Shhh (don’t tell @benjaminhollon), I moved more dirt today. With help from the miss, we finished off the front yard and filled the dumpster!

Who knew home ownership could be so exciting!!!

#homerenovation #sweatequity #dirtywork #familyfuntime

Hot dang! A buddy of mine helped me out and we finished moving all the concrete today! 🥳🎉

#menatwork #sweatequity

Cleaned up all around the pool. Slabs gone, piping has been marked, and of course more projects have been found (e.g. replace the pool intake).

On of these days I will get to fully enjoy my backyard 🫠

#homerenovation #manonamission #sweatequity

It’s all about that #SweatEquity

@straygoat

I completely agree though usually express it differently. I might say a company that cannot pay a living wage is not yet profitable, and it should not be permissible to skim "excess" until there is some.

Or, alternatively, you're profiting on your employees, not your product. Nothing to be proud of if this is your desired end state.

I like to think of a minimum wage as a bound on how much you can underpay folks to get your business started, and like those being underpaid are automatically founders who should automatically be buying priority stake (sweat equity) in the company equal to the delta between what can be paid in cash and what is offered in equity to acknowledge that these people are every bit as much taking a risk as those putting up initial cash.

That stake should not be dilutable by the games rich people play with excess cash. This is these people's lives and just because they have a terrible bargaining position doesn't mean they aren't owed human decency.

This is why we have government and regulated economic systems: to ensure that this money exchange model isn't just one more tool of rich to exploit the poor.

It's important to understand that power doesn't scale linearly with money. Money begets money and it hoards money, but after a while does not measure contribution. A person with a million dollars can make a second million much more easily than a person with zero can make the first million. And when big companies make money on workers, that should not be something where society lauds them for doing so and says "go forth and invent more ways to exploit".

And don't even get me started on regulatory capture as an obviously inappropriate way to magnify that power even more.

More thoughts in my 2013 essay Lien Times for Startups.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/08/lien-times-for-startups.html

#MinimumWage #LivingWage #SweatEquity #Equity #Inequality #BargainingPower #Economics #StartUps #Profit #Exploitation #Morality #Ethics #Law #Government #WorkersRights #Politics #StakeholderTheory #Capitalism

I just want to say that I am truly humbled by some of the great minds I have been able to interact with here on Mastodon.

Not without pain.

I was targeted and trolled on another instance not too long ago and if you knew how bad it can get you might not ever turn your computer on again.

But we are a resilient group of people. I have faith in my community of followers/followeds and the overall reliability of the mods and admins.

We make mistakes. Sometimes when we should have each others' backs we fail and targeted individuals can feel betrayed and abandonded. And hyper-criticized to boot I believe that is what happened to Chanda. For a while, I felt that happened to me,

We can forgive, and where there are irreconcilable differences we can agree to blocks, mutings, defederations and/or silencing of instances.

Every day I spend building this social media presence is a day I am away from income-producing activities in this, the busiest time of year for me. But that is OK.

We have a precious jewel here, no, really a living thing here on Mastodon. Holding it in our hands....we need to care for it.

Instance admins are experiencing a lot of demands on their time and there are bills to pay. Some of us who are not admins are nevertehless pouring much into the work of building this twitter diaspora...

Because what we are doing now in early winter of 2022-2023 is laying a foundation upon which we will build a better future.

A future free of the tyrannical constraints imposed by the likes of Musk, Trump, Johnson, Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Flynn, Kevin McCarthy and the Mussolinist elected in Italy. The Assads. The Netanyahus. The Khatami's.

I hope we can play are larger role in supporting the courageous women of #Iran. And preserve the right to reproductive rights and women's (and men's) autonomy...

There is so much that can be done now with decentralized internet....

It is well worth investment of time, money and energy and I for one am OK making sacrifices and investing in this future we are building.

It is now 5 AM in my time zone, I probably need to sign off.

Good night/ good morning where ever you may be, friends.

#sweatequity