my days off because god forbid I enjoy any time to relax with my partner especially in these last weeks before our first child is due.

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They can set the age to 52, we're not retiring.

We're not raising hell because they've criminalized protest. Once you have a criminal record it becomes much harder to find work. You'd be completely beholden to the system. It feeds itself.

Education. The elite/owners/masters made it a pay to win situation in the USA years and years ago and for good reason. Average peasants/citizens only need to be smart enough to pull the levers and press the buttons, that’s it. They want all our questions to max out at: “why my button broke at work station?” Which they pretty much have now.

That’s why people aren’t pissed. Because the light box tells them it’s their neighbors fault. Or the Red. Or the Blue depending on what algorithmic tribalistic bubble Facebook/Instagram/Tick-Toc has placed you in.

The elite and the true “owners” of this country understood the dangers of a population capable of critical thinking and being able to know (in real time) that they’re getting actively fucked constantly. So we’re kind of past that now (taking it back from them). People are too dumb, fat and stupid to revolt intelligibly and make any real change before they’d get stamped out. We all live in Police states now, but we know that since George Floyd’s murder.

I remember this old bumper sticker from the 80s-90s that I’ve always loved and it’s ringing in my ears right now.

“THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED”

…and that’s why no one will ever know it’s happening until it’s already been killed. We need to unplug and organize.

The question you should be asking is "why aren't you out there protesting? Why aren't you rising hell?"

I'm not saying this to be a dick. What I'm saying is, our problems as a people are also your problems my friend. We're all fucking tired, poor, afraid for our families, our lives, our job security.

We aren't out there because the majority of us are here (on the internet) asking others to do it. Not because we can't but because deep down we all know it's fucking scary. The thought of being the next protest brutalized by overzealous police is a fear in all our minds and we don't have the time, money, or ability to take off work and protest in the streets.

Without organizing and direction these things will keep a large majority from doing anything.

You got the right energy, I respect that. To give an explanation, we need a little history. Back in the yee ole times of the late 1800's and early 1900's when unions were being formed they had a situation both similar and very different from us today. On one hand what many people forget is that many (if not most) unionization attempts at this time were not peaceful, a lot of people died, there were quite a few massacres, a lot of destroyed property, etc.

In case it wasn't obvious, unions were even more 'effectively' illegal than today; a key difference can be seen with the recent railroad strikes that were told to disband, during the union hay-day, there's a good chance they would've told uncle Sam to go fuck himself, and proceeded to take over and occupy important railroad stops, with guns, and the explicit intent that no one was operating anything until demands were met.

Why that kind of response is so different isn't because we have militarized police now (they had the Pinkerton's, and I'm pretty sure there were occasions where US troops got involved) and it's not because none of them had family's or nothing to go back to. The reason is because of how much worse their work was, and much less they got back.

A common theme for many industrial cities at this time was apartments meant for one family being shared by 2 or 3 (and keep in mind this back when people would have like 7 kids and want more) and a man was expected to work anywhere from 12-20 hr days, 7 days a week, with maybe the occasional holiday off (if upper management was feeling especially generous) and this would get you barely enough to feed the kids. It was not uncommon for these working men to borderline starve themselves to make sure their kids didn't die; well the younger, the older ones (think 7 or so) had to go get factory jobs themselves, which were not much better than the work the fathers were doing. The mothers on the other hand often took odd jobs, cleaning, seamtressing, or prostitution. And the job conditions in factories were... horrific is an understatement. People would lose body parts or die due to no safety regulations on near daily basis in most larger factories, and if someone died the expected response boiled down to push the corpse out of the way and keep working, no breaks.

Today because of their violent resistance to their exploitation, we have a standard 5-day work week, the standard 8 hr shift, the concept of a weekend and having days off, overtime, and a minimum wage, having breaks, amongst other things. When it comes down to it the reason people aren't rioting in the streets is because the ratio of exploitation to cost of resistance hasn't gotten extreme enough. Part of that is our fetishizing of peaceful protests (there's a reason we learn a lot more about MLK Jr in schools than the Black Panthers for example), but another very important part is that most people exist with just enough comfort that they don't want to risk potentially their life, or at least their access to shelter, food, and a smartphone, to do what is necessary to renegotiate the status quo.

I'm not necessarily judging people for this, it's a more or less entirely subconscious decision whether or not it's worth it, but I will judge the degree to which people bow down to the status quo while saying that it's broken. If the status quo is working against you, then you will not be able to fix it by listening to it. Strikes can't end because the government said it should. When the law tells you that you are not allowed to stand up for your rights and dignity as a person, then maybe you should reject following those laws.

Laws are all well and good, but there's limits to what they should cover, and when they cross that, we should be more willing to consider it void. This isn't even new age radical thinking, literally every protest, uprising, rebellion, and revolution in the history of civilization is based on this idea, even if no one was saying it explicitly.

Yup and those are the ones who are paying the politicians to make the bills the way they want them. To where their workers will have to work forever, and never breed, but they better breed, but they don’t have to be able to afford the future workers to actually survive… Who would ever. 🤢

This is amazing to me. I remember when Redditors were fawning over Musk in the 2010s and the way that story went was always that he was bullied and was thrown down the stairs for "being different." The meme was that he was a nerdy genius and the stupid kids couldn't recognize that and beat him up out of concealed envy. It's a classic storytelling "and just look at me now!" narrative

That's how it goes with Musk. He spins like no other. Like how he spun holding his dying child when his ex-wife had to go into the Twitter thread and clarify it was her that did that. That's not a detail he could forget. Dude just lies with half-truth ingredients.

his dad wanted to go nuclear and have the kid punished, but then he realized it would not be a popular position bc the brat had it coming... he only backed off to save his own rep. whoever that kid was, i'd like to high five him and buy him a beer.

Much better

Are you proposing some kind of game where once someone hits $1 billion in wealth and assets, they've won the game, get tossed into the arena, and get eaten? Thus freeing up $1 billion dollars for the poor.

Would be good discouragement to not become a billionaire, and keep them for existing for long. Gotta be sure to be charitable to keep total wealth down.

Literally, i began to fucking hate elon when he said “induced demand isn’t real” which means that the more road space you give to cars, the more they drive. He just wants everyone to buy his piece of shit car just to make america and the rest of the world addicted to cars and never solve the climate crisis.

That’s a legit issue

Once you reach a billion dollars in wealth you prestige like call of duty, and start off with no money and see if you can be a billionaire again because they are divine, right ?

As a nutritionist, I have to constantly remind people that an essential cornerstone of a balanced diet is eating the rich.

Eat the rich!

Every billionaire is a policy failure

Literally no human being in history has "earned" a billion dollars. The only way to make that kind of money is exploitation of others' labor.

Billionaires need us but we don't need them.

I think that's how it used to be right? Prior to the Regan administration? Seems like that man did a lot of harm that were paying for now.

Fix tax loopholes. These guys have wealth but don't have to have income. Income tax is for income. The business generally owns everything.

He's a billionaire because of assets, not "earned" money. The tax code doesn't treat appreciated asset valuation as "income" until sold.

Soooo they take out loans using the higher valued assets as collateral. Loans are also not income.

BUt ThEn THeY WoNT InVEsT.

Your idea makes me so mad because I don't make 1 million a year...

Bring back the 90% corporate tax rate too.

We tried not doing these sensible things and now we have trust fund douche bags telling us we aren’t good enough slaves while half of America is kneeling at their feet and rage masturbating over M&M foot fetishes, driven by a righteous drive to punish their countrymen, all for mortal sin of daring to stand up for ourselves and each other.

I’m gonna go ahead and say their way doesn’t work. It is fundamentally incompatible with human prosperity.

Didn't we use to tax at 90% anything over 1 mil? Let really make America great and do this again.

Fun fact there used to be a maximum wage 25k(400k adjusted for inflation) anything above that was taxed 95%

Once you can afford to buy/sell/trade an average member of society's entire lifetime earnings and it holdd no risk to your lifestyle to completely lose that investment you have too much money. At the point where you see the lifetime earnings of a factory worker or teacher as play money, to be used for whims, that's when you should have that money taken away. It mocks the contribution of real members of the community to have a lone individual free from risk assessment, outside of the community's shared financial risk, but taking advantage of the positive aspects of the community. Billionaires artificially inflate prices by doing things like buying way beyond their needs in the real estate market, greedily inflating prices for square footage and good locations because that condo is the billionaire's 12th home (this one for their cats). You want a teacher's money to compete with that money? The billionaire will buy the entire block and rent to the teacher but the teacher can't raise capital beyond a finite point in order to actually afford an asset. Billionaires can operate at margins the rest of us can't take. They can take losses up front on a massive scale in order to create localized monopolies, they can buy up utilities, they can start businesses to put your place of work out of business and they can do all these things fully insulated from personal risk. They can do them for fun, or spite, or as an accident. As if buying and selling whole livelihoods is a game with no consequences. Tax the rich now. This protected class of billionaires toying with society is cancerous.

They’ve done studies where they get people to play monopoly with randomly assigned starting cash. Unsurprisingly, the people who were randomly given more starting cash than others usually end up with the most money and winning the game. But when asked “do you think you just got lucky or do you have real skill at this game?” A large majority of the participants that got the extra money just assumed they were better at the game even though they know they had an unfair advantage given to them.

It’s quite literally people born on third base think that they hit a triple.

Yeah, and did you see him shitting on that disabled twitter employee for being "independently wealthy" when he actually worked and started his own succesful business from the ground up.

Edit: the employees name was Haraldur Thorliefsson

And lied about his degrees and illegally immigrated.

"Born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a home run."

He's the poster boy for dunning-kruger

The year is 45,000 BCE

You are immortal

You decide to save $10,000 a day

Tfw you still aren't richer than Elongated Muskrat by March 2023

More than most??? Dude that’s a VAST understatement.

reminds me of that meme from about a month ago on reddit, that life is like a game of darts.

• Rich kids get multiple dart throws, often missing wildly but eventually 1 lands close to centre or a bullseye.

• Middle class kids get 1 chance to land a bullseye, most fail but on a rare occasion one lands a dart near the bullseye, if they miss the first chance, and choose to gamble and ask for a 2nd dart and fail, they are crushed with debt.

• Poor kids get zero dart throws, if they work incredibly hard, after a few decades they MIGHT get a chance to throw a dart, and if it fails they are crushed with debt.

I'm paraphrasing, but that was my take on the meme.

Not just his daddies money but his connections and friends too. He's fallen upwards his entire life because there's a whole network of rich white men ready to hand him an office and a wad of cash every time he trips over himself.

A Ruth Langmore saying if you've watched Ozark

Wow, I didn’t know that I too work 80+ hours per week

I literally got into an argument with a guy over that. I was like the math literally does not work for how much Elon claims he’s working. Like there would have to been more than 24 hours in a day for Elon to actually being doing what he says he’s doing.

He’s so anti union and anti labor that it’s ironic his build quality is much worse than anything UAW workers ever rolled out.

When you see the [ Removed by Reddit ] on a billionaire post, you know it was something incredibly based.

Then let's drive down to Florida and punch Ron Desantis (another punchable face) and I'll knee him too.

Maybe they meant 30 million a year.

I could spend 30 million a year. I'd be practically setting the world on fire in terms of my resource waste to do so but I could do it. Things like buying a jet to throw away after a year or two and using it to commute cross country for mcdonalds. but its doable.