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Just get a small loan of a few million bucks from your dad!
the primary habit of successful people is fucking over ignorant poor people who don’t realize they’re being fucked over
Also, make sure you own at least one media giant. Then, you can use it to spread agit-prop about how our society shouldn’t do anything that inconveniences rich a$$holes.
I get the feeling that the ultra successful also fuck people over who very well do realize that they are being fucked over
I was just at a depressing job fair trying to recruit for maintenance. It was held at a plant set to close in 3 days. Most of the people I talked to were there for 30 years. It was partially employee owned. Somehow a person in power (I don’t know the piece of shit’s title) convinced the employees to sell their share at the promise of expansion and investment.
The person in power closed the shop, cashed out, and retired. Will not have to worry about a thing. 200 some people and families now have their lives upended at the benefit to few.
This kind of aligns more with the person you responded to but still relevant.
Shit like this is always on my mind when I think of how better things would be if the economy was set up in a way that employees were paid with both money and equity in the company they are a part of. The main difference would likely come down to the employees at least getting a share of the sale proceeds when someone else wants to buy the business and liquidate it.
Though I’d hope that most would at least hold out and not take the first big offer.
But I don’t think that a majority vote should be enough to liquidate a business. If just one share wants to keep going, other shares should only have the option to sell their own shares or try to buy the holdout out.
Powerlessness is the key demographic
Have you tried being born into wealth?
I tried real hard, but I got born into lower middle class by mistake. My bad, I should’ve tugged harder on my bootstraps while I was an incorporeal potentiality.
I don’t even buy avocado toast, I should be a billionaire by now
That’s your problem. If you never buy it in the first place, you can’t stop buying it. You can’t save nothing from nothing!
Here, let me help you out:
- Be rich
- Squander your money on avocado toast and greater luxuries
- Stop squandering your money on these things
- Now you’re rich.
If you don’t do 2., how can you expect 3. to work?!
Own a home, at least
The key to the Massive Fraud strategy is that you have to already be in the tax bracket that allows for privileges like massive fraud. If you try to do it without meeting that lone prerequisite you end up being arrested by the IRS.
I’ve been smashing my own avocados like a chump!
Ah yes, but have you tried brewing avocado coffee at home?
This could work
They can rip my vanilla latte out of my cold dead hands.
Or what about having rich parents or relatives?
Step 1: Be rich.
Step 2: Don’t be unrich.
Fatgirlhedonist might not be a millionaire, because hardly anybody is - and anybody who promised her she would be was full of shit - but making her own coffee has certainly left her with money she didn’t have before. I’ve always saved money the same way, by doing as many things as I can for myself. I really don’t see how there’s anything wrong with that.
I’m going to downvote you anyway, not because what you said was untrue or hurtful or disrespectful in any way, but because you’re harshing the general unforgiving vibe of the room and I need to stand with my fellow mob.
I upvoted them.
My father has not gifted me the bootstraps made from billions in exploited labour, but the exploitation of coffee producers tastes like I’m already there.
Have you tried having rich parents?
If anyone is curious if the girl was buying a single $5 coffee per day, contributing that $35 into a basic S&P 500 fund each week, and doing so for 2 years she should have about $4500 in her account. Now, if she’s buying coffee supplies at a grocery store to replace buying it at take out , we’d have to subtract the cost of coffee supplies from the $4500 to know how much she truly saved making coffee at home.
You got me curious, so I did the math for us.
I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.
- Small (12 oz): 4x @ $2.65/pop = $10.60/day
- Medium (16 oz): 3x @ $2.95/pop = $8.85/day
- Large (20 oz): 2x @ $3.25/pop = $6.50/day. This is obviously the cheapest choice, but will result in a cold bottom half of the cup due to drinking my coffee slowly vs pounding it
My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don’t know what we paid for them the last time around.
So… since my wife also drinks coffee let’s say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.
The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.
Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you’ll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.
Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you’ll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.
Boiling the water costs money too.
Ha, this is true as does amortizing things like the coffee maker that needs replacing every 5 years, white vinegar for monthly descaling, the Stanley thermos I bought 4 years ago to bring coffee to work, etc.
Let’s say that it takes 15 minutes to brew the pot of coffee at 1,500 watts. That’s 0.375 watt hours. At $0.20/kwh that’s $0.075/pot. Yay for dumping it into a thermos once it’s brewed.
All in, even if you added an extra $0.50/day brewing at home is still way cheaper.
Providing she doesn’t spiral into a coffee hobby.
It likely wasn’t just the one cup
I don’t know how anyone can survive on a cup of coffee a day.
Usually people eat some food and drink some water, as well as the coffee, during their day
Damn, is that why I feel like shit all the time, I’m supposed to be eating food too?
Yes, but just one? By noon I am already on my third cup with two or three still left to be had over the afternoon and early evening.
I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but that sounds like a bit much…
Maybe there are people with such a skewed worldview that they consider anything short of a billionaire ‘unsuccesful’ but building wealth of few million is perfectly within reach for average middle class person and simple life-style changes like this are a key part of getting there. No fraud needed. If you want to stay middle-class then by doing middle-class things is how you stay there and buying $5 coffees daily and financing a car are good examples of that.
If you make a couple million dollars as a middle class person, without familial connections, you’ve at best committed fraud on a massive scale, or been involved in something highly illegal.
Median income in the US is between 37K and 80K depending where you look and what figures you use. At 80K, it would take a person 12.5 years to make a million dollars. That’s not paying taxes, not paying living expenses, and generally somehow living in a bubble where you owe nothing and get to keep 100% of the check. In a more realistic scenario where half that income is taxed or expended on living expenses, that’s 25 years per million.
Between inflation and price gouging by vendors and retailers of popular products, nobody alive today with a middle class job is ever going to have a hope of saving up a million dollars, there is no ‘lifestyle’ choices a person can make even with a well paying job that’s ever going to see them become a millionaire in their lifetime, let alone a multimillionaire without fraud or illegal activity.
Yeah if you’re going to save money from your wage and store that on your bank account, then you can forget it.
This is where investing and index funds come in. To reach $1 million by age 65 with a 7% annual return, a 25-year-old would need to invest approximately $5,009 per year, or about $417 per month. That’s perfectly within reach for average middle-class person.
Right but inflation will eat at that. If they have a million in 40 years it won’t be worth a million of today’s dollars.
It takes inflation into account. 7% is the average long-term stock market return after adjusting for inflation. Without inflation the rate would be closer to 10%
It was within reach 20 years ago, but not today. Median hourly wage in the US is about $23/hr. Median rent is about $2000/month. That’s more than 50% of gross wages, and along with inflated prices on everything else, it’s no wonder that half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
The “average middle-class person” you’re referring to is now upper-class. Not because they’re extremely wealthy, but because they can afford to invest (which was once quite common, but is increasingly out of reach for the “average” person).
It’s not always the case.
Bill Gates I feel earned his money.
But, I agree, the others definitely exploited people
You don’t think Microsoft has exploited anyone??
Well. You’re making the claim, let’s see the receipts. They pay their workers well, I haven’t heard any evidence they get treated like slaves like bezos
I knew I’d get downvoted but Lemmy people, but I’ve heard no evidence otherwise.
Bill got rich because of windows 95, and it was a really good product.
He made a lot of his riches before the Internet and before IE
Oh my, if you want to look back at those days with rose colored glasses be my guest. But to anyone that lived those days, your comment is a basket full of straw mans.
Our first family computer was a 8086.
So don’t speak on behalf of me please, or make assumptions
Explain your answer.
To literally anyone at that time, Windows 95 was a game changer. It brought many things including proper plug and play, and less screwing with autoexec.bat
The competition was Apple. Apple started going bankrupt because of this. Bill was a coder from 13 years old. They weren’t a monopoly until much later.
He was going to be successful regardless. His initial fortune was from Windows 95 which sold 7 million copies in 5 weeks
Explain yourself? Do you pay my bills and I didn’t notice? Fuck off.
Just conversation starters :
Win95, 98 and 2000 are embarrassingly unstable, even if you think it’s a world wonder that got someone to be ultra rich.
Oh by the way all of this was based on DOS, which was not made but bought by Microsoft. Pretty sure it wasn’t from a savings account for flipping burgers.
Internet explorer had such bullying and monopolistic practices that it lost a lawsuit.
Microsoft willingly went out of their way to bully and kill other OS competitors that were getting a good foothold on getting adopted. Was that Novell? So long ago, and they got killed almost at the same time as they were invented.
Ie wasn’t even a factor until years later. There was no compelling reason to use anything other than ie until Firefox (to end users, Netscape and Mozilla was comparable to ie). It had no impact on the initial success of Windows. Netware failed because it was crap compared to windows 95 too. Their competitors simply didn’t compare to windows 95. That’s not bullying. They were too busy competing with windows 3.1
Windows 95 wasn’t that unstable either. Maybe you had bad ram in your system or bad drivers . Sure the NT kernel was better, but Windows 95 was perfectly usable and was used. It did crash. But it wasn’t a regular thing. You’re acting like it happened daily.
Osx was only released in 2001 and macos required Apple hardware Windows 95 succeeded because it actually worked and had broad hardware support
You keep talking about IE, but Windows was successful before most people had the Internet. Internet explorer only became anti monopoly consideration because Windows had already managed to be
Also, how do you expect people to respond when you disrespect them and make assumptions about their experience and age to try to add credibility to your argument at their expense? If you don’t know how old I am, don’t assume I’m young. I’m not . And fyi, one of my projects was mentioned in Linux format 20 years ago, so don’t assume I wasn’t heavy into Linux either
I never understand comments like this, where people act as if they know better but make no effort to actually demonstrate their superior knowledge.
It almost seems like you’re less interested in changing minds and more in fishing for upvotes from the ‘Microsoft bad’ crowd.
I don’t have superior knowledge, but it’s probably useful to recognize the way I see that company is very different than yours and other people.
I don’t think we can agree, and my goal is not to convince you, but remind that there’s people like me who think Microsoft represents so many bad things that I can write a book about it.
To illustrate, I’m sure 20 years from now recall will be as divisive as windows 7,10 or how they were completely opposed to open source and now act like that never happened.
If you disagree with someone enough to feel it’s necessary to say so, it’s generally advisable to explain exactly what you disagree with and provide reasoning for your stance. Otherwise, you’re just making noise. A truly informed person has no trouble coming up with a few examples to back up their claims. It’s quite patronizing to imply that you have some insight I don’t, and then not even bother to share it - especially when following it up with, ‘I don’t think we can agree,’ after putting zero effort into reaching an understanding.
The guy whose mom was on the board for IBM and who convinced them to invest into her sons’ garage company? Being born to wealthy and powerful parents really does wonders for your ability to become filthy rich, does it not?
The guy started learning to program when he was 13 and had already written a lot of software and done a lot before Ms dos
I tried to look up the IBM claim but couldn’t find anything.
But, what has that got to do with exploitation?
Or are you trying to argue he exploited IBM…
It’s right on her Wiki under “career”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
Nepotism is a hell of a drug
He didn’t write DOS, he bought it.
I never said he wrote dos. They bought it from cpm if I recall
I said he was a developer well before Ms dos
He was a hard worker from the beginning. That’s why he was successful
Nope. He was successful because of nepotism, a bit of luck, and being born into a position where he could apply what he was good at. Being a “hard worker” will only get you sick.
You just can’t accumulate that much wealth from nothing without being charismatic, smart and a leader . Like Alexander the Great
But even the best of them have caused thousands of crushed lives and careers in a long trail. Ruthless is a mild word to describe
I recommend the Behind the Bastards episode on him. He had a ton of opportunities available to him normal people don’t, including ones that aren’t strictly financial. For instance, he was allowed to ignore most of his other subjects in high school to concentrate on computer stuff. As a person who had similar interests in computers and sometimes not an interest in some other classes, that’s a huge advantage.
While I didn’t have too hard a time in school (only needed 2 classes to pass my final year), being able to concentrate on just computers(which were my electives) would have been far less stressful and would have allowed more concentration. That’s just one of many intangible benefits.
Being a millionaire is easily doable now on a regular 9-5 job if you’re paid fairly. In my city at least, I can tell you that a software dev can reach millionaire status within about 20 years of work. No fraud needed unless you count ETF investments or software dev as fraud.
