It’s possible that the enforcement of a rate limit isn’t because of AI scraping, but rather because they failed to migrate before the June 30th deadline.

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89 points

What’s up with billionaires and not paying their bills?

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57 points

Think I got rich by paying people?

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76 points

This is so much more true than I think most people believe.

My husband and I have a small engine business, and I took a free “community entrepreneur bootcamp” class through the local university this spring in the hope that we might learn something helpful. Instead, I learned fun things like leaning on your customers’ fears as a marketing tactic (?? 😔🤦) and that the most prominent local accountant - brought in as an expert speaker by the university! - advises his clients to pay as little as possible as late as possible, and most appallingly, I’m not exaggerating, these are the actual words I heard this man say in front of a room full of people: “if one of your employees gets hurt at your business, it’s better for you to stand on their neck until they stop breathing than to call for help, because it’s so much easier and cheaper to settle a death claim then an injury.” And he actually said that it sounds like he’s joking but he’s not, this is his understanding of the situation.

I genuinely want to see the best in everyone, and I have never before had the experience of fantasizing about a person’s death while they were talking in front of me, and it was abhorrent and awful but also… Wtf? How do we even help someone who sees other people as expendable tools the way this person does?

What can we even do about people who not only don’t want to live up to their agreements and commitments, but are just straight up out to fuck everyone else over? How do we help/fix that?

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0 points
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💀

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1 point

If one of your employees gets hurt at your business, it’s better for you to stand on their neck until they stop breathing than to call for help, because it’s so much easier and cheaper to settle a death claim then an injury

That is because of regulations that pass the buck. If the US had public health care, and fines for negligence and OSHA violations, this wouldn’t be true. Public health care would be the best thing for small businesses because it removes the health insurance benefits and workers’ compensation issues completely. One big problem with the GOP is they are half right a lot, regulations are problematic, but not in the way they think. They take this half rightness and use it to do the wrong thing.

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4 points
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💀

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39 points

It sounds very similar to when I was in seminary. They literally had classes on how to manipulate your audience. How to “use vocal patterns and body language to make yourself appear more sincere.”

People severely underestimate how many shitty people there are in this world (and even those who appear trustworthy) that would eat your firstborn to increase their net worth if it wasn’t illegal.

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15 points

This sounds like an unfortunate consequence of the evolutionary pressure that has been allowed to take place within humanity for the past ~150 years. Profit is more important than anything else. So of course you’ll have sociopathic “profit-above-all-else” mindsets among influential business figures.

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7 points

From a business standpoint I would never want to hire that accountant. If he openly talks about employees that way and being a bad customers to others he would probably also be a very bad supplier.

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113 points

I think it’s more that people who tend to be billionaires tend to also be kinda scummy people.

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54 points

You dont make that kind of money being honest and empathetic. The most honest ppl I know that run businesses are barely paying themselves. There’s a reason CEOs have higher than normal representation of psychopaths. It allows them to make the best decisions even if it means running the orphan killing machine 24/7.

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22 points

I think you mean the “most profitable in the next 3 months on average” decision. It certainly isn’t the best decision by any other metric.

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16 points

In this case I think he doesn’t understand cloud hosting at all, so he doesn’t see the cost making sense. If you don’t value something, the pricetag seems ridiculous and you won’t even consider paying it. He will probably realize the mistake eventually.

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6 points

with higher interest rates, it means they can’t get cheap loans, these companies will go under if the rates keep rising

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19 points

You don’t become a billionaire by being honest and spending your money.

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3 points
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-20 points
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This is not a thoughtful reply. Hopefully Lemmy can do better. I dislike Elon more than most people, but just reading uninformed ragebait like this is exhausting. Yes his parents managed an emerald mine, no they weren’t that wealthy, and no it didn’t make a substantial impact on the source of his wealth.

Edit: most of his wealth originated from PayPal. Yes the money from the emerald mine helped him get to the US, and get an education. And it may have even helped him in his earlier career a bit. But it wasn’t like hundreds of millions of dollars that were just given to him like “here, go be rich!”.

So he basically had as much monetary benefit as an upper-middle-class kid in America. Not the same as the commenter I’m replying to who implied that Elon is only wealthy because of his parents wealth, which is just obviously wrong.

Just to be clear again, I think he’s a scumbag. BUT I don’t think we should blindly agree with something just because it fits our narrative… we should have intellectual curiosity for the truth. If anyone has any evidence that Elon received a substantial portion of his wealth from his parents’ emerald mine, please show that because I couldn’t find it.

Sources:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/

https://people.com/human-interest/who-is-errol-musk-elon-musk-father/

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