Joe Biden Love Thread

[The Batlord]

Gimme a little bit of time to respond to this as I'll actually have to do a little bit of research on ****ing Wal-Mart to give a meaningful response, but I will say that my previous post isn't saying that only specific levels of wealth in all times and places are capable of producing greater wealth. There are times and places where you can have less SEED MONEY and do greater things wit it. Post WW2 America, when a destroyed world economy allowed America to hold half the world's wealth and where the New Deal actually redistributed a degree of wealth to the middle and lower classes that they hadn't had access to previously. Also the invention of the standardized shipping container around the Vietnam War allowed for far greater and far cheaper international trade than ever before, an economic frontier that made Walmart's success far more possible than just hard work and good decision making.

Again that's not a full response but just some food for thought for now as I think your Wal-Mart example seems reductive.

[jwb]

Lol... it's not even about specifically Walmart. Are you ruling out that a small business can grow into an empire or is your only point that this is exceedingly unlikely? Cause that's all I'm really trying to drive at with these examples.

[jwb]

Like with the Vietnam Nam thing and the shipping containers... let's say you're right and they lucked out and that made their business possible. What even is your point? Remember I wasn't saying the cliche trope of through enough elbow grease anything is possible or that they are the sole authors of their own success. So the fact that you are bringing this up sorta gives me the impression one of your motivations is to convey that they don't deserve credit for said success. But that is actually besides the point in this case.

[The Batlord]

Of course it's not a black and white view, you idiot, nor is it a conspiracy of the rich, but the level of money needed to build money-making system (aka a business) grows with the level of economic development as competitors grow, fail, spread, and monopolize. It's new economic frontiers that allow for those who can't afford to break into the pre-existing markets to have a chance to develop their own foothold but the more developed the markets in general the more SEED MONEY is required even for developing in new economic frontiers.

Bill Gates got funds from his family but still used non-copyrighted software made by enthusiasts to develop his computers and operating system because computers were largely an untapped frontier.

Bezos was shut out of that frontier by the 90s because Microsoft was already a mega company but he could exploit the internet as a way to sell people ****, but that required so much startup capital that Amazon wasn't even profitable for years.

And now that computers as a general concept is a tapped market and using computers to do useful things is also kind of tappe you now see galaxy brained tech bros desperately trying to find the next computer frontier and inventing crypto and NFTs because the obvious avenues of monetizing computers are already taken and even though there isn't really a use case for any of that **** the energy use of all those servers doing crypto **** is as much as a country. If an actual use case that people latch onto is found then how many new servers will you need?

[Frownland]

Originally Posted by jwb

Lol... this is possibly the most emo debate tactic I've ever seen frowny.

Didn't mean to make you sad with reality, my bad.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Of course it's not a black and white view, you idiot, nor is it a conspiracy of the rich, but the level of money needed to build money-making system (aka a business) grows with the level of economic development as competitors grow, fail, spread, and monopolize. It's new economic frontiers that allow for those who can't afford to break into the pre-existing markets to have a chance to develop their own foothold but the more developed the markets in general the more SEED MONEY is required even for developing in new economic frontiers.

Bill Gates got funds from his family but still used non-copyrighted software made by enthusiasts to develop his computers and operating system because computers were largely an untapped frontier.

Bezos was shut out of that frontier by the 90s because Microsoft was already a mega company but he could exploit the internet as a way to sell people ****, but that required so much startup capital that Amazon wasn't even profitable for years.

And now that computers as a general concept is a tapped market and using computers to do useful things is also kind of tappe you now see galaxy brained tech bros desperately trying to find the next computer frontier and inventing crypto and NFTs because the obvious avenues of monetizing computers are already taken and even though there isn't really a use case for any of that **** the energy use of all those servers doing crypto **** is as much as a country. If an actual use case that people latch onto is found then how many new servers will you need?

Uh you can say no obviously it's not black and white and by that I presume you mean you agree with me that said general store could indeed grow into a retail empire. So I don't know what use it was going to be for you to try to do more research on Walmart to disprove that particular notion. You call me the idiot but you originally tried to correct what I said which was that the main distinction between the large business owner and a small business owner is their level of success. You said its actually how rich their parents are. Which is just a vacuous anti capitalist virtue signal that even you realize isn't the actual distinction. You were just tone policing because the way I framed it almost made it sound meritocratic but my actual point was they are essentially (albeit very uneven) competitors driving at the same goal. So I don't see any particular moral high ground in being the loser in that race, even if you did start with a handicap.

But yeah I've seen pirates of silicon valley and none of that **** changes my point either bro. I'm not saying they don't cut throats to get ahead either.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by Frownland

Didn't mean to make you sad with reality, my bad.

...

Originally Posted by Frownland

I'd clarify but you don't care.

Do you want me to reassure you that I care so you can go ahead and make your point?

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by jwb

Uh you can say no obviously it's not black and white and by that I presume you mean you agree with me that said general store could indeed grow into a retail empire. So I don't know what use it was going to be for you to try to do more research on Walmart to disprove that particular notion. You call me the idiot but you originally tried to correct what I said which was that the main distinction between the large business owner and a small business owner is their level of success. You said its actually how rich their parents are. Which is just a vacuous anti capitalist virtue signal that even you realize isn't the actual distinction. You were just tone policing because the way I framed it almost made it sound meritocratic but my actual point was they are essentially (albeit very uneven) competitors driving at the same goal. So I don't see any particular moral high ground in being the loser in that race, even if you did start with a handicap.

But yeah I've seen pirates of silicon valley and none of that **** changes my point either bro. I'm not saying they don't cut throats to get ahead either.

No because your position is anti-intellectual cope to justify the idea that you can just start a business and become wealthy as a a vague ideal to strive for in order to put out of your mind oceans of history and context that suggest that you're essentially just playing the lottery in which your failure is mathematically highly likely unless you are of a particular economic stratum.

[jwb]

No. My statement was more precise than yours which is why I rejected your correction. Because it was an inaccurate one based on tone and rhetoric more than precision. There are people who don't have the wealthiest parents who go on to "win the lottery" as you put it. We've already agreed and established this is exceedingly unlikely. It's probably more likely for a Harvard student than someone with a high school diploma but once again it is exceedingly unlikely even for someone with Zuckerbergs exact background. For every one Zuckerberg there are a million clones of him who went on to live ordinary lives because they didn't create Facebook, they just got a job programming or some****. I completely agree for that level of success that it is just a lottery with a few winners. But that doesn't contradict anything I previously said.

[elphenor]

Originally Posted by jwb

vague enough and out of context enough that it feels like a Christian quoting scripture lol

Like I said I could see you making the argument that maybe if they don't have employees they are in some third category but other than that, the worker/owner distinction quite simply refers to the internal power dynamic within the business, not how large the business is or how wealthy their owner is. Regardless of how small a business is, the person who owns it is the owner and the people they pay to work there are the employees.

wasn't the whole argument over the Marxist model of class