mycorrhiza they/them

driving them out of their homes and into shrinking, increasingly crowded prison cities with horrendous living conditions is ethnic cleansing. But they also have killed many thousands of Palestinians, not counting the 11,000 since Oct 7.

well yeah, fuck the CEO and upper management. This was my response to /u/SCB telling you there’s no wealth to redistribute. I tagged you so you would also see it.

If your only justification here is

The first thing I mentioned was ethnic cleansing, which tends to radicalize people after a few decades of it.

But also, Israel has Palestine inside a literal fucking fence. They control the fucking water supply. Yes, they are responsible for Palestine

Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?

Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.

Instead of the CEO and other upper management, try stock buybacks and dividends, which enrich the actual owners. GM spent $21 billion on stock buybacks in the past 12 years, and around $18 billion in stock dividends. That averages to over $3 billion a year, which is over twice the worker raise from the strike — and a lot of that raise is going toward correcting the 19.3% pay cut they took after 2008.

@[email protected]

transphobia and an adult abusing his position of power to hurt a kid, two berserk buttons in one headline

communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66

it is a requirement if you want to be a very rich social democracy

Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.

I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me

Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.

God-tier title

Hold onto it and talk about it at parties?

If someone else has the main video site on the internet, that is a beachhead for building a larger platform and challenging Google as a whole.

Hahaha… to own them we’d have to pay for them

We’re already fucking paying for them! I’ve made this point twice now.

My brother

I’m out of patience

of Google, not Youtube

That’s my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.

If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don’t feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.

Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it’s probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.

So does shipping, etc.

Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you’re still in business.

What is your proposed alternative?

If you want to talk real life, they’re already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google’s servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.

Blackrock owns 5% of Tesla

Blackrock’s clients own 5% of Tesla.

Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people’s money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They’re very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.

Also, when I said “they own the entire fucking planet” in my original unedited comment — which I edited for tone before I saw your near-immediate response — I was referring both google and the companies that advertise through google, which is why I said “they all make enough money already.” All is plural. Google sells enough ads, and their client companies buy enough ads.

Also, Blackrock is an asset management company that handles other people’s money. Google earns 16 times more revenue than them.

I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.

they took $470 million in losses

According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.

that…what?

Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.

Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online.

In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.

And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.

I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.

deleted by creator

The nazis rose to power because they were backed by capitalists and the German establishment, and the reason they were backed was that they helped suppress a resurgent socialist movement in Germany and redirect the frustration of the german middle class toward scapegoated minorities and away from capitalists. Nazis co-opted socialist language and messaging, but were staunch capitalists and class-collaborationists who carried out mass privatization and crushed labor organizing.

I know I’m dreaming here, but central internet services like google search and youtube should be utilities controlled by the public.

The video pool that Youtube draws from, generated by the public, should be public property, hosted on public servers, internationalized somehow, with an opensource market of frontend interfaces and algorithms to deliver that content to people, instead of one youtube algorithm and one interface designed to meet the profit incentives of google. People should be free to use the algorithm and interface they find most useful.

If I started arguing something about any of my fields of study and you seem less well versed, that doesn’t give me the right to berate you for it

what if I acted like I was well-versed and scoffed at your opinions about a subject you knew more than me about?

limit your arrogance

it’s not arrogance, it’s frustration. That’s also why I pointed out the misspelling, to point out that you don’t know about this topic and yet you are confident in your opinions about it.

Libya is not an English word, it’s a country name — but that said, I didn’t consider that your language might use a totally different script, e.g., in Chinese, Libya is 利比亚