• milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      That’s your problem. If you never buy it in the first place, you can’t stop buying it. You can’t save nothing from nothing!

      Here, let me help you out:

      1. Be rich
      2. Squander your money on avocado toast and greater luxuries
      3. Stop squandering your money on these things
      4. Now you’re rich.

      If you don’t do 2., how can you expect 3. to work?!

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Caffeine powder. The best part of waking up, is snorting rail of FDA certified caffeine. You WILL have to explain some things to HR, but they will trust your explanation because of everything else in your HR binder.

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      I tried real hard, but I got born into lower middle class by mistake. My bad, I should’ve tugged harder on my bootstraps while I was an incorporeal potentiality.

  • compostgoblin@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    It’s less a lack of willingness - I’m just never presented with opportunities to massively defraud corporations

    • JordanZ@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You gotta create that opportunity. This guy decided to fake being a real company and started sending invoices to Google and Facebook to the tune of 120 million.

    • Anticorp@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You don’t defraud corporations, that’ll earn you the scorn of powerful people. You defraud poor people.

      • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Oh, you can defraud shareholders as well. You just have to tell more compelling lies and secure the right accomplices. Get the auditors on board and you can ride the sinking ship for at least a couple years before you finally run out of cash and the entire organization collapses within a matter of days.

        • Prehensile_cloaca @lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          You don’t stay for years. You smash and grab and bounce to your next gig immediately after getting your quarterly bonuses for unsustainable business practices.

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    My father has not gifted me the bootstraps made from billions in exploited labour, but the exploitation of coffee producers tastes like I’m already there.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    If anyone is curious if the girl was buying a single $5 coffee per day, contributing that $35 into a basic S&P 500 fund each week, and doing so for 2 years she should have about $4500 in her account. Now, if she’s buying coffee supplies at a grocery store to replace buying it at take out , we’d have to subtract the cost of coffee supplies from the $4500 to know how much she truly saved making coffee at home.

      • Karjalan@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Usually people eat some food and drink some water, as well as the coffee, during their day

          • Polkira@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but that sounds like a bit much…

        • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          Damn, is that why I feel like shit all the time, I’m supposed to be eating food too?

    • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You got me curious, so I did the math for us.

      I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.

      • Small (12 oz): 4x @ $2.65/pop = $10.60/day
      • Medium (16 oz): 3x @ $2.95/pop = $8.85/day
      • Large (20 oz): 2x @ $3.25/pop = $6.50/day. This is obviously the cheapest choice, but will result in a cold bottom half of the cup due to drinking my coffee slowly vs pounding it

      My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don’t know what we paid for them the last time around.

      So… since my wife also drinks coffee let’s say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.

      The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.

      Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you’ll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.

      Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you’ll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.

        • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Ha, this is true as does amortizing things like the coffee maker that needs replacing every 5 years, white vinegar for monthly descaling, the Stanley thermos I bought 4 years ago to bring coffee to work, etc.

          Let’s say that it takes 15 minutes to brew the pot of coffee at 1,500 watts. That’s 0.375 watt hours. At $0.20/kwh that’s $0.075/pot. Yay for dumping it into a thermos once it’s brewed.

          All in, even if you added an extra $0.50/day brewing at home is still way cheaper.

  • auzy@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s not always the case.

    Bill Gates I feel earned his money.

    But, I agree, the others definitely exploited people

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      The guy whose mom was on the board for IBM and who convinced them to invest into her sons’ garage company? Being born to wealthy and powerful parents really does wonders for your ability to become filthy rich, does it not?

      • auzy@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The guy started learning to program when he was 13 and had already written a lot of software and done a lot before Ms dos

        I tried to look up the IBM claim but couldn’t find anything.

        But, what has that got to do with exploitation?

        Or are you trying to argue he exploited IBM…

    • actually@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You just can’t accumulate that much wealth from nothing without being charismatic, smart and a leader . Like Alexander the Great

      But even the best of them have caused thousands of crushed lives and careers in a long trail. Ruthless is a mild word to describe

    • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      I recommend the Behind the Bastards episode on him. He had a ton of opportunities available to him normal people don’t, including ones that aren’t strictly financial. For instance, he was allowed to ignore most of his other subjects in high school to concentrate on computer stuff. As a person who had similar interests in computers and sometimes not an interest in some other classes, that’s a huge advantage.

      While I didn’t have too hard a time in school (only needed 2 classes to pass my final year), being able to concentrate on just computers(which were my electives) would have been far less stressful and would have allowed more concentration. That’s just one of many intangible benefits.

      • auzy@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Well. You’re making the claim, let’s see the receipts. They pay their workers well, I haven’t heard any evidence they get treated like slaves like bezos

        I knew I’d get downvoted but Lemmy people, but I’ve heard no evidence otherwise.

        Bill got rich because of windows 95, and it was a really good product.

        He made a lot of his riches before the Internet and before IE

        • trolololol@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Oh my, if you want to look back at those days with rose colored glasses be my guest. But to anyone that lived those days, your comment is a basket full of straw mans.

          • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            I never understand comments like this, where people act as if they know better but make no effort to actually demonstrate their superior knowledge.

            It almost seems like you’re less interested in changing minds and more in fishing for upvotes from the ‘Microsoft bad’ crowd.

            • trolololol@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              I don’t have superior knowledge, but it’s probably useful to recognize the way I see that company is very different than yours and other people.

              I don’t think we can agree, and my goal is not to convince you, but remind that there’s people like me who think Microsoft represents so many bad things that I can write a book about it.

              To illustrate, I’m sure 20 years from now recall will be as divisive as windows 7,10 or how they were completely opposed to open source and now act like that never happened.

              • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                If you disagree with someone enough to feel it’s necessary to say so, it’s generally advisable to explain exactly what you disagree with and provide reasoning for your stance. Otherwise, you’re just making noise. A truly informed person has no trouble coming up with a few examples to back up their claims. It’s quite patronizing to imply that you have some insight I don’t, and then not even bother to share it - especially when following it up with, ‘I don’t think we can agree,’ after putting zero effort into reaching an understanding.

          • auzy@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Our first family computer was a 8086.

            So don’t speak on behalf of me please, or make assumptions

            Explain your answer.

            To literally anyone at that time, Windows 95 was a game changer. It brought many things including proper plug and play, and less screwing with autoexec.bat

            The competition was Apple. Apple started going bankrupt because of this. Bill was a coder from 13 years old. They weren’t a monopoly until much later.

            He was going to be successful regardless. His initial fortune was from Windows 95 which sold 7 million copies in 5 weeks

            • trolololol@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Explain yourself? Do you pay my bills and I didn’t notice? Fuck off.

              Just conversation starters :

              Win95, 98 and 2000 are embarrassingly unstable, even if you think it’s a world wonder that got someone to be ultra rich.

              Oh by the way all of this was based on DOS, which was not made but bought by Microsoft. Pretty sure it wasn’t from a savings account for flipping burgers.

              Internet explorer had such bullying and monopolistic practices that it lost a lawsuit.

              Microsoft willingly went out of their way to bully and kill other OS competitors that were getting a good foothold on getting adopted. Was that Novell? So long ago, and they got killed almost at the same time as they were invented.

              • auzy@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Ie wasn’t even a factor until years later. There was no compelling reason to use anything other than ie until Firefox (to end users, Netscape and Mozilla was comparable to ie). It had no impact on the initial success of Windows. Netware failed because it was crap compared to windows 95 too. Their competitors simply didn’t compare to windows 95. That’s not bullying. They were too busy competing with windows 3.1

                Windows 95 wasn’t that unstable either. Maybe you had bad ram in your system or bad drivers . Sure the NT kernel was better, but Windows 95 was perfectly usable and was used. It did crash. But it wasn’t a regular thing. You’re acting like it happened daily.

                Osx was only released in 2001 and macos required Apple hardware Windows 95 succeeded because it actually worked and had broad hardware support

                You keep talking about IE, but Windows was successful before most people had the Internet. Internet explorer only became anti monopoly consideration because Windows had already managed to be

                Also, how do you expect people to respond when you disrespect them and make assumptions about their experience and age to try to add credibility to your argument at their expense? If you don’t know how old I am, don’t assume I’m young. I’m not . And fyi, one of my projects was mentioned in Linux format 20 years ago, so don’t assume I wasn’t heavy into Linux either

  • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The key to the Massive Fraud strategy is that you have to already be in the tax bracket that allows for privileges like massive fraud. If you try to do it without meeting that lone prerequisite you end up being arrested by the IRS.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Fatgirlhedonist might not be a millionaire, because hardly anybody is - and anybody who promised her she would be was full of shit - but making her own coffee has certainly left her with money she didn’t have before. I’ve always saved money the same way, by doing as many things as I can for myself. I really don’t see how there’s anything wrong with that.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I’m going to downvote you anyway, not because what you said was untrue or hurtful or disrespectful in any way, but because you’re harshing the general unforgiving vibe of the room and I need to stand with my fellow mob.

  • howrar@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Being a millionaire is easily doable now on a regular 9-5 job if you’re paid fairly. In my city at least, I can tell you that a software dev can reach millionaire status within about 20 years of work. No fraud needed unless you count ETF investments or software dev as fraud.