this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
161 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

44149 readers
1399 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] rekabis@programming.dev 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

By your definition game development (in the old style) is also passive income... so is art... so is building a house or a car or pretty much any form of manufacturing.

These activities all involve building something with no promise of selling it - then trying to find a buyer... in each case you, the producer, are investing up front in a venture which may or may not succeed and then hoping someone will pay you for it.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Homebuilding would be active income, since you can only sell each house once. Game development would be a good example for someone like the Minecraft creator. He invested a bunch of time creating this cool game, and then he sat back and got rich. It's passive at that point (assuming no maintenance, bug fixes, etc.), since he continues to gain sales, despite only doing the work once. The digital realm is full of opportunities for passive income, or at least it used to be. Corporations have essentially shoved individual creators out of the market.

Edit: I'm aware that the Minecraft creator sold the game, but was using his earlier experiences as an example. I read an interview with him once and he said "I think I was already rich by the time I thought 'holy shit, I'm going to be rich!'".