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10 Most Profitable Manufacturing Business Ideas Under 10 Lakhs
🌟 Dreaming of becoming your own boss? 💼 Discover these Top 10 Profitable Manufacturing Business Ideas Under 10 Lakhs! 💡 Let's turn your business dreams into reality! #SmallBusiness #BusinessOpportunity #FinancialFreedom #StartupIdeas
Manufacturing businesses produce goods using equipment, machines, and labour. This sector is vital to the economy and offers many opportunities for entrepreneurs to start their own companies. Manufacturing businesses can be established in various industries, including food, appliances, electronics, vehicles, clothing, power tools, and more. Today, many people dream of becoming entrepreneurs, but…
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Corrugated Box Business: इस तरह शुरू करें कार्टन बॉक्स बनाने का बिजनेस और कमाएं कम लागत में अच्छा मुनाफा
Corrugated Box Business: इस तरह शुरू करें कार्टन बॉक्स बनाने का बिजनेस और कमाएं कम लागत में अच्छा मुनाफा
Corrugated Box Business : आज प्रतियोगिता के दौर में हर कोई चाहता है कि वह ऐसा व्यवसाय अपनाए जिसमें कम लागत में अच्छा लाभ मिल सके और वह एक सफल उद्यमी का सफर तय करें। लेकिन इस बीच लोग ये चयन नहीं कर पाते हैं कि कौन-सा व्यवसाय प्रारंभ करना सही है और किससे उन्हें अच्छा मुनाफा मिल सकता है।
Corrugated Box Business
अगर आप भी एक सफल उद्यमी बनना चाहते हैं लेकिन सही व्यवसाय का चयन नहीं कर पा रहे हैं तो…
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why do usamerican anarchists even want to cook bathtub insulin like regulations on drug manufacturing just arent exploitative relationships
the only reason anyone ever does anything incorrectly is the profit motive. if you took away all safety regulations and threw a bunch of random people into a machine shop and asked them to build medical equipment they'd do so perfectly safely and correctly, because why would they Want to do otherwise?
i joke, obviously, but that's the thought process - it's fundamentally an extension of idealism: for a politics that otherwise completely ignores the material necessities and restrictions placed on political organisation and the measures they require to apply to the real world, in favour of, essentially 'if everyone just agrees with us our ideas will win', it shouldn't be that surprising that that extends to production.
in reality, of course, there are factors outside direct human control, and the implementation of safety regulations and inspections are an incredibly obvious and necessary measure - *but*, once you accept that, the question is then 'what good are safety regulations without any form of enforcement?', which, for anyone concerned with simply the task of bettering life for the working class, would prompt a response of 'oh, you're right, we'll need some form of enforcement, then.' for a lot of people, that's the end of their relationship with anarchism.
however, the underlying motives that generate these politics - as, in general, idealist political philosophies disconnected from reality don't simply spring up by themselves - aren't about the task of bettering life for the working class. fundamentally, the interests of these worldviews are those of the small-producer, the middle class: they promote a utopia where everyone is a small business owner (whether in a commune or a 'free market'), and, providing no real method to achieve these utopias, function mainly to drive these middle classes away from their character as labourers, and towards their privileges. the question of 'authority', a nebulous concept, has always been specifically the existence of any authority *over the small-producer's enterprise*. it's for *that* reason that, when the idea of 'authority' comes into contradiction with the task of improving the lives of the working people, some *do* decide that 'authority' is more important.
there is no such thing as a definite 'left' and 'right wing' - there are left wings and right wings of individual classes, but they both share more in class interest than they often do with their counterparts of other classes. libertarianism, in all its forms, is a middle class ideology, and shares its flaws - any jab against libertarians works just as well, 'who'll build the roads', 'would you need a driver's license', 'how will you ensure medicine is produced safely', etc.
when faced with these problems, people not married to the need to avoid 'authority' will simply accept the ideology is flawed - there are people who are pre-emptively 'anti-state', but fundamentally, their opponents are not 'pro-state', just practical. the anarchists are the only people coming to the table with a pre-existing, overriding position about 'authority' and the role of the state, and they're willing to abandon all practicalities to support it. functional regulations on medicine production *have* to be considered authoritarian, because that's the point of the ideology.
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any idea how much $$ a mid-late 20s female could get to sell her virginity? just curious .,,,
This is a classic person-who-has-never-done-sex-work thinking-it-will-be-easy-and-that-they-will-be-inherently-more-desirable-because-they-are-not-a-sex-worker type question.
How are you going to find offers?
How are you going to advertise yourself?
What photos and videos do you have that will convince prospective bidders that you have something interesting to offer, sexually?
What sexual skills do you have?
How are you as a conversationalist?
Are you a good listener?
How would you handle a client who is crying, triggered, drunk, depressed, or irate?
How are you going to vet a client for your own safety?
How will you accept payment?
What is included in the offer?
Where will the deal happen?
What are you going to wear?
How long is the session?
Why should someone who normally hires skilled, experienced professionals want to pay a novice like you?
I will level with you. Your virginity is not worth shit. You have been lied to all your life about the value of that conceptual "purity," and about sex work being a low skill, low value service. It isn't.
It is an incredible amount of work to get even one decently paying client as a sex worker. It takes a ton of effort creating videos and photos, editing them, manufacturing your image and brand, networking with other sex workers, maintaining a social media presence, vetting potential clients, and establishing yourself as a small business owner to even begin collecting revenue, and quite a while after that before you turn a profit.
Are you ready to put that work in? Are you willing to hire other sex workers as a client yourself first, so that you can pay them to show you the ropes? Are you ready to shoot porn of yourself to advertise your services, and post it daily, interacting with scores of unpaying viewers before one finally converts to a real-life client? Do you want to develop the interpersonal and sexual skills necessary to give a client a good time?
Or do you want someone to just cut you a check because you're a virgin?
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It starts with him
What was once a promise of technology to allow us to automate and analyze the environments in our physical spaces is now a heap of broken ideas and broken products. Technology products have been deployed en masse, our personal data collected and sold without our consent, and then abandoned as soon as companies strip mined all the profit they thought they could wring out. And why not? They already have our money.
The Philips Hue, poster child of the smart home, used to work entirely on your local network. After all, do you really need to connect to the Internet to control the lights in your own house? Well you do now!Philips has announced it will require cloud accounts for all users—including users who had already purchased the hardware thinking they wouldn’t need an account (and the inevitable security breaches that come with it) to use their lights.
Will you really trust any promises from a company that unilaterally forces a change like this on you? Does the user actually benefit from any of this?
Matter in its current version … doesn’t really help resolve the key issue of the smart home, namely that most companies view smart homes as a way to sell more individual devices and generate recurring revenue.
It keeps happening. Stuff you bought isn’t yours because the company you bought it from can take away features and force you to do things you don’t want or need to do—ultimately because they want to make more money off of you. It’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, and it’s discouraging.
And it has stopped IoT for the rest of us in its tracks. Industrial IoT is doing great—data collection is the point for the customer. But the consumer electronics business model does not mesh with the expected lifespan of home products, and so enshittification began as soon as those first warranties ran out.
How can we reset the expectations we have of connected devices, so that they are again worthy of our trust and money? Before we can bring the promise back, we must deweaponize the technology.
Guidelines for the hardware producer
What we can do as engineers and business owners is make sure the stuff we’re building can’t be wielded as a lever against our own customers, and to show consumers how things could be. These are things we want consumers to expect and demand of manufacturers.
Control
Think local
Decouple
Open interfaces
Be a good citizen
1) Control over firmware updates.
You scream, “What about security updates!” But a company taking away a feature you use or requiring personal data for no reason is arguably a security flaw.
We were once outraged when intangible software products went from something that remained unchanging on your computer, to a cloud service, with all the ephemerality that term promises. Now they’re coming for our tangible possessions.
No one should be able to do this with hardware that you own. Breaking functionality is entirely what security updates are supposed to prevent! A better checklist for firmware updates:
Allow users to control when and what updates they want to apply.
Be thorough and clear as to what the update does and provide the ability to downgrade if needed.
Separate security updates from feature additions or changes.
Never force an update unless you are sure you want to accept (financial) responsibility for whatever you inadvertently break.
Consider that you are sending software updates to other people’s hardware. Ask them for permission (which includes respecting “no”) before touching their stuff!
2) Do less on the Internet.
A large part of the security issues with IoT products stem from the Internet connectivity itself. Any server in the cloud has an attack surface, and now that means your physical devices do.
The solution here is “do less”. All functionality should be local-only unless it has a really good reason to use the Internet. Remotely controlling your lights while in your own house does not require the cloud and certainly does not require an account with your personal information attached to it. Limit the use of the cloud to only the functions that cannot work without it.
As a bonus, less networked functionality means fewer maintenance costs for you.
3) Decouple products and services.
It’s fine to need a cloud service. But making a product that requires a specific cloud service is a guarantee that it can be enshittified at any point later on, with no alternative for the user owner.
Design products to be able to interact with other servers. You have sold someone hardware and now they own it, not you. They have a right to keep using it even if you shut down or break your servers. Allow them the ability to point their devices to another service. If you want them to use your service, make it worthwhile enough for them to choose you.
Finally, if your product has a heavy reliance on the cloud to work, consider enabling your users to self-host their own cloud tooling if they so desire. A lot of people are perfectly capable of doing this on their own and can help others do the same.
4) Use open and standard protocols and interfaces.
Most networked devices have no reason to use proprietary protocols, interfaces, and data formats. There are open standards with communities and software available for almost anything you could want to do. Re-inventing the wheel just wastes resources and makes it harder for users to keep using their stuff after you’re long gone. We did this with Twine, creating an encrypted protocol that minimized chatter, because we needed to squeeze battery life out of WiFi back when there weren’t good options.
If you do have a need for a proprietary protocol (and there are valid reasons to do so):
Document it.
If possible, have a fallback option that uses an open standard.
Provide tooling and software to interact with your custom protocols, at the very least enough for open source developers to be able to work with it. This goes for physical interfaces as much as it does for cloud protocols.
If the interface requires a custom-made, expensive, and/or hard-to-find tool to use, then consider using something else that is commonly available and off the shelf instead.
5) Be a good citizen.
Breaking paid-for functionality on other people’s stuff is inherently unethical. Consider not doing this! Enshittification is not a technical problem, it is a behavioral one. Offer better products that are designed to resist enshittification, and resist it yourself in everything you do.
Nothing forced Philips to do what they are doing: a human made a decision to do it. They could have just as easily chosen not to. With Twine’s server lock-in, at least we chose to keep it running, for 12 years now. Consider that you can still make a decent living by being honest and ethical towards the people who are, by purchasing your products, paying for your lifestyle.
We didn’t get here by accident. Humans made choices that brought us to this point, and we can’t blame anyone for being turned off by it. But we can choose to do better. We can design better stuff. And we can choose not to mess things up after the fact.
We’re putting this into practice with Pickup. (We also think that part of an IoT reset is giving users the creative freedom of a general-purpose device.) If you’re looking for something better and our product can fill a need you have, consider backing us. We cannot claim to be perfect or have all of the answers, but we are absolutely going to try. The status quo sucks. Let’s do something about it.
Published October 15, 2023 By Jeremy Billheimer
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Bad Dragon is suing SinSaint over copyright infringement of their dildo designs. What I want to know is, can you copyright the shape of a dog's dick? Because if you can, you shouldn't be able to.
I did knot need to hear about this one.
one more pun
TSG is gonna be one of the more reputable sources for this one
MARCH 25--A manufacturer of “fantasy-themed sex toys” has accused an upstart Brooklyn, New York firm of knocking off its distinctive designs, according to a federal lawsuit alleging that the defendant has infringed on copyrights for dildos such as “Spritz the Seadragon” and “Tyson the Water Buffalo.”
In a March 20 complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, Bad Dragon Enterprises contended that its “sculptural” products have been illegally copied by SinSaint, which is headquartered in a Coney Island warehouse and advertises that all its “Ethically Manufactured” toys are “made in Brooklyn, USA.”
Bad Dragon, which noted that it has had “significant commercial success” in the adult toy field, alleged that SinSaint has been selling the duplicative dildos through its website and other trade channels, including the recent AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas (where the new firm’s exhibitor booth was next to that of the all-nude Palomino strip club).
The lawsuit identifies 13 separate dildos that Bad Dragon claims have been copied (and renamed) by SinSaint, which was incorporated in New York last year. The colorful silicone toys feature scales, tentacles, suction cups, and other design elements meant to mimic the genitalia of dragons, sea creatures, and other fantastical characters.
Some of the Bad Dragon products that SinSaint is accused of swiping are “Kelvin the Ice Dragon,” “Stan the T. Rex,” and “Vergil the Drippy Dragon.” SinSaint has not been accused of pirating other Bad Dragon offerings like “Jason the Demogorgon” or “Cuttlefish of Cthulhu.”
According to the lawsuit, SinSaint’s counsel last month stated that the company had begun removing “some of the allegedly infringing listings for product redesign.” This response, Bad Dragon contended, was “unacceptable,” adding that it “continues to be harmed by Defendant’s ongoing, unlawful conduct.”
The Bad Dragon complaint seeks an order enjoining SinSaint from continuing any further alleged
copyright infringement and seeks “disgorgement of all of Defendant’s profits” related to the artificial penises. The company may also seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each of the dildos in question.
For more than a decade, Bad Dragon has sought trademark and copyright protection for various product lines. While often successful, the firm’s application to trademark its “Cum Tube” was abandoned after a government attorney rejected the ejaculating dildo because the “applied-for mark consists of or includes immoral or scandalous matter.” The application included a very NSFW image, which can be found on the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office website.
According to an August 2023 trademark application, SinSaint’s owner is Oleg Semenenko, 50, a resident of Brooklyn’s gated Seagate community. Semenenko lives less than a mile from SinSaint’s warehouse, which shares an address with GlobMarble, an industrial molds business for which Semenenko is listed as “manager” in a separate trademark application filed this month.
In a brief interview today, Semenenko was asked how a dildo firm grew out of his original business. “We work with rubber,” he replied. Semenenko dismissed Bad Dragon’s claim that its products were unique and original: “How can octopus hand can be your idea?” (4 pages)
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Hope the judge that did the recent trump case gets this one, even though I know that's basically impossible, just the thought of making him listen to hours of testimony about how these rubber fantasy dildos are protected by copyright or trademark law, or something like that is funny to me.
It's not a revenge thing wanting it, just a keep him humble thing. I know you think you're hot shit now, so here listen to these arguments for a bit.
Totally different note, I'm wondering how long until the discourse starts up, or if it has already started up, where using horse dildos is either bestiality or a gateway to bestiality because what with the way people treat cartoons of fictional people I can't imagine it's far off or not already here.
Look to japan for the tentacle ones.........
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Why do economists need to shut up about mercantilism, as you alluded to in your post about Louis XIV's chief ministers?
In part due to their supposed intellectual descent from Adam Smith and the other classical economists, contemporary economists are pretty uniformly hostile to mercantilism, seeing it as a wrong-headed political economy that held back human progress until it was replaced by that best of all ideas: capitalism.
As a student of economic history and the history of political economy, I find that economists generally have a pretty poor understanding of what mercantilists actually believed and what economic policies they actually supported. In reality, a lot of the things that economists see as key advances in the creation of capitalism - the invention of the joint-stock company, the creation of financial markets, etc. - were all accomplishments of mercantiism.
Rather than the crude stereotype of mercantilists as a bunch of monetary weirdos who thought the secret to prosperity was the hoarding of precious metals, mercantilists were actually lazer-focused on economic development. The whole business about trying to achieve a positive balance of trade and financial liquidity and restraining wages was all a means to an end of economic development. Trade surpluses could be invested in manufacturing and shipping, gold reserves played an important role in deepening capital pools and thus increasing levels of investment at lower interest rates that could support larger-scale and more capital intensive enterprises, and so forth.
Indeed, the arch-sin of mercantilism in the eyes of classical and contemporary economists, their interference in free trade through tariffs, monopolies, and other interventions, was all directed at the overriding economic goal of climbing the value-added ladder.
Thus, England (and later Britain) put a tariff on foreign textiles and an export tax on raw wool and forbade the emigration of skilled workers (while supporting the immigration of skilled workers to England) and other mercantilist policies to move up from being exporters of raw wool (which meant that most of the profits from the higher value-added part of the industry went to Burgundy) to being exporters of cheap wool cloth to being exporters of more advanced textiles. Hell, even Adam Smith saw the logic of the Navigation Acts!
And this is what brings me to the most devastating critique of the standard economist narrative about mercantilism: the majority of the countries that successfully industrialized did so using mercantilist principles rather than laissez-faire principles:
When England became the first industrial economy, it did so under strict protectionist policies and only converted to free trade once it had gained enough of a technological and economic advantage over its competitors that it didn't need protectionism any more.
When the United States industrialized in the 19th century and transformed itself into the largest economy in the world, it did so from behind high tariff walls.
When Germany made itself the leading industrial power on the Continent, it did so by rejecting English free trade economics and having the state invest heavily in coal, steel, and railroads. Free trade was only for within the Zollverein, not with the outside world.
And as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, and others have pointed out, you see the same thing with Japan, South Korea, China...everywhere you look, you see protectionism as the means of achieving economic development, and then free trade only working for already-developed economies.
#political economy#mercantilism#economic development#early modern state-building#early modern period#laissez-faire#classical liberalism#classical economics#economics#economic history
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Chapter III. Economic Evolutions. — First Period. — The Division of Labor.
2. — Impotence of palliatives. — MM. Blanqui, Chevalier, Dunoyer, Rossi, and Passy.
All the remedies proposed for the fatal effects of parcellaire division may be reduced to two, which really are but one, the second being the inversion of the first: to raise the mental and moral condition of the workingman by increasing his comfort and dignity; or else, to prepare the way for his future emancipation and happiness by instruction.
We will examine successively these two systems, one of which is represented by M. Blanqui, the other by M. Chevalier.
M. Blanqui is a friend of association and progress, a writer of democratic tendencies, a professor who has a place in the hearts of the proletariat. In his opening discourse of the year 1845, M. Blanqui proclaimed, as a means of salvation, the association of labor and capital, the participation of the working man in the profits, — that is, a beginning of industrial solidarity. “Our century,” he exclaimed, “must witness the birth of the collective producer.” M. Blanqui forgets that the collective producer was born long since, as well as the collective consumer, and that the question is no longer a genetic, but a medical, one. Our task is to cause the blood proceeding from the collective digestion, instead of rushing wholly to the head, stomach, and lungs, to descend also into the legs and arms. Besides, I do not know what method M. Blanqui proposes to employ in order to realize his generous thought, — whether it be the establishment of national workshops, or the loaning of capital by the State, or the expropriation of the conductors of business enterprises and the substitution for them of industrial associations, or, finally, whether he will rest content with a recommendation of the savings bank to workingmen, in which case the participation would be put off till doomsday.
However this may be, M. Blanqui’s idea amounts simply to an increase of wages resulting from the copartnership, or at least from the interest in the business, which he confers upon the laborers. What, then, is the value to the laborer of a participation in the profits?
A mill with fifteen thousand spindles, employing three hundred hands, does not pay at present an annual dividend of twenty thousand francs. I am informed by a Mulhouse manufacturer that factory stocks in Alsace are generally below par and that this industry has already become a means of getting money by stock-jobbing instead of by labor. To SELL; to sell at the right time; to sell dear, — is the only object in view; to manufacture is only to prepare for a sale. When I assume, then, on an average, a profit of twenty thousand francs to a factory employing three hundred persons, my argument being general, I am twenty thousand francs out of the way. Nevertheless, we will admit the correctness of this amount. Dividing twenty thousand francs, the profit of the mill, by three hundred, the number of persons, and again by three hundred, the number of working days, I find an increase of pay for each person of twenty-two and one-fifth centimes, or for daily expenditure an addition of eighteen centimes, just a morsel of bread. Is it worth while, then, for this, to expropriate mill-owners and endanger the public welfare, by erecting establishments which must be insecure, since, property being divided into infinitely small shares, and being no longer supported by profit, business enterprises would lack ballast, and would be unable to weather commercial gales. And even if no expropriation was involved, what a poor prospect to offer the working class is an increase of eighteen centimes in return for centuries of economy; for no less time than this would be needed to accumulate the requisite capital, supposing that periodical suspensions of business did not periodically consume its savings!
The fact which I have just stated has been pointed out in several ways. M. Passy [13] himself took from the books of a mill in Normandy where the laborers were associated with the owner the wages of several families for a period of ten years, and he found that they averaged from twelve to fourteen hundred francs per year. He then compared the situation of mill-hands paid in proportion to the prices obtained by their employers with that of laborers who receive fixed wages, and found that the difference is almost imperceptible. This result might easily have been foreseen. Economic phenomena obey laws as abstract and immutable as those of numbers: it is only privilege, fraud, and absolutism which disturb the eternal harmony.
M. Blanqui, repentant, as it seems, at having taken this first step toward socialistic ideas, has made haste to retract his words. At the same meeting in which M. Passy demonstrated the inadequacy of cooperative association, he exclaimed: “Does it not seem that labor is a thing susceptible of organization, and that it is in the power of the State to regulate the happiness of humanity as it does the march of an army, and with an entirely mathematical precision? This is an evil tendency, a delusion which the Academy cannot oppose too strongly, because it is not only a chimera, but a dangerous sophism. Let us respect good and honest intentions; but let us not fear to say that to publish a book upon the organization of labor is to rewrite for the fiftieth time a treatise upon the quadrature of the circle or the philosopher’s stone.”
Then, carried away by his zeal, M. Blanqui finishes the destruction of his theory of cooperation, which M. Passy already had so rudely shaken, by the following example: “M. Dailly, one of the most enlightened of farmers, has drawn up an account for each piece of land and an account for each product; and he proves that within a period of thirty years the same man has never obtained equal crops from the same piece of land. The products have varied from twenty-six thousand francs to nine thousand or seven thousand francs, sometimes descending as low as three hundred francs. There are also certain products — potatoes, for instance — which fail one time in ten. How, then, with these variations and with revenues so uncertain, can we establish even distribution and uniform wages for laborers?....”
It might be answered that the variations in the product of each piece of land simply indicate that it is necessary to associate proprietors with each other after having associated laborers with proprietors, which would establish a more complete solidarity: but this would be a prejudgment on the very thing in question, which M. Blanqui definitively decides, after reflection, to be unattainable, — namely, the organization of labor. Besides, it is evident that solidarity would not add an obolus to the common wealth, and that, consequently, it does not even touch the problem of division.
In short, the profit so much envied, and often a very uncertain matter with employers, falls far short of the difference between actual wages and the wages desired; and M. Blanqui’s former plan, miserable in its results and disavowed by its author, would be a scourge to the manufacturing industry. Now, the division of labor being henceforth universally established, the argument is generalized, and leads us to the conclusion that misery is an effect of labor, as well as of idleness.
The answer to this is, and it is a favorite argument with the people: Increase the price of services; double and triple wages.
I confess that if such an increase was possible it would be a complete success, whatever M. Chevalier may have said, who needs to be slightly corrected on this point.
According to M. Chevalier, if the price of any kind of merchandise whatever is increased, other kinds will rise in a like proportion, and no one will benefit thereby.
This argument, which the economists have rehearsed for more than a century, is as false as it is old, and it belonged to M. Chevalier, as an engineer, to rectify the economic tradition. The salary of a head clerk being ten francs per day, and the wages of a workingman four, if the income of each is increased five francs, the ratio of their fortunes, which was formerly as one hundred to forty, will be thereafter as one hundred to sixty. The increase of wages, necessarily taking place by addition and not by proportion, would be, therefore, an excellent method of equalization; and the economists would deserve to have thrown back at them by the socialists the reproach of ignorance which they have bestowed upon them at random.
But I say that such an increase is impossible, and that the supposition is absurd: for, as M. Chevalier has shown very clearly elsewhere, the figure which indicates the price of the day’s labor is only an algebraic exponent without effect on the reality: and that which it is necessary first to endeavor to increase, while correcting the inequalities of distribution, is not the monetary expression, but the quantity of products. Till then every rise of wages can have no other effect than that produced by a rise of the price of wheat, wine, meat, sugar, soap, coal, etc., — that is, the effect of a scarcity. For what is wages?
It is the cost price of wheat, wine, meat, coal; it is the integrant price of all things. Let us go farther yet: wages is the proportionality of the elements which compose wealth, and which are consumed every day reproductively by the mass of laborers. Now, to double wages, in the sense in which the people understand the words, is to give to each producer a share greater than his product, which is contradictory: and if the rise pertains only to a few industries, a general disturbance in exchange ensues, — that is, a scarcity. God save me from predictions! but, in spite of my desire for the amelioration of the lot of the working class, I declare that it is impossible for strikes followed by an increase of wages to end otherwise than in a general rise in prices: that is as certain as that two and two make four. It is not by such methods that the workingmen will attain to wealth and — what is a thousand times more precious than wealth — liberty. The workingmen, supported by the favor of an indiscreet press, in demanding an increase of wages, have served monopoly much better than their own real interests: may they recognize, when their situation shall become more painful, the bitter fruit of their inexperience!
Convinced of the uselessness, or rather, of the fatal effects, of an increase of wages, and seeing clearly that the question is wholly organic and not at all commercial, M. Chevalier attacks the problem at the other end. He asks for the working class, first of all, instruction, and proposes extensive reforms in this direction.
Instruction! this is also M. Arago’s word to the workingmen; it is the principle of all progress. Instruction!.... It should be known once for all what may be expected from it in the solution of the problem before us; it should be known, I say, not whether it is desirable that all should receive it, — this no one doubts, — but whether it is possible.
To clearly comprehend the complete significance of M. Chevalier’s views, a knowledge of his methods is indispensable.
M. Chevalier, long accustomed to discipline, first by his polytechnic studies, then by his St. Simonian connections, and finally by his position in the University, does not seem to admit that a pupil can have any other inclination than to obey the regulations, a sectarian any other thought than that of his chief, a public functionary any other opinion than that of the government. This may be a conception of order as respectable as any other, and I hear upon this subject no expressions of approval or censure. Has M. Chevalier an idea to offer peculiar to himself? On the principle that all that is not forbidden by law is allowed, he hastens to the front to deliver his opinion, and then abandons it to give his adhesion, if there is occasion, to the opinion of authority. It was thus that M. Chevalier, before settling down in the bosom of the Constitution, joined M. Enfantin: it was thus that he gave his views upon canals, railroads, finance, property, long before the administration had adopted any system in relation to the construction of railways, the changing of the rate of interest on bonds, patents, literary property, etc.
M. Chevalier, then, is not a blind admirer of the University system of instruction, — far from it; and until the appearance of the new order of things, he does not hesitate to say what he thinks. His opinions are of the most radical.
M. Villemain had said in his report: “The object of the higher education is to prepare in advance a choice of men to occupy and serve in all the positions of the administration, the magistracy, the bar and the various liberal professions, including the higher ranks and learned specialties of the army and navy.”
“The higher education,” thereupon observes M. Chevalier, [14] “is designed also to prepare men some of whom shall be farmers, others manufacturers, these merchants, and those private engineers. Now, in the official programme, all these classes are forgotten. The omission is of considerable importance; for, indeed, industry in its various forms, agriculture, commerce, are neither accessories nor accidents in a State: they are its chief dependence.... If the University desires to justify its name, it must provide a course in these things; else an industrial university will be established in opposition to it.... We shall have altar against altar, etc....”
And as it is characteristic of a luminous idea to throw light on all questions connected with it, professional instruction furnishes M. Chevalier with a very expeditious method of deciding, incidentally, the quarrel between the clergy and the University on liberty of education.
“It must be admitted that a very great concession is made to the clergy in allowing Latin to serve as the basis of education. The clergy know Latin as well as the University; it is their own tongue. Their tuition, moreover, is cheaper; hence they must inevitably draw a large portion of our youth into their small seminaries and their schools of a higher grade....”
The conclusion of course follows: change the course of study, and you decatholicize the realm; and as the clergy know only Latin and the Bible, when they have among them neither masters of art, nor farmers, nor accountants; when, of their forty thousand priests, there are not twenty, perhaps, with the ability to make a plan or forge a nail, — we soon shall see which the fathers of families will choose, industry or the breviary, and whether they do not regard labor as the most beautiful language in which to pray to God.
Thus would end this ridiculous opposition between religious education and profane science, between the spiritual and the temporal, between reason and faith, between altar and throne, old rubrics henceforth meaningless, but with which they still impose upon the good nature of the public, until it takes offence.
M. Chevalier does not insist, however, on this solution: he knows that religion and monarchy are two powers which, though continually quarrelling, cannot exist without each other; and that he may not awaken suspicion, he launches out into another revolutionary idea, — equality.
“France is in a position to furnish the polytechnic school with twenty times as many scholars as enter at present (the average being one hundred and seventy-six, this would amount to three thousand five hundred and twenty). The University has but to say the word.... If my opinion was of any weight, I should maintain that mathematical capacity is much less special than is commonly supposed. I remember the success with which children, taken at random, so to speak, from the pavements of Paris, follow the teaching of La Martiniere by the method of Captain Tabareau.”
If the higher education, reconstructed according to the views of M. Chevalier, was sought after by all young French men instead of by only ninety thousand as commonly, there would be no exaggeration in raising the estimate of the number of minds mathematically inclined from three thousand five hundred and twenty to ten thousand; but, by the same argument, we should have ten thousand artists, philologists, and philosophers; ten thousand doctors, physicians, chemists, and naturalists; ten thousand economists, legists, and administrators; twenty thousand manufacturers, foremen, merchants, and accountants; forty thousand farmers, wine-growers, miners, etc., — in all, one hundred thousand specialists a year, or about one-third of our youth. The rest, having, instead of special adaptations, only mingled adaptations, would be distributed indifferently elsewhere.
It is certain that so powerful an impetus given to intelligence would quicken the progress of equality, and I do not doubt that such is the secret desire of M. Chevalier. But that is precisely what troubles me: capacity is never wanting, any more than population, and the problem is to find employment for the one and bread for the other. In vain does M. Chevalier tell us: “The higher education would give less ground for the complaint that it throws into society crowds of ambitious persons without any means of satisfying their desires, and interested in the overthrow of the State; people without employment and unable to get any, good for nothing and believing themselves fit for anything, especially for the direction of public affairs. Scientific studies do not so inflate the mind. They enlighten and regulate it at once; they fit men for practical life....” Such language, I reply, is good to use with patriarchs: a professor of political economy should have more respect for his position and his audience. The government has only one hundred and twenty offices annually at its disposal for one hundred and seventy-six students admitted to the polytechnic school: what, then, would be its embarrassment if the number of admissions was ten thousand, or even, taking M. Chevalier’s figures, three thousand five hundred? And, to generalize, the whole number of civil positions is sixty thousand, or three thousand vacancies annually; what dismay would the government be thrown into if, suddenly adopting the reformatory ideas of M. Chevalier, it should find itself besieged by fifty thousand office-seekers! The following objection has often been made to republicans without eliciting a reply: When everybody shall have the electoral privilege, will the deputies do any better, and will the proletariat be further advanced? I ask the same question of M. Chevalier: When each academic year shall bring you one hundred thousand fitted men, what will you do with them?
To provide for these interesting young people, you will go down to the lowest round of the ladder. You will oblige the young man, after fifteen years of lofty study, to begin, no longer as now with the offices of aspirant engineer, sub-lieutenant of artillery, second lieutenant, deputy, comptroller, general guardian, etc., but with the ignoble positions of pioneer, train-soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot-maker, and exciseman. There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him to advance a step. Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die a laborer on a second class road, or a corporal in a regiment
Oh! how much more prudent Catholicism has shown itself, and how far it has surpassed you all, St. Simonians, republicans, university men, economists, in the knowledge of man and society! The priest knows that our life is but a voyage, and that our perfection cannot be realized here below; and he contents himself with outlining on earth an education which must be completed in heaven. The man whom religion has moulded, content to know, do, and obtain what suffices for his earthly destiny, never can become a source of embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you?...
Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one’s self till the age of twenty with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten the threads of a mule-jenny or pick coal at the bottom of a pit? What! you have by your own confession only three thousand positions annually to bestow upon fifty thousand possible capacities, and yet you talk of establishing schools! Cling rather to your system of exclusion and privilege, a system as old as the world, the support of dynasties and patriciates, a veritable machine for gelding men in order to secure the pleasures of a caste of Sultans. Set a high price upon your teaching, multiply obstacles, drive away, by lengthy tests, the son of the proletaire whom hunger does not permit to wait, and protect with all your power the ecclesiastical schools, where the students are taught to labor for the other life, to cultivate resignation, to fast, to respect those in high places, to love the king, and to pray to God. For every useless study sooner or later becomes an abandoned study: knowledge is poison to slaves.
Surely M. Chevalier has too much sagacity not to have seen the consequences of his idea. But he has spoken from the bottom of his heart, and we can only applaud his good intentions: men must first be men; after that, he may live who can.
Thus we advance at random, guided by Providence, who never warns us except with a blow: this is the beginning and end of political economy.
Contrary to M. Chevalier, professor of political economy at the College of France, M. Dunoyer, an economist of the Institute, does not wish instruction to be organized. The organization of instruction is a species of organization of labor; therefore, no organization. Instruction, observes M. Dunoyer, is a profession, not a function of the State; like all professions, it ought to be and remain free. It is communism, it is socialism, it is the revolutionary tendency, whose principal agents have been Robespierre, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and M. Guizot, which have thrown into our midst these fatal ideas of the centralization and absorption of all activity in the State. The press is very free, and the pen of the journalist is an object of merchandise; religion, too, is very free, and every wearer of a gown, be it short or long, who knows how to excite public curiosity, can draw an audience about him. M. Lacordaire has his devotees, M. Leroux his apostles, M. Buchez his convent. Why, then, should not instruction also be free? If the right of the instructed, like that of the buyer, is unquestionable, and that of the instructor, who is only a variety of the seller, is its correlative, it is impossible to infringe upon the liberty of instruction without doing violence to the most precious of liberties, that of the conscience. And then, adds M. Dunoyer, if the State owes instruction to everybody, it will soon be maintained that it owes labor; then lodging; then shelter.... Where does that lead to?
The argument of M. Dunoyer is irrefutable: to organize instruction is to give to every citizen a pledge of liberal employment and comfortable wages; the two are as intimately connected as the circulation of the arteries and the veins. But M. Dunoyer’s theory implies also that progress belongs only to a certain select portion of humanity, and that barbarism is the eternal lot of nine-tenths of the human race. It is this which constitutes, according to M. Dunoyer, the very essence of society, which manifests itself in three stages, religion, hierarchy, and beggary. So that in this system, which is that of Destutt de Tracy, Montesquieu, and Plato, the antinomy of division, like that of value, is without solution.
It is a source of inexpressible pleasure to me, I confess, to see M. Chevalier, a defender of the centralization of instruction, opposed by M. Dunoyer, a defender of liberty; M. Dunoyer in his turn antagonized by M. Guizot; M. Guizot, the representative of the centralizers, contradicting the Charter, which posits liberty as a principle; the Charter trampled under foot by the University men, who lay sole claim to the privilege of teaching, regardless of the express command of the Gospel to the priests: Go and teach. And above all this tumult of economists, legislators, ministers, academicians, professors, and priests, economic Providence giving the lie to the Gospel, and shouting: Pedagogues! what use am I to make of your instruction?
Who will relieve us of this anxiety? M. Rossi leans toward eclecticism: Too little divided, he says, labor remains unproductive; too much divided, it degrades man. Wisdom lies between these extremes; in medio virtus. Unfortunately this intermediate wisdom is only a small amount of poverty joined with a small amount of wealth, so that the condition is not modified in the least. The proportion of good and evil, instead of being as one hundred to one hundred, becomes as fifty to fifty: in this we may take, once for all, the measure of eclecticism. For the rest, M. Rossi’s juste-milieu is in direct opposition to the great economic law: To produce with the least possible expense the greatest possible quantity of values.... Now, how can labor fulfil its destiny without an extreme division? Let us look farther, if you please.
“All economic systems and hypotheses,” says M. Rossi, “belong to the economist, but the intelligent, free, responsible man is under the control of the moral law... Political economy is only a science which examines the relations of things, and draws conclusions therefrom. It examines the effects of labor; in the application of labor, you should consider the importance of the object in view. When the application of labor is unfavorable to an object higher than the production of wealth, it should not be applied... Suppose that it would increase the national wealth to compel children to labor fifteen hours a day: morality would say that that is not allowable. Does that prove that political economy is false? No; that proves that you confound things which should be kept separate.”
If M. Rossi had a little more of that Gallic simplicity so difficult for foreigners to acquire, he would very summarily have thrown his tongue to the dogs, as Madame de Sevigne said. But a professor must talk, talk, talk, not for the sake of saying anything, but in order to avoid silence. M. Rossi takes three turns around the question, then lies down: that is enough to make certain people believe that he has answered it.
It is surely a sad symptom for a science when, in developing itself according to its own principles, it reaches its object just in time to be contradicted by another; as, for example, when the postulates of political economy are found to be opposed to those of morality, for I suppose that morality is a science as well as political economy. What, then, is human knowledge, if all its affirmations destroy each other, and on what shall we rely? Divided labor is a slave’s occupation, but it alone is really productive; undivided labor belongs to the free man, but it does not pay its expenses. On the one hand, political economy tells us to be rich; on the other, morality tells us to be free; and M. Rossi, speaking in the name of both, warns us at the same time that we can be neither free nor rich, for to be but half of either is to be neither. M. Rossi’s doctrine, then, far from satisfying this double desire of humanity, is open to the objection that, to avoid exclusiveness, it strips us of everything: it is, under another form, the history of the representative system.
But the antagonism is even more profound than M. Rossi has supposed. For since, according to universal experience (on this point in harmony with theory), wages decrease in proportion to the division of labor, it is clear that, in submitting ourselves to parcellaire slavery, we thereby shall not obtain wealth; we shall only change men into machines: witness the laboring population of the two worlds. And since, on the other hand, without the division of labor, society falls back into barbarism, it is evident also that, by sacrificing wealth, we shall not obtain liberty: witness all the wandering tribes of Asia and Africa. Therefore it is necessary — economic science and morality absolutely command it — for us to solve the problem of division: now, where are the economists? More than thirty years ago, Lemontey, developing a remark of Smith, exposed the demoralizing and homicidal influence of the division of labor. What has been the reply; what investigations have been made; what remedies proposed; has the question even been understood?
Every year the economists report, with an exactness which I would commend more highly if I did not see that it is always fruitless, the commercial condition of the States of Europe. They know how many yards of cloth, pieces of silk, pounds of iron, have been manufactured; what has been the consumption per head of wheat, wine, sugar, meat: it might be said that to them the ultimate of science is to publish inventories, and the object of their labor is to become general comptrollers of nations. Never did such a mass of material offer so fine a field for investigation. What has been found; what new principle has sprung from this mass; what solution of the many problems of long standing has been reached; what new direction have studies taken?
One question, among others, seems to have been prepared for a final judgment, — pauperism. Pauperism, of all the phenomena of the civilized world, is today the best known: we know pretty nearly whence it comes, when and how it arrives, and what it costs; its proportion at various stages of civilization has been calculated, and we have convinced ourselves that all the specifics with which it hitherto has been fought have been impotent. Pauperism has been divided into genera, species, and varieties: it is a complete natural history, one of the most important branches of anthropology. Well I the unquestionable result of all the facts collected, unseen, shunned, covered by the economists with their silence, is that pauperism is constitutional and chronic in society as long as the antagonism between labor and capital continues, and that this antagonism can end only by the absolute negation of political economy. What issue from this labyrinth have the economists discovered?
This last point deserves a moment’s attention.
In primitive communism misery, as I have observed in a preceding paragraph, is the universal condition.
Labor is war declared upon this misery.
Labor organizes itself, first by division, next by machinery, then by competition, etc.
Now, the question is whether it is not in the essence of this organization, as given us by political economy, at the same time that it puts an end to the misery of some, to aggravate that of others in a fatal and unavoidable manner. These are the terms in which the question of pauperism must be stated, and for this reason we have undertaken to solve it.
What means, then, this eternal babble of the economists about the improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity, their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.? All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths of the human race in disgrace, — what is it? Did not Nature make all men equally gross, averse to labor, wanton, and wild? Did not patrician and proletaire spring from the same clay? Then how happens it that, after so many centuries, and in spite of so many miracles of industry, science, and art, comfort and culture have not become the inheritance of all? How happens it that in Paris and London, centres of social wealth, poverty is as hideous as in the days of Caesar and Agricola? Why, by the side of this refined aristocracy, has the mass remained so uncultivated? It is laid to the vices of the people: but the vices of the upper class appear to be no less; perhaps they are even greater. The original stain affected all alike: how happens it, once more, that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious for all? Does this not show that progress itself is a privilege, and that the man who has neither wagon nor horse is forced to flounder about for ever in the mud? What do I say? The totally destitute man has no desire to improve: he has fallen so low that ambition even is extinguished in his heart.
“Of all the private virtues,” observes M. Dunoyer with infinite reason, “the most necessary, that which gives us all the others in succession, is the passion for well-being, is the violent desire to extricate one’s self from misery and abjection, is that spirit of emulation and dignity which does not permit men to rest content with an inferior situation.... But this sentiment, which seems so natural, is unfortunately much less common than is thought. There are few reproaches which the generality of men deserve less than that which ascetic moralists bring against them of being too fond of their comforts: the opposite reproach might be brought against them with infinitely more justice.... There is even in the nature of men this very remarkable feature, that the less their knowledge and resources, the less desire they have of acquiring these. The most miserable savages and the least enlightened of men are precisely those in whom it is most difficult to arouse wants, those in whom it is hardest to inspire the desire to rise out of their condition; so that man must already have gained a certain degree of comfort by his labor, before he can feel with any keenness that need of improving his condition, of perfecting his existence, which I call the love of well-being.” [15]
Thus the misery of the laboring classes arises in general from their lack of heart and mind, or, as M. Passy has said somewhere, from the weakness, the inertia of their moral and intellectual faculties. This inertia is due to the fact that the said laboring classes, still half savage, do not have a sufficiently ardent desire to ameliorate their condition: this M. Dunoyer shows. But as this absence of desire is itself the effect of misery, it follows that misery and apathy are each other’s effect and cause, and that the proletariat turns in a circle.
To rise out of this abyss there must be either well-being, — that is, a gradual increase of wages, — or intelligence and courage, — that is, a gradual development of faculties: two things diametrically opposed to the degradation of soul and body which is the natural effect of the division of labor. The misfortune of the proletariat, then, is wholly providential, and to undertake to extinguish it in the present state of political economy would be to produce a revolutionary whirlwind.
For it is not without a profound reason, rooted in the loftiest considerations of morality, that the universal conscience, expressing itself by turns through the selfishness of the rich and the apathy of the proletariat, denies a reward to the man whose whole function is that of a lever and spring. If, by some impossibility, material well-being could fall to the lot of the parcellaire laborer, we should see something monstrous happen: the laborers employed at disagreeable tasks would become like those Romans, gorged with the wealth of the world, whose brutalized minds became incapable of devising new pleasures. Well-being without education stupefies people and makes them insolent: this was noticed in the most ancient times. Incrassatus est, et recalcitravit, says
Deuteronomy. For the rest, the parcellaire laborer has judged himself: he is content, provided he has bread, a pallet to sleep on, and plenty of liquor on Sunday. Any other condition would be prejudicial to him, and would endanger public order.
At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly given them by the city government, receive higher pay than college professors or the head-clerks of the government ministers: I mean the porters. The price of loading and unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule of the Rigues or porters’ associations, is thirty centimes per hundred kilogrammes. At this rate, it is not seldom that a man earns twelve, fifteen, and even twenty francs a day: he only has to carry forty or fifty sacks from a vessel to a warehouse. It is but a few hours’ work. What a favorable condition this would be for the development of intelligence, as well for children as for parents, if, of itself and the leisure which it brings, wealth was a moralizing principle! But this is not the case: the porters of Lyons are today what they always have been, drunken, dissolute, brutal, insolent, selfish, and base. It is a painful thing to say, but I look upon the following declaration as a duty, because it is the truth: one of the first reforms to be effected among the laboring classes will be the reduction of the wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others. Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain only the grossest individualism. The revolt of the silk-workers met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and the river population generally. Nothing that happens off the wharves has any power to move them. Beasts of burden fashioned in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with politics as long as their privilege is maintained. Nevertheless, I ought to say in their defence that, some time ago, the necessities of competition having brought their prices down, more social sentiments began to awaken in these gross natures: a few more reductions seasoned with a little poverty, and the Rigues of Lyons will be chosen as the storming-party when the time comes for assaulting the bastilles.
In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through education or education through well-being. For, without considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always inclines towards barbarism and misery. Everything that has been attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the established order. Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be solved.
For the rest, if the economists, by exclusive attention to their old routine, have finally lost all knowledge of the present state of things, it cannot be said that the socialists have better solved the antinomy which division of labor raised. Quite the contrary, they have stopped with negation; for is it not perpetual negation to oppose, for instance, the uniformity of parcellaire labor with a so-called variety in which each one can change his occupation ten, fifteen, twenty times a day at will?
As if to change ten, fifteen, twenty times a day from one kind of divided labor to another was to make labor synthetic; as if, consequently, twenty fractions of the day’s work of a manual laborer could be equal to the day’s work of an artist! Even if such industrial vaulting was practicable, — and it may be asserted in advance that it would disappear in the presence of the necessity of making laborers responsible and therefore functions personal, — it would not change at all the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the laborer; the dissipation would only be a surer guarantee of his incapacity and, consequently, his dependence. This is admitted, moreover, by the organizers, communists, and others. So far are they from pretending to solve the antinomy of division that all of them admit, as an essential condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor, — that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers, — and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot. Those reformers whose schemes have nothing to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of the simplism, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of labor, then propose a plurality as a SYNTHESIS, — such inventors, I say, are judged already, and ought to be sent back to school.
But you, critic, the reader undoubtedly will ask, what is your solution? Show us this synthesis which, retaining the responsibility, the personality, in short, the specialty of the laborer, will unite extreme division and the greatest variety in one complex and harmonious whole.
My reply is ready: Interrogate facts, consult humanity: we can choose no better guide. After the oscillations of value, division of labor is the economic fact which influences most perceptibly profits and wages. It is the first stake driven by Providence into the soil of industry, the starting-point of the immense triangulation which finally must determine the right and duty of each and all. Let us, then, follow our guides, without which we can only wander and lose ourselves.
Tu longe seggere, et vestigia semper adora.
#organization#revolution#anarchism#daily posts#communism#anti capitalist#anti capitalism#late stage capitalism#anarchy#anarchists#libraries#leftism#social issues#economy#economics#climate change#anarchy works#environmentalism#environment#solarpunk#anti colonialism#mutual aid#the system of economic contradictions#the philosophy of poverty#volume i#pierre-joseph proudhon#pierre joseph proudhon
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Top 10 Packaging Business Ideas - List of Manufacturing Business Ideas
🎥 Dreaming of starting your own packaging business? 🌟 Let us guide you with our Top 10 Manufacturing Business Ideas for the Packaging Industry! 💼 #PackagingBusiness #Entrepreneurship #BusinessInspiration #StartupTips #PackagingTrends 🚀 #Businessideas
The packaging industry has experienced rapid development in recent years, making remarkable progress. In today’s dynamic business world, packaging plays a crucial role in providing solutions for the safe transportation, storage, and presentation of goods. The growth of retail, eCommerce, and increased consumption of consumer products has driven the demand for packaging in the country. As consumer…
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another guy drawn. pondering the idea of just forcing myself to not browse the internet most of the day and instead focus on drawing more characters. i dont think i have the restraint for it but it's nice to dream
MARAI KANNAKVARI
A rather shady black-market merchant who primarily deals in purchasing and reselling equipment salvaged off the bodies of the dead. Although this business model is not actually illegal within the United Alfilian Territories, it's widely viewed in a rather negative light, especially by the larger corporate manufacturers who don't appreciate "the unauthorized resale of their products by scavengers." It's contentious enough that Marai tends not to make himself easy to find, for his own safety. Still, his services are popular with many mercenaries, especially lower-ranked and/or independent operators who want to make some extra coin off of less profitable assignments.
#adventures in image production#now we get to the first lizardguy in my current wave of Guys Standing With No Background. hooray#mannn icant fjckin draw throwing knives. im throwing up more like
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#manufacturing business ideas#Best Manufacturing Business Ideas#Profitable Business Ideas#best Business Ideas#top Business Ideas#small scale industry ideas
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hey j! :)
i hope this question isn't too much but may i ask you how you came to work with run for cover records?
in late 2019 when our debut album was starting to take off we had three different labels reach out to us almost simultaneously. one of them became defunct shortly after (if you know you know, legitimately goddamn tragic for a friend of mine who was signed with them but at least we dodged that fucking bullet) another was very kind but small and didn't have all that much to offer, and run for cover just had the best offer right out the gate, though we hired a lawyer and went through a couple of rounds of negotiation before signing. the label head tom later said they would've taken just about any terms because they wanted to sign us so bad which was a huge compliment... also he's like legitimately one of the nicest people i've worked with in the industry, nothing but good things to say there. anyway, i have no idea how we got on their radar, we talked about it a long time ago but i don't remember the whole story, probably had to do with los campesinos and ian cohen shouting us out iirc.
it's funny because before the album released i'm 90% sure i sent them demos and they were ignored, because i had sent demos to just about every record label i knew of JUST in case. but tbh i think label submissions go right in the trash. when labels wanna sign people they do the searching themselves or take recommendations from other industry people
ALSO i have to say - do NOT ever sign a record deal unless the terms are truly great. we were very lucky to have good terms and have an entertainment lawyer who could help negotiate. in the modern day there's not as much point to signing as there used to be, distributing music digitally is ridiculously easy now. the main things rfc helps us with is merch/physical album manufacturing and distribution, lots of boring business and advertising stuff we hate doing, and giving us advances just about any time we need them because we have now established we can pay stuff off promptly - lots of labels will wave a fancy advance in ppl's faces to get them to agree to shitty terms but it is a loan, and you can't make a profit when you have to pay it off. ours was 20k which i think is fairly normal maybe on the smaller side for a label of this size, definitely nothing compared to the stuff major labels will throw at people though. we were, again, very lucky to be able to pay that off and start actually making money in under a year, but every time we get the budget for a new album we have another big advance to pay off.
hope you don't mind the unsolicited advice, i can't help giving it though when people ask about labels because it can be such a dangerous thing but also very cool depending on the contract and how you play your cards!
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You might have seen that Warner Bros has shelved another finished movie, this time with Coyote vs Acme. It's a movie that tested extremely well, had high praise from advanced critic screenings, and was generally being talked about as one of the best uses of mixed live action/animation ever put to film.
And it will never be seen again.
Why do studios do this? Why are there more and more finished movies getting destroyed before they're ever released? Why would a studio bother spending $150 million on a film just to never release it?
Greed, obviously, but the specific mechanism was something I was never quite clear on so I wanted to write a simple explainer for how this works.
Note: None of these are exact numbers or percentages, this is just an example to explain the concept so I'm using numbers and amounts that are easier to illustrate.
Imagine you're Warner Bros and you've made $100 million in one year. Let's suppose your tax rate is 50%. In that case, you would owe $50 million on your earnings. Now let's say of that $100 that you made, you put $50 million into producing Coyote vs Acme. The average marketing budget for a movie is between 50-150% of the production cost, and since this is a franchise release, let's say the marketing budget is somewhere in the middle at 100%. That means spending $50 million to market Coyote vs Acme on top of the $50 million production costs.
So now, you've made $100 million, but between production costs and marketing budget, you've spent all of it on your new movie. Plus, you owe $50 million taxes.
For Coyote vs Acme to be worth it, then, you'd need to make back the $50 million in production, the $50 million in marketing, and then another $50 million to cover your taxes. For this movie to be profitable, you'd need to make over $150 million, or three times its initial budget. Which means you started with $100 million and are now $50 million in debt unless you can make $150 million in which case, you break even and have made $0.
But what happens if you shelve it? What if you destroy all prints of the movie and never release it?
Well the studios can benefit from a tax law that says that if they produce a movie but never release it, they can write it off as a loss and use that to reduce their taxable income.
So in this scenario, if you never release Coyote vs Acme, you can write its budget off as a loss and then the money you spent making it won't be taxed. Which means that instead of being taxed on $100 million, you'll be taxed on $50 million. Which means instead of owing $50 million in taxes, you'll owe $25 million. Which means you started with $100 million and after production costs and taxes, you walk away with $25 million. Which means in effect the movie only cost you $25 million to make.
Compare that to the other option - of marketing and releasing the film - where you would need to make $175 million at the box office just to get to the same place, and you can see why films get shelved.
It's not that studios make money doing this, it's that they avoid LOSING money. Studios are doing this because after the movie is finished, they play it for test audiences and select critics and try to gauge how much money it'll make if it's released. If they have any doubts about whether it can make back more than what they'd save by shelving it, they play it safe and shelve it.
This is happening more now not because studios are getting greedier, but because they're floundering. They're being taken over and run by people whose previous jobs were maximizing profit margins for companies that manufacture porcelain for bathroom fixtures. The CEOs have no idea how art or entertainment or film work so they just shelve and destroy anything that they think won't be a guaranteed hit and in the meantime, are gradually eroding their own business and destroying their ability to actually make anything.
Assuming things continue as is, companies like Warner Bros are on track to be scrapped and sold for parts to Apple or Amazon or Xfinity within a few years. One of the truisms of media is that not everything needs to be a big hit or make money - it's the interesting and cult and niche and "mid" films that collectively comprise people's attachments to the theater experience. So maybe Coyote vs Acme on its own loses money or just breaks even, but if it's acclaimed and loved by a decent number of people, that's that many more people who are now more attached to films as a medium and excited about the movie going experience, which will make them more receptive and interested in future releases.
Looking at another industry, it's why Xbox has been tailing Playstation and Switch. It's not about the blockbuster releases, though those helps, it's about all the smaller genre releases that keep people playing and engaged and curious and loyal. You get none of that if you only release things you're certain are going to smash hits. All you do then is make increasingly focused grouped, and thus predictable, entertainment and art that over time becomes less and less engaging to people and as a result, leads to people moving on to other activities and pass times and media.
Studios shelve movies because it ensures they hold on to a little more money in the short term, meanwhile, they're slowly but surely doing everything they can to lock themselves into eventual bankruptcy and collapse.
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Orphaned neurological implants
The startup world’s dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don’t show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company’s products.
You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning — poof! All gone.
Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc.
All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug.
But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.
A startup’s physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don’t exactly hold their value, and there’s not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses.
Wily investors are more interested in intangible assets: user data and patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling.
If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there’s a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business — and a much larger chance that it end up in a troll’s portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. Patent trolls are parasites, “businesses” whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses.
The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. There’s no point in investing in sustainability — good information security, robust systems, good HR — if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff.
Your excellent processes won’t help you when your investors shut you down, so a “lean” startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff — or get sold to a Big Tech firm — then you can fix all that stuff.
And if the far more likely outcome — failure — comes to pass, then all the liabilities you’ve created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else’s problem. Limited liability, baby!
Combine these three dirty secrets and it’s hard to understand why anyone would use a startup’s product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of closed source and patent trolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it.
Think of Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, Spiral Toys, had a successful IPO — and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents’ phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys’ speakers.
But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms.
By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys’ share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. The data — 2.2 million intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents — just hung out there, free for the taking:
https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/
Data leakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever — after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead.
Data breaches are permanent. Filling a startup’s sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches.
It’s not just your data that goes away when a startup folds — it’s also the money you invest in its hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That’s bad enough when it’s a home security device:
https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761
But what about when the device is inside your body?
Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants — which allow blind people to see — lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
Nano Precision Medical, the company’s new owners, aren’t interested in maintaining the implants, so that’s the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus’s “bionic” eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.
Having a bricked eye implant doesn’t just rob you of your sight — many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to “do our best to provide virtual support” to people whose Argus implants fail — but no more parts and no more patches.
Second Sight wasn’t the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. Last week, Liam Drew told the stories of other neural abandonware in “Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure” in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html
Among that abandonware: ATI’s neural implant for reducing cluster headaches, Nuvectra’s spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain, Freehand’s paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance.
Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: “long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage.” In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business.
A better answer: standardization. “If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under.” 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach.
But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a Case Western biomedical engineer: open hardware. “Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. ‘Then people can just cut and paste.’”
This isn’t just the best answer, it’s the only one. There’s no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people’s nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how.
This is the case that Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully and I made at our Defcon panel this year: “Why Patients Should Hack Medtech.” Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i1BF5YGS0w
This is the principle that animates Colorado’s HB22–1031, the “Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act,” landmark Right to Repair legislation that was signed into law last year:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair
Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.
It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.
It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable.
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
[Image ID: The staring eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Centered in it is a medieval anatomical engraving of the human nervous system, limned in a blue halo.]
#pluralistic#neurology#medtech#unauthorized bread#body horror#regulatory capture#bodily autonomy#floss#medical implants
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Tom Toles
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
April 26, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
APR 27, 2024
Yesterday, in a long story about “the petty feud between the [New York Times] and the White House,” Eli Stokols of Politico suggested that the paper’s negative coverage of President Joe Biden came from the frustration of its publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, at Biden’s refusal to do an exclusive interview with the paper. Two people told Stokols that Sulzberger’s reasoning is that only an interview with an established paper like the New York Times “can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
For his part, Stokols reported, Biden’s frustration with the New York Times reflects “the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience,” and their conviction that the newspaper is not taking seriously the need to protect democracy.
A spokesperson for the New York Times responded to the story by saying the idea that it has skewed its coverage out of pique over an interview is “outrageous and untrue,” and that the paper will continue to cover the president “fully and fairly.”
Today, Biden sat for a live interview of more than an hour with SiriusXM shock jock Howard Stern. Writer Kurt Andersen described it as a “*Total* softball interview, mostly about his personal life—but lovely, sweet, human, and Biden was terrific, consistently clear, detailed, charming, moving. Which was the point. SO much better than his opponent could do.”
Also today, the Treasury Department announced that the pilot program of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that enabled taxpayers to file their tax returns directly with the IRS for free had more users than the program’s stated goal, got positive ratings, and saved users an estimated $5.6 million in fees for tax preparation. The government had hoped about 100,000 people would use the pilot program; 140,803 did.
Former deputy director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti wrote on social media, “Of all the things I was lucky enough to work on, this might be my favorite. You shouldn’t have to pay money to pay your taxes. As this program continues to grow, most people will get pre-populated forms and be able to file their taxes with a few clicks in a few minutes.” Such a system would look much like the system other countries already use.
Also today, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Williams-Sonoma will pay a record $3.17 million civil penalty for advertising a number of products as “Made in USA” when they were really made in China and other countries. This is the largest settlement ever for a case under the “Made in USA” rule. Williams-Sonoma will also be required to file annual compliance certifications.
FTC chair Lina Khan wrote on social media: “Made in USA fraud deceives customers and punishes honest businesses. FTC will continue holding to account businesses that misrepresent where their product[s] are manufactured.”
In another win for the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union negotiated a deal today with Daimler Trucks over contracts for 7,300 Daimler employees in four North Carolina factories. The new contracts provide raises of at least 25% over four years, cost of living increases, and profit sharing. This victory comes just a week after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW.
Today was the eighth day of Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to interfere with the 2016 election by paying to hide negative information about himself from voters and then falsifying records to hide the payments. David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid, finished his testimony.
In four days on the stand, Pecker testified that he joined Michael Cohen and others in killing stories to protect Trump in the election. Trump’s longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff took the stand after Pecker, and testified that both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels were in Trump’s contacts. Next up was Gary Farro, a bank employee who verified banking information that showed how Michael Cohen had hidden payments to Daniels in 2016.
Once again, Trump appeared to be trying to explain away his lack of support at the trial, writing on his social media channel that the courthouse was heavily guarded. “Security is that of Fort Knox,” he wrote, “all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial….” But CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately responded: “Again, the courthouse is open [to] the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on [trial] days, is easily accessible.”
Dispatch Politics noted today that when co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita took over the Republican National Committee (RNC), they killed a plan to open 40 campaign offices in 10 crucial states and fired 60 members of the RNC staff. According to Dispatch Politics, Trump insisted to the former RNC chair that he did not need the RNC to work on turning out voters. He wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts.
The RNC under Trump has not yet developed much infrastructure or put staff into the states. It appears to have decided to focus only on those that are key to the presidential race, leaving down-ballot candidates on their own.
While Trump appears to be hoping to win the election through voter suppression or in the courts, following his blueprint from 2020, Biden’s campaign has opened 30 offices in Michigan alone and has established offices in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida.
Finally today, news broke that in her forthcoming book, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem wrote about shooting her 14-month-old dog because it was “untrainable” and dangerous. “I hated that dog,” she wrote, and she recorded how after the dog ruined a hunting trip, she shot it in a gravel pit. Then she decided to kill a goat that she found to be “nasty and mean” as well as smelly and aggressive. She “dragged him to the gravel pit,” too, and “put him down.”
Noem has been seen as a leading contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Trump, and it seems likely she was trying to demonstrate her ruthlessness—a trait Trump appears to value—as a political virtue. But across the political spectrum, people have expressed outrage and disgust. In The Guardian, Martin Pengelly said her statement, “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story,” was “a contender for the greatest understatement of election year.”
—
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
#Tom Toles#American Values#political cartoons#Letters From An American#Heather Cox Richardson#election 2024#South Dakota governor Kristi Noem#Ugly American#A. G. Sulzberger#NYTimes#Biden's accomplishments
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