Communism

Stupidity.

Background: Some moron came to social media to simp for passing a law reducing the work week to 32 hours. Some people complained that they wouldn’t be able to pay bills with a 20% reduction in income. The response from the advocates of this claimed the law would require an hourly raise so the fewer hours would not affect the employees’ take home pay. That’s the background.

I objected, asking how businesses would pay for this. The response was “studies have shown that this schedule increases employee productivity so that this plan has no net impact on business operations.” I called bullshit- if this were the case, businesses would already be doing this.

In response, they attached a “study” done by the government of San Juan county, Washington. Since 2023, the county has only required employees work 32 hours per week. They have made it permanent by claiming an increase of over 200% in job applicants and an increase in employee productivity.

The catch is in how the government defines productivity. I will quote it here:

Maintaining Productivity: Employee timesheet data shows an average of 18% less sick time used after adopting the 32HWW, and 21% less sick time used during flu season. 

That isn’t productivity. That’s presence. Just because an employee doesn’t call in sick as often doesn’t mean he is doing anything while he is there. This is the kind of bullshit that people pass off as “scientific studies” today.

So I asked, if employee productivity goes up, why wouldn’t all businesses do it? His answer? Business owners are greedy. If by greedy, you mean “all business owners want to earn the largest profit they can,” Then I guess they are. However, if they are greedy and want to maximize profit, you do that by increasing productivity.

There are two types of costs that a business incurs:

  • Variable costs. These are costs that vary with the amount of product you produce. Things like labor, raw materials, etc.
  • Fixed costs: insurance, cost of the factory, administrative overhead like HR and accounting departments, things like that.

If a business is creating 3200 widgets and has 400 labor hours each week, there are 8 products being made per labor hour. That’s a measure of variable labor costs. If I could reduce that to 320 labor hours, but still manufacture 3200 widgets, I just cut my labor costs by producing 10 widgets per labor hour.

But there’s more. At the same time, the fixed costs stay the same, only now there is time in a week to work another 3/4ths of a shift in the three days remaining. If I hire a second shift to work an average of 240 hours per week and they can maintain the 10 widgets per labor hour, I am now producing 5600 widgets per week without increasing my fixed costs.

I just increased my profit margins. Why wouldn’t I??

The reason I wouldn’t? Because productivity doesn’t increase when you cut working hours. If a person can assemble ten widgets an hour, he won’t magically assemble 12 of them because you give him more time off.

So what happened? How did San Juan county’s government departments all meet their targets, even though they were working 20% fewer hours? Two ways: They made salaried employees work more hours, and they had an outsourcing contract that brought in outside contractors to complete the backlogged work.

That’s how leftists and governments define success. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

By Divemedic, ago

Stepping on Your Johnson

Three times I voted for Trump. He was and remains a better choice than any of the three who ran against him. That being said, the Iran war clearly shows him to be stepping on his dick.

Iran is clearly prolonging the conflict until November, because their aim is obviously to influence the election. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the Democrats are conspiring with Iran to make that happen.

Still,this is a disaster in the making for the Republicans. Fuel prices are sky high. Gasoline is averaging more than $4.30 a gallon. Inflation is high, and the Fed is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter percent today.

The nation, and perhaps the world, is about to enter a recession. Americans vote with their wallets. Republican lawmakers, sensing vulnerability to anti-Trump election pressures, are beginning to turn on him.

All of this signals a return to Democrat control of Congress. Trump is about to become a powerless lame duck.

That also means a likely stranglehold of both Congress and the Whitehouse. Imagine President AOC, but backed by Control of both the Senate and the House.

By Divemedic, ago

Kidnapper’s Morality

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That’s what the communists claim, is it not? My question has always been- “How do you determine ability and need?” Well, Ayn Rand already answered that question:

 Whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht — and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not?

If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth — why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t?

Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars — rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’ — and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ — so he had to beg in public for his relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm

The key to getting treasure in a communist system is to be needy. To prove need, one needs to have a tragic story, one must claim your victimhood. The contest, then is to be a victim. That’s why social media has become what it has. In this world, the crowd has decided that a black man who has been accused of being a domestic abuser is less of a victim than the mother who has to live with poor mental health and three dead children, even if she is the one who killed them.

The landlord isn’t a victim. The corporation isn’t a victim, and neither is it’s billionaire founder. The victim is the looter, the thief, the person who doesn’t produce anything. Why is this? Because it must be in order for the communist system to work.

Again to Ayn Rand in the morality of the kidnapper. The kidnapper holds a physical captive for ransom. Those who would take from society are holding those who producers captive using the producer’s own morality as a weapon. The “morality of altruism” holds a good person’s conscience, empathy, and sense of duty as a ransom.

theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love.

your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t. The day when you’ll discover it is the only thing they dread.

learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce.

You have a desire to succeed, to build things, to accomplish things. My entire life, I have always worked, and built, and struggled to accomplish things. Those who would take advantage of me know this, and so they take advantage of my desire to do things, to work, to be useful. They take from me in the form of taxes, of asking that I do the right thing. They take small pieces of my time, my effort, my production for themselves, secure in the knowledge that I will continue to do so. They do the same to you.

As long as we continue to provide, they will continue to take. Like the old plow horse, the useless breeders in our society will continue to take our labor until we collapse under the whip. Not just us as individuals, us as a society. They will continue to take until the entire system comes crashing down.

It’s always been so, and will be until we have decided that we’ve had enough.

By Divemedic, ago

Government Stupidity

First, a word from our elected Representatives:

Let’s say she is successful at capping student loan interest at 2%. You are a lender, and you have funds to invest. You are looking for a low risk vehicle to place those funds in.

  • You can invest it by lending it to a student and get 2% per year, but won’t ever be repaid your principal.
  • You can buy a 12 month T-bill at 4.15%. Wash, rinse repeat
  • Or a 10 year treasury note at 4.75%

The only lender who can offer 2% student loans is the Federal government, but only by subsidizing them using money they are in turn borrowing at double the rate they are lending it out at. It currently borrows at roughly 4%–5% for comparable maturities, then bears servicing costs, delinquency, default, forgiveness, and interest-rate risk. Charging borrowers 2% therefore transfers part of the loan’s economic cost to taxpayers.

Department of Education lending costs $3.3 billion each year using Federal Government accounting practices, and $15.0 billion under fair-value accounting, which incorporates market risk more fully and is the systems businesses use.

Our elected politicians have become idiots who get elected solely by promising people free shit. Noone thinks about how it will be paid for.

By Divemedic, ago

Moving too Far to the Left

You know the Democrat party is moving too far to the left when even Bill Maher says they sound too much like communists, and his vote may be in play. Watch the video in this post, it’s worth it.

By Divemedic, ago

Free Stuff

So soap, toothpaste, and other “biological needs” should have no penalty or law preventing them from being stolen? Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, my 14 year old niece who believed tampons should be free.

So when anyone who wishes any of those things can just walk into a store and take whatever they want, how will businesses react? Of course, they will simply stop carrying those products. Is there anything the left doesn’t want businesses to produce for free?

By Divemedic, ago

Claims

In his very first round of golf ever played in 1994 at the Pyongyang Golf Course, Kim Jong-il supposedly shot a miraculous 38 under par (a score of 34), which included 11 holes-in-one. It’s always the communist dictators who make the grandiose claims.

By Divemedic, ago

Can’t Count

Isn’t it odd that EVERY time an election has some sort of problem counting votes, it’s the most socialist candidate that comes out on top?

It looks like November’s election is going to be “We don’t have any ideas you would like, but we aren’t Donald Trump, so you can feel safe in voting for us.”

The growing rift within the caucus has some mainstream Democrats fretting that progressives like El-Sayed will be tough sells to general election voters in November. Others argue that their “big tent” can include more differing opinions as long as there’s unity against President Trump.

Come to find out, Islam won the global war on terror by claiming to be communist and calling all criticism as “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

By Divemedic, ago

Confiscation

This child tries to explain socialism and claims socialism is where workers seize the means of production, but the young commies in this country blame us for not understanding the difference between socialism and communism.

This is exactly what I was talking about when I said children don’t understand economics, business, or anything else. Your communists believe that a worker who made a pen is entitled to an equal share of the profits. Note that she just brushes by the part where “subtracting out all the costs and everything.” All the “costs and everything” is the most important part of the business.

A person putting pieces of plastic together to make the finished pen is doing almost nothing. They aren’t the ones who created that profit, they were just a small link in the chain. They are simply brushing aside the procurement of materials, a facility to manufacture pens, transportation, marketing, sales, accounting, and the hundreds of other things that have to be taken care of to manufacture those pens as being “costs and everything.”

Proving that she has no grasp of business, she claims that a worker assembling 50 pens per hour at a profit of one pound each is creating 50 pounds per hour of wealth, but is only earning 15 pounds per hour and is therefore being cheated out of the “other 25 pounds,” which is an illustration of your average communist’s grasp of both business and mathematics.

This child has the same grasp of economics and business as my niece, who thinks tampons should be free, and to accomplish this, she is going to pay her factory workers in free tampons. That conversation happened four years ago, when she was only 14 years old. Now that same child is 18 and just graduated from high school. She will be voting for the first time this November, and even though she has no idea how the world works and only just now has secured her first job (working at a fast food restaurant) will tell you to your face that she is a committed Socialist.

Did I mention that she is living at home with her mother, her 21 year old sister, and the 21 year old sister’s boyfriend? That’s the flaw with Democracy- it grants decision making authority to a person that can’t manage their own life or affairs, yet somehow assumes that a lot of people who can’t manage anything somehow gains wisdom, insight, and the knowledge of economics and business to a point where they can make decisions that affect the world.

By Divemedic, ago