Tango
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The main problem is that investment funds need the constant growth in order to pay for people’s pension. If you don’t have index funds that return above a given yield, year on year, then there’s no way for pensions to work because there aren’t enough young people being born to work and pay taxes to support the older people’s pensions. That’s why every financial services company is pushed, hard, to return more and more profits. That’s why governments don’t regulate them harder: because they NEED the financial sector to be greedy on an epic scale, or else the economy doesn’t work.
SETH: “Shit, this is really gonna affect people.”
WILL: “Yeah, it’s gonna affect people like me!”
SETH: “No, no, real… real people.”
WILL: “Jesus, Seth; listen, if you really wanna do this with your life, you have to believe you’re necessary. And you are. People wanna live like this, in their cars, and their big fuckin’ houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is ‘cause we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off? Well then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair, really fuckin’ quickly, and nobody actually wants that. They say they do, but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also wanna, you know… play innocent, and pretend that they have no idea where it came from. Well, that’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck 'em. Fuck normal people. You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow, if all of this goes tits-up? They’re gonna crucify us for being too reckless. But if we’re wrong? And everything gets back on track? Well then the same people are gonna laugh 'til they piss their pants, 'cause we’re gonna look like the biggest pussies God ever let through the door.”
SETH: “You think we’re gonna be wrong?”
WILL: “Nah, they’re all fucked.”
The whole world economy is based on a system whereby the global regions and demographics that Have, extract wealth and value from the regions and demographics that Have Not. And everybody here commenting on this post are Haves. Maybe not on the scale that some others are, but I know I certainly didn’t have to walk several hours today just to get clean drinkable water. Given what some people are forced to do without despite how hard they work, I really shouldn’t be able to afford the lifestyle I have for the amount of work I do. But I can, and that’s because my government tilts the scales in my favor. And even I’m financially screwed compared to some other people! The only way to fix it is a complete overhaul, and nobody has the stomach for that.
10·2 days agoThat would matter in a criminal prosecution where guilt must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. However in a civil suit, all the BBC needs to do is convince a jury.
If you insist that strict capitalism has never failed because neither the USA nor any other Western nation has ever practiced pure unadulterated capitalism, then you necessarily have to accept that strict Marxism has never failed either, because neither the USSR nor any other communist nation has ever practiced pure unadulterated Marxism.
If Trump refuses discovery it would be a huge payout for the BBC, not from them
I’d be shocked if the BBC’s defence didn’t include a countersuit to the effect that his original suit calling them liars amounted to defamation. Trump can drop his suit but has no control over whether the BBC can file or continue a countersuit.
12·4 days agoEven when they wear badges they always have some strap or other piece of gear obscuring the badge number.
I can only imagine two possible reasons:
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If Infantino thinks he might be forced out of the FIFA job soon
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If the UN job has greater potential for bribes
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I’ll give that a try, thanks!
Not the person you’re responding to but if I wanted to turn an old Asus MeMO Pad 7 into something I could stream from my PC with, would you advise me to install Postmarket OS, LineageOS, something else?
TBH I never thought that it would be Iran that would be the last nation on Earth to figure this out.
422·8 days agoI must say, this Mamdani fellow seems to be having a lot of success very quickly. One has to wonder why nobody ever tried any of this before. Can it really be that the switch to using Ranked Choice Voting in NY primaries made THAT much of a difference in the type of candidate that made it through?
Yes. Large-scale sabotage is, well, large-scale. And it tends to be investigated until the saboteur is found. Whereas a widespread movement of many small individual acts of sabotage can often be harder to detect as having been sabotage at all. For example, clogging a coolant system with adulterants that are plausible to have found their way in through laxity in operation, so that when the machine it cools goes kaput, a post-mortem makes it look like the work of wear-and-tear, operator error and insufficient maintenance. Such a saboteur can go undiscovered and live to sabotage another day.
And the same principle applies to non-mechanical sabotage. As mentioned with “every decision by committee”, it can often be done entirely in the open and still be undetectable as sabotage.
In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual; a document aimed at the unhappy citizens of fascist nations, to instruct them on how to sabotage the economic and military capacity of their own nation. I’m not saying that Oskar Schindler ever read it, but the movie line “Stern, if this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be very unhappy” is definitely in the same spirit.
One need not work in weapons manufacturing, either. The manual suggests sabotage techniques for every kind of worker. For example, office workers could help decrease their fascist nation’s economic power by insisting that every decision be made by committee, slowing output.
The manual is fascinating in that it’s focused on people who are afraid to be “heroes”, instead suggesting sabotage methods that entail little to no personal risk.
https://archive.org/details/SimpleSabotageFieldManual/page/n2/mode/1up
My general policy is to always be wary of lending too much credence to something I want to be true. You have to be aware of your own biases.
Mitch is alive and apparently mostly well.
Bold of you to assume I’m gonna be able to afford a back yard.
North Korea was untouchable from the beginning due to all the artillery it has embedded in the mountains, aimed at Seoul. The Korean peninsula was a hostage situation whereby the North would destroy Seoul at the first sign of trouble and nobody, not even the USA, was able to do anything about it.
North Korea sought nukes not for security but to give it options for further extortion.
Oh, I wasn’t arguing in favor of the system. I was just pointing out that if one was to look for the mustache-twirling villains behind everything, they wouldn’t find them at Blackrock. The people working at Blackrock are simply deluded enough to think that they can stave off the pension bomb forever if they just keep the numbers going up forever. As you rightly point out, the system isn’t sustainable. But as long as the overall economic system doesn’t get the drastic general overhaul that it needs (but that nobody has the stomach for), it’ll remain a Nash Equilibrium whereby nobody can move to end it unless everyone does.