Yeah, I would always pick the law over the union. I once had an employer try to fuck me over the pettiest thing. they had incorrectly, probably deliberately, terminated my contract so that I was ineligible for unemployment benefits. They don’t pay that benefit and it takes them literally 5 minutes to fix it, so it pretty much would cost them nothing to make that change. But it meant the world for me because that would’ve been the only way for me to put food on the table. I argued with them for days and the entire time they’re gaslighting me with “You don’t know what you’re talking about, we did everything right. Nothing is wrong.” Eventually I got fed up. I told them “I don’t need to deal with this shit. Give me the official reason why you can’t change the reason for me termination. I’ll forward it to the labour office and you can deal with them.” literally the next thing they said was “fine, we’ll fix it.” and 5 minutes later it was done.

I imagine a union would’ve also helped me in that scenario, but I enjoyed the safety of knowing I could stick the law in their face and tell them to eat shit. My opinion is that worker unions are great but labor laws are even better.

Yeah. You don’t need to look far (to lemmy.ml) to find people who argue that Russia is perfectly justified in not respecting the ceasefire. Clearly we won’t be changing the mind of those people because to them anything Ukraine related (from the west) is 100% propaganda which means Macron stating the obvious is also just “propaganda” to them. But for people who aren’t keeping up with the news it’s useful to remind them that the world doesn’t believe the tankie sauce certain people seem to think is the truth.

Because it’s largely irrelevant? If someone says “This is the best lock you can use on your front door” and someone else replies “not if you leave the key in the lock” do you think that’s a important thing to mention? No lock is safe if you leave the key in the lock. Maybe it’s important to remind people that you shouldn’t leave your key in the lock, but that statement says nothing about the security of the lock.

Similarly maybe it’s important to remind people that their phones might already be rooted, but that statement says nothing about whether Signal is good or bad from a security point of view.

Their losses are clearly significant enough to bring a foreign army (North Koreans) to replenish their forces. Maybe not 50% but I don’t think it’s that far off.

Yeah, Embark was founded by the former CEO of DICE so I imagine quite a lot of DICE talent moved to Embark.

I think I was rambling a bit. I think the best course of action is to just give it a try because I think the gameplay is the biggest make or break for people. If you don’t enjoy the gameplay then it doesn’t matter if the game isn’t a toxic mess and not really predatory with the MTX.

I would say the community is much better than what you would expect from Call of Duty or Destiny or anything looking to hit super mainstream. I think most toxic players won’t play the game because the game has a high effective TTK. The average encounter is around probably 1-2 seconds because you usually need to hit more than 5 shots and your opponent has enough time to react and use movement to make them a harder target to hit. The higher TTK may be a deal breaker, it was for a lot of people during launch, but I personally enjoy it.

I think the MTX is pretty mild. It’s all cosmetic so they don’t impact the core gameplay at all, which means if you don’t care about cosmetics your only interaction with the MTX is the little sale window on the top left of the main menu. You can earn some in game currency to buy cosmetics but because it’s F2P their only revenue streams are the battlepass (which again is also strictly cosmetic rewards or in game currency) and the cosmetic shop. Some things are only for real cash and they can look expensive (like $20 for a pack of cosmetic items) but they usually come with in game currencies so if you’re planning to use the in game currency as well that $20 usually drops to $7-$8 which for 2025 isn’t actually that much. I forgot to mention, the battlepass can be bought for the in game currency so what I’ve done is bought the $20 thingy and the use most of the in game currency to buy the battlepass.

No, it will not stay the same. That’s the point of taxation.

If you own a chair today how does that change when tomorrow some tax is applied to your “capital”?

This just shows how bad faith all of your arguments are. I clearly do not mean competition and profit are necessary, just that they lead to capital accumulation, which is what you denied.

I guess it depends on how you define capital accumulation. If we take the standard capitalist understanding of capital, then yes it leads to capital accumulation and I’m not denying that because adding labor power inevitably leads to an increase of capital.

However, you argued that the profit motive and competition lead to production efficiencies and then added that without " an expectation of profit, private property, etc" this doesn’t work at all. I denied that you need a profit motive or competition to reach better efficiency. We’ve had at least 2 millenia of increasing production efficiency a real need for profit or competition. Capitalism is not a necessity for production efficiency. Believing we couldn’t be efficient without capitalism is just capitalist propaganda.

A market compels economic agents to act a certain way, as they are driven by profit, and markets provide information on what is in demand/profitable. Within a market framework, establishing a monopoly is highly profitable and makes a lot of sense. Which is why your accusation of incompetence you made in a previous comment falls apart, since while that, which is profitable is not the same as that which is good for society(governments should try to make sure the markets exist in contexts that make them beneficial)

Do you even understand what you’re saying? You pretty much just said that capitalism is not good for society. And your original argument about the wealthy needing their wealth is one that wants to perpetuate capitalism. You’re pretty much arguing against yourself here.

And just as an FYI, markets are not unique to capitalism. Market socialism is also a thing.

If you do not accept this, I see no point in talking to you any longer. You are thinking in one line slogans and do not see the context of what I, or you for that matter, are saying.

What am I supposed to accept? That we should put profits over what is good for the society? If you want me to accept that then I also don’t see a point in talking with you. If you want me to accept that capital accumulation is something that happens, I can accept that (though I definitely have a different option on what should be done with that “capital” we keep producing).

Just a PSA, The Finals is playable on Linux and is F2P with a very reasonable monetization (cosmetic only with some free cosmetic options as well) and the new season just began.

For me it scratches that multiplayer itch because the destructible environments make matches feel very dynamic.

So you think there is a distinction between investment capital and some other capital I do not know about?

Ookay… So what’s the issue with taxing them? It’s not like the office chair they own suddenly becomes useless if they get taxed. Their capital in the most general sense will stay the same.

Yes it does. If there is not an expectation of profit, private property, etc this does not work at all. If there are, it will lead to capital accumulation.

Ah yes, we were all hunter gatherers until capitalism was invented. We didn’t improve our production methods, we didn’t improve our tools, we didn’t educate ourselves. No offense but that’s an absolutely moronic argument.

Creating a monopoly is not an example of unreasonable decitions. What?

So we don’t need a market economy? Because a monopoly destroys the market.

Google has a lot of money, and experimenting with possible products is not what I would call an example of stupid decisions.

I never said it was a stupid decision. You said they need to allocate resources correctly, they don’t because because they’re probably making more money they can spend. They don’t feel any pressure to make correct decisions.

Bying a competitor is a terrific idea.

I’m sorry, I thought competition in the market is the reason companies make great decisions. So it’s a terrific idea to get rid of the very thing that forces you to make great decisions?

Well, you’re not wrong. Capitalism loves when it can just buy itself into a monopoly and churn out shitty products because people have no other option.

The wall street did not crash because of individual mistake of investors, but because of market tendencies. This is completely unrelated.

Those market tendencies were all reckless financial actions from orders that came top to bottom. The capital owners were squeezing everything they could out of the people, until it all came crashing down. And then they got bailed out by the government.

“The more they slave the more profitable they will be” is, of course, true in a sense that paying less can increase profit margins amd you can force the workers to work more, but this is not always possible as there are usually regulations that protect workers, unions, and some positions are highly competitive.

So capitalism is okay because the non-capitalist things are supposed to keep it in check?

I do not know what is the case in America, but here government jobs pay less than private sector. Often a lot less. Goverment workers are as likely to overwork because they are understaffed. They are still less efficient. There is no research that reflects what you are saying. This is just your opinion.

Okay, so provide sources proving otherwise you saying the government is less efficient is also JUST YOUR OPINION.

You said the govenment ahould decide how capital is allocated, and not capitalists. What is it if not central planning?

I assume it’s implied we’re talking about investment capital considering you said taxing the rich would reduce their ability to invest and I talked exclusively about investing.

Competition and profit motive create incentives to decrease production costs, increase production, look for new markets and lower the price(not always, do not tell me about when this is not the case, I know).

None of those things have anything to do with the existence of wealthy people.

And both capitalists and upper management exist in a very pressured environment. Capitalists have to allocate resources correctly, because they own them. For that reason, they are careful when investing, and only do economically sensible things(if they themselves are sensible, and if they are not they will see their capital diminish)

Maybe 50-100 years ago. Do you really think Google, Amazon, Meta and anything Elon Musk touches exists in a pressured environment? Google has so much money they can create new tech for a new product and then 2-3 years later throw the tech with the product into the dumpster. Amazon has deliberately attritioned out an entire market (by undercutting everyone) to create a monopolistic empire. Meta “expansions” into other markets have been exclusively through buying out a potential competitor, because they just have that much money. And Musk blew away 42 billion to run one of the biggest social media sites into the ground. They don’t feel pressure. They don’t need to allocate resources correctly. Mega corporations have so much capital they don’t even know what to do with it. They probably could torch half their market value and their closest competitor still wouldn’t be competition to them.

Or did you mean the time wall street literally crashed the economy so hard the government had to bail them out? When it comes to the wealthy there are no risks.

This is the system that made America the largest economy in the world.

And for what purpose? Who benefits from having the largest economy in the world? It’s clearly not the American people.

The same can not be said about government owned firms. I said nearly unlimited, and this is more or less the case. Governments throw money at the problem until it is solved, since there is no profit motive, no pressure to perform, costs are higher, performance is worse, etc. Of course, they try to optimise, but history shows that they are almost always less efficient than private firms.

You’re trying to say China isn’t on the verge of beating the US in the economic game? It has nothing to do with who controls the company, it’s about how much you make your employees slave away. The more they slave the more profitable you’ll be. Government entities tend to be “less efficient” because there’s higher scrutiny towards slaving away (they can still end up slaving away because they’re usually underfunded so one person has to fulfill multiple roles, but that’s because there’s not enough taxation coming in due to us not properly taxing the rich).

I don’t feel like writing an essay so I’ll approach it a bit differently.

Governments invest in some things, but they can’t effectively manage the entire economy. It is too complex, and markets provide information that will simply not be available under central planning.

I’m not sure why you brought up central planning. That didn’t even cross my mind when I made my comment. I don’t think there’s anything else to address here because most of what you said seems to be in the context of central planning.

The government is getting ripped of by private contractors

Why do you think the wealthy aren’t getting ripped off? What are they doing that the government cannot do?

as they can’t control the complexities of production

And the wealthy can? And by wealthy I mean the wealthy individual, not the companies they own.

have nearly unlimited resources, so they do not optimise

unlimited resources is clearly hyperbolic because if they did have unlimited resources then who cares if they’re getting ripped or and are extremely inefficient, as long as the things get done. As for “optimizing”, optimizing for what? Should the government optimize for profit the same way companies do?

and a lot of asinine decisions are made because nobody cares enough.

Do you think companies don’t make asinine decisions? COVID showed that work from home is perfectly viable. It’s also an obvious cost cutting method because you don’t need to rent or own a huge office space, you get to downsize and save money. Most companies chose the more expensive option. For what?

Look at how bloated the military funding is in the US for example.

How do you think the military industrial complex came to be? Modern MIL came into existence during and after WW2 when private enterprises saw a huge market in war. The very people you claim should be making the decisions about capital allocation are the people who played an integral role in bloating the US military funding.

fuck off with that neoliberal bullshit.

I am not opposed to inreasing taxes necessarily, but people need to understand that the income of wealthy individuals is not used purely for the fulfilment of their needs and wishes. Rich people play a rather important role in allocating and managing resourses(capital) in society, and increasing the taxes will decrease the capability of rich people to invest, which is not ideal.

Governments already do “investing”. Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world thanks to the US government subsidizing Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. Your tax money is already going into allocating and managing capital in society, so how about instead of letting wealthy individuals choose how capital gets invested we let the government decide that? It’s neoliberal brainrot that wealthy capitalists, without any real oversight, should be the ones to dictate how capital is used.

Also, if the tax increase is percieved to be unfair, rich people can just leave and go to Monaco or Switzerland or any other “rich friendly” country. They are pretty much free to do so and they do it all the time. So increasing taxes will not necessarily lead to more tax revenue if they are increased above what is reasonable.

And let them go. The wealthy can go wherever they want but most their wealth is tied to their businesses and moving those businesses elsewhere is extremely expensive. The can take their wealth with them only if they spend an insane amount to transfer all their businesses out of the country or if they cash out their businesses. Both come with a significant drop in wealth, so they’re not going to do that. You’ve been fed bullshit propaganda.