Thanks. We’ve been making spreadsheets already to try to figure out costs, potential profits, pricing, etc.
Weirdly enough, the ultimate backup plan is to make jewelry since a lot of the tools for making brazed steel bikes is the same as for working on jewelry. My friend and I have dabbled in jewelry as a hobby so we figure we can at least make the shop rental pay for itself with some jewelry sales if the bike business is a total flop. We definitely want to make the bike thing work though.
Yeah I’m pumped and also terrified. My friend (I guess business partner now) and I are currently making a bunch of plans and I just keep remembering the Mike Tyson quote: “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.
Thank you. So many people are ready claim conspiracy just because conspiracy is more comfortable for them. Is it really that hard to believe that the police threw way more resources than normal into this case? Their purpose (IMO) is to preserve existing power structures. Of course a CEO murder is top priority. Is it really that hard to believe that a person who just murdered a guy might do a few irrational things after?
I started a bike fabrication company with my friend. We’re about to move into our new shop space. No idea if this is going to work out but we both agree that we’d rather fail than wonder if we could’ve pulled it off.
Wasn’t the manifesto (and the silencer) found after searching his apartment?
It’s already being spread everywhere by news and whatnot. Might as well have it shared with a different context to reframe people’s associations with the guy.
Financing is one of the major hurdles of employee owned businesses trying to compete against investor owned businesses, so you’re right to identify that. I have 4 main solutions to this problem:
Investment isn’t the only way to raise capital. There’s also loans. In a fully co-op economy, the financial infrastructure for loans would likely be more robust. This is already how a lot of businesses get off the ground.
A company doesn’t have to be 100% employee owned for the employees to have a controlling stake. An employee-owned company could decide to sell off 49% of its value to raise capital. They could do this at any time, including during startup.
The average worker would have more money to do as they please. In 2023, American companies earned a profit of $22k per worker. In a co-op economy, that’s an average of $22k each worker has control over that they currently don’t. Your average worker would be more capable of making the type of investment that you described.
Companies don’t necessarily have to start as employee owned. A normal path for an entrepreneur is to start a business, grow it until it’s sustainable and later sell it to somebody. Instead of selling it to an investor, they could sell it to their employees. In a co-op economy, this would probably be required in some way or another.
Unless the tax rate is similar to income tax rates, it still won’t change the growth > dividends incentive. And it would still be very unpopular because it would lower retirement incomes or make existing retirement accounts last for shorter lengths. Any proposal to change how capital gains works would have to also address retirees’ legitimate concerns in order to be politically viable.
Completely agree. My wildest fantasy would be a phase in of co-ops/employee owned companies. This could be done over a 10 year period with each year requiring 5 more percent of the company value be owned equally by the employees (judged by the employee with the lowest stake). By the end of that decade, employees would own a controlling stake in their employers and would have plenty of time to organize a method of governance.
There’s one critical metric that I think would determine how easily a company could make this transition: (total company value)/(2 x total company payroll). A $1M company with a $500k payroll would require each employee to pay an entire year’s salary for them to have a controlling stake. That’s very achievable over a 10 year period without really even having to give the ownership to the employees. The owners could just sell it off to them.
With this metric in mind, the companies that would transition the best would be ones that pay their employees very well relative to company value. Something like a small welding shop with a high number of skilled employees might be able to do this easily. A tech company with huge valuation relative to the number of employees would be forced to offer aggressive stock buying programs for employees (for every share you buy, the company matches 10 shares for example). This would force companies that don’t pay well to either buy back stock, issue new stock, or drastically increase their payroll to make the transition.
This is how incentives are currently structured to play out. If a company makes some money, it can either re-invest it to grow the business or pay it out as dividends. Dividends are taxed as income while capital gains are taxed much lower. This discrepancy in tax rates is explicitly to promote growth.
This is one area I think the left has missed the forest for the trees with the “tax the rich” slogan. The uber-wealthy aren’t uber-wealthy due to high incomes. Steve Jobs famously had a salary of 1$. A higher tax bracket or 2 would barely affect them. You need to tax capital gains as income to actually make a dent. This would also impact a lot of middle-class retirement accounts though so nobody wants to do that. I think a proposal that bolstered social security to make up the difference for retirees should be combined with a proposal to tax all capital gains as income. I haven’t done the numbers, but I bet that the extra tax revenue would more than pay for the extra social security spending.
Solid Edge has a “Relationship Assistant” tool that I want to use IRL
Same. I was a kid. I would get CDs from the library and fill my crappy MP3 player from the files extracted from WMP. My CD collection was mostly burned library CDs. Before my parents got a PC that could burn, I would go to the neighbor’s house and get their dad to do it for me. Simpler times.