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moregraceful · 11 months
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linkedin sent me a job posting for the los angeles dodgers for their community outreach team, obviously i clicked on it...boy how are you going to pay a middle manager in charge of literally every single youth and education program for the dodgers a mere $25-30/hr. can your staff even afford an apartment in los angeles on that salary. you have freddie freeman on the books for $162m, how the hell do you justify paying a manager $25 a hour
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marnz · 1 year
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scrolling through non profit job postings with ludicrously low salaries like “could I do that? I could do that. Wait for that salary? No I couldn’t.”
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spoekelse · 2 years
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This person was trying to argue that transphobia/antisemitism was the same as Chinese food and I therefore needed to not advocate boycotting the new Harry Potter game
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fazcinatingblog · 10 months
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Me: has studied management accounting, knows about ABC costing for different product lines
Also me: WHY CAN'T THE EARNINGS FROM MEN FUND THE WOMEN
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let me explain why i’m flooding your dash with posts about the harpercollins strike
As a bookseller, I want you to know that one of the worst things about our industry is the unsettlingly pervasive idea that we should financially suffer for working in it. There is a powerful idea in creative fields (as in many, many fields under late capitalism) that one should be willing to forego necessities of life -- namely, an adequate wage -- in order to have work that one resonates with emotionally.
In bookworld, I’d say that this is frequently aided and abetted by two factors. First, we often feel a strong sense of community with our coworkers and the book creation/promotion world at large and feel we should sacrifice personally for them; that to do so is right. Second, we have a sense that, due to a confluence of factors  from Amazon monopolization to the rise of the Internet to the pandemic’s financial tolls, we work in a permanently struggling industry -- that we should be willing to take the hit, as it were, to help keep our business afloat.
Neither of those feelings is accurate in an independent bookstore. It doesn’t matter how narrow the profit margins are or how close you are with your coworkers. Your labor is labor, and it must be compensated. They are even less true in the context of a multi-billion-dollar publishing corporation, where the people at the top (including the parent company’s owner, who is literally Rupert Murdoch) benefit from growing monopolization while employees are unable to afford basic cost-of-living expenses. May I remind you that of HarperCollins’ thousands of employees, many are required to live in New York City -- one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world. While working long hours, HarperCollins staff making a starting salary (45,000/year) make $18,600 less than the average annual cost of living in New York City for a single person.
This is unacceptable. As one sign carried on the picket line read-- PASSION DOESN’T PAY THE RENT.
Fair wages do.
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scintillyyy · 3 months
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i actually think it's pretty funny dc writing dick growing up the son of literally famous, show selling out performers that literally everyone on the planet has heard of and really kind of poor growing up actually because the latter really says a lot of what dc thinks of extremely skilled circus performers and is. a little racist & classist if you think about it. and somehow manages to reflect really poorly on both john and mary grayson and haly's circus.
because i think it's like. they take the roma retcon + itinerant lifestyle + grew up in a rv + circus folk are basically carnival workers who get paid under the table, right? and add that up to = ergo dick grayson must have been very poor growing up despite the fact that. literally everyone on the planet has heard of his super famous parents.
and i'm not just talking modern day, where everyone and their brother seems to have gone to haly's circus (or was there that night). but even in post crisis, people like bonnie's mom were casually name-dropping "oh, like the flying graysons". they were pretty casually known, actually.
like yea, in a lonely place of dying mr. haly mentions that even back then (when they had the flying graysons as an act), the circus was "barely breaking even" but also does this make sense for a circus that would sell out whenever the flying graysons performed. like there's almost a dissonance between how well the circus is always shown to be doing in it's heyday (constant selling out, employing extremely famous acrobats) vs how well they're told to be doing (barely breaking even).
and like. if it is true & they were paid poverty wages despite the fact that they were literally the extremely world-famous headlining act of the circus, then either john and mary are completely incapable of negotiating themselves a fair salary for their skills &/or mr. haly is probably exploiting them.
because like. the flying graysons being a act for haly's circus means they would have to have a contract with the circus for their pay and benefits in return for their act--even in a lonely place of dying the other performers mention their contracts with the circus. because, again, circus performers are skilled workers. so being extremely skilled acrobats who are super famous, john and mary have. a LOT of power on the negotiating table given they're the only three people on the planet that can do a quadruple somersault and other circuses are probably salivating to offer them a lot of money to work for them instead. to buy their world famous act outright would probably cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to avoid paying them royalities for everytime they performed it. if their act wasn't bought outright for a lot of money then their contract probably stipulates a certain percentage of profit from the shows they sell out as the headlining act OR should be more than enough to cover their yearly expenses, food, gas for their rv, insurance, etc. in fact, they may stipulate certain stipeds for gas and food. they might stipulate the circus cover their life & disability insurance given the inherent danger of their act.
so if they're completely unaware of what they're worth and being underpaid for their skills that are literally selling out shows, then you're implying that they're completely clueless & unable to negotiate a fair price for their skills and mr. haly is taking major advantage of them and dick grayson should tell that man to kick fucking rocks.
or they're just. okay? with being completely and totally underpaid for their skills given they like mr. haly so much?
idk. the more famous dc makes the graysons, the more dissonant this actually gets. like in modern day if they're so famous why don't they also have a monetized youtube of their acts & practices with millions of views. if they're that famous and still poverty level struggling, then why were they incapable of advocating for their worth as the only 3 people who could perform a quadruple somersault. like either the circus was a niche thing that struggled a lot and they shouldn't be famous (tim drake should be their only fan) or they were extremely famous and mary and john grayson. should have probably done decently well advocating for themselves, actually.
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Podcasting "Microincentives and Enshittification"
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Tomorrow (Oct 25) at 10hPT/18hUK, I'm livestreaming an event called "Seizing the Means of Computation" for the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
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This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "Microincentives and Enshittification," about the way that monopoly drives mediocrity, with Google's declining quality as Exhibit A:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
It's not your imagination: Google used to be better – in every way. Search used to be better, sure, but Google used to be better as a company. It treated its workers better (for example, not laying off 12,000 workers months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years). It had its users' backs in policy fights – standing up for Net Neutrality and the right to use encryption to keep your private data private. Even when the company made ghastly mistakes, it repented of them and reversed them, like the time it pulled out of China after it learned that Chinese state hackers had broken into Gmail in order to discover which dissidents to round up and imprison.
None of this is to say that Google used to be perfect, or even, most of the time, good. Just that things got worse. To understand why, we have to think about how decisions get made in large organizations, or, more to the point, how arguments get resolved in these organizations.
We give Google a lot of shit for its "Don't Be Evil" motto, but it's worth thinking through what that meant for the organization's outcomes over the years. Through most of Google's history, the tech labor market was incredibly tight, and skilled engineers and other technical people had a lot of choice as to where they worked. "Don't Be Evil" motivated some – many – of those workers to take a job at Google, rather than one of its rivals.
Within Google, that meant that decisions that could colorably be accused of being "evil" would face some internal pushback. Imagine a product design meeting where one faction proposes something that is bad for users, but good for the company's bottom line. Think of another faction that says, "But if we do that, we'll be 'evil.'"
I think it's safe to assume that in any high-stakes version of this argument, the profit side will prevail over the don't be evil side. Money talks and bullshit walks. But what if there were also monetary costs to being evil? Like, what if Google has to worry about users or business customers defecting to a rival? Or what if there's a credible reason to worry that a regulator will fine Google, or Congress will slap around some executives at a televised hearing?
That lets the no-evil side field a more robust counterargument: "Doing that would be evil, and we'll lose money, or face a whopping fine, or suffer reputational harms." Even if these downsides are potentially smaller than the upsides, they still help the no-evil side win the argument. That's doubly true if the downsides could depress the company's share-price, because Googlers themselves are disproportionately likely to hold Google stock, since tech companies are able to get a discount on their wage-bills by paying employees in abundant stock they print for free, rather than the scarce dollars that only come through hard graft.
When the share-price is on the line, the counterargument goes, "That would be evil, we will lose money, and you will personally be much poorer as a result." Again, this isn't dispositive – it won't win every argument – but it is influential. A counterargument that braids together ideology, institutional imperatives, and personal material consequences is pretty robust.
Which is where monopoly comes in. When companies grow to dominate their industries, they are less subject to all forms of discipline. Monopolists don't have to worry about losing disgusted employees, because they exert so much gravity on the labor market that they find it easy to replace them.
They don't have to worry about losing customers, because they have eliminated credible alternatives. They don't have to worry about losing users, because rivals steer clear of their core business out of fear of being bigfooted through exclusive distribution deals, predatory pricing, etc. Investors have a name for the parts of the industry dominated by Big Tech: they call it "the kill zone" and they won't back companies seeking to enter it.
When companies dominate their industries, they find it easier to capture their regulators and outspend public prosecutors who hope to hold them to account. When they lose regulatory fights, they can fund endless appeals. If they lose those appeals, they can still afford the fines, especially if they can use an army of lawyers to make sure that the fine is less than the profit realized through the bad conduct. A fine is a price.
In other words, the more dominant a company is, the harder it is for the good people within the company to win arguments about unethical and harmful proposals, and the worse the company gets. The internal culture of the company changes, and its products and services decline, but meaningful alternatives remain scarce or nonexistent.
Back to Google. Google owns more than 90% of the search market. Google can't grow by adding more Search users. The 10% of non-Google searchers are extremely familiar with Google's actions. To switch to a rival search engine, they have had to take many affirmative, technically complex steps to override the defaults in their devices and tools. It's not like an ad extolling the virtues of Google Search will bring in new customers.
Having saturated the search market, Google can only increase its Search revenues by shifting value from searchers or web publishers to itself – that is, the only path to Search growth is enshittification. They have to make things worse for end users or business customers in order to make things better for themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
This means that each executive in the Search division is forever seeking out ways to shift value to Google and away from searchers and/or publishers. When they propose a enshittificatory tactic, Google's market dominance makes it easy for them to win arguments with their teammates: "this may make you feel ashamed for making our product worse, but it will not make me poorer, it will not make the company poorer, and it won't chase off business customers or end users, therefore, we're gonna do it. Fuck your feelings."
After all, each microenshittification represents only a single Jenga block removed from the gigantic tower that is Google Search. No big deal. Some Google exec made the call to make it easier for merchants to buy space overtop searches for their rivals. That's not necessarily a bad thing: "Thinking of taking a vacation in Florida? Why not try Puerto Rico – it's a US-based Caribbean vacation without the transphobia and racism!"
But this kind of advertising also opens up lots of avenues for fraud. Scammers clone local restaurants' websites, jack up their prices by 15%, take your order, and transmit it to the real restaurant, pocketing the 15%. They get clicks by using some of that rake to buy an ad based on searches for the restaurant's name, so they show up overtop of it and rip off inattentive users:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
This is something Google could head off; they already verify local merchants by mailing them postcards with unique passwords that they key into a web-form. They could ban ads for websites that clone existing known merchants, but that would incur costs (engineer time) and reduce profits, both from scammers and from legit websites that trip a false positive.
The decision to sell this kind of ad, configured this way, is a direct shift of value from business customers (restaurants) and end-users (searchers) to Google. Not only that, but it's negative sum. The money Google gets from this tradeoff is less than the cost to both the restaurant (loss of goodwill from regulars who are affronted because of a sudden price rise) and searchers (who lose 15% on their dinner orders). This trade-off makes everyone except Google worse off, and it's only possible when Google is the only game in town.
It's also small potatoes. Last summer, scammers figured out how to switch out the toll-free numbers that Google displayed for every airline, redirecting people to boiler-rooms where con-artists collected their credit-card numbers and sensitive personal information (passports, etc):
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766
Here again, we see a series of small compromises that lead to a massive harm. Google decided to show users 800 numbers rather than links to the airlines' websites, but failed to fortify the process for assigning phone numbers to prevent this absolutely foreseeable type of fraud. It's not that Google wanted to enable fraud – it's that they created the conditions for the fraud to occur and failed to devote the resources necessary to defend against it.
Each of these compromises indicates a belief among Google decision-makers that the consequences for making their product worse will be outweighed by the value the company will generate by exposing us to harm. One reason for this belief is on display in the DOJ's antitrust case against Google:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download
The case accuses Google of spending tens of billions of dollars to buy out the default search position on every platform where an internet user might conceivably perform a search. The company is lighting multiple Twitters worth of dollars on fire to keep you from ever trying another search engine.
Spraying all those dollars around doesn't just keep you from discovering a better search engine – it also prevents investors from funding that search engine in the first place. Why fund a startup in the kill-zone if no one will ever discover that it exists?
https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android
Of course, Google doesn't have to grow Search to grow its revenue. Hypothetically, Google could pursue new lines of business and grow that way. This is a tried-and-true strategy for tech giants: Apple figured out how to outsource its manufacturing to the Pacific Rim; Amazon created a cloud service, Microsoft figured out how to transform itself into a cloud business.
Look hard at these success stories and you discover another reason that Google – and other large companies – struggle to grow by moving into adjacent lines of business. In each case – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon – the exec who led the charge into the new line of business became the company's next CEO.
In other words: if you are an exec at a large firm and one of your rivals successfully expands the business into a new line, they become the CEO – and you don't. That ripples out within the whole org-chart: every VP who becomes an SVP, every SVP who becomes an EVP, and every EVP who becomes a president occupies a scarce spot that it worth millions of dollars to the people who lost it.
The one thing that execs reliably collaborate on is knifing their ambitious rivals in the back. They may not agree on much, but they all agree that that guy shouldn't be in charge of this lucrative new line of business.
This "curse of bigness" is why major shifts in big companies are often attended by the return of the founder – think of Gates going back to Microsoft or Brin returning to Google to oversee their AI projects. They are the only execs that other execs can't knife in the back.
This is the real "innovator's dilemma." The internal politics of large companies make Machiavelli look like an optimist.
When your company attains a certain scale, any exec's most important rival isn't the company's competitor – it's other execs at the same company. Their success is your failure, and vice-versa.
This makes the business of removing Jenga blocks from products like Search even more fraught. These quality-degrading, profit-goosing tactics aren't coordinated among the business's princelings. When you're eating your seed-corn, you do so in private. This secrecy means that it's hard for different product-degradation strategists to realize that they are removing safeguards that someone else is relying on, or that they're adding stress to a safety measure that someone else just doubled the load on.
It's not just Google, either. All of tech is undergoing a Great Enshittening, and that's due to how intertwined all these tech companies. Think of how Google shifts value from app makers to itself, with a 30% rake on every dollar spent in an app. Google is half of the mobile duopoly, with the other half owned by Apple. But they're not competitors – they're co-managers of a cartel. The single largest deal that Google or Apple does every year is the bribe Google pays Apple to be the default search for iOS and Safari – $15-20b, every year.
If Apple and Google were mobile competitors, you'd expect them to differentiate their products, but instead, they've converged – both Apple and Google charge sky-high 30% payment processing fees to app makers.
Same goes for Google/Facebook, the adtech duopoly: not only do both companies charge advertisers and publishers sky-high commissions, clawing 51 cents out of every ad dollar, but they also illegally colluded to rig the market and pay themselves more, at advertisers' and publishers' expense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
It's not just tech, either – every sector from athletic shoes to international sea-freight is concentrated into anti-competitive, value-annihilating cartels and monopolies:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
As our friends on the right are forever reminding us: "incentives matter." When a company runs out of lands to conquer, the incentives all run one direction: downhill, into a pit of enshittification. Google got worse, not because the people in it are worse (or better) than they were before – but because the constraints that discipline the company and contain its worst impulses got weaker as the company got bigger.
Here's the podcast episode:
https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/23/microincentives-and-enshittification/
And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_452/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_452_-_Microincentives_and_Enshittification.mp3
And here's my podcast's RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
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thebibliosphere · 11 months
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wrt the AI thing, the doom is in what is just good enough to no longer pay people for it. Machine translation isn't good! The sentences are nice and often grammatically correct, but the information hasn't been accurately transferred a lot of the time (genre doesn't matter, but DeepL is pretty good for news articles, less good for other stuff). AI text is sentences that are made of words likely to go together it doesn't understand any of it. Especially if you want to write something a bit experimental, if you want to use specific words to evoke specific things etc etc... true art will not die, no matter how much some people try.
I mean, yeah, but that’s also just a progression of what’s already been happening for years. Publishing houses and companies have been outsourcing to the cheapest bidder for decades now due to lack of labor regulation and the death of unions. That’s what the major Harper Collins strike was about. Even while publishing houses are making record profits, they’re not paying their editors a living wage.
When I worked for a medium sized mainstream publisher back in the late 2000’s to 2010s, they used to remind us daily that if we didn’t hit our editing quota there were people on Freelancer and Fiver who would do it for a lot cheaper— and I was already earning below minimum hourly wage, that you could “make up” by taking on extra work.
(The salaried editors were the only ones with guaranteed income, the rest of us were told we were just lucky to be there.)
And multiple times a month they’d eliminate someone to ‘cut costs’ and the work would land on your desk and you’d be told to get it done because they knew we had no other options. It was this or unemployment at the start of what would be the second global recession of my life.
Eventually we did all get laid off and they opted for the cheaper, subpar labor. And while it sucked to be unemployed at that time, the relief I felt was real. I was no longer self-medicating with caffeine and alcohol to cope with the work environment. I was no longer churning out 100-200k a week in edits and rewrites to keep a job that treated me like shit. I missed it, because I loved working with my authors and editing and writing was something I loved. But I did not miss the rat race they had us locked into for the sake of profit over quality.
The fact that Harper Collins staff, one of the biggest publishers in the world who contribute to the monopoly that creates that environment, were also not making enough to live, tells me things have only gotten worse inside the industry. Unless, of course, you’re near the top of the corporate ladder. In which case you probably can’t understand why all the peasants are so unhappy.
The machines will not fully replace us—at least probably not in my lifetime. But that doesn’t mean what’s already happening isn’t bad.
AI is just the next wrung on this sordid descent into exploitation and elimination. We need better labor laws. We need better protections. We need fucking respect.
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sreegs · 7 months
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do you think the 2019 tumblr acquisition was made on a more optimistic note? In terms of how they thought the site could have been made profitable or at least self-sustaining.
yeah it felt good at the time because tumblr was owned by Verizon. switching hands to a company that was at least aligned with what tumblr does (blogging) and a private company made it feel like Tumblr had a chance to refocus and reprioritize, but Automattic was not a good fit for Tumblr culture
because tumblr was mostly nyc based and had things like, observed public holidays, and an office (this was pre-pandemic). there was this transitional period where tumblr was treated with some exceptions while they adjusted to the Automattic way of things. this strengthened the divide as seasoned Automattic employees saw us as getting special treatment like sub-competitive wages (as compared to absolutely not competitive wages) and a day off during national holidays.
this transitional policy was loosely documented and adhered to, and was unceremoniously ended by a decree from the top that Tumblr no longer has holidays off. i'm not going to say which national holiday triggered this change of heart but, lol, it's a doozy
additionally there were only a handful of automattic people who understood what tumblr was, and much less who understood the vibe of Tumblr's userbase. i know there were at least a few people who thought Tumblr was an analog of wordpress and didnt even know the dashboard existed
Tumblr employees started leaving en masse because their benefits and compensation were cut. Mullenwig's seagull style of management and the general disconnect between Automattic and Tumblr culture accelerated the exodus. I remember reading on Automattic's anonymous employee-only message board (yeah.) employees expressing their happiness that the "lazy overpaid Verizon acqui-hires" (the Tumblr staff, who had lower salaries than other tech companies and never identified as Verizon or Yahoo or anything except Tumblr) were being shed like dead weight and soon it will be Automattic in charge of everything
Also, side note: Automattic is weirdly anti-profanity as an unofficial workplace policy ordained from the CEO. How's that gonna fit with Tumblr?
So the initial feelings of freedom from Verizon and opportunity to work on things that might turn Tumblr around were dampened under the wet blanket of pay cuts, benefit cuts, cuts to time off (Automattic has "unlimited" vacation, lol), bad management, and an unwelcoming attitude from naysayers
The remaining old pre-2019 staff are very, very few in number. It's mostly Automattic's show now, and you can see how that's working out for them. i was once hopeful it would work out for Tumblr but that hope has long waned. it would not surprise me if the biggest advances toward profitability have been due to employees leaving Tumblr and not being replaced
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socialistexan · 9 months
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I think people get too caught up targeting CEO's when talking about the ills of the modern late capitalist economy.
Like, yeah, CEO's and other executives make way too much money, but if you, say, redistribute Bob Iger's $27 million a year he gets from Disney, every Disney employee would get something like $300 extra dollars a year. Not nothing and is something I think should absolutely happen, but also not exactly life-changing money and won't pull these employees up to a living wage.
CEO's are very publicly visible and their salaries are an easily visualized target. It's easy to blame a single person for the issues rather than an amorphous blob of shadowy investors who constantly demand that line go up. I get it, but I think it would be so much easier to tie all of our struggles together by pointing out the effects of financialization has had on every single industry.
It is never enough to not just make a profit, but that profit has to be higher every single year - year over year - to keep the investor class satisfied. The line can't just go up, it has to go up more every year. That's why you see pay cuts to ever more overworked employees who providing goods and services of increasingly lower quality at ever inflating prices.
There are CEO's that get paid very little of "donate" their salaries, and they can do that because they make money off of their investments. And the CEO's who aren't investors are beholden to the investors. Their job is to make sure line go up enough to make the investors happy.
We need to start blaming the McKinneyification of industry, higher returns for the lowest possible input and expenditures. Focus your fury on the market, on wall street, on these investment companies that skim off of everyone else's labor and misery. Investor market economics is the enemy we should target, everything else is a bandaid.
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tassjis · 2 months
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Small Copper - 10 lion Medium Copper - 100 lion Large Copper - 1,000 lion Small Silver - 10,000 lion Large Silver - 100,000 lion Small Gold - 1,000,000 lion Large Gold - 10,000,000 lion
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30 Fruit on the market <100 Payment for ordinary handiwork
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100 Shumil Feystone 100 Effa paid Lutz 200 Payment per flower part of a hair stick 500 Payment for making a mass-produced hairpin
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1,000 2 mugs of Behelle and some sausages in Ebb's bar 1,100 Hair ornaments with an express fee 2,000 Stone slate and one slate pencil 3,000 Initial price set for a mass-produced hairpin 6,000 A used calculator 8,000 Myne took home after selling her first sheets of paper 8,000-10,000 Ralph's monthly salary
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10,000 10 cookies sold at the Harpsiel concert 10,000 Given to each soldier escorting grey priests to Hasse 10,000 Cost per hair stick arranged for the girls in the Ehrenfest dorm to wear as a promotion 20,000 postcard-sized parchment 20,000 postcard-sized Volrin paper 30,000 profit from Frida's hair sticks (split between Lutz and Myne) 40,000 postcard-sized Trombe paper 40,000 A bottle of writing ink 40,000 Initial price for one of Freida's hair sticks 50,000 registration for the Myne Workshop 50,000 - 70,000 planned price for Reversi and Playing cards 60,000 Frieda's twin hairpins
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100,000 An apprentice uniform for Gilberta Co. 100,000 contract-sized parchment 100,000 contract-sized Volrin paper 100,000 minimum monthly wage for a Math and Writing Tutor - Three 1 bell lessons per week 100,000 Monthly salary of a gatekeeper (Gunther's Salary) 160,000 Myne's share of the 5 small gold donated to the temple 200,000 Given to the guards for handling an unexpected Clarrisa correctly 300,000 Monthly travel allowance paid to Italian restaurant chefs 300,000 Price for a Concert Program 300,000 Single colour poker set 400,000 Premium Reversi and playing cards 500,000 contract-sized Trombe paper 500,000 Monthly rental fee of an Italian chef 500,000 A Ferdinand portrait sold at the concert 500,000 Price of Karuta sold at the castle 500,000 - 800,000 Ticket price for low seats at the concert 800,000 Final price for a picture book
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1,000,000 price per Italian restaurant recipe 1,000,000 Highest seats in the concert 1,000,000 A picture book sold at the castle 1,000,000 Coloured playing cards sold at the castle 1,000,000 Price paid on Brigette's dress 1,000,000 Damuel's reward for the raise angelicas grade squad 1,000,000 Previous Grey Priest price 1,000,000 Royal Academy's Library Registration fee 1,800,000 Initial price of the Children's Bible 2,000,000 Laynoble price for Rozeyne's Mana Compression Method 2,000,000+ A faulty magic tool that will break 2,800,000 Cost of the mana tool to save Myne 2,800,000 2.5 years of Gunther's annual income 3,000,000 Information Fee to improve Rinsham 3,000,000 Used Mana draining tool that has been overwritten twice 5,000,000 Commission for a new mana-draining tool (estimate) 5,000,000 Average price for a grey priest 5,000,000 exclusive rights to pound cake for a year 6,000,000 Production method for plant paper 8,000,000 Mednoble price for Rozemyne's Mana compression method
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10,000,000 Mynes initial donation to the temple 17,000,000 Production method and rights to hair sticks 20,000,000 Archnoble price for Rozemynes Mana Compression method 22,000,000 price of grey priest Volk 30,000,000 deposit to borrow a book from the Royal Academy's library 30,000,000 Donations from the Tea Party 40,000,000-50,000,000 Price of a book 50,000,000 250 Trombe Paper (The size of a holy book) 128,600,000 profit from Ferdiand's concert (an undisclosed portion of this is considered "loose change" to Ferdinand) 180,000,000 estimated cost of transcribing and translating Dunklefelger's history
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txttletale · 9 months
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Hi! I'd like to ask a question about the whole small business thing, I hope that's ok, I really only want to understand better! What I'm curious about is where you draw the line, between handmade jewelry maker who sells on etsy, jewelry maker who sells at a market stall, jewelry maker who has a rented store space, jewelry maker who makes everything themselves but a family member helps with packaging and logistics, jewelry maker whos spouse does all the non jewelry making work of the business, jewelry maker who hires someone to help them with the non jewelry making work of the business, jewelry maker who hires someone to help them make the jewelry... Is the line drawn when a person is hired with a salary instead of splitting profits? Is it them owning the physical space of the shop and workshop and tools? Is there some other distinction? Is a mom and pop taco stall a business if only mom and pop work there? If their child takes on a shift or two? I'm trying to figure out the underlying logic! Hope that's ok to ask!
so when i say 'a business' i am referring to an organization with employees. and to be clear and address this i am aware and was aware when i made my post that many people call their one-person commercial venture a 'small business' -- i'm saying that categorization is a misleading and unhelfpul one that's tied to petty-bourgeois aspirationalism and that leads people to delude themselves about their class incentives.
and to address your question--you are entirely correct that the line is when a waged labourer is hired. because at that point, even if you continue to work your ass off, there now exists an ownership relation--you are the 'business owner'--that entitles you under capitalism to the value the waged labourer is producing. if you pay someone to do somethign for your jewellery making stand, whatever it is, you are obviously expecting their work to make more revenue for you than you'll spend paying them. this discrepancy--surplus value--is the fundamental unit of capitalist exploitation.
this is why i disagree that people running a one-man-show are 'business owners' because what do they own? they are not profiting because they own a business, they are profiting from the work they themselves are doing. the ownership relation is not producing wealth for them--being a 'business owner' means owning something that generates wealth because you own it. your own hands and tools are not a business
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strangebiology · 3 months
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How Funding Affected my Journalism Jobs
The different places I’ve worked as a journalist, and in related fields, have all had different funding. Here are my experiences at different places–and it seems to me that grant-funded stuff is the best. 
Internship at Nat Geo
Grants sponsored both of the other interns, but not me. Nat Geo makes a lot of its money through things like books at TV.
Mine was low-paid, but probably normal for an internship in 2016? LOVED the experience. Freelance at Nat Geo afterward was MUCH better paid. $14/hour part-time. IDK how much the grant-funded interns made. 2016.
Fellowship at PBS Newshour
A grant from the National Science Foundation funded me, but PBS is state-sponsored media. Interestingly, that’s a huge red flag in China and Russia, but I found the US-funded Public Broadcasting Service very fair to its subjects. Good experience, but even worse pay, at $13/hour full-time. 2016-2017
Job at Newsweek 
Their funding is from clicks. This place was crazy bad and paid garbage. Everyone hated it and almost everyone quit, unless they were being fired for making a living wage. Some people even got fired for accurately reporting on the company itself on assignment from their editors–there was no obscuring it, that was cited as their reason for termitation. Newsweek is Hellfire and damnation. I suspect the nonsense demand for 5 stories/day/person and silly demand that we make them go viral stemmed from the following: the fact that the company primarily made its money from clicks and higher-ups didn’t appear to care about the long-term reputation of the company or its reporters, and perhaps an ego-fueled refusal to try to understand what actually got clicks. $39k/year. 2017-2018
Freelance at VOX 
Funded by clicks/ads and grants at the time, but halfway through they started a contribution campaign. The difference I noticed between VOX and Newsweek was that VOX practices were smarter and they actually paid attention to analytics and sane business practices. Also, it's much easier to qualify for and get grants if you're actually doing good journalism, so I don't believe that Newsweek's policy of "lots of garbage" was actually business-savvy in any way.
Vox was a good experience, even though I wasn’t working as a journalist, but doing SEO/social media for journalists. $35/hour, then $50/hour part-time. Then I was laid off due to the pandemic. 2019-2020
Freelance at Alzheimer's Association 
Remote, not really journalism, but I liked it anyway. Nonprofit, so, funded by donations and grants. $65/hour part-time. 2021
Job at Bay Nature
My job was entirely funded by a grant. Odd situation–I got the grant and I could bring it to any legit journalism employer. Bay Nature was supposed to contribute 40% of my salary but flexibility happened and they just paid health insurance and such. They got basically no money at all from clicks, like, pennies a year. Not much from subscriptions. They have fundraisers, and at the time, there were 3 writers/editors and 2 fundraisers on staff. Later they hired another writer whose entire salary was paid by a philanthropist, and then I’m told they got another salary funded by a UC Berkeley journalism grant program. So, like half of their editorial staff was grant-funded.
Great experience, but low pay for the Bay Area. $50k/year, all from Poynter-Koch, 2021-2022.
Freelance at Politifact
A nonprofit and they probably get lots of grants. My particular position was also funded by a grant entirely. Loved it. $250/article fact check. 2022. 
Book
REALLY love it. $50k is from MIT Press, which is a not-for-profit, and it gets some grants and endowments. Then I got $56k from a grant from the Sloan Foundation on top. 
Future? 
I also got $500 (plus gas and hotels) to attend a day of learning with a program called Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy, and that means I’m one of 100 people eligible to apply for 10 $25k grants for future projects. The idea is to support creatives to stay in Wyoming and have sustainable businesses here. Maybe do some art that will bring in tourists. 
_____________________
Note that a grant sort of does, and sort of doesn’t, mean free money. It means money to support a project that usually has to have a mission and a public good, like educating the public. You don’t pay these back, and the org giving the grants doesn’t require a percentage of the profits or anything. But, for instance, the $50k grant from Poynter-Koch was more like a gift to Bay Nature, so they could pay me, and I worked for a year to actually have the funds. 
However, I’m not yet convinced that there is any objectively good funding model to ensure the most fair and accurate journalism. In theory, the capitalistic ones would be the best, but the public desire to read inflammatory stories about how their political enemies are evil, or a different generation is full of idiots, adversely affected the accuracy of headlines at Newsweek IMO.
You might think that the worst funding source would be Poynter-Koch, which is a program run by Poynter and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. But neither Poynter nor Koch even asked me to tell them what I was writing, let alone try to stop me from writing it. (Poynter hosted mentor-led auxiliary groups to talk about our careers/lives and such, so the topics of our articles came up sometimes if we chose to share that.) 
Anyway, I’m thinking of writing an article on how funding models affect journalism, for better and worse. There are some high-profile examples of grant funding causing harm. But for now, the above is my experience–pretty much all good, except not enough funding sometimes. 
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nixcraft · 1 month
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Reddit is going public via the IPO route. Last year, the CEO got $193 million, but moderators are not paid and expected to work free past IPO. Only some moderators and active users in the USA can apply for Reddit's initial public offering to buy stock at a special price. Most Reddit users are motivated by fake karma points and likes. Also, they banned almost all unofficial Reddit mobile clients. Meanwhile, the CEO profits while everyone provides free labor.
Until last year, Reddit used to encourage many users to guilt-tripping them to buy their gold coins. Now we know who got paid with those gold coins. It was for the CEO's exorbitant salary. Lmao. I even brought some coins out of that guilt trip. I feel like a sucker . LOL.
You can't browse NSFW subreddits without logging into your account. On Reddit, users share their adult content for free, while the CEO and management team benefit from the platform. This is why federated social media is important. One corporation should not have too much power to dictate how and what we are allowed to view without an account.
I really hope Reddit burns down. The CEO is a real POS who refuses to pay wages to Reddit moderators while taking $193 million salary per year. Even past IPO Reddit is not going to pay any money to moderators.
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jessiarts · 11 months
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I posted this in an art discord & they said it should be a post so others (both non-artists & artists) could see it too, so I'm pasting it here with a just few edits to add context:
Having feelings about capitalism and art.
Like, got an unexpected Redbubble sale today. Unexpected because I genuinely never expected to see another after I took some advice and did the whole "raise your margins to 50% in protest so people will use Redbubble less because 'prices are too high'" (For those unaware, Redbubble is introducing a tier structure for artist accounts, where Redbubble will now be taking up to 50% of an artist's monthly earnings as an "account fee" if they end up in the "Standard" tier. Artists are upset about this and are finding various ways to protest the change.)
And it got me thinking about margins, and what it takes to run the company, and how much CEO's take home and just-
Ok so say base price for a product is $10. If your margin is 20% it sells for $12 and you take home $2. Redbubble takes 80%, and uses that to buy materials/print/pay workers. Ok, no argument. I want workers to be fairly compensated.
But you look it up, and the highest paid Redbubble executive makes $950,000 a year. Average executive salary is around $235,000 a year. You can't really find the info for the positions of workers (meaning those who labor to print the products) only that "the lowest compensated makes $34,000" -aka roughly $16 an hour at 40hrs a week. And good on them for paying the workers a decent wage if this info is correct. Hope they keep it up. Or pay them more even.
But then I keep coming back to the fact that the company needs the artists' work to even exist. So why, if the CEO is making nearly a million dollars a year and the company obviously isn't hurting for any money to compensate it's workers or run itself, why does everyone make artists feel greedy just for asking to not have our cut eaten into with added fees? Why are we made to feel bad if we express any disappointment that a CEO makes so much money off the designs of so many artists in comparison to the artists' cut?
Idk how to say it right. It's like we're just expected to collectively fork over our work, let someone else get obscenely rich off it while we make barely anything from it (or in the case of many social media platforms, make literally nothing from it), then then smile about it. Anything else is seen as artists being entitled or 'lazy' or idk what else.
Or we're told to "just raise your margins" like competitive pricing isn't a thing that exists. Not to mention that fact that whenever prices do go up, especially with art, those same people complain that the prices went up and look for something cheaper.
I always see people saying that artists are just jealous that they don't make more sales, or saying "well maybe you'd make more if your art was better" but they're completely missing the whole point that is: Maybe if a company literally depends on the creative 'content' of individuals to exist/profit, maybe don't treat them all as disposable?
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zvaigzdelasas · 1 year
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Trade unions have announced a sector-wide strike next week, following days of turmoil in refineries fuelled by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s statement that striking workers be ordered to go back to work.
Unions have been demanding “real wage increases” of at least 10% and have criticised the government for its “ultraliberal strategy”. They also reject reforms currently being reviewed by parliament, including unemployment insurance, pensions, and the budget.
The general strike would expand to all sectors on 18 October, the radical-left CGT trade union, alongside several others, announced on Thursday (13 October).
The decision comes from Borne’s announcement earlier this week that employees essential to the operation of Esso-Exxon-Mobil depots must go back to work, as week-long strikes strain the country’s fuel supply.[...]
The French left has lent its support to the movement.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical-Left La France Insoumise party, for example, announced it would organise a march against increasing living costs on Sunday as “the time for a showdown [with the government] has come”.
Strikers also point to the mismatch between the lack of significant salary increases and the so-called “super profits” made by energy providers. Anger is rooted in the unfairness of super profits and rising inflation, Communist Senator Céline Brulin told EURACTIV.
14 Oct 22
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