Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses.

Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

Businesses are just large bunches of people, each trying to maximize various metrics given the incentives they interact with. None of those people, including the owner, is automatically pro-slavery, which is the other word for "wants free labor."

Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. This isn't evil nor is it specific to "businesses," "business owners," or "rich people" either.

> Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible.

...is exactly in agreement with what I said above.

The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.

I would also accept the other direction. That is, a tenant wants use of a property for no rent, ideally.

My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. They want money for free just like everybody else.

> property but no rent

I mean, I guess sure, but... only lunatics think that exists legally and sustainably.

Certainly no one who has managed to get a business degree, or attain any leadership role, thinks so foolishly.

Normal businesspeople know that if you pay minimum wage you can expect only a weak effort, and also they don't waste their mental energy fantasizing about anybody 'working for free.'

As a manager, I fantasize about getting everyone under me paid enough to hold turnover very low (because turnover sucks), but not so highly that my team becomes a poor ROI that economically should be replaced with (AI, an offshore team, a couple people from a consulting firm, etc.) -- and I'm sure the CEO and any non-crazy shareholders want that equilibrium as well.

Yeah, no.

I’m no longer an entrepreneur - ran out of runway - but it was always my goal to have aggressive profit sharing as part of my company. Acceptable salaries - years of those salaries saved “in the bank” and profit-share the rest.

I never wanted free labor. In fact, the reason I didn’t have employees is because I couldn’t afford them at the rate they deserved. People deserve to be treated as people. People deserve to be treated well.

I want to play the “game” of creating things I want created and making enough money to comfortably sustain myself and help those I care about.

If I’m hiring people, I want people that want the same things as me and are paid well, or people that are willing to exchange their labor for both a respectable base earning and also extra earning based on how we, collectively, are doing.

In other words, the Law of Supply & Demand.

Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants.

Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling family vacations with time clock funny business, etc.

When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.

I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway.

I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually do the accounting in a double entry system because of the legal jurisdiction and corporate structure.

I think that this is a byproduct of the economy being filled with small businesses owned by people who aren’t competent at operating their business as a business, which isn’t the same thing as being successful at making money.

That’s the game, and some people believe it’s the only game.

I’m with you though. For me business isn’t a channel for hoarding all possible resources and assets. It’s a combination of a craft and a means to an end. I’d still do it if I needed no profession, because it’s a craft I enjoy.

It’s fun to share that craft, and it’s good to share that craft on generous terms.

The subtle irony is that the version of the “game” as referenced in that other comment is the same, expect that all those niceties only apply to executives and people who already have lots of money. A socially perverse arrangement, to be sure.

This isn't a business. And if you found a way to do this, you'd be subject to endless audits and AML/CTF suspicions because actual businesses don't look like this.

Business owners come in a range of personalities, just like everyone else. Some are selfish and unreasonable. Some are altruistic and generous. Some are purely in it for the money, others really love building teams and working in a friendly environment. Some have global ambitions, others just want to get by with as little effort as possible.

You can claim depreciation on all your hardware (including your desk and chair).

You should be claiming some of your rent/mortgage as office expenses. And, obviously, your broadband cost, your electricity bill, your heating bill (if different), etc.

You can claim all the coffees you buy potential clients.

Having zero expenses is absolutely not what you want to efficiently run your business.

Big organisations tend to accrete rules as they age until it's almost impossible to do anything apart from the core function.

You are an exception.

> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.

Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.

Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.

No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.

Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.

>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T

That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.

I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.

If you could get higher rent without getting punished by the market (turnover), you would do it. If you could spend less on maintenance without getting punished by the market (turnover and reduced resale value), you would do it.

Many, if not most, landlords push both of these levers to their absolute limits.

The essence of being a landlord is that you've got your name on the title of a scarce resource that is difficult or impossible in some cases to duplicate: real estate in a particular location. The fact that your name is on this title means that you can extract value from people who need a place to live and did not arrive there first so they could buy the cheap property, build the building, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I hope to be a landlord too some day. Ownership is what matters when there's nowhere else to move. I look forward to the rent checks. However, I won't be pretending there's anything noble or fair about what I'm doing. It's just how the rules of our economy are set up.

I've been a perfect tenant my entire life, and I was still always treated like trash by every landlord I've rented from. I don't think they make a distinction.

Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.

I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.

And, I expect, as a point of fact... you haven't bothered to be a landlord.

>It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it.

That's how you perceive it. But the reality of it is that while many are hustling, few are prospering, few enough even that reasonable people might wonder if the few successful ones are the result of luck more than having figured out the get-rich-quick thing that everyone's been trying to figure out for millennia. Good luck, I suppose.

In one apartment, I even spilled some bleach in a closet, and sneakily replaced the piece of carpet from the scraps I found when they were recarpeting a nearby unit. They didn't notice or care.

As for whether I’m an exception — maybe. Subjectively I think I am because I perceive myself to be putting more into the “business of business” than most other business owners I know, but I also have a bit more time. The services my business provides benefits from heavily cross linking service, sales, and event/auditable data. It fits cleanly into out of box sales processes that business software assumes. When we adopted our ERP we just changed our processes instead of butchering the software. What we actually offer is, to a large extent, set-it-and-check-on-it.

I would think that is a great luxury in a way. I don’t have to do back breaking labor to make a delicious batch of croissants for the masses every day. I’d rather the croissants be tasty than the bakery’s books be perfect. As long as they’re doing what they need to stay in business.

I did have something specific in mind when I made my comment about “how hard can it be?” I think I was painting with too broad a brush. When I typed that I was recalling the FinCEN BOI filings. All of two or three pages of an online wizard asking for all the same information most secretaries of state require, and such a disproportionate outrage about even having to do it. From peers in the business community I heard a lot of “this is too complicated!” Having read the FinCEN documentation on BOI, it definitely sounded way more complicated than it ever was to complete.