You're not really engaging with my points or questions so I'm gonna move on. I understand how the current situation works quite well, having been involved in many businesses in many different roles throughout my life. Most of us agree the way things work today is awful. I was here to explore fruitful changes to make to the status quo. Not to be told how one can, in fact, seek risk through the joys of sole proprietorship.
Cheers, have a good weekend.
That's a super naive understanding of how it works to "setup a business", outside of I guess a sole-proprietor tiny little situation.
And regardless - let me ask you, why must it be all or nothing? Under your scenario, I either take all of the risk myself by founding the business, or I am strictly paid in dollars by someone who did, and nothing in between - but why? What's the argument that this is a good way to do things? Am I not taking some risk by buying into the company I work for? Why is that only an option for the very top of the company? Because "risk" is a misnomer that focuses on the wrong part, and actually it's freaking great to have a true stake in your place of employment?
I'm not arguing that it's impossible to start a business, or to work and scrape and get lucky and transition into the ownership class in some small capacity. I'm saying having only a few people have true skin in the game for any business is frickin stupid, a bad way to do things, likely to produce half-hearted efforts from employees, and guaranteed to produce the extreme wealth inequality we see today.
Edit: bit more detail on my preferred approach
Thank you, very useful to have someone who has done it in the thread. Would you agree that being born into one of the wealthy families in America would dramatically reduce the difficulty and risk of everything you've described above? All that stuff sounds so much easier if you're rich enough to pay others to do a bunch of it, and rich enough to still be fine (even still rich, usually!) if it doesn't work out.
What if instead of zero profits, all employees are paid in part via some amount of ownership stake in any company?
My issue with the "we take all the risk, tho!" argument is that I'm never even allowed to take the risk, too. For example, my current company is small, compensation has grown disappointing after we were acquired by VC, and there is no pathway for me to begin purchasing any kind of ownership stake. We're just the labor, despite all of us having been here longer than the new owner, in many cases having been here to build the thing the new owners bought.
So it must be pretty damn attractive, actually, for those at the top to continually offer that to one another, while withholding it from anyone below executive leadership. I'm pretty tired of hearing it as a justification when those "taking all the risk" end up doing so goddamn well, and the rest of us are locked out of it in the first place. It's just abusive language we've all internalized.
Edit to add: ya know, it was probably easier to swallow and originated in the prior eras, where a steady paycheck was a safe and stable way to go through life. These days being an underpaid wage slave is far riskier than being any kind of investor. I don't think "all the risk" is even meaningful or remotely accurate anymore.
I mean, "theft" implies depriving someone of something, to me. But I don't want to bicker about definitions if your position is more about morality of taking something for free than about the definition of theft.
For myself, I'll happily pay for things that provide fair value and a fair agreement / relationship. That includes donating to stuff that is offered for free - there are a handful of content creators and other services (Internet Archive, Signal, etc.) that I directly support, every month. And by the same token, I don't feel bad at all about enjoying something, for free and against their wishes, from a company or publisher that only offers unacceptable (to me) terms.
To me those are perfectly consistent. My dollars go to individuals and publishers that produce the kind of media ecosystem I think is good for us. Because - we must be clear - it's not a level playing field, and the shift away from consumer ownership is a plague of exploitation inflicted upon us. It's now metastasizing away from strictly digital domains, now to physical hardware, which is outrageous. Roku, for instance, can update your streaming device overnight and force you to accept their new terms, in order to keep using your device. This is not hypothetical, it happened (may have gotten company wrong).
Do you think the companies enacting policies, particularly ones prohibiting ownership outright, are operating from an ethical or moral framework? I promise they don't believe in anything like that. They screw us precisely as hard as the courts, and the court of public opinion, allow. And they're always trying to move that line in their favor.
Why do you care about pirating? Who or what are you standing up for, I guess I'm asking?
Oh, yeah that makes sense too. Bad premise all around I guess.
I mean, are you taking your definition of "theft" from the law? Or from your own internal set of ethics for right and wrong? Is it theft if no one is deprived of anything, because bits copy, and because you'd never trade dollars for the privilege of maintaining an exploitative relationship with a company but that is all they've made available?
If you're hung up on whether the legal system thinks it's theft - I dunno what to tell ya, it obviously does.
Edit: uh, maybe you're literally asking for how the logic in that statement works, which I read as just "if it can't be owned, how can it be stolen?"
You say complacent, I say complicit.
:(