this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
1445 points (99.1% liked)

Work Reform

16397 readers
1741 users here now

A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.

Our Philosophies:

Our Goals

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tristynalxander@mander.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I see no compelling reason to maintain the institutions

Okay, so you're not serious about change to your supposedly better system.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

What?

You're advocating for maintaining status quo "institutions". I'm advocating improvement. You're advocating regression. I'm advocating progress.

Your criticism here makes your stance seem wildly inconsistent.

I think you need to explain what you mean by "institutions" when you suggest that I will be destroying them.

The "institutions" I believe will be destroyed by a securities tax are overtly harmful and should be destroyed. Can you provide me an example of a beneficial "institution" that would not survive?

[–] tristynalxander@mander.xyz 1 points 21 minutes ago

No, I can't "prove" to you that a "beneficial" institution would not survive because if I name an institution that I think is beneficial, like universities or research institutes, you'll either argue it's not beneficial or argue that it would survive via some other mechanism. Either way, it'd miss the point that there are in fact institutions that do good in the world that are built on the current systems and need some means of transitioning or surviving your radical change. You're clearly uninterested in those arguments, which basically means no decent people (i.e. people who are intent on minimizing harm) are going to be interested in working with you.

Honestly, I don't even really want to write this comment because I'm struggling not to assume you're just some angry kid. Like maybe you're someone who broadly agrees with me but just hasn't worked through the practical math of whole percentile wealth taxes on institutions or who doesn't yet appreciate that endowments effectively serve as a decentralized wealth re-distribution for public good causes. We're probably both positively inclined towards notions of wealth limits and income limits for individuals, but we clearly have very different views on how institutions and organizations should function. I don't really want to engage in an argument about that with someone who seems perfectly willing to see everything burnt to the ground in the name of "progress".

Do you know how you make progress? You gain a deep understanding of how things work and then you tweak, modify, and twist bits and pieces -- this doesn't result in marginal effects either because these modifications aren't just cumulative but synergistic and ultimately transformative. Institutions like academia have real problems, no doubt, but a few simple rules could dramatically improve them: limiting the ratio of administrators to other employees to combat administrative bloat, incentivizing use and teaching of FOSS to prevent corporate software entrenchment, addition of lotteries to application processes mitigate alumni advantages. There are lots of ideas that won't destroy every humanities department or every independent scientific research institute in the country by making endowments nonviable.