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doubleupgradeobbies!
Australia1361 Posts
On July 09 2026 17:12 ETisME wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2026 16:56 doubleupgradeobbies! wrote:On July 09 2026 16:39 ETisME wrote:On July 08 2026 09:31 LightSpectra wrote:On July 08 2026 08:45 ETisME wrote:On July 08 2026 02:53 Jankisa wrote:
It's mind boggling to me that people can smugly advocate for individuals having more money and power then whole nations of tens of millions while 5 million children die from consequences of poverty every year and still sleep at night.
I almost wrote "and feel good about themselves" but the individuals posting this shit here are clearly miserable so that definitely wouldn't work. Not your money, not yours to control or rule how to spend. Should they also stay up because how much job/wealth they have generated then? I find it annoyingly stupid how we keep looking at their wealth like it's some sort of public asset to be spent. Because it is. No billionaire has ever created their wealth ex nihilo. Labor creates wealth and the wealthy take the lion's share because they had preexisting capital to invest. The people who actually create things that advance society, like Albert Einstein, are frequently socialists. you can't be serious. Labour doesn't create wealth, value generation rewarded create wealth. There are plenty of value generation without hard and large amount of labour. "actually create things that advance society", "how do you measure "actual" we measure cost/profit because that's how we can put a medium of exchange value to the equation. There are plenty of innovation in every single business sector, be it in the optimization of factory management to efficient warehousing with automation. These are all extremely powerful better resource allocation for value generation. That's his point, who creates that automation? Who implements it? Do you think the billionaires are sitting down and analysing resource flows, and the merits of existing automation technologies, there are barely any billionaires who are even passably knowledgeable in these fields, let alone experts. The billionaire tells someone in upper/middle management 'I want our warehouse operation to be cheaper/more efficient'. Then this c-suite manager asks an expert (or tells an underling to find some expert) to find, plan then implement it. Eg the actual systems experts and workers who implement it are doing labour. The business owner just profits from it. What do you mean? Mark from Facebook, Larry Page from Google etc are all founders of the companies and very hands on with the company. Automation is part of the entire business; the business service and product are the valuation. Marketing, logistics, financing, HR etc are all part of the business, spearheaded by the CEOs and the board. Valuable employees are rewarded with stock options, which space X showed just how valuable it is, many have been made millionaires now. Many of these automations are part of the business, they are rewarded based on their KPI and promotion. Start your own automation company if it's that valuable. It's not like there's no companies specialised in automation, from software to hardware. Are you going then cry about how CEOs earning the most again? There are plenty of extremely wealthy family, Bernard Arnault, one of the richest man in the world $160Millions, remind me how many startups did he create, how many his children start a few successful companies? What a loser mindset.
Zuckerberg, and Page are rare exceptions to the rule, in that they started off as essentially technical 'staff'. Guess what, writing the codebase for facebook, or the google search engine... is labour. This is the same thing that any developer/coder does (yes it was very innovative, but like inventors, the actual work of creating any new system IS labour).
Saying that labour doesn't create wealth is insane. It may not be an efficient way to make money, but labour underlies everything big businesses 'sell'. The bags that Louis Vuitton sell? Labour made those bags. Google, Facebook? Labour coded that software, labour installed the servers that keep them running. Management aren't gods, they don't just speak things into existence, someone needs to actually do the work to make these things exist, eg it requires labour.
Bernard Arnault didn't design LV bags, he doesn't sew them together, he doesn't do the very successful marketing to allow LV to sell them at a ludicrous premium. If he did not have all that labour working for him, LV/dior/Tiffany & Co would be worth nothing, since they wouldn't be able to sell any of their products that requires labour to manufacture, to market, even to sell.
Bernard doesn't make a crapton of money because he creates anything that people pay money (and these days neither do Zuckerberg or Page) for, it's because he owns things (eg companies). Companies that make money, yes, but companies that are full of people who do labour to make that money.
Ownership is not labour (it can involve doing some labour), when you rent out a house you own, you are making money from ownership. (if you do your own maintenance, then yes you are doing some labour). But that house was built by labour, if there wasn't the labour to build the house, you wouldn't be able to rent it out.
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United States44398 Posts
On July 09 2026 17:41 doubleupgradeobbies! wrote:
Ownership is not labour (it can involve doing some labour), when you rent out a house you own, you are making money from ownership. (if you do your own maintenance, then yes you are doing some labour). But that house was built by labour, if there wasn't the labour to build the house, you wouldn't be able to rent it out.
I think you're expressing this point poorly. The landlord isn't making money from ownership, he is taking money from ownership. The tenant has to perform some kind of productive activity to make money. The landlord demands a share of whatever productivity the tenant does due to his ownership. He doesn't make anything.
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doubleupgradeobbies!
Australia1361 Posts
On July 09 2026 18:00 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2026 17:41 doubleupgradeobbies! wrote:
Ownership is not labour (it can involve doing some labour), when you rent out a house you own, you are making money from ownership. (if you do your own maintenance, then yes you are doing some labour). But that house was built by labour, if there wasn't the labour to build the house, you wouldn't be able to rent it out. I think you're expressing this point poorly. The landlord isn't making money from ownership, he is taking money from ownership. The tenant has to perform some kind of productive activity to make money. The landlord demands a share of whatever productivity the tenant does due to his ownership. He doesn't make anything.
I'm using 'making money' in the everyday use of the term.
I didn't want to go full Marx/Smith, since my argument was against labour creating no value, rather than against money and value/productivity being the same.
The usual response to rent-seeking behaviour being... rent seeking behaviour is also that that 'aghr but the landlord is responsible for maintenance and/or building that property.'
Since my argument was against labour creating no value, rather than against against private ownership. I wanted to get ahead of 'yes, things a property manager would do is labour, things a builder would do is also labour, a landlord is not making money for that labour, but that labour did/does create your ability to rent out a house in the first place'.
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Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms.
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
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On July 09 2026 15:43 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2026 05:36 LightSpectra wrote:
This is another case of words becoming fuzzy over time because of bad actors intentionally obfuscating them, like "socialism" or "illegal immigrant".
The term "Zionist" originally meant someone who supported a homeland for Jews, but because the most fanatical Israel supporters accuse you of being an antisemite when you ask how blowing up a hospital or allowing settlers to steal people's houses are "counter-terrorism," it now colloquially means anyone who unconditionally supports the Israeli government against whatever real or perceived threat they're facing.
Zohran Mamdani said he supported the existence of a secular Israeli state, that technically makes him a "Zionist" in the classical sense, but you're never going to hear FOX News call him one. Yes the term illegal immigrant, which originally meant someone who immigrates illegally, after years of regressives insisting it is some kind of secret KKK code word meaning brown people, has been obfuscated so much that its meaning has evolved to mean someone who immigrates illegally.
So if someone immigrates legally, and then the POTUS cancels their legality or their visa expires, that doesn't retroactively mean they immigrated illegally, which is your definition of what makes someone an "illegal immigrant", right? Weird how right-wingers always count those as part of the number of "illegal immigrants" in the country, though.
On July 09 2026 16:39 ETisME wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 09:31 LightSpectra wrote:On July 08 2026 08:45 ETisME wrote:On July 08 2026 02:53 Jankisa wrote:
It's mind boggling to me that people can smugly advocate for individuals having more money and power then whole nations of tens of millions while 5 million children die from consequences of poverty every year and still sleep at night.
I almost wrote "and feel good about themselves" but the individuals posting this shit here are clearly miserable so that definitely wouldn't work. Not your money, not yours to control or rule how to spend. Should they also stay up because how much job/wealth they have generated then? I find it annoyingly stupid how we keep looking at their wealth like it's some sort of public asset to be spent. Because it is. No billionaire has ever created their wealth ex nihilo. Labor creates wealth and the wealthy take the lion's share because they had preexisting capital to invest. The people who actually create things that advance society, like Albert Einstein, are frequently socialists. you can't be serious. Labour doesn't create wealth, value generation rewarded create wealth. There are plenty of value generation without hard and large amount of labour. "actually create things that advance society", "how do you measure "actual" we measure cost/profit because that's how we can put a medium of exchange value to the equation. There are plenty of innovation in every single business sector, be it in the optimization of factory management to efficient warehousing with automation. These are all extremely powerful better resource allocation for value generation.
It seems you do understand that acquisition of wealth is amoral (that is, it's not distributed or created as part of a system of morality), people acquire it independent of whatever they've done to earn it or however much they personally deserve it.
Since we agree on that, the question arises why can't we tax billionaires into nonexistence? Their wealth is a public asset to be spent (unless they plan on going full warlord and militarily resist paying taxes), it's just that under Western capitalism, we spend it by letting billionaires have it in their portfolios instead of using it on things like addressing child poverty.
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I guess that is one upside. With only a bit of patience, we will see all of these old destructive assholes die off one by one.
Sadly, we still have to live in the world they created. And there seems to be no lack of new destructive assholes, either.
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On July 09 2026 22:13 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2026 15:43 oBlade wrote:On July 09 2026 05:36 LightSpectra wrote:
This is another case of words becoming fuzzy over time because of bad actors intentionally obfuscating them, like "socialism" or "illegal immigrant".
The term "Zionist" originally meant someone who supported a homeland for Jews, but because the most fanatical Israel supporters accuse you of being an antisemite when you ask how blowing up a hospital or allowing settlers to steal people's houses are "counter-terrorism," it now colloquially means anyone who unconditionally supports the Israeli government against whatever real or perceived threat they're facing.
Zohran Mamdani said he supported the existence of a secular Israeli state, that technically makes him a "Zionist" in the classical sense, but you're never going to hear FOX News call him one. Yes the term illegal immigrant, which originally meant someone who immigrates illegally, after years of regressives insisting it is some kind of secret KKK code word meaning brown people, has been obfuscated so much that its meaning has evolved to mean someone who immigrates illegally. So if someone immigrates legally, and then the POTUS cancels their legality or their visa expires, that doesn't retroactively mean they immigrated illegally, which is your definition of what makes someone an "illegal immigrant", right? Weird how right-wingers always count those as part of the number of "illegal immigrants" in the country, though.
Overstaying a visa is illegal.
That's why there are visas.
If you come as a tourist, overstay and live in the US, you are 100% an illegal immigrant. You are not a legal immigrant, you are not a citizen, you are not a tourist, you are not an enemy combatant, you are not a diplomat, and you are not a magical temporarily paperwork delinquent undocumented citizen.
When you were a tourist, you were not an illegal immigrant, but that is simply the nature of how TIME works. Unless you were already, for example working on a tourist visa, which is also illegal, and would make you an illegal immigrant too. Which someone who had the intention to overstay would probably be doing already.
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Maybe you shouldn't have said the definition of an illegal immigrant is "someone who immigrates illegally" if you actually had a much wider net in mind. Words have meanings.
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On July 09 2026 22:33 Simberto wrote:I guess that is one upside. With only a bit of patience, we will see all of these old destructive assholes die off one by one. Sadly, we still have to live in the world they created. And there seems to be no lack of new destructive assholes, either.
Hopefully the younger generations of Republicans aren't as successful / effective as McConnell.
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On July 09 2026 23:35 LightSpectra wrote:
Maybe you shouldn't have said the definition of an illegal immigrant is "someone who immigrates illegally" if you actually had a much wider net in mind. Words have meanings.
Again, someone who overstays a visa and lives in the US has immigrated illegally. They have obviously not immigrated legally. You may think laws shouldn't exist but in the framework that they do, this is almost self-evident.
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Someone who does something in the future has retroactively committed a past crime. Yep, that makes sense. Still not as dumb as your post about percentages though.
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The issue isn't deporting illegal immigrants.
The issue is doing so whiteout fair trial or following any other actual rules and laws or doing so in cases were people lived basically their entire lifes in the US...
But Republicans have allready proven that they aren't interested in actual solutions. How else would they stoke the flames? There probably aren't enough Trans people to build a big enough boogeyman for keeping the deplorables scared.
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Step one, exaggerate the problem of illegal immigration to apocalyptic proportions. Step two, now any solution you want, even one that literally echoes Adolf Hitler, is justified.
It's not just oBlade that thinks this, by the way. JD Vance flirted with simply ignoring federal courts. "You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for". Weird how that didn't apply to forgiving student loans when Biden was president (even though federal law literally gives POTUS explicit authority to do this, unlike all the dumb shit Stephen Miller wants), but then again, Democrats didn't spend the past decade making up insane lies about immigration. Maybe Biden should've gone around saying "student loans will result in the extinction of the white race" and then suspended the Constitution.
That would've been politically moderate, right?
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On July 09 2026 23:44 LightSpectra wrote:
Someone who does something in the future has retroactively committed a past crime. Yep, that makes sense. Still not as dumb as your post about percentages though.
The US doesn't count people on tourist visas as illegal immigrants. Nobody does.
The US does not count visa overstays as illegal border crossings, which is also different as crossing outside a port of entry is a bona fide crime.
Both border crossing and overstays are ways to immigrate illegally, and the people who do it are illegal immigrants.
Kind of like how shooting someone to death and stabbing someone to death are both murder, but we don't count stabbing victims as gun victims. You apparently think "illegal immigrant" means "border jumper," which makes you the obfuscator you warned us about, and would be a categorical mistake akin to thinking "murder" has to be committed with a gun.
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Overstaying a visa is only illegal migration if you can reasonably prove that the person had the explicit intent of illicitly staying past their visa's expiration date when they applied for it. If they attempted to renew the visa in good faith and failed because the criteria or other circumstances changed, or because bureaucrats mismanaged their application, or even they're stuck in some legal limbo because of passport issues and can't return home, then the person didn't retroactively commit a crime.
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On July 10 2026 00:04 LightSpectra wrote:
Overstaying a visa is only illegal migration if you can reasonably prove that the person had the explicit intent of illicitly staying past their visa's expiration date when they applied for it. If they attempted to renew the visa in good faith and failed because the criteria or other circumstances changed, or because bureaucrats mismanaged their application, or even they're stuck in some legal limbo because of passport issues and can't return home, then the person didn't retroactively commit a crime.
When your friend asks you to leave his house party and you don't, you are trespassing. The invitation and RSVP are not in the picture.
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In this analogy, the Stephen Miller approach to your friend still being in your house 1 second after asking them to leave is to lock them in your basement indefinitely.
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On July 10 2026 00:20 LightSpectra wrote:
In this analogy, the Stephen Miller approach to your friend still being in your house 1 second after asking them to leave is to lock them in your basement indefinitely.
Pretty sure Stephen Miller is big on deportation.
Right wingers are not padding illegal immigrant stats with ten million good faith people who only overstayed their visa by one of the world's smallest violin's days and are only late in paying their overstay fine and leaving of their own accord.
That cohort is vanishingly small.
Furthermore, visa overstays, while illegal, again are not border crossings which admit to criminal penalties, which is up to 6 months the first time and 2 years after that which falls short of indefinitely.
Your problem, conversely to what you think Stephen Miller is doing, is now having to look at like a guy who overstayed his visa for 5 years and go "He just missed his flight! It could happen to anyone!" Luckily the United States of America does not operate by the "foot-in-door" principle.
On July 09 2026 23:50 LightSpectra wrote:
Step one, exaggerate the problem of illegal immigration to apocalyptic proportions. Step two, now any solution you want, even one that literally echoes Adolf Hitler, is justified.
Obligatory reminder Hitler gamed Germany by renouncing his Austrian citizenship to make himself undeportable.
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On July 09 2026 23:45 Velr wrote:
The issue isn't deporting illegal immigrants.
The issue is doing so whiteout fair trial or following any other actual rules and laws or doing so in cases were people lived basically their entire lifes in the US... I think the fairer version of the post is that you do have an issue deporting illegal immigrants. You don't want them deported if they've been here long enough. To put this plainly, I read this as
On July 09 2026 23:45 Velr wrote:I do have an issue deporting illegal immigrants. It shouldn't be done in cases were people lived basically their entire lifes in the US... + Show Spoiler +[only in cases of violent crimes, or felonies, or recent arrivals] aka only deported in special circumstances The issue is that this is an endorsement of unfettered illegal immigration. The issue is the encouragement to violate the laws of the US, since you're playing a good lottery of staying permanently. The issue is that you condone not "following ... actual rules and laws" when they're immigration laws. This remains an issue even if one political party embraces your position, and the other party is too corrupt, inept, or divided to do anything about it legislatively.
I imagine that you would oppose any compromise that strips off ICE masks and long detentions and steeply punishes mistreatment during arrest and detention, but successfully deports hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that aren't guilty of other crimes. That will never stop "being the issue" if everybody knows what will happen once the currently hated Trump admin policies are dead. I call that a free boost to Republicans.
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EPT
