in the video, the uploader complains about her standard of living while making her boss all this money. this dude, rather than looking at the reality of the situation, makes up a scenario in his head where she’s supposed to make a competing business with her employer despite using all her time to work for her employer at a job she says barely pays her rent let alone would allow her to start a business from nothing that competes with one making millions per year
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1q39rdn/the_american_nightmare/
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It’s easy though. Just go take out a $250 million interest free loan from your parents and start your own business. It’s not that hard. Besides, if you fuck up then you can just do it again while living off your trust fund.
Atlas shrugged and said just start a business 😮💨
: “Just go and do something that has a 70% chance of failure and requires you to have tons of startup capital already and all the right permits. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind paying rent for a storefront to a landlord. Everyone has to be their own little business owner because I said so! I haven’t really thought of this, just shut up and either become a pork like me or die!”
Oh no, you don’t get to do this “mind your own business and if you don’t like porky, just become porky. Live and let live” crap after slavery. The ruling class was built on slavery and centuries of nepotism.
Many people DID try “just become porky” only for the best case scenario being Walmart comes in and sabotages them with their billions in head start to further advance Monopolization OR just the fate of Black Wall Street. The porks are lying when they say they’re looking for new members into their little club.
I’m a fucking commie and I’m actually much better for small business owners than any pork claims to be.
I didn’t know Chase Passive Income had a reddit account
Imma be honest, taking your 5 workers from starbucks getting business loan and starting new coffee thingy is more plausible scenario than hoping unions will do jack shit.
Also, lack of free uber app will continually baffle me. They already don’t have any liability, but leftists would rather invest money into aocia and 50 millionaire consultants.
Nobody will give 5 coffee shop workers a loan to start their own. Unions do actually help but most union organizers won’t touch you unless you have a minimum head count. So you’re really just out of luck there. IMO, many coffee shops and small restaurants are just vanity projects by wealthy people anyway.
It’s not uncommon either. A lot of places have literally nothing but the labor they employ, and you can easily kill a bad company by just leaving with enough people and taking clients with you.
There are a lot of business niches, where you can be coops without attracting eye of sauron of capital, but you have to have noticeable starting capital to start with. Audiophile or highly specialized analogue electronics, optics, vacuum tech, specialty pcb (less likely to succeed due to china), exotic wares for porkies, like sculpture/stone work etc.
Engineering and Architecture is a massive one. Almost every small engineering firm is employee owned or will be employee owned after the founding engineer dies or retires.
There are 3 in my small town alone. The company I work for is chud run, and the family has built in kill switches in all their contracts so their employees can’t poach them (thats how they started was by poaching contracts from their employer). The waves have already started though, and this one’s only been around for t years. The core team is really tight and when one of us goes we all go.
and the family has built in kill switches in all their contracts so their employees can’t poach them (thats how they started was by poaching contracts from their employer).
Aren’t there various restrictions on noncompete clauses, or is it something else?
There are, doesn’t stop them from filing tons of frivolous suits against you. They hit one person with fake felony theft charges and they had to spend time in jail. They also have a lot of good old boy connections and will use that to drag any competition started by a former employee through the mud. Makes it hard to survive early on when your former employer is suing you constantly and telling everyone in the industry that you’re a thief
im not knowledgeable about basically anything but i have to say i disagree with that. i cant imagine a bank lending money to 5 baristas to start a coffee co-op. im sure it happens but cant be more common than unions getting gains for workers
i cant imagine a bank lending money to 5 baristas to start a coffee co-op.
Can you imagine a municipalist Revolving Loan Fund doing this?
i don’t even know what that is so to be honest i can’t
So first you get a couple friends who have a bit of financial capital that they put together, and they want to have a non-predatory lending model for getting workers’ cooperatives off the ground. They donate the money into the fund, which then loans it out in place of conventional venture capital to activist entrepreneurs, or employees who want to purchase the business they work for and cooperatize it.
Instead of owning a stake in the company, the RLF has lending terms where the new co-op repays its initial capital loan back into the Fund which can then loan out that money again.
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No, it is kinda implausible for those niches that i mentioned, because bank won’t loan 20 million for you to produce vacuum gauges, because even if you and coworkers are competent in that area, the bank can’t judge that or payments will fuck you up anyway. For small restaurants? Idk, if le small business is impossible there, that’s how those dipshits start after all, they get tyrannized by rent (so pure guy with idea, instead of bored property owner) or no traffic without advertising, which is again spending available capital. But structurally 10 people getting 1 million dollar in loans doesn’t sound implausible to me, you tell me.
More likely burgers can’t imagine trusting each other that much to coown business and fail together. The whole ass country organized so that business bankruptcy won’t touch your own assets, you can pay yourself profits and avoid taxes, interest payments reduces your tax exposure (relevant for salary/profits split)
And that’s all in comparison with bright idea to donate money to dem consultants. You bet your ass collecting money for some angel investment coop loaning structures to try at 50 coop businesses sounds more viable to me, after observing bernie and aocias of the world.
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yes, but business loan bankruptcy doesn’t fuck you up in the same way, they don’t stay in debt. say it fails, only 10% still work after 3 years. so what? unionization rate is 10% as well. i’m saying there is certain magical thinking involved in we have to elect good people (doesn’t work for 60 years running), we have to do revolution (doesn’t work for 100 years running), and not doing what actually existing early capitalists did - doing more efficient business than their feudal counterparts, because you don’t have externality of paying porky his share.
all exploitation calculus points to 2-5x rates of exploitation in high manufacturing (i’m ignoring software, where it’s even more obvious), meaning that if you somehow wind up running that business you can afford 2-3x higher salaries (restaurants are an exception here, but even there - successful ones still get 1.5-2x, but with more complicated calculus of managers and rents, due to tiny size). yes, in my napkin plan of angel invest coop, their principal capital will disappear through succession of bankruptcies and falling rates of compensation on used equipment during bankruptcy sales, that’s the angel part, you spend to deny porky profits out of spite, not because you run successful banking operation.
i mean compare plan of opening (or plain buying out) 100 restaurants for the money bernie wasted on his good friend campaign, where if 90 fails you still can point to something working.
unions won’t work in any business employing 10-20 people (which is a lot of modern manufacturing), they just can’t generate sufficient leverage (lost dollars per day of slow down) unless you get sympathy strikes, and average treatlerite won’t strike even for themselves, so sympathy strikes are really wild in 21th century to imagine.
and yes, it can only be in small business niches, but for simpler reason - capital won’t notice it to fuck you up out of spite. you can’t run commodities production where your competitors are bankrolled by goldman, they could run at a loss for years (see uber). you can run a niche production, because there are 5 competitors there not bankrolled to the limit and owned by small petit bougie fucks themselves, who can’t afford to take losses infinitely (i.e. not owned by high finance - plausible if hard to compete, owned by high finance - you are fucked)
*the biggest issue with high manufacturing is both capital and name recognition. as far as i know, their expenses are something wild like 2 millions on salary, 20 million on asset depreciation, 5 million in profits, 2 million on rents/expenses. meaning that to start such a thing, you have to buy equipment worth 100-200 million. some of it it scalable to smaller sizes (i.e. instead of 5 cnc machines you get 1, but some just isn’t reducable) (you can of course run it like modern business - lease equipment, but then you are getting more and more exposed to the vagaries of the market, dependent on central bank rates, etc)
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being a person helping people is already success in this world, don’t let dipshits tell you otherwise.i also feel restless that i can’t find some socialist-related stuff in my vicinity, my choices in applying my labor is like soulless ngo, where you feel like a toy for rich people, political party which i don’t particularly agree with, church with its own brainworms out of wazoo or animal shelter. All of them are in some way doing good in the world, some of them i support, but nothing is something i can believe in in my heart to go full hog with my time and quit my job
i’m saying there is certain magical thinking involved in we have to elect good people (doesn’t work for 60 years running), we have to do revolution (doesn’t work for 100 years running), and not doing what actually existing early capitalists did
So what is to be done then?
i’m saying that numbers-inclined socialists shouldn’t be dismissive of economics (real micro-economics of how to run a business - accounting/market research/feasibility studies, not supply demand bullshit or business school idiocy, prices of commodities are already known), and, in my idealized example, investigate business reports of publicly traded companies to find feasibly “disruptable” industries to try their hand at running business as explicit coops with like minded folks (everyone gets loans together, the ownership structure and future worker recruitment if it succeeds is predetermined to be equitable in some fashion, just as loans repayments are considered collectively), yes probably majority of them would fail via bankruptcy, and finding like minded committed people (and interested in business area of choice! unlikely system designs engineer would want to be a cook in a restaurant, even if they are a communist) who you won’t argue 50 times a day is hard, but (a) this is valuable experience even in ghoul why-i-left-the-left life (failed to run a small business is not a bad thing on resume), aside from myriads of things you learn about permits/accounting/taxes/commodities (b) if it succeeds, you directly interfere with porky and probably making good money (again, big if) © ideology sell isn’t made hard by word communist from the get go, be our own boss, collectively, is resonating with treatlerite mindset (d) there is kickstarter as risk free seed money whitehole to check consumer desires, if it’s something not b2b related.
obv its hard and all that, and heavily conjectural, but i don’t think i’ve seen concentrated efforts in non-mercantile business (probably due to capital restrictions) to just be small revenue business, at best it’s like farmers market reseller, book shop or publishing (dying industries with chronically low margins). i understand perfectly well i’m biased, but i can see constantly small headphones companies popping up, who employ like 5 people in a garage (extremely niche business model obviously), or something like mini pc market (minisform and beelink something are obviously chinese), where the components are there for the taking, and someone with kickstarter takes them, or some radio kits or other small electronics stuff. why can’t a kickstarter business be a coop? (well, for consumer discount tech it’s obvious - they would make it in china, it’s glorified dropshipping with some engineering on top at best, but it doesn’t have to be nor is it always that)
**real (moral) problem in manufacturing is you have to serve either top decile (who can afford to pay for usa made goods, and sounds little bit unfun) or military (which seems extremely unconscionable for communists), the rest of usa is not exactly swimming in cash for this businesses to work
I think this is the kind of thing Richard Wolff advocates for. He’s very pro-coop iirc
Co-ops aren’t some magical solution, but neither is bank robbing or unionizing or even revolution.
If leftists think robbing a bank might sometimes be a viable way to fund an org, then carving out niches and enclaves of productive forces shouldn’t be off the table.
A lot of us delivery drivers were considering an open-source or co-op model a few years back. I got out of that job so idk if it’s gone anywhere. But if the current delivery apps are even viable (which is a big if during an oncoming depression) then it stands to reason that eliminating the corporate/marketing/engineering bloat as well as the parasitic shareholders should make a co-op model actually competitive.
they aren’t truly viable (worst comes to worst, goldman will sink its profitability), but i’m bothered that they just don’t exist as an app i can download, and where all my interactions happen on phone without any servers involved, just ratings of drivers and users and prenegotiated rates of price per mile, and some dumb venmo account or whatever, independent contractor bullshit turn-around is a fair play.
say even goldman sinks it as an alternative, so what, if the app existed you can start use it again when uber gets back to its bullshit.
I always have a little story to tell people when they come to me asking for economic advice, specifically starting a business (which happens pretty frequently because somehow I know what I am talking about, for reasons that I do not disclose to them).
I have a friend who works for a high level accounting firm. Not the Big Four, as they just use and abuse people, but one of the ten biggest firms in the world. Their clients, for the most part, are the private finances of multi-millionaires and billionaires. Now, being one of their star employees, my friend has had access to all kinds of fun records and accounts, though due to professional discretion he will never actually share the names of these individuals with me, which I understand.
Most of these individuals have fail-sons and daughters that are also ‘independent business-owners’ that the firm also does the finances for as a favor to the large clients. These are people who run businesses at losses of over a hundred thousand dollars a year, essentially indefinitely, always promising that next year they will turn a profit, often of course they are unknowingly actually loss leaders to reduce the taxes for their parents, as their parents continue to funnel money into those ‘ventures’.These range from restaurants to clothing stores to gyms etc, all occupying prime real estate in major cities.
If you’ve ever seen like a Gucci store in a metropolitan area that never seems to have any customers but still is in business, it is those kinds of businesses.
If you are starting a business from scratch, that is what you have to compete against. And not only that, but these people have teams of lawyers, so if you somehow do manage to be successful, if your product even somewhat resembles theirs but executed completely, they will sue you to the ground. They don’t even have to win, they just have to stall until you run out of money and credit.
It’s a rigged game, but sometimes you can hit a jackpot I guess.
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