I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.
If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.
Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.
Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
I say this because any time you bring up the idea of collective action, collective bargaining or, well, collective anything, you'll get a bunch of comments from Ameribrains who say "I don't want my salary dragged down by other people" or "I can negotiate my own salary" even though there is a *massive power imbalance.
If the company doesn't employ you or has to pay even 10% more it doesn't really matter either way for 99% of people. You are replaceable. Even if you think you aren't, you are.
But if you don't have a job in the US, that's your house, school for your children, food, health insurance and your car. All of those things depend on you having that job.
For you this is literally life or death. For the company not only is it not, but they have every resource in the book. They can pit you against other candidates. They can suppress your wages with layoffs or even just the threat of layoffs. They're going to do things like this to algorithmically lower your salary.
And you think you can compete with that? You can't. You may think you can but you can't. They're using the hybris of the human psyche against you. Everybody thinks they're above average. Everybody thinks they can text and drive. At least 95% of people can't.
In a weird way this is kind of the same thing as dynamic pricing. Dyanamic pricing is using algorithms to see how much you'll pay. Well I guess this is the other side of the coin: let's see how little you'll take. The goal of all these systems, and probably the true "value" of AI, is to suppress your real wages.
If you want someone to read everything you have to write, abstain from triteness like namecalling.
Hyperindividualism isn't a disorder, it's refusing to treat your life as a group project where mediocrity votes on your future. Reality isn't a committee. Power imbalances exist, but crying life or death serfdom is just fatalist cope. If 95% can't negotiate their own salary, they sure as hell can't run a utopia without creating new parasites and gulags.
AI doesn’t suppress wages, it exposes what your morally bankrupt and evil ideology denies: real value comes from individuals, not envious collectives.
All communists deserve death for the 100 million corpses their "beautiful theory" required. Socialism is cannibalism with worse food and longer bread lines. The Ameribrain you mock actually builds wealth, prosperity, and lifts people out of poverty. Yours builds excuses.
As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pocket of your employer they just become their takeaway. Employers won't spend it on improving the company if they don't have to. And the only things that force them to spend money in a predictable manner is regulation and markey opportunity to earn more. When they have those needs they mostly do it with credit anyways.
Conversely as an employer you should advocate for lowest income taxes possible for your workers.
The incidence of taxation (which party bears the burden of the tax, irrespective of who 'pays' it) is widely studied. As it relates to payroll taxes (paid by the employer) and income taxes (paid by the employee) most research finds that employees bear most (but not all) of the burden. This is the opposite of your claim.
Employees get taxed when they spend money by being consumers. Sales taxes and VAT are their tax burden. But income taxes of the employees are the burden of the employer. It's employer who has to fork that money because otherwise he wouldn't be able to pay enough so that the employee agrees to work.
That's all you need to know to understand the actual mechanics in presence of misleading labels. Nominally income tax (of employees) is just a tax on purchase of labor.
Another angle you could use to understand this is that reduction of income tax (for bottom 90% of earners) promotes employment. Why is that? Beacuse it makes the labor cheaper.
anonymars•2h ago
Freeze Your Data - The Work Number https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others
* Yeah, that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
laweijfmvo•2h ago
lateforwork•1h ago
The Work Number is in fact Equifax.
xvxvx•19m ago