• TheSpectreOfGay [hy/hym, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    lmao. easily find another job, in this economy?

    how come the plasterers I hire from time to time earn more than me?

    mfw i realize my ‘business’ is just playing middle man for people with actual skills

    • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      mfw i realize my ‘business’ is just playing middle man for people with actual skills

      cereal1 hey yeah, go do plastering then if its so lucrative.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    lmao every small business owner like this thinks they’re being crucified with responsibility. No one is forcing you to run a stupid house flipping company. If the plasterers are making more money, why aren’t you doing that instead, genius?

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    The whole premise of legal entities like LLCs under capitalism is that you don’t have personal liability if the business fails. You don’t lose your house. The only way you lose your house is if you decided, deliberately, to overleverage it for your business, which is not a smart or valiant business decision.

    There are usually no risks taken by small business owners. Their only “sacrifice” tends to be as owner proprietors that need to work long hours, though this is in exchange for being free from exploitation. And they all seek to become petty bourgeois, having as few hours as they want with enough employees to cover all shifts while they go on vacation or become obsessive little tyrants over those employees.

  • Bishop_Owl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Every small business owner I’ve ever worked for is like this and I’ve worked a lot of these kinds of jobs, because

    Might as well throw some slop in the trough for you fucking sickos.

    Locally owned pet supply store: owner wanted me to try to steer people towards this dog food that was causing dogs hearts to enlarge, because they had a contract with the company that manufactured it. They had a print off of straight up apologia I was expected to recite to every customer who raised concerns over recent court cases. They advertised in the listing that they were hiring groomers and offering training. First day after the interview they stuck me on the register and it was immediately clear that they didn’t need groomers at all. I made it clear in turn that I was done working public facing positions and got fired very shortly after finding out about the aforementioned apologia.

    Warehouse for a small online vendor: Ownwr would get mad if I didnt send a supply request to them on time, but when I did send them they wouldn’t bother ordering anything and forced my to get creative with packaging and shit. Then, we’d constantly get complaints about the poor quality of the product or packaging, and they would always reply to them “You may not realise this but I’m actually a small business owner and returns and complaints like this hurt my business.” Straight up trying to guilt trip customers into keeping garbage they were tricked into buying. Lied about a bunch of future benefits, profit sharing, healthcare, allowing me to bring my dog to work which was a contingency I had laid out during the interview process, they just kept putting things off till later. The business moved locations further away so I took the opportunity to leave.

    Local gift shop: Actually not so bad, but they wouldn’t hire more people even though we were desperately short staffed. I couldn’t understand why I was the only back of house employee, because the business was very successful, and then we had a big meeting with cake for everyone, where they announced that the purchase of the business by a larger company had gone through. I realised the extra work I had put in, making minimum wage, to keep things going steady despite being short staffed directly resulted in the company looking better on paper for a sale. Left with the next wave of seasonal turnovers.

    My current job is worse than all of these, but I make decent enough money, and I have a mortgage now so leaving means potentially losing my house. Basically the owner’s best friend got “hired on” which means they moved a trailer onto the property for him to “work” out of. He does absolutely nothing and collects overtime every single pay period, meanwhile the actual employees here get told we need to cut hours because the business is hurting.

    Still beats working in the corporate retail hellscape, and having metrics and shit to deal with while your boss sits on the computer in the back and watches the cameras, gets on the microphone to chew you out if you aren’t actively doing shit, even when there’s nothing to do, but for fuck’s sake, only barely.

    My dream was to be a paleontologist when I was a kid, and I would have been a damned good one, I know every dinosaur. Think of a dinosaur, go ahead, I’ll wait.

    Yeah, I know that one.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      slop in the trough for you fucking sickos.

      SLOP FOR THE PIGGIES! sicko-pig SLOP FOR THE PIGGIES! sicko-pig

      dog food that was causing dogs hearts to enlarge, because they had a contract with the company that manufactured it. They had a print off of straight up apologia I was expected to recite to every customer who raised concerns over recent court cases.

      State-sanctioned dog abuse. what-the-hell

      “You may not realise this but I’m actually a small business owner and returns and complaints like this hurt my business.” Straight up trying to guilt trip customers into keeping garbage they were tricked into buying

      The smol beanification of the rich. Somehow the actual worker is an after-afterthought and somehow only the capitalist is the ultimate victim and poor widdle guy is just forced to be reliant on the charity of others! Take it from someone who’s even worked non-profits, behind all of them is someone proudly being the ultimate charity case.

      My dream was to be a paleontologist when I was a kid, and I would have been a damned good one, I know every dinosaur.

      Really cool and good we live in a system where all jobs worth a damn are luxury jobs only for a small select elite. I wish you all the luck in the world if you can one day make it a reality.

      Solidarity comrade, thanks for the fresh slop btw 07

      • Bishop_Owl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Yeah, a lot of the grain free dog food, which got really trendy there for a while, was blocking absorption of taurine in dogs, I think mostly because of poor research and planning on the manufacturers part, they just wanted to get on that train.

        Dog food in general is incredibly depressing when you take the time to think about any of it. Can you imagine feeding yourself with nothing but $30 a month? Even $100 a month which is widely considered exorbitant for dog food by most people’s standards, at least in the US.

        What could you possibly put in there that qualifies as nutrition and not straight up poison? We wonder why dogs only live to be maybe 20, and of course natural senescense plays a major role there, but I think that at least part of it is because the best you can hope for out of kibble is stuff thats manufactured by companies like fuckin’ Colgate.

      • Bishop_Owl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Well you sent me the wiki page for this one so I assume it’s not the one you’re thinking of, which in this case would be another s. mirabilis, the newly discovered spinosaurs mirabilis with the large scimitar-like crest, which actually got its own hexbear thread a little while ago so that’s sort of cheating on my part.

        I’ll go ahead and pre-emptively guess the one after this. You’ll send me dracorex hogwartsia, named so because of its likeness to the wyvern in the Goblet of Fire, expecting me to think of pachycephalosaurus and all the dispute and drama over the ideas put forth by jack horner and his team, who was married to a nineteen year old student of his and is a total creep, BUT that would be a deliberate misdirect. In fact you’re thinking of the closest thing we’ve got to a real wyvern, next to which dracorex hogwartsia is but a wyrm: yi qi

        Edit: specificity for the sake of comedy

    • Saymaz@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      5 days ago

      Thank you for the slop, comrade. I hope you rediscover your passion for pursuing a career in Paleontology.

      • Bishop_Owl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Thank you comrade. I’m still very passionate about it, but like many others, I have an abundance of excuses I use on myself, to keep from fundamentally changing anything about my life.

        Even that has some comedic value in a sick sort of way.

    • AFineWayToDie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      I used to dream of being a paleontologist too. In fact, I even did three years of university before my undiagnosed ADHD and resultant crippling anxiety put an end to that.

      I sometimes wonder if a fascination with science and the natural world is some kind of dialectical materialist pipeline.

      • I really want to be a fossil preparator mostly, just sit on the worlds worst stool in a fluorescent hellscape all day, get home and tell my partner about uncovering my thirtieth psittacosaurus metatarsal or my five hundredth fractured ammolite shell or whatever.

        That said if they don’t let you listen to music while you do that I’d have to bow out.

    • Saymaz@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      6 days ago

      I support the natural process of proletarianization when capitalism eventually run these ‘small business owners’ out of business. 🙏

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      Arguing on the internet is more about convincing the audience than the other person, but more importantly some people just find it fun to argue.

  • It’s hilarious that they chose plasterers, specifically.

    It takes about 10 years of training and experience to become proficient. No joke. It still works on a quasi-apprenticeship system in the US because of that. It’s not something a petty-bouge contractor can do in a pinch.

    They charge that much because that’s what it’s worth. The reason society looks down on skilled labor so much is because it isn’t something that can be easily replaced.