this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Rich people think this way for everything
That's one of the core injustices of capitalism.
Rich person says "Build a thing"
Workers design, research, and build the thing.
Rich person keeps the profits.
Reminds me of when I heard someone talk about a recent experience when they "built houses". I thought that sounded unlikely, as I could not picture this person wearing a toolbelt and hardhat and actually swinging a hammer. I asked for clarification, and they explained how they managed a construction company or something, and that in English, saying "I build houses" covers the management side as well, not just the people actually doing the building.
It's not that hard to say they're a manager, they just wanted to feel included
As someone who has actually physically built houses (i.e. nailing walls together, putting up the siding, hanging and mudding sheetrock, installing doors and windows etc.) this mindset pisses me off more than anything. "Management" does stuff like buying already-built houses, trucking them to our site and placing them on foundations, discovering the houses were built in the 1960s with 2x3s instead of 2x4s and thus needed to be torn down to the floors because they're no longer up to code, necessitating us rebuilding the houses entirely from the floors up, and then discovering the houses were placed two feet too close to the property line so we have to literally chop two feet off of them and rebuild the walls.
True fucking story. And I forgot to mention that the floors were 3/4 rotten so we had to rebuild most of them, too.
How about building houses the right way like in the EU: Out of cellular concrete
"The Life and Times of Thomas Edison"
...or swallows the loss.
The laid off workers also suffer the loss, typically.
Furthermore, I don't think "he gambled" compellingly makes this system fair or good.
Or benefits when they got employed. Point is, that you aren't rising much with just working. You earn your wage whether the owner did right or wrong decision. Unlike them you don't have to bear the risk of losing your savings
The owner also gets a wage and benefits while the process is running.
And much of the time, they're spending VC money. Minimal personal risk.
And even so, that doesn't justify the owner keeping almost all of the proceeds. I don't care if they put their life savings into it. Labor built it.
Wage paid out of your own money to youself isn't a benefit.
VC funding.
Also why are you so invested in defending capitalists?
VC funding isn't free money. Usually you have to have alredy prospering business for anyone to even talk with you. Companies like WeWork or more recently AI companies are extremely rare exception.
Why not?
lol. Many people get funding for their companies because of their connections. Zoom famously got funding even though the investors thought it was stupid to try to address what they saw as a solved problem, but he was their friend so they gave him a few million dollars.
The last business I worked for started with his daddy's money, which (surprise) came from previous capitalist exploits. The first one was similar.
Capitalists have done incalculable harm to our environment, society, and individuals. They don't need your defense. They have almost all the money and power.
What you don't see are all the cases of business failing resulting in total loss of capital. What you see, you see because it worked out. But for every single startup that survived are 5-10 that don't.
First, generalization like that caused incomprehensible harm to many societies. This sort of generalization was foundation of Fascism, then Nazism, and then Holocaust.
Second, while imperfect, that capitalist system works. I've seen no other system that would reconcile the incentives of multiple egoistic parties. None. Every utopian design fails miserably when inevitably some people turn to be assholes.
Failing businesses is irrelevant to the argument that labor is entitled to a fair share of what it creates.
Your analogy to generalizations and an old timey Godwin's law is laughable.
The capitalist system "works" at tremendous cost to many people. Many such systems work. Chattel slavery would "work".
And you haven't clarified why you're so eager to defend this system. Are you a capitalist? Do you employ people while keeping the bulk of the profits?
I don't think I can take you seriously
How about labor getting their fair share of loss if business they work in fails. No? Why not?
And you haven't proposed any better system. It's always the same when I ask that question.
But I'll satisfy your curiosity. I am a capitalist. I run super small business. If you think it's sunshine and rainbow, you're sorely mistaken. It's more work, there's no pay guarantee, competition is ALWAYS ahead of you, in capital, scale and know-how, you're sweating shitless on any change in costs, because raising prices always comes at the risk of losing customers, meanwhile you're required to do shit ton of government mandated paperwork.
But I'm still in favor of capitalism. Because my parents and grandparents lived in socialism and told me how their life looked like. Long story short: It was an inescapable poverty and no free speech. That's how alternatives really look like.
If the business fails, the workers lose their income and their shares are just as worthless as anyone else. The workers should have shares. (Or some other mechanism so there's not a handful of fat cats living a life of luxury due to the labor of many others)
The person who started the business can always go work somewhere else. It's not like he's put to death. And if the concern is that "someone who loses their money might suffer and die" then we should fix that problem more generally, because there are many other ways to end up there.
That wasn't the question or the point. A fairer system off the top of my head is profit sharing with a union. But that wasn't the point.
If someone says "X is bad for A, B, C" saying that Z isn't better is not a rebuttal. We haven't gotten that far. We're trying to reach agreement that X is bad. Then we can talk about replacing or fixing it. Maybe Z does suck.
It's a common mistake. Someone will be like "windows sucks" and someone will be like "well apple is expensive", just blazing by on that express train of thought. Take the local train.
So you have generational trauma skewing your views.
Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this economic system. And let me remind you of all the people fired because their employer didn't like what they said, where they risk falling into poverty and worse.
The way capitalism manifests in the US is a set of tiny tyrannies. Your boss tells you when you can piss, what you can wear, what you can say in public. Maybe you don't care because you are the boss. You give your people time off?
And the dream is for you to make it so big that you don't have to work anymore. Your business expands. You buy out or out compete everyone else. You sit back and let other people work. Then you raise prices, lower wages, and buy a private jet.
The end state of capitalism is a rich asshole who doesn't work, and a shitty world for everyone else. Maybe it takes years. But enshittification is pretty widely understood.
Maybe a worker owned collective would enshittify, too. But as a small consolation, you'd at least have thousands of rich people instead of a billionaire.
Now, I wrote this on the toilet so it's not the most coherent or polished. I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth even though we disagree.
That’s why they don’t see any problem with replacing workers with AI. They think AI will do X better than humans do just like machines could build X better than humans could at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
But the cost benefit analysis often proves to be quite the opposite in the long-term, despite deceptive short-term gains. But a short-term gains seem to be all that businesses seem to care about.
They like AI because it doesn't provide feedback about their ideas being less than perfect.
You can just tell AI to provide feedback and not be a kiss ass.... Hell most of the good models well"good" models do provide feedback by default. The whole AI is a kiss ass thing is almost entirely a byproduct of free cheap low-end models or outdated ones.
So this particular criticism hasn't really been valid for a hot second anymore. Honestly, 99% of everything everyone thinks AI is in this entire thread is either flat out wrong at this point as things have already changed. Or they're conflating the business problems with the actual tool.
Mean hell Claude will straight up. Tell you you're dumb. You'll do so professionally and in corpo speak and it's awful. But it will tell you you're dumb.
It will also totally throw shade at you while taking the blame for your f****** which is pretty funny.
Mean to be fair, most people who hate AI aren't going to go spend a bunch of money to actually learn what good models do and how good models actually operate. They're just going to look at the s*** on their phone that's free. That sucks and go it all sucks.
Mean to be fair. Those models do suck. The company's running them suck. Those companies did a bunch of illegal s*** and are ruining the environment and that sucks.
There's a lot to hate about AI.
But the actual tool in and of itself isn't actually that bad and it doesn't need to be bad. The open models trained on data that's actually freely given in license appropriately while not as good as those big giant multi-trillion dollar ones.
Aren't ruining the environment, aren't displacing people out of a job, aren't full of stolen information, and can still genuinely be useful for small tasks.
A tool is a tool and it's only as bad or good as we make it.
AI sucks bcz it hallucinates (a fundamental flaw of all LLMs), increase electricity costs, water usage, and their overall environmental footprint. Pick your favorite bcz there's a lot of reasons to hate AI other than, the "free models aren't good".
You're absolutely right!
And here’s the thing
You're not crazy!
on a slight tangent: that's why I tend to prefer Claude (when I have to use AI), because it does actually provide push-back and doesn't get all kiss-ass with me like ChatGPT
It's how our finance systems evolved to be, no one got time to wait for long term gains anymore. It's all about playing the hot potato.
And because of that, unfortnately, a lot of regular people also think the entire point of technology and wealth is to never have to do anything substantive.