Spyke

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Five Guys CEO says he gave a $1.5m bonus to his workers so he wouldn’t get shot in the back

In the conversation with Fortune, Murrell added that he gave a $1.5m bonus to employees of Five Guys’ 1,500 US stores to try to make up for the chaos unleashed by the promotion at various locations.

Globally … FiveGuys has 30,000 employees.

So let me get this straight. This fucking moron dreamed up a dumbass promotion that made 30,000 employees lives miserable as angry customers demanded free burgers and most likely hurled vitriol and hate at them.

His big brain protection was to give every store $1000. $1.5M spread out amongst 30k employees is $50 per employee.

You think one of these employees could be mad enough to shoot you and then go “hmm… $50 ought to do it”

I sorta hope someone spend their $50 on ammo

Edit: fiveguys made $3.5B in revenue last year or about $10M per day and this guy wants a slap on the back for handing out 1/10th of 1 days revenue to the people that actually make that money for the self serving reason of not getting shot.

Edit: for those that would prefer I rerun these numbers for just the US employees

From the fiveguys website

We average roughly 25 employees per Five Guys location. Add it all up and we currently have more than 30,000 people working for Five Guys worldwide!

At our corporate office, we have around 250 employees.

So let’s take the $1000 per location (which I calculated with the number of locations in the US) and divide that by 25 employees per location and we arrive at… $40.

For those upset that I used revenue instead of profits, five guys doesn’t publish annual profit figures so I’d have to guess and I can’t imagine that would make you any happier. At a 10% profit margin it’s 1 days worth of profits.

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What is something society treats as normal that you secretly think is completely insane?

Capitalism.

Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.

But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.

If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.

Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.

Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.

Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.

So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.

Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.

This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.

And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.

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Hakeem Jeffries endorses Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor

The reason Dems are doing this is clear.

If Mamdani wins they can go “we endorsed him, he won because of the backing of the party”

If Mamdani loses they can go “see, we told you that we need to pivot further right. We told you. We didn’t sabotage him, we endorsed him for goodness sake”

Withhold endorsement and throw mud in the water all the way up to the end then try to slap a last minute endorsement on there so they can absolve themselves of any blame and pretend like the “time to vote left is the primaries” like they won’t ratfuck you after you win the primary.

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*Permanently Deleted*

This assassination attempt was almost definitely a false flag.

Let’s, for sake of argument, say it wasn’t.

The location has plenty of security, security that successfully stopped the gunman.

In what world would this mean “obviously we need more security.” The security worked, it has enough funding, also the thing that protects the president is the secret service which is part of the department of the treasury, not DHS.

So the secret service did their job and stopped a threat and for some reason that means we should give an unrelated part of the government more money.

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Billionaire CEO: Work-Life Balance Is For The Weak

These same CEOs will say they work sun up to sun down and then they just consider any moment they are awake “working”

  • enjoying a lavished catered lunch on the company dime: work
  • having drinks with other executives punctuated by the occasional sentence here or there about buckling down for next quarter: work
  • sitting and barely listening to a presentation someone else put together and then making a semi-random decision based off a partial understanding after someone has boiled all the complexity away into two viable solutions that are only cosmetically different: work

And then after a long day of doing nothing of value they go back to their mansion and enjoy their 8 figure salaries and “read a paper” or “think about work” and consider that burning the midnight oil while all the material cares in the world are easily handled for them.

Fuck that noise

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The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality. Donald Trump misused the annual presidential tradition in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question.

He can tell Americans they are in a new golden age all he wants, his hyper focus on it belies his anxiety.

People will swallow a lot of lies. Immigrants caused you to be poor, trans people pose some existential threat to you, if it were for woke DEI youd be better off.

These lies work because there’s no real way for the listener to validate it, you are giving them some reason why their lousy lot isn't their fault.

The lie that doesn’t work is “you have it good” because that person you’re lying to knows whether or not they have it good. They are paying the bills and if you tell them “actually the bills are cheap” even the most believing believer will have to compartmentalize that. They will either have to sit with the lie and accept it or contort themselves into a less blatant lie like “things could be worse”

Trump is at the bar chatting up the down on her luck, past her prime, divorcee, telling her how now that she’s met him she’s hot again, everyone is saying how hot she is, everyone is saying how rich she is, everyone is saying how much she’s winning. But when she looks in the mirror, or in the bank account, she has to believe him more than her own eyes.

That’s a tough sell, he has a cult so it might work, but it’s a real tough sell.

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Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening?

Miranda rights only apply if the police are asking you incriminating questions.

If you are being arrested and questioned theres actually never any advantage of demanding to be read your rights, I see a lot of people demanding the police read them their rights.

When the police read you your rights it protects the police not you.

If you are questioned and incriminate yourself there are two possibilities. They did not read you your Miranda rights, in which case almost any lawyer in the country can get that incriminating statement thrown out because you weren’t read your rights. The did read you your Miranda rights, in which case you are fucked, you were informed you didn’t have to answer but incriminated yourself anyways.

It is never in your interest to demand they read you your rights and you should never really be upset if they don’t. Either they don’t have to or they just fucked up to your benefit.

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Are we entering the LET THEM EAT CAKE phase of the American Democracy?

The more disturbing thing that we are entering is a K shaped economy.

The consumer base of the United States has split, the wealthier part is doing better and spending more, the poorer part is doing worse and spending less. You have diverging lines like a K

One of the scariest things going forward is that the consumer base of America used to have an economic protection in that the economy depended on not crushing the consumers. With the split in the consumer base the poorer part now represents less and less of the GDP, down to near 10%. This removes the incentive to protect them and we will start seeing more and more bifurcation in the haves and the have-nots.

It remains to be seen if the have-nots will accept this, so far the American population has been pretty accepting of the slowly ratcheting person crushing machine that is late stage capitalism.

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Politicians Will Not Save Us.

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I wish people could really understand this.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism. Not like in a cartoonish they sit around in some fortress of evil planning a Nazi takeover.

Neoliberalism all over western society has shown itself ineffective at meeting people’s needs.

Neoliberalism wants free markets and limited governments. This leads to capital gaining a huge amount of power because the government categorically doesn’t want to regulate them. That power eventually turns to exploitation of the citizens and capture of the government.

Exploited citizens with an ineffective government get frustrated with a system that’s not meeting their needs. This is the dry tinder in which fascism catches fire, a charismatic person shows up and says “give me unlimited power and I can fix this quagmire you are in” and a lot of people go “fuck it, it can’t be worse than this” and you get a fascist dictator.

Neoliberalism leads to fascism not because they are the same but because neoliberalism creates the perfect environment for fascism to sprout and grow.

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Trump says he plans to cancel most of Biden’s executive orders

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Executive orders shouldn’t have the ability to make law or ignore laws. The legislative branch passes the laws and the executive branch is supposed to faithfully execute them.

An executive order is meant to lay out how the executive departments should carry out the laws passed by the legislative branch. And if they overstep that by failing to faithfully execute the laws or creating their own laws out of executive orders, the judiciary is supposed to act as a check.

Our constitutional order seems to have completely failed. The legislative branch is in a state of permanent deadlock, except when it comes to tax breaks for the uber wealthy and defense spending. So EOs have expanded in scope and the judiciary has just shrugged and decided that the whole separation of powers and checks and balances thing isn't worthwhile anymore.