When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
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If employees are paid in tokens that means employees are *paying* for tokens out of their own pockets.
No different than mining company town folks having to buy (or rent!) boots and work clothing from the company that employs them. At "special" rates, no doubt.
By the way this should tell you all you need to know what class "white collar" vibe coders and broader IT folks are.
Hint: no, you're not running the company town, you're renting your tools from your factory owner.
The only man who made money in the gold rush was the one who sold clothes and pickaxes.
Serfs, the lot of us.
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@rysiek currently tracking down Altman touting this idea of tokens as money in 2024 and again in 2025 on podcasts, lotta excerpts
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If employees are paid in tokens that means employees are *paying* for tokens out of their own pockets.
No different than mining company town folks having to buy (or rent!) boots and work clothing from the company that employs them. At "special" rates, no doubt.
By the way this should tell you all you need to know what class "white collar" vibe coders and broader IT folks are.
Hint: no, you're not running the company town, you're renting your tools from your factory owner.
@rysiek I am constantly thrown off by the "journalism" around the subject.
I can't remember if I have ever read about a "success AI story" that is not narrated by openAI or Anthropic. -
RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek Did Disney ever pay it's staff in Disney Dollars? Wouldn't surprise me. If they didn't then there's probably a law against it, only reason I could think might work. Or unions.
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@rysiek currently tracking down Altman touting this idea of tokens as money in 2024 and again in 2025 on podcasts, lotta excerpts
@davidgerard oh good. Looking forward to reading about it!
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@rysiek The only difference i see is the fact that suff produced by soviet factories was usually quite useful.
@montar @rysiek ...you must not be from that region and that time.
We even had jokes about stuff we bought and then had to actually make it work.
One was about USA stealing the plans for a rocket, and building truck / train engine / whatever out of it. And then somebody from the USSR would go "oh, you just have to hammer it in shape!". -
@rysiek Can you pay the bills with LLM tokens?
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Cryptocurrency and AI compute share the same goals; fobbing a fraud onto the gullible .
They're both fool's gold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/the-guardian-view-on-cryptocurrencies-a-greater-fools-goldhttps://www.workers.org/2025/06/85955/
https://finbold.com/senior-economics-professor-says-bitcoin-is-fools-gold/
https://news.bitcoin.com/peter-schiff-argues-bitcoin-is-fools-gold-not-the-real-thing/
Company scrip as employee wages was outlawed nearly a century ago and for good reasons.
https://medium.com/financial-times/cryptocurrency-salaries-are-a-bad-flashback-to-company-scrip-392f4160bbdaIt often was disguised debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
https://rethinkq.adp.com/artifact-coal-company-scrip-miners/
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@montar @rysiek ...you must not be from that region and that time.
We even had jokes about stuff we bought and then had to actually make it work.
One was about USA stealing the plans for a rocket, and building truck / train engine / whatever out of it. And then somebody from the USSR would go "oh, you just have to hammer it in shape!".Q: What is it: does not glow and does not fit in one's arse?
A: Soviet device to glow inside an arse.But I think @montar's point was more about how stuff produced in those factories was at least ostensibly useful.
As in: a washing machine is a useful thing in general, even if a particular washing machine happens to be broken.
Which is not really the case with "AI" tokens.
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek aside from the whole "maybe your product sucks if you have to force the employees that make it possible to use it" thing, company town behaviour is also maybe not the best sign of a healthy company or economy
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Q: What is it: does not glow and does not fit in one's arse?
A: Soviet device to glow inside an arse.But I think @montar's point was more about how stuff produced in those factories was at least ostensibly useful.
As in: a washing machine is a useful thing in general, even if a particular washing machine happens to be broken.
Which is not really the case with "AI" tokens.
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@rysiek I swear, Rysiek, those people are truly getting more and more on my nerves… they and their crony fellows and their corrupt friends… 🤢
Hardware is bought by them… so that we use their cloud…
They are all in the same boat… data is the new gold; let's kill E2EE and train our slop generators with everyone's messages…
Move fast and break their minds and societies…
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/spiralist-cult-ai-chatbot-1235463175/
Let's pay our workers in sh*t and force them to use it to pay…🤢🤢🤢
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@code_disaster @mu they taste like anything you can prompt a slop generator to "imagine"
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@rysiek aside from the whole "maybe your product sucks if you have to force the employees that make it possible to use it" thing, company town behaviour is also maybe not the best sign of a healthy company or economy
@OctaviaConAmore yup, I mention company towns a bit later in the thread.
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek @trendsbot scrip has been in USA history quite a bit.
And using it to compensate wage laborers has been outlawed since 1938.
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@rysiek @montar Regarding the edit - yeah, there could be a difference in different meanings of "useful" there.
Anyway, found another joke :)
Q: What is three stories tall, consumes 20 gallons of diesel an hour, and cuts an apple into three pieces?
A: A soviet machine designed to cut an apple into four pieces.
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek anyone who doesn't take cash is a fool
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RE: https://mas.to/@trendsbot/116211553284922724
When USSR was crumbling, factories were also paying workers in products they manufactured.
This is AI bubble companies trying to print own money. Printing your own money only works if you find a way to make it necessary. That's what taxes do, for example (recommended reading: David Graeber's "Debt").
Here:
👉 "printing money" part is paying employees in tokens
👉 "taxes" part is requiring employees to use AI in their day to day work (thus making tokens necessary)
@rysiek
So, all they need is to make an bio implant in the serfs arm with a nice display of how many tokens a person has left. If this counter went to zero, so is the serf''s life...Those crooks are all into sci-fi just they want to rewrite endings from sad to happy.
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@OctaviaConAmore yup, I mention company towns a bit later in the thread.
@rysiek oops, sorry 'bout that
gonna go properly read the rest of the thread now before nodding off 
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