this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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"Passive income" if you describe yourself as having a passive income, I want nothing to do with you.
Passive income is a myth - all income requires labor... if you're getting income without putting in labor then you're stealing someone else's income.
Do you have a 401k?
I don't because I'm not working in the US but I do have a retirement fund. I can critize the system we live in and those that revel in exploiting it while also realizing that if I completely eschew investment I'll be a pauper. I'm not going to bankrupt myself and be unable to afford my partner's medical expenses to win an argument on the internet.
I'm aware that the stock market is slicing off income from laborers in an unjust manner - it slices off my income as well... I don't celebrate participating in this system, but I do participate in it while acknowledging how bad it is. It isn't a significant portion of my income and if I could personally will it out of existence I would.
I think the stock market is fine. It allows the people to own a bit of the companies they work for and buy from.
I donβt see anything wrong with that in theory.
It's a critical element of the financialization of the economy that has lead to it becoming even more irrational and unstable than it was before. Easy example, look up stock buybacks. It's not just that though, it's the entire system of obligation to shareholders to deliver quarterly gains with no concern for employees or even the long-term health of the company.
What if I did a bunch of work in the past and I am still getting income from that work, even though I do almost nothing to keep that income coming in now?
I get about 30 dollars a month in Interest in my savings account. Is that not passive?
The bank is investing your money into the economy. And the economy is growing because of people's labour.
Sure sure, and the amount matters, right?
You live off of $30 a month?
I make about $1k a month absolutely, completely passively from Amazon. I've put in maybe 30 minutes in three years. When I tell people this, they see that passive income is real.
Then I tell them about the years before that, where I spent every second I had making shirt and book designs. I had made a single sale early on and I saw the potential, so I sunk every godforsaken hour I had to spare (I also worked full time) designing and uploading, researching, networking, and pushing. I gambled, grafted, and earned it.
It's absolutely worth the investment, but I only know that now. Back then it was an insane gamble - hundreds of hours of proper work for ?????. I stop telling people about my 'passive' income now because no one wants to ruin the dream of freeeee money.
You're literally telling us that you did actually put in a ton of labour, so it's not completely passive
That's why passive was in quotes.
FIRE these dipshits straight into the fucking sun.
You're heart is in the right place, but your conclusion is wrong. It's entirely possible to build a passive income without involving anyone else's labor. Without even getting into things like investment income, which I'm assuming you'll still attribute to someone else's labor in the most abstract sense, there are still plenty of ways to do this. I personally lived off mostly passive income for several years when blogging was big. I created a bunch of blogs myself, did all of the development and design myself, managed the servers myself, and wrote all of the content myself. Then I put a few non-intrusive ads on the sites. When they started generating pretty good money, I mostly stopped working on them. They continued generating decent money until social media killed blogging. I still have one of them, and I receive around $60 per month from it despite the fact that I haven't touched it in over a decade. So, how exactly was/am I stealing someone else's labor?
Sure sounds like labour to me.
And there is no requirement for labour to generate income immediately. A majority of labour is front-loaded, with income being back-loaded.
Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still βlabourβ. Because sure as shit youβve been doing these thingsβ¦ no hosting provider is going to let you go 10 years with zero updates or patches to the website or the underlying framework that allows the website to run. Because failing to do that is how entire hosting platforms get rooted and infected with malware.
Yes, my labor, which resulted in passive income. Nobody is saying that passive income is a magical thing which you just acquire without effort. You invest the effort, and then you sit back and reap the rewards.
By your definition game development (in the old style) is also passive income... so is art... so is building a house or a car or pretty much any form of manufacturing.
These activities all involve building something with no promise of selling it - then trying to find a buyer... in each case you, the producer, are investing up front in a venture which may or may not succeed and then hoping someone will pay you for it.
Homebuilding would be active income, since you can only sell each house once. Game development would be a good example for someone like the Minecraft creator. He invested a bunch of time creating this cool game, and then he sat back and got rich. It's passive at that point (assuming no maintenance, bug fixes, etc.), since he continues to gain sales, despite only doing the work once. The digital realm is full of opportunities for passive income, or at least it used to be. Corporations have essentially shoved individual creators out of the market.
Edit: I'm aware that the Minecraft creator sold the game, but was using his earlier experiences as an example. I read an interview with him once and he said "I think I was already rich by the time I thought 'holy shit, I'm going to be rich!'".
How is interest labour?
Where do you think interest come from? Do you think banks just give you free money every month?
Yes. Capital isn't Labour.