PizzaMan

Anyone employed in the manufacture of nuclear fuel pellets adds value to the economy simply by virtue of showing up for work, and doing whatever it is they do.

But when they do that it doesn't change the demand for nuclear fuel pellets. The demand is largely static, so in order to sell X more pellets, X pellets from other producers must go unsold/not made. Somebody else has to lose, which makes it a zero sum game.

The fact that he's an MIT grad doesn't mean much.

It does. Not everybody is an MIT grad or has the skills to be one, and yet you say that just anybody can compete with google. That is a contradiction.

Almost everyone can

60% of the country cannot because they are living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford it.

I wouldn't be at all surprised by the popularity of socialist policies. Kids are naive.

Basically every other developed nation seems to think otherwise. For example, we are more or less the only one without universal healthcare, that's what's naive.

What kind of food? Caviar? What kind of housing? McMansions? What kind of basic utilities? All 800,000 TV channels? What kind of transportation? A Bugatti? What kind of healthcare?

Basic food, not caviar. Basic housing, not mcmansions. Utilities should include heating, cooling, water, electric, literally just the basic necessitites, not cable. Etc.

You're splitting hairs at this point.

It's very hard to draw the line anywhere above $0, which is the technically correct number.

Nobody can survive on $0. You need to have food water and shelter.

Yes, this presumes everyone owns property of suitable acreage, and with a stream, and that's unrealistic for everyone. But it's entirely possible for some.

If it is unrealistic for everyone then it isn't a reasonable answer to what the minimum wage should be.

it's going to vary from $0 for some people on up to — I shudder to think

If housing in this country wasn't so fucked, it would probably be around $40-50k a year. Nobody is buying caviar and a bugatti with that budget.

We can all strive to be more like Jesus. I know it's not easy, but there's so much value in trying.

Blaming individuals for the failures of a system, and suggesting individuals change to deal with that defect in the system is irrational.

I'm curious to hear your perspective on that.

Ramaswamy's response to the pansexual women is about as out of touch as one can get. Him saying that the LGBTQ+ is a bunch of groups is just a thinly veiled effort to weaken the power of the LGBTQ+ through propoganda. He wants to act like republicans are the victims when the LGBTQ+ receive death threats and attacks on a routine basis. He also just straight up doesn't understand much about the LGBTQ+. Basically the whole thing he uses nonstop strawman fallacies. He has a fundamental lack of understanding of everything he criticized through the whole thing. And in the end it's culture war bullshit.

If you're aware of a more appropriate word, I'm all ears.

"The decline of christianity"

Every time I look to Christ for guidance

Even if we have free will that isn't an instance of you changing your mind of your own free will. These things you list are just examples of you performing actions that are in line with your beliefs.

The foundation of Western civilization is not, and cannot, be infested with termites, because the foundation of Western civilization is the Lord our God.

I disagree that the foundation of western civ is solely placed on god. There are a lot more things that go into it than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_civilization

If you're going to look through this, I recommend spending extra time on the section explaining the enlightenment.

There's nothing you can say to legitimately criticize God.

Sure I can, god, according to your worldview, created a world in which children get cancer. I can conceptualize a world in which that does not happen, and therefore a failure of god. And before you say I think I know better than god, in reality I know better than the humans who made god up.

If we don't know how something works, of course we can ascribe the answer to God, and that answer is always correct.

That's a terrible thing to do because it is a form of lying to yourself. In the end it wasn't Zeus who causes lightning, it is a build up of a difference in energy between clouds and the ground. Answering "god" in that context was wrong. We shouldn't just blame a mystery on a bigger mystery.

It's created by God to work in a certain way, and we've deduced the mechanism by which it happens.

No part of the explanation for how lightning works involves god.

But it misses the vast all-encompassing nature of God's glory, so it doesn't seem like a very compelling answer.

People prefer real answers rather than ones that just blame a bigger mystery.

The most intelligent scientists all believe in God.

Not only is that not true (because you added the "most intelligent" qualifier), but given that scientific literacy is correlated with atheism, I find it to be rather damning for religion:

https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2009/11/Scientists-and-Belief-1.gif

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

If god really is the answer for everything all around us we would expect those who understand the universe better than the average population to understand god better than the average population. Yet we see the opposite.

Einstein is the most notable example.

He was a really weird deist, not a christian. And he was from a time when it was far less socially acceptable to be an atheist. So that's not really much of an argument.

I would now if I picked it back up.

Go for it! It's pretty easy to play against others nowadays now that there are so many popular chess sites. chess.com and lichess are pretty decent.

We must be servants of someone

Being a servant is antithetical to freedom, at least the common definition:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom

There are two main types of freedom, positive freedom and negative freedom. Positive freedom is the ability to choose between a number of options, negative freedom is the freedom from the demands/influence/laws/rules of someone/something.

For example, imagine you are stranded on some planet 100 light years away. Nobody is around, it is just you on a barren but oxygen rich desert planet. Nobody around is telling you what to do, that is negative freedom. The less somebody tells you what to do the more negative freedom you have.

An example of positive freedom would be being able to choose between numerous transportation options, car, bike, walking, train, boat, plane, etc. The more options available to you the more free you are.

I understand you may hold a different view of freedom than this, but can you at least see how being forced to worship either god or satan is antithetical to freedom in my view?

You can absolutely choose to have faith in anyone or anything.

I think you are confusing trust and faith. At least how I define it.

but peer pressure fosters a burgeoning relationship with God for the vast majority of the students.

And that is coercion, antithetical to freedom.

Suffice it to say I trust that God's in control, and the changes we observe in nature — whatever they may be — are according to God's plan.

This is naive in both of our worldviews. In my worldview it is naive because we are responsible for the problem, and only we are capable of fixing it. Nobody will come save us from destroying ourselves other than us. And to push that responsibility onto a fictional, nonexistent being is akin to an easily preventable species wide suicide.

And even within your own it is naive because god assigned us as stewards of the land and we are royally fucking up that job. It's our job to fix the problem no matter which way you cut it.

You don't really need money to marry. Life is short.

Unfortunately in our case at least we will. Like I said earlier we will be getting married in Costa Rica once we do, and the plane tickets and hotel fees for that aren't exactly cheap. And I would like my family to be there but they don't have much money so I would likely need to help some of them out with it.

We would get married here, but it would basically instantly mean that she would loose her disability aid. She also has a lot of medical debt (and will likely continue to grow it) as a result of her condition, and a lot of student loan debt, all of which would be significantly harder to get forgiven if my income were to be considered hers. So financially it doesn't make sense to get married here. And I am ok with that. I don't care what the state has to say about us, nor do I care what the church says. We're together and that's what I care about.

This is false. A broad class of competitions do not have winners. Only zero-sum games have winners. The economy is not a zero sum game. Every participant adds value.

This varies wildly by industry. Some are zero-sum, some are positive sum. And the age of an industry is usually the defining factor for this, which means most industries turn into zero-sum. Take for instance nuclear fuel pellets. A company who takes part in such an industry is in a zero-sum one because of how limited the demand is for it. And the demand for nuclear fuel pellets doesn't change much at all because of how long it takes to build new reactors, how much political force it takes to build one, etc. A company in such an industry can't expand the total demand much at all, so there is no new value they can add.

Oh yeah? May I introduce you to Gabriel Weinberg

An MIT graduate with past business experience and their foot in the door a decade and a half ago isn't really evidence that just anyone can start a new business today to compete with google.

so many of those failed companies generally result in eventual success.

Not everybody can afford to have a failed company on their hands.

I just wonder what people would come up with.

I think that is a fun idea and I would fully support it. I think you'd be surprised at the amount of "socialist" policies that are widely popular. It would be a difficult thing to pull off though given that most people don't really know how to write in leagalise, and how many policies need to be rather complicated or need a high level of understanding to make sense.

Does it include iPads for the kids? How about the cost of pet grooming? Vacations for the whole family to the Bahamas every couple of months? Where exactly do you draw the line?

None of that crap.

Food + Housing + Basic utilities + Transportation + Healthcare (if not already universalized) + Maybe a 5-10% on top for discretionary spending.

However much each of these end up costing, calculated yearly, added up, should be a reasonable start.

Again, it was commonplace for most people to grow their own food in the not too distant past, and we lived simple lives. Isn't a living wage, then, $0?

If everybody owned land, it would be much closer to $0. But you still need to buy/get/pay for fertilizer, water, heating, taxes etc. Those things aren't free. I would love to own my own self-sufficient homestead and have been rather obsessed with videos about it. I wish everybody had the money/land for it, but that's not how things are.

And additionally, everybody having their own homestead isn't generally a good thing for efficiency, because economies of scale probably also applies to food production, and therefore it is more efficient to have industrial farming as the main food source.

Because I see plenty of evidence that vertical mobility is alive and well.

I can't remember if I posted this link elsewhere, but I'll do it again just in case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

We are #27. We could be doing far better.

Maybe you don't hear about them much because they're mostly Republican.

I don't hear about them because I don't really care for lottery winning stories, and avoid the news sources that show them. I want news with more substance than that.

Jesus could.

We aren't all Jesus and are therefore subject to the negative effects of poverty.

I suspect that's what you're observing when you say my definitions are different from the norm.

Potentially, but at least in this case I believe the difference was over the word "secularists/secularism", and usually the best people able to define a group are those that are within the group. A christian is generally more qualified and familiar with the definition of "christian", and the same applies to secularists.

I sought it out, learned about it, read the Bible, and accepted Jesus. It was totally a choice.

That part was a choice, but that is not the totality of the process of coming to believe something. Everything after that was to my understanding not a choice.

But where do you think the two human concepts came from?

Humans are social creatures by nature, and a part of that socialization is language. There was a need to describe actions that helped and hurt people, so the words good and evil came about. Or at least some version did, and then as each language evolved from some predecessor, it eventually turned into what it is today.

so true good and evil are predicated on our experiences contending with literal entities.

So it seems we are in agreement that "good" and "evil" exist at least in the form of concepts, so do you still hold to what you said earlier:

• "But the problem is that good and evil are entirely real, and it's absurd to pretend they're not."

I give you credit for at least admitting it. So often it seems like leftists are following a program to destroy western civilization, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've witnessed an admission of your willingness to do so.

I think you are exaggerating what I said. If the foundation of your house is infested with termites, the correct thing to do is to fix the problem. There are a million different ways to do so, but you have jumped to "burn the house down" as the solution where I have not suggested it. In my opinion the solution it so determine if the foundation is salvageable, if it is, then it is time to bring in an exterminator to deal with the pressing issue, and then to replace any beams that have gone too far. If instead the problem is not salvageable it is instead time to build a new, better house, and then move into it once it is ready. At no point should the house be burned down with people inside of it like you seem to think I am suggesting. I think civilization should still exist, and would very much prefer that.

Why do you suppose ancient people were overall more religious than people today?

Because humans are intensely uncomfortable not having the answers to things, so they try to explain the unknown through any means possible, including through incorrect answers. Nowadays we have an explanation for lightning, so nobody blames Zeus anymore.

The space of unknown things in which god resides shrinks more and more the longer we study the universe. And that's a big part of why more and more people are less and less religious.

Most of us have no clue what our planet naturally looks like

I agree completely. If I had it my way, there would be significant changes to our infrastructure to reduce the light pollution, regular pollution and to add more green to our cities. Unfortunately this isn't a game of sim city. This is a big topic, so if you are interested, I'll leave you with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOc8ASeHYNw

Our only hope of knowing truth is to look to God

Given that you believe the only source of truth is the christian god, how do you contend with science, a process that never turns to the bible or invokes the name of god?

If you see a mistake, it's probable you're evaluating an illusion.

That's a very broad generalization.

You're fortunate to have a chess partner. I haven't had one in ages. I miss playing it.

I have two friends whom I regularly play with, usually daily-timed games, and then another two of complete randoms. I usually have an ELO of about 1100, but have been sitting around 1050 for a bit just because I haven't had much ability to concentrate this last year or so. Our of curiosity, what's your ELO if you have one?

They wouldn't have done that if they thought it should frequently change.

They definitely didn't intend for it to be frequent, I agree. But they intended it to be able to always change.

I don't think the founders would have abandoned the Articles if they could have foreseen the behemoth they created in its place

The alternative was British control. I very much doubt they would have kept the Articles if they knew.

Corporations do not seek power. They seek sales.

And power equals sales, so by seeking sales they also seek power.

the rest of the states are supposed to send their militias south to help defend the border.

Under the articles, it was like pulling teeth simply for the money to pay back the nation's loans. Getting actual troops is a whole other level.

A more extreme solution would be to erect border checkpoints to conduct "random" searches.

And that would be a huge disservice to the country. Our nation thrives on the ability to quickly and easily cross state borders because they basically don't exist. I can only imagine the damage to our economy if such a thing were to happen.

But reality is like that.

I'm not sure that data is really helpful for determining true business size since so many people have more than one job, and corporations like to own other corporations to hide how big they are. And employee count is only one factor in how big a business is. Market share, net worth, profit, all of which contribute to a business' size. It also doesn't take into account the power/influence a company has, or it's market share. A restaurant/grocery store might only employee about 50 people in total but have a fraction of the market share for the local area or no market share at all on a regional/national level. And on the other hand a landlord might own a company with 10-20 people, and owns a huge chunk of the city's housing.

And because of supply and demand the reality is that the power is not in the hands of labor (for now), and the internet does exist.

Like any market, supply and demand does determine price.

Agreed. And with today's huge population, the supply is so huge that it depresses everybody's wages. The internet only makes it worse with how easy it is to apply to hundreds of jobs.

The end result is that the average person has no control over wages.

Personally I don't care when people work

And that's you, which is great. But most places aren't like that and instead control it under threat of termination.

That's not anyone having control over the other party

I think we have a difference of opinion over what constitutes control.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control

I'm more or less using definition 1a

Everything's on the table in a negotiation. You just need to recognize it as a negotiation, and learn to negotiate well.

You can't have negotiation without leverage, and you can't have leverage when the market is oversupplied.

Many jobs just require you to get a certain amount of work done.

This is pretty much the same issue as above. So I'll move on.

we wouldn't want a business to be democratic any more than we'd want our country to be.

You might not want our country to be democratic, but the vast majority of people do.

A democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for supper.

A democracy is the way in which the social contract is maintained. The alternative is the wolves just slaughtering the lambs. In reality, there are 10 lambs for every one wolf.

it's extremely hard to find someone qualified to do the job well

That's because today's corporations are bloated. If everything was small to medium business it wouldn't be a problem.

I'm lost as to your overall point about how money is distributed.

I'm talking about the percentage cut of what each person gets, and how CEOs get overpaid.

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

But that's not evidence that companies seek power over people.

It absolutely is. If you control what media people consume, you control what they think, and that is power.

Here is an example of the Sinclair stations using that power:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

Even in the worst case examples, big tech silencing conservatives

I'll leave you with this:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/05/918520692/facebook-keeps-data-secret-letting-conservative-bias-claims-persist

Why do my mailings from Team DeSantis keep going to spam, no matter how many times I click "not spam"?)

As somebody who works in tech, I can tell you the answer is likely just that they send our so many emails that it trigger's your email host's spam filters. It's often a case of quantity instead of content. Either that or a really stupid bug. The whole field of tech is littered with them.

and I'm under the impression an increasing number of people are contributing to it.

I am quite hopeful. Look how far linux has come as an OS, I'm confident that lemmy/kbin can do the same.

Human freedom enables and empowers people to obey God

How do you not see freedom as being incompatible with obeying? Not to be glib, but if somebody told you "freedom enables and empowers people to obey their slave masters" or "work will make you free", I'm sure you would recognize the contradiction there. How do you not see the contradiction in what you've said yourself?

(Skipping a bunch here.

No worries, I've been skipping stuff too. That's sorta how it has to be or else this already splintered conversation would be ten times worse.

What do you suppose you actually felt, when you thought you felt the Holy Spirit? When you say that you believed it all, did you really believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, or did you only say you did? When you decided that none of it was true, do you think you might be enduring a test of faith?

It's been years ago, well over a decade ago so I don't remember the details too well. But what I can tell you is that I felt what I thought was a connection to something greater than myself, that yes, Jesus was raised. I know there was more but I honestly cannot remember it all.

And I didn't "decide" that none of it was true. Beliefs as far as I am concerned are not choices. You are either convinced or you are not, the only extend to which we have a choice (if we have free will at all), is over the extent to which we expose ourselves to other ideas.

Of course JWs also believe the Second Coming happened in 1914, so I've got a few grains of salt.

Don't get me wrong, I think JWs are off in the deep end too, but on that particular issue they have merit.

I just wish they had the same decision on school prayer, that nobody can be forced to partake, but the rest of us are going to proceed with it anyhow.

As nice as that would be on paper, in reality you can't really have one without the other due to societal pressures. If everybody in the room is praying except for you, there is immense social pressure to conform. Allowing prayer of any kind in school will result in what is effectively forced prayer/speech.

and the claim of a "dying world" (what)

Climate change is killing off countless species/animals.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63875331

For instance, bug population is on a huge decline, and they are pretty low in the food chain and therefore very important to the health of the planet. The further trends like this increase, the greater the chance of a food chain collapse. I couldn't ethically justify putting a kid at risk of enduring that even if my girlfriend didn't have her current health issues.

I'm happy for you! When's the wedding?

Thank you! We aren't official engaged yet, as we have agreed we would only get to that point when we both feel we are financially stable. But so far we have agreed that we will be getting married in her home country, Costa Rica, and the church will not be involved (sorry!).

It matters because if "true christian" population is correlated with self reported christian population, which it should be, then self reported christian population should also be inversely correlated with drug addicition.

To break it down a little further:

1. (n) "christians" = (n * x) true christians

2. (n) "christians" = inverse (drug addicition)

Therefore:

1. "true christians" = inverse (drug addicition)

Does that make sense?

I'm flattered. Thank you. I find the conversation enjoyable...

I am enjoying it too, and it's quite alright. I'm (so far) able to keep up.

Well then we're close to splitting hairs.

I'll move on then from this part.

What if we just talk about free markets? There's nothing about...

Even the term "free markets" is incredibly vague. And depending on what you count as "modern times", even capitalism itself hasn't existed until modern times. So it would kind of not make sense to expect to see mega corps in an economic system that doesn't permit the kind of corps we see today.

And I hate to repeat myself, but core principle of capitalism is competition, but competitions inherently have winners. And therefore the freedom you speak of inherently gives rise to mega-corps. They buy each other up and kill off competitors until they become mega-corps.

Any given loser of a competition under capitalism may not immediately die, but each loss forces a company closer and closer to dying.

everyone's able to compete, fair and square.

We unfortunately don't have that though due to inheritance discrepancies, and the burden of entry that corporations put in place through their control of politicians, and through the inherent difficulty of starting a business in an economy as specialized as ours.

For instance if somebody wanted to start up a new business to compete with google, at a minimum they would need several billion dollars to have a reasonable chance of success. Google has such a huge market share and is so well established that it would take decades for any new company to put an actual dent in google's market share.

Is it a West Coast city? What you describe is absolutely not the America...

I actually live on the East coast, in a mid to large sized city, I think mine is 3rd in pop for my state. And as for your second bit here, I haven't made anything up.

Majority of citizens living paycheck to paycheck

Housing is increasingly unaffordable with an 18% hike in prices I don't know about you, but my wage has never increased anywhere close to be able to match that. Grocery prices are no different

The retirement age is going up

Yeah, it was a joke. I explicitly said I was joking.

Sorry, I am a very argumentative person if you couldn't tell already lol

No, not usually. Its rate of scale is directly tied to the starting investment. It's eventual success is only tied to that certain kinds of tech startups, where a ton of work is needed before there's anything to show for it. For most businesses, success is tied to vision and execution.

This is another one of the issues that I wish I had more data on, but unfortunately do not. The closest I was able to find was this:

https://www.luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/

And the most frequent cause of failure is lack of cash, which definitely ties into what I've been saying.

People may feel a lack of freedom resulting from estrangement from God.

So this is similar to the drug addiction/true christian inverse correlation that I've been talking about in one of the other threads. I know you don't quite agree with the freedom index I've been using, but freedom is not in any way correlated with christianity.

What's a livable wage? That's a mighty subjective phrase

Sure, it's a subjective phrase, and I would personally like to see it added and defined within a new amendment to the constitution, though it probably would never happen

As for an actual definition, a living wage should be defined as a wage that is sufficient to raise a family on, with adequate housing and food. A living wage should be a basic but decent wage for a family.

I would also like to point out that you seem to have missed my point about the lack of freedom through vertical mobility.

And we were happy. Because we had God...

I don't think that was the reason, I think the reason was because life was literally simpler and more connected to nature. Also you can't be happy if you can't afford food and shelter.

anything more than that standard, it's unreasonable

I'm not saying a livable wage is one in which you will be able to afford anything fancy. It should be a basic wage, but enough so that you can have a family without worry

Definitions are so important!

Definitions are also defined by the way in which the majority of people use them. The word "yeet" was utter nonsense until enough people understood the word and its meaning to land itself a spot in dictionaries.

So I hesitate to argue over definitions, because there is an "objective" answer so to speak, and from what I can tell you seem to use completely different definitions from the norm. So I don't see much point in talking about it.

That's between you and God, not me. I just think you've intentionally decided to refute God, and thereby unknowingly invited Satan to guide your thoughts.

I hate to repeat myself but this goes pretty close along the lines of what I said in one of the other threads, and that is that beliefs as I understand them are not a choice. So it simply doesn't make sense to say somebody has intentionally decided to refute god. Just as I cannot choose to become christian, you cannot choose to become muslim. We can choose what ideas we are exposed to and that can have an effect on us, but it is indirect at most.

But the problem is that good and evil are entirely real, and it's absurd to pretend they're not.

I know a lot of christians understand god to be good itself and satan to be the opposite, but that's not really how I see it. Sure, good and evil exist but they are human concepts, human labels that we ascribe to actions. They aren't literal entities that exist. I am not pretending good and evil don't exist. They exist just as much as friendship does. It isn't anything physical or some being, it's a human label.

You're denying the foundational tenets of Western Civilization

So be it. If there are problems with the foundation of western civilization then there ought to be changes to fix the problems. There used to be a time when western civilization permitted slavery (and technically still does), so why would I treat it as perfect?

You arrogantly pretending you're somehow smarter than our ancestors who built this civilization with God's blessing

Humans stand on the shoulders of our ancestors through our ability to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Couple that with our ability to analyze history and hind sight, and it's very easy to discover flaws of the past. I am not saying or pretending I am smarter than previous generations because you don't need to be to discover such flaws. To put it in an analogy, I play chess a lot and have a friend who is significantly smarter than me at it. He beats me basically every time. However, when he makes a mistake in the game I still have (on occasion) the ability to discover it, and very occasionally beat him. Yet I never say or pretend I am smarter than him.

you're somehow smarter than God Almighty Himself.

I can't say I am smarter than something I don't believe exists.

But you can, and you do. When you deny God, you embrace Satan. There is no third option.

The third option is that these beings simply do not exist.

faith cannot be predicated on reasons at all

And therefore I want none of it.

So in the case of the US, that single document really does define our culture.

Too much has happened in our country for that to be true.

and it's 247

Whoops! I should have paid slightly more attention to my google search result.

Out of curiosity, if it wouldn't be invasive, which state are you in (or from, or most familiar with)?

I'd rather not say at the risk of doxing myself, but I'll say I am from the north east coast.

That's progressive revisionism. They most certainly did not [intend for the country to change].

They quite literally built a system in place to add amendments to the constitution and to take them away if needed. Why would they have done so if the intention was to keep the law static until the end of time?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

It was. The economy fell apart, the states were constantly squabbling over petty things, we had Shay's rebellion, the nation's debts weren't being payed. The currency of the time had no value. Britain was screwing the country over with it's blockade (which couldn't be solved due to the lack of any federal power). The articles of confederation was such a disaster that it had such a short lived life that the founders themselves got rid of it.

If government is tiny then businesses are tiny.

You have no evidence for this, let alone causation.

When politicians have next to no power, there's no sense in spending money to help them.

Politicians have power by definition, and corporations have a direct incentive to get as much power as they can. So there will always be motivation to spend money to bribe them regardless of the power they hold. They might spend less, sure, but they will still do it.

I concede I wish I was better at staying on track

Same. It's incredibly difficult.

I believe it's a sovereign state's role to regulate commerce within their borders as they see fit. So business sizes should vary according to state culture.

So states should regulate commerce, but not the federal government, is that what you mean to say? If so, then how would that work out for situations where the regulation/unregualtion in surrounding states impacts a different state? For example, if california legalized weed and had the effect of making weed more available to the surrounding states, how would those surrounding states deal with it?

When you sell your labor, you set the price you want to charge, and seek out one or more customers willing to pay that price.

If everything was small business and there was greater power in the hands of laborers, and if the internet didn't exist then maybe this would be true. But the modern reality is not like that. Corporations set the wage, you apply, and if you tell them you need more money to work there they tell you to get lost*. Job postings receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications. Why would they lower their profitability by giving you the wage you set if the next person in the very long line will work just as hard for cheaper?

* I am aware this is less so for higher skill jobs, but most jobs you have very little power in this regard.

Corporations are nothing more than people who pay other people for their labor, as a voluntary agreement between both parties. Neither party controls the other.

Corporations tell their workers what to do and therefore control their workers. Same goes for hours. If I told my boss that I will only work Sundays-Thursdays from now on, I would be fired. That is a form of control.

You really should start a business of your own, if for no other reason than just to learn how little power it gives you.

If I were to start a business it would be a small one and therefore have no control. But again, the problem generally isn't small businesses, it's the big ones.

They do control each of these things, and I can explain how:

place of employement - Corporations quite literally have been forcing people to return to offices or face dismissal. There are other kinds of this action, but that's just one example.

type of employement - Corporations are the one who decide if you're exempt, non-exempt, a contractor, what the job responsibilities are, etc.

hours - If you refuse to work the hours you are told you are fired.

how money is distributed - At no point does your average worker control this. The higher ups decide this and almost universally decide that the majority should go to them. If businesses were truly democratic, then you'd never see a single company giving a CEO the money for a brand new yacht every year.

the media (narrative) - Virtually all media companies are owned by the rich, and they do not allow news articles and the like to be against them. For example, the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, and you'll never see an article from them criticizing Bezos or Amazon.