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53 points

“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.

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14 points

Do you have a 401k?

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18 points

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.

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-1 points

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 don’t see anything wrong with that in theory.

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19 points

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3 points
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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?

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11 points
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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.

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.

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.

Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still “labour”. Because sure as shit you’ve been doing these things… 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.

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3 points

Sure sounds like labour to me.

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.

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3 points

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.

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6 points

You’re literally telling us that you did actually put in a ton of labour, so it’s not completely passive

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1 point

That’s why passive was in quotes.

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5 points

I get about 30 dollars a month in Interest in my savings account. Is that not passive?

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-1 points

You live off of $30 a month?

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0 points
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3 points

The bank is investing your money into the economy. And the economy is growing because of people’s labour.

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1 point

Sure sure, and the amount matters, right?

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1 point

How is interest labour?

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4 points

Where do you think interest come from? Do you think banks just give you free money every month?

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4 points

Yes. Capital isn’t Labour.

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2 points

FIRE these dipshits straight into the fucking sun.

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5 points

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?

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