If your wages are hourly or salary then they might be raised dependent on either a “performance” bonus which works as an incentive or by a fixed yearly raise but neither is tied to profit. It’s technically just engineering the workforce to give more output by dangling a carrot. The size of the carrot distribution is factored into the labor cost - it is distinctly not profit, it is operating budget which deducts from profit because it is counted as an expense.

Here is the thing about profit - it comes from saving money on labor, resource or overhead. Sometimes it’s a neutral or good thing when the profit comes from a source like a clever innovation that solves a problem or by fulfilling a highly desireable market demand… But a lot of the time that isn’t the case. Those profits can come from collaboration with competitors to pay labor less, finding cheaper materials that shunt the costs onto other people outside the business by means of pollution or utilizing exploitable workforces with less health or legal protections, outsourcing.

Yes people are motivated by money but why do people want money? In the case of your average worker the demands are quite small. Money equals security - a non toxic and comfortable place to sleep, food on the table, assured care for health when sick or old and creature comforts to create fulfilling free time. Profit oftentimes incentivizes removing these things from other people in service to an investor class. Creating protections against this is often the prerogative of government because government depends on the wealth of it’s people to perpetuate itself so it’s incentive is to protect the majority of people whom hold them accountable on the whole from becoming exploited into poverty, sickness and death because those things can be profitable. One can say “that’s just the way it is” only so long as once a large enough group of people see no value or security in living life they generally start banding together to become violent.

Technically workers do not care about profits, they care about wages. The average worker doesn’t benefit from profit because they represent a fixed expense. The work they produce is worth more than their salary which is how a company produces profit. As long as a company breaks even and the salary is enough to meet one’s needs a worker does just fine. However a worker’s job could easily be axed in the name of profit because they are what is being profited off of, not the entitled beneficiary of the business as a whole.

Profit it just the take home winnings of the investors or owners of the business and the few jobs at the top where compensation is based off of profit percentage or lavish bonuses for making the targets.

Oh they always just say it in a word vomit. Ie :

“The antifa, globalist, deep state, Black lives matter, gender confused mob…”

It’s like bad beat poetry.

I have been stuck swamping in a truck for days with the driver blasting right wing radio. They never stopped whining about BLM, they just pepper it into everything because they no longer feel the need to talk about it on it’s own anymore.

When something becomes that ubiquitous it’s always there but as a supporting member of the chorus, not the one in the spotlight

That there is no tried and true fix for. The US is an old Democracy with a massive cultural complex around not changing anything a founding father sneezed on. There’s some weird exploits in the 9th and 10th Amendments that could potentially cause a massive melt down if a sitting government decided to ever try and use them but it is just theoretical and anti-originalist so it’s unlikely.

I look at the US government being in a death spiral as a separate but related problem. If your air conditioning isn’t working and your engine is busted, the air conditioner isn’t really your first priority.

Basically pass something through government channels to wrest the service from the hands of individualized businesses wearing the skins of hospitals and the business complex of health insurance… Like every other nation who has a social system did at some point in the past.

It’s kind of easy to forget but like sanitation, fire service, post, police services, hospitals, secular school systems … Those were all exclusively the domain of for profit businesses once. Just because something currently lines someone’s private pockets doesn’t mean that makes it untouchable. It has all been done before. Just wiping out the third party insurance companies alone and socializing the insurance would probably do wonders.

Yes you did do it right, lol…and pokemon is pronounced Po- kay (or like Quay) and the same mon as in monster.

And I absolutely don’t intend to put you on blast. It’s just you can kind of look at language as a kind of technology. That tech can be used to spot minute differences to inform people of a lot of things… Trans people often have to live a little bit like spies in high risk situations so dogwhistles can actually be helpful technology to us assess an environment and risks. Muddying the water can actually make things harder.

Like I for instance pass mostly as a cis person… though not in the way I would hope for. I am not physically transitioning for partner related reasons so while a lot of people can suspect I am some kind of queer they often falsely assume my gender and pronouns based on my body.

Because I am always working with new people I basically take mental hits every all day at work that other people are entirely unaware of. It tends to absolutely wreck my self esteem and makes me feel really isolated…But it’s sometimes safer than being “out”. People who make a mistake because they don’t know are trans are a lot easier to deal with then people who know and aren’t adapting well. Like when someone is making a bunch of mistakes with my pronouns it brings way more attention to the fact their brains do not register me as my gender and they are undertaking an artificial process. When they undergo that process I have to work a little harder to teach, and let them know that I am okay, that I understand, reassure them they are doing fine… It takes a lot out of me to do. EVERYONE fucks up pronoun changes. Coming out and getting people used to me is work that I am gunna be doing over and over and over. If I am gunna have to do that I am gunna pick candidates who I know will be worth the personal effort of onboarding or who make my job easier who already have the playbook down and just haven’t put it into practice.

Currently I am out selectively only to people I judge as safe. How I judge rather people are safe are not is by how they comport themselves. What sort of language they use, how attentive they are when I use they/them pronouns when referring to friends of mine when trading stories, how they react to different conversational topics, what do they find funny and how willing they are to defer to someone else’s needs… It could be veganism, or a religious practice done for comfort or making adjustments for a person with a disability, if you show that you are willing to make concessions or small behavioural changes because you value other people’s comfort that’s a MAJOR green flag.

It sucks but I am literally running an active risk assessment of everyone I meet in a professional setting. I do this because even if they aren’t actively bigoted they can make my life a hell.

I had a boss who just wanted to debate trans talking points all the time while we could not leave our posts and I lived in constant fear he’d figure me out… because becoming his personal entrapped ambassador for a community he had zero understanding of was going to add way more patience and effort just to get through my day than any of my coworkers would be required to muster. I would likely lose my job because even if he was not intentionally mean dealing with being the subject of his intensified curiosity and questions that are generally invasive would drive me to either need to leave or do something that would get me fired.

We trans folk are generally skittish of folk who take a little too much interest in us because of our transness. It’s can be a lot of work to just get people to calm down, not be self conscious around us like you’re scared doing of something wrong and not treat us as special. Just making us feel like comfortably normal people doing regular people things is a wonderful gift. In the case of your store based acquaintance it’s generally safer to like compliment her clothes or jewelry or something. It’s like saying “I think you’re cool” without making her feel self conscious that people are staring at aspects herself that trigger that fear of being observed as something abnormal.

So if it helps think of the adaptation as learning to speak trans safety code. If you are saying “trans people” in an office full of co-workers who use “transgenders” you are using language technology to fly your green flag in a sea of ambiguously checkered red. We’ll spot you.

The thing about that… Is that whether or not something registers as cool or not generally needs to come from the group. As an example you could try to “take back” an n-slur from bigoted use … but if that initiative isn’t coming from the community to whom that term is levied you are basically just using an n-slur because you believe yourself entitled to use the slur for your own personal reasons.

It’s not just about sticking it to the Conservatives, it’s about listening to the why that comes from a community that is often talked about rather than talked directly to… At best trans people who hear you are going to think you are out completely of touch like people who pronounce pokemon like “Poh-key-man”… Or that you cannot be counted on to listen, that you are a different kind if problem and you are someone to hide from being openly trans around if they can because it’s ultimately safer than rolling the dice against whether you are a transphobe or not. Places (for example a work place) where terms like “transgenders” is openly used without challenge from other people is a message to us that that community is either not safe or at least very very ignorant… And that self advocating in that environment is going to be an uphill struggle of dealing with people who are convinced they know what’s best for us more than we do…

Oh good! I accidentally replied to the wrong person a couple days ago and had a moment of wondering if maybe my app was fritzed.

How the absolute hell… During the reply section the correct comment was featured and I swore I double checked… Jerboa, why dost thou forsaketh me?!

Sorry stranger. Keep on being awesome.

Small nomenclature heads up “Transgenders” is a common conservative dogwhistle. In correct use trans and cis or transgender and cisgender are adjectives , it’s always paired with a noun. For example “Transgender people” , “trans woman” , “trans man”. It’s like the rules for the racial term “black”. Drcently cool to use as an adjective but when you hear someone nounify it to “the blacks” it leaves a certain impression.

The space between the words is actually important as well. In the UK changing the adjective into a noun by removing the space is used by TERF groups when they operate in more public discourse to signal to each other they imply that they aren’t talking about a specific type of man or woman but a distinct second category. As in "That’s not a man, That’s a transman™.

It’s not a huge deal, nobody’s offended or anything, the post body is obviously trans supportive so nobody is gunna think you are repping the anti-trans agenda or anything but I figure it’s something you’d probably want to know? I am not intending to be pedantic just sorta handily educational.

How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

Yup. They are lovable dum dums…

And by lovable I mean they will like exactly one person and wish death on everyone else. Just because you can have one as a pet and it will be your bestest friend doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Owls do not understand vacations or sick days.

Just because they do not take shit from humans and are violent avian insurrectionists that absolutely will ruin your day doesn’t mean they are unworthy of love.

Yes it does suck on your end but on the other side of the phone your perspective date is probably having a whole mental breakdown about it. For a lot of trans folk disclosure is absolutely nessisary as early as possible and preferably for safety reasons not when you are face to face…

Buuuut they also are very likely to get really vile transphobic backlash from a perspective date as much as they are honest rejections based on genital preference which sucks to be rejected for but is nobody’s fault. There’s a lot of trans people out there who feel like they are never going to be given a chance. Either way steeling themselves for one form of rejection or a vile reminder of the awful people out there who think you are subhuman and are offered up a nice juicy target on which to let loose their bigotry does tend to make for disordered social niceties. Once someone has been burned enough they get pretty damn shy and the procrastination is more of a case of battling personal traumas until the last possible second where one absolutely must do the right thing.

I would advise not taking it too personally.

Yeah… If anyone starts talking too much about the shape of the human skull as if that means anything whatever they are selling ain’t worth the pitch

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

Not a particularly good point. Just because gender and race are both social constructs doesn’t mean that both run on the same ruleset. Women and men exist as social categories in all cultures and trans people are seen across cultures existing even when the idea of trans people is buried and obfuscated. In reality there is no %100 male or female body. Our bodies are all mutable holding different measures of the same horomones, the organs are basically just inversions of each other and male and female are just sliding scales of intersexual potentialities. Trans people in many instances aren’t just looking for just a skin deep social category change. If it were a possibility a lot of trans people want to be able to have the full biological function of the category including the ability to birth children. While gender is performative transness is not strictly all about affect. Gender performativity as described by a few genderpunk philosophers does not well explain the full phenomenon of transness.

“Cross racial transness” if it exists in good faith at all, is pretty bloody rare. The likes of Oli London have found their way into the feeds of the anti-trans pipeline where they have used their experience to try and make gender performativity and trans people look like made up bullshit. As a community this has been used as a cudgel against both trans people and POC. Catch all rules for every instance of social construct does not exist - each one is unique and the negotiations are complex.

Now that is a complicated question. There is a “one drop” narrative that extreme supremacists have… but someone who doesn’t look black claiming blackness would definitely get a side eye from a chunk of the black community where even lighter skinned black folks are made aware of the privileges of shade and tone…

So probably both yes and no or the principle of Mu depending on circumstance?