partial_accumen

We do lots of things wrong here, but our power bill is based on usage. If you only use this much, this is your rate and the more you use the higher your rate goes.

At the residential level that can exist too in the USA, but its not nearly that simple here in the USA, and I doubt its entirely that simple in your country either. Electricity isn’t like a tank of fuel that is drawn down and refilled. Besides maintaining the infrastructure for generation and delivery, electrical capacity at any given moment has to be built into the system, not just pure total consumption over time. So simply paying for electricity consumed doesn’t capture all of those costs in the system to make that electricity consumption possible to the consumer.

Commercial/Industrial customers in the USA don’t just pay for “amount consumed” but also “demand charges” which means “at any given point how much electricity will you be pulling from the grid?”. Its not uncommon that the demand charges for businesses can be larger than the charges for amount of electricity consumed. Additionally, some European governments give large breaks in electricity rates to incentivize certain industries. Germany for example gives 50% discounts on electricity for chemical production, glass producers, or semiconductor producers if those companies invest in decarbonization efforts.

Many European commercial/industrial electricity consumers have variations on what I described above in addition to wholesale electricity purchases for a given period which also breaks away from your described “pay for what you use with higher rates for more consumption”.

Can I ask you what country you’re in (or another country that you know uses your country’s same system)?

No I wasn’t suggested it be forced or companies be nationalized.

My mistake then. So in your proposed system private companies would continue to exist.

I was saying governments could provide incentives and support for workers to form worker owned companies.

If that’s the case, I’ll go back to my first statement then. Tech workers will likely choose the higher risk but higher reward private company rather than one that my only have a modest return. If the private companies exist along side the co-ops, the boom and bust cycles will still exist except the co-ops won’t be the beneficiary, but will certainly be on the losing side of cycles.

In order to transition to worker owned companies, it would be difficult as you mention, but governments could provide financial to help to get worker owned companies started.

Hang on. You’re proposing seizure of existing private companies and forcing the creation of the worker co-ops? Thats a very different thing. Should I assume your system would ban future private companies then?

I wouldn’t agree either of those approaches. Choice is important. Forcing people into co-ops because you think its better for them isn’t a system I’m interested in being inside.

Tech work can be highly volatile in the business environment. Maybe its different for new tech workers entering the work force, but for a worker owned company, this can mean large losses of revenue for months. I don’t know many tech workers that are willing to take a massive pay cut to continue to stay and commit to a worker owned company if they personally can find better paying work elsewhere.

From the article:

"The playful atmosphere of tech offices flush with investment, enjoying luxe catered lunches to attract programming talent, has been replaced by a looming fear that layoffs are just around the corner "

This boom-and-bust cycle of tech growth and devastation has happened three times during my IT career. Its even more frequent in specific IT niche industries.

“We’re like a family here, in the sense that you’ll wear my mark literally on your skin for the rest of your life even long after I’m dead. We also do a pizza party in the office ever other Friday. So that’s fun!”

There are better targets for the anger for not paying enough taxes:

Alphabet (Google parent company) earned $132.17 billion in profits in 2025 and paid $26.656 billion in US taxes for an effective tax rate of 20.1%. Sure this could be, and historically was, higher before trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% in 2017.

Tesla, on the other hand at the same time in 2025, paid $0 in US taxes in 2025 on profits of $3.794 billion for an effective tax rate of 0%.

Google isn’t in financial trouble from this spending. Cash Flow Negative just means in a specific period they’re spending more than they bring for that period. Google and other tech giants have been sitting on mountains of unused cash at $242.5 billion for years. This is a rare time where they’re finally dipping into it to the tune of $5.9 billion.

Although less integrated with the vehicle’s systems, aftermarket telematics and diagnostic-port (OBD) solutions offer limited cloud connectivity to fill the gap left by OE services when they’re phased out. Unfortunately, most are engineered for fleet services

No mention of Open Vehicle Monitoring System (OVMS) here? Its mostly focused on older EVs where the manufacturer has abandoned the cloud portal for remote management of the car. However, that’s nearly the exact problem the article is calling out for other non-EV cars.

A tesseract is a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional body. The fact that a tesseract has to be animated to show all of its 4 dimensional vertices in 3 dimension is an act of shaming 3 dimensional space for being “less than”. Frankly, I don’t stand for this type of body shaming.

Two dimensional projections can be represented in three dimensional space. Even single dimensional entities are welcome here.

Please read the sidebar rules before posting. Posts to this Lemmy community must be exclusively represented in 3 dimensional space.

Where is their other friend Johnny, and why is Johnny’s face on the back of the shirt?

are they tho? maybe for a quick buck.

Sustainable business is far less profitable than maximizing profits. The billionaires’ goal is self enrichment irrespective of the impact to others. This is why they’re not pressing the “small profits, sustainable business button”.

there are lots of factors. for example, unemployed ppl can consume less and pay less taxes, which is bad for the economy as a whole and can devalue the invesrments in all companies of a region.

Why does a billionaire care about the holistic outcome when there is enough inside their zero sum game for them to still benefit the most?

Effectively no button to a button presser that is only interested in maximum possible profit (which is the billionaire perspective), but the button absolutely exists and they choose not to press it.

The button likely exists, but that button’s profits are infinitesimally smaller than the other button’s profits.

What is the dollar figure of your highest interest bill and its interest rate?

• A common insurance co-pay to see a Primary Care Physician (regular family doctor) is $40. That could mean going to the doctor or not for some folks.

• $20 would pay for five different 30 day prescriptions of common generic prescription drugs.

• $25 ($5 short) would buy more than a month’s worth of insulin.

• $20 will by 35lbs or rice. That’s well over 2 weeks worth of meals (at 2000 calories a day).

• $20 will pay for one month of mobile phone service with unlimited talk and text along with 4GB of data (as well as hotspot functionality)

• $20 would pay for 100 full charges on a very large ebike battery. Thats enough to go 7500 miles of range on average.

Dude, you realize the whole ‘going to the moon’ thing was just a way to convince the public to fund ballistic missile technology?

And this was true for both sides of the 1960s Space Race.

• Sputnik 1 was carried into space by the Soviet Sputnik rocket (an adaptation of the R-7 Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) on October 4, 1957 source

• Yuri Gagarin was carried into space on April 12, 1961, by a Vostok 8K72K rocket. The Vostok 8K72K was a three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle derived directly from the Soviet Union’s R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) source

There was fierce competition inside the USSR for which rocket technology would be best used for weapons. The whole “exploration” or “civilian use” thing on both sides (USA/USSR) was just window dressing for weapons programs in space.

Just wait until you see how much they waste on unused life insurance!

I know you’re joking, but lots of people buy really bad life insurance products (whole life, universal variable policies) that are a horrible waste of money in 99.9% of people’s situations.

A large-ish term life insurance is fine if you have a family that needs to replace your income if you die early. Other than that, you only need enough money to get your remains put in the ground without burdening your family. Estimate $10k or so for full funeral and burial plot if that is your desire. If you just want cremation and spreading of ashes is much cheaper. If you’ve got the cash for that, you don’t even need a small term policy for that.

$250/year starting investing in 2020 into the regular S&P 500 would be worth $3,703 today. So maybe as much as a month and a half of rent depending on where you live. However the point being is, if the subscription is unused, you’re not getting any value for it. A free month (or more) of rent is something you’ll actually use.