this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Socialism
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Did he do the market research, R&D, design, patent application, QA, machine tooling, material resourcing, QC, marketing, sales, technical support, administration, transportation... all on his own too or did he just pull a lever on a machine?
My money's on something closer to the latter. This is a terrible reflection on production and labour costs.
No, it's a fine reflection of production and labor costs.
It's a poor representation of development costs and total costs for a product. No doubt a part of the picture is missing, because it's not like he's producing the thing then it goes right on to store shelves and people buy it up by the truckload right from where he works. Any reasonable person should be able to surmise that he shouldn't earn so much that he can buy 3000 of them from one hour of labor where he produces 3000 of them... There's packaging (even if they're just hucked into a box, it's still a package), material costs, the development costs not only of the part, but of the machinery to make the part, transportation of the raw material and finished product, sales, marketing, management, and losses from defective, malformed or otherwise unsellable units that need to be disposed of or recycled.
Every part of that costs money and there's probably a bunch of stuff I've left out, meanwhile, the image does not even remotely discuss any of it, but with everything that's made, it's generally understood that he's not going to make 3000 things worth of money per hour.
That's not the point and it never was.
The point is there is a 1000 fold difference in what he makes vs what he's making; and it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to realize that he's not being compensated fairly for his efforts in creating those.... Things. Wtf are they anyways? ... Doesn't matter, he should make more per unit than 1/1000th the selling price.
Bluntly, that's pretty obvious to me and IMO, that's obvious to the majority of people who see this. Pointing out that he didn't pay for the R&D is a strawman argument at best.
Exactly, the fact that most commenters on a Socialist board don’t get this is troubling.