Youtube comments of (@jmitterii2).
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Germans have many things going for them:
1) Their healthcare insurance covers up to 6 weeks of paid sick time at 100%.
2) Long term disability at 70% for several weeks.
3) Kurzearbeit or short work allows firms to reduce hours instead of laying people off, and the other portion of time wage lost is made up by the government providing that other portion not being worked so the worker never misses a full-time pay check.
4) Housing authority in Germany is strong enough both federally and locally, just recently put a price cap on rents that were doing what's happening throughout the world becoming excess of 35% to 60% of take home pay, a completely unstable sum.
5) Universal healthcare that is comprehensive; copay per need: ambulance, hospital stay, clinic visit, Rx, etc. is only 5 to 8 euros, and annually capped at 300 euros and no more copays. Out of pocket costs are lower than what a typical person spends on movies and sweets in a year. No possibility to go bankrupt on medical bills since total annual pocket expenses are capped at 300 euros a year.
6) Codetermination which requires depending on the size of the firm to have up to half the board of directors by filled by non-managerial non supervisory workers voted on by the workers themselves.
7) The quasi unions system which ensures salaries/wages, vacation days, retirement pensions and funds, etc. go to workers and aren't fuel to recreate the robber baron era on steroids and fuel speculative bubbles in stocks, stock buybacks, real-estate, pharma companies which are allowed to charge whatever they want, and they do, often 500% to 100,000% returns per unit product.
8) Transit system that doesn't require most to heavily use their vehicle or even can opt out on owning one, and just renting one when they need it such as if they move or go on road trip vacation resulting in huge savings to the people in not needing to pay insurance, fuel, and upkeep on vehicles. Instead, their transit costs are substantially lower using mass transit.
Germany has a lot going for it. Common sense policies to avoid a robber baron system that had formerly destroyed the nation, and caused the rise of the so called communists and fascists that further left the nation into ruin.
They know what happens if they let their robber barons loose. It never ends well. So they keep a tight leash on those parasites.
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Every coma case I have so far heard about in random places, one guy is a piano player who was in a Mozart Documentary, a friend came and played Mozart... he heard music, but it was India Bhavageethe like singing.
They all keep stimulating the person, and eventually do something to push the stimulus for a response.
For whatever it's worth, if you know anyone in a coma, stimulate the person, and do things like play music, put a whistle in their mouth, touch them with velvet, flowers, cotton balls, etc. Do all things to get a response, and try to discern what movement seems capable of them to encourage them to keep doing as a way to maybe reach them and wake them.
Almost seems like assistance is needed to jump start them out of the comatose state.
If faced with that situation I would do those things. Nothing to lose.
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When I first saw that Mattis resigned, I thought he was his "check" to keep Trump from doing something crazy... but when I further read the article about why he resigned, I thought well wait, Trump actually is doing something good, and that's why he's resigning... Message to Mad Dog Mattis: don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!
We don't need to intervene in every world affair bankrupting our nation while we don't have what 170 of the 201 recognized countries: universal healthcare, nor do we have a good K-12 education program, nor do we have universal higher education and vocational training something we also desperately need instead of $1.5 trillion in student loan debts of which 11% are delinquent because 1) people still have to work full time and can only attend classes piecemeal 2) this results in many never actually obtaining enough credits to ever graduate 3) this makes their studies near worthless as things change over time 4) most subjects available are too narrow and don't provide vocational experience training.
Intervening like this is what brought every empire down from the Old Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Spain, France, and most recent the UK.
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If you play with crypto you realize it's not what it pitches to be:
1) It's often more expensive and always charges a fee no matter the size of the transaction. And exceeds all payment processor fees very frequently VISA, Mastercard, Discovery, AMEX are often cheaper, and with various credit card and banks these fees are often $0... it always costs to make transaction with crypto.
2) Speed is a farce, it often takes over an hour just for a few confirmations, many require 9 or more confirmations, and those with reduced non ASIC block require hundreds of confirmations since such blockchains are more vulnerable to 51% attack.
If the network is crammed it could take a day or so for ASIC chains to process transactions to enough confirmations to know if it will stick to the decentralized ledger.
3) There is no security. If you accidentally submit to the wrong wallet such as tethers TRON or EC20, it's over.
4) No FDIC or SIPC security on any of these deposits at exchanges.
5) Not scale-able. Even ETH is not scale-able. Hence why ADA exists, which isn't scale-able either but at token to invest in someone who promises he can make a scale-able block chain that doesn't cost ridiculous sums of money to make transactions.
But inability to scale is a built in feature to block chain, it's to ensure transactions have agreed consensus over the entire users of nodes so that not a few could just make up whatever they want on the ledger and force the smaller participants to accept it.
So it's unlikely to scale without becoming centralized. Which defeats the ponit of decentralized thesis.
Above are the big factors of over hyped that is crypto. And really its uselessness.
Going into the future 10 years to 20 years:
6) Further out into the future, various ASIC proof of work and even easier faster models for de-centralized ledgers become useless whenever sufficient quantum computing develops. All security is obsolete as 51% would be simple, as well as mining coins becomes no feat at all... QM qubits excel at such algorithms: their function is to place all possible values at once and return only those values that work. Only quantum encryption models that work against other quantum computing is centralized thus hidden algorithms and blocking of iteration methods (hence why your bank or other login screens give only a few chances to guess your password, block chain mining (hash rate) is just that iteration without limits. QM doesn't need iteration to solve these problems. Again, it dumps all possible values at one time into a problem and returns only those answers. Reducing a problem that could take hundreds of thousands of years at an iteration attempt of 2 trillion attempts (hashes) a second, to a few minutes.
QM computing is a decade to decade and a half threat though. However this could be sooner than later as IBM and some other institutions have announced various plans to achieve larger than expected qubit computers up into the mega-qubit. Qubit power is 2 to the qubit... basically just 2000 qubits has the computation power of 1,418 followed by 599 more digits.
Or more stars in the observable universe. 14 times the number of all the atoms of the universe.
And that's only 2 kiloqubits.
Currently, most damning about the crypto thing is that since its inception it was nothing but a speculative bubble that turned into a ponzi scheme. Initially from 2010 to 2013 with Mt Gox and the other exchange scam.
And then taken over and presently with two scams 2015 to present Tether Bitfinex scam with affiliates of Binance, Bybit, Kracken, even now registered and trading on the NASDAQ Coinbase... irony that NY recently declared in court findings that Tether had repeatedly lied about their USD holdings, whether they owned Bitfinex or not (which they did), mislead an audit to a bank, and simply never had a dollar to dollar match available to redeem any tokens.
Tether responded by not only prohibiting NY customers from owning tether as per their terms of service, but ALL Americans are not permitted by the terms of service to hold tethers.
And the entire thing with tether is an open an obviously circus like cartoon scam.
We know what the next future movies will cover.
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It wasn't all rainbows and sunshine in Ancient Greece. Or really any ancient peoples for gays or bi's. All the Greek nations had their own customs, laws, and government, etc.
For Athens, Corinth, and Rhodes women were subservient; they were expected to cover their face and often entire body when in public. Only prostitutes would be in public places uncovered and un-escorted.
Similar to the Pakistan where is considered taboo for young boys or men to be with girls in public resulting in romances involving young boys and older boys and men and boys and teens; ie Pedophilia.
In ancient Athens in particular, it was considered acceptable (not desirable) for pedophilia relationship between a young teen 13 or 20 to be with a 18 to 29 year old. It was expected though, homosexual relationships would end when they reach at least 30 and which they hoped they would have eventually married a woman.
Really depends on what culture. Most cultures strictly forbid homosexual behavior particularly for adults; on the practicality out of fear of not producing enough surviving offspring to help with hunting or farming. Not to mention the vast majority of people tend to be heterosexual; with very minor bisexuality, and an even more minor amount of people who are absolute homosexual.
Sparta literally raised their Spartiates (soldier class) in compounds of men, with gradually older boys and then men looking after each other. The older boys and men would bugger the younger as their right.
Sparta is a difficult culture to examine without ethnic centrism: their Heloc slave class which were routinely murdered for sport and as a way to train a young Spartan to their abusive training and molestation... we could argue not just culturally, but empirically/scientifically they had some harmful equitably, physically, and mentally cultural norms; ie. they weren't good. And this complicates what we think of as acceptable.
In the republic of Rome, it as considered acceptable if you had homosexual relationship with a slave, but not with an ex-slave or with a full citizen.
Some Celts and Saxons and Native American Tribes, Ulmec, Mayan, Aztec describe abandoning/banishing or even sacrificing or just executing homosexuals or bisexuals. Some Native American tribes today still past down having LGBT as being either a person who was born with out a soul (I can't remember the name for it) or possessed by a bad spirit.
So if you ever find a time machine, you won't go back into a LGBT loving ancient world. It really depends on the context and which civilization your visiting. And beware, if don't look that tribe or civilization, they may think you some evil spirit, barbarian, etc.
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+Mutton Man The reason why it tends to work is that this new money being lent into existence is going toward both supply investment to make new stuff and/or demand in getting financing a car so you can get to work and do other things you want to do with a car or bike or whatever item.
It helps expand the money supply while expanding both supply of stuff and helping demand as well, when both quantity of supplies increase and quantity of goods demanded increase, the overall economy grows, meaning more people have a chance to improve their standard of living.
That's the basic concept.
The downside to fractional banking is that it can increase risk to banks on default should their be a run on their bank and depositors flee, hence why FDIC was created after the 1929 crash, and also why regulations that put a firewall against investment highly speculative banking and deposit banking. Unfortunately in 2000, the republicans in congress signed by Democrat Clinton in the US repealed this firewall protection. And just 7 years later, we had a meltdown and runs on banks in the US. Also, it didnt' help that new risky financial instruments were never and still are not regulated like credit default swaps.
From early 1990's finance sector was only 5.5% of GDP, by 2006 it had grown to over 8% of GDP, financing to be efficient should be too expensive, so it rising in GDP means it cuts other sectors' shear of GDP in producing tangible goods and services.
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Abrahamic religions make no sense at all to most of reality... one god? Do humans reproduce asexually? And are there only one type of species in the world? And are we all that powerful, can't we at times be preyed upon by other predators? Even herbivores like hippos are very dangerous to people; killing one of the Egyptian kings in the first kingdom.
So to think one magical being, in a world where we have large individuals in tribes, liters, broods, lots of species, cyclical cycles of the moon, day and night, seasons, etc.
Seasons you see a rebirth from the dead winter, to rebirth of spring, life of summer, and the dying of autumn, in a cycle that repeats.
Abrahamic religions are very anti-earth denial of observations of our reality. Hence why Abrahamic religions are the odd balls of all various religions throughout the world.
I'm skeptical of all "spiritual" ideas. Find them entertaining anyways.
Thoughts about reincarnation is likely as old as human self awareness. Seriously, based on observation of reality, the inference about reincarnation is only logical. The mumbo jumbo of Abrahamic religions that generally fly in the face of observation are more of an illogical mental gymnastics head banger; a very difficult inference.
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1) Auto loan debt surpassing credit card debt
2) Credit debt over trillion higher than last recession.
3) Mortgage debt higher than great recession.
4) Credit default swaps on business debt over $1 trillion was only $400 billion b4 last recession
5) Total business debt was $4 trillion b4 last recession, now over $9 trillion. Only the richest 40 companies particularly Amazon, Apple, Alphabet(Google), NetFlix, Facebook had surplus cash. Other companies like GE, GM, DuPont, etc. were taking loans out to buy back stocks.
6) Commercial real-estate higher than last recession that never actually went bust.
7) Student loan debt over $1.5 trillion.
8) Total stock market margin debt reach all time high of $668 billion.... last all time high just before last recession was $378 billion 2007... this forces stocks to sell to cover margin accounts... $378 billion in 2007 turned to $100 billion as margins were called in in just two months.
It was absurd in October that it was still going up. Was obvious this was like bitcoin, dot com, mortgage real-estate, etc. bubble. It was overwhelmingly obvious.
And we already have most developing countries and some developed countries in recession including most countries of S. America and Central America, Middle East is a basket case and is effecting even the oil rich nations, China is in major slowdown with protests on their P2P lending collapse, France is protesting, Hungary is protesting, Brexit is a joke, Italy looks to be utterly unstable and holds billions in debt making it orders of magnitude worse than Greece or even Spain.
And most interest rates are still low around the world. SO there's very little monetary policy can do to fix it, other than fuel more bubbles that go boom, which happen in much shorter jarring duration.
The collateralized debt obligations on businesses, 2019 18% of them are due for repayment of which many companies are unable, and more in 2020... they go bust.
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I'm usually not for booing at these things, just let the fuck face talk, short boos, and let the fuckers get off stage. But in this case, I'm sick of this overt one party horse shit. The delusion is over. We want an actual opposition party, one that actually is for and by and of the people. So I would boo the fucker.
Then try chanting "Social security!" over and over again. We have socialism.
Any fucking economics class was explain essentially all nations are mixed social-capital market systems. We are a social country.
Socialism doesn't mean dictatorship. Capitalism has had just as much dictatorships and oligarchies and plutocracies that were tyrannical. Often socialist policies is what saved nations by ensuring the peasants got some dignity by enjoying the fruits of advanced technology that delivers more productivity.
These jack asses are done. Their so disconnected they have no fucking clue how ridiculously overtly dishonest they are to all of us.
We fucking travel. Canada is next door. And a trip to Germany, France, UK, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan, even Australia (the most expensive flight ticket).
And we have the internet to get the juicy details on exactly what they pay compared to us. They don't have medical bankruptcies. We do.
They're not beholden to their employer (like a feudal serf to the feudal lord) for meager discount program that pretends to be insurance. *Canada is for supplemental insurance like dental and prescription that is provided at a pharmacy. But there is discussion on closing those loop holes in their universal coverage: adding full coverage to dental and especially prescription medication outside a hospital/clinic.
At the end of his idiocy, I think I would chant "There is a party that fits your shit, go join the RNC, we want a real opposition in policy party, not plutocrat vs plutocrat bullshit."
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All companies seem to do it. Businesses to day have contempt for the customer and the employee.
So this makes for horrible decisions being made. That end up destroying the company or at least harming it big time... problem it becomes a feedback loop. That bad decision leads to yet another and so on. I see it in regular day job businesses past and prior companies I have worked for... example: they're okay to increase their monthly costs to $2 million more a month, to save $500 thousand a year on labor costs. Because it's labor... it's dogma that labor cost is the only thing in their control, and thus lowering that cost is the Key Performance Indicator. So they spend $2 million a month or 24 million a year, to save $500K a year. Very brilliant, they just added 23.5 millionaire to costs to the company while making persisting employees life worse off with a skeleton crew.
Another example at a bottling plant, they're concerned about keeping labor costs cheap they're not even able to keep employees so night shifts are too few that production doesn't happen, or when it does, it causes $50K of bad product to be produced that must then be destroyed. Because they didn't seek to keep the existing employees, and the new employees are so underpaid they last for a few months at best, and the ones they do keep for a while longer are unreliable at best.
And of courses, cutting further corners into the areas of legality of quality of product becomes frustrating for long term hanger ons like myself.
Microsoft example of charging so much that they're really just wanting to lease/rent out their MS Office... so I just don't use it anymore. I use Open Source which is literally free... and it can convert all spreadsheet and document files to various all types of Microsoft or Apple or other file types... so you don't need MS Office at all. And the layout is better; and doesn't change every, now, month or so; forcing you to have to google how to get the setup you had prior back.
I can donate directly to them on their website to keep them going similar to how I've done to AdBlock... to keep them afloat and continuing their good programming. And their recent Windows 11 requirements for various motherboard setups.... they really screwed up big.
Also, it wouldn't surprise me some of these outfits start treating their development team so bad, that there is some purposeful sabotaging. Disgruntled workers that linger on, or are about to leave, give a final gift. Ethically, I'm not for that type of protest. But that does happen. And it it appears in some instances, that some of these "updates" are so bad and not even close to logical in that it would make more money or be better in any way... that it has to be a form of sabotage.
But I think a lot of these companies are going down hill are due to bad key performance indicators. They're dumb. They look at one statistics and that's what they themselves are rewarded for, despite it causing sometimes major problems elsewhere.
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Just Rachelblog, way back my high school history teacher repeated the same thing.
Turns out utter rubbish. Most still had somewhat long hair or short hair under their wigs... some styled their actual hair in the manner of a wig like Jefferson or Washington. B. Franklin and son never cut their hair, and would wear wigs, particularly when they were in London. Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, and prior Newton etc. all had hair, many wore it long until the French Revolution which put long hair out of fashion, smacked at the idiocy that is nobility and royalty, so they took to shorter hair styles, then later, about 1830's big beards all shapes and sizes of beards and mustaches. Lice was always a big deal and problem. Wasn't until the 1940's Pyrethrin, a 1300's compound of Pyrethrum powder, that lice became an easily defeated parasite.
Wigs just as normal hair allowed lice to lay eggs, and cause irritation. And lice doesn't just infect the head, but all over. Wigs literally were taken to a hair stylist for cleaning and decorating, part of the work consisted of delousing with Pyrethrum powder and plucking the egg nits off.
So no. Not sure how that rumor started, but it's garbage. And when you think about it, it's very childish... seriously, suddenly the early 1800's and mid 1800's lice isn't a problem no more? So lets go all out with big bush beards? And wigs some how prevented lice infection, despite the fact lice don't need head hair, but any hair (body lice). And that most people wearing wigs kept their hair.... they didn't shave it off... that was more custom of officers in the military.
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Many of these were realized and even exceeded actually. In no particular order:
1) better medical; not as described though, and not quite as 100% on all diseases or infections. But many vaccines and antibiotics that save literally millions if not billions of lives every year.
2) 1902 so this was before 1912 Wright Bros fixed wing aircraft.
3) Air recon being sent down from the ship... nope and not in the air, in orbit in space and broadcast to commanders and even the very sailors and soldiers, and even more to civilians in peaceful times for surveys. And saved censored photographs will be used in navigation with a constellation of satellites; GPS.
4) Telephone is only the start.
5) Life expectancy average in most nations reaches in the 70's. Drops in the US as the evil empire crumbles under its own oligarchical contradictory idiocy; 2015 2018 US actually declined in age expectancy; mostly due to deaths of despair: heroin overdose, suicide, muderer suicide, mass murder, inability to afford to take Rx and see a doctor before terminal or fatal emergency emerges.
6) Most people around the world do get a compulsory primary education. But several developed nations still require their citizens to go heavily indebted to obtain vocational or higher education of which is diminishing in returns particularly as other nations provide it for free to their citizens.
7) Yes the tank.
8) Yes the bomber and fighter aircraft.
9) Yes, advance farming mechanization. And ability to create nitrate by splitting the triple bond of di-nitrogen to artificially create fertilizer; this has prevented countless potential famines in the 20th and 21st century... and no reason it shouldn't have prevented other famines that did and currently are taking place about the world at present.
10) Yes, land transportation would be mechanized completely.
11) War would become uglier costlier to the point we could destroy the entire world and most life on it.
12) Yes, most people strive for physical betterment. As for walking 10 miles, it is doable. And yes, you are considered a ill or have some other problem (too old ie. poor hips or legs or have some other condition) to walk 10 miles. That's really not far, and walking isn't that difficult.
But they didn't realize there would be lots of obese people; primarily because they won't have the time to take proper care of themselves nor the best of diets.
However, our diets are still better and most people are more well physically that even a person who requires prosthetics either legs or arms or hands etc. can at least get about and do a workout that otherwise would be considered ridiculous for such a person with out a limb to even bother with.
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Globalization is a recycled term as Patrick mentioned. Literally the same term used prior to the panic 1873 and again during the 1920's leading to the 1929 bust.
Other terms used have been colonialism. And such colonialism goes back further than the triangle trade of the 1600 and 1700's.
But you can go back to even prior to antiquity of Greece and later Rome. Going back to classical era of Greek city states culminating in doom for various empires in the great bronze age collapse.
Essentially, it almost always included slavery or a form of feudal like structures. Very few actually benefited from it directly or even indirectly. And such economies always boom and fell apart in a great bust.
The term is too gity without looking at the fundamental problems; generally it uses exploited labors either slave, feudal peasantry, or a tyrannized repressive dictator or oligarchy of some sort or another that gives way to what I've coined inauthentic comparative advantage. Lots of other subsidies also come into play as well; where producers receive tax money to offset costs for other inputs beyond labor costs. As well as operating costs like shipping and inventory; distribution costs often get a hefty subsidy by the taxes of the nation.
So the costs are not actually lower, but subsidized by desperate, suppressed, enslaved, and tax funded other non-labor inputs and distribution.
The quality is worse, but the price is more attractive and floods the market forcing better expertise quality makers to go bust. Price wars we see with oligopolies and monopolies.
And in the end you have a late stage where only a few getting the benefits.
Supply chains get idiotic as pretzel like zig zag of various stages of goods making require even further fuels to move the inputs and sub assemblies and final assemblies then various retail.
All this sourcing from all over the place takes more energy which costs more. But this excess cost, yet again, gets offset by either direct subsidies for those purposes of transportation and/or by the other subsidies of inputs via tax money and suppressed labor wages; that the extra cost on energy is offset by the low or no wages being paid and the inputs being mostly paid by the colonial country.
And often these pretzel like supply chains lead to a collapse along with the fact it leaves very few able to consume the goods and services because everyone falls in wage/salaries toward the suppressed labor; aggregate demand falls. It's probably why hyper inflation didn't immediately come out of the massive QE that was being done by many countries after the 2010's following the bank bust and massive bail out to the financial sector. Wages stayed low, and businesses were very scared to grow very much knowing that very few, the top 20% were really left being able to purchase the vast majority of the goods and services being supplied to the market.
Between the inefficient supply chain that becomes fragile when ultimately resentment takes place and war happens, financial disasters take place as the top 20% can't hold an economy together with massive suppression toward the bottom 80%, and often to placate the 80% in less suppressive nations, these countries often under go wars of conquest or civil war.
And it all falls apart.
It's moronic.
Trade is good.
But label all trade as good is dumb.
Some trade is bad.
Authentic comparative advantage is a key to figure out what type of trade is good, and which type is actually harmful over time.
If the country in question has more of resource than other countries, it's a good trade. An authentic comparative advantage.
If a country has expertise that's better than another, than its a good trade.
Actual quality and or abundance of good or service.
If it's forced via slave labor or otherwise suppressed labor or gigantic subsidies this constitutes an inauthentic comparative advantage that will put those with better expertise out of business lowering quality, as well as driving supply chains into idiot spaghetti, and all nations fall in equilibrium as aggregate demand falls. The remaining 20% or the top 10% simply don't need 1 billion toasters or 1 billion ovens or 1 billion massaches etc. Instead you're left with great resentment among the less suppressed nations, and even of the tyrannical nations, they tend to realize the gigs up and start abandoning the late stage colonialism/globalism; which becomes very dangerous as supply chains are all over the place due to the inauthentic comparative advantage described.
It's idiotic.
Since recorded history, over and over, this type of bad trade keeps popping up, because it does give a quick boost to economic boom. But it always goes bust because it's unsustainable. It only really helps the top 20%, and eventually maybe only the top 10%... until it helps nobody.
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My mom just recently passed because of the non-existent healthcare system that we have. She literally was allowed to both starve and what ultimately caused her death couple weeks ago, she wasn't properly hydrated... at no point did they even bother to put an IV for hydration... her personal doctor came to visit and saw her in a bad state and called ER to get her out of there and told us the manager of the nursing home said sometimes you have to let Jesus to his work. $10K a month for this murder. Literal murder.
ER the blood specialist hadn't seen sodium levels as high as my mom's. Attempted to rehydrate via IV, aspiration and she got pneumonia, one lung became infected and essentially wasn't getting any O2. Couple this with brain damage from the severe sodium levels due to dehydration.
And my mom and dad both fully covered with "supplemental" coverage along with medicare/medicaid and other insurance.
This is with my youngest brother full time helping my dad at home, and my mom was only in the nursing home hoping for a short period to rehab her legs so she could walk on her own and return to home. It wasn't to be a permanent nursing home stay. Just a temp for my mom to rehab. She only had leg problems... nothing life threatening.
Instead the nursing home (the only one that was accepting anyone in the area, and still they were horribly understaffed) killed my mom.
This is disgusting. Doesn't matter if you're insured or uninsured.
It's time we follow a model that actually works. Like the UK NHS model. At least like the military, we have people staffed, yet like our Air Traffic Controllers, the NHS pays EVERYONE working in it a very good wage/salary. An LPN the persons who do most of the work including lifting, bathing, washing, feeding, etc. get paid less than many who work in fast food in this country.
We have a putrid system.
And this just adds to my other experience with this non-existent healthcare system.
Many other coworkers friends and now my mom has died due to this void for profit eugenics system.
Dying in their prime from continuous misdiagnosis allowing something otherwise simple to treat to become septic leading to death.
Dying from neglect in a nursing home for the goal of rehab to get out of the nursing home.
The highest profit margin in healthcare of the world, the highest prices gets us eugenics, absolute murder.
It's pathetic.
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Musk is a big freeloader and scam con artist of the century.
That's my take on the hustler.
EV's while interesting and cute, they're not cost effective, not safe, and they're not green. They're so not green. Take a peak at cobalt mines, nickle mines, and lithium mines. All you're doing is front loading your carbon expense in the batteries ahead of using gas/diesel. And these batteries don't last very long, and incredibly unsafe. Lithium burns when subjected to water. That's why you can't just put out a lithium fire by dumping water on it, it'll cause the lithium to ignite. Your phone burns, pouring water on it can make the fire worse. You just have to let it burn out, and dump CO2 or other stuff to attempt to stifle oxygen to it, and when it's doing a thermal runaway you just have to let the energy dump exhaust itself, all that pent up battery energy is being released all at once through one cell batter to another in a thermal runaway. Happens with all lithium ion batteries like phones and lap tops and long since has happened to lithium ion go carts.
Musk is a con jobber... there's a skeptic on youtube that exposes the clown con jobber freeloader... you can google his channel or do a youtube search Musk skeptic or something.
He goes in depth to all of the cons Musk and his brother have been up to... and how horrible they've all gone, and how we the tax payer of footed just about every con.
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Ground speed starts to increase or decrease greatly from winds aloft.
Even just a few thousand feet you can get a nice tailwind, and so do the birds. At near or above ten thousand feet, normal wind speed is about 30 mph. Ranges from as low as 10 mph to as high as 80 mph at 10,000 MSL.
So you can get a nice boost if that's a tailwind... or the opposite if its a headwind.
Right now, Boise wind surface is calm. Elevation about the airport is 2800 ft MSL. SO the below winds aloft at 3,000 is listed coded as 9900 meaning, that's surface winds or below elevation at this location.
At 9,000 ft MSL winds are 19 kts coming from 270 degrees (west), at 12,000 MSL winds are 35 kts at 280 degrees West by west north.
So if you're going east, you'll get a 35 kt boost to your ground speed, and so do birds or anything else in the air.
So these birds could be flying today where winds are calm at the surface, but at 12,000 MSL they would be going their unassisted airspeed of 24 mph to 37 mph plus 35kts (40 mph) = 64 mph to 77 mph at 12,000 MSL if heading direct tailwind of heading 100 east by east south.
It's really cool to see cranes and geese at high altitudes as you fly over them... was flying in Cessna 172 between 9,000 MSL and 13,000 MSL first noticed cranes just below me by about 1,000 ft... was in June and July. Was amazing.
And Hawks ride and circle thermals going well beyond 13,000 MSL sometimes, I'lll be at "high altitude" for a C172 anyways, and a hawk is circling what appears to be another 10,000 ft above.
FT 3000 6000 9000 12000 18000 24000 30000 34000 39000
BOI 9900+04 2709-04 2719-10 2835-22 2850-34 287348 287754 277654
https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp/data?level=low&fcst=06®ion=slc&layout=on&date=
https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/wilson/v070n02/p0184-p0187.pdf
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China also has a belief in eating random animal body parts will them with all sorts of things like tiger penis with impotence, bear paws, shark fins, Rhino horn grounded to organs to cure fever, gout, insomnia and meningitis, etc.
Leading market for poaches on endangered species across the world is China for these superstitious medical beliefs.
And eating wild random animals is bad. Many animals are not really fit for human consumption as they harbor microbes that are also human contagions like the bubonic plague... same bacterial infection is in the USA carried by many rock chucks aka ground squirrels... especially bad epidemics state officials will announce not to touch or otherwise handle any sick looking squirrel or rock chuck.
If we had the same weird medical superstition, we'd be harvesting them... and spreading the literal plague.
So it's not racist when it's real. It's something the people of China really shouldn't do, and it is their defunct corrupt joke of government that nobody there likes and treats seriously other than that its oppressive when it wants to be.
Basically, China is a mess. And that's not racist to point that out.
Just as it's not racist to point out the US medical system is a fucking mess, as well as its housing and higher and vocational education systems.
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@okokokokokokokokkook That's how I interpret basic fascism.
Essentially, a hostile take over of government by the plutocrats often via a vessel politician or set of politicians or a political party; this politician and/or party uses methods of scapegoating and fear of foreigners or immigrants to avoid the criticisms of plutocratic unfettered or mostly unfettered capitalism; and imagines a great history (often that never happened or is in rose colored glasses) that was lost and must be rebuilt:
NAZI Germany hailed the Teutonic Knights and the King Barbarosa leading to the enlightenment period with Prussian King Fredrick "the great". Italy with Mussolini brought up the massive empire that was Ancient Rome.
The appeal was to toward a true Italian/Roman or true German, and all others who didn't fit in their "true" ethnic ideology was a foreigner bent on everyone's destruction or at least misery; they feign socialism in this respect. Really, it's socialism for the rich, pacifiers for the few who fit a particular ethnic and national ideology, and rugged go fuck yourself individualism for everyone else.
Comparing fascism to other governmental and economical modes; it's basically a neo monarchical nobility mercantilism.
Whether a constitutional monarchy with a house of lords and house of commons or an absolute monarchy with its contingency of the nobility and clergy were in bed with the richest merchant class who may not yet have nobility titles bestowed upon them.
In all cases, government becomes owned and operated by the business interest, usually at the behest of a figure head like a King/Queen or politician who uses divided and conquer strategy to unify a base of supporters against a scapegoated other.
In all intense in purposes, in the US Trump fits this fascist definition. Plutocrats usually go with fascism as a last resort as this does put tremendous power into a nut jobs hand. But fearing general strikes or various other strikes, riots, rebellion, adding social policies that ensure workers have bargaining or any bargaining power at all; they'll fall in line behind a thug. It's easier with mercantilism as it was quoted with theocracy of an anointed monarch and in turn his anointment of the nobility; it's mixed with magic and tradition; and often uses less of the xenophobia: instead of kick them out or genocide it will just explain these others need to be educated and cultured appropriately and learn to know their place.
Either forms are at odds with a constitutional democracy; and any democratic socialism; which in my interpretation is a government that has a constitution that provides protection to debate, minority descent, peaceful protest, right to speedy trial, right to trial by jury, right to be provided a well qualified attorney, right to vote for representatives, ratification of laws and levies, etc.
And an economic aspiration that the workplace to becomes a constitutional democracy in that all workers have democratic voice into the operations of the company and ability to collectively bargain. I particularly think Wolffe's co-op concept is really the ultimate goal to experiment and strive forward; the issue always is capital formation; where does such an entity get the money to start and run operations? This is where co-op banks and a Co-Op Reserve Banking system could assist completely undermining any need for an aristocracy in the first place.
Hence why such plutocrats would side with the evils of a fascist. These plutocrats dynasties depend on never opening such a door. Or they have no more point as in the case of most countries who no longer have nobility nor monarchies, and some that do are more figure head and tourist attractions than any real power of the government.
They don't want to be a museum piece... as they know they wouldn't be the museum piece held in fond old tradition to live their lives in luxury traveling from an unknown quantities of estates and living large; they know what would be in such a museum wouldn't be them, but some of their ridiculous estates; just as old mansions in the UK by nobility are now bed and breakfast inns and great palaces like Versailles or St Petersburg Russia's Winter Palace are tourist attractions devoid of their aristocratic kings and queens. They know they too would be devoid of those possessions.... of course unless they wanted to work for their livelihood in running them as hotels and museums. But in general, that's an insult to them, as such work is very well beneath them.
You see, they make their money work for them so they don't have to.
And so can you although how statistically unlikely that may be.
It's their replacement or update to the montra of the divine right to rule.
It's their statement of entitlement, and they don't take it laying down.
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Have a coworker who was a Serbian refugee, he owns a house in Serbia today, his parents live there. He's going to retire in a few years and move there to take care of them.
He said that evictions in Serbia are rare, and that one a tenant lives in a place for so many years they cannot be evicted, but eventually enter into a buy to own contract with the landlord. The landlord eventually receives their investment plus return and has to either build new properties or buy others to do the same again over a period of 20 to 30 years.
Housing there is very affordable both just to buy, but even to rent; despite the world wide stupidity allowing international cartel aka plutocrats to buy up properties as a store of wealth like their gold ingots or something. Empty, and leaving what's available to buy or rent prices going up. And of course the insidious trusts called Real-estate investment trusts aka REITs which get lots of various plutocrats as well as 401K and roth IRA and other private small time retail investment accounts to buy these things, pushing cash into these REITs, these REITs based on their prospectus cannot keep so much in cash, they must use that cash from investors pouring in to buy real-estate, and the agents of the REIT don't care about how much they're over paying or over bidding for properties, they just need to burn that money quickly so they're within their prospectus. And these turd baskets literally go into an area and offer 10% to 25% above asking price just to quickly close a sale. Bidding up property prices among everyone else. Many of these REITs don't just turn and burn property either, they rent them. And doing so they hire some large oligopoly property management company that charges the REIT fees and the tenant fees, they do nothing on the property but charge fee after fee, fee to pay a fee to pay rent has a fee. Absentee landlords pumping up home and rental prices.
These things ought be illegal. Any new development firm that wishes to have rentals should be required to build 10 units to every 1 existing unit; whether that be a single or multi-dwelling unit; whether it is to be sold or rented.
Oh and these REITs are going bust. Our fucking Fed Reserve is bailing their junk bonds and ETFs and Indexes; check it out the excel spread sheets Aug, July, June, etc:
Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility
August 10, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
August 3, 2020 PDF
July 10, 2020** PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
June 28, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
May 29, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
April 29, 2020 PDF
March 30, 2020 PDF
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/reports-to-congress-in-response-to-covid-19.htm
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His idea of a vacuum tube train just revealed to me he's not only a con artist, but he's an idiot who hasn't the grasp of basic physics.
He's a millionaire, with a "hundie" who now became a billionaire by charging us tax payers for reused Russian rockets, of which many have blown up.
Diverting funds from reliable less risky rockets that were assembled under multiple contractors and direct operated government manufacturers.
He's a bit of a con jobber. I don't think purposefully. Just another rich fuck (his fortune from bone head invention of pay pale), suddenly thinks he's Gandalf of physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Massive amounts of economic power makes people rather delusional.
Beyond his delusional powers of grandeur he's in reality more of an oaf that got lucky in a business that caters to easier funds transfer than VISA, Master Card, etc. which are still a oligopoly.
I like that he tries to get people excited about thinking about advance technologies. But many of his ideas are in actuality bad considering the alternatives. He's also causing an actual slow down in large advance technological research and implementation, as all the very large items required huge resource requirements (money) to develop. He's convincing people that somehow business can advance technology better when they tend to actually harbor old technology until it is exhausted as it would effect their current apple carts to make their stuff obsolete. So fewer collective (tax revenue) will go to science causing a stunt, a slow down at least, in advancement of technology.
Advancement in transportation, information, and food development has largely come from government operation and sponsoring as well as contracting.
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Since then, gift cards have huge restrictions... like not being able to get money orders or any cash equivs.
So that makes it a complete cock blocker.
Try it.
I have LOL! You have to now spend it on merchandise... oh think about returning it and getting a refund... in cash...
That doesn't work either. Payment will show it was from a gift card visa or whatever, and that refund must either be placed back on that card, or a new gift card given, that only merchandise or equiv in purchasing power is refunded; no cash or equiv.
That, I accidentally discovered, when paying for something partially with gift cards and my normal card for the remaining balance. I took something back, she said oh, I see you paid with debit and two other gift cards, we can refund you up to the dollar amount you paid on the debit card, but the remainder we would need to issue you another gift card for the remaining balance... I was just wanting an exchange anyway, not a refund, just got the unlucky defective vacuum cleaner out of the box. The replacement still works to this day no problems.
But yeah... he ruined it for us all... he could have quietly told us about it in reddit board LOL!
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I became a single payer system when I realized at age 10 that it wasn't already in the US. And realized why our system is so fucked up compared to Germany. Even Canada has better clinics and hospitals, and is much cheaper.
We pay up more than double just for coverage which in other countries is just tax that's half our premium costs often even less, and no deductibles nor copays. And the services like in Japan are excellent.
A Japanese friend broke his wrist while visiting here, and he laughed about how antiquated our clinics, that we had a 1950's technology and old x-ray machine, while their clinics have ultra sound, MRI, and even CAT scans in their clinics. And when he went back, he had to have is wrist re-broken and recast because it was set wrong here in the states.
I continue to get my Rx from Germany; its not an extreme necessity Rx cold sore outbreaks, but only thing that helps. I get two versions of the antiviral same price to 1 filling of 20 pills in the US $160, I get 300 pills mix of 2 versions for the same price a little over 1 year supply; and I get choice, 2 types; one is better if I catch the symptoms early, and the other is better if catch the symptoms late. Here, I get one or the other at any given time. And max filling is 20 pills which may treat 2 outbreaks before having to refill.
If I had to get other Rx I would get it from Germany or elsewhere.
US is becoming among the worst places to live in.
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teehee1604 The rightwinger propaganda have firmly placed their thumbs up so many of our fellow citizen's asses.
Last 40 years right wing propaganda has turned people greedy among themselves in the following subjects:
1) Anti-universal healthcare program.
2) Anti-economist of scale and essential service and monopoly busting in favor of privatizing everything including prisons.
3) Anti-unions where labor actually had more democratic role in the businesses, in favor of pure despotism and resulting in lower wages fewer benefits including pensions going bye bye.
4) Favoring 401K over 5 year vesting pensions.
5) Allowing congress and president (both parties are guilty of this) enacting trade agreements that completely void American legal oversight in NAFTA and CAFTA. And adopting such poor trade policies in which only favor plutocrats and the top 10%, but completely screw everyone else in all countries involved.
6) Failure to provide research and development to get off fossil fuels in projects like fusion such as the ITER international program. But also could do other various energy building programs concerning solar, wind, LFTR fission, etc.
7) Failure to keep up with infrastructure around the country including water lines, roads, and ports, as well as not installing rail systems in towns and cities around the country; especially failure to not have such long distant rail systems installed. Instead, we're stuck in 1970-80's infrastructure that's not even in good condition anymore. We can't even maintain the infrastructure we do have, let alone expand and enhance the infrastructure.
Some how the right wingers have played to the greediness and stupidity (ignorance) of our citizens. I really hope this new generation that I'm with will steer us away from this backwater greedy plutocratic developing situation. We can still be a great country. We don't need to be greedy pigs fighting among ourselves. But somehow right wingers have convinced at least a plurality, and others who don't vote, they've just made them apathetic.
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In grade school learning the exponential compound formula, first thing we learned was population growth... first thing we learn is the offsetting death and food population.
Got to the exponential compounding of interest, well you'll retire and die.
But what about banking corporations and other corporations that can exist many times the lifespan?
That exponential concept of dividends and interest... All other sciences you do find exponential, and you are always to engineer a buffer otherwise you destroy your engine, wing design, structure stability, chemical stability, etc.
Capitalism doesn't have a buffer, it literally does what nature does without buffers when it has exponential components: it oscillates its self to pieces; tears itself apart. Left with a system that has buffers against exponential components.
Our system is oscillating itself to pieces.
The oscillation in the 1800's were very severe, that century in the US half of all the years was in a panic, long depression, depression, recession, etc.
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Or Germany, Norway, Japan, Mexico, France, Italy, UK, Australia, Canada, even the fucking US of A!
Every fucking country practices levels of socialism.
Venezuela as an aristocratic fascist racist oligarchy pissed to the bone since literacy rates increased thus voting participation that means they'll never have democratic governmental power again. They still have businesses there, oligopolies; but they also have been pandering the EU to the US to any nation that will go for a coupe with promises of sweet sweet oil.... well dirty heavy oil in the case of Venezuela.
What's currently destroying that country is both the fall in oil prices, even Brazil and Argentina... fuck the entire S. America has shit itself as commodity prices went south.
Then add the fact US has placed sanctions on the nation.
Sanctions can royally fuck up most nations. Particularly if it has the clout of a bully super power.
Funny to pick Venezuela, they never went that far socialism as some nations.
Oh no! They nationalized their oil! So does Norway, Sweden, Mexico, etc.
Many nations nationalize certain minerals because they're technically owned by the nation as a whole.
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It's sad because you listen to libertarians and conservatives and even rewatch (despite it being obviously wrong thus painful) to Milton Friedman even Ayn Rand... I try to understand how they can take such at least obvious to me, wrong stances on things. For a short period of time ( specifically 2004-2006), I thought I just didn't understand that I was missing something. I was really hoping I had been wrong about their ideas of economics... unfortunately I was correct about the vicious unstable system they were describing.
You have to listen to both sides, because only thing that matters is what actually works, reality.
They're declaration of not debating those who don't agree with them demonstrate that they're not honest about finding what actually works, they're demagogues, only working to promote their interest or others and getting short term rewards for it. They have nothing to say, but to lie to people to get them to do things against their own interest. They're dangerous to themselves in the long run, and to everyone in all short, mid, and long run.
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Unless you're loaded with lots of liquid wealth: CD's, properties that would at least sell for something and you wouldn't mind at a big loss, and stocks you don't mind dumping at a loss and still end up with a few million in cash at least, you'd be fine for the rest of your life.
IT's 90% of us who don't have real liquid wealth. US median individual yearly income 2019 was 40,000... 40 years of work means $1.6 million lifetime gross income.
And that's the rosy way of looking at it, as most people don't start their working life making the median income, but spend at least 10 years making well below it. And to make up ground must spend half or at least ten years making well above it to average the median life time income.
In other words, most individuals make well below their lifetime gross income.
And those who reach the 20% to 15% top income brackets, often just make about $400K to $600K more to reach about $2 million.
In other words, people are rich if they have access millions of cash or equivalence. For every $1.6 million you have that many times the median lifetime gross income. The very top 5% to 0.1% have thousands of times to even a million times the lifetime income of the median income worker (half the population).
It's a way of understanding the absurd paychecks of certain individuals in society... when they're making excessive of $1.6 million they're literally making lifetimes of income.
I personally think any income so high should be stated in such terms...
Fancy Pants Joe of You Don't Wanna Know What We Do with Your Money Bank makes 50 times the median lifetime income every year. Or $80 million dollars a year.
This Doctor Evil look alike CEO of the Unspeakable Corporation has net worth of 62,500 lifetimes of individual median income earner or $100 billion dollars.
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Our company insurance is a joke that we're the brunt. You should see the faces on people when I mention what Germany's insurance covers: all medical clinic and hospital, surgeries, dermatology, including dental, orthodontist, vision, 6 weeks of 100% paid sick days, 70% income on long term disability, Rx covered with max co pays at 2% and 1% for those with chronic conditions max yearly copay; copays range from 4 euros to 6 euros per doctor visit, Rx filling, hospital day stay, etc. Tax is 7.3% matching contribution 7.3% from employer. And max yearly premium tax at $4,800 Euros which happens after about 50K Euros a year salary/wage.
Canada's is cheaper than Germany's and ours, but covers only hospital and bodily clinic and Rx inside the hospital or clinic, not at a pharmacy and no dentistry at 5.3% tax with a annual max tax premium $2,800 Canadian dollars which is income after $52K Canadian stops being taxed.
UK covers all medical like Germany, but most of the Kingdoms like Scotland, Whales, Ireland there are no co-pays for any of it. It starts at at 0% for the first bracket, then middle bracket 12% then goes down to 2%.
All three cover any dependents (children) with the same price, there is no increase for "family" and premium goes up per kid you have to cover as it does here. The reverse happens instead in many instances the tax and copays are reduced if you're caring for someone chronically sick, disabled, affirmed, etc. and you get tax credits for daycare for your kids.
What we have in our country is gimmick after gimmick.
1) Our insurance system never wants to payout. Even those employer created insurance pools really don't want to payout because then their $6,500 for the high deductible really shitty plans or the more typical $9,000 for the PPO medical plans employer contributions go even higher.
2) Private clinics that want to bilk insurance for as much as possible adding the most ridiculous items at several times the actual price particularly at hospitals. Ambulance fees are so insane, most always opt not to take it if one shows up, but have someone drive them. All universal healthcare nations, the cost less than the price of a taxi, or not price at all. In fact, thinking about a price for an ambulance would be us thinking about having to pay for library memberships, fire department calls, or police calls: ITS A FUCKING EMERGENCY.
3) Big pharma rakes in ridiculous sums as it can in such as sector because people will pay any price not to die or be in misery so no matter the amount of suppliers price doesn't reduce: inelastic demand. Hence why all those other nations negotiate the price tag. Our country even with our elderly and affirmed medicare/medicaid program leaves negotiation to private insurance regionally. Absurd as putting bank robbers in charge of guarding banks.
4) if you're sick for long period of time even with FMLA after 12 weeks (4 months) your employer can fire you, then you pay employers portion under COBRA (aptly named) which eats up much of your short term or long term disability which is usually 55% and often require a buy up premium just to get 66% of income. So it's an insufficient coverage.
Really the entire insurance shtick, is more of an insurance for various clinics and hospitals will at least recover some revenue should something catastrophic happen. It really just protects clinics and suppliers. Hence why medical bankruptcies for families are still with mostly people that have so called insurance.
Our medical system is a complete fraud. And people are well aware of it. We travel more than any time in history, we're more connected with the internet.
We know what's up.
The days of establishment spreading false rumors (propaganda) pissing on our legs calling it rain is over.
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+Chase Gallagher When I was a child, it blew my mind that hospitals, clinics, or any other medical service or product providers were ran like any ordinary business as well. I had always thought it was like most roads, utilities, fire departments, public K-12 education, etc. paid via taxes.
But when I went into the doctor's office once as a kid, my dad was upset because I decided to opt out of getting a wart taken off, the entire reason why we went in the first place, that it was a waste of money to even go in. Fortunately, my body became immune to the wart virus and the warts vanished within just a few months after seeing the doctor.
My dad and mom both yelled at me for wasting a $100 office visit. That was the first time I understood that going to the doctor or doing anything doctor-wise was for profit business and it was weird. This is in the mid 90's, I had played sim city and those games the hospitals were like schools, police, fire, etc. they were city ran and paid for by taxes since they inelastic essential services requiring huge economies of scale in order to be efficient providing a lower per person pricing.
Anyway, it has always baffled me that we have an old economic structure that reminds me of the days of snake oil salesman, and quack doctors you had to pay substantial sums of money usually for bogus ineffective treatment. I thought, wow we're idiotic country. Now that I'm older... I still think the same.
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Even tens to hundred billion dollar players can screw the market.
What we saw both 2020 (by Softbank) but in 2021 we still don't know which one or many were doing this, but they were following and often fading retail traders.
Typical big money when they're buying or selling... they front run their sells or purchases of the underlying by purchasing options to the direction they think their selling or buying will cause the market price of the underlying.
1) If about to sell a position out or get rid of large amount, they first buy up a bunch of puts... this helps take advantage of the cratering prices they will cause in the underlying making money on the premium of the puts and selling those.
2) If about to buy a position up or increase it, they first buy lots of call contracts... again to take advantage of the pump.
A phenomena that often happens when huge volume of puts or calls happen are the market makers who sell these contracts naked, have to hedge.
Back to the 2020 and 2021 pump and dumps.
So what was happening to small caps, to meme stocks, to latter portion of 2021 the big cap stocks, was buying same week expiration call contracts to pump the price of the stock.
What they would do buy millions of dollars of call contracts slightly out of the money, retail already playing along as they have been yolloing calls on AAPL, and other stocks.
This sudden increase in call contracts bought causes market makers to have short term open interest that has a gamma influx, market makers have to buy underlying to cover some of their new purchases that are about to expire that Friday for potential delivery aka gamma squeeze... to ensure price doesn't retrace, often the big money would buy the underlying shortly after placing all the same week call options. Market makers forced to cover, cause a gamma squeeze... and the big money is looking to only have these options open for the day or two... once in the money or close to the money at least the premium has pumped, the big money dumps their call options they bought for huge profits 100% to 400% with no interest in keeping them open to exercise the options for ownership.
In fact, when they're done pumping using this method, they'll often swap in to buying puts... often that Thursday, especially if they had to buy large shares to help support and even pump the price to trigger the gamma squeeze (market maker of options forced to buy to cover their naked call options).
So now, the big money is holding the bag, they want to sell it all... they buy puts usually the day before. Next day, they start to trickle in selling, then about an hour or so in, they dump the shares on ask... making probably a loss... but their puts will more than provide the profit margins to make out like bandits.
OPAD meme stock watched that one, they pumped and dumped exactly in this manner.
TSLA was an interesting one... they actually spent $1 to $4 million every week to place a put wall in place. Nobody in their right mind would short like this. Particularly not same week expiration contracts... not enough time to get in the money... too obvious for others to take the opposite trade... and this also causes a put wall... where market makers will actively buy the stock not just to cover, but to reduce the chance of the puts being in the money and having to buy the shares of all those put contracts. Particularly as also lots of same week call contracts were being bought and market makers were needing to cover for those anyway.
Just shy of $1,100 price TSLA first achieved, the put wall buyer stopped buying these puts. It ended.
Gamma squeezed to $1,200 then dumped fairly hard. Up and down.
Big money for holiday season that was doing all this chicanery seemed to have gone on vacation in to January.
Retail traders have also stopped buying that many options... probably current pullback rekt too many and their bust now. Lots holding stock are upside down significantly on their 2020 hype stocks and now meme stocks.
So yeah, these super big money like Black Rock... their games are probably more insane.
Almost guarantees winning positions.... almost. And most of the time. They have the ability to hedge and move markets one way or the other.
With that options manipulation there is one key problem that makes it not always work.
1) You need constant fomo into buying the underlying (by retail or other traders) to support the price at least keep it form dipping.
2) You can only pump the chicken a few times over a course of a month as you increase implied volatility of the call options ( or puts of you're looking to do the opposite reveres gamma squeeze) the premium is so expensive that change in price won't give you much profits or any. So you can only do it once or twice or at most 5 times.
More frequently that you do it, and the higher you pump it the less you can make from doing it and riskier another big player or set of big players counter what you're doing rather than helping.
So there are limitations to these manipulative events.
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Economics, worse at prediction than even meteorology.... at least in meteorology the closer the week forecast the more accurate they become.
As I get older I'm considering economics as more of a dogma religious like invention trying to pretend it's a philosophical science.
Seriously, it has to dabble into the physical science such as psychology and engineering and technology without even knowing the fundamental basics of these things.
Didn't help when the this particular guy goes off into Star Trek fantasy and stating that we live in a mild version of that fantasy.
Ignoring that scarcity still exists, even in the US, and more pronounced with housing shortages (literal working poor living in vehicles or tents), healthcare that most Americans forego because of lack of a universal healthcare system, unfilled science and engineering jobs because those very jobs are actually not as stable as they were 40 years ago... you can just use the plantation economy to outsource that to some other country who has state funded free or reduced tuition universities.
And why are labor/consumers reaching to debt?
Oh, that's right, wages are flat if not fallen, and cost of living is beyond inflation with rents, insurance, and other actual basic needs have increased, so to get by, here comes the debt. The median income individual income ranges per state from $36K to $42K 2017-2019.
Home prices and rental prices in most areas have risen 4 times than nominal wages of growth. Some ares it's much higher than that.
And let's not forget the ultimate bubble maker, all that income sitting with a small minority want to make that money produce a return... investment bubble with no real underlying demand... magnifying this with investor debt. And often this may make more supply of something, or simply buy up existing supply causing prices to rapidly inflate beyond median incomes or even average incomes. Then the asset prices bust and the investment money runs and hides, massive layoffs and bankruptcies.
Let's forget about that.
Let's just talk about consumer/worker debt. And it's because we live in a pseudo scarcity free world right?
We should just appreciate what we have compared to people 300 years ago. Ignore the fact technological advances sort of helped do this.
Next time someone needs me find an alternative testing method and chemical reagents that are hopefully cheaper and less toxic to perform for quality analytic tests on some products; I'll tell them:
NO! You just need to appreciate what I've done to this point, and the tests that are being conducted today. We live in an age of pseudo non-scarcity; just borrow some money and buy a Lamborghini and be happy until you go bankrupt.
Oh, don't worry, you'll be able to find some cheap food place to feed your face, you won't die.
By the way, did you know we don't get pandemics anymore nor do we have famine... ignore Sudan and Yemen and Libya and Somalia, and the ever decreasing crop yield globally that's extending further latitudes N and S of the equator.
I love talking like I know something and am about to reveal something accurately and insightful, but won't because I'm an economist who can't predict shit.
But man! Do I like to pretend I can, and everyone loves me whispering those sweet nothings into their ears.
Come with me, we can pretend together.
Just remember, everything I say you should probably do the opposite or just ignore completely and figure it out on your own as your guess is probably better than my elaborated bullshit. As I am an economist.
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In fact, he should have busted into Buttgiggles' cheese ball victory stink, and kept interrupting him Will Ferrell style: "NO! No! I'm the victor! I'm the victor here tonight, I won, not you! I won Iowa, and we are on the New Mexico... we're gonna skip ahead and do California too cuz we're on fire! ON FIRE!" And every time Buttgiggles stunk his cheese opening his mouth, this crackpot would spout "My victory! Not yours, mine!" "You mean, my victory of the Iowans, they're all mine... just look at them, all those goggling eyes are mine, all mine."
He probably bring his support up from 0.000000000000000000000001% to 0.0000000000001%... maybe he'll even get support from himself!!!
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Those people are not affordable to society while the rest of us suffer $50K or less year. Same as the royal families of UK with the Downton Abbey, the French, Italian, Austrian, German, and Russian bourgeois who essentially commanded most of the countries wealth and its income while everyone sucked eggs, some countries more severe than others.
And the bourgeois had in many cases had their heads fall in a basket, or simply shot to death.
It's unstable. Workers make only 11% of profits. While these fuckers suck up 89%. Literally everyone could be paid double, and they still would have 78% of the income from the wealth.
But this entire system is self destructive. Underlying demand of the peon class is diminishing, and so does their wealth gravy train. Right now its just wealthy borrowing and throwing money at investments piling on, last one holding the bag gets fucked, and consolidated until there isn't an economy anymore.
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The most traveled generation, I have been throughout Europe, Japan, etc. I have used their pharmacies and clinics during my visit, even went to a hospital just to see what they were like. They're better. And cheaper.
I have several friends from Japan various places in Europe including the UK, Germany, Austria, etc.
One would think having experienced it first hand, you couldn't pull the wool over peoples' eyes and make up bullshit in opposition of something political like low to no tuition for universities and universal healthcare.
But I figure the people in the south aren't among the most traveled since they're extremely poor. It sucks. They have them locked into a cycle of poverty. And that's what they want to do with the entire US.
Keep'em dumb, poor, and in fear: They won't travel to experience reality rather they'll hunker down with their fellow poor boob who is also getting ripped off, they can't think past the end of their nose in ways to better themselves, and they're too busy being poor (working several shitty jobs with cheap thrills of smoking and drinking since other healthier thrills are too expensive).
All leads to a vicious cycle of poverty.
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Old Wisdom:
The earth's core is heated by radioactive isotopes that decay over time, releasing energy as it decays into other isotopes some that are stable and some unstable isotopes that have lower energy to release; the earth is cooling over time.
The sun as present the sun is in a cooling period.
All three Milankovitch cycle periods Axial tilt (obliquity) is in a cooling trend that will last until year 11,800 CE.
Axial precession cycle of 26,000 years is in a 13,000 year cooling trend.
The orbit over the next 100,000 years is becoming less eccentric, more circular, circular eccentric orbits have a cooling trend.
Essentially, the next 50,000 years all things being equal, we should have glaciation begin again.
All factors, we should be cooling in a very slow fashion. Instead, overall temperatures are increasing and at a rate that is very fast. Too fast for many life forms to adapt, and they'll go extinct. And likely too fast for most humans to survive as weather patterns cause drought in some areas, and massive flooding in others leading to crop failures, economic disaster, and famine. Already happening in Syria through the Middle East, and North Africa; hence so much turmoil in that area is largely brought on by massive crop failures.
The speed in which the climates change mean abandoning coastal cities as well causing massive migration of people at the same time of food shortages.
We should be in a very slow cooling phase. But we're not. And the apparent factor is the increased greenhouse gasses especially the over 400 ppm CO2 levels which haven't been that high since 2 million years ago. Such a sudden increase will cause a change in climate that is not in hundreds of thousands of years, but in decades. And that's where the problem becomes. It's human contributed, and it's that increase rate of change that is the issue.
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@heels4lifx There was a choice... it was to do Iceland and simply take it over. Fire all the executives and tops... and prosecute them for various misconduct both civil via SEC and criminal via DOJ.
And government take over, would allow to readjust mark to mark all bank debts on these insolvent banks. Push prices to the deleveraged stupidity rates... readjust interest rates... this would have assisted all borrowers to keep them in their homes and buildings... same with developers to keep supply of housing increasing for the population growth requiring persistent new housing supply.
Instead, the banking cartel Fed Reserve bailed out the banks via monetizing all that debt, causing massive inflation on costs despite the big jobless layoffs... and many lost homes and crushed necessary suppliers like developers thus causing a huge imbalance on needed housing against a population that isn't decreasing, but increasing... only giving way to another pump and dump opportunity... at no point since 1980 has new constructions for both multi and sing dwelling housing topped 24 new constructions per 1,000 households. In the 60's and 70's new constructions per 1,000 households were as high as in the 30ish new constructions.
2004 it topped out at just 18 new constructions per 1,000 households... and dipped as low as 9 new constructions per 1,000 households after 2010.
This oscillation is not good for economic well being of anybody.
Monetary policy should simply be utilized to keep inflation and deflation at 0%. And stimulus to keep employment low, only legislature can determine needs to invest... housing, transportation, healthcare, fire service, infrastructure including utilities, energy, transportation which include roads, rail, airports, mass transit both local, regional, and continental mass transit, and food.
Stimulant without a plan just gives the con artists and morons and fuck heads to swindle the system blind, and when the wrought of dominos or stacked, they're out. But everyone else in the civilization is super screwed.
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I keep warning people when I hear them say just dollar cost average into the stocks, it'll come back at some point always does.
I show them Japan's NIKKE.
Oh, that can't happen here.
Over the last decade I show them the CAC and FTSE and some other exchanges.
Oh, that can't happen here.
I explain Japan is a decade and a half ahead of us in all aspects of what we've already done:
1) Deregulation of banking sector (removal of Glass Steagal, allowing easy company stock buy backs).
2) Retail trading frenzy 1.0 in the 90's and 2.0 now, etc.
3) Near 0% to 0% interest rates.
4) Borrowing frenzy fueling asset prices covering up lousy real wage increases if any even in nominal terms.
Japan.
They're the looking class into our immediate future. Particularly what it looks like in stocks and real-estate.
Yet we have hardly the social safety net that Japan has:
1) we lack universal healthcare
2) we lack labor rules that ensure solidarity in employment wages and benefits.
3) We lack a housing authority and planning system that hasn't even coped with the last real-estate bubble in prices resulting in even more shortages of housing and even higher housing prices that were already un-affordable then and even more so now, and this time rents are well beyond affordable; many retirees and working people living in tents and RVs already; this only gets worse.
4) political instability fueled by political propaganda derision cultivating a lunatic fringe that has adopted beliefs that are completely factually wrong have become mainstream accepted as if fact.
Essentially, you have potential for worse than a lost generation.
You have collapsed super power similar to the scale of USSR, Russia in specific, even similar to dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Either economic collapse or complete governmental collapses neither is good for us Americans.
We're very much fucked in the pants unless we adapt some social policies, regulate the financial system, prop up our labor and industries, and hold to account would be robber barons trying to pull a fast one... the feigning argument that we can't regulate because the rich will always find a way out of such regulation is bogus... so we capitulate and aqueous? Do we do this for people who murder, rape, steal, endanger, kidnap, etc.?
Anyway we have some serious inflection points, our nation either changes to address them, or it looks bleak for us all.
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@RonaldAndrew Yeah, right.
Television/video screens, audio, telephone, computing, electronic mechanics, flying machines, etc. would have been completely out of his league of even thinking about. Even in the 1800's, people would speculate on the future of having large hot air balloons transporting people... not even airships/blimps.
He wouldn't call us idiots... if anything he would think we were magicians or possibly demons or angels with our far seer vision things and far hearer things. The horseless carriage... I don't think so.
Essentially all people literate, even of those who have conditions that make reading very difficult can in fact still read, blind with their own alphabet of braille and dyslexic with techniques that enables them to read albeit slowly as well as audio books that assist them all.
I think even Leonardo da Vinci would be happy with our progress and advancements.
Of course, they probably wouldn't want us to stop, and would be equally concerned by various other challenges that face us.
I don't think they would instantly call the majority of us idiots; at least not in comparison to the people of his day.
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Hopefully, historians will explain the bubble of everything.
This is why tinderbox debt ridden bubble economies are disaster waiting to happen.
And a service economy or any single emphasis economy adds to the tinderbox. A decent economy is a diverse one: industrial raw goods, manufacturing, service, office, R&D, etc. We're a large enough geography and people.
Anything that disrupts things can set it off, if not the insolvency of the debt itself.
After existing albeit as a child during the savings and loan crisis, but through the tech bubble 1.0 then financial bubble, and now this one which is a combination of financial bubble this time including mortgages, credit cards, but this time add vehicle debt, student loan debt, normal business amortized debt, business credit default swap debts, margin stock market debt, and public debt (public debt is becoming harsh even at extremely low interest, our annual payment to bond holders is $404 billion a year... it's over half our current $700 billion DOD ridiculous spending.
This is where we effectively said to the rich and their pockets aka corporations:
We won't tax you. Instead we will ask for a voluntary loan via the bonds, you will get your principle back with interest, safe place to put it because our very constitution states all public debts must be paid: the money whether generated from tax revenue or not and just printed will be supplied to meet that debt.
And the rich for he last decade have held at least 1/3 in bonds. Often as much as a half of their holdings in government bonds; it can't lose face value and will always give more than face value on maturity. And it is somewhat liquid as you can sell some in the bond market, often above par making a profit even before maturity of the bonds.
Anyway, this is the danger of having a bubble double trouble economy. Financializing itself into a quagmire.
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I actually did a study on effective taxes of Sweden, Germany, Canada, France, and Austria basing it on taxable income (after deductions) of an individual non-married no kids $50K, based it on Idaho resident as I am. We pay more in taxes than all those countries plus we pay a substantial amount on medical premiums even if employed and co-payments.
We're really screwed on our taxes here.
The funny thing on incomes individuals above $125K individual and $175K married, then your taxes are lower in the US than most of these countries.
Their deductions are much more generous, so to reach those taxable levels you likely have to be making significantly more gross pay than that than in the US. But eventually the richer do get a slightly higher effective total tax rate.
For instance Germany's child deduction is EUR 3,714 if you elect to take for the first and second child € 184, for the third child € 190, for every other child € 215 a month. Or you don't elect the monthly payments, then you can deduct €7,428 or in US dollars $4,570.52 taking the monthly payment, or $9,142.01 2017 per child deduction.
In the US each dependent is $4,050 . Substantially less either way compared to Germany's.
Children up to age 14 an additional deduction of 2/3 of necessary costs of child care
Maximum of a yearly amount of € 4,000 per child or $4,922.12.
We don't have that deduction in the US.
When you add medical insurance premiums such as an employer plan to their medical deduction, their effective taxes are way lower on those incomes of $125K individual and $175K joint taxable income earners.
I point out Germany because of all the other countries, it was closest in effective taxes on individuals of taxable income of $50K, and it was still slightly lower.
Seriously, add up all of our state income tax (if applicable), Federal income tax, payroll, and you can budget a food cost for any applicable sales tax, as Euro members collect taxes about as much via their version of sale tax (VAT tax). And since they all have universal health insurance, special pension programs, etc. It comes out we pay more effective taxes and especially more withdrawal toward a 401K match and medical insurance, than they.
Really, we're getting screwed hardcore.
I did not figure for property taxes when doing the research.
Its no wonder many other 1st world nations look at us as they also look at some other idiot nations. We're a bunch of idiot rubes the way we handle our economy and finances.
https://home.kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights/2011/12/germany-income-tax.html
http://www.scheller-international.com/child-benefits-in-germany/
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@000dixon Exactly.
They called themselves princeps civitatis which literally means principle/main citizen ... kind of like a permanent consul with permanent emergency powers as dictator, dictator having the concept that the power came from the Senate and Tribune and military and thus could be deposed unlike a king or emperor (king of kings).
And is related to the princeps senatus firstly created under Octavian, first senator.
It's why various families and followers with the newly formed Caesars allowed and maintained religious mix often holding some high priesthood as did Octavian with his title as pontifex maximus. It was to legitimize their authority not just by the votes of the Senate, but also from divine blessings.
The average Roman would still vote local elections, in the provinces, and in Rome for various senators and Tribune members as well as other magistrate offices. And in theory to any Roman general population, they would explain that even the Princeps civitatis (first citizen) what we call the emperors today, could be deposed if they govern poorly... as they were, but not usually by open public elections, but a mix of military and plutocrat dealings both in the Tribune and particularly in the Senate. And often resulted in civil war if the Princeps civitatis had strong military, plutocratic, or tribune affection.
This faded after 300 CE period to a more monarchical based ruling even to the general public as the religion of Christianity is a very patriarchal theology based on kingship aka a monarchy. For this and variety of other reasons, what was left of the Roman Empire east and west shifted to a Empire/kingdoms monarchies into the dark ages and beyond.
Up until 300 CE, an average Roman citizen in a Roman Governed province would consider their government a freedom loving republic where no man has absolute power.
Not even their pious Princeps civitatis... if they govern poorly, lose their piety or otherwise lose their favor with the gods, they can be canned by at least their representatives in the Senate and Tribune or Mars and other deities will see to it the militari virtute sanctæ (their holy mighty/virtuous military) would rescue them from tyrannical and/or deity cursed princeps civitatis or from any other person's governorship.
Exceptions were made for provinces with puppet kings and queens. And those provincial nations would be cited by fully or partially Roman governed provinces as inferior because they're not as free.
Similar to the USA's two party duopoly that displays pretense at an opposition party. When in reality the two parties govern more or less the same particularly on economic issues. And regardless of party, usually any major political candidate depends heavily on the plutocratic support of the district of the candidate. The influence over government is heavily plutocratic, with a Princeton study revealing the mass of people have virtually no influence over policy... other than the usual ruling classes need to accommodate a minimal pacification necessary to avoid a national general strike, or rioting hence the heavy subsidies on foods, energy (gasoline), and a few other basic necessary services.
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Ancient Greek, Ancient Rome, and Europe in the middle ages filled themselves with childishness of various entertainment to the point of harm too, and the aristocracies/rulers and theocracies used it to control the masses... theater and track games, chariot races and gladiator fights, jousting, fencing, sword, and archery matches.
Today we include the ball sports, concerts, movies, and video games.
When entertainment becomes too extreme holding too much attention and taking more time than other things in life happiness and means of fulfillment we're in trouble.
My experience thus far in my mid 30's, having traveled on business around the US including several southern states, western states, mid-west, and eastern states as well as abroad in Europe... people in general are dumb. We're not born with brilliance in general. Some are naturally curious... but most just think they are, but aren't. So in short, people are inherently stupid, and never go beyond trying to fill their stupidity with non-stupid.... instead often they do the opposite... digging that hole of stupidity deeper instead.
Just look at some of the woowoo youtube channels and flat or young earth or other such channels. Ideas that evidence already exists, and methods to examine evidence that exist that they apparently haven't the time. And critical thought and understanding how to be skeptical appears to not exist with a large number of people... its usually a minority, but a large minority... about 37% to 40%.
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@juniorgod321 Nobody wants communism particular the type USSR had nor the the state capitalism China has who label their party "communism".
We want a social democrat economic system, and one that uses a co-op enterprise model in which all workers have a vote on the board and as to all aspects of the business. Elected by all in the company: the CEO and other executives and managers come up with various business plans, and the workers vote on them, workers petition for other ideas in capital expenditures, and other details etc. Like Germany's Co-determination policy.
Capital formation doesn't have to come from a parasitical plutocrat oligarchy (who in our system are in a death spiral themselves desperate for return thus pushing up real-estate rental and housing purchase prices, and any commodity with a modicum of demand goes through the roof in speculation purchasing), but from where they get their funds in the first place, removing the middle man banks, a Fed Reserve dedicated to lending at a discount to co-op enterprises.
We want an upgrade from communism and capitalism... both systems as put into action over the course of history are utter failures.
Call it whatever you want, this system we have is a failure. We know how its failing and know what would produce a better robust, much more stable, equitable, environmentally friendly, and growth friendly in prosperity.
There is nothing "natural" about any economic system, it's an invention made by people.
We want to invent a better system that actually works well for everyone for a long time.
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Nehpets pacthgil He does review economics, and reality is the trickle down, deregulation, mercantilism trap of having developing countries remain developing based on surf labor while also deteriorating developing countries wages, doesn't work. It's created a new gilded age, actually more so than the gilded age, its more like a platinum age while median income has actually gone down in real terms, and many periods in nominal terms.
Please review what Bernie stands for and various economic principles. Don't get turned of by woo woo words like socialism. Because we are a mixed market economy, and that's what Bernie is about. He'd like to take bits of pieces that worked for various countries in Germany, Sweden, Norway, UK, Australia, France, etc. and use their ideas that worked here.
Because the present economic policies are a disaster, a repeat of various crashes in the past, many resulted in civil war, war, and riots and despotism of various countries.
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Greenspan's last comment demonstrates how he thinks even still that "he" was all economists. "What do we economists really know, if we didn't catch this?"
Ummm plenty of fucking economists realized what Greenspan was doing from the time he began after Volcker... the same thing since 1908...
A cycle of higher interest rates... then at peak interest rates to boost the economy these interest rates are lowered... and lowered... and lowered each time providing the short term sugar rush boom. That is always followed by a mountain of debt (that's how money is created into our system)... that cannot be repaid (the bust)... and at times it can lead to inflation... so then there is a tightening period where interest rates are hiked. Leading to a recession in order to maintain price stability.
He got the golden goose of super high interest rates to end the 1970's Arthur Burn's induced stupidity stagflation. Something that should have been discussed, including Burns (then Fed Reserve Chairman under Nixon) CPI that Burns gutted and started excluding over 72% of what was in the CPI out of it... giving false nonsensical data that would show no inflation. Then he had to backtrack and r-add various items back into the CPI formulation.
Volcker had interest rates higher than 20%... Greenspan's boom was simply reducing that to 1% over a period of 20 years...
To add, doing what everyone else had learned and protected against with the Glass-Steagall Act... having that removed allowing monopolies to become a thing again, no more trust busting and we damn sure no Amazon to Microsoft to Google to Walmart, etc. etc. many other companies are outright monopolies and shouldn't exist as such both vertical and horizontal.
Allowing stock buy backs to become a thing when prior they were mostly banned as they add absolutely no value to anyone workers or investors other than a short term buying frenzy to lift stocks for a short period so short term equity holders and options holders can cash out quickly while the short term buying frenzy of the company buying back shares happens. A complete scam... hence why they were very rarely allowed unless the company was literally buying itself into a private partnership, buying out all the public float and ending trade-able shares.
The commercial banking and deposit banking having a firewall so deposit bank money was not utilized to speculate in securities of any kind, only to produce loans both signature and collateral loans for business and individuals. Commercial banking generally with those willing to risk their deposits on speculative potential pyramid and ponzi scheme like junk could do so at their own risk keeping everyone else from suffering the ill consequences of such scams.
All this was undone during Greenspan's era and with his support.
He lived thru the lowering of interest rates from 20% to 1%... no kidding equities went to the moon... that's debt binging money creation like never seen in US history. Japan did the same during the late 70's and thru the 80's culminating in their still continuing malaise that started in 1989 their stock market peak still even today 2022 has never achieved to break even.
Everything he thought he "knew", rather thought, was wrong.
Dead wrong.
Ayn Rand lunatics with delusions of being some Morgoth of Arda or Sauron the swine robber baron like fat nosed JP Morgan or other of the ilk... no wonder he endorsed monopolies... the very thing that contradicts competitive market principles that is at the heart of the only good that so called "free" markets perform at all well... competition.
Only reason a competitive market principles work is to have competition.
Greenspan was a horrible egotistical lunatic who still thinks he was the economists economist. It escapes him completely to realize that many economists were warning his stupidity has already been done several times all thru the 1600's 1700's 1800's (1800's is cute because half that century the USA was in a recession, depression, long depression, or a panic). And complete culminated in the 1929 crash... hence all the reforms that included FDIC deposit insurance on money at the bank so we don't lose our money should a bank go bust... The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 which fully legalized unionization collective bargaining for all sectors of the economy.... the social security program to ensure elderly aren't left as bag women wondering until they die in the streets in parks and in ally ways... initially the Housing Act of 1937 updated several times during FDR's administration and into the 1960's into the HUD Act ensured affordable modern housing complete with actual foundations and floor boards, utilities including water, sewer, and electricity... even during the so called boom 1920's the vast majority of Americans lived in what we today would called hovels or slums apartments lacking water, sewer, electricity many of them dirt floors... shacks.
All these things were either mostly or completely abandoned or undone.
And we stand in amazement wondering why inflation is now sky high... why even prior to the pandemic millions of families live in their cars, tents, or an RV... KOA campsites of all small towns and larger cities get flooded with tenants the moment they're made as the vast majority of people cannot afford to borrow for a home, nor pay the rent prices despite working full time or even double or triple employment.
We stand in amazement on how younger people die as they cannot afford critical medical supplies like insulin as they ration the amount... despite every other nation on this earth that has a form of universal healthcare and a pricing allowance knowing exactly the margin and costs to produce such medicines... not surprisingly the US medical supplies and services exceed these profit margins by 100's of times. Yet we have fewer clinics, hospitals, staffing levels, lag in test results, etc. etc. the worst care possible at the highest price possible. Any foreigner first told the price of our ambulance for one ride to the hospital... are surprised that a taxi cab (a luxury service) is cheaper... but it's emergency?
So do you pay a lot of fire service too? Which fortunately the robber baron's have not privatized that.... yet.
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It's oligarch propaganda... or trying to combat oligarch propaganda...
Seriously, people I work with or family members who are left or right of politics in the US, nobody thinks Germany or France or Italy or any of those countries are corrupt inept in anyway... particularly those who travel there either due to military or just vacation like myself, and have ancestry there too.
I found it funny... everyone knows German manufacturing tends to be of the highest quality, and they tend to honor the warranties very well... just about all the EU member nations.
And the average shit head in the US knows we're fucked on our healthcare system, and trickle down economics is outright dangerous for our democracy and prosperity for everyone... we know Germany has better worker employer relations with co-determination policies of 1/3 to 1/2 board of directors being the wage workers and be elected by the union... that they have a quasi governmental union structure that sets trade wages, which is better than just a lousy minimum wage that never increases with inflation.
And we lack a housing program that ensure homes and apartments are cheap... Austria is a good example in Vienna in their 60% live in public housing, large 1,000 sq feet apartments for 600 Euros a month... imagine being able to do that in NYC?
Most Americans don't think of Germany of most of the EU nations in idiot terms like that... only super ignorant idiots, and of them they don't even know where it is, and if they did have such a specific thought about Germany, it was only because they heard it on some oligarch promoting political radio station.
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Our aristocracy, our oligarchy in the US is greedy as fuck, many worship greed is somehow good philosophy of Ayn Rand.
No people should trust any of our American Oligarchs and in Trump's case, pretending oligarchs... pretenders can be often worse than the actual net positive asset oligarchs.
But they're all sociopaths or psychopaths. Are nation is essentially 60% poor and declining, the so called middle class are the upper 30% and above and most of them are just doing so so yet unprepared financially if they had a catastrophic medical problem in their family, and their kids struggle to find decent employment that actually pays.
We're a joke of a nation to which all the people are the brunt, while the aristocracy composing of the top 5% laugh their way to their yacht, mansion, villa, jet, etc.
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I kind of think that's it even with people who seem to have it all... they're in busy rat race to keep doing more. And becoming famous and always having strangers either praise you or boo you would be its on constant serfdom. Being slaves.
Suicide rates in Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, and S. Korea are among the highest in the world for sometime now. And its mostly all they do is work long hours often weeks without any days off. In China, when they take a holiday, they make up for it by working their 1 day week off for several weeks until their days off they took for their holiday are made up.
It's living to work. Not working to live.
Slave, serf, peasant existences make us all pine for freedom even the finite freedom that death finally provides us all of never knowing we ever existed.
I have never been that suicidal to actually have the means and be ready. I just thought if I did, that's what I would do. Wait another day. Just to make sure. And then do the same thing, wait one more day just to make sure I wasn't just in a funk... then again.... ad infinitum.
Of course, you'll never end up committing suicide.
And that's the point.
The other thing I told my littler brother who is often suicidal, and almost did once with pills, is to let death take you in its own time. It comes for us all, no need to rush it. Wait on more day. And always give another day, every day.
And of course see professional help, because something may not be right medically.
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It's a way to be cheap to servants.
And maybe counter intuitive, the richer someone is, usually if the person was born rich, but can apply to those so called self made rich, the less they tend to tip.
And people wonder why, at least in the US, that service can often suck ass. That and people often don't get breaks or adequate breaks, no legal by law minimum paid time off, no universal healthcare instead extremely high priced premiums for insurance and to use that so called insurance is often expensive anyway, and base pay stinks.
Reason why comments from friends from Japan, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Australia, etc. often are, wow most of everyone is very poor here... but your country is the wealthiest in the world?
Literally people out of gas in clunkers in the middle of the intersection making for a risky dash in the other lane to get around them, homeless on the corner with cardboard signs begging for money, people in obviously filthy clothes walking the streets, etc. We look a lot like Russia in the 90's.
And that goes for more dense populated areas like Seattle, Portland OR, or lesser dense areas like Boise Idaho or Oklahoma City OK.
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As technology and civil rights advance over time, it's kind of a "no shit" that compared to 1800's, we're better off with about everything. Less scarcity, advanced technological infrastructure including running water, sewers, indoor toilets, heating and air conditioning, antibiotic, vaccinations, MRI, etc.
One ought to compare in the same period of time, how violent are we now to other countries.
And you could do a comparison with our country and other countries in the same time periods in the past.
Otherwise, you're basically saying civilization has advanced both economically, civilly, and technologically... no shit.
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@TheJAMF The republican and democratic parties flipped ideologically about the 1920-1930's and by 1960's they were opposite from the 1860's. Basically, the democrats of the 1800's and early 1900's were regressive pro elite plutocratic oligarchs, while the republicans still pro plutocratic industrialist had a progressive streak that was for ending slavery and developing rail and road and ports and utilities (water, gas, and later to be electricity).
Both parties until 1950-60's though were full of bigots. And until 1930, both parties were pro robber baron for the most part, with what is to many irony of Republican Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting and square deal... he later ran again as a third party called the Bull Moose Party. He as president from 1901 to 1909.
FDR in 1930's pushed the democrats to be pro union (was actually illegal for most workers to strike or form unions until the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") of 1935... often prior unionization was seen as a type of rebellion in some states and counties by their local robber baron who then had their own hired armies war with the unions (term redneck) came about from union workers, particularly the coal union workers as they would protest and strike wearing a red bandana. Called the coal wars, but many collective bargaining wars broke out throughout the country.
1935 made collective bargaining legal and required procedure if a workplace votes to become unionized.
And of course social security comes from FDR's administration along with FDIC (bank deposit insurance that will make good on your money if a bank fails), Glass-Steagal Act that separated investment banking from deposit banking (which unfortunately has since been repealed in 2000 hence the crash and now zombie economy of the US since 2008), and many other progressive economic policies started under FDR.
Civil rights under JFK and LBJ and medicare started under LBJ, a medical plan for elderly, US Still doesn't have a universal healthcare system.
Anyway, that's the short of it as I could make it.
In a nut shell, US politics since the nations inception has been essentially two or three robber baron or plutocratic oligarchical parties going at each other with their own agenda, but business always came first... gotta keep those dynasties funded into the centuries. Occasionally, they get a loose cannon candidate or the use a candidate that feigns what the people need and want to get votes.
Kind of like still today.
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Having high rate on the highest income bracket forces the rich to reinvest it because capital expenses (spending the money) isn't taxed, profits are literally money left unspent in a business, or if they really want to stick in their pocket, as they do today, but with a very high rate on the highest bracket they only take out so much otherwise if they want to take out insane amounts to stick in their pocket, they only get 10% or in the case of 70%, 30% above their $2 million real income, was actually $200,000 nominal (as it was in 1950's) or whatever the highest bracket would be set today, say nominal $3 million or $10 million.
Having an aristocracy that takes in so much income is dangerous to democracy.
And you can calculate your taxes to see if you would pay more...
Germany it breaks down individuals gross income after their initial 0% tax free portion allowance 2018 it's 8,820 Euros for individuals and double for joint.
My net take home was the same... but I have a shitty high deductible plan with a PPO dental insurance, this year I spent out of pocket $700 on emergency work... so if I add that, I spent more than if I were in Germany.
Breaks down, individuals of $50,000 USD or jointly $100,000 USD gross income, German tax on the income is the same net income after taxes and insurance here in the US. So basically we pay about the same in all our paycheck deductions for taxes and insurance, but get shittier insurance services than Germany no deductibles only copays which are EUR5.00 to EUR10.00 (USD6.36 to USD12.72) for Rx, and clinic office visits etc.
We have copays of usually $20 to $100 plus deductibles.Then depending on the work, often only 80% to 50% is covered until the full out of pocket max of about $5,000 USD takes effect.
Our medical is insane in the USA.
Essentially, taxes are about the same, if not cheaper when considering you're also getting a better social security pension plan, and better insurance in that it covers more that you would otherwise have to pay.... it's actually an insurance plan, not a gimmick discount program.
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The wealthy countries don't because putting sub assemblies, foreign direct investment, in poorer countries like Mexico or China or even poor still nations like Malaysia, India, etc. are just being exploited as a plantation.
If things go sour in one nation for whatever reason, there's plenty of impoverished nations to setup shop quick. And the income that the "plantation" nation gets from this FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) is a tiny 5% or less fraction of the overall revenue of business... it's chump change. When all the revenue and profits are centered in the richer nation. In other words the individual work and the nation as a whole are simply exploited with flimsy insecure economies that can vanish quickly and are only there because they're in misery thus cheaper and still secure enough for long enough to make sense, until the next cheaper and just as secure poor nation comes along.
And many developed rich nations have an excess of capacity at plants they still have open, so they can't up the production for a period of time to keep up with demand, and shrink it once they find another plantation nation to exploit after the other went sour. So supply chains can actually move rather fast. And often during global or wealthy nation recessions, demand goes negative, so they often don't even need to make up production while they shop abroad for the next poorer nation to exploit.
In other words FDI is not a stable means of an economy. It's fragile and only there because the local/national economy is it tatters. They're being taken advantage of.
And of the poorer nation while FDI is flooding in, that poor nation has an uneven chance to take advantage of it than the rich nations.
Whenever the poor nation attempts to do this, the rich nations' FDI flees to other poorer nations.
FDI is kind of a death trap for most economies to remain in a malaise as they try to get out of it by demanding a fairer share of FDI, they don't just experience malaise but economic crisis as FDI leaves.
FDI isn't necessarily a good thing. Particularly for poorer countries. And that's why it makes up so little of richer nations.
Foreign Indirect Investment is the parasite that extracts wealth to the richer nations, and with financialization, that's what has fluffed up "asset" prices from stocks, real-estate, commodities, etc. around the world flooding the system with debt to the point that a down turn causes a catastrophic domino effect. EU with still negative interest rates, US very close to it, as well as Japan's long malaise since the late 80's early 90's is testament.
This economic system over the past 40 years is on the verge of utter failure.
Expect new economic paradigms to be born. And let's hope they're much better than this one.
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First off, culpability to gun manufacturers on what someone else uses the gun for can only be assigned if the gun maker sales the gun directly to the person if they fail to do background checks. Most manufacturers don't sell directly to buyers, they sell to retailers. A person who uses a car to kill a bunch of people, there is no culpability on the car maker. Unless a car malfunctions, defects, like a gun defect that explodes in the holster or explodes upon firing the weapon, then they could be culpable for making a defective product. The gun that shoots and hits its target is exactly what proposition the company is making, there's no defect, no culpability.
A law that would assign culpability where there isn't any would not be held up in court, its not constitutional nor in process or nor in federal constitution; specifically stated in the prohibition on corruption of blood where your actions of your blood relatives cannot be held against you just because you're related to them; their actions are their own deeds. It's considered illogical, as it is, to make someone or entity culpable for others' actions. And the only culpability would be if they sold it directly to a person without following the law such as ensuring and passing a background investigation, or if the weapon malfunctions, such as explodes or fires when it shouldn't or doesn't fire when it should.
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Propaganda from Rush Limburger to Alex the nut case lunatic to every other talking head moron brain washed the working person into the Ayn Rand/ Milton Friedman greed is somehow good privatize everything, embrace every monopoly forget about actual economics and when and only when profit motive works (for sectors that don't grossly violate competitive market principles) creep show, and much of the democrat voters are also brainwashed against their own interest.
Basically, the propaganda is boiled down to fuck everyone over for yourself. The results are we end up fucking ourselves over to the detriment of essentially everyone, and only to the mid-run benefit of a very small minority 1%. Even the top 20% to 5% would do better (lower prices and higher wages/salaries/dividends) under a more Keynesian system. Instead of the Friedman privatize and lacks regulations on everything especially for monopoly like firms; in fact, add fuel to the fire to create more monopoly by granting medical patents, as if pharma needs that since most of the research in drugs are from various government funding not to mention the prices will always be market-wise higher than other products, because medical products from medicine to appliances have a big inelastic demand curve, meaning prices won't influence the quantity demanded; people will still buy at whatever price to alleviate pain and to cure or at least subside an injury, illness, or condition.
Make everyone stupid by not teaching economics as an empirical philosophical science, instead teach it as a dogma religion. And spew nonsense tinged with race baiting.
And we have what we have. An idiotic self defeating system. During its destruction though, it has to collapse hard as its failed completely the millennial generation (those 36 and younger) and much of the gen X'ers are also disfranchised with vast majority of them who don't have any pensions only saved by lower to no student loan debt, and many of them were able to buy homes at affordable prices before the last and current bubble fueled investment chasing investment money on the backs of huge leverage (debt) because underlying demand continues to deteriorate, and what underlying debt does exist is often fueled by over leveraging of firms and individuals once again as wages still aren't going anywhere.
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I was upset the entire time with his asinine economic shit. I realized Obama wasn't that big on economics, just a GOP lite well before he became president, he soothed David Cameron's reptilian scales just before the elections in 2008, paraphrasing on CNN don't worry not much will change in the financial system, nor will there be a headhunt.
And when he kept Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, I knew he was just another corrupt politician as it comes to the economy, and all his GOP style economic plans, cash for clunkers, banning pale grants to graduates, talk about the bogus buzz word he always said "we gotta retool, and probably more often now with global-exploitation," paraphrasing.
Anyway, I realized he was a fuck-wit on the economy. And quickly became more pissed at him than anything, and thought everyone else lost their minds in love with the fake democrat.
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It's why they look stunned and extremely confused when they find themselves literally being executed by a mass of people after their illegal acts finally collapse the system. They have the look of utter shock as they take their final breath and upon death their bowels relax and fill their drawers. Some of them fill them earlier with such confusion and contempt. Utterly out of touch with reality. Monarchs and nobility from Russia to France were noted to have such perplexed attitude upon meeting their firing squad or national razor respectively. In today's age, we can understand they were utterly diluted thinking magical deity ordained them to have everything and piss and shit on the people; they were religious delusionals as we think of most religious nut jobs. Presently, these aristocracy/oligarchs/mafioso think objectively that merit exists in what they got, even though the merit was some other relative long dead, and often illegal, nothing to do with merit, but fraud. Present elites have a more entrenched delusion, they can cry meritocracy, even though its far removed from merit. Any of us played such a game we would be rewarded with a jail sentence, fines, and civil claims against us.
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+fu islam Just because your buddies or those you know are, doesn't mean statistically a majority can be deduced. Statistically speaking, people aged 21 to 35 are more educated than ever. So in other words, people in other generations were less educated, ie more ignorant often referred to as dumber tending to being more naive, easier to manipulate, etc.
Doesn't mean this generation is completely full of geniuses, you are case in point of that. However, statistically this newer generation is more college educated, traveled, and informed often via the internet about the world than any other generation prior.
The elderly seem terrified of the younger because they realize as policies continue, that we may end social security and medicare unless taxes are increased, they also realize all the offshoring musical chairs of sweat shops to various perpetual 3rd world nations means wages will continue to stay low making such programs they now rely on insolvent without taxing the rich, and they know the rich have bought our government because of the elderly peoples' own greedy piggy let me have it all won't be my problem when I'm dead as a door knob mentality. But they're still alive... so they're very scared their particular apple cart maybe rattled. Even though most of us younger generations actually want to ensure these programs are solvent and provide even better.
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A co-op system where workers get equal share and vote is what he was talking about. You're a worker, no matter the position you have equal stake in the company as far as profits. Your going pay wage/salary maybe a bit lower, but should the co-op produce profits, you get to choose to increase that wage/salary, take a dividend (bonus), and which proportion should be to upgrade equipment or even expand.
At some point in the future, due to automation, especially when automation of automation occurs, robots fixing robots, there will be very little need for human labor in servicing and producing. You will either get a despotic emperor and their few nobility lords, and a mass of very impoverished people as work is incredibly scarce compared to the amount of potential labor. And to keep idle starving people from re-enacting the French Revolution and Great Terror at the national razor, a very oppressive lordship dominating regime is inevitable, and when such tyrannical nation states, ever consolidating vicious cycle of demand destruction, they will war among other tyrants.
The only peaceful prosperous for all structure is one where workers, how little they work, must take part in also being the owners of the enterprise, taking responsibility, decisions, profits from the work being done. They must have pieces of the entitlements that welfare recipients called oligarchs, multi-millionaires, billionaires, the few people who still get the now phased out pensions.
Entitlements are wealth, so that they may take part in its income directly.
Presently, workers take part in profits indirectly, and not as the profits, but the expense to making a profit.
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Depending on the case, if it goes to a jury or even judges today might find legalese misleading from the laymen written words if their meanings, dates, times, and other specifications are different.
You have the last day for a 100% refund in legalese hidden on a pdf burried in a link is by 6/1/20... but you have the website proclaim it's 6/2/2020, particularly if this 6/2/2020 date is in more than one link page on the website, and especially more so if there is literal printed documentation with this other date. And the person demands a refund after this date only gets a 50% refund... therefore they wait and decide to return and refund after the 1st... and only get the 50% refund... most juries or judges will place the judgement against the defendant for the other half of the refund owed to the plaintiff.
It's misleading, even bait and switch if done on purpose fraud, if done on accident still misleading, even if the website somewhere else especially very hidden has a disclaimer that whatever is on the website doesn't constitute a contractual obligation.
Most juries and judges are fed up with companies either purposefully or accidentally posting contradictory pricing, dates, refund policies, warranty limitations, etc.
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Economics is political. Economics is not a scientific study... its an inventions.
You cannot separate politics from economics. Economics isn't a physical sciences, it's a philosophical and social study. Not a scientific fact.
Basically, economics is about social norms, who has the primary power (hegemony) in government, cultural entertainment, religion, customs and courtesies, etc.
So it's all political. Turkey is not playing the real powers game in which the invention of our current monetary system says the only way Turkey will get rid of their hyper inflation, is to raise interest rates to the moon. And even that might not help for some time... all destroying the economy plunging it into recession either way... but at least reducing inflation and destroying the debt via massive defaults.
Or it can do it long style doing what their little essential dictator is doing... hyperinflation until demand blows up and thereby supply too and the economy falls apart anyway...
There is no good answer here.
But fighting the powers that be which is the rest of the world that uses a debt based monetary system, not raising interest to kill excess money in the system... you're going to have out of control inflation. Probably hyper inflation turning into a completely failed government.
Or raise rates, cause a massive recession depression, have turmoil and run the chance of a failed government... but this route would play out faster than the other since you would be playing with the world powers that be, and new capital would come running in at rock bottom prices exploiting all bankrupt individuals and companies.
Economics is politics. It's a bad misconception that people think it's science and physical law... it's not. Economics is social studies. Invention of we apes who like to beat our chests and if we get upset have the potential to throw our fecal matter at each other or worse kill one another.
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I'm an American I know the UK is in the shit can for workers, and has been since late 80's early 90's after Thatcher really screwed them, and Blair's policies were almost Thatcher like too, and the policies have resulted into oligarch safe haven buying up of real-estate, and like our rust belts, de-industrializing the entire country to serious degree. I know from studies and data, as well as anecdotal evidence by all the British from Scottish to English to Irish who have moved here either temporarily or permanently. And some friends who have this year and many other years who have gone their on vacation. It's why the British voted for Brexit... it was a big fuck you finger to the establishment. It's why France nearly had a fascist. It's why Brazil now does. It's why Mexico finally has a Bernie Sanders like president. It's why Italy has been in constant governmental chaos. Pick a country... it's why we got ding bat Trump. People live in the reality, and the reality sucks.
Things aren't great world wide for middle and younger aged people anymore for many nations... really the only nations doing okay would be all the Nordic nations including Finland, and Germany. Most other nations have fallen into the race to the bottom, hollowing out of workers able to have a comfortable life with decent rent or house price, and secure work. Forget about employer pensions.
Even Japan is having a stagnation problem since the 1990's.
This economic model of race to the bottom, just produce and import as much from destitute nations isn't working. Even many of those exploited nations are having a hard time such as Brazil, and China is dropping off quick as many other destitute nations have their quick boom and bust... sweat shops leave once another place is cheaper. So a nation of sweat shops never advance, they just lose their sweat shop jobs, and another more destitute nation gets to have some sweat shop jobs... until the comparative destitution is more so in another country. And that's what we're seeing in the so called developing countries. And the response to once wealthy nations... still wealthy with the oligarchs who make their primary home in them.
Literally, we're in a race to the bottom. We need to change our economic structure completely away from how corporations are governed. Germany has a handle on it in particular with their quasi-government union trade structure setting established wages for position and skill level, and their law of Co-determination that requires depending on the size of the companies workforce and/or revenue that 1/3 to 1/2 of the board members must be wage workers voted upon by the workers of the company.
A co-op enterprise structure is what's needed. Otherwise, we'll keep going in destructive oscillations of boom bust oligarchy since the 1600's to present.
It's long past time to democratize the workplace.
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Feb started trading and seeing what all the fuss with crypto.
It's junk.
1) Costs more to transfer even to your own wallets. And isn't scale-able, congested nodes means $40 to $100.
2) Time it takes. Several confirmations required. Takes hour just for a few confirmations, but often many accepting the stuff (essentially only exchanges), require 7 or more BTC confirmations which took longer than 9 hours... can take a week or more.
3) Nobody to call if something goes wrong... posted the payment to the wrong type of wallet.
Those 3 alone make it less than competitive against a host of payment processors.
So the utility is mostly to gamble, a pyramid like scheme of gambling. That was fun.
But it's just the greater fool principle.
4) Decentralized nature makes it impossible to ever scale. It's not scale-able. It's obsolete technology from the get go. It's essentially a redundant encrypted torrent file network of nodes.
Positives:
1) Positive side it was fun to gamble with. Play the greater fool.
It's over hype, and now it makes sense why certain crypto has become hyper inflated.
When I was trading actively I used all available information: using crypto meter to see all spot and margin exchanges (all trade in Tether, most exclusively the few that don't it's in USDC).
And exocharts allows one to see order flow in great detail among many exchanges. And you can literally view even for free order size tiers, and whether they're longing (buying) or shorting (selling). And even when they're rekt, liquidated against their leverage and margin.
None of it started making any sense after the fomo Feb thru April.
During the Summer, trades look incredibly suspicious with $500K plus or $1 million plus trade sizes make huge bets often on the weekend during low trading volumes either to dump or pump the price.
Again, largely as tether exchanges, but all exchanges merge into some weird protocol they've created.
Either way, I have pulled all USD deposits off ALL crypto only exchanges in June/July. Fortunately, I cashed out in profits in May. And even made some trades around that time for fun. I just can't take the risk even with my goof money... and I like the little bits of profits I made. I can still trade it on my broker if I want... deposits actually in USD.
I don't see long term promise in this stuff. I was hoping to think it was decent. But crypto is just tulip junk. Competition of other payment processors are so much better: cheaper, secure, someone to call, theft protection, timely, etc.
Crypto just can't compete with this.
It's all hype. And now I'm suspecting the big prices are all a pyramid scheme and defi is an outright Ponzi scheme.
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People need to understand the morbidity of the very rich.
Median individual income is $31,099. If you made on average your entire life exactly the average, meaning you likely made much less for the first decade since half the population makes that or less, may have gotten close or at or slightly above the next decade or two, and maybe started to making more the last decade of your working life, and that may factor into your average 40 year income.
40 years x $31,099 = $1.243 million.
Not even $2 million.
$1.243 million is in general more than most make in a life time on average.
Now think multiple millions in a year. Then tens of millions. Then hundreds of millions. Now thousands of millions or billions.
It's several lifetime earnings of 80% of the population in dividends that some of these rich make in just a quarter or less. Some its every month, and the super rich (billionaires) its every week.
Now, look at any businesses income statements, balance sheet statements, and if you want, cash flow statement. In a profitable business making tens of millions in revenue a year, generally if you consider as part of the profits instead of a cost, total labor compensation that includes wages/salaries/bonuses, (social security/medicare matching tax), insurance benefits, and pension/401K contributions, uniforms, shoes, etc. if they provide them... total labor compensation ranges from 5% to 20% of net profits.
This means they take 95% to 80%... this means many companies could pay double the wage for a year, and still make out with 90% to 60% of net profits.
And yes net profits meaning even after capital expenditures, money they put into grow the business. So that's already accounted. Net profits are what businesses do to either do stock buy backs to raise the price of stocks, or payout dividends; most businesses tend to just payout dividends, but lately many very large companies still have mountains of cash, so they they have been literally buying back stocks too.
A better system exists. Co-op business structure with a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank that can lend directly to people wanting to start or change into a co-op business at discounted interest rates just as the Federal Reserve Bank does to private banks to essentially backstop their illiquidity and essentially guarantee a profit. Co-op in which all workers get a vote and say on wages/salaries/capital expenses/leadership/management etc. Do you think such ridiculous profits would just go to a few owners? That certain necessary equipment to produce more effectively would be continuously put off for a later date until it becomes impossible to produce at all? Would workers vote to outsource them?
That's the way we need to go. Corporations and their oligarchy are not just useless, but are as harmful as nobility of old, and slave masters of old.
Time to change our economy so it functions with prosperity for all of us, and eliminates such morbid wealth and its income that it essentially purchases any government that exists around them.
This is an economic system that simply doesn't work for us. It works for those taking 95% to 80% of all the profits... multiple times yearly earnings goes to a few who often don't even work, but collect the money via dividends.
You produce it, they take it.
Must change.
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Once served in the Air Force and a stint in FAA... not that many Fed Government workers to begin with and most don't make air traffic controller 6 figure wages. It's closer to $40K to $60K for all non- Air Traffic Controllers for just about all other positions from FBI to CIA to ATC to NTSB etc. Unless you're in an executive or manager position then its about $75K to $110K. The very top positions are capped at GS-15s in this situation will receive a maximum of $170,800 this year 2020 and that's if your geting GS-15s hourly rate. Likely you're getting G-15 $138,572 top executive generally appointed by the president and confirmed by congress.
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2019/GS_h.pdf
And government jobs are often less stable than private jobs for a variety of reasons.
Labor department jobs numbers:
"In May, employment continued to decline in government (-585,000), following a drop of 963,000 in
April. Employment in local government was down by 487,000 in May. Local government education
accounted for almost two-thirds of the decrease (-310,000), reflecting school closures. Employment also
continued to decline in state government (-84,000), particularly in state education (-63,000).
Employment in information fell by 38,000 in May, following a decline of 272,000 in April. "
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
page 22 of 42
Total Federal, state, and local government workers May 2020 was cited as 19.692 million nationwide with labor force of 137,242 million.
Government makes up about 14.34%
That's police, fire fighters, VA doctors, Air Traffic controllers, teachers, FBI, FDA, etc.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
I'm not a government employee, most of my time been privately employed via a small or very large private or publicly traded corporation. And at present, no immediate family work for the government local or federal. So no bias.
Just letting you know scapegoating is for dumb asses.
We have real problems.
Perhaps we might want to learn how the few government workers get just a bit better wages/salaries and benefits instead of shitting on other people?
But you know I'm only being practical here.
I just don't see how saying: hey look at them! Lets shit on them so they feel our pain too! Helps anyone. Other than pathetically make you feel better that someone else is also in misery too... which again is fucking pathetic.
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I learned this over 14 years ago (can't believe that 2006 is that long ago, feels like yesterday). My second boss at my call center trainer job, told me perception is reality. I thought she was crazy.
She was just being real.
And yes, reality is crazy.
The other freaky thing you'll find out about life, the wealthier the person or just more prestige of a person truly is usually all hype. They're usually dumb as fucking box of rocks with un-relatable ambitions: some truly are narcissists looking for "trophies" as money was or is no longer an object, that trophies met, or was always on their wall since they were born or young via their family.
Speaking of family members, they often want to one up their family members, or other rival families with these "trophies" which almost always include having most paid off politicians as their extended staff, becoming a politicians themselves (usually this is considered beneath the more wealthy dynasties), have the most public buildings or parks with their names on it or at least a commemoration with their name associated with the public work. More recently over the past 40 years, its to portfolio size comparison... so they're always looking to own more and more.
The next household name wanna be:
Some want to look like they're on the edge, the next Ford, Disney, or Einstein or at least someday become a legendary kitchen table name, not just an actor or musician who will be forgotten mostly in a hundred years by most and look archaic, but someone like Caesar, Ulysses S Grant, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, etc. Someone that will be referred about at least sometime in everyone's life.
Some just want to be in the "club" of hundred millionaires or billionaires as their local pater patriae (father of the fathers). Similar to Cosimo the elder Medici received in Florence Italy. Even if some or all of their owned businesses are increasingly unprofitable either due to demand or they went way into debt, they don't care about the debt, the prestige that comes with being the Duce the big boss man and "taking care of his/her underlings" fills them with a sense of being loved and being very important at least in their little fiefdoms.
In short, the really wealthy are in a different world of perception. And its completely unrelated to the rest of us peasants.
And its probably not good for the rest of us as they have a near absolute influence over local government, as well as national government; and a complete influence over economics.
And these people aren't necessarily smart. Most of them are actually quite dimwitted and again disconnected from reality.... well at least the reality that about 95% of the population of the US exist in.
I guess what I'm trying to say: the one's steering the ship, if simplified to anyone or set of people steering anything, are all bat shit insane.
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This system is too screwed up. You now have investment money chasing investment money into various booms and busts.
After the real-estate collapse, the boom was into commodities which went bust about 2011-12.
Now its gone into lending extended auto loans now in the US passing 1.3 trillion highest ever and more than credit card debt.
And back into real-estate combining commodity bust nations like Brazil, China, Russia, etc. foreign money pouring out of the country often illegally as most of those countries its illegal to take money outside their country without special permission; hence the bit coins and others like it going through the roof. It then finds a "safe place" in US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc. in housing and multi dwelling units all over again.
As well as bubbling up stocks which have been pent up by massive company buy backs through the 2011 thru 2015.
Domestic real-estate is back at it adding to the foreign inflow.
All while the median income around the world is falling in real terms, and the lowest quintiles 40% or lower earners are making even less in nominal terms not just real (adjusted for inflation) terms.
Its race to the bottom wage/consumer falling underlying demand, while low interest rates in banks and negative in some nations, forces those with money to chase into other things like stocks, and real-estate, as they did with commodities.
Over time, investment chasing investment making phony investment fueled demand while underlying wage/consumer demand is faltering mean consolidation of investor class to ever smaller numbers until you have an already extremely small investor class becoming even fewer.
At some point the entire system just can't take the massive leverage, and underlying demand simply isn't there whatsoever. And cash becomes the only place to put money and all freezes up. Massive unemployment and the entire economies fail completely.
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The $700 billion a year, just half would be more than enough $350 billion to fund universal healthcare on a medicare for all single payer system along with opening 100 state operated hospitals and 1,000 clinics, 1,000 dental clinics nation wide, tuition free and dorm free college and vocational training, and still would have of that $350 billion another about $120 billion left for the year to do other projects like rebuilding roads, bridges, building a high speed transcontinental rail system, as well as a intense Manhattan/Apollo project to fast track our own ITER/Wendelstein 7x program to have extremely cheap super clean fusion power.
But we live in an evil empire. Utterly corrupt evil plutocracy. They're not yet overtly killing us like in various other nations when trying to mount an opposition group. That's the only bright side. Only because I think many of them are so disconnected they see 45% that didn't even bother to vote as good news, rather than what they should: as ominous warning the gig is up, people are onto the stacked essentially phony non-choice so called elections and propaganda.
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All nations including UK, Canada, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Japan, S. Korea, with some exception Germany, etc. are all facing the race to the bottom, and extreme oligarchy with massive wage/salary cuts to labor and social programs that constitute a civilization in the first place being cut, and a rich class literally doesn't even get prosecuted by laws already on the books, as well as making new legislation as they see fit.
Economist Thomas Piketty’s research concluded that financial markets tend to outpace economic growth. Simply put, this means the distribution coupons must take even more of the economic above its growth, a massive distribution of wealth and income to those who already own all the coupons (financial instruments). Piketty's revelation as well as Yanis Varoufakis former Greek finance minister and economist concludes that full financialisation of markets lead to a collapse in democracy and they become one in the same of any dictatorship whether it be an absolute monarchy, a constitutional federation of noble lords monarchy, or simply a dictatorship, or a mafioso style oligarchy; and the mass of people suffer, and tend to cause break down in civilization including civil wars and outright war among other nations.
All nations are effected by this Milton Friedman/ Ayn Rand greed is good neo-con/liberal return to robber baron hood. The same nonsense that gave us Nazi Italy and Germany as well as the despotic tyrannical so called communist Stalin Russia and Mao China.
A new method of income and wealth generation must be had. A co-op based system using a Co-op Reserve Bank backed by the particular nations' printing press; same printing press many other nations' Reserve Banks function today only difference, is its for private for profit banks (no wonder these institutions have grown so powerful and so quick to rewrite the laws as they see fit), a co-op reserve bank would be used for capital formation as it is today, without needing to necessarily go hat and hand for any particular greedy investor wanting 75% to 95% of profits, instead all profits/surplus belong to the workers and they make final authority votes to how much is recapitalized to grow the business, where to produce, how to produce, and to set wages and salaries to allow those profits to actually return to workers. Instead of today, your salary and wage is just an expense. You might get a bonus if your company was profitable, but it amounts to an extremely small amount.
This makes the invested/lent money into the expense, they way it ought to be. And the workers instead of being the expense, the asset, the owners getting the bulk of the profits.
The employee and employer relationship is what has changed from slave/master to surf/lord to franchisee /franchiser merchant to employee to employer... the relationship to of worker and those who don't do the work (usually) are what has changed over time providing better standards to more people each time.
This time, the employee should be also the employer. In co-ops its a democratic system that allows this to happen in an orderly way .
But until that happens, all nations are undergoing the return to robber baron economics. Which becomes nasty, eventually imploding.
Often without notice, and turning ugly violent and miserable.
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Trump caused our company to give everyone cross the board only 1% raise because of his idiot tariff on aluminum.
Some voted for Trump and half didn't even vote.
Anyway, we're irritated. Nobody at the plant save some of our bosses were impressed with his latest tax cuts for the rich and their corporate apple carts on more trickle down, the joke was, haven't done this trickle down shit since the 80's and it keeps making things worse right?
Anyway, its not necessarily the Trump voters, its also many people feel so disenfranchised with a decent choice for candidates they don't even bother to vote. I in fact did vote, but for Jill Stein. Couldn't vote for Trump he's a flat out con buffoon. And Clinton is just as her husband on policies with NAFTA, repealing Glass-Steagal Act, reducing HUD sponsored development that has now caused an extreme housing shortages nationwide, and also lead to the real estate debt bubble.
It's not that people like Trump, or even voted for him in red states, but people just feel powerless in a gerrymanders fiefdom of a few oligarchs.
Half my ballot was blank because they were uncontested seats for state legislature and city and other elected offices.
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It's all a carnival show with a clown and often sets of clowns.
And a relatively small investor class and a banking financial system all looking for a return because lending isn't doing it for their get rich quick dreams of making it big, and even boring banks dislike the low interest rates.
The so called "recovery" in the last decade was a joke.
But we all knew it.
1) Random people posting viral idiot videos suddenly making a million or more in a year (youtube).
2) High flier myspace take over Facebook... a system that makes identity theft so so much easier to happen... and their follow Google/Alphabet playbook on buying up any perceived competitors.... entry into such a think like myspace or facebook is rather cheap, just requiring a data farm and to grow and shrink at user accounts needs. Technology has only made such data farms more secure, robust (backups), more storage, and faster and cheaper, way cheaper to install and operate... data farms once required warehouse like space, can be done in the very office buildings at various headquarters' basements.
3) Crypto craze.
4) Companies across all sectors literally floating junk bonds to buy back stock.
5) The fact that most companies were using whatever profits or just revenues and going into debt bonds or otherwise to buy back stock... 20% to 30% range on shares outstanding consolidation... but giving a 300% to 400% (some larger) boost in price... better than doing something free: declaring a 1 for 2 stock reversal that automatically (all things being equal) doubles (100%) the original price as it removes 50% of the shares outstanding.
And these buy backs have accounted for most of the last decades buy trade... many years net outflows would have been more. Stocks wouldn't have had the ever increase in price well beyond decent PE ratios.
6) Wages/salaries flat line nominally and worse real and especially more so in terms of cost of living with rents and home price payments in many areas rising 4 times more than wages.
7) Lack of affordable healthcare system even with insurance. And some absurd price gouging on many Rx medicines.
8) Retail apocalypse, with even Walmart abandoning certain really impoverished places and shortening open hours; almost all retail shortened hours, especially if they we 24 hour stores.
9) Phone app craze... with children busting out ding bat programs and selling them for thousands of dollars, sometimes more. In rare instances millions by the Google or Facebook or Amazon (their strategy at keeping their oligopolies).
10) the debt run up in all aspects of they economy... Stock margin debt $700 billion all time high, Corporate debt $9.5 trillion double that of 2008, Auto loan double that of 2008 to over $1 trillion, Mortgage debt more than 2008, Credit card debt back above $1 trillion at all time highs, student loan debt more than doubling 2008 to be at $1.3 trillion, CBO business crap reaching $1 trillion. REITs over investment into their secondary market, causing a flood in real-estate prices as they buy and bid up more and more property, and REITs too floated quite a bit of junk bonds... many of these junk bonds the Fed recently his buying.
Onion news parody became the last decade and so fart his decade's reality.
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Buoyancy which is absurd. It's their utter lack of all knowledge on all things including basics of chemistry, optics, aerodynamics, geology, cosmology, mathematics, physics, etc.
Arguing with their idiocy is as about as productive as attempting to teach your dog or cat or wall algebra or music theory or great literature works.
In short, it's not. Unless you yourself need a refresher on the subjects or entertain yourself on poetry and great novels or plays.
They are entertaining though. Their ignorance is extraordinarily funny. I really haven't met anyone that was so dumb. And I have met some dimwitted folks, work with some now... in fact the conversation came up about flat earther's... I remarked because of the internet I never knew there were people so dumb who literally thought the earth was flat... and remarked on video by a flat earther who sounded like his brain was fried by some substance as he would belch out a persistent phrase "...in my reality..." I guess reality isn't universal in his reality. Seriously, these people are hysterically funny.
I mentioned one of his big beefs was why doesn't the aircraft have to nose down in order to follow the curvature, why doesn't it just fly off the globe of the earth if in straight and level flight. In the lunch room with others in on the conversation, I said, "I bet any of you can figure why an airplane doesn't need to nose down to follow the curve of the earth to stay on the earth in straight and level flight!"
I was a little nervous one of the dimwits took on the challenge mumbling out loud their thoughts in about three seconds in the mumbling they said "Gravity keeps the plane from going any higher, or else you need to turn up the throttle to climb at higher altitude."
I screamed "BINGO! Gravity!" Silent thought: even this idiot figured it out in 3 seconds.
And this idiot is truly dumb. Lovely and good intent, but they can't remember anything, and when you explain something to them they get it backwards or just scrambled. It takes them forever to figure out simple alarms on machines. Just glad I don't work directly with this person. Their lead wants to kill them as they move them to one machine to fix one problem, only for this operator to cause another problem making an inappropriate adjustment.
I'm just saying this person is a walking intellectual disaster, imagine what a flat earther must be like!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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The amount of debts in all aspects of the economy are even bigger than last time which is spooky. Mortgage debts, credit card debt, and some other debts that weren't at their record like US vehicle debt surpassing credit card debt at $1.3 trillion. Total stock market debt usually doubles from the past crash, and its just about done so, June 2007 all time high was $378 billion, its now at $668.940 billion May 2018 so far record all time high ever, double to the prior all time high would be $756 billion, so we're almost there.
Business debt is extremely high, CDO's on commercial real-estate which hasn't been doing that great with retail apocalypse has major maturities period in October 2018, fears insufficient liquidity to pay the maturities have been discussed openly and in articles since Feb this year.
And the amount of venture capital and just plane stupid money both from wealthy people, and just stupid borrowed money primarily in the tech sector has largely been spent, and those who have borrowed and invested are now looking for returns that aren't happening.
When the recession hits this time around its going to be extremely hard on everybody, and that's before considering the trade wars.
With the so called recovery, only the top 20% recovered, the next top 60-80% are just treading under what they lost, and the rest of the 60% to the bottom are actually doing worse in real income. Some taking out loans and borrowing again though to make up for the difference. And they have borrowed more than last time despite their wages being effectively flat, the same.
We're undergoing an worldwide collapse in the economy from over consolidated sectors, which consolidates to an even fewer aristocracy, and pushes out everyone else. A race to the bottom. The politics such as Trump is unwinding it faster than the markets would otherwise, since markets nearly did, but Reserve Banks world wide opened up their printing press to band aid the cancer.
It's spooky, because I think it's going to get a lot weirder than Trump.
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I thought this was common conservation knowledge. Idaho forests, even desert/brush, and marshland are open to grazing; albeit there is a small fee: pays for roads, cattle guards, fencing, etc. Grazing helps fertilize, reduce as much as possible dry grass and brush for fire prevention, and stimulate healthy soil and top covering. Key is to have them not overgraze.
It's not 100% cure to make arid land into a type of wetland. Large amounts of Idaho while lots of mountains with forests, the foothills and the plains (actually so vast plateaus they appear like plains) are high mountain desert: a type of bushy, seasonally grassy dry desert, not a bare dirt/sand desert; really a type of dry grassland with sage brush and juniper trees along with other tall grasses and some small cactus; remains very dry. You can't turn this dry terrain into lush grassland or forests; forests in Idaho remain moist both from the higher ground level providing cooler temperature, and due to orographic lifting that causes precipitation throughout the year, and snowfall that builds through the winter. Lower flatter areas benefit by the snow melt for at least late spring, early summer; but much of it becomes very dry mid to late summer until the next spring.
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Markets are mechanism that can efficiently (stress can) efficiently squander resources out to wherever the highest bidders meeting the lowest ask prices.
BUT they do a horrible job on their own at effectiveness and stability.
Take several instance in history where there were no planning on crops, no crop insurance generally provided (due to the prohibitive economy of scale) by governments, grain storage depot requirements, and quota limits on max foreign sales and requirements. Since markets are dumb as any other single minded functional invention of mankind, they cannot for see periods of huge harvests that would see crop prices fall and ruin farmers or the same, horrible crop yield seasons where the people starve and so does the farmers.
Both events causing supply disruptions to the future.
Therefore most nations even in the US have forms of crop insurance to farmers, as well as price floors to which the country will purchase the goods or only allow sells of the goods at that floor price. Both instances allow suppliers to become stable... should one year be a crazy great harvest... it doesn't push many farmers in to bankruptcy because it caused the price of their crop to be worth too little. At the same time, should crop failures and bad yield occur, farmers aren't going bust and thus making an already bad crop season get worse by many bankrupt farmers not able to farm to get us out of a potential famine generating condition.
Research François Quesnay, who convinced King Louis XV to completely release all grains from quota limits for export and did away with any strategic grain supplies in a laissez-faire method. 4 years after implementing it and oh yes a boom but the bust was horrid nearly cost Louis XV his crown as famine and riots struck. The king quickly re-instituted quota limits, various farm subsidies for seed production, and strategic grain storage (an insurance policy against horrible yields in any particular or back to back years).
Unfortunately, his son didn't learn from daddy's little booboo believing markets were mystical know all look forward and can see the future nonsensical butterflies and rainbow turds.
Louis XVI had other problems and need to raise cash to pay debts... so attempted no planning methods and instituted laissez -faire let the mystical farts and stupidity of the markets efficiently squander away resources. What a boom... for 2 years... until it was a complete bust and famine again... this time King Louis XVI had his head ultimately taken off.
Markets are efficient at squandering out resources. The effectiveness though on desirable outcomes... only works if there's a goal, a plan. Otherwise congrats... you got rid of the goods/services... now what?
Counting on markets for everything in economics is like taking a prune knife to chop trees. Market are just another invention, tool, that does a specific job. Way to squander out resources quickly in exchange for something else.
But it does not provide you with goals, stability, innovation, etc. etc.
It's just a tool. And a rather dumb one. One that has been in existence since before recorded history.
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Oh yes, Bernie talks about the wonderful past, when had universal healthcare and he wasn't picketing and being arrested for civil rights protest.
Just a hack job. The billionaires and millionaires and the toadies are freaking out. The establishments doing fine, thank you. They don't want change no matter what, might rock their apple cart. Some of them might actually need to get a job instead of sit on their ass collecting dividends and rents.
What they lack in understanding, this system is VERY unstable. A house of cards that will see their toadies fucked in the ass and many of the billionaires and millionaires go broke. Leaving all of us with a chaos.
And it's not necessarily the billionaires and millionaires, the oligarchs Bernie points out, but the system. And some of the most easy fixes like universal healthcare, reduced to no tuition higher education and a worker program, major infrastructure project modernizing the electrical grids and high speed railing systems, etc. are what every fucking developed rich country already conducts. Besides us.
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It's absurd to think utilities a natural monopoly should be privatized. Quite literally competitors are impossible thus violates completely and utterly the competitive market principles. The profit motive is therefore moot completely; the pricing mechanism is incapable of delivery appropriate supply with appropriate and required demand.
I have heard Texans have been struck with ridiculous bills as the rate for power went up on some phony bid and ask exchange. Such ridiculousness is beyond the pale.
Case in point with Idaho:
Idaho is mostly serviced by a private power company called Idaho power.
Can you imagine, a red state... oh no it's communism or socialism... oh no!
Well, Idaho's citizens have long known utilities are natural monopolies: non-competitive cash cows.
Thus the Public Utility Commission oversees any private utilities.
Most utilities are actually owned and operated by state, county, or city to which is serviced.
Includes utilities from water, sewer, garbage collection, and landfill operations.
So rates don't float on some phony exchange in some bid ask auction that doesn't really exist. That's absurd. Rates are discussed with the private utilities in public forum and an elected set of officials as well as the public get to discuss them then determine what rates will apply and how much.
So at least Idaho protects residents and businesses alike with fixed rate schedules... no floating bullshit rates that suddenly skyrocket whenever the utility performs poorly thus inducing scarcity.
They are not therefore reward for failure such as in Texas's case to winterize their infrastructure, they don't get a windfall reward... reward for not delivering.
The ridiculousness is palpable.
Additionally, if you're wondering which is cheaper and better:
Private for profit or public owned nonprofit?
Example shows for itself:
The city of Idaho Falls owns and operates its own power supply and distribution.
Idaho Power Company services most of the rest of Idaho.
And the rates at which
Idaho Falls Power city owned and operated is
Residential Commercial Industrial High Density
Energy Charge (per kWh) $0.0625 $0.039 $0.039 $0.039 $0.0625
Demand Charge (per kW) $0.00 $9.00 $7.25 $9.00 $0.00
Minimum Demand Charge $0.00 $26.00 $0.00 N/A $0.00
Service Charge $18.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $25.00
Power Cost Adjustment ($0.002) ($0.002) ($0.002) N/A N/A
Example:
Used 800 kWh = $50 + 18.00 service charge total bill $68.00
Used 2,000 kWh = $125.00 + 18.00 service charge total bill $143.00
There is also a Power Cost Adjustment, currently a credit that's not quite a penny; surplus profits from cost to generate are rewarded back to the customer.
Idaho Power privately/publicly traded for profit prices:
TIER 1 TIER 2 TIER 3
KILOWATT-HOURS (KWH) 0–800 801–2,000 Over 2,000
PRICE (CENTS PER KWH) 8.5005¢ 10.2214¢ 12.1424¢
Non-Summer (September–May)
TIER 1 TIER 2 TIER 3
KWH 0–800 801–2,000 Over 2,000
PRICE (CENTS PER KWH) 7.8984¢ 8.7077¢ 9.6437¢
The more you use the higher rates start to apply to additional uses in 3 tiers.
Plus $5.00 service charge for all classifications
AND two percentage rates (Fixed Cost Adjustment FCA and Price Cost Adjustment PCA) multiplied by your total usage bill in schedule:
Basically think of the FCA and the PCA as the second "service charge" because of course that $5.00 service charge (what you might think is the flat every month allotment is too good to be true... it is. These amount is multiplied by your usage and added to your bill.
Residential
0.02% + Price cost Adjustment 4.20% = 4.23% x total monthly usage.
Private for profit power company bill
Example: you used 800 KWH = $63.1872 in usage x 4.23% = $2.67
plus $5.00 service fee = $70.85 total bill.
About $2.85 more expensive than city nonprofit power of Idaho Falls.
Often many cities tack on a "franchise fee" rather a tax ranging from 1% to 3% of the usage fees.
Example at 2,000 Kwh
If you used 2000 kwh that bill period $63.1872 at tier 1 +$104.405323 tier 2 = $167.59 + 7.08= total bill of $174.67
About $31.67 more expensive city nonprofit power of Idaho Falls.
FCA and PCA for other classifications
Small general Service
FCA 0.02% + PCA 3.47 = 3.48% total times total monthly usage.
Large General Service only the PCA at 5.76% monthly times usage.
Large power PCA only at 7.5% times total monthly usage.
Irrigation PCA only at 5.32% times total montly usage.
Business customers for electricity via the private power company has 3 scheduled rates depending on their consumption amounts per billing period (month) for their rates.
For profit is always more expensive and the service tends to be less maintained. In fact, much of our taxes pay to subsidize the costs in maintaining hydroelectric dams and their construction where most Idaho electrical generation is made.
In fact, Idaho Falls ALL utilities are owned and operated by the city of Idaho Falls.
There are about two private water company in Idaho servicing most of Boise, parts of Meridian, and Eagle.
And in most instance the price is metered and the rates for private for profit water company is more even with the PUC regulating these cash cows than the city owned entities that most towns and cities enjoy.
There's absolutely no reason, in fact only many reasons why the local municipality should operate and maintain their utility services.
It's no surprise Idaho Falls is also interested in rolling out their own fiber network for internet services too.
All this in a red state... just imagine what the other robber barons in the other red states are screaming... oh socialism, communism, strangling the wonder berries of the free silly ass market to fly like the birdies and swim like the fishes.
The ire have with the idiocy of allowing private enterprise to run and operate a utility. It's bat shit stupid.
I could understand allowing the power municipality to raise IPO possibly... but then it becomes a burden to have to perform to shareholders who may or may not live in the serviced areas.
But to allow them to parasite off a non-competitive enterprise... a natural monopoly is beyond dumb. It's as if the basics of economics was completely lost on such people who think its a good idea... or just want to parasite off people with lots of stock and/or other ownership in a private utility at the expense of everyone else.
https://www.idahofallsidaho.gov/264/Rates-Policies
https://www.idahopower.com/accounts-service/understand-your-bill/pricing/idaho-pricing/for-your-home/
https://www.idahopower.com/news/idaho-power-files-annual-power-cost-adjustment/
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There's more than twice the population in Europe 743.1 million vs US at just 318.9 million. EU population is 500 million. There's more per-capita in the EU and Europe in general than the US. Hence more demand.
Would be bad if the EU wasn't the same wealthy or more wealthy than the US. There's more supply and demand, bigger GDP potential than in the US.
While the US has more natural resources, so does Europe in general, EU members unfortunately lack in that area, many of their failing nations attempt to build their nations as tourist attractions... in this race to the bottom trade climate that doesn't support many nations in driving a meaningful middle class.
As an American, I would rather do business with EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, S. Korea, etc. developed nations with a strong civil rights and labor rights than with various other countries that are either despotic or under severe oligarchies and corruption like China, Mexico, various Central and South American countries. Trade between same playing field isn't a race to the bottom.
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They tried to do the market driven system. It simply doesn't work well.
When just about all, if not all competitive market principles are violated in a sector, you simply can't put band-aids to make it a competitive market, and hope it works as well as other sectors that may violate only a few or no competitive market principles.
Heath care violates every competitive market principle.
Such markets run better collectively. Hence why all major nations have better quality and lower per person yearly price on medical care than the US mostly profit motive.
Single payer is the only way to go.
Do ever feel you don't belong in a time period? I feel like I'm in the 1600's-1700's arguing for public fire departments, instead of fire insurance brigades.... something that screams out as obviously better.... you had to show them your policy when they arrived, often it was in the home or office in the fire, often the brigade that arrived wasn't your policy holder, so they wouldn't fight the fire. And because you neighbor didn't have it, or couldn't prove it because it's in the burning building, your home near by would burn... hopefully you got your papers, and matched it up with the brigade that you subscribe, or you'll lose your home home too. It's obviously idiotic. People will eventually figure it out.
And that's what I feel like, that I'm born too early.
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I noticed this about Canada, Germany, France, and Japan. Their taxes are lower overall for the lower incomes-- under $60K gross income and less compared to the same income effective taxes in the US.
I looked at some friends pay stubs in Germany, they have deductions as we do. But their less overall. I showed them mine-- Idaho State tax 7%, Federal tax withholding 20% (single no kids sucks to be me), medicare and social security 7.65%... just in taxes 34.65% withholding... then comes insurance LOL! Then 401K taking another 10%.
Germany taxes are a bit closer for a single person at equal to $60K a year, but minus out the medical premiums, and most don't have a 401K, they contribute to a company pension program that's usually about 1% to 5% withholdings which is ontop of their government version of social security.
Their version of medicare and social security is 19.35%, their version of federal income tax is 0% from 0.00 EU to 8,652EU then 14% from 8,653EU to 53,665 EU then from 53,666EU to 254,446EU is taxed at 42% for individual non married.
Married, the brackets are doubled so most of the money up to 107,000 EU is taxed at 14%.
That's all before deductions though. They have lots of deductions just as we do.
Their total effective tax rate for a single person making equal to $50K taxable income (so they're talking about gross income of about $57K to $60K depending on how much you can stick into various retirement accounts as deductions as we have they have too) is about 30.45% as a single no dependents.
US our taxes same $50K taxable income for federal is 16.59% + 7.2%(idaho state income tax) + 7.65% SS and medicare = 31.44%
Then we pay additional 10% for 401k, then additional 9% for medical insurance premiums... just the premiums... Germany doesn't have deductibles and copayments on many things don't exist either.
So Germany's 30.45% vs USA 31.44% on taxable income of $50K USD value on a single person.
We pay about a percentage or two more in taxes, get less for it, and have to pay more for private medical insurance and bogus investment schemes.
And so many fellow Americans wonder why other countries think we're all crazy idiots. The deductions they were stunned at were the taxes on top of that all the medical premimium deductions and 401K deductions and various health care saving accounts. They kept saying, you pay more than we do in taxes, but what does that get you? I always laughed and said roads? We have roads! Well I suppose its for our huge military LOL! That's when their eyes rolled, and they would ask, and how does that really help you?
I told them, it helps keep the sea lanes open so they can offshore more jobs to China and other 3rd world countries LOL!
http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/uk/taxsummaries/wwts.nsf/ID/Germany-Individual-Taxes-on-personal-income
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Time, or better stated causation, exists otherwise there would be no continuity to anything, and observation show everything has continuity, even in QM you get a chronological order, in QM its just that an interaction causes the chronological order and appears it cannot be predict exactly only probability of a particular location or state of a particle.
Time and space are aspects of the same thing. It exists. We just currently lack how to describe it fully. Relativity comes very close, relativity is actually used in QM. As far as the nature of causation at the fundamental particles we just currently can only predict in probabilities rather than finite exactness.
Time exists as much as space exists.
Time travel would not necessarily mean all time exists all at once, and if it did, so what. What's ridiculous about that? Singularities are a point of zero volume with immense amount of mass in no space-time at all.
Super fluids have 0 viscosity like liquid helium, acts like a boson.
We have super conductors with 0 resistance rendering the Ohm's law useless, requiring to use the Messenger Effect in the London Equations concerning their magnetic repulsion.
Your evaluation that something is nonsensical therefore wrong, flies in the face of your claim that time doesn't exist, that we only invented it because our observational ability couldn't make sense of your claim of time not existing.
You're using the same qualifier for your claim as well as against your claim.
I'm just pointing all this out because I found your comment funny.
Thanks for the chuckle.
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That's even worse than our current FMLA gimmick which is fucking only so you can't be fired immediately for being sick. You have max 12 weeks unpaid sick if one is sick, and must be approved for the medical condition. To be allowed to have 12 weeks of no paid time off due to illness, birth, etc. Are they not merciful, they don't straight off fire your ass. Oh, and this 12 weeks of no paid sick time only applies after a full year of full time employment.
We're a nation that loves fucking workers in the face. It's so shitty some businesses actually do offer more time off when you're sick, and even pay some sick time.
Get better in 12 weeks or no more job! And then you pay the COBRA price for insurance, so if you bought long term disability insurance 66% of take home pay, most of it will go to paying your insurance premiums you cancer patient.
This is why single payer system is a must. Our current system is as archaic as child labor and not having compulsory education for the young not having fire departments, and due to our insane system everyone avoids using ambulances as much as possible, so we might as well say we don't have as a nation so called super power don't even have ambulance service.
We're a fraud of a nation.
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Was jogging today, and finally decided to finish my jog on a track at an elementary school.
And realized not many kids out playing despite it being 11am to 12pm for my jog. And at first nobody playing at the playground... half hour late, one father and son was to the side have a picnic near the track.
The other day, townhouse development I live in, the kids aren't really doing much outside ever. Heard a neighbor kid screaming for their other parent.
I recalled my childhood... I was always out and about... my mom often kicked me out to "go play". She even sent me to the mall for punishment for leaving far without permission, I went to see a friend who had moved 2.5 miles away... I was only gone for 20 minutes... said hi and by to my friend, and told my mom where I had gone as I commented their new house looked cool, she gave me money and said get your brother's food coloring and cake decorations, was my little brothers birthday. It was about 10am
So I took back off on my bike 1 1/2 miles to the mall... I didn't even lock my little bike (I didn't have chain), and walked into the ZCMI, road the elevator (loved riding those) and got the stuff.
And back home. Another 20ish minutes or so. My biking adventures that day done all before 12pm. I was 8.
But that was typical for me growing up. And even prior from 4 (before school age)... but I didn't leave the two neighborhoods very often until about 8.
Anyway, I would hate growing up now. I was accustom to going outside and playing all day. If I had chores or work to do, I would get that done asap and off to playing... even when I didn't care either way. My mom would kick us kids out... particularly if we were being loud or hyper. We had video games... loved NES and SNES etc. Was a big Mortal Kombat fan. And we had a computer, this was the 90's. I would also baby sit for lots of friends and neighbors, mow lawns for some money, shovel driveways in the winter for money, and had a paper rout for a while.
If I were growing up in these households today... I don't know... probably look like Jabba the Hutt by teenage years.
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I think the point was the Romans did it better (they still suck by our standards).
Athens even during the democracy only non-slave natural born Athenians could participate, and you often had the similar meltdown of what was essentially democratic meltdown to authoritarian like behavior similar to the French Terror.
But to the point, which would be more hospitable:
1) Excluding Sparta, women would need to wear a vale when in public, and could not be near males in public similar to some Middle Eastern nations today.
2) It was extremely rare for a slave in Athens or any other city state to gain liberty, to no longer be a slave. Rome, it was customary and became customary to grant slaves their liberty.
3) Rome pushed for better civics and practical technological utilities like sewers, aqueducts, machinery for production of various goods and services like bakery, mills, olive oil production, etc.
4) Romans were more inclusive (of course in a subtle we still have to make that foreign thing into a Roman way of doing things too, where Athens just assumed other foreign methods were just barbarian ways, Sparta of course was the epitome of xenophobia as it was necessary to keep their weird concentration camp economy of Helot slaves vs Spartan slave master.
While Athens invention of democracy is inspiring for us today, it's effectiveness in the way they used it demonstrated the need for constitutions that protect minorities and protect against mass panic induced bad law or suspension of various law like habeas corpus.
Rome would be better to live in and provided much more in advancing civilization philosophically and technologically. The Greek city states, in particular Athens and the short period of the life of Alexander the Great's conquest... we got theater. We got the concept that government should be of and for and by the people; self government by majority rule; instead of hokey myths of an oligarchical set of families with tales of them being born of some divinity thus their excuse they they themselves should rule for the betterment first and foremost for their own families and it will just magically trickle down to the benefit of the rest of the people living in that government.
They both were rotten compared to our standards, but to have advances in technology and sciences Rome did more in advancing them then the shorter period the Greek city states. I think Rome being essentially a band of misfits enjoyed the variety that was the Greek city states; hence the preservation of "Greek" culture by the Romans.
It is in our time that we merge democracy with republic, and have been doing so with positive effects and growing technological and moral advances.
The next step is to merge social-capital into a social-capital-democratic economic structure. With policies like Germany's co-determination policies that put 50% of the board are workers voted by workers. And concepts of co-op enterprises of which all employees have one vote to all aspects of the operation of the business. As well as a concept capital formation method being a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank similar to National Reserve Banks of most countries that currently lend to private banks at a discounted rate to ensure their banking system is liquid; you could do the same for such co-ops to gain capital formation. Reducing the reliance on an aristocracy which throughout human history often act as do nothing parasites, that eventually capture whatever government that exists whenever it suits them.
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I can. A day or so after the election, woke up at 4 AM to get ready for work. Bedroom up stares, living room and kitchen down stares. I made some coffee, went up stares. Heard someone knocking at the door... though perhaps pizza delivery person has the wrong address? Went down stares, door has a stupid ass window on it, could make out a person but they were kneeling.
I was about to unlock and open the door until the nut job starts banging on the door trying to force it open screaming at me. I screamed, you have the wrong house! And ran into my kitchen and grabbed a knife turned of all my lights, patio slider door at the kitchen I quickly pulled the blinds.
Still screaming something incoherent, banging on my door. I waited in terror. My phone even rifle (only fire arm) up stares.
We had a rash of burglaries recently in the Boise area here in Idaho. One guy who confronted a burglar got shot in the arm by the burglar.
I waited for a while in the kitchen after a few minutes of silence and dashed thru the living room then up stares which is directly in front of the door that has the huge door window. Got up stares, grabbed my phone to call the police department.
Felt like a nightmare come to life. Terrifying. And I'm a guy.
Anyway, the cops told me other people from my town house had called and that police were on the way. Half hour later the police were there and I saw the guy being taken in, the police apparently consoling him, a youngish mid 20's early 30's looking guy in a US flag beanie. The cops asked if he ranted about Trump losing or something... I told them I couldn't make out what he said, perhaps he was drunk.
And I'm a white mid 30's vet. Born and raised and have lived most of my life in Idaho, and have had other sort of similar experiences as a teen living with my parents in an apparently rough neighborhood, couple drive by shootings, and a couple neighbors being stormed by the swat team using flash bangs.
So no. I know exactly how she felt. It's terrifying.
Even in small low populated states. It's America.
We're a fucking quagmire of a country.
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If the people did a coupe to recapture the US from our hideous oligarchy, I would have her immediately sequestered in prison while an investigation was conducted to determine the criminality of her net worth while she was in government.
And charges would range has high as embezzlement, bribery, to outright treason.
But the same would happen with many current puppets and other oligarchs who made massive amounts of money during their time acting as a government official.
And of course afterwards, in the constitution nobody would be allowed to make money from books, speeches, or any influence of government matters concerning lobbying or acting as attorney against for for the government whatsoever for 20 years following their last term in any elected government office or serving as an administration to a governor or president or appointed as a Brigadier General/Rear Admiral O7 or higher.
Their right to free speech not infringed as they may without profit speak, write, or otherwise communicate their ideas. But they may not make a personal or indirect profit or wage or salary for the period of 20 years that invokes national or state or local policies.
All weapon production during non-congressional war declaration must be owned and operated by the government. Contracts with any other entity outside government are strictly prohibited during the period that a declaration of war is not in effect. And when declaration of war is in effect against another nation, any contractors' contracts are on the basis of not for profit cost only, any surplus or profit yielded in fulfillment of the contracts must be refunded back to the government. All non-war contracts are at cost contracts with a 1% profit margin including food, clothing, construction, etc. for DOD needs. An allowance of only 1% profit ensures no racketeering of any contractor whatsoever. Any exceeding such, profits/surplus must be refunded to the government. The government will attempt all possible ability to work between other departments for as much of their needs before seeking such non-weapon contracts: Army Core of Engineers, Department of Transportation, etc.
War profiteering/racketeering is hereby prohibited.
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Simple health issues the doctors treat you like you're a waste of space. Simple but can get worse if not treated. To save the disgusting health issue I'm not going to say what it is... it's not life threatening... for now... told to just soak in some soapy water of hexa chlor gluconate (surgical soap for us Americans).
I was in the military... similar issue they would have treated it much more aggressively. Because its simple to treat now and get it done and over. And I know if I was some fancy pants mother fucker, I would get the treatment.
I told the nurse (not a doctor anyway) who I spoke with, what we did in the military.
Oh no, that's not something they do at this office. This was a simple procedure that any MD or even just CP should be able to do. Everyone in the Air Force learns, including the RN's.
Anyway, I paid $100 bucks (WITH INSURANCE MIND YOU) for nothing... just go take a soak while we soak you for nothing.
I've lost every family doctor I keep getting since 2019... 3 months after getting full physical, get a letter, they're shutting that clinic down and that doctor is retiring.
2021 May go and see another family doctor, pay up the ass hole over $100 (with insurance mind you) to get setup with another "family doctor". A few weeks later, that doctor is gone. Poof.
Good thing I'm healthy. I have nothing chronic or anything.
I can now understand why a few of my coworkers recently, very healthy too, died of Sepsis due to a simple untreated injured toe nail or some other gash. Leaving behind their entire family. They sought medical help, but the useless system just threw Rx at him, for the symptoms such as vertigo. Never undertook a full examination seeking injuries, no blood checks until it was to the point the sepsis caused a clot in his brain and he had a stroke that soon after killed him.
And similar issues with other friends and coworkers and even family members.
Deaths unnecessary. If we only had a functioning medical system, not some lousy hustle under a bridge.
This insurance scam too is ridiculous, at no point do I not pay something or substantial even with insurance... and then I see what the insurance paid.
We're in the land of stupidity. All other nations have some form of universal healthcare that provides a functioning healthcare system, not clinics persistently understaffed, medical professionals underpaid and hating their lives and not performing well, hospitals closing, and misdiagnosis all the time.
My past few histories of medical issues (fortunately not life threatening) have been a farce, I had to finally diagnose the problem myself, and prove to one doctor after 5 other doc in a box like clinics threw one medicine or whatever at me, so that I could get the required Rx to get rid of the problem.
They tend not to want to examine or do tests or anything. Sometimes they'll look at the problem for a second... look at some general vitals and then go on to troubleshooting by throwing RX or just as bad some OTC stuff you've likely already been using, or some other pseudo science remedy so they don't have to be bothered and can move on to the next customer, caching!
Like I said, I'm fucking glad so far I have no chronic health issues thus far.
And I feel for all those who do. This system is a disaster.
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You never read Marx have you.
You can't say he's a failure because he had no solutions put forward to fail.
It was a critique on capitalism, of that you yourself are doing that too.
As all systems should be examined and criticized for any failures or inadequacies, otherwise all you have a feigning everything is fine when it is not.
You're conflating the works of Marx on the Communist manifesto and particularly those of USSR and China... and China hasn't really failed, which for me is depressing, because I'm a complete advocate for democracy, and China's communist party is not democratic AT ALL.
And China is now rivaling the US for dominance.
SO... basically no system has been successful thus far.
And let's not pretend our country has bases all over the world still to be the "world's" police force for philanthropic reasons.
This is strategic in wealth and income, particularly in Western Hemisphere in Central and South America; it wants resources, not the country, but the owners of the country.
The US plutocrats that put politicians in their spot so they can use labor and other resources. US is not innocent, but rather a bullying colonist profiteer and racketeer (when using these puppet nations for tax avoidance). And they'll team with local plutocrats if any exist to see to it that the government remains a puppet regime to a world federation of plutocrats.
And most citizens of the US in all political spectra hate the military industrial complex.
It's all about money. Our taxes among the 80% of the population and if you add insurance that we must pay for is significantly more than the effective taxes that Brit, Canadian, German, French, Finnish, etc. pay annually. Yet they get high quality services and goods for it directly to them.
We get crumbling infrastructure and several armadas as if we're about to invade every developed nation on the face of the earth.
Policing the world for free LOL! Oh no, the plutocrats get both military contracts and puppet governments that will allow them to buy up resources. It's not free. Our owners have and still are making fortunes.
Let's not pretend.
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You know, it's creepy when someone from Great Britain names the county and cities I live in and near in low obscure populated state.
And a local pluto-ratic home builder that builds hastily built shitty houses.
Just a few years back, about 2018, I had to giggle when my nephew remarked, while driving through a CBH subdivision to visit my cousin who bought (borrowed to buy) a house and lives with his in laws, wife, and kids to make ends meet,
"Hey look, these homes all look drab and falling apart, they look worse than an old Soviet style built housing project."
I smiled and answered at least the old soviet homes that look better than this shit was essentially "free". These poor renters or home buyers have to pay through the teeth for the privilege to live in these crumbling wrecks.
These CBH houses are horrible and age worse still.
These homes look like absolute trash, poorly built facade of phony stucco siding crumbling revealing wood framing and even insulation falling out, and poking out. Hot water heaters littering yards. Sheets of shingles dangling over the edge of the roof. And piles of shingles lay on the ground below. Home after home looking the same.
Concrete that looks like they hired Evergrande to pour the foundation, crumbling with moss bits from a leaking outside water spigot.
Some homes were fairly new 2 to 3 years old at the time, lots that were left empty by 2009 and just recently finally built just 2015-2017.
And the older subdivisions portions built in 2006-2009 just as the boom and bust came and went.
Unless you knew which portion was the new or the old, you wouldn't have a clue other than perhaps you ventured into a space-time warp and found yourself in the Russia circa 1995 or so.
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This is same in Idaho. Even Utah. And not just in my Boise area, but in eastern Idaho where most of my family lives including parents in Pocatello.
Record homeless... crack heads or whatever... even family members in the past few years have fallen to the opium pandemic leaving orphans for my cousins and brothers/sister to take care of.
Same in Washington State in Spokane... and large cities have long since been hit all through the 2010's with increasing homelessness and slum conditions.
Trip to Portland Oregon with my nephew, dead bodies literally laying under bridges... we called police as my curious nephew wanted to know if the guy not moving under blankets was dead... he lifted it, and sure as shit the guy had maggots all over him and was a putrid mess. The stench, similar to a rotting cow that you my come across hiking in Idaho anywhere. Horrid.
This is robber baron 5,533.0 taking place.
When will we learn wealth and income concentrations are not a wise ideal system.
Not all of us will be trillionaires dillionaires quadrillion pentilion fucktilionaires in waiting.
Pit workers against each other nonsense.
Never works out for the worker. But the same poisonous propaganda does seem to work for the elites.
Since time immemorial.
Yet prices on homes continue to surge, fortunately building is happening across the state as much needed housing supply is built and continues to be built. Again, long term will be putting pressure on real-estate prices.
Something that should have been addressed in great recession of 2008.
It wasn't an over supply of housing necessarily, but a massive un-affordability crisis.
Only reason US had a bout of prosperity across all economic classes in this now collapsing empire that is the US today similar on scale with the USSR's collapse, is that major labor and unionization took place along with first time ever housing programs that ensured tax money went to developing housing both multi and single dwelling units.
This subsidy was not passed onto the price of homes and boosted supply to match much needed demand. Most people prior to the 1930's were living in "cabins" sounds quaint. Until you visit one, my grandma grew up in. Dirt floor. Caste iron stove. Plywood box. Part of the hovel hung over a small creek for quick water gathering with out leaving the shack. About 4 kids (including my grandma) grew up in this thing.
Along came many reforms including works programs, housing acts, etc. that built sewers, city water, roads, electrical grid expansions, my great grandpa was able to get a job at a cement plant, along with many others, and build a modern house complete with electricity and complete plumbing both sewage and water in 1938. My grandma was about 5 when the modern house was complete. The property itself, was more or less a freebie in the middle of Idaho.
Pioneering spirit was free land grants from 1860's onward. I mean, there's plenty of it in the west. And grant money to build on that land.
The plutocratic everyone is trillionaires in waiting propaganda today would decry this as Lincoln phones I mean land.
It was simply using tax money we all pay to fund ourselves into prosperity.
And much of it is given today and mostly only to plutocrats... the dear job creators.
Anyway, the plutocrats came running back to reclaim robber baron 3.0 in the US and we're living through it's misery.
People wonder why WWI and WWII happened.
Massive disenfranchisement tends to spread discontent.. and with technological advancements both in food production and medicine, people live longer and can think and ponder and act... that in other times they couldn't. Enlightenment dispelled superstition (for the most part anyway), so people didn't fall for the divine right of bullshit.
The 1800's world wide was a cluster fuck.
Enlightenment period during the 1700's wasn't much better on the stability front and economic progress front, but life expectancy shit, usually life expectancy in most places at that time was about 50's and many died in their 30's. This short life expectancy doesn't gravitate to festering rebellion or war in the same terms, mostly warring between nobility and royalty hang over from the middle ages.
Little history recap.
As we can take heed on what's happening particularly in the US.
We're collapsing empire. And this insanity on prices like real-estate going crazy is happening everywhere.
Is nothing new.
Thomas Jefferson quote fits nicely what to expect going forward:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around (the banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
You presently have a Federal Reserve system. It's not a publicly owned bank. It's private. It's a banking cartel. It is not like other nations have, a National Bank. The only thing public is that the chairman is selected by the president after being told his/her options from the banking cartel who they can select, then confirmed by Congress. And a few heads are also the same situation... they're selected by the president and confirmed by congress... the selection being more or less a small short list of who is acceptable to the various voting and non-voting members of the Fed (cartel banking).
So our banking system is essentially a private banking system that has command over the Treasury and Bureau of Printing and Engraving to order money; caveats abound to make it appear less conflicting of interest such as Fed isn't allowed to buy directly from Treasury actions on treasury bills. So there's a middle man operation that does this as buyer of last resort as they know the Fed will buy them; the primary dealers as they're called.
Then the Fed can buy the bonds from them. A temporary monetization of debts. Because the Fed uses funds collected from the banking cartel they all pay into a kitty, but also can demand money creation to buy the treasury bills or rolled over treasury bills called US bonds. The fed doesn't have a set limit on such purchasing/money printing to "buy' this stuff... made worse with Frank Dodd act of 2010... so they don't have to go to congress to pass a TARP spending bill to buy other things other than US treasuries and bonds. Now they can buy corporate junk bonds as well as REITs and other ETFs... and boy are they doing this with both hands.
What they presently can't do via the Fat Fuck Gummer Frank and Admiral Ackbar Dodd Act, is to buy stocks outright. Cocaine Mitch looks more like Ackbar but he already has a nickname... cocaine Mitch with his wife's adventures in smuggling coke on their cargo liners.... cocaine Mitch.
That might change.
Japan is ahead of us in this disaster financial trap by about 2 decades.
Japan's government owns 7% of their Japanese stocks. And most of its own debt. They have better social safety net programs... but things aren't that great going on almost 40 years now. Their stock market dumped in 1989. And has never come back since to those highs.
Enjoy historic times.
Because there won't be much else about it to enjoy.
Other than the thought that they're historic times.
Blue against red... sideshow bullshit to pit workers (essentially everyone other than the elites) against each other when circuses and bread fails to pacify them.
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I would have "spouted off" yeah you were poor, until you became bought puppet of oligarchs, congrats to you, your stinking career really helped the middle class income groups of $50K or lower to get worse off and add more to their ranks, congrats, if you think your "helping", who needs problems to be helped from.
As for trickle down piss on me economics:
They don't pay that way, workers are an expense not an asset to pay more toward. They pay what they can get away with, and often, low that they can get away with it and are constantly try to find someone who will work for extreme low pay never to get anyone, and a few they do, only stay for so long temping it up for something better, or to save to get out of the shit hole they find themselves in.
Profits only find its way to the pockets of the owners that have ever consolidated to a few and fewer oligarchs and their corporations.
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I really thought Bush and much of his administration would be facing congressional trials if weapons of mass destruction end up not being found. I remember in 2003 just before the invasion, the lead up, I remember talking to some friends and my dad, thinking well they might as well go in, sounds like they have sufficient evidence, otherwise Bush and Cheney will be behind bars for lying.
Well, they did lie.
But they never went had a trial, and of course no prison without a trial.
My dad, a vet himself, said at the time, while he thought Saddam was a brutal dictator, he didn't like the idea of invading. He brought up the same point, as soon as he's out of there, it will fracture into 3 pieces in civil war. And the entire region would be open to more terrorist activity. The only reason Saddam had power and was such a brutal dictator that that was about the only way Iraq was even held together.
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I agree to the extent of unions being any solution.
They've been made weak in most states, to the point forming one is near impossible.
And when they are formed or more often pre-existing, they're extremely weak to the point of near uselessness.
A co-op based system is required to which all workers get a vote, essentially overriding the do nothing owner class to begin with.
There's no way to restart are union participation in this country, laws prevent them, and ability to simply move production not just overseas or to another state or even just a town a hundred miles away to a more desperate workforce. Union concept in the US is dead, they're not capable of addressing any of the problems in the mid nor long term.
Co-op business model with a co-op Federal Reserve Bank is the only method to actually change the system.
It's delusional to think you can revive union membership. They're only useful in sectors that have no ability to outsource... and that only remains in government employment for the most part. Even food manufacturing often can actually more easily move, not necessarily out of the country, but to a different state, or simply a few towns down the road.
And they do it, all the time either from response of threatens of a union, thus they increased pay real quick (illegal but they do it anyway), then they plan a move to cheaper more desperate labor nearby.
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They won't change if we the people of this government, of this country allow it.
All other nations from Canada, Germany, France, India, etc. have laws forbidding price gouging and these artificial monopolies by reducing patent length or eliminating them altogether. Additionally, even on generics which often don't save much since competition is in the form of a oligopoly (fewer competitors) they ensure the cost price of production is well known and only allow so much margin for profit. In some instances some countries quite literally operate to produce a particular medicine themselves to ensure it is at cost if no private for profit firm is willing to do so.
Profit motive is only useful due to competition, when competition doesn't exist, profit motive is harmful to any economy. And in some sectors like healthcare including hospitals and medicines just as utilities (water, sewer, trash, electricity, telecom, internet) a natural monopoly exist that precludes real competition... thus used to determine regulations such as price controls, and collective ownership and operation to sell at near cost that includes capital expenditures (cost to grow and repair).
There's a study in philosophical sciences... oh yes, it's called economics. We discern via competitive market principles... we establish all markets to become more competitive, and when such competitive markets are grossly violated for profit motive is harmful, and collective market provides better prices, quality, and quantity supplied.
Solution:
1) Prohibit patent protections all medical items (drugs and appliances).
2) Subsidize full FDA trial studies to biotechs... they can make their money in appropriate profit margin via subsidies to eliminate the risk of failures by being paid for their attempts... instead of trying to come up with a marginal drug, and as a "safe" bet on another erection like pill so they can swiftly sell the patent to big pharma for billions, when they only spent a few million, making orders of magnitude in profits... then big pharma wanting to make a return on an inflated patent purchase.
3) Allow FDA to perform their own trials.
4) Allow FDA to use other countries' own approved medicines backed by their trial cases for early release to the US, so these medicines are quickly and easily available without having to wait for FDA trial studies to complete... still do a trial study in the US to ensure such studies provide similar results as the foreign country... and an easy way to discern another nations' accuracy on their own approval, is if two or more countries have approved a drug with similar trial studies that each country conducted independently..... you know, you use your fucking brain to help discern things.
5)Price restrict drugs like every other functioning wealthy country does. This means using an accounting auditing team to determine the actual cost per unit to then establish max profit, and ensure that information is available to the consumer which includes medical professionals and patient.
6) Eliminate unnecessary prescription requirements on most medicines: only medicines that should be Rx included the following
a) high risk of addiction
b) Extremely complicated dosing and methods of delivery and/or certain life threatening reaction to other medication.
c) Side effect includes mental impairment or that involve mood or psychological changes.
d) Risk to over use that may lead to evolution of resistant bacteria; like for antibiotics.
All other medicines should be made into over the counter without need of Rx. This reduces barrier to purchase on the demand side, less admin cost on the supply side and would provide more quantity supplied and ability for more quantity demand... easier access.
7) Eliminate private/nonprofit insurance... establish a single payer medicare program covering the entire population residing in the US. Similar to 173 of the recognized 201 countries do... we're the remaining 28 countries that idiotic hasn't discovered or simply doesn't have the power over its aristocracy to enact.
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Gerald, just for shits and to watch his "blood boil" some more, I would call him a Putin buddy back to him, and say I'm rubber your glue whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.
Now that we're done with preschool antics, let's talk about the topic at hand, and not straw man, we're talking about the US. I'm making no comparisons, you are. I'm simply stating the fact that we have more people in our prison system than any other country, we have more in poverty despite being as so called super power, we haven't even universal medical, nor higher education, we have a president that is elected by getting fewer votes overall by 3 million, we have fewer population votes for our right winger party yet they're established in power more so than the majority votes in all state and federal legislature due to overt gerrymandering, we support 75% of the worlds dictatorships in various military campaigns, etc.
So why the fuck do you include US as some magical democratic super hero nation?
We're as fucked up as some of these nations you're protesting against. Just in a different way. So what. We're fucked up. Why not protest that too!?!?
Why not look to Oslo, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, or Austria as leaders in democracy? Because they actually practices much more of it than we do.
Germany even goes so far to require about half the board of directors on large corporations to be filled by their non-supervisor/management workers to vote on wages/salaries, capital expenditures, benefits, work hours, safety, etc.
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Greenspan, often conflated as gloating, but he states he wasn't, he's so monotone it's hard to tell if he was ever gloating or not, that worker job insecurity was reasons to low inflation even in the late 90's; at least why it job wages even in the late 90's early 2000's were largely flat across the board of sectors of industries.
When I looked up what he said, it was actually a warning. But since he was in charge, they conflated he was gloating. I didn't see any gloat, rather it sounded more like mild concern about the future outlook of consumer demand: these fuckers are going to be too broke, more indebted, and willing to take lesser pay and thus unable to sustain consumer demand making the overall economy decline, not grow.
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Idaho we have done absentee ballots by request of any reason for decades.
My absentee ballot goes into a signed and sealed envelope and I keep a perforated receipt of the ballot itself with ballot number specific to my registration and ballot. I can also look up my voter registration information that also gives me updates on my absentee ballot: if it was accepted and valid... mine was. In Canyon county they paid postage for the mail return envelope.
Mail in ballots absolutely do not lack chain of custody. They are marked with lots of data as per my ballot receipt I have: the county, ballot count, VBMP-File number, Extract: number. right side district and precinct and ballot count number again: the ballot number that was sent to me.
They're iron clad. And because it's to match vote to registration you cannot have a ballot counted twice. If I attempted to go my precinct to vote twice, it would show that I had already voted and would be turned away.
If you attempt to vote in multiple counties, which is possible, an audit is conducted well before certifying election results. If something like this were to happen, my votes would likely be invalidated the last one, and I would probably be prosecuted for voter fraud; at the very least I would be questioned to find out how it came to be that I had registered and voted in multiple counties and/or precincts. Such voter fraud is rare, first it comes with a big fine and jail time. Second... why? For one extra stupid ass vote? Really?
Most people who have done multiple voting are generally wealthy people who own property and are residents of multiple states; and attempt to literally vote in both states they live in, this is near impossible to identify. This typically means the voter is wealthy, and most wealthy voters tend to be republican; as it's in their interest as wealthy aristocrats to vote in such manner.
So any fraud voting or multiple voting tends to be not what you apparently think it leans towards.
As far as counting the ballots, there are lawyers of both parties along with volunteers who find voting sacred: all votes count no matter how the voter voted.
At least that's been my experience.
The only suspicions I have had are computerized tally. That will always bother me. That's why I always insist that all elections in all places should be later recounted by hand to ensure integrity of election and not the whims of some computer that may have been tampered with on purpose or just not working correctly. The vote MUST reflect what the people have cast.
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I suspect there's some of that... empty homes on the market.
But new constructions per 1,000 units both multi and single dwelling units have been below population growth for decades. The heist has been in the fact these inflated prices have priced out new supply from developers to build units people want as well as properly can afford. Property, just the dirt itself, has become inflated. Making risks higher for developers to build. Even individuals wanting to buy some property to develop their own home, it's become absurd.
1,300 to 1,800 sq ft ranges are what myself and many others would prefer. But much of new building has been in much larger units. And where smaller units have been these terrible townhouses 1,000 units attached to other units and no or hardly no yard and those inflated to be as much as a luxury condo. It's a market mismatch on what is being built, and not enough being built at all.
The other bid up in prices was caused be REITs... the vehicle how even median income earners to super rich invest in real-estate... the dump money in to a REIT fund and that fund because of its prospectus must use this money to buy up real-estate... and they don't care what prices, they just need to spend that money to be inline with their prospectus as well as it's good for the agent and REIT managers as this gives them fees, and fees, and more fees. So they come in and offer above asking prices to close the sell quick. Often cash price... because they're using cash from the REIT fund. These REIT's are also absentee landlords often using some oligopoly management company that's incredibly immoral and does things that it shouldn't: charges separate fees to tenants on various nonsensical things and basic upkeep that's suppose to be part of the rent payment, and they charge the owner high handyman fees, and if requiring a contractor, they get kickbacks from local contractors to the property manager that charge bucket loads to do work. This in turn requires the REIT to hike rents even if it's beyond the wage/salary ratio of the area.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
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The other reason: it taxes the poorest the hardest, and the richest, it's just taking a few annual drips from their seething pot, instead of a piece of the pot itself.
Funny thing though, most states and other nations have property tax that always includes real-estate, your home.
Most of the wealth belongs to the very top 1%, but most of their wealth isn't real-estate, but stocks, that in most nations including the US isn't part of the property tax. Most rest of us wealth is in our house and vehicles... that gets taxed.
Because it's okay for the plutocrats to tax their homes, as their few drips from their pot is more than enough to pay for it without giving any piece of that pot.
As for the rest of us... well it sucks.
But wealth tax on other things that most of the rest of us don't own, but mostly the rich... can't tax that, might cramp their style.
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@AlexIncarnate911 Yes. As we are of the order of primates, and all humans are in the classification ape family by infraorder called simiiformes: tailless primates.
Human complete biological scientific classifications:
Kingdom of Animalia,
Phylum of Chordata,
Class of Mammilia,
Order of Primates,
Sub Order of Haplorhini,
Infraorder of Simiiformes ie apes,
Family of Hominidae,
Sub Family of Homininae,
Tribe of Hominini,
Genus of Homo,
Type Species: Homo Sapiens.
Now if any of those were misplaced and put us in some different class like avian or order like Squamata then you'd be a lying bird snake. ;)
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Our culture is in decline, but that has to do with the entrenchment of idiot culture that involves disregarding science even fearing scientific discoveries, adopting religious idiot superstitious dogma, wearing pit stained wife beater, eating oil bloated fast food, knowing more about sports players and reality show morons than basic chemistry, mathematics, geography, etc. With the only desire is to see the next remake a theater near you, and spend time watching cars round and round and round with the side show of a big car run over small cars. And if you're too broke to do that, stay home and watch fake wrestling with phony ass knuckle dragging comical drama mixed with maybe the exotic real cage fighting.
'Merica!
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With an "opportunity minimum wage for a consecutive 90 days" of $4.25 for those under 20 years of age. Read that yesterday in our HR bulletin board at work. Opportunity for various businesses to fuck the younger student work, since 3 months summer vacation means the summer jobs could go for less. I'm not aware locally any employer using that $4.25 an hour wage though. In the late 90's when I started working I was paid above minimum wage doing sheet rocking, min wage then was $5 an hour, I was paid $8 in Idaho. Then a part time year round job started at the then new min wage rate of $5.50 an hour. Ended that job after high school at $6.50 an hour, then took on another job making $8.50 an hour, ending that job 3 years later at $9.50, for a job that paid $10.50 an hour, ending that job with various promotions at $17 something an hour. Military for a while making much less salaried. Recently had a utility job that started at $12.50 an hour, ending at $21 an hour, left for some other chance that fail through and now making $14 an hour :( Wish I hadn't tried the other opportunity, but I'm back at the utility job just in a lower paid position, hoping to get back to the other position $21 an hour.
But the min wage in this country stinks.
And all wages have fallen due to trade with 3rd world and 2nd world countries as has all other 1st world nations for the most part.
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TristarGaming It's the best way to become atheist. Especially reading it as an educated adult in various sciences. You finally decide to read it fully. Then as you read through it you, suddenly you get a spooky pit in your stomach that the general public, family, friends, etc. of which many take this crap with any grain of seriousness. You start to realize people are insane taking this horse shit which frankly isn't written very well to begin with, with as much seriousness as they do building churches, temples, cathedrals, etc. This is just as bat shit as the Greek Pantheon, Ancient Egyptian pantheons, popol vuh, zoroastrian, the Vedas in Hinduism, etc.
It's like a toddler growing up in NAZI Germany realizing their SS daddy and mommy, family, and friends essentially the general public to large portion are fucking insane after stumbling onto a concentration camp. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
So sure. Teach it. Put it in mythology or literature class or philosophy class. Enjoy! More atheists on the way! :)
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Alex Cavendish Let me try. Numbers are useful in explanation of something: telling someone how to put together a particular substance or mechanical work like medicine or an airplane or how to fly that airplane: configure its weights and balance to charting a flight from a sectional via figure True course from map and plotter then correct for wind to get to get True Heading then correct for geographical magnetic variation to get Magnetic Course and finally the correction to the compass in the airplane written by the mechanics gives you the Magnetic Heading you'll actually fly.
Then when you actually fly the route where things may change a bit and won't fly it exactly as planned, but mostly as planned, and provides methods to detect deviations or changes in the flight ie. wind direction has changed, accidentally flying wrong course due to not correcting compass precession, changing the MH because you accidentally over flown it significantly requiring a different heading for the next leg of the course.
Numbers are just useful as language is to explain and work things out. So useful that they at least appear real in terms of the degree of the significant figures required to do something useful. Sometimes too much detail isn't required to accomplish a particular task, you don't need to measure a bike rim to the the nano-meter when millimeter is good enough.
It's not just about numbers. It's about the level of accuracy in the measuring device, and the level of accuracy needed to test or conduct whatever operation to a useful also usually desirable degree.
What we should rely on is experimental and observational evidence. Numbers are just a tool to help just as picture diagrams and spoken language.
You can imagine anything that may actually have no relationship with each other, and later find it to be inconsistent with the evidence. But that doesn't mean reality is inconsistent with itself, it means our conjecture or guesses or currently tested observed models may be inconsistent with various other conditions not currently aware of which actually turns out to happen a lot through history of science. Reality actually always remains consistent, and our models are adjusted to conform to the consistency of reality. Because we take our cues from what observation and testing data reveal. We let testable verifiable repeatable evidence provide the guidance to the truth, and numbers are a tool which are as good as the accuracy of the measuring device and/or model being used.
In some cases, like Newtonian physics works good enough for lots of things including putting things in orbit, even though Relativity is more accurate as it encompasses more conditions specifically relativistic speeds and masses, but Newtonian physics is simplified and accurate enough for putting things in orbit or building a bridge or designing an airplane as needed than using relativity equations when the conditions don't require that level of detail or conditions. Relativity equations would be over doing it when simpler Newtonian is just as good.
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My grandma wasn't. She was and so is her surviving older sister, my great aunt, die hard democrats. In fact, the older they got and have gotten, the more staunch democrats they become. My grandma in particular was paranoid of republicans gutting social security and medicare. My dad, who looks like an old timer hick with cow boy boots and big belt buckle Idahoan, has only become more of liberal democrat over time.
He's upset with the democrats because they've become essentially the GOP economically.
He dislikes to "extreme" EPA laws, as he was an industrial worker, working at a phosphorus refinery that was later sold off to China, shortly after he retired.
He thinks the EPA should have funds to provide subsidies to meet clean standards, he understands the importance of the EPA, as he put it, without the EPA we'd end up like China with incredibly bad air and tainted water. He just doesn't want the EPA to be used as an excuse for big business to cut production, and send it overseas where there isn't the environmental protection. We wonder why CO2 levels continue to rise despite the gutting of our own industrialization in the US and western Europe; the production went to China, Malaysia, Mexico, etc. where they don't enforce many if any environmental protections; they're often even dirtier than when the factories or mines were in the US or other developed countries.
So, it's not really the case older you get, you side with the GOP.
Only greedy fucks who come into lots of money decide they want to go GOP.
They got the money honey now, so fuck you all small people.
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I know lots of people who can. I can. It's staying with a consistent accent that takes time. Like English, German has several accents, and even dialects... imagine if Welch or the various Gaelic was actually an English relative instead of a Celtic. German spans even parts of France along the Rhein, Lichtenstein, Austria, Switzerland, parts of Czech Republic, a piece of Italy in the Alps, Prussia-Posen in modern day Poland/Lithuania all regions have various grammar and phonetic differences.
There's a song done in 85 languages by German artist, the first several (I think over 10 are variation of German accents and dialects).
It's like English, nobody speaks standard German flawlessly, its always colored by their own accent and sometimes dialects, and for non-native speakers wherever their teachers or they interned. And like English, many people say the other asshole has the accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOrsQaUCTYI
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+Lightice1 I would also say the last line of ali's comment is also argument from ignorance, we don't know therefore a deity had to do it. Which is flawed in a few points: 1) we may some day discover the subject that is being touted as only a god or gods or whatever could perform or make happen, to find out how it works and has nothing to do with any gods as had happened countless times already.
2) Ignorance of something doesn't mean one should make up or fill it with something that just "feels good" or "sounds good" . Instead, it should make you ponder and think about all the possibilities and even try to think of hypotheses, testable ideas to see if they can be falsified.
3) Lastly, putting something in there whether its a god, or gods, or we're in some matrix, or it's our own thoughts that make the universe or whatever idea that cannot be tested falsified, doesn't actually answer your question anyways. Even philosophically just claiming a narrative like the matrix or god or gods or it's your own thoughts that make the world or whatever doesn't answer the question, its a non-answer: what made the matrix? God? gods? Your mind that makes the universe? It's the problem with infinite regression or progression on non- verifiable claims. You never actually answered the question, you filled it in with whatever sounds good to you that never actually provided any insight, often you made it more complicated by doing so if you actually thought about your claim, you skipped over and said this is it and I'm done thinking because this is it.
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Go read a history book, people from ancient Athens, to Germany, to Russia, to Iran have wanted to go toward a dictatorship because democracy put them in a position to have to think... some of the nations suffered for long periods of time afterwards, some short but severely suffered.
When dictatorships take over, they generally rule for a long miserable period of time at the peoples' expense.
Poor baby has a headache because he has civic duties.
Well you could have a bigger headache should some dictator, or dictator party rule your roast. Perhaps you have some mark, and see to it that for whatever reason you should be beaten twice a day before dawn.
Anyways, dictatorships are never good for anyone besides the dictator and a very few sycophants. And even then you might complain about having a headache from having to think of ways to appease your dictator(s).
All jobs can be a "head ache" sometimes. When choosing what to do with your life or anything, think about which shit sandwich you'd rather have.
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zzot2 Actually, it has worked better and better as industrialization and other technological advancements continue. Turn of the century, the entire world was falling apart from plutocratic and aristocratic rule.
A democratic social capital mixed market works far better than plutocratic rule. Read some history books, you'll see the only time the US wasn't a backwater for the majority of its people, the golden era with a prospering middle income group didn't take place until about the 1940's when social mixed markets were being adopted such as social security, right to collectively bargain, labor standards, etc.
You're so wrong to reality it makes me want to take a nerf bat and make you read history books, if you stop, I'll beat you with the nerf bat screaming continue reading you ignorant shit, we're going to fill that ignorance with some knowledge of reality.
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Would like a peaceful revolution.
But the longer it goes with how fucked up the economy from rents, housing prices, medical system, financial system, gerrymandered to the fucking tilt obviously fake democracy, student loan debts to the hilt, leverage so extreme from auto loans, pensions vanished, wages stinking to the extreme, etc.
likely will require a blood bath, no peace. The black flag.
Unfortunately.
We all must prepare for war.
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If stupid is a pre-existing condition, essentially none of them would ever get insurance... actually they would pay out, but when they went to use it, they would be told they were denied... We are sorry to inform you, your medical coverage has been denied as we discovered you are "hold my beer, and watch this..." stupid. Therefore, your claim to fix your broken back, lacerations to the eyes, nose, neck, chest, legs, and feet, punctured lung, liver, stomach, and dislodged intestine.
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I was in Seattle, there were a huge influx of them. The college I was at was constantly giving them tours of various education departments and programs.
There's always a few that do well. But most of them, just like any human, go a little nuts. Some get home sick. Others go nuts and get in car accidents. And some don't study at all and try bribing teachers. LOL!
There's a huge Asian population around the Seattle area, so you have Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. They all hate each others nationality, but all of them agree, they hate the Chinese for various reasons the most.
Always found it funny. I got the scope on Asian populous politics while I was there. Very interesting.
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Milton Friedman actual would attempt to convince people of that nonsense in the 70's and 80's on various talk shows and speeches.
Watching some of the taped programs of his, I want to scream so bad, sure, free market will correct poisonous products from that "brand" after several people are dead and ill due to it, then they'll stop buying that brand for the another name brand, but same product because the same producer quit selling it under that LLC name and formed a new one, and eventually they'll start getting ill and die with that brand name.
And in some instances, you'll just never know the product is harmful. Because records aren't kept, and the business claims its not their stuff doing it with no objective testing requirements.
Insanity. I despise libertarians on "lazy-fuck" markets, because they apparently are incapable of thinking beyond the end of their fucking noses. Buy into some horseshit dogma that markets work wonderful left with as little rules as possible, they completely take Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations completely out of context, about the hidden hand as this magical wizard of god or something.
When we can see through history markets on their own with too few rules have blown up, and are the leading cause of many wars and civil wars that cause a nation's economic system to collapse.
King Louis XV did it in 1758 on grain transport and restraints (requiring grain surpluses) when gang busters for 10 years, sold all their grain, bad harvest in 1768, massive famine. Louis XV quickly abolished his Laissez-faire putting back restraints on grain transports and sales so their would be saved supply in case of a bad harvest. Louis the XVI didn't learn the lessons from his dad's snookered into deregulation, and well he lost his head largely due to repeating the same deregulate sell it all do nothing markets, and starvation ensued and helped spur the Revolution that ended in Terror.
Even the US knows famine is bad, and heavily subsidizes crops with crop insurance provisions to farmers, and price floors.
Funny thing, Glass-Steagal Act abolished 1998, and 10 years later we have the banking system failure of 2008. Laissez-faire let it be markets do not function well at all, it's not just hypothesis, objectively we see they fail when rules are abandoned.
People do stupid shit individually.
No rules collectively on anything such as markets appear to increase the then collective stupidity levels by orders of magnitude.
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SumoGambit
Actually many of the European social country's pay less taxes than many of us Americans.
Median income in the US is $51,017 2013 and Idaho is $45,489. Most are families. Individuals are generally making $25,000 to $30,000 a year.
I did a comparison between Germany, UK, Austria, Canada, and US on an individual person at $50,000 income. I did not do any deductions or tax credits which all nations have, I assumed the $50,000 to be the adjusted gross income and the individual does not qualify for any tax credits so it would be a simple comparison.
I found US taxes at $50,000 adjust gross income taxes were higher than UK, Austria, and Canada. Germany came out about $500.00 lower than US when taking in account of all income taxes and sales taxes.
In fact, US only becomes beneficial at incomes starting above $100,000. Then it quickly becomes cheaper in terms of income and payroll taxes.
I was expecting the US to have lower taxes, but we have the highest for 80% of income earners.
Here's our benefits:
Medicare for elderly
Medicaid for disabled
Social security for elderly supplement income
Social security disability supplement income
Food assistance for the very poor.
First education grades K-12
Higher education pales grants max of $4,000 a year if qualified: student and parents income are combined in considering qualification until student is 24.
Students 25 and older only the students income is considered for qualification.
Most qualify for either subsidized interest while attending school or unsubsidized interest loans which capitalize even while attending school and before repayment begins. Many are in hock to their eye balls. And graduation from colleges are fairly low meaning many have debts $20,000 debts without even completing a 4 year degree. This program is a mess.
Here's how much $50,000 gets taxed in Idaho, USA.
-State income tax:
1.60% $1,322.00 = tax $21.15
3.60% $1,319.00 = tax $47.48
4.20% $1,320.00 = tax $55.44
5.10% $1,320.00 = tax $67.32
6.20% $1,319.00 = tax $81.78
7.10% $3,302.00 = tax $234.44
7.40% $40,098.00 = tax $2,967.25
Total Idaho State Income tax owed $3,474.87
Idaho effective income tax rate on $50,000 is 6.95%
-Federal income tax
10% $8,925.00 = tax $892.50
15% $27,325.00 =tax $4,098.75
25% $13,750.00 = tax $3,437.50
Total Fed income tax owed $8,428.75
Federal effective income tax rate on $50,000 is 16.86%.
Medicare tax 1.49% on all income and no caps
$745.00
Social security tax is 6.2%
Stops taxing on income more than $113,700.00 meaning no one will pay more than $7,049.40 for that year in social security taxes.
$50,000 at 6.2% is $3,100.00
Summary:
State $3474.87
Fed $8,428.75
Medicare $745.00
Social security $3,100.00
Total payroll income tax for that year $15,748.62
Plus Idaho has
3% sales tax on electricity, natural gas, sewage and trash, and water service utilities.
6% sales tax on all goods/services including food.
Sales tax or excised taxes exist on other specific services at additional or higher rates:
Gasoline per gallon Federal and Idaho State: Idaho is 0.25 per gallon and Federal gasoline tax per gallon 0.18 total gasoline total tax $.43 gallon, telecommunication taxes landline and cell phones, dish-cable-internet providers.
And property tax in Idaho is varies from 1.0% to 1.9% according to county.
We get very weak social services while paying the most in taxes compared to the Nordic and most other develop countries in Europe.
We have a gigantic military that has become job of last resort for most young adults entering the labor market.
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Wasn't actually super low interest rates. But the principle amount borrowed was much smaller, because housing was inflated in schemes of get rich quick gimmicks.
Homes depreciate in value as they require upkeep, and often need remodeling, and in some cases complete demolishing and rebuild. Just as vehicles depreciate rapidly after their sold, you lose 25% of the original price paid.
So prices weren't super inflated. And to ensure people could afford homes, many various subsidies were provided to build the roads, sewers, water, electricity, and other utilities so developers couldn't racketeer off their building them then charging the racketeering prices; basically our tax money actually benefited the people. We didn't depend on privatized utilities or development rackets.
People understood how to determine what sectors are competitive and contribute well via a for profit motive, and those sectors that don't, and require various regulation or outright collective ownership and operation as well as how to spend tax money on such operations to get the best price, supply, and quality.
Thatcher/Reagan dogmas are utterly failed. And the boomer generation are clinging onto the hopes that it hasn't as they're heading toward retirement and whatever they've accumulated; their interest is to keep it. Fuck everyone else. They're desperate too.
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Their country appears to have just collapsed. They have no law and order.
It's a fucking cluster fuck as you described. Idiocy.
No wonder they can't trust various foods and products. What a horrible shit hole of a country. And vast majority of their population remain well below a Japan, S Korean, Australian, even South African median income life style.
This is not a country to emulate as far as law and order and economy.
They take no responsibility for their government, since they have very little ability to change policy, so they just disobey what pathetic government remains, until the government quietly whisks them away whenever the few mafioso leaders decide someone got to big for their pants, or rubbed them the wrong way.
Only reason China and other defunct nations have even the facade of development, which is all it is, a facade, is the greed of oligarchs from the same mentioned nations like Japan, S Korea, Australia, the European countries, US, Canada, etc. dumping all their labor needs from these defunct dictator governments and destitute shit holes.
Greed will be humanities undoing. Greed the ruling class once again will bring ruin to humanity.
Will we humans ever fucking learn. And we haven't training wheels. Nuclear technology means our power isn't iron swords or cannon, where one can make mistakes and it only causes minor setbacks. The power we willed now can push us into a miserable stone age existence for thousands of years, potentially causing an extinction of our species.
We either learn oh go the way 99% of all other species.
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Well, the US was suffering the great depression in the 1930's while the Soviet Union was having a boom economically rebuilding from their civil war.
My great grandparents with my grandma were living in a hovel in Idaho my grandma called a cabin... it was a shack made by plywood, dirt floor one room, hung slightly over a creek to dip a bucket under to get water without leaving the shack. A caste iron stove that still sat in 2000 as we toured it one Memorial day. By 1938, a concrete plant employed by great grandpa, new works from FDR's works programs, my great grandparents were able to afford to construct a "modern home" with foundations, normal insulated walls, and even electricity and running water and sewer plumbing as the small town of Inkom Idaho put in a sewer system from the works programs of FDR.
My grandma said the 3 bedroom, 1 living room and 1 kitchen modern home, great grandpa called it his castle.
Compared to the dirt floor one room shack they lived in, I would consider it a palace. The modern house was upgraded over time to be wired with electricity... it had plumbing from its initial build. Initially only had 2 bedrooms, but they added another bedroom. And they dug a basement sometime in 50's; just as my grandparents did their house in Pocatello Idaho that started as a 2 bedroom 800 sq ft home, they first added two more bedrooms, expanded the living room, and made a utility room... then when I was about 5 they finished the basement into a second living room, they in the 70's they had finished two rooms in the basement for my youngest uncle and an office like room. The other half the basement was my grandpa's workshop; he had side gigs repairing fridges and freezers along with working at a fertilizer factory.
Anyway, in the 30's soviet Russia might have been more prosperous than the US.
Wasn't really until FDR's works programs then especially WWII and the rest of Europe and Asia destroying itself that left our nation and even Canada and Australia with the vacuum of being the last powerhouses of production to have our economic boom.
That now has been spent... since 1980 really. Now, its all financialized, recycling of all the other nations surpluses is what keeps the US and perhaps Canada, Australia, and even the UK afloat... for now. Until that gimmick is exposed for the house of cards that is.
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I was looking up an Alexandr Wang 25... apparently there is a Alexander Wang clothing designer in NY City whose very rich too, that guy is older, my age, at 40 this year... and of course he had sweatshops and sexual allegations against him.
The other Alexandr Wang 25 year old is heir to some physicists in Los Alamos... on paper he's worth billions with some AI apps and probably has some stock or private stock that has taken on funky bubble prices in the AI stupidity.
But yep. Exploitation. And pure tyranny. Or just gimmickry. The older one exploited poor people forcing them to work ridiculous hours, and when he was not paying them for holidays or vacations or sick time, they filed workman comp, he fired them, another illegal activity.
They don't follow laws, and when they can the become law makers making laws that screw everyone else while padding their pockets and their power to go beyond just the passive exploiting of labor.
The young one just seems to be subject to the ongoing "investing" scams. AI becoming the hot buzz your nether region for the past 8 months.
That'll end horribly if NVDA misses their 11 billion revenue target this next earnings quarter.... they typically their quarterly earnings are 6 to 7 billion and last one it was lower than the prior year quarter; just as all other semiconductors.
Nobody can understand how all other semiconductors are showing a steepening decline, even NVDA's last quarter was worse than the last, and last year same quarter numbers.
Supposedly it was firstly backorders. But there isn't anymore. Then it was some AI chip. Which makes more sense. We'll see.
I only follow those earnings numbers since I actively trade stocks and options.
Most capitalism on its own, which isn't new, existed in since Ancient Greece and extended into ancient Rome so over 3,000 years of it, generally has devolved back to an oligarchy to a king or emperor over and over, and in some instances devolving into various forms of slavery including feudalism: a lighter form of essentially slavery.
All markets systems, as you stated, have a propensity to incentivize dishonesty and exploitation.
It's why even the very rich who tout market wonderment, have a very strong desire to keep courts in their pockets and have such courts to exist along with the police force who execute such court commands. The irony the rich want to pretend markets are just nice and neat and self healing (ie they explode and cause massive misery and everyone has to reject the stupidity and eventually figure out something better)... they love socialism of courts and police forces. Often the military is their best friend too.
It's why democracy is the key.
Ironic too that many of the rich and pro rich oligarchy lament how we're not a democracy, that we're a republic. Only demonstrating they're not for freedom of the sort that the majority have power and ability to make decisions, that they're against such liberty and freedoms.
I would argue at this point, we're not much of an authentic republic either, but more akin to ancient Romes senate which literally was relegated to the very rich who had to put up massive sums of money to run for various offices.
And with gerrymandering, which many other countries have not surprisingly figured ways to rebuke and make go away, but in the corporate states of America, it's flat out ridiculous.
And with campaign financing, essentially legal bribery.
So we literally have a rule by the rich, plutocratic oligarchy. Which can than fall apart into an form of dictatorship either under monarchical type rapped in magica and woo of various religions or just a flat out dictatorship (that also generally creates magica and woo around the dictator).
Or misery befalls everyone and it devolves into chaos and stupidity.
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REITs are a disaster to housing. And should be outlawed. They do the same thing back prior to the 1934, whereby many investors would gobble up land in various cities, especially during the 1800's and very early 1900's. Many surrounding towns, hence why there are surrounding towns and many of the capitols that were forming, are smaller, because the surrounding areas created their own townships with charter laws that outlawed the speculative nature of lots for sale. Keeping prices low and thus the lots were bought not by speculative stupidity and becoming unaffordable to essentially everyone, residents and employers alike, but kept them relatively affordable and thus they grew larger as a town while the capitol grew but slowly or just fizzled altogether and was moved to another town... Idaho... Lewiston, then moved far south to Boise. But then Boise started having the same land grab hording via speculative I want my goofy NFT cuz all the Paris Hilton's of the world are coming to town! So you have several, as you do in just about every major city in the US, other cities next to each other; all that chartered their property laws with anti speculative ordinances; limits on lots, requirements on development before even getting close to the max limit of lots per year or more, etc.
REITs really are a disaster for everyone... including morons who bought some of these shares on them... as they're also levered to the tits.
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The migration thing is a sort of a cyclical thing.
People moving here to Idaho from say California or other states tend to come and realize they make next to nothing in terms of income, and job opportunities are shit. The work at home bull is just that, you're just expendable on the next downturn and will have to leave this state to find employment in person elsewhere... same shit and smell just blowing away from the face, to later come wafting back into your face.
The population count though is here to stay and go down. This was expected.
Alarm was that the world's population would increase beyond resources.
Various statisticians and sociologists and biologists have long concluded that advances in technology tends to arrest the growth rate in all cultures over time.
In decent economies the growth balances to a net 0. And negative if social policies are horrid. Slight positive if they're beyond horrid and enter into a dark age or regress as child mortality goes up birth rates go up.
Since developing nations have decreasing child deaths, birth rates also decline.
Additionally, as nations shift from farming to market driven economies, children become a liability, not an asset. They cannot help earn additional income, at least not right away, for the household, and in fact even in their teen years they tend to never repay the infant and childhood cost of caring for the child. They are indeed a fiscal deficit on a household, unlike agrarian under developed nations where the child is immediately put to work as soon as they're able body for farming and other goods producing activities.
As for the death rates increasing, this is bad when you see life expectancy fall.
This typically happens in very seldom situations:
1) Poor to nonexistent social services.
2) Diminish economic circumstances including inequality becoming severe.
3) War and Civil War. Including invasion by a foreign force.
4) Governmental collapse.
5) Pandemics and epidemics disease oriented.
Most of these are deaths of despair. We see this frequently in the 1990's in Japan, Korea, Taiwan... but this also was observed in former Soviet States as well as Russia.
The US has now come into this same global malaise as it is vulnerable for all of the above reasons now to a lowering of the life expectancy age.
Prior to the pandemic, US 2015 to 2018 3 years in a row lost life expectancy.
Again, deaths from despair: opium crisis to suicide increases attributable to worsening economic situation by most (inequality). And poor social services in this country particularly compared to many other nations including 2nd world nations such as Mexico.... lack of universal affordable medical or even access to basic living conditions. Many now live in tents in RV's tantamount to a new Hoover-ville phenomena.
Culminating in cartoons being elected president, a weird beer belly putsch at the capitol, and continuation of poor inequity in work to wages.
So yes, people like myself are saying fuck you pimps in the real-estate business, particularly the landlords... but this extends to others up the chain who essentially own all of the country in terms of a feudal like plutocracy.
You all fuckers better have kids, because I'm not making a peasant to row your boats... you all get up off your entitled ass and row your own boat. Cock suckers can scam your own heirs in who gets you the beer and sucks your butt holes.
I will not sire a child to provide you with a serf.
So... row you're own damn boats.
And yes, this part of the population demographic is here to stay.
The immigration.... that's cyclical. And always will be.
Grass is greener on the other side... no it isn't... boom back to where they came from, or a few skip around to another place where the grass might be greener but probably isn't.
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Almost every goofy ass empire as they come and go, thinks their exception to their own world order thesis: everyone else must do a,b,c,d,etc. but not us. We're the exception. Because we're wonderful that way.
And most nations that become empires tend to stagnate in self glorification. Somehow thinking their best, when in reality they're far behind, and they become backwaters. From Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Dynastic Chinese Empire, Frankish Empire, Spanish Empire, Ottoman, British Empire, etc. they implode on their diluted hubris.
Wish we could just end our empire. IT helps nobody in our own country, and abroad... besides maybe a few oligarchs for a while.
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I personally think people in general, a majority of about 60% to 70% who are well traveled particularly Japan, Australia, New Zealand, western and eastern Europe, and Canada. We have enough foreign friends, we compare our pay stubs. We've gone pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals in these other countries; likely used them to buy OTC or Rx or get check ups.
The internet allows us to examine exactly how each nation does their healthcare. We know how fucked we are compared to them.
Couple this with over the last few years insurance companies have really gone out of their ways to not cover shit in their high deductible plans or even just PPO plans with huge ass deductibles of $1,500, they simply don't want to cover stuff that is obviously covered on the plan, and finally after appealing it they'll do the coverage they're supposed to be doing, and often what they do cover wasn't even 100%, but often just 80% to 50% anyways.
People are sick of our shitty insurance from our employers. It just sucks, and its overpriced for what pathetic amounts it covers. A
Then couple how ridiculous it is that it costs so much even with insurance for an ambulance or hospital stay.
I know there's still 30% to 40% who are not well traveled. It's too expensive for their lifestyle (they have kids making traveling abroad too expensive), or they have no interest or both.
Various recent polls show that a universal healthcare program is necessary by 56% to 70%.
The day you can fool people is over, knowing damn well people are generally too poor and/or busy to be able to travel abroad, stay in contact with friends and coworkers abroad... with the internet even us lower income or poor folks can take trips abroad and keep in constant touch with our foreign friends.
Pissing on our legs and calling it rain won't work anymore.
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Inflation is and always is a monetary thing. That's all economics foundation since Ancient Greece.
There is no other inflation causes. It is always a result of too much money in the system.
Inflation is the rise in prices across all goods and services. Not just a shortage in one or two things. Or in this sector. That's not inflation.
We're getting inflation, that is rise in prices across the board of all sectors even the low demand currently service sectors; they're actively raising prices as their inputs have increased, even though service sector demand is still below that of pre-pandemic levels.
The only way you can reduce inflation like this is to raise interest rates. In a non-debt based money system, you would stop minting coins gold silver cheese cucumbers whatever the medium, you would halt minting more coinage.
And yes, this does cause a recession.
Welcome to the stupidity of capitalism and let it be fuck head markets.
You know some structural planning does fucking help. I mean we do have in the US social security so we don't have rampant bag ladies and tramps roaming the streets that was so frequent in the 1800's... we have fire service, police service, judiciary, etc.
Other nations don't have people going bust because of of affordability of healthcare because they have universal healthcare like we have universal fire services and police services so your home and place of work and business and groceries and other stuff don't go up in flames because they couldn't afford to pay the fire department or police when bands of gangsters came robbing their establishments.
But morons ate the plutocratic stupidity propaganda and we now suffer the consequences of a few. As usual throughout history until it becomes intolerable. Which is fast approaching.
The Fed is in a corner, there was not structural recourse to the problems we face. And throwing monetary policy at it is already burnt to a crisp, leveraged beyond repayment aka debt trap. No matter what we do will result in a depression.
The fact remains, if we do nothing we have a depression with stagflationary results where GDP is negative yet prices continue to go up... don't think that can happen... look at several nations in Europe and S. America. Happens there repeatedly just in the past 50 years.
If we raise interest rates, the economy as it is structured today, based on a pyramid of new money lent and borrowed and call that cluster mug house of cards growth pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme, we will enter a recession. The bad debts clear away, prices will be forced to come back as less money to chase goods and services, and goods that haven't the supply to keep up with current demand caused by fear that is induced by inflation (got to raise rates and buy now as prices will only go higher).
This would put pressure on stupid demand to stop being stupid and quit buying today and raising rates of their outputs.
It would allow over priced assets to reset as defaults would happen and you would get a true valuation of a home or this good or that good or for rent.
Without a planned system at all, this is the idiocy you have two choices:
1) Stagflation that lingers until it all comes undone.
2) Upping interest rates which will contribute to a recession and reset of prices to which a stronger foundation can be built. This one is shorter lived misery.
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Individualistic society?
Well, our old tradition was slavery, so I think not.
Ben Franklin a founding father of the nation long prior brought notions of libraries, workshops, fire departments, etc. to the largest towns.
Manifest destiny was fueled by massive land give aways as a homestead.
Our railroad system was subsidized by the government. Later, the electrical grid and telephone system subsidized by our government.
Our interstate freeway system was inspired by Germany's Autobahn.
That bogus individualism is such utter nonsense; if that were the case we wouldn't have cities, public education, at least some laws supporting unions, at least a 40 hour work week, we wouldn't have over 100 large cities throughout our country.
If we were some hair brain individualistic society we would look more like central Asia in shit stain backwaters of Afghanistan or the other stan countries. Fucking wild west free for all wasteland shit holes.
And the US was a shit hole during the 1800's in the west. IT was the wild west. But that was before the territories became states, and before cities developed.
Many small towns, some of them ghost towns, the people formed banks, and without actual certified police force, when such banks were robbed they would form a passe to go after the robbers because that was all the town's peoples' money the robbers took off with.
That type of individualism?
The lawlessness ended fairly quickly, whether initially by robber baron ranchers with their hired men (thugs) and appointed sheriffs, or town people elected mayor and sheriffs to later to actual elected representatives of that state from mayor, governor, judges, and legislative representatives of the state. I honestly haven't a clue what the fuck this fantasized individualism even means? Do you watch advertisements for charities for various starving people in Africa, slums in Central or South America or slums in India where they can't even organize to build proper sewer systems and think they're celebrating wonderful individualism, and think darn look at their wonderful individualism!
And actually Germany's taxes are about the same individuals or families pay, in fact with their deductions for children its less than ours for income earners taxable income of $75K individual or less and married/joint $125K in US dollars taxable dollars rates are lower in Germany. Its income earners above those amounts that see higher higher taxes than our higher income earners. Basically, the elites their pay a higher rate than ours. Oh no. 15% of the upper crust pay a bit more in taxes, they might not afford 5 houses, instead they'll just need to get by with 2 or 3 houses.
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Actually he could have. 45% didn't even bother to vote between turd Psycho A vs Turd Psycho B.
Then there are the 2 major states that had margins that Jill Stein had over the margin victory. If some of her voters like myself voted for Bernie, and Bernie got some of the 45% abstaining to actually bother to go vote he would have.
16 electoral votes: Michigan 47.6% Trump 47.3% Hillary and 1.1% Jill Stein; margin of 0.3%.
10 Electoral votes: Wisconsin 47.9% Trump, 46.9% Hillary, and 1.1% Jill Stein. With 1.0% margin between Trump vs Hillary.
20 Electoral votes: Pennsylvania 48.8% Trump, 47.6% Hillary, and 0.8% Jill Stein; margin 1.2%
Just with these 3 states is winning 46 electoral votes; 278 for potentially a Bernie and 260 for Trump.
Florida could have swung too for an even bigger victory for Bernie:
29 Electoral votes: Florida 49.1% Trump, 47.8% Hillary, and 0.7% Jill Stein, with Trump/Hillary margin of 1.3%
So it is reasonable to say he could have won. Anecdotally, I live in Idaho where independent and mostly right winger kind of goes hand and hand with about 2/3 unfortunately. Many were turned off by Trump, and said if they got to vote for Bernie, they would have because they don't believe in Trickle down economics anymore, the 3rd/4th time trying. They're done with the right wing gimmicks on the economy. They didn't even bother to vote. And of course all my liberal/progressive/lefty buddies around the country and here in Idaho either didn't bother to vote, or voted for Jill Stein as I voted for her too.
And I only voted because it was on my way home from work, and there wasn't any lines, my polling places was more dead than on the last midterm election.
So likely Bernie would have won. I did this homework because I was curious if he really did have a shot... and based on these figures, if he did as shitty as Hillary, and she didn't do that well in blue normally blue states, and still invoked some more turnout and took some of the Stein voters, he really would have won.
Now, I'm pissed I bothered. He really could have won... FUCK!
Instead we got Trump a Dump, who is has some serious pathology issues, filled his cabinet with oligarchs, and his only achievement so far is to repeat trickle down idiocy, the last one nearly imploded our financial system. And all they did to fix the last one was inflate it back up for a while, so in 2 years, by 2019 year end we will likely be in a great depression, and probably laid off from work :( Fuck FUCK FUCK!
https://www.politico.com/mapdata-2016/2016-election/results/map/president/
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This should frighten us all, on the level of our plutoc-ratic power.
The rich in this country can ignore scientific basics to deduce at minimal level of incredulity on something like this.
I'm not a bio-scientist. But even I was thinking, wait... you need sufficient quantities to evaluate certain data in any substance... for blood... to discern a reliable statistical analysis of cholesterol, to lymphocyte levels, to platelet counts, etc. require a large enough statistical sample to eliminate the potential for getting a false count.
If you take a sample that is too small and in an area of small infection, you're likely to get a high lymphocyte reading.
Cholesterol count requires centrifuge separation of the various substances in the blood. If you don't have enough blood to do this... you can't rely on the reading.
Small guess-estimate readers that provide an okay diagnostic, are followed up by more statistically sound tests to discern if readings were accurate with a larger sample. Someone showing anemia on a simple small blood test, will have a follow up blood check with larger blood samples, to eliminate false statistical sample size.
So large flags should have been immediately warn anyone knowing just basic statistics in applied sciences. "Wait.... how can you use such a small sample size to discern anything? And wouldn't you then need larger sample sizes anyway if such a test were to provide results that are out of normal ranges? How is this even possible when a normal blood test, or water test, or milk analysis or any small basic preliminary small sample test if it gives potentially bad readings, then require larger more in depth sample sizes to confirm it?"
I mean sample size is important in terms of statistics for a variety of reasons... and that should always send up red flags on potential effectiveness.
The level of stupidity in this country is a reflection of the powers that be... and the powers that be are akin to hereditary rule of nobility and monarchs of centuries prior to our own. In our case, it's dynastic money ruling elites. None are very educated; just enough to be carnival barkers. And many now, that was their ticket to dynasty: entertainers; in the US sport coaches are among the highest paid employee in most states in the country.
Plutocracy is as dangerous as absolute monarchy or nobility.
The level if dumb from such forces of power will be its own undoing and the misery of everyone else living in it.
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Really, since Mt Gox from 2010 to 2013 and now iFinex aka Tether aka Bitfinex from 2014 to present are responsible for the biggest pyramid and currently with "defi" Ponzi scheme both require constant inflows and use persistent pumping of their poker chips to foam the market.
All of crypto is nothing but a scam.
That will violently end.
The actual use of the stuff is horrible:
1) Always costs just to move your funds from one wallet to another even if the wallets are yours because by design its to put in place on the ledger the funds and confirmation of those funds with consensus.
2) Time it takes to fully confirm a transaction takes long periods of time to authenticate. There's no intermediaries in many instances so quick merchant transactions are near impossible. Even with staking or proof of staking; and those staking their coins or forced to by design of their crypto make for difficult to use crypto... if you're forced to stake it, not all your funds are available when they're covering the funds of another transaction.
3) No security and nobody to call when anything goes wrong.
4) 51% attack and open ledgers even with today's technology is possible if miners cut back on mining for a variety of reasons such as not profitable to mine anymore due to the dumping of the price of the crypto.
5) cost of transactions become huge during heavy use. And this too is by design to avoid a 51% or centralization of the decentralized system. No crypto has anyway to really scale up to be a genuine payment processor.
And then there's the con aspect. Why has this shit appreciated that much when so many merchants or other entities still don't accept it as currency? And those that have, have recanted their acceptance? And some that "accept it" don't they actually only accept it on the premise that you will immediately exchange it for the currency of the land to the amount equal to the charges of the bill due; that's not accepting it. That's accepting the real money you get from the crytpo; much like payment processing won't accept gold or silver, you need to first take it to an exchange and get currency... therefore this stuff isn't currency.
So what's up with the many bubbles? And some going to a high low base line?
Pump and dumps. Mt Gox from inception of crypto essentially until 2013... at which the stuff fell back to a few bucks base line. Didn't grow. But then 2014 to 2015 new players pumping this stuff with their version of stable coins came to the fore... Tether. They're responsible for the pump in the 2017 and subsequent dump as inflows turned to out flows, after their mega tether printer poker chips went burrrr.
And then again in August 2020, my guess, NY AG was after them and this was the last squeeze before exiting and running for the hills... some other scammers probably with their own hustle completely unrelated started to fomo into this junk due to COVID19 boredom or failing business or a quick hustle to get out of debt scheme: those being Tesla later on and early in August 2020 Micro Strategies. both failing financially; Saylor the CEO having a bad record settling with fraud on 3 years 1997 to 2000 signing off on false earnings reports where they actually made losses 3 years in a row. Not profits.
And Musk who seems in the past several years a bit in over his head with an electric car company getting by only by more debt and carbon credits, carbon credits that are quickly losing cash value as other car companies are now producing EV's and earning their own carbon credits.
Whatever their motives, their foaming of this stuff probably sent prices of BTC to even higher than expected from the Tether scammers.
Of course, when everyone has invested what they will, and those who have cashed out to take profits to appropriately diversify; and those who are careful with their money learned of Tether, and their settlement in April 2021 and then Tethers ridiculous 2 pie charts that raised more concerns on the backing of their reserves than calmed... the smart money cashed out... even Musk took over $200 million dollars off the table.
Saylor, already in over his head, if he sells any now, it would ruin his firm as he's taken out massive debts including junk bonds and direct loans as well issuance of stock to purchase more bitcoin over the past almost year now; he would risk crashing the price and forcing a call on many of his loans forcing them in at least Ch 11 if not Ch 7.
Back to Tether.
With recent outflows over May and into July, the real money backing is severely lacking, and reserves of Tether in crypto (assuming they have enough BTC or ETH or some other crypto) to exchange on fiat to buy up USDT to keep the peg to $1 is quickly becoming impossible.
So their recent pump over the weekend July 24-25 under exclusively tether exchanges (as all derivative markets are prohibited in USD) for longers and shorters under huge amounts of leverage; as news came out that Tether is under Federal Criminal investigation.
In the most obvious half decade long scam.
All of crypto is likely to be consigned to prohibition as pyramid schemes and Peter to pay Paul ie Ponzi schemes are today.
There really is no use for block chain technology... essentially its a marriage of not useless torrent file nodes (obsolete because disk space has become so cheap that file sharing is impractical: slower and more costlier and riskier) with a consensus read write function.
That's all my take on the subject. Buy the stuff and figure losing all of your money.
Important reads before continuing to invest or starting to invest in this, as to what and why I think this stuff is a huge scam.
Swing trading was fun... but I think no technical analysis will warn you of the exact moment tether becomes insolvent or is taken offline. To which 80% of the liquidity vanishes, and more than half of the crypto exchanges freeze up and go disconnected. from the internet.
I don't even think American registered exchanges like BitTrex or Coinbase will come out well... and since neither have FDIC or SIPC which is rather ridiculous neither exchanges come out and state this plainly:
Did a search in June 2021 to find out... and they both play games around clearly stating they're not FDIC nor SIPC insured, instead they do a song and dance act:
Coinbase remarks how they have FDIC on their bank accounts with their banks... hinting you have some pass through protection... you don't.
FDIC insures only up to 250K standard and only max $750K if 3 beneficiaries are named.
SIPC doesn't insure deposits on these crypto exchanges. Therefore you're safe to dabble with brokers that deal in stocks and just happen to have an outlet for crypto markets... at least your USD deposits will be insured.
BitTrex just remarks about their $300 million dollar insurance they took out for themselves against hacks. But none clearly state they are not FDIC or SIPC insured.
All their insurance they to tap dance about, is to protect themselves. Not your individual accounts.
If you lose all your money, you can't say you weren't warned.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/07/26/executives-at-tether-worlds-third-largest-cryptocurrency-reportedly-face-criminal-probe-for-misleading-banks/?sh=43cd661f41ec
https://www.coindesk.com/tether-executives-facing-criminal-bank-fraud-charges-report
https://www.sumcap.com/single-post/tether-bitcoin-s-crypto-nite
https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/
https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/01/24/the-next-btc-crash-could-be-truly-epic/
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The syphilis thing was a bit over blown.
The fact was, wigs were available since Ancient Rome. And the use of them were too... men and women would both wear wigs... it's just they were generally more natural looking until the time of Louis the XIVth (the Sun King) the king that to keep his power intact and keep the nobility from rebellion, he developed a cult fandom of himself... built out the Palace of Versailles and created ritual customs of his everyday dressing and eating and undressing for the evening where the nobility would act like Musk fans fawning at every gesture, statement, and action the monarch performed. The king began wearing a wig, an ornate wigs at that... so did they. And so did everyone else in Europe.
It was the style of wigs... then they changed from the 1600's style long wig to cropped smaller wig toward the 1700's, these wigs pulled back to ponytail, sides having one or more curls on the side, small ponytail (sometimes two ponytails) tied with a big bow and/or silk sack to place the tail.
They became something similar to today's bow tie or regular long tie. Wearing one became a ritualistic practice that demonstrated importance of the occasion. Hence why judges and barristers (lawyers) in Australia and the UK still wear them in court. And during special parliamentary procedures such as when the monarch address them and the nation, various members of the lords wear a wig even today.
Again, something similar to the mostly ended wearing of a top hat during the US presidential inauguration. And at other governmental special events. The wearing of the top hat at these functions faded after JFK.
It's why you see cartoons often depict the mayor, governor, or other elected official often wearing a top hat. Like Abe Lincoln. Even though the common wear of a top hat had faded to a rarity by the 1910's. Reserved for extremely formal occasions: weddings, funerals, embassy/diplomatic parties, (the so called black tie events) etc.
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I think everyone including myself should watch this video you just made twice.
It has every key point we all need to understand:
1) We don't know how this exactly plays out, but we know the potentials for longer term disaster
a) Could be long lasting where price of homes are high, rent is "lower" than payment on a house for a while then that shoots up when big money corners most of the housing stock.
b) 75% of homes are still mortgage purchased and the 25% big money cash purchases cannot cope and they realize losing rent prices along with equity prices is just impossible (particularly with rising inflation that must and will ultimately require and be met with higher interest rates). And even Big money decides to pull a Zillow and dump their market maker stupidity in real-state that never had margin enough to play housing as a fungible asset like stocks... but they're not... they're all extremely different in terms of construction, utilities, economic circumstances, depreciation/upkeep management, etc. Thus dumping their 25% of the recent several year purchasing spree onto the market to stop loss out of the stupidity. That was never wise for them or for renters or buyers/sellers or homeowners or smaller to mid size landlords alike.
c) Be cautious. Know that if you set on buying, that you're likely going to be upside down for a long time. Meaning you probably won't be able to refinance the mortgage. Secondly, if you sell in just a few to even 5 years time or even 10 years, you could still end up owing more than that future sell price you got. Meaning, you were worse off than just renting. You may have to enter into a short sell just to get out from under the upside down equity to debt ratio.
d) Thinking this is a great time to become a landlord with high rents... this could be also a costly mistake... not only will you be upside down on the equity, but rental income will only drop as recessions could hit and higher rates to tame stagflation could last for over half a decade to a decade.
e) A big recession means you are forced to sell. People don't tend to sell their life time retirement savings or stocks or even long term or mid term holdings because they're "scared". They do so because they've lost their job... and the new job can't be found and they've tapped any and all savings. And if they do find a job, it's insufficient for the debts they have currently.
And buyers simply aren't there, nobody has any extra cash to throw at the market... particularly at a market that just seems to be a great way to light your cash on fire.... throwing money at something that just keeps burning your money up gets very depressing. Just like we get fomo to the upside... we get very few buyers wanting to DCA into stuff for a while as it just keeps going down, and DCA near high levels and then grinding lower levels literally is like lighting money on fire... so you get smaller volume sides on the bids or taking on ask prices. No buyers and forced sellers.
So be cautious.
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Oh yeah, even a 5 year old in the very late 80's I knew computers themselves were going to change the world... studied typing, thought it was amazing to my older brother type without looking at his hands... so I was able to do that... at Sears or other stores I would test out computers and type stuff... older people would watch me type fast 50+ words a minute.
TV for kids' channels often played the hype of the internet through the mid 90's... the funniest name "Information super highway".
AOL was free with all their monthly or 6 month give aways my parents rarely ever paid.
At the same time, there was a bit over hype with companies that didn't make any revenue or if it did, net losses.
And of course there were many gimmicks and scams from Qwest and Century Link to Global Crossings to WorldCom to Enron creating trading accounts on outcomes of weather... sound familiar with crypto and especially the gimmick of them all NFT's.
The speculation rolled over into real-estate with low interest rates this created the housing prices to become unaffordable... no problem they gave interest only loans for the first year or two or three or no payment at all for a year mortgages.
This is a combined bubble of everything is going to be epic... it raps the 1987 savings and loan catastrophe, the 1991 Japan over heated low interest rate insanity, dot com bubble, banking crisis 2008, the short live roll over into commodity crash that dumped by 2015, and now we're in this pump of all things; debt astounding larger in all categories from total stock margin debt to mortgage debt to consumer and business debt to housing prices that simply are too high that 95% of the population simply can't afford in the long run, etc.
This is an epic disaster with many volumes.
1) Stock buy backs,
2) REITs that make for absentee land lords
3) ETF's that make price discovery impossible and are the multi-level marketing of mutual funds with big entrance but tiny exits
4) Corporate junk bonds and debt creating zombie companies... some using the debt to buy back shares which cause a short term bump in stock prices, but literally add no value.
5) collateralized debt obligation and other such derivatives
6) Margin debt double from all time high achieved in 2008 of $378 billion already near $800 billion.
7) Housing shortage in many developed countries that abandoned housing planning for market driven insanity which turned into speculative worthless development or the lack thereof.
8) Monopolies vertical and horizontal creations, and cartel among cross sectors such as cell phone, chip makers, shippers, etc. creation from Google to Apple to FaceBook to Amazon to Walmart etc. There are fewer companies over time now than just the past decade, and fewer still compared to 2, 3, and 4 decades ago.
9) The invention of crypto and now NFT... the decentralized nature that is obvious to anyone our age who saw computing power advance quicker than expectations that this stuff is exposed to be hacked... 51% attack as well as hash cracking from offline ledgers that will be a thing within 10 to 15 years... 2031 2036 with quantum computing... you cannot have an exposed algorithm nor the speed of iteration method encryption becomes utterly obsolete: you simply have to place lock out attempts and the any password alg must be hidden in a centralized location. But this stuff might bust in a decade... so this one will probably be the last book written.
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@akihitochan When everyone you know and yourself seem to be doing fantastic... everyone else is crazy.
Four years back about 2015, from 2011-15 to that time, my brother and his family were doing quite well, able to buy a home for fairly good price (still expensive in my opinion) in 2011, and things could be better all the way into 2015. I was doomsday person after coming back with a stint in the Air Force, and returning from a college near the Seattle area, and I conveyed what I saw and how terrible the more populated areas have it.
They all thought I was nuts.
Early 2016 my brother was told his plant was going to close that summer.... he was making fairly decent money for just a high school graduate and for Idaho, I think $23 or so an hour, and he had worked there for almost 20 years.
Fortunately, he found some other jobs, all paid less, one paid right at the $20 hour amount. But he felt they were unsafe so he found another place paid much less $15 an hour start off, but better hours and more safer... good thing he quit that place as a guy died at the other place the week after he left.
It's just human nature I think for many to not notice other people or care to if their situation is just fine or fantastic even.
Then there's some who can see it, even if their circumstances are good.
I always felt bad as I made $5 or even $10 more an hour, and couldn't understand those middle aged and older working for $12 or less back in 2000-2009. And many of middle age had the same story, they had a better job, but it got outsourced domestically or abroad.
Always sent shivers down my spine.
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Thanks for the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure with medieval kings. :)~
By the way, as an Idahoan and yes I travel all over the place lived variety places, just short visits, and short term on the job stays or my stint in the Air Force from Richmond VA to Cleveland to Berlin to Munich to Cologne to Frankfurt to Vienna to LA to Chicago to San Antonio to OKC, DC, NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc. etc.
Even NYC and other mega cities are too overwhelming even to me.
And as I have gotten a bit older, I'm hoping they all just stay there.
You have it all so good there. Just stay. Please... it's just deserts and sheep fucking here... and it's not you going after the sheep but the sheep raping you... sheep and goats going on a raping rampage... and they mug people... it's horrible.
Just stay in your big happy cities.... don't go west of the Rockies. Just stay put.
Or you'll get raped by a cow.
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Reminds me of Fox "News" holding a town hall meeting posing the question to the group of people if they would give up their private employer insurance for a universal coverage; almost all the hands went up. Nobody likes the shit our employers call insurance; first it's not really insurance, it's a money making gimmick marketed as insurance when it's a creepy discount marketing chicanery; only reason to get it is for their "in network" discounts so you don't pay the bogus rip off sticker price but the ridiculous phony prices meant for large hospitals and clinics to and big pharma to pretend the insurance company won benefit to a negotiated price points. And insurance still both doesn't want nor can afford to meet the so called negotiated discount pricing without 50% co-pays, max annual limits (particularly to dental care since that's still legal under ACA), and deductibles that really describe a system that isn't insurance at all, but a gimmick discount program: pay us a huge annual premium ($1,300 to $4,000), and your employer pays even more often 5 times as much ($6,000 to $10,000), but we won't pay anything until you first pay $1,000 up to $3,000.
That's not insurance for the health patient, that's liability auto insurance at best for the hospitals and clinics to get at least some money, but really it's just a gimmick.
No other nation does deductibles. Co-pays yes. You mention deductibles to a Japanese, Australian, German, French, English, Swedish, Danish, etc. they'd think you we're joking and on crack.
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Could be like us "essential" workers (QC for soda pop and bottled water) cuz Americans need their sugary fat head drink otherwise they wouldn't be fat heads now would they?
And hey, bottled water? As if this pandemic had anything to do with their major water works failing. Anyway, we continued working.
And our reward? Oh, yes, our annual raises were stopped, postponed for at least a few months... maybe indefinitely. Don't worry, one lunch meal a week is on the company.
At first, we were going gang busters with orders all the panic shopping.
But last few weeks orders fell off big time... good for our can line, because our suppliers are scant, having to import cans from Mexico instead domestically.
Funny thing, some people are laid off right now, and they're getting $600 plus whatever state unemployment pays them a week, here in Idaho depends on how much you made, it ranges from $200 to $500 a week. What I would get on unemployment would be about twice my current take home pay a week or biweekly or monthly.
Irony.
About to go to work right now, so you can all have your soda pop! Nobody's buying bottle water, so it wasn't on the schedule to make this week. And not too many are apparently buying that much pop, when normally things would be ticking up and we would be very busy now and all summer long.
Kind of a spooky situation. I am glad I have a job. I don't trust unemployment even if for a short period it would pay me twice... some reason I think my state (Idaho) would figure out a way of wanting excess beyond 100% of your normal take home back, or just letting $600 Federal portion go, and simply not paying the state portion.
I trust not my government nor my employer.
This entire failed nation state has not trust of anyone.
And there's some contention at work, some arguments.
Typical stupid days really.
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Zionknight, they're put in a rock and a hard place.
Many can't speak their parents language well or at all.
They know nobody back in their parents' country.
So it's a messy situation. We're a large enough nation with an issue that isn't even in the tens of millions of people, rather maybe a few million. We can handle allowing such people to have some empathy and ability to work their way through a rock and hard place.
Dreamer program is a decent program. Helps them become productive members of society, gets them from dark under the table dealings that actually effect to lower wages to legal workers, albeit, minor degree compared to shit wit trade agreements. And it provides method to allow them to then apply for citizenship. An illegal can't just apply for citizenship. They would have to leave to a country they never lived in, then apply. Makes no sense.
It becomes a difficult situation.
Our trade agreements is where you should be concerned. The effect on such global exploitation trade is the heart of decreasing wages, there is effectively an endless supply of cheap labor. Cheap because many of these nations don't have or don't enforce worker rights as wages, child labor prohibition, worker safety, food and product safety, environmental protections, etc.
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Creepy Joe: "And I would let you smell my hair if I had more, but I was told I'll lose it if I do it too much... where am I again? Who are you? Oh, that's right, we were talking about Yo Yo Ma! You know, he let me play with is yoyo once, I can tell you, I am no Yo Yo Ma, but he sure plays a fine yoyo himself. Speaking of fun little toys, I can't seem to find my marbles. I remember playing those as a kid, great times. But unfortunately I lost my my marbles and can't play anymore... I shouldn't have said that, didn't sound right, you know I shouldn't talk... that's what they tell me, and I think they're right."
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Bill Clinton was a essentially the best republican money could buy.
Essentially, we had a none-choice. Both candidates were of the same party. One just hood winked us, Clinton and some democratic congress people, some republicans such as those in Idaho even voted against NAFTA. But most Republicans did vote for NAFTA and Bill Clinton signed it.
102 democrats and 132 voted for NAFTA
156 democrates and 43 republicans voted no on NAFTA.
and 1 Independent voted no in the House in 1993.
Voting for the agreement were 27 Democrats and 34 Republicans; voting against it were 28 Democrats and 10 Republicans in the Senate 1993.
It's when both parties literally became one corporate oligarchy bribed soaked puppet whores.
I remember the day it was signed into law, my dad remarked, Reagan cut the throat of the working person, and Clinton pierced the heart of the working person he paraphrased Ross Perot at the time, the sucking sound will ruin us all.
Later in economics class in college I would learn about the wonders of the maquiladora which is similar to molinos de grano (grain mills) now from my Mexican friends decry of people stuck working what they call as sweat shops. And we would use our pretend company in a scenario to open up these sweat shops. After the course was over, our economics professor asked us what we thought of maquiladora. All of us were even more against them. Our biggest concern, this causes the ecosystem that drives economies to deplete underlying demand harming everyone. Because you're essentially doing the same thing slavery had done, exploit workers that have very little benefit in return. Nobody wants to work at these sweat shops, and our food products caused many who were earning more on farms to lose those jobs, to then work at a sweat shop for even less in Mexico. And Americans lost decent paying manufacturing jobs, to work at less paying service sector jobs, and those manufacturing jobs left, their pay too fell. It hurt everyone. A vicious cycle.
Our professor stated she was only concerned about quality issues, but had never thought about the vicious cycle issue... WTF?
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/h575
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/21/us/senate-roll-call-on-trade-pact.html
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May I ask, do you have a roommate?
Just curious. I had roommates most of the time the first year, then 1.5 years on my own apartment, then again for another 5 years with a roommate, it helped quite a bit. During those periods of time I was working full time, and school, later changed to online classes because I was traveling somewhat frequently for my job. Just sucks pay is so incredibly low, and its creeping into mid level skilled jobs too. Spooky as fuck. And some people our 30ish or late 20's age are pussy whipped.
We we're informed today we would only be getting 1% increase in our wages due to unexpected increase in material costs. And one of the guys said he was grateful for that small increase. The company makes $600 million a year. Profit margins are gigantic over 250 million a year. 1,000 employees the average of $50K total compensation is $50 million or 5% of revenue. We're only 16.6% cutting into profits; they're bagging 83.4%. But they can't even provide for current 3% inflation figures let alone an increase above inflation.
The worker is fucking broken.
Be thankful you got a pay decrease when factoring inflation LOL! A fellow employee really said that. I just think, WTF? Are so many people fucking pussy whipped. Fortunately nobody else has made such sediments, everyone else like myself are pissed and considering union formation.
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I've taken various knowledge or IQ like tests.
It really depends on factors including motivation on taking the test: did you prepare for the test (study), do you have sun burn that hurts while taking the test or some other discomfort, do you even care about taking the test, etc. And of course it depends on knowledge over time that has accumulated.
I don't think they're immutable. I scored rather low on my ACT test because of a sunburn that I got a day before the test, I really didn't give two shits about the test; I didn't even study for it, I really wasn't planning on immediately going to college at the time, and I had a trip planned to Germany that was weighing on my mind more than anything else. Doesn't help, someone was honking their car horn outside the school I was taking the test.
Took other tests like the battery tests for Air Force, an Air Traffic controller test, and some others, and my scores were ridiculously high.
Took compass tests when I first attended college, and they stunk like my ACT... again didn't prep for the tests. Taking other compass tests at other universities and colleges, I got to test out of many classes I would have otherwise had to painful attend and worse, borrow even more money becoming even more in debt.
It's a large factor of environmental. Almost 90% would be my guess for any knowledge tests including the IQ tests. Even the fluid test, being good at learning is another skill that can be acquired; you can learn to be a good learner; critical thinking is a skill, not just an attribute. To be frank, I think attributes, natural talent is helpful to an extent. But it can also make you lazy and cause one to struggle to learn more and develop that skill further. I was naturally able to play the piano. Prior, I learned the clarinet and some other orchestra instruments at school; so I learned musical notation first before I discovered I could play the piano without any initial lessons. Made me lazy though. Playing scales and developing better technique was too boring for me, thus it took me longer to realize the value in learning better technique; so it was a roadblock. Also, because I can play what I hear... I typically dislike looking at the sheet music. But we're all human, and often when I finally look at the music, I realize certain parts of music that I was not correctly playing according to the sheet music.
So natural attributes are over rated. Unless you want to be lazy. Which... in some activities we do... is just fine.
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In fact, my idea is the closer you are to a target and actually would be vaporized faster than neural synapses can communicate with each other, you're in the safest place; because your misery won't even be noticed.
On the other hand, remote places, your misery will be long felt both in terms of radiation contamination as well as food and other shortages, and if that wasn't bad, simply you would be back to the misery of living through 1600's with common strep throat becoming scarlet fever, TB/consumption coming out in force, and any other infection risking going septic, teeth loss alone reduces your chance of survival as abscessed tooth becomes a potential fatal illness; your life would be rough, ugly, and actually fortunately a bit shorter than 76-79 average, to about 56 to 34... possibly lower if you're lucky.
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Leo's point is why the method that Stalin and Mao took was an utter failure. Completely at odds to what Marx's thoughts. And removed democracy completely too. It was moot on any advancement for the populous at large. And just changed the name of the elite ruler class from oligarchs to so called leaders of the people.
Authoritarianism is an extreme cause of inequality.
It's only under employee and employer relationship that the mass of people had economic advancements. Slavery to feudalism to mercantilism to industrial capitalism to mixed social-capital corporatism... I say the next transition is what Richard has begun advocating as it makes perfect sense is changing corporatism to co-opism.
Using a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank with the authority of the Treasury to lend directly to co-op start ups and buy outs of other businesses, as well as set up branches not just for lending, but for deposit banking too.
The advantages beyond current corporations, banks, credit unions, etc. means they'll go mostly extinct when they're forced to compete with co-op businesses and housing and multi-housing co-ops and branches of the Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank.
No need for oligarchs holding massive amounts of wealth and its income that usually always draws upon a cancer on any government as they invade it.
Puts democracy into the workplace, workers actually determine what to do with surplus/profits, what to do with revenue in general; how much and what to spend on capital expenses (growing the company or making it more efficient), benefits, compensation, safety, etc.
Authoritarianism is always a failure in any economic system. Democracy with a basic constitution to protect all rights is always better at providing a prosperity to all of its people.
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In the US, they're often different cities too... suburb cities. Like the many cities in Seattle area has Seattle, Bellevue, Renton, Kent, Federal Way, Auburn, Covington, Redmond, Kirkland, Shoreline, New Castle, etc. All within 30 mile area; most of which within 20 miles; and I didn't name them all.
Smaller example: Boise Idaho, has Boise, Garden City, Eagle, Meridian, Nampa, and Caldwell all within a 30/40 mile area.
Even smaller Examples: Pocatello and Chubbuck or Idahofalls and Ammon.
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@louisbrown4620 Which means deep down Melkor/Morgoth could at any moment repent, that he is not the ultimate source of evil, any of his creations independently could do bad things... things that destroyed, hurt others, killed others prematurely, raped, enslaved, marred or otherwise became a real piece of work.
Also Eru (at least as far as my reading and understanding) is not like the omnipotent and omniscient... timeless halls would invoke a type of omnipresent.
Otherwise Eru would not have need of the ainur nor the requesting their music to added to his initial introductory music and thus creation.
So I personally don't take Eru as infallible. Such notions are cartoony in my opinion, and must invoke a creepy hypocritical and thus illogical stance on definitions of good and bad. In the bible, simply put evil is going against the one God's decries. Should that decrie require murder or rape or pillage or other harmful things, they are not evil anymore, but "good". A doctrine of tyrannical stupidity. Which includes god works in mysterious ways, as if this justifies anything such a being does.
Hence the 3 omni powers, I find as horrid. Essentially that becomes a lonely one entity bored and wanting to create things for their own amusement, and with evils of rape, horrid slavery, torture, murder, etc. is a one entity bored playing with creations for their own sick jollies. ... it's not satisfying.
So I just think of Eru as a being that found himself existing, a force of nature, and this compulsion to create things and the ability to then allow those creations to have independent thoughts of their own. Yet because the one is the first and creates, he does at all time have the ability to halt such creations or actions if he wanted.
I don't think he does because he wants to see wonderful things beyond his own imaginings. Hence he is not all knowing and all powerful in this sense.
And I further see that in this Melkor/Morgoth is not really the source of all evil, rather he becomes the source of all evil as he continues to go down bad choices within Arda. But even Morgoth could become Melkor again should he just realize what he is doing and learn from it rather than constant contending with it.
Good and bad is within all creators potential. To which extent creators do bad or good is dependent that creator to either reflect and learn anew, or just continue down one direction good or evil .
To make it satisfying for myself, I think Melkor/Morgoth could and can and probably will eventually learn from their stupidity in the realms of evil or wrong doings, acts of harm on others. He's not inherently evil or bad or stupid. Same goes with the other various creators that joined the bad side.
At some point, they will learn. That is probably among the many other reasons Eru doesn't intervene all the time... it is much a lesson for Melkor/Morgoth and the other bad Maiar and even among the good Ainur like Aule who made the dwarves without authority, but due to his humility and root reason for his creation he his forgiven of the transgression (which wasn't a big one, just to remind him those were just finger puppets because Aule lacked the ability to give independent minds to his creations).
The other reason to allow free will was that Eru isn't all powerful and all knowing... that he desires more insights into the possibilities of creation and among these are to allow his creations their own minds to make things beyond even his initial imagination. I get this strongly with the discussion Eru has with Ulmo at the very first chapter of the Silmarillion music of the Ainur. Telling Ulmo, sure Melkor is a big pain in the ass, but check out what his mischief has unexpectedly done... snow, and beautiful frosty sculptures... steam and mists and clouds... and rain that caries water in land. That despite Melkor's marring, there is still unexpected good things that come from it.
And to me further demonstration that Eru isn't "all powerful and knowing". But too delighting in unexpected goodness coming from otherwise mistakes or wrong doing. At the moment of initial creation those wrong doings weren't really "bad" bitter cold immoderate or heats and fire without constraint... just smacks at the only "bad" is that there is no moderation in Melkor's knuckle dragging.
Melkor's bad doing though becomes more persistent and more defined as harmful acts against many for his own pleasures and desires.
Since this is fantasy fiction... and its really well written... I chose to think Eru is not all powerful and all knowing so I can enjoy the fictions.
And I chose to think Melkor/Morgoth could and will eventually learn from his idiocy that induces evil harm to so many including to himself.
Worse come to shove, Eru could eventually undo Melkor from existence and even from time itself... an experiment that only Eru would know about as it would for the remaining beings never had happened. It would have only been a thought that was never put into to any form of being by Eru.
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The two nuclear weapons that bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima were equal in power to a full firebombing raid of WWII with conventional bombs.
Nuclear weapons today are hydrogen bomb, the primer that sparks them is a fission reaction that triggers a fusion reaction that is three orders of magnitude more destructive.
Measured from kilo-tons of tnt, to megatons.
Carl Sagan said it best:
"The conventional bombs of World War II were called "blockbusters", filled with 20 tons of TNT they could destroy a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities during World War II amounted to some 2 million tons of TNT -- two megatons. Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo -- all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945 -- a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons. Today, two megatons is the equivalent of a single thermonuclear bomb -- one bomb with the destructive force of the second world war. But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The missile and bomber forces in the Soviet Union and United States have warheads aimed at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet is safe.
The energy contained in these weapons -- genies of death, patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps -- totals far more than 10,000 megatons; but, with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours. A blockbuster for every family on the planet; a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 70,000 people. In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing. "
http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speaks-for-earth-1980.htm
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They will blame the very people and ideas that are out of power and not being used in any way, nor do they even know/understand those ideas they blame, they have a void of knowledge, a singularity of utter ignorance. Because a large segment of the mass of people have been culturally indoctrinated, in short brainwashed into utter nonsense.
The level of stupid that the average moron holds, and what they use for rebuttal is terrifying to behold.
I dare you to discuss someone about economic issues, particularly those who initially advocate being conservative on most issues... bring oven gloves for face palm protection!
You've been warned.
Best chance scenario, they admit they don't understand capitalism or economics at all, so most of the time you'll just be explaining ECON 101 principles the entire time... the discussion needing to wait until they even know what they're talking about in order to have a rational logical discussion.
Worst, they'll profess they do know, you may quiz them, and find they know virtually nothing on the subject.
Good luck.
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She didn't seem to be all there. This happens in nursing homes all the time as far as having to use "force" to get them to bed or whatever. Older generation are heading there already and ratcheting up in the next 20 years. Few friends worked at nursing homes.... worked because they got sick of residents spitting, slashing at them, choking them, throwing stuff at them, literally urinating or throwing their feces at them. Tough shitty job that pays squat.
They don't kick elderly necessarily out, they become wards of the state and go to an assisted living location.
This is a bit dramatizing. I'm liberal progressive, but this is sort of silly, this happens in Europe and Japan and all other countries. You get old people who literally are unable to afford their rent, or can't take care of themselves in their homes and require assisted living conditions and go kicking and screaming.
Her care taker was even being refused by the old lady. Fact of life. Is hard to watch, sucks.
Much of the older generation is getting this treatment. They voted on majority for it. They can die with it as we will too.
So fuck them.
They haven't earned any right, anymore than any of us.
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It wasn't there.
The idea of lending via bank deposits is that the bank holds so much for daily needs of their depositors for withdrawals, and the vast majority is lent out.
Then too much money was lent out, banks end up lending several times the amount in deposits... all works fine until a breakdown in repayments of such loans start happening.
This started happening firstly with business loans, then those businesses laid off people who then couldn't pay their loans. Those who didn't takeout loans likely had deposits on the bank. No FDIC at this time. And runs on banks cause bankruptcies at banks; any deposits you have are gone.
You can't buy stuff and/or pay your debts, has a knock on effect like a set of dominos cascading.
Money literally gets created by this fractional lending method in deposit banking.
And other source of money to make things go is from investment money; literally people were investing on credit... margin. They might put down $100 of their own money, but borrow an additional $1,000.
This makes stocks boom upwards, but when such credit to buy stocks shrink suddenly banks start calling in those loans, forcing the holder to sell the stocks they bout with that $1,100.
All the money wasn't real. It was borrowed in to existence on the future income if everything went well. That's what borrowing is; you're borrowing from the future, hoping the future will produce more income than the principle and then some to both pay off the debt and to pocket the profits. And once paid off, you don't need to borrow anymore just operation... perhaps for growing the business.
Anyway, it all collapsed.
Capitalism traditionally had done this every 2 to 5 years on average. It can take up to a decade for the "business cycle" as it's called. It's a feature to capitalism.
In the USA during all of the 1800's half the century was in a recession, depression, long depression, or panic. There was a great economic collapse bringing in the 1900's.
And that's prior to most people using consumer credit nor investing in stocks; stocks were always saw as a gamble that rakes or dandies speculate and lose their shirts. Only the elites traded stocks, and they didn't just by a few 100 or so shares, they bought as they do to day in terms of full percentage of a company with other elites who currently own the shares cutting deals on what price their willing to sell that stake.
This is a feature to capitalism in all nations, it has a name: the business cycle.
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+Puglous That's not what happened at all. FDR and Congress created Glass-Steagal Act which put firm laws on deposit banking and speculative investment banking, created social security, created FDIC which protects deposits up to $250,000 from bank defaults, and many more programs that helped our country out of right wing oligarchy plutocracy nightmare that this country had been suffering under since its inception, and even more so under industrialization and the exploits of the 1860's to early 1920's robber barons.
Essentially, socialism saved capitalism from the capitalists.
Because our socialism is a mixed market social-capital system. You go complete capitalism and you'll have a country in a perpetual state of underdeveloped shit hole with daily riots, extreme crime including many ransoms everyday on people who just appear wealthy, and of course outright civil war.
What happened that may have made the depression a little longer was the Federal Reserve which is separate from the presidency in which, the chairman and the rest of the voting chair people voted to raise interest rates too early; which caused a double dip recession period. It's the reason why the current Federal Reserve has kept interest rates, the overnight rate, at all time lows. Whether this doesn't have it's own undesirable effects is to be seen as it could just lead us into an ever bigger boom followed by an even bigger bust than the real-estate disaster which of course was a bigger bust than the tech bubble disaster. That's why this problem isn't just monetary, it's structural.
The structure of our economy has returned to an oligarchy, a world wide oligarchy that exploits developing countries' labor and in the long run in equilibrium the developed countries people also fall in standards of living. Instead of colonies of old mercantilism, we have perpetual developing countries, forcing even developed countries to strain under the pressure, a few of every country develops and over powering plutocratic elite on everyone else's hard work and lively hood aka standard of living.
This type of economics needs to go extinct, just as feudalism had, and not be brought back from the dust bin of history.
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+TheMrfrodough Not all things that are simple, are actually good.
You wouldn't state a law in which someone injured someone accidentally, but we have a blanket law that states battery is a felony offense and the person should be sent to prison for 1 to 10 years.
Nor murder, as we have premeditated murder, non-premeditated murder, and negligent homicide most often vehicular homicide.
The appeal to simplicity is an easy one to fall for, but it's often thoughtless leads to bureaucratic robotic-tude that most hate about big businesses, large labor union contracts, and large government agencies. They're too simple, ignoring the actual complexities of reality; so people end up trying the futility of fitting a round peg into a square hole.
Deductions are actually good for everyone and their made to be dynamic for particular person or entities needs. Poor people benefit very much from the earned income credit. College students benefit greatly from interest payment deductions. Home owners just squeaking by, are greatly helped by various deductions for home improvements and financing.
You don't have to get rid of the ridiculous loop holes by throwing all the various tax deductions and loop holes away. You simply make law against various loopholes being used, such as writing law that nullifies the benefit of domiciling a business in a foreign country, the law would state all revenue from the US would still be subject to tax. And if you still wanted to include all total revenue would be subject to tax, you'd include that as well.
Lots of libertarian nut jobs convinced people via the argument to simplicity fallacy. And often the "what's the use" or apathy fallacy; why make a law, it will only be repealed at some point. Such idiotic logic. But so many have fallen for it.
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I am so dismayed about the amount of stupidity by the general public. Working with the general public over the past 20 years, they appear to get stupider and more nonsensical bat shit stupid.
Carl Sagan stated that the dangerous cocktail of advancing technology and the utter ignorance and disinterest on how such things work could bring nations to their knees. And we're observing the effects of the dangerous cocktail of utter ignorant stupidity of the masses. Couple gerrymandering, and it doesn't require a majority, not even a plurality. Just a small minority of stupid suckers, coupled with their toady class, they get their way for stupid policies that hurt everyone.
And their entire policies in the long run are insanely unstable, it actually puts establishment at risk as the entire system is on a knives edge of utter collapse. Just as every oligarchy tends to collapse every 60 to 100 years in all nations that have ever had a tyrannical middle class. As old as the Canaanite late bronze age collapse which appears to be an internal rebellion against their elites, to the classical ancient Greece collapse, to the constant civil war through ancient Rome's existence, various war lord nations through the dark ages to middle ages, and constant war and civil war through the renaissance and enlightenment with mafioso republics of Italian states and collapse of the Dutch's republic, the mess happening through the industrial revolution through the 1800's, and new collapse of the early 1900's.
All through human history entrenchment of an tyrannical economically and/or socially bring about utter ruin.
Will we never learn?
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Because the system is so absurd most who already don't want to believe, the absurdity makes it even easier to not believe it.
Also it's not 100% accurate in the description on how it works... all money created by both banks in fractional reserve lending as well as the government issue debt, a bond. So it's completely a debt based system.
For every unit of money created, the same unit of debt via a bond is created by the government, and some entity has to first buy that bond with existing cash or with other debts.
The money printing comes in at the last when there are "reserves" aka "assets" which are other debts (loans and bonds) that are swapped.
US Federal Reserve can't literally print money; unlike many other nations' Central Banks.
And the Fed Reserve cannot buy directly from Treasury auctions for US Treasury Bonds. Only dealers and other entities can participate in such initial auctions.
Then the Fed Reserve buys the bond from the dealer or bank or other holders.... possibly you from one of teh US Treasury bond Exchanges.
The Fed Reserve collects 6% of all profits collected by all private member banks that builds up a liquid cash reserve to which the Fed Reserve makes most of its purchases thereby. That's the QE method, as well as the recent and I think completely harmful new thing they started in April 2020, buying ETF stuff from ETF bonds, Real-estate and Equity Trusts (REITS) to stock ETFs.
Wonder why commercial real-estate, bond market, stock market are acting completely disconnected from the actual economy?
There are also swaps, where money is temporary created by the Fed Reserve to to provide reserve balances to banks... the Fed Reserve swaps debts (good or bad) loans with a bank for immediate cash infusion to the bank's reserve balance. This money by the Fed Reserve is created immediately for temporary effect; using the swap of the good/bad loans as collateral if the Bank can't make good on repaying the money created to pad the banks reserve balances.
So it's still tied with debt.
There are National Central Banks though, that without legislation, can literally print money into the system with issuing bonds or debts. Such nations rarely do this, and when they do, the currency usually fails rapidly. Argentina and Turkey and Venezuela, etc.
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+jos vermeuelen By the way he also cites many academic journals and you can seriously go online and cross check everything his states with reliable credible sources from various universities, museums, and other anthropology foundations and institutions. It's called google.
And there's nothing wrong with showing a wiki page, so long as the sources related to the wiki page subject are accurate themselves. And he doesn't just use wiki like I mentioned. In fact, he doesn't use wiki that much at all, he cites various academic journal peer reviewed work, and other institutional review work. Again, you can cross check the sources.
This is actually very well done. Many in anthropology or who have studied anthropology just don't bother, give these ancient alien and other woo woo scammers a time of day. But when History channel is giving them a QVC shopping network free advertising, it's probably best someone make a short concise point by point explanation to how and why the woo woo people are flat out making up shit for money, attention, from pure lazy ignorance themselves, and/or a form of entertainment. Either way they'll make you stupid, and follow them too closely, they'll be happy to take your money while they make you dumber. They're scammers.
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+Frank Mello What's really sickening, is most of them making $60-$50K a year level pay less in taxes than we do making that same level income.
And they still get more for their taxes. We swapped tax returns and pay stubs, they were a German, Austrian, S Korean, Japanese, and a Brit.
They asked does those taxes include insurance, pension, etc. I was like well not until way late in life late 60's to 72, and medicare 65. Current medical insurance and 401K are a different deduction below there. They were astonished how much gets taken out of our paychecks.
They pay less in taxes and on their own pension systems ( about pension/retirement not so sure about the UK, I was confused on how their retirement system worked exactly).
They do tax much higher incomes more above $200K to $250K.
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+MattsterFelix Oligarchs playing with their mentally challenged right wingers have pushed that word as if it means communism.
Social security is social, medicare is social, public schools are social, fire departments are social, public roads are social, public airports are social, we've been socialist since at least 1930's after pure creep show freak show oligarchy with their robber barons left this country ridiculously busted; and all through the 1800's to early 1920's only a few rich made it big, everyone else were shit fuck poor, we were a backwater shit house.
Reality is our plutocracy is a dirty for everyone save a very few. And should we continue down this road to oligarchy, it won't be good for them either, as people fed up start finding these bastards including their body guards and hanging them from tree, or ransoming them, like happens everyday in Mexico and many Central American countries, and other perpetually "developing" countries.
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upqsevenhundredhp As an American, I like Germany, the labor practices and various other aspects such as universal health services, educational system, and you have the ultimate transportation systems of any country I've been to.
But your history is what has forced you into being an "accomplice". You know WWII. So of that, I have no remorse. What happened under the NAZI government was unspeakable. Dachau was so flipping close to the concentration camps. I had always thought these camps were way out in the country side just near the towns they're named after, not right next to them.
So your hate on that ground is unfounded. You can hate us for being shit heads economically though LOL!
Your country is also incredibly brilliant in handling the great recession. Kurze Arbeit, Short Work policy is very smart, helps stave off a vicious cycle of lay offs by stopping lay offs begetting more lay offs cycle and halting lowering incomes.
Rather than having companies do lay offs, the system distributes cutting all workers hours at a particular business, and the difference in hours cut is made up by the government. So the workers are not laid off nor do they experience reduction in pay. Not only is such a program cheaper to the tax payer than our unemployment insurance system as it only has to come up with 10 hours or so of work each week to pay vs up to 60% for 6 weeks or 6 months or so of the laid of persons wage or salary, short work policy also lasts much shorter as it stops the vicious cycle by assisting demand to rebound and the program can then be ended that much quicker.
We need to have some of your economic people come here and teach us a thing or too. Please!
And our filthy rich fucks don't need to worry, Germany is among the countries with a large billionaire and millionaires population. The fact is, at least the workers are treated with much more dignity, time off, good pay, healthcare, education, etc.
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I would agree with you if they presented what is actually possible.
And the History Channel isn't just presenting conjecture they're claiming to have evidence. Therefore this evidence should be scrutinized which it isn't.
History Channel allows the claimants to make outright fabrications. Absolutely no cross checking with other sources, or fully revealing all data available like the accuracy location and geology of the structures, quarries, tools found on sight, the discovered meanings and texts of the cultures in the area, etc.
Its the same as me saying:
I have a bridge to sell you. Here is the picture link below.
Bridge is for sale for a cheap $150,000 dollars. Bridge was built 2008 well maintained with subsidies by the local county to assist with maintenance and resurfacing.
Yearly revenue is $85,000 minus total costs of $50,000 means profit $35,000 total fyr 20013.
I'm selling it for so cheap because I'm needing cash flow. Too many projects and need to finish them. I'm in a squeeze and figured youtube would be the best place to get a quick buyer.
http://www.picgifs.com/graphics/b/bridge/graphics-bridge-034889.jpg
Financials:
http://www.bcbridges.org/BridgeInformation/TollRates.aspx
I presented some evidence of my bridge. So its possibility I have a bridge for sale and you could literally make a pretty good profit as I claim.
I then provide evidence.
Of course the evidence is total bullshit if you actually review it. The bridges remarked aren't even the same bridges. The revenue figures are completely made up.
Now the question becomes: would you accept advertisements or a documentary based on complete bullshit? Does providing fabricated evidence cause people to be unaware to deception? People who really don't have much time to do their own research and generally trust a fair treatment of analyzing claimed evidence?
Is the excuse to essentially deceive people for entertainment sake justifiable? Or as you put it, help us advance in any meaningful way other than to make people a little more stupider?
"You hear about that bridge for $150K on the internets?"
"Ya, just 5 years becomes big fat cash cow, thinking about snapping that bridge up!"
"I'm gonna get me one of those bridges too!"
Now you have bunch of morons thinking toll bridges are fairly cheap. And that they're widely privatized bridges exist for sell. When in reality, they're probably going to visit some con artists website and certainly sell them a bridge LOL!
Oh yes, the caves, without duping people we'd still be in the caves LOL!
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+Doping1234 The particular time lines are based on genuine tests that weren't being implemented at any phase, so the time frame is better aligned with various facilities actually running, not people just talking about doing experiments.
Thorium reactors are a much better alternative than uranium plants, because it's incredibly difficult for nuclear warhead proliferation, you would actually have to halt fission activity and strain the 233U, and begin it again, leaving enough 233U to restart the reaction. It'd be an incredibly slow method of obtaining enriched uranium for weapon manufacturing.
LFTR would be a good bridge if we need it until fusion plants are implementable, it's a don't stick all your eggs in one basket, as you stated, technological obstacles aren't to be underestimated.
Rather than just talk, countries and organizations are actually doing, and it's a spread of all possible types of nuclear energy with defined schedules, not people sitting around throwing numbers in the air year after year whining about how hard it is.
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Like a co-op system. I support a co-op reserve bank that provides capital borrowed and grants to co-ops to get into sectors that require large amounts of money/capital. Like mining, refining, heavy manufacturing, even light manufacturing requires a few million just for the various machines and conveyor systems, distribution like trucks, rail shipment payments for transporting inputs and finished goods.
So the Anarcho part I'm not with you necessarily, there is a place for government, its for capital formation assistance. Syndicalism is good in the form of co-ops.
And it doesn't have to be just at the work production area, but that could include housing. Several places have cooperative housing, which ensures rent gouging doesn't and surpluses are voted on that tend to include rent decreases and upgrades to your community in which you live. One particular example was a rather poor trailer park neighborhood that was served with eviction notices, the land was about to be sold for development, the community formed a co-op and bought the land themselves. Since then, their rents have decreased, and profits/surpluses have gone into upgrading roads and providing clubhouses with swimming pools.
http://www.parkplaza.coop/
Renting from a co-op is better than renting from a private land lord... as the the name implies land lordship is a feudal concept that requires 1/3 to 1/2 of your income be paid in tribute to the lord. Where a co-op simply pays for any mortgage, upkeep, and upgrade costs and everyone gets to vote on the price and what to do with the surplus. While you don't outright won the property, you own a share in the property thus vote in the operation of it, all profits gets the benefit to you directly, not to a lordship.
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Alex Jhons I'm an Idahoan and I don't know how these GOP candidates or many former or current congressmen and congresswomen get elected.
I think it's a cultural phenomena, like religion. Facts don't matter. Which is spooky. And they love to make stuff up. I don't know how often a coworker or just someone I talked to at a store will just pull stuff out of their behind about politics. Like Obama's going to do X or Y. A few times I got irritated if it were true, so I said damn it are you kidding? She was like nope. I explained how I disliked that position, and looked it up, found out what it was about and it had nothing to do with whatever she was talking about. And explained what it was. In a nice way. I can't remember what it was exactly, something to do with Obama and doing something ill to unions which made no sense, but Obama hasn't been the greatest on economics, he's been GOP on many things.
Anyways, they'll either make something into something else, or they'll just make it up completely. My dad is guilty of this and he's a democrat, he's a pro union and social democracy mixed market to the core. So it spans political affiliation.
It's a cultural thing; I've noticed it mostly happens to people with lesser education than those with higher education. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes the higher educated person is doing it very deliberately because they think the people they're telling the BS to is too ignorant to fact check.
I've noticed not just my state, but all states in the US, quite a few people are PT Barnum trying to sucker people into stupid ville, and there's a weird creepy ratio of con artists and those ignorant enough to be conned that it perpetuates.
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+FuckOffAlready What do you mean socialistic ideas won't work? Tell that to UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. And tell that to the facts that show their healthcare systems that are largely single payer work better than ours, keeps total costs of drugs per GDP at a very low percentage unlike we in the US which are being racketeered with.
Basic economics states the perfectly competitive market principles are what is required for markets to work efficiently. You do not have failures in various principles concerning medical sector as they require large economies of scale, they also have a steep demand curve, pay up or die so they can charge whatever they want meaning there's very low diminishing returns as required by a competitive market principle.
I think you don't understand basic economics. You're rather instead stuck in bogus land full of shit by supply side shit bags who just wanted to make easy killing of a bunch of idiots who proclaim to know things when they haven't a clue.
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McDonald's and other mostly franchisers are a joke. Franchises are a con job multi level market gimmick to sucker idiots to "be their own boss" by borrowing a franchisee loan up to $400,000 to $1 million to leverage a store, their wares including food, McDonald's pockets the borrowed money immediately, the loan is on the franchisee, the borrowed money is used to buy the food and other stuff from McDonald's.
I work in utilities, and see many Franchises especially McDonald's, constantly in Chapter 13 or 11 depending the size of the LLC or partnership or individual who owns the franchises. Recently come of them actually went Chapter 7, nobody left to "sell" the franchise business over to some other sucker or partnership of suckers, and you finally see the store close up. Many don't close up, because they keep changing hands to one sucker or group of suckers. Mean time, McDonald's is cashing in on the sales of all the food, containers, and franchise fee from the indebted franchisee.
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+thirteenguage That's because we were in a cold war with Russia who was actually despotic communist. We were by then socialist-capitalist, mixed market hence social security and by the 60's medicare.
But yes, they kept pounding this crap into peoples heads about social aspect, and to make it all privatized, and greed is great, and just let markets do their thing, etc. during the 80's was a huge push by plutocrats.
And now we've seen 40 years of this shit, and we see what it causes, boom bust cycles and pushes everyone else lower, with a very few doing extremely well, for now anyway, eventually it'll hit them too.
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You should be required to at least send in a ballot. Like jury duty summons or any court summons, just as you are required to pay taxes on earned income. It can be completely blank (absolute abstain), write ins, or partial blank abstains. But you should be at least required to see and turn in a ballot. Perhaps you'll surprise yourself and vote on one of the items as you hadn't a clue that was up for a vote in the first place like a bond measure to improve a library or fire department, or gives money away to some random company, vote that requires you to pray to the Pencil god, etc.
You can always vote for write in candidates. And there's more on the ballot than president or other major offices. There are referendums in various states that require voter ratification for certain passed state bills to actually become law.
You would realize this if you went and voted.
And I think it would be fine if you just left ballots blank or sections blank. I did that on my last ballot. Left certain uncontested spots blank or if I didn't know the office and the candidates at all; left those blank.
So you should be required to send in a ballot. The entire thing can be blank (abstain) or sections can be abstained as voting is now.
But you should be required to at least look over the ballot and make your mark that you voted. Abstaining all or parts is still voting.
Not showing up is being a complete fuck wit. As the Greeks coined word for people who didn't participate in their democracy they called them idiṓtēs where we get our word idiot from.
Otherwise non-participation becomes a method to control people to ruin republics and democracy, turn people off, make them apathetic cattle to herd as you please. Make them less involved. Give them a sense of powerlessness. Or give them no sense of responsibility; "they" will take care of it all for you. That's dangerous for any republic or democracy. We do have a duty. And this is a simple duty. At least get a ballot, sign for the registration of that ballot, and return the ballot. What you mark on the ballot is still up to you. But you did your duty. We do live in a civilization. Not requiring a vote is absurd as allowing people to decide to not pay taxes, be summoned to criminal or civil court, or jury duty, or deciding you're not going to get various licenses and registrations for vehicles, aircraft, vessels, safety permits, etc.
Those are all duties to maintain a civilization.
Failure to meet those duties is a harm to everyone in the civilization.
You want to be a rebel with or without a cause, fine. Turn in a blank ballot. But you're going to get one and mark your registration and return of the ballot.
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That's because there's a huge variety of ways to determine the curvature of the earth. It's such an absurd assertion to claim the earth is flat after all the methods to discern the curvature that the assertion itself is rather stupid.
And you can't fix stupid. It's as absurd as saying car engines don't cause their motion it's the ground that's generating the energy to move your car, your hair isn't hair it's cotton candy and tastes like chicken, or the light bulb isn't being illuminated by electricity instead it's your magical fart power.
The assertion of a flat earth itself is lunatic.
Seriously, navigation, time zones, setting and rising of stars, moon, the sun, the seasons, planetary orbit observations, observation of constellations at different seasons and at different northern and southern hemispheres, the seasons themselves, horizon observation concerning height hence why light houses are perched as on cliffs and on towers, satellites for GPS, dish tv, rarely used satellite phone systems, etc.
You really have to be flat out stupid or trying to con flat out stupid people to be pushing such a idiot assertion that the earth is flat.
I can now see why Bill seemed drunk in another clip... he's given up on the stupidity of people.
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+William Drewe
We now know that the earth was probably formed after the sun began fusion.
The earth originally didn't form with water on it; the earth formed from many planetoid and asteroid like objects that formed in accretion.
The sun was probably already luminous with visible spectra light before earth actually would be distinguishable between many other planetoid objects, and night and day is due to the rotation of the earth which was actually spinning faster at its initial formation. A collision with a Mars sized object caused the earth to have an axis tilt that we have today that produces the seasons, and debris from the collision via accretion formed the moon.
"“Let there be an expanse[a] in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made[b] the expanse and (E)separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were (F)above the expanse. And it was so. 8 And God called the expanse Heaven.[c] "
We now know, space is not water; water is H2O, Space is a vacuum with 0 atmospheric pressure, it's literally the absence of matter.
Originally the earth was hot and water couldn't exist as a liquid, but only a vapor. Then it became a world wide ocean with the new continents forming.
Micro organisms developed initially 3.5 billion to 2.7 billion years ago, and only single celled organisms started to emerge 600 million years ago, so for about 2.9 to 2.1 billion years there were just microbial life.
The first flowering plant didn't emerge until 160 million years ago, well before that period prior to that you already had the first amphibians 374 million years ago, first reptiles 300 million years ago, 205 million years ago mammals emerge.
" “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for (I)signs and for (J)seasons,[f] and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God (K)made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars."
As stated prior, the tilt of the earth was already made, the tilt of the earth produces the various seasons that occur in more pronouncement further latitudes north or south of the equator. And the sun was already in existence before earth was even formed, and the stars were already in space, many of which are still twinkling in the sky before our solar system even began. And again the moon was well established by 4.53 billion years well before any biology let alone liquid water could exist on earth.
"And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds[g] fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So (M)God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, (N)“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day."
Sea life existed before land life. Seas were already full of life by 510 million years ago, first plants didn't exist until 416 million years ago. So woops got that one out of order. And birds didn't evolve until 150 million years ago from dinosaur ancestry.
Livestock is actually humans over course of period of time domesticating other wild animals, this breeding of animals and plant domestication lead to crops and animals that were easier and safer to raise creating agriculture, hence why agriculture didn't take off until 12,500 and didn't happen all at once necessarily, each particular tribe of humans required different times to accidentally cultivate their various flora and fauna until they were suitable for settled agrarian civilization, and many other tribes often returned to a hunter gather method due to crop failures as well and some maintained a nomadic existence.
Either way, livestock emergence requires human first in order to breed wild plants and animals in to livestock.
Just some corrections... okay a lot of corrections to Genesis story.
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Part, he's a democrat. Republicans have created a huge right wing media to eliminate labor unions, pensions, even trying to remove social security, public education, public roadways, etc. In favor of trickle down supply side economics. They built up this notion that government is going to take everything away. While business owners have everyone's best interest in mind. Its kind of weird. The premise liberty by giving up your liberty in a less democratic workplace with fiat work environment. The right wingers also pander to the religious cranks. So the GOP get lots of willfully ignorant or just uneducated ignorant constituents.
The fact he's half black doesn't help either with racism, or just racial tensions between all races somewhat contentious. The melting pot is a hopeful concept, but the US has had many critical moments of racial bigotry boil over into riots and other crimes. Even fellow whites were bigoted in various places: the Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. Its easier for a country that has a strong homogeneous ethnicity to become more friendlier to other ethnicity: primary population doesn't feel threatened politically or economically by an extreme minority, and the minority immigrant feels more compelled to adopt some cultural norms making it more of a softer melt.
US as most of the Americas, have been a heavily immigrant populated region of the earth over an extreme relative short period of time.
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+Ola Nordmann Actually, prior to the 1930's the US was a shit hole, and you speak of rural areas... my grandma in Idaho with her parents, my great grandparents in the late 20's and early thirties were living in cabins... actually dirt floor shacks, a shed, no electricity nor running water besides the creek that ran outside. No, the US was back water until the mid to late 30's and after 40's primarily due to 1935 unions becoming legal, before that the oligarchies who owned most of the various businesses had hired men and many shootouts and massacred took place even more so than they do today in the US if you can imagine. Most places didn't even have electricity nor phone lines until the 1960's.
The US was a rough and shitty place for everyone, even the oligarchs would hire their own "law men" to make ware on each other.
It's interesting history, and have lots of family members apart of it, coming from German immigrants (two brothers from Germany) to Texas in 1849, two great great great uncles were killed over their horse, and they were at first blamed for horse theft, when it was discovered it was their horse that was stolen.
Talk about cluster fucks of the wild west!
I'd rather read about and visit some of the abandoned shit holes aka learn from past than repeat its mistakes and failures.
Thanks.
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+Dawn “DawnLuvsPossums” Marie Completely agree.
And the biggest problem on the left side, is they feel very powerless and become apathetic; they don't turn out to vote. Speaking to my dad the other day, he admitted he's guilty of doing that several elections. I was talking to him about politics. I mentioned democracy isn't a spectators sport, it requires participation for it to work well. 37% turn out in the last mid term was pathetic. I can understand some of the positions on the ballot goes unchallenged, but there are many others with challengers.
And some of the people running might not be exactly what you want, but that goes with democracy; you chose the best one you can find, and you also try to encourage others interested in politics who may think of running to do so.
I hope they do unplug from the matrix as you stated. It's getting irritating. Even one of my older brothers, he's left as I am, we voted Obama again 2012 and watched the elections, acted as if the economy and all was going great. This summer in June, he got his pink slip. He was making for our area a pretty decent wage I think over $23 an hour worked there just about 20 years or just over. I kept explaining to him things weren't all that rosy. I'm not sure if he voted in the last midterm, I don't think he did. My younger brother told me that the older brother was laughing about how I was in conspiracy theories, which is outright absurd; in fact I consider myself a skeptic, I don't believe in ghosts, or even an after life or any other hog wash that doesn't have evidence to support the claim. I asked my older brother and his son (my nephew who's 20) what they were talking about on a party line on Skype; they said it was my opinion about the economy. This was about March just before he got word that his plant was being shut down and relocated to an undisclosed location. So stating reality of how crappy the economy is, so long as some don't feel the pinch so much they also sort of tune out; and if you mention reality you're put aside with the fringe crackpots.
Spoke with my uncle and aunt who live near the area a few months ago at their home. Discussed my older brother's situation; my uncle said he shouldn't be draining his 401K, I guess that's one of the things my brother is using along with a 6 month severance package he was given. I discussed putting in lots of money, but at this time staying away from stock funds, because stocks are sky high, and the underlying demand is not there. My uncle said its for the long term, he mentioned he was still mostly in stocks, he's 62. I told him ought to cash in, take profit and put much of it as high as 80% into a reserve fund for the time being for profit taking that stocks will come back down. But at least 50% should be put in a reserve fund just because of his age or bonds which ever. Just about month ago, he got laid off too. And stocks are tanking.
I need to make sure in the future I carry a wooden block so we all knock on wood when I discuss finances with family members!
But anyway, everything is going dandy until it hits them personally in the face. Catches them completely off guard. I just don't want the unplugging to be a brutal smack in the face; multiple disasters happen at once. But unless it does smack them in the face, it appears they don't listen. Which is bad. Very bad. It's about avoiding disaster. Not waiting for it to happen then react.
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Immigration is a problem in most countries, and where countries emigration (people are leaving) is a problem, housing is still not affordable for them either.
Or where immigration nor emigration is no problem, and even the birth rates are down, you still have immense affordability problems such as Japan.
It's a banking CDO/CLO nonsense largely, but also lack of planning among cities and provinces/states and the national government on ensuring housing quality and supply.
The fact that most countries discontinued programs that built homes on tax subsidies and even managed some of these retaining ownership of large complexes so that rents were nonprofit meaning private had to compete with public housing. Vienna Austria is very good on this subject.
And the development system fell apart, after the great depression and after world war 2; most nations had a robust subsidies in development where our taxes paid for lots and utilities.
Now its up to the developer to install even roads along with sidewalks and parks along with utilities and these private developers pass that cost on to the lot buyer. But the tax that subsidized this development? Still being taxed. USA its property tax.
A robust housing plan has always been central to ANY country that had ANY level of prosperity in the periods implemented. Homestead Act and Land Grant Acts starting in 1863's and thru the 1880's is what developed the US. Without it. Most of the mid west to the west would still be vacant robber owned paradise emptiness.
As those acts faded by 1890 thru 1920's most people in the US had serious issues on affordable housing. Swinging 20's was really just top 20%. 80% or more were actually dirt poor, dirt in that their homes as we would see them today, often referred to at that time as "cabins" were in our eyes shacks, sheds, dirt floor with maybe a caste iron stove in the middle of this shack, if any divisions for rooms it was a blanket or towel drawn across a section of the shack.
Wasn't until 1935 HUD and some other programs that incentivized counties and states to develop modern housing construction (utilities water and sewer and electricity).
My great grandparents were recipients of this in Idaho... and until early 2000, the modern home they lived in, the property still contained the "cabin" my grandma initially grew up in along with 4 other siblings. Dirt floor shack, caste iron stove, uniquely positioned over a small creek so I guess they didn't have to venture out of the shack to collect water as a piece of the shack overhung the little stream.
Planning.
Instead Milton Friedman let markets just do whatever nonsense.
Everyone is living thru that nightmare.
Which actually insights a level of immigration causing war and civil war to become more prevalent. And of course, the rest of the population to think it's mostly immigration problems.
When it's our idiot economic structure brought to you by an oligarch near you who sponsored the now dead Milton Friedman crackpot idiocy... handing the economic market rules over to these very robber barons once again, time and time again throughout human history both in the western European to eastern European to Asia to India this type oof oligarchical rule by the rich degrades to a state of feudalism... since Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome.
We can only be so glad that, even as early as the 1800's, slavery was somehow still socially acceptable, because... the oligarchs loved freed persons competing with slavery... you can't. And that's why they loved it.
We have to realize social mixed market economies are required, and without any planning...
This is the nightmares we return to living in. Over and over and over and over and over again.
But there are always different periods in time we can look at to discern economic models that work... as well as in the present... Vienna Austria has a very robust public housing program that makes housing affordable. And the homes are very luxurious. Even the wealthy are allowed and do partake in the program.
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And we need one. Because I think in the next down turn, its going to be a gigantic economic cluster fuck. Record debts from auto loans, to mortgages, to stock market margin debt, to credit card debt, to student loan debt.
I figure it will turn violent quickly. And since the global financial system from the Euro, US Dollar, British Pound, Canadian and Australian Dollar, etc. all nations will look inward since dependent upon trade will suddenly become just not be there; we literally won't be able to fund the military so you'll have mass of ex-soldiers along laid of workers.
It will turn violent.
As history demonstrates this since the late bronze age collapse and all through history.
We don't need an aristocracy. They're unnecessary. We need a democracy in government in the economy. Aristocracies always tends to cater to psychopaths and short term profit and dumping the mid and long term cost on the everyone else. And festers otherwise normal people into becoming sociopaths with delusions of delusions of grandeur.
I'm certain a revolution will occur as since its inevitable of the collapse of our unstable economic system, and the environment cost particularly global warming which will pick up momentum as permafrost in polar regions releases huge amounts of methane as its already beginning to do; and the first thing to happen as already happening in lower latitudes close to the equator; record yields decline, and outright crop failures.
But I'm losing hope that the needed economic and political revolution will a peaceful.
And we need the economic and political revolution to strengthen peoples' ability to live well, and especially to address climate change. WE need an Apollo/Manhattan project that fast tracks ITER/Wendelstein 7x fusion reactor research to reality as that ends using fossil fuels outright with an over supplied grid making electrolysis extremely cheap that can supply hydrogen to fuel cell vehicles, and can even create other fuels for aviation all carbon neutral, and abundant, super cheap. Aluminum refinement becomes super cheap, cleaning chemicals become cheap, various foods become cheap, desalination becomes super cheap, recycling various used materials such as plastics, metals, papers, glass, etc. becomes super cheap, many things become orders of magnitude cheap and abundant with such energy density, the initial fuel being non-radioactive deuterium (heavy hydrogen) with abundance in the ocean alone that would last the world 35,000, and its safe, no way for meltdown, no long term waste, tritium that is bread with lithium blankets along the plasma chamber decay in 12 hours, and is safe to enter the chamber after 9 hours without any PPE. Final product is chemically inert helium 4 and non-radioactive.
We drag our feet. Makes absolutely no sense.
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Looking like the USA. I live in Idaho. In all states, including Idaho, you can only use firewood for campfires, not for fire collection unless you purchase a permit.... they don't want people cutting trees down everywhere... so it can be planned... conservation thing. Same with hunting and fishing there are seasons for various game. We just have lots of forest land, so it's not that difficult to purchase permits and harvest some wood or just buy it at a store. Smells bad... dislike the chimney use.
But electricity is a large method of heating in homes around the US. Could be like Texas a few seasons back, literally froze and people couldn't even get electricity to heat their homes and deaths occurred. Not to mention, Texas apparently is moronic and doesn't have profits controls on their monopoly of electricity and people saw huge $1K and over a month power bills that are usually $100 to $200 a month here in Idaho... Texas being warmer would I would think normally range $50 to $100 in the winter.
And food is skyrocketing here... rents are out of control many people living in cars and campers and RV's... entire families... a KAO campsite is built in any town, they fill up immediately... and they're not cheap, many are spending $500 to $600 a month renting a small parking spot for their tent or RV or car to have such a spot. Which is also absurd. That was the price of a 1 to 2 bedroom apartment just 5 years ago. And about the price of a mortgage about the same.
Our central banking stupidity or in our case the USA Fed Reserve banking cartel, have really ruined the middle class... been going on since the 1980's.
The Fed Reserve and the EU central bank and UK central banks are all starting to realize they messed up big time, and are attempting to hike interest rates. Problem though is that many businesses and individuals including investment institutions took out huge loans to buy various things and this is causing a debt domino trap...
Monetary policy was recklessly used to paper over severe problems in the various nations' economies. Mostly to salvage the banks and investment firms of which the most richest have have 90% stake... and they decided screw the people... monetize all the bad debt... neo colonialism aka globalism or whatever buzz word you want to call using despotic countries for low wage labor to get your goods from... that eventually ends when everyone everywhere are too poor and are living off debt to fuel their basic needs.
I've been grimmly joking, all nations are on a race to see which ones become the next Sri Lanka.
Good luck!
We're all going to need it.
PS
It's become kind of a joke, but we in the USA are fairly confident that Nord Stream 2 was the work of our CIA. Doesn't make much sense the Russians would do it... they would want that as negotiation leverage and a way to make money selling their natural gas. But our robber barons here are chomping at the bit, normal BTU price of natural gas in the states is roughly $3, but since the Russian Ukraine thing, it's shot up as high as $9 over 3x the normal price... which means lots and lots of profits.
And our country is owned by our rich... robber barons.
What I don't think these robber barons realize is that they're pushing the economies of the world to the brink, that even they won't have a place to run... yachts and palaces aren't the best place to hide.
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Affordable housing is a problem everywhere in the US as well as many other nations.
Just in Idaho prices have risen 4 times than incomes over the past 10 years.
Even during the boom, new construction (house and multi-dwelling units) per 1,000 households was only 18 units.
In 1960-1970's range was 35 to 26.5 units per 1,000.
As of 2017 it's only 9.5 units per 1,000.
We need a housing program that brings this back to 40 to 50 new units per 1,000. Development costs should not be passed onto consumers, rather the local county and state sales, property, and/or income taxes should again be used in absorbing that cost and upkeep as it once did.
Additionally, rent pricing and house pricing controls need to installed with a housing building project across the US. It's how most people in the US were able to afford buying a house or renting a home in the 1940-60's.
The falling interest rates by the Fed has pushed banks to appraise home prices thus loan origination amounts well beyond sustainable pricing so that the banks could continue making the same annual amount at the lowering interest rates.
It never translated into more housing construction, has been a continued housing crash trend, the boom has only been in the ridiculous pricing, and the busts when debts simply can't be paid.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
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Yeah, the positioning needs to be worked on.
A) they need to admit they went a bit over board (necessary perhaps due to the pandemic, a world wide emergency) on debt binge go burr.
B) What did this cause: massive inflation as well as massive speculative bubbles that were already a decade old thing from 2008 with QE even in the EU and and UK holding rates low for a very long time prior to the pandemic something they need to admit was a double mistake but many of these people in charge; applauded this reinflation of the assets that were already well beyond affordability and pumped up via leverage.
C) How do we fix this? We must raise the rates of borrowing, that is how money is added to supply. As well as discontinue the QE nonsense that pushes assets above affordability so that bankers can lend out without as much risk to themselves to anyone with a pulse or a "use case" < I'm looking at crypto and the bozo the clown cherry on top NFT's. Not that either aren't bozo the clowns, both are speculative idiocies with no underlying value other than the greater moron thing.
D) This should correct for affordability in all things including housing prices, rents, goods, and services.
E) This often does cause unemployment to elevate.
F) Only thing to mitigate the harmful effects of E, is to have your legislature local and national propose supply "of last resort" or rather extended resort to keep developers building homes... the supply of housing in many places never kept pace with the population thus demand despite the levered balloon bubble of everything speculative idiocy... in fact it could have kept supply lower as it catered not to affordable homes and apartments, but put lots of levered newly created money into more expensive luxury homes and apartments.... not the supply we need. As well as cheapen the few builders attempting to cater to the fewer and fewer people able to or willing to buy the then "affordable" non-luxury homes. So remaining middle/lower class housing developers just pooped out turds... and small quantities at that since fewer middle and lower classes could afford the rents or mortgages or homes outright.
Housing in most cases has always required a central planning element to ensure healthy affordable and liveable conditions and the supply of them were met, or rather slightly exceeds demand. You want always more quantity supplied than quantity demanded for various reasons; population is not shrinking for one, the other is that older units are always being demolished or in need of rebuild; like a car that gets depreciates over time from use, so do buildings.
So look to your governance. Markets are only as good as what the people of the nation desire to have. Look to places like Vienna Austria. And many other places with very good yet also very affordable and even abundant housing. Look at different time periods when this occurred.
Or wallow in this bankster gangster economy as that shit of a Chief Economist shat out of his poor excuse of a mouth; more of an anus hole really.
But that's the big problem we do have. These oligarchs have become brazen. Contempt for the worker, contempt for the vast majority of the population. The top 10% and rather the top 1% live in different realities than our own. They're far disconnected from what is real. Similar to nobility of not that long ago along with royalty and other oligarchs that continued to exist in many places around the world that eventually can no longer functionally do anything for the country to prosper as a whole, rather they seek to parasite off what is dwindling. And announce that as prosperity.
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Biggest emphasis is that such the idiot wealth to so few of people is a complete danger to democracy. Also for the US specifically, we're among the 28 countries of the 201 that doesn't even have universal healthcare. But globally, having such a system is idiotic. I'm more of a co-op structure with funding from co-op banks from a Federal Reserve Co-Op lending at discounts, and these co-ops aren't trade-able, rather employment constitutes one voting right and only employs and all employs have voting rights on all aspects of the business.
In such a system you would never get such out of wack inequality in compensation at all, additionally, they would never vote to outsource their work abroad, or borrow to buy stock, since they couldn't anyway being non-trade-able businesses, but to spend money on capital expenditures to improve the efficiency and quality of the work, and the stunning share of profits to total compensation including payroll matching, employer portion insurance premiums, etc. ranges from 5% to usually union work 20%, leaving 95% to 80% in complete profit that is paid as dividends to shareholders. Pay could easily be doubled to 10% to 40% and the business would still walk away with 90% to 60% of the profits... that's how absurd inequality.... and you wouldn't necessarily have top executives walking away with 300 times the average (not the lowest) the average worker... that's factoring in that 300 times figure.
A transition from corporations to co-ops is a necessary transformation or we'll only keep repeating failed democratic republics that turn back toward a monarchy/emperor/dictator type system.
We need to advance as we did from slavery then feudalism then mercantilism, and now industrialism employer employee relationship to a co-op style.
Pensions wouldn't be de-funded so a few executives and major shareholders can have their 20th yacht and 100th mansion collection along with buying four or five private jets, while still having enough money to buy several more islands, and literally purchase government officials in 100 different countries.
Current system is very much like reinventing royalty and nobility under feudalism with a splash of mercantilism as they buy up governments via bribes or even via themselves as they run for office because even an affluent person wouldn't be able to afford to do such a venture.
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People naturally dislike going to the doctor for check ups and dental visits even in universal medical nations. Because people dislike being poked, jabbed, scraped, etc. So part of what many of those nations do, is promote their system to ensure they do get check ups; to catch anything early.
The hair brain notion that people would start using universal medical system as if free upgrades to mansions for all is insanity. That's one of the jokes in Germany and UK, if I had to pay the prices to have them take blood, drill my teeth, rip my skin off, etc. I certainly wouldn't bother to go the doctor until I absolutely was at death's door.
Unless your a hypochondriac, normal people dislike going to the doctor/dentists; its just a necessary annoyance so you catch things early before they become chronic, or terminal.
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@insurgentpepper For longer term investors these stock buybacks also are bad news. Particularly when the company is taking out debt to buy back a few hundred million dollars worth or even a billion (depending on current shares outstanding and current share price).
All these stock buybacks accomplish is generally a meaningless slide down in the shares outstanding... 100 millions shares trading at $50 is a market cap of $5 billion dollars.
They do a 10 million dollar buy back, that sudden buying frenzy means they will probably pump the price of the stock up say $60 per share average for this $10 million buyback, therefore they bought 166,666 shares... there are still 998,333,334 shares outstanding or 0.2% reduction in shares outstanding, justifying only a 0.2% increase in price moving up on shares... but that's not what happens... the quick buying sends the stock up fast with the buyers suddenly outnumbering the sellers... this can also cause various other things to happen, sudden buying pressure causes options trading on calls that were trading cheap $20 a contract for $55 strike... stock pumps to $57... market makers who may have to deliver these at $50 suddenly need to buy the stock too thus adding more buying pressure (gamma squeeze)... so the price goes up to $60... when all this insanity is done... contracts set to expire end of week, stock buyback program is done for now, and normal buyer and seller ratio comes in, stock starts to dip down, and market makers holding excess shares to cover calls for higher strikes above $60 start to sell as the stock dips, dumping the stock back to the normal trading range of $50.
All this happens over a week or so. Sometimes a month. In really insane bull markets over a quarter or longer. Then eventually it all comes crashing down when this excessive pump and dump buyback mania ends. Long term investors are holding the bag... and the poorest investors among us who buy regularly at whatever price it happens to be trading, may have bought shares right at the thigh of this distortion.
And that's the heart of it... it adds no value to the company and only acts to distort the market price for a few peoples (those who have vested interest in short term rise in the stock price via options or warrants or plan to sell soon) and everyone else is left holding the bag... including employees who now have a company saddled in more debt, or profits used not to make the work better, or become more competitive in terms of adding more production lines or innovation or quality controls or better distribution etc.
But to a short term pump and dump scheme.
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That's what I explain to people too. They laugh, in agreement.
Wages flat and for many even fallen. Yet prices on the most substantial portions of incomes keep going up (Mostly everywhere housing, in the US medical, in the US education, almost everywhere even food and transportation).
But because it goes in to their pockets and its among their peers, suddenly inflation might happen... that's why you care so much.
If they have time and computer or smart phone I invite them to the Fed Reserve website showing their account balances of shoveling funds of money to various entities "buying" assets with printed cash to make the system liquid enough it doesn't collapse so that Peter can still pay Paul so Paul can pay Mary and so on; everyone can continue to pay their bills and debts; in this case its the corporations including banks and Blackstone Holdings Finance Co LLC... yes they own so much stuff they should have their own entity category of their own.
And yes the Fed Reserve bought/printed and is holding $4.3 billion in their junk bonds alone.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/reports-to-congress-in-response-to-covid-19.htm
Shows all the accounts of pumping up various banking sectors; which is typical.
Not typical is the monthly statements entitled:
Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility
Fed Reserve started as of May of 2020, last year, to buy up Corporate junk bonds, ETF Bonds, REIT's ETF's, etc. from Alphabet (parent company of Google) to Walmart to Verizon to Blackstone to Berkshire Hathaway Holdings, etc.).
Over $100 billion printed just in these over that period of time...
Not including the multiplier effect of banking when dumping over a couple of trillions of dollars in Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility, Municipal Liquidity Facility, and the other non-typical Fed Reserve Accounts: Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility, Main Street Expanded Loan Facility, Main Street New Loan Facility,
Main Street Priority Loan Facility, Nonprofit Organization New Loan Facility.
A humble increase in wages/salaries pales on monetary inflation/deflation against what our system does in its monetary policies.
Banking accounts for 99% of all inflation via fractional reserve lending.
How did you buy your vehicles? With cash? No? Of course not. You caused more inflation than giving someone $5 or even $20 an hour raise.
Did you buy your home with cash? No. You borrowed, you instantly caused total home borrowing costs and loan to enter the money supply bidding up all other housing or other goods and services.
Borrowing is the biggest form of inflation. And we're now all in on that as our wages stink.
Do you scream at banks for lending? And others like yourself for borrowing?
No??? Why not? If you care so much about inflation.
Borrowing is the form of money creation on a debt driven monetary system that we have had over the century.
Paying of debt actually reduces the amount of money in the system.
Wages/salaries... any inflation by such things could potentially actually alleviate the "inflation" really it's the soaring cost of living prices via a gigantic asset bubble and flight to inelastic demand curve items like healthcare and housing where no price controls are in effect... sweat shops de joure still hell hound this planet producing cheap consumer goods like coffee makers and blenders and toasters... things you buy a few times over a decade... perhaps a few more times than usual as the quality has substantially diminished from such goods.
I always find it funny and sad how ferocious people can be among their own... if it means their group gets something, it's bad.
The propaganda over the past 40 years has really turned people into BDSM sadists, really put us all in a pathetic state, at least here in the USA.
A Stockholm syndrome of stupid proportions.
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There are actually even better medical facilities in the UK, Australia, Germany, Austria, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and some other places.
On case in point, the ocular implant was initially researched in the US via state funds at a state university. It was further researched in Austria and was actually made public initially in Austria.
MRI was initially funded by US and UK state/national university funding. Developed at the same time to be delivered to hospitals and clinics. Japan's medical sector that is state sponsored then adopted varying lower priced MRI's so that many clinics can afford MRI's not just at hospitals just as they did with CAT scans and ultrasounds.
In fact, because patent protection that provide incentive to private health R&D, the monopoly characteristics mean various private biotech firms do not work with each other in their research as well as attempt to prolong their patent rights for as long as possible, they literally stifle innovation and bringing new treatments to market in many ways.
One case in point, Valtrex generic valacyclovir and Zovirax generic acyclovir (cold sore, shingles, gentile herpes, and chicken pox antiviral medication).
Both made by GlaxoSmithKlein:
Valtrex active ingredient Valaciclovir was patented in 1987 and came into medical use in 1995 held a patent monopoly until Nov 25, 2009
Zovirax active ingredient acyclovir patented in 1979, patent ending in the mid 90's.
Since Valtrex pushed on the market, GlaxoSmithKlein worked hard to keep Zovirax ointments from becoming OTC, to boost sales of its new drug Valtrex.
In Germany this corruption failed and Zovirax or acyclovir generic has been available over the counter for as little as 8 Euros for 5% acyclovir cream since 2010.
So it's kind of a greed game, that slows the distribution down as well as the collaboration on making better medicines and procedures.
The absurd price for Zovirax in the US 2015, actually had one patient with a large tube that would cost about 20 Euros, cost the the US patient $95 and his insurance paid $2,532.80 USD.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20150306-column.html
So not really. And the primary inventor of the medicine Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion initially graduated Hunter College public school free due to her grades was awarded the Nobel Prize in part due to her work on acyclovir.
People were rewarded and do get rewarded for inventing medicines, appliance, and procedures.
The problem becomes distribution and continued R&D... the income stream that private enterprise wants slows advancement and makes any use of current technology often un-affordable to most. Inelastic demand curve... people will pay whatever to not be in pain, especially die. And business will charge as much as they can, and they can on medicines and appliances.
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I'm agnostic atheist.
I just amuse myself at the various regions of the world depicting Jesus as their own variation.
I look at the Mormon painting of Jesus; some Dutch or Nordic dish water blonde straight hair with blue eyes prominent European nose.
Then there's the Italian Jesus who looks like our very own Metatron.
Then the black Jesus. Then the hispanic Jesus... then the Asian Jesus.
If the guy really existed, I would just suspect some Jewish ethnic look today, probably short curly hair (poodle hair) with a short cropped beard.
If he looked completely different from the area, the Gospels would have made a point about it; at least in one of their several versions.
Unfortunately, there aren't any contemporary historical accounts of Jesus's actual life; hence why I'm fairly convinced Jesus is probably an allegory that became euhemerized; a spiritual tale outside our own existence, later made to fit within our historical world as if a real person... this happened in many sects from Dionysus to Hercules to Zeus to Apollo to Romulus and Remus to Castor and Pollux to just about all the various deities and semi-deities etc. Other regions around the world to Nordic to Indian to far East Asian have examples of doing this euhemerism. The Gospels, particularly the oldest one, do a poor job of describing the region of Galilee; many towns that were larger were not mentioned when travel in that time period of Jesus's life on the way to one town much smaller and on wrong courses. And it reads like a narrative of allegory onion style; foreshadowing the cursing of the fig tree for not bearing fruit, then turning the money changer tables at temple, then leaving the temple, and ending with the mention of the fig tree now and that it has withered; very poetic and foreshadowing. This is great narrative; it is contrived for a reader. The reader gets excited when all characters including the apostles; but we're in on it as the reader... or the characters are truly that cartoony dumb.
So what did Jesus look like... whatever you want him to look like. And everyone does just that.
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China so doesn't have our back.
This is likely the scenario of any outcome of an attack.
1) We attack N. Korea.
2) N. Korea immediately releases all artillery bombardment which levels Seoul killing over hundreds of thousands, injury millions in just a few minutes.
3) S. Korea, Japan, and US forces invade North Korea, which is on the Chinese land boarder.
4) China admits N. Korea is a no longer capable of governing itself. And takes responsibility for annexation of N. Korea, demanding that all forces retreat from the territory.
5) S. Korea and Japan being very upset about the massive casualties from N. Korea's bombardment would refuse to retreat, the US would compliment their denial to China to evacuate the N. Korean territory.
6) China would threaten attacking into that territory, initially in the guise of a North Korean push back, but later becoming an obvious Chinese support.
7) All out war with China; China would immediately cut trade off to the US, unfortunately much of US and Europe's supply of finished cheap and durable inputs and goods come from that location; various items like elemental phosphorus, to lamp fixtures, all goods would sky rocket in price.
8) China would seek allies against the Korean, Japan, and US faction. At this point tension would become very high, likely possibility of it turning into a nuclear war.
That's a mild scenario; the least ugly one; one that N. Korea gets no nuclear weapon off. And that China takes their time attempting to vanquish the allied forces from being in N. Koreans territory.
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I have never smoked or used the stuff. But plenty of friends who have all through high school and through 20's and mid 30's of today.
Pot is certainly a vice; it is addicting, and has other adverse effects.
I want it legalized so that cartels don't exist, and that we're not bothering fining and putting people in prison for its use, and there is economic advantage (we can make paper products with the material instead of just relying on wood pulp). And I think like alcohol is a vice, pot is slightly less problematic, yet we put up with the adverse potentials and actualities of alcohol. Historically its because the timber companies didn't like the competition on paper making, and used the racist bigotry of the day about Mexicans who would smoke the bud of the plant and become less productive. The reason that plant became illegal is absolutely absurd.
And beyond, I want pot and essentially all substances to be legal so that it isn't a crime, so that folks who get addicted can seek recovery, and not be trapped with a criminal record making it nearly impossible for them to get on with their life.
Funny, I haven't tried pot, but alcohol, and I think alcohol effects are much worse than weed. Both appear to have the same potential for addiction; much less than nicotine, but low like that of alcohol addiction.
Irony. I won't try weed nor any other recreational substances because of nicotine. I tried pipe tobacco and since have struggled with smoking ever since. I have an addictive personality; mostly to uppers I think. Alcohol not so much. Hardly ever drink, and never have any cravings for it. Nicotine.... evil.
Anyway, I'm for legalizing all substances and instituting mandatory rehab programs for those who become addicted; and to promote just because meth, heroin or LSD all this shit is legal, they are not safe nor should you even bother trying these things. Do so, and you'll likely be in constant addictive state, always on methadone in the case of heroin addiction, you'll never be quite right pre-addiction.
Universal healthcare is important too, specifically mental help, because I think many of these people who start using illegal drugs have mental problems, and are seeking ways to medicate themselves.
Also, the taboo on some of these substances ignores some very obvious potential benefits; hemp can make amazing paper, rope, and other fibers. The medicinal use appears to assist with pain, and appears to assist with certain type of glaucoma.
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In speculative mania periods like this, even art becomes over done. As the rich that got richer have incomprehensible amounts of money they're seeking to preserve anyway they can, and have exhausted typical means of stocks, government bonds, corporate bonds, CD's, simple savings, shell companies, real-estate, etc. so they go exotic with art... particularly when art becomes a pass time hobby for some of the super rich not seeking to really ever make a return on their art spending, but rather a trophy for themselves. Similar fomo hits some of the other big cats... so they too pile into art.
But just as fast as they all pile in, they all stop showing up suddenly too. Or they attempt to sell their art for stop loss. Some billionaires in the past gave up even trying to sell their art and just in some rage against their own stupidity take it out on the art and ruin the piece. As if it was the painting or antique or whatever object's fault for their decision to purchase the item well beyond the limits of even insanity would permit.
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WTF? We should have prepared long ago. At shortest time span for prep work, even Bill Gates in 2015 inspired by the Ebola pandemic to give warnings and talks on the necessity to properly plan for an inevitable pandemic.
And well before then many epidemiologists have consistently for the past 102 years, after the Flu pandemic of 1918. In fact, it's spurred most nations including the US to put more of our tax money to the R&D of flu and other viruses in universities and labs both public and private, eventually leading to the discovery of DNA and RNA and other genetic material.
It actually was among the many motivating factors that brought about UK's NHS, prior to 1948 its establishment and prior in 1911 without any planning life was more grim for most people; infant mortality at birth very high along with mother mortality, most births being done at the mother's home, life was much shorter and brutish for those without means when no economic planning was conducted.
It should have been planned at least by 2015 with the near miss of an even more fatal Ebola outbreak nearly went global ie. a pandemic. At the very least in the last 5 years. At the most, we should have continued the major achievements from the 1918 pandemic.
Without any planning, you're doomed to the chaos of you own idle dumbness.
So mathematically counting from 2015 is 5 years. 1918 is 102 years. We had many periods of time to prep.
We did not, at least not in this country.
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chapter/inheritance#general-practice-and-primary-health-care
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Nero... social security, medicare/medicaid, police, fire departments, judicial, elected government officials from judicial to legislature to executives like governors or mayors or commissioners, etc. to public roads, schools, ports, parks, food inspectors, weights and measure inspectors, libraries, etc. etc. are all forms of socialism.
Forming a civilization is the very act of society coming together to mutual benefit. Not for the benefit of some overlord or aristocracy at the expense of the peon or peasant or essentially everyone else.... but any civilization is in itself a form of socialism. The idea of today's socialism has to do with ensuring the benefit doesn't just go to a few people at the expense of everyone else like monarchies and mafioso oligarchies have in the past like the Medici.
It's the idea that everyone gets mutual benefit from civilization.
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A phenomena happening and picked up pace in a huge way since 2012 or so and keeps getting bigger is investors often foreign somewhat wealthy and super wealthy park their money in giant apartment complexes around largest cities. Entire apartment block vacant in large cities. It's freaking creepy ghost town areas in large cities around the world.
Toronto Canada actually implemented a tax on foreign purchasers of apartments and houses. And immediately saw a decline in rent and purchase prices.
It's working because these "investors" are doing what the classical economic that would lead you to think: they're not building more apartments or houses, and they're not upgrading nor providing upkeep. Instead, they sit empty with no repairs often damage occurring to properties like froze pipes making them uninhabitable until repairs can be done which they don't do, they're sitting on the properties as a store of cash like hoarding gold or some other commodity.
Other developers are slow to want to build more units because they know its artificial hording, and in the mid to long run the developers are likely to be faced with flash sale and crashing market as suddenly all these vacancies come up for sell. So developers build slowly, if at all.
I think a solution would be to do what Toronto has done, and now Vancouver is doing to stop this insane hoarding of homes.
The other thing would be to institute subsidies to start building houses and apartments through the country both in operating and even allowing the operation to be cosigned to a co-op of the tenants, and of just developing and selling houses to compete with other domestic hoarders... you want to sit and fix the pricing by waiting for the next sucker... fine, wait forever because you now have competition.
There was a housing program in this country, but over the past 40 years it's been gutted significantly, and its showing.
http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/buying/canadas-plan-to-tax-foreign-investors-is-already-working/news-story/38af5331ef2fd9c9730dc5b24c8096e5
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Had the King done that back 200 years ago, or appointed someone to do so during the Olive Branch petition...
Well, the even if we became independent later on anyway via common wealth as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South America, etc. have done, the US would likely have a functioning healthcare system like Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, etc. etc.
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There are so many brainwashed morons that tend to vote for corporate puppets in both the DNC and GOP, but I think some are starting to realize the phony false dichotomies.
Whatever system you want to call what we need: a worker new deal that provides actual advancing standards of living not declining, paying attention to environmental issues and using that problem as an opportunity to also advance prosperity instead of look at it as some type of cost which advancing technology required to deal with the issue means it would be the opposite (a boon to the economy), a co-op reserve bank that allows lending at low interest rates for workers to buy out their corporate oligarch businesses so workers own the businesses especially those in high economies of scale capital cost businesses that co-ops are unable to secure any loan from current financial system, rent price controls, stablize housing prices, etc. Because this boom bust cycle oscillating in orders of magnitude more violent every boom bust cycle as it eventually tears itself apart, it effects us worker class the most.
We're done with this idiotic system.
It fails at providing clear open elections with open candidates that aren't part of a mafioso oligarch puppet workshop, provide opponents in every public office, let no office go uncontested, seeing a ballot with only on person on a ballet is not an election. It's a joke. We once upon a time laughed at dictatorships like Saddam's Iraq when he was the only one on the ballot.
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Not all was rosy though about some of the Ancient Greek city states.
Athens, Corinth, etc. treated women like modern day Pakistan or Saudi Arabia: women should remain at home or be in a burka when in public, and similar to the old 19th century women shouldn't be outside on their own, but chaperoned. Producing a weird harmful to children pedophilia culture. Not so much in the Victorian era, but the extreme cultures of some of the Middle Eastern cultures have produced some hypocritical sexuality.
Romans mostly still looked down at homosexuality in most ways. Bi was slightly okay, but still scandalous among the elite class, unless you were using your sex toys, slaves, and they cared nothing for the masses; they considered the rest of society as mostly the majority stupid idiots anyways, dangerous, something to keep in check.
Homosexuality and bisexuality is a low number compared to the majority in most tribes, civilizations, etc. But you can have some cultures that have an influx of homosexuality and bisexuality; sometimes for good freedom to express your own personal interest, and sometimes caused by oppression in other sexual areas.
I think our increase in the states has a couple reasons that are generally caused from good and neutral effects: It's no longer thought of as a bad thing. It's edgy, so why not see what sexuality you really are, and neutral effect, our economy doesn't subscribe to having as many children, they're extremely expensive, and wages are flat and falling. So there isn't the drive to have large families nor even have kids. So that allows for the freedom to experiment; and keep an open idea about relationships.
You could make the case our economy effect causing people to experiment with sexuality as they're no longer focused on building a family with children, could be oppressive.
Where it becomes caused by the effects of overt oppression you get male children being pimped out to young adults and even older adults like what's happening in Pakistan. These traumatized children later in teenage and young adulthood then molest other children themselves.
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Bingo. And when you make unstable the basics: water, shelter, and food.
You have no wealth at all. But an impending if not already collapse civilization. Your payment will be your own corpse swinging from some tree.
Housing ought not be a business first, but a basic need first and foremost. Hence every country, even the miserable moronic robber baron loving nation of the United Corporations of America still have laws on the books that limit the max properties one person or their entities may purchase. As to not monopolize thus manipulate the markets to extremes and kill economic activity thereby
As well as many other limiting factors to ensure the citizens are housed.
Even the US at one point until they become the UCA, had various projects to build individual housing as well as multi dwelling units for rents. The cities and counties and states and federal government played a part using all our tax proceeds to build the infrastructures for modern housing. These developments were not passed on to the builder nor the buyer. Additionally, property prices were required to remain relatively low. Banks weren't allowed to pump the goose for their own gain because interest rates their cartel set was constantly dropping off a cliff to over stimulate a race to the bottom debt exhausting economy.
Rather, the banks had to act maturely about how much they were willing to lend, because they were on the hook for that 15 to 20 to 30 year loan period.
Now, they can just sell it to the cartel banking thing and poof they got their 30 year return immediately and just about the entire 3% interest that went along with it including the various 3% or so initiation fees that went along with it... and ready with fresh capital to make more loans and do the same... so why not pump and the price... allow a higher asking price... they're all doing it!
Yeah, that jack ass financial engineering is probably not ideal for the rest of us who live in civilization.
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And usually more efficiently with often better quality; modern universities and colleges, modern clinics and hospitals (except US at the moment at least on affordability; catholic clinics and hospitals and clinics tend to be cheaper and better quality than other nonprofit or profit clinics and hospitals), modern banking and financing, modern legislative and judiciary, library service, social welfare programs including housing assistance, etc.
Really, religion sucks at doing much of anything. Probably why even the aristocracies around the world just have and still use it as a pacifier on the lower orders, as well as how validate their elite status: oh I'm god's anointed... or for less monarchical societies: apparently I'm in my position of wealth and power because god favors me and listens to me, not you, so do as I say and maybe some of that magic will sprinkle on you; give me your money and magically god will bless you... maybe.
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Because the stats on rapes and murder by ethnicity and resident status doesn't correlate to their claim that immigrants are causing those issues.
They're tackling a scapegoat.
And yes, the refugee crisis in Syria and other places has placed a tremendous burden on many countries. Perhaps we all ought to reflect on what our idiot governments are doing in those regions; their motives. And maybe stop "bringing freedom" to these nations. When in reality we're not.
Allied forces often support other dictatorships and tyrannical theocracies or oligarchies (Saudi Arabia, Kingship of Iran, Egypt, Turkey), and even support religious fanatics in Syria fighting as rebels.
United States (my country) has supported more dictatorships the democratic republics. So bringing freedom is quite bullshit. And when we're done we leave them a defunct country: Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, and Libya.
We should probably stop acting like world police toppling governments that we dislike or find we might make fortune doing so via control of markets, and what we usually do is make those regions complete failures... and what do we expect, but to have massive migration away from disaster areas.
Given the same circumstances you would have, as human history has shown, mass emigrations from Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy, Greece, Poland, China, India to other places with possibly greener less failed pastures.
Who wants to stay in a miserable failed state?
So why should we be supporting war that creates these failed states?
The answers are complex. And they want simple. Blame the symptom instead of the condition. Scapegoat.
Most probably die from septic shock due to treating infection of an abscessed tooth instead of dealing with bone loss and dead or near dead tooth.
And put pressure on the supposed allies like my utterly stupid nasty oligarchy country the US. We (my country) has only accepted a few tens of thousands refugees from Syria, and about that number when refugee status was given to Afghanistan people.
A geographically small country like Germany shouldn't be expected to take 1 million refugees in 1 year.
This is a mess that the causing nations need to figure out.
And we the people need to vote these shit heads out to stop these oligarch wars that cause failed states and their mass emigration to our nations creating disgruntled invaded nations to form small terrorist cells and become even more radical.
Address the root cause. Blaming immigrants is pathetic. And won't solve anything. Treat them well, and decry our nations causing their problem and end it.
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Kamala is terrible, her name in Finnish literally means horrible. So I have taken to calling her Horrible Harris. I can imagine people in Finland joking if it's Trump vs Kamala... laughing their ass off thinking fuck US has lost their mind they had to find someone more horrible literally to run against Trump. Trump VS Horrible! LOL!
I think they'll try, but it will not come anywhere close as Hillary. I think it's too soon.
As for private insurance elimination, I wouldn't focus on supplemental insurance.
Supplemental insurance is a joke if the universal system is correctly formulated to cover EVERY medical issue.
Canada still requires supplemental insurance for all dental and all Rx medicines and appliances given outside a hospital.
Canadian politics right now is in debate to at least add Rx to the universal program, many are thinking adding dental including all oral surgery and orthodontist work too as current supplemental insurance is mostly a joke in that you don't get much from the premium you pay into it, out of it; the offerings are slim. So many don't get dental unless their employer sponsors and takes on most of the premium. Something we should try to avoid. Seriously, supplemental junk isn't working in Canada.
Price and Coverage of Canada's Universal Medical Program in Canadian Dollars:
Medical 5.1% payroll max yearly contribution: $2,748.90: stops being taxed after income beyond $57,400
Unemployment insurance: 1.62% max contribution $860.22 stops being taxed after income above $53,100 (This is not unemployment insurance for unemployment pay if you get laid off, this is "paying" for times you'll be between jobs to be covered by the universal healthcare program).
https://www.bookkeeping-essentials.com/payroll-tax-deductions.html
Bernie's point is that we should do like Germany, France, UK, Australia, etc. that cover ALL medical including Dental (orthodontistry oral surgery), Vision, Prescription, hospital, clinic, etc.
We would pay a bit more for fuller better coverage. Rendering supplemental insurance less necessary.
In Germany, I can understand getting supplemental life insurance, and perhaps if you could actually find a 30% buy up long term disability plan, the biggest one is for orthodontist work since the compulsory government insurance only covers age 21 or younger.
We would want something closer to Germany's system which makes supplemental insurance mostly an unnecessary thing, and for alternate private plans reveals those for the shitty gamble that it is as it requires people to put their funds where their stupid is by making enough money per year before they can purchase a private shittier less coverage plan.
Only 11% of Germans purchase supplemental medical insurance.
And only 11% of Germans purchase private insurance as their system provides so much; and you can't purchase private insurance unless you make more than €57,600.00.
Basically, they realize you will likely skimp on the private insurance, and they want to make sure you will be able to afford a medical disaster with poor insurance coverage (ie. they're letting you gamble, but only if you can foot the bill if the gamble goes bad.). The private insurance isn't necessarily cheaper though, it's roughly the same, as all private insurance must maintain similar standards to the compulsory healthcare insurance. So again, they're letting idiots gamble, but not too much.
Germany's Health price and coverage:
Germany's main medical program costs 7.3% on income up to €50,850 (stops being taxed so max at €3,712.05 per year 2019)
Covers:
1) All medical: hospital, clinics, dental, orthodontist work for those under 21, vision, pays 6 weeks of sick time 100%, short term disability of 70% for 16 weeks.
Germany does have copays that range from 5 Euros to 10 Euros per medical visit or Rx filling, with annual max copay caps at 1% for people with chronic conditions, and 2% of annual income.
Germany also has unemployment insurance of 1.5% (Again not the same unemployment insurance in the US where you get paid by the state when you're laid off, this is like an advance on moments you're in between jobs not paying into nor making any money, but still covered fully under the universal healthcare program).
Max yearly cap: Taxes are calculated on wages equal to or less than €74,400—or €64,800 for residents of the former East German states, except Berlin or
max yearly tax cap on this portion of €1,116 to €972.
We could probably offer something similar at least ALL medical type for the same if not even cheaper than Germany's 7.3%.
http://gpminstitute.com/publications-resources/Global-Payroll-Magazine/april-2016/what-to-know-about-payroll-in-germany
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/germany/
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True. But really, there isn't much to decide. What's going in economically isn't vague. It's overt return to corruption and the ruinous path to oligarchy robber baron that brought us world wars, civil wars, and regimes the likes of Fascist Italy, Germany, so called communist dictatorships of Stalin USSR and Mao China, etc. And the resource grabbing US and UK meddling with actually elections installing instead Shaw of Iran, Saddam, Gaddafi, then the purposely muddle mess of central and south American countries... the bloody US backed military dictatorship coupe in Chile Pinochet... And of course US and France and other nations rip up of the Middle East... talk about making several Afghanistans. Millions of refugees. And presently arming the dictatorship of the Saudi monarchy to kill people in Yemen turning that into a terrorist hot bed. Then we'll probably invade Saudi Arabia in 20 years.
No, this system is completely obvious it's an overt replay.
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That's true for so many people here in Idaho. Some idiot revealed he bought a car for $30K, a car. Not a truck, a car. Because his wife wanted it. He makes probably $40K a year. He said his wife didn't work for the first 17 years of his marriage. He can't really afford the car, he's trying to sell it. So they go in to debt to the fucking eyeballs.
When my grandparents were alive, particularly on my mom's side, they took out home equity loans, and a home paid off back in the 80's they owed $60K by 2002 in equity loans. As well as many other credit card loans that when grandpa died, my understanding, they just stopped paying and the companies didn't go after the estate. My uncle took over their house and equity loan to repay it so he could own it and he moved into it.
People don't like to admit they're poor, particular poor white people. Especially the older generation and the one just before people born in the 80's. Our generation born in the 80's keep it real, because we realize we're fucking screwed over the past 40 years. Rents and housing prices are higher inflated prices than the inflation insanity of the 70's, at least in the 70's wages kept pace with inflation making the pain dubious.
I always find it funny, the ones who protest they're poor are usually the general manager, or specialty fields that make 6 figures... making 6 figures in Idaho as my oldest brother does means you're affluent.... well, once did... home prices make it so you can afford a new 1500-1800 sq ft house. The other slightly lower workers to mechanics, chemists, and especially the operators all think they're rich when some of these people are scraping by with $13-15 an hour. Pathetic wage, and shitty medical insurance.
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The prop was defeated. But better than rent controls would be public housing done right.
Vienna Austria public housing model conducted over 80 years, 60% of the multi-family dwellings are city owned, and constantly building more supply.
Prices as of 2018 in Vienna is $600 a month for about 1,000 sq ft apartment (2 bedroom), even cheaper for 1 bedroom apartments for $388 a month 600-800 square feet... that would be like trying to rent a place in NYC/LA/San Fran/ DC for that price and size.
Over 60% of people in Vienna live in this public housing.
Even the rich seek to live in these public housing units.... seriously they look amazing... something that if built here would cost easy $1,000 to $2,000 a month range depending on the city.
Other cities like Seattle and countries like UK and Canada are looking into the Vienna model.
Because if it works there, should work everywhere... imagine that, they discovered a way that doesn't screw people over.
There's also a co-op model to which the renters are all board members with voting rights to the Corporate Co-Op charter to which they vote rent rates, what to do with revenue, how to pay any mortgage, and what to do with surplus(profits) often they use it for much needed improvements and repairs.... and even rent reductions for long term tenancies.
And each Housing Cooperatives are different, some you actually have to buy into them, others you don't, you just rent, you're in but don't keep any selling equity.
That model is slowly starting, but doesn't appear to have development strength, only works after units are built... usually when owners are about to destroy the property for some other development or sell, the tenants buy out the property under a Co-Op Charter.
And the co-ops that require buy ins, don't really eliminate the price problems, as the prices are still rather high.
Either way, we need housing programs fast.
This should have been major concern of Obama's Administration when the real-estate crash occurred... it wasn't that people didn't need housing, they needed it, it was the fact prices for both rents and mortgages well outstripped incomes.... as it is today with a vengeance.
Seriously, this supply side economic horse shit where so long the rich lord or this case land lord and banks and other folks are doing fine, everybody must be doing fine is a lot of shit.
All they did was set us up for an even more spectacular crash.
https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/05/what-the-future-of-affordable-housing-already-looks-like/560126/
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vienna-affordable-housing-paradise_us_5b4e0b12e4b0b15aba88c7b0
https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/how-does-vienna-build-such-terrific-housing.html
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-10-26/why-rich-people-austria-want-live-housing-projects
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And even when they're in dire straights within their own family, they deflect or irrationally ignore it. Case in point, a coworker who has over $50K medical debt, due to thinking he had insurance at the time, but didn't and a member of his family need hospitalization and a surgery... he may file for bankruptcy... he even worked for our state's welfare department, and with his 3 kids and low income has subsidized housing.
Yet he dislikes welfare, despite the fact it's the only thing keeping him afloat. He doesn't like the idea of universal healthcare because he's afraid the "government" will take over everything, despite the medicare single payer model doesn't imply this at all. And despite the fact he's over $50K in medical debt likely to declare bankruptcy on it. He doesn't think medical care is a right despite he thinks people needing medical treatment should get it.... here I'm at a loss, there is no logic in the void.
What I think makes him think irrational ways is that he's highly religious, his family conducts some church with his father as preacher, his wife "works" at the church, and his extended family are all right wingers politically, at one point he mentioned his uncle called him a bleeding heart liberal because he voted against a proposition that would allow slot machines if horse race tracks were built in association with any casinos. He doesn't like how horse race industry historically treats most horses.
He almost didn't want to pass medicare expansion despite the fact he's in dire straights of needing good such to cover himself, wife, and 3 kids.
Again, there is no logic in the void.
These people are utterly brainwashed.
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It's creepy on how it does both in large corporations and in just privately owned corporations. The owner comes to visit or the VP or CEO comes and it's as if the nobility Earl or Duke or the king or queen is on their way.
And the way I noticed particularly with my current privately owned corporation, our owner acts very similar to downplayed feudal lord. He's not kingly in that he makes much fuss about having an entourage even though every time he does come he does in fact have an entourage (usually the COO and the CFO or at least some accounting and finance executive along with a couple regional managers as well as a few I'm not sure what they do other than possible secretary workers).
In his case, he acts more like a cartel boss demanding from our regional manager that a new equipment piece for one of our lines would only take 2 weeks not 3 or 4 weeks to install ( required ripping out a mixer component and filler component along with changing airveyors and conveyors and installing new ones in certain segments as well as test runs to ensure it all worked with existing equipment sections).
He left it open to asking him any questions except that of politics, he stated he learned never to get into politics with workers. Nobody said shit. Why bother getting on the wrong side of an owner who could unilaterally if he so chose fired anyone he wanted on a dime and literally have us escorted out immediately from the building.
So crickets. Even I rolled my eyes. I really wanted to ask about the financial state of the business. As they never show any of it anywhere. But since he wasn't talking about it and never did, other than to say how much more soda cans and bottles we produced year over year compared to other years in a very pointless data for the most part; it isn't that difficult to conclude, oh this fucker is all about keeping what his cartel makes under wraps.
Unilaterally too he decided to halt annual raises. Wasn't going to be much, heard it was only going to be 2.5%, but my rent went up another $80 in June; that's $80 x 12 months = $960 yearly extra divide by 2080 standard total yearly annual work hours = $0.46 an hour raise just to break even in my purchasing power.
My 2.5% would only give me about 43 cent raise still insufficient. But 0 raise is even more of an insult.
Then we got a contradictory letter stating how wonderful the company did last year and still continues to go strong, and in their words: to put their profits where their mouths are, that they put 9% of our annual wage into our 401K.
So they're not hurting, they're even more profitable. I guess.
The other sad part about their particular 401K, contributions are random and they're not 100% vested. Instead, they have a 10 year vesting period where each year of employment is only 10% vested. Most workers there below one or two years. A few more 5 to 7 years. And hardly none beyond 10 or more.
So it's a shitty contribution that most people will ever realize. Not to mention new workers until their 1st full year don't get such contributions into their 401K at all, in fact they can't even open an account with the company until their first full year.
It makes sense because capitalism really came from nobility and monarchies feudal system from mercantilism to today's capitalism.
The really big problem is this system is a sociopath and psychopaths wet dream come true. These neo-feudal lords take an obvious enjoyment at being the at the helm and being the big boss to which everyone depends. The wanna be sociopaths and psychopaths see this and emulated it. They have no desire nor comprehension on such responsibility. They're like the mad feudal lords and royalty that eventually were assassinated due to their inability to relate to their fellow human; not even considering the needs whatsoever of their underlings and in fact taking great enjoyment at making their lives miserable; instead of the other way around.
Both are dangerous: the good intended ruler or malicious intended ruler.
The latter is where it finally shows warts and all and generally collapses.
Even though a good intended ruler might jump up in their place and scream: Oh, don't throw out the bunch when it was just one bad apple!
Whether real effective change happens is if people buy that excuse or not.
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States rights.... sure, the man had entire life 101 years to justify and unjustifiable war... he was much as slave as the blacks. He had to do his "duty" because otherwise he'd be skipping drafts... and jailed or forced into their limited navy.
That's why you fought. Caught up in society. And making up something that sound more noble than the reality you were hoodwinked or otherwise coerced into fighting.
Slaves in all other terms who don't get that point.
The man died revealing to us all to learn from what he did not. He was too a slave. A slave to society that said you better do your duty. And when his side failed, and the obvious revelation that slavery is bad, and that the US Civil war promptly ended slavery faster than otherwise would have happened, that makes his efforts in such a war on the side that promoted and protected slavery look even worse. That's damning. But one must let one's ego go. And realize... the poor bastard didn't even know what a state was until a child and that he was in some magical wonderland called Virginia. Groomed to be a slave. And be a slave to one's ego.
What probably he should be thinking is, I was fooled. Suckered. Suckered into magical elements of saving my home land... states rights... fuck human rights... states have more rights, tyrants to have slaves have more rights so that slavery can exist; as a slave has no rights. States rights trump human rights. All an evil immoral hazard that can as it has since recorded history come back to bight anyone; Ancient Greece, Rome, Ottoman, etc empires... slavery wasn't just relegated or easily identified to a particularly ethnic/racial skin color or look. But was equal opportunity slave system whereby even their own Italian or Greek or otherwise were subject to potentially becoming kidnapped and put into slavery.
Just say... I was in an era that forced me to fight. And if I was eager to do so, it was because it was my home. And didn't know any better.
Let's just revision evil with some non-evil. Or you just look even more pathetic and evil: in his view states rights sounds more noble than defending slavery... but with a few brain cells capable of thought, it's easy to realize that's even more evil... that the state has more rights than a human subjected to slavery. Or just as worse, perhaps he didn't see the slaves as human; despite them being every bit as human as the rest of us.
The man lived his young life being fooled, and spent the rest of his life until his death fooling himself.
That's the lesson to be learned here.
A tragedy all around.
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Dude, this has nothing to do with communism, if you don't register your car and if you tamper with your car in certain ways it requires special inspections.
In Idaho in particular, driving without a registration means your vehicle gets towed, and you pay for the storage for the period it gets taken by the government, and they privatized the tow company so you'll pay an astronomical fee for that to make some tow company rich if the government tow isn't available which is usually cheaper. If you're victim of a crash the local government tows are usually free, and/or the arrive sooner than your insurance tow and are still cheaper.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with communism.
And China and their people don't really consider themselves "communists" in the Mao sense anymore. They're a oligarchy plutocracy like the US, Russia, and several other smaller countries. Fuck the mass of people to establish an elite rich that get a republic of representation.
China even lacks universal healthcare, and most things that even social democratic capital countries, essentially all the top economic powers of the world excluding the US.
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Plutocracy... an aristocracy of any kind one wrapped in magic and stupidity anointed by the magical ferry god mother of stupidity to reign anyway they wish... or a rich psychopath stupidity...
You are playing right in the hand pretending the "state" in a democracy is something outside themselves.
Plutocrats of all sorts have long since owned and threatened the people the state was some horrible thing, so that the peon class would beg the thugs and gangsters aka the plutocrats to reign over them... to "protect them" from the horrible state that is owned now and completely handed over to the plutocrats by the very mass of people.
It's stupid.
Co-op business where all members have a vote is a clear structure to of economics, it limits and reduces an aristocracy that always ALWAYS Become s parasitical freakshows hellbent on the domination over other wills, using deceits and scapegoats and turning the economy into a wild casino for the mass of people, while plutocrats are the casino... the house always wins, it's statistical fact... and if one learns to count cards... thug them out of the apple cart.
We need democratize the workforce democratize our enterprises.
And this does by default limits the aristocracy.
The groups of workers would never vote to outsource their work to save a nickle a share on earnings...They would never vote to pollute their own neighborhood... they would never over borrow just to use the borrowed money for a squandered sugar rush in stock prices for stock buy back scams... they would never use capital expenditures that make no sense or for some outright scam that has no long term value to the business... they would never vote that certain individuals would have 300x the average (not the lowest, but average) wages. You would have a mechanism that technological advancements go along with the prosperity of all including the workers, who in this repeat to stupidity of robber baron oligarchs, those oligarchs gave us fascist Germany and Italy... and completely toppled and gave us thugs of Russia and China.
We must democratize the workplace. That's the ultimate structure that must be changed.
Aristocracies are unnecessary and are actually threats to humanity all throughout human history in all places around the world.
That is the structure that must be made, democratize the work force. Very odd we democratized government to self rule... but we left out the places were at the vast majority of the time, at work.
Democratize the workforce would be a significant advancement in stemming the harm that return to robber baron economics has wrought yet again... or we will for sure repeat this shit over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
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I actually thought something similar when in the same clip Friedman said that the various people in different parts of the world may despise each others' nations. I thought, well sometimes they produce inputs for what is used to build the full weapons that eventually are used against them.
Assassin markets, weapons markets, etc.
As well as the fact that some nations or even within their nation, the worker does the work to eventually over throw those who benefit from the final product of their input or full product; a way of biding their time.
And that goes back to the crux, it's not fully voluntary as the alternative to working for various employers are generally not that much different from their locality. In essentially sweat shop locations about the world, you have one sweat shop to another, they pay the same miserable wage and work the same long miserable hours; and the only reason anyone puts up with it is that there's better alternative.
That's as voluntary as being mugged at knife or gun point, or paying taxes, or following the local and national law... the alternatives are poor: being homeless, hungry, becoming very sick up to and including being killed.
There isn't any alternative.
And often this makes animosity that when they are working, they're poking away resources to attack the wonderful people at the heart of the this "voluntary" system.
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I think it's an accumulative thing causing a breakdown in society:
1) Economics sucks for most other than the extreme top 20%, and even for them it can come and go faster than bullet. Race to the bottom.
2) We have piss poor medical system including mental illness.
3) Ease to own high capacity and powerful weaponry.
4) And among the least fortunate, feel so hopeless they latch on to insanity. This has happened in many nations; look at the breakdown in Russia early 1900's. Look at France several centuries to examine including the well known French Revolution then Terror.
It manifested itself differently each time. In our nation, it shows itself as mass murder.
And it doesn't help we have a president that hints and often outright states racial nonsense.
Recipe for what we have.
We're a nation coming undone.
About gun laws specifically. It's fucking odd people can just willy nilly buy a gun, but to hunt in most states, like Idaho, you must take Hunter Safety and pass once in your life. I heard it is no available via online course which I think is stupid unless you demonstrate you're in a very rural area far from Fish and Game classes.
You learn how to use all types of weapons, laws and rules about various game, best practices in hunting various game, outdoor survival in cold weather or hot weather and in various types of biosphere, and actual practical exam demonstrating safe responsible use of a fire arm, and written test. Then graduation the class goes out and gets to shoot some 20/20 rounds at a range to celebrate.
I think anyone wishing to own a firearm should at least have taken Hunter Safety course or a Fire Arm safety course.
Universal background checks.
And no more nonsense with these clips or magazines that contain more than 12 rounds or so. Who needs 30 or 50 or 100 high powered rifle 30/30 or some other fairly large caliber?
That's un-sportsman like, in fact in Idaho for geese (excluding lite geese) hunting you must have a plug or shot gun that can only hold 3 rounds.
I just think semi automatic and holding more than 6 or 10 rounds is really just asking for trouble: you start firing more frequently without re-evaluating your situational awareness and it simply is cheap shot. If you can't target something, than you suck. Animal survives, and you lose. Try again later.
Anyway, nobody needs high capacity clips or magazines for hunting or even target practicing.
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Adrian, that's an old wise tale by the plutocrats so they can privatize natural monopoly sectors such as judicial, police, fire, utilities (water, electricity, sewer, etc.), healthcare, education both primary and tertiary, armies, navies, etc. They want it all. All the power.
And that type of propaganda repeated by the serfs is the serf handing the baton over to the oligarch and promptly turning around revealing their rear end and demanding they hammer it home this very instant.
Any large enterprise compartmentalizes; and this can create redundancies/efficiencies when poorly managed.
Governments particularly local, tend to be underfunded and must make do with little. Larger national government is often tasked with the scope of an entire population to service; and this is no easy feat without logistics; it all depends on how it is managed.
And since everyone is the government (footing the bill via taxes and voting and customer of it and often volunteer or worker) in democratized nations, everyone is in the face of government enterprise, always there to point out any poor quality or inefficiencies and wastes.
So out of most organizations, civil governmental departments tend to be the least organizations than for profit or non-profit private large organizations. For private enterprise; they often just up their rates. Particularly if they can; in natural monopoly sectors this is no problem; and you now can't vote against the increase and know where his new revenue is going... in this case it's often going to a few shareholders at the very top who literally don't even have a board position... and if they do it's among the most ridiculous bullshit job "Chairman".
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No its not. For two main reasons:
The good news, this only accounts for about 25% or less of the population. Keep in mind 45% didn't vote in the presidential election and last mid term 63% didn't vote.
And last election it was split almost 50/50 with the loser somehow getting the prize between those two they have about 25% or less of the population. And major reason many don't bother to vote, is media dogma decry certain states are always this and that, becomes as self fulfilling prophecy, along to the fact that many seats in the locality have uncontested candidates... that's starting to change a little recently, but we'll see if that has staying power.
And about democracy, we don't have democracy or the loser wouldn't have won via an insane electoral method, something that effects us all shouldn't be done in the manner that represents the least the most... that's anything but democracy.
So this isn't necessarily a perfect example of democracy with a majority stupid.
We have minority of oligarchs with all the money who select puppets as it takes lots of money to run for office, puppets who gerrymander districts, and fomenting a minority that's less than the plurality let alone a majority to bother to vote among a bogus hedged candidate selection, again many seats that go uncontested.
Several decades ago, even our major media outlets would have reporters and anchors reporting in the US, and currently many other countries, about a government with the same obvious government would say that nation has no actual democratic representative government, but a kleptocracy oligarchy, and they would make that preface every time they spoke about that governments name.... "the Kleptocracy of America today declares it will...."
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If I was Wolff, I would have explained that to him... you've been a coward all your life playing the sneaky 3D chess game, and in doing so you've resolved nothing. ACA was a deal with insurance companies to keep them relevant when they're not, and allowed hospitals, clinics, and especially medical manufacturers of drugs and appliances to charge whatever floats their boat; medicare/medicaid doesn't negotiate prices, instead you have so called insurance companies do that, and medicare adopts that insurance carriers "in network" price for that region.
A better method exists in which all medical producers must submit costs, and they are allowed a specific profit margin often 6% or so for their services or goods; so the price is published as such.
It's not that difficult to do.
And when the private market fails, as it does a lot, and medicine violating every competitive market principle, you simply supplement it with state production of that good or service... Rural hospitals had long been set of non-profits often county and state hospitals in the US, over 2010 to present over 100 hospitals have closed. Reason, profit motive doesn't work in the medical field; for hospitals its due to economy of scale, just like roads, ports, fire departments, police, etc. And for pharma medicine and appliance makers its the inelastic demand curve: price set isn't influence by amount of competitive suppliers as people will pay any price to not suffer or die. Even R&D spending most still comes from state college and university funded research. Our tax dollars to research, than we pay more to get the fruits of that research. Makes no sense.
I would have taunted Krugman, "Be brave little Piglet! Because your cowardliness has garnered nothing of real value. All ACA has been is a recovery program for big pharma, hospital, and clinics to recover at least some of their huge bills, still leaving families bankrupt and then without useful coverage.
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Show up, there's usually other things on the ballot that are actually more effecting than what comes out of the Federal Government especially the presidency.
And we need to vote for any House and Senate members more importantly or as importantly as we do as the president. Just leave it blank or vote green party.
I did this 2016, voted for Jill Stein. Didn't matter that much because I'm was and still am in Idaho... it's going right winger no matter what because people are dumber than a box of rocks on rye bread AM radio has made Swiss cheese of their old cantankerous brains... because really it's mostly elderly who bother to vote.
Not voting at all is how our oligarchs stack the deck in primaries against the people in the first place. And continuing it's how local robber barons keep reign of their local fiefdoms.
So vote. But you can leave various offices blank. There is often levies and other laws that require ratification in most states, counties, and or cities of your district.
The reason other than very possible vote tally manipulation that Bernie isn't doing well, turnout. My county literally just 13% turnout and that's with the RNC and DNC as well as in my county just 3 months ago that was voted against, another attempt to pass a $26 million dollar levy.
Because voter turnout is so low, it doesn't accurately represent any majority... it's a statistical random generator, a gamble... we need turnout to increase.
Otherwise, we get to comfy with apathy, we will never get shit.
So vote. Just leave some blank and/or vote 3rd party.
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I wouldn't call the Hillary left, far left. They're centrists nut jobs that just hate Trump, so anything Trump does they want the opposite... almost the same as Trump is doing concerning whatever Obama liked or did, he takes the opposite stance. It's fucking insane though.
We're ruled by bickering lunatic rich fucks. Which seems to happen to every nation that becomes wealthy... and nations that aren't that wealthy.
And the mass of people are brainwashed in meaningless tribalism utterly unconnected to policy.... so they follow the leaders off a cliff of stupid absurdity.
Seriously, if Trump offered universal healthcare to include all health which includes all medical, dental, and vision with right to negotiation medical prices on all things (something our idiot nation doesn't have with medicare/medicaid) the Trumpers would suddenly be for it, and the Hillary lovers would be completely against it screaming how are we going to pay for it??!?! like GOP does today, and most centrists democrats do; despite the fact that all wealthy nations have better outcomes at 50% less the per capita cost... we're fucking getting ripped by big pharma, insurance, and hospital... its a fucking racket... over 16 big pharma companies producing over 300 generic Rx were discovered to be colluding to price fix. American public are being fucked in the face.
While millionaires and billionaires on the major 6 media want to concern us with nincompoop tribalism nonsense. We have real fucking problems. And its rather obvious when you buy a Rx Medicine and one that's over the counter, but Rx here for 8 Euros ($9.11 USD), but costs in a range of $600 to $2,000 USD... you know something is fucking wrong.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/generic-drugs-price-fixing-investigation/
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This is the absurdity I was concerned when the real-estate crash happened.
IT was never that people bought dozens of homes and realized they only needed one.
They bought one. And couldn't afford that.
What should have happened: Banks were all insolvent therefore they all should have been nationalized. All mortgages should have been recalculated to no more than 1.5 times gross income and interest rates recalculated at 3% or so; keeping people in their homes.
Developer loans should have also had the same recalculations as they bought land at bubble prices; then provided a major works subsidy in developing water, sewer, electricity; and require cities to do what they once did; develop. Instead of force this to developers who add this to the price of the lot and home.
A major house and apartment building program should have been implemented in every city and town in the US.
The nationalized bank could then be spun off to credit union banks. And a complete prohibition on lending more than 1.5 to 2.5 times income on homes.
Rental co-ops subsidies in all towns and cities to support rental housing using a similar model of Vienna Austria.
It's an absurdity the way we do our housing, healthcare, and higher education. We have many examples on how other nations from Finland, Vienna Austria, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, etc. do it with lower prices, better quality, and more supply than we do.
Our system is nothing but a casino bubble bust bullshit on an open fire.
Our taxes are nearly the same as German total taxes, and its even more when you add our insurance premiums we pay and even more so when you add any copays or deductibles in using this so call insurance that is often employer sponsored.
So our taxes are about the same, sometimes less such as most provinces in Canada a person making $60K gross USD pays less in taxes than we do and that's including their universal healthcare payroll tax portion, and not counting our employer sponsored insurance premiums with our taxes.
We can make things work correctly: better quality, lower price, and more supply. These other nations provide ample examples on how.
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We have such a nobility and royalty class in our nation that they have no sense of shame. In fact, they're sense of shame is if the peasantry, you or I, are making slightly above what they deem the market wage/salary.
We're not human, we're subhuman to them. People, yes, but not really people, more like playthings they have to giggle and squiggle and wiggle around... but not real. Not really.
Case in point, you or I owned a factory, and someone died somehow using the machinery... not matter the fault or how it happened, you or I would feel immense guilt... right? And it would damage our selves, embarrassment would be immense.
I know many and one particular oligarch who sued after being held liable under their worker compensation to pay a small sum of $20K for the funeral expenses. They fought it and won the appeal. Not even trying to settle the matter out of court, not just paying the small $20K funeral expenses nor the medical expenses.
But trying to pawn it off on a joint venture company... a confusing situation, for sure, but they die under your factory and employment even if temporary.
We're nothing more than chattel to such a class of people.
That in itself demands that we rid our selves of such monsters. Because monsters they have become. They don't see us as human beings, but as animals to do as they will therewith. Evil and putrid. Nothing more can be stated.
An oligarchy of any kind, just as we have a rule by the few rich, an aristocracy itself, should not exist. Such a class are what starts wars and other conflicts among all people, all for their own amusement often. And as often if not more often, they're shear disconnection and even boredom.
Again we become abstract playthings. Toys to do what they will therewith.
The highest definition of absolute objective evil as their ever could be.
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Stock buy backs by corporations do no actual good, only harm as it short term distorts market valuation on their stock by flooding buying quantity vs sellers (asking). Then when you couple the fact many businesses now are going into debt to buy back stock, this is as absurd as allowing deposit banking meant for loan making, to be lent for stock buying... highly inflationary as this leverage adds artificial amount of buyers or quantity demand for stock at a momentary temp pushing stock prices up, but no actual economic gain of any type occurred. The business never produced more, sold more, were more profitable, etc.
It's something that should be outright illegal for companies to buy back their shares, unless its to buy all of it back to become private again.
Far as the creepiness of the super rich... Jamie most recent heir to Johnson of Johnson and Johnson Corp fortune, did his own expose'. You find both documentaries about the super rich... they're mentally disturbed beyond proportion. These make the old feudal lordships and monarchies look kind of sane... and we know many of them were utterly out of their fucking minds. In the born rich documentary Cody Franchetti a textile heir in the Rothschild dynasty ancestry at some point married a Sicilian princess so he has nobility titles, lives in NYC, he explains that he gets so bored and not sure what he wants to do... he'll think okay I want to read a book or have sex... while doing one he immediately become disinterested in sex and wants to read book for example... or he'll read the book becomes disinterested in that and wants to do something else.
Normally considered fun activities utterly bores them. No normal activities amuse them. Interestingly, one of Franchetti's pastimes appears to be annoying the fuck out of his tailor. Seriously, if he's so picky, if any of us were that picky and interested and that amount of time on our hands, we would just want to know how to do it ourselves. Extreme boredom.
Josiah Hornblower, Vanderbelt heir, says it fucks with your head.
Luke Weil in it heir to a gaming fortune, attempts to stop the use of footage of him in the documentary by sue Jamie Johnson... the guy even before goes negative, is really interestingly sociopathic... what I think of the typical psychopathic rich people... even Ivanka Trump who is in the documentary, just comes across as a rich bimbo heir idiot, irritated that someone would ask what she does for a living or works at... because at the time she didn't work at anything at all.
I think that type of wealth and power is corrupting as well as psychologically damaging... studies shown rich peoples' ability to discern and show empathy greatly diminishes.
Born rich documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km_JmxnzTvc
1%er
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiInW0DYw_A
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@clarestucki5151 That's completely untrue.
Based on OECD figures:
Greek workers are 5th highest among the most hours worked nations at 1,956 average hours per year.
1,786 average hours per year in the USA 11th place.
1,363 average hours per year in Germany last place at 39th.
1,680 average hours per year in Japan about in the middle at 23rd.
2,148 average hours per year in Mexico 1st place highest hours.
Amount of actual hours worked... 5 day with 8 hour worked every week for the entire year is 2,080 hours.
So vacation, sick days, holidays, furloughs, etc are all factor out, as well as overtime and second or third jobs are all factored in.
Literally total ACTUAL hours worked.
https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
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It's a private company but it has:
1) gotten loans from the government both Space X and Tesla.
2) Gets government contracts, particularly Space X, in fact that it's bread and butter, without such it wouldn't have enough funding to do much.
3) Receives assistance at various NASA locations for its launches.
4) Has received various subsidies and both direct tax credits or through effective carbon credits that are awarded by states and other governments, these carbon credits are required to be purchased by other vehicle manufacturers in order to avoid even higher fees; Tesla sells these carbon credits to the vehicle manufacturers. Without government requiring and giving carbon credits, a subsidy, Tesla would never have any type of profit at all. Last profit was only because it sold just in the last quart $482 million in carbon credits.
"To put that in perspective, regulatory credit sales were greater than the company’s free cash flow and amounted to four times Tesla’s $104 million of net profit for the quarter."
So, it's private receiving lots of subsidies from governments.
I'm mostly okay with this. WE have to move away from fossil fuels.
Do I think Tesla is the answer... maybe.... but I'm thinking more on H2 fuel cells, when Wendelstein 7x or ITER fusion reactors or LFTR fission reactors are built up... making electricity super cheap thus electrolysis cheap, and manufacture of H2 from water is then super cheap and carbon neutral and done at home and at stations, no transporting the fuel.
Lithium and cobalt that make up batteries are extremely expensive and certainly not carbon neutral mining such material. And it takes about 140 pounds each of the rare substance. Lithium is 5 times more rare than copper in the earth's crust.
So H2 fuel cell cars are more practical... and they refuel faster.
Both battery and H2 cars at present have safety issues though, but they can be resolved through engineering.
With cheap electrolysis, other longer hydro carbon based fuels can be synthesized that don't ad CO2 to the atmosphere too; as well as materials that can be synthesized.
But changing to these technologies will requiring planning, ie subsidies.
Just as building highways and interstate freeways and sewers and electrical grids and power plants and ports etc. have in the past and continue to today.
Unless you want to live in a dystopia shit hole where most people live in slums with a few small conclaves of elites hiding behind walls aka gated communities.
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Socialism isn't about that at all. Socialism is simply ensuring the majority of people get a paid well and have protections against oligarchs and plutocracies consumer and labor protections. And seriously, capitalism reinvented the active use of slavery... free as humans?
Big purchases it's important to have as many records and logs as witnesses should something go wrong with your purchase. Basically you're complaining about not being able to possibly break laws by proclaiming certain property ownership. Which is pointless because vehicles, vessels, aircraft, etc. require registering anyway to use in the airspace, roads, and water ways.
And real-estate like farm pasture or homes require registry whether you pay in cash or not. And unfortunately the banks have inflated house prices everyone has to borrow the money anyway... so much for your cash only or we'll be subject to the new world order... already happens... most people are in debt either credit card, school loans, mortgage, or some other borrowing... and consumer debt surpasses the peak in 2008. And business borrowing was $4.5 trillion is now more than double at $9.5 trillion.
Cash? What's the point, most of us don't have real cash to begin with, it's all borrowed cash.
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It's not that forward looking.
But a quick QE that bought up $4 trillion in corporate junk bonds by the Fed Reserve... that money doesn't just vanish. It goes somewhere. And even if only a quarter of $4 trillion goes in to stocks... that's $1 trillion running into stocks. That's enough to push prices very high. And with margin reserves flush with brokers and other financial institutions selling their corporate junk bonds to the Fed, those brokers now are increasing margin allowances with traders; they got more than enough reserve cash, time to make new loans! And granting more options that are all on margin (debt) which magnifies the new money in the system.
This is called money printer go burrrrrr and burrrr some more.
I personally don't care if it goes into stocks. That doesn't really effect us peons that much, it really soaks up extra cash. It's what it does in the mid and long term.
That money eventually finds itself, as it has in the past decade, into real-estate. Not in building new stock, but bubbling up in trading existing housing stock back and forth. Creating the housing crisis world wide for both land, house, and rent prices.
Then the other problem that can happen is when all that money starts running into commodity contracts, which it recently has, with oil market flooded since about February by Saudi Arabia and Russia, suddenly prices pop there.
In fact, there was a news story about upset idiot investors not realizing commodity contracts are a type of option. If they hold it to expiration it either is canceled and get nothing or they have to take delivery on the last day of the contract.... needless to say they didn't have a silo to take delivery of any crude oil. They had to pile more money to extend their contract pricing for the next month; or lose all their money. So they put more money up to extend into the next month's and month after that contracts.
This has the effect of pushing up that commodity price.
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They tried to steal a Caucus election in Iowa. A non-secrete election, where all who attend can observe the majority visually and physically as they herd one part of the room or rooms for writing the votes down. Primary secret ballots are many times easier to forge. I want to think the votes were actually counted correctly, but I lost most trust in this system.
Nonetheless, I will vote. This time it's a primary in our state of Idaho. Voting for Bernie again, as most Idahoans who are independent or democrat did last time in our caucuses.
As for Biden, he hasn't a chance against Trump. He's got some sort of obvious mental problem. He was never confused just a few years ago. And if it's dementia, that illness sets in quickly. I know some people who have had the disease.
One in particular who was diagnosed was coherent couldn't tell anything was wrong with her, she had a Master's degree in English and a few other degrees.
She immediately setup her living will and planned care takers upon learning of the diagnosis, and moved in with one of her daughters, mother of my friend. Within just 3 1/2 months she was in her own world, would mistake everyone with someone else from her past, corrections just confused and bewildered her, and would relive moments of her past telling the same story over and over.
And at the stage of confusion Biden appears to be at, if it is dementia, he'll likely be in that same severe stage by about August or September.
What do we do then?
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That seems grasping, a lot, with both he just didn't find it relevant, or for writing for a Greek/Roman audience?
Romans 100 years earlier to the period of Jesus's life, during the sacking of Carthage described the "barbaric" infant sacrifices Carthage would do, similar stories were spread by the Roman's and Greeks about the Gauls, Celts particularly the Druids, and Germans doing similar.
And don't consider the Greek city states as one nation, they warred with each other even under the Macedon kings, and each culture would often hold one city state in contempt for their various customs. Sparta among all of them was considered a strange pariah, and their staunch look over Spartan children for imperfections and potential death to a newborn along with Sparta's entire tyrannical social economic structures was considered extreme; one of the reasons poets and writers of the day loved making dramas about Sparta.
In Rome, infants could be set to exposure, usually if the parents could afford the child, but what would happen is they would leave the child with crepundia and taken to Columna Lactaria ("Milk Column") or “spurci lacus” (filthy pool) and usually left with clothing to increase chance of survival, these children would be adopted by various people, and an unfortunate motivation was that slave drivers would take on many of the infants and raise them to be sold into slavery at a later age.
But to outright kill, as several text mention, is still considered to be very disturbing and worthy of writings.
As the story is only in one Gospel alone demonstrates the likeliness of an added embellishment.
All of the Gospels are extremely historically inaccurate.
The first ones appear to be written in Alexandria over a century to several centuries after their claim of Jesus's life, each version came out about a century later, many contested by various sects, and each adds more and more details some correct the geography of Israel and the surrounding area while claiming more and more fantastic details to the lore.
So you can take the Gospel outside religious use as far as you can take any other lore; it's 90% fiction, most of it is parable; Jesus cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit despite it being out of season; shortly before turning the tables at the temple money changers. And the returning to the fig tree to observe it withered.
Completely inaccurate description of a Roman Census or any census in the ancient period, as they were, as they are today, a way to collect current information of households.
Absents of much larger Roman towns.
Incorrect directions to one village that is completely out of the way to arrive at another.
The the Sea of Galilee is described as a large sea when it's actually a small inland lake all banks are visible; describing being at sea for a period of time, and having sail through a storm, while it was an inland lake, the boat would remain adrift during a storm.
Rome nor Judia had a tradition to ask to free a criminal; again this was parable, as the crowd shouts Barabbas which means son of the father... it's a choice to pick the violent revolutionary or the spiritual revolutionary.
These aren't historical documents, they are religious tomes and edicts.
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Most banking with the worker class, was often done among each other. Early 1900's into the 1980's, workers, often using their similar union membership, to build credit unions.
My dad, who isn't that old, recalls in the late 70's early 80's, their company credit union started with one particular guy who held the funds and ledger using an old utility closet as his office. It became a larger credit union. He and another fellow employee kept up on deposits and withdrawals, interest payments, loan making, payment processing.
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Richard called this guy out... but so could have my great grandma when she had Alzheimer's.
Hustler.
And like most hustlers being called out, they start groaning, freaking, shit I'm caught!
Cold sizzle of silence, the anger and the gears turning... and the eventual groan.
At the heart of anyone that simply says they're this or that... they're selling you them to sell you something else. At worse, they're liar to you to lie to you some more.
44:00
Of course Richard was referring to the hustle that capitalism is.
I don't know this narrator guy, but he has sleazy used car salesman, sleazy lawyer, sleazy politician, sleaze just oozes from him. But I give the benefit of the doubt.
He at least is articulate and lets the others be articulate and holds them to the question.
At 50:00 they guy is out of his league. But glad he's trying to learn (he's not really he's got a shtick... a hustle and he's sticking to it).
At 54:00 this point Richard seems short changed falling into a heated emotional hustle question. He does answer that it's not at the cost run up stage yet on many of these existing monopolies... some are... that would be the cable companies with throttling and requiring metered data plans.
Richard should have described Walmart and Amazon, as well as others as not just monopolies but monopsonies. A monopsony controls the market forcing producers to sell at even lower wholesale to the point that their production plants must forgo quality standards, safety, wage/salary, etc. often forced to seek destitute labor abroad to exploit. They can also perform a vertical monopoly in that they suddenly start copying the same good from another producer, and only advertise their copycat good. Often also selling at a bit lower price to then force that producer out. Completing a full monopoly cycle.
At the stage most monopolies are today are in the oligopoly stage, where they're still price warring where they must. Cable companies where no competition, prices are much higher. Interestingly, when a town or city declares they will produce and offer fiber optics that will take 2 years to put in place, suddenly these monopolies lower their prices after long periods of jacking prices up.
There are also natural monopolies... electrical, gas, garbage, sewer, even internet, telephone and cell phones (the internet and old telephony on the back end is still monopolized etc.). Hence why they are often city, county, state operated or heavily regulated with a public utility commission to ensure input from the locations they service on all things related to their service including quality and price.
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I personally know nothing really about reparations, sounds like Bernie the same... I didn't even know that was still a thing. I would have just said I haven't thought about reparations, and would have just asked what they were talking about in more detail. And if I still didn't have enough information on the subject I would say I will need to examine that further, I have no comments on it yet because I'm unaware the facts about reparations.
I am against affirmative action. I think of it as reverse racism that can cause more animosity than its intention to get people of different ethnicity to mingle and provide minorities opportunities. Personally, our obsession on race on various forms reminds me of backwards pre civil rights; similar to NAZI Germany and other places about that time. We should be in a society ethnicity/race doesn't matter at all. Being obsessed by it only promotes ethnic/racial tensions.
Ask a German, French, Finnish, Polish, etc. to gather information about different races/ethnics; they'll feel dirty and like a bigot doing such creepy statistical research; like trying to discern racial attributes of intelligence; it's just not something that correlates as other circumstances exist that are likely higher influence on level of knowledge on subjects such as how educated were your parents, grandparents, extended family, family income, area raised, etc. Whether you're black, white, "yellow", brown, red, etc. is as causally influence on your knowledge as eye color or favorite color preference.
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Gold never worked well. Half of the 1800's the US was in a recession, depression, long depression, or a panic. It doesn't work well. And it's not what you think it is.
Domestic exchange for silver/gold was often halted, the metals were held for international exchange... so you're money was good to buy stuff that came from abroad. And the big kicker that if you like being able to buy gold or silver or other precious metals as a hedge... you won't like a gold backed currency because they can halt all domestic hoarding of it... in addition governments literally set their price to whatever they wanted on the metals so it didn't even really matter, the gold wasn't floated as a market like is today, it currency to gold was declared by the country. If the nation needed to increase money supply, they increased the currency per gold unit.
For currency protection, monetary policy should not be allowed to do QE, particularly buying corporate junk bonds and ETFs... that's ridiculous. And these banks that are insolvent should be taken over by the FDIC and if necessary a national deposit bank and credit bank for solvent businesses to continue to preserve their cash and provide short term credit for business operations.
There's no need to bail out these bloodsucking banks and distorting markets in keeping various assets (debts and stocks and real-estate) at prices that make no sense to wages/salaries.
And structurally by law, REIT's simply shouldn't exist. These secondary market monsters have completely distorted bloated the price of real-estate in the primary market in dangerous well beyond wage/salaries both in rents and in price ownership.
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I would have. But not anymore. All of my friends who liberal democrat all the way down, aren't going to vote for her. My friends that actually voted for Obama, usually mixed GOP, are all voting one way or another, but not Hillary, they hate her. After the last few months, I can see way. She's manipulative toady in that she's trying to water down any expectations of what the people want, a universal payer system fuck the insurance company rackets, return to glass steagall act, abandon the TPP, repeal NAFTA, CAFTA, and bilateral permanent normal trade with China, and start monitoring dumping from these countries, utilizing surf labor, placing huge tariffs for using countries for the sole purpose to have essential surf/slave labor as that effects all other developed countries including our own, restructure taxes, reduce higher education expenses, those with student loans allow us to refinance at market rates, 5.8% is high when you can get car, mortgages and other loans at 2% to 1% or refinance them. Why not student loans?
No to all that from Hillary. Then she goes to some rich piggy party and places noise machines to hide what she's saying.
Her record as Secretary of State stunk.
She's a terrible candidate. She just has it good with all the center right oligarchs and she's female, bubble gum brain dead notion from those assholes what convinced her to run.
I'm not voting for her. I probably would have a month ago. But no matter what I'm writing Bernie in as president.
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+Andrew Addams The medical sector including the medical insurance sectors even the non-profit portions of some of these business make huge profits, dividends, stock options, and salaries for the top executives, etc.
From biotech companies, pharma, the few major hospital and urgent care companies, to the insurance companies.
They don't want their apple carts' rocked. That's why they dislike Bernie. They're oligarchs losing control of their unwashed masses, and they're freaking hard. They may actually have to get a job, or a real job, or make due with a little less... oh no, unborn Susan Higgens IV might not get her own fleet of aircraft... just think how she may have to do with just one jet or even worse, resort to chartering... how pedestrian!!!
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+Sanil Khurana That be cuz thay are and now I'm gonna put poop in my ouchy and build my immune system like they did in the olden days, they weren't now cowards weak pathetic politically correct with homosexual Muslim tendencies along with athiest and communist liberal tendancies to send us all into a Fe Fi Fo Camp, or four fathers would be ashamed! THey'd be rolling in their graves!!! I can hear'em too. We need to go back to the good ol' days!! With Jesus and being man and woman. And the CIA and FBI and ABC CNBC CBS TNT are planning, plotting behind your back with the new world order, check your dollar bill says right on the back! Hows that for proof!
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This is there argument, and it is wrong on all points, but they're fucking idiots, reasoning with them takes lots of time, you have to figuratively hold their hand. And even then there's a malfunction because they won't remember, nor will they pay attention. Sadly, we don't have a natural killer cell that kills people when they're out of rationality in completely irrational and in utter derangement.
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+Brad Olson That's not how social security was setup. The money was intended to be placed into non-traded government bonds, the immediate cash could be spent on whatever, because at any time, those non-traded bonds should they need to be cashed in, would be simply printed no matter what, and the advantage is and has always been that the those funds never vanish due to market crashes or collapses and they always make a 6% return, because they are essentially lending to the treasury to pay whatever the government wants to pay, the funds go into the general fund; and of course any deficit spending eats the general fund up.
But the social security bonds are always there. And should we have to cash them in, which is starting to happen, the money is printed to do so; its called monetizing the bonds and it is by law that it maybe done so.
The misunderstanding on how social security works really irritates me. The propaganda on the "trust fund" being tampered with was right wingers wanting to demolish social security. The trust fund is there, the right wingers hate the idea of monetizing those bonds should more be paid out than collected. And they really like the idea of privatizing social security so that those funds go into their investment accounts pumping up stock prices, the very stocks they own quite a bit of; but of course then the funds wouldn't be secure. It'd become social insecurity LOL!
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Then you would know well before you stated your nonsense, that free means nothing in economics.
And more importantly, healthcare isn't a competitive market, you're not going to compete with anything.
You'll get collusion, monopoly, racketeering, huge externality costs, requires huge economies to scale, it has a steep inelastic demand curve meaning price changes do not result in any more production or demand for it, as you either pay up or suffer and/or die, etc.
Healthcare is not a competitive market.
Healthcare violates every competitive market principle.
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Sean Caliman Your point is lame (on the douchey side) when considering to be in the top 95th percentile is making $196,000 ( means only 5% of the population make $196K or more) and the following:
1) one of the inflationary factors that burden majority of people is rising healthcare costs, while so many have seen their incomes drop and their retirement income drop, it is asinine to expect higher income earners to keep squeezing out even higher incomes while everyone else is losing income. This isn't all tides lift all boats bullshit often spewed by some moron economists.
2) And considering you're not thinking about majority of people whose income 50th income (that's half of the population) brackets at $51K or less that have to do the exact same thing with their elderly parents, which also include everyone below the 50th percentile into the 20th percentile with income of $20K that have to do the same thing. And they don't have anything left to save and they must be extremely frugal all the time.
It's self centered. So yes douche bag material. You should just be thankful your parents are affluent. That income inequality is bad, but it gets even more ridiculous for the top 1/10 or 0.1% who make even more ridiculous incomes then one of your parents.
It's the structure of the economy. And it is violently unstable. Just be thankful your in the lottery for now. But don't promote douche bag economic policies that will continue the same course as that lottery prize award you with its grand prize of a gibbet with a rope around your neck strung out on it, or everyone will just turn poorer as the entire system crashes. And affluent people generally pampered can't handle any financial challenge as they're too unaccustomed to such challenges having a larger rate of suicides triggered by money problems. Basically, don't become a douche over your situation. And always remember its not your money, its one of your parents money. Which brings up the second scary thing, is that going into our next decade we're going to see more and more inherited wealth beyond 71% that currently exits to as high as 90%. Which has never been good for any country including ours during the 1800's and early 1900's. When inherited wealth and income gets that high, it usually triggers great depressions, riots, and rebellions.
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"To deny God is to deny reason, logic, morals, justice, meaning, truth, certainty, values, virtues, sacredness, dignity, honor, or anything immaterial, abstract, universal, and absolute. These attributes don't fit into the atheistic worldview of empiricism."
Nice circular argument. My turn!
"To deny the great and almighty unicorns, and rubber ducky is to deny reason, logic, morals, justice, meaning, truth, certainty, values, virtues, sacredness, dignity, honor, or anything immaterial, abstract, universal, and absolute. These attributes don't fit into the atheistic worldview of empiricism."
Hope I demonstrated why your argument sucks.
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Just to add to Mnakekeli Ngcamphalala point,
Greece, (ancient Greece), Italy (Rome), Egypt (Ancient Egypt), China (China Dynasty) etc. were the first in many inventions.
Letting that get to one's head means your good days are done.
It's best for a country like ours in the US to be humble. And its also important to realize, unless your a native American, we're all from various other countries. Some were very much from their country from origin, Levi Strauss German immigrant, Tesla Croatian immigrant, Ford heavy German immigrant and studied in Germany using their new assembly line system, magnetic tape storage various stages with first actual tape recordings by Austrian-German Fritz Pfleumer, and first floppy disk drives by Japanese inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu. We shouldn't grow a big head, otherwise we as a people will turn into Greece, Egypt, Germany, UK, Italy, people who were once great. Let's keep trying to be great as a country and as a world so we're never quite there therefore we can never have just been great, we're not there yet, we're trying to do better always.
And frankly right now, in the US we're doing miserably on many empirical social categories from healthcare services, poverty levels, life expectancy, social-mobility, etc. we're far from being that great of a country. We have work to do.
And we should always want to be better instead of patting yourselves on our backs for being great once upon a time.
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+Nicholas Zounis Constitutional democracy ensures the majority doesn't run rough shot over the minority. Checks and balances in such constitutions ensure mob rule of barbarism doesn't get out of control.
I think that's what you're major concern is over majority rule.
With a constitution to protect the minority, majority rule in most aspects is much better than other alternatives have utterly failed including oligarchy of a few aristocrat merchant mobster rule, or ministers of some nepotistic government like essentially all communist governments functioned, or theocratic authoritarian government either direct theocratic or monarchy.
As far as anarchy no government, that never works. The wild west of the US including many other places even today don't work well, look at Yemen and Somalia and other places where anarchy has and some places still exists. They're shit holes often without running water, sewer systems, other basic essentials.
You're bark raving mad.
You won't be considered too mad once humans have technology that eliminates all scarcity. But even then, you'd have some judiciary and legal system for people who do terrible things to others like murder.
A person isn't an island unto themselves. Unless they're stuck on some island in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of some forest, desert, or grass plains. And when they find themselves adrift in such places, their standards of living are diminished severely to the point they're concerned about where they'll find the next meal and water to drink. If they end up breaking their leg or having an illness they're overall prospects are bleak. Essentially, they have no standard of living, they're then too busy just trying to survive; its akin to the stone age. Fuck, even feudalism has a better standard of living.
Hence why you are stark raving mad about your libertarian anarchism horseshit that only results in creating a vacuum to be quickly filled with worse governmental types.
The very computer, clothes, water you use to shower and drink and cook with, the toilet you shit and piss in and that shit magically disappears, isn't unto your magical individual self, sure you pull the lever that takes that shit away, but that shit goes into a pipe that the rest of society takes care of as well as makes your clothing, provides the water that is safe to drink and shower, and everything else. Everyone running around doing their own thing without some type of rules generally creates a vacuum of necessity of needs of setting the rules judiciary, executing the rules, judiciary of the rules, economic distribution of the rules will always exist ( and better to be collective rules with constitutional rules protecting minorities) ensures it's not anarchy.
Otherwise, you'll be like so many currently other places that do exist under anarchy who exist without literally a pot to piss and shit in, and certainly no toilet paper to wipe the shit off their ass. This is why so many often refer to libertarian philosophy as childish; they can't reflect beyond their own egotistical self absorbed self-centered universe of their self.
"Don't register your car, try to avoid using governments services, which can be difficult I know." No kidding. Because it's impossible. Because you're brilliance of your self centered universe doesn't provide essential services or needs that make up a meaningful advancing standard of living. And thanks for freeloading of the roads the rest of us do register our vehicles and pay taxes, you fucking self centered freeloader. Even bitcoin requires the internet which the backbone of the internet is actually provided via major university hubs, and US universities and many around the world are government subsidized. Whoops. No bit coin can't use that, that's there be goberment LOL! Gold and silver? Most gold and silver stashes are actually held by governments as well, whoops. And most businesses will not accept silver or gold as their prices fluctuate fairly extreme per traded units.
"Take a stand and help free this world from fuckers like the non human entity in this video." And yourself centered universe has just condemned someone into not being human so you can now feel the authority to treat that person as a non-human possibly non living creature. "Put the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again." You're already passing your own egotistical legislature and judicial review appointed by your own fiat ego. You're already trying to fill the vacuum created by your own idiotology (SIC).
Please reflect on your philosophy as it's self refuting, so much so, it's childish at worst it psychotic.
In other words: grow up.
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Eamon Quinn And just to add, some of the most social spending in the US even though many European countries had already started such as placing minimum wage, standard work week that required overtime pay if breached, unemployment insurance, Deposit insurance, social security, etc.
If these things weren't in place we'd either fall apart into several states, become communism, fascists, or mixed in various states just as so many other countries had during the last hurrah of aristocratic mercantilism.
The US didn't have phone systems, a interstate system, electrical grid, and several other utilities in every city or town in the country until the mid to late 1960's. Our country was never much of anything, but a backwater until the 40's after FDR and social policies.
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+Marq Mac This is where our education system is completely failing. Everyone should know basic taxes, the tax bracket system and how it functions, basic labor right laws such as time and half above min., and every other basic financial item.
Most don't understand how marginal tax rates work at all.
They don't understand how stocks work at all.
They don't understand how a 401k work at all.
They don't understand how pensions have 5 year vesting periods, that you do keep the vested portion should you work at a place for 5 or 10 or 15 years; you get more each vesting period, and later in life at retirement age deemed by the pension you will get the money even if you only worked there for 10 years.
They don't understand how to budget.
They don't understand how to use credit, both revolving and installment loans.
They don't realize compound interest; not only in savings, but in borrowing; very important when considering "buying" a house on a 30 year loan, the amortization, you generally don't really start making any dent in the principle until about 10 to 15 years in the higher the house price; principle of the loan. So you are under water for most of the time you own a home on a 30 year loan, especially considering re-shingling a house and all the other upkeep items that cost tens of thousands of dollars; so people are dumbly going for very expensive priced homes just because they can make the monthly payment... for now.
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I don't think Nixon was purposely trying to screw our country for the following 40 years after his ruinous reign, but his actions have had consequences that has completely shaken the United States.
1) He began bi-lateral trade agreements with Mexico and many Central and South American countries that would later be the sucking sound of the reformation of today's neo mercantilism; using colonial, into today's situation using entrenched oligarchical or despotic developing countries as a means of cheap production exploiting poor people with very few rights if any to sell back to developing countries.
2) His initial trade terms with China paved the way with normal permanent trade relations as early as the 90's many cheap manufactured goods were coming from there.
3) His floating the currency also sped the pace of mercantilism because although the currencies are floated each country still has the ability to devalue their currency causing currency wars, turning all countries in the long term in to colonial late nations, each country is trying to export their way to prosperity while forgoing a strong domestic economy.
4) He paved ways to blame unions for everything under the sun.
5) Creating the EPA as a hall monitor rather than as a partner to assist in sharing the costs in helping plants become cleaner in their production, instead he created EPA to have a budget that only makes constraints on production rather than helping them achieve cleaner implemented production processes; scrubbers and other technologies could have been assisted. EPA was essentially used as a scapegoat to transfer dirty methods to other entrenched oligarchical countries or despotic countries.
6) He chose the military industrial complex again when he chose Uranium based nuclear power plants instead of thorium plants, of which most would have used the liquid molten salt reactor thorium plants; in short those nuclear plants cannot meltdown because their core is already molten and provide a self sealed plug, if it gets to hot, the salt plug melts and it falls below to collection point. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium make it incredibly cheap. And it's incredibly difficult to use to make any bomb; that's why Nixon chose the Uranium plants, to produce more nukes and power at the same time, short sighted idiotic dip shit decision. Not to mention, LFTR or liquid fluoride thorium reactors also don't produce as much radioactive waste and the toxic period of the waste is 200 years rather than uranium waste which takes 10,000 years to become safe. Also, all of the waste can be reused, placed back into the reactor for further fission to make either quicker half life isotopes or even back into non radioactive isotopes.
7) He cut various science funding significantly over his tenure.
The only good that he did was finally get out of Vietnam after double downing initially fruitlessly killing more American.
If it wasn't for him, possibly we'd have a universal medical single payer system as Reaganomics that only through a long stem of events has recreated this new mercantilism that essentially helps a few plutocrats by turning everyone else in to desperate surfs. Much of what the 1400- early 1900's were composed. You generally had no middle class, you had a toady class of about the upper 20%. And that's what we have today.
Funny, how one man can set the course of a nation and to much of the world to ruin and far set backs for a half a century to a full century.
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It would hurt him really bad if he proclaimed himself as an atheist. He shouldn't say he's atheist at all. He should either dodge the question like he did there, or say I'm spiritual secular humanism essentially. There's too many religious nuts who vote on both democratic, independent, and of course republican and tea baggers.
People in general, don't get atheism because religion is hardcore into peoples' culture still. You have to realize the president often is given moments to "pray" or say things about a dead soldier, and is expected to bow their heads when others "pray". So this cultural indoctrination isn't going away anytime and is completely besides the point of why Bernie and others like him need to win political office to defeat oligarchy.
So he should actually act like he's all about god, even if he is atheist, just put on the deist hat, we atheists are agnostic at the core, as well as we simply understand that much about gods or a god is projection of ideals. So project away Bernie!
Do not say you're atheist!
And probably shouldn't go around saying socialist or at least ensure people understand what that means. Because most now a days thinks of socialism as communism, which Bernie is most certainly nowhere near. He needs to explain its still a capitalistic system, where people own property, small businesses as well as people work for businesses, it's that is ensures the gains aren't going to a few, that workers aren't being exploited.
Those are some tweaks, and things he shouldn't do, in order to appeal to a broader range of people. And to be president you must appeal to a huge variety of people.
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+meme last
Right to bare arms purpose wasn't as a right to rebel, it's not a check on the government of the US, it was because at the time the US did not maintain a standing army, nor have the funds to arm such army in haste, instead the US relied on conscript via a militia regulated by congress.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
It doesn't mean treason was acceptable. So you cannot use the right to bare arms to attack or form an army to start war against the US because you don't like what's going on or feel like you need to protect yourself; that's treason which the constitution remarks as well.
And more about the militia:
Article 1
"Congress shall have the power...
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.” – Article I, Section 8
And in practice during the Shays rebellion 1786 and the Whisky rebellion 1794, a mandated conscription (ie. draft) was made as well as registry of their weapons to form a militia in order to put down those rebellions.
As for treason that is strictly defined in the constitution, and actually allows congress to establish punishment for rebellion. The first congress of the US actually established the death penalty as maximum punishment. US history some during certain rebellions including the Civil War were executed or served a life time sentence, other's in the general state armies were paroled. Corruption of blood portion is about a person committing treason, that whatever assets that person has can still be past down to heirs, in common British law, family members associated with the treasonous person would lose everything, they would have the "corruption of blood"; the founders reasonable saw this as idiotic, why should you suffer anything for another family members actions?
The right to bare arms was to make it cheaper to raise an army. That's essentially the point of the Article.
Article 3, section 3:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."
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Rezuis, but you won't, your protons and electrons, your molecules will continue to do stuff. Just as they do now when you part pieces you take in like boogers, poop, and pee. They end up in trees and weeds and other biology. And so will your rotting corpse, even if you are cremated, the various gasses and vapors will end up in something biological. You're doomed to live on in many pieces in many places for quite some time.
And if not in biology, in space floating. Just floating.
Okay, so you wont' be conscious.
But based on your comment, you're barely conscious as it is.
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It's called using productivity gains to benefit the workers.
It's the concept that happened with the now standard 40 hour work week in the US since the 1940's require over time pay above 40 hours a week.
Prior people worked 12 to 16 hour days 6 days a week, for less money.
Technological advances shouldn't be held hostage by the "owner" oligarch class. But shared to workers by reducing their hours required to work while enjoying the same to even higher share of the income (wages/salaries).
Germany for instance works fewer hours a year 1,300 hours compared to other countries at 1,700 to 2,000 yet Germans often make more income working less hours.
The concept is that technological advances in production to produce more has benefited the workers too, not just the vending machine slave master do nothings but sit and collect the fruits of other peoples' work. Because they have a piece of paper stating they're ordained by god to rule... I mean they have piece of paper that stating they're ordained by the system they bought that they own you and everything else... Warren Buffet mentioned, the rich have the best welfare program ever, its just not called SNAP or food stamps or social security, but shares. They do nothing, but have a piece of paper that states they should be given a chunk of profits every quarter or yearly (dividends) doing nothing but holding that certificate of entitlement.
Anyway, back to productivity advancements via technology benefiting the worker. Economist Keynes thought by now productivity would have advanced and actually went toward the worker that their actual wage/salary would have increased in purchasing power by double from what it was in 1950's, and only be working about 20 hours a week for that even higher pay.
But instead, it has only concentrated into a new feudal lordship, oligarchy, mafioso, despotic phony leaders of the proletariat, whatever fancy name you want to call it, has the same effect. A few do nothing pigs with an irrational dogmatic claim on essentially all the rewards to them for everyone else's work.
The race to the bottom on worker wage/salaries have caused an overall sunken demand. Its' why even monetizing $4 trillion in money supply still hasn't provided wage inflation in the US. But sure has inflated the fuck out of rents and house prices to the point of disaster; record homeless in major cities, and even minor small cities are too expensive for most to make timely payments on homes or rents. Its a rebubble to another disaster, this time even more leverage. Technological advances are good, but they must benefit the worker, not just a few do nothings with titles of nobility.
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If I was a reporter there, I would have just said that:
"Cut the bullshit, it's basically about oil, the petrol dollar, weapons market, and it's easier for our oligarchs to deal with a dictatorship of an absolute monarchy than any form of representative government; hence the debacle with the Mohammad Mossadegh 1950, supporting the Shah, but that ended badly 29 years later in 1979 resulting in a theocratic kind of a republic; which the US government has been butt hurt over ever since, right?"
Stuart Jones probably would have given a long silence, finally shaking his head shrugging his shoulders in a silent "kind of" agreement then holding a long shrug, Stuart Jones would have asked, "We done here?"
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Pythos Sapunov No, it was written by a pixie who's name is Tinker Bell. Therefore its fantasy fiction. Actually, yes it was all made up buy some dudes over the course of several hundred years. Consolidated into a cannon. With the wisdom of people a thousand years ago, which is to say they were wrong about a lot of their convictions:
1) Understanding of light
2) Understanding of gravity
3) Astronomy way off
4) Biology completely wrong with ideas of spontaneous generation ie. rotten food stuff turn into flies.
5) Wrong about illness.
6) Wrong about physics considering the fundamental elements of the world as water, fire, earth, and air. Completely bad categorization of which none are related in anyway as a category of elements to anything. One is a chemical compound H2O, the other is an exothermic chemical reaction, the other way to general to really know exactly what they mean if dirt, that's lots of compounds that can be broken down to individual elements within the various compounds some of which is solid, liquid, or gas. The last one is just a state of matter.
7) They professed the humors in medicine to bleed or blister people to get their humors in balance.
On and on, the people of that day were ignorant of many things, and their assertions supposedly divinely inspired were completely wrong.
The only evidence the bible provides is that such assertions of religions should really be discounted as ignorance mixed with social controls by the elites and other peoples of that time. Not to actually consider it to be true, its apparently not true in any of its assertions. In fact, even some if not much of the historicity is completely fabricated, the only portions that could have some underlying reality such as this king lived and did this or that, a war happened, then died, etc.
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+the green man It's the same thing that happened in the states, just a little more extreme to the right. People are conditioned to be suckers for nonsensical policies.
I have to say though, I'm not clear on all of Corbyn's policies; I don't know them all let alone support them.
But in the US, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. to Clinton GOP lite, to GW have conditioned people to be further right than what is actually beneficial for most people. Obama's ACA or Obama Care is a GOP plan that was used in Mass. by former Governor GOP Romney, as well as sponsored in the Senate by Bob Dole in the 90's. It's a GOP plan; sell out to big pharma, biotechs, insurance industry, clinics, and hospitals.
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66 for full retirement and 79 is life expectancy means you have 13 years of life before expected death. And many jobs still today are impossible to keep working as mentioned in the video. These people are so disconnected from workers, they only see office workers in their line of work, and only observe operators at a computer consul when they visit other workplaces, but they don't stay or visit other areas and watch workers running around to various lines to keep product running, constantly fixing jam here or there, ignore utility workers out in the field all day repairing water lines, hanging electrical lines, fixing meters, using jackhammers, construction crews, plumbers, electricians, welders, truck drivers, mechanics, etc.
Somehow, everyone works at a call center, does accounting, data entry, teaches at a public school or college, or otherwise sits at a desk.... no. More than half of those desk jobs like data entry and call center pay shit, they're generally not a career job anymore... data entry is nearly extinct. And one only need so many accountants and book keepers. Those desk jobs really make up a fairly small portion of our overall economy.... especially considering many call centers left overseas to India. Out of fucking touch.
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***** Culturally delusional is the most likely. I was that way until about 5 years ago. I really didn't care either way and suspected religion was likely bunk, and that death just is the same as the moment prior to our birth.
But after reading the bible from beginning to end, the religion of my childhood, as an educated adult while in the military, I realized it was rather idiotic and really fell ashamed my dad and so many family members, and the rest of society takes that stuff even remotely seriously. It's horse shit plain as day.
Cultural influence goes a long way in keeping one thinking that something magical may still occur after death or whatever. Until you actually sit down and confront your biased culturally influence thoughts on the subject. It also helped I went to many different religious services from Jewish, various Christian, Islamic, all the way to Wiccan services. As well as took various anthropology courses in college.
So don't think people are completely stupid. Its more of a delusion driven by cultural influence (friends, family, and rest of society). As well as the usually apathy on the subject from most very inactive religious people who deep down reserve all possibilities including the likely scenario. People just don't really think much about it unless they have a reason: extended family is way into it, they get assistance financially from the church or its a fun activity like country club experience etc.
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+Melroy van den Berg The sun dies. Depending on the star's size, our sun will begin to use up its hydrogen fuel and become a red giant star, and begin making heavier elements than just helium such as producing carbon, this is thermonuclear fusion and its system the way it does it and the amount of energy it then releases is even greater, the size of the star becomes huge in the red giant phase, it's density decreases because it's releasing all the mass in the form of energy and expands in volume and it's density, gravity isn't strong enough to keep the outer layers together, so it starts exploding immense layers as well as let layers to drift off into space (it's not a super nova in scale, these explosions would be like burbs relative to other cosmological explosions). Eventually what is left of a star the size of our sun is a white dwarf, essentially very dense material made of carbon and other elements, not to include any new iron, our sun isn't massive enough enough to ever produce iron or many other elements even below iron, I think nitrogen and oxygen are among the heaviest our sun will create.
Bigger stars will continue the fusion process until iron develops in their core, at which point iron actually absorbs energy rather than releasing energy so gravity wins and the the star collapses from the outside in, suddenly the energy from the collapsing star reaches a critical amount in the center core and it bounces back out causing an explosion, a super nova, expelling all the material outward so fast the elements continue to fusion to the rest of the heavier elements above iron all the way to uranium. What is then left behind in the core is a neutron star, extremely dense material, with degenerate matter extremely dense thus heavy, it may not have any protons, only neutrons because the density thus gravity is so strong only neutrons can exist, but they decay slowly in to electrons and/or protons; thus they all produce very strong magnetic fields. If a neutron star spins as most do they produce a pulsar star intense magnetic radiation. And appears that new formed pulsar stars are actually the most extreme magnetic thing to be observed in space, a magnetar an extremely magnet pulsar star.
If the the super massive star is sufficient in size it will still rebound and explode creating a supernova, but instead of a neutron star, pulsar, or magnetar, it creates a black hole, the core essentially falls into 0 volume, or an undefined density that is mass is divided by 0. All the energy at the core is focused onto space-time, the matter is utterly destroyed, the energy remains with a locality transferred directly onto space-time, and known physics at this singularity breaks down, because it gives you an undefined number divide by 0 error aka you're relationships in your equations are no longer have a relationship that can describe anything useful. However, the outside of the black hole still interacts and can be described, its where you get the event horizon, and what black holes do to the surrounding area, the event horizon actually does grow in size the more massive the black hole. At the hart of the singularity of the black hole however, this isn't any size, there's no volume anymore. But lots of mass, which again, can be increased as things fall onto it.
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+Eero Haapala I'm a socialist, in the mixed market sense.
Economically, empirically it means competitive market principles in some sectors competitive market principles don't exist with complete private production due to natural monopolies such as utilities or essential services like medical, fire, police, judicial, legislature, executive entities, etc. And over time under completely private markets competitive market principles tend to become distorted because private business is at odds with competitive market principles and tends to invoke various activities that violate competitive market principles such as collusion, price wars killing smaller competitors with the capacity to make losses for the short term until their smaller competitors are either bought or out of business, as well as corning the market with unnatural monopoly power, etc.
It's about empirical economics.
Social-capital mixed markets using the concept of competitive market principles and applying social regulation and/or social collective production when competitive market principles are violated provide the best prosperity to everyone. Mixed market economies provide better standards of living in terms of more goods and ability to buy the goods, as well as better education, and advancement in technology that actually enhance standards of living a little more so than distribution of goods that social economic functions do.
So socialism works. A social mixed market system of private production mixed with collective production and/or regulation based on the competitive market principle. As well as assistance on both demand side and supply side.
It's the most reasonable and demonstrated to be the most successful economic structure to ever exist in human history. And such economic structures actually maximize democracy in legislature and avoids plutocratic oligarchies from becoming entrenched. It's the best method of society economically and government. It's the best method to realize a government and economy that allows the government to be for, by, and of the people.
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+Doping1234 China has a 10 year program to have an energy producing liquid thorium salt reactor, they announced and started it in 2014... so by 2024 would be the estimated time of having a working LFTR reactor.
ITER first plasma reaction test is scheduled for 2027.
Germany just this month December 2015, tested and successfully ran a low energy plasma in their twisty tokamak reactor.
I think fusion reactors would be available about 2040 to 2050.
I think a LFTR model bridge would be good until then to avoid adding CO2 into the atmosphere, and LFTR is actually cheaper in the midterm than using fossil fuel energy; thorium is very abundant and the amount of energy per unit of thorium as it mentioned in the video is huge, like tokamak fusion, you get so much energy per unit of fuel it makes making other energy distribution methods via electrolysis to make H2 or a synthetic hydorcarbon chain using water and CO2 from the atmosphere cheaper than using gasoline or diesel.
Only draw back LFTR vs Fusion Deuterium lithium-tritium breeding blankets is LFTR does have some waste mostly cesium, which has a high cross section (it absorbs neutrons more than it will split and release energy) so you can introduce too much cesium waste back into a thorium reactor, you'll likely end up with some storage of radioactive cesium. Fusion deuterium has no waste products at all, the tritium is incredibly small amounts and it's alpha decay is very weak doesn't break skin, 9 hours after an immediate shut down, you can go into the plasma chamber and do repairs without any worries of radiation. Neither can "meltdown" and neither can be used for nuclear weaponry.
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+timmian85 Considering my atheist about 4 years now, I would disagree. I have very good friends who were atheist and theist all through high school.
I actually got more ramblings from the theists than from atheists.
Really, from my atheist friends, they would just I don't believe there's life after death, and there are no gods or god. They would listen to my theistic ramblings of what I thought which boiled down to deism and I haven't a real clue. And it ended. One best friend always said, I wish I could believe, but I just find it to absurd.
I think you can find some atheists who are activist atheists, just as you can find theists who are activist theists, and the general population either way just doesn't care.
In my personal and especially professional life, I listen to peoples' religious convictions as just a way to understand the person; their likes, dislikes, their values. I don't care to change their mind about any of it. I simply don't care. And it might help them. I don't know. I'm not a shrink, and hate to think I triggered their pathology to murderous or suicidal or just have a mental breakdown because I put doubt into their heads about their fantasy fiction. I say, whatever you believe so long as its not unlawful or not the typically agreed unethical, go for it.
But I have noticed, since I now state I don't believe in gods or god or anything like that to theists they assume I want to argue with them. I actually have to tell some of them, I have not argument at all to make, I don't care. One insisted I wanted to argue, she said I can see you want to, I said nope, I just wanted to know why you like lots of end of the world stuff and want the world to end LOL! Because he was talking about how she liked topics about "the end of the world". I just wanted to learn why. I had to explain to her, I don't argue about religion, especially at work, but I don't mind hearing about peoples' opinion.
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Justin Cuomo Cite your "faulty studies". Because of all studies only 12 come up against them, and those studies have biases generally funded from oil and other fossil fuel companies who have actually obvious faults.
The fact of remains carbon dioxide is at incredibly high levels and continues to increase at an alarming rate, faster than any other time, save a few disasters with calderas like Yellowstone or Toba caldera eruption in Sumatra that nearly wiped out human species probably what caused the genetic bottle neck of about 7,000 humans 75,000 years ago.
We're flirting with a disaster the will likely feel its full force in the 2100's. But likely will show up increasing in unpleasantness in about 50 years. By then, its way too late to do much about it. Possibly, CO2 absorbing devices could be installed. That's actually what the scientific community has started looking at. Because world wide, CO2 emissions aren't decreasing, but increasing ever faster, no meaningful reduction is happening. Gets even worse with coal, because coal produces the most, so when oil price jump, substitution to coal makes the situation worse.
We have LIFTR fission and soon (but I think we could do even sooner if we actually spent money on it to the same amount we spend on NASA $16 billion a year) Tokamak fusion reaction systems; right now just ITER is the only foundation currently doing any deuterium tritium breeding fusion reactor R&D.
We should as the world take this extremely seriously. It's a solvable problem that doesn't require living back in caves or lower standards of living, in fact, could actually be used as a means to increase everyone's standards of living. Currently, it may not increase the current fossil fuel barons and other compliment to fossil fuel oligarchs standards. But their wants, will certainly decrease their standards and especially ours in the long run.
The biggest concern, we're looking at poor crop production to complete failures, as well as displacement from rising seas, and changes in precipitation causing inundation in some parts and long droughts in other parts of the world. Not good for crops or even trying to conduct any other business.
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+George Mayer I think that would be a fantastic way to end every church mass or bible class.
"And that's how Moses saved the people of Israel from the evil Egyptians.... Let's all pray now, dear god and baby Jesus help us help our selves, amen... And our Atheism portion begins now: okay, all that shit about Moses parting the sea, and earlier mentioned the magical rainbow as some contract with god to never flood the world again... not only is it immoral, it's all bullshit... wasn't that all a waste of time!?!
But since we're all here, let's take a vote on what we should do: water park, theme park, game of paintball or laser tag, bowling, or whatever else... and next week's activities will include some fun experiments with different chemical compounds that explode as well as change colors, and a guest speaker is a cancer researcher who will discuss some latest developed medicines and trial studies."
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+carol martin Mindless bubble gum tabloid culture. That's how. We're a nation of idiots. But slowly in various pockets people are waking up.
But many still have their heads buried in beer, the next sports show, what player said what and when where and so what, reality tv, comparing stadiums, and whatever stupid comes on their phone, tv, or computer screen... many of them really don't even know who Bernie is.
Basically people in the US have yet to figure out that not having universal single payer system is the same as not having primary compulsory education, fire department, or police station.
And the one's on the right are guilty of the latter, as well as buying in to bullshit propaganda they see in corporate news and labeled right wing media; those people tend to be the most uneducated and/or highly culturally indoctrinated in essence their very delusional people; like Joe the Plumber who wasn't really a licensed plumber and made no where near the profit/ income that would incur the tax increases Obama had and did support in raising, the highest income brackets. His imaginary business in is imaginary income...
We're stuck between people who are apathetic and bury their heads in the sand, and those who are snookered and turned delusional.
We're not the only country in history constituency have become barking mad by their own apathy and fooled by their ruling aristocracy.
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Sir Frankie Crisp In the US so many think they're going to be a rich oligarch some day they could give a rats about anyone else in the community.
Also, in the US so many are uneducated about economics they completely don't understand competitive market principles that make a more liberal market place efficient over collective markets, and when collective markets are more efficient when competitive markets can't or don't exist for particular sector.
So they completely miss the point on natural monopolies, essential services that do not respond to prices increases or decreases as they have an extreme inelastic demand curve (most don't even know what an elasticity curves mean in the US) even though they tout markets all day long they're fucking clueless, and addition many Americans don't understand all of the other principles required to ensure competitive markets operate competitively such as the perfect knowledge, barriers to entry, markets requiring economies of scale, requirement of many suppliers or substitutions, etc.
They just listen to their pet political ideology. And when they think they themselves will become bloated rich, they want to make sure it will be rosy for themselves by essentially cutting their own throats now. Most Americans haven't a clue about how tax brackets work, they think they make more money all their money is taxed at a higher rate, so they'll use the higher rate tax as an excuse not to do overtime even though its only higher on the money above bracket amount. Essentially, most Americans are economically and financially illiterate; they haven't clue how stock markets work, bond markets work, currency works, etc. And this isn't just the US, many in Canada, Mexico, and other central and South American countries tend to be economically illiterate.
So for those who are in the money and or have no conscience, it's like stealing candy from a baby.
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I was in Germany at a museum reading various Roman artifacts, and their use of just V which sometimes was meant to be a U made it a little difficult when combined with the way they would abbreviate many words since it may not fit on the marble or other medium they wrote one. Then they didn't do much spacing. I,V,X,C, L, M could be numbers, little to no word spacing, v could be a (u) and i could be a (j) and a name like Mummius might be written as MVMIO or even shorter they would put one letter for an entire name word like P and you were to figure it meant pecunia (money) based on the context of the rest of the sentence.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/edk7/5844752565
My limited knowledge of Latin, I was amazed I could read most of their writings though... was creepy, oldest material I have ever read, up to 2,000 years old, and the ease of reading made it feel like I was reading something that someone wrote just yesterday, like an immediate portal to the past and present.
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I may want kids later. But only when I can more afford them. And especially a spouse!
Which right now the spouse would certainly have to work to support just one kid.
Just want to make sure the kid would have opportunities through K-12 and some trips and possibly other fun things like travel and taking extra various classes or sports or whatever floats their boat that is healthy, educational, and makes them happy.
I'm not paying for their college though. They can figure that one out on their own if I have kids. Unless of course, I become a millionaire.
What I think I'd do is contribute to a revoke-able trust from the moment their born. Whatever's in it, would be turned over to them in certain installments according to their age. Or if they ended up total hellions, I'd revoke the trust to them and keep the money for my spouse and I. Or to help pay for rehab for the hellion child-children. My experience between all my family members including by brothers' and sister's kids, you never know how your kids will end up.
I'm perfectly fine not having kids though too. Have enough nieces and nephews to enjoy. The only reason I'd really want kids is the selfish thought that I'd like to ensure someone is there if I die old, that I wouldn't be alone. Which is not that logical, as I'd have nephews and nieces and their kids. And its no guarantee my kid or kids would survive before my death, live near me, or like me enough to really care. So it becomes a dubious whether I have kids or not.
Either way doesn't matter to me. The important part is I really want to be financial prepared enough with a stable relationship with the spouse.
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When someone says something factually wrong, its not talking over someone to stop their bullshit from spewing.
1) inflation is the cause of the problem... Thom points out all inflation is equal throughout the world and in real income we're still 27th. The other countries are still doing better.
2) We have more class mobility... Thom quickly points out that's bullshit. It's wrong. We're down since the 70's. And among the 3 worst.
3) Wealth stratification is a function of monetary policy... Thom quickly points out its a function of how wealth is distributed in the economy, he highlights taxation being among the biggest effects, but there are many factors; education levels, race of power of majority, ethnic/religion majority, labor rights including collective bargaining, etc.
4) Redistribution of income is theft... Thom immediately points out that redistribution are remedies to ensure a fully functioning economy, usually due to lack of labor rights, lacking collective bargaining, concentration of fewer businesses resulting in oligopoly to monopoly, political bribery and other corruption, etc.
5) Tide raises all boats...Thom points out that it hasn't since the 80's rather it has done the opposite. It has only raised the top 20%, and recent World Bank Report the to 1% has risen 500% while the 50% have remained flat, bottom 20% in real incomes have lost some ground in the US. While most of the European nations bottom 50% saw a 30% real income gain, and their top 20% realized 100% real income gain over the period of 1980 to 2016.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/25078/9781464809583.pdf
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This race hating and tribal hating is what happens under a global oligarchy every time in history since the late bronze age collapse thru next ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, feudal dark and middle ages into the renaissance, enlightenment, early industrial era, late industrial era, to the atomic age. A large "global" inter-dependent economic structure tied together with oligarch power destabilizes the world, you get mass migration from wars, civil wars, environmental mess up, etc. and race to the bottom economic that is oligarchy on a global scale makes the dumb masses find the easiest scapegoat, immigrants or people different than you either in religious or ethnic or minor political differences.
You then have a repulsion from the mass of people over the stupid, oligarchs like that knowing very well that mitigates their asses, but in the end you get tyrants that cause the already fragile inter-dependent system in the race to the bottom to completely collapse and turn into an authoritarian nightmare with various oligarchs attempting to be that tyrant in charge.
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Democracy is actually the best form of government, because all other forms are authoritarian. What people mistake democracy for being bad, is that a democracy is a mirror, it will give them a reflection of themselves they may not like.
Also democracies can be tainted... constitutions can be too weak or too strong in enforcing or amending making the democracy not very representative of the people, super rich can buy candidates (stack candidates) so no matter the candidate the rich get whatever they want even if it is verily at odds with what the majority want or even harms the majority.
And apathy can kill the wisdom of the crowd effect, you only have a few establishment or radicals voting.
And if incumbents are able to draw up their own districts, they basically get to pick the voters instead of other way around... might as well call them Duke or Duchess of whatever office they hold. It's there's now for keeps.
Safe guards need to be in place to ensure actual democracy exists in the system.
Unfortunately in the US we have all 4 problems, and in order to fix our constitution is too strongly rigid in its amendment process. And it's all leading to apathy.
A democracy though will show the people who they are... currently we're apathetic, cowards, plutocrat dick/pussy sucking know nothing bozo the clowns who are more concerned about some coach or sports player or musicians pimple on their ass than ensuring we have a functioning government that works for all of us.
For the same type of people, it's much easier to blame it on democracy itself... hurts to look at our hideousness. Denial is the most immediate remedy... its easy and you don't have to do much but bitch. Until it becomes too apparent and painful to bare and we finally change our ways.
Basically, when doing nothing hurts more.
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Yeah, this entire run up was large institutions rebuying after taking a 30 day wash trade sell in December... buying back in January.
This persistent buying pressure was an obvious trade long as these funds required by their prospectus to get back into the funds they're supposed to be in, so many call options along with traders both retail and larger retail and hedge funds front ran buying; causing lots of buying, retail now buying lots of options forced market makers to start covering portions of their call writes, causing gamma squeezes of market makers to cover their mostly naked call writes; gamma squeeze.
Problem becomes nobody really is exercising these options typically. And market makers finally buy too many stocks; and if the call option frenzy buying ends and/or stock buying pressure ends (market makers no longer have to freak out and buy more stocks to cover naked call writes) becomes an unwinding of all that "delta" hedge of market makers, and just normal sell off longs taking profits, hedge funds taking profits, stop losses or trailing stops longs getting triggered, suddenly those same options market makers have to dump their now massive holdings of stock, especially as prices fall, regardless of call options volume.
And you get a big dump after the gamma squeeze.
Same can happen in the reverse, when lots of selling happens including short selling and lots of put options are purchased, same market makers require to raise cash so they are capable of buying the underlying stock if those puts they wrote get into the money... so they dump stock holdings they have to raise cash as their puts they sold get into the money.
And down we go.
Either gamma or reverse gamma squeezes typically last only a week or two... sometimes a month. Unless it's a crazy meme stock that continues to have lots of stampedes by both margin and regular traders or the new retail traders that keep buying several shares a day with some delusion of "getting them shorts to squeeze" really they're contributing to short burst gamma squeezes.
Anyway, these things happen with a big strong run up. Then they dump just as quick if not faster.
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Well, when a majority of GOP voters even prefer universal healthcare, of course the socialist stigma is a propaganda fueled nonsense.
And socialism, mixed market capital-socialism works. We already have an instance of it, just a very mild instances of it in retreat returning to robber baron capitalism. We can observe other nations with universal healthcare which confronts the point that health care industry violates every competitive market principle: 1) externalities 2) essentially inelastic demand curve; price doesn't doesn't influence quantity demand that much so they can gouge huge prices regardless of how cheap it actually is to produce the drugs and appliances or services 3)requires economies of scale specifically hospitals and more.
Hence why all other 1st world wealthy nations pay less in their "premiums" and little to no co-pays, and absolutely no deductibles, and they also get higher quality care both intensive care and preventative care. And the price for drugs behind the scenes are set to a reasonable to the consumer, and still profitable for the supplier price. And when certain drugs have no profitability because economy of scale quantity demand simply doesn't exist like epinephrine allergy shots, the country either produces or subsidizes the cost for not meeting economies of scale so the few who need those life saving needles on hand, get them.
And many of these nations are also able to provide low to no tuition higher education and vocational education. Simple stuff that our country denies, but it can give oligarchs and corporations trillions in tax cuts and tax credits, deficit spend on a military we cannot afford, etc.
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If you understand CO2 405 PPM already in the atmosphere and the amount that it keeps going up, and what this means to climatic changes... we have to literally take gigantic national action immediately.
1) We need several LFTR fission Apollo like projects.
2) We need several Wendelstein 7x and ITER at the scale of the Manhattan, Hoover dam, interstate freeway, and Apollo project put together.
3) Implementation to change from fossil fuel vehicles to hydrogen and electric vehicles... H2 (hydrogen) via electrolysis of H2O to H2 using the energized grid via LFTR and later fusion.
4) more solar and wind plants... unfortunately the amount of energy density required means the ultimate source will have to nuclear power. LFTR is way better than current pressurized uranium plants as they can't meltdown, use not just 1% of the fuel, but more than 95% leaving small amount of waste that decays to safe radiation levels in 300 years, not 30,000 years, and near impossible to make a nuclear weapon.
And fusion design leave no radioactive waste products using heavy hydrogen (deuterium) which is non-radioactive to breed super heavy hydrogen that then fuses to Helium 3 and 4 all stable other than the tritium which is only produced during fusion and in very small amounts at any given time with a fast decay half life of 12 hours. Just on earth there's enough deuterium for 35,000 years.
These projects are a must. Without them, we will not have the energy density needed to get off fossil fuels fast enough to stop increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
China has started a 10 year plan 2014 to develop LFTR, so far they have moved on with two liquid plant programs and two solid thorium programs.
Wendelstein 7-x is showing some promising results in the last test able to hold a plasma for over 100 seconds, reaching much hotter temperatures than expected at 20 million degrees C, they weren't attempting fusion as its not yet configured for that yet, which needs 100 degrees C. So far, looks good there.
Imagine if we had several great works projects pouring into these things, we would be off fossil fuels within two to two and half decades. On off fossil fuels, means all nations would no longer find it cheap to use them compared to fusion and even the LFTR fission reactors mixed with solar and wind.
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Really two things are happening:
1) Only 7% of the population votes in primaries or caucuses; not sure if that's 7% for RNC and 7% for DNC or if it's flat out 7% eligible votes... we have bad turn out, most people simply don't vote. Irony is that people are more likely to attend a function, a talk then the milk-toast nerdy attend a polling place just to caste a quick vote and leave... it's likely why caucuses get such a turn out over primaries. We're vapid people. If it's not entertaining, it's last on the to do list.
2) And primaries are easier to fudge figures. It's not that hard to fluff the figures when the votes are secret, unlike Caucuses. They tried to do with Iowa Caucus and got caught by precinct supervisors: they saw and counted the vote, they knew what it was. They have no clue what the votes were in secret ballots at primaries; they just collect them, and most just put them through a machine and that's that. Whatever programs they use, all of them tend to use their own systems, can then be randomly go to other people or simply poof vanish.
The bad press is backfiring in some states. But it's a mix. Some states are "network" people eating up whatever comes out of the boob tube. And other states that dislike anything that they see on tv. Problem: turn out. Often this just causes poor turnout because people throw up their hands; with an electorate that only 7% participate anyway.
And in general presidential elections 55% to 65% and 37% to 49% in primaries.
It's worth a fight. But don't expect much. We're a corrupt and ultimately financially scared apathetic people.
There are reasons unions were strong 40 to 50 years ago: there was a network of support (temp jobs) in case of strikes as well as funds setup for strikers. Similar to what exists in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, etc. And people in the US are more financially strained: rents, mortgage, insurance and other medical, transportation (vehicle, auto insurance), then couple that to credit card debt which already surpasses 2008 peak, etc. You have a fragile financial ability for people to feel remotely comfortable paying any attention to these matters and unionizing. Even in the late 80's and 90's I remember it was a strain for my parents when my dad's union was about to or considering a strike. It's even worse today.
And that's replicated throughout the industrialized world to UK and Australia.
What would help at this point would be Warren endorsing Sanders. It would be a big help. It may actually be the only way forward.
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They're stuck watching the fucked up 6 nationwide network propaganda stations. So they remain uninformed and deliberately mislead. This isn't just an African-American elderly phenomena, but cuts across all elderly people of our idiot nation. Us younger folks cross check what the 6 stations offer as news, and we discover it's usually really slanted, or simply absent of various events happening... tourists visiting France right now upset because they have no idea about the general strikes nor even the now two year old yellow jacket protests... in the US oligarchs of any political strata don't want people to get an idea.
Similar to the fact that just across the boarder to Canada, even Mexico, even Cuba let alone most of all of Europe east and west, Japan to Australia enjoy a universal healthcare system that is cheaper than our racketeering one, and far more effective than our own.
It's impossible for us younger people who have traveled probably a bit more, or at least came in contact with people in other countries, probably have internet buddies all over the place, and live in economic idiocy of diminishing wages and cost of living that's become so absurd as working people forced to live in their fucking cars that they can't piss on our leg and tell us it's raining.
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It actually is. I'm American. Born and raised. Have visited Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and France. And have friends in addition to the other nations who live in Korea, Japan, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the UK... and probably missing several other OECD (rich countries).
The US is like a beat up country seemingly convinced of its superiority, all while its a shit hole in comparison to the other nations, looking closer kin to a 2nd world nation with tent cities and poverty that makes other OECD nations think... wait did I cross the boarder into some other 2nd world or even 3rd world nation?
Seriously, a random charity field hospital set up and thousands of these folks show up because they otherwise can't afford nor get regular medical, vision, and dental check ups and address those various needs?
We're only short the outright creepy dystopia that exists in Russia.
And of course, N. Korea... but that's its own sad sorry mess.
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And it wouldn't cost that much of all public universities were more streamlined... currently US spends $355 billion a year on public university (books, tuition, parking, other materials, dorms).
The spending in universal education is much less, because it's all streamlined. And universal education gets more people with diplomas... in the US most have to take out loans to pay for it, and work full time to pay for rent and food... we have a large drop out ratio compared to those countries that have a universal higher educational system. US rate over 50% when rest of Europe average is 30% drop out rates... Italy has among the highest, and not surprising, they don't have a universal education program, public universities range in tuition from 850 euro to 1,000 euro for tuition.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/eag_highlights-2008-9-en.pdf?expires=1543386372&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=1CC1EDC24067B8A3781CD698388A1B1E
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/09/12/the-crazy-amount-america-spends-on-higher-education-in-one-chart/#242d22714482
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Does any other country conduct such a method as you describe?
Let's be blunt, our insurance and medical manufactures and hospital and clinic operators and owners are very free. And they have never created such a thing, as it would not allow much in terms of profit.
UK system is the best at the lowest taxes on incomes $120K to $200K as it's not a payroll tax, but like our Fed income tax, first 12,500 pounds not taxed. And other deductions that reduce the taxable income. As well as a child allowance that's paid out monthly with max annual child allowance of 20,000 pounds.
Germany has a payroll tax of 7.3% on the first 53,100.00 € then 0% after, like our social security tax 6.20% on the first $137,700, then 0% after for 2020.
Our current medicare and medicaid program is 1.49% on the first $200K for individuals, married jointly $250K, and married filing separately $125K then it goes to 2.35%.
Germany's targets lower income earners more with their provincial universal healthcare a bit too much compared to the UK and Canada. Canada at this time doesn't cover dental nor Rx out side a hospital.
France taxes total social programs: both their version of universal medical and state pension at the rate of Total 8% on worked wages on 97% of gross income. And 7.1% on 95% of gross disability and pension income, and net gross gains of Investments, annuities, rental income and capital gains 13.2%.
All nations spend at least 50% less GDP on their healthcare.
Another large benefit to why this is the case, is that the nations negotiate and ascertain profit margins on medicines, appliances, hospitals, clinics, procedures, etc. So there are no price gouging.
The absurdity in the US is allowing multiple insurance companies to pretend they have any clout nor reason to bother negotiating with pricing when they themselves are not provided with lawful authority to analyze actual cost to produce goods, nor establish max profit margins.
Hence you get the situation like 2015 where an LA citizen insured was was prescribed cold sore medicine 5% Valcyclovir cream (antiviral) that is in smaller allotment quantities is over the counter in Germany, and for the same amount is only $30 USD, today only $25 USD over the counter. Or if prescribed 8 euros via their universal healthcare program as all prescription copays are 5 to 8 euros with an annual 300 Euro max then no more copays for anything.
Canada it was available at that time for $21 for 5 gram generic.
He paid $95 and insurance paid $2,532.80
Two grams of it in Germany is over the counter is only 5 to 6 euros depending on the store.
This is what our market based let them be free capitalism without controls has provided us.
What you need is what other nations have done:
1) Negotiated prices by requiring and auditing cost per unit to ascertain actual true costs and allowing a max profit margin, often 5% to 6% maximum markup.
2) subsidizing rural hospitals nonprofits and often continuing to subsidize local state and county hospitals as we do with fire departments and police stations and the military and the interstate freeway system and airports and sea ports and national forests, national dams, local water works, sewer works, electrical and gas works, etc.
3) A single payer system to avoid marketing and advertisement and administration fees as our medicare/medicaid programs have only a 3% overhead cost compared to private insurance that has up to 20% overhead costs.
4) All recipients are part of the same universal healthcare and may chose their doctors, specialists, GPs' etc.
5) Medical professionals are provided cancellation of any student loan debt, as well as provided a $50,000 not taxable bonus after working in the healthcare field for 5 years in their professions; and incentive for medical professionals starting their own and partnership practices to establish their own clinics: dentists, oral surgeons, specialist surgeons, optometrists, etc. And a special incentive for group of doctors opening a clinic (dental, orthodontic, optometry, urgent care, family care, dermatology, etc.) to cancel 75% of any start up capital expenditure loans after 5 years of quality care, and service at least 100-200 patients a year; number of patients varying possibly smaller based on the need for that expertise.
6) Additional incentives as the need arises; including cheaper medical appliance manufacture for CAT-Scans, MRI's, ultra sound, etc.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20150306-column.html
https://geizhals.de/zovirax-lippenherpescreme-a1273058.html
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Talking about king, I actually had a dream, bunch of other goofy stuff in it, but I was on some boat down a canal, the type that's only in Europe, while going down the canal I passed the "Presidential palace" and Trump was dressed in military garb. I thought it was funny because he looked slightly uncomfortable, and I was laughing he had no ribbons or medals as he hasn't been in the military at all.
Then as I passed him, I looked back and realized he had a golden crown on his head, and I thought mother fucker thinks he's king or something. I thought someone should tell the baby in the US we don't have kings, and bothering to wear a military uniform is idiotic; in fact only George Washington wore a military uniform in office while being president (when he road out to assist in putting down the whiskey rebellion, but quickly left when he realized his presents wasn't necessary), that it has been later established that the commander and chief along with secretary of defense is best to be only civilian, that we civilians are masters of the military, not the military masters of us.
Anyway, then he got up on a horse and poorly road down the street catching back up with me on this boat, abeam me he drove his horse into a inlet to the palace and not very far into the inlet he got off the horse. I heard him say something about not liking to ride the damn horse, or get a better horse.
Weird dreams. I don't even necessarily absolutely hate Trump. I just think he's a bozo the clown, and he's only a symptom of our system in disarray; I don't blame him directly. We've gone back to robber baron oligarchy in a matter of 40 years. Not that we weren't completely out of oligarchy, but since the 40's to about the early 80's, US was on the path of diminishing oligarch control and ending a fetish on an elite class.
How, just over a span of 30 years, things can revert.
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Problem with DNA tests used for Ethnicity or ancestry is that they use their own current defined groups of who they think qualify as indigenous. My understanding none of them have very much if any US Native DNA to compare. And that is for the same of many locations. And of European through African to Middle East to Asia etc. ancestry certain areas have long been a mix, you're not likely to get an accurate representation of the past ancestry locations.
The best method and its only good as a group as individual ancestry end doing Y chromosome mapping if no males were the product of you, or X chromosome mapping when at some point a male was product of you, so trying to use X or Y chromosome mapping creates blind spots of other ancestry as those markers weren't past down from that particular generation.
Genetic information becomes diluted after just 3 generations, if you had one person who was Hispanic, and all subsequent were western European, physically the 3rd generation and especially the 4th generation will have no Hispanic physical traits, and the DNA key markers will have that 90% to higher in common with the western European DNA groups, which is typical for all Europeans, it tells you nothing of small variations.
You can only hope that you can use Y chromosome mapping and X chromosome mapping on every generation of that family, and someone may show up as set of special markers indicating there was Hispanic and Western European in the family at one point, then those offspring just reproduced with western European groups. It's very expensive. Entire families need to be DNA tested and Y and X chromosome mapping undertaken.
That's why those ancestry dna tests are a joke. Take them with a grain of salt. DNA as a whole can only carry so many generational information, there are blind spots just after the 3rd or 4th generations, then after those generations, the blind spots become exponentially bigger. The chromosome markers (which commercial DNA tests don't use because they're only for group analysis) are the only long term source to discern anything.
So you're only looking back about 3 to 4 generations, and they're not that accurate since some of these commercial genetic checkers have a piss poor indigenous definition and sample volume.
Just keep that in mind.
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@ChannelNews1 Lithium batteries as they are including the problems with solid state batteries which cannot be recharged... kind of a big problem.... doesn't help the conventional cobalt lithium nickel batteries are dangerous in that they develop dendrites that short out the battery causing thermal runaways and battery goes up in sparks... lithium just as all alkali metals react (burn) in contact with water. Still makes me giggle on all the various EV's that go up in flames, that fire fighters are puzzled why it keeps burning for days and even weeks after the initial start, when they're literally trying to put the fire out with water.
EV also doesn't solve the solution of where we get that energy either, but tries to centralize to a power plant producing the electricity. So it pushes the problem to central power plants.
Nuclear is really the only option. Even if you think a hydrogen fuel cell cars. And trains... lots and lots of trains. And city level, regional, and long distant trains.
Better than driving and often more efficient as it cuts down on traffic jams. Easy to achieve economy of scale. And can electrify them using a nuclear power plant or solar or wind or hydro non carbon electric grid to power the rails. Individual mode of transportation used when required in super rural areas, and of the individual car, right now the best option for now is hybrid reducing the amount of fossil fuels used.
And maybe hydrogen fuel cells... problem with hydrogen, similar to that of lithium EV cars, is that it's dangerous. Hydrogen has immense energy density; highest of all other materials. But with such an energy density, it has extreme explosive potential. H2 released and mingled with ambient atmospheric gas becomes extremely explosive; irony the biproduct other than heat is H2O... but the explosive energy can tear a garage or house apart in a second... H2 mixed with the O2 in the atmosphere, a tiny ignition sources as a spark from just static electricity... and boom.
The problem is real. And at present moment I can only see that nuclear would be the best way forward in order to maintain our energy needs for our current tech. And of nuclear; both the current uranium plants can be made safer, and there are other new potential methods to make thorium and even uranium plants not require pressurized cores eliminating the chance of a meltdown incident. Waste is the problem, so there needs to be discussion and commitment to where to place that waste material... and not spend billions and decide that there's contention against placing it in that location.
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The phoniness of these republics as if they're democracies is starting to become blatant.
Good news though, with internet services, it makes it possible for more direct forms of democracies. Imagine as many states (like Idaho) requires, when the legislation both at the city, county and state levels pass legislation, it must then be ratified by a majority vote by the people. Perhaps no bid contracts... line item veto by the people. Nope, not having that part pass. how about just randomly sending tens of billions to a nation that's as corrupt as the very country we're defending, sending them munitions and war weapons without our consent, and that only have 1, 1 person in legislation voting in opposition. If you tally the American voter, I can almost promise you it would have had about 25% for ratification, and probably 75% against ratification, and in line item veto, NONE of the aid would be to provide weapons of any kind, reducing the sum to perhaps single billions to assist in humanitarian relief only; food, medical stuff, and makeshift shelter (tents). NO weapons.
And the mental case sanctions. No thanks. That doesn't help anyone other than the oligarch factions of the world at the misery of all of us peons.
You know in reality we'd be better off if we the people, during the equiv of state of the union address and stormed it and imprisoned every single one of these oligarch puppets and oligarchs themselves and started fresh.
Dump these bastards on some Island in the pacific... perhaps make a hunger games reality tv show to see which ones mutilate the other so that they can be come oligarch king swine of the palm tree or something. The little sociopaths and psychopaths would make great educational and research material as well as very amusing and entertaining.
Note, I did not say end their life. I can't condone murder. It's horrid.
Nobody should be murdering anyone. For any reason other than for self defense.
That being said, people are feeling that this is becoming self defense against the oligarchs. Perhaps this is the only way to actually get genuine democracy again. I hope not.
Because that can always turnout worse for ware; cue the French Terror shortly after their revolution... only resulting in Napoleon.
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@prateeksharma1703 We saw 40 years of easing of interest rates across the world. Leveraged money is how money supply in the current global banking system works... and when it does dump... it'll be like Japan 1989.... just for the entire world. All nations are now indebted into a debt trap...
Money supply was growing parabolic, it will suffer a decline parabolic the same as money supply in a debt base monetary system decreases by: fewer lending and/borrowing, paying back borrowed loans, or the big one defaults. In a debt trap economic structure the default rates become a shock to the system and the entire financial domino of Peter to pay Paul ends the music.
There are few nations left that aren't saddled by the debt trap. Turkey, now China are among the last.
Brazil and Argentina, most European nations, US and Canada and even Australia already in that boat.
There are few nations remaining as borrowers of last resort... all that can be done is to encourage lending, but borrowers may not show up to the table; and at some point, you can't encourage lenders to lend either. No matter how much "QE" you're doing. And that becomes a problem as inflation will eventually happen as you're just at that point transitioning from a debt base monetary system to just a money printer go burr economy and that ends abruptly too with worthless currency... a stagflation effect.
Essentially, the last 40 years was similar game played after WWII and after WWI, and something that happened all through the 1800's, have the century of the 1800's in the US was in a recession, great depression, long depression, or panic. And we had private fake money scams or wild cat banking... similar to the goof ball crypto nonsense. This time it's mired int a massive fraud concerning so called stable coins.
Euphoria gone insane.
Each and every time this ended in civil war, war, riots and rebellion, a complete break down in society, rises of dictators and other gangsters and crazies.
They did a great job, they being the plutocrats that repealed various banking rules like Glass Steagall Act, in recreating in short order the next robber baron phase... that always ends in misery for many. Rules finally come back on line. This time... we ought learn from this stupidity. Aristocracy cannot be trusted... an aristocracy is pathetic, mostly parasitical. A new system more democratic in enterprise not just in government should commence, or in 100 years we'll be facing the same untenable nonsense. Businesses should become more co-op like in nature whereby all parties workers and customers have a say as to all aspects to the operation of the business.
Just as most governments became better providing democracy to self rule, the same is said to that of individual enterprises.
You would not see many of the parasitical self destructive behaviors we observe time and time again with autocratic dictatorship enterprises where very few make out like bandits at the exploitation of the customers and workers.
1) Stock buy backs that add no value to anybody but provide a short term sugar rush in prices so that executives can cash out their stock options or bonus stocks while bankrupting the enterprise won't happen.
2) Sending production overseas to skirt environmental laws and seeking tyrannized essentially slave/serf labor won't happen.
3) Additionally, those enterprises remaining domestically won't attempt to save a few pennies via unnecessary polluting their own area.
4) The compensation won't just flow to a few at the top, rather a better mechanism that would allow technological advances in productivity gains would go largely to the workers first and foremost.
5) You would actually have better quality and efficiencies develop with better incentive workers as they are now co-owners of the operation and can make critical decisions with better understanding of how the operations works and what changes are necessary to provide better quality, efficiency, and quantities produced as apposed to the current few who are usually disconnected from reality of the world, and worse, by the operation of the detailed operations itself. Not to mention many of the higher ups in most businesses today are products of aristocracy who are to be blunt in their own world of make believe, often foolish ineffectual in all they do if they do anything at all... and when they do, do something, they generally do what's good for number one at the expense for everyone else... many times over though they don't even make competent decisions that would be good for number one, themselves, either of the long term. Similar disconnected stupidity that arose from the inbred nobility of old in feudal and mercantile areas of Asia and Europe of old.
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They hedge; pay off both potential side. That way they win whoever wins. Hence why our economic situation is absurd, and in gross in favor of the wealthiest while harming essentially everyone not wealthy which is most of every country.
Median household income is $59,039, and $31,099 median individual income. Or individually $1.24 million 40 year lifetime earnings or family (two incomes) $2.3 million 40 year life time earnings to put an evaluation on "wealthy" or "high income". If you're worth a life time of income or make that amount in just a fraction of the year, you're wealthy or high income. Very few; those making $500K or more year in any form of income in the US are only 0.7% of the population. (2016 numbers)
Households with $1 million or more in net assets excluding their first/primary resident 11.5 million households (2017) or 9.9% of the US households.
So even saving over a lifetime just under 10% of households achieve even $1 million net assets. We're talking about a small subset of the population.
So the mega rich tend to influence the entire political system by hedging donations, very cheap to do in our two party system. Only two companies to buy influence. More expensive/difficult to do in other nations with parliamentary government with several parties.
And thus you have starkly insane wealthy bias laws in the US compared to just about all other economically wealthy nations.
Seriously, if child labor, social security, medicare for the elderly and disabled, compulsory education, fire departments, city/municipal/federal roads, airports, seaports, etc. were not already in effect; they would stand no chance of existing at all in our current return to robber baron oligarchy; the same complaints through mid 1800's and early 1900's were made about the same basic standards all nations are evaluated to determine their developmental status.
We're an antiquated nation that is grossly under developed and where technology advancements are making such economic systems contradictions untenable. Much like Feudal Russia in the early 1900's. Or Feudal France in the late 1700's.
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We're in the middle of the biggest bubble ever. Everything bubble or mother of all bubbles... mortgage debt is beyond that of 2007 crash, stock market margin debt is double to that all time reach in 2007 before that bust, credit card is beyond that of last recession, vehicle/auto loan debt is $1.3 trillion well beyond that of 2007 at only $400 billion, corporate debt was about $4 trillion is now $9.1 trillion much of it was used to finance stock buy backs and merger acquisitions... it's insane.
The stock market was the fugazi generating lots of debt pile up and miss allocation of desperate affluent and oligarch rich trying to find a better return on a portion of their portfolio, going into various tech unicorn companies some of which made IPO and some already showing the fraudulent activity like Theranos... much more of that type of bullshit hot air to bust.... this fooled high profile people like retired General Colin L. Powell, George P. Shultz, and military general now US SOS Jim Mattis, Hillary Clinton, Betsy DeVos, etc. all having board roles in the company.... demonstration that these people aren't "smart" they're just greedy and creepy.
Get ready for the postponement of what was going to be a major depression in 2007, happening likely by 2019-2020 transition... Lots of collateralized debt obligations in business debt... yes similar to that of the housing crisis mortgage nonsense... most of these loans chopped up are destine for failure, and many payments on them are due in 2019 and especially 2020.
Currently, we have lots of this type of stuff going on already in China in their P2P lending. China undertook massive debt over the 2008 to 2015 period to keep production and jobs stable while US, Australia, Europe and rest of Asia were in recession and stopped buy as much.
This time is odd. Last time commodity prices were starting to soar higher in 2007 period... this time commodity prices are only mildly up from their recession lows and commodity bust that happened about 2011-12. Busting Brazil completely. And many commodities in the tank still and losing more ground... last time I just suspected lost of speculation out of stocks that were tanking into commodity contracts that were bubbling up and crashed in 2011-12, proceeds went back into stocks and fueled tech unicorns.
Major industrial companies like GE, 3M, caterpillar, and various car sectors have taken on massive debts and their revenues are quickly vanishing. Really the only companies with large cash piles are only the top richest 40, all others are in dire straights.
This next economic downturn is going to be something we haven't seen since the great depression... but even worse. Lot's of us will be out of a job.
All I can say is save your money as much as possible, and don't be in anything that is too risky... stocks, fuck no... wait for at least a 45% to 50% drop in stocks from their all time S&P500 highs. And even then only put a partial allocation maybe 25% or 50%... because the likely drop will be more like 80% to 90%. Just wait for the discounts. And this severity... you might not get much of a bounce. This next bust looks to be one that may finish out the current financial corporate business structure completely. Likely will cause more pressure in Italy which has massive amounts of debt liabilities orders of magnitude bigger than that of Spain and especially Greece.... the complete dissolution of the EU is very likely by 2022-2025.
Hold on to your butts. The next 10 years is going to fucking suck ass for just about everyone.
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Dude! Quit trying to fool yourself. This shouldn't be a surprise.
Again DNC and the RNC are private corporations used by plutocrats to stack candidates and to give the illusion of open and fair elections.
Do you ever wonder why our participation rates at elections are ridiculously low: 37% typical of midterms and last general/presidential election was only 55% more typical at about 63%?
And local elections for a levy or voting a public seat is often single digit percentage unless it's something insane like a levy for $186 million dollar jail (not a prison) a county jail in which it would raise already high property taxes... 15% turnout in that case. To which 66% including myself voted against the stupid ass levy.
People don't participate in our elections first and foremost.
That culture should change. But barring major outlets do so, it won't.
You can't chalk it up to that it's hard to vote. It's not.
It's not hard to vote. In my state anyway
1) same day registration, AND
2) you can fill out an affidavit at the polling place if you lack photo ID and/or a utility or bank statement proving your state citizenship.
3) Absentee ballots available well before the elections.
4) They treat primary elections as public elections which get high level of oversight and scrutiny on the tallying of votes; harder to fudge the figures.
5) Easily accessed website to find your precinct as well as mailers for registered voters informing months in advance if any changes were made to their voting locations; which happens in my precinct all the time... so lots of mailers.
I think you are realizing our politics in the US is an absurd bullshit waste of time for most sometimes entertain theater only, and that nobody participates.
Nobody cares. It's a well known quagmire bullshit-o-thon. It's something to giggle about or commiserate with friends, family, and coworkers.
I discovered this about a decade ago. I'm still interested and participate the best I can. And encourage people to actually vote. But it's short of pissing in the wind.
And there's no surprise for me on most of these outcomes in the last previous elections.
I was surprised that the establishment was so brazen that they literally attempted to rig caucuses such as Iowa's... they pulled out big time when they got caught. A caucus is near impossible to rig as the votes are obvious to all including the precinct supervisor who has to tally and report them... yet they still tried. And got caught.
Primaries... states that consider elections public and require by law official oversight of voting and tallying of votes, harder to fudge the numbers.
BUT
States where primaries are considered private corporate votes... easy to fudge; they can literally count whatever they want whenever they want, or not count, or just ignore any votes. Precinct supervisors haven't a clue who voted for what in the secrete ballot.
It's a private assembly, not a public election. Easy as fuck to do whatever they want, and it's largely legal to do so.
Couple this with an already ridiculously typically low turnout of about 14% of elg voters for the DNC.
Really, Bernie could breakaway from the DNC and RNC and has a strong possibility of winning over both Trump and Bide. If he can get the turnout in the general election.
He should strongly consider it. There's enough independent and even republicans that dislike Trump and actually like Bernie. But can't stand Biden nor the rest of the establishment DNC puppets. But will they turn out? Probably not. But there is a shot. That is something that could entice turnout. But he would have to constantly harp on turnout every time any media camera is broadcasting his mug or his supporters.
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Stock buy backs were largely illegal until Reagan era 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed rule 10b-18.
All expenditures including capital expenditures are excluded from being taxed, so taxes often prompted spending on growth, R&D, or on better equipment. Because they wouldn't be taxed on it if it was spent. Stopped hoarding money for windfalls for do nothing majority shareholders.... they got topped off, and wouldn't want to take more money out of the business to hoard for themselves, and would actually nurture their business more with potentially excess money.
Yeah, I think she undersold the positions. And she fell for meaningless jibber jabber... "Goal is to go electric cars in 12 years." "That means higher taxes." How does that necessarily mean higher taxes? She said "Yeah..." and started talking mindlessly about tax increases that had nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I would have just said, that has nothing really to do with taxes, we're talking about a goal to push electric cars and have most vehicles go electric in 12 years.... that actually means subsidies to producers and buyers to move that direct faster.
When it's time to talk about taxes, its to be specific. News works on idiot sound bites... time to take that bullshit away from them.
I would have said my tax strategy is to ensure 80% of the households and individuals who have become more tax burdened over 40 years aren't, and re-shift the tax burden to the upper 10% really 1%. Oligarchy is dangerous. It nearly collapsed our country several times during its inception as a nation. I would start by revoking rule 10b-18, no more stock buy backs. Businesses can start actually spending the money on the business itself R*D and growing and better equipment. Not distributing all the income into a few hoarders pockets. As well as not causing boom bust cycles, which is also insanity.
And then I would have explained marginal tax rates vs effective tax rates, because most idiot Americans quite literally don't know this. We're quite literally a nation of idiots. And this I would have taken the spot light by sensationalizing it by saying I have something very important to reveal, since most Americans apparently don't know.. and explain tax brackets. You get their interest, and can explain to them what tax brackets mean.
Then explain that these lower tax brackets I would lower those rates which helps you and even to a small extent rich because they pay into the lower brackets first too.... but those making over $500K or more would start to see higher tax rates on income above those amounts. Allowing an aristocracy to get so economically powerful is dangerous for democracy.
And I would give them a comparison to Germany, UK, France, Sweden, and Austria on effective taxes for individuals making $50K and families making $110K or less pay lesser taxes than we do particularly when you consider their medical is literally a tax.... they all pay less in effective taxes and insurance premiums and medical cost than we do, and they get more for it.
Germany for instance gets even more generous tax credits and deductions on daycare and dependents too. While getting the benefits of a universal healthcare...
And this is where I would pivot to healthcare explaining 18 companies so far have been discovered and under investigation for price fixing. Our medicare system doesn't negotiate directly, like all other countries hence why we pay double the per-capita of any other wealthy nation on the same Rx and medical appliances. All this must change.
We're being screwed, and I'm here to end it.
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Just some additions he could use maybe later time:
Bernie should have mentioned Germany has co-determination policy, they're not communists... they're social democrats. Then explain bullet point the benefits of such a policy: you don't have CEO's making up to 360 times the AVERAGE not the median or the lowest paid employee but the AVERAGE which is offset higher by executive pay, they ensure workers get paid better, ALSO ensures good working conditions and adds to productivity and efficiency at work as the workers have a say on capital expenditures often the workers know what machines or items need to be replaced or added to grow and improve the company's performance. Also, they ensure they have a better work life balance, not being forced to work with a skeleton crew doing massive overtime for little pay, but work fewer more productive hours with higher pay, additionally they get to co-decide NOT to outsource their jobs domestically or internationally: they're not going to vote their jobs away just so CEO and owner makes another billion.
GIVE your money away, write a check to everyone in the US! You won't. You know why: Because right now, you're a liar, you're bribing with your money BUYING not giving away money for Ads so you can buy the highest office in the land, the quint essential definition of outright oligarchy.
You saw Trump and thought, oh I can buy my way to being Caesar.
Giving your money away HA! Just like when someone goes to a realtor and gives their money away, and walks away with a house.
Oligarchs in the US love talking about their philanthropic give aways, but it's always a drop in a bucket that's needed, often improving nobodies lives who desperately need specific items like healthcare or higher education or affordable housing. And thus far NO oligarch aka billionaire has done so, they instead attach it to a firm named after themselves and promise when they're dead they'll give it way. Never has happened once. And all the time, they use it to bribe public officials, and put their own hired puppets in power hence the term Oli (few) and arkho to Englishized: garchy meaning command/rule.
And a great nation shouldn't wait for give a ways as it unfairly distributes income inappropriately in the first place, a beggar nation.
Simply put, workers need a fairer share of the productivity; since 1970's worker productivity has increased; wages have flat lined and in the bottom 40% actually has fallen.
And in real income, the average worker pay is that of 1973; we've gone back in time; and it continues to go further back in time where only the top 20% make out okay or for the top 1% like bandits, while everyone else has saw substantial declines in the standards of living; likely giving way to the the desperation and despair in this country that has literally brought our suicide rates and drug overdose death rates per year higher than the entire war in Vietnam. The level of despair mixed with a ridiculous healthcare system is likely to play a role in the rampant mass murders in this country, something that all other developed wealthy nations even some poorer nations do not experience.
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The banks are the ultimate gate keeper. But their greed gets the better of them, particularly when interest rates are so low, to make the same or almost same return when interest rates were 6% to 10%, principle loans were lower... much lower.
But to make the same return when rates are 2% to 4%, the principles has to be even higher... so banks have an interest to allow bids to go through and not step in saying no, that house asking price isn't worth the bid... you must go back with a lower bid.
And it doesn't help when you have many bidders and banks competing... they tend to eventually say, YES! That ridiculous price is just fine and dandy! Not going to squabble over $10,000 or $50,000 anymore... then the next house asking price goes even further. Spiral upward trend.
And incomes and job security that are supposed to be evaluated in determining if the loan will be issued becomes less scrutinized. Don't worry, real-estate keeps going up, not enough construction for the population has been developed, and what is being developed for new inventory are "luxury" over sized things most people can't afford anyway. So this smaller or midsize house or apartment complex will be just fine if we have a default. We'll just sell it and maybe even make more money.
Anyway, the only reason most people in most nations live in "modern" housing: homes/rentals that have electricity, in door plumbing, heating, and even often AC is due to massive national purpose built grants of some sort: Cities used property tax receipts to develop roads and utilities so lots could be made in housing or commercial or industry... this development portion was subsidized and was not a factor passed on to the buyer or supplier of the construction of the structure. Secondly, massive grants were often given particularly for mult-dwelling unit construction to ensure rents were low enough for people to afford them. Thirdly, purchases of homes still to this day can be backed by the government so banks will approve any loan to a small laborer, but again, more oversight on not allowing the price to be bidded up.
Problem we have today is ultra low interest rates; this causes investors and creditors alike to seek a return anywhere they can find it: bid up on such things as bonds, stocks, and real-estate commences... often without real underlying demand... and investment and debt trap.
Also actually producers of these housing units really never add supply to assist with the ever increasing un-affordability, they've seen this game before unravel a decade before... and some of these construction companies simply don't exist anymore going bankrupt in the last fiasco.
So over the long haul without any planned intervention we will have a shortage of housing... an over prices catastrophe. Shelter, food, water, air, health, education, etc. are basic needs.
It's surprising to see since 1960 to 2017, housing per 1,000 households has actually decreased over time significantly from about 36 new constructions (both single and multi dwelling units) to even during the housing bubble (2000 to 2008) peaking at highs of just 18 units per 1,000 households, to 2017 about 9.5 units per 1,000 house holds.
Our system presently isn't providing the goods... in this case the housing.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
Surprisingly, this doesn't necessarily mean real-estate is a great investment: there's a shortage!
The bad thing about real-estate driven collapses, is it's effects on the overall economy: when renters or mortgage holders are spending over 30%... in many cases today as high as 40% to 60% of their take home pay on housing, this often leaves them with every little to stimulate the economy. And eventually layoffs start happening and the entire thing collapses, including real-estate... renters go back to their parents or other family members, or roommate or move to a cheaper place or even in their vehicles are tents occasionally cleaning up at a gym or hotel.
And existing renters and mortgage holders start calling their banks and landlords pleading for relief... then suddenly payments start stopping altogether... renters just call and say I'm moving. Mortgage holders say I'm putting my home up for sell.... worse situation, if the prices are already below the mortgage principle, they just turn the key in and leave for something else. Or squat waiting for the eviction process thus saving as much money possible to find some other means of shelter.
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This is utter bullshit. Us liberals would never deface a statute of Lincoln.
I don't know a liberal who doesn't revere Abe Lincoln. This was when the Republican party was liberals- anti-slavery, anti-child labor, public school supporters, pro compulsory education, etc. First to institute an income tax, institute the first free college, was anti "free" trade, trade agreements that are exploitative in nature, etc. a rather liberal guy.
The two party platforms swapped over time.
Wasn't until about the time of Woodrow Wilson and FDR that the parties flipped in liberal-progressive for the mass of people policies such as collective bargaining. Began with the rift of Teddy Roosevelt with his square deal then later his Bull Moose Party vs the GOP.
So, I think this is bullshit.
In fact, all other news reports have no evidence who were the vandals.
You're just blaming liberals.
Liberals wouldn't do this.
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That's what I fear is going to happen. All of us have a breaking point. And many people are at that point. Over the past 40 years, union funds to help alleviate financial strains during a strike, and relationships with other employers for temp jobs during strikes to further make ends meet collapsed. Workers just hung their head low and took it up the ass. But now it's not even allowing enough to save or often not enough to pay the rent or mortgage. Many living in their cars, workers living in their cars. And some in tents or shelters.
And many who are in homes now, are a recession lay off away from going back to living in tents or shelters or their car.
I recall in 2010 thru 2012 the frequent shop lifting "runners" making fast toward the exits with shopping carts with food just to eat or to get some clothes.
This recession will be even uglier when it comes as it's even more fragile with both house prices and rents well beyond affordability.
Then couple this with medical system that's an un-affordable mess, and college loan situation (fortunately if you're unemployed or not making money you can do an income based repayment plan and get it to $0 a month, but the interest continues to capitalize and grow exponentially... many of these income based plans have a 20 to 25 year forgiveness, but it comes with a catch, it may be taxed as income).
People are in hot water. And the temperature increase isn't a slow simmering rise, but a faster plunge.
If such riots or protests take place, it needs to be taken to where the establishment live and work. Not in our own living areas. Too often such riots trash their own neighborhoods, and that's essentially kicking yourself in the crotch.
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It's symbolic to quickly identify a nation with patterns of shapes and images, sometimes slogans and other words.
From an atheist point of view, I would need to modify the concept of sacred. I don't believe in any particular god or gods or magical "sacred" things.
But I can imagine important items, like cherished pictures taken of loved ones, a slogan for some activism, a person's name, a moral principle being very important to them.
For instance I think the rights of man include all available implementable technology which includes sewers, drink-able water, irrigation, food, healthcare, education, liberty to the extent it doesn't harm others more than just annoyance, etc.
Those things I would use the word sacred.
But even if someone made a poster full of these principles and burned them, I wouldn't care. Those ideas are beyond symbolic representation.
They're simply the way we ought to treat and love each regardless of any other factors.
Under your argument, my sacred items would need to be honored too, making a list of my principles and talking against them or symbolically burning them would be bad, you should honor my sacred object.
Then you would have no disagreements. Everyone's ideas not matter how contradictory are sacred. We're all right and we must honor each other that way.
If only we could live in a state of quantum entanglement and chose the states we like best.
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What gets misleading indicators with GDP outstripping population growth by 2.81 times, is that much of GDP isn't consumers buying with earned income, but with debt, as well as businesses expanding not with expanded revenue, but with debt and investment money seeking a return. Investment chasing investment dollars is a sneaky thing, and in such an economy, investment acts very much so like debt, investment money is seeking a return, if it doesn't get that return it dries up quickly, and no more expansion of anything, just as debts become insolvent.
That's what happens in a skewed oligarchy society with a big gap between high income and wealthy and just the median income earner and median wealth holder (wealth holders on the lower end are extremely unbalanced especially considering pensions are mostly a thing of the past in most sectors of the economy).
Below, this is why those few at the top are thinking things are going gang buster great. While in fact there is a sickness in the economy of most people making such small wages to afford much like starting a family, buying a house, etc.
Numbers below at first appear great. But its fueled by investment money looking for a return chasing other investment money, investment debt to magnify their return, and consumer debt.
2010 GDP $14.784 Trillion
2017 GDP $17.093 Trillion
13.5% Growth over that period.
2010 308.641 million
2017 324.459 million
4.8% Growth
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Yee Yee, it would have been worse in 2015 because telecoms tried throttling and blocking competing websites, which they were then stopped by the FCC, the court said FCC had to make ISPs fall under Title II in order to stop them, so the FCC did that. So we don't have packaged internet; $50 for banking websites, $20 for government websites, $30 for news websites, oh no, you're server line is getting to many hits from people, we'll have to slow that down despite that you're paying the extra price for a commercial access already.
So that's why 2015 nothing bad had happened. The FCC stopped it as the court required them to then put ISPs under 1934 Telecom Act Title II.
Without that protection, after a year or so expect internet to be packaged like cable or dish tv.
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But short work week means the owner or owners who don't work can pay for fewer employees who now work as much if not more than before. What notice almost all occupations now. I worked at a water company, cell phone company, currently a beverage manufacturing company. It's a skeleton crew working even more, and extremely difficult to take time away even for medical emergencies.
Probably since we had a holiday today, I will be working Saturday. Right now they're asking for volunteers. But there simply isn't enough people who can do my particular job on that particular line. Besides maybe 3 others, one is already covering another aspect of operations for another person. And the other has an entire plate of her own doing micros. The other is doing the other shift... its just no way.
The operators are just as tight. Fork lift drivers too.
What we need is co-ops instead of current corporations owned by a moneyed few. Capital formation must come from somewhere else.
I submit, a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank where the government lends directly to groups wanting to create a co-op or those same groups to buy out corporations. Turn into co-ops so the workers are not just an expense anymore. They are in fact the owner, and sharer of profits.
Right now, none of the profits go to workers... perhaps bonuses or some small time stock buy in program; but they're bullshit in return. And still not votes on wages/salaries, capital expenditures such as getting better machines, etc.
Only way you'll get what Keynes also though would happen, shorter and shorter work and an even higher and higher wage/salary slice of the revenue, is if you democratize the business and the workplaces.
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1) There should be no reason to file your taxes using some 3rd party racketeering stupidity. When it's a simple tax form: any realized securities profits, wage/salary income, a few rental properties income, bank and stock dividends foreign or domestic, etc.
2) Stock buy backs are a miss-allocation of wealth of funds via stocks/equities, encourages many businesses to use any existing capital to be used as a pump and dump scam on stock market allowing executives to pump the price via the stock buy back to the level of price to their key performance indicators so they can cash out on warrants and options and other securities... but adds absolutely no value to the company itself... not to the shareholders nor to the employees nor to society in general increasing supply of output as it diminishes capital investment to grow the business.
Stock buy backs are simply a pump so the executives can reach their exercise or equity price goals to sell into the pump, a pump and dump scam.
Stock buy backs ought be prohibited with only a few reasons for allowance... mopping of stocks as a business is going private for example.
3) Medicare and medicaid should always have negotiation power on medical services and goods. No other country doesn't regulate an extremely inelastic demand curve sector as medical; people will pay any price to not die, suffer, or get worse; so price mechanism simply doesn't work: more suppliers and more quantity supplied won't mean prices go down... the demand and will always be inelastic... prices will remain high regardless of the amount supplied and amount of suppliers supplying the goods/service.
Hence why US medical margins on medical goods and services are extreme. No other country allows such extreme inelastic demand goods like medical to become absurdly profitable, a form of morbid price gouging... and literally morbid in that it literally injures and kills people as they ration need medicines like insulin below their required Rx need to maintain health and life.
Government spending isn't the source of most inflation, in fact its not really capable of taking money out of the system nor injecting more money into the system that is the root of inflation.
The cause of inflation is and always is a monetary phenomena... and our debt based system that is the interest rates that each bank is allowed to charge each other lending to each other over short term to keep their fractional lending scheme running and not becoming completely insolvent. Also, how much quantitative easing a central bank or in the case of the USA a private banking cartel ironically called the Federal Reserve (even though its no more Federal than Federal Express... it's not really a governmental agency, but a quasi governmental agency in that the Chairmen is designated by the President of the USA and confirmed by congress. And a loose framework purpose buy law that the banking cartel is supposed to seek monetary policy that maximizes employment and provides for stable prices. That's about it. Everything else is private, the elections of all the Fed Reserve presidents and executives are between all the banks, and even the chairman position is on a short list that is drawn up buy the private banks for the POTUS to choose from.
The Fed Reserve or in other nations their central bank policies is the source of inflation.
If the overnight rates are high then low or no inflation or even deflation.
If the overnight rates are low then inflation happens.
If the Fed Reserve or national banks engage in various methods of so called quantitative easing: buying governmental treasury bonds with bank reserves to keep interest rates low, and/or buying bank loans from various banks that allow banks to cash out of their loan they hold, the bank can therefore quickly make a profit on the loan and have cash reserves to make yet more loans adding to the money supply. 99% of all inflation comes from Fed Reserve or National Banking policy in debt based monetary systems; banks then lending more money out.
So it doesn't really matter what the US or UK or EU member nations spend or don't spend or tax or don't tax when it comes to inflation; as all their spending is bond invested procured, no new money is created, money is just transferred from investor buying governmental bonds and treasury bonds that otherwise could have been spent elsewhere instead spent on execute the government program including paying interest and repayment on mature older bonds.
So if anyone is looking for a reduction in inflation a prime necessity is that the Fed Reserve must raise interest rates, and lower their balance sheet to sop up the excess money in the system. To halt the ridiculous sum of borrowing (which banks dislike because they are in the business of selling debt, a big conflict of interest here).
Discouraging borrowing via higher interest rates is the only way to reduce inflation.
There are some methods to reduce some prices in certain sectors which would help overall inflation:
Some targeted lower prices on necessary goods and services (which would help overall inflation and even cause a slight yet healthy amount of and much needed deflation) would be to invoke supply of necessary goods like more housing both single and multi-dwelling, develop the utilities required for these new housing constructions instead of forcing the brunt on developers which then just pass the cost of building the utilities (sewers, electricity, natural gas, water, communications, etc.) on to the price of the home or rental price.
Encourage actual competition via trust busting; monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, etc. Some entities are beyond oversized and resulting in fewer suppliers in the market and thus smaller quantity supplied goods and services; these entities cause this via price war jacking prices up after competition is eliminated, buying up competition to eliminate competitors then jacking up prices, forcing competition to compete via inauthentic comparative advantage means such as using tyrannized and/or destitute nations' labor and various subsidized goods and operational costs; a type of race to the bottom; unsustainable; not new, Greek city states and Rome did this with outright slavery and this dislocated many people slave and non-slave alike hence their very short term boom bust and constant civil wars.
And a genuine plan on critically needed goods and services like energy and transportation.
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Doesn't have to last long. We must learn economics. WE must realize it is a philosophy. An invention.
We can invent a better system that isn't based on the appendages of evolution from which our current economic thought comes from: feudalism which comes from slavery.
Our systems in place were designed to ensure an aristocracy took front and center stage. It is a bozo the clown model that most 1st world and even less prosperous nations have shunned as a form of monarchy absolute monarchy dictatorship and many other now viewed as tyrannical forms of government... via introducing democracy 1 vote for all citizens of their respective nations as to all operations on how the government ought function.
Same democratization of the work force via co-op model must be adopted.
And to learn the propaganda scapegoating and gas lighting (all is fine nothing to see here) are used.
Subtle but highly effective... worship the aristocrat as if they have a deserved place and requirement in society for prosperity to happen when in reality they have a parasitical nature if such aristocracy or any really take hold.
They are at variance to the interests of the typical worker or small business operator and worker.
They have an interest in scapegoating collective bargaining of unions as the blight of all ill in the world, as well as race, the very government itself pretending it is not democratic that it is a separate entity from them and from you when in reality a democratic government is one that is ran by all of us, that we ourselves are the government, but they will instill that government is bad, ripping apart any participation of democratic government and with both hands the mass of people who have been told to refrain from critical criticism of current economic systems with jingoism and threats that they're not a true Scotsman fallacy galore with mockery of well you're a "communist" or "socialist" all while hypocritically both in terms of government control you hand that democracy over to them, they become plutocratic oligarchy where you have absolutely no influence over law and future policy, and they pour social policy to their benefit to further entrench themselves into the marrow of society, a deep rooted fungal infection, they become the feudal lord and we all become feudal serfs with few abilities to effectively push for policies that would benefit everyone, as anything like this would sufficiently take too much political and economic power from the aristocracy. They'll gas light that all is better off now, so no need to critique the obvious and repetitive failures of our economic system over time, repealing laws that were put in place for solid reasons as to not allow such parasitically induced stupidity to happen again by robber barons.
Make people think they too are just robber barons in waiting.... until they realize that's a complete and utter scam. And in fact the system indeed seeks to entrap them in giving again with both hands their political and economic power to a few.
We can create a co-op reserve bank that works toward capital formation to enterprises that are indeed co-ops in which all persons have 1 vote no matter the share holding quantity in such a co-op firm.
That workers and other stake holders alike have 1 vote each as to all aspects of the operation of the corporation.
In such a democratized workforce similar effects would take place as it did in dispelling the stupidity of divine right by pigs aka monarchs or feudal lords, and instilled liberty in which allocation of resources and plans go to benefit all workers not just a few plutocrats at the exploitation of the very workers who made it all actually happen.
You would never have or rarely have a democratized work force:
1) Vote themselves out of a job to increase already profitable company by a few cents per share to outsource in some country who has a tyrannical form of government thus suppressed wages, a from of inauthentic comparative advantage.
2) Rarely or scarcely ever share productivity gains brought to us via technological advancements: they're not going to issuing stock buy backs that provide absolutely no long term value and actually can cause indebtedness for a short term buying spree pump in price on their stock, procure useless luxury stupidity for a few executives at the expense of needed capital expenditures to improve production and administration equipment and processes.
3) Formulate a wage/salary strategy that is not based on merit nor ability to pay, but on what one can get away with, exploitation. Wages and salaries wouldn't be placed under the rug, where nobody knows the true price of their work relative to others... imagine going to a store where the prices of each item you wanted to purchase was blank... and each time you came up you had to guess to the cashier on the price, and haggle blindly not knowing if the price the countered or started was really fair or not... perfect knowledge principle utterly violated. Such wages/salaries for each position would be clearly posted and regularly negotiated with considerations in context of the businesses ability to pay aka it's profitability or losses.
4) You would never have workers vote to have an unsafe work environment.
5) You would never have workers vote to have a threatening work environment in which employees are pitted against one another, when they're supposed to be collectively a team working to compete against the competition... not each other.
6) You would never have workers vote to ruin their own surrounding environment they all live and work in.
7) You would never have workers vote to forgo known quality problems for short term profits... short term because eventually those poor quality issues will surface and sales will plummet, reputation ruined.
8) You would never have workers vote to squander capital or in debt themselves that have no or limited impact on increasing productivity, safety, profitability not just for the coffers of the enterprise, but for the workers as a whole.
9) You would not see votes to perform scams for short term reward and long term pain; workers have a longer period of return requirement and therefore look for long term growth and sustainability in the operation of a firm, while many modern day so called entrepreneurs (really sacks of manures) have only short term interest in flipping the business either to a venture capitalist who then wants to flip it on to the open market in an IPO... no long term strategy that's real, but for short term dress up to make the business look pretty to some suckers, not really care if the company has any interest in ever becoming profitable, or make debt obligations, or really do anything at all in the long haul, so long as it can dress the pig up in lipstick and shiny jewelry enough to fool entities they're flipping the business on pays top dollars, they're in and out hello good bye.
Basically, the risks of a business are taken strongly on the workers even more so than the founders.... founders often playing several businesses at once, particularly in our modern time, often under a corporation to which debt is detached from their own personal holdings, they're not risking their own money, and of their own money they have comparably much more disposable amount than we the worker. $1,200 coach ticket for a flight on a $50K year worker is 2.4% of their income. Where as a first class cabin and shower ticket to the $50K year earner $12,000 is 24% of their income... the $12,000 ticket to $1 million a year earner is only 1.2%... in respect to their annual income, a $1 million a year income person is paying less disposable income compared to the 2.4% relatively much meager $1,200 ticket of a $50K a year worker.
It is cheaper for the million a year person to pay the $12K price tag, than for median household earner (2 income earners of $50K) to buy coach ticket.
Let that sink in.
Let it all sink in.
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And the stealing of resources is for our oligarchs to then exploit us too with; both by dying to steal resources for the corporations, then to buy the tainted resources at extortion prices. It's a win win...
Fuck the oligarch. Blow up their mansions, sabotage their jets, and sink their yachts, let no oligarch go not dead.
Must destroy the military industrial complex. It's killing our citizens to fight in their evil empire, and draining our ability to have a functioning civilization.
Our evil empire must end.
Jingoism about human rights? How obviously absurd. We have more trade agreements that are beneficial with human rights violators than we have with other countries that are known advanced human rights advocates in their laws and abroad.
Again. Time to kill an oligarch near you.
And we're not the picture perfect version of human rights as pointed out by Kyle, but we lack basic civil services like universal healthcare, universal higher education and vocational training, required vacation days by law, required paid sick days at full pay by law, a coherent transportation system, utility systems that aren't tainted as they attempt to make them super cheap so to sell them to some private corporation as a monopoly cash cow, etc.
Destroy the oligarch. Before they destroy us and everyone else.
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The sick thing in the USA, oligarchs did a good job brainwashing people...
E. Holmes was charged with 11 counts of criminal conduct.
She was found guilty on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud. 4 counts total.
She was found innocent on the other 7 counts of defrauding patients and related conspiracies.
The oligarchs got their vengeance. The peasantry she put into harms way, and some were very harmed thinking they had one illness or no longer had a particular illness until further testing and medication that they didn't or did need that has harmful side effects... no fuck the peasants.
USA is an oligarchy.
The oligarchs have conditioned the people in such a way that makes the condition of Stockholm syndrome blush.
Member of the Jury was cited after the sentencing, that Holme's seemed so inspirational and sure of her abilities to make something amazing, we (the jury panel) really liked her.
And thus the cons of America are coming out blazing... or have... even as their mountains of cons screw people left and right.
My country, is pathetically dumb, brainwashed beyond the realms of sanity... I mean we do have murders in this bozo the evil clown country every day in every major city, and mass murders about every month.
So unless Musk keeps pissing off the oligarchs... he's skating onto more cons and he's keeping every dollar he cashed out... unless he really F'd himself in the Twitter deal, because much of it to my understanding was financed using most of his TSLA shares as collateral (which I think are being margin called the last several weeks hence the apparent capitulation sell volume) that and he made enemies with lots of other oligarchs.
He can mutilate and dance over those bodies of the peasantry in this country... and people will STILL thrust cash in his face (TAKE MY MONEY MEME)... even offer their children to him as sacrifice ( Michael Jackson).
But the moment too many oligarchs majority start to call Musk out on his con, they get fucked enough... then and only then MAYBE he'll get some sort of fraud charge.
And still the jury... the pathetic we the people peasantry... in awe of the rich... the conviction would be less than a coin toss probability he would be acquitted on most if not all charges no matter how apparent the evidence.
Basically, Musk has to keep pissing off rich people to get justice. Otherwise... he's laughing his ass off all the way to the bank until the day he dies.
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Abhikrishna ps Abhikrishna ps
Why so much misinformation spreading?
I mean google does exist now a days. You don't even necessarily need to type the inquiry, but vocally ask it.
Keep in mind, the US ethnic white population which combines Hispanic white is about 73%. Almost three quarters.
I'm not saying it's bad to have Indians working for NASA. But don't sell the one's who do short. They're still an extreme minority... based on the below statistical information straight from NASA they're either listing themselves in 7% Asian American or Pacific Islander or the less than 1% other.
Cited works:
Seventy-two percent of NASA employees are White or Caucasian, 12 percent are Black or African American, 7 percent are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 8 percent or Hispanic or Latino; 1 percent are American Indian or Alaska Native, and less than 1 percent are more than one race.Jun 3, 2020
https://www.nasa.gov/offices/odeo/workforce-data
73%
White people constitute the majority of the U.S. population, with a total of about 234,370,202 or 73% of the population as of 2017. "Non-Hispanic Whites" make up 60.7% of the country's population.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/
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Clint, various scientific journals and extracts that break it down explain why climate change / global warming induced by human activity is different from far past climate changes.
You should make use of google, instead of consulting what is tantamount to public toilet graffiti for answers on important topics.
Just a suggestion.
But I suspect based on your profound ignorance and the fact you did scribble your questions on the proverbial toilet stall wall, that you aren't asking, but being rhetorical as you have already made up your mind global warming / climate change is the same as any other climate change in the prehistoric past. In fact, your claim that the last 1,200 years was a warming trend was false, it was largely a cooling trend, and should still be so as the all three factors: eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession cycles are in a period that would promote cooler overall earth average temperatures. But we're warming instead, probably lucky as this buys us time with the CO2 that we have pumped into the atmosphere.
If I'm wrong that you're not just being rhetorical, then go google for the answers by actual scientists. Lots of information is available. You apparently have incorrect information; or just made it up yourself already convinced of something you have no knowledge of.
Go google and look for scientific sources.
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What happens with this supply side economic idea of making people stupid rich and that they'll trickle it down to investment, is you over inflate investment money.
Too much Investment money without enough demand will sometimes pose as consumer demand; particularly when irrational exuberance happens. But what happens is investment money is very similar to savings money; it comes with strings. That money savings goes mostly toward borrowing. Too much in savings over time creates lots of borrowed money that eventually slows the economy as borrowers payback the money, then many borrowers struggle to payback what's been lent further causing problems. Investment much the same, except the investor usually stops getting much of a return (no more dividends) and companies file bankruptcy and the stock value goes to 0; they lose all obligated money.
As investments tank, Investment money can quickly sell to savings. Kind of what's going on right now with the smart money heavy bond buying to the point the 10 year note yield is less than the 3 year note yield (inversion) which has now happened twice in the past 6 months; inversions are always key note to a coming recession.
Basically, monetary policy that dedicates too much to investment money is very similar to a monetary policy that dedicates to much to savings.
And that's the problem. Trickle down economics thinks no structural issues need to be addressed. Just monetary policy that pushes more money into investment obligations (stocks, indexes, capital expenditures for new and expanding old businesses). That buy itself will somehow drive demand. But it doesn't. In the long run, all it does is increase savings. Which acts as a lending spree that eventually goes bust, and insured secured savings acts as hording invoking a deflationary cycle, after causing a short inflationary cycle.
It never addresses labor pay which is the underlying demand.
Instead you just get boom bust cycles, and continuing such policies as we have starting in the 1980's and today is each boom and bust oscillates more and more to the up and down side as it shakes itself apart. Creates a casino like economy. Those few who win big, and everyone else who loses.
And monetary policy fuels idiocy such as housing prices for instance. Home prices have only gone up in price over the past 50 years in terms of income to home price not because of better value of homes or even house sizes. It has to do with the fact lower interest makes it easier to fool yourself bidding higher on a home. And the banks become willing to make such loans that are now more risky as the higher bid is now another or two multiples of your year gross income. They do it because the bank will make the same amount of profit as it did when interest rates were higher: offsetting the lower interest with a higher principle.
Banks should never be allowed to lend at such high bids.
So trying to use monetary policy alone, especially trickle down supply side economic monetary policy, will only make wealth and income inequality worse over time. To the point of a great depression or a total economic collapse.
Either two will more than likely necessitate actual labor policy changes like increasing the min wage, universal healthcare program, co-determination policies that require half the board of a corporation to be filled by labor voted upon by the employees of that corporation, and co-op enterprise systems that all employees enjoy a single vote as to all aspects to the operation of the non-trade-able enterprise.
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The absurdity of our military budget, recent vets and old vets I know such as my dad others even complain about the scandal. Seriously, we have 11 active aircraft carrier fleets, with a 12th one in construction.
Brazil has 1, China has 1, France has 1, India has 1, Italy has 2, Russia has 1, Spain has 1, Thailand has 1, UK has 1. Total of 9 active non US fleets. All other countries have 0.
All countries have 0 in reserve.
20 active aircraft carrier fleets in the world, of which 9 are not US, and 2 are with nations we're not on the best of terms (China and Russia).
It's insanity... as if we're poised with huge armadas like Spain in the Elizabethan period.
And like the Elizabethian period with fire ships that made that those huge armadas an expensive white elephant, new small drone ships could easily in numbers overwhelm and get through a fleet and sink large vessels in that fleet like an aircraft carrier... we're buying useless dreadnoughts.
Land of the insane aristocracy and run away financial, military, and medical industrial complexes.
Welcome to Oligarchy... next stop Kleptocracy, oligarchs will fund police and/or military and/or judicial and/or legislature directly to protect them.
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I notice this effect with taxes higher wages higher, taxes lower wages lower between Idaho and Washington state... Idaho has a state income tax effectively for everyone since it's "bracket" tops out at income after $11,000 makes it effectively for everyone at about 7.3%... Washington has no state income tax... the wages on the same type of lower end jobs from call center work, to warehouse work, to even skilled work is less in Washington even around the Seattle area... call center workers in Idaho in 2011 were making $13 to $14 an hour... Washington it was $9 to $12 an hour. Similar were other jobs like forklift drivers 2018 $13.80 in WA and $15.50 in ID. This compares non-union work. WA does have higher union participation, in union jobs both Idaho and Washington people tend to have 20% to 50% higher pay for the same type of work and position.
But like Idaho, despite having more union participation than Idaho most jobs in WA are non-union. And they enjoy lesser gross pay with their no-state income tax.
Until now, I just assumed that may be coincidental. WA does have a sales tax of 9% depending on the county and perhaps the city too.
Idaho has a 6% sales tax throughout the state... and only two variations of property tax... city or rural... and a 50% discount on that property tax if it's your primary home you live in. In Idaho, cities and counties can't easily tax separate only taxing authority is at the state level. Always found that interestingly hypocritical of the GOP when they clench their pearls and scream states rights, local government does things better... but when the shoes on their foot, it suddenly the higher level government does better than local cities and counties.
Basically the right wing strategy is there are no principles, just pretend a position if that position in that situation is convenient to get what they want... usually workers to shut up and work for peanuts, and more money and power to do whatever they want.
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Gross apathy. People sit on their ass waiting for magical options in general elections. Instead of participating in primaries and caucuses.
Of eligible voters:
Only 7% bother to fucking show up to primaries and caucuses in combined GOP and DNC.
General election, 45% didn't even bother to vote.
Last mid terms, 63% didn't even bother to vote.
Our citizens are lazy. They must stop sitting on their asses waiting for some promotion, some entertainment machine to tell them how to think. Or we all get what laziness and sheer stupidity provides:
Shit.
Case in point, you get someone talking about another nations flag being a maple leaf as a joke. 26 other dip shits bother to thumbs it up. What bubble gum mindlessness.
Vapidity of our people is what's wrong with our government.
Instead lets watch a bunch of assholes throw a foot ball back and forth and talk about their scores, players, and coaches. Tv shows, movies, actors, musicians, comedians, etc. distractions that rot the brain even further, a trap as bad as meth or opiates.
Everything's a joke, but the dip shits don't realize they're the fucking brunt.
And the circle jerk of empty headed apathy only entrenches year after year.
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"We want our oligarch to shove his old crinkly thing up our holes! So get off the stage! He's promised me fifty bucks for showing up! I'm a toad who needs his master!"
By the way, I die a little everyday on the momentous stupidity of so many people; at work the conversations get so ridiculously wrong and flat dumb it gets spooky. One day I couldn't take it, was a long 13 hour plus workday, a coworker was saying things that were completely to the contrary to reality, I had to stop him and corrected point by point at all he had said; one of the ridiculous things he said: people are afraid to speak out in European countries on policies and laws because they're afraid of being put in jail or shot by their police... HELLO! Yellow Jackets in France! Then I had to explain some of the interesting things the Yellow Jacket protesters did: commandeered a highway toll both and allowed everyone free access through it, even got a police officer to sign their petition. Another group put up a blockade at a port to stop trucks leaving; I remarked in the US our police would literally open fire on them, he agreed that they should open fire on them they're breaking the law, I asked to the point of killing them? He said yes. I said, well the French police see this as a protest and not a murderous offense, they would simply wait them out and arrest them if they feel it necessary charging them of obstructing a road at the most, they wouldn't kill them unless they were literally attempting to kill other people, what the fuck is wrong with you... well they're breaking the law.
And I had to explain we have higher crime rates in the US, as well as murder rates, they don't. And we have more mass murders, where that's an extremely rare thing to happen.
Since he also ranted about how terrible their hospitals and clinics were and that nobody ever sees a doctor or dentist or is able to get their prescriptions... I explained how their medical works in Germany and UK and France in particular since not only is their data online, but first hand experience, and all nations now have video available online of their medical care they get as well as their own universal healthcare programs; all of them at least 50% cheaper than our own, and covers more items typically. And the few items it doesn't like Canada's dental and outside hospital refill Rx, you can get a very cheap often via employer supplemental insurance that covers it, also the prices without insurance are highly regulated so many medicines even without the insurance in Canada are often cheaper in price than medicines with insurance in the US. And that I often still buy some prescription medicine from Germany as it's cheaper there than here by a substantial amount. But I really wanted him to understaned.
So I explained to him that medical sector is an inelastic demand curve (demand doesn't go away by function of price, as you either suffer longer, get worse, or die) so even adding more suppliers doesn't do it on its own. And hospitals require vast economies of scale just to operate as too few a people will ever need a hospital for the amount of cost it is to run; it's like fire and police services. It's cheaper to collectively pitch in, and ensure hospitals are at least break even solvent so that none of us per person bare the full burden of that price tag when we need it. It's again why all other major wealthy nations have a form of universal healthcare; it's cheaper, and even better quality of care, they can keep a rural hospital open as it doesn't need to even break even, it can run at a loss FOREVER so long as there are people living in that region who NEED a hospital for emergencies. He agreed with me that we needed to do something about our ridiculous medical system, he agreed we should negotiate put max profit margins... as he said his sister or mother got a bill that was just over ten thousand dollars.
He had ranted on about how they all live in tiny cracker box studio or one bedroom apartments. I had to explain that's only in some large cities like London in particular, but most Germans and even French, and that he should look at some pictures a Serbian coworker's home he still owns in Serbia... they're as big if not bigger than the US, often 1,500 to 2,500 sq ft, and as for apartments they vary from 800 sq to 1,200 sq ft. And recently Berlin passed legislation to stop the ridiculous price increases on rentals as it was effecting the citizens very negatively; prices were becoming well above the median income and affordability of 20% to 30%. Vienna Austria has a public housing program that it has had for quite some time, that even the rich want a unit to rent, they're about 800 to 1,200 sq ft and list in prices around $600 to $700 USD a month and that's their "New York" or "DC" as it's their capitol and main financial city; they build on average 10,000 new units a year, and recently with population in Vienna increase they did 20,000 units in one year to keep up with demand.
It is true that housing in Europe particularly major cities are becoming insane rent and house prices, as its happening in our country too, as all the financier bankers as well as all other rich are trying for the last place for return on their funny money; lending isn't enough and at such low interest rates, so they've been buying real-estate as if they're preparing for a Feudalism 2.0.
I cited sources such as the Mirror Mirror 2017 report by the Common Wealth Fund as well as the WHO reports, and gave him keywords to look up like Austria public housing... and I did a google and street view of a housing suburb near a hotel I stayed at back in 2001 in Munich, and asked him where's this at? He said Boise? I said no, this is a suburb housing area of Munich Germany, and zoomed out to show him more exactly where it was at. You cannot tell the difference in particular with Germany between US or German homes in many cases, unless you notice a sign in German. It's similar to Canada. You often can't tell.
He was in the navy for a while, and he insisted where-ever he went the houses were tiny; and he thinks it was in France or the UK. I explained sure, we have shitty poorer areas in Seattle, Portland, LA, NJ, NY, FL, even in our own wonderfully poor ass state of Idaho.
But Europe isn't ALL poor, it's not all living in 1950 rebuild cottage and crack box apartments... other than the inner major cities as is also the case in the US.
I also showed him pictures of some farms... yes they farm in Europe too! In fact like the US much of the country side is farmed.
I said I don't want to argue just for argue sake, I just want to correct your misconceptions because they're wrong on so many counts. He said he would look up my sources.
I have yet to hear from him about any of it. Which is fine. But I hope he did. He's otherwise a very smart guy. But damn is he just wrong on everything else, and seemed just ripe out of his fucking mind.
It's beyond dumb... it's a type of psychosis, a type of Stockholm Syndrome.
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Actually there were lots of slurs with homosexuality, but not the same as today.
Cinaedus was the slur given to those males who were passive (bottoms), it was considered humiliating or lower status (slave) to take it up the butt.
Slaves in particular in Rome weren't fully humans, so their masters could have sex with any slave's gender and age.
Boy or Latin, puer, was what all slave boys and even slave men would be referred to, as they were not real men.
Calling a free person a Puer (boy) or messing with a freeborn actual boy was considered bad, and depending on the class (patrician, equit, or pleb) there were legal consequences for sexual contact in those cases.
If you were free born and did the penetrating and it was on slaves or lower class males; it was mostly considered okay through most eras of ancient Rome.
If someone insulted a free person or citizen without apologizing calling them a puer (boy) as a free Roman male, that would be grounds for a duel to keep honor.
If the person didn't fight for their honor or at least argue against being called a puer, they were considered cowards and passive, often called women.
Closest to what we have as today gay slurs. Which are actually fading in offense as most bi's or gays or even straight simply don't care if someone calls someone a fudge packer or flamer or lumber jack or whatever. Who cares.
And some take delight in being called various former slurs like queer or faggot. Gay actually started as a slur. Now it's consider a more pleasant term than homosexual.
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When sanity is considered insane, and insane is consider sanity we're lost as a civilized society.
It's not like homeless will get to really choose their housing and live in some fancy mansion or penthouse apartment, but they'll be housed so they can get into a stable hygienic safe environment to where they can get consistent medical attention, keep the from desperation to committing crime, boost their morale, get some education via a class of some type or internship, and get a job and save money to become prosperous which benefits us all.
But no. Just let them suffer because you know its fun. And make the situation a miserable shit hole, the same type conditions that you scoff about that exist in 3rd and 2nd world countries and in vast areas even in some wealthy 1st world countries. Deal with the increase desperation leading to crime, drug addiction, unsanitary conditions, etc.
Okay. Insanity is the new sanity.
"We have a problem, I have to poop."
"Okay go use the tiolet."
"How dare you offer a toilet to the pooper. We don't have a problem. He has a problem! Make him poop in the streets!"
Fine... he will go in the streets right behind your house. And enjoy the odor. And don't blame me if some of your toilet paper and hemorrhoid cream end up missing.
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Since Silver has always been very cheap, even as a child in the 90's I would buy ingots and also collectibles like Morgan dollars. Still have all the silver I bought back then. I started when Silver was $4 an ounce then it went to $8 then went to $4 an ounce which was difficult to get the pawnshop to sell their ingots to me; one lady demanded that I show her my Idaho license to buy and sell precious metals. My dad was there too. I scoffed at her, are you going to sell me the stuff or not! I bought before, and I know I don't need any license to buy this stuff. If you don't want to sell just say so. She finally relented and sold me some ingots and I think that's when I bought some WWII 50 cent pieces that have silver in them; in fact that's why she relented on selling the silver, that I bought the more profitable to them collectibles.
Anyway, my uncle bought literally several tons of silver in the 70's and early 80's. Lost his ass.
My experience with silver is it's very unstable. It's a bi product of every metal mines; zinc, nickle, copper, iron, etc. almost every mine has a silver bi-product production line, because its still profitable to do so. And there are literal silver mines primarily producing it.
And as he said, central banks sold most of their silver back in the 80's, 90's (in fact the $4 an ounce was Russia selling off all their silver holdings early 2000's late 90's... the day I bought it, the actually trading price that day and through the month I think, was actually $2 something an ounce... it shot back up over the year making an average of $4 an ounce, thus her reluctance to sell me the ingots I think).
The biggest non-recycling consumption was photography; to make silver iodine, that's gone.
Silver isn't as useful.
Silver is still nice, just don't expect it to suddenly go up $100 or $1,000 or any orders of magnitude. Expect the range of $10 to $20 range.
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Trump is an idiot. The polar vortex that rotates about the poles becomes weakened as it warms in the polar area causing the cold polar air masses to go further south into lower latitudes causing super cold temperatures in those areas. We've been dealing with vortex weakening increasingly over the past 10 years. It means winters in higher latitudes just beyond the polar latitudes will have severe cold temps in winter, while sever warm temps in the summer, dry regions will experience more dryness, and wet regions will experience more precipitation. Latitudes just north and south of the equator, the tropical latitudes will experience increasing temperatures every year; rainy seasons and dry seasons will be extended. All bad for crops, and already begun in latitudes of Mexico, S. Texas and California, North Africa through to Egypt, Sudan, Syria, and this movement will continue north and south latitudes of the equator. Many of these places are already experience political unrest, famine, as well as mild food shortages.
Crop disaster in the making. Nations fall apart when food becomes scarce.
Based on the data so far using a best case scenario, crop yields will have an abrupt and increasing decline in just a decade. You'll notice the problem when once year round crops like tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, oranges, berries etc. become seasonal at grocery stores. That's likely to occur in 2030-2040.
Then grains and seasonal crops become expensive and some not even available some years about 2050-2060.
Even developed nations may face isolated famine like conditions by 2070 to 2080, if wars aren't already contributing to food production problems making food shortages and famine even worse.
The major sea level rises that will effect every coast doesn't really start causing severe problems until about 2100 to 2120 on the best case scenario. But by that time, nations will be economic cluster fucks from reduced world wide crop yields. Hardly in any economic situation to even rebuild cities further inland, let alone try to create massive projects in a vane attempt to save the cities location.
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I kind of think many of his hypes are to keep him afloat with investor and lent money. His hyper loop is delusion in ignorance of physics and engineering that a mag lev hasn't already resolved. Digging tunnels and pretending he reinvented the subway is mind blowing apparent he's literally digging himself into a hole. Space X while cool and I like space, his concept he can magically save money by landing the booster rockets thus reuse them... NASA reused the boosters on the Space Shuttle. NASA did invent re-landing rockets, but found the risk of them tipping over after landing or not landing and blowing up thus not being reused outweighed the for sure ranging them into the ocean for recovery for reuse. And the concept to use 140 pounds of lithium for one vehicle, when lithium ore is rare there's simply not enough ore available to scale to take over the number of vehicles in just the US, let alone the world; lithium is 1.1 ppm... that's on par with palladium at 1.0 ppm or platinum at 1.9 ppm both precious metal and used in cars, but only consists of 2 to 6 grams per car or lite truck. Gold 0.16 ppm contrast with abundant elements like iron 1,090 ppm, aluminum 58 ppm, nickel 58 ppm, etc. Simply not
So using something even more rare than platinum you can see where the lithium prices would go if even 1% of N. American vehicles used 140 pounds each of lithium, if just 2-6 grams of slightly more abundant platinum is used and we have $844 an ounce or $27.16 a gram.
Essentially, most of his ideas are why others haven't bothered, or rather they found other alternatives that actually do work like hyper loop is just stupid hence why engineers invented the mag lev that does work economically and more efficient than alternate long distant trains.
Subways have already been invented, and their helpful and yet still rather expensive.
And a few others are simply didn't save money, others don't save money in the long run like vehicles with relatively gigantic lithium batteries.
But engineers have discovered H2 fuel cells using a cathodes do work and material very much economically abundant, other than the H2 at present, but can be via an energized grid using solar, wind, LFTR fission nuclear, and especially ITER/Wendelstein 7X type fusion reactor designs and then using electrolysis to produce the H2 from H2O.
These problems require a Manhattan/Apollo like project to surmount though, huge budgets that can only be risked by governments.
Hence why he goes down the path he does, he's doing all he can do, which is squat. And as he's started just in the early short run, his actual finances are buckling, he's not producing enough cash flow to stay afloat without more loans, investor money, or advance payments from customers.
I personally think in the next crash, he will be among the likes of Elizabeth Holmes with Theranos. Maybe not as fraudy, but certainly over hyped his ability to think through the physics and economics of his ideas.
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That's one of the reasons US hasn't adopted a cheaper and more effective higher quality universal healthcare system.
Another big reasons, is that healthcare for the top 1% actually makes them a return... albeit a small 1%ish return... as a rich dynastic family or smallish business will simply make their own insurance company... they then load it with half a million to 1 million up to 4 million to even 10 million as collateral. This collateral then is used for investments and reserve for payments while collecting premiums from workers or using returns on collateral to feed the kitty to keep it at par plus about a 1% return after capital gains and dividends and payouts.
To avoid big hits to the kitty, they often take out insurance if draw downs become this amount, that insurance will pay to make them whole again. This premium is well below the return on their investments from the kitty.
Again, their net advance is about 1%.
So current US healthcare system pays them a 1% return.
Instead of it costing them anything it pays them a return instead.
Ta-da! And that's why they really really don't wanna give that up.
Hence why these disconnected nut jobs thought an HSA would be brilliant for the peon class. Why, that's what they effectively have, and they don't really pay anything, they make money from it instead. Why can't they just float a note to cover expenses as one disconnected billionaire lamented about a government shut down in 2016.
Float a note... you hear someone refer to taking out a loan like that you know they're disconnected to the nth degree from the financial affairs of the general population. That or they're a corporate financier or accountant.
Now this doesn't work with large or huge mega scale corporations with 100,000's or more employees... as the collateral becomes too big opportunity costs are outweighed to do so... example Amazon or Walmart or a cell phone company of 100K or more workers would require a billion or 2 billion or 3 billion to be put down as collateral. Their 1% return on such a huge collateral would be too little.
So in these instances it does cost them at that corporate level... but again its cheaper as the premiums with such a big giant group discount is small comparable to revenues the mammoth company makes.
And the collateral required to act as their own insurance that would be $1 billion or $3 billion, can be put to use making a bigger return expanding the company or in many instances as of the last decade, stock buy backs to pad the pockets of the owner class who have warrants turning them into stock as you pump the price, you sell into that and Voilà! Convert corporate profits in the banks of the corporate accounts into the personal accounts of the owner class. Voilà!
The cost to insure their millions of people only amounting to $100 million to $500 million or less a year on revenues of $3 billion or $10 billion or $100 billion... no problem.
The owners of the corporation of course with their family brood dynasty, they of course will make their own dynastic insurance company as mentioned above... sometimes if they're members of the board entitled to corporate benefits, they'll join that instead or on top of their family insurance company.
It's similar to why they really don't care that much about deficit spending, borrowing lead to government floating treasuries and bonds. Who buys these bonds 95% of the country doesn't. Instead its largely the banks on the T-Bills side and the rest are very wealthy 1% looking to preserve their wealth.
They've turned their tax costs into a loan with interest.... so not only do they not have to pay taxes, they get their money back with interest.
This is how plutocratic our systems in the US truly are.
And how hardwired they are.
Lots of freeloaders with lots of power to keep their freeloading powers intact.
And that's why they'll go down until the entire system just implodes. As late stage capitalism or plutocratic or just any economic system with too much concentration of power and economics into the hands of a few always does.
The weight of it always comes crashing down on them too as it collapses into unbearable untenable misery for the masses.
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Look no further than Japan on how this ends... they're 15 years ahead of us with extreme low interest rates after their crash in 1990. Japan's Central Bank does even more than our Fed Reserve... as of December 2020 Japan's central bank is now the biggest holder of Japanese stocks at $434 billion.
First, the stock market crashed and never recovered to this day to anywhere near its 1989 high of 38,915... however currently it's at its closest at about 28,700.
Capitalism can't sustain itself. It always devolves into monopolies or duopolies or the best it can do an oligopoly... either way it's claim of competitive market motivation always becomes moot.
I'm completely for a co-op model system that uses the advantages of real competitive market laws and rules not inauthentic comparative advantage such as abusing a nation already under either poverty for whatever reason or tyranny from some dictator or rule by the few to set up sweat shops and plantations in effect competing with serf or worse slave like labor. And of course you cannot claim authentic comparative advantage when a nation backstops the industry allowing it to sell at a loss only awaiting for the other firms that don't get such treatment to out of business then raise those prices.
Anyways, every time in every situation that laissez faire capitalism has been allowed, it ends in misery. Nearly ended the King of France Louis 15th, as he liberalized the grain holdings allowing merchants and farmers to sell domestic or abroad all the grain... 4 years later it caused a famine due to a bad growing season, all the grain was sold, what would have otherwise had a strategic reserve of grain, similar to our present day national strategic oil reserves.
Same thing happened to then ext King Louis the 16th... that king ended up losing his head over the ordeal of attempting laissez faire... again all the grain was sold an famine occurred due to just one bad crop yield season.
Initial attempts in the US to allow banks and states to produce their own currency failed so spectacularly that the founders of the US convened a convention that was secret to immediately establish a new governmental constitution, as it failed grotesquely.
If you're curious how this plays out, look to Japan. They have a 15 year head start on near 0% or even negative interest rates, and a central bank that's even more aggressive in handouts to zombie banks and corporations.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boj-becomes-biggest-japan-stock-220000323.html
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They're not green either.
All you're doing is fronting your carbon footprint.
The amount of lithium and nickel, 140 plus pounds of lithium per EV car, takes enormous amount of fossil fuels in the mining and refining process of lithium. And much of it for whatever reason isn't being recycled when the batteries go bad and are replaced, that part surprises me, even with recycling, it takes various chemicals that are fossil fuel intensive and energy intensive to produce.
And you're only purchasing a medium of energy. Not the energy itself.
So the actual energy used on the EV is likely still some fossil fuels to 100 percent fossil fuels depending on what is used for the grid where you charge your car.
It's not a practical solution for commuters either. Extra expense in both charging and the cost of the car and the short battery life.
And yes, they are fire starters. They're dangerous. That problem has been a factor with lithium batteries since they're use forever. It's partly why phone and lap top makers sort of spike their batteries to just stop working after 3 to 4 years; they know the longer you keep using these batteries the inevitable dendrites build up will lead to shorts and eventual catastrophic failure and a spark an fire if the battery is attempted to be charged or is actually charged. Phones and lap tops if fully charged can create make sparks and flames, while a large series of battery cells that are in an EV is dumping massive amounts of energy into that fire.
And they're hard to put out for that reason, and that lithium burns in the presence of water.
All the Alkali metals, all the ones elemental charge to the left: lithium, Sodium, potassium, rubidium, cesium, etc. all react exothermically on contact with water. Youtube it yourself. They all react rather explosively.
And yes, lithium batteries rely on elemental lithium as it's used to store the energy; it's not a alloyed or compound of lithium, but elemental di-lithium... same with sodium batteries.
So there is no advantage in these things.
People just reached out for what seemed simple and didn't brain in their skull to think a bit and realize the crux is that you're not changing the energy source... only using a medium.
And that medium is even more fossil fuel or at least energy consuming to mine and refine than the same 10 years of petrol consumption.
The numbers never balanced.
We can thank Musk for spamming his con artistry to the max, and people wanting a simple solution even if it wasn't a solution at all but a scam.
Like Norman G Baker who scammed thousands of people making millions back in the 1930's that he could cure cancer with his "formula 5". He, at least, was convicted of fraud and served some time in prison, but his penalty financially was a few thousand dollars, and he kept several million, tens of million in today's dollars and retired to Florida a rich fuck.
Grifts.
But we have brains.
Why not use them?
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Apparently, our country in the US maybe among those even as soon as 2040....
check out this news article about Cleveland.... and the obvious powder keg of homeless that has only gotten worse particularly in places of stable year round weather from LA to Portland OR to Seattle WA and back east... every city even minor town in the US, even here in Idaho have their tent cities and vast hobo camps... in the 90's they were mostly bearded vets from Vietnam with PTSD strung out on self medicated substances to mentally ill as our embarrassment as a nation is the lack of universal healthcare and large delinquency among the mentally unwell and even challenged adults in many states, they simply don't want to deal with them, literally paying these peoples' bus tickets or even air tickets (the only two options in our inept nation's also inadequate antiquated transportation system which largely are old interstates and bridges that are falling apart quite literally).
Back to LA, Portland OR, Seattle WA, and several more in the East of the Rockies powder keg where extreme poverty huddles near extreme wealthy; it's currently exploding with riots persistently, and it's no relegated to one political stance but across left and right wing fanatics... originally we had in Idaho in the Boise area protests that saw right wingers literally go to police and other government officials homes, threatening and vandalizing their homes picketing right outside.
Then BLM movement fascists counter protesting one day with BLM group downtown, then fascists right wingers armed with whatever rifles and handguns protesting with counter BLM and other counter protesters.. just in Idaho... becoming violent in Portland OR, a weird sequestration in Seattle where even medical professionals such as GP's, dentists, dermatologist, registered nurses, etc. setting up their own medical booths to see the mass of under-insured and uninsured for free, collecting donations to rent professional plastic outhouses often used for various outdoor events and holidays in an effort to keep their protest standoff sanitary.
And with 40% of all renters in latest polls expecting to suffer an eviction in the next few months.
Below article interviews a refugee who has lived in the US for over a decade, recounts how she came from a civil war and watched people die in front of her, and now the same is happening in her own neighborhood in Cleveland.
This is on top of the usually prior to the pandemic mass murders some more spectacular thus reported on more for sick entertainment advertisement value like the most recent week ago suicide bombing in Nashville.
We have open incitement of civil war even if it's mostly advertisement for a future Trump radio or tv channel, where an obvious winner of the election and already recounts in several states that made the winner's margin widen even more, the loser attempting any strategy just to nullify an election even when courts have heard their cases and some courts throughout the challenges with prejudice as the lawyers risking perjury demonstrated the frivolous nature of their suites just as many other authoritarian and tyrannical nations.
Abandoned modern day ghost towns, many with people still living along the edges of these empty towns, places in WV and Alabama and Mississippi that even Walmart stores sit empty and long ago closed, but thousands still live in the area without a shop to buy groceries and clothing.
Field camps by doctors' without boarders conducting free annual clinics from dental to medical and doing critical procedures in WV, with Deutche Welle reporting with contempt as a field the size of several stadiums start to fill with people camping in order to be the first come first serve tickets to these field hospitals that the German reporter compares to something one generally only see in a war zones; this is the only medical these people can receive for the year.
And don't count on US oil. Our oil glut capacity is extremely transitory; comes from the excessive fracking in speculation among many small drillers, many are already in bankruptcy and couldn't maintain profitability even at $50 or $60 a barrel as the fracking sites they dug would go empty faster than originally forecast; the original idea in certain wells and basins that production would maintain for 20 to 25 years. They're already seeing a vast drop off in just 10 years in certain places and near no production on these wells in 15 to 18 years.
Very transitory as the amount of oil wasn't as expected, and just as the housing bust put thousands of housing developers into liquidation extinction, the same with oil drillers; you won't get the stampede of drillers to cause a glut in production.... these business, ultimately their investors learn.
2040 the only possible continued low prices of fuels will likely be natural gas, a glut in capacity exists for several decades and that does show to be more accurate, but as for oil production, this will be vastly tapered to production levels that were prior to 2008 that saw one barrel of oil reach $200.... expect $400 and then even more... coupling with the idea the US dollar won't be worth as much in 20 years on the same trajectory over the past prior 20 years, prior 20 years to that and so on.
And don't count on so much electric vehicles, the cost of lithium and cobalt that is used in battery production is very high, and it makes sense, takes 140 pounds of lithium and about the same of cobalt to battery one EV. Lithium is 5 times more rare than copper. And it's massively polluting and fossil fuel intensive in mining lithium and cobalt. Production capacity can never reach 10% let alone 80% without causing such basic input costs as lithium and cobalt prohibitive.
This too is assuming the US is still a world reserve currency. As the gigs up completely if US loses the current global reserve status for something else like the Euro or some other more stable region like Canadian or Australian dollars or perhaps small country like Switzerland or Sweden if those nations step up to flood the world with those bank notes.
If the US does tumble into complete chaos, that is actually a possibility...
Ironically among the reasons the US Dollar is often used as a reserve currency is the flood on the market actual printed notes held abroad; there's just enough to have a functioning reserve with them, while also being rare enough too compared to the usual purposeful mass printing of domestic note denominations. So it wouldn't be as surprise that even a defunct US, that some nations would continue to hold printed US Dollars as their reserve currency; now they're even more rare, as they wouldn't be printed anymore... ignore the fact the very nation that had printed them no longer honors them as legal tender or even exists to honor them in the first place.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/gunfire-and-crashing-cars-in-struggling-neighborhoods-were-losing-our-grip/ar-BB1cpMdN?li=BBnb7Kz
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/tripideas/the-abandoned-tennessee-ghost-town-where-millionaires-vacationed/ss-BB1cqrCP?li=BBnb7Kz
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dw+poverty+in+the+us
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Carl Sagan was the best on the subject, and summed it up very well:
"The conventional bombs of World War II were called "blockbusters", filled with 20 tons of TNT they could destroy a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities during World War II amounted to some 2 million tons of TNT -- two megatons. Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo -- all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945 -- a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons. Today, two megatons is the equivalent of a single thermonuclear bomb -- one bomb with the destructive force of the second world war. But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The missile and bomber forces in the Soviet Union and United States have warheads aimed at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet is safe.
The energy contained in these weapons -- genies of death, patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps -- totals far more than 10,000 megatons; but, with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours. A blockbuster for every family on the planet; a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 70,000 people. In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing...."
I encourage you to read the rest of it or listen/watch it: Cosmos: who speaks for the earth.
http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speaks-for-earth-1980.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGds93obhpM
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I think these idiots are coming up with their ideas from porno plot lines, and think hey why not... people masterbait to this stuff, turns them on, I can make their fantasy (and mine) real because I'm rich and famous. I'm the universe's gift to the world!
What did that one billionaire fat fuck say about other rich people... it's aspirational; I'm aspiring people.
All workplaces I have been discourage romantic relationships in the office, and if one does chose it, there's protocol such as informing HR of their relationship as well as ensuring neither report to each other. And any other sexual harassment has protocol as well, if the person isn't interested and says so, sexual or dating advances must stop immediately or you're fired. Basically, the best action is not to get romantically involved with coworkers.
A coworker of mine put it best, don't piss in your own cheerio bowl/ sandbox. You'll just end up making work life more complicated, and risk getting fired.
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He keeps showing toilet paper and paper towel isles. And perhaps a few other canned food isles. Those are mostly all produced domestically in home nations as well as their inputs. And you can now find toilet paper and paper towels fairly easily already and it was due to a run on those items shifting from eating and pooping at work and out and about to at home, and just pure stupidity something you would expect would happen in Hurricane and earthquake prone areas that are swift to do runs on toilet paper and paper towels because this type of phenomena happens every few years or even every year.
At my plant we make soda pop both cans and bottles. We do have supply disruptions, but its domestic disruptions. Our pop cans were made in the US. Now, we're having to import from Mexico, our plant in is Idaho; the traveling costs are more expensive, so now we have some cans from WA state and some orders from Mexico. Until the Can makers in WY and MT come back online.
Oh, and orders at first picked up on the bottle (plastic bottle) line when grocery runs were happening, but now this and next few weeks orders have collapsed. Nobody wants any more bottle water nor soda pop. Particularly the more profitable soda pop in a bag that's used for cafe's and eateries soda machines, and single serve 20oz and 1L sold at various vending machines and convenient stores... so literally my shift were making dick next two weeks.
Supply disruptions are global not just China. In fact, China for the past several weeks despite China halting its quarantine they're not seeing any orders. Some of their P2P lending is in a long slow motion collapse. The major factories are owned by the government so they can sell at a loss for indefinite period... dumping. And they have for the past few years been in decline; Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are broke. And some nations like Japan have always had tight levels of autarky.
It's the race to the bottom come to it's bottom. COVID19 just sped up a process that was already in meltdown... US Fed Reserve had to step in all autumn 2019 to help out the Repo market because of massive liquidity defaults, banks stopped lending to each other no more money. And lots of defaults already in the mix in the US starting with Vehicle defaults.
And the dump of oil from Saudi Arabia and Russia around Feb. puts more defaults on fracking oil businesses sector.
It's not just China that's experience the end of this idiot economic race to the bottom, all nations combined are feeling a nation wide depression as the eventuality becomes the present.
Doesn't take a fucking rocket scientist to see where race to the bottom economics eventually leads: to utter economic collapse followed with civil war, famine, plague, etc. and any ability to deal with any random problem or catastrophe that happens out of the blue like a very bad hurricane or a random pandemic or even just a regional epidemic which then turns into a pandemic, or really bad crop season (drought or inundation or to hot season or salt induced desertification, etc).
We were in a very pathetic profit only motive with no planning economic idiocy.
Something that was tried countless times through human history from the bronze age to Greek and Persian Empires to the Roman and later Spanish, French, Dutch, UK, and most recent British Empires, and the present Russian, China, US empires.
It's just ironic it's almost exactly 100 years since the last episode came to its fever pitch of eventual economic collapse and then worldwide revolutions and wars that then followed.
Perhaps we should learn, the profit motive isn't that great nor efficient at getting the goods. In fact, much to say that most developed nations only became that when they had strong unionization, developed social programs like social security and universal healthcare (US with just elderly and disabled kind of healthcare thing) compulsory public education, etc.
When we stepped back and let robber barons take over, they repeated the turd they shit out last time.
Plutocrats simply can't be allowed to exist anymore. They're a parasite that's utterly dangerous to any potential democratic republic.
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Ultimately it will be deflationary for at least the midterm (5 to 10 years).
I think they're going to lose control as they already have on attempting inflation. Race to the bottom economics despite the money printing go burrr and low interest rates from 2009 to 2016 and still low relative rates to just 2.x% then back to 0% didn't cause the massive inflation on all things.
It did obviously cause another real-estate bubble, a huge corporate debt bubble, a vehicle loan bubble, contribution to the stock market bubble (90% of volume in the past decade was stock buy backs in the US lowering shares outstanding in a range of 10% to 30% on average, so not at a stock split reversal that would cause stock price to double.... these buy backs and other froth buyers have caused stocks to quadruple on average some even higher).
What I expect is money to flow into commodities when stocks crash. As they did last time. When commodities are over supplied (as they already are) these prices will fall again mostly because these options will either expire or you'll have to exercise them an take the commodity... most of these commodity dealers will have whatever warehouse/storage full... prices will tumble as they did before, couple with particular commodities that may soar having producers jump in on it flooding supply, when that starts happening, a stampede of dumping their contracts and prices crash in commodities.
I really see a possible second flash bubble in the stock market.
Then a flight to safety that essentially everyone will be afraid to buy anything other than staying in cash, national treasury bonds.
I would say gold would go up... but that would have crashed recently too in the commodities run up... gold is a little more stable in that people are more easily able to exercise gold contracts... it doesn't take that much space... but the security required on it is a money loser.
Really, ultimately the system we're in is deflationary.
The reserve banks have been throwing money into the system like crazy over the past decades, and yet prices on all goods haven't budged much, and wages are particularly flat. Where cost of living has skyrocketed due to a bubble not inflationary forces, rents and housing will crash as people just won't be able to maintain mortgage and rental payments.
Interest rates will be very low for a long time.
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Means don't buy the top. Or you'll be upside down. Rally is just another bear market rally that will dip again... either making higher lows, or equal lows, or even another leg down lower lows. Basically, if you're dollar cost averaging into the market on a weekly or daily or monthly basis... right now is probably a bad time to buy anything. You'll be fomoing in at the top. Like a moron.
Allow the market to show us more. And dip. Even if this is a start of something better... it's bad risk to reward... this likely bear market rally or just rally was just mostly up and away. It should digest and pull back either way.
And conditions don't intigate this is any rally to buy. But to sell what you did buy on the dip perhaps... at least don't buy more now.
This rally was a combination of shorts covering, as well as new shorts having bad opening locations having to cover in a panic; which is always a transitory as those buyers leave quickly and are done buying.
But also reallocation from all the tax harvest sell offs of the losers from 2022 thru December... was a dip largely in December as lots of big funds and smaller holders sold losers to lock in losses for tax write off purposes.
That leaves lots of cash to go back into the market into January. Lots of it apparently went right back in to shite... that it had oozed out of originally.
While meme stocks still have some memeing they too forced some shorts to cover... lots of meme stocks are literally penny stocks now... so shorts really have no business remaining short on those names; and many of them in the pennies have bounces into the single digit dollars... as retail and some contarion large funds came knocking... more short covering than in 2021. So there's why the vomit stocks, or stocks worse than shite... like the meme stocks started to meme up again.
The other garbage stocks, just large funds going back into riskier junk as per their prospectus after tax loss harvesting; wash trading requires to sell the underlying similar thing and not touch it buy/short sell again the same for at least 30 days in order to claim the loss on deductions for taxes.
Lots buying back in all at once, short covering more than in 2021, will produce a rally of sorts. And that's what January was all about to present.
Likely just a bear market rally that will go back down... probably faster than it went up.
Banks are puckering. Fed Reserve no longer buying their loans the banks issued, so banks have to sit on whatever loans they made and hope the borrower repays. Defaults are fairly low still, but ticking up, and so are delinquencies. And lots of individuals and other companies have variable rate loans. So as interest rates go up, the ability for these folks to repay become more difficult.
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@williamprior7831 To scammers and those in the wrong in a dispute, I certainly hope it's very visible.
Let's face it, Adam Smith is used today as away for a few elites to convince the unwashed masses to hand over their democratic power to form agreed upon rules of a market in the exchange of goods and services.
Their propaganda has scored a many brainwashed individuals; cult members now, that if JP Money Bags were to demand that people ought for the sake of freedom take a mallet to their groin region with swift and full forcing strokes, they would indeed take part in destroying their private regions.
What banks have done; all of them private in most nations, all in the US and this includes other financial institutions, is to make them seem so essential beyond that of basics of food, shelter, water, medical, education, security, etc. that they must be provided for even when they poor investment or bad accounting, etc.
That there is no hope without their private banks... that they can't just be taken over as they indeed can be, even in the US by the FDIC; all depositors up to an amount are made good on their deposits, encouraged to continue to bank there, loans are still under obligation to be repaid, and the entire defunct bank is sold or spun off to another existing bank capable of handing the deposits and loan portfolios of the defunct bank for long term operations.
What was done in 2008 to salvage a bankrupt banking system was absurd.
The best method was probably to nationalize them, mark to market all principle loans for individual mortgages and developers to both allow people to afford to stay in their homes, and developers to continue building homes as it wasn't housing glut problem but an affordability inflated housing pricing bubble via fractional reserve lending in concert with other banks to appraise higher and higher principle loans to make up for diminishing returns on lower and lower interest rates as well as make large principles loans that could be spun off and sold to other firms for immediate profits and free up more reserves for more pumping lending, make good on all deposits, ensure credit availability to all businesses particularly payroll accounts.
Once all the misdeeds were adjusted: home prices and other artificially inflated prices of things perhaps including student loans and auto loans, were readjusted to that of real term affordability un-inflated via the pump up by banks on these appraisals; the government would then spin off the massive accounts into private credit unions and banks; re-institute various rules so that these banks function as solvent enterprises for deposit banking and lending; keeping separate more risky commercial deposit banking that is geared toward more risky investments such as stocks, commercial/junk bonds, etc.
And of course, a housing program to ensure buildings of multi-dwelling and individual units were added to supply commensurate with that of the growth of the population; knowing full well that the fractional reserve pump that added to some housing wasn't adequate to the growth of the population:
Construction starts per 1,000 households from 1960 to 2017 including single family and multi-family houses:
1960-65 peak 29.0 units
1970-75 peak 35.3 units
1975-80 peak 26.8 units
1983-88 peak 20.0 units
1990-94 peak 15.0 units
1995-2000 peak 16.0 units
2001-05 peak 18.2 units
2006-10 peak 5.00 units
2011-17 peak 9.5 units
As you can see the so called housing boom wasn't the amount created peaking at just 18.2 units... half that of 1960-75, and well short through into 1988.
It was and always was an affordability issue.
In fact, fewer homes were made at any time during that past several decades to that of the population.
A major housing program was indeed required as the private system was insufficient as historical norms would dictate: early 1880 to 1930 shortage of housing almost totally privately supplied gave way to slum lords and districts and shanty towns in many areas of the country.
Prior to 1880 from 1863 Home Stead Act and Land Grant Acts both provided free land and grant money to build on those lands.
National Housing Act of 1934 provided increased developmental grants for modern housing (electricity, water, sewer, etc.).
National Housing Act of 1937 increased this providing even more funds to local public housing agencies to develop land: roads, sewers, electrical works, water works, etc.
Housing Act of 1949 increased even further construction of public housing where costs were not affordable without, and where it was mortgage insurance for private borrowing to purchase a house, and many other financing of other dwellings including farms, building techniques, and urban renewal projects to take dirt floored shanty towns into properly constructed houses.
The unfortunate turn of events with both the repeal of Glass-Steagall act via the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 allowing deposit banks to become "creative" and mingle with commercial riskier financial activities, and the year prior Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, that defunded public housing, created the useless section 8 voucher program, and placed more people into debt beyond their abilities to repay than those who could and gave limited to no regards into price affordability and control to supply housing via the Hope IV program
Was a pure dismantling of helpful market rules for housing and financial markets in favor of a few, and in a short decade period, reinvented the great depression economic collapse style with the even less supply output of housing and even higher prices; turning into an insolvent wreck and a fortune to a few.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
Markets have existed since time immemorial.
They are by concise definitions a forum whereupon people with agreed upon rules meet to exchange goods and services.
At no point are they necessarily free or not free. The entire premise is meaningless... markets often were in the trade of un-free slaves or indentured servants, or came with various price to admission even today it costs to lots of money to trade directly on the floor of the NYSE, etc. The necessity of some items including food and water and shelter were dire and inability to make an exchange meant life or death. And there have always been agreed upon rules such as time and place, disclosure requirements, prohibition on threat or use of violence, dishonesty, bribery, etc.
The phrase free markets is as meaningless an utterance as telling someone to go north of the north pole.
Key point is that markets are first and foremost built upon agreed upon rules.
Therefore the propounding of free markets or less regulation is only the outcry of a few who would want to strip you of a democratic power to make such rules of markets, that you hand them over willingly so they may make the rules. And these few will make the rules indeed in favor of themselves, at the detriment of you, every moment they can.
"Free market" mantra is a con to swindle the power of the people to participate in the rule making process.
Pure and fucking simple.
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Roger, this system is corrupt. You can work very hard and smart within bounds of legality and not get anywhere. Many of these assholes likely didn't. Even if all of them did hundred millionaires and higher wealth individuals only constitute 0.1%... many lotteries have higher chances of winning a large sum of money than becoming that rich.
In addition, the very system that allows for those to accumulate that much finite wealth and its income is destructive to everyone else. It causes a vicious cycle toward similarities that ended old economic and political systems like slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, etc.
In the long run, its demand destructive.
It's cute you mention moving to some other country, as if its that simple to up and move and work in another country... one is where they are because of friends and family. Do not contest that I should leave my country, otherwise all we get is the counter... no why don't you leave for Cuba or where ever. And nobody is arguing for authoritarian Stalin/Mao brand government and their phony communism. We're talking about real social/capital mixed market system that creates prosperity for all of us.
Becoming super rich is not an indication of being a better person (smarter, work harder, some how have better morality) it's actually more of an indication that you either got super lucky either inheriting a fortune which is 90% of such wealth holders or happened on a legit business that happen to have high demand, did something immoral (Zuckerburg stealing the ideas from those who commissioned him to write the software), or simply lied, stole, and otherwise abused their way harming others to gain their fortunes; findings are that most higher income peoples' pathology tend to be psychopaths.
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Last year there was a lot chicanery involving meme stocks... not an extremely coordinated pump and dump, but the volume of buy limits that would pulse thru would indicate large money would (as with btc and other crypt too) would buy up huge amounts of on a block order pumping the stock, it would wayn a bit in price usually to 50% or less retracement and another pulse of a big block buyer extending the move to 100% sometimes 168% and sometimes even to the 240isth% fib extension. Large sell orders would get places at the very top in the order books as I suspect the big money was hoping scalp up the cream at ever higher prices.
IF the stock had option contracts they would also force gamma squeezes... and this was largely on smaller cap names early to mid 2021... but latter part of 2021 this same thing hit large caps like Amazon and AAPL... I played a long following these pumps... and I would quickly dump if it was more of an in an out trade (same week latto expirations). And typically there would be a very big retracement down when the pumping was done. The Amazon pump was particularly obvious that it wasn't small money forcing the gamma squeezes (buying the call options slightly out of the money) because the stock was $3K (before the big 10 for 1 split), and the call premiums that close to the money (slightly out of the money) was still often 28.00 to 30.00 x 100 option premium or 2,800 to 3,000 per option contract... and the volume that would get bought was often 6,000 to 10,000 contracts in a single minute... that's not even your typical margin day trader who has a $200K to 2 million account to trade typically the futures and perhaps a few other underlying stocks/options; keep in mind these are same week expirations, sometimes on Thursdays expiring the next day Friday... or the very same day.
Recently, this year, some UOA, can't remember the name, but lots of either puts or calls (can't remember the betting direction), but over $300K in premium paid for same week expiration. Next day a big news event sent the stock moving. The commentator I watch had circled that one on some of the UOA the day prior, and the very next day when the stock soared he laugh, hmm now this was an obvious insider trade, and gave a suggestion to whoever did it to make it less obvious, don't buy same week expiration contracts, perhaps spread them a bit at least go out a few weeks if not a month or or two and spread them around a little. Perhaps hedge them with a few opposite direction plays to at least make it seem like you don't have insider information that this news would drop. And his mantra, but they don't care, the SEC is still in a coma.
Perhaps the SEC is finally waking up from their coma?
Or this was just a yawn?
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Just got what I thought was my cable bill... it was a notice that my cable is going up $15 bucks more a month because my "old plan isn't offered anymore" LOL!
Prices sky rocket... because they monetized the give aways to corporations via junk bond purchases and QE bond and mortgage junk and lower interest rates... tax on the poor inflationary monetizing the debts...
Just as they lowered corporate those permanently under Trump, and higher bracket tax rates lowered.
Deficit spending prior to the pandemic. When these corporations were making more money than ever.
Come to the pandemic, most businesses are making more money than ever. The richest Americans have increased their wealth and income buy 50%.
The structure of our economy is ridiculous. And they fret on NPR and other outlets about whispers that we might end up in civil war soon.
We peons the 95% of the people have exactly 0% influence on law.
We're absolute plutocracy.
And we're not suffering the same effects of it as the world did about 100 years ago... it gave us murderous gangsters like poop stash in Germany, bug eyed bald moose face in Italy, walrus gangster of Russia, fat mole face in China, murdering weasel in Spain, etc. etc. etc.
This time we have technology that has immense power to literally change the climate for several decades that could cause famine and destruction leading us into a deep dark age around the world.
We have to do something to complete clear out the aristocracy. They've become completely dangerous.
Some are flat out frauds like Musk and several others. Others are using same should tired tactics of monopoly horizontal and vertical: Amazon and Google and Walmart. Some simply use their IPO and junk bond status to buy up potential threats of competition, that fortunately only lasts for so long though FB.
The robber barons really did come out hellbent on revenge against all of the various market policies that ensured majority of people also benefited from technological advances not just a few of the aristocracy.
At this point, no aristocracy should be allowed. They serve no function whatsoever other than to extort, to exploit, to murder, to impose their will over everyone.
At this point, politics is a futile sport. It's over for 95% of us. We have no voice. As we fall deep in to depression, which is almost inevitable, we will need to look for our force to erase the structure that has brought us here, understanding fully we cannot install gangsters, any elites whatsoever. That only via democracy in government AND most importantly this time even through business enterprise it must be a co-op democratic style system.
Only via democracy can we achieve a long lasting prosperity for all, and not hope the king and nobility at the top will poop out turd nuggets we can munch and pretend it's tasty treats while festering in cholera and E Coli puking our guts out in illness, ringing our hands like brainwashed sociopath buffoons that we too are aristocracy in waiting; and boy will we make rain for ourselves when we achieve the deceit.
It's over man.
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John Oliver can be funny, but he can be rather wrong several shows in the past. One show he promotes having more party choices, but demonstrating our current political system is a joke in order to have them, it also hit on gerrymandering and how many ballets have uncontested candidates.
He did a show about how "wacky" third party candidates are suddenly after formerly promoting them, and how insane Jill Stein was about providing universal education and healthcare that it's some wacky idea, despite the fact he's from a country that does both. Grant it, the method touted may not be the cleanest that Stein advocated, just have the Fed buy the debt, and then write it off, which would likely need congress to do such a thing, not just the Fed. Bad debts bought by the Fed went into liquidation bankruptcy and then written off.
He's just another disconnected millionaire talk show host out of touch with the working class: us who work for a living and if we make on average for 40 years the current median individual income of $31,099, would $1.243 million for a lifetime of work, they make in a fraction of a year.
And that median lifetime income takes in consideration the first 10 years maybe lower than median income, next 20 years maybe not quite or just there, moments of unemployment, and final decade hopefully higher than median income to bring that average 40 years to $31,099 which usually isn't the case as US income volatility is severe at 34% experiencing income changes with that being as severe as 49% income loss to 56% income gain.
So you're total income is likely to be slightly shy of the individual $1.243 million income over your lifetime in present value.
Again, these talking heads and entertainment clowns, some actors, some musicians, etc. make several lifetime earnings in present value in a fraction of a year.
They're utterly removed from our experience. So of course they have their slants and want to protect their master of the world apple cart.
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A province in Canada put a 15% tax on foreign real-estate bubbling because exactly as she mentions is a method of laundering money as well as a sign of the collapsing economic structure world wide (they don't trust any other assets other than physical assets like housing).
The laundering is big because many of these countries like China and Russia, it's actually illegal in their own countries for taking money out their country for investments etc. They're desperately seeing capital flight out of their own countries, foreign direct investment as the commodity bubble cratered and now the manufacturing sectors are following in this slow motion 10 year build up one, two, three collapse; some people in China caught laundering money out of the country that happened to be in China have been "vanished".
Anyway, the housing crisis is big. Smacks at physiocratic feudalism. Europe struggled through this as it struggled through throwing of the chains of feudalism; so decent built projects, and strong rent controls in many nations there ensure affordability pinning no rent above 20% of the median take home pay; or even marking certain locations at a particular price while adding to supply both building and providing subsidies.
They're avoiding the problem of rent seeking, and vapidity of a boom bust system that completely utterly misallocates resources into bad locations to build, un-usability (too large of units means utilities are too pricy, too small of units means nobody wants to live in one), and sadly many of the misallocation of resources goes completely to waste; real-estate if a building is abandoned for too long, upkeep can render a building useless and must be demolished or nearly the same price of initial building renovated.
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Nuclear is the only option for the energy density we need.
Wind and solar is way way insufficient.
And there are appropriate plans for safe nuclear power. China started in 2014 a 10 year plan to research various thorium reactor methods like LFTR. Advantages is that these plants cannot go in to melt down. The fuel is already molten liquid, and should the temperatures become too hot at the core, a solid core of fuel would melt at a plug drain area that would then allow the molten fuel to run into a drip tank to later be reused once the reactor core was drained.
And meltdown explosion impossible as the chambers require no pressure.
In fact, current uranium plants could be designed so that a pressurized core isn't necessary thus eliminating a pressurize explosion that comes with a meltdown. Currently the reason why older uranium plants blow up during a meltdown is that these plants require the core to be under pressure or pressurized. This isn't necessary. Techniques are available both in uranium fuel plants or the proposed thorium plants to not need the core to be pressurized at all. Eliminating a pressurized explosion that accompanies a meltdown event. Meltdown event happens when the core becomes too hot and the solid fuel rods literally melt... the fuel rods are suppose to stay solid. The temperature of these melted rods and exceed the containment melting points, so they melt through one containment area and continue to drip and melt through to other parts, pressurization stacks up at the core exceeding the max pressure causing an explosive decompression.
So there is a safe method of delivering nuclear power. And it is the only option.
Fusion power even safer leaving no waste behind is still decade or more decades away: ITER and Wendelstein 7x experiments very promising. But timeline is at least a decade away for anything useful.
LFTR thorium eliminates over 90% of the waste as it would reuse and split the very radioactive waste, and this uses more of the nuclear material... whereas the current uranium plants only are able to use 1% or so of the fissile material, these would be able to use closer to 99%.... the only waste that could stack up would be fissile material that's harder to split the nucleus (high cross section) like cesium... which acts to absorb neutron barbdoment, and doesn't easily split to it's decay products... so it has to be reduced out of the liquid salt fuel and added into the core at smaller amounts... cesium decays into barium... eventually the final decay products are lead. So these LFTER methods nearly eliminate all waste.
The energy density and efficiency of a LFTR reactor:
A marble size of thorium would produce one American their lifetime supply of energy needs based on how much energy the average middle class American uses today.
Several other nations, not just China, have undertaken thorium reactors both LFTR and solid thorium reactors.
Denmark Seaborg Technologies has a plan to build first prototype 2025 just 3 years from now.
Fuji MSR graphite design fuel salt is working with Oak Ridge and Norway... was a Japanese Russian and US consortium. Still ongoing.
Integral MSR Canadian based company Terrestrial Energy plans to have their first plant operational by 2030.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx
The safer uranium and thorium plants are something that can be done with half a decade. I just hope it isn't too late.
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Thus yet another example well before the overt idiocy of Trump, the right wing politics and even neo liberal politics have no principles.
They're only purpose is to get what they want. Motives need not apply.
But it usually involves getting whatever it is they want.
Any logic or principles or motives they promote is theater, propaganda to convince the ignorant to give them what they want.
They have no principles. There are no logical consistencies that underlie their desires. No moral necessities or philosophical structure.
Simply they want what they want. And fuck off.
This in many aspects goes with some of their flock, they want what they want: fuck everyone else.
They'll skew their actual desire with bogus pretenses. Feigning various values such as family values, stability, patriotism, loyalism, conservationism, spirituality, religiousness, liberty/freedom, etc.
But the moment they demonstrate they have no real family values, show no loyalty to others nor patriotism as they form militia and scream for their weapons so they may rebel against such an entity whenever they don't get what they want, liberty for them even if it deprives others of the same, freedom for who, religion so long as its acceptable religion to my religious beliefs and spirituality:
Summing up to the complaint: it's my Nanny state, not yours!
Is their underlying principles.
I want what I want, if it fucks you, so what.
Hypocrisy isn't a term strong enough to describe their principles or lack thereof.
Neo liberal policies are much the same. But feign understanding of those being fucked. While really not carrying one iota, so long as they too get what they want when they want it... don't worry we have plan for you too... but we have to ask the other side first what that plan is permitted to be: other side?
Right wing side: Hidden hand! Let the market figure it out! Oh, and ensure you place liquidity within the banking system, we're all out.
Where was I? Oh yes, hidden hand! The "market" will fix it all for labor class, I mean labor pool, I mean people!
Neo Liberal side: Okay! Hidden hand! And here's your money financial sector.
You heard it folks, we did our best! The hand will soon grasp you and give you he old rub down. We've been promised.
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I played with the stuff starting Feb 2021... when the meme stock nonsense and doggy coin (my dad calls it douche coin, I get a kick out of that), all was mooning.
Realized from stocks to this garbage crypto fake money nonsense was in an idiot bull market... so thought why not put tiny (literally just a few hundred dollars) and play with it which I hadn't done ever prior. I knew and used torrent files... a decade ago when it had a point; file sharing usually other games and movies... but you don't need to do that anymore. So torrent file structure apparently went toward this crypto nonsense.
Anyway, I traded the garbage too. Made some profits, just looked left and bought on dips... and had limit orders at various areas of resistance.
I moved BTC and other stable coins from tether to circle from one exchange wallet to another, even setup a tiny mining thing to see what it was like mining the garbage.
Payment processing fees to move money from one wallet to another ranged from real money $1.20 to as high as $100... and time it took for BTC validation could take 9 hours and for just 3 validations 5 days... one exchange originally posted you had to have 7 validations from the blockchain before you would get that credited to your trading account, but just after 3 validations they just gave me access to trade the junk on their exchange. I checked 2 weeks later to see how many validations, and it still was only 3. Which was funny. Not enough independent mining nodes even in 2021 at the height of the stupidity to validate the garbage.
My conclusion on intrinsic worth of crypto was that it indeed was worthless. Trash. Worse than trash, as you have recycling potential. None in this stuff. Literally game of chickens or greater fool principle. So long term was bearish... only playing day trades.
By luck and some other youtube TA trader salamis, I had cashed out profits and waited for a big dip going into May/June 2021... which happened.
Over that summer 2021 I read about tether, terra luna, Celsius, Twinkle Toe Twins gemini, etc. essentially all open scams even at that point in time.
That's when I confirmed that no FDIC or SIPC on any of these "exchanges", that in fact by US law they were only considered payment processors not exchanges.
My conclusions that summer of 2021, it's all a big cluster mug of scams, and how dare the FTC and the SEC and the DOJ allow this obvious cluster of scams to just go on.
Took all my real money off Coinbase and Bittrex and another one... and haven't bothered trading crypto again.
Figured, sure, you could score big... but these "exchanges" are all part of the fraud, so good luck withdrawing your real money gains or any real money for that matter.
If you want to play risky trading games, you can do so with risky stocks and/or options... at least if you win big, you'll be able to withdraw and keep those proceeds
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Unfortunately, the banks aren't even that regulated since, particularly in the USA, the banks are literally regulated by the... (drum roll please) the banks: Fed Reserve is a private banking cartel. Hence why the massive bank failures, essentially all banks, especially the biggest banks, were all toast, bankrupt, but debasing currency aka quantitative easing, printing money to bail the banks out of their bad loans via debasing currency, was a thing.
So really... even the banks aren't really that regulated.
I mean even the SEC has given up regulating securities... with judges who have the intent to only bailing out the oligarchs too, last crypto judgement was rather humorous as E Holmes conviction on financial fraud charges, but acquitted on medical fraud and harm to patients, the XRP case the judge said it's okay for the crypto casinos to defraud retail with those tokens, but not when it involves XRP selling their worthless tokens to hedge funds and other institutional investors directly.
What we have is a system on the verge of stupidity collapse because the oligarchs want it all. And have levered themselves and the peasantry into vast amounts of debt. Hence why the big businesses want in early on as many Ponzi and pyramid scams as possible. It's a last ditch supernova set of stupidity... because the way this ends is either in massive hyper inflation or deflation. One or the other, both are bad news for the rest of us... and also for at least half the oligarchs too... they're playing a game of musical chairs.... and they know it... and if they don't play, they've already lost.
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They built the biggest fucking bubble in everything, anything was going to bust this shit.
Just last year they tried to raise overnight rates, and the stock market started tumbling, and had to reverse course, reducing overnight interest rates.
All autumn 2019 there were runs on repo market the Fed Reserve had to step in and offer money for assets (bank loans on their books) for short term liquidity (money) needs.
This entire run up was a mother of all fucking bubbles, it was already at the point of out of money to keep the juggling act going.
This is no surprise. You said it yourself this is a big fucking bubble.
And the fed reserve has probably lost complete control in monetary policy.
Think Japan 1989-90... they never recovered to their highs on the stock market and they've been at 0% overnight liquidity for a decade longer. If it weren't for Japanese huge social safety nets they would have had a huge 40 year depression. And despite many of Japan's business have a cozy sanctioned monopolies in their sector with the government, they were able to sort of hold on, but the younger generation are a ghost of any other generation.
This was the tinderbox that was bound to happen:
1) Mortgage debt now larger than 2008 peak
2) Credit card debt now larger than 2008 peak
3) Auto loan was $400 billion 2008 peak, now $1.2 trillion
4) Student loan was $400 billion 2008 peak now $1.2 trillion
5) Total business debt was $4.4 trillion 2008 peak now $9.6 trillion
6) Total stock market debt (margin debt) was $378 billion 2008 peak few months fell to $168 billion... now $700 billion and that debt margin causes bank calls to force debt to either put in more money on the shares they're borrowing or forces them to sell.
7) Credit Default Swaps on business CBO's like subprime default swaps, was $400 billion, is now $1 trillion. This is composed largely of fracking firms on oil and natural gas that's now in the red based Saudi Arabia and Russia flooding the market.
It's a 7 headed hydra that was bound to go bust. Debt fueled insanity and all put in the dumbest places in the economy imaginable.
There isn't much that can be done to save this economy, it's literally utterly bankrupt.
It's similar to why bitcoin nonsense is just that, almost the only way you can get money back from your bit shits is to use an exchange... to make sure you get your money and the buyer gets his bitshits.
Those exchanges are jugglers with insufficient bit coin and cash, meaning they're always facing possible busts; they don't really have the bit shit to sell to pay everyone.
It's the same with the financial system, there isn't enough literal money to cover all the bogus "asset" prices: stock price, building, home, commodity prices.
There is no real liquidity. It's all papered over with the juggling act of more and more debt. And becomes more and more difficult to juggle all that debt with the amount of money.
Doesn't help stock market record margin debt, but also historic company purchasing their own stock for short term stock price jump up, and some of these companies were literally borrowing to buy their own stock.
And there is so much rob Peter to pay Paul, you can't press pause.
That entity needs to pay that entity so that entity can pay that entity so that entity can also pay that other entity... it's a big domino. Pause literally makes the entire thing fall apart even faster. Time value of money, it's all scheduled to be paid on time or somewhere the chain breaks... everything is setup on auto pay and when it's disrupted nobody gets paid down the line... delayed payments causes entities to find cash: they sell assets, prices on those assets, and so does everyone else along the fuck train: they all have to do the same.
In fact, that's what just a small disruption causes that very pause.
This is a combo of the virus and Saudi Arabia and Russia... it all falls apart... the tinderbox.
As far as having the election:
DNC nor RNC cares. They don't really count the votes. And hardly nobody shows up anyway... total RNC and DNC primary shows historically on average is about 14% of eligible voters.
And the mainstream local media as well as national media already accidentally in Illinois displayed the vote tally they made up ahead of the election and declared Biden winner.
We live in the Twilight Zone?
Well, really you just got a peak at the old naked senile man behind the curtain.
We've in in the Twilight zone probably since you and I were born in the 80's and probably well before that.
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This short term sugar rush of buying via stock buy backs only perk the price up long enough for stock options and warrants (pieces of paper that have claims of adding new shares to the float when a given stock price is achieved) to cash out all over everyone holding the shares for longer term heads'. After all these purchases are done, the gamma squeezes on call options sold naked by market makers, market makers suddenly forced to get into the buying frenzy to cover their call options add to the short term buying pressure, also you have short term traders who pile into buying the shares on a "breakout" trade, lead the stock price up higher and higher, you as an average median income investor in your 401K and/or personal brokerage account allocating some savings to investment dollar cost averaging or buying a few shares here and there, end up buying at wildly high bogus prices... that suddenly when all the idiocy is over, stock buyback period is done, the gamma squeezes of market makers and all the short term traders have cashed out, the momentum to the upside ends, and the prices fall back to normal trading pressure aligned with the fundamentals of the company... the stock prices plunges. And you may have bought a few shares on the pump only to hold them still during while the dump plunges the prices down.
Further more, this type of activity adds no value to investors or to employees over the long run. The funds from profits or borrowing to buy back stock didn't make the business more competitive: R&D or build more retail, or better machines, or pay workers better thus get more form workers to produce higher quality and/or more of something... it didn't even act to diminish in any meaningful way the float of shares like a stock 1 share for 2 share reversal, float 100 million shares outstanding turns into 50 million shares outstanding and all things being equal if traded for $25 a share, would immediately become $50 share... but your 100 shares at $25 or $2,500 turns into 50 shares at $50 still $2500. These reversals or splits in stock float don't add value.
And certainly these buy backs also don't add any actual real value.. it's an accounting trick on the reversal and splits.
And on the buy backs, these buybacks usually account for as little as 0.1% to 1% of the floated stock outstanding.
Yet the immediate buying frenzy introduced in the short term can cause the stock price to jump significantly higher 10% to 100%... only to fall back down again erasing all that dubious momentum.
This type of activity was mostly prohibited until the 1980's. As it was known this pump and dump scam added absolutely no value to shareholders or workers or consumers alike.
It was only allowed if the business was interested in going private buying back all publicly trades shares floating, or buying back a significantly quantity 50% or so to reduce the shares outstanding rather than doing a stock reversal. And using leverage/debt to perform this task was often discouraged as this smacked at literally a pump and dump scam. Literally sadding the company up in a worse condition to pump a stock and sell into that pumped up price in a very short period, only to then have the share price fall back down, and the company be saddled with more debt liabilities, being in worse financial condition than before the pump the subsequent dump.
This is something that should be dealt with rather quickly. Among ending deposit banking and commercial banking involved with equity and options speculation As well as prohibiting elected officials to actively trade stocks when they often have exposure and close discussions with affiliates to or directly to public traded companies on news that isn't public yet, thus insider trading, as well as their conflict of interest, it is often their final decision on various contracts by the government or introducing and/or voting on a favorable law to any particular business.
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DNC must back Bernie.
Means they must match their platform in policies to his.
Otherwise, they can fart wagon off.
Match most of the western countries of Europe and many of the Eastern European countries and Japan.
1) Universal healthcare.
2) Universal education with option for worker allocation with trades apprenticeships work training.
3) Diminish trade reliance on human rights violating nations like China, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. And rebuild our share of global GDP.
4) Put into law 30 day vacation requirement for companies over a set size in workers, or revenue of the businesses.
5) Restart home and apartment building fund to construct more homes and apartments to get supply to actually catch up with pent up demand so that renting and home ownership is affordable.
6) Enact secure retirement for workers by either mandating 10% to 15% minimum required contribution on the gimmick of a 401K with immediate vesting period, or require pensions to be established with 3 year vesting periods.
7) Enact affordable living wage $15.00 as it stands now.
And my own policy, not sure what Bernie's take is on it.
8) Enact a Co-operative Reserve Bank; that lends to small and large new, and old businesses in established co-ops.
9) Buy out to co-op option; if a firm decides to ship a particular production overseas, allow the employees to vote on approval, if it is denied by workers, the workers immediately get to co-op charter that portion of the business being lent money at discount interest from the Co-op Reserve Bank. Bring democracy to take over the currently tyrannical corporate cesspool that has most wealth and its income going to the top 1%. That has made stagnant over the past 20 years wages/salaries to the 80%, while seeing top 1% soar many times over.
Stop the current wealth and its income distribution, the bleeding. Bottom 90% of Americans has been falling steadily for 25 years, hitting 22.8% in 2016 from 33.2% in 1989.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/the-top-1-percent-of-americans-now-control-38-percent-of-the-wealth.html
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I'm somewhat for it, but I don't like the problems it would face similar to social security ie. cuts and meaningless amounts to begin with that don't keep up with inflation.
I think a more likely method to pass in our country is establishing a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank similar to the Fed Reserve, but that it lends at discounts directly to groups forming or want to form or change to a special co-op business that cannot be traded or IPO'd, that employees all have voting rights on all aspects of the business from board members, leadership, management, and proposals on all aspects of the business including budgets, etc.
In this way, capital formation comes from discounted borrowing by this special Reserve which would have regional divisions and branches that would analyse the viability and credit of the groups apply for such loans and formation of such enterprises.
This changes the problem we have where all profits go to a few elites which enjoy all productivity gains from technology advancements. Currently, for profitable enterprises only 5% to 20% of profits when you count all employee costs (wages, insurance, 401k/pensions, payroll matching taxes) as profits.... so quite literally you could double such compensation with profitable companies would still walk away with 10% to 40%.
Pensions would come back, the gimmick of the 401K may remain, but only as it was intended, a tax dodge for a small supplemental savings scheme for retirement.
And those profits are after deducting capital expenditures... you say, well they would invest it back into the company... no. Most business don't. They literally turn it over as dividends and/or buy back stock.
The point of Fed Reserve Co-Op Bank (FRCOB) is to be able to lend large capital so that co-ops can actually get capital in the first place that is in more sectors than retail... they can enter telecom, ISP, mid and large scale manufacturing, mining and refining, etc. All require large capitalization (lots of money). FRCOB provides that funding and at a discount just by virtue of being a Federal Reserve, able to buy treasury bonds and print currency similar to how Fed Reserve Bank does for all FDIC insured banks. You have a method of capital formation other than form an aristocracy.
A basic income didn't even work well in Finland with their test, and they're as liberal as it gets. I link an article that supports it despite the failure of it in Finland... my point is that installing a Co-Op Reserve Bank and formation of these Employee owned and operated co-ops would be much easier to get passed than an universal income system. And I personally think, changing from a corporate structure to co-op structure would actually be better than any universal income... people would get more income... likely double of today's median income... and much better pensions, actually 3 to 4 week vacation after a very short probationary period, and likely less hours too... particularly when these enterprises become profitable... because fellow workers who have each one vote regardless of their title, isn't going to see all those profits go bye bye into a few peoples' hands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/universal-basic-income-finland.html
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Problem is our disgusting turnout rates... nationally and state level.
West Virginia the state’s 1,245,849 registered voters, 593,900 cast ballots either Tuesday or during the state’s early voting period, representing an overall turnout of 47.67 percent this midterm. About what is estimated to be this midterms nationwide turnout... last two mid terms were about 37%.
And our last presidential election was only 55% nationwide.
Must get more people to turnout. Culture treating voting like drudgery of jury duty, allows for corruption. Doesn't help that we have a rather bogus two party system, and gerrymandered districts, quite literally the office holders of these seats draw the district lines... something that would be considered utterly corrupt in any other nation.
But then again, 173 out of 201 nations, not having a national universal healthcare system is corrupt, and especially the elderly medicare and disability medicaid system that doesn't negotiate Rx prices is utterly corrupt... like allowing the wolves to guard the hen houses.
If more people voted, got off their asses, stopped playing the woo is me, my state is always red or blue self-fulfilling prophecy act, the corrupt could be broken, and we as a nation can start having nice things for a change, instead of being treated like a mob of people the oligarchs parasite from.
Until we get 76% or higher turnout, we'll be doomed to ever increasing corruption until the entire country ends in some weird long drawn out malaise and/or sudden collapse.
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Franchises are the worst.
1) You have to buy the franchise over priced supplies.
2) You have to set price points to what they demand.
3) Often Franchise loan is provided by the franchiser with an underwriting bank at a ridiculous interest rate.
4) Often there is a Franchise Fee either a fixed amount, or usually a percentage of sales payment... and remember you're buying their over prices supplies, and likely paying their over prices loan interest payments.
When I worked at the water utility in Boise, one of my jobs were processing bankruptcies so we wouldn't shut water off for non-pay and know what amounts we could legally collect... McDonald's and several other fast food and other franchises constantly in Chapter 11... and a constant trickle that would eventually go chapter 7... a McDonald's location finally went Ch 7 and poof vacant around 2015... still vacant today. Retail though since 2011 has been weird... I worked until 2017 at the water company, lots of new retail, but they would exist for a year sometimes less and Ch 11... then 7... then poof gone. Lots of retail space empty. Those weird Mattress Firm places literally built across the street from each other brand new buildings... we speculated if they were a front for money laundering... well they're now in Ch 11.... they're not a franchise... but some other goofy initial public offering scam. Retail itself gets goofy.
Franchises, though, are a racket unless you do your own financing, have extremely good locations, and are allowed to find cheaper suppliers... and you need more than one or two locations, you need several locations in a large area and an agreement with the Franchise of a non-compete for any other Franchise within 40 miles... good luck getting those terms or having that ability.
Otherwise, you're better off with a startup operation.
And now we discover, the Franchise model not only fucks the franchisee, but the workers too.
Fuck that model. It's parasitical multi-level marketing gimmick fucking everyone over most of the time, only to their benefit.
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No, I want them to pull the trigger and blow up the entire world.
Then have Indy explain how the case is that we're all here. Get into some weird causal reality splitting into different pieces to which we can observe all possible eventualities... something that makes us think he's been dipping into the absinthe during his social distancing.
He can get into it, with his gestures flipping over in his desk, really screaming about whatever, and at some point tipped over at his desk feet in the air he starts using his feet as feet puppets. Getting to a climax of whatever, screaming and quick gestures, he pauses... pops up from the desk in some insane outfit as he passes through many probabilities of himself... one as a cross dresser, another as a beach bum living in Hawaii, another as a hippy of the 60's, another as a business tycoon with a monocle gone coke addict, etc. until BOOOM BAMM... Indy Neidell here, your host on Time Gost, and you the viewer, and this how we came to be here in this year 2020!
Thank you all, all of us together for taking that ride down the history of histories!
But the twist... are we really back to our original reality, the one that we enjoyed before he told us about the causal refraction splits after the Cuban Missile Crisis? As any acknowledgement and demonstration of such a causal split, as Indy will have explained, alters the causal reality you are in, shifting it to a different one...
in the background a cage with what looks like a parrot, but on the bird's body is Spartacus's head to which he smiles and gives a wink and with his normal human voice asks: "Polly want a cracker?"
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It's our 2019 enrollment.
I'm taking the high $3,000 medical deductible since I have $6,000 in an HSA already, and current employer contributes $500 thru the year to it $41.95 bi weekly paycheck. PPO dental covers up to $1500 and no deductible. For 3.89 a bi monthly paycheck. Added a 60% "buy" up for long term disability. And $180K accidental death and dismemberment since I can live thru it its maxed out at that coverage, for $3.24 biweekly paycheck.
Anyway page has totals:
My portion will cost me $50.54 biweekly.
Employer contribution biweekly paycheck is $210.72.
If we had a universal medicare for all at 5%, current medicaid/medicare is 1.45% for elderly and severely disabled, doesn't cover dental or vision.
A universal health system you would want cover head to toe, everything medical, dental, and vision the major 3.
So to cover everyone you could up it to 5% or even 7%, no copays nor deductibles.
It would cost the employer to match 5% on $2,000 biweekly paycheck only $100.00 Less than their $210.72 biweekly they're paying now... employer would save 110.72... I would pay more, but be covered completely, no copays, or $3,000 deductibles, no limits on dental, on this hair brain plan I or if I had a dependent must be under age of 20 to be able to use a 50% copay on orthodontist work, glad I got that done 10 years ago.
Universal medicare for all would not just cover medical only, but all medical expenses foot to head, as does all other countries with universal healthcare.
Even at 7% match on $2,000 biweekly the matching would be $140, still cheaper than employer is paying at $210.72, savings $70.72 biweekly.
And I would again be covered for everything. No extra out of pocket costs, no office or urgent care visit costs sometimes have to do to get refills on a cold sore Rx that literally consists of being weighed, blood pressure and pulse taken which costs $100.00 then the $4.00 a pill Rx for 20, so that's $80 for a filling for generics. I have found some online pharmacies approved in the US where I can get $60 tablets for $26.00, still need the Rx from a doctor.
It would eliminate medical insurance relegating it to just life insurance, accidental death and dismemberment, and long term disability insurance. Like other countries that have universal healthcare.
And would require the universal medicare for all program to negotiate and set prices, even be the supplier of last resort if all available producers are attempting to sell at extortion prices, margins well above competitive pricing, or those drugs that can never obtain an economy of scale pricing because too few people need the appliance or drug.
Right now, workers and employers are getting hosed by our moronic insurance system, and current medicare/medicaid program that cannot negotiate drug prices directly, but has to settle with regionally negotiated via insurance companies' prices.
Would require an end to medical patent protections, and require FDA to also perform medical trial studies to evaluate effectiveness and approve Rx and to take many medicines from Rx to over the counter status.
Let me highlight the absurdity to our Rx pricing as of now:
Cold sore medicine acyclovir cream has been available in several countries since the 1980's, the 5% acyclovir cream is over available over the counter in Germany, Amazon Deutschland is offering it for 8.33 Euros... in the US its Rx only, and its $840.00 https://www.drugs.com/price-guide/zovirax-cream
That's right $840... two orders of magnitude more expensive.
And in 2015, LA Times did an article about the same drug and price was at $2,000... for an over the counter antiviral medicine cream 5% acyclovir at 5 grams that in Germany costs $9.36 in USD, and is over the counter.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20150306-column.html
Madness of our system is so absurd that it's beyond obscene.
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Based on what the top rich people and various large pension funds and big brokers are doing though, they know its not; they've dumped stocks like the plague over the past 3 years; picking up other things bonds and money accounts that are backed by governments. Even real-estate is spooking them, something real, but they know can easily become worthless if its not kept up, and keeping empty buildings up is expensive. Why are stocks up... oh yes, corporate profits are going to buy backs. It's cheaper than paying dividends. Dividends are generally taxed as normal income (higher), while selling shares are taxed as capital gains: lower.
They know their boom day has it's doom day written on it.
Doesn't help the repo market just experienced lack of liquidity as a bunch of various funds bought a large amount of treasury bonds and paid some taxes. Banks didn't have enough to lend to each other over night to keep the house of cards in tact. So the NY Fed Reserve stepped in throwing over $53 billion dollars at them, and another $75 billion. This hasn't happened since the great recession.
This basically means there isn't that much real money in the system to cover all the banks liabilities (deposits) to pay stuff.
At a time that business debt is now more than double the 2007 peak of $4.5 trillion is now $9.5 trillion, mortgage debt surpasses 2007/8 high, credit card has for the past couple years surpassed the all time high, vehicle debt surpassed the $400 billion 2007 high now at $1.3 trillion, and then there's student loan debt that was roughly $400 billion, is now about $1.3 trillion.
What a repeat house of cards.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-crack-just-emerged-in-the-financial-markets-the-new-york-fed-spends-dollar53-billion-to-rescue-the-overnight-lending-market/ar-AAHr9oG
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/lowes-spent-billions-on-share-buybacks-zero-on-severance/ar-AAFHJRq?li=BBnbfcN
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To be fair, invention of splitting triple bond of nitrogen to produce nitrate fertilizers which is the same nitrates produces naturally via lightening is helpful. We would have already had severe famines in nations we consider wealthy, millions living with worse diseases and dying of simple diseases, worse economic situation overall due to the domino effect, and probably a few more wars between such nations than we have now.
The taste of your veggies come down to the species and when you pick them... some things picked too early will taste bland, and some things picked to late will taste bland even though they're huge... like strawberries.
Most fertilizers are used on crops that really consume nitrates like corn and soybeans, most veggies and fruits are not that fertilized with much nitrates at all... you can accidentally change the pH and make such fruits and veggies not grow... and killing orchards of cherries, pears, apples, etc. can ruin a farmer for half a decade or longer... so they tend to fertilize those with the local compost material (leaves, cow and horse dung).
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Social Security is government bonds specially non-traded because it's the most secure thing, stocks and other securities like commodities or real-estate are casino up down idiocy. Putting social security into other non-secure assets, makes it social insecurity defeating the point.
The big drivers of the debt is allowing companies and oligarchs to perform illegal acts of tax evasion, and a regressive social security tax cap.
And if they want to use the word entitled, then the entitled do nothing oligarchs and their cronies get passive income from dividends and capital gains from stocks, or if they own the company outright, they pay themselves a dividend instead of wage/salary forgoing any payroll tax, and the federal tax brackets on federal income tax, only paying the 15%-20% dividend/capital gain tax. Half of what a worker who makes $30K to $50K individual effective total tax excluding sales tax is about 31% to 37%, about effective 19% fed tax + 7.65% payroll tax + any state tax, in Idaho effective tax 7.2% = 33.85% for workers making 30K to 50k not including sales tax if applicable, in Idaho its 6% on all sales transactions.
But an oligarch stops paying 6.2% after 118K so the more money after, the less effective tax if they even make a wage/salary. Again most make their money via dividends and capital gains, which is 15% on the first $416K then the next amount above is 20%. No payroll tax, and many states don't tax dividends or capital gains.
Let me give an example on how ridiculous this is:
Someone who doesn't work collected $10 million dollars dividend/capital gains will pay an effective tax of 19.79%.
The worker who makes $30K to $50K tax pay effectively 33.85%. Effective wage/salary declines sharply after the social security cap is reached after income above $118K.
Talk about fucked up tax system.
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Luna is now 0.0071 USD as of 8:36PM 5/12/22.
And UST is at 0.14 USD as of 8:37 PM 5/12/22.
Complete collapse.
Next will be Tether. Then USDC... or maybe USDC?
The problem with Tether is that they're likely not backed at all by any real collateral... USDT has been pumping billions and then apparently "selling them" or "giving them" away to casino tether based margin exchanges that offer 100x leverage to trade other crytpo like BTC ETH or even Doge... ADA and many others.
This stable coin stupidity is a reserve currency inflation system that has caused the price of BTC and ETH and other crypto to go to the moon. So long as real money outflows don't kill the system and cause a run on the these stable coins.
Pyramid and Ponzi scheme. It's why BTC went from $100 to as high as $69K in 5 years.
It's an over leveraged pyramid scam... tether representing 80% of crypto liquidity.
And it's also why so many use USDT... to trade other crypto on these margin exchanges.. SEC has not approved any of these securities for contracts to short and long any crypto. But with a VPN and tether only trading exchanges like Bybit, Derbit, Binance, etc. several of them, they all trade in tethers... and often offer lots of "freebies" tethers to trade with, only so many of these poker chips go to Coinbase or Bittrex or the softer side of Binance or Kracken to be sold for real money.
And yes, Tether actually has to be sold on an exchange... tether does not redeem their tokens... you sell them.... what tether does do is occasionally come in on an exchange and wash trade buying up the ask order book when the price of a tether goes too far below $1.00000 USD.
So a run on tether is frankly inevitable. We can see all the exchanges and money flows... and net real money outflows have been persistent since August last year.
The pyramid scheme needs new real money inflows because there are simply too many tethers printed and not enough real money to cover them all.
Same with Circle coin... with exception at least last time I checked Coinbase does redeem for no commission fee USD to USDC 1 for 1. And back to USD from USDC 1 for 1.
Coinbase seems to be acting as a offloading ramp... and perhaps an onloading ramp for real money inflows and outflows from circle coin.
USDC also suffers similar problems as tether.. they've lied in the past. Claiming they had $1 for every 1 USDC. Later admitting and releasing a non-audited statement showing 60% of their tokens at that time were backed by USD and 40% was held in some other asset.
Both Tether and USDC since last summer have gone on a minting spree pumping billions of these things... the higher they've minted, the higher the price of ETH and BTC and other crypto coins.
It's a massive pyramid scheme.
As written in tether's own recent statements, they own some other crypto as collateral... probably lots of BTC as Tether also owns BitFinex their own crypto exchange. And they likely bought using their poker chips lots of BTC and since BTC on many real money exchanges are now selling BTC at the inflated prices... for now... they could sell some BTC and other crypto like ETH for real money to buy up the ask order book on USDT to USD real money exchanges to maintain the peg.
Again, this all requires all crypto to stay high as possible for sufficient collateral, and when a run happens, this causes tether to sell their crypto holdings further decreasing the funds they have available buy up order books to maintain the peg of USDT to USD.
A run on crypto in general or on tether... or both looking for the exit means they all go bust.
Same with Circle/USDC.
The entire thing is one big pyramid scheme... acting like their own fractional reserve lending... just without a government, FDIC or SIPC, or any other backstops.
They're a run on the bank pyramid scheme waiting to fall apart.
Terra was first.
Next, it will be one of these... it is thought that if BTC drops to $20K or so, that Tether will have a hard time to maintain the peg outflows as their collateral in BTC and other crypto will be insufficient with decreasing prices on that collateral to raise real money USD to use to buy up tethers on exchanges being sold for cash to maintain the peg.
When either those two fail, it will cascade and cause both stable coins to fail. And crypto in general BTC ETH will all collapse... we're already seeing this now with Terra/UST.
Will be epic. A 2 trillion dollar market cap scam over 15 years for Tether.
Get ready for some interesting stuff... and some lousy movies that for sure will be made about the entire stupidity.
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If you ever find yourself with the time you should take a few micro and especially macro economic classes. It's helpful in understanding the complexities of economies, as well as a philosophical discrete understanding to current and past thought on all economics. Fundamentally, it's no more difficult than learning elementary algebra, chemistry, geology, anthropology, astronomy, meteorology, or biology. But you'll find a stark contrast from those physical science, that economics in particular the details are not physical binary, but contrived philosophical science... philosophical in that various premises need to be supported by rational propositions.
You will be surprised too, that even today's policies and laws ignore all of economic study. Our policy makers and media ignore philosophical standpoint of even using various methods for discernment on regulations, or collective ownership (what should be privately owned, and what sectors should be collective and why, etc.).
That really current laws and policies have built an economic system that's floating off the cliff in some weird neo-liberal/con dogmatic form of stupidity as they don't even heed philosophical scientific economic analysis.
For yourself you may say, so then why bother learn the philosophy if they're not even using it themselves. But that's precisely why so many get away with economic dogma, nobody knows any better.
Learning economics will help you know better, and not be sucker.
Just like in any study, other's have asked the same questions: why's the sky blue? What causes the seasons? the tides? How does light work? What is energy? etc.
Others have long had the same economic questions, so they have already discretely defined and began sets of useful analysis. Learning it allows you to catch up and understand basic concepts, to help you think through the complexities of economics.
What I disliked about macro economics was that literally current used monetary policies are reactive (from Keynesian to Hayek, and Austrian is just let it bubble and blow up and crash and maybe you'll have a civilization worth living in, or maybe you won't who knows oh well, your nation should have horded more gold other precious metals.),
One can't actually predict much of anything, which is at the heart of the contradictory nature of a heavily capitalistic system, you only know disaster will happen, various markets will collapse, the business cycle will happen, crashes in the economy will happen, a recession will occur; then what do we do about patching it up.
Richard is good because he's cutting to the chase by saying why have an economic system that's so unstable and unfair in the first place? Why distribute so poorly that it crashes every 5 to 10 years. And every 30 to 50 years launches a great recession, and once every 100 to 200 years causes a complete breakdown in a nation often falling into civil war? And how do we go about building an economic system that democratizes more of our lives, perhaps in the workplace?
Just consider it, or you could just look up class sessions on the internet and youtube that should include topics of money supply in fundamental terms then branch out into various Modern Monetary Theories such as Marx, Keynesianism vs Monetarism (Hayek) vs Austrian, etc.
It's helpful to know too the idiot system you're in, so you can know what data to look for to make some thoughtful decisions on long term; how to setup your 401K, where should you live, should you take that promotion in that city or in the other city?
In general, it's handier than tossing a coin to make a decision.
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In our international economics class we learned about Maquiladoras, essentially sweat shops. We did a mock business plan based on one using NAFTA. And did several reports about various maquiladoras. At the end, our economic professor asked us what we thought of globalization and maquiladoras: did you think more positively or negatively.
We all unanimously though worse about this type of sweat shop trade.
We had to explain the macro effects: displaces our workers and theirs, and the new jobs in place are lower paid. So less demand will occur.
All she said was, "Oh, I didn't think about that, I just thought quality issues could be the only negative."
WTF? She's a fucking economic professor! This doesn't take that many classes to understand macro economics particularly virtuous cycles and vicious cycles.
It's an obvious race to the fucking bottom.
A beneficial trade is one with authentic comparative advantage:
1) They have know how and skill to produce more and/or of better quality.
2) They have a resources that is more abundant than the other country.
Inauthentic comparative advantage exists:
1) Dumping: when country either directly operates and supplies a good at a loss causing the other countries producers of that good to eventually go out of business: usually an incitement to use quota, tariffs, or embargo of that good.
2) Externality costs: they don't have an environmental, humanitarian policy and/or they don't enforce such policies that are near equal in strength: those policies being pollution, waste, sewer, etc. controls, and labor rights and civil rights.
Inauthentic comparative advantage known not be beneficial to the economy at large, and particularly harmful in the long run to the economy.
It's as if even economists all had lobotomy of the part of the brain which they stored their learning of economics.
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Two very well off people disconnected with most people struggling to figure out the reasons to the culture wars.
The culture wars have one reason: race to the bottom economics.
Rest of us, are economically in serious decline. And this is occurring globally.
The terrifying fringe is the disconnected 20% and the re-entrenching plutocracy bring back oligarchy robber baron nonsense.
So you have a violent side on the right and left develop once again, same thing occurred just a 100 years ago.
Let's hope the non-violent sense-able type break through to make actual meaningful change concerning race to the bottom economics: how do we ensure productivity is connected to wage as it's become completely disconnected since the late 70's, how do we bring about democracy in enterprise, how to prevent a new feudal landlord structure from forming (keep in mind in the US massive subsidized development of homes during the 1940's thru to the 1970's created new housing starts of 38 new constructions per 1,000, phasing all this we currently have 9 housing construction starts per 1,000 households) We have a fucking housing shortage.
These major changes are becoming more difficult to change as the very few continue to increase their economic power, and become more disconnected to the facts of this failed economic structure for everyone else. To these few minorities including to lower top 20% toady class, everything is wonder berries for them, things couldn't be better.
Just as robber barons and nobility in both the early 1900's and same in the late 18th century.
There is very little fringe on the democratic side. We tried running a centrist. It failed. 45% didn't bother to vote. Because neither party really speaks to the problems of the mass of people. We really have a one party system pretending to be a two party system.
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If you're trading on Robbin Hood or Webull or even TD Ameritrade and many others, most if not all your orders go to a dark pool exchange, not on the direct NASDAQ or New York Exchange.
It's among their ways they make their money "commission free". They sell your order flow... they get money for sending orders (us to buy and sell stock) to these dark pools to make a market for them.
They also make their money even if some orders get thru to NYSE or NASDAQ, they make money off your limit and market orders by taking both buyers and sellers from their own dark pool (everyone trading on their brokerage) and not initiating on your order unless the price on the NYSE or NASDAQ or dark pool is lower or higher than your limit order. And they really abuse market orders on this bid ask spread.
Example:
Buying:
You have a limit order for ABCDEFG stock for $10.00 on 50 shares. $500.00 order.
They will place you on the order book on their exchange at $10.00. Looks great.
And they will fill that order on the bid at or better so at $10 or less.
Now how they make their money.
They will initiate that order at a few basis points maybe smaller pips = $0.0001 plus or minus your limit order.
So you might not get exactly $10 limit, but an average of it. Or you'll get it at your $10 exactly per share.
But it doesn't get filled until it gets to a certain basis points discount or premium.
One example where you get in right at $10.00 per 50 shares:
They will fill your order when the ask meet to your bid is something like 9.96. So 4 basis points to which they will pocket.
This cost them $498.00
They then fill your order at $10 for the 50 shares, you pay $500.
They collect $2.00 spread.
Selling is similar but in reverse.
You want to sell your 50 shares at $10.00
Limit order is placed. All looks good.
How they make their money on the trade:
Price on the exchange increases just a few pennies (basis points) above $10.00 order is when they will fill the order.
So they sell the 50 shares at 10.04 or for $502.00
They then give you the proceeds of the $500.00 at $10 average price.
They keep the $2.00 spread.
And of course, various exchanges they send your trade or it gets filled by, the exchange pays them a rate of some sort for sending them order flow to build a market. Especially if they're limit orders, this helps make a market for their dark pools for other participants to be able to make better trades (these island exchanges) desire as many as possible to trading as traders on their dark pools want more participants; more participants means tighter bid ask spreads, and exchanges like this as tighter bid ask spreads means more trades are executed. More executed trades for them means more commissions and/or bid spread scalping.
Options require OPRA since 1934 as price distributor.
Participants plug into OPRA and send their bid and ask information to OPRA so OPRA can display in real time or as close to real time to the public... for a fee.
Participant exchanges are many from 4 spin offs of CBOE to Box Options Exchange LLC to Miax Emerald LLC to NYSE American LLC to NYSE Arca, Inc.
By law, you must be able to view OPRA prices between these consortium of exchanges.
Therefore you will always get fees from OPRA and SEC and the exchange you were sent. Webull gets a cut of this action for sending your options trade to NYSE American LLC or whatever exchange filled your order to match with bid/ask.
Therefore Webull doesn't necessarily and doesn't collect a commission; they sold you as market flow to an exchange to give their exchanges a market.
The problem becomes, when you're the product, Webull and the various exchanges they send you to, see all incoming orders and could really roast you on market orders and even limit orders. They could also delay your order, filling others that pay them more money instead of yours first... order flow by law is Price and then time at price of bid/ask.
You might be first to sell 10 cash secured put at $0.10, but some larger broker trading on NYSE American LLC pays a bigger commission or wants to sell more contracts at the same price suddenly.... maybe 50 contracts at that same $0.10. So they'll cheat and let them cut in front of you.
Which can suck, because now the stock price has risen, and the put ask is down at $0.09... nope now $0.05.
Your quick $100 buck premium trade is gone. :( sad.
They could ignore order flow by law, and that can be difficult to contest or know its even happening. And exchanges kind of know this. It's why paying for order flow was considered a taboo unethical thing for so long.
And reality, larger normal orders can actually cost the retail trader more than flat fee commissions and considering trades are executed at the exact true exchange bid/ask price then scalping bid ask spreads... this was also considered immoral as you're not giving them the true bid ask price... point of brokers is to get the best possible price at your limit order.
You just never know how much extra you're paying for your trades. As it's behind the bid ask spread.
They're hiding their fees. And your costs.
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Our system, if all national debt was paid off you would have hyper deflation since most money in existence is based on national bonds that come into existence due to deficit spending. Even if you exclude private debts, private debts is how most money is created in the first place in fractional reserve lending system called Money multiplier, creates most money in the system, but has a catch, there's never enough money to pay off all debts, so you would have massive defaults.
US the reserve amount is only 9% of bank deposits, so 91% maybe lent out... its a factor by 9.1 times more money due to fractional reserve lending, than what underlying money actually exists.
There's never enough money at one time to pay off all the debts, often government spending provides a cushion for lack of liquidity at any given time, and even has an emergency should any one bank have issue can borrow at a discount that essentially promises profits to banks, over night, and sometimes at longer periods to keep them liquid... enough cash to service deposits waiting for loans to be repaid.
Anyway, if government paid all deficits off, money supply to pay principle and interest would become insufficient, liquidity problem would occur, and many loans would go into default. Pressuring most banks into default themselves, runs on banks would occur particularly with depositors with more than the FDIC $250K insured amount.
And if everyone tried to pay of their private loans all at once, banks wouldn't have sufficient deposits on hand to repay all those loans, FDIC insures up to $250K, but generally has a budget limit that would need to be increased or removed by congress to continue FDIC on failed banks to pay deposits.
Our system is based on financial time value of money.
More people should understand how such a system works. No matter what system you have, there is always an element of time that changes that value of money.
What makes having a low national debt handy, is if the country for whatever reason wants to spend large sums of money into the economy, giant sums of GDP increase in spending without causing price distortions, having a lower debt to GDP ratio gives that wiggle room to do so.
The more government debt to GDP, the more harmful effects are possible when the government wants to spend more money... there's also the interest on such debt... servicing greater volumes of debt means a substantial amount of a national budget is tied up in paying principle and interest on rotating bonds... less money to use for actually spending into the economy (building roads, fire, healthcare, etc.).
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They want to be king... or rather a dukes and duchesses... king is too high profile and generally to high responsibility... they want to walk about normal not hounded like a movie star or music star or sports player. Some are ego maniacs wanting some fame a trophy on their wall of prestige, but most are quiet, wanting mostly to secure a dynasties for centuries, and with that they want power behind the scenes in order to do so.
They're a parasite most of them particularly the heirs of these dynasties, who had nothing to do with the success of company wealth they own in shares, and most of them have never worked in these businesses, only shareholders... they vote to give them selves more dividends and caretaker of the business... who will be on the board.... aka they shop. What the rest of us would call a few errands... shop... schedule a few things like a haircut, dental appointment, doctor appointment, meet someone at a bank for financial planning... attend a family member's recital. It's work, but not production work.
It's the work we all do when we're not doing out 40 hours plus a week of being extracted for our production. Basically, they do a few chores every so often.
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At this point, now understanding the concept of a Co-Op controlled enterprise, I would turn it into an employee co-op where all employees regardless of position have voting rights to the board on all topics of operating, revenue, capital expenses, leadership, management, supervisors, safety, wage/salaries, dividend, etc.
And profit sharing becomes implicit at that point, because the usual crumbs of 5% to 20% of labor gets of profits (ONLY IF you add it back to profits then take the percentage, because labor in today's business is a cost, not profit sharing, not a stakeholder) could easily get double compensation (that includes not just wages/salaries, but retirement accounts, uniforms, company paid portion of premiums) could be doubled, and these businesses would still be walking away with 90% to 60% of the profits (again when you assume the total cost of labor including payroll tax back toward profits, because presently its not, total cost of labor is an expense computed before net profits are calculated).
We're being screwed hard, and Amazons and Walmarts of the world are contributing to a return to robber baron feudalism.
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We're also in bigger crisis in areas that won big after WWII. There is a 40 year malaise in the richest countries. And the developing countries like China are paper tigers with large income growth over the last 20 years, but it's comparably too small; 300 million out over poverty in China, but 1.1 billion still in poverty. That's not stable. Same with Brazil, which has already returned to a deep recession yet again. Developing nations in a state of perpetual state of "developing".
And developed nations are in a vicious race to the bottom in return to oligarchy robber baron economies that gave us various collapses through history; the most recent was the 1900's which gave us USSR Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot and fascist Spain/Italy/Germany and collapsing UK, and continuing backwater of the US.
We've instituted the same conditions of the early 1900's.
And as the other person mentioned, we now have technology that is more powerful/deadly than WWI and WWII. And we're even more "global" in production than various other times in history that makes economic hit when wars break out more painful to various nations. Too interconnected increases the risk of a wide spread economic collapse causing vicious cycle of civil war and war with other nations. The great bronze age collapse was in part due to incredibly required interconnected not enough self reliance Egypt, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, Mittani, Assyria, and Kassite Babylonia collapsed over a course of a 100 years in period of 1200 BCE. Trade is good, but becoming to reliant on trade invokes "You can give a person a fish, they eat for a day; you can teach them to fish, and they can eat for life."
Over connected causes us to be so specialized that nations are incapable of supplying their own basic goods.
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They must be doing some serious austerity in France because 2017 Mirror Mirror Report their healthcare scored the worst ever only above the US. Canada was the one with the worst for the longest time second to US, largely because their Universal healthcare system was adopted in the 1980's, and doesn't cover dental and vision.
I was wondering why France dropped so much in overall healthcare rating... now I know.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/documents/___media_files_publications_fund_report_2017_jul_schneider_mirror_mirror_2017.pdf
And France, don't do this Thatcher/Reagan nonsense. Utilities and other natural monopolies aren't competitive thus for profit motive is nothing but harmful. Profit motive only works for sectors that do not violate competitive market principles. Profit motive only being useful in incentive for competition that can help maximize supply and quality/innovation. If the sector is already non-competitive due to being a natural monopoly or having severe effects on externalities, large barrier to entry, cannot acquire economy of scale (large volume of customers to offset and reduce cost per customer) like hospitals, has an inelastic demand curve (people will pay any price no matter what) like medicines, operations, medical appliances, etc.
My state, Idaho, made attempts to privatize some natural monopoly items like our prisons.
It didn't work, it ended in severe scandal where funding wasn't going to ensuring the prisoners were well taken care of guarded, thus Idaho had to take back the prison.
And long standing, most cities in Idaho have privately owned sanctioned monopoly company called Idaho Power... only a few cities like Idaho Falls, has it's own city owned and operated electric power.
Idaho's electricity is mostly hydro-electric... we have lots of dams as well as wind, and solar.
But most of the cities and rural areas are supplied by for profit owned Idaho Power company. Idaho Power sold a 30 year contract to sell power to California... but our state has grown according to normal population growth, something that could be planned. But wasn't. Idaho Power just saw big green money bags from California. And now our electricity prices are insane.
Fortunately, my current apartment has natural gas for heating which also heats my hot water heater.... probably not good for climate change as that adds to CO2... but it's more affordable.
California needs to build nuclear power plants and/or its own hydro electric and other supply of electricity, us selling them power is not helping to make more supply, and is only to give Idaho Power more profits that's not going to building more power plants, particularly not green power.
Never allow sectors of the economy that severely violates the competitive market principles to become private... for profit motive doesn't help in such situations as explained earlier. It hurts everyone by causing higher prices and lower supply, and even stunts quality and innovation.
It's economics 101. But thanks to Milton Friedman we went the way of neo-liberal neo-con stupidity, a ridiculous moronic dogma that is retreating all nations back to idiot oligarchy prone to economic boom bust oscillations, each oscillation being more violent than the last, and eventually collapse. And of course the workers, the poorer, end up the most hurt all through the idiot process.
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Underlying fundamentals is a mountain of debt, this time same major 3 (mortgage debt, stock margin debt which is now about doubled, and weak diminishing real income) are now larger than before with 4 more major bubbles that didn't exist before ( $1.3 trillion in vehicle debt, was only $400 billion in 2008, corporate debt topping $8 trillion with lots of junk rated bonds, most companies are in debt to their eyeballs, the slush money some say corporations are holding only apply to the top 1% of the richest companies, Credit Loan Obligation topping $1 trillion well beyond 2008 and essentially subprime loans for businesses, commercial real-estate debt up beyond 2008 while retail literally is imploding, and of course the student loan over $1.5 trillion was only $500 billion in 2008).
We're literally at the top of an insane leveraged economy that is strung across essentially all sectors that when the eventual bust happens will be more catastrophic than combining the last several recessions together: the "great recession", smaller than the savings and loans disaster of 1989, the first tech bubble of the 90's.
And the problem doesn't seem to be just with the US, but even China with it's massive P2P lending debt along with softening demand from US, Canada, EU nations, Australia, etc. And many other nations that had run ups in commodity prices in 2006 thru 2009 crashed and are in horrible recessions to this day like Brazil.
Anyway, expect an insane crisis unlike anything before in modern history, this maybe even darker than 1929 stock market crash and eventual depression.
Essentially, our economic systems will demonstrate they're utter failure. And unfortunately, society brainwashed in wonderment of this asinine system are ill equipped to handled the collapse... we're seeing how we're handling it before it's collapse world wide by electing buffoons and rise nationalists and theocratic superstitious fools turn murderers.
Since huge amounts of leverage loans need paid more than 13% in 2019, a larger chunk is due 2020... that's the most likely period of the insolvency of the entire system... oh nations will print money and some nations won't. But at that point, the gigs up.
The conditions are set that nations that print money to again re-inflate assets like housing/buildings will only cause hyper inflation, and those that don't will suffer deflation; neither work. The system is quite literally bankrupt.
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Oligarchy isn't aspiration, and it prevents us from ALL of us doing well, only 0.1% do extremely well... for a while until the system collapses and mass of people come harvesting swine.
We are suffering from underlying demand destruction as pigs like him hogging all the wealth and its income. You suddenly have fewer able to buy stuff; economy turns into vicious cycle. You have periods where investment money chases investment money consolidating even smaller group of oligarchs in a fuck fest boom bust cycle; each oscillating more violently as it shakes itself apart.
Extreme success in this system is not an indication of good moral hard work and ethics, it often indicates the contrary, how you can con people into buying poor quality services and products, fuck workers by finding exploited tyrannized labor de jour, or randomly invest in something that you might lotto win yourself into investment fueled idiocy.
The added insult is the blatant bribery threat.
The fat hog hasn't a clue this system is fundamentally flawed, it's tearing itself apart, its contradictions are self-destructing. Returning to oligarchy; either a robber baron and monarchies of the early 1900's gave us the wonderful revolutions of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, China, Korea, etc. And the 1800's was nothing but a basket case including our own stupid ass country with its civil war, fortunately ending slavery in our country.
Hog is so disconnected, he's essentially asking for the mass of people to find his neck among his fat rolls... and they will find it, its got to be there. Somewhere. He's asking for his own downfall. What a fucking nut job.
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That's the problem is that the US saw the collapse of various other nations and summarized it's their economic system not the fact they weren't democratic.... that they were very authoritarian.
So that emboldens our real authoritarian stupidity of economics to pilfer itself back into the mess that brought about various tyrannic despots.
This guy had to caution he wasn't being Marxist. When he was. And that's fine. Marxist wasn't Stalin or Mao or other pro dictatorship nonsense. He was largely critiquing capitalism as it was then. A very authoritarian regime that tends to tyrannize most of its workers as well as people incidentally living in the area where the plutocrat reigned and held dominion.
Without constructively critiquing things, one never improves anything.
First step is finding the problems, then figuring ways to solve them.
This has been a long time coming as all entrenched power forces become, because they make it dangerous to critique the status quo.
Until the system becomes such a farce, a miserable obvious farce, that nobody wants it and is revolt to it.
This is dangerous because those wanting to fix it, are struggling to figure out without constructive long term critiquing on what to put in its place. Often they put the same thing back up. Never solving anything long term and making the next collapse even more severe and miserable.
Everything he said on this I agree with completely. Not one thing he said I would disagree.
One thing to highlight is the advent of the internet. I can read your comment, someone who lives in Portugal. I can follow up and see how things really are. What are the laws on the books. What are the various social safety nets from healthcare to social security aka national pension, as well as what type of company pensions exist.
And gather the facts. And realize how truly left in the dark age we in the US are.
The next step is combating this. The throw off of repression. This can be dangerous because the powers that be become very angry and nervous, and they can release this power they have to that can ruin many decent people.
It's a gangster capitalism as one other youtuber puts it. We don't have capitalism, we have gangsterism. (Again that avoidance of using terms like socialism thinking that means tyrannical regime of Stalin or Mao or even Hitler despite that Hitler was anything but socialist... perhaps socialist to the plutocrats of Germany and the former nobility of the former monarchical structures).
Whatever you want to call it to speak the proper non-turn off language.
It is a double standard he puts out.
Recent bill in congress and senate is squabbling over a a few tens of billions of dollars to be given out as child tax credits... again the tax payer will more then likely pay more in taxes than the credits they get back... but let's ignore that, means less revenue... means that tax revenue might have to come from the upper income earners... can't do that. Robber barons don't feel they should pay any more despite the complete lop sided disposable income ratio to taxes or other purchases compared to the middle class or the very super rich.
But they were absolutely fine, they being the elites the robber barons, the powers that be, when the Fed Reserve came to the rescue with literally TRILLIONS of dollars to buy up corporate junk bonds, mortgage backed securities so banks would lend like there was no tomorrow, pumping asset prices to the moon, and making it cheap to for all even the zombie companies to borrow to the hilt some more; even though this has caused massive inflation and wage suppression even now real incomes are down 2% to the inflation rate that is now worse than 1989.
That's a tax on the poorest among us, inflation. They did not mind at all.
Not to mention the 2017 tax cuts that weren't necessary as the economy was growing just fine then.
The lopsidedness of this is palpable.
Firstly, Corporate income taxes ranged with brackets from 15% to 39%, was reduced to a flat 21% tax.
An 18% tax cut from the highest bracket.
Secondly, household (individual or joint) income taxes on the highest brackets saw major decreases.
Top bracket 39% on income above $426K joint filing or $424K single filer reduced from 39.5% to 37.5%
2% savings plus.
brackets of income $195K-424K from 33% to 32% another 1% savings
Brackets 82.5K to 157 from 28% to 24% another 4% savings
38.7K to 82.5K from 25% to 22% or another 3% savings.
9.5K to 38.7K from 15% to 12% another 3% savings.
And lowest bracket not changed $0 to 9.5K remains at 10%.
These lowest tiers remain only until 2025, expiring and reverting back to the old tax brackets.
Median individual income in the US is about $46K
So the vast savings is about 3%.
But for the biggest earners this saved 18% on the corporate profits that then get funneled usually via long term capital gains which is 15% to 20% depending on total adjusted income.
If they earn income via wage/salary the enjoy further savings the entire bracket of 11%.
Total savings in taxes by the biggest earners between corporate and wage/salary income tax is a reduction of about 28%.
Regular worker saw about a 3% tax cut; median individual income $46K
Employer I was with at the time, dished out a happy 1% raise for 2018 across the board.
Far as we knew the business was very profitable. Was a serious smack in the face.
Employer had the freakish insult to injury to put near the time clock an email citing how the tax cuts are going into effect and will based on deductions, result in probably a 2% increase in take home pay.
That we should consider putting that 2% into a 401K for savings, it's a retirement plan in the US that employers may or may not match or contribute, but we're able to contribute either tax deferred or taxed ahead so future retirement withdrawals are not taxed.
The funny part too was that the deduction calculations on paychecks were botched nationwide, causing too little to be taken from paychecks resulting in many people owing taxes for that year rather than getting an expected tax return.
It's a double standard that we live in. Socialism for the rich. And raw brutal capitalism for everyone else.
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It's cocaine starvation... liquidity crisis.
And the fact most recent pumps were option trading mechanical manipulation. Buying calls week to expiration that type of pump and dump all summer long with meme stocks. I know I'm in one right now... and it was only one of the few silly chickens up... sold a covered call that expired today on that one.
And my put SPY printed... sold it.... we'll buy more as we pop to resistant areas on a longer expiration than the March 18th.
DXY going up then dumping, and TNX going up now slumping with TLT that was dumping now pumping.
TNX or TLT or both going up is bad for equities in a short period of time and longer period of time means risk off movements.
DXY going up with TNX going up that's bearish.
And VIX that was going up along with the SPY and QQQ for a while was demonstrating the fragility of the market.
Softbank did this option manipulation last year, literally buying same week expiring 70K or more contracts ATM or near the money contracts, then same day dumping them leaving open interest at about 9K or less... this causes IV to pump on these call options making do overs next week less and less rewarding sometimes not rewarding at all. Market makers may hold for a day or week the shares they bought to cover their delta requirements in the gamma squeeze... but recently they've just dump them end of day after the entity that's been quickly flipping calls for quick gains.
Pump and dump scam.
So you mix this together and that we're at ATH.
THEN you realize the China situation is horrible with developers unable to pay bonds.
Their phony ADR stocks that aren't really equity in the actual companies in mainland China dumping.
Power outage due to lack of coal and destroyed dam power plants due to weather.
Then you have the COVID mess happening in China too, but now also in Europe with new lockdowns in some German provinces.
THEN you have SPY and QQQ and DIA at all time highs.... in a fragile MACD and many bearish divergence.
Fed presidents floating the idea that interest rates might rise quickly from 0% to 3% and that there maybe up to 2 to 3 rate hikes next year.
Stupid evaluations such as TSLA worth more the entire auto industry combined... stupidity WTF evaluation.
There has yet to be a visit to the daily 200 moving average over a year, only very few years this has ever happened.
Consumer confidence rate falling in August that was signify always within 18 months a recession... with additional months of falling consumer confidence in the toilet 60 region.
Housing market gone insane and now falling apart... revelation of Z and others of their ilk using faulty algos to snap up dumpster properties for stupid rates sight unseen.
The 30% crash similar to all other crashes of over evaluated nonsense falling extremes from their highs, the crash that's already happened and you don't even know it phenomena the high fliers don't all dumpster dive all at once... rather the first 30% get picked off over the course of a year or so... than the remaining 70% high fliers like a giant iceberg as Jeremy Grantham calls it, falls into the sea, as they too roll over.
You have so many confluence of an 8% to 15% correction.... and if you're into looking at past topping formations, probably a wave 4 correction (8% to 15% correction) then a blunder bust back to test ATHs possibly surpassing them before the final topping patterns that results into an ABC super cycle thunder buster downtrend and beginning of a bear market.
The confluences are stunning.
It's not just one event, but a confluences of indicators and events that are driving this topping process.
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My 6th grade teacher in 1996, and a few other teachers remarked we may never get to observe atoms directly they're so small. Being a rebellious little shit I would counter, well if they could observe DNA molecule shape in the 60's, we ought to at some point observe directly. But he was amazed that I was able to get imported Swiss chocolate from at the time ZCMI and for the science fair bring in an ultra violet light that he said were hard to come by, but my dad being an amateur gold prospector and other geological mineral collector like geode rocks, quarts crystals, etc. my dad had a couple UV lights. My 6th grade science fair project was on the various wave lengths of the EM spectrum from visible light to UV to radio EM. And using mirrors and other medium to cause refraction, reflection, diffraction, etc. I would have included Rayleigh scattering had I known burning candles, candle smoke, you can observe the blue light scattering effect.
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We had regulatory reform post 2008... and it was done by the oligarchs despite the tea baggers tea bagging stuff... and the Wall Street Occupyers occupying stuff, and some turning into wildcat speculators and losing or maybe making a fortune... And we got Frank Dodd Act which basically debases our currency at the whims of the Fed Reserve the cartel banking sector, should they blow up. It has not been planning on how to build an economy that has sufficient and quality homes with nice things like community swimming pools, gyms, etc. nor no planning on cheap per person transit like community rail as well as regional rail; which would cut costs down on insurance premiums for auto as well as on traffic accidents as well as on fuel consumption, and make it so much cheaper and more easier to make trips 50 to 100 miles or even further like it is in Europe.
We decided to acquiesce to the oligarchs of healthcare both the "insurance" sector (as if you can call what they offer insurance as they cover hardly nothing while demanding big premiums), but to big pharma including the hospitals and clinics. No other country allows pharma to clinics to hospitals to charge whatever they feel like. Knowing healthcare is like a natural monopoly with an inelastic demand curve (people will pay whatever price to get better or not die, and quantity supply will not make any difference to that price) that they cap margins as many states even Idaho big bozo the clown red state, most cities with any private utility like Idaho Power which is a private for profit electrical company with a granted monopoly, price margins are established, usually around 6% because they're a cash cow. Essentially all other countries do the same to big pharma and hospitals and clinics from dentistry to a family doctor to specialists to surgeries to rehab. Not having 10,000% or 100,000,000% margins quite literally shouldn't surprise everyone that that keeps costs way down.
And then just removing the idiocy of thinking insurance needs to be privatized? Why? They're not competing? They're a pointless middle man. It's best to just have regional governmental partitions. Really NHS model is the best. Cuts out all the privatization nonsense. But isn't easily implemented on a large scale very quickly... UK built theirs after WWII. But perhaps we should too. It's a bit better than Germany's in cost savings... some needless redundancies in the German model of quasi governmental/private insurance with many private dental and clinic and governmental hospitals... it's easier to implement the German model, but there still retains a bit of an over expense compared to the Canadian and especially the UK model.
Japan has something similar to the German model. I'm game for any of them, because we simply don't have a real viable healthcare model.
Instead we pretend lazy fuck head economics is the way to go, when it has burnt us to a crisp, life expectancy is tits shits only found in nations under invasion, at civil war, or in famine life expectancy falling 3 years in a row 2015 to 2018 then again 2020 thru 2022.
So do I have confidence that when we hit rock bottom, we'll have meaningful reform?
Fuck no.
A) Gerrymandering to propaganda gone beyond the cartoony yellow journalism pre 1920's, campaign bribery often called softly campaign finance... and an oligarchy that only needs to retain 20% to 25% of the citizens to insight stupidity like Milton Friedman hogwash.... you got an incident that just enough will repeat that gatorade it's what plants crave. Over and over and over and over, and just put more of that gatorade all over those plants.
Oligarchs did a good job the last 60 years.
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That subject came up with a guy at work. He's about my age early 30's. He was reading something on a CNN alert and just asked me WTF? is wrong with our "news" channels. It was about some semi-famous actor in American Pie... "Do I really care? How is this even news?"
I told him its partly why I got rid of cable tv. That and History, Discovery, A&E and TLC became so called reality shows, fucking cartoony stupid shit.
With youtube I get BBC, Canadian, DW, etc. which have some awesome documentaries. Enough for my fix. :)
No, most of us are realizing, particularly with the president of baby cartoon himself, that we in the US have serious issues. Not to mention obvious murders by cops thanks to youtube and other video platforms that show what happened on video, candid camera (I remember that show in the 90's).
We realize it. It's similar to that of the USSR before its empire collapsed when everyone knew their media was a joke, it was an upfront everyone knows its bullshit who are they fucking trying to kid bullshit.
We're aware. At least becoming more aware... it's more than just a suspicion now. It's more WTF? How more ridiculous can it get?
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We're overblown the idea of what China is... it's simply the dumping ground for cheap labor... it failed to provide a virtuous cycle of a middle class. And they're facing a debt binge as huge as the US and many other countries both in private and public debt. The recent P2P lending has already crashed.
Production is saturated in China along with all other countries with massive manufacturing capacity with the inauthentic advantage of low wage workers... of China's 1.4 billion population 1.1 billion are still in poverty conditions.
And this is much the same around the world in all persistently "developing" nations... Brazil, all the central American countries, most of the S. American Countries, the Middle Eastern countries and along N. Africa are basket cases even those not hit so hard by the so called Arab Spring, India still has over a billion in poverty despite having vast resources, wealth, but their fatalistic culture I think keeps people in a state of apathy there.
There is no place in the world that is stable in this race to the bottom economic structure.
US $19.39 trillion, $12.24 trillion China, and Russia is already a tiny economic power at $1.578 trillion.... doesn't matter the country we're head for major world wide depression, the eventuality of race to the bottom supply side economics.
Every nation took part in it, even the most socially mixed nations like Germany, Norway, Sweden, etc. No nation will be unaffected.
Trump is just a symptom of the collapsing nature of 40 years with the race to the bottom supply side economic strategy... the symptom that speeds up its own collapse.
Good luck.
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It's PTSD, I'm in the same boat. But oh well, I still have most of my money so long as currency is still good... and if that goes bad, then all their assets are trash too, we all lose.
However, just recently with just a few thousand dollars of my already huge savings started gambling in some stuff... mostly bit shits. Riding the lunatic bubble. Really doing it for fun. Never have formally gambled in slots or played black jack. And dislike scratch tickets and the ridiculous major drawing games.
I figure this type of gambling is fun just playing around on the swing trade and maybe at some point when I keep a position to let some of it sit.
When the insane happens it goes up a few orders of magnitude again, as it has over the past decade... I'll have an actual amount of money that I can buy a house with, or at least have in my savings for retirement...
Anyway, such ridiculous low interest rates, held 11 month CD and some others for almost nothing return.
I have savings time and half yearly income. Plus retirement 401k; the gimmick of our generation considering the power that is the defined actual pension plan.
I think no matter what you do right now, in a decade or so, things are going to be more insane. There is no better way. I think many of us are serious trouble. After you accept that you become happier again. And that's what matters.
But yes, PTSD. I turned 18 in 2001. I saw as a child the "mild" recession 90's savings and loan scandal recession, then the dot com bubble bust, then mid 20 year old the real-estate debt crash... and during this time the complete dismantling of decent paying jobs with asset prices such as homes and even rents increase well beyond that of wages, in fact wages have largely decreased even for college graduates with not just one degree in one subject but several.
Then you couple climate change to the race to the bottom....
You're not the only one that forgone the 2010's run up. I thought it was going to crash back in 2016.
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@cicatrace Problem we face though is that other currencies is what DXY is measuring. Not the DXY itself.
It's not optimism on the DXY that makes the DXY high right now.
The run up on the DXY is that so many other currencies are in the dumpster compared to USD.
And the big issue here is lots of debt privately issued thanks to all National Banks or their equiv like our Fed Reserve, were too dovish. And this has caused massive inflation.
As well as reckless debt binge. Decade long debt binge for the 2010's were China, Turkey, Australia, and even the US and large portions of Europe.
The debt binge in China and Turkey both are coming to roost.
This is causing a huge demand for dollars as much of the debts are US denominated.
This increase in money supply is via issuance of more and more USD debt. China and Turkey and several other places were big debtors, it's who took out the debt to run up the money supply.
They're in default and having problems rolling over their debt load. This is causing debt/money supply to go down. Hence the run on the DXY right now.
There's not enough stable money to pay off the unstable debt chain.
So the thesis could be wrong should we see further contagion from another debt collapse.
Which I think is likely. We're already observing this in China and Turkey. This will possibly spread to Australia very soon. Australia will be a bell weather on whether this goes further into US and Europe.
Because so much of this debt is denominated in USD, this debt destruction zaps money supply out of the system.
USD is a debt based monetary system, it only expands money supply so long as debt is increasing and being repaid. People are taking out debts and juggling if not repaying such debts.
The juggling act seems to be faltering in Turkey and China at present. Hence the DXY.
To raise fresh USD to pay off creditors and for creditors who have obligations to pay their creditors, they all raise USD via selling assets like stocks, real-estate, and anything including the kitchen sink.
We're in a liquidity crisis. And the tightening of the Fed and other banks to combat inflation will make that debt juggling act even harder to roll over debt. And more defaults will beget more defaults.
And we may still have price rejections causing as softening of demand. Causing even more fragile money losing companies or even money making companies to cut back, making consumer debt unstable... individuals have to sell assets to pay off debts, as well as defaults... again Peter to pay Paul domino money supply go poof after it went burrr on the debt binge.
Not sure if we'll get another China and Turkey and several other nations to support new debt juggling.
Brazil and many other areas do not seem poised to be debtors of last resort.
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The Fed Reserve allows banks to issue more loans via lowering interest rates, as well as QE where Fed Reserve buys loans banks have made allowing banks to then immediately lend more out.
Lower interest rates encourages individuals to borrow more because it's cheaper to do so.
QE encourages banks to lend more, because the bank can sell the newly lent loan to the Fed Reserve, gaining principle and some of the interest back immediately instead of having to wait the term of the loan to gain principle and full interest.
Debt based monetary system, lending money into the economy is how money supply is introduced, and also how it is taken out of the system (when they raise interest rates, or stop doing quantitative easing ie stop buying loans from banks; forcing banks to sit on their loans they've issued and await repayment terms to get their principle and interest over time, instead of immediately ready to make more loans).
Not sure what you mean bank reserves not making it into the economy... bank reserves are just enough (fractional reserve lending requirements) to make payments on maturing CD's and savings interest to depositors and the like; while juggling their loans they've issued and continue to issue.
Hence the overnight window that banks lend to each other to stay solvent, the Fed acting as lender of last resort should banks stop lending to each other in this fashion, juggling checking/savings and CD's and other types of withdrawals and interest payments with income from repayments of loans and new fresh deposits into savings/checking new CD purchases etc.
It is important to point out it's not printing money literally. But acts very similar. Difference is that there is strings attached... the money being lent into existence must be repaid and has an interest rate acting as the size of the printing machine... smaller the interest rates, the more people/entities will borrow... the larger the interest rates, the less people/entities will borrow.
And similar on the other side with banks, smaller the interest rates banks will be more eager to make more larger sized volume loans. Especially if QE program exists where the banks can dump their loans they've originated off their balance sheet onto the Fed Reserves' balance sheet... and thus be repaid immediately with some profit principle and make a new loan adding to even more lent money into the system.
Printed money with strings attached.
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The company I work for uses aluminum. We were buying from the US plant that finishes them. Now we're buying from a Canadian plant for both the aluminum and finished sheet aluminum and product of that sheet aluminum because its cheaper than sticking with the US finished aluminum sheets... but now all aluminum is more expensive... we got only 1% cross the board raise due to the higher costs.
So it's not going to stimulate aluminum purchases in the US regardless, and hurt companies that use it for inputs.
So just ding bat tariffs didn't work. You have to offset tariffs with subsidies to get production back quickly otherwise prices no matter what will increase. That's the problem with committing to trade with nations that are violators of various economic matters like labor rights, dumping, currency manipulation, civil rights, and inability to enforce laws they may tout having.
He's also an idiot, prior to his stint about aluminum, the price was on the rise at a 5 year high. It was stupid as fuck to pick that particular item to tariff. I remember early this year he declared tariffs on aluminum and I thought, oh price must be way down or something... I checked it out, nope. they have been climbing and have been at a 5 year high.... WTF?
Normally you pick items that have fallen or in a huge slump trading below cost to produce. Not when they're at all time highs... Trump doesn't know shit.
Un-winded trade isn't easy... and you should pick the nations you trade, Canada is a fine nation to trade with, they have good labor and civil rights, better than ours.
I would back off on Mexico and China and other similar corrupt and often no or no enforced labor laws and civil rights.
Some irritation with our cheap pieces of shit we import today:
I've gone through 3 coffee makers cheap pieces of shit in just 1 and half years... a good coffee maker in the 90's would last for 5 or more years costing $40... these 3 cost about $17, so 3x is $51... I've spent more money on shitty coffee makers that keep breaking and we make the same in real income 11 years before I was born 1974.
Even the more expensive models are either China or Mexico made.
We're paying more making less, and we're making lives more miserable to the servitude labor in those other countries creating their own tyrannical oligarchs in the process.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/real-wages-are-essentially-back-at-1974-levels-report-shows/ar-BBLUiNe
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When he was making comments about wanting to repeal net neutrality I thought, WTF? Does this guy enjoy waking up to bag of burning dog shit on his front porch every morning? Later, he in fact complained of fliers on his door and neighbor's door stating he's going against the will of the people.
Now that he's done it, hope he enjoys paying for body guards for the rest of his idiotic life. They won't help. People in our country are fucking nuts, and he not only pissed off us on the left who generally don't like to actual violence, he pissed of the right wingers too who tend to really get bloody.
What dumb ass. He asked for it. And whoever it is, so long as its only Ajit Pai, not any of his family, I'll cheer. Prefer he just keeps getting beat up. Nothing lethal. But come on, this is the land of a mass murder every few weeks or month, and a murder every day. That dude's going to get shot.
His fault for being a tyrannical toady.
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While it's absurd for such price gouging to happen, the masks are way over rated and could be more harmful if not replaced entirely frequently.
In fact, unless you can take one exposed mask off, wash hands and put another one on after eating or drinking or assisting others and touching things at short intervals as a medical profession usually does doing surgeries or examining potentially infectious patients, these masks do very little and may even do harm. .
Viruses are not microscopic, they're nano-scopic... wave length of visible light is 400–700 nano meters.
A virus like the coronavirus is 125 nm.
Other viruses range from 20 to 400 nanometers.
Viruses are literally smaller than wavelength of visible light; hence why electron microscopes are needed to resolve an image of a virus.
This means a mask is only filtering large water vapor droplets that are a hundred microns in size, but missing mist vapor that contain the virus in the smaller water mist of 1 micron (1,000 nm) or even less. It can for a moment protect you from someone who sneezed near or on you for a little longer... maybe. The size of viruses and the particles they're on is very small; it's what makes airborne disease so contagious... there isn't much you can do if you've been near someone with symptoms especially fever the highest amount of virus shed. You're pretty much screwed with or without a silly sneeze mask.
The mask does very little to prevent infection... and using the same mask over and over actually exposes you to the current virus and other flu and cold viruses and bacteria more, as the general spread is through facial contact with hands and things that are infected to the face: nose, eyes, and mouth.
It's like chicken pox, unless you had the vaccine, if you're anywhere near someone who has a fever or even just prior to symptoms, you're infected.
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Even before the pandemic the homeless were mounting in streets in every town and city; a ridiculous sum even prior to the pandemic were filling up KAO campsites to the point that most still aren't taking reservations. Homeless toddlers and other children, homelessness in cities... it frankly looks like the collapse of the the USSR mid to late 90's and into the early 2000's when I went to Europe. But many had an apartment or house in various former soviet states which they either paid very little to rent or owned it and paid either nothing or very little for property tax.
Homes that people do live in were ironically upkept better than the ones many here in the states are living in paying either huge mortgages or huge rents.
It's a dystopia for sure.
And nobody is fooled anymore, we have no representation in our gerrymandered and bribed soaked districts. Locally the bribes are becoming as ridiculously open as various other places around Eastern Europe or Central and South America. And do these criminal even with convictions serve much time or pay much of a fine? No. More of slap on the wrist... just another cost of business... to rub some palms with cash... kleptocracy. I know, see it at my employer's place all the time concerning various things as pushing their property tax appraisal down by 50%. You or I try to do that with a home you may be owning or renting from the bank (mortgage) or actually renting to hopefully get the lord of the land to discount your rent bit (good Fing luck) if you can save them on property tax... yeah not going to happen.
But at these various feudal lordships, that grease palms in the local fiefdoms... half off on your property tax completely... oh and that excessive usage on sewage... it's just a fine... oh a bit too big of a fine, we'll put that half off... levy comes up locally because we need a bigger sewer system as many plants including my employers keep taking up huge capacities... levy gets passed to increase the city sewer capacity; increase on property tax oh it's just an extra $100 a year on property tax... and $120 a year on the sewer bill a year... while those who are causing it will continue to get a 50% discount on their property tax, and their over use fee will get cut in half... gangsterism. Kleptocracy.
That type of thing is becoming just overt.
Rail cars not being inspected and maint. leading to ever more collapses... factories like various food plants just exploding. Neglect of infrastructure even to these oligarchs' own properties because they're greed is stripping any upkeep and stripping any updates or upgrades to safety and functionality. And they stand dormant many times with inputs yet lines are down because of the contempt their hired thugs upper and middle manage have for workers not providing a clearing wage so they don't get enough employees. And those they do get, haven't the skill nor get the training to actually run the highly automated generally old and machines that lacking serious upkeep frequent falling apart. Audits that are more a ritual of a nod and wink, as the auditor is there on the program that was written by the various companies, self regulation... if they can't even follow their own subscribed food safety they just change their own rule book... I mean they make their own rule book, grease some palms and all local or state or even federal regulators do is rubber stamp these self regulated programs the companies themselves write. It's very bad sign if any actually do get shut down for a period of time as it's because the food or item might actually be outright dangerous and traceable to the factory... just make not traceable, and we can start the plant back up.
We're joke.
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It's the structure of our economy:
1) We've allowed Monopolies to arise again. We have allowed monopolies like 100 years ago to fester and grow in dominance in subsidies and other loop holes. Amazon, Google, Ueber,, FB, Microsoft, etc. all either make money now or don't at all, but are offset by vast amounts of spending power via massive debt and IPO money they're able to garner like a giant cash cow to destroy any competition.
Solution:
Trust busting. And be vigilant about it. Not falling asleep like a bunch of festering fuck tools for 40 fucking years.
2) Taxes on the highest income makers have been skewed; insurmountable amounts of taxes are raised by the poorest via various statistical studies have revealed the bottom 90% have no statistical influence on law or any future laws and policies and regulations.
Solution:
Quit turning the wealthiest corporations and the funneled funds that contribute to the highest income earners into a lending with interest event. The rich have effectively turned their tax bill into a loan program whereby they not only don't pay taxes, they lend and get interest back via deficit spending. When the US and most nations deficit spend, they issue bonds. The vast majority of those bonds are purchased by high income corporations (largely banks) and individuals. They then get interest back on that.
This is obscene.
Solution:
Return corporate income tax to the normal period style of the 1960's. And have alternative minimum income taxes when incomes reach a certain thresh-hold. This helps currently for near infinite deductions that wealthy use, and at some point exhaust such bullshit loop holes and have to by the ATM. This can be done overall on the over arching tax amounts.
3) Tax proportions are unfair in the amount of taxes of disposable income to the various income levels.
Solution:
Provide a tax schedule on capital gains as one gets taxed on payroll income to a certain bracket amount. Making clear to ensure those retirees living on a fixed income of investments $50K or less or joint $80K be taxed at a fair low income.
But raising those brackets for those who essentially make most of their income via dividends and capital gains both long and short at a certain amount... currently it's 0% on the first 40Kish then 15% an then 20%.
Instead treat bracket just above 40K just as you would with payroll income. With many brackets.
4) We haven't addressed various sectors that simply don't function appropriately to the prosperity to all such as healthcare in the US. Healthcare just as fire service and police service is not something that functions responsibly and desirably as competitive market principles as it violates every single competitive market principle in all. Same as we do not allow judiciary to be a competitive market principle. Utilities are the same, natural monopolies.
Solution:
Institute universal healthcare program immediately, preference to model it via the NHS of the UK is preferred, but even the German style is sufficient albeit a bit more expensive and just a bit lesser in quality.
5) Utilizing subsidies of foreign governments that are often despotic/tyrannical dictatorships of some sort that provide a servitude labor source and/or extreme subsidies in input costs. This is similar to the monopoly powers of businesses that can remain bleeding red while a few throw billions at their cash flows to allow them to sell at a loss for years to destroy any competitors (price war) then when all competition is essentially destroyed the prices go up to allow for the monopoly to become in the green on the bottom line; simply no real competition no choice. I literally have bought something from Walmart online and received my Walmart purchased item in an Amazon stupid smiling box. Collusion once was part of anti-trust law. But... plutocrats own this country now... so they don't follow any laws but their own.
Solution: Re-importation quotas and taxes... mostly quotas for utilizing such in-authentic comparative advantages... of serf labor and freebie inputs to effectively allow the company to sell at a loss, and no competition that is viable to develop.
Not doing this is a race to the bottom that will inevitably lead to aggregate demand to fall.
As labor in the home country has to compete with the lower wages, their wages to lower.... aggregate demand therefore falls.
It's more obvious than if you eat shit, you increase your chances of contracting disease that cause you to become ill and potentially die.
Mark imports for those items that have authentic comparative advantage... those non-labor resources you cannot obtain domestically or as abundantly domestically.
6) Extreme loose monetary policy to bail out the essentially bankrupt financial and banking sector has been an extreme mistake. This begs the question, is it moral that we allow the banking system to hold a cartel that overseas our monetary system? Probably not. And over the past decade we can see this is filthy hurting most. All it has done is to cause inflation to inflate the asset prices of whom the rich hold most of the wealth, while a tax that is less affordable by those who hold very little in assets and make very little in wages already, it is a tax on the poor. To the only benefit of a very few rich. There was no reason to bail out any of the financial institutions, they could have just been easily taken over completely by the government... the amount of QE and low interest rate stupidity was a tax and monetization of the debts well passing what would have happened had we done what Iceland had done and just have we the people clear the banking and financial system... it was and still is insolvent. It is simply using the reign of the debt based monetary system to monetize itself for now as if it were solvent. It isn't.
Solution: No more bail outs for banks and financial institutions. Instead such "too big to fail" nonsense corporations will be taken over by the government just as FDIC and SPIC does... the institutions are allowed to fail, the bogus CBO's and other so called collateral that is literally junk, gets re-rated. Certain collateral of assets get remarked recognizing a reckless price pump that has since dumped, because of over leverage pyramid scheming. Homes that were sold well beyond wages and beyond any sense of sanity would be remarked lower on the origination principle amount, and a fixed lower interest rate would be assigned, all prior payments would then reflected in the remaining balance owed. This would have kept people in their homes with mortgages that were capable... as well as assisting developers who are building homes to remain to build homes that statistically are needed... in the financial meltdown of 2008 it wasn't a housing surplus, too few of multi-dwelling and individual homes were being made to the growth of population and the deterioration of older homes. We needed these developers to remain to continue or as we are now risking a supply shortages in homes across the country.
Additionally, a housing program should be instituted similar to Vienna Austria... if it works for them, it would work for us. And don't play games here, if 1+1=2 it fucking works universally. Pretending otherwise is just pathetic.
6) Pandemics are worse than any world war or any civil war or any war for that matter. The necessity to assist the entire population is that of a world war like cause. Otherwise an economy so leveraged to the hilt, or even one not leveraged, will eventually fall into a depression.
And who benefited most from this loose monetary policy as well as stimulus money to keep people from missing rent/mortgages and to allow for basic foods stuffs was largely the very wealthy.
Solutions:
In times of war, many nations including the US seek to ensure inflation from such change in spending doesn't cause inflation including upping taxes on the highest income earners up to even 100% at a certain bracket for just a few years... this limits the deficit spending so it doesn't become absurd into debt trap, as well as keeps inflation from showing up. The rich still make out like bandits as that 100% bracket would be placed on a huge income of $100 million taxable income or perhaps $250 million taxable income on corporations and wealthy alike. Additionally, many other practices to limit inflation and other price gouging was conducted including ration stamps and housing price controls both in terms of house price sales limits and rent limits.
We pretended markets are smart, and not exploitative. Markets are always exploitative when left to their own devises, they plan for nothing, they make no moral bones, it's what they can get a way with, damn be the long term or moral consequences... why do you think slavery, indentured servitude, and feudalism went hand and hand for so long under a largely capitalistic regime that started in the 1400's?
7) Politics that leave 95% of the income makers with statistically no influence over law.
Solution:
End gerrymandering... a statistical mechanism for setting districts must be made that is indifferent to set out districts.
Set term limits for all elected officials.
Ban on all elected officials to serve of 10 to 20 years in certain sectors they have regulated either by election winning or by appointment, and no compensation in that sector maybe received indirectly by these sectors during this period, nor stemming in waiting for this period to end.
Ban all elected and appointed persons from engaging in speculative trades on assets particularly stock, options, warrants, bonds, etc. That all investments they may have be carried out under a blind trust during their time in appointment and certain few years after their service.
These are just a few things we can do. And really, many of these things the US has done over a period of time.
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No seriously, small time investors were mortgaging themselves with 10 to 12 units... sometimes up to 20 to 50 units. Units meaning houses as well as duplexes or quad plexes.
I high school during the late 90's, a particular class program I took, one guy was a doctorate in adult learning, another a master's... one of our assignments was to talk to bankers and learn about various loans including mortgages. One particular day, I was visiting yet another bank... I think I was dropping something off to the one teacher too... but he was visiting this one banker to conduct yet another purchase for his rental thing... the banker told me he was his best customer, it was his 18th purchase in just a 2 years. I joked, unless you're buying these outright with little to no financing, it's not a purchase, but a leveraged margin long position like buying stocks on margin. You don't own them... they sort of own you; you're tenant to the brokerage... or to the bank. The banker didn't like that coming from a snot nose senior from high school.
These two teachers both came from California, so I'm not sure how much they were leveraging, and how much was owned 100% how it was collateralized on all their properties they were buying.
All I know is that yes, these "mom and pops" can really go out and splurge. And they do. Fortunately for them, it was the 90's just leading into the huge 2000's blow up bubble. Haven't spoken to them since... hopefully for them they dumped their properties at the top or at least had them all paid off and didn't care whatever rent came in was just enough to at least pay for property taxes and upkeep.
Any amount of buying pressure can cause any asset to stay elevated. So don't count out the ameature individual investor adding enough fugazi buying pressure.
Look at GME and AMC and dozens of other meme stocks that 1,000% to 10,000% ran up. Or the greater full worthless crypto so called money yet nobody accepts going up 100,000% or more in just a year. A stampede is a stampede... and there are many more individuals than large investors.
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Universal healthcare is superior to our system in every way: Costs less, better quality, more access, more efficient organization of care, better outcomes, etc. Even more superior to our medicare system for the elderly and medicaid for the disabled or impoverished.
While almost all other nations around the world provide universal healthcare, they are different in scope and size and general methods of delivery.
The best universal healthcare programs are those that are fully comprehensive: dental, eye, bodily, ALL medical needs; UK, Germany, France, Japan, Austria, and Australia among the more comprehensive method systems.
Canada provides bodily healthcare, but does not provide dental nor Rx outside a hospital coverage; this requires supplemental insurance as well as price limits on producers so that medicines and dental work doesn't become extremely un-affordable. And most who have supplemental insurance in such non-comprehensive insurance nations come from their employers similar to our system. Most in between jobs, or work that doesn't provide such supplemental insurance benefits or the elderly retired don't purchase the supplemental insurance since it's premium is generally equal to its payout; it's pointless; and the provinces and country negotiate prices already, so there's no gimmick discount per insurance company like in the US providing some extra discounts.
But even Canada's and other nations basic universal bodily care like systems, perform better than the US in most aspects including quality, costs, and availability.
Link provides a comparison between the wealthy nations.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Link provides detailed information about the coverage and method of taxation for premium collections, copays, and coverage in detail per country. There are many more countries you can look up then the ones listed below to see the details.
As you read the details on how little the taxation, particularly copays if any for various services, and what's all included, you'll start realizing the devil is in our own ridiculous system. It's a cultural shock to many of these people when you mention an ambulance ride can cost upwards of $1,000 or even more; this often triggers a question, if your emergency services cost so much how much does it cost to call the fire department or take a taxi? Because most of these nations ambulance services or even hospital services are a basic need these things logically cost less than a taxi for the person. Just as we're accustom to having police and fire services at no per use charge or at a very small fee (inspecting fire risers or something). Being something cheaper than movie tickets or sporting event or cover charge at a night club.
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/germany/
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/england/
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/canada/
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/japan/
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/australia/
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Adderall is a junk drug; it's an amphetamine... basically meth just another form, and legal in the US as a Rx for big Pharma to make one hell of a racket.
Actually illegal to use in UK and many other countries as other treatments for ADHD exist that are better at resolving it, and far fewer side effects including less chance of addiction.
It's the worst ever to use. So he should probably be given something to help him get off that junk, and take up another better ADHD medicine.
Many better acting and not addictive ADHD meds include Atomoxetine, Buproprion (which is also used as stop smoking aid better than Chantix as well as being cheaper and less likely to develop depression, in fact Bupropion is an antidepressant, Clonidine, Guanfacine, Lofexidine, Modafinil, and some others.
So lots of other choices. But often ADHD is given as an excuse for a junk to get hooked up and stay on their legal meth.
Adderall is probably the absolutely worst one to use. It's basically like the over prescribed oxycontin, or rather ,ever prescribed pain med. When many others even hydrocodone is less addictive and mellower; not leaving people a shatter shell or nut job.
Possibly why he did what he did... high as fuck on Adderall... Donald Trump is known to take Adderall... and weirdly, it's been found he snorts it... not sure why... I don't think crushed up med of it absorbs that well in the lungs... but that guys also a wack job... maybe because he's strung out on meth... well it's an Amphetamine. But so is Meth. They're basically the same thing.
Sorry you folks who have been put on that stuff. You're probably stuck for life.
But weed pot is illegal.
Anyway, sorry about that rant.
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Anarchists are in many cases grifters and/or outright dumb as dog shit living in cognitive Dunning Kruger effect world of their own stupidity.
Sum up their philosophy and even their own mental acuity:
"I'm a simple minded moron, extremely shallow uneducated fool who thinks he knows more than experts in various fields of science and arts, and Ayn Rand philosophy is amazing and her books are readable, and everyone should be able to do whatever they want so long it aligns with what I want them to be able to do, so ultimately I, with a capital I, can do whatever I want to do."
Even shorter:
Anarchists are the epitome of hypocrites.
They're liars, double talk, gas lighters, hucksters, frauds often to themselves as many aren't that mentally capable to think past the end of their nose resulting in cognitive bias of Dunning Kruger effect, and those who know better, that actually know they're purposefully being deceitful are simply liars with out shame, recruiting to their will the dumber people who can't realize the contradictions of their philosophy.
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The amount of debt in concern is insolvency throughout their entire banking system.
So plan on all the developers eventually becoming nationalized.
And the properties not built and even some that are, won't be because they were investment properties fueled by the prospects of more investors... no actual underlying demand.
Since 2013 we had those ghost cities... and even through to 2017 they were continuing to build on those ghost cities and build more ghost cities.
And as China's manufacturing became more expensive than other nations, they were losing any labor competitive advantage and subsidies by the Communist party on manufacturing long ago dried up and instead the various provinces were making money on the real-estate quagmire developing... there were Chinese executives on national/international programs warning as early as 2015 that it was an insolvent mess and when it finally busts... it's going to be spectacular.
The entire world utilized the borrower of last resort, China, in the 2008 western meltdown to get commodities up... lots of commodities went to the roof during the early stages of the western debt collapse. Brazil benefited from this early on. Many other commodity producers, particularly those near to the country like Australia saw their economies recover very quickly and not even dip into a full recession at the time... Australia not at all and only kept going with their own real-estate bubble never popping at all... while the commodities heavy Brazil.... by 2014ish went into a severe depression of which it sort of remains as commodities took a dump around 2015.
China is now down and out. The borrower of last resort... there really isn't anymore borrowers of last resort this time around internationally... and world banking systems are rather caught in a gigantic debt trap.
This is why you observe Russia acting "weird" invading Ukraine... and China with their "Zero Tolerance" policies... COVID really isn't the factor here... it has always been through this entire year, record protests... COVID just being an excuse to get people off the streets from protesting the insolvency of all of the developers and most of the banks. Summer they "relaxed" the COVID thing only to have those protests immediately re-ignite. And, surprise, surprise! WE have another possible lockdown due to "COVID".
The way a communist nation or really any other non-plutocratic nation would handle this bank bust... nationalize all the banks. Which is likely... and what this means creditors internationally, the rest of the banks internationally will get nothing. Their risk came to full fruition. Similar to Iceland where the banks were nationalized. Instead of bailing out the rich, they bailed out the country as a whole, redoing and remark to marketing all existing debts to the real values of the collateralized loan... your home is now worth 50% less... your principle is now origination amount 50% less, and all proceeding payments went to that loan... oh and interest rates are lower so we'll refinance that new half off mortgage at a lower rate... and you're now right side up on the loan to equity ratio with an even lower payment.
Who loses... the bankers and "investors". Which is what most nations should have done.
Now on an investor side of things... you should be scared... you're not going to get treated as the endangered species.
What makes China more complicated is that many of these properties were not even built, nor for their own use... they weren't living in these properties, but speculative investments to flip them or charge rent on them.
Only real demand was new investors with no actual real need/use demand. So... you could see remarking these loans to a newer market price may fail because investors suddenly right side up with some equity will immediately sell that property to lock in their profits only plunging prices further.
And now that the music has "stopped" the realization there is no real use demand, that it was only speculative fueled demand... it could take some time to reach a bottom on housing prices.
Additionally, there are more competition on labor for manufacturing outside of China... and lots of China's economy relied recently on their domestic housing bubble.
In addition, the Belt and Road policy, all of those loans across the globe to very poor nations, are also insolvent and cannot repay those debts made by various private and public enterprises of China... Belt and Road policy was a way to keep their people employed often sending them to these poorer nations to build the lent project: a sea port, airport, commercial or housing development, rail, etc. A type of Chinese worker program. And that's gone.
So household incomes are likely to fall and continue to do so.
Basically, as an "investor" any investments with China would be considered suicidal. Just stay away.
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At this point its cheaper to build a house as lumber and other prices of fixtures have come way down.
While existing homes are still pretending commodities of lumber haven't cratered.
The dirt on real-estate in many areas have also dropped... undeveloped lots and other land without any structures, particularly no utility hook ups, which generally so long as a street that runs near with utilities isn't that expensive to hook up. Water about $3K, sewer about $3K, power $1K. If it's down another road these costs can vary. And if no sewer available, septic system for about $5K to $10K. These lots are fairly affordable, not cheap as they "should" be in some areas, but some come with sweetners if utilities are nearby they'll throw that in to the sale to either discount the ask or even install before the sell.
Land prices are still higher than usual.
But land prices are coming down as developers have cut back, getting backlogged on the housing they've started and haven't started quite yet.
Developers have been very cautious in buying up undeveloped land for the last decade being burnt buying land at a premium leading up to 2008 crash.
And seeing land prices spike again around 2015 to 2019 then the blow off pandemic top starting 2020 to 2021.
What I've noticed when it's cheaper to build a new house from scratch, typically marks a period that leads into a general housing slump in prices; and the only big crash we saw in 2008 in housing. As supply is typically expanded as existing homes start to fall to equilibrium with the cheapness of new home building.
I also suspect many who bozo the clowned into borrowing to the extreme during 2020 to 2021, heavily upside down, and paying, despite possibly locking in historic interest rates, still have huge payments they're unlikely able to continue. Even without a major job loss. Add any major job loss, or required to relocate, a common thing in the US; might see short sells, walk aways with bankruptcies.
Here in the Boise area some weird stuff as usual concerning real-estate, people mortgage into a home, but leave only a week later. For sale sign back up. It would be odd that financing fell through because the steps are very painful with closing and everything else. But some new laws exist that allow the purchaser a time to reflect and escape a badly chosen mortgage; similar to automobile purchase, a buyers remorse law that allows a person to return the vehicle for a full refund. It's to protect borrowers from being pushed into getting a raw deal and something they really couldn't afford.
Either way, it's odd that people would move in, introduce themselves, and before the end of the week, they're already moved out. And not just happening once, but already 3 times in my local area.
Couple things I suspect is happening is that the ability of work at home is being dropped by most employers, and those who persiste are just being let go. But could be, they realize their books don't balance. And it's impossible to refinance in the future while being so far in the red on equity to all the mortgages taken.
Over 70% were mortgaged financed, despite many cash buyers during 2020 to 2021.
That over 70% financing often came with bad financing, banks realizing the bubble ask prices, limiting the home price loan 80% requiring yet again the same bad practice of people taking out an ARM (and this time multiple ARM) loans representing a downpayment. Good luck for these individuals with the expectation to refinance, as they're already upside down in most areas around the country, particularly the most pandemic blow off top regions.
The irony is the bond market is trading like we're about to have a recession that dwarfs the 1929 great depression.
Yet as Ramin shows, at least in Canada, bullish sentiment on a chart.
Very contradictory stuff going on here in all markets... equities while breadth is very bad, the over all indices are up... albeit due to 3 to 4 stocks being elevated: AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, META, and NVDA.
Personal opinion, we're looking at another 2008 catastrophe in the making.
This time, we can't allow QE to "rescue" us, as it has proven ineffective. And only causing inflation. Screwing everyone.
We'll need to just nationalize the failed banks, and mark to market all loans to allow price resetting from this hyper inflated asset bubble triggered by the banks bad leveraging to the tits on everything monetizing their bad debts debacle.
And prohibiting and such CDO markets from existing withing deposit banking ever again. Deposit bank writes a loan, it's theirs until it is repaid. They'll be less flippend on approving and appraising higher valuations of homes or cars or other collateral loans they grant.
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First off, it's absurd to call universal healthcare slavery, a right to something doesn't necessarily imply conscription. Doctors and nurses and other medical staff in universal healthcare are not forced to do the work, they were never forced to go to medical school. You wouldn't want someone forced to do anything, they'll likely botch the work... it's idiotic... that would basically calling fire, police, air traffic control, USPS, city utility, etc. all slaves... it's just absurd.
Secondly, not surprise. Libertarians are nothing but walking talking contradictions. Listening long ago to Molyneux praising the wonders of our US for profit non-universal healthcare system, how wonderful it was... then to find out he was Canadian living in Canada... I thought... FUCK YOU! You don't have to suffer our fucking idiot healthcare system... you don't even live here! Come on over! See how much you'll like potentially bankrupt should you need a critical medical procedure.
Lastly, most hospitals and clinics are private, what is socialized in the system is a universal payer (insurance like structure). Germany is the same... so is France... most universal healthcare is that method. It's a single payer system. And where there isn't enough hospitals, clinics and countries other than Canada that doesn't cover dental (which is absurd) also have some government dental clinics... but most are privately owned and operated with a single payer being the government.
Nobody is forced to work in any job. They do it for a variety of reasons, they like doing surgeries they like the work they do, and they do get compensated more so than almost any other profession.
The only country that I'm aware that has most medical establishments and workers as their government employees is the UK... and they're always rated best in all categories in overall care year after year. None of them are forced to work... and in fact, the MD's dental and medical (stupid we make a distinction even in the general sense) are all paid the same high incomes, but also registered and just licensed nurses... the ones who change bed pans and do most of the difficult labor, get paid even more so... they're system just cuts out profit motive, no need to steal from the doctors and especially subordinate medical staffs' incomes so that a collection of do nothing shareholders and owners and racketeer of injuries and sickness.
And they pay half of what we pay per capita... just about all the universal healthcare countries only by about half per capita than our nation. And they get much better results.
Libertarian arguments on economics are pure unadulterated bullshit.
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The Eclipse in Idaho had many hotels charging through the roof. And there were still mass vacancies in towns just outside totality.
Some states like Idaho, and sounds like Texas (interesting they're red states) love to price gouge. As if it's okay.
When it absolutely is not. First, there is not actually underlying shortage overall, only local shortage due to disaster. Even government won't take bids that are extortion rates when they may purchases for disaster relief, fight fires, etc. And during war, they simply price fix to avoid racketeering. Last resort, they charter their own operations to procure the resources and products being sought.
Price gouging, racketeering, rent seeking, etc. are all market errors that cause undesirable results; Hence why further rules are required. Let it be no rules markets don't exist never have. And minimal market rules are no good either. Market rules must match the desired results.
You want to live in a shitty society, put bare bone rules on your markets. You want to live in a prosperous, safe, happy, and compassionate society, you place good decent rules upon the market, and ad lib when markets go stupid like during times of disasters or bubbles.
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And other countries include ALL medical too, so we could add dental and vision in our universal program as does UK, Germany, Sweden, etc.
And its still 50% cheaper than what we Americans and our employers pay on just premiums, and then copayments and deductibles. I have two choices for just my medical a "low" deductible PPO that still has a $1,500 deductible, or a high deductible plan with $3,000 being deductible, anything medical I have to cover the $3,000 before insurance even kicks in, and I pay $50 bi weekly paycheck for that portion.
Our dental only one option that's $4 a paycheck, but only covers so much two cleanings a year and some things are 80% covered and other things 50% covered. Orthodontist if you're under 21 is covered 50% but only up to $1,000.00... I got braces back in 2007, with another employer that covered 50% up to $1,500 lifetime max, and still paid out of pocket over $3,800.00 for the two year treatment. My medical was better than too as we had PPO option office visits were $10, Urgent care $20, and ER was $100 and free if admitted to the hospital, and they covered lots of stuff, but my employer was paying a lot of the portion of the premium over $10,000 a year, and I paid $100 a month. My current employer's insurance options really suck, they're putting in $5,700, while I pay $110.
Vision is $2 a paycheck, I didn't buy that since my vision is better than 20/20.
Fortunately, I have only had dental issues lately, had a Rx under dental so that was covered, and some bone grafting was covered I only had to pay $250 when it was originally billed as if it was going to cost me half of $1,900 and my portion being $975. Because I have insurance, the insurance has a discount so the price was $850, and I only had to pay $250 of it. Someone without insurance would have had to pay double, that $1,900 figure. I don't get our system.
I did use my medical portion last year, and it didn't cover the 15 minutes at a primary health clinic where they checked blood pressure wrote Rx, that cost $120.
The medicine wasn't covered either was $28 for just one treatment dose (8 antiviral pills). "Medical" Rx and offices visits don't get covered at all until I get to the $3,000 deductible. Again I pay $50 a paycheck or $100 a month for this so called insurance that essentially doesn't cover shit.... until you've racked up bills over $3,000 in that year, then it will start to cover some, but not all until you reach the max out of pocket $7,350.
Can this medical portion of my insurance really be called insurance????
To be fair, I did get $500 contribution over the course of 2018 into a healthcare savings account. But $500... when my deductible is $3,000.... I'm paying $100 a month... company is paying $5,000 for this portion a year.
I have a feeling that other countries wouldn't even call what we have insurance of any kind. More like a scam.
Universal healthcare program would save families and even employers buckets of money, and we'd actually get healthcare. Instead of giving so called insurance companies a racket, and these medical companies a racket.
I'm really glad I'm fairly healthy. But for those with chronic conditions like diabetes... what a fucking nightmare.
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Our country has huge deficits due to our policing the world. It's unsustainable. And our trade agreements have allowed despotic nations to use their tyrannized often impoverished citizens as a source of cheap labor, they failed to build a meaningful sized middle class in various nations like China, Brazil, Mexico, and Central American countries are still doing rather poorly in order to buy stuff from the developed countries like the US and western Europe.
Current system has failed. It has only pleased the aristocracies of various nations. But the rest of the working population, essentially 99% are worse off. Hence various changes in nations lately from the Arab Spring, to the various political changes from the UK, Italy, France, and with Trump in the US.
Most people are doing worse, not better, under the current system, and the trade agreements are not virtuous, they are vicious, a race to the bottom which results in lower demand as wages don't keep up with inflation, and monetary systems are constantly having to spend at a deficit for the military spending to police the world cutting into much needed demand such as building infrastructure, education, medical, R&D, etc.
It's not a good recipe for success.
I don't like Trump, but he's correct on many points. I think he's mostly a con guy, he'll say anything to get what he wants. Most aristocracy and those remaining higher end middle class don't understand, as they haven't been adversely effected by this system as of yet, they're in a bubble, hence so many didn't see the Brexit nor Trump victory. Those people won't be adversely effected until serious rebellions happen as the Arab Spring, or weird military action by desperate nations like Russia against Ukraine taking Crimea, and prior to that the Russian invasion of Georgia.
Nations are filling the pinch in this race to the bottom system, if they don't go into civil war, they will lash out with war as sources of production of goods and resources have inefficiently been redistributed creating hardships when relationships sour (as they are now because most citizens of every country are doing worse), the status quo hopes is this new dependence would make for easier reconciliation, when history shows any time trade dependence becomes too extreme it only makes for civil war as most don't benefit but are harmed, or war because another nation feels the pinch too and is attempting to better their peoples' lot to avoid civil war, or civil war succeeds, and you get in its place a warmonger system or other nations dislike the change and attack the new nation.
History just seems to constantly repeat itself.
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It's because healthcare sector violates every competitive market principle thus doesn't function at all without rules and generally collective market is the only better method to get the desirable (lower costs, higher supply, and higher quality) then markets that aren't competitive.
In that case, food is government "controlled" with requirements of nutrition Facts, ingredients, and expiration dates. And since retail is taxed on income to the retailer, many states charge a sales tax and/or an income tax too, with that qualifier, then everything his government controlled in the economy.
Go read an economic book. Learn about competitive market principles.
And examine how other nations deal with market rules for various sectors.
You'll find the US propaganda from our oligarchs that we're getting fucked on many of our utilities especially if you're the unfortunate one to have to pay for privately owned utility company rather than a municipally owned, health sector is a big fat fucking racket from biotech to big pharma circle jerk, to higher education costs.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror
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And they have created inflation: housing, healthcare, education, and even food has gone up the latter housing which once accounted for 20% of take home pay, is now accounting for over 40%. While wages stay flat to falling because we're competing with serf labor in various other nations which are already fallen rock bottom like Brazil, a major commodities producer as commodities had and were the first to crash in the collapse. Now China and other manufacturing serf nations are collapsing because demand in the once rich nations are falling apart, and the would be emerging markets are based on serf labor can't purchase the goods they make. So the entire thing is falling apart.
Capital sees this and freaks and is going back to physiocracy; you see this with elites from Russia, China, Asia, Mexico, Brazil, the four corners of the 3rd and 2nd worlds buying gobs of land in the so called wealthy countries, as well as the elites domestically in forms of individuals and large trusts to get whatever crumbs income the worker is making. Monarchs and their nobility class loved physiocracy, it was their thesis to having a feudal system.
Thus that is what you are observing world wide.
Really doesn't take multiple simulations of probability algorithm on a super computer to figure this shit out.
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I'm sorry to say for your own financial we being, what most of you do would do as a hobby; post videos about your hobbies or what you like to do. Or rant. And the stuff produced, we would all be fine without... short and sweet google articles explained with cartoon images and personal political slant... seriously you can do that in your own head and save time to so, or have a discussion with a real friend.
The people who want five to ten minute breakdown of something in the format of a cartoon, aren't usually serious people at anything or they would look the information up that's a few key words away.
People thinking in cartoon, perhaps why Americans are starting to behave and think they're a cartoon, and the rest of the world actually knows they're a cartoon.
As advertisement goes, we don't watch'em. So there's little to no advertisement value unless your doing infomercials as the subject of your content which some of us do look up concerning various things like electronics, how to's, etc. There's actual value rather than cheap mild entertainment.
Most of us block the advertisement junk. If forced to watch ads, we leave. I seriously, didn't watch much youtube until I got an ad blocker. It as a place to store my home videos and maybe make them watchable by friends or anywhere on youtube.
And when I did watch without an ad blocker, it was usually BBC, national geographic, etc. documentaries on those channels that weren't monetized in the first place. As soon as an ad appeared and started playing, and couldn't be ignored, off I went on to better things. Still do the same if I'm on a computer that doesn't have ad blocker.
Ads suck. Don't depend on them. Like in store retail, it's over valued.
Basically, enjoy the time you have with whatever money you're making.
There's an ad bubble along with a retail bubble. Likely won't last for long.
What pay exists on things like youtube in the long run will be very low, part time job low.... and none for those trying to make it big in show biz... as has been with every electronic media format.
Oh yeah, this time is different.... funny, when that's thrown around... it usually isn't.
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The establishment DNC is so fucked up. Nixon who remarked "We're all Keynesian now." would be considered more left than the DNC now. We have moved so far fucking right winger economically, that the entire system is falling apart, as it does under an entrenched oligarchy over any government type over 3,000 years of human history.
1980 top bracket at 70% on income above $200,000 adjust to $1.18 million 2016.
Reagan dropped them every year until 1988 to 28% on income above $29,750 adjusted to $60,200 2016 value.
While he brought the bottom tax rate down from 14% on income to 12% 1982, then 1983 to 11%, but then snookered everyone when in 1988 the bottom income tax soared to 15% with only two tax brackets 15% under 29,749. And 28% above that.
So he fucked the lower income earners, so the rich could be more bloated.
Sick and twisted. Reagan should be hailed as the returner to oligarchy robber baron setting the stage for a 40 year play out for economic collapse. And that's just his tax policy. His anti-union stance fucked the worker hardcore, his allowance and further normalization of trade with despotic serf labor and dumping selling at a loss government owned gulags of China, and the rise of the joke of the century the 401K in place of the pension.
No. Everything put in place since Reagan has gone ueber right winger economically. And we're suffering for it worldwide. The economic system nearly collapsed in 2008. And it's being held together with gum and sprinkling dust by the oligarchs who are losing control over the political systems of every major and minor nation world wide to various nut bags as people take on apathy not voting, and those who do pick insane people over their stacked selection in the two so called different parties.
The DNC has to become and actual opposition party to the GOP, not a cover for them. The DNC cannot be a fake option anymore, the assistance toward the delusion there's a choice. Whether the DNC consciously mean to be the fake party, or not, that's what has happened.
Coke and Pepsi. A taste test revealed people who preferred one brand pop over the other, in a blind taste test would chose the opposite to their preferred choice brand. It upset the subjects so much, they had to discontinue doing the yearly poll samples.
People can be highly delusional. There's no choice. But enough advertisement, enough normalization, it feels like choices abound. When they don't. And you mention it to them when you find out what their true preference would actually be objectively, they get very pissed off. Like a sleep walker being awaken abruptly from their sleep they will be confused and anger very easily.
Our species is such a weird piece of something. But at least knowing how we work we can improve ourselves.
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10goldfinger, no shit, most nations issued bonds (often "bought" their own bonds: monetized it with potential to sell such bonds if inflation were to occur) they went way into debt.
It's what happens when you have a complete collapse or even just a recession. Government is the spender of last resort, otherwise you have a complete collapse of an economics then a new government often brutal bandits arise, civil war, etc.
What did you expect after a deep recession?
People literally making less wages/salaries and some how you expect revenue to increase under such condition, and in fact you have many needing assistance in the short run as they just got laid off?
WTF?
Do you not understand basic macroeconomics?
What's scary though is this bubble afterwards has inflated private/consumer/corporate debts. Household debts surpassed 2008 high first 3 months of 2017.
Total stock margin debt in the US is nearly twice the high of 2008 that was roughly $378 billion, is now $559 billion.
The system never was fixed, instead it got its "fix" of meth.
This bubble is on steroids, and the last one nearly defunct the financial system.
Leverage (all this borrowing) mixed with investment chasing investment money as there is no actual underlying demand, in fact underlying demand continues to decline in the vicious cycle, causes these boom busts that oscillate in ever increasing ferocity, like an earthquake from start to end, it becomes so violent it shakes itself to pieces until the structure falls, each wave more terrible than the last.
Anyway, that's what has me concerned. We're headed for catastrophe. And most of us worker types are going to be fucked. Gig economy, while that's a joke where we're the brunt, there won't be an economy whatsoever after this bust, or at least the next right after. The oscillation in these busts are exponential.
But you're worried about national debts... ha!
http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=3153&category=8
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Many of the countries that have national oil system, fund many of their government that includes higher education for all citizens, universal healthcare, national pension/retirement plans, etc. Most notably is Norway. But even more are all the Middle Eastern countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, UAE, which include spending on basic living stipends such as paying for housing, utilities including electricity, water, sewer, etc. day care, even vacation allotments.
People just don't realize the economic-political fortunes of many industries have that in our country are privately distributed to a very few people.
They will soon enough as it all falls apart as capitalism's consolidation usually does.
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That's what I was thinking because what is former stances have been, and even now. That he's actually fucking the idiot constituency on the right, he realizes as a PT Barnum marketing gimmick machine himself, hey, I can take all these schmucks on, and gives two chances for a liberal to actually get elected, Trump secrete liberal, or an actual liberal in name as well. All he has to do is play to their xenophobia and he's got them.
If Trump does become president, and ends up passing liberal policy like universal coverage, taxing finance sector and other extremely wealthy to assist in fixing our infrastructure, backing out of NAFTA, CAFTA, and other trade agreements to build back our domestic economy, etc. I'd be like YEAHH!!!!
I'm just not counting on that. But I can hope. He seems like he's all over the place right now, but if he is pulling a PT Barnum, he's gotta be that way. But he could easily go full hardcore right wing freak show too though and completely destroy what is left the middle class.
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I think in the US in particular, people say they "know" god exist for several reasons:
1) Culturally it's acceptable to say you are convinced that god exists, that you have special knowledge.
2) It's highly profitable: not taxed and it's an invisible product other than the building or trinkets as overhead, and it's easy to gain ignorant people to pay for your special knowledge per number 1. All you need to do is convince yourself that you saw visions or spoke with god directly or had a sign of some kind, due to number 1; makes this move into to sociopath pathology very easy, or just be a psychopath who doesn't need to turn toward sociopath pathology to potentially do harm by knowingly lying to people; some psychopaths might even get a kick out of it, or really extreme psychopaths may not even be phased by lying, it meets their goal to make money, so what if it's lie.
Those are the prime 2 reasons those numbers would rank rather high in the US; cultural acceptability of supernatural specifically regarding to gods or a god, and profit motive which puts this into a feedback loop amplifying those numbers.
The 3rd applies generally all over the world, to use a narrative to feel as though you have control of what is uncontrollable, often in grandeur the self as well as the objects and other people and things in the narrative, makes them seem grander than what we or the objects or others maybe. This may play into number 1 in the US, since we have very few social safety nets until you are elderly. Our educational system is very inadequate relative to the current modern technology and scientific knowledge now discovered and per the required needs, and a weird self indulgence escapism on celebrities and wealthy people; the seeking of grandeur in their lives provides immediate comfort to their problems and concerns.
Hence the US, but this 3rd point can easily apply to every other place on earth, the appetite for very imaginative conspiracy theories including UFO's, ETs, New World Order grand plan, Truther Movement, Kennedy grand assassination ideas, etc.
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+han solo I actually have a Bachelor's degree in Finance and management. And I do own stocks. I'm talking about my day job. Not about my capital investments for retirement.
I also have a degree in aviation. I recently have a tentative offer going through the screening process for Air Traffic Control. So I'm working very hard. It just happens that field work pays more than office work. And I'm going where the money is. The place of employment I'm at no longer offers pensions as of 2010, I got out of the military 2011, and hired at the place 2012. So I'm out pension a the current place I work.
I'm a little nervous on the ATC thing, it's en-route position is my TOL; has a huge fail out rate. Current employment is a bit more secure then starting up a career in Air Traffic Control. But we'll see. I'm still going through the final screening phases right now.
The stock market isn't a very good gamble necessarily. Looking at the past, the US stock market's last 40-50 years is not normal. It usually only gains about 4% and often actually loses money. And other stock markets internationally even in our time such as Japans, can be very flat for a generation; currently Japan's stock market is still in it's 25 year flat spot.
If you made a fortune from 2009 to present congrats. Just don't count on that being a stable way of money making. I made some money as a young adult in 2002 playing the stock market. I realized much of finance is a gimmick. A new tip I heard on getting car loans now, simply make lots of various deposits to your bank account. The dealerships are looking at numbers of deposits; at least that's what's weighted on getting you a lower interest rate; not how much is in the bank account or how big those deposits are.
Learning finance, I realized much of it is a gimmick. My international finance class concerning maquiladoras really turned me off. Essentially, we've returned to colonial mercantilism all over again. Substitute colonies with perpetual developing countries this time however. And rather than aristocracy and wealthy noble peerage owning the monopolies, plutocrats are using their politicians to assist in subsidizing various sectors of interest. What we have is comparative advantage only in what each country subsidizes and the inauthentic comparative advantage of surf wages for all other sectors for that nation. USA subs farm goods, aerospace such as Boeing and Lockheed those are our greatest exports while all other sectors are not doing so great and the wages drop further in sympathy. Mexico owns outright their oil company; their greatest export; they have huge displaced farmers can't compete with our subsidized food now working in maquiladora sweat shops. Russia subsidizes its weapons, space, and energy sectors letting the rest of their sectors sink in further wage depression for the inauthentic comparative advantage. China subsidizes cheap consumer good manufacturing as well as refinement of raw materials all other sectors go to the inauthentic comparative advantage of surf style low wages. Germany subsidizes it's precision manufacturing sector as well as (and smartly so on the demand side) price fixes rents and consumer stable goods to pump up domestic buying power while looking relatively cheap internationally.
The economic structure we have right now, is essentially mercantilism all over again. What needs to happen is a focus on domestic production-supply and domestic consumption demand. Unfortunately, all nations appear to be stuck in the rut of all nations trying to export their way to prosperity. And this is mathematically impossible. It comes at a detriment to domestic economies world-wide, a vicious cycle of underlying demand deterioration. Bernanke even stated, this last great recession is not necessarily a monetary problem; that it is more of an economic structural problem. All things being equal; we don't change from this mathematically impossible notion of all nations trying to export their way to prosperity it will ultimately bring about a vicious deflationary cycle. Same as happened under mercantilism; only thing that actually aided mercantilism on occasions was technological advancements in industrial revolutions; as well as the eventually withdraw from nations simply trying to export their way to prosperity, but to focus on domestic supply and demand.
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+VeryEvilPettingZoo I agree, there is actually a mathematical response too to considering a tornado arranging a junkyard if it happened an infinite amount of time. First, we must define are you meaning a fully function 737? If so, such a thing wouldn't be possible. Something that resembles a 737 in shape? Sure.
What you'd likely get is just an infinite combination of arrangement of jumbled parts within a infinite repeating pattern. Possibly not even resembling a 737 ever in the repeating pattern.
But anyways. That's not how the big bang is theorized to work anyways.
Lots of it is still unknown other than lots of evidence and expansion took place everywhere and it does support the concept of cosmological inflation theory in that the expansion grew faster at the speed of light and mixed from one end to the other and smoothed distribution of energy out significantly; that phase changes took place that started then began the first expansion, then slowed the expansion rate, and then re-accelerated the expansion. And today it's accelerating even faster.
Phase changes appear to happen in the manner of how the universe has expanded. That is observational fact. How, is still being studied and figured out. Dark matter and dark energy still being figured out. Symmetry breaking of the anti-particle and particle pares is still being studied to figure out how anti-matter makes up hardly none of our universe, how our positively charged protons become the primary atom in our universe; how did symmetry break is still being worked on.
I really hate how people either pander to their audience in deliberate misinforming people, or just talk out their ass because they're ignorant about a subject.
Let these theocratic people with axes to constantly grind know, big bang was actually initially theorized by a Catholic priest. It proves neither way if magical gods or god exists. It doesn't bother with such nonsense, the're no need to take your ax and kill it because it somehow violates your superstition, it doesn't bother with your superstition or fairy tales.
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Neo should be changed to Nostos (return), the repetition through ancient history from the Ancient Greeks, Romans, feudalism of the dark ages to the middle ages, to the mercantilism and oligarch from renaissance to the industrial era.
Nothing new. Just humanity as if it has no memory returning to the same economic systems that put an oligarchy of some kind, leaving the mass of people into war and economic hardship until it all falls apart in some bloody revolt to the point who knows what gets put in its place.
We the people need to get our heads out of our asses and get these people out. We cannot afford to wait for it to become a violent revolution. It must be a swift peaceful campaign that clears out this so frequent nostos to oligarchy. Ignore their yellow journalism, stick to the issues, attend all primaries, encourage those capable of running to run, if that is you then put yourself out there, and for sure you must vote, at least attend all primaries and elections and vote, put in absentee ballot if you can't go in person, but vote.
Otherwise it will end in some violent bloody mess, and it won't mean we're the victors of anything, but usually the brunt of yet another cycle in this never ending madness.
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Heir to a fortune want free shit for their entire prodigy. Never have to work a day in their lives. And those in upper crust want workers who actually get stuff done, to be paid substantially less and expect a virtuous growing economy that produces growth in demand for the very production factories and distribution networks they lord over?
And it isn't free stuff, its called an investment among the people; they'll be more productive with a cheaper accessible healthcare system, with a better system for distributing natural monopolies, better methods of education and worker allocation, better set of formation of rules the destroy unnatural monopolies destroying competitive markets, those unnaturally consolidated monopoly markets that cause a huge 80%+ to exist in poverty, production relegated to a few oligarchs and toady class.
That is a system with huge equality issues that cause the system to be self-defeating. It's why no system, not even US, is a pure capital laissez faire system, they've all gone toward social-capital mixed economies and the best national living standards among the nations with a strong democratic-republic system; not a dictatorship or absolute monarchy.
A more laissez faire approach is what brought us autocratic systems with economic systems of fascism and autocrats of the proletariat communism, and nearly pushed many other nations into prolonged impoverished conditions the likes that are still observed in Central America, South America, and Central and South Asia.
Social-Capital mixed market systems are the best in establishing competitive markets, and distinguishing those markets that don't function well under competitive market principles as they violate every competitive market principle, and ensure equitable distribution to maintain a virtuous/growing economy; not a vicious/shrinking economy.
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+Fly I don't like bloody revolutions and the Terror after the French Revolution when they suspended their constitution destroyed their revolution.
However, the way these oligarchs are going, they'll be swinging from trees or bleeding from their temples from some bullet hole.
And we the people fucked over, will have to pick up the pieces. Hope that we can return to sanity, uphold the constitution, take control over our country as a democracy of, for, and by the people and get on with life. And hope another suspension of the constitution doesn't instill another Terror and then another dictator.
What these oligarchs don't understand, is that people are on the ropes and have nothing to lose, so the opinion becomes why not risk it? We have nothing to lose, we're already tyrannized economically. It's like being in the desert or in some tropical forest with no clothes or anything else, all the freedom in the world, but to starved and cold and eaten by bugs to enjoy this so called freedom.
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BLU Robot Soldier We do exist, nothing technical about it. I think what you mean our expectations about reality may not exist.
The nucleus of an atom from the proton-neutron to the electron mass doesn't cause structure and volume effect, rather the electromagnetic force is responsible for producing much of the structure and volume and other properties we interact with everyday. EM force provides us with structure, things to touch, feel, smell, and involves a majority of our interactions with molecules.
It's not that we don't exist, not even technically; rather its the expectation one holds on reality that may not exist.
It's that EM force interaction makes up most of what we think of as reality: liquid, solid, gas, plasma, etc. The particles themselves are extremely small, and in many cases have no defined size like the electron which can often be in many places at once, its more of a cloud, an orbital, orbitals are used to provide understanding of the emerging structure of elements and compounds. And protons and neutron centers are also smeared in several places at the same time in a proportional amount. It's the entire particle-wave duality phenomena. As they scale in amount of atoms emerge in chains and other geometric patterns emerging structures and properties of the structure; smooth, rough, hardness, softness, melting points, boiling points, freezing points, etc.
But we as many chemical compounds exist.
It's may not be how everyone may have expected such things to be the basis of our existence, our expectations never existed.
What one expects exists, doesn't, but what really does, does exist.
For instance, early Christians all the way to days of Zeus, deity of one form or others were thought to cause lightening, they expected reality of gods causing lightening. When it was discovered lightening is large scale static electricity, lightening didn't stop existing, lightening still exists, what didn't exist all along were their expectations that deities or one particular deity was causing lightening, it was their expectation of reality that didn't exist.
Lightening though, it still exists.
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Hallucinations regardless of their cause either it be from night/day terrors, lucid dreaming, substance eaten like mushrooms or LSD or whatever, are still hallucinations; your mind sparking various portions of the brain that give experiences of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and sometimes mixing senses together or creating a sensation of other senses above the 5 input senses we have.
It's brain failures just as a book of optical illusions or other illusions.
To say their somehow divine or come from some magical sources is making a huge hasty conclusion via false correlation.
If you chose to trip balls, that's your own desire and personal enjoyment.
I personally had night and day terrors as a child, essentially waking dreams that were often terrifying and some were so odd they make no sense at all. I haven't had them sense I was a toddler and rather not trip on anything. I have enough vivid and sometimes lucid dreams that its enough for a source of creativity and adventure and sometimes pure horror or just adventurous fun. Don't need to take substance for that. No thanks.
I had some lucid dreams last few years back, and one in particular I did experiments. I knew I was dreaming, but everything seemed so real, I was amazed and wanted to experiment with various things in it. Picked up water with my hands, sand on the bank of the river, listened to the birds and wind, felt the warm of the sun and the light reflecting off the water. The smell of the river etc.
Felt very real. There were only a few flaws I noticed. Instead of observing the various things by taking it in, I only came to notice them when I thought about having to notice them, birds chirping only started when I thought I should hear them, smell of "seaweed" or the river didn't happen until I thought I should smell it, warmth of the sun not until I thought I should feel it, essentially there wasn't anything that drew my attention because it was annoying or drawing my attention to it, rather I thought about it first then it happened. The other problem, water dripped of my skin to quickly, and the sand that remained went away to quick without washing it off. I just quit thinking about the sand on my hands and it went away. I had to pay close attention to the inconsistencies, and I noticed during the dream and even now, I dislike thinking about the inconsistencies, as though the brain is trying to make up for the flaws or just trying to brush them off aka ignore them. But I really wanted to compare on contrast the dreaming consciousness with reality. There is very subtle differences, but mostly remarkably and amazingly the same.
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+GoErikTheRed Spelling is to facilitate the spoken language and have recorded for a long time. It's often arbitrary. If anything, it was making the language more efficient to rid constants and vowels that aren't being spoken for that word anymore... in other words has nothing to do with dumb down the written language, but to modify the written language to conform to how it is spoken.
Do you think all the other languages after Latin and Ancient Greek are all dumb down? As that would imply from old French, German, Russian, English, etc. to current languages are all just gradually dumber languages; which frankly is stupid, we've discovered much and added more vocabulary to use to discover more. I wouldn't call that dumb.
Languages change over time and so do their writing. And skool is not written like that yet, no joke. But at some point it could be, it's more phonetically correct the way it's spoken in most places in the US. For now though, our current spelling standards will likely remain longer than it had in the past.
Regardless if it's American or UK spelling English spelling is insane mostly due to the French influence under the Normand Kings. Receipt, straight, etc. how many useless constants including an additional vowel to make the ae noise is needed in a word, and changes in i before e except after c rules... English spelling overall is illogical. Almost as bad as the logic of French spelling.
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In fact, it was "globalization" or really what it is a a return to feudalism using despotic countries and poor oligarchical countries like Guatemala, Honduras El Salvador, Mexico, Vietnam, etc. to produce all our stuff. The smoke stacks left Europe and US. But they didn't vanish. They just went to these places, and even worse without any scrubbing technology and enforced environmental protection whatsoever, industry is now pumping out even more than what would have been had all that production that left, remained in the developed countries. People wonder why no dent has been made despite Europe, Australia, Japan, US, etc.environmental regulations, and our cut in emissions. It's because all the production went abroad. And the lost jobs has the effect of being very persuasive to an uneducated public, now under employed, to ignore and even be hostile to the concept of climate change due to industrialization, as they think that's why the jobs went away.
CO2 produced in the US has the same effect as CO2 produced in China. China can act concerned as most nations. But I wouldn't go to various places in China without a mask, their smog is terrible, and they had an entire port blow up last year. All nations are just pretending to do something about it. Fact remains, that status quo keeps the oligarchs of the respective nations apple carts full... until everything collapses that is.
Many in the UK and Europe populous also think climate change is a hoax or is overblown, as they're out of work. Everyone is scapegoating with something or another. And focusing on the US is yet another scapegoat, so nothing of action ever happens. Too many apple carts would be rocked; from the oligarch to the executives, the management, to lower management, to the pleb doing the dirty work. Lots of apple carts. Easier to pretend we care, and then focus on a scapegoat. US's case, pretend it's a hoax as a scapegoat.
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+Sharstar G I think very uneducated people fall for this nonsense. I remember in late 80's or early 90's, I was flipping through channels, and started watching the "700 Club", my mom said oh turn this shit off they're phony money grubbing pieces of shit. I didn't, moments later, my dad came home, and said, "Why the Sam hell are you watching this trash. Turn that trash off, all they want is your money, they don't speak for Jesus or god or anyone, other than their bank accounts. There's a special place in hell waiting for those assholes, so Turn it!"
LOL! Really? cool! I want to see! He stomped out of the living room.
I watched a little and couldn't imagine why anyone would give them any money.
And my parents aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, so if they can spot a scam, I have a hard time understanding the people who do fall for these cons.
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Make ratings. And since the public tends to love power of rich people including business executives, owners, sports members, actors, musicians, and big politicians from dynastic families or promoted by another rich person like Oprah, their ratings only go up what the general public will watch. And high ratings brings in advertisements money which pays their bills.
General public has to stop caring about athletes, movie stars, musical artists, rich business owners, and dynastic families. The fawning of them has to end for any change to happen. What usually ends those things is serious pain unfortunately.
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Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Australia, UK, S. Korea, Japan, France, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. are all social mixed market economies shit head. We are also a social-capital mixed market economy not as much as the other countries. And Greece is being bailed out by those other more social-capital mixed market countries. And Germany's budget along with many of the others are actually much smaller deficit to GDP than our nation that isn't as social-capital mixed market relative to them.
No. The lie of the oligarchs is over. Our people are becoming more educated than ever. We can figure out social democrat view point isn't the same as communism of Cuba or the former USSR or N. Korea or what weirdness was going on in Venezuela. Speaking about Venezuela, under Juan Vicente Gómez essentially military dictatorship, he created a very corrupt oligarchy that lead to a under educated masses to go full tilt communistic after 1935 to present. So the robber baron economy trickle down piss on me dogma only results in a collapsed economy and government that can lead to lower education and thus worse government and economic reform.
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And rents and home prices continue to soar. Due to the dumping of money supply into the system from the Fed Reserve to stimulate the economy, with the assumption that higher real-estate prices will get people feeling richer, thus spend more.
Which actually causes rents and mortgages to become extremely high cutting into the budget to spend on anything else. We need to bring back supply that is subsidized. Just ensure the quality is good, no slum lord projects, but good decent apartments 1 bedrooms from 700 sq foot to 900 sq foot, 2 bedrooms 800 to 1100 sq foot, etc. and housing with what's become known as starter homes that builders aren't building instead they're playing to more affluent market building large houses that sit empty because that more affluent market is small, but it only takes a few units to sell to make a tidy profit.
We need more unions. More co-op business ventures where the employees own the company and can contribute to making business decisions to where the profit goes.
And we need to slowly and sneak (to avoid a trade war) back production to the US, and then put a quark in dealing with totalitarian nations' and corrupt poor nations' serf labor, and dumping such as happens in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Mexico, etc. Because at the root of the problem is the race to the bottom trade.
But we need to take back our country from the oligarchy.
6% were for ISP's being able to legally sell your personal browsing information; 94% of all Americans were against it. That's not a representative country, nowhere near a democracy in the slightest. Who's being represented are the oligarchs who have purchased our government.
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+Mobo vids Some experiments have been done to see if space is flat, curved like a sphere, or like a saddle. Results: Space appears flat.
So either the universe is really huge, so the curve isn't noticed at the observable universe length or at the distance done in the experiment, or it is indeed flat, meaning it's infinite.
I don't understand infinite space, but I don't understand undefined singularities either very well. So an infinite universe to me wouldn't make much sense. But it is a possibility. I think it would bend back on itself you would essentially keep going far enough you circumnavigate back from where you started.
But the experiment showing the universe is flat would imply you wouldn't, you'd just keep going. The only way I can kind of understand an infinite universe is that it is expanding faster than C as you get further than our Hubble Sphere, so you could never run out of space, it's continuing to create more space for you to get into as you try to move further.
And the weird factor from the singularity we come from, everything is equally far from any "edge" so everywhere would have that same problem; if the universe is infinite; even on a different galaxy on the other side of the observable universe from us, they would also be as if it were just as far from any "edge" as we are. Farther you look back you are no closer to the center of the universe, because there isn't any center. And that is trippy to me.
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Debt deficits are bad when the reserve loses control over fixing interest rates. Deficits on their own aren't always bad. Depending on what is being spent on-- long term investment spending like energy, transportation, ports, markets, other utilities, and R&D is good. Security is good only to the level is required to achieve secure commerce, any excess only stimulates until it is no longer receiving funds. Temp relief like unemployment and other short term aid is only as good for a short term.
The concern is what the deficits should be for? Security/military which doesn't have that much of a residual benefit and pretty sad when it does like GPS-- because now your spending so much you are statistically bound to get some R&D item that's useful beyond security. Instead, we should spend purposely on commerce R&D like navigation, transportation, medical, etc. specific criteria. And implementation of technologies like better grids using superconductors and get thorium reactors online in just 5 years as we await ITER which will take at least another 20 years.
Where deficits relate to peoples and non-federal banking is on what purpose the borrowing: It's either investment such as house or utility like a car which has returns on its use and/or future exchange or consumption spending like on a vacation or tickets and hotel stays for the super bowl which carries no continued financial value, but just life value on enriching ones life experiences.
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Lennie Godber We do. It's serious. Just trying to get help for a family member took forever (7 years). They have to develop a "rap sheet" demonstrating harm to the community before on can actually force them to be treated. And my dad actually made a comment he didn't have the cash to one of the asinine public councilor which put a rash in that asshole councilor's ass.
After a rap sheet of weirdness, one final morning the police finally came and escorted once again to the emergency room. This time the remained in the hospital while the nurses were taking blood and doing other tests. And the police finally made the determination she should be taken of psychological analysis for 72 hours. Which at that point a judge and doctors would determine how much more treatment would be done.
Needless to say, they discovered the person was manic schizophrenic unknown origin exactly even to this day which required several months of treatment. And yes, my dad hadn't the money to pay for really any of it. The judge explained the person would become ward of the state and the state would pay for it. The councilor got upset and told the judge Idaho wouldn't pay for it, the judge actually got irritated with the councilor and said I told him (my dad) the state is paying for it. The 2 1/2 months cost like $90K in a state mental hospital. They found what medications work, and the person's been out since doing okay. Of the amount the state did pick up most of it with half picked up by my dad's medical insurance and my dad picked up $10K of it. And they pay medical premiums of $700 a month. The person is near 65 toward medicare age, so soon they'll be able to not have to pay that premium for bullshit insurance which basically takes her social security she's 62, her social security is just $780 a month pretty sad amount. Many elderly people live on this pathetic amount.
The US is a bullshit place. If it weren't for my dad's pension for working for a company for 35 years and the VA benefits for his own medical issues they'd be fucked up the anus.
The US is a fucked up country which I personally believe our next generation is going to be living in tent cities. Our medical system is a joke, our trade agreements simply use despotic countries for oligarchs to exploit destitute labor to sell their products back to the US and other developed countries. And they frankly don't give a shit that demand is deteriorating in all developed countries least to say the US. Its about the buck now, and fuck the future. So long as they end up holding all the economic and political power.
We have many problems. And our social safety nets are a joke. If we had any of the unemployment problems Spain, Italy, or especially Greece is currently undergoing, we'd have a civil war in no time flat.
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I always suspected what he mentioned about how and results of Portugal.
That if we just legalized every drug, and take all the money into re-introducing them into society that it would help.
Notice whenever countries that economic situation deteriorates, epidemics of drug use and deaths soar. By further punishing addicts, you make it impossible for them to ever overcome the addiction.
Our "drug war" is bogus. And it only helps fuel drug lord mobsters, and use our police force and in ill mannered ways. But the US isn't known for not being backwards.
Rather famous for it.
And being so incredibly hypocritical: Freedom! But we're among the last nations to prohibit slavery. Democracy! But we're among the last nations to allow all men and women vote and run for office. Family oriented. But again, among the last to introduce compulsory public education, prohibit child labor, etc. The gift from France with a duplicate in Paris, the statute of liberty doesn't come from our own country, "...give me your huddled masses..." Actually, US is notorious for various nationalistic and racist gang fights from Irish to Italian to Sicilian to Polish to Russian to Mexican to Porto Rican to the natives and their various warring tribes among themselves, etc. has been not a melting pot, but often a boiling feuding pot. So being backwards appears what we're good at.
But the good news. We tend to eventually stop being backwards, and move forward.
Just usually among the middle or last.
So hurry up rest of you nations out there. Get 50 other nations to do so, and we'll be there!
Hurry. Snap to!
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US is the same in the sense of all the taxes added up.
Here's our break down for an Idahoan (the state I live in as it varies by state and some states by county as well).
Idaho State income tax which has a funny progressive tax system that tops out at $11,000 at 7.6%... so everyone's effective tax is about 7.4%.
Federal Income tax which has some deductions as all countries do, including Sweden. My effective tax rate for 2017 was 9% after simple deductions.
Payroll taxes that are based on gross income, not adjusted nor based on "taxable income, so your entire gross income is taxed at 6.2% for social security and 1.49% for medicare/medicaid or total combined 7.69%.
If you are an independent contractor or otherwise running your own business you pay the employer match or 12.4% Social Security tax and 2.9% making it 15.3%
So effective tax of 7.4% state + 9% Federal + 7.69% payroll = effective tax of 24.09% that's gross income of $36,000... was not an independent contractor, was an employee, with an employer that matched the payroll.
Otherwise my tax would have been 31.7% however, my deductions might have drawn that down a bit... would have deducted all businesses expenses. As an employee with very few if any business expenses only took the standard deduction.
Then we have a sales tax of 6% in the state of Idaho for all counties.
Gasoline tax $0.18 per gallon Federal and Idaho is $0.33 per gallon summed gasoline per gallon price is $0.51 more gallon due to taxes, and your taxed 6% on top of that for sales tax for whatever amount you buy.
Property taxes in Idaho (again they vary by state and some states by counties, and cities too) are The statewide average urban tax rate is 1.582% while the rural rate is 1.032%. If it is your primary resident, you're living there, you can deduct 50% of that tax... so only pay 0.791% or 0.516%. If its a rental or extra home, you're paying the full amount which is assessed every year based on the market prices... so if you're in a crazy bubble and a house that once was $100K suddenly goes for $150K you're paying more... most people pay this through the year in an escrow account that gets submitted to the state, and certainly if its mortgage it almost always must be paid via an escrow account to the bank you have the mortgage toward as part of your monthly payment, the bank doesn't want to have the state to force auction the house due to unpaid property taxes. So the bank makes sure you pay it by adding it toward the monthly mortgage payment.
Then of course there are smaller fees for licence and registration.
But that's the main gist of our taxes.
It mostly hurts the lower incomes as payroll taxes particularly the 6.2% social security stops being taxed above the gross income of $128,700... so your effective tax declines significantly on gross income above that for 2018.
Dividend and capital gains taxes are 0% for incomes 0 to https://www.corporatemonkeycpa.com/2018/02/22/taxes-on-dividends-and-capital-gains-under-the-tax-cuts-jobs-act/ $38,600 for single filers and $77,200 for joint filers. taxes are 15% for $38,601 - $425,800 single and $77,201 - $479,000 joint, and income above that margin tax is 20% top.
And is not subject to payroll or any other tax.
Hence why many rich effective taxes are about 17% to 20% while workers taxes are as mine 24.09% or high wage/salary earners like doctors effective taxes can easily be in the 30%. And that's not including all the other taxes mentioned and medical insurance premiums and co pays and deductibles.
We're a tax the worker and especially the poorer worker the most. The most poor do get substantial deductions and with children some credits. Those just treading water $30K or higher workers, get hosed hard. Hence why so many that start a business, if it picks up good income, make it an LLC and issue their wages as dividends.
Website below can give you a nice feel for basic taxes in each state.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/idaho-tax-calculator
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The United States like many other countries has evolved its government through its life time to present.
At the beginning it was a constitutional republic federation of states. With mostly all the power to the states and any democratic election to its republics decided on by the states. It was economically and politically chaotic, so the Constitutional federal Government was created to oversea all states, the one Washington was elected by congress to be president (our first US president under the constitution).
Most of all the elected bodies to the federal government was voted into office by peers elected from states, only under state level were male white property owners allowed to vote for their state representatives or run for office.
-Then times changed by 1830's all white males could vote for state candidates regardless of property ownership.
-Then all males regardless of race could vote. Black suffrage was later extended to all states by the 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870)
-Then the people could vote directly for their federal representatives (senate candidates) not just for their state representation who would elect the federal representation. The Seventeenth Amendment (Amendment XVII) to the United States Constitution established direct election of United States Senators by popular vote
-1920 women could vote. The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX)
Then women and men could vote for their state representatives.
- Bringing the vote to people under 21 years of age wasn't fully adopted in all states until 1971. The 26th Amendment ratified by in 1971, voting age became in all states 18 years old or older.
So its been an evolving process. At the start basically for elite property owners with most votes from within the states elected bodies who then elected federal candidates to federal positions. Kind of like today regarding the electoral college. They did this for a few reasons, the elites didn't trust the uneducated mob for higher authority of government, many were actually couldn't even read in the 18th and 19th century. And of course, to maintain their businesses (their wealth) and political authority just like any elites do in any social structure. Human nature.
Because what was written at the beginning was a power too and for a few wealthy white men, a plutocrat. And has evolved into more of a democratic republic as far as the federal government. As for states, each state acts different. Some states like mine in Idaho, require popular vote to approve their state legislature to raise any state taxes or to give any authority for taxes or establishing any governmental state authority. Essentially, Idaho, as other states, many state laws passed by legislature must be ratified by popular vote by the people. So its a complex subject depending whether you're talking about state or federal government, and which state. Then what time period.
All happened at various times by states and eventually adopted by all states usually by constitutional amendments. All from protests, riots, rebellions to outright civil war. The founding fathers only stroke of genius was to keep the constitution vague and open for updates. And it has been updated quite a bit.
And needs lots more updates.
Below is source of timeline regarding democratic vote of the people.
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/resources/Constiutionality-V6-2010-3-7.pdf
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FarryEntertainment I have thought about several points you made. But they're answerable logically.
1) the first one why am I me? Why not one moment I'm someone else?
Answer: I'm particular set of biological system that gave rise to my brain. Within my brain is the processes that make me, me. My neurological processes are closed and cannot migrate to other brains. So I'm stuck being me, as you're stuck being you.
2) Doesn't matter if the process that derived you makes the universe exist. The universe exists regardless of the brain and the process of the brain that allow you to notice things.
3) The approx 7 billion people in the world do exist regardless if you meet them or not.
Some friends and I related an idea that when people leave our presence they just go into a closet like some robot or vanish and wait to re-enter our presence. This is actually a common initial idea the brain models. What you're referring to is cognitive developmental stages. In humans there are various cognitive developmental stages based on our ability to reason as our brain matures. Egocentrism is the stage when someone usually a toddler is unable to discern their perspective from another person perspective. Part of the process of growing out of egocentrism is that starting to challenge such thoughts by reflecting what others who left your presence are actually experiencing. And you realize, your sun shine butt isn't the center of the universe after all. People leave and continue experiencing things albeit different eating dinner at different times, having fun, while you maybe being sculled for accidentally breaking something, or visa versa. Essentially, the fact we start to describe such events and share them with others is demonstrating our maturing out of such false egocentric models.
However, some adults go back into self-centered universe thinking its all about them. LOL! Knowing very well its not, but they don't care, they don't experience other peoples' happiness or misery. So long as they're happy who cares about the rest. Of course, that can be dangerous if an entire society takes on such philosophy. Before you know it you have a few elite class oppressing everyone else. Riots and rebellions take place and life sucks for the vast majority. But that's a different psychological condition possibly psychopathy the inability to have empathetic response, or sociopath condition where that is learned not to concern yourself with the empathetic response one experiences about others' happiness or misery.
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Kanazak2, I agree with you. Unfortunately, that's not what has been happening. Supply side economics has become entrenched in US politics. It doesn't work as we observe. And it will fail, as it keeps sputtering.
What's required is supply and demand economics-- thinking about both sides of the demand curves. Input a demand subsidy it should be offset with a supply subsidy. And the opposite too: input a supply subsidy it must be offset with a demand subsidy. That way you get the actually intended results. Otherwise we always get the so called unintended consequences. Funny too how the Milton Friedman / Ian rand worshipers tend to love supply side subsidy legislation like tax cuts and credits, but freak when there's proposals for demand side subsidies like universal healthcare and expanding public education to include 2 year associates degrees or 4 year bachelor degrees or apprenticeship programs.
Also funny how they love patent protections such as those on medical appliances when that type of subsidy is admitting market failures-- essentially saying inventors won't invent unless you artificially manipulate prices by providing them monopoly power. Yet when there is apparent conflicts with many perfectly competitive market principles such as medical sector with its inelastic demand curve; pay any price for the product/service or die, hospital's huge economy of scale with ERs sitting at low usage for emergencies, etc. suddenly they're complaining about market manipulation and it's unintended consequences LOL! Real reason, patent protection lines lots of pockets, and a single payer system and utilizing a mix of state run hospitals and clinics doesn't line enough pockets as the status quo.
Then there's wages; you'll note in Europe especially in Germany, wages are openly discussed. Very common for a stranger at a party to not only ask what you do for a living, but how much you make at the job.
Because it's the only way to know how much you should bargain for when taking on a job. US suddenly perfect knowledge principle goes out the window. No, that's personal and you shouldn't discuss your wages with other employees. You either should be embarrassed by your wage or fear jealousy... which is idiotic. One shouldn't be embarrassed by their pay, nor should they fear jealousy from others; you didn't set the pay, the employer did. And that's why they like to keep wages secret, pit employees against each other and in ignorance what each other are making so you can keep their wages over all lower than if they knew their market worth at that company. It's why most median income jobs in western Europe, especially Germany, tend to pay better than the US.
Anyway, I agree with you on the fix. I just don't see any politician actually doing anything about it. We got cash for clunkers with Obama. And a weak tax raise on the higher income brackets. We never got a lift on social security caps that would help keep it solvent. We never saw a break up on medical patent protections from the current biotech to big pharma bid up that causes medical appliances and drugs to be extremely high in the US. Nor did medicare get the ability to negotiate for prices for various medical services at clinics and hospitals.
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+Light of Judgment What I find interesting about at least Germany, is that they have price controls. It's one of their clever ways they can compete fairly well within the EU. Essentially, their relative earnings is smaller than many other countries in western Europe, but their domestic prices such as rent and some other staple goods like food are price controlled, to be lower, therefore their domestic purchasing power is actually stronger.
Their relative actually pay outside of Germany is lower giving them the usually inauthentic comparative advantage of having lower waged workers, but domestically/internally that lower wage with the price controls is actually as high if not higher in purchasing power than the same countries.
They're kind of cheating, but with this weird return to a neo mercantilism trade structure, it's actually pretty smart way to play the system for benefit for essentially their entire people; it is however at the expense to all the other sucker countries not realizing their game.
Germans generally aren't idiots with numbers, this is the same country that actually came up with the very brilliant Kurze Arbeit or Short Work, instead of laying people off, the government would help business cover workers pay as if they were working full time. So if their normal work week was 37 hours, they all get cut so many hours say to 30 hours or 27 hours, the government paid the workers the difference, therefore the workers never took pay cuts nor went unemployed, this stopped the vicious deflationary cycle that generally happens during recession and allowed the economy to recover quickly after the great recession; demand didn't slump so far. And when things got better, the hours were restored, and the short work program ended. This was actually cheaper than paying unemployed people unemployment insurance money, as well as made the nipped the vicious cycle of lost jobs beget more lost jobs cycle making it faster to restore at least their domestic economy. They were out of recession incredibly quick.
The US has skewed income levels as well, and we have more percentage of our population in poverty than most developed European countries, on a review we ranked 7th highest in child poverty out of 37 countries. That's not very good for a rich country. Essentially, we have a few people who make a tremendous amount of money, and the rest not so much. And even using the median rather than the average, we still get the distortion because the incomes between higher earners and lower earners is so extreme, you can't really even use the median to try to find a decent statistical median 50/50.
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+Jonathan Seale LOL! They do all the time depending on the species. Various birds including ducks, geese, doves, etc. Squirrels, dogs, cats, etc. They can be very cruel to each other.
Then outside species cats and other predators will often toy with their prey. Keeping it alive, slowly crushing its legs until it eventually is mauled to death. And they usually don't eat it if their full. They just leave it.
That doesn't justify us humans acting like other uncivilized animals though.
I'm just saying animals domestic or wild can be very cruel to each other's own species and to other species.
You don't want us to use the nature of all animals as a morality compass.
Sharks, black widow spiders will eat their babies if the babies remain nearby shortly after birth or hatching.
Walrus mating and child rearing is very disturbing. Male walruses will fight over female walruses. The winning male walruses mate and leaves, the female walrus gets pregnant and eventually gives birth and abandons the baby walruses on the shore never to return. The male walruses that lost the opportunity to mate with the female walruses, act as surrogate parents of sorts to abandoned pups. Sexually frustrated, they remain but it's not for free. Regardless of walrus gender male or female walrus pups, the male surrogate parent rapes the pups who scream for mercy. Nature can be very disturbing.
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Tyler Anderson Yes. The speed at which we're going through our galaxy is 1.3 million miles per hour. So if you stopped going at the speed relative to our galaxy, your rate of time compared to the frame of reference in our galaxy, your reference frame would tick by a little faster compared to our rate of time inside and moving with the galaxy. 1.3 million miles per hour is about .001951 or 0.195% of the speed of light. I'm ignoring all the other motions of the sun orbiting the galaxy and earth orbiting the sun, and earth's rotation as those speeds are not significant to the large 1.3 million miles per hour the galaxy is moving. Especially considering orbits of the sun and earth and rotation of the earth vectors are not always summing in the same direction of the vector velocity of the Milky Way.
So relative to the galaxy, galaxies, your time rate of passing would be about 1.0000019012554222 times faster than time passing in the Milky Way (excluding local effects objects near heavy masses such as near stars and black holes and effects of planets even earth sized planets because proximity to mass has an effect on time dilation, closer to massive objects and the more massive the object the slower the object's rate of time compared to objects farther away or with little mass). Also you must realize, all objects in the universe are moving at various velocities and vectors (directions). And being at rest position is always relative. Even in the above example with the Milky Way.
So you're rest position in respect to the galaxy could still be motion relative to some other galaxy or object in the universe and is only at rest relative to the Milky Way.
Relativity is relative to other moving objects, and those objects in the universe does not have a particular direction and velocity to be at a universal rest position in relationship toward. Hence the Relativity is named with the word relativity.
What you're asking is can you move slower than our current rest velocity, sure. But all you're doing is making that object have the velocity in respect to you at rest to it. There is no universal rest velocity in respect to everything else in the universe. It's all relative to the direction of the object and the direction of velocity to something else. All motion is relative.
In examples where rockets are used and earth is then considered object at rest, is largely because the rocket or spaceship is the one expending energy for acceleration and it's velocity is faster relative to our motion remaining on the earth. Same when trains are used, you're just sitting in one location relative to a moving train which has a faster velocity in respect to you sitting at the station. It doesn't imply that earth has some universal proper rate of time.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html
http://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html
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whyamimrpink78 Actually, putting trust in a priest isn't the same as putting trust in a scientist. You don't go to a priest and expect them to be able to safely extract your wisdom teeth that are impacted, or to conduct extraction of your appendix. You don't go to them to find out what the weather forecast. You don't go to a priest to decide how to allocate your investments. You don't go to a priest on how to design a building, vehicle, aircraft, or anything really. You don't go to a priest to fix electronic devices or develop and build new ones or to program an app. Any questions about physics, math, astronomy, economics, etc. you tend not go to a priest, unless that priest is also a scientist, that he studies at universities and conducted experimentation and data collection and has submitted peer reviewed papers for duplication of experiments for validation.
Its not the same at all to go to a priest or a scientist. Thinking that demonstrates why people are so naive from their ignorance.
And the funny thing about states rights and representation of states, generally a few oligarchs even just one tends to rule the roost. For evidence, midterm elections where most votes are all state driven have the lowest turnout of all voters, as they feel apathetic; they dislike the choices if there are choices, many times judges and other incumbents go up without a challenger. Only time challengers are put in is when a rich oligarch is displeased with the incumbent. Greece used city state system, Rome to another degree used a form of city state system, because it allowed the nobles the patrician class to exploit patronage more efficiently. So dividing up the nation makes it even easier for oligarchs to own that portion through their payments and influence and employment power. What you want is to have a more concentrated influence peddling oligarchy.
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Why does the "left" or at least the established left, always act like pussies thinking they're doing the same as right wingers?
Walking out on a speaker giving a raw-raw pep rally is not stopping that person from speaking, its just saying no thanks, I have heard your other arguments, strongly disagree with them, find them absurd, and have no need to be given a pep speech by the likes of you.
And additionally, some of the far right and a-political nuts that deny science are unapproachable. Its more effective to have a conversation with a brick wall, when the other party ignores all reality and objective facts.
As far as a few other speakers, they're more of a "look at me, I'm saying something absurd just to get attention."
We have the right from past listening of their stuff, to decide it's garbage and not hear anymore garbage from the same dumpster.
And if some place like a university decides they don't want to pay for the person to speak, than they also don't have pay them. The speaker can arrange their own platform to speak.
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Times exist that we don't. Like that last sentence. Computers are great, and adding an s to that implies all computers (many) more than one.
I like our pluralizing of words. Again, no numbers were mentioned. But adding the s implies more than one. When using singular, might confuse I like playing game for some specific game, or games in general? Which one? And if you had talked about a game prior, single may imply that last game, when you meant games in general.
I like single and plural denotation in our languages of at least Romantic and Germanic languages. Sounds uncivilized without that denotation. Like native speakers of Slavic languages are not accustom to separate articles that lead the noun, yes I'm very much talking to you Russian native speaker slash English not native speakers. "All you need is coffee pot. Take money to bank, and we buy house someday, okay." Barbaric way of speaking English, or any language that has articles leading the noun. Bad! bad! bad!
I looked a little on how Slavic grammar works... Its tough. So I can't blame them too much. But I can insist they keep practicing, or just keep sounding like Ug Fug the cave man. Up to them.
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aaron Browme It is the type of industries these developing nations attract like textiles. The moment the impoverished nation begins increasing in wages, the industry pulls out for a cheaper location. Which leaves that nation in stagnation, and eventually falls back to where it originated.
In many cases, the nation that was essentially used, falls worse in standard of living from its origination because individuals sold assets to move toward cities, other economic structures that were growing from within were abandoned to accommodate what appeared to be a economic boom, now have sunk costs from under taking changes that accommodated the usury industry. And individuals have sold their other means of subsistence like farms or prior trade equipment with no ability to purchases them back.
Trickle down doesn't really work, they stay in a perpetual state of being a developing nations as no nation from the past 30 years have risen from their under-developed status. Especially those nations that don't adopt reasonable trade agreements, minimum employment, and education laws.
S. Korea in the 70's and Japan (after WWII) developed strong collective systems such as healthcare, education, and decent minimum wage laws.
Most other nations that were developing starting in 1980's have remained developing. Brazil has done aggressive actions such as subsidies such as establishing strong energy policy, education reform, minimum wage, and establish very aggressive trade tariffs and agreements as well as suing the US over our sugar subsidy (which I find kind of funny since they subsidize their sugar industry by 80ish billion dollars and we subsidize ours by about $3 billion).
It's very substantial evidence that trickle down myth is wrong. The problem is more complicated. And being satisfied that they at least have a job for now is really being flipped about the whole problem.
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Osca, only if we have co-determination and absolute collective bargaining arrangements as Germany, have a quasi governmental union board that often establishes min pay based on various trades and occupations which also consist of every public and private corporation having various control level votes of labor on the board of every company.
2,000 employees. For companies with 500–2,000 employees, one third of the supervisory board must be elected, and for smaller shops and businesses have labor councils which act as their union among many smaller businesses like coffee shops, bars, cafe's etc.
Their pay and compensation such as vacation days (30 days a year) and separate pool of paid sick days usually up to 2 to 3 weeks depending on the severity of the health issue, and the government often picks up on the paid sick time.
Then sure.
Who needs the gimmick of market tickling min wage, when you have a functioning smart economy?
Because Germany doesn't. It has much better economic policies.
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This is when the oligarchs are the same when the early part of the Industrial era of the late 1800's to early 1900's thought having a place to live with a family, indoor plumbing, electricity or some time up heating system; all the time the oligarchs were bloated rich with mansions, yachts, decked out with the latest plumbing, electrical work, pools, etc.
It's all repeating all over. Let them eat cake.
This time might break the US into outright civil war as it almost did then, and did in Germany, Italy, Russia, China, etc.
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If we can tap the people who didn't even bother to vote, 45%, and the other estimated 20% that voted alternatives, left blanks, or held their nose and voted GOP or DNC, you have a possible market share of 65% leaving the GOP and DNC with 35%. And considering only 7% bothered to participate in primaries and caucuses, you have 93% to help form and shape a good platform find some compelling good candidates, that will help win the 65% and even possibly some of the other 35% among the GOP and DNC.
There really is an opening.
Everyone poopooed Trump. Oh, he's just a joke candidate.
People are desperate to elect a fuck wit, I know he narrowly one, but he won.
People are fucking hungry for a new party. The two are just as obviously bought by the oligarchy as Chinese People Republic "communist party" in mainland China.
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It would take cooperation between peoples' of different languages and cultures.
In general, most of the states of the USA are of the same culture, but even we have our problems. It is better to have a unified nation economically and socially. The question becomes, how do you get it to work... people have suspicions of taking advantage of others or being taken advantage of, jealousies of various resources and geographical locations, etc.
And the ultimate difficulty, various local oligarchs enjoy their status as feudal lords, Kings, reigning over their little fiefdoms. Try to make them compete with nationwide oligarchs and that rocks their apple cart and makes them grumpy pants and since they employ or have some standing in their local states they can pass on rumors, conspiracy nuttery, various laws, gerrymander districts, and other propaganda to have their peasants fight for them, often against the peasants own interests.
EU has to get through all that, plus cultural differences in language, religions, customs, etc.
When Obama won for the 2nd time, an extreme minority of Texans wanted to split from the US. When Trump won, an extreme minority of California want to split from the US. We've already had one civil war over the subject. And we currently have some laws that many states are ignoring altogether, and some states with state laws that are beyond their limits as a state such as laws touching on diplomacy with various boarder nations. We're a cluster mug already with mostly similar culture, custom, and language.
For the EU to become a "country" well good luck.
Not so sure my country, the US, can hold itself together for another 100+ years without another civil war.
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+The Atheist Socialist Vegan I'm for Bernie and very mixed market. But I'm not for nationalizing the oil sector. A better method would be to implement an Apollo like project on building wind, solar, and fast tracking both LFTR fission and especially ITER fusion systems and implementation both are incredibly clean carbon neutral and incredibly abundant forms of energy, so abundant in fact, that many liquid fuels and even various plastics and other materials could be generated from them cheaply and last tens of thousands of years, ITER fusion deuterium fuels would last just on earth alone for 150 billion years from the sea water, many times over the remaining inhabitable period of earth estimated at 600 million more years left, and 60 million years supply left for the lithium required.
And of course well before that period an even better method would likely be created, probably many other methods would be discovered in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
Such cheap and abundant energy would be a major advantage for all people throughout the world. And that's what we really should focus on.
I don't see many countries that have nationalized oil other than Norway and Sweden, have benefits toward that. Mexico's essentially nationalized oil system, their price to their consumers is actually relatively very high, $3.36 per gallon, or 14 pesos per liter which is about 4 liters to 1 US gallon, price was 10/20/15 it was much higher when our gas was in the $3.00 range nationwide.
It's better just to advance past oil. Just regulate as we do the energy sector.
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I don't know if they'd necessarily riot. But they would be astonished.
Getting my private pilot license at a large airport, I got a chance to see how the higher classes behave and fly. From hundreds of million in asset owners from gasoline franchise owners, to vice president Cheney, to various unknown business elites, to popular actors and musicians, as my instructor would point out whenever I gave him the look or we discussed their antics, "They live a completely different life than you and I or most people."
A quick flight I tagged along with my instructor to pick up a tape for the 6 o'clock news about the Dalai Lama in Sun Valley Idaho. When we landed in our Cessna 182, got out and went to the waiting room to meet the reporter to get the tape. Returning to the plane, a small jet was being loaded up and its APU was on, the door was open with steps, this lady stood there for several minutes. The pilot quickly runs over and throws down a red carpet. Only then this lady finally starts to walk forward onto the steps to board the airplane. She literally waited for the red carpet LOL! After she boarded, what looked like the pilot, picked the carpet up and flung it to the side.
Another time, after having my private pilot license. A family shown up with their stuff in the general aviation waiting area. No security to go through, quickly loaded their stuff in the jet outside. My friend and co-worker I was flying that day was like where's the security checks? I said "This is how the other 'half' live." I got the keys to the airplane, no security and out to the door we went. I told him to keep the lacks security on the down low. Since that time about 2009, security is a little stronger. After hours of the aircraft rental place, you must apply and have the security badge to go on the general aviation apron area. So I don't mind sharing now.
But yes, very wealthy to dos, those with non-farm or non-art assets of 25 million or more generally live a very interesting life. Of course they're not the other half, they're the other 1.3% or less. They live in a completely different reality from the rest of us regardless if you're a self employed person or employee of some other organization.
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Rome fell apart for many reasons. Going toward Christianity or becoming less religious has very little to do with the Roman empires downfall. They were incredibly large at their height, so they placed two primary emperors, not uncommon to Roman rule even under Octavian the first emperor immediately after Julius Caesar co-ruled Rome such as the triumvirate with Anonius and Lepidus; and Augustus original name Octavius placed much power toward his friend Agrippa who actually has blood line relatives become emperors later like Caligula and Nero after his son-in-law Tiberius.
Toward the end of the Roman empire, it was split East ruling in Constantinople and west in Rome by two different emperors. Both adopted Christianity and appointed their own individuals to authority over the state religions.
The actual end of Rome which fell first, was the surrounding puppet governments advanced enough to not pay tribute to Rome, displacement of various tribes specifically the Visigoths who were demanding permanent secure settlements, actually turned Rome into a puppet state for themselves demanding and putting in their own choice of Emperors, these Roman emperors had no power. And Rome fell apart. Constantinople in the Eastern Empire did not bother to intervene for the western empire. The Eastern empire lasted for 1453 CE, compared to Rome fully dissolved 476 CE. The Eastern empire held on for quite sometime until technology outmatched them, the Ottoman-Turks used cannon to attack Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul.
The primary demise of empires, is surrounding nation states are displacement caused usually by massive crop failures causing migration which in turn causes warfare and displacement of more people thus even more economic troubles, and by technological advancements of those neighboring nation states.
Failing to advance technologically and ignoring the well being (economy and security) of their people or puppet nations being supposedly protected is what leads to an empires demise.
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Little deep on ownership/property rights.
Fact is, property rights only exist based on sovereignty of whatever countries' laws you happen to be in at any given time. Without a country, your right to own anything is based on your ability to defend your self physically from being ran off the land, or being killed so someone else can take whatever land or stuff you may have.
And places where no laws are, you're under international treaty law such as on the open sea, whatever vessel flag is flown or aircraft registration, that country's laws apply for property ownership at or over international waters: murder at sea in international waters on an American ship or aircraft, you will be tried in American courts with the additional possibility if the victim was from another country, some countries have treaties where the US would cooperate with the other country, to have right to try the accused, and some countries without treaties with the flag ship country, would make protest to have the accused be extradited, whether the flagship country follows through, is up to that country and its own procedures.
Find land that is unclaimed territory, it's whoever kills you or forces you off by force and keeps the land... hence why governments exist. So people don't just walk in at gun point and tell you to fuck off or die. Interestingly, if the victim was originally citizen of a particular country, that nation may come after you for murder, and just consider that land to be international maritime or unclaimed territorial land, called Special Maritime or Territorial Jurisdiction. The US would try the person in federal court if committed in international waters, or in unclaimed land (all land currently is claimed, besides series of islands in the various oceans). So if evidence is available for murder and other crimes, even if you did it in your own claimed "country", you might not get away with it.
In the US you own the land with many rules based on where the land is located; zoning for farming, commercial, residential, etc. And further agreement laws based on a home owners association, and some states give such HOAs large power of agreement authority on specific upkeep to the point such as my brother's house, they must have at least one tree growing in their front house, or they face a monetary penalty they must pay to the HOA.
Additional, laws such as eminent domain mean widening a road, or whatever reason to the public good deemed by whatever government entity: federal, state, county, city, etc. can take your land, but most eminent domain laws require compensation by fair market value based on the value of the land being taken at the time its being taken, often they'll negotiate an extra amount of money to cover moving costs, and effects of surrounding area of taking such land if it causes land value to go up quickly nearby, so you can afford to still buy a place near where you once did.
And then there's property taxes. But they're much cheaper than rent, by quite a bit.
Opened up a deep topic about property rights. Almost all law is derived on the topic. It's just about the entire point of civilization/government in the first place.
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MrPepsicola123 Look up quantum mechanics and specifically virtual particles and quantum fluctuations. Such events can and are observed happening. Exactly how is still being researched such as the study to identify what dark matter and dark energy are.
And laws? What laws? All there are is experimentation and observations that form models that are useful in predicting future experimentation and observation. Science really doesn't have any laws. If you're referring to "laws of motion" from Newton, those are very specific fact statements about a condition to allow prediction of a future observation. The "laws" of motion are conditions of Newton's theory of motion. They're not actually a law that can't be broken or that is useful for all situations, they're only so good as describing a model, in Newton's theory of motion its describing conditions of his model. General and Special Relativity actually "breaks" such conditional statements rendering Newton's theory obsolete under certain conditions as it doesn't describe as much as Relativity does, and allow for as accurate predictions as Relativity does. Newton is still used because its simple in calculation and works to enough significant figures to not need really complicated calculations that are required in Relativity. But once relativistic variables such high masses, extreme speeds, or requiring high level of precision in calculation, then Newton doesn't work. Relativity model is required as it more accurately describes the reality of the universe compared to Newton's.
This isn't theology where some deity or deities supposedly set down some unbreakable laws for decry. This is science where data from observation and experimentation influence models of reality, and are evaluated based on their accuracy of the predictions those models make.
Quantum mechanics is actually at odds with Relativity. Relativity has problems when volume and time is at zero or in complex (a negative square root) variables called a singularity. But QM appears to provide understanding without the need of any time function or volume density. Nothing is shattered. QM provides very accurate predictions that are observable and testable under these conditions that the model of Relativity cannot.
And you really shouldn't post your ignorance online when there are creditable sources you can cross check your wrong assertion, wrong assertion because based experimentation, particles can pop in and out of existence all the time.
Worst part is starting off with calling people shitheads. But whatever. At least we realize the quality of person you are. And we can always hope you improve on that quality.
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+Robert Devino Tax expenses are used to help educate a population so that new technologies and innovations are implemented that have effect of giving you better goods and services and cheaper manufacturing and delivery of such goods and services. Having educated population also tends to help them be employed in a gainful way that allows them to also purchase goods/services from your employment and labor or shares of business that provide you with an income.
Having healthier population that is collectively being cared for means that not one set of businesses have the complete burden to ensure their workforce remains healthy thereby able to maximize their productivity.
Essentially you benefit by having an educated workforce capable of both supplying and demanding (being able to purchase) your goods/services and providing goods/services to you, as well as a the population healthy enough to provide such productivity at their optimal output, and as well as creating ever better innovations that are essential for higher standards of living.
Technologies such as refrigeration, modern sewer, electrical works, water works, transportation systems including vehicle and aircraft, agricultural advancements such as nitrates being able to break the at nitrogen triple bonds of the N2 di-nitrogen that is about 76% of the atmosphere to produce fertilizer nitrates that allow for huge food production, etc.
The next technological advancements will include thorium fission, and especially deuterium-tritium fusion reactor systems that supply a huge amount of energy safely and cleanly and since its a huge supply means extremely cheap, which allows making many chemical energy when required for space advancements such as mining asteroids for other minerals even cheaper as it provides more access to such compounds and raw inputs. Electrolysis using over abundant energy from thorium fission or deuterium fusion provides any compound plastic, fuel, etc. one needs and opens up even more resources in space for various other elements and base input compounds like precious metals and energy elements required like more deuterium and lithium etc.
What's in it for you is a better standard of living.
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elky360 I think there's too few of studies to exactly say either way on how evolutionary homosexuality is, and he may not have read very many papers either.
What I've read is that there is a continuum of sexual preferences. And some papers based on twins where one his a committed homosexual and the other is straight. And what they found was the straight twin often was much more promiscuous having much more sexual partners and more sex with their partners than the gay twin.
The inference is that some gene I think they identified the exact allele that helps determine the level of promiscuity one will have and that this same gene can also effect in sexual orientation that this gene has a heterozygote advantage in that it is actually and advantage in that usually the characteristics the gene provides leads to more reproduction be it more fit, able to fend off disease, etc.
While heterozygote advantage proportionally most with the gene will be better off a few will have a counter expression of the gene that may not be advantage to those smaller proportions of that gene.
Heterozygotes depends heavily on one allele or just a few alleles to produce the phenotype (characteristic expression) that has the advantage, causing a small portion of the population with that particular heterozygote advantage to exhibit counter advantages. With most having the advantage, the gene doesn't go extinct in fact it flourishes. Sickle cell anemia is an example of heterozygote advantage. Most with the particular gene will actually not have Sickle cell anemia rather, they have blood cells that are resistant to malaria and are otherwise also normal and healthy. However, on a small proportion of the population with the particular allele that provides this benefit will cause the person to have deformed red blood cells aka sickle cell anemia, a counter advantage, but most of the proportion to the population that have the heterozygote advantage gene will do better than everyone else and too few will ever get the counter advantage sickle cell anemia condition passing the heterozygote gene on to future generations. The higher proportion of those with the gene with the benefits will outweighs the risk of a much smaller proportion who will get the disadvantage expression of the gene.
I don't think he has read much on the topic. I'm sure he would have mentioned those studies if he had. The most recent studies have shown that women generally have the advantage expression of the gene, making them have genetic expressions that are more apt to have more offspring (more fertile). So women tend to pass the gene on. But also, not all of their male offspring will have the disadvantage homosexual gene either but the same enhanced level of offspring or baby potential producing sexual encounters.
I'm too lazy to look up the exact studies. You can google heterozygote advantage and gay gene or whatever to find them.
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+subject_17 No their argument is fallacious, dubious. Essentially, they're saying see this is what elections gives you, it may end in not having elections or some clown coming to power, but they forget we can throw the clown out at a later date, and the clown is bound by the constitution that isn't easy to change along with the military and all branches of government.
Much of Drumpf's rhetoric is simply unconstitutional nonsense not even the military would obey. Our constitutional democratic republic is more nuanced than some un-elected so called bureau of the proletariat which more often obtains a fanatical despot, Mao for instance was not so great, Stalin, Pol Pot, the crazy shit in N. Korea, and those nuts can do whatever they want, they don't have a constitution that can stand up against tyrants.
When you serve in any government function, military, or political office you swear an oath to constitution of the United States first and foremost. You can go to jail for following illegal orders or take on illegal job assignments in this country. China, not so much.
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Most economist these days are worthless. They fail at any predictions any try to make, and many refuse to even try to make predictions... the point of any science.
Meteorology with all the variables of weather tend to not be the most accurate predictions, yet make better predictions and all at least try.
Economics should be listed among the theology department.
The race to the bottom is already entering full circle. China, Brazil, and many other emerging markets are in the tank, trade overall has dropped over the past 3 years all while the US dollar had gained in international buying power... the reason, once rich nations like the US and nations in western Europe saw their working class wages drop and can no longer demand much from the emerging markets where so much outsourcing has been done. And China, Mexico, Brazil, etc. have all failed to create their own middle class to demand goods from us and from their own manufacturing in their own countries.
So the entire thing sputters and stops. No more demand, and supply gets cut even in 3rd world low wage shit holes. And then the entire world wakes up and realizes they've been had.
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+badpanda84 We never were an established religious nation, many other Christian churches, those claiming to be Christian don't recognize each other as being Christian. And of course the constitution is very clear, the is no established religion by the country, nor infringement to exercises ones own particular religion. And there is no religious tests to ever be made to hold public office. It means we're a secular country, always have been, even if states often broke the constitutional law, the highest law of the land, they broke the law, made law that was not binding.
Correctly stating we are nation who has a majority who classify themselves as Christian at 70.6%. 5.9% are other religions other than Christian. And 22.8% are unaffiliated of which 3.1% identify as atheist, and 4.0% identify as agnostic while 15.8% identify as nothing in particular.
A completely separate category for "I don't know" is 0.6% which I find funny because its so small.
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/
Our country isn't a Christian nation or any particular established religion. Our people however are a majority Christian.
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+cloudofthought Problem is, animals are incredibly unpredictable. A cute moment can suddenly turn into a very embarrassing moment.
Ducks, geese, doves, pigeons, squirrels, chipmunks, etc. may approach and be all cute and cuddly, then suddenly bit, peck, and/or poop at the worst moment. So it's not recommended. Even Bernie just smiled at it and kind of let the birdy do its thing. You just never know.
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And we're allied with these evil twisted piece of shit?
Just so we can gain access to their dirty fucking oil when we have the capacity to supply our own oil in the short run, and do a Manhattan-Apollo like project to get ITER, Wendelstein 7x tokamak fusion power plants online, as well as do the same as China started in 2014 with 10 year plan to have an operational LFTR fission plant. We don't need fossil fuels, only the oligarchs with fortunes to provide for their dynasties, so little Oligarch Jr the 4th can have 50 mansions, 20 yachts, and a small fleet of jets.
Pigs should be strung from their fucking testicles, and likely will soon. Especially if climate change brings about world wide famine in the next 20 to 40 years; they better hope that doesn't happen. Because it's all over for all of us. When the reality it will be people just trying to survive, the hanging of them by their junk saticifaction for justice, will be the same as killing some ants or termites, oh they're dead... oh...good... anyway, lets see, I think I saw a flock of geese go that way.... gonna have some goose for dinner :)
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I see it, part of my job is collections. There's lots of poor in Boise Idaho despite the unemployment rate being very low in our state. Most of them have jobs, they're just juggling their tiny pay checks to pay one of their utility bills over whatever other utility bills and other bills they have to pay. The working poor.
And off goes one of their utilities because they are behind 3 to 6 months. The sick and injured can get a 30 day medical moratorium if the doctor faxes a note that states they require that particular utility, then after the 30 days it's over and we immediately shut them off if its not paid in full.
Good ol' "Merica. Looking like a typical oligarchy serfdom every day.
I was working full time and going to school at the same time as well getting two degrees, and got my pilot license. And later served in the military. Then went back to school and worked part time for a little bit until my GI bill kicked in.
What they've convinced people is that workers should be paid less, so your stuff will cost less... the problem is this translates to workers which is most of the consumers of the nation, end up making less and can't afford anything despite the supposed "lower prices". Reality though, inflation continues because the government sets the interest rates, and lately that's something the Federal Reserve has been trying to do it pump up asset prices like houses and stocks to get people to invest to make jobs. But what what's happened is businesses have just bought back stocks to pump their share prices up not reinvest in building more supply because overall demand is down; so they've just upped per unit prices to rake in record profits, and send those profits in forms of dividends and stock buy backs. It's not much on expansion of the economy. It's a vicious cycle of consolidation to fewer rich and more working poor.
Good ol' supply side economics. A new phenomena we're getting from China, many rich Chinese are buying up houses even here in Boise Idaho of all places. Causing home prices to soar for the short term anyways.
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They need to find where the fentanyl from China is coming from, and take assassins and bust them in the production in China itself. Black ops.
But no, you're still just going after the symptoms of the a fucked up system.
Portugal legalized all drugs over 15 years ago due their rampant drug problem reversing their tightening drug prohibition as it made the problem worse.
From 25% of the population on various drug addiction and overdose, 2015 they're the 2nd lowest drug overdose per capita than all other countries in Europe.
They took the money they were using for jailing users and addicts, and to "fight" the dealers, instead put it to rehab and worker rehab programs offering employers to pay half their salary to give addicts a chance at rejoining the work force, focusing on building personal connections which is scientifically shown in lab animals and Vietnam Vet studies that once a group has better economy, better connections with friends and family, that they drop addiction, military personnel in Vietnam were heavily users of heroin. Of all the Vietnam vets 90% stopped using heroin when they came back to the states.
Get to the root cause, make it legal. And treat it as a medical problem, and foster re-employment and connection building with friends and family.
You're sticking a band-aid on a festering wound... and you'll end up dead of septic blood. Doing otherwise, essentially, you're not doing shit.
But go gett'em them there bad docs, will be replaced by another bad doc, and another dealer, as the addicts will continue.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/05/why-hardly-anyone-dies-from-a-drug-overdose-in-portugal/?utm_term=.da23f04fb4cc
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We just lucked out in the US because of the Supreme court decision.
They should stop adding sugar to their ice cream. In fact, most ingredients should be in small packets you have to purchase separately; depending on how unhealthy the ingredients, the more expensive. And the more necessary of ingredient, the more expensive. And random scoops or cups you get in stores aren't even ice cream, but frozen sour condensed buttermilk or something nasty other thing. The kicker, you might realize you got the nasty scoop or cup at the store because it will be 5 times more expensive at check out, or if you try to return it, you get charged more.
1) as a way to reduce diabetes
2) But more to the point as an example of our idiot insurance scheme of deductibles, co pays, premiums, and out of pocket costs.
3) The random nasty is to demonstrate the occasion you my get an illness, an injury, or condition.
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Find the video about fields, and you'll understand why it is so weird compared to the other fields EM field, Strong and weak fields, gluon fields, etc. It's rest energy is above 0. All other fields have a 0 rest energy, in order for the field to get excited, it requires something to pump energy into it. The Higg's field actually goes down in energy level when its in the presents of other field excitations (particles) that interact with the Higg's field.
My understanding the Higg's field transfers its above 0 rest energy to other particles (excitations of other fields), and that is where the fundamental mass of particles come from. Higg's field is weird, it's springy with energy, nothing there it holds energy, something there it transfers some of it until the object isn't there and springs back to being at a higher rest energy than 0.
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+lieutenantbears I think it's become a big problem now for a few factors
1) it hasn't actually kept up with inflation, it hasn't be raised for a quite some time.
2) Wages have been depressed by lower skilled jobs leaving to other countries generally toward developing nations, which as caused more people to go into poverty in the us in under employed wages.
3) To become competitive, QE was used to debase the currency to make our products cheaper to buy abroad. This also causes what lower nominal incomes to become even lower in real purchasing power.
4) Unionization often was a little easier before various trade agreements allowed companies to offshore production, as well as new laws that make it difficult to form and maintain a union, this lack of negotiation power that actually could effectively properly get the highest wage possible according to that particular company's profit margin and revenue without hurting the company has now made most of the income go toward the higher executives and shareholder classes of society, and smaller portion of the productivity gains that have continue to increase not keep up with inflation-- the debasement of the currency, essentially 99% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and the other 1% of new income gets split between 99% of the population. Basically, income inequality without negation power and competition from overseas mostly developing countries have caused the minimum wage or wages near the min wage to become a huge factor in more and more people, and this trend is worsening, not getting better.
That's why min wage has become a big issue. People are working more for less essentially. And they've lost targeted per particular business and their particular profitability situation negotiation power of union, and are now seeking the last resort to bargaining for better wages that are in both nominal and real terms falling for many people, even the median income earners aren't doing well in real terms, and for a while even nominal terms there was a big drop.
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William Wolf LOL! Did he actually recite it? Because being a foreigner, he shouldn't have, and certainly shouldn't have been made to as that makes no sense LOL! He's not a citizen to pledge to our country to defend it at all. Our republic doesn't represent him at all either. In fact, making such pledges in some countries can end your citizenship.
Kind of interesting.
We didn't get exchange students until High School, and in High School none of our teachers had us say the pledge. One time, one teacher tried to make us to do it, and the majority of us didn't want to. So the teacher gave up LOL! And this is in Pocatello Idaho mind you. Really, only elementary did we ever say the pledge, and only a few teachers made us do it all the time. In Jr. High and High school, we basically never recited the pledge, a few teachers would try to get us to say the pledge most of us didn't want to and would just sit. Others who did, would make up a different pledge. The few times they tried, we'd have a conversation about how weird it is to have such a pledge in a country of liberty, and that it shouldn't be for kids. That it smacked at childhood indoctrination.
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+DEVRIMCI2007 My that you mean social-capitalism, mixed market.
It's the only method that is consistent in avoiding ridiculous income and wealth inequality that eventually gets so extreme that bloody revolutions, war, or complete economic collapse occurs.
Starting places are obvious. Sectors that violate key competitive market principles like natural monopolies, opaque knowledge, externalities, essential services, etc. Key sectors for major social systems including medical sector, education, and infrastructure.
In the US, we have failed to maintain the concept of when to use social markets to correct for poor behaviors in the capital markets; there's no reason our country doesn't have a single payer or universal healthcare system, including some higher education and apprenticeship programs, and our infrastructure from water lines, roads, rail, ports, are not maintaining proper capacity nor advancements.
We're acting more like a 1st world country wanting to re-become a 3rd world backwater.
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The system appears to be concentrating wealth and its income into a very few hands which makes potential output decline thus demand declines making the economy smaller. Then you mix this with diminishing returns on energy consumption to mine, timber, farm, manufacture, transportation; its costing more to get the same amount of copper, zinc, transport inputs and finished goods, etc. Mixed with climate change with bad results of agricultural products.
Lot's of head winds as we have both monetary inflation, economic structural concentration of wealth and its income, aging population to underfunded government and social safety net systems such as social security with no change admits it will cut payout by 25% by 2033, and pricing shift due to diminishing resources.
It's a growing disaster. Its not just monetary inflation, but price shifts due to diminishing resources requiring ever more energy to get even more out of places with even less remaining that requires ever more energy and current implemented energy technology fuels are diminishing. Its a shit storm.
But the high flying elites made out like bandits to ensure they own 90% of the wealth and its income. Throughout history, so long as you can spin your ownership on property rights, you can slough off and expect others to slave for you. I think some of the current economists know they're in "uncharted" territory, and they're plan is simply to inflate their way out as was done during the 60's and 70's.
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Do you realize how many possibilities you can get with this or that didn't happen in history? Starts out at a lower limit from the deviation from current history and rapidly grows into an infinite possibility spectrum. You can essentially say just about anything as long as its physically possible, follows physics, anything could have happened.
And even then, you're already in every physical possibility, you can also just make up fantasy and say unicorns would have evolved. Dragons would be born from the rocks, and we'd live in a cool new age of magic with elves, giants, vampires, and all sorts of mystical things.
This is fun to do, but it really isn't history, its more less fantasy. Its only an okay exercise in sociology and psychology the study in human behavior evaluating not the events at all, but imagined events and how people may react.
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It's not just about energy decline, otherwise the dump of oil by OPEC would have super turned around all economies world wide. Instead, less than 1st world developed countries all have hit a long term slump themselves. And 1st world countries remain sluggish.
It's a deflationary spiral. Even for Brazil, China, Russia, etc. big producers. There's a structural problem within the economy which is essentially serf labor. At the same time in many countries you have a declining population you would think wages would be going up due to lack of labor supply, but the contrary is happening due to bid to the destitute, desperate, and most tyrannical nations. It's a new feudalism that is subterfuge all worker/citizen writes that were gained during the latter part of the industrial revolution.
Energy does play a factor though. Just not as big as the structural problems at present. Energy will need to be addressed in a big way though very soon for reasons of supply of energy itself, and the effects of global temperatures causing food and water shortages which will if we continue the same course, in 100 years cause massive famines not seen since the early 1900's in currently developed countries.
The energy problem can be resolved by more wind, solar, and especially newer energy technologies including Liquid Fluorine Thorium reactors, and the ultimate goal with deuterium fusion reactors like at ITER and Germany's Wendelstein; such energy is on orders of magnitude more abundant than current chemical fossil fuel energy; so much energy that can be harnessed currently in the form of electrical energy that can be converted to liquid forms of H2 and even formed into complex hydrocarbon liquid fuels the same as current harvested fossil fuels, yet be carbon neutral and be incredibly abundant from the energy density of fission and fusion energy.
A major energy program fast tracked would resolve energy caused economic problems.
But the current economy race to the bottom system with consolidation of wealth and income has to do with exploitation of the most desperate people on the planet, which then causes even developed countries to respond by falling in equilibrium; a race to the bottom. All countries developed a new form of feudal lords with their serfs. It's a dangerous economic system that is utterly unfair for essentially everyone other than a very small selected few. It's unstable and generally collapses causing civil war and war among other countries as over 2,500 years of recorded history demonstrates over and over and over and over and over again.
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Religions tend to help a few people as advertisement to get donations that mostly help themselves.
The solidification of organized religion occurred in hand with totalitarian government by a king. Even the Republic of Rome extremely intermingled their Consuls and senators by defying them after their death, and become normal during the Caesars/emperor period, with emperor worship sects.
Religion is magic bullshit used by the ruling elite to convince the ignorant masses to accept tyrannical illogical absolute control.
Religions are a joke. What value they offer is a place for weddings, funerals, and weekly brunch with a bunch of potential buddies like a country club as well as a community place that often discusses the issues of the day... like a country club.
We just need to substitute bogus religion with "country clubs". A place for people to gather and discuss the issues of the day, recite various stories of struggling and overcoming, and coming up with ways to help the community, and just enjoying each others company, sing some songs maybe, having a few outings boating, fishing, hang gliding, camping, swimming, etc.
Leave the delusional horseshit out. Didn't the enlightenment happen over 200 years ago? They act like there's no method used to distinguish reality from fiction, false from fact. It's called the scientific method; based on rational logic, and empirical measurable evidence of testing and observation.
But nope... didn't happen... we may never no the truth... but magic does... and if it doesn't what do you have to lose?-- as if Pascal wager as if 300+ years old was just thunked up by them a few minutes ago, and hasn't already been discussed and shown to be extremely fallacious.
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+Tom Leeds I was suspicious about such claims as aliens even though my dad ate the stuff up. When taking anthropology courses, from Meso America concerning the Olmec, Mayans, and Aztecs; to Ancient Egypt, Greek, Persia, etc. Various arts from the dark age to enlightenment western and eastern European to Middle Eastern covering the same periods.
Certain things like the Mayan calendar foretelling the end of days in 2012, after we studied everything about it, learning the Mayan used the calendar to attribute names to people based on their birth date.
The so called UFO's found in dark and medieval art... It gets frustrating because the ancient alien nuts are so ignorant about all of evidence of what's actually known, its overwhelming to even bother to explain to the ignorant person who doesn't really want to learn the evidence that does exist. Glad this guy made this video, it's concise and to the point, and hits every goofy outright false claims. Erik guy is a well known convicted fraud.
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Nothing like NAZI Germany, because NAZIs as evil as they were, actually passed wage and salary increases, labor rights requiring to provide employees vacation, state sponsored vacation pay, etc. It was very socialistic, it was a version of socialism.
Trump is basically oligarchical, return to plutocracy of the mid 1800's thru early 1900's which spawned Fascism in Italy, Germany, Japan, and despotic communism in Russia, China, and the other countries in Eastern Europe.
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So what happens when someone hacks the crypto junk? Programs fake wallets or invalidates several potential bit coin crap?
And stopping corruption?
Most organizations using this junk are undercover government agencies, drug lords, and other mafioso and illegal transfers in a quick attempt to evade detecting for selling illegal goods, human trafficing, and simply avoiding taxes and rules that prohibit various people from taking money out of their various governments to take elsewhere.
And the wild ride, means its bullshit crap shoot casino, not a currency. Only one who uses this as a currency at this time are literally those doing illegal conduct in a mad attempt to get whatever illegal funds into "clean" funds. Even though the governments can now track and have already taken and used the trace of "block chains" to see exactly all wallet's purchases; their wallet including IPO transfers.
My personal opinion, these are garbage and will do more harm to the public than any good.
Gangsters and oligarchs skirting paying taxes, doing illegal funds transfers, and selling prohibitive items; essentially a big money laundering and tax evasion tool. It's too volatile to be currency, and is actually incredibly vulnerable to being hacked: phony wallet accounts, phony transfers making your bit coin "already spent", and loss ledger activity; if you don't have enough morons running their GPU's to process the transaction data or a central market holder (which defeats the point of it being decentralized), you really have a potential for chaotic nonsense during transactions: suddenly most of your bit coin are "already spent" or they're "invalid" due to counterfeit transactions in the ledgers.
Personally, I think they should be illegal. Individually and collectively they will do more harm over time than any good.
Snooker idiot individuals out of money while a few assholes steal big.
And provide a haven for oligarchs for tax evasion as well as other black market weapons deals and drug lord activity in a money laundering.
I think the FBI, CIA, and Fed Reserve don't mind these crypto junk because they are in fact fairly straight forward in finding out who transacted what in bit coin land; it can be untangled to an extent using ISP's and the IP record data.
Basically, governments are currently using these as mouse traps, and for their own black ops crap.
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So you're telling me people have a firm gasp of London theory on superconductivity, statistical thermodynamics, Diophantine geometry, game theory, DNA methylation and expression, protein synthesis, random access memory design, integrated chip design, aerodynamic principles including coefficient of lift, boundary layer theory, potential flow theory?
They just go to school already plum full of this knowledge from experimentation they did in K-12? Really?
Just like to say, I know many who don't even know basic concepts such as Ohm's Law or Gas Law or even know what Avogadro's number is used for or any other basic Chemistry or any basics just right out of K-12.
But you're saying they even know the higher stuff and some that is still being researched and developed? Wow!
Very interesting. I wish I knew cutting edge experimentation well before going to college. I would have opened my own labs and pounded out my own patents. Would have saved me time at college and would have jumped into my profession instead of doing an okay paying career developing job and school at the same time for nearly a decade.
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+Mr.Sir I just glanced at what c-51 contains, it's nothing like our wonderful (sarcasm) "patriot" Act.
But much of it has expired, but other parts are now extended until 2019:
1 ) roving wiretaps, 2) searches of business records, and 3) conducting surveillance of "lone wolves"—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.
With an exclusion that the NSA can't collect mass phone records and such, that they must be on specific people with a warrant from a Federal judge or judges.
Really, all we needed in the US was to allow the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, state and local agencies to be able to share information between each other freely and easily. And put in place judiciary system to judge sufficient evidence to allow warrants to spy on specific suspects.
They went overboard on the Patriot Act; when it first passed they could detain anyone for as long as they wanted, it was essentially unconstitutional against unlawful search and seizure and right to due process; a suspension of habeas corpus. It's the reason they still keep all the terror suspects outside the US in Guantanamo Bay and else where, they're not trying these people. And if it were a US citizen, that'd really be an infringement. I kind of consider foreigners our military and other agencies have captured as prisoners of war, or prisoners of illegal combatants.
I understand for better law enforcement, but I also understand such things can be abused.
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Democrats are social libertarians not economic libertarians. Hence the term liberals instead of libertarians. We see no point in having freedom to do and say nearly anything you'd like if you don't have a pot to piss in or food to keep alive.
We democrats understand competitive markets tend to work the best, but the conditions theorized that allow markets to work well is based on a flawed notion of perfectly competitive markets which don't actually exist. Its an abstraction like the number pi, no physical object is perfectly round. We understand it isn't an absolute means to manage economics.
Liberals understand serious flaws exist in markets that bring about undesired results and reject the fallacy that no other alternatives are better other than just letting markets run themselves. Evidence shows contrary that markets can fail, consolidate into monopolies, collude, predatory price competition, and not even work for particular class of people and technological sectors, that other options are available through some planned projects, subsidies, welfare, etc.
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I nearly didn't vote in the last election. But had nothing else to do and felt guilty so after I came home, and then did some stuff, I had time to hurry and vote polls in Idaho close late. So went to vote, was nearby. It was fun. The people at the polling place, the DMV but in a nice easy access location during normal business hours is busy, wasn't extremely busy. And local items were also on the agenda which was nice to vote on.
But I think people are discouraged as I am. Both democrats and republicans are of similar minds: trickle down supply side economics and continuation of mercantilism as this is what got their big bucks to be able to even afford to run for office in the first place. These people don't want to upset their apple cart. So 63% of the voting eligible public find its worthless. Second, even of the parties, many candidates go without ballet opponents anyways. Not always because no one is running against them, but the requirements of getting on a ballet aren't met; certain amount of money given to the voting authority, certain amounts of petitions that must be signed, etc. Even worse, news doesn't generally cover local government. I realized the other day I and pretty much everyone I know doesn't know even one Supreme court Justice on our Idaho State Supreme Court. No media, and little interest means those with money who tend to have excessive time start to play puppet master. Its fairly easy. Local governments need to be utilized by the people. In some places it is. In red states oddly only the elite money powers really do much with local governments unless some crisis that happens to get acknowledge by media. Sometimes the acknowledgment by the media is actually the elites playing puppet masters. Sometimes its not, but some tragedy.
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First class and business class seems to never be full, and often half capacity or less.
Coach tends to be full all the time. Especially for international flights.
My experience, because 1st class and business class (if that airline actually has a distinction), are smaller, with mostly coach since those seats actually fill.
Makes sense they even bother having a 1st class/business class even at the smaller capacity that still only fills half or less.
They give out 1st class if you take overbooked offers. Only time I ever fly 1st class is when someone gave it to me, which I told him I didn't want to do that, that's expensive by he insisted, yes it was military and yes I had crutches, but it was a training injury nothing special, or taking an overbook offer. I'd pay the least possible.
There's not enough people who can drop $3,000 let alone $14,000 on the same trip that they can pay $800 to $1,300. And if they had to pay $3K to $14K, many simply wouldn't go unless the company they worked for was paying.
People are generally broke. You have a tiny market share of rich people.
And super rich people tend to charter aircraft, either their own, leased, or just contact a charter company.
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+Laurel Anne Lyles Democracy and republic are essentially the same. Unless you want us to go toward what the Soviet Union once was or what the Republic of China still is, a bureau of un-elected representatives. Yes, the Chinese call themselves a Republic too, the communist mainland China that do not hold democratic elections, and the same country that it is forbidden to speak about politics.
No, we democratically elect our representatives, we also often times in states, counties, and cities also democratically vote on to affirm laws this is called a referendum vote.
You're so far gone into stupid ville you are ready to secede your democratic republic for that of the USSR and other totalitarian un-electing representative forms.
Please, read a non-fiction book in history, economics, physics, philosophy, etc.
We can't have more people this mentally brainwashed into pure absolute stupid. I know you're not mentally deficient if you're capable of using a computer to get to youtube and type a message which has correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. You're just massively misinformed to the point of being in some weird ass cult of thought.
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Basically, Clinton was a weasel playing both sides. Really, economically and even on social issues he was very right leaning.
1)DOMA
2) DADT
3) NAFTA
4) Normal permanent trade relations with China
5) Repeal of Glass-Steagal Act
6) Increase of mandatory sentences on drug possession felonies; we need to bring them to heel first before we get to the root cause policies.
Just to name a few things social and economically; he was essentially a GOP. Not even lite, he was just GOP giving lip service to democrats.
since early 80's with Reagan thru to GW, about 30 years of right winger obvious wrong systems. While Obama via the Supreme Court, and executive orders has been socially more liberal, but not economically.
And growing up in the 90's, I could never understand what was so bad about the term liberal. It always gave me a sour taste when they spoke about conservatism, always meant fuck workers, you all workers make do with less, you know conserve; while we over here pig out on the economic front. Technology and social issues you were to conserve as much thought as possible... in fact don't even think, save that thinking for when you're unable to think ie. when you're dead.
Liberal then and now brings up images of thoughtfulness, reflective thinking, sometimes to a fault; either dither in complexity or apologize for being correct, or for something that went wrong that has no causation from your own actions.
And I'm from Idaho; blonde blue eyes white guy, my dad also a liberal democrat, big on labor unions, who often sports cowboy boots and a big buckle on his belt.
The AM radio right winger creep show crap by Rush and others backfired to even the older generation, and almost all of us younger generation.
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+gunk wretch It does both, it makes the risks unknown, and it blocks finding any benefits as well such as some of the promising results in fighting cancer (not smoking it, but using the extracts of the various active compounds). It's idiotic that it's illegal the way it is. It's not meth, crack, or heroin. And for those 3, people need to be given treatment and not a criminal record. The best way to treat addiction is to re-establish/include people into society, not shun them, make it hard for them to find work, and ridicule them on how they become an addict. It happened, so what. Now, how do we help them recover, and giving rap sheets, not treating any potential underlying illness, and making it very difficult in getting a job isn't going to help anyone.
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+Nathan Jones Nathan Jones I suspect its also an economic issue, generally least educated tend to be the most religious, as their more ignorant on evaluating whether something is false or should be considered as reliably true.
And recently, the lower income people, who tend to be least educated in the population, have only dropped to even poorer levels, and those who were in the middle or even slightly above the median income level aren't anymore, which leads to desperation and what do least educated people tend to do when they get scared? They lash out at everything and cling to easy things like their communities which usually includes their religions, and their various religious convictions become more and more literal and fanatical.
The displacement of median and slightly above median paying jobs over the last 20 to 30 years, I suspect is the primary rise in more fanatical religious opinion in the US specifically. Worker displacement has been incredibly bad on most people due to various trade agreements as well as some technological advancements that don't require certain workers, and various policies that make it harder for them to unionize or demand better pay such as "right to work legislation" and the fall of pensions in favor of mathematically in relative to median wages idiotic 401K.
Uneducated people are scared, and they know not what to do, but cling to their guns and bibles even more so. You see the same phenomena in the Middle East to a much higher degree. It's a typical flight to the "good ol' days" and so long a politician or oligarch or whoever elite or fellow community member can lead tham on to regress back to some good ol' day period even if the policies are truly old school, but had resulted in disaster, they don't know about such events, they're uneducated about them, ignorant. And that is what is happening in the US.
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The wall thing is stupid. NAFTA and redoing trade is smart. NAFTA hurt people in Mexico as much as it did in the USA. Our food subsidies crushed the Mexican farmer and farm worker, maquiladora (sweat shops) along the US Mexican boarder to produce sub assemblies as well as cheap appliance that pay worse than their former farm and existing manufacturing. And of course it offset our sub assembly and full assembly plants.
Hence why so many migrants did come up from Mexico legally and illegally.
Our trade deals stink. Brazil has long complained about any trade deal with the US because their well aware of our food subsidies and various other subsidies that put much of their food industry out of business causing a rush to sweat shop factories in their country. Much Central America under CAFTA has pressured land owners to sell since they can't compete, or foreclose on land because they can't make a profit with dumping of food stuffs from the US; hence why lately it hasn't been Mexican immigrants, but was people from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras. As they migrated north, they were actually causing problems in Mexico. Was a repeat of what NAFTA did to Mexico. But even more painful because central American countries are now competing with Malaysia, India, China, Vietnam, etc. And Central American countries have recently gone to war with each other as well as having their own civil wars.
These exploitative trade deals of really caused a problem world wide. China is having a hard time with businesses staying profitable, as many are highly leveraged, they borrowed to the hilt, and sales aren't growing, they're actually down, because Europe and the US and other developed countries are too broke to buy as much as they once had.
The entire trade we got into was based on exploitation, and we just ended up exploiting all working people to the point of feudalism once again. And like feudalism, people get grumpy and you get people like Trump in office. Or worse, civil war, or the status quo becomes oppressive to their own people, and/or goes to war with other nations.
Exploitative trade is hallmark of all major nations throughout history. It's a lead way to rebellion, civil war, and war between nations from recorded history of civilization.
Basically, trade wars and actual wars are the result of exploitative trade agreements.
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I think lots of minorities are spooked by Trump or Cruz so they think the safe bet is Hillary. Unfortunately, I think if it's Trump as the GOP nominee, voting for Hillary is the most unsafe. She doesn't excite the base at all, and she even turns many off.
We'll see. Trump is a lunatic and could potentially get more independents to go democrat. But I doubt it. Many I hear say they'd rather vote Bernie, but if it's Hillary vs Trump, they'll vote Trump.
Which doesn't look good. The polls show too that Bernie outdoes both Cruz and Trump compared to Hillary. So they're actually, likely unaware, doing themselves harm. But what's knew. Has been happening for the past 40 years now. Hence why we're the only major 1st world developed country without universal single payer for all citizens, no more reduced or 0 tuition for higher education, and shattered pension retirement system as most companies have done away with defined pensions for the gimmick casino of a 401K instead with even lower wages making it even more difficult to put meaningful amount into a 401K account, just doing the usual 4% matching doesn't provide you with anything near most defined pensions paid out, and of course the ridiculous trade agreements with various countries some are often under tyrannical and/or corrupt control of their aristocracy with little to no labor protection, environmental protection, or any quality inspections, trading with essentially slave economies with our economy just causes a race to the bottom eventual equilibrium; that's something effecting some to a lesser degree than others all developed 1st world countries; but several have strong trade standards like Germany France, Sweden, Japan, to avoid to heavily the hit on the race to the bottom, but they're still being effected.
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We use 100% of our brain.
The 16% referred is how much the various of the brain or undergoing large amounts of electrical activity; specifically in the outer part such as cerebrum used for thinking. Inner parts of the brain is always working such as involuntary actions of heart and breathing as well as other parts receiving inputs or waiting for inputs like hearing, seeing, sense of touch, smelling, etc. at their individual cycles.
Cerebrum brain cycles very quickly: waking consciousness ranges from 12.5 to 30 transitions or cycles per second.
And new studies show both grey matter which is the smallest portion of the brain once thought to be only places where neurons formed memories and other complex activities appears to be wrong. White matter are of the cerebrum has been observed to change shape over time after learning motor activities.
http://io9.com/5681378/mysterious-white-matter-may-be-more-important-than-gray-matter-in-your-brain
So we use all of the brain. And it cycles very quickly.
Essentially, the 16% is describing how large bursting activity happens in a series instead of all at once in cycles. But if all of your brain wasn't working; it wouldn't receive those bursting cycles up to 30 every second and continue the brain activity. And if all of the brain lit up 100%; likely many of the interrogative parts of the brain that specialize in many areas such as speech, motor function, facial recognition, etc. would get too much cross information (some parts of the brain and concept forming use same regions or mixture of regions for different things so data would get mixed up) causing you to ignore the stimulus of 100% burst activity, unconsciousness, seizures, spasm, or become extremely confused and disoriented until it was reduced back to the lower numbers mentioned in the video.
Analogy to turning all transistor paths on a computer to on. You'd get scrambled confusion... just an analogy but it'd be something like that.
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+Jamikazeify Here's the secret of becoming a 1%er if your not already going to inherit that money... take out huge loans, garner investors into some gimmick be it a hedge fund or whatever, make sure any new money pays out former investors, handle at least a few million so you can state you handle such money to become a VP or mid to high level executive, from up LLC's and take out huge loans and gain more investors (don't use your own money and make sure it's in an LLC to protect your own personal stash of money and stuff... and about that stash, make sure it's diversified overseas bank accounts, consider getting dual citizenship somewhere else too).
And above all, if you find you're needing to pay off old investors or creditors, take over a pharma company that makes a unique drug or medical appliance and/or has an existing enforced patent, and increase that price of the product to get that money... be warned if you up the price too much, become to much of a media whore, actually think you're good enough to be king of some country or el presidente of some country, or whatever, you might end up just making a fool of yourself, and worse could end up in indicted... will you serve time in jail... maybe. Will you blow up whatever region you become the official in... maybe. Could you lose it all? Oligarchs stick together, and if you diversified correctly, no way.
Enjoy.
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A type level 3 civilization would likely figure out inter-galactic wormhole type travel as energy to produce it would be available to such a civilization, and it appears to work so long as you have enough energy which we being type 0 don't.
I like Carl Sagan's book Contact, the high level civilizations are playing with dead galaxies and using nearby galaxy's black hole to shoot quasar beams at the dead galaxy as a way to regenerate star birth and get the dead galaxy to comeback to life.
Projects immense like this would be the dominion of a type 3 civilization. Replacing a sun/star that's aged and about to go super luminosity just before entering the red giant phase, with a younger star via an entanglement/wormhole swap thus saving a solar system would be the projects of a type 2 civilization.
A type 4 civilization or completed civilization 3 however you define it, would have control of both forward and backward space-time providing as much freedom in temporal dimension as we already have in our 3 spacial dimensions. Above types 3-4, those civilizations would likely exodus our solar system discovering other space-time dimensional reality and find it more fulfilling of an existence for whatever reason... something new to explore, not as dull, seems more reality than our system which from the outside our reality is a singularity of all time being start to end placid, not the most specific aspect of reality, etc.
Their technically may not have any limits, and to invoke such limits with our level 0 civilization is the same as early iron age individuals invoking speed limit barriers to the human body fearing sustained speeds excess of 40 MPH would kill a person because the body wouldn't allow it and no technology could would be fathomable... air conditioning and refrigeration along with telecommunications would be magic to them, to cool something down without ice would be a limit they would wrongly invoke.
The big question isn't limits, we're in no position to even know what technological limits exist in the far future. We may note obstacles only.
But the big question, will we destroy ourselves before even advancing to a type 1 civilization?
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+John Allen That's my biggest irritation with the illegality of pot is that of medical use such as pain relief and eating it certain types with correct levels of THC and CBD current research shows it has to be a certain balanced proportion that so far appears effective in fighting cancer and to be taken orally.
And it's not just pot. There are various types of anti-virus medication like valacyclovir (valtrex) an acyclovir used to treat common cold soars, shingles, and gentile herpes. Valacyclovir is the only FDA approved drug, and it's patented under the name Valtrex, while there are many producers of valacyclovir throughout the world including in Europe, and acyclovir the cousin to the same drug had been available in most other countries since early 2000's just recently was approved near end of 2013 by the FDA patent only from the makers under the brand Zovirax.
Essentially, our country only represents big business including big biotech and big pharma. And the mark up they make here in the states is ridiculous. A relatively benign drug gives absolutely no high, with possibility of an upset stomach, headache, and feeling tired; no one will abuse such a drug, not habit forming in the slightest is available for less than a $1.00 a pill in Europe, Australia, India, etc. But is $13.50 a pill in the US for either drugs. It's insanity. I buy mine abroad only use it for cold soars.
FDA has missed the point, and now is just being used to for big business to racketeer off the inflicted. And pot is among many that are being singled out. It's irritating. I don't really advocate the recreational use of any drug, but certainly advocate for medicine especially when it's been trialed and shown successful by several other reputable countries.
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A better method than just government based income, would be requirement of shareholding in which you get a certain amount of shares that can't be cashed out for the money, but you trade for other shares to rebalance a portfolio. Essentially, provide more ownership of the wealth, and it's dividends. One reason income inequality becomes so severe, is that wealth concentrates to an even more extreme fewer. If workers got shares, meaningful amount that can provide dividend returns that provide a meaningful income, that would be better. It would require less taxes to redistribute, and require the concentration of wealth in such a few hands to be distributed to more people.
If you're employer isn't publicly traded, or even if it is, you would get a certain amount of non-cash out stocks that provide a meaningful dividend. That way you have everyone become wealth owners and get to take that income too.
Would be better than hoping the next congress will or will not cut such a basic income benefit. This would also help provide for retirement as you continue to get more shares as you age. We don't need dynasties that have their broods inherit the wealth, and non-profits that will mostly horde the principle and may spend it on various things that don't really benefit many people nor stimulate the economy.
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Polls are bullshit.
And if you even look at the shitty polls, it's withing the +/- 3% margin of error, polls must always be looked at with the +/- 3%... which means it's also not a simple majority in favor.
It's in the margin of error. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. all made the same mistake in the other polls for president.
And as far as the Trump supporters, most of them have no convictions. They do what they're told by their community, culture, and latest favorite action figure. They're morons in the extreme.
You must remember, it's the same bunch of pea wits who took Trump's love for fools as a compliment, when anyone with a slight bit of sense would have realized that's an insult; it's the same comment made by and scammer to their buddies in the back room after pulling a fast one on a bunch of idiots.
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I was talking to a coworker several months back about general anesthesia that I took when I got my wisdom teeth taken out as well as when they had to remove a cyst via place a small grommet to shrink the cyst and then later take it out. Reason why you should have your wisdom teeth removed if they're impacted, they can cause cysts that can later become cancerous. Anyways, didn't do the anesthesia when he had is wisdom teeth taken out.
Since I went under 3 times, I told him how odd it felt. That it was like not knowing the very moment you out, and that time seems to not apply. One moment watching the doctor put the stuff in the IV then waiting the next moment waking up surgery is done. I referred to the likely sensation that death is probably like. He agreed. But added also, its like falling asleep sometimes, you never notice the moment you're out like a light, and sometimes don't notice how long you've been out when you finally wake up.
I'm not sure what his religious convictions if any are. But he didn't seem to mind.
Now, in another department that I'm in currently, I suspect many would be butt hurt. I'm glad to know they're a little on the fairly religious side. I really don't need to have them feel like I'm some creepy libertarian Ayn Rand selfish psychopath. I'm not libertarian, I'm liberal social democratic liberal.
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They need to be more specific than "resist capitalism". He mentions corporatism is what we are increasingly going toward, it's the results of what absolute capitalism is used often under the magical myth of free capitalism as if that means anything... suddenly there's something free among these nothing is free minded people, talk about speaking out both sides of one's mouth.
None of the technology would exist with out both social government R&D, implementation, and well regulated capitalism combined.
Mixed market systems are the techniques best used; and the underlying principles are the competitive market principles.
Social-capital mixed market systems using violations and fits within the competitive market principles as a guide on the balance of the two market techniques.
Capitalism and socialism are techniques to use (like a tool box with many tools) not an underlying philosophy to use, the underlying philosophy is competitive principles of which some sectors naturally violate competitive principles and the objectives within businesses is to compete win against each other so persistent oversight that breaks up large unnatural monopolies from forming, regulates and/or operates natural monopolies, prohibits collusion which destroys the positive effects of competition by making agreements with other businesses not to compete, makes distinction with foreign sovereignty of various government types of dictatorship or dynastic or oligarchical rule, and human rights and labor rights, as well as foreign nations ability to also collude, sell at a loss ie dump, etc. and to regulate against such inauthentic competitive advantages that eventually remove the positive effects from authentic competition.
Absolute socialism turns into the poor results of communism. Both corporatism/oligarchy/mercantilism/feudalism and communism easily become a totalitarian form of government; very little liberty to participate and resolve grievances in their society.
It's the problem with buzz one liner culture is that it doesn't provide enough informative understanding to get to the best results. So we get the battle of the crazy free market Ayn Rand greed is good when the very definition of greed is negative as its an extreme of getting what you want at the expense of hurting someone nut jobs vs the crazy embrace communism nuts which ends up with a similar oligarch in absolute control of government often leading to liberties of voicing opinions, participating in government.
The closest to a buzz word would be "Embrace competitive market principles as a way to balance the way markets function to ensure their is more than sufficient supply and demand and its distribution is the most fair."
It's kind of long. If I was a twit I would pound sign that. :)
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+cyberanimealien Is it a private for profit insurance corporation, or is it a non-profit organization?
I'm interested, because you all in New Zealand tend to have high marks on the Mirror Mirror report.
And more things we in the US can look at the better, because our medical system here is terrible; it always gets the lowest score on the Mirror Mirror report.
Your country tends to get middle range of the handful evaluated. Out of 11 developed countries, New Zealand ranked 7th. The USA, as every report, we ranked overall 11 worst. But it doesn't surprise me. We pay more than any other country, have the least access, our quality isn't all that great, our wait lines stink; I tried finding a family doctor that I'd go to regularly for check ups, and none are taking new patients, they'll see you as a new patient only for urgent care minor emergencies and even then they discourage you to go because you'll have to wait in line with their other regular patients. Our insurance offered to us is a joke paying both deductibles and copayments as well as the premium it's a racket. And drug costs are astronomical.
2014 Mirror Mirror report they score the categories on page 7
US scored dead last 11th overall, and New Zealand scored 7th.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/files/publications/fund-report/2014/jun/1755_davis_mirror_mirror_2014.pdf
2010 Mirror Mirror report and ranking out of only 7 countries that were evaluated. We in the US scored 7 dead last again as we always do. New Zealand scored 5th overall. Page V or 5
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Fund%20Report/2010/Jun/1400_Davis_Mirror_Mirror_on_the_wall_2010.pdf
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Human comedy is to think 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars, that there are no other lifeforms in the universe other than humans and biology of earth. Statistically, that would be impossible. We just don't know the exact statistics right now to use he Drake equation, or rather distribution probability.
I personally think there is a high chance that we're among the first, as one scientific article I read mentioned that amount of heavy elements needed, that the last few billion years is about the only time enough heavy elements to create complex chemistry for life. So, we had a couple billion years, when chemistry of life was possible, and here we are. We're early arrivals. Possibly among the first. Estimated in a few more billion years, even more heavy elements will have spread among various galaxies, that it would make probability even more likely to generate complex chemistry that can form life forms. So as time increases, more complex chemistry is possible, thus more likely that life forms will be generated.
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Top ten get 43% of all income, that means 57% of what income is left is trickled pissed on 90% of the remaining population.
And just because 71% of the revenue of taxes come from the top 10%, the 90% are stuck with a very diluted distribution of the available 57% of the national income. How else would you expect the rest of the 90% of the population to be able to pay more of the income?
Thanks for showing us more data that it is indeed fair that the more income you get the more in taxes you can afford to pay, and the more taxes you ought to pay, because you can't get much out of the rest of the 90% of the population with income distribution that skewed, and don't get started on how skewed the wealth distribution.
Now show us how effective taxes have decreased in higher income earners as well as businesses over the past 50 years, and how many use carry over interest tax loop holes as well as making most of their money on passive income that has a much lower tax rate: no payroll taxes, and lower highest bracket taxes currently 20% highest bracket after income above $406,750 for singles or $457,600 for married joint-filing couples.
So yes, higher income earners fair share should always be higher, and the actual effective tax rate decline and rise in income disparity as well as flat real incomes and in some cases fallen incomes for the other 90% demonstrate allowing higher income earners to pay less causes a deflationary recession economy.
Thanks.
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Varney's type of attitude is exactly what has caused major problems in demand from labor/consumers. You begin to lose people who could otherwise buy the products, demand. So now we have lots of consolidated money from various funds. millionaires, and billionaires and they don't know where to put it, so they rush into whatever seems hot at the time, boom, then when they realize there's no real underlying demand just investment money chasing investment money as well as the potential to add debt based investment, you get huge busts.
If people are working more than the standard 40 hours they should get paid for it. In fact, productivity increases rather than going toward workers enabling the standard work week to reduce further further toward the lower 30, it's all gone to the top. So not only do they want all the productivity gains, they don't want to pay out even nominal work wages for excess work. Talk about going back to the robber baron chaotic years of the mid to late 1800's and early 1900's, the same chaotic years that saw the rise of autocratic regimes from fascism to communism. No thanks.
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On healthcare progress that must be made is:
1) Cost controls are required; A) limit patent terms to very short periods or completely remove them; above all this is the biggest reason prices are so ridiculous in the US compared to everywhere; an artificial subsidy to a few producers. If you're concerned with R&D for medical drugs, procedures, and appliances; a better reward mechanism is available; totally fund trial studies as most of the ground work is already completed when the biotech takes a drug to trial, they're literally mostly paying for just the trial studies. And the government already funds most ground breaking portion of any research. Certain drugs that have to few volume of customers, can be offset by some subsidies to ensure there is a supply at a lower per unit price available.
2) Allow medicare and medicaid to bid for prices for drugs and other treatment.
3) Eventually and very soon, a single payer option or system must be developed; this provides clear coverage and pricing, as well as assisting in supply in ensuring hospitals and clinics are fortified with subsidies to meet the barrier of economy of scale required.
This is economics 101. Essential services that have inelastic demand curves, and huge economies of scale require supply and demand assistance in terms of subsidies and price controls just as we do with public education, fire service, most roads, most utilities from water, electricity, natural gas pipes, to telecommunication. Businesses and labor/consumers are being screwed with the current system, even with ACA (Obama Care). In fact, the ACA just tried to continue the apple cart the big pharma, biotech, and medical insurance companies enjoy despite being a deeply flawed system for everyone else.
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Germany airs porn late night on some channels.
First time I saw it was 2001 at a hotel flipping through the channels, I just graduated from high school 18 staying with a traveling group, two of the kids were 16 and 14. The other guy was 17 a senior in high school.
Trip was with various teachers, students, and teachers' friends. I asked Rick, my German teacher, what was up with the porn. He said they've been doing that for a while to try to get the domestic population up.
Not sure if its working. But Germans have a lower crime rate than us Americans by a long ways... but then again they have their shit together; universal healthcare, quasi-government union of all trades, nearly zero cost educational system including apprenticeship option if you don't want to do the college professions, excellent urban and national transit systems.
Only draw back, when certain grocery and shopping places close, they close. And nearly nothing is open on Sunday. And when it is, it closes very early, and they literally kick you out just before they close LOL!
If that was the least of our concerns in this cartoony country of ours!
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The way you handle China's trade deals, you quietly as possible ignore China, play up subsidies for businesses to comeback from "any offshore production" while placing tariffs on all 3rd world serf countries. You don't make the announcement to China directly, so to provide time to get production back into the US.
It's a bad trade deal for many reasons: 1) lack of labor rights and any enforcement of what labor rights they do have 2) lack of any environmental policies hence the world is essentially on the same pace on global warming because all developed countries including the US got cleaner, but the same dirty industry never vanished, it just went over seas, and is bigger than it ever was in the developed countries. 3) many companies enjoy huge subsidies from their government as well as many are outright owned by their government which allows them to sell at a loss-- dumping.
So it's a terrible trade agreement for most of the US, its a race to the bottom, and we become overly dependent on a nation for sufficient consumer goods and appliances, can put us in harm of sharp price increases should China do things we don't like, or we do something China doesn't like; now not only war, you have an economic depression in the face of a war, which in history always makes for an extremely bloody war.
Anyway, there is a way to go about it. And that's what I figured. I liked its stance on NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, bilateral trade with China and other 3rd world hell holes. But I was weary the fuckhead was too stupid to figure out how you change course cleanly and quickly. Instead, he's hoping he can just get is way by taunting and acting like a general jack ass. As he's done his entire life.
But he won't get his way. This time he'll put us in economic ruin, and probably into some serious wars.
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sanekabc Depending if its just a small contractual, can you carry my stuff in the house, or shovel snow, or mow my lawn, then sure.
If its an actual 8 hour a day or other such regular full time or part time employment, no.
Because that laborer has achieved a certain value via education usually paid by society in general, together we are attempting to achieve a good and ever better standard of living. So that minimum value should reflect a minimum labor compensation value.
Otherwise, you get the same situation you have in places like Taiwan and other such places that have no mechanism to provide a basic minimum standard of living. Higher suicide rates, very poor prospects to increase wages, and overall poor standards of living. We're talking about people living in dog cages and living in dorms the size of 10X10 or smaller with 6 or more roommates.
So yes, markets will find a standard of living. But for most, without some market guidance, that standard of living the market provides for the majority is most likely to end up being a living nightmare.
Fortunately, Taiwan officials are starting to invoke various welfare mechanisms to increase their dismal standards of living. But it's slow moving. While Mainland China was radical communist despotism, Taiwan became radical laissez faire capitalism ended up being a plutocrat. Both regimes are now eating crow and changing their extreme ways because they simply didn't work. A mixed market system works the best basing that on evidence of the USA, western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, etc.
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+Keksi I do. As an atheist myself, I don't care if he lies if he actually is an atheist or agnostic. I don't believe in the bullshit, but he'll be dealing with lots of people who do, especially in bad times such as soldiers return in coffins, and may be invited to say a "prayer" people may not feel its sincere if he proclaims his atheism. And in that job, it'd be chicken shit to turn down a chance to eulogize or say something about an occasion. As an atheist we ought to realize most people deep down realize its bullshit, but what the term god is is just a projection of what we'd like or to build up more onto itself, its a form of allegory.
So actually, no. He wouldn't be lying. He'd be using allegory or appetition. And a catch all, atheists such as myself at our core are agnostic, there's a chance there's a Stalin in the sky after all, we're never 100% certain about such unverifiable things.
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+Nicholas Capucci +Nicholas Capucci I feel that way sometimes when talking about blood and the vascular system. I have a huge phobia with blood. If it weren't for that, I'd have definitely went to school to become a doctor; I really loved the heart, wanted to become a heart surgeon since I was 5 years old until about 11 when I discovered human blood and domesticated animal blood freaked me out; feeling of impending doom, mouth gets dry, feel need a drink of water and leave the room I'm in, maybe even go outside, and kneel down on the ground. Even in chemistry in college, talking about Osmosis and reverse osmosis as it applies to blood dialysis treatment freaked me out, I had to leave the classroom for a while; and he was only talking about the chemicals.
Pisses me off, it's ruined my life LOL!
The other passion was airplanes, but I was always nervous as a kid thinking what if I'm scared of flying. Turns out I love flying all types upside down, or just normal civil aviation, stall procedures, spins, whatever, love it.
Who'd known. Blood would scare me, but heights that could really kill me doesn't really scare me, in fact I love it.
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+william smith Interest rate amounts don't necessarily have to do with soundness of the economy. But there is a rang upper and lower bound that is bad.
22% wasn't good because the inflation rate during the 70's and 80's was very high, so the reserve had to suck up cash in the system by raising rates to historic highs. So it wasn't good under Reagan either.
And now, we have a deflationary vicious cycle caused by supply side economics making inflation flat and in some periods of time average retail prices actually fell; things weren't selling and people were laid off, hence the huge unemployment rate by the end of Bush's term leading into the first months of Obama's. So the Fed lowered over night rates to the point that it's essentially 0%, and banks are paying incredibly small sums, a 30 year bond only paying less than 2%, velocity money at historic lows of only 1.5, which is incredibly low, when such records were kept it was around 2.5 to 3.5 times range.
Facts hurt especially when you don't even know what they are and what they mean. Fuck you people are the stupidest idiots alive. You people are so mentally unfit, it's amazing you all don't pass out every often forgetting to breath, and having to rely on your involuntary breathing accomplished by the part of the brain, cerebellum, that controls non-voluntary functions. In fact, I'm wondering if that's all that you all were born with, a brain stem, no corpus callosum and cerebrum. Just waking reactionary nit wits with just the cerebellum in other parts of primitive brain including the medulla oblongata. Just reacting to things whizzing by, with no thought any more than fish or small lizard or frog. Lights on, no one's home.
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+SilenceOfTheSwedes We're already a social capital mixed market system. No other system works other than a mixed economy. Pure socialism like communism especially totalitarian communism like the USSR or more liberty based communism like Venezuela doesn't work.
But neither does everyone is on your own capitalism like in Taiwan leaving people to commit suicides, having to stick up nets to catch workers, or other very robber baron mixed economies, they just produce oligarchies. Like what Russia returned toward, as well as China despite their tongue and cheek "communist" reverent propaganda about Mao.
Mixed market economies are essential in an industrialize market based society to maximize prosperity for everyone and continue advancements in technology that actually increases the standards of living for everyone.
If it weren't for social security, FDIC, medicare and medicaid, public education, grants for college, and former 0 tuition colleges in the 60's and 70's half our advancements we all take for granted wouldn't have happened here in the US. Would all be somewhere else, and we'd be living in the backwater agrarian shit hole with an uber elite in some of the cities along with filthy sweat shops; kind of like many places throughout Central and South America, and many other countries world wide. But the entire world history would likely have been different because during the 1930's the entire world was in a shit storm due to the failures of mercantilism and industrial robber baron colonialism, for both the republics and the monarchies, all were falling apart economically and politically.
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This is where the non-parliamentary 2 party idiotic system easily gerrymandered and manipulated in candidate stacking by oligarchs in both parties is a total failure, a repeat to Ancient Greece and Rome. Naming our top legislation as the senate was post-diction to its ruin. We're the only developed country with such an idiotic legislature and election system that isn't parliamentary in nature, and it correlates to how it doesn't represent the people it's claimed; its how we lack basic universal health coverage, reduced tuition, and everything for tax cuts for the mega wealthy while lower income groups often pay higher effective tax rates, tax cuts and deregulation of various sectors including medical, financial, industrial, etc., and a ridiculous military much of it obsolete and too expensive to even use in any conflict.
We're a plutocratic banana republic, with a choice of choosing a face of the same coin. They're both equally evil, stacked candidates by aristocracy who own the various media outlets, the ones capable of only a handful of families to buy the airways, and methods to limiting the candidate pools, the concept that they're one or the other is an illusion of entertainment and mostly a pacifier, big binky for adults.
I'm writing Bernie in no matter what. Should question mark, apparently insane Drumpf somehow win. Oh well. If he's as insane as he acts, perhaps the support for the people to take back their country will happen. We'll see.
At this point, it's done being coward to support the fiction of a lesser evil, the same chickenshit behavior that reinforces that fiction of a lesser evil actually existing. The two are shitty, so go with a different choice that isn't. It's time to listen to Whiny the Pooh "Be brave little piglet."
Or be made in bacon tomorrow.
It's time for us to be brave, instead of little scared turd baskets, because if you haven't figured it out, we're floating around in a toilet that's being flushed already.
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First advice, ditch those friends. They're either brain dead morons not worth having, or their con swindlers not worth having. If they're family, you can love them. Just watch out... they might either be con artists or they're going mad... or their just flat stupid which in that case you might plan on taking some life insurance policy out on their head... you'll need it to pay for their soon rack up funeral and legal expenses. Boy did you have some crummy luck on your choice of friends or happen stance of family members.
Did they really do a "big think" segment on this? Seriously, most of humanity knew via experiment and the observations that the earth was a globe more than 2,500 years ago, this isn't just going backwards, this is more like sticking our collective heads up our asses. It's sad when you're having to give remedial lessons on methods to determine the curvature of the earth, especially considering our current technology: ability and availability to fly, take a ship to go anywhere around the world, view images from many satellites from many countries and private businesses, the IS, GPS, satellite tv, radio waves, astronomy, availability of education to understand simple mathematics like trig, etc.
Idiocracy is coming... if it's not already here!
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***** The law breaks down because it isn't the most accurate model on exactly what is going on. Its wrong for many other conditions. Ohm's Law is only called a law for historical reasons, and since now many stipulate the conditions, its okay to describe Ohm's Law as a Law, but not a model or theory.
It incorrectly describes current, voltage, and resistance relationship in conductors for all conditions. It doesn't even work for diodes. People still use it because for normal everyday electronics tend not to be superconductors and aren't working with diodes and other components that violate Ohm's Law. Or they'll switch away from Ohm's Law. Because it isn't accurate for their use.
As for electrical resistance, at the critical temperature, there really is 0 resistance in that material. While the flaws and vibrations of the atoms do exist, the electrical resistance is 0. So far tests show even after 50 years the current is still preserved. The atomic flaws and vibrations appear not to interact with the initial current being induced into a superconducting circuit, those flaws and vibrations don't provide any resistance to the current. And current can store forever in the closed system and not violate thermodynamics because no new energy is being created.
Newtonian physics meets Einstein Relativity. One model does good enough job for most things currently, but the other is more accurate and must be used for those conditions requiring its use because Newtonian physics is fundamentally, as a model is wrong for all conditions, Einstein does all of the conditions Newtonian physics allows plus more, so its a more accurate model. Same with Ohm's Law vs BCS Theory, London Theory, etc.
http://www.supraconductivite.fr/en/index.php?p=supra-resistance-supra
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+Kenneth Nyström If you were actually curious, you'd look up the research yourself. There's several major evidence that global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it is man made caused by releasing fossil fuels which has increased the carbon-dioxide levels to 400 ppm compared to the range of 280 ppm to 175 ppm cycles for the last 400,000 years. And it is well known that CO2 retains heat, that it has a greenhouse effect. Excluding all other causes, even the sun, and considering all 3 Malkovich cycles in which all 3 at current would promote a cooling trend (we should be entering another ice age, but we're actually warming), etc.
The evidence becomes overwhelmingly in inferring the warming is due to mankind and it is happening in accordance to the causes of increased greenhouse gasses and the feedback loops associated with climate at an incredibly fast rate. It's the rate of the warming that is very bad, as it doesn't give much time for biology nor civilization to adapt.
I'm very skeptical on all things especially claims like this. Al Gore was a sensationalist who likely did more harm than good, because he needless uses false and often extremely pumped up claims about climate change. The truth is, it is happening, and it will pick up pace very quick probably toward latter half of this century.
You can read the actual data from climate scientists yourself if you're really interested in the science.
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Because the establishment treat the rest of us like bozo the clown peons to do their killing so they can than use that country to sell there shit to and subjugate their citizens as cheap indentured servitude near slave like conditions which then eventually cause our citizens incomes to fall in equilibrium to those indentured servants. Life gets shitty. People quit studying. And you have a mass of idiots, dragging their knuckles drooling like some fuck for brains voting Republican to keep their stupid domesticated servant small brain under subjugation. The elites just laugh in their stupid drooling faces.
Of course, when these mindless drooling ogres start clamoring for harmful stupid that could harm the elites, such as the most recent stupid on an open fire spout of not getting vaccinations, the elites get scared. They see their pet politician playing to the brainless. But just to make sure, the elites call their pet politicians "Hey, you need to get control of this situation. You need to softly convince your army of morons these vaccines aren't bad. The last thing I want is to catch some fucking disease and die in my ivory tower from these shit heads! And 2nd worst, they can't be infecting our labor supply and consumers that buy our stuff, that's profits... you hear me? PROFITS! 3rd but less likely to happen, they spread a pandemic killing even 20% of the population, that's enough to cause social unrest... that means my oligarchical ass gets overthrown... but I know number 3 isn't even close to happening because you're going to make sure the idiots moo the right way." Click.
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Climate change has already effected the globe at latitudes of Libya, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. as they have had massive crop failures and increased rate of desertification. And on the other hemisphere, Mexico and most of the other central American countries as well as Texas have had serious crop failures due to mix of to dry and hot, and inundation. That is going to spread. Our thin veneer like the facade of stone covering a wooden building, is a paper tiger, house of cards taking one thing to collapse the entire thing. Similar to the collapse of the late bronze age disaster.
Not doing something about it will make complete ruin of the entire social system; the economy won't be ruined, there simply won't be one.
The Paris climate agreement reminds me the futile efforts of the League of nations prior to WWII.
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+IpuntTurtlezz It was at first a complete oligarchical republic, that has been slowly over its existence toward a democratic republic.
Initially only free male property owners and in most states required to have European ancestry to vote. Each state had their own voting requirements; many states ages varied; age 21 or older in many instances up until 1971 with the 26th amendment uniform to vote 18 and older.
Some offices were voted by other representative bodies like the Senate was voted by state legislatures, and the president was vote by the Federal House and Senate; no a popular vote in each state is conducted that the House and Senate has always used to determine their electoral college votes for president; they still have the right to vote for someone else as president though. Most know they would get pitch forks in their ass if they went against their state's popular vote though.
Over time, that has changed. Many states allowed varying degree of limits or inclusions compared to other states; some states allowed women to vote, and set their own age limits.
For the entire country, all male non property owners could also vote by the time Andrew Jackson was president, then later all male ethnic/races could vote, then women could vote by 1920 via the 19th amendment, then 1971 voting age across the country was reduced to 18 by 26th amendment.
So we're going into the direction ever since the creation of the US from plutocratic republic mafia style toward a democratic republic.
Not to mention most states also have requirements in their own constitutions and legislature for any law or state constitutional amendment proposals to have a referendum vote in order for a law that was passed by their legislature to become actual law, which is very democratic.
The form many states use the democratic process to elect people of the community to debate, formulate law, and a democratic method reject or approve the laws written; so not only do people democratically elect their representatives, they democratically approve some laws their elected representatives have passed.
We're a type of democratic republic. Moving toward more of a democratic citizen choice over an elite aristocratic mafia style republic; where the rich landed elite feudal lords pick the peoples' representatives.
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I did a google search to see what this university was all about.
It's like complete right wing propaganda freak show from denial of science, denial on the environment, oligarch worship, etc. It's a lunatic fringe non school aka its website is a .com rather than a .edu website. What a bunch of con artists.
Peaked my interest because they we're historically inaccurate for the most part. Very vague lacking quite a bit of detail on how the colonies functioned, and mixing how the colonies functioned at various times in history until the US Constitution was adopted which prevents states from establishing a religion, nor taking a religious test for office. They're timelines were mixed in after describing the later years in the 1800's the begin describing colonial law instead of US law and state law under US constitutional law. Was very purposely jumbled.
As for the content and conclusion:
Thank the pilgrims? Are you kidding? And you talk about Rhode Island, saying that's why it was setup, sure was. Was because the intolerance of the Massachusetts pilgrims, the puritans who came here, kicked Roger Williams out of the colony of Mass., Roger Williams then setup a colony in Rhode Island.
And it doesn't end there. Library of congress provides laws and many accounts on how the colonies were always at each other's throats. Religion in the American colonies was not tolerant. The Puritans actually formed a law of execution on the Quakers. And so much more. In fact Mass. Puritans ended up hanging a lady after her 4th run in on preaching her Quacker crap.
No, I'll thank the US constitution and the politicians of that time that didn't ignore or play games with history, and in doing so reflected on the strife that religion intolerance had caused in Europe and in the Colonies, therefore by not ignoring history as you bozos are doing, they ensured non-establishment of religion and non-religious test for office clauses in the 1st Amendment and the other in the 6th Article.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01-2.html
I couldn't let these quacks get away with dumbing people down any further. The populations as in all times are always in general dumb enough, we never want the populations to be any dumber for everyone's sake. Otherwise we don't get advances in morality like religious tolerance.
How dare they call themselves University.
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+blurglide Barriers to entry isn't what's causing profit margins to increase; it's failure to use the competitive market principles in the first place for use in determining what areas to regulate, break up, and/or collectively market.
Our trade agreements have also provided short term sugar high from existing sticky wages domestically with more production going toward often despotic or extremely impoverished surf labor. This has a profit expansion effect in the short run. But overall mid to long run deflationary effect on domestic wages as those sticky wages finely fall.
You get a consolidation such as in finance and banking, but you see this in all sectors as demand is actually peaking. And for the emerging markets, they've already reached failure to gain a domestic demand driven economy; much of the last 7 years since the great recession was debt fueled from China building mega empty cities and infrastructure, and a investment mis allocation toward commodities that has busted, investment money is chasing investment money. Hence why so many companies either sit on cash profits, and/or have bought back stocks rather than expand.
Two points,
1) Neglecting competitive market principles in determining the social-capital market mix. Our regulatory, collective market formation, and trust busting has neglected the use of competitive market principles;
2) Trade. Our trade agreements are based on unauthentic competitive advantage of essential slave labor from despotic nations, dumping, and neglect of externalities of these despotic and/or corrupt nations, and the counter effects on our subsidies that is essentially dumping on them; displacing workers in all countries to lower wage employment opportunities. Very few people benefit, and only short to mid term.
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Fatalism is bad. India's majority Hindu population has an extreme fatalism philosophy relative to other religions. The results in India with extreme fatalism is a very entrenched caste system, and lower middling sort (median higher income) that relative the rest of the population are still very well off, and the top aristocracy caste do very little to help others below their castes.
And the lower caste often feel they are responsible for the situation and circumstances they were born into, they must have done something bad in a past life for instance, so there is very little grass roots movement from the lower castes to seek improvement.
Apathy from all social stratification pervades, and you end up with raw sewage running through most streets in most towns and cities through India, most without running safe drinking water, essentially very badly designed roads or any other decent infrastructure other than a few concentrated locations in some cities where the elite castes lives.
In short, fatalism, regardless from faith or non-faith, produces apathy which results in ruin for society and individually. It's a form of wallowing in your own filth from despair.
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He was only doing it for political posturing, he had to safe face to his nut bag constituents. Probably thought he could invoke a 90 day ban on some countries, then when it's over, he'd have some pretend reforms on immigration. But it back fired for it's obvious stupidity as it really does nothing to prevent terrorism, at least based on what has happened in the past.
I seriously don't think he's doing this because of intelligent reports as he stated he wanted to do a "Muslim ban" during his campaign. And he doesn't appear to trust the intelligence from the agencies, nor does the agencies trust him.
And how hasty the order was put together, and the 31 year old Goebbels look and act alike who recently has been apparently assigned by Trump to speak to the press about the court overruling, appears to have also written the poorly written: vague and likely illegal executive order, which wouldn't be a surprise as his statements (Stephen Miller) appear also to demonstrate that he lacks the complete and utter understanding to the importance of judicial review, "...that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned." "The president’s powers here are beyond question."
Not only is their Judicial review, congress has the power to override a veto and is the only entity allowed to approve a declaration of war, or begin and initially approve any law.
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You too settle down. Use spell check.
And use a dictionary. Then you'll understand socialism is by far better than imaginary only exists in anarchy laissez faire capitalism and state run production communism.
And remember economics and governmental systems are two different distinct things. Democratic means of, for, and by the people using a constitution that safe guards right to assemble, petition, and speak one's mind and many other protections to ensure our judicial system is fair and voting for legislature and executive branches are democratic.
We have a mixed market economy called social-capitalism where we have mix on both demand and supply side subsidies: demand side we have medicare, medicaid, social security, FDIC, unemployment insurance and on the supply side we have public primary education, public universities and colleges, fire departments, roads, ports, and often local utilities as well as subsidies to agriculture, aerospace, probably too much for military suppliers, and many various subsidies direct and indirect in the form of tax credits in the energy sector, and many other businesses most of them privately owned, few publicly owned like the USPS, or most fire departments and public primary schools.
Let's recap:
Our economy: Social-capital mixed market economy aka socialist economy.
Our government type: National constitutional representative democracy with a national supreme judicial, legislature and executive branches with duplicate three branches subordinate several States with their own state constitutional representative democracies with some states being an additional referendum democracy, or fully described in some states: A constitutional representative democracy with democratic referendum on legislation.
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Fannie Dafuq I'm from Idaho. We have a small population of about 1.6 million people in a fairly geographically large state. Not all of us are that backwards. Only a few freak shows are. And really, as long as its an appropriate class like literature, religious studies, philosophy, etc. it wouldn't be so bad. In fact, they should also teach Wiccan books, Islam, Hindu scripts, book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price etc. Give an education on the insanity of the major and minor beliefs. And reading the stuff and studying it in an empirical fashion is the fastest way to becoming atheist.
After I read the bible as an adult in full, boom, Atheist. And actually spooked me realizing people are all in some mass insane culturally indoctrinated psychosis dream world of various religions. I really think it'd serve to end at least the fanatical religious nuts. So long as it was done in the correct subject class. Seriously, you can't use it for physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Well, I guess you could, just to show the ignorance of ancient people I suppose, but that would be more in context with a history class.
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One dollar coins, or coin money doesn't stay in wallets. And they fall easily out of pockets. In Germany before the Euro switch, and they used primarily Mark coins in 1,2,5, and 10 mark coins as well as 1,2,3,5,10,20,50 Pfennig (their cents). It was a coin mess in my pocket. Leading me to stop at a bank several times to exchange my DM coins into paper DM. Still have them sitting in my Beer Stein. And do have some paper DM as well 5, 10, and 20. I like 1 dollar paper money and think it is worth printing $1 money compared to the shoe-leather cost of going to a bank, loss of coins, and irrational exuberance of spending. The penny is really stupid though. Along with the nickle.
We could actually save money too if it was forbidden to sell things in higher than tenths of a cent and always round down to the nearest tenth. Example gas was $3.56 gallon x 7 gallons = $24.92 -- round down $24.9 compared to $3.5 x 7 = $24.50. Buying in bulk and over the long run would save lots of money.
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If we had a universal coverage system employers would be able to save money on employees too by reducing the burden employers make on contributions to insurance plans, allowing for higher wages and better competitive environment to produce stuff.
Only reason why NAFTA has only benefited mostly just Canadian workers while being a wage zapper for Mexico and US workers is that they have social medicine. They're able to compete better. Instead we have oligarchs such as oligopoly pharmacy companies like Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Glaxo-Smith-Klein, interestingly enough they're names of the founders who have dynastic families who do relatively nothing but sit back on their grandparents or great grandparents business and collect dividends. Basically the trade of is that we have dynasties that are a less economically and politically powerful for better cheaper and higher quality medical system. Sucks though these plutocrats control us with their peon upper 10% toadies such as lobby groups various lawyers and paid off politicians.
And the average American unfortunately is completely clueless how the financial system such as stocks bonds, taxes, etc. are actually conducted. Our educational system also needs a serious overhaul including primary and higher education. We're becoming a bunch of bum fuck nincompoops. ACA was a Republic right wing oligarch plan to keep insurance companies relevant and to eliminate doing away with unnecessary medical patents only necessary for the apple carts of dynastic oligarchs pharmaceutical families rolling in the dough, and biotech companies spending relatively small amounts with already government funded pre-researched medical technology to bring to the market. We can do so much better.
- We need a universal medical coverage option.
- We need to redo our primary education as well as our worker education to allocation method, and better our method of higher education as higher education prices our out costing the actually return in wages.
- And we need to restructure our economy from one that is highly dependent on global tyrannical despotic countries who use their despotism to exploit impoverished laborers, for a more domestic economy. Our current global economic structure is very similar to mercantilism where we have a few large players using 3rd world despotic countries as old mercantilism used colonies and a few very large players backed by their usually aristocratic republics or mostly hereditary rulers.
We ought to be only trading for items we cannot get anywhere else, and being choosy from which we get those particular items, never seeking one particular country as a sole source. Such trade dependency creates possibilities of becoming more hostile toward one country or another should one country decide to either charge tariffs, diminish or quit buying or selling as much, or raise various rates of goods or services. And the pressure competing with despotic nations is that our own nation falls in equilibrium to the same despotic system in all aspects of society: economic, legislature, judicial, and executive.
Currently our country is mostly filling up with extremely wealthy oligarchs who have paid for both political parties, who appoint politicians who therefore appoint judiciary of their choosing, lobby legislation to make laws conform to their interests at the complete disinterest of the common laborer or entry entrepreneur, and fund executive offices for governors and the President to promote their interests that our in complete counter to everyone else's interest.
Currently without such changes we will continue to see wages and purchasing power drop. Peoples' education become worse suited for anything practical. And limit ability for public protest. People will be too ignorant on how to protest and if they do protest, what to protest and what solutions would work. The standards of living will fall to that of the 3rd world countries currently being exploited. We're already seeing this all over the US, and in many places in Europe. Russia is an extreme case we can observe their oligarchy suck their people dry, and their ignorant under-educated people haven't a clue how to resolve their problems so they chose some backwards party such as Putin.
We must resolve to make the changes. Otherwise we'll be living in a 3rd world shit hole.
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Part of the right winger oligarchy stick, is blind obedience. And in the military, obedience, discipline is part of what the military uses to keep their armies from turning into rabble.
So blind obedience stick of the GOP tend to appeal to military (not always I'm vet and know many others who are liberal, but many especially older military tend to be GOP or tea bagger nut jobs... but to be in the military, you're either nuts to begin with or you turn a little nuts while in there).
Always found it funny, a Major I served with was bitching about the "Nanny state" and the prospects of universal medical system, all while she worked for the most USSR style communist-dictatorship employer in the US; the military where everything she wears, to how she does her hair is dictated, and she's given housing money which often is twice the price of most mortgage payments, why many high enlisted to low level officers take out out two mortgages for two houses, they can start a small rental business on the side, and a nice salary that always increases on scheduled basis, with a defined 20 year defined pension plan in addition to social security payout that is an addition to the military pension that happens at age 65 (postal pensions you have to chose between social security or the US Postal pension they won't pay both), all while universal health care under tri-care.
Really, it's that they want theirs and fuck everyone else.
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+jaycol21 +jaycol21 I live in Idaho, and didn't realize how much of a red state I live in until recently. I think the population I live around is higher than 50% who are dangerous idiots, and not just dangerous to other people, but even to themselves.
On the bright side, they're friendly dangerous idiots, and our crime rate is generally low.
The only downside is our accident rates are not so much as a proportion to the population; accidents like shooting themselves or allowing toddlers to get to their fire arm, or some dangerous appliance, or accidents doing something outdoors, vehicle accidents, etc. And we generally have a rather poor state, wages stink, we're a beacon for cheap labor call centers and some cheap manufacturers save a few tech manufacturing plants, however even those plants come here for the cheap labor.
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The DNC doesn't bother because they're already owned by the actually wing of the party they belong. DNC is just a phony front for the wing of the GOP.
Didn't you know that?!?!?!
The two parties are one in the same.
It would be counter productive for the DNC to pay lip service to states that are already gerrymandered to the point of oligarchy, a populous impoverished who have been weaned on the tit of delusional religion and conspiracy nuttery that's complete bat shit, a population that is under educated, in such levels of poverty they haven't a clue what other countries do. Keep'em dumb, keep'em divided, keep'em apathetic with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.
Most red states, this is already achieved. So the front fraud that is the DNC isn't necessary to pacify the traveled, educated, tend to be not so impoverished unless they had some very bad misfortunes (injury, illness, etc.).
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That applies to markets too, there is no such thing as a free market.
Competitive market principles are how one determines what to regulate and the amount of regulation and to what purpose of the regulation, as well as what works better under private ownership and operation vs collective ownership and operation.
So sure. Nothing is free. Neither are "free markets" their as meaningless as saying magical markets, or twinkle toe markets.
Private markets are only more efficient under competitive market environments broken down into various competitive market principles.
Medical sector violates many aspects of the perfectly competitive market principles:
1) Huge barrier to entry due to huge economy to scale requirements similar to sewer, water, and electrical lines.
2) Nearly perfectly inelastic demand curve, price has virtually little impact on quantity demanded nor quantity supplied-- people either suffer, condition gets worse or spreads, and/or die. So no matter the price, people will pay whatever they can to get the medicine, treatment, or appliance. So suppliers are able to charge ridiculous prices because they no people will pay or suffer or die.
3) Externalities are huge: if the people are too sick, injured, and/or not at least treated medically they cannot be as productive otherwise. And people generally hate going to the doctor anyways, placing more discouragement such as a big bill, they simply won't go until it becomes an even worse condition making the person even less productive, possibly long term or permanently disabled 0 productive.
4) R&D risk on investment for research is high, so virtually all ground work is done via tax funded research with another minor amount on donations, because there is absolutely no certainty on return on investment. Private markets generally only cover the small portion that involves trial studies, essentially 10% of the entire R&D. 90% taxes spent on subsidies, university grants, and nonprofit. Even though patent protections attempt to intervene this violation, they don't work very well, funding only the last 10% of R&D, the trial studies. And some of those trial studies are also funded by government grants, and non-profit donations.
5) All firms sell identical products which is violated by patent protection, patent protections being cited as a way to get private markets to do more R&D which obviously doesn't work when 90% of the R&D is still government spending, for violating yet another competitive principle. This one allows biotech companies to spend $10 million to $100 million conducting trial studies for FDA approval then sales the patent to a big Pharma for $1 to $5 billion, then the big pharma charges monopoly power price per unit upping the price of the drug even higher; a very bad "fix" to competitive market principles; medical sector doesn't need any patent protections due to their inelastic demand curve, price doesn't discourage buyers from buying, they'll pay whatever price allowing producers to nearly set whatever price they want already.
6) Perfect information/knowledge: it's best to allow doctors to share best practices, which has potential conflicts with collusion toward not competing with each other.
Medical services and goods sector simply violate many competitive market principles which demonstrate how they don't work efficiently under a private and little to no regulated market scheme. They're best under highly regulated and sometimes collectively operated and privately operated scheme-- Hospitals are often best highly regulated and/or collectively operated natural monopolies, the prices are cheaper customer basis, and supply can be more responsive to meet the demand. Hence why all 1st world countries even many 3rd world countries have some form of universal medical system. Just as any decent country has public roads, utilities, fire services, postal services, ports, etc.
This is ECON 101. Science. Not dogma of magical twinkle tow free markets, funny how the same econ theocrats in their same breath about free markets say there's no free lunch. Talk about talking out both sides of one's mouth.
These regulated or collective and privately mixed controlled markets are not free, but they're cheaper and provide better quality to the alternative because the alternative isn't a competitive market by nature at all; they're in no way a competitive market thus you use a different strategy for better outcomes.
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+Ken Blodick No it hasn't, look at Germany, Sweden, Norway, UK, France, Austria, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, etc.
Mixed market social-capital systems tend to work the best, and they still produce billionaires and millionaires, all those countries have their own millionaire and billionaire class, which demonstrates people still aspire to better themselves. It just makes it more realistic to be able to better yourself, rather than it become more of a crap shoot casino with the odds favoring the house by a tremendous degree.
And in fact, it makes in the long run, successful people even more successful as it keeps both supply and demand growing.
Your post is exactly what neo conservatives have been blowing since the 50's and have gotten ever so more fanatical through the 80's to current day, giving us the worst health care system out of all developed nations for the past decade and a half according the the Mirror Mirror reports as well as giving us an even lower social mobility results compared to the UK which has a historic nobility monarchy based defined economic class structure. It's sad that in a monarchy with a House of Lords has better social mobility than a republic which claims to be the land of opportunity. We're more the land of obfuscation for easier exploitation.
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Bingo. Two major effects of inflation: Labor shortages like we saw in the 70's, or really bad monetary policy allowing; massive borrowing either or both public and private as this provides a massive boost to money supply; in the case of borrowing for capital expenditures; it takes a while for that extra supply to produce productivity and its usually to one sector of the economy, it doesn't increase supply in all goods and services to offset the new money supply increase, and consumer spending simply adds to the money supply without any extra productivity/supply.
Debt is immediate add to the money supply and effects all sectors immediately upon its spending.
Most sectors of the economy have total employee compensation and payroll tax as about 5% to 10% of the costs of the business.
Since labor is calculated as a cost it's tricky calculate labor's share of revenue aka profit because then you have to add their costs back to revenue and minus all other costs to get profit before labor costs; and in that case most sectors labor is about 3% to 15% of the profits.
Literally, most sectors owners or shareholders get 97% to 85% of profits.
Retail grocery and apparel, fast food, and non-franchiser restaurants are the primary exceptions.
Those sectors can run as high as 10% to 25% for labor costs; just a quick google search can reveal; costs to profits range from 10% to 40% depending on the size of the business... there's an economy of scale if multiple stores are opened that draw labor share of profits down toward the 10% range.
Most sectors labor is among the smallest costs.
The reason labor is the first to get hit the difficulty negotiating with supplier contracts, and to have good supplies that work on your machines or with your sunk cost established processes. Its more difficult to cut utilities like water, sewer, trash, electricity, recycling, etc. And its more difficult to change distribution.
So first to take the ax is usually the employees; pay cuts directly, or increase their share of insurance premiums, or freeze pay, or make do with skeleton crews etc.
Most sectors, the equipment, rent/mortgage, utilities, and supplies are all individually the highest costs. They're the most difficult to bring down too.
Min wage so long as its not overly burdensome on start ups and smaller scale businesses would touch inflation figures.
Profits no matter what are still generated and sent to shareholders and spent adding to velocity in the market no matter what.
Its money creation via borrowing and extremely tight labor supply that ultimately effect inflation. With global economy the tight labor supply hasn't been much of a factor over the past 40 years. We should be in a massive deflationary period, but extreme borrowing in all sectors of the economy has kept inflation rising at least 3% on average over the past 40 years.
Accumulative 398% increase from 1978 to 2018. Which isn't much compared to the 1940 to 1980 accumulative inflation of 568% tight labor supply. But still 398% increase is due to huge borrowing. Lots and lots of it.
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
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Milton Friedman was a jack ass in his logical fallacies.
An easy counter to the now dead fuck, would be to meet his conflation face on.
In this situation with Ford, it wasn't about the price to install the part wasn't unknown, nor was it cost prohibitive in which case you would state the hazard of the gas tank and of a rear collision could be fatal to any would be buyers.
The conflated scenario he makes up is that resources to save a few lives would result in death to millions due to lack of resources; somehow magically millions would starve. As well as stating it's too expensive to make perfectly safe car; that would imply unknown safety design flaws.
The issue here with Ford, wasn't that cost was unknown to make the car safer. Ford new of their design flaw. The reason Ford didn't take action was to make even more profits, it wasn't cost prohibitive, it was quite cheap relative to the entire per unit price, even cheaper when you consider bulk economy of scale to the production of such a part. It's just not fixing it was even cheaper and made them even more profits.
The other quackery Friedman does on many occasions is to say "don't look at the money" it's not about money, but resources. As if we're in some fucking barter economy. It's "not money" it's "allocation of resources". The fuck it's not about money too! Do resources not flow based on the exchange of money? Again we're not in a barter economy. And all economic studies evaluate qualitatively by money.
But he wants people to ignore the money part because that provides a qualitative method to evaluate and demonstrate the Milton Friedman Ayn Rand is utter bullshit.
Centuries from now, Friedman and his brand of economics will be regarded in economics as quacks of the 18th century who advocated the cure of the humors by bleeding, blistering, and taking of copious amount of laxatives.
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+Sam Sunnyboy It worked on Bill Clinton, just give them grief, they're just talking heads with very little stance on anything other than their own legacy, it's all about them, so it's the best way to get their so called opposition to go along with them, and the cherry on the top is you can share or push blame on the so called opposition when their apparently bad policies eventually blow up in everyone's face.
NAFTA, permanent normal trade with China, deregulating the banks under Clinton, then Obama Care, watered down banking regulations Dodd-Frank both now serving as bank board members, under Obama.
So when this shit fails, they can say it was all (like Obama Care which is a GOP sponsored plan since the 90's such as Bob Dole) or partially blamed as well.
So it's a perfect strategy. Pretend you hate their guts. And they'll do whatever you want them do, and take very little to none of the responsibility.
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There's a chunk of the population that is, despite the internet, and supposedly the most traveled, they're either not traveled themselves, have very few close nit friends, none of which in other major developed nations, etc.
They fall for idiot propaganda.
I have traveled, I know Germany, Austria, UK, and Japan medical system using parts of it and visiting hospitals and a clinic with friends. Even being a foreigner it's cheaper. Since then I still buy a Rx usually from Germany.
Propaganda. It's powerful force. Many former soviet states in the USSR, even in China with their bogus communist party suck on their propaganda stuff pretty hard. It's not just US that gets snookered by their rulers and aristocracy.
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Total compensation hasn't not followed productivity, studies that compute productivity is based on total compensation including wages, salaries, bonuses, uniforms, shoes, medical insurance, pensions, retirement contributions including 401k, etc. and inflation over time.
The raw cost of an employee is lower per productivity.
And as a share of income its decreased significantly in most sectors.
1987-2015 BLS report reveals even adjusting using different deflators to normalize real income CPI, and even with the more conservative output deflator 77% of all industries saw an actual decline in share of income per productivity.
The reasons they suggest are globalization, automation, and faster capital depreciation in some sectors.
Income literally is the total compensation of employees adjusted for inflation. Depending what one uses to compute deflation CPI or output price index demonstrates still a very significant misalignment with productivity; a very wide gap has developed and remained since 1987 to 2015 of their study.
Link below has interesting details.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-labor-productivity-and-compensation-gap.pdf
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Price controls in the fashion of Germany is actually decent. It ensures production of buildings to live in that are good, not pieces of junk. So it plays both supply and keeps the price lower at the same time. Essentially, it subsidizes the production of more multi-level housing for the price fixing. Kind of like HUD home does now, just not with any expiration, and you don't have to qualify for low income housing. Everyone has access to live in all dwellings, the prices are just fixed to ensure they're not incredibly high, and offset with subsidies to developers and to at times to landlords.
It's mostly why most people rent in Germany than own a home, even though some houses of certain sizes are also price fixed.
You do have to be incredibly careful when you start price fixing. You must work both sides of supply and demand.
And he's playing both sides, I just read; housing council to allow them to build homes.
And he's promoting regulating private landlords to have decent living standards.
Something that actually exists at the state, county, and city level of every state in the US already. Not very extreme. On that front we in the US are better there.
http://www.jeremyforlabour.com/housing
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Competitive market principles only work in the following sectors and rules of markets:
1) All firms sell an identical product;
- With patent protections; they're not. Remove patent protections.
2) All firms are price takers - they cannot control the market price of their product;
-Pharma, Hospitals, Clinics, are price makers due to patent protection, inelastic demand curve (people will pay any price to avoid pain or death when sick or injured).
3) All firms have a relatively small market share;
-Pharma and hospitals especially have huge market share per organization due the economy of scale required to enter medical markets.
4) Buyers have complete information about the product being sold and the prices charged by each firm; and
-Medical industry requires collusion to come up with better medicines, applications, and procedures.
-The nature of medical services require that often the patient doesn't have time to dither about what hospital to go to during emergencies.
5) The industry is characterized by freedom of entry and exit. Perfect competition is sometimes referred to as "pure competition".
-Medical sector for clinics and hospitals have huge economies of scale, it takes lots of money to startup and keep a hospital running.
The medical sector violates every competitive market principle. And in some cases, they're artificially created violations like medical patents causing artificial monopolies of producers for long periods of time. And in most cases, it's the nature of the medical industry: requires huge economies of scale (lots of money) to start up and run the various organizations for a competitive environment, consumers don't have any fair knowledge of prices compared to other hospitals, clinics, or operations, hence why they dither on your bill after services are rendered for all the "just in case we had to do more work when looked inside your body". And you simply can't dither on pricing during emergencies. And collectively, the entire medical sector has a very inelastic demand curve: the price changes do not effect a persons willingness to get or not get a life saving services; they'll pay any price when in pain or to keep from dying.
Then you have huge externalities-- people miss work more because they're not getting treated early, instead waiting for the condition to become worse; or they're too broke to get the required treatment. A hospital ER doesn't have to treat the illness, they only need to stabilize for instance: abscessed tooth is an infection of the tooth treated by pulling the tooth or root canal procedure; the ER will not do those procedures, instead they will give antibiotics to stabilize the situation, and recommend you go see a dentist. The actual problem persists.
Police, fire departments, airports, seaports, roads, libraries, parks, criminal and civil courts, housing and development, public utilities from electric, water, sewer, trash, etc. are all various violations of competitive market principles. It's why they're in general they're a collectively arranged single payer for each city either directly or indirectly operated by the government. They don't work under competitive market principles as those sectors violate the competitive market sectors; they'll never be competitive, and you'll always come up with worse results (higher prices, worse quality) than collective market operations.
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+Ek Deubell I've done the same. I was thinking I probably will vote for her. But really, every issue that's important to me: NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, regulating Fracking, return to Glass-Steagal Act, end idiot slave labor trade with despotic nations like China, advancing a single payer system for medical, reducing tuition prices as well as allowing student loans to be refinanced at a lower rate.
She's essentially everything I'm about. So. I can't.
Drumpf only has one issue I'm for and its about trade. However, I think he's such a meat head idiot, he'd fuck that up by not offering subsidies and credits for companies who come here and remain here for 10 to 20 years which would be required to get any production to comeback here quickly otherwise so many goods and sub assemblies have went offshore it would cause shortages and huge price increases which the oligarchs would just use as a boycott to get rid of modification to our trade agreements and go back to slave labor trade agreements.
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+Josh K You haven't voted have you... there's not just one position that's on a ballot, it's several votes. They can't just not count votes.
Many are fill in the bubble with pen or pencil type scan ballots.
When you write in someone it counts it as a write in, for that person, of which later they go back to see who was written in, if there's not enough write in selected they tend not to bother for several days, but eventually will look at all ballots that had a write in somewhere on the ballot for recording purposes.
They don't just throw your ballot away for one write in, there's several other positions and many you probably will select from the written selection, in some cases some write ins have actually won because there wasn't anyone contesting a particular state legislature district, you had to write someone in. They see that for selection 20 which is state legislation district 15 has 52% write ins, we need to go back and see what was written. And they do. Because it's the law. And eventually even if its .01% on selection 5 for Goof Ball County Judge, they record the write ins for the legal record.
Spreading nonsense like that belittles the votes, and perhaps some little shit today turns into an older shit tomorrow in a position to count votes and thinks throwing away votes is okay, that's what they did in the past right? Because they listened to idiots like you.
Here's what we do... we count all write ins. All votes matter. Some of the people or things are quite funny.
http://documents.nytimes.com/vladimir-putin-dr-joyce-brothers-for-president-some-new-yorkers-yes
Don't ever say votes get thrown away. That becomes the end of any democracy.
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Qingeaton This coming election in 2016, I'm going to do just that. I've had it chosing between the same and the other same. So I'm literally going to write him in. Even if he states he's not running. Who cares. He's at this time one of the last ditch moments we have from completely coming economically unhinged. The entire global economy, this weird mercantilism thing, is sputtering out of control. And domestically speaking, we as a country don't have the structures to keep our own country from falling apart in mass riots and a complete wreck. At the rate we're going, in my time near 2030 we'll see tent cities and what will reemerge are the shanty towns once again. Especially considering most will be relying on a 401K most will have already tapped or have completely insufficient funds therein, and no pensions anymore for most people. Everyone I know who are in retirement or about to retire, have a series of pensions or at least 1 primary pension. Otherwise they'd be hosed. And by 2033 from the Social Security Administration themselves, that only enough funding to pay out 75%. So there you go.
I'm writing him in. Saying fuck it. I'm done, but not dropping out completely. Even though a write in means really nothing. Especially if he isn't even running.
But seriously, we don't get someone in there to combat our oligarchs, it will very quickly become violent. Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece may be able to handle 25%+ depression level unemployment with their safety nets. In the US, unemployment insurance runs out after a few months, possibly extended for a year as it was in 2009, but not for decades.
I think violence will happen if things don't change fairly soon.
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+Tom Hallam You always make a difference to people you're around. Most of us all will just make a small difference around the people we know and spend time with directly. I find that satisfying enough. You may or may not end up becoming famous entertaining people, or come up with a new medicine or energy system and use a new energy source or transportation system or whatever. You may right a very interesting book fiction or non-fiction. Or you may just spend time with friends and family and have fun participating in each others' company.
No human is a waste. A waste would be if you started getting involved in drugs or hurting others or yourself, and even from that you can return out of those activities. Most of us work at various jobs in our lives, study various things, and experience different places, people, foods, animals, pleasant times and not so pleasant times. We may help others and hurt others, may hold grudges even when we don't want to, or be held in contempt by others no matter how many apologies. It's life, human life in particular, high drama or low drama.
You're not a waste. No one is a waste.
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+rationalguy And imagine if it was properly spent on those things, which you wouldn't even come close to even needing to spend half that amount either. Imagine though if same amount, even half that amount, and what type of economic stimulus that would be, spent domestically with halted tyrannical nations surf exploiting trade agreements?
It would be huge! Young adults wouldn't have student loans, medicare costs would be lower with a universal coverage, we have at least 3 transcontinental bullet trains, improved free ways, FAA would have already deployed NextGen technologies actually saving money going forward, as many other administrations would actually be more efficient from the investments going forward saving money, and that's only spending half that domestically $3.5 trillion. Spend the other $3.5 trillion we would already have an ITER like fusion program similar to Germany's own program, just about ready to build a demo commercially viable fusion plant, really that amount of money you're able to fast track so much of it.
Diabetes, various types of cancer, and neurological diseases and injuries many of them would have various types of successful treatments that would effectively be a cure.
It would advance us about 30 or 50 years in science technology and implementation as well as cut forwarding costs in government operations due to the increased productivity due to the technological advancements and implementations.
It would have been huge.
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He wasn't promoting necessarily being tax higher. He was promoting ensuring labor gets a fair wage and joins into the wealth of owning shares of businesses and supplies. For instance, a group bought their trailer court I think in Michigan. They bought it as a co-op. The rents are actually smaller and the profits go to actually doing upkeep, they put in better roads and better main water lines, as well paying of the co-op mortgage they took out, so soon they won't have mortgages and they'll all own their lots outright. Saving even more money not having to pay rent. At that point, any payments on the co-op would be just for maintenance and any new tenants that just want to rent a lot. And they share in that wealth.
It's something that will have to happen as automation and robotic works make most labor obsolete anyways... probably 200 or so years down the road. When even putting electrical lines, main water lines, construction, etc, will have some robots that drive out to the location and start doing all the work themselves.
At that point, everyone requires a distribution not of income, since wages won't even exist, but of the wealth that provides the income. During the transition period, which is happening now, it would be smart for co-ops and meaningful share distribution to workers to make incomes off the dividends.
Otherwise you have a precarious fragile winner takes all feudal, slave, robber baron economic system doomed to collapse in anarchy and/or struggle for long periods of time in autocracy while the oligarchs suppress the people until it eventually collapses anyways.
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This really is economics 101 with natural monopolies, considering medical insurance payment function as a natural monopoly because it requires huge economies of scale, meaning it needs lots of people paying into it to make it more efficient aka cheaper per unit. Since medical items and services are essential services, the inelastic demand curve means essentially any price, the quantity demanded will not go away.
This is why even private utilities not just municipal utilities are granted monopoly and highly regulated for that monopoly; it is much cheaper-efficient for natural monopolies to be regulated and use the maximum amount of economy to scale to reduce the per person price; you don't see 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 choices on which electrical company or municipality to get your electricity from, nor sewer, nor water, nor natural gas, etc. Because it would be grossly inefficient to have to build several power lines, water lines, sewer lines, etc. and have to maintain all that, and reduce the economy to scale, the individual utility's customer volume, the break even price would increase tremendously for every other competing water, electrical, sewer, etc. company, the per person price would soar.
Medical sector is a natural monopoly because it requires huge economies of scale to make it cheaper, and as well as not responding to price in change of quantity demanded, whatever price is named, someone will pay it because the alternative is to die or continue to suffer; its very inelastic, almost a perfectly inelastic demand curve.
That's why all major developed countries have some type of single payer system for everyone. It's better quality and its cheaper; much cheaper compared to our spending.
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+Tim Wiebe Wiki can't always be trusted, they upload whatever crap anyone wants to put on there.
Scholarly sources are better, they provide context that is the key. Those trumped up numbers were just that.
Despite his lack of innovation, Commissioner Swing declared the summer cam
paign a success when they reported that 1,089,583 persons had been apprehended
by the U. S. Border Patrol during FY 1954.89 Yet, the over one million deportations
recorded for 1954 cannot be attributed to that summer's program because F Y 1954
closed on 30 June 1954, just two weeks into the summer campaign. The large numbers
of apprehensions recorded for FY 1954, therefore, were made between 1 July 1953 and
30 June 1954. Apprehensions for FY 1955, which included the largest portion of the
summer of 1954 campaign, registered only 254,096 apprehensions.90 Fewer apprehen
sions had not been made since 1948, making the law enforcement accomplishments
of the summer of 1954 less than they were portrayed to be. Understanding that mass
deportations did not accompany the campaign of the summer of 1954, however, does not
render the summer of 1954 meaningless. Rather, instead of being a major law enforce
ment campaign, the summer of 1954 can better be understood as a massive publicity
campaign for what had happened the year before and a public claiming of migration
control by the U. S. government despite the critical contributions and participation
of the Mexican government.
https://faculty.utep.edu/LinkClick.aspx?link=Hernandez.pdf&tabid=72958&mid=166258
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First off Krugman is completely off his rocker. Without production there is nothing to service and service with-- there will always be construction, utilities upkeep and operations, material goods in every sectors... other than finance sector, but eve that sector has adjusters and appraisers that have to look at a good-- vehicles, real-estate, valuables, etc. Service sector jobs only exist if there is production backing them.
The entire system falls apart should the developed world succumb to the race to the bottom. The emerging markets have failed to produce a meaningful middle class as their only competitive advantage was their meager wages.
If that economist, probably the most worthless study as it essentially predicts nothing, the entire point of science in the first place, meteorology with its poor prediction ability due to all the variables does better than economics, if that guy wants to make the democratic party the outsource party, he's just put the nail in the DNC. Too bad the GOP love allowing offshoring and turning the US into serf labor.
Automation taking away all jobs is very far into the future. In fact, more jobs tend to get created as technology advances as it technology advancements always require the production of something-- letter carriers to telegraphs to telephones to computers to smart phones. Requires the production of something else. Horse to horse and buggy to vehicle-- with their ancillary the horse breeder to blacksmith to horse carriage carpenter to factory sub-assembly for vehicles to assembly line factories to auto mechanics. You don't lose jobs due to technology, they shift to other items of production and servicing. Krugman and others with his thoughts are disconnected over privileged nuts who don't realize reality, and pushing for their warped bubble universe will only see such nuts swing from some tree in rebellion-- which has happened so many times since recorded history-- hence why I say Krugman and others of that mindset are insane nut cakes, completely disconnected from reality.
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At this point worldwide, whoever produces this drug should be shot on sight.
Apparently, China a major distributor of this horseshit, should have all manufacturing sites blown up. Any oligarchs in US, Canada, European countries, Australia, Japan, etc. should be poisoned with this sludge until dead; death by their own poison.
And the junkies are not able to be independent people, that poison has stolen their mind. Therefore mandatory drug detox for as long as it takes and follow up probation should be occurring.
Shit like this is beyond disgusting. It's no longer a choice for these zombified people.
They must be taken to a detox. And closely watched on a probationary assistance, and introduced back to society in various work programs to build up social connections that fight off the addiction to ever go back to this shit.
Any dealer pushing this junk should be forced all the pills their found with to OD, but before that they should be grilled about their suppliers as much as possible.
Sick of this nonsense. Too many dying. Too many fucked up lives.
And too many pretending these junkies have a choice... they don't.
They're brain has been completely and utterly stolen.
And the mother fuckers who have done this must pay with everything they have including their lives.
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+No Approval Needed Current state of affairs reveals how right wing propaganda coupled by our own culture of stupidity (people put more weight on sports scores and who's going to be the winner on dancing with the stars than how their city, states, and federal governments are being run, how financial system works, bargaining to get better pay), etc.
Fortunately, even the GOP are split on Drumpf and embarrassed. So we can only hope he's got support from lunatic fringe. But the other side, people have become so pathetically stupid and/or desperate for change, they're opting for murder suicide. I have heard it many times; burn it all to the ground so we can rebuild. Murder suicide. What they don't understand, the rebuild part often takes generations after they're even worse off before. There's no need to burn it to the ground; hence their ignorance is astounding. They're stupid as a fence post... that gives a fence post a bad name, they're much stupider.
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I suspected the asshole was as egotistically motivated as Trump when he became president in 2008 and accept the Nobel Peace Prize from Norway.
He wasn't on the job for even a year yet, no accomplishments at that point. Yet he'll accept a Nobel Peace Prize??
I wouldn't do it. I would say, my election from whoever chooses these awards is pure political, and has no actual merit. Wait, and see if I actually accomplish something that warrants the such an award.
But not him.
Made me very suspicious about him, even though I liked him at the time.
I think we were all just happy GW was gone, and a wave of democrats took over both houses of congress. Unfortunately, even if with a majority, they didn't pass a universal single payer system. With the GOP sponsored healthcare plan, ACA, they still didn't get one single republican vote from either houses. It was pointless to have removed the single payer option. And the congress people who they cited needed to not be too far left, still lost their seats in the following midterm.
Obama was only good on civil rights; mostly for LGBT. Everything else, he sucked ass at.
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scott helft 40 years of right wing economics, I think not.
ACA often called Obama care is actually a GOP sponsored plan. Not only did Romney pass that shitty shit in Mass., Bob Dole in the 90's tried in committee to get this same sell out to insurance industry completely ignoring the bullshit biotechs and pharma are playing with patent protections and oligopoly concentration of the pharma industry.
You're just a puppet in the long 40 years of right wing economics now sponsored by mainstream democrats since Clinton: Deregulation of financial sector which nearly lead to a collapse, union busting so that workers have shittier and shittier pay and vacation/holidays, etc, de-funding education that once had low to zero tuition in the 60's and 70's, de-funding projects for childcare now requiring huge expensive daycare or not to work, good bye to pensions say hello to the gimmick called the 401K with the dirty lie that "Pensions you can't take with you" complete false which you do take with you, as they are by law vested every 5 years. 401K just ends up being a savings account until the next bust and people raid it, and have jack shit. 2030 to 2040 if we keep going with right wing economics we will have tent cities all over again. Hoover-villes.
Please examine your opinions. Because they are wrong. You and I will suffer if a majority have opinions such as yourselves. I beg you to really think about the issues and the past 40 years and all of the last 100 years than look at economics in the US and world wide over 200 years. Please think about the issues. We're all in it together, and you very rash shitty attitude with no apparent thought other than I heard it on AM radio from some jack ass or my ultra right wing conservative family tell me so it must be so. Please stop and examine. Please.
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The biggest thing we need to get online that would resolve our energy needs is ITER fusion reactors and some other similar fusion systems. ITER should be online in another 10 years or so, but not fully finished testing until 2030 something.
China started in 2014 a 10 year plan to have a fully implemented LFTR Fission reactor, uses thorium liquid salt. Thorium is very abundant and has no other applications. Can't melt down, its already molten, a self plug of the molten salt freezes, so if temps get to hot the frozen salt plug melts causing the LFT salt to fall down, ending fission. LFTR does produce waste, much of it can be reintroduced to be split further into shorter half life elemental isotopes are stable non radioactive isotopes. The difficult waste product to reintroduce is cesium because it has a high cross section: rather than split when it takes on a neutron it likes to just absorb many of the neutrons before the cesium atom will finally split, and to allow to much cesium with its absorbing capacity means it absorbs quite a bit of energy in reaction that would be desired for power production to the grid. So not much cesium at any time can be allowed to be in the chamber for optimal energy production. But in small amounts even that radioactive waste produce could be split further into non-radio active isotopes or those that have a shorter radioactive period. Compared to today's fission plants using uranium that waste lasts for tens of thousands of years, LFTR would last for only about 100 years or less.
Fusion using deuterium with lithium breeding tritium reactors are only radioactive for 9 hours (tritium is the only radioactive product and it fuses to helium which isn't radioactive) after they quit running and can't melt down either, if temperature gets to low it all stops. And fusion you want it as hot as possible. Its actually tricky to get it as hot as required. Deuterium is very abundant on earth estimated 30,000 years worth supply for the entire world just on the earth. A in the solar system several billions of years supply.
So those 2 are what will rescue humanity from either of the two dark age scenarios: 1) Run out of cheap fossil fuels essentially causing chaos worldwide 2) Continue to burn all the fossil fuels including coal, oil, natural gas and quickening climate change that will likely cause massive famines due to inundation some areas and severe drought in other areas causing massive crop failures resulting in chaos worldwide.
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Brandon Selke They wouldn't be raids or skirmishes. The entire Army's divisions would attack with more heft on evasion. Kind of like they do today. The only difficulty would be coordination, however, it was extremely difficult just to coordinate the large brigades. And the same was true for this type of warfare even in WWII, often the radio was inoperative.
When individual brigades face off, if taking the offensive, each regiment and company within the regiment would attack in platoon not to be massed into a battle rank formation. But similar to skirmish lines. More like a tactical march of today. And use wick grenades (not the lousy Ketchum) and small mortars which would have been fairly easily fashioned at the time.
I'm only speaking from hindsight that they did eventually find out their weaponry was ahead of their tactics, as their tactics evolved to trench warfare and tactical drill methods.
Line formation was not good at all for either side when taking the offensive. The defensive even in the 1700's and past, always had an advantage of hiding behind walls or building fortifications. However, at this stage, you had to attack with an aggressive defensive nature.
If I could go back in time with hindsight, would introduce these tactics. Instead of 50,000 wounded and dead in a large battle, the results would probably fewer dead at least on one side. Standing in line formation in front of parrot cannons or Napoleon cannons was extremely stupid. Attacking a cannon position should be treated as we treat attacking a machine gun nest today. Diversionary fire, movements in sight that can be seen are constantly changing positions, and the goal is to flank rush. For hard to move cannons, this would be a pretty good tactic. And you could use cavalry as a offensive diversion especially countered by defending cavalry near the cannon positions.
My other main point, if my opponent insisted on fighting Napoleon style, you could always get him to attack your fortified positions. Always get your opponent to attack while your strength is well fortified.
The ending fact, the way they fought with the weapons they had was absurd in hindsight. They slowly adjusted toward the end of the war.
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That would mean all the other long depressions, panics, and "regular" depressions through the 1800's invented a new economic system... probably changing corporations by individual ownership into worker co-op ownership.
And an aristocracy that is parasitical to a nation could never gain much power whatsoever.
Based on the stupidity of humanity and the nature of oligarchs aka robber barons and their toadies, it's difficult to imagine such a stretch... just ending slavery and then civil rights between men and women moving so slowly... people are stupid and those in power tend to be utterly vicious toxic suicidal nut bags.
So... completely unlikely.
Basically, end of slavery would have had to happen at least in the lat 1790's in the US and most of the world. End of monarchy about the same time, and no terror or monarchical gang bang busting any other republics... economic system surpassing just capitalism, gold standard abandoned much sooner by 1800, Government Reserve Bank lending to co-op enterprises as well as banks both private and credit unions and co-op deposit banks, welfare state with compulsory education, child labor prohibition and restrictions, etc.
Lots of stuff... as the economic system in that day, a great depression or any depression or recession was not unusually, but massively expected. Just in the 1800's half the years were in a recession or depression. Even the first part of the 1900's started 1900 in a recession, and went on to have 2 panics, 1 depression, and 5 recessions... 8 recessions in total before the "great depression" in just a 29 year period.
Capitalism on its own without at least some mixed market social requirements (labor laws, national pensions, universal healthcare, public compulsory education, etc) is unstable as crack and meth head living with a heroin addict suffering from bipolar disorder and a schizophrenia. Reasons why there were endless wars in the 1800's and early 1900's so grand to call them world wars. And civil wars including one in our own country.
The norm was to be in a recession or depression at least half the time.
List of US Recessions starting from 1800 to until 1929 great depression.
1802–1804 recession 1802–1804 ~2 years ~3 years
1807–1810 Depression 1807 ~3 years ~3 years
1812 recession 1812 ~6 months ~18 months
1815–21 depression 1815–1821 ~6 years ~3 years
1822–1823 recession 1822–1823 ~1 year ~1
1825–1826 recession 1825–1826 ~1 year ~2 years The Panic of 1825
1828–1829 recession 1828–1829 ~1 year ~2 years
1833–34 recession 1833–1834 ~1 year ~4 years
1833-34 1 year recession
1836-38 2 year recession 32.8% decline
1839-43 4 year recession 34.3% decline
1845-46 1 year recession 5.9% decline
1847-48 1 year recession 19.7% decline
1853-54 1 year recession 18.4% decline
1857-58 1.5 year recession 23.1% decline
1860-61 8 month recession 14.5% decline
1865-67 2 year 8 month recession 23.8% decline
1869-70 1.5 year recession 9.7% Decline
1873-79 5 years 5 months recession 33.6% decline
1882-85 3 years 2 months recession 32.8% decline
1887-88 1 year recession 14.6 decline
1890-91 10 months recession 22.1% decline
1893-94 1 year 5 months recession 37.3% decline
1895-97 1 year 6 months recession 25.2% decline
1899-1900 1 year 6 month recession 15.5% decline
1902–04 recession Sep 1902 –Aug 1904 1 year
1907 May – June 1908 Panic of 1907 1 year
1910 Jan – Jan 1912 2 years Panic of 1910–1911
1913 Jan–Dec 1914 Recession of 1913–1914 1
1918 Aug –1919 March Post-World War I recession
1920 Jan–
July 1921 Depression of 1920–21
1923 May –
June 1924 1923–24 recession
1926 Oct –
Nov 1927 1926–27 recession
1929 Aug 1933 Mar great depression.
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I did a breakdown on gross income of $50K and equivalent, both in income tax, payroll (social security medicare) and sales, and property tax $200K appraised home.
Germany, UK, France, Austria, and Sweden effective total taxes are lower, just at their income tax effective rates are lower. But including their value added (sales tax) on food and goods is lower.
Did married at $90K their taxes are lower. And with dependence their taxes dramatically become lower in those other countries compared to same number of dependents in our country.
Then when you add our yearly premiums we pay, not including our ridiculous co-pays and then deductibles, we're in far crazy field of insanity in over paying for services like medical and education.
They pay lower effective taxes and get all the other services cheap no additional user fees (co-pays).
I haven't done Denmark, started a little on Norway... only thing I notice in Norway in particular is that they tax fuel quite a bit. We in the US do the same most states its at least $0.50 per gallon as high in some states as $1.00 gallon.
Literally, only those making $150K individual to $200K married and above start to have taxes break even to what Americans at that same income and household, then they deviate to higher effective tax rates. And those making more than $50K individual $90K only in dividends and capital gains pay more taxes than us Americans. So you have to be affluent to rich, or take all your income from dividend and it be more than $50K or $90 (married) to save on taxes in the US. We tax our rich less, and our lower income groups higher. They do the opposite.
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That's why asset prices are so high... money printer go bur is debt binge go burr.
The idea of debt based money supply is that too much debt aka money into the system there's a string attached, they can pull the string to pull money/debt binging out of the system via increasing interest rates. Both lenders and borrowers tend to lend and borrow less as its more expensive and risky. And those sitting on cash free and clear of debt they owe, tend to save the money in cash, savings accounts as interest rates are better or other safer interest rate earning instruments like I-Series savings bonds which are essentially risk free and adjust to inflation here in the USA... now paying 9.62% annually and paid quarterly and compounded monthly... lock up period 12 months... and only penalty is forfeit 3 months of accrued interest if redeemed less than 5 years... no penalty after 5 years on redemption. Limit is $10K a year per person and tax ID entity. And these are non-trade-able bonds, always redeemed at par plus accumulative interest after the 1 year lock up period with tax exemptions on local and state income taxes.
Then this makes goofy stupidity growth stocks that make no money look less attractive as the risk reward becomes better balanced when interest rates go up. Actually makes sense to preserve your money in savings rather than wild eyed pie in the sky speculative stupidity like NFT's and farts in a jar.
Anyway, the idea of debt forgiveness becomes difficult for a debt based monetary system to stomach as this cuts the string to pull out too much money chasing too few goods in the system to halt inflation.
Certain debts are dumb and destructive overall. Infrastructure, utilities (power, water, sewer), Student loan and medical debt are absurd when simple non-debt taxation can take care of those items without the cost of interest and the mediators servicing the debts.
Any debt forgiveness though must go hand in hand with restructuring of prices.
What should have happened during the banks going bankrupt in 2008 was that they all should have been nationalized.
And under this nationalization, the prices pumped due to the debt binge of the Fed Reserve lower interest rates and the banks playing their goofy games to keep pumping out more debt/loans, the prices of all mortgages taken should have been remarked to the new market prices... you took out mortgage for $250K or $180K for a property now going for $150K to $110K... okay that's what the actual non-debt inflated price really was... your entire principle from origination would be remarked to that lower principle amount, all payments made would reflect on that principle amount, interest would be marked at a fixed term of about 5% to 4% (at that time a low rate).
This would have allowed the debt collapse along with prices to become stable... lowering prices to real money supply that got zapped by defaults... and kept people in their homes and kept developers who build homes in business of building the supply of homes a net positive population growth requires to keep housing affordable.
At some point, the nationalized banks would be spun back to becoming private banks, most of them turned into credit unions with the sole ownership democratically voted by their depositors as all enterprises really should be owned and operated.
And laws that halted this same stupidity, in the US it was the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933 that circumvented the same stupidity that lead up to the great depression of 1929. It placed fire walls between commercial speculative banking and deposit banking that dealt only in collateral loans such as vehicle loans or mortgages and some signature loans in installments.
And stock and junk bond nonsense was done away from normal deposit checking and savings for the wealthier able to risk more commercial bank customers.
It also barred most stock buybacks that just short term sugar rush stocks pumping and then when done dumping stock prices so that a few insiders and owners holding the stocks can sell all over everyone's little heads. This revenue from the company going to no future value is gone poof... just used to pump stock price for a very short period so that these ass holes could cash out on the top. Leaving the company with no cash to improve, grow, or otherwise operate their business better. And the stupidity of junk bonds... many companies not only took out installment loans, but floated junk bonds (they continue to this day playing this horrible stupid game) to buy back stock. Adding absolutely no value, and in fact leaving behind a zombie company that has so much money it can never repay back on any future prospects and unable to even compete into the future to grow or make better their products.
That alas did not happen. Instead we reward banks for doing horrible stupidity debt binge dispensing. Gave them bonuses and cheap consolidations to make even more money. And allowed productive supply of home developers to go bust, those left standing terrified only building enough supply of housing to promise them sales. Making housing un-affordable both in terms of rent on multi-dwelling units and on home ownership on single dwelling units.
And it forced a debt domino collapse among all the working class and some non-working class who found themselves jobless and/or under employed for several years to a decade, leading to the "Great recession".
And instead, even worse things were passed in law: Frank-Dodd Act which made it more easy for the Fed to just bypass congressional approval on TARP like programs whereby the Fed Reserve can just start buying up bank loans and other hobbled together junk instruments that allow banks to lend into an oblivion undermining the entire banking system's purpose.
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Amazon is just too big for it's own good, and it's not a sustainably profitable company, only becoming bigger via borrowing to the tits, and morons that were stampeding to buy their junk bonds and stoncks that at first was only going up... now isn't so much. Last quarter they made another loss.
They sell at losses, they buy up vertical monopolies that none of them are good at: Shipping, manufacturing, distribution, etc. so the quality just isn't there on their vertical buy up of everything so they're an ueber monopoly vertical not just horizontal (all the retail space).
And this bastardization of Tolkien's work... only shows the evil of Amazon. Not that it's CEO and founder looks like Dr Evil complete with even more bulgy and one lazy evil googly eyeballs and his infamous dick rocket that everyone hopes each time it launches it just stays in orbit, sling shot to never return to earth, or just freaking explodes... with Dr Evil on board of course... maybe with some of his billionaire/millionaire customers taking a low earth orbit trip in his dick rocket.
Putting quality out of business, so they can fuck it with their own brand of monopoly shit.
Amazon can go fuck itself.
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Our nation is the world's thug. But don't be too happy we're presently on the "same side". That's how it always starts. The moment you are not in poverty or have half or more of your population that's cheap labor, or laws aligned that an oligarch can ensure their multinational corporations can either use you as sweatshop labor or take various resources: oil, lithium, cobalt, etc. watch out.
At that point, my nation will say to the rest of the world: you all need some liberty in the form of some dictator that my nation will install with glee... don't worry we counted votes... from somewhere and it appears they won.
And as a hostage of this idiot nation, as we all are when a nation does it's own thing and is in control of whatever oligarchy (power of the few) I will sadly inform you:
If you so much as squeal for real freedom, well my little piggy, you'll be bacon... so get use to it. And don't say I didn't warn you.
And this is how we Americans pay for this garbage:
Only OECD country not to have an actual full universal healthcare system.
Only OECD country without vocational and full low fee no tuition higher educational system.
Only OECD country to have more people in prison than any other nation on earth including the despotic non- OECD nations of regime system of China or Saudi Arabia or Iran or even N. Korea the creep show of them all.
Only OECD nation to have life expectancy fall three years in a row from the years of 2015 to 2018; mostly due to deaths of despair: poverty not getting medical attention when needed, reducing their Rx because they can't afford it and food and rent/mortgage housing, suicide, and drug overdose.
Only OECD to have the most mass murders, one just about every month now.
Only OECD nation to have eviction processes that have short notice of less than 4 days processing.
Only OECD nation to not provide civil council (lawyers) not just criminal attorneys when a claim is filed against them.
Only OECD nation to allow the very elected officials to draw up their own voting districts: gerrymandering; the elected officials literally pick their voters, and these voting districts are cartoony as fuck: literally squiggly lines, often islands circling that area and then another area 10 miles from the other squiggle.
Only OECD nation that demands repeated access to the margin of international waters and airspace with military vessels and aircraft; yet freaks if any so much as make 100 nautical mile stop in places in the Caribbean or Central or S. America.
Only OECD nation that effective tax rates are percentages less than lowest and median income earners: essentially if this was Empire Total War game, this is where you would place the lower classes tax bar higher than the higher class tax bars.... and thus how we "afford" to build now 13 aircraft fleets with all their aircraft. And the fiasco on the F-35 probably the most expensive piece of shit naval fighter bomber that literally has its radar absorbing coating melt in rain, hundreds of billions in its now nearing 30 years development; something that the DOD should have scrapped a long time ago and potentially sued for negligence in its development for wasted tax money.
Only OECD nation to be the major reserve currency of the world... at least for now as we print so much money that it is available, but not too much that it is too few. And is largely required for dealing in various commodities in 2nd and 3rd world nations. As well as in black market often cartels and other gangster war and drug and human trafficing trades. Again, its enough cash out there, but not so much that it's a defunct Zimbabwean trillion dollar note.... and they couldn't do money printer go burrrr because the US Dollar was and still is their reserve currency the "gold" that backs their funny money.
The ironic and sick thing:
These aircraft carriers are likely the biggest obsolete false sense of security since the outdated era of the battleship/dreadnought. Mini drone vessels, submarines, and aircraft can easily evade a fleet and make their way to any flagship... in this case, the carrier and at the very least, disable it from launching aircraft. At worse, sink it.
The only use they have, is as an early offensive weapon. Even during WWII, they struggled as a defensive weapon. So unless my it's an overt attack, these things are very worthless.
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With medicare for all, there are major improvements to medicare/medicaid current provisions: it needs to include ALL medical meaning dental/oral surgery/ orthodontist and vision... everything medical... and of course it must include negotiation power provisions and ability to be supplier of last resort... meaning if companies want to try to screw the single payer system as in many other nations with universal medical programs, they are able to establish their own medical appliances, medicines production as well as build and operate their own hospitals and clinics to sell at cost within the program... a big birdy finger to contracting that often is more expensive than collective ownership and operating as it sells its service at cost... not profit... which profit motive is only necessary in competitive sectors... when items aren't competitive like natural monopoly (utilities, roads, ports, etc.) profit motive means nothing.. it becomes only an additional cost to enrich others for nothing.
SO medicare for all literally means all medical/dental/vision EVERYTHING.
And the program has regulatory and negotiation power and ability to produce procurement completely... no racketeering, overcharging whatsoever will exist. And those rare appliances, drugs, rural areas that lack clinics and hospitals, the collective economy of scale of the system allows the direct operation and production of those drugs, clinics, and hospitals.
Thirdly, an important protection on a person's estate must be included in any universal healthcare program or medicare for all... ending estate recovery.
No matter the treatment and cost of treatment, no property assets can be held in lien.
Medicare for all is paid by payroll taxes as a collective... only in the sum of co-payments if established which should only range from max out of pocket copay yearly of $300-$500, maybe sought for collection on someones estate when they die. If no cash/stock/bond asset exists on the estate those accumulated co-payments must be forgiven... that force of sell of real-estate, vehicles, or other non-money assets are prohibited... as no lien on any asset other than cash assets would be allowed on the estate.
Too often currently elderly or disabled people needing assisted living see all assets of theirs taken away to "recoup" the cost. Utter bullshit. The system is paid for by our payroll taxes.
Those are the major details that in my opinion are non-negotiable. O
nly way you can provide a single payer system and allow it to by dynamic and sustainable. Keeps prices down (taxes on it down), and maximizes supply... and protects everyone from a unintended perversions of the law: like holding homes and other properties ransom for medicare/medicaid payout that we already see today with our current defunct systems.
And prevents people from not getting needed care, and having to declare bankruptcy.
3 things that must be obtained in any universal program we do.
Otherwise it will be doomed to fail.
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I'm starting to think that average 4% to 6% interest rates mean is a decent healthy rate to lend at. Too far below causes massive inflation and/or speculative bubbles. That then requires that 4-6% mean to be elevated to suck up all that extra money in the system that causes inflation to go away. That then causes a oscillation that then tricks the fools to "stimulate" the economy to lower rates below that mean. Only to cause inflation and speculative stupidity to come back causing yet another bubble and another requirement to jump rates above the mean.
I think a steady 4% to 6% rates is the best rate for smooth and healthy lending.
If you want to stimulate the economy, that should come from legislation democratically elected on what is valued: we value health therefore that produces healthy people able to stay productive, great you get the envy of the world, and benefits that us Americans can't even believe exists, the NHS. Or you value oligarchs pretending their scams are real, and they'll trickle all over everyone one else, not with urine, but money like some pinata, you get our sorry excuse for a eugenics program for elderly care with no rooms available for elderly care, regional hospitals going bust both private and the very few state or county hospitals closing up, and prices that are as ridiculous as a meme stock or the tulip mania of crypto going to the moon, and medical insurance that's not really even insurance in any international standard terms; rather insurance that's not really insurance, but some phony scammy pretend discount buy in program with the hustle, you pay huge amount to buy into the program, but the discount doesn't even come close to ever repaying that buy in premium... medical insurance deductibles... even Germans say WTF on that scam.
But back to stimulating the economy. If you want to stimulate the economy, you put the house priority and values in order. Value health of the mass of people to be productive... you put money into things like hospitals, clinics, elderly care facilities, and medical R&D like UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, and even Canada is doing.
You value oligarchs and despite labor and want labor to be cheap to stimulate the economy on the backs of labor as we do in many other countries including the USA... you make it hard for self employment by ensuring the low income self employed person's risk is higher cost burden, provide a scam aka so called medical insurance, and hope that the Catholic church and other non profit organizations keep building money losing hospitals and clinics so we have some facilities available for the mass of people, and encourage people to take lower wage jobs just to have the false assurance of the scam of employer medical insurance, even though most medical bankruptcies in the USA are people who have employer sponsored insurance or medicare/medicaid or both. At least we have medicaid and medicare I suppose. Even they're for severely handicapped and/or terminally ill, or elderly; and is insufficient.
Other priorities can be to grow infrastructure like power grids, power plants hydro thermal or other power station types, rail, roads, and sea/air ports. etc.
Provide sale subsidies for units sold or cost produced for certain goods that have precarious foreign sourcing.... the chips deal was just done in the USA not because there was a long term shortage of semi conductors, but because much of the semi conductor supply comes from Taiwan, and the concern has been China invasion of Taiwan. And the rich can't be burdened by a chip shortage should that happen; they need their luxury tech palaces to be full operational. And of course this would put a burden on all types of manufacturing as everything uses some sort of semi conductor from the lowly resisters and capacitors to smally integrated chips and CPU's.
And there is always good or bad ways to stimulate the economy.
But doing it via monetary policy, the past several hundred years, we can observe, it doesn't work. It just causes boom bust cycles, and the vast majority of people aren't better off.
When programs like compulsory education, universal healthcare, land grants, homestead acts, farm/food subsidies, great transportation and utility construction from water works including water distribution and provisions and sewage, etc. and R&D on various engineering projects and concepts... we get big technological advances that DO increase prosperity across all spectra of society.
Monetary jiggering... should be relegated to keeping both deflation and inflation flat. Keeping prices as stable as possible. Nothing more.
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This is where the Ayn Rand nonsense comes in.
This type of greed is good or rather more precisely (to be fair) altruism is bad, always do things to benefit others only if the benefit to yourself is more than break even benefit to yourself.
A sociopath or rather a psychopath point of view.
Okay, let's grant them their (the Ayn Rand greed is good worshipful groupies and culties).
So let's imagine a world where everyone is in it for themselves.
There is only expectation that I will only do deeds that will in the end benefit myself in known direct ways.
Instead of having people assist those stranded, children lost and helping them safely and securely find their care givers, a person or family member down on their luck, a family member or stranger needing assistance of any kind, a neighborhood that has no entertainment/leisure who would like a playground or a community pool of sorts, a coworker needing swift and a few minutes assistance with something, etc.
Let's imagine we used what's in it for me mentality only.
The child lost in the street, who cares, I rather go for my jog and meet up with my buddies... or I'm way late for work, I can't deal with this kid, someone else can figure out where this crying lost child comes from, tell him/her to go knock on someone else's door and seek help or just ignore the obviously lost child calling for his mom or grandma.
I mean, I'm late for work, the benefit of helping this kid is less than the cost of arriving late to work or for the deal I might lose on my poor punctuality.
Now let's envision same scenario as time goes on, even children learn to play on peoples' generally default empathetic response (most people aren't without empathy aka psychopaths) so they become sociopaths (a general learned behavior to shun empathetic thought) when everyone knows everyone is in it for themselves...
Now the same person observing this lost child, the child is probably not lost, he's probably bate to say I was trying to abduct the kid, or worse they might try to abduct me my luring me over to the side of the street the kid is on and mug me. Or perhaps the child him/herself has fire arm and is known to do what's in it for them gangster mentality and may mug me.
Or less aggressive, the child will look to pan handle and seek some goodies from me, money or whatever.
The unintended consequences (as the Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand groupies like to squirm about whenever their gas lighting and double talk fallacious arguments always (ALWAYS) go whenever you talk about something other than price mechanism as a method of supply and demand distribution). These Unintended consequences of being a little sociopath uncaring other than what's in it for me mentality comes with HUGE costs.
A) Cynicism. The need to always be watching your back, fear, and short tempers. That generally promote harmful behaviors: shoot and ask questions later, punch and claw and ask questions later. Hide and be afraid and don't discover and learn. This breaks any attempt to form a community of trust required for the good things in life. That playground and/or community pool, why should I pay when I can get someone else to pay. Why bother, because nobody will take care of the pool area... (the sob story of tragedy of the commons) is actually invoked and not rebuked in their psychopathic world of what's in it for me... so the community pool does get built: but everyone has that what's in it for me mentality... I'm not going to clean it, I'll let Bob do it, he uses the pool more than I, and he probably made the mess anyway.
B) Resentment. I did this for you and you did nothing for me. How dare you. Caught you being a freeloader, everyone is a freeloader, how dare they. I'm going to be a hypocrite too and be a freeloader, I just need to not be caught... and how dare they be a freeloader though. This eventually bubbles to the surface in turning what otherwise would be good Samaritan in to becoming near or into criminal activities. The pan handler knows nobody cares and will not help, so they resort to robbery, potentially armed robbery. The neighbor who needs some assistance never gets it and gets hurt doing it by themselves.
Or perhaps the pool was built on price mechanism alone (the glory to the Ayn Rand Milton Friedman groupies idle)... the pool only gets built by a few very wealthiest of the neighbor hood, and they do it hoping for profits. Unfortunately, the price and profits desired only allow the richest families entry... leaving the remaining of the poorest out, they just don't have the funds to swim there if ever. This produces lots of resentment, and of course everyone dealing with public pools knows kids tend to jump the fence to swim.
Worse, everyone is too poor to patron the swimming pool and thus not producing the profits desired by the sack of manures hoping to make money on the desire of leisure activity... so it gets closed down and no swimming pool. Loss in a good that would otherwise provide a safe and healthy environment for members of the community to exercise, enjoy themselves, and relax.
So you go without that extra happiness. Because there's no profit available in the need.
Kids get bored and decide to toilet paper buildings and homes. Other kids with no exercise or good places to play, either get fat and/or simply poorer health. Or they go adventure doing things such as exploring a dangerous canal and often get hurt or worse.
The talk of morality is from greed is good altruism is dead, do only what you can do that benefits you only in a direct way... maybe indirect if and only if you got time and it doesn't cost you more.
Their very drive from geed is good, only thing that matters is what's in it for me drives the very thing they lament about in a double talk falsehoods as they invoke tragedy of the commons... in fact not only would their psychopathic stances encourage tragedy of the commons on the few public spaces available, but even in their own for profit spaces this would flow: coworkers would seek to do what is only good for them, they see an opportunity to make the other person look bad, there's no incentive to not help the coworker in need: Besides, when has that person ever helped me with anything? Or... if I let that dummy fail, I'll look better and get the bonus or raise or promotion over them.
Their rants and raves about altruistic deeds and programs that are build on community goods/services only come with tragedies of the commons nobody wants to invest their time in keeping it up, or making it nice, or doing it at all actually takes place in private goods/services at the work place, in the pubic areas we all need to use to get to the private areas.
And all parts of society is indeed a tragedy... but not just of the commons, but of private and the few common areas remaining.
You have a society looking to screw one another, not trusting one another, attempting to fool one another, or fear of being fooled from one another, a built up resentment from one another, a very grim hateful world...
Their world (the Ayn Rand self interest only) does not only promote the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the entire civilization in which such unloving, uncaring, what's in it for me only, mentality festers.
This is the type of activity you get in nations that have factions who fight one another, this is often the mentality that becomes apparent in times of civil war or civil strife.
You don't have a civilization at all eventually.
But one big human tragedy.
That's why it's funny such parasites speak of morality. Their morality one of a dark enemy. Reminds me of Tolken's world of Middle Earth where he describes the big enemy of his fantasy world, a demi god by the name of Melkor. Later named Morgoth which is translated to mean dark enemy. The evil of this creature was that of extreme narcissism and extreme greed... what's in it for him.
These Ayn Rand culties like to say such things promote freedom and liberty, but really it is about power, greed generally requires power and power is really all they crave. Their greed for all things becomes not just of stuff and objects, but of liberty itself, they want liberty, for themselves... in fact they want all the liberty, all the freedom for themselves, and in order to obtain such, only they may dictate the liberties of others, so that they may retain the maximum liberty for themselves.
I find the section in the Silmarillion that comments on this Morgoth on how it describes his mentality. It describes every known Ayn Rand like narcissist and megalomaniac... read the passage below and it can fit the description of many people we know in the public eye today.
"For he coveted Arda and all that was in it, desiring the kingship of
Manwë and dominion over the realms of his peers.
From splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save
himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding he turned to subtlety in
perverting to his own will all that he would use, until he became a liar
without shame. He began with the desire of Light, but when he could not
possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great
burning, down into Darkness. And darkness he used most in his evil works
upon Arda, and filled it with fear for all living things."
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While I do eat bread... I generally eat more soft tortillas more... don't ruin it form dude. LOL! I love making the quick quesadilla. Faster than grilled cheese sandwich. Just pop some cheese between two tortillas. Maybe some baby spinach. Talking about a quick thing.
We unfortunately don't pop to the grocery store everyday. Because of the oligarchy. Our stores require a car to drive and pick stuff up. And we work 12 hour days 3 days on and 3 days off 4 days on and 4 days off type... or some baked in overtime schedule... and if we're only working 40 hour full time, we're going to school or some other activity.
We need big changes to live like Europeans do today.
I'm game for starting with a universal healthcare system. Modeled of the NHS is the best... Germany's is okay. But NHS is better, cuts the costs down significantly and ensures all healthcare workers from the surgeon on down to the licensed nurses, not the registered nurse, but even the licensed nures, the ones who have to lift patients and wipe them... the gritty work. Even they get a sizeable pay. While the prices still are affordable, because only reason prices in the states are so insane... no regulations that cap margins at say 6%... instead they have ulimited margins. And inelastistic demand curve you find in monopolies you find in healthcare... no matter the quantity supplied the price can remain and does remain high... so the thought of allowing prices run-a-muck will bring in more supply that will lower prices... well that ain't happening now ain't it LOL!
Fact of the matter, inelastic demand curve items like police protection, fire protection, education, healthcare, water, sewer, etc. many of them being natural monopolies... even a regional hospital can only function as a monopoly because most of the time you're not having tons of people needing hospital services; hospitals are there for emergencies or planned surgeries.
So first, let's start with universal healthcare.
Then we can move to universal education; just expand K-12 to vocational and higher education. Like was the case until about the 1980's. So tuition (at least in state universities and colleges) really isn't a thing. Like in Germany.
Then let's go big on mass transit nation wide; both city and town and regional as well as continental. Much cheaper per customer than flying. And maybe those who would rather not keep buying an expensive car all the time can either sit on the car they have longer, or even have times where they're not wasting money on the money pit from hell, a car... with insurance... and registration... and cleaning it... etc. etc. etc. And that last one can develop a better European like cultural system where people could quickly drop at a store to buy a few things everyday riding the lite rail system... thus homemade baked bread would beat the garbage at the super duper market or wally world.
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The major crypto are part of a huge pump and dump scam via USDT 80% of it's liquidity is poker chips of this "stable coin".
Then there's the other "stable coins" that are more Ponzi than pyramid scheme than Tether:
USDC is a Ponzi more than pyramid in that it is a savings scheme using other savers to pay 7% return or higher on that savings... but when a run happens... USDC finally admitted several months ago that they only have 60% of the cash in their savings as dollars, prior they promised/lied that each USDC is backed by $1 USD. Like tether... tether lied and revealed several months ago that they only have 3% of their poker chips backed by $1 USD.
Terra is completely a mystery what their actual holdings are. And they too are a mix of pyramid scheme that they trade with casinos aka margin exchanges trading other crypto currency. As well as doing the Circle USDC thing promising big return 7% or higher but that return is paid out in the poker chips that and only redeemed in other savers money; and if they're using those funds for speculative investments to make a return themselves, an unknown potentially huge risk they down play pretending you're just sitting in digital dollars in crypto when really you just bought an investment poker chip that could (if you cash out before everyone else does) make the stated return, or if there is a run on their Ponzi scheme, lose most if not all of your holdings.
Tether is a bit more sinister in that they sell their USDT (tethers) poker chips to casinos aka margin exchanges at a discount. These casinos know that tether poker chips are thus likely insolvent and if too many of those poker chips get sold (yes you have to sell these poker chips on spot exchanges to some other sucker or wait for a frequent wash order that buys up the order book on a regular basis probably Tether and other affiliates to maintain the peg 1 tether for 1 USD).
So the casinos have lots of their own double dealings reserving their own amount of tether and purchased other crypto to pump and dump the market, breaking people out of their stop losses or in many instances forcing traders to liquidate their position gambling on ETH or BTC or DOGE or ADA or EOS or whatever underlying crypto with the margin based in tether.
Some major protocol was implemented several years back to link spot exchanges with these margin futures contracts to provide liquidity to spot exchanges.
That liquidity can easily vanish should tether become insolvent; unable to buy up the ask order book at spot exchanges trading tether for USD; maintain the peg.
Whenever Circle or Tether fails to maintain their peg or circle no longer has the backing to redeem circle for dollars via Coinbase (presently USDC's only partner spot exchange where one can redeem circle for no commission and actually redeem aka swap exact 1 USDC for 1 USD. No need to place a limit order and wait to see if the trading price will reach your limit sell order of tether for USD to get your fiat money so you can actually spend the stuff on everyday needs or reallocate to other gambling or investments or savings.
One thing is for certain... when this speculative mania ends... lots of horrible movies will be made about it all. And crypto will likely inspire many of them.
And don't get started on the NFT stupidity.
The stuff does seem to be unwinding. At least in real money in flows... persistent money outflows seems to be happening looking at reliable sources.
Yet, in a major red flag way, the stable coins of USDT as well as USDC and Terra seem to have minted more and more of their poker chips.
Tether minted about 7 billion more USDT in November. As the price of BTC and rest of crypto started to fall again to the 2021 summer lows. Tether seems to be sitting on much of those poker chips... or the affiliate exchanges are sitting on them... or a mix of the same. My best guess following Summer 2021 tether started minting a lot of poker chips then billions... then suddenly we saw while outflows of real USD or other fiat continued to pour out of crypto, the poker chip margin exchanges had HUGE order sizes quickly reaching over 1 billion in tether in an hour period of time buying up order books on many of the margin exchanges ask order book pumping the price back up.
The recent fall was likely the casinos and possibly even tether or under direction of tether to quickly sell short the market to dump the price to force liquidate and wreck real gamblers at these margin exchanges to keep their poker chips from hitting spot exchanges to sell for fiat.
Just be careful... these types of scams, when they end, they end fast and furiously. And usually out of nowhere. 80% of liquidity that tether represents in crypto means prices can easily fall nearly 99% as holders just want whatever cash they can get back. Traders buying the dips realize it just keeps dipping hitting their stop losses or just continuing to dip they give up and realize things are falling apart and stop trading reducing the other 20% of the liquidity... and nobody is home to trade with.
A sample of who crypto trades without influence of tether is to look at coins that don't trade on these margin exchanges like SC coin or many other coins on spot exchanges that are not on these margin exchanges. There is no liquidity driving the prices up or down. Just actual fiat money inflows and outflows. And these non-stable coin manipulated coins are looking very much in a deep winter freeze. That's similar to how the current larger market cap coins will trade whenever these stable coins fall apart... particularly if tether goes bust.
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It's so easy up and go. You just have to find a job immediately, and still confront the same high rent prices (voiding the entire reason for moving because this nonsense is happening EVERYWHERE... not so much the bidding wars, at least not yet, but the insane rent prices).
What we need, and have needed since the 90's, but too much dogma prevailed and we allowed housing world wide (not just the US) to go with the whims of the market, which was captured by the banking sector... they sell debt... interest rates going down the only way they could keep making tons of money selling debt is to magnify the debt, that is to find something that most people borrow against (debt they sell) and make that a scarcity and pump the chicken on that asset. Lever it up. It's why stocks pump, or recently crypto stupidity pumped: Massive leverage. That dumps into the market.
All so that 5% to 2% rates would be similar to 7% to 15% rates of the past, just make the amount people borrow go up. Sell more debt.
This is why it's foolish to have the banking cartel Fed Reserve in charge of our monetary policy. They shall always use their power to enrich themselves at the rest of the economies detriment. Landlords will suffer soon enough, some of the most foolish and greedy have purchased rental units recently and will be immediately upside down (if they're not already even with these high rents) on their mortgages they used to borrow for these rentals.
It's a disaster for all.
It's as if we decided cobblers, show makers, control our monetary policy... you would see shoe stores on every street (as we see banks on every street, even in the most dead zombie town in the US).
We need a housing plan, because housing supply never increased enough for the population growth of the country since the 80's... oh that's right it's when public housing and planning moved directly to a "market" driven stupidity... which of course was taken over by the financial sector.
We need planning. No nation develops without it. Markets aren't a new thing, and they're no more efficient at something than a hammer... they're great at what they do. But they do not plan. They're not a planning method.
This is a complete supply chain issue... and it's been this way for some time. It's pure stupidity of the dogma that markets by themselves are some how magical and mighty.
Congrats... we're living in it. All it does cause massive imbalances boom busts that never allow enough of a good to materialize over time as the busts crush supply after demand is crushed... when demand starts to try to peak up a little, supply never gets where it needs to be for demanded needed, only where demand is capable. And then it eats more of the demand capable creating more demand incapable. And supply dips again. These oscillations becoming more and more pronounced over time, tearing itself apart.
Hope we learn from this dogma. It simply doesn't work. Just as state capitalism aka USSR or Mao China Communism doesn't work.
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Candidates for various offices from Judge, Governor, congress (senate and house), president, etc. should be required to take basic knowledge battery tests, and may only run for office when they pass; they may take the test as often as needed, retakes requiring to wait 1 week.
It wouldn't be to keep the average idiot from running, just the extreme stupid who doesn't really give a fuck because they're a spoil rotten brat and is just running for their sick perverted amusement. If they don't care, they won't bother to study, nor keep retaking the test.
Basic science from chemistry, geology, physics, as well as basic mathematics including algebra and geometry would be required, and geography exam maps as current date announced on the study aid. As well as world history and basic government types.
If they were able to get through high school or college, they should be able to pass it with no problems, so long as they study.
The idea would not only be to test them on their knowledge to know if they're idiots, but to force them to be current with knowledge that may have been rusty. They're about to work for us.... okay bitches, know your shit, or no job for you. This isn't like some free loading corporate whore house where you only got your executive job because your daddy happens to be friends with the CEO nonsense. And you literally do nothing, but rubber stamp shit all day.
Successful battery test would only be good for 4 years. After which, they would have to retake the test before they can run again.
Voters are only one vote. They need not take a test to vote.
The candidates do.
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When this first came out a few weeks ago, I thought how someone could go against the will of the people so overtly... I mean, you do have to get sick of burning dog shit on your front porch, people spitting and shitting in your beverages and food when dining out, house getting toilet papered?
Right? You have to be begging it on to be overtly undemocratic.
This is not a right or left thing, as most policy issues really are, this is about democracy the will of the people and allowing us not to be screwed by a few oligopolies. This helps businesses and workers/consumers alike to have net neutrality; they can't favor one server website over another. The technology came from the DOD and various other scientific governmental institutions foreign and domestic like CERN. Also, the money putting in fiber optics were often granted by government subsidies.
It's no where near financially required to essentially make excuses to raise prices by rationing internet speeds to servers of various websites.
We already get limited on the purchase end by speed and download amounts. We don't need that on the back end, the server end.
Racketeering much?
At this point, fuck the private internet companies, hand the keys over to a universal internet provider, reduce the price to the true whole sell value of $20.00 a month unlimited download data at 50 mbps. Most web servers can only provide 1 to 5 mbps anyways regardless of the long haul fiber optic system that can support up to 50 to 150 mbps, but only intense various work has servers that can even dump that much data onto the fiber optics networks; those that need that size whole sell price would be about $50, a reduction nearly $175 to $300 what they're currently paying. Fuck the middle man. All they do is advertise, only useful thing they do is upkeep, which we the people can do at a fraction of the cost.
Congrats Pia, your evilness has destroyed the internet upkeeper cartel. Wonder what your donors are going to do to your front porch now?
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The Amherst study in full explain the cost savings
1) Overall increase in health care demand through universal coverage 12.0%
Sources of system-wide cost savings
2) Administrative restructuring 9.0%
3) Pharmaceutical price reductions 5.9%
4) Uniform Medicare rates for hospitals and physicians/clinics 2.8%
5) Improved service delivery/reduced waste and fraud 1.5%
6) Total cost savings
(= rows 2+3+4+5)
total savings: 19.2%
And it would be cheaper on businesses of all sizes:
Summary Figures: Impact of Transition to Medicare for All
on Businesses by Size
Percentage change in health
care spending
Small businesses—0 – 9 employees
No health benefits 0%
With health benefits -12.9%
Medium-sized businesses
10 – 19 employees -7.7%
20 – 99 employees -7.7%
Large businesses
100 – 499 employees -8.9%
500+ employees -9.0%
How a tax strategy on revenue for the medicare for all purpose tax.
Summary Figures: Impact of Transition to Medicare for All on Families
Health care spending as
share of income
3. Change in health care
spending as share
of income
1. Existing system 2. Medicare for All (= column 2 – column 1)
Low-income families
$13,000 in income with Medicaid 3.5% -0.1% -3.7%
$35,000 in income, uninsured 2.5% 1.7% -0.8%
Middle-income families:
$60,000 in income
Underinsured 8.0% 1.6% -6.4%
Individually insured 15.5% 1.6% -14.0%
Insured by employer 4.2% 1.6% -2.6%
High-income families
Top 20 percent: $221,000 in income -0.1% 3.7% +3.9%
Top 5 percent: $401,000 in income -0.9% 4.7% +5.6%
Premiums go down for all but the very top 20% or $221K a year income earners who would pay 3.9% more than they do now as a share of their incomes.
And the top 5% $401K and more income would pay 5.6% more than they do now as a share of their income.
Presently the mega rich tend to have a healthcare savings structure or devise their own insurance program that earns interest and dividends that more than offset their healthcare costs, hence why they actually make money even on their own policies; the dividends and/or interest more than cover their usual yearly healthcare costs which includes their premiums too. And in that you can see why the mega wealthy do not want a single payer system. The current system pays them, provides them a positive net return. Maybe not as much as if they decided to invest in more stocks or real-estate or some business, but their literally only cost in their healthcare isn't losing money (paying for something), instead it's getting a smaller return on their healthcare purchase than they could otherwise get in buying something else like a stock or CD, etc. Opportunity costs. Not real cost to them.
While it soaks the rest of us not just in opportunity costs, but in net costs.
https://www.peri.umass.edu/publication/item/1127-economic-analysis-of-medicare-for-all
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"It's difficult to explain."
Yeah, its because its what it is, on video. It shows exactly what happened.
We see mostly in 2D, our 2 eyes gives us parallax for our brain to compare the two images for crude estimate of depth perception (3rd dimension).... nice try idiot attorney.
"I don't like video because they show what happened, and I can't easily lie... instead I have to say stupid shit and reveal I haven't a clue about biology and neurology too... woopsy poopsy dooo!"
Not to mention the report was a complete fabrication, a lie on paper.
WOOPPSY Talk about conspiracy for murder, this easily 1st degree murder, put the fake cop fuckers on death row, and have the entire batch of police on the scene under investigation and charged with conspiracy to cover murder after the fact, aiding and abetting etc.
Make an example of a corrupt police department, that if they're unable to "do the right" thing, they get death row and life sentence in jail.
We need not these hired thugs. We need lawmen.
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The problem has always been with Krugman and people like him, they're to busy apologizing for their socialist positions. It doesn't work that way, you can't ask for economic freedom, you take it. And you can't pretend something is something else. I personally long ago wish Bernie used a different term, but it was too late, he now is stuck with it, and it's fine. People are surprisingly not as stupid as the media has hoped and still hopes to create them to be.
And Krugman again apologizing for universal healthcare... it frankly means it would cover ALL medical body, dental, eye, everything; with no deductibles or no or limited annual max copay with small or no copays in the first place.
Nobody likes our current employer insurance, it's all shit. It's more a discount program than "insurance". Huge premiums I pay, and my employer pays even more premiums, and then when we use it, doesn't do much until deductibles are met first, than it's only covering 50% to 80%... and the price of Rx or ambulance is completely absurd even with insurance.
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Great. You just explained even further why insurance, at least this private insurance, isn't effective and is actually obsolete.
Maybe our tax dollars should be insuring our selves for these horrid events, even an individual random house fire?
And maybe we pay for it adjusted for what we own appraised value?
I mean, most of the time a state declares an emergency and if the state and/or Federal government lends aid, those transfer dollars typically don't go directly to the people to recover, but rather they backstop the insurance companies to ensure those who purchased insurance actually get their claims paid.
It's sort of a can't lose scam with insurance.
Same thing happens with medical and disability insurance.
If it becomes long term to where the person can get on SSI or Medicaid, anything the insurance company paid out during the back payment SSI and/or Medicaid grants, is recovered by the insurance company, turning them into just a fronting the cash sort of company; they never actually draw down reserves those claims.
So cut out the middle man.
Which is obviously ineffective.
It's why nations developed fire services or fire departments instead of offering "fire insurance" policies, that were hysterically funny episodes in London's great fires, or even small fires, when customers of various fire service insurance accidently went to the wrong fire house company, or the proof of purchase was left in the house being burned, thus couldn't produce proof of coverage thus no fire fighters to help put out he fire.
Private insurance is basically a scam.
At the fairest, it's obsolete bullshit.
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Just found out, still not sure if its just rumor, but we're only looking at a 1% pay rise this year across the board at my new employer. We only get 24 hours after the first 90 days, and the first year its only 64 hours up to 2 years. Than 3rd year its 94 hours... it goes up but on a weird basis up to 10 years which is 120 hours. Then 20 hours you get 140 hours a year. WE have no bucket for sick time. The pay is so low they can't keep line operators. The company's revenue is over $600 million a year; they employee not quite a 1,000 people total, at our location its almost 50 when including a few admin, supervisors, and the 3 main managers.
Their balance sheet statements are impossible to find since its a private company.
We're all thinking about forming a union and demanding a decent contract that makes sense. If it falls through, I'm out by fall this year. Ain't worth it. I have several degrees. I can do better. Thinking about using more of my GI Bill anyway.
The insurance also sucks, its as weak as the stuff on the Idaho ACA exchange.
Pisses me off because we know they're highly profitable, HR and finance came out to congratulate us on hitting record yearly cases of beverages bottled and canned, and record profits which they put 5% of salary toward our 401K.
Only been with them just about 6 months. I'm so sick of lame employers after lame employers. They're disgusting. I really am considering moving to Canada, Germany ( I speak German so so), or somewhere else.
This place reminds me of a shit hole that other good countries scoff at and wonder how such nincompoops can tolerate such a backwards society.
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@kknn523 The oligarchs bought all the national news turning it in the yellow journalism that would make William Randolph Hearst blush with their bullshit yellow journalism. And our two phony parties that do what the buyers who bought them told them to do.
Means we have no recourse at times. Or in this case, whoever actually shot this CEO felt was the only way actual justice could be rendered. I mean we have a convicted felon awaiting sentencing, and more inditements on the way, and current president who pardoned his criminally convicted son who was serving time in prison.
No laws for the oligarchs, no laws for us peasantry.
We're just like the former Soviet Union with limited recourse, or current Peoples Republic of China or the deranged North Korea... and the not as deranged but equally corrupt S. Korea with their even of martial law until their oligarchs we're upset and decided they didn't like their president squashing their rule by the rich effectively house of lords republic.
NO recourse means people start to act out. Japan's not to long ago assassination of Shinzo Abe, not even the Prime Minister anymore.
Oligarchy came back with a vengeance, and as oligarchy did at the turn of the last century brought us two world wars, and massive amounts of murder and left much of the world in ashes.
The oligarchs didn't learn their lessons. They've pinned us to the wall, and they have to expect war among the peasantry. They've pushed us too far. It's game over for us, then it is doubly game over for these hogs.
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@Madzguy007 Every country has subsidies in various sectors of their economy. US it's trucks and SUV's, food crops, initial food processing like sugar, flour, some food preservative chemicals, etc.
China is more restrictive across all sectors on tariffs from vehicles, electronics, home apparel, etc. than most other countries.
It's been pretty one sided. They were able to get away with it largely due to the fact all corporations US, EU, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc. want cheap labor, as well as some of the Chinese subsidized (thus cheap) inputs.
The catch always was, China wanted to ensure it didn't have to import things it was already making in its country, only those items it couldn't get domestically... like fossil fuels, extra foodstuffs, certain medicines and medical appliances, heavy precision manufacturing equipment (Germany made that sector their specialty) etc.
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There isn't much of a problem waiting for elective procedures... people in all nations really despise going to the dentist or doctor unless they feel ill or have something bothering severely.
Check these BBC documentaries of people with tremendous fear of going to the dentist, they finally convince these people to go and get work done.
They get treatment for free, and still some people don't go. One of them gets a tooth transplant... that would be considered in our country cosmetic, and insurance wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole; theirs covers it completely, the oral surgeon doing the work states the likely price is about $14K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPcs4O_gi2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NZGQZXaKRc
Our system is more like the mob. Board of directors are the new Medici vs Borgia vs Strozzi vs Pazzi vs etc. etc. etc.
And they should be careful mentioning Venezuela because they had capitalism mafioso on steroids prior to their current socialist party that has been in power since 1999; prior thru 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's it was an economic basket case with revolutions constantly... people have elected the same party because poverty rates fell from 48% to 32%, literacy rates 89% in the 90's to 97% 2016. While I think it verges on an authoritarian style government in that the constitution changed to that took away checks and balances, and would not want for our country or any country I would want to live in, the people there keep voting the same party in as a plurality because the alternatives scare them; they don't want to go back to the dumpster they once were with oligarchs that still live there and produce and sell there; so it's not like N. Korea extreme dictatorship with absolute communism. The alternatives just don't exist there.
What I want is not to have an economic collapse which is precisely where we're going based on many past historical economic vicious cycle systems; they become untenable and fall apart, and often you get authoritarian regimes... J. Caesar and rest of Ancient Rome was a result.
Fascist Italy, Germany, Authoritarian so called Communist Russia by Stalin, Mao's People's Republic of China, etc.
What we want is empirical economic policy known to work; mixed market structure to sectors that simply violate severely one or all of the competitive market principles nullifying any good benefit for the profit motive.
And we can move toward a better economic structure all together. Like a co-op based organizations with employees as if a member of the board of directs voting power of business (similar to Germany's Co-determination policy but all employees are members of the board, not about half filling seats) using a Co-Op Federal Reserve Bank, much like the private banks racketeer off our Federal Reserve Bank by borrowing at a discount.
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Several articles are bitching that the stock market recent declines are due to the appreciating dollar over a basket of other currencies. The dollar is actually increasing in value over the past 10 years, and recently spiking upward because interest on savings and CD's are increasing, and bond yields are increasing as our interest rates are better than most other currencies of similar purchasing power.
Wall Street is bitching about having too strong a dollar at the moment.
My personal opinion about strong or weaker dollar... I just want a currency that is stable as possible, no big dips up nor down. Flat as possible, no deflation nor inflation. That requires national debt GDP not to go too insane... we must cut our idiot military budget by more than half. And we must commit to an universal healthcare system that has direct negotiating authority with pharma, clinics, and hospitals like 173 of the 201 other nations already have.
We must fast track a massive set of programs such as our own LFTR fission program, ITER/Wendelstein 7x, high speed rail, and drinking and irrigation water systems. And we need to rethink completely our educational system so it is effective in teaching critical thinking skills, and application to various career fields.
Our spending needs to be on actually moving our nation toward real sustainable and orders of magnitude more bountiful than what our systems have for us today.
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At least you know if you had it or not.
My plant at work, literally everyone got sick about mid February before the states started to shut down and do any testing, and the news kept saying it was a flu... when really it's more like a very bad cold.
Some did have fevers, everyone had a severe cough. It hurt and made you want to sleep.
I didn't particularly get body aches, but my chest would get serious sharp pains, and the cough was like bronchitis.
It remained for about two weeks.
Everyone was essentially okay first week of March.
By second week of March, I was feeling fine, one or two people seemed to have a serious cold like cough still though. None were tested during that period. Not until April someone at work on a different shift appeared very ill, was sent home and was RNA tested which came back negative.
Since at that time, I guess this is accurate, there were no antibody tests, even today they're debating on some of them that are worthless as they're accuracy is that of flipping a coin.
Would be interested to know if our "plague" as I call it, was COVID19 or one of the influenza A going around.
My symptoms were more cold like, focused squarely in the chest. And the week I started feeling better, no cough, not jarring sharp chest pain, one last symptom that lines up to being COVID19 diarrhea, more like liquid water coming out the rear end. Took Pepto Bismol, and was fine the next day. Never felt a stomach ache or tired during that day.
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Basically, like all other civilized nations have utilities, emergency hospital and healthcare services, police and fire services, etc. it's done by we the people of a government.
Because nobody trusts a banker or hustler on their own... to many since ancient Greece have gone bust.
And I find it funny, the example of banking, we'll keep your money secure.
Sure... that wasn't a selling point in the history of banking, contrary to that, putting money with a banker or bench money changer, was actually risky both in that they're a target of theft/robbery. But also the point of banks to lend money.
Safety deposit boxes were available at Inns and hotels and other places before banks decided they were part of the government or quasi government with security... in the latter 1900's.
And most banks were never insured until the 1700's and that insurance was generally not sufficient for 100% reimbursement of theft. And generally 0 against default loans or bank runs. Until later on in the late 1800's... and almost middle 1900's in the USA under FDIC and SIPC... USA... always behind the times, among the last nations to ban slavery.
Oligarchs don't like to shake their apple carts... so... what ya gonna do?
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I've been watching you since 2008... possibly 2007.
The entire time, I was interested on what was "actually happening" first hand accounts.
I knew you couldn't say too many disparaging things at least out right while living there.
But the entire time, I kept thinking, this won't end well for this poor guy... he'll probably move onto maybe Hong Kong or just some other country around the world.
It's a type of gangsterism that's going around all countries... worse in already overbearing tyrannical governments like China... but even our nation in the US has been at tipping points.
The world powers are grasping on the pinnacle of their wealth brought to us buy overwhelming stupidity of a global economic system that is disastrous to all of us who actually work and make the prosperity even happen for anybody.
Good luck. We're all going to need it. The elites of all the respective nations are going full stupid to maintain their peak wealth. This has happened over and over again. And at their peaks it's typically at the exhaustion to the misery index to all who work, the mass of people who row the boat. So they'll grasp relentlessly to a collapsing stupidity that was festered.
We're replaying the same stupidity that gave rise to fascism in Italy and Germany, and the gangster stupidity with pretenses of communism or socialism for the people of Russia and the USSR, the latter 1900's of western Europe and UK common wealths of Australia and Canada and New Zealand to the USA as anything that kept their nations from falling int the same tyrannical regimes are undone. And a repeat to fanaticism fomented by these elites to build their wealth and power back.
We're here again. But we need not reintroduce such stupidity. Just as overwhelming amount of nations around the world have not stooped to outright slave economies nor feudal economies... we can learn not to head toward tyrannical gangster economies of pretend socialism or communism or the casino stupidity of robber baron capitalism.
We can form a new thing. A new structure of economics that is democratic, upholds the required freedom of opinion and expression and press and peaceful protests, structure of laws and as fair as possible judicial that is also democratic, in fact the US courts with jury by peers is overwhelming democratic requiring the full panel of jurors to vote unanimously in order to convict a person of guilt of a charge against them. And even then there is appeal process that re-examine any new evidence that comes in to potentially retrial the case. And if voted unanimously innocent, that specific charge can never be prosecuted again.
We can create systems much better. And we should always even when we improve something better, critique always all things in such a better system.
The problem is that propaganda tends to silence critiquing... and that is when things revert back to a horrible mean. We should always critique. Always use incredulity on all things, demanding even better, as nothing is perfect. And even if we sense perfection has or will be reached, that we set the bar even higher. Perfection is probably an illusion. There is nothing perfect... reality is not perfect, it is rough and tough and even the most prosperous and glorious have their trials and tribulations.
It's when we sniff our own farts and think they're glorious, that has been the undoing of everything.
We need to keep this same level of criticism. So that the absurdities to which the system is so ridiculous it refutes itself, we have mechanisms to improve... we have the solutions as we have the records of ongoing critiques already presented.
Instead, we're like children, unaware, dumb. And confused. With only a system the self-refutes, finding our selves in misery and in prospects of only more misery ahead should we continue the system as is.
We have no idea what to do, because we never kept such incredulity and critique in high regards.
We'll worry about it until it becomes absolutely unbearable simply won't do. It's the lazy and cowards way out. And we cannot be lazy nor cowards going forward.
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I agree.
But there are no checks and balances on aristocracy or oligarchy world wide.
And this aristocracy or oligarchy simply stack their hired men (usually men not always), in all branches. Thus the checks are cartoony phony farces usually a scapegoat here and there... along with denials, nothing to see here, or gas lighting or other distractions upon distractions.
Checks and balance for government is nice... but also there should be checks and balances on oligarchs/aristocracy who tend to buy the very government... and in any more free of press nation, they buy the government stacking in with their hired thugs, and propound propaganda that convinces the masses that the masses aren't the government at all...
therefore the masses of people with both hands hand the government over to the very oligarchs/aristocracy that was screwing them over... and leading the economic system into a debt trap collapse.
Rinse and repeat.
So I say, yes checks and balances on government... but we really need to include that to big business aka to the aristocracy, to the oligarchy.
In fact, we don't need an oligarchy whatsoever no aristocracy is really ever needed, it moots merit from people who actually do the work.
We need to move to a co-op employee owned equal vote no matter the number of shares to all aspects of a business model.
Checks and balances on an aristocracy is as necessary to advance civility and prosperity for all as prohibiting indentured servitude, serfdom, and slavering was. And then allowing collective bargaining, etc.
Checks and balance the government only can and is always and is actually being undermined by the aristocracy/oligarchy.
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And the idiocy we provide them with an unnatural monopoly like drug patents is an insult to injury. Double wammy effect. There are a variety reason we in the US pay over double per-capita of what other nations pay in medical care, and pharma pricing is among them.
1) Get rid of medical patents, they're absurd. And if you are a "let it be" market person you really shouldn't be advocating for an artificial government intervention like a patent.
The biotech to big pharma chain is a price inflating idiocy... biotech spends $10 million to $100 million on trial of a drug then once approved, sells it to a big pharma for $2 or $3 billion or more... big pharma then has to make up for that big expense and wants big profits, so it's per unit cost now goes up.
No more patent protection on medical technology. And institute a proactive FDA that seeks to work with universities and other organizations to approving medical procedures, Rx, and appliances.. then open sourcing all to any organization that wants to produce the new technology.
2) Allow medicare/medicaid to negotiate pricing directly; not via health insurance companies bargaining for their network and out of network nonsense in regions.
3) Regulate pricing on vital medicines and appliances profit margins; no more racketeering.
4) If the private enterprise fails to produce at marginal profits established, allow government to supply at cost the same medicines and appliances to make up for quantity supplied... in particular those medicines and appliances that have too few patients thus no economy of scale to make affordable to produce. Produce them via government operations at cost.... a producer of last resort.
5) Universal healthcare at least a single payer system (medicare for all).
6) Producer of last resort for hospitals, clinics, and dentistry... rural areas that otherwise have to travel hundreds of miles, place small hospitals that otherwise would never make a profit.
Medical prices would be halved as they are throughout the rest of the world.
And quality of our healthcare outcomes would improve tremendously.
And private pharma and appliance makers would still be rolling in the profits... in-elastic demand curve; prices don't influence demand, you pay or die... you're gonna pay any price, they're promised to have customers. And if it's a drug that has no economy of scale, it was never something the private market could handle efficiently anyways.
It just won't be as much of a racket, more modest profit taking.
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Okay, I get it Clinton News Network... you want a do nothing status quo candidate.
GO fuck our propaganda network. Fox, MSNBC, and CNN can go fuck itself.
Nothing but propaganda from silly as twat face oligarchs and their toads fighting over everything the mass of people could give a shit about for the most part, and ignoring what is destroying us the peoples' lives: insufficient housing construction and development, insufficient healthcare since we lack universal single payer system, ridiculous higher education and vocational system, a ridiculous excuse of a min wage, laws that make unions toothless or near impossible to form, etc.
I'm sorry, I couldn't listen to all of this form that CNN guy. His voice mixed with the content or lack thereof... nails on chalk board.
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Sum up with what Richard is saying:
Since recorded history we've had an aristocracy that is nothing more than a parasitical fecal matter festering with infectious diseases that eats itself.
Western recorded history from the period of the Sumerians to Assyrians into the late bronze age and that collapse we had the first recorded history of imperialism... that was the name coined.
Into Classical Greece into Ancient Rome imperialism utilize the slave labor of its conquests to fuel a boom bust fighting between a dictator emperor and oligarchy.
Middle ages similar fighting over serfs in feudalism.
Then we went into colonialism. Oh look we're so interconnected with colonies delivering raw goods and even manufacturing some things at an extreme cheap price due to indentured servitude and slavery.
Then in the late 1800's into the 1920's it was coins globalization. And we know how that went.
And again, we don't even get a new term, but a recycled one hundred years ago... for the same stupidity. Responding via government swapping from a dictator or autocratic system to an oligarchy and back and forth.
Based on inauthentic comparative advantage of tyrannized labor and destitute labor.
At some point we realize this recorded since human history nonsense is just that. Aristocrats, particularly when they become dynastic, has and always will become a parasitical force that oppresses people and eventually collapses as it causes trade that makes no sense. Using more resources particularly energy resources on transportation to move the goods from one place to another that could have been gotten closer thus cheaper on a conservation of energy standpoint and a real cost standpoint.
But inauthentic stupidity such as destitute labor and/or tyrannized labor artificially make this trade work for a few at the top doing the oppressing.
Lots of propaganda is spewed forth by these oligarchs how they have some merit of some kind... kings and emperors often used magic and mysticism... ordained by a deity or two or three or an entire pantheon... others in such a joke that should make anyone sick, proclaim their brilliance of being born in an already wealthy family and look I was able to start a business with just a few million or 100 million a billion dollars... see, my boot straps were golden... why aren't yours? In a disconnected ignorance.
A co-op mottle enterprise system where all workers and investors have only 1 vote as to all aspects of the operation would not allow such stupidity.
And it is only natural we humans look after our families first and foremost. That being said, we ought not build an entire dynasty around our families that effect adversely other families... that we look beyond our own family and think of our civilization as part of our entire family.
Dynastic ambitions easily could be forbidden with sufficient estate taxes, income taxes, votes of and by the workers equal to any of the investors... 1 vote per worker and investor regardless of the number of shares one owns as to all aspects of operation, mandatory union guilds for the workers, etc.
Universal healthcare and higher education and utilities... just as we have with fire service and police service and even defense ie military... roads and most ports are in most nations even in the US despite the several toll roads that still exist today.
The term has changed... we had imperialism then feudalism then colonialism then globalism.... same premise... just different names.
And they all end horribly... and they're recycled from time to time. Funny that the buzz word used today was so quickly recycled from just 100 years ago... the wonderful robber baron stupidity that ushered in two world wars and the first use of nuclear weapons.
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And this only has a little over 6,000 views as of April 7th. While silly ass cat videos or some meaningless no impact on individual lives as far as their prosperity nor education celebrity video gets millions of views in a few ours. Shows contribution from mindlessness of our culture cultivates 45% nonvoters on presidential elections and 67% nonvoters on midterms.
And only 7% even bothered to participate in combined GOP and DNC and alternate party caucuses and primary voting; probably the most crucial as this stacks the general election with candidates that could be all terrible if little participation as we saw in 2016.
We should think of voting like jury duty. Mandatory by law to at least be present a ballot either by mail or in person. Even if that ballot is blank or mostly blank or a write in that's literally a cartoon character like Mighty Mouse. And make it easy, just mail it in, vote online, at a courthouse, etc.
If people have to take things seriously maybe they won't be so fatalistic and apathetic as an excuse to be so lazy or feeling not a part of their government... something lost long ago, everyone is the government. Based on votes many don't think their government is theirs that they are part of the country; and by the way they vote, it isn't their country. It's someone else's. And their just subjects. Keep being subjects tyrannized by everyone else... oh wait that's what over paid coaches, billion dollar stadiums, cat videos are, an painkiller to cope with dictatorship.
On a brighter note:
Australia has made voting mandatory. You can write in whatever, or whoever, or leave it blank, or leave some blank as you can do now when you vote now in the US, but you have to preview a ballot and submit it. This is an attempt to eliminate coercion to apathy/disinterest/fatalism to not participate from playing on their class, ethnic, and education level backgrounds. Much of politics particular by the incumbent as they already have their base voters who will vote, to get turnout to be as piss poor as possible.
Results, despite Australia having their own propaganda spewing oligarchy, they have a universal health care system that ranks among the highest of the wealthy nations, and low to reduced tuition, and a standard of living that is better than the US along with several other wealthy nations.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/interactives/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2018/WHR_web.pdf
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The bad part about Musk, is that he's a total con job.
All of his "businesses" are just welfare state from city, county, national tax give aways that kept them going. Or they long ago would have went bust. Every single one of them. TSLA to Space X which largely require huge tax give aways.
TSLA almost went bust back in 2018 to 2019. They were losing suppliers as they stopped paying them; one supplier that I know about near where I work, canceled their contract when Musk rat was sending good battery board controllers costing $1K each claiming flaws. There were no flaws. So what was Musk rat up to? Oh, he wanted them "redone" and not be charged for all these "bad" boards at all.
The contract was canceled almost immediately. It was a fraud case.
Space X too requires essentially totally on government contracts, foreign and domestic. Private companies have used Space X, but due to some bad things happening, like Facebook Zuckerburge used their rocket once to attempt to launch a satellite, the launch went bad rocket and satellite blew up; the insurance company wouldn't underwrite another launch using Space X, so they were required to use another agency, they used the French one if I recall correctly; the satellite was a billion dollars.
And all his other cons. They're out right frauds from the Boring Company to the Neurolink to Star Link, none of them are viable in anyway way without tons of government give aways as well as carbon credit type taxes on other companies to keep his scams going.
He's an absolute fraud.
So of Musk, he's the worst possible to trust on anything. He should have long ago went bust with all his scams.
Instead, we're paying little over 80 million on a Super Falcon launch that has a quarter of the payload the Space Shuttle program was capable, and cost 87 million per launch. So we're paying just about what we paid for a Space Shuttle launches for a quarter of the workload. And very few if any are "human" certified. While all Shuttle launches were indeed manned; with 4 times the payload capability.
He is only good, and only to the dimwitted, a show, a carnival act.
With Space X it was the re-landing of the rockets. NASA already was capable of doing such rocket launches, but abandoned the programs which used a tripod like design; as the required fuel which is 90 percent of the cost of a rocket launch, requiring fuel landing reserve meant decreasing the useful payloads by 50 percent or more. That it was cheaper either to do as the Shuttle program did, glide the lander back, or just use parachutes or sea landings to salvage the parts. The rockets and other items are only 10 percent the cost.
90 percent of all rocket launches is indeed the fuel. So that relanding reserve fuel is a complete unnecessary waste, as well as making the mission more risky; rocket fuel is very unstable.
And of course, any of the commercial and government uses of Super Falcon Heavy launches or even the smaller rockets, they forgo the relanding nonsense. As the cost or payload in their uses makes it prohibited for a fuel reserve for landing. So they're simply dropped in the sea and salvaged the same way. The salvage operation is the same regardless; the entire components need to be completely refurbished to ensure safety. And the cost again, is only 10 percent of the entire launch.
Star Link is just junk in space, with bad internet. Geostationary satellite internet exists in the USA and throughout the globe, in the USA there are 6 different major companies, and you can get decent DSL broad band internet for about $65 a month geostationary satellite with about $100 or less for the receiver equipment. Musk's receiver is over $1K and monthly cost without magical subsidies is over $100 a month. And based on the satellite decay of 4 years means it's not viable long term. And the quality his horrid as you're constantly hopping from one wifi connection to another as the low earth satellites leave your horizon.
Again, one scam after another only viable via sweet tax subsidies.
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I think we're still stuck in that among the most conditioned. The right winger folks or those who identify with republicanism first, lament that we're just not letting markets be free enough to do their thing. And they fret about the oligarchs who they think want to be "green" and rule the market to force people to buy EV's that don't really work in rural or large spaces regions of the nation. Or they fret that the oligarchs want to cull the population (even though its rather the opposite as they freak that there's not enough labor pool to then pay less, the abundance of labor is declining as people aren't having enough labor babies).
These same conditioned, brainwashed, fooled folks will lament any possible "generosity" and not a punch in their nether regions, like you have them lamenting perhaps we should have had the stimulus checks, and this comes from a coworker who is living with a family of 5 in a camper trailer at a KOA for the past 5 years. As he is concluding that this is inflation was caused by the stimulus to the masses even though that was spent and gone, no savings. And that he would have been even worse off without the stimulus he got, as it was really just a small tax cut for him, and this inflation would have happened anyway, that the stimulus wasn't really the primary cause of inflation if at all.
That the larger share of liquidity money was $4.5 trillion that the Fed Reserve added to their balance sheet from 2020 to now. And the junk bond purchasing program they did 2020 ending Feb 2021. They produced massive money supply to bail out and reinflate and now gone beyond just reinflating but causing inflation by easing the money market system to the point of stupidity with now 8.5 trillion on the Fed's balance sheet, and still even with the tepid interest rate hikes to soak up all that liquidity is at 1.5% to 1.75% as of this comment. While inflation according to their figure is at 8.6% and wages are only going up 5%.
And that is also a knee jerk reaction brainwashed into these fooled souls. That wage increases are causing inflation. I must remind them wage inflation cannot happen unless wages are increasing at a larger rate than that of inflation.
With wages trailing inflation, as they're doing, wages are not driving inflation. The upping of wages are a result of the inflation happening. Wages increasing right now are the effect, not the cause. And that this wage increase isn't, it's nominal increase, but in real terms you're getting roughly a 3% decline in your wages. Again, according to the CPI numbers which most understand are not that great, one can double the figure to get an accurate inflationary figure.
The cause again is the Federal Reserves easy monetary policy that helped bail out the stock and bond markets. And they went overboard and are still reluctant to do much because they know it'll crash the economy even more.
You get these knee jerk reactions due to the effective advertisement the right wing oligarchical robber barons have propounded for over 80 years since 1940's... it's like the advertisement of McDonald's, the burgers are nothing like what you see in their ads, they look like someone sat on them, and every time you do eat there, you regret it as you have a stomach ache and probably some expunging problems at the toilet. Same with Coke or Pepsi, it's ads are persistent. Providing a sense of normal, a comfort familiar thing, in an otherwise chaotic world, you get a sense of calmness and even joy like seeing an old friend... despite the fact that coke and Pepsi both taste something similar to battery acid. McDonald's burgers look nothing like the ads and often give you pain after eating them. You see those golden arches while traveling out of town or somewhere you've never been or rarely go, and suddenly you feel at home, comforted.
Knee jerk reaction.
And that same thing still persists with lots of people who have been weaned on AM radio and other robber baron stupidity all their lives and perhaps grew up in an area that have fellow friends and acquaintances and coworkers on the same steady ad diet and group loop thinking.
So a type of insanity ensues.
They know what they're going through sucks, they know they're in trouble, living in a camper trailer for years and still not able to save or do much while working over 50 to 60 hours a week.
But instead of critically thinking about how things work, or even looking into the matter, they come up with knee jerk reactions they've been indoctrinated. Even though the very knee jerk reaction they are prone to exclaim are the very policies that punches them in the nether regions.
Like someone sexually raped and tortured through life, screaming for their ear that was just torn off by their rapist and brutal slave master, they think perhaps their ear or the pain of the ear will go away, perhaps they'll get to keep the other ear if they only scream for more pain, to shove the gag ball further down their throats and to use not one but two hot pokers up the behind this time around.
It's a type of sad pathetic insanity.
The robber barons did a tremendously terrible and horrifyingly effective job.
In short... I think we're screwed with at least 20% if not 33% of these lost brainwashed souls who have been struck with a severe form of Stockholm syndrome mixed among some with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger effect.
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The problem becomes often that plutocrats who feel oppressed by non-plutocrats can often cite they're liberties in purchasing whatever they want: judicial, legislative, executive, etc. or influence as they did with marriages of monarchs or dictatorships, if those things are not available for sale, they often cite call to arms or revolution because they demand democracy... it isn't anything of the case, it's strictly they want democracy for themselves.
Just as feudal lords often sought parlay with the absolute monarch so they could have their interests and liberties preserved, but they cared not one ounce that their lessor born or inferiors liberties and democratic power. Quite the contrary.
So you do have to be careful with certain resistance groups, some of them are actually various plutocrats either fighting other plutocrats or non-plutocrats or a system that squashes plutocracy, when reality they want democracy for a few, they really want a type of oligarchy (rle by the few) either by the rich aka plutocracy or by the devout of a particular religion theocracy or a special we know better so shut up and fall in line bureaucracy/technocracy which encompass the small groups that would proclaim: we know what's good for everyone especially for those who need to actively sale their labor so called leaders of the proletariat.
Athens was very much like this, even during its 100 years of "democracy" before bringing back a monarchy, the plutocrats held heavy influence over that city state. And of the civilian population who promoted as they could participate in this democracy, it was only to Athenian non-slave both mother and father Athenian born free males who could actually participate in the democracy. While some free people were still cut out: the women as well as any non-fully born Athenian freed males residing in Athens, or any fully Athenians who were remanded into slavery and were able to purchase their freedom were all strictly barred from active participation in voting or debating in their democracy. They're more better defined oligarchy.
Then there was the slave population that made roughly of 3 slaves to 1 free person, different periods this was as high as estimated to be even higher. So the vast majority of the population of Athens had no power in their system. While it wasn't a democracy strictly of wealthy plutocracy it was still an oligarchy: rule by the few.
In case of ancient Athens it was more precisely defined as a patriarchal ethnocracy. System ruled by the few ethnically fully Athenian free men.
Hardly something we would call a full democracy with a constitution that protects rights and dissent and openly allows let alone promotes full participation of the adult population.
USSR, Peoples' Republic of China, or the most contradictory named Democratic People's Republic of Korea aka North Korea have a level of democracy. But it stifles debate and subjects and only a few may participate fully in the voting process, as well as in some instances lacks a constitution that installs checks in balances to avoid one or two persons having absolute authority.
They're a type of democracy, but they're not a good one. Just as banana republics that allow elections of plutocrats.
The devil's always in the details. Various tyrannical regimes have mocked the modern idea of democracy or liberty by citing that's what the were fighting for, when reality they were not. It was democracy for them or groups of people like them and only them.
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We need the Green party to do more advertising. Possibly even change its name to something else. And lots of advertising. Burn it in their face as fast food chains, box stores, endless insurance companies, etc. do every day on radio, tv, and internet media sites. It must become normalized, common, as the Golden Arches are to people when they're in some foreign country or somewhere they've never been, they see the arches and think McDonald's... a safe place, I know what to expect, its normal. Despite the fact their food likely will give them the shits, the burgers appear as if someone sat on them, and tastes as if drenched in high fructose corn syrup and sucrose, even on their fries.
It's normal as Coke and Pepsi.
Problem with Green party name is many average people response to the Green Party is thinking they're all hippie eco cranks without a clue, and a backbone. And simply sounds unfamiliar... not normal... too trendy for me.
Has to appeal to the average person... maybe America's Party.
Something with gusto.
And it must be advertised everywhere.
Otherwise your RC Cola and Shasta or another no name brand. Or some exotic trendy expensive nincompoop frivolous artisan soda-pop. Either way is a put off to the moronic general masses we have today. So you have to reach them.
1) Change the name.
2) Advertise constantly.... all the billboards, on cereal boxes and bags, etc.
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Some of these people are either making up themselves or were told bullshit by someone about ACA "Obama Care". It sucks because its not a public option or medicare for all universal healthcare. The complaint about not supplying the young adult or costing the parent is BS. It would be on the child, not the parent, the advantage is to allow the adult-child to remain on a more often better parents' insurance. Because in the past as soon as the child turned 18, they wouldn't be allowed to be added to their parents' company's insurance. My dad's employer allowed to keep me signed up until 19... but I had a decent job and joined their insurance paying it at age 18, so I was double insured for for a year... this is back in 2001.
Back to the point, these people have either been lied to, or are just making shit up themselves to justify their tribal urges.
We have a dumb as at work who is $50k in debt because of some medical disaster concerning his wife. And he may go bankrupt, and he hates our medical system. Another coworker asked if he liked universal healtchare, he said no. Go fucking figure. And the dumb ass jokes on his own stupidity.
This is why we in the US can't have nice things, too many shit heads.
Seriously, people are so morbidly idiotic they have other deeper concerns, but is the only subject they can recall, discuss in detail, and give predictive opinions about?
Answer: Ball games.
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All food is "processed" if it's cooked (mixed with other ingredients) and usually cooked or salted or otherwise preserved.
What's bad, is what ingredients and what methods of preservatives are in our foods.
The biggest killer is firstly high fructose corn syrup that's surprisingly in almost everything that is "sweetened". HFCS is poison. Stay away from it! And it is hard to do so as its in some french fries, peanut butter, hazel nut butters, soda pop, sauces from tomato sauce to salsa to Tobasco to Ketchup to juices, breakfast cereal, even some breads.
And then there's the amalgamated sugar from cane or sugar beats which is sucrose. While perhaps not quite as bad as HFCS, it must be consumed very little... sweeten a piece of chocolate or piece of dessert. But shouldn't be added to a main course. Skip it in main courses such tomato sauces.
Cutting out the High Fructose Corn Syrup especially, but also amalgamated sugar is the biggest thing anyone can do.
And of course we know why these food manufactures love adding sugar into their foods, even the main courses: it's tasty and its addicting and its cheap... US subsidizes sugar by forcing an 11 cent per pound minimum. Wish they did this with more healthy veggies and fruits to produce an abundance in healthy foods.
I work in the food industry at present as a chemical quality control, and getting older was gaining some weight, not obese but 20 pounds heavier than I've been most of the time, and realized the foods I thought were healthy (even many types of crackers) had HFCS... cut all of it out and dropped already 10 pounds.
Biggest thing: Watch out for sugars. Try to get all your sugars from natural means fruits and nuts.
And read the labels. It's literally the only way.
Manufacturers now have to admit their added sugars on the Nutrient Facts. And they have always posted if they they used HFCS. So start checking... there's usually an alternative that doesn't have that poison added. Your teeth will thank you too.
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Kim, private markets assisted in half inventions used today.
Computer concept, telecommunications including email, internet, technologies, video phone, satellite, touch screen, fuel injection and refinements to fuel injection, various antiviral medicines, vaccinations, various Rx, MRI, etc. were firstly developed and funded by the government via various agencies from DOD, DOE, various universities, and among many different nations'government funding and agencies.
Some were grants provided to some telecoms and computer companies to develop various circuit, memory saving devices magnetic, flash memory and various other types still being researched today have government grants often from universities as well as corporations.
It's a mixed structure.
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Same reason we don't tend to privatize fire service and police or other natural monopolies. Such sectors violate competitive market principles: They require huge economies of scale to just break even, inelastic demand curve people will pay or rather go into debt to any degree for items and services that prevent suffering or death, externality; people waiting too long until their condition worsens causing loss of work and income and happiness, need for perfect knowledge: medical professionals need to communicate with other professionals freely to develop new and best methods of care and medical appliances and medicines.
Profit motive is why hospitals are closing. They were never a profit motive driven institution anymore than courts, police, fire departments, roads, ports, etc. are a profit motive driven, but a social system that our collective taxes and democratic votes operate.
It's why all other nations use a universal healthcare system, and in most of them have a large subsidy system even if some clinics and hospitals or privately owned; most are non-profits.
And many are owned and operated by their local government.
It's called ECON 101.
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You just describe the United States today when discussing the slum of Victorian London.
And when you think about the similarities:
1) My prior apartments we have entire families living in one bedroom apartments, and this is in Boise Idaho, 5 to 10 people in 1 bedroom. Some were refugees, most weren't.
2) gap between rich and poor is huge.
3) the rust belt was dirty, raped in a way. But since our industrial base is gone to other hell holes for slave tyrannized labor of despots, our environment in the west at least, is mostly clean. The fires in the Summer time mixed with farming makes our area of Idaho among the worst air quality in the states.
4) We have nothing but crime and some haenous murders; a constant shooting in every small, middle and large city across this idiotic knuckle dragging country. Mass murderers and serial killers galore. We're sick fucking country in all ways possible.
5) high suicide rate among all industrial countries, as well as highest drug overdose deaths.
6) No universal healthcare, literally millions go without dental and medical treatment preventative or taking care of chronic illnesses like diabetes. Over 30,000 die a year due to lack of affordability for medical goods and services.
7) And now we're the evil empire the sun doesn't set!
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I don't dislike Warren, I just don't trust her. Her record is sketchy and her actions are often dubious to goofy... "I told the bankers, you better cut it out!" She's got no spine... she didn't back Bernie when it could have helped... probably wouldn't; the DNC really was run by Hillary's campaign.
I prefer Bernie. And it slightly disturbs me that establishment is starting to concede to her on many articles from CNBC to CNN.
And a genuine reaction if I were running, would be, something to the effect: Damn was hoping AOC would have came out for my support, but at least they came out with one of us actual progressives, either way we will all come together after the primaries, and I really love AOC so wishing she would have come out for me!... something to that effect. You know, be genuine. My personality would be to joke about it, "You had to rub that one in my face when you had the chance! Yeah, I'm happy for Bernie, bummed for myself. I love AOC!"
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This isn't Keynesian economics this is Hayek monetarism only philosophy.
Keynesian would have required good spending on needed items that the bubble miss-allocation of stupid caused; in our case it would have stated supply of homes were not over done during the real-estate credit crash, it was the prices that caused that crash, the amount of homes to population were actually steadily down in half compared to 1960 and 1970's from 26 and 36 new units per 1,000 households to 15 to 18 units per one thousand households. And then the collapse by 2017 making 5 units per 1,000 thousand households. Both multi-dwelling and single dwelling housing.
Why were so many homes being built back in the 1960's and 70's?
The structure of which cities and rural areas developed was mostly using tax receipts to build the utilities and roads for these lots keeping housing prices lower along with subsidies to build such single and multidwelling housing.
This assistance has since changed completely, relying on independent contractors to develop property of which many went bust after 2008 and those survivors don't want to get burned again, so they're not developing nearly as much, and they're ensuring they pass that cost onto any buyer as localities don't pay for them with tax receipts.
So Keynesian would say spending needs to go to bulk up supply on a needed item: such as housing since it went tits up in a speculative bubble.
And with extra supply coupled with price flooring on land prices, you have proper affordable housing again. Some nations do a great job at this such as Austria and Germany and Japan compared to the US and UK and Australia.
Hayek monetarism would just say pump the liquidity via the central bank and let the market get brave to build supply needed. And affordable supply of needed items like shelter will happen.
We're not Keynesian since after 1980's. We're mostly trickle down only use monetary policy of Hayek of the 1900's... just Hayek on steroids. At least in the US and several other nations.
You'll hear about Keynesian policy occasionally in the US when they realize monetary policy all by itself is causing tent cities and working poor living in their cars or tents to skyrocket to the point of potential violent revolution, so they poop out some idiot policies that do very little in the long run: like cash for clunkers, or reduction in payroll taxes and lowering some federal tax brackets by a meager amount, or the recent stimulus checks.
Really, we're playing an old game of race to the bottom. It's old because every super economic power nation since Ancient Greece has played this out; in most of it literally they used slave labor. Today, it's tyrannized or simply corrupt nations and their destitute cheap serf or slave like labor. It's a type of labor insecurity. Underlying demand only propped up by the Central Banks of Nations and banks full of funny money handing out new ways to get quick money to buy stuff today, pay later.
Old days had some leverage too.
Race to the bottom tends to end terribly in several ways: long misery of mostly poor with a few super rich and their security forces or army in a strong arm like dictatorship. Revolution. War between other nations as a scapegoat to the failed nations ability to provide growing prosperity to many people.
It's not necessarily drunk insolvent Uncle Sam unless you're saying our "privately" owned banking and financial sector is Uncle Sam. Which they essentially are... Government Sax is the nick name for the Treasury department. The current Fed Chairmen worked for The Carlyle Group up until 2005, his education with a BA in Politics and doctorate in Law nothing to do with economics or finance... which is interesting.
The government isn't insolvent as it just prints money to its hearts content.
It the debt chain of the financial system that's insolvent, hence why they're trying to flood the system with money in hopes that people will be able to make their debt chain obligations and not cause the domino cascade effect of a crash.
You can have an insolvent government in the event that there is such low GDP and their currency isn't used for international trade at all nor as a reserve currency.
The US Dollar, British Pound, Euro, and Yen are both used actively as reserve currencies. Any of those currencies stop being used as such, can make it harder to keep purchasing power, and if a nation has a failed treasury sale where they don't sell all their bonds they have to offer and are unwilling to up the yield any further and thus don't sell the amount they needed to fund their government.
Also when nations take on more debt to GDP percentage at 100% to 200% things get spooky. And even with low interest rates, when most tax receipts go to paying for interest on the outstanding bonds/debts than on services, you can get some big problems. This can cause a money printer hyperinflation, or a withdraw from government spending that causes a hyper-deflation.
Neither are any good.
There is a fiscal balance nations should stay within, I personally think a national debt of 20% to 50% is healthy... allows for emergency spending that can temporarily exceed 100% of GDP. And make managing the interest on the debt possible.
But being at already 100% before an emergency is reckless.
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Famine and food shortages already happening in Sudan and much of the latitudes along Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. will intensify moving further latitudes... already drought and sun scorching is causing problems in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and California and moving to toward the plain states. I suspect based on models, food prices will spike by 2030 world wide... and you'll notice when certain food items once year round become seasonal... like tomatoes and lettuce. By 2050-60 wealthy nations will invoke rationing.
By 2080... I'll likely be dead so good for me... not for everyone else, famine maybe common even in wealthy nations.
It's food shortages and the very dramatic increase in crop yield decline and failures that will see us all flatfooted, well before the sea level changes.
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I thought he was making a huge mistake buying those ADR's (not really stocks) from China.
Very dumb. But even someone like him can make bad bets. It's knowing when to take a stop loss and get the heck out of dodge when your bet turns sour. Otherwise you hold massive bags... and you might learn from ding bats trading fake money for real money aka the crypto scam... those folks lucked out completely as they were caught up in a scam pump and dump and were holding early... unfortunately it trained them to be morons and many did not sell for real money and never locked in those profits as crypto falls apart...
Taking a stop loss ensures your bet doesn't turn into eventuality of forced selling (I need the money because I have huge bills and/or I lost my job and have no other income... or even worse... the value of the holding is literally untrade-able... it's bust chapter 7 liquidation goodbye... it's worthless).
And so many not understanding swing or day trading... the only reason a few actually do okay or even make money on it routinely is due to lots of study of charts... and risk management.... $2 dollars in wins for every $1 in losses.
10 trades... such ratio of 50% wins to 50% losses on those trades... you get get 5 wins for $2 each or $10 bucks... and the other 5 trades losing only $1 is $5 bucks lost... net gain of $5 profit.
And that's with a 50/50 win loss ratio. You're still making a profit.
BUT that means you take your lumps immediately limiting your loss to only $1 for potential gain of $2... AND it also means you have to know a trade potential that will provide a $2 gain for every $1 you're risking. Some take the losses, but haven't studied enough to know the target profit area to ensure they get $2 gain for every potential $1 loss. As soon as it's green... $1 up for their $1 risk... they cash out immediately. Or the really risky moron who goes past the $2 gain... and allow it to run to $3 or $5... hodling... never cashing out... and it suddenly reverses quickly to a loss or only less than the $2 gain they should have locked in.
Basically, trading takes time... it's a job. Lots of research and understanding how to read fundamentals of the underlying, market internals, macro economics, micro economics, and technical indications.
China in particularly has some bad things happening... they have the mother of all debt trap... essentially all their developers are bankrupt. China, Brazil, and Turkey were loading up on the debt binge while all other nations' had their debt problems in 2008. Now it's them and the rest of the world that never really got out of the debt trap.
There is no other nation to take that slack of being borrower of last resort like China, Turkey, and Brazil did.
It's sort of a game over period on that front.
More over, the idiocy of the world's monetary system, the US Fed Reserve, as unleashed so much debt lending to actually cause stagflation, that is inflation despite the prospects of recession/depression of lowering demand... that the only thing known to end such inflation is to raise interest rates and end easy debt binge policies to stop demand from going out of wack... so that supply can catch up to demand and grow higher than demand to cool rate of prices or even reduce the rate of prices ie. end inflation.
So China would be like investing in Brazil in 2015... very dumb. Or investing in Turkey just recently last few years... and be a massive bag holder of probably mostly worthless stuff in the long run... and nearly worthless stuff already.
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If we end up without any allies, the US dollar gets dropped as a major purchasing currency, we already had our non-food manufacturing devastated; we'll end the way the USSR went. Broke as fuck with a series of busted new currency introductions.
Oddly, like the USSR, our nuclear weapon systems are antiquated technology using 12 inch floppies.
Same deal happened with the USSR, their actual infrastructure was shit. Our interstate system, water, electrical, sewer mostly get shit rating of most of the country.
Croatia, Serbia, USSR, even Libya are prime examples how quick a once at least modest 1st or 2nd world country can go completely belly up in a matter of a few years.
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Democratic socialism isn't, and it is also a form of capitalism... we live in it. We have a mix economy social-capital: public roads, highways, utilities, ports, parks, judicial, fire departments, police, social security, current medicare and medicaid, military, etc. We need a system that involves more social balance, because we've gone so far to the capital balance that we're in oligarchy which cannot continue to exist unless it installs an authoritarian figure to make sure the workers stay in line, in a system that's getting worse in real income by the generation.
Key word democratic socialism. Nobody wants authoritarian rule. Communism in the manner of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, is the same as the capitalism under fascist Hitler, Mussolini, or the monarchies of old France, China, Russian Czar, etc.
None of us are subscribing to that.
Socialism is evil, sure. If its those latter non-democratic dictatorship like regimes.
In terms of logic, that's called straw man argument.
Now that I've called you out on that, try again.
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Well, I thought the Fed balance sheet got lower was due to some of the junk bonds the Fed bought reaching maturity... no... only a few of them mature the soonest in October this year. Most it's next year and further years. Only two mature this year:
RAYTHEON COMPANY mature date 10/15/2020 $1,000,000 par $1,008,143.18 maturity value.
KELLOGG CO mature 12/15/2020 $2,000,000 par $2,032,242.39 maturity value.
In fact from June/July period to July/Aug their holdings have doubled in corporate junk bond buying. :(
Must be their overnight to banks balance sheet being repaid. Fed is still goosing in a very unpresidented way buying junk bonds and junk ETF's and indexes and REITs.
Scroll to the below section and any of the available spreadsheets show you what the Fed bought for that month period.
Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility
August 10, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX**
August 3, 2020 PDF
July 10, 2020** PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
June 28, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
May 29, 2020 PDF | Transaction-specific Disclosures XLSX
April 29, 2020 PDF
March 30, 2020 PDF
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/reports-to-congress-in-response-to-covid-19.htm
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I agree with you Leo. I hate work. Nobody really likes to do it. But our technology isn't even close, no matter what sci-fi hype nonsense you hear, we're not even close to that at all. Go find out. Go to any manufacturing production line, mine that provides you with the various metals or elements or compounds for your washer and dryer, carpet, door knobs, soda pop, various computer components, foods, etc. And farms are also not even close to being automated.
While fewer are needed to run the same amount of production, you still need at team of people as various components break down constantly, and some days you have all sorts of things fall apart on the line. Medical requires quite a bit of labor, transportation from airplane, train, vehicle, etc. manufacturing to the pilots, train operator, drivers, etc.
We're not there yet. Elon Musk's own car plant had serious issues of over automating that actually didn't work well, and broke down constantly. He abandoned them because they were less efficient and simply weren't working. We don't have machines that can fix other machines, not even close. And we're talking about serious work that's not easy to fix, lots of mechanical engineering from transmission boxes, to high pressure nitrogen, CO2, tanks and lines, Ozone generators, Reveres Osmosis filters, Carbon filters, brine tanks, Sodium metabisulphite tanks, electric motors galore! on everything, etc. We're just not there yet. Not even close.
Basically, work is still required to produce all things.
So you're getting ahead of yourself pretending we live in a cartoon. We don't.
When technology does get there, which it should eventually at some point, then yes. I'm not going to guess when. Because we simply don't know. At the pace of technology as a whole, computer technology is advancing rapidly. But mechanical technology that puts computation into production is orders of magnitude slower. So likely in a few hundred more years, quite possibly in a few thousand more years.
But we can use what technological productive advances to work fewer hours with higher share of the immense productive increase.
I only take fault at what you're saying as its long after our great great great grand kids and nieces and nephews are pushing up daisies.
We need something now, or we'll never get to that utopia. Technology and civilization needs more time to advance. And it won't with the current system as its poised to collapse, as this type of economic idiocy in civilizations has continued since recorded history; specifically since the late bronze age collapse; and we keep having a late bronze age collapse over and over and over and over again. And is always followed for a long dark age periods where we regress into misery and even darker crueler brutal stupidity.
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Most of us millennials and the newer (our babies) Z's are fed up. Pun not really intended.
We have been pondering solutions. It's the X'rs especially the boomers who have been utterly brainwashed by the present system similar to a mix of Stockholm Syndrome to BDSM cult like... similar to some crypto nuts with magical words like yolo and hodl and going to the moon and FUD...
The solutions is the very employee employer relationship.
Enterprise must still remain liberated from central control structures: all Soviet style communism as well as right wing fascism was centralized capitalism; change the classification names of the aristocracy is the only difference.
What we need is democratized workplaces.
Workers, consumers, and shareholders have 1 vote. No more no less as to all operations of an enterprize.
For workers, they have 1 vote no matter their position. As well as free access create and vote upon petitions and raise matters of concern in meetings for votes as to all aspects of the operations of an enterprise.
Consumers of stake such as those who live in range of the workplace have stake to a degree that externalities give them 1 vote per all aspects of the operation.
Investors which can be a combination both or either or consumer or worker have 1 vote as to all aspects of the operation to the enterprise.
Motive would be beyond just money making profit, but the profit would expand into living arrangements, working arrangements, equity in pay, concern for location of work (you're not going to have workers en-mass vote their job away so the company can save $1.00 per share or a nickle a share or any price.
You won't have workers nor consumers living near by vote to save a nickle a share to spill garbage or toxic liquids that could get into the local water supply.
You're not going to have investors vote to destroy the very source of demand of their goods by saving short term on production by piss poor wages to save a penny in the short term on their earnings per share, nor do meaningless pump and dump scheme of share buy backs that have no real long term effect on the value of their shares any more than a stock reversal or split has presently.
And you wouldn't see investors nor labor pump executive compensation of orders of magnitude that of the majority employee positions.
And with only 1 vote per stake, and no cross over (if you already fit in any one category: shareholder, employee, consumer of stake) if you all or any one; only 1 vote. No matter how many shares and no matter if you're also a consumer and employee and a shareholder, you get absolutely ONE vote. And right to petition others of the same as to all aspects to the operations of the enterprise.
You keep capital formation via investors, but their power isn't propounded by the number of shares they own; they only get one vote. If they don't like the direction of the company is taking, they can sell their shares or stop buying them.
It's a co-op based model.
People still free and clear to start and be protected of a potential bureaucratic government that often hasn't any keen interest in the specifics of your goods/service production business.
And the control remains with the stake holders of the business.
This is how modernity has transition through history economically and politically.
It's the relationship to worker and distributor.
Started with slavery and slave master.
Then feudalism with peasant serf and lord.
Then transition to mercantilism that introduced the free merchant.
Merchants introduced the indentured servant and merchant.
Then modern times the concept of employee and employer.
So the next advancement must and will be that all employees are also the employer.
They become incumbent as one.
You have various take holders with their own vote, but since all entities get only 1 vote, the employees tend to get the majority stake; this ensures competitiveness can be achieved (workers picked by and for the purpose of the business are likely to have the most knowledge as to become the most competitive possible to provide the production and/services of their business).
While keeping the interest of the local communities and investors.
And as an investor of last resort; a Co-Op Reserve Bank that would provide at a discount to encourage such capital formation for these co-op style enterprises.
As well as a stock exchange that trade exclusively for such co-op businesses; no matter the number of shares you purchase in that business, you get 1 and only 1 vote for your proxy.
And face it, most of us own such small amounts our proxy today is even more meaningless... if everyone had 1 vote, a company trading 100 million shares to a billion shares outstanding, suddenly you 3 to 4 to even 5 orders magnitude more voting power in that one vote than you do now owning 10,000 or 1,000 or 500 or 100 shares.
We have a plan.
You all just been brain washed to think there is no other way.
The plutocrats/oligarchs whatever name you want to call these parasites have done their job well in their brainwashing dogma normalization.
It's what gives us the inducement to see the golden arches of McDonald's while traveling and thinking "OH GOOD! A place I'm familiar with and now I feel good... I can expect what meal I will get eating there. Along with the typical shits it gives me."
It short term makes you feel good, but does nothing good for or to you.
The robber barons did a number on the older generations.
It has fallen flat on us younger peoples as we've lived through this collapsing system.
I think similar to how Fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and Communist East Germany, Poland, Russia, etc. to their generations.
It hasn't put up the goods.
In our eyes, it has failed. And continues to fail.
And we're not dumb and ignorant of other nations. We know in the US how screwed we are concerning our medical system (that really doesn't exist) compared to the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, even freaking poorer countries like Cuba or Mexico, etc. etc.
The internet makes it impossible to hide.
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Very important about Venezuela is that it was worse before 1999, they're poverty was 48% reduced now to 37% because it was a disaster well before the social authoritarian government took over. Authoritarian because after the elections a vote was done by the people to remove checks and balances... something that I think any country should NEVER do, and if they do are automatically classified as authoritarian in my opinion.
But what they will get if we keep going down this untenable system, we will go the way of some authoritarian regime. Look at the uneducated shit wits drooling over Trump who makes authoritarian statements and flat out contradicts himself, and these buffoons state they like how he's a "strong" man. Every seed to every authoritarian regime was a collapse of another. And that's what not doing empirical scientific evidence based economics results.
All major nations that have universal healthcare pay about half in GDP as a nation, all secure, pay less taxes than we do on individual income of $90K family Income of $120K. And they don't have to pay insurance premiums, copays, and deductibles, and not be covered if "out of network".
That's fact.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/documents/___media_files_publications_fund_report_2017_jul_schneider_mirror_mirror_2017.pdf
And the GDP growth rate that occurs now at 2016 $3.337 trillion in all medical spending, over last 10 years 2006 total spending was $2.156 trillion; 64.6% increase in 10 years.
So if it increases by the same 64.6% by 2026 in the same idiot system we have today it will be $3.4 trillion we spend today in 2027 would be $5.59 trillion a year... or 6.46% yearly increase compounds over 10 years to $44.94 trillion.
The study actually addresses healthcare price increases and accepts that such increases would be stopped, but essentially capped no increase in prices nor decreases due to bargaining power of a universal system. Only reduces administration costs to 6% even though medicare historically is 2% administration cost.
$44.94 trillion projected to spend based on healthcare rate increases over 10 years - $32 trillion under a medicare for all system over 10 years.
So really you're looking at a nominal (not adjusted for inflation) savings of $12 trillion.
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11:03 sounds kind of the same ol' today in the US to France to Italy, etc.
Retail apocalypse, housing shortages because what is being built isn't affordable just the land itself is outbid because investors have consolidated and usual 1/3 to stocks, bonds, and real-estate don't build new constructions, but just buy current ones bidding up prices as developers fear holding the bag if they build and attempt to sell, small businesses especially getting hammered and on shaky ground, all soaked in debt, stock market that siphons more and more to dividends, etc.
Demand for commodities reveal there is no real underlying demand. With Brazil's now 6 year collapse in commodities from energy to agriculture to manufactured goods. Even China before the COVID19 pandemic was in a long 5 year decline. Overnight repo market all autumn long in the US was frozen banks stopped lending to each other, not enough cash for all the debt, so the Fed Reserve several times last fall 2019 had to step in and lend billions, at the same time they reversed their quantitative easing selling of "assets" loans, and started buying new "assets" loans from banks to provide banks with more cash the Fed then hopes those banks will start lending again to consumers, businesses, and between other banks in the "overnight" REPO market.
It's an investor/debtor fueled bubble.
Anything that stops the domino or juggling act, whatever metaphor you want to use, sets the crash in play... domino cascade or juggler has all the balls crash over his head.
And notice the tone of politics around the world. And watch what nations do with businesses giving them all the backstops: tax credits, lower taxes, protecting market share, providing unbid contracts, etc. they don't want whatever businesses that are profitable now to have hard time otherwise that can set the domino of default chain going crashing the entire system.
COVID19 and Saudi Arabia with Russia oil dump were the needle that popped the bubble.
It sucks in many nations and localities because economics for the majority of people never was becoming better; cost of living from gentrification high rents, insufficient new construction to often no construction, jobs that paid lesser and lesser, in the US and even some other nations with insurance costing more, in Europe couple the race to the bottome wage front with their lunatic austerity measures, etc.
There's a reason why the generations including much of generation X to the millennial generation to the new Z generation, prospects are worse than prior generations.
As if we learned nothing.
Things are different. We don't have a gold standard that frustrated monetary policy, instead we have 0% and even some places negative interest rates that do that for them.
Interesting rhyming of history.
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Superstition is dangerous. Have churches, but make them a meeting place to meet with people in the community, play basketball, do a play, dance, swim, whatever.
But the magical and illogical content is destructive to all humanity.
I think every civilization in the universe eventually throws off their superstitions, or ends up going insane with them and committing civilization suicide.
A species with command of nuclear weapons, bio weapons, etc. means mistakes a specie makes now costs the species' existence.
Throw of nonsense. It's the only salvation for us all.
We still have a lot of religious people in this country, most are Christian. You're touting that horn way to early. Have you not looked at actual Christian countries like Sweden, UK, Norway, Netherlands that persist with monarchies? They have fewer practicing religious than we.
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Let's face it, even if they have insurance, the reserve these insurance have are insufficient to pay everyone anyways.
Same thing happens in hurricane disaster areas and other mass disasters.
Insurance is largely a scam.
You are funny market distortion garbage nonsense just ignores the fact insurance is obsolete; they all distort magical notions of magical equilibrium or sufficient reserves to make the scam seem solvent in the event of mass claims.
Anyway, most of the time, like 99 percent of the time a mass disaster area is declared and mass damage has happened, the tens of billions or hundreds of billions that is authorized by the Federal government and maybe some of that from the state government typically is transfers directly to the insurance companies so that those who have insurance get some sort of payment for their claim.
Similar to long term or short term disability and extended healthcare.
Payments and insurance costs are recouped by the insurance company once the person is pushed onto SSI and Medicaid, they will be provided back payment from when they qualified, and all that back payment goes to the insurance company for paying out all that period and time, and those government programs take over afterwards.
So all the insurance company was, was just a credit card fronting the money in advance. Very little to no draws on reserves.
A nice little scam.
Truly, private insurance is an obsolete model for all sectors.
Even the small stuff that can be "convenient" for some to take out such as 1 or 2 year policy on damaged cell phones; of course your claim will be met via a preowned device refurbished and sometimes a "like" model; and it may accompany some sort of deductible $50 to $200 or more depending on the value of the original phone. At which point it's probably worth just buying a new one for nearly the same price.
I mean, even the small "cheap" "convenient" insurance is largely a scam.
And you have to talk about "market distortions" to make your lazy fair ferry story sound reasonable.
Dude, insurance and banking act as a market distorting device, everything we do in markets distorts markets, and the put and the call that is insurance or borrowing always distorts markets.
There are no magical equilibrium the price is right figure.
Everyone is just trying to get something for nothing.
And that's all that market freedom mumbo jumbo is all about.
Get serious. The inevitable payer of most claims and particularly during disasters is ourselves collectively via our tax dollars. So maybe our tax money we pay should cover this stuff, it does anyway, and that's after we also paid a private insurance company so they can make huge profits.
I think if we hadn't had fire departments, and still had the old 19th century and prior multiple fire service company scam, you would be defending that BS by stating how you could make multiple copies of your proof of purchase and do drills on finding your particular company's firehouse... and bla bla bla!
LOL!
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You do realize Venezuelans post youtube videos... average folks... I don't get them saying they want the US to invade.
Besides the few fraction of people who do, as an American, you and they can go fuck yourselves. I'm sick of my country intervening when we're bankrupting and hollowing out our own country economically with our bloated military spending. We lack universal healthcare, housing construction is way too low to provide affordability both renting and buying, our worker and educational system doesn't work leaving an entire generation in tens of thousands of dollars in debt that cannot be cleared via bankruptcy protection, our own inflation as wage purchasing power is that of 1974.
So go fuck off. Fight your own revolution. If you have actual support for it, it shouldn't be too hard to muster your own fucking armies.
Have fun, and despite you have no gumption for putting my fellow soldiers in harms way, I wish you good luck, and try not to get yourself killed.
And hope its over quickly as civilians always suffer more so than just what suffering comes from hyper inflation. Right now you're seeing difficulty buying stuff without using US dollars or some other currency. Civil war: you're looking out thousands dead every city along the streets, in homes and other buildings. The stench of the rotting is only comparable to the aftermath of a terrible hurricane in a shantytown.
And what gets put in its place could be worse than what you're crying about now.
Now you've been warned: go have your war. Leave us out of it.
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This is an oligarchy crisis, its when we put so much emphasis on net worth as if it means anything other than you won the casino jackpot or that you're only good at a narrow thing that got you that jackpot winnings. It doesn't mean your some mystical wise sage.
These people have gone fucking insane narcissism and sociopath.
This fuck twat doesn't understand competitive market principles, and the many violations medical sector just education, just natural monopolies like utilities, just like fire services, roads, ports, military, judiciary, etc. violate competitive market principles making for profit motive method to stimulate competition that can't exist in those sectors bad.
Healthcare violates it in many ways particularly there is no real substitute for medication; you need medicine or you're in misery and/or die. Demand and supply doesn't change the price very much or at all as people will pay any price. Inelastic demand curve.
Additionally, hospitals and other medication and appliances are only utilized by a small amount of people, but require large amounts of money to produce, it has no economy of scale. Same concept that sewer and water works and electrical works and other natural monopolies (fire service, roads, rail, etc) is cheaper to have one set of power lines, roads, rails, sewer lines than have several and having each customer pay at least double or triple or quadruple the price.
And like fire, police, judiciary, legislative, executive, education, etc. a moral principle exists to prevent absolute corruption in the function of these services in price and quality.
We have an oligarchy crisis in this country among many others.
The only way you'll get affordable care with high quality is under a single payer system with the system capable of negotiating pricing, and capable of being an operating provider both at hospital, clinics, and producing appliances and medicines particularly; if no other business produces the medicine or refuses to negotiate; then it maybe produce at cost by the us the people.
Profit motive doesn't work in sectors that are naturally not competitive. It's a fucking reality. It's why 178 nations of 201 have universal healthcare. Many of them don't allow privately owned natural monopolies like electric production and grids, sewer systems, water works, etc. And those idiot nations that do are often classified as being in perpetual developing status (2nd or 3rd world wealth/incomes). What occurs is very little production gains, but lots of price increases that don't get spent back in poor country, but extracted to pay some share holders in the private water or electric or sewer companies.
Simple economics explains how to allocate social mix of economy and where private mix of economy. It's not fucking cryptic or unknown, It's called the study of fucking economics.
And if you become a billionaire or millionaire it doesn't fucking mean you suddenly know everything. There are musicians, sports players, actors, painters, composers, bitcoin casino winners who cashed out in time who are millionaires and some damn near billionaires.
This is the dangers of putting emphasis at all on how rich a person has become.
It means precisely dick.
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We had a second primary election in May, when you get a ballot for that they asked if you wanted to receive an ballot by mail for November, I marked yes.
So in Idaho most of us are likely going to vote by mail.
The election just before the big lock downs was literally a week before them sometime in March for a primary vote and some levies that that was already voted down in November, but they got their levy approval this round because hardly nobody bothered to vote.
What really frustrated me, I cited that I have not party affiliation. So they literally gave me no DNC nor RNC ballot, but a ballot for a judgeship only. In Idaho, you don't have to cite party affiliation, but demand one or the other ballot RNC or DNC and vote.
Very screwed up. Fortunately, it was the second primary, not the first, and really didn't matter.
I got to vote in the initial primary.
Anyway, I'll be getting an absentee ballot to my address this year for the November elections.
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Why does nobody in the real world aka the 99% of us worker bees really use Twitter... okay perhaps 3% of the scammers riding the coat-tails of oligarchs... and the propaganda networks of all the news channels that nobody believes anymore in some non-journalism forward whatever an oligarch poops out as if it's news, and 2% of the morons who buy tabloid magazines gad fly goober heads who have no life of their own.
And that's why Twitter can't make money... nobody really uses it other than oligarchs... and among these oligarchs they play various swindler games in their scams like Musk rat... and all the others.. and then they engage in stupidity drama to entertain some nit wit gad flies with no life of their own, and provide non-journalism to the propaganda networks to propound some narrative to manipulate the masses one direction or another among their own interests... perhaps one faction of oligarchs war against another or simply to push for one interest of making more billions to secure their dynastic wasp into the next two centuries.
Nobody essentially in the mass scale, nobody uses it... nobody cares... eyes roll among the 95% hearing about Twitter... they're twits... kids don't use that platform... ME and Z's don't... nobody uses it... it's garbage. Similar to LinkedIn and many other social media stuff... those platforms are a dime a dozen, low barrier to entry with server space being extremely cheap anyone can compete and there is no need for loyalty in any of these things.
Only reason Youtube itself has sustained is big money bags from IPO money providing huge legal teams to stop copyright law suits... so big producers and holders of copyrights instead of drowning youtube in copy right law suits like they did with Napster they decided to just allow consolidation of one giant platform and drown it out and eventually take it over similar to cable tv in owning the ad money.
Big IPO money and debt printer go burr allowed FB to do the same gobbling up platforms because there are no barriers to make another FB or similar. Only way they can stay relevant and not become a Myspace used by a fraction of the people over time, is to buy up any new one they think is a threat. Even then they run out of that IPO and ad dollar actual income money and junk bond and regular loans. Discord is at this time the most used among cross generations... and soon that will probably be replaced with something else... just as discord sort of humped reddit out.
Barrier to entry is that of a yard sell... there isn't any.
Twitter is probably concerned as other companies... if Musk is just scamming and has no actual intention nor capability in purchasing for the price he claims.... Musk hasn't been able to deliver on anything promised... it's always toned down or mostly ignored as he uses the tactic of moving immediately onto some other scam.
He's huckster and con jobber who has to keep dancing, and even then he's so caught up in scams the music will just go splat no matter what... but the moment he stops dancing the music will cease. And some of the potential criminal activities Musk is possibly committed from embezzling NASA funds to buy junk bonds of his cousins Solar City scam which has a host of other government local and federal scams grants, along with civil scams on TSLA shareholders on purchasing the bankrupt bogus scam of Solar City... then the host of other weirdo scams he calls companies... he's just collecting rubes with money in private offerings... then he goes after the rube retail investor or just simple person who never really has actively invested (as they have so little to do so in the first place aka they have no actual savings and are likely in debt to their eyeballs therefore have no real business investing yet) he goes after that fomo nonsense to keep his own debt juggling and stupidity going.
Eventually though... the house of cards comes crashing down. And I think we're very close... Musk is just one example.... social media the same... just examples... you can look at most industries and things or gizmos of today's economy. Banks have been at it not soon after 2008 collapse... they were all completely insolvent, no more than 2 to 3 years later, they're at it again approving loans to anybody with a pulse... Fed Reserve "buying" all their CBO's and junk. Music never stopped.
Problem becomes with a Fed Balance sheet to large (Fed does have a limit... it's the total bank reserves (deposits) in the member bank system) or they too cannot stay solvent.
But prior to that, they are the global monetary system... and they unleashed so much liquidity they've caused all other nations' currency to undergo very high inflation. Nations already flirting with hyperinflation and in that realm now. Thus they will need to increase interest rates... draw back their balance sheet to take all that debt based liquidity out.
And unfortunately lots of that debt itself is insolvent... it's trash.
I think this could spell the end to this idiotic notion since the 1908 of the Fed Reserve System. It has too many flaws and has not helped anyone since its inception except for a very few entrenched elites/oligarchs at the sheer horror and misery of everyone else. Like monarchies. Or dictators. Or other oligarchies of old.
Just doesn't work.... it was only a tool for the rulers that be to establish, maintain, and grow their power. At the eventual misery of us all. Harmful murderous parasites.
So far, all the Fed Reserve has done is give rise to the massive hucksters and liars without shame to pump scams onto everyone... massive pump and dumps... 1908... then we had a collapse 1924.... followed by the big one 1929.... and just over and over.
So fractional lending scheme and especially allowing a cartel banking system like the Fed Reserve to manage credit/money.... not a good idea... history points this out clearly.
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I think it's so overt that it's funny, the millionaire actors want a republican essentially. And one that's gay... token gay guy. Biden? Really? Seriously? Nobody not even self described centrist like Biden. And Kamala? Seriously? Finnish long ago coined that word correctly.
Status quo. Keep my millions, things are doing great for us!
They haven't a clue.
And if they're uncomfortable stuffing the money machine ballot box, then restrict private fund raising for political ads, and do only public financing and make requirements for printed press, spoken press, televised, and internet press to offer equal free allotments of airtime for all candidates as a public service.
Than you won't even have these bribe sessions, as they would be illegal. And you're precious identity is concealed. Ironically, when your profession puts you into the public spotlight anyway, a brand you want to keep clean... then be clean. Can't have it both ways.
And the vote is always private. Bribes though aren't. And shouldn't even be legal.
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The mechanism for QE is about total national debt; total bonds including goofy banking stuff that was now held by the Fed Reserve, that was "bought" by the Fed Reserve via the Treasury "printing" money. Essentially, the $4 trillion of QE debt owned by the Fed Reserve are book marker bonds, that could be resold to an open market bond market should inflation start to rise very quick that causes them alarm.
Of course the fuckers don't count largest most effecting prices as inflation including housing, rents, insurance, tuition, etc. The most expensive inflation items. They count bullshit items like non-durable goods (coffee makers, toasters, towels, cups, etc) and durable goods (washer/driers, AC units, hot water heaters, etc), and then they play mental gymnastics with food prices, if certain foods go higher they assume that higher price isn't as high because they'll buy more fructose corn syrup or some alternate.
Most dishonest method of measuring inflation ever as they exclude the biggest monthly expenses, and calculate what they do include in dishonest manner.
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Past is always better isn't true in the grand scheme of Silmarillion.
1) In the very beginning Melkor announces he wants to be master and king of Arda, he is driven away.
2) The Valar make Arda into a garden to their delights, raising the two lamps.
3) Melkor sees this and destroys the two lamps, and corrupts everything of Middle Earth.
4) Valar take the continent of Valinor and raise the mountains of Aman, the Pelóri. Where they built their own paradise to the exclusion and protection against Melkor.
5) Upon the creation of the two trees in Valinor, the elves are born in Middle Earth where Melkor reigned. Things sucked ass for the elves.
6) The Valar make war on Melkor and capture him, the elves see in a distance the light and sounds of the battle of the Valar. Melkor is captured, and most of his minions destroyed, and what remains of them is sent into hiding.
7) Elves migrate toward Valinor, some remaining in Middle Earth, others getting all the way to Valinor creating wonderful cities.
8) Melkor is released, and he immediately begins trying to corrupt the elves of Valinor... he's about to be discovered, so he and a creature from the void, Melkor during the music of the Ainur and when he fled for Arda at the very beginning of time, often sought knowledge and explored the voids outside the realms of Arda, and even during the music you could say outside the Timeless Halls of Eru. He crashes the trees.
9) The most of the elves leave Valinor to seek revenge on Melkor now called Morgoth.
skipping even the Númenóreans who helped the elves in Middle Earth's northern Beleriand from total destruction were prized with longer life and an island content.
The running down of time has to do with things becoming more stable... the glories of the past, had exponentially more hideous dark periods that make the era of the Lord of the Rings look like a minor tiff.
Tolkien didn't like allegory, and wasn't writing for that purpose. You get whatever it is you get out of his writings; the allegory is, as he paraphrased, any allegory is only projection by the reader. Which is fine. It's the large purpose to use stories fact and/or fiction to describe other things in a poetic manner to get our thoughts across about topics of the day.
But he didn't do this on purpose. His large goal as he stated that all topics return to one thing, fear... and that fear being death, and how that fear mangles the happiness and prosperity and beauty of the worlds in both reality and in fiction.
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Someone in the comments said a multi headed hydra... exactly:
I feel the same, business and finance major, It's like the calm before the storm, like wandering the decks of the Titanic before it sinks unable to change the disaster.
So doing what I can. Saving as much money as possible because it's going to be scary for everyone... it'll be the great depression that was only put off due to China and the US flooding their financial systems; but they only succeeding in making the problem orders of magnitude worse. But nobody reports it... that would upset the market and make the party stop early. But it is reported in pieces, the data is available, this isn't conspiracy woo woo, fuck I hate conspiracy shit. No this is raw data. It's like that debt you might have you hate to look at, that's what society does with this bad news data.
Anyway, whatever eventually starts the stampede, many dams will break. List of them below, which one bursts first causing a cascading effect is anyone's guess... mine so for are vehicle loan delinquencies are on the rise, and business CLO's are expected to have more who can't mak their big October payments and next years April/May payments.
1) Credit card debt all time high even surpassing 2008
https://www.magnifymoney.com/blog/news/u-s-credit-card-debt-by-the-numbers628618371/
2) Vehicle debt surpassing credit card debt and not being all time during the period of the last crash. And auto loan debt is now in the stages of increasing delinquencies this summer 2018.
https://www.autofinancenews.net/auto-debt-and-late-stage-delinquencies-on-the-rise/
3) Mortgage debts surpassing last time all time highs.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/data/mortoutstand/current.htm
4) Commercial real-estate still well beyond valuations of the last recession, while retail continues to tank.
https://www.cbre.us/about/media-center/lending-figures-q2-2018
https://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/cre-multifamily-mortgage-debt-outstanding-spikes-in-first-quarter-mba
5) Business Collateralized Loan Obligation same concept as the mortgage CLO's, have increased every year since the great recession and have boomed the last few years including this one. Of which several companies credit ratings are in the shitter, likely to go Ch 7, big payouts are expected in October to which a critical amount are likely not able to pay, then another big set of payments are scheduled to be made in April/May 2019... so that one you have some period to look for. Many unicorn businesses during the new "tech" bubble that have never turned a profit. Some are well known like Tesla, and others not so much.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-10/clos-have-hit-a-peak-when-mom-and-pop-show-up
6) Total stock market debt is all time record highs, and near double from the all time high of 2007 $378 billion... is now $652 billion August this year 2018... all time high was $658 billion in May 2018.
http://www.finra.org/investors/margin-statistics
http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=278&category=8
7) Real (adjusted for inflation) income average is that of 1974.
This one particular concerns me, as this sets the stage mortgage and commercial multi family real-estate debt to crash... too high rents see defaults from renters which is on the rise, and mad dash for firms and individuals to buy properties well above what they could ever collect in rent to make the debt payment. At least renting in 2007-8 was still affordable, and a safe haven for those burnt on the housing purchase or result of lay offs and couldn't pay their mortgage... now they can't even pay their rent. And those firms who bought well beyond inflated multidwelling units can't pay their mortgage.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/real-wages-are-essentially-back-at-1974-levels-report-shows/ar-BBLUiNe
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All these fuck faces from Bolton to Cheney who keep pushing the war racketeering conglomerates need to be tried for treason, evidence being so overwhelming likely resulting in their guilt should be all put to death as described literally by our constitution.
And we must stop the military machine of war profiteering. Simply require all weapon supplies of the military from fighter jets to rifles to tanks be 100% by the US government. No profit from war only in time of emergency when the Congress has made an open declaration of war against another country, and only during that period, and only with max profit margin of 1%. Any surplus above bust be refunded by contractors to the government. Failure to to do so would be considered treason, punishable by death.
All the weapons companies can go fly fucking kite, we produce it at costs, and no profit motive to encourage ass hats to lead us into perpetual wars and "conflicts".
And maybe we won't have a DOD that $600 billion a year on average, spending more than the next 7 highest military spending nations combined to which we're allies.
Perhaps we could join the civilized world in having universal healthcare at a fucking fraction of the cost of what we currently spend on DOD... seriously if Medicare was allowed to negotiate prices as every other fucking countries medical system does to prevent racketeering, a universal healthcare system would cost about $250 billion dollars a year, universal no tuition and some room/board higher education would only be $80 billion a year.
So much we could do with $600 billion a year.
Gets squandered on making us less safer so war racketeering fuck heads can keep making money.
But then there's healthcare, our own medicare system cannot even negotiate with hospitals, pharma, clinics, etc. Red flag of what a corrupt oligarchy we are in the US.
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He's about my parents age, about a decade older. My parents are fortunately okay financially, my dad has VA for his medical, has pension from the same company for his 35 years, and social security... and he had to retire early due to glaucoma with his diabetes.
My job, we have some elderly regular and elderly temp... someone made a snarky comment about her being a grandma you gotta give her some time, I said, we'll be in the same boat... ALL OF US. We have no defined pension, we have the joke that's called a 401K that gets scraps that mathematically impossible to accumulate the amount required for a decent retirement based on how much the contribution from the companies we work with, and amount we're able to contribute given the extreme rent and home prices along with all other items that have sky rocketed and that's ignoring the $1.5 trillion in student loan debts many of us have to make less than our parents... race to the bottom. It's just an ordeal for some to save for a years worth of expenses. And you cannot count on the stock market giving any return. 300 year historical data would say it collapses utterly every 50 to 80 years, and that during golden eras, usually its every decade hence the bad stigma it had through out the 1600-1900's as being highly speculative for anyone how doesn't purchase 10% or more of a controlling stake in a company. They quite literally considered small players in a few shares freeloading gambler rakes.
Race to the bottom. And it's come full circle. So called developing countries like Brazil, China, Vietnam, India, etc. are in deep financial and economic crisis... the magical sweat shops that were suppose to vanish when their "boot straps" slaving for them would poof them away... never has, never will... some just played a game of hot potato (leave China for a few years for Vietnam... then hop to Malaysia... then hop to Peru... then hop to Argentina... then hop back to China... then hop to Vietnam..)
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It's why I always put unaffiliated on all government stuff.
I tend to vote democrat and independent.
I did once vote for a republican, the candidate won being in a red state, he was over the school in our state... and his term ended in corruption and scandal over his idea to issue K-12 students HP lap tops. He stood to make millions from the deal.
Why anyone would trust GOP candidates is beyond me anymore, even if they appear to have some interesting ideas. And I'm about the same thought on DNC candidates.
We're a empty republic; corrupt like so many other countries other non-corrupt countries laugh at. And we probably still today laugh at. But now all nations are laughing at us.
Time to trust bust both corporations, but also our bogus two party system. They're not two parties, they're pacifiers representing oligarchs that like gays and think abortion is legal for the woman to decide, and the other that doesn't. About the only difference.
Two decisions that have long since decided, in probably in the best logical manner.
So there's no difference. Other than who they pacify.
Right wingers: Pacify the usually utterly ignorant and superstitious religious advocating cultists, and wanna be oligarchs and mid to high level management.
Left Wingers: pacify the green, I'm not a hippy okay, but I think we need to take care of mother earth... usually ignorant on all subjects they're not formally trained or educated but have similar strong convictions based on cultural circumstances and random butt yank made up stuff from friends and themselves... similar to that of the general right winger.
And they only have to pacify 30% of the population when about half or 1/3 vote... the rest don't even bother.
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Boise is actually dropping in population 3 percent in 2019 and 2020.
Reason affordability.
Rich people from other states, we Idahoans like to blame California, but many come from everywhere New Jersey to New York to Florida to southern states to mid northern states... everywhere. I was born Pocatello, adulthood 3 years in Idaho Falls and moved to Boise in 2004; in 2017 I moved closer to work in Diaper town for lower housing prices and easier commute to present.
It's becoming like Jackson Hole, where millionaires were displaced by billionaires.
Our state caters to the rich, and eliminate the poor. Even if local cities pass ordinance that limit landlords from charging whatever they want for application fees on rents, the oligarch toady governors of last few decades veto it, as it infringes on their masters money making strategies.
It's clean because its a fairly dead city. Similar to Oklahoma city, it's a desert playground for a few lower class tourists out and about, and the rich who randomly decide to visit for a few days out of the year.
It was a hopping town when I first moved in 2004, robust college town crazy as any college town.
But by 2008 it was a real-estate bust. Even by 2015 the rich who retreated Idaho and bought lots of farm estates around the area, and a mansion, started selling them around 2018 and 2019 as they found it boring; no longer fearing the pitch forks.
We have problems all over Idaho on affordable housing. Speculators come in and violate county and even state and city laws, and the goons in charge who have brain washed the electorate that typically have a 34% to 36% turnout on non-presidential elections, do whatever they can to help speculators and the like to "create economic prosperity".... consigning many such as in Ketcham to have a rather Oliver Twist pathetic sir may have a camp ground to pitch my tent on at least, petition. Very pathetic. When they should be petition the vast emptiness on whoever owns some of the land around the tiny town of Ketchum in literally middle of nowhere to force sell to develop in competition with public and private developers so that they may rent or buy affordable homes; reduced to beg for camping grounds that still price at $500 to $600 month not including any water or electricity used, what was once the price of a 1 to 2 bedroom apartment just in 2015, or 9 years ago... such rentals in small towns simply don't even exist. Larger towns western side Boise area, range from $3K to $1.2K; keep in mind it's a poor state, most people make $36K a year individually. And combined its $52K; actual numbers that adjust for census and credit reporting inflation (people inflate their incomes on surveys and credit applications for obvious reasons... to get the loan and to hopefully show less risk thus get a lower interest rate).
That's the reason for the goof on badgers and wolverines attacking out of staters trying to move in.
They're displacing Idahoans. And then they have the ridiculousness to complain about our very much seasonality in weather. It changes and changes big from extremely hot summers, suddenly chilly falls, super cold and sometimes severely snowy winters, to a miserable snow to rain to snow to rain wondering if summer will come spring, back to suddenly super hot summers.
And many that come from rich states, are just regular working classes peasantry as most of the country. So they get jobs locally and complain their pay sucks. And we wonder... no kidding and you took that apartment that I had a lease for $780 and offered $1K... congrates, you screwed us and yourself. Wonderful. Now before you move and start flashing your stupidity around, do your research and offer properly because like most "everyone loves a landlord" they're greedy as all get out, and we have fewer and fewer regulations as we once did since zealot let oligarchs screw everyone politics took over the state, they will not drop these rents until we have another 2008 to 2010 exodus, as we the area had in 2001 to 2002 prior to my personal arrival in 2004.
When things go bust here, they go bust LOL!
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Since 2000, every study demonstrates universal healthcare was by far cheaper and better quality than private healthcare WHO and Mirror Mirror Reports by the Common Wealth Fund.
Currently, even our medicaid and medicare program are unable to negotiate prices themselves, instead must follow whatever private insurance companies have negotiated regionally... most idiotic concept ever, why not let private banks have access the Bureau of Printing and Engraving via the US Treasury to issue money at a discount or just for free and get paid a dividend by the very open cookie jar... oh wait, the Federal Reserve catering directly and only to private banks lending to them overnight loans at discount rates, and most recently buying $4 trillion in bad debts from these private banks and a combination of US Treasury bonds directly to keep interest rates down. And still paying out to the same banks 6% of proceeds from the Federal Reserve... side topic, but seriously we need to essentially give private banks access to the printing press so they can essentially be promised profits and liquidity to run day to day... free market my hairy ass. And that's fine, so long as its stable. But let's not kid ourselves, no market is "free" or "let it be". And when they are, they don't tend to last very long.
Currently we already spend $3.3 trillion in consumer spending total both private and public on healthcare, or 17.1% of GDP 2017, total GDP 2017 was $19.390 trillion.
$32 trillion over 10 years is already at least a trillion dollars less... but likely would be even less over all if such a universal system could actually negotiate prices itself since medical insurance companies would no longer exist; and provide the new universal healthcare system the ability to buy out and develop its own hospitals, and even pharma factories including Rx and appliances production should the hustlers of few oligopolies of big hospital and big pharma not want to meet sensible negotiations.
Fact of the matter, healthcare violates all of the competitive market principles, so it shouldn't be a surprise for profit motive in this sector utterly fails to provide best quality at the lowest possible prices; instead it does quite the opposite. As empirical (logical) economics would forecast.
Reason why other sectors that violate one or all severely the competitive market principles are often not for profit motive supplied or if such exists do so extremely poorly... utilities like water, sewer, trash, electricity are natural monopolies, and yes idiot US has many private monopolies in utilities, and based on the private vs public cities and counties, the private for profit legal monopolies tend to charge more than the public owned supply. Hence why most places still have public sewer, water, and electricity; we're not complete dimwits only halfwits.
For profit motive only works better than public ownership when in sectors that don't violate the competitive market principles and rules/laws/regulations ensure competitive market principles are not broken and are upheld like consumer protections providing perfect knowledge of reviews, quality controls via inspections, certifications, requiring full disclosure of contents and agreements to operations, etc.
US, the people in general, and the oligarchs themselves have capitalized on not thinking empirically/logically/scientifically about anything, especially economics. Such idiot nonthinking has become the robber barons escape from their cave they were put in when we nearly went either fascist or authoritarian communist Stalin/Mao style in the 1930's until about 1970's. Now the robber barons are out of their hole and they want their idiot brainwashed buffoon loving masses to do as oligarch says. Keep'em all halfwits, intelligent or thoughtful enough to do labor for me and buy my stuff. But not smart enough to ask questions and understand how to discern answers to those questions, and don't even give them a chance to even think of such questions... such blasphemy can't even enter your mind... just roast your mind on some sports or music or how about drink yourself into an oblivion or clog your face with some fast food fried and grease.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
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I like Blythe a lot.
Just one issue I have with the last thing he mentioned: He hasn't been in manufacturing for a while... cotton swabs or coffee makers or socks or soda pop or bottle water or banking soda or toilet paper, etc. such equipment components for these parts are dime a dozen and are often sold or reused and modified and put into a production line in a plant within a month. And they've become very eager beavers to make it to distribution when orders are very very high; so they pay for welders and the very makers of such machines around the clock to have it put in and bring something that would in typical 8 hour days taking 2 to 3 months, they can compact that down to 2 weeks for first production.... sometimes lots get thrown away as tweaks maybe needed to the machines and production is a bit slow at first, but that's typical of slower setups too. That's an unavoidable process that usually takes about another 2 weeks to 2 months to begin optimal quality and efficiency.
I have watched and participated in it here in the US.
Yes, the US still does manufacture things albeit not that much, and it's often third parties doing it for major brands as a franchise selling the stuff to a major distributor that the big box store than make orders from.... and most of it is hygiene, up scale small appliances, food, beverages, food, beverages, medicines OT and RX, oh and did I say food and beverages?
There is one issue, but this applies to all manufacturing in everywhere: USA, Germany, China, France, Belgium, etc. doesn't matter. Is input supply chains. Changing from one input producer to another can be a pain, both in extra transportation costs which is often the biggest problem, second often biggest problem quality/compatibility with your machines; you can a bunch of soda pop cans that are packaged like shit, so first layers of soda cans are scrapped.
Or you switch to a different cap producer for tooth paste for bottle water... they're all squished or otherwise slightly off, so you get many missing cap products that get scrapped, and you may have issues meeting with this new or temp input producer to fix the problem.
So that can throw wrenches into things. It can do so even with staying with the same input supplier particularly during change in material or branding or design.
But it doesn't halt production; it's not even a fence let alone a wall in production operations.
It's not that difficult to set up shop. And Rx or OT medicines, among the more restrictive and tightly controlled for obvious reasons, often most plants try to have lines that can turnkey other product... already have their inspections and GMP guidelines written just for such occasion pre-approved and ready to go. Only time waiting is the first batch produced needing final testing to ensure product conformity.
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We're a brainwashed nation from all the oligarchs.
BUT that good news, misery sort of has people rethink everything... and particularly dogma they've been spoon fed forever and ever.
However, it's a double edge sword, our nincompoop population conditioned to eat every advertisement BS pushed down their often bloated fat faces, can just side more with indoctrination: Stockholm syndrome.
On the positive, many of us Americans have internet buddies and have actually visited them over seas to Europe or Japan or even Canada... couple that with medical "tourism" aka desperation for medical help that won't bankrupt them,, people realize our medical system or lack thereof is a human crime. And not normal ANYWHERE, even in poorer countries... lots of medical tourism to Turkey and Mexico for instance, not just to Canada, UK, Japan, or Germany or other nations of Europe.
Or a joke of a nation and with the internet people are realizing it. But they're also realizing it's near futile at present as various mini and large oligarchs control EVERYTHING about our various political parties which they own both (easy to do when there are only 2) and even the 3rd or 4th party formations are just to make it easier for the dominant two parties to split one or the other. With very little chance an third party or independent can get anywhere near an election win.
Gerrymandering coupled with campaign briber aka campaign financing via SPACs and other bribery, that grift is very bad. I find it funny how our own nation and investor morons say other oligarchs love the USA due to the very trustworthy courts... aka the oligarchs can bribe the courts. Trust? More like bought.
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The only solution to the re-entrenchment of oligarchy and plutocracy:
Co-op with a Fed Reserve Co-Op Bank lending directly at a discount (as does the Fed Reserve of all nations to private for profit banks) to non-trade-able co-op enterprises where ALL workers have 1 vote as to all aspects to the operation of the business.
End any perceived need for an aristocracy; like slave masters and later nobility of old had proven that they're simply evil parasites devoid of any value whatsoever.
And it keeps the businesses in the hands of specialist workers that know how to produce the best possible methods.
No such enterprise would put profit for the sake of:
A)polluting their or their customers environment.
B) Offshore to to save on costs if it means their jobs, or is just swapping locations where pollution controls and laws are not enforced.
C) 80% to 95% of profits wouldn't go to a private bank and a few plutocrats apple carts; quite literally most companies that are profitable could still double labor pay and walk away with 60% to 75% of the profits.... that's doubling everyone's pay at the business (excluding the Chief Executive titles ridiculous pay).
D) Capital expenditures to make the plant run better: safer, produce better quality, reduce costs, increase efficiency would get passed much faster and more accurately than waiting to convince disinterested slobs who meet a few quarters and prance around like feudal lords with actors using the market gimmick excuse. Or even worse, activist shareholders who don't allow executives to do the best decision; as they're interested in taking as much profit as quickly as possible in dividends. Long term means nothing to them, they'll sell the stake in a few years as they change up their portfolios. Meanwhile raid that company. And if it doesn't produce enough in profits, just take loans, float bonds, and sell more stock, on preferred shares funnel that credit as dividends in our bank account leaving the enterprise empty and hollow and fragile as a stack of playing cards.
Co-op economy is really the only method to advance us beyond the apparently ineffective economic system.
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I served in the Air Force. We practiced various combat situations. This is similar to defensive fighting position. The orders were always simple. And never involved shoveling closer on the knees or any of that nonsense like crossing the legs.
It was simply:
Once determined they're unauthorized approaching your DFP:
0) Halt!
1) Weapon down!
2) Hands high!
3) Fingers spread apart!
4) Step forward 5 paces! (to get them away from the weapon).
5) Stop!
6)Keep Hands high!
7) Kneel!
8) Lay forward!
9) Legs spread out!
10) Arms spread out!
11) Fingers spread!
If they complied, the next two behind would take over at the DFP so your wingman and yourself could report what you saw and did immediately to CQ, and get some more soldiers to take the person into custody.
If the person put the weapon down, but continued to walk forward with hands high, you used non lethal force: butt stroke, thrust, slash, etc. Or if available taser or pepper spray.
This is for a war zone.
The moment you see them put the weapon down, observe no other weapon around them, and they're making attempts to follow your orders, it's no longer legal to use lethal force.
It's especially required to be patient because you maybe saying this in Farsi or Arabic or some other language entirely. They maybe trying to tell you their entire life story, you just patiently keep issuing the instruction until its finally complied.
I haven't a clue what these fucking idiot cops were thinking.
We're more cautious about shooting people in war zones than at home.
If you did something like this in the military, and it was on video... come on, this is cold blooded murder. At least 2nd degree murder.
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And one wouldn't "free markets" or better explained in definition as "let whoever do whatever with whatever to sell or buy stuff".
Because you would constantly being sold bad stuff, wrong stuff, shitty stuff. And capitalism always concentrates towards duopolies and monopolies as she's explaining in the video.
The only reason for profit motive function works is for competitiveness. Rules must be established firstly on what sectors of the economy even have natural competition or don't: utilities like roads, sewers, water, electricity, etc. are natural monopolies not competitive at all, and forcing many sewer providers to exist would only cause more redundancy forcing per customer break even cost to go up, as each sewer company would pay the same costs laying pipe and sewer treatment plants, but with sharing fewer customers to make up for the identical redundant cost.
Various sectors that seriously violate competitive market principles should never be privately owned and operated or should be highly regulated: prisons, civil and criminal courts, police force, military forces, healthcare particularly hospitals and clinics, health insurance programs, pension provisions and protection programs, etc.
And even for the most competitive sectors like grocery retail, food processing, clothing production, clothing retail, household appliance production, building construction, etc. still requires rules to ensure competition avoids inauthentic comparative advantage: cutting corners, not disclosing corners being cut: such as adding poor ingredients, not using sound construction methods, piss poor wiring, etc. And prohibiting certain corners that must not be cut ever to avoid fire, sickness, and injury using the product or services; usually requiring inspections and certifications on those inspections, education with a license demonstrating knowledge in that field, etc.
Let it be markets are a free for all, whenever attempted they seem great at first for about a year in, then suddenly they crash in gigantic bust.
Globally nations moved very far to that just in the last 60 years, and we see booms and busts, each one often more violent than the last. This oscillation shakes itself apart in war and civil war always.
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Fact of the matter, we cannot fall for false dichotomies or just false methods... you can't be reduction in personal liberty while embracing a collective good while maintaining a steady monetary system while ensuring demand drives the impulse to supply, not supply trying to muster a non-existent incapable due to lack of monetary access or actual developed resources. One must look at both the demand and supply curve.
We've been taught you must choose one or the other. They exist only together. Doing otherwise you distort everything, and learn nothing from economic objective study.
Would be like physics discarding photon duality, it's wave properties we use in everything from microwaves, cell phones, telecommunications, etc. and quantum mechanics which we use in touch screen technologies, nano technology, MRI's, super computing, and soon quantum computing.
Physicists by no means say you must either be an advocate of the wave theory of light only, or you must be an advocate of quantum particle theory of light; the photons exist as both a wave and a particle.
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Medical goods like pharmaceuticals have inelastic demand curve that is near perfectly vertical.
Means no matter the amount of suppliers or quantity supplied, the price will not change as people will pay any price and all suppliers have really no incentive to reduce their prices; competitive market principle price mechanism fails. Why generics, when the bogus patent monopoly is expired, never really does anything to the price of medical goods particularly prescriptions.
Hence why all other nations on the face of this planet does not allow unfettered margins on their medical goods and services, but regulates them like most states do with utilities: water, electricity, sewer, natural gas, etc. a max margin usually 6 percent, and sometimes another 6 percent max on capital expenditures; are placed on these companies if private, and price public services that these margins; as many utilities are still public not privately owned. But some are, or use some aspects of privately owned utility supplier.
It's why you as an American with a prescription, sometimes without one, or just get one in the other country can go to Mexico,
Canada, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Cuba.... okay just about everywhere on the face of this planet, and get any prescription or surgical procedure without insurance, at very small price compared to USA's ridiculous often 1,000 to 100,000 to even 1 million percent profit margin medical services and medical goods.
You pay for medicines or procedures without insurance lower than the cost of paying for the same in the USA with so called medical insurance.
It's why everyone laughs at us Americans while also cringes at the same time.
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That damage clause smacks at indentured servitude.
Simply resigning, not making hay, just saying I found a different place to work is no damage. Its market forces. So its not market driven nor free. It's insanity regression back toward servitude. Perhaps not slavery, but certainly servitude. Which is illegal constitutionally by the 13th Amendment. If you want to quit, and can't due to repayment of prior work done constitutes as involuntary servitude. Such contracts are thus illegal in the United States.
I would recommend any journalist working in such conditions to seek a lawyer or start a class action to make such contracts void. Just don't do something that would demonstrate damages: ie appear nude on camera, begin ranting profanities, etc.
Just respectfully quit. And should they not pay for your services rendered and demand repayment of past services, sue them. Take this all the way to the supreme court.
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
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Wish you would post the income per quintile.
It's very sad for a very long time and has only gotten worse. Showing income demonstrates what that wealth pays... or rather no wealth and only selling our labor like a mule.
Share of total income in the USA
2021 data:
0% to 20% 1st Quintile got 2.9%
20%-40% 2nd quintile got 8.0%
40% to 60% 3rd quintile got 13.9%
60% to 80% 4th quintile got 22.6%
80% to 100% 5th quintile got 52.7%
This means 60% of the population share of total US income is only 24.8% not even a quarter of income goes to 60% of the population.
The bottom to 40% are getting 10.9% of total income.
The top 20% get more than half of the income at 52.7% total income.
At this point you could literally place a 100% tax the lowest 40% poorest and still not make much headway in the budget deficit as the bottom 40% combined only get 10.9% of income.
Or even the bottom 60% taxing 100% wouldn't do much as their total income is only 24.8% .
It's a reason why tax brackets dating from 1916 to 1984; the highest brackets were generally from 50% to 100%. From the 1940 to 1960 it was 90% paying for WW1 and WW2. And dipped down in 1964 to 70% and remained as the highest bracket rate until 1984 at 70%.
The motive since the 1980's was lower tax bracket and expand the base... essentially tax the higher income earners less, and make the lower earners pay more.
Effectively creating deficits, which the rich can safely buy treasury bonds. Turning their otherwise tax bill into a loan program. Where they get safeguarded income generator via interest and their principle back maturity.
Basically, to balance our national budget, the only method is to raise the rates on the highest brackets, creating new brackets perhaps to do this as there was in many other periods of the 1900's.
While, sure, we have a priority problem on our spending, doing what Eisenhower warned against, the industrial military complex, which accounts to over $1 trillion in annual spending which is more than the next 9 highest military spending nations put together.
We lack what other nations, including poorer ones, have already achieved: universal healthcare, a robust transportation system, a robust housing programs, reduced to near tuition free or completely tuition free vocational and/or college.
Our problem isn't necessarily a spending problem.
It's a revenue problem. We're being taxed largely at the lower end of the spectrum.
Take for instance social security and medicare/medicaid taxes at 6.2% and 1.49% combined 7.69% on the GROSS income (no deductions allowed) and it is harvested only on earned wage/salary income, the income the vast majority of Americans make other than the top 20% or top 10% or top 1% who don't labor for their income, but sit on their but collecting interest and dividends or making capital gains in stocks, real-estate, etc. which has a lower initial bracket of 15% for long term capital gains, and a top bracket of 20%.
So social security and medicare/medicaid is essentially being paid for by the very mass of poorest who get the least of the income.
Us peasantry are having to salvage ourselves.
Sure, you may say, what about the matching contribution employers pay.
Don't worry, employers consider their matching 6.2% and 1.49% contribution as part of your pay package when you're hired; it's coming out of what they would have paid you or would give you raises anyway. They know its there. And that's considered part of your pay package.
Short term capital gains, interest, and dividends is ordinary income and is not subjected to payroll taxes of 7.69% on gross profits.
Instead it is only subject to Federal and state income tax where applicable which includes deductions, write offs.
We're not collecting taxes from where the vast majority of the income is at. The top 20%, and when you micro look at the to 5% is over 22.2% of the that full 20% bracket share of 52.7%.
So the top 5% income is more income than what the bottom 60% make put together.
Oligarchs that have become nations unto themselves.
So we need to tax effectively where the income is at.
And we need to prioritize much better on what we do spend. We can afford a $1 trillion plus yearly war budget. But is this critical? Is this what the vast majority of us need?
Or would joining essentially the rest of the world in not spending such heavily on war, (ironically we call defense), but making priority to spending on universal healthcare which can include all bodily dental and elderly care system? Higher education and vocational programs? Public mass dependable and reliable and frequent transportation? Stability in our electrical and power production? City owned and operated communications including internet service provisions?
Or a military budget that effectively could attack 10 other developed nations at once in an instant armada invasion?
Our current revenue collection and spending is heavily influenced by the biggest freeloaders of our days; our oligarchs.
They've effectively turned their portion of taxes into a loan program where they get interest from the rest of us who have to pay taxes.
They get most of the spending that does take place via various programs; Musk, for instance has received billions in Federal subsidies, and other billions in local state and city subsidies.
Including Bezos where both the state and city fall over backwards offering free land grants, including property tax exemptions, and many other handouts; so he can build his chicken coups to pacify the peasantry and pay them next to nothing. Similar affect with other dynastic families and persons like the Waltons with Walmart. And many other oligarchs get all sorts of hand outs and look the other ways from big reduction on property taxes to outright subsidies; money to build their plants, to buy their stuff, to buy their inputs for them to build their stuff, etc.
We need to tax appropriately where the income is at.
And we need to spend where the need is the greatest benefit to the vast majority.
This system of oligarchy we have now is very unsustainable. Hence we seem mass murders, riots, and other conflicts increasing every year. Drug and suicide deaths that our life expectancy has fallen 3 years in a row from 2015 to 2018... and after the pandemic is has return to falling year over year.
This life expectancy falling is not normal in human technological advancement, the few times it does happen, it generally marks a period the nation was invaded, at civil war, or an extraordinary natural disaster took place.
This is not just a concern for fairness, but a concern for future prosperity or potential misery to come for everyone. Including the current top 20% or top 5% or to 1% who often in a breakdown such resentment has them drug through the streets or hunted by bounties into other countries the oligarchs attempt to escape.
It's a concern for everyone.
Even the top 20% and 5% and top 1%.
They mock or assist in doing nothing attempting to preserve this perversion of civilization, then not just consigning the rest of us a more brutal miserable life, they will have marked their own graves too.
Check out the tax brackets over time in the USA.
https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
Share of total income data
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-household-income-of-quintiles-in-the-us/#:~:text=About%2052.7%20percent%20of%20the,earned%20by%20the%20lowest%20quintile.
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If we could have a quasi hunter gatherer like life.... because running portable water and sewers make life so nice. I hunt and camp. But I always love coming back to a functioning toilet and bath tub and shower aka civilization.... and I often do shower in creeks while camping, but it's not the same as warm running water and dealing with sewage with a flush...
And don't to rosy of a picture, we know many hunter gatherers and things weren't that great for them that wasn't mentioned: famine was a real concern, hence their nomadic wanderings, and they did exist between entire bands not mentioned here, they had to communicate with different 150 people groups with several other nearby groups. Then other completely different tribes often warred with each other, and some were less successful than others in such conflicts or at enjoyable existence.
Teeth have been a problem for some time. Child mortality wasn't just due to chronic condition, but often poor nutrients from nursing and first infections of various pathogens... in really destitute nations child mortality is still high due to the same otherwise simple ailments that would have been avoided with modern medical (vaccinations being top among them) treatments. Hence why human populations hunter gatherer or early farming had large families; about half on average would die before their 10th birthday. Worse periods, almost all would die.
The point is, you don't want to say fuck this go in the wilds; you'll live wonderfully... you'll be comically or cruelly (which ever your humor goes) disappointed. Instead, maybe realize people really don't like working that long. And that shouldn't be something to be ashamed that that doesn't necessarily mean you're lazy, you just want to do other things.
And that should be a goal, to reduce hours worked, and focus on the other "non-work" items like hobbies and such.
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I have been mostly shopping at Fred Meyer's a Kroger's company for the past several months here in Idaho.
The loud speakers for the past couple months have announced masks are mandatory for all employees and customers, they add that if one has a medical disability that precludes mask wearing that they have free grocery delivery.
At first, I only wore the mask if required or ask to do so. But I got sick (again) and had a COVID19 test waiting, I needed groceries and wore a mask at the store, at the time they made it mandatory. I felt like a dork wearing it as many didn't prior.
As I shopped I noticed EVERYONE was wearing one. So I was glad I wore it... then I heard their loud speaker advising that they're mandatory.
Now, they do have one or two in there aren't wearing one. The store employees aren't really enforcing it. As I was leaving one day, an elderly man was asking why another person leaving the store wasn't required to wear the mask to an employee.
People just don't want a confrontation. And I don't blame them. So long as MOST of us, essentially 99% wear it, let those that don't either because they forgot to bring one, or are just acting like toddlers.
What's really important are those who are actually coughing that might have it to wear one.
The masks alone won't prevent such a virus that is airborne completely, but can reduce the chances of getting sufficient viral count to become infected. The virus is about 125 nano meters. Smallest wavelength of visible light is 300 nm as it drops into the ultra violet spectrum. To a group of viruses clumped together or riding an extremely small smoke/dust particle that's especially capable of Mie scattering, your mask is as if its not even there.
It to block micro sized clumps of particles. SO it's better than nothing. And if you're coughing you really need to block those when out and about inside or at work etc.
I think people just realize it's not a lot of prevention, so why bother at all. That's the boat I was in for a while... My personal thoughts it either ought to be required or not at all... too much ambiguity just confuses people. And if you are sick you certainly should wear one when around others.
And wearing of the masks only really reduce infection rates if most people are wearing them. Not if a few or even just half are.
Speaking of toddlers, those under 2 or 3 years old are medically advised not to wear a mask for long periods of time or at all because they're nose breathers, they can't compensate as easily as older ages with mouth breathing to expel CO2.
SO I think the announcement at the store excludes toddlers under a certain age from having to wear a mask. I still see really little ones wearing masks. It looks really funny on their tiny faces.
I don't see them on babies or those under 2.
Far as legality of private property owners, the common sign at gas stations or other small convenient stores: No shoes, shirt, no service!
And there are the fancy pants restaurants that have dress codes, some of these places for convenience will lend out a blazer if someone comes under dressed without one on accident so the customer can still join their party and the establishment can still have their business.
Employers can send people home if they're not in uniform or wearing required PPE.
So obviously legal for private groups or persons to require it to do work or be in or on property.
Such activity is done all the time.
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Very odd. Why would the parents have to go to court to have him evicted unless he had a rental agreement with them?
After age 18, the parents have no legal obligation unless the court has deemed him mentally impaired. And in the event parents or guardians are unable to take custody, he would become ward of the state, usually taken to some facility or assisted living area.
In this case, this guy is apparently not mentally ill... perhaps depression or bi-polar.
But parents again are not obligated to help.
Situation is weird. If I were the parents, depending on the child's mother's affairs, I would try taking guardianship of his kid. He apparently can't even take care of himself. Let alone his kid.
And why are we watching this odd ball on national news?
Even weirder freak show stuff happens in courts and among families all the time. This should be private awful situation.
Okay end of this segment sums up why they put this shitty non-story up. Generation bashing.
You fuck ups, every damn generation had their share of weird family issues. Seriously, hippies and LSD use, and prior entire families living in a fucking shack in the 30's and prior into the late 1800's kids left outside in literally feces, garbage, and other filth in the roads many pictures taken by Jacob Riis.
Let's keep generation bashing. We had the most insane economic depression, some people were really hit hard. He could be clinically depressed. This can happen to anyone at any age, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 years old.
Let's keep dividing people some more. Take your own depression and anger out on this group! Now this Group! Now lets make up this group!
FUCK YOU CNN!
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I never understood that generation bashing article about avocado toast meaning us younger generation squander money. At least here in the west, avocados are as cheap as tomatoes or apples, when I was in high school working at Sizzler, and still Sizzler today they offer them on their all you can eat salad bar.... an entire avocado, not just a few slices on some toast. And as many as can shove down your face.
Secondly, slices of avocado on toast? Never hear do of it.
Salad, omelette, guacamole with chips or a burrito or enchilada, sure. Toast? Okay.
Next they're going to say jam/jelly/preserve is the fault of us younger generation... our extravagant appetite for a PB&J for lunch and our toast with jam for breakfast is so damn expensive no wonder our savings sucks... its not because nominal wages are flat, and real wages (after inflation) are 50% less, rents and mortgages have become a monopoly tycoon board game well beyond sustainable 20% to 30% of take home pay so some get rich quick oligarchs and their puppet minions can reintroduce feudalism since they have already accomplished reintroducing the robber baron era.
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This type of poverty existed in the US up to the 1930's. My grandma showed us her "cabin" she was in during her early childhood in Inkom Idaho. Essentially was the the shack you explained only that it had and still had a caste iron stove. Was dirt floor, with part of an over hang built over the small stream, I suppose for easy access water.
Widespread poverty continued but started to decline dramatically after late 1930's and didn't become the small amount it is today in the US until the early 1960's.
Above the shack was my great grandparents "modern home", the current owners let us come and tour it. Actual running water, electricity, and connected to the local sewer system; my grandma recalled that my grandpa called it his mansion. Was a typical modern house built in the late 1930's early 1940's with lots of new additions, a basement, more rooms then originally built, etc. They were able to build the modern home thanks to the work programs during FDR's admin, my great grandpa got a good paying job at the cement factory that was built and still remains in operation today.
Prior to that great grandpa worked both various jobs from farm hand, to shop clerk.
A week after visiting the shack, it was destroyed by a freak very small tornado... Inkom is in a mountain valley, and the house and shack in then also in a deep ravine, tornadoes are not typical of Idaho at all... not even in plains/plateaus.
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"Oh, it appears people travel to Mexico, Canada, Germany, UK, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Japan, and 173 other nations of the 201 and notice their universal healthcare system, and how screwed they get here in the US... oh dear me my pearls need clutching! Gasp! They want that here! What ever shall we do?"
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There are many countries that lack education. They're all poor in general, and semi affluent are the top 0.1% there is no 20% affluent. Everyone is essentially in poverty, international poverty level defined as a dollar a day.
This comes from prohibition of child labor laws which ended exploitation of children; on the raw economic purpose this disallows young children and teens to be used for servitude instead of an adult that has economic needs to maintain for their own family.
These idiots haven't picked up any history books beyond their own wild goof ball stupid selfish fantasies.
Be a selfish pig, and you what you will get is a dirt floor hovel, a hole in the ground filled with feces as your toilet, and baths... they don't exist, find a river and hope it doesn't have other sewage running through it because it probably does if its in a city area.
Their selfishness and spite would have themselves living in horrid condition should these typical ass wipes ever get their way. Not only economically, but political ramifications, nobody would support a constitution that has even 5th of the population starving, you would have literal armies of starving desperate people raiding the other 4/5 that aren't.
There literally areas around the world that experience the libertarian dream as we speak.
It's a nightmare.
As for his spite, he should be upset he had to pay and do it over 20 years. That's grossly inefficient and likely during that 20 years his various courses, he forgot most of what was learned, and any text books and documents as he learned a decade ago have likely became outdated. So several courses he took that far in the past were possibly useless.
No, he shouldn't have had to pay much for his higher education as the rest of us should, and especially be provided loans that we cannot declare bankruptcy.
I worked during my first degrees. Went to the military, and my third degree I used the GI Bill. And still accumulated college debt; not as much as some, but its significant. And its absurd. Because we cannot compete with other regions like most of Europe, Australia, etc. that contribute to low to no tuition... some even paying stipends to attend as if they all got the GI Bill to ensure they efficiently get through school and join the workforce either start their own businesses or working in an occupation.
All his wealth and income came from an educated populous regardless if he is just a worker somewhere, a business owner, or inherited his money and assets.
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Candidates are stacked, essentially RNC and DNC candidates have become one in the same. Oligarchy sucks ass. People tune in and drop out. LOL!
Seriously, people I know that talked about voting due to local propositions that were mostly dubious like whether to allow historical horse racing (aka slot machines)... he didn't end up voting at all. He couldn't make up his mind about it. Another coworker quite literally voted for governor because the candidate he hated gave him wedgies in highschool and was an all around bully, unfortunately the democrat candidate didn't win, went to his high school bully. The rest of the ballot he said he left blank.... proposition to expand medicare... he's for, but he didn't care as it only covers $17K or less. So he left it blank.
Pragmatic and fickle... that is why half our country doesn't vote... mixture of disenfranchisement, confusion, and downright dumbness... and face it, since the votes really don't matter... RNC and DNC policies are nearly indistinguishable, people don't care. At least half the country doesn't bother. I know other 30 somethings who have never voted. Nothing they said yet on the ballot concerns them.... both candidate policies are nearly the same so why bother. Then there's the we're always red state or always blue state... why bother.
And that's why we're not an actual representative government, but an oligarchy. Stacked candidates resulting in disenfranchisement.
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Kim Manufacturing is already very automated here in the US.
Most are already mostly machine driven.
Of machines you still need operators of those machines, quality techs (you can couple those depending in the complexity of operation of the machines), fork lift drivers even if you couple that with automated forklifts which aren't useful for most heavy pallet loads, and order fulfillment teams... you can literally run a shift on about 10 to 20 people per line in operation.
Just depends on what's being done, what is being manufactured.
Manufacturing doesn't employ that many people even now, but it does pay better than most other occupations as it produces massive amounts of wealth; takes in very cheap inputs and makes it into mass quantities of finished goods worth much more than the inputs.
And then you mentioned engineers... often most manufacturing outfits may only employee 1 or 2 or a handful of engineers per company or set of factories, other factories are cheap and just source engineering out as they're not needed that frequently, only when making specific updates, changes to product lines, installing new machinery, etc. Then their job is over. Mechanics, operators, QC, etc. all take over from there.
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Co-Op based system backed by a co-op Federal Reserve Banking system with access to the treasury to lend at a discount money into existence as does the Fed Reserve does for private banks today, so far is the only idea I know that would work brilliantly to change our economy for the better, and literally makes aristocracy utterly unnecessary.
Solves the capital formation problem. And you would no longer see the extraction by aristocracy from the wealth we see today and in the past.
It's as revolutionary as ending slavery and feudalism. Next advancement from our aristocratic employer and employee system.
And I can imagine many methods to assist in such a Co-Op Fed Reserve to create branches and even individual co-op banks to audit and determine various businesses and business plans so such lending has high chance of successful outcome of a sustainable profitable co-op.
If anyone has peaked at any business that is profitable today, if you add in all workers compensation including payroll taxes, insurances, etc. into profits (because workers on income statements are an expense deducted to calculate net profits just as capital expenses are as well as interest on any bank loans or bonds), you will find 95% to 80% of profits goes to dividends... workers get 5% to 20% of profits. Mere doubling of every worker's compensation would be life changing and such businesses would still retain 90% to 60% of the profits.
The amount that goes to the aristocracy is beyond disgusting, it's flat out absurd. Quite literally demonstrates it's not a return on investment, but extraction parasitically on other's work. Hence why productivity has gone up over the past 40 years, but wages are flat if not fallen in some nations, and almost all wealthy nations have experienced real median wages decrease.
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It's more of a surprise that the other can speak your native language. Happened to me in Germany once. Was goofing off in one of the long commercial buildings that had offices as well as attached to a hotel on the far end and shops below.
Some guy started talking to me in German, so we spoke for a while in German, he worked in an office, an engineering firm that makes mechanical parts. Eventually, he asked where I was from, I said in the most hick accent: Idaho. And added: Der berühmte Kartoffeln Staat der Amerika. The Famous potato state of America. Mentioning potato state seemed to always help most Germans understand at least the geographical shape of the state.
I asked him in German if he was from Köln (where we were at) he smiled and he's American too, from Philadelphia, he seemed surprised and happy and so was I. Always nice to hear and speak in the native language, it's like taking a break in your own grammar, lexicon, phonetics.
Was funny we both thought each other were Germans and ended up Americans.
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We don't control the debt.
The hideous part of too much debt is national banks ie also the Fed Reserve in the US put interest rates at 0% or even below. Making savings make nothing, and maybe costing some in nations already in "negative" interest rates. So what to plutocrats and their banks do to make money? Buy up needed items like housing and apartment blocks, and attempt to push home prices up by each available buyer and keep development low as to keep the housing stock low thus allow prices to keep going up: banks and plutocrats alike need asset prices to go up.
With deflationary demand (most people are more broke than ever, there's no such thing as a middle class but people just above the poverty line) bid those asset prices up they need the principle of debts to be higher to compensate for the low interest rate environment.
Same with would be landlords or really REIT's Financial players in most rentals now... they bought apartments at well beyond the construction and development costs and made for a gigantic profit for the original owner, but now the new owner must charge twice or thrice or even higher multiple to make even slightly less percentage of return on investment.
And developers are not keen since 2008 crash to be holding the bag like they did last time. So they'll sit tight until banker has found the investor/creditor and buyer both then build.
You don't get the median or even close to median income earners. You get top income earners, thus you get very little construction compared to the need of a growing population which most nations are just that, growing... needing more homes. But we don't get that construction.
Fun fact: US and many other nations literally used tax revenue to develop housing both homes to buy and to rent; and they kept a price cap on the underlying property and would not allow developers to racket off of development costs that were subsidized by the local and national governments; developers literally were paid for their handy work building the house, that's it; not casino bid up on property land price that has not real value, not charging additional return on the cost of developing roads, sewer, water, electricity, natural gas, etc. your and everyone else's taxes paid for that. Some decent nations still have this functioning and they don't have near the housing affordability problems or even insufficient supply. But most nations like the US have abandoned city development in favor of independent private development. And we can see this doesn't work well.
And back to renting busines:
Original buyer purchases a 4 plex apartment for $200K rents them out for $600 a month making $2,400 month revenue or $28,800 on his $200K investment was a 14% rate of return.
Second buyer buys the 4 plex for $400K... attempting to push up rent at $800 a month making $3,200 a month or $38,400 on $400K investment is now a 9.6% rate of return despite rents going up 25%, the investor is making less while renters are paying more.
A lose lose situation.
In fact, rents have to go up to an astonishing $1,167.00 to make a 14% on his $400K investment. From original $600 that's an increase of 194% in rent. Incomes don't go up that much. All things being equal either people making higher incomes must now be stuck living in shittier living conditions, and those making the lower incomes who could only afford at $600 to $900 to live in the same 4 plex apartments now live in cars or in tents or with roommates sleeping in the living room on the couch, either way living in a worsening quality of life.
That's where this system becomes dysfunctional, nobody is really doing better, it's a grind to worsening conditions for both investors and worker/consumers and complete puts them out of ever thinking of saving or investing themselves.
It's the late 1800'as and early 1900's all over again.
And we know how that went.
Now we have much more destructive methods of destroying each other.
We should probably change our economic system. It simply is utterly dysfunctional.
But won't matter, it will force us to change it again anyway when it collapses.
It is better to do it in peaceful relatively okay periods of time. As you never know in desperate times what rises up in the ashes of a failed system. Last time, it was not good in many places of the world. And ultimately, the plutocrats that be didn't learn their lessons and came back with a vengeance. Hell bent on being roasted by the pitch forks.
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Sure tech companies particularly unprofitable companies (that includes TSLA without tax payer money and carbon credit binge from other auto makers) will lay off first.... and of course even profitable ones like Microsoft will lay people off to improve their margins.
But consumer staple companies won't. They, in fact, will continue to offer incentives such as sign on bonuses as they're doing now. And this will continue should they have the pricing power to do so to even expand their margins.
Home prices and all won't really go down so much until the Fed raises interest rates to combat inflation. We will, until then, go into stagflation. And as home prices fall, the monthly payments even at the fallen prices will be the same which will not encourage that many buyers (the banks always win because they control the markets)... not until the Fed gets serious about raising interest rates... then prices will fall proportionally to monthly payments suddenly becoming decent enough... but only because job losses will become obvious in ALL sectors including consumer staple jobs (food manufacturing, grocery retail, auto repair, etc.).
So you have to see unemployment start to really go up.
And again that won't happen until the Fed pumps the interest rates to combat inflation in a serious manner. If they do it slow... they'll grind rates to 10% like they did in 1970's... and still inflation and unemployment will be severe: welcome stagflation... prices of homes will still be too much because the payments will be too much even if they've retreated from the ridiculous speculative stupidity of last year and in some areas still now. If they slowly grind rates to 10%, and not active aggressively, they will then need and actually do active aggressively shooting interest rates probably as high as 25% like by 1980. And then we'll have several recessions... rock bottom. Then home prices will fall with a monthly payment for those employed who then can afford a home, and thus forming a bottom for the longer term.
This could play out for half a decade. If the Fed acts aggressively... then it could play out in just 2 years.
My bet though, they're going to act timid. It's just way to profitable in the stock market to keep interest rates low and hope on the transitory story which is completely BS.
And their capitulation will be when there are record homeless and the CPI numbers (which will have pull backs) but will come back... til it tops 10% and continues to bounce above that double digit number. Then you might get a president willing to commit political suicide and appoint a Volcker who will aggressively raise rates as this will probably topple us into a great depression... it caused series of recessions in the 70's... but imperialism, colonialism, globalism whatever structural race to the bottom economic term you want to call it, wasn't established... and thereby also unionization was still in the private employment at mid 20% of all workers were part of a union... right now only 6% union workers in the private sector (which could and looks to be rising a bit) and with the nonsensical more resource hogging pretzel supply chain exploiting tyrannized and destitute labor and national subsidies in colonialism... this structured economy looks much more like the 1920's. Both in terms of labor unionization and colonialism/imperialism/globalism with supply chains and tight inventories on inputs that can't handle any upset and were never authentically had any comparative advantage: exploiting the hot potato of destitute labor of one nation to another nation, and tyrannized labor, and input subsidies from the various nations.
Anyway, these are the two scenarios at this point and how it plays out in a nut shell:
1) Quickly aggressive Fed raising rates then we get massive unemployment quickly and we get a great recession number 2 more severe than the last... essentially a depression.
2) Slowly raise Fed Rates then enter into stagflation, and forced to aggressively raise Fed Fund rates... we get a great depression. And then we'll have our bottom.
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Karl Marx didn't have specific solutions though.
I'm with Richard Wolffe on Co-Op charters, and with UK labor party concept of establishing a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank that lends directly at a discount to groups wanting to charter a Co-Op that specifically provides voting authority one vote for every employee on key aspects on leadership, management, capital expenses, wages/salaries, vacation, pension, etc.
Federal Reserve Bank was required to keep all our private banks from going bust, and has worked fairly well compared to before having such a structure... should work wonderful in capital formation for co-ops that generally can't get funding any other ways because its not profitable to lend to them. And investors want all the profits literally, employees presently are just an expense. And when you add all total employee costs including pay, benefits, taxes, etc. back into profits, then assume what share of total employee costs are part of profits, almost all profitable businesses this ranges from 5% to 20% of profits. The shareholders keep 95% to 80% of the profits.
Implications: this means they could literally double everyone's wages and benefits and total costs to 10% to 40% and and still walk away with 90% to 60% of profits.
Co-Op structure, nobody is going to neither vote themselves into insolvency nor vote to let a few people walk away with all most of the profits. Literally, people could vote double their total compensation which means an even better 401K or pension program.
And the business would still retain 40% of their profits.
Example of a unionized for profit water company.
$6.462 million was total employee cost (includes payroll taxes, pensions/benefits, pay, uniforms, every employee cost).
Total profits and paid to shareholder in Dividends paid $16.430770 million.
Total profits with labor added back into profits: $22.892934 million means 28% of this profit is paid to labor $6.462; actually larger than normal likely due to the union contract.
Doubling it means total labor would get $12.924 or 56.45% of the total profits, leaving 43.55% of the profits to be retained by the company or $9.96 million in profits.
And since you likely don't have shareholders in such a co-op since the money is borrowed, that excess could be used to retire long term debt. And once debt is gone, voted on for rainy day fund, for R&D, for cash flow buffering, expansion, higher compensation, or mix of all those things.
Now, I'm actually would be against allowing utilities or other natural monopolies to be private for profit entities. I would use competitive market principles to determine what should be public and private; those sectors that violate some or all and severely any of those competitive market principles should be collectively owned and operated by the public. Most water providers in Idaho are in fact city owned and operated, Boise is just a weird throwback that never changed from the 1800's, the robber baron years.
So yes, Boise is getting really screwed by their water rates to fill some rich peoples' pockets in France (parent company). I'm just using the example of how screwed employees are, and this one the employees actually make decent pay relatively speaking as most of them are union.
And even they would likely not vote to let so much in profits be distributed to a few shareholders.
A co-op way of doing business with capital formation from a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank similar authority to the Federal Reserve Bank, but different in that it lends its printed via the Treasury directly to Co-Op Charters.
No serious need from investors. And if investors would like to join, sure, the employees vote on that subject, and investors get only 1 vote. No matter the amount of ownership, just as all the employees get only 1 vote no matter their position in the company.
I think such a system would be the most productive and prosperous to everyone involved. And corporations the likes we have today quite literally wouldn't be able to compete against them. And would be fun watching them all diminish as they try, along with an aristocracy that's become an overt dangerous unstable parasite to democracy robber baron kleptocracy.
Full income statement for year in question below
https://www.puc.idaho.gov/fileroom/cases//water//SUZ/0Annual%20Report/2016ANNUAL%20REPORT.PDF
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Yeah it could, it just doesn't want to go after the rich because the rich own our country, they voted themselves a tax cut permanent in 2017, the bonds that then are issued to pay the deficit spending are largely purchased by the rich... they turned their tax bill in to a loan with interest, with us peons paying their loan and interest back.
So yes, tax rates could be raised where the vast majority of money resides, among the very few plutocrats or pluto-rats.
The plutorats aren't interested in completely completely collapsing the USD... so they would eventually pay a bit higher taxes to stop the bleed. Additionally, interest income on savings would increase and help mitigate some tax losses on taxed on everyone's savings and bonds savings as interest rates increase.
The reason a complete collapse is probably off the table is that our money printing is not true, when the cartel banks aka the Fed increase money supply they do so by lowering interest to encourage borrowing, new borrowing debt is what money supply is in a debt based currency system... so if mass defaults happen, payback on loans, stop taking loans... money supply vanishes and we have a deflationary spiral.
Right now, we're at that inflated asset bubble that will end in a deflationary blow up. And in the mean time if interest rates increase or instability politically happen a deflationary run-away effect will happen...
Inflation always ends up becoming deflation at some point.
Of course the inflationary pressure can last for a while depending on how interest rates act. And how prices are responded to, do wages and other goods/services get accepted? Or do they get rejected? They tend to get rejected when too much debt without ability to pay it spirals into a domino effect. Price then crater... if they don't interest rates will go up until they do crater.
Anyway, we're still at the point slightly higher interest rates wouldn't be too big a factor... keep in mind much of the bonds are in 20 and 30 year notes out for some time with low rates... so it would be flipping of the debt that would slowly get worse over time, not a sudden increase on all of the debt. But a slow grind in higher interest rates should interest rates go up.
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When will humanity ever learn, heir to royalty or fortunes make poor governors.
They're usually dumb as a fence post despite having the among the most expensive education that exists, have a psychotic self-worth of themselves, never work a real job in their life (CEO, President, Chairman, shareholder, etc. aren't real jobs they're photo ops, shopping jobs, and tell other people do my job similar to how one hires a plumber to fix a toilet, an account to do their tax returns, a dentist to do their teeth, they do common everyday chores, not labor, they hire others to do work for them so they're not technocrats, they're entitled lazy freeloaders). That's among the reasons that huge wealth and income disparity is dangerous, it leads to purchase of governments just as had happened in the past.
Say no to plutocracy and royalty.
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In all nations, universal medical programs often cover everything (dental, body, vision) is more affordable than our idiot system by 50% per capita. We spend double than all other wealthy countries... all other wealthy countries have universal healthcare... and we have shittier healthcare for our double the per capita price.
Both employers and employees pay less for full coverage in these universal medical programs than our idiot bogus bullshit private insurance nonsense.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Employers' portion they pay on universal healthcare is actually cheaper than our system of private insurance on all other wealthy nations (that all have a universal healthcare program).
We're at an economic disadvantage because we don't.
Additionally, only sector benefiting is the insurance and big pharma.
The disadvantage of our it system also effects many hospitals and clinics; both non-profit hospitals and clinics and for profit ones. Hence why you have several hospitals and clinics closing up nationwide.
It would be cheaper for all employers to go on a universal system.
Case in point, Canada is overall cheaper one employers and employees which has universal healthcare program that excludes dental and vision, they get private insurance for dental and vision. Similar to our Medicare/medicaid portion that has the same exclusions (dental and vision) hence why elderly an disabled on those programs get the "Advantage plus" insurance plans.
Current figures 2018
USA
Employer portion 1.45% and Employee portion 1.45%
Then employers and employees pay private insurance:
$13,049 (70 percent) for family coverage (with employees contributing $5,714)
or a HDHP with a savings option, the average employer contribution was $5,004 for single coverage (82 percent), while the employee contribution was $1,020.
https://squareup.com/townsquare/payroll-taxes-defined
https://www.griffinbenefits.com/employeebenefitsblog/what-is-the-average-employer-contribution-to-health-insurance-premiums
Canada
Employer portion 2.324% and Employee portion 1.66%
Canadians usually get extended insurance that covers Rx, dental, and vision on average from $1,000 a year to $2,000 a year premium. Employers often pay a portion, but tends to be as little as 10% for the extra insurance.
https://home.kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights/2011/12/canada-other-taxes-levies.html
https://home.kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights/2011/12/canada-other-taxes-levies.html
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
In the US, we pay double that of any other nation per capita, and just to be insured employers and employees pay double.
Other nations are much better than Canada, UK dentistry, vision, and Rx covered.... in fact Germany, France, Sweden, and many other nations make no distinction on medical coverage, all is covered. Seems to be an idiot North American thing to separate dental, vision, and everything else, so most of Europe and Asia (Japan) cover everything under their single universal health program... medical insurance in these countries are relegated to only life insurance policies and insurance for extra income in case of disability.
Many other countries do even better job in their programs by including all medical (dental, vision, and everything else).
US spends about double per capita on medical, and gets the worst results in all criteria which includes access, healthcare outcomes, equity, administrative, care process for every year the CWF conducts its survey, most recent figures at the website below.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Our system is a joke. A racketeering monster. Hurting essentially all sectors so a few sectors can be parasites. And most importantly making our lives more miserable should health problems creep up. And it is hurting our overall competitive advantage, as our employers and we ourselves pay more than any other nation for far the worst medical of all other wealthy nations.
We could easily have a full coverage program similar to Germany's at about 5.5% matching payroll tax, taking the place of the matching 1.49% medicare/medicaid.
We could extend that coverage to all health (dental and vision and everything else) for that price. You would not need deductibles whatsoever. And copays would be limited as they are in Norway and Sweden to no more than annual total of $300 a year, and each copay being about $20 per Rx, office visit, OR, dental visit, tooth filling, etc.
And for the price of 7%, no copays or deductibles whatsoever.
In our hands what exactly we want. But we certainly want something better, because all those proposals are cheaper than what we currently have, and actually provide much more than what we get for our over paying now.
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I'm glad I have only bought one thing from them ever... can't remember what it was... electronic something I think. Last couple years, for whatever it's worth, I have consciously made a choice not to buy from that monopsony. Amazon is the internet Walmart.
It's a thousand million = billion. People don't understand the concept of even a million dollars though as media floats it around like everyone's winning the lotto.
If you made the individual median income exactly of $31,099 for 40 years (lifetime working) that equals $1.243 million, you would just slightly go over the million dollar mark... after a lifetime of working.
Obviously, most first 10 years of work make well below the median. And then next 10 just below at maybe finally meet it. And hopefully the last 20 years you're mostly at or above it most of the time.
Less than half ever make it through the median income; so they're making much less lifetime.
So a million dollars alone is almost the individual lifetime median income.
A billion is a thousand lifetimes of such money... and 160 billion is 160 thousand lifetime earnings.
Only 58 country out of the 192 countries around the world make 160 billion or more in GDP... or 134 countries entire national GDP is less than $160 billion.
30 of the states and territories in the Union make more than $160 billion GDP out of 56... the other 26 states have a smaller GDP than $160 billion.
It's an absurd amount for one individual to have.
Only sort of bright spot, the figure is somewhat fluff, market capitalization isn't actual money in circulation and is only calculated via the last closing price of the stock times all outstanding shares... so its kind of a fluff figure. Fluff figure or not, it's still an absurdity... he go slowly sell an liquidate... he could find investment banks to buy his stuff at those prices... or he could even borrow using a portion of those shares he holds as collateral. Or he can just hold onto it to soak up any dividend it makes... grant it Amazon the way Bezos has ran it in the past, he rarely pays out dividends, he uses most profit to just keep growing the monster... which presents a monopoly or oligopoly or monopsony problem.
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Both other non medical business and employees save money.
And I hate employer based private insurance, its 2 nasty choices that tend to have lots of co-pays and huge premiums.
Germany's system has a healthcare tax of 15.5% of the employers salary/wage, of which employer pays 7.3%. Today, employers pay $600 a month or more plus employee premium portion of another $110 per individual. It's insane.
And they don't charge deductibles, co payments, or anything else. You just go to the clinic, dentist, hospital, etc. You just go online to the clinic or dentist office website and make an appointment.
Everything is covered.
Too fucking rosy? WTF!??!?!?!
Japan, Sweden, UK, Norway, France, Australia, Canada, etc. have a similar systems. They all have better medical systems than our own.
Even Mexico and India, poorer second world nations have better systems that our Americans go to (medical tourism) to have otherwise prohibitively costly operations done, or just to get inexpensive Rx.
I swear, had we not already committed to compulsory education, child labor prohibition, universal suffrage, both local and regional and state fire services, police services, public transportation systems including streets, highways, and interstates freeways, etc. yet such things exist essentially in every developed world including most poorer 2nd world nations, they would argue any one of those items are somehow "rosy" sounding.
"Oh gee, compulsory education and child labor prohibition? You paint that as some rosy picture? And that concept of municipal water, sewer, and trash... India doesn't do the latter, and they seem to be just fine?"
WTF????
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Everyone still needs to at least go vote on the ballots of their district.
You can leave the president blank, or vote green party or write in whoever.
There are things on ballots local that more effect people directly and faster like levies that cause property tax increases, sales tax changes, bond levies, other offices including Federal, state and local.
The reason Bernie's results weren't well other than the very possibility of vote tally manipulation (particularly how so many exit polls show opposite to actual results), is that turnout ALWAYS stinks. My county March 10, 2019 was only 13% and that's with the RNC and DNC combined as well as a sneaky dirty rotten trick our local officials did by placing the very same bond levy for $26 million that was already on the Nov 5 2019 and was voted against.
This time they got what they wanted. March 10, it passed. They know voter turnout stinks.
Essentially, voter turnout is so low that any election has no reflection or correlation to what the people in general want. It's just a random number generator. And established politicians local, state, and federal know this and are punking us all with it.
You must go vote. You can leave items blank on the ballot, but you will be surprised how often there's something on the ballot that you do have a strong opinion about that otherwise could make your life worse off, or maybe better off if it passes or doesn't pass.
So go vote. Our participation is why we have literally crooked corrupted fuck faces in office in all levels of our governmental system.
We act like not voting is a form of protest. Nope. It's a form of pulling your pants down and saying take your boot and kick me right square in the ass.
In generally, they don't want you to vote. Lower turnout always is better for the establishment, particularly an establishment that got there via low voter turnout which is the case over the past 40 years.
So educate yourself on what's on the ballot and go vote for those items.
Don't just not show up to any election. It's absurd and will only deepen the misery.
Participate. Or let them have free reign over your ass and everyone else's, as we presently have.
Vote. You can leave items blank. And tell others they need to vote. Low turnout is why things are the way they are in government and why our nation is so far backwards its amazing we haven't re-instituted unfettered child labor, slavery, feudalism, revoked K-12 compulsory public education, turned exclusively to roads for all roads, etc.
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The oligarchs are hate democracy... they know that at anytime their much fewer, tiny often 1% or just 0.1% of the overall population, well out numbered. Their power hangs always as illusion. And if they can invoke delusion to manipulate the very people they lay low in misery, so be it. And if they can use such people as tools for their bidding, they do. Hitler to Mussolini to Franco to Stalin to Mao utilized this very manipulative conditioning, a type of brainwashing, fortifying it with half truths to mask the disgusting lies, a type of Stockholm syndrome or perhaps a type of being broken, a madness can ensue whereby often a tiny plurality 10% to 25% to 30% of the population will invoke a tyrant's call. Democracy and every civility falls. And the oligarchs pave that deluded yet fearful and harmful segment into a vicious poisonous rath. That often cannot be esuaged.
Knowing this... those manipulated are often harder to convince they've been fooled, than it is to fool someone in the first place.
A monument testament to this time old stupidity should be proclaimed, it's as old as ancient Greece, Rome, Ottoman Empire, the various Renaissance to the Industrial ages of the 1800's in to the world war 1 and 2 era... and as it is today.
Perhaps with such persistent awareness, this evil will end its apparent perpetuity. The madness will end.
Ask yourself in all things doing, am I being manipulated? Is what I think even accurate and true? What parts are true and what parts are fabrications?
We have to end this madness as it will surely end most of us if we don't, as it has time and time again.
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The constitution explicitly states that pardons do not work on impeachments. Which is the only way he can be trialed is via an impeachment by the House then judgement by the Senate while he's president. And when he's no longer president, he no longer holds any presidential authority of course and would be trialed as all other citizens.
So no, he cannot pardon himself, any crime or suspect to a crime he is accused of committing is a case of impeachment.
The only reason Nixon was pardoned by Ford was due to Nixon stepping down from the presidency and no longer being an impeachable process, but regular criminal court.
"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."
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Oligarchs and their puppets politicians some have as much money/income producing wealth to be an oligarch themselves are utterly disconnected and have a very rude awakening when our economy continues to fall fucking apart. Many people who did vote for Trump are in no way political savy junkies of any kind, but you get the same response even if they didn't vote for Trump or at all, I like that he's angry because I am too.
We're all fucking pissed at how ridiculous our system is. We all understand by tourists and co-workers to travel on business to fix stuff for us, and we have the internet to which we have pen/internet pals from various countries, we see our standards of living sucks compared to theirs, we compare pay stubs; they literally pay less in taxes and especially when considering their taxes pay for healthcare, and we pay as much in taxes then we pay premiums for so called insurance to which you then pay even more to use it (deductibles, copays, and yearly caps such as on dental).
We're a fucking joke. Its in the vicious cycle that was forecast when NAFTA, extreme deregulation of all enterprises including banks, telecoms, airlines, halting the use of trust busting, bilateral trade with every authoritarian/totalitarian 3rd world country with no human rights, civil, labor, consumer, etc. or at least no way they enforce such laws if they even exist, and privatizing natural monopolies; the most utterly idiotic thing one can do considering economic theory in the only reason for profit motive works: the competitive principles. Natural monopolies have no competitive principles, and so called right to work legislation, more like right to be fucked in the ass hole legislation.
We get fewer vacations a year, sick pay account once normality was a separate 40 hour bank no longer exists, pensions essentially a thing of the past, even to new military recruits in favor of what was initially a tax loophole incentive for the 20% and higher income brackets to gloss up their retirement portfolio: 401K, which makes utterly no sense for lower income workers because 10% of what miserable mount 80% income earns is never sufficient in 40 years for a dependable retirement, and that 10% is considering the meager common 4% match. It would need to be at least 15% or higher match to even come close to making sense and be FDIC ensured; retire when the market tanks, you can rebates from your losses. There's reasons since stocks since their inception were considered speculative gambling from the 1602 thru until the 1910's... and now they want us to rely on that shit for retirement? On our income? And on their sloppy common stock that likely doesn't even pay out a dividend?
Nancy is such a fucking piece of shit.
Please vote that ass wipe out of office. She's fucking an extreme right winger invading this platform, along with Clinton and several others.
Really, its time we abandon the DNC platform, for a new one. I don't think this one can be salvaged.
When 63% didn't bother to show up to vote in the last midterm, and the last presidential election 45% didn't bother to vote, it means people find our system completely defunct. Representative republic my hairy ass. It's a fucking oligarchy: representation of the rich and the rich only.
And the rich are determined to see this country's economy collapse.
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Important addition to Hypoxia in aviation:
Another thing to add, some aircraft at or above 40,000 MSL including A380 require pressurized O2 to alleviate harmful effects of hypoxia.
Airlines tend to always provide pilots with O2 masks that deliver pressurized O2. You may still feel the effects of hypoxia for a moment as a passenger since those masks only deliver 100% non-pressurized O2.
So always fix your mask first, then help others. And you may still suffer some effects of hypoxia if at altitude that would require pressurized O2.
The concept is that the pilot will immediately descend to altitude that doesn't need pressurized O2 (below 40,000 MSL), and eventually below 14,000/12,000 MSL where supplemental O2 shouldn't be required by the general population.
Another big point: hypoxia at altitude is not the same as holding your breath.
The reduced pressure causes all gasses to expand, which includes O2 in your blood and organs to come out of solution faster than usual; like opening a fizzy drink; except that's O2 fizzing out of your body very quickly. Holding your breath won't help you with anything, in fact it will only make things worse.
Amount of time of useful consciousness decrease per altitude and most airlines cruise at 30,000 up to 44,000 MSL:
FL250 (25,000 ft; 7,600 m) 3 to 6 minutes
FL280 (28,000 ft; 8,550 m) 2.5 to 3 minutes
FL300 (30,000 ft; 9,150 m) 1 to 3 minutes
FL350 (35,000 ft; 10,650 m) 30 secs to 1 minute
FL400 (40,000 ft; 12,200 m) 15 to 20 seconds
FL430 (43,000 ft; 13,100 m) 9 to 15 seconds
FL500 (50,000 ft; 15,250 m) 6 to 9 seconds
You literally have seconds in many cases.
Rapid decompression event, don't try to hold your breath or inhale when you hear the boom; either can tear your lungs, and can result in death. You likely will feel a sucking sensation, allow that to correspond with an exhalation. Once you fully exhaled, begin breathing as normal, and don O2 asap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness
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When you see your wages go nowhere insufficient to cover $150 extra in a lease renewal and the rest of the market is even higher or exactly the same and have no choice, when you have half your coworkers living in an RV, not even a mobile fucking home, but an RV or in their tents are cars with their fucking children and wife, when you see tent cities and vehicle cities of all ages many destitute working still, and another half apparently given up strung out on something, when banks want to charge you for deposits thus making banking obsolete, when medical costs are so extreme a vacation hit to Canada or Mexico is really a medical shopping trip or if you know friends in Europe you have them buy and send you some medicines at a fraction of the price.
When the jobs that exist here are by far bullshit jobs for a few toadies, and the grunt work that does exist is based on a skeleton crew...
When even liberals/progressives even those minorities that right wing often propound as scapegoats to all their problems can relate and actually quietly booy the beer belly putsch at the capitol, and lament they didn't take much of the so called representatives swiftly to their graves.
It's no longer a matter of decades before the outright collapse.
It's simply a few more years. 2024 is going to be violent.
People treated as trash and pitted against each other brainwashed into stupidity is exactly the insanity of the series of conflicts during Sulla then Caeasar then Octavian; you end up with a series of tyrants more tyrannical than the last and subtle in their scapegoating and preservation of the slave master elites.
Or you have absolute death of the elites as in the French Revolution that devolved in to the Terror.
There's reason that even the lefties as well as righties have been purchasing fire arms, some military like.
The oligarchs and the puppets seem utterly incapable of even grasping their death wish on the continuing direction this country has gone under over the past 40 to 50 years now.
Depending my situation, hoping to leave this country for good. I plan once gone to never return. I have nothing here. I am a foreigner in my own nation. The people are mad, but they're so mad, their crazy mad. It's a murder suicide warpath pent up anger that will see many even mildly affluent be targeted in some mass French Terror.
And one cannot really blame them, and may even feel a bit fellow Schadenfreude at the destruction of the elites by the hands of a maddened crazed citizenry.
But little will their rewards for their vanquishing of the evil enemy; but probably the propounding of some strong man dictatorship.
My plan is to go. Stay away.
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That shit was a symptom of the larger problem... inflated speculation much of debt driven and the other concentrated wealthy looking to make a return on their wealth holdings... aka it was hyped up worthless bullshit, in less than 5 years it will already be laughed about how ridiculous fad as pogs in the 90's or pyramid schemes in the early 1900's... tulips in the 1630's.
Shit's worthless.
Not easy to use (takes over an hour for a transaction).
Not protected for fraudulent unfilled transactions (tantamount of sending someone cash in the mail or a cashiers check, doesn't eliminate central assistance in assisting and making secure transactions).
Not stable (prices going up and way down, is impossible to know pricing terms)
Not secure (moment quantum computers reach quantum supremacy, the entire transaction log can be solved for all passwords to tokens in a few minutes... what took miners several decades, in just a few short minutes of QM iterations... go to spend your bit coin or others of its type, and find it's already spent... no longer valid.
No intrinsic value (requires electricity and lots of people continuously using it, as soon as just a few players leave, particularly big ones, you're left with literally passwords to an elaborate algorithm program that not only allows iterations, but requires iteration and transaction completion now takes weeks... and as more drop out months... then years... unless of course your using a QM computer... in that case solving most of the transaction log enough to identify enough passwords/coins, making the entire thing pointless).
Among the biggest scams in human history.
Anyway, yes. Crypto is down as it goes to 0. It's only reason it was up in the first place was the symptom of the overall flawed economic system we have.... everything was bubbled back up.... low interest rates on treasury bonds and bank deposits meant those left with wealth had to go find some hype and splash cash... one of those places was this goofy scheme of crypto crap.
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Capital systems have and still have labor camps to. Our prison systems in the US do labor.
But NAZI Germany very much against communists used labor camps. US pre Civil war used labor camps, and post civil war used a variety of tactics to kill unionization often at gun points from the coal wars from 1890 to 1935 and so many other insanity.
And most nations are based on money exchange for goods and leverage; hallmark of capitalism; every nation has had a revolution or deep depression. They collapse, wax and wane.
All economic systems thus far have been unsustainable.
So we need to think of better inventions of methods of production.
My opinion a co-op reserve bank to lend leverage to sectors that require huge economies of scale like mining, large farming, refining, development, utilities, etc. And instead of just wage/salary compensation, include voting rights and share collection and dividend payouts. Don't allow a few elites to corner markets as happens under authoritarian models and let it be capital robber baron mafioso markets... which become tyrannical too; and when two or more oligarchs start fighting each other, you get civil war or war against nations.
We need to come up with a better economic system.
Feudalism was abandoned for mercantilism which was a step up, then mercantilism abandoned for industrial let it be oligarchy, which was then abandoned for social-capital mixed markets, each being better than former.
So we need to come up with something even better than just social-capital mixed markets.
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We outnumber big insulin... they're on our hit list... and they should be shitting themselves... and if they're not... they will eventually when they're dead as a door knob swinging from some tree.
And I'm not even diabetic. I do know many family, friends, and coworkers who are diabetic. And this nonsense can't continue.
This goes beyond insulin, many other chronic conditions or even temporary conditions that require life saving medication... especially maintenance meds like vaccinations and regular check ups for preventative procedures, short term meds, etc.
There's reason why the US, the first industrialized country, to under go 3 years in a row 2015 to 2018 to decline... something not observed really ever... unless pandemic and/or their home country being invaded.
And then there's the millions living in their campers, cars, tents, or literally just outside in maybe a blanket or sleeping bag.... many of which are working, holding down jobs.
Since the pandemic, it has only gotten worse.
This country's oligarchs are in for a rude bloody awakening... then a long infinite sleep.
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They're duped gullible morons, and you'll find a fairly large amount of them all over the country, some are likely to be your family members.
It's tribal mixed with uneducated inability discern reality from fiction... or even know that fiction means not real, imaginary, made up. Actually had a coworker mechanic say he gets non-fiction and fiction mixed up on which one is fact based literature and which is made up... another coworker had to actually explain to him which one was what, and I just sat in amusement as this person makes more money than I do at a higher tech level.
People in general are scary stupid among most topics of basic knowledge, they hardly know their own professional niche, at least in the US.
Generally anywhere in the world that has a nation with high amounts economic disparity has the same effect; mass amount of stupid running around.
Question becomes, how do you get them to think instead of just react? How do you even go about teaching them to think and how to think: how to discern reality from fantasy so they're not gullible rubes?
Because every time you attempt to even just ponder subjects, some maybe big or small, they'll shut it down and say something stupid or refer to their superstition, that your pondering doesn't matter.... it's hurting my head to think of that they'll say.
So if people who experience pain to think, how can you get them to enjoy thinking? How do you get them to no longer experience pain when thinking, but pleasure?
If we don't figure this out, we'll be drowning in more stupid soon enough.
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Late stage robber baron colonial capitalism... or many other buzzwords that go along with it... essentially late stage rule by the few, generally a rich set who own the government and have produced massive propaganda that makes nepotism the divine right to rule and propaganda that the few knuckle heads keeping the few in power doing the dirty work of the few who rule to bully the rest with murder and other violence. Some nations more subtle in their control: USA just makes everything a crime and prosecutes people harshly and places most people than any other nation on earth in prison. Making healthcare a complete profitable farce, shit quality with elderly care that is more akin to a eugenics project than actual healthcare.
Developed country like the US 2017 to 2019 3 years in a row life expectancy dropped again in 2020 to 2021... largely from deaths form despair suicide, drug overdose, not being able to afford critical medicine like insulin, or critical utilities... Texas deep freeze in 2020 and 2021 many died not able to pay their outrageous power bill because they "let it be markets" stupidity on an open fire. Death becomes the answer.
And death is how it all ends.
Including for the few who control the world end up with the same, death.
China USA Japan both S and N Korea... and in the worst new colonial regions South and Central American Countries, eastern European nations, Middle Eastern and Africa have long become a cluster fuck in collapse mode, noted the rampen inflation of Turkey, Argentina, Venezuela, etc. and the basically collapse of Libya, now decade long famine in Sudan, the insanity of Egypt, Syria, etc. The recent creepy fascism spreading in Poland throughout Europe.
Late stage rule of the few... time and time again. And we're there at the collapsing tipping point.
Hope we fucking learn our lessons and don't just mock one nation when it's a problem globally and of humanity since recorded history, over 4,000 years of it.
It not only rhymes, it's really the same old with different labeled buzz words... slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, colonialism, globalism, fanaticism... take an ism and one may glorify one and condemn another in an endless stupidity that should be realized quickly and condemned for it's uselessness in solving anything... and obvious diversion when trying to come up with the complex solution to ensure ALL people live well and comfortably and to their firstly needs and then to their merits.
But it's so easy to fool people it seems, until the fooled become insanely fooled and then the only fools are those who thought they fooled everyone as they're generally go down by the idiot masses they induced into a frenzy of stupidity.
Let's hope we learn as this and after we let all this shit burn down worldwide... what China's system was and the USA systems and the systems in eastern Europe and the tyrannical religious nuttery systems of the middle east... and the caste eugenics system of southern Asia, etc.
None of them were good, but repeated the same late stage rule of the few collapse, as it becomes so obvious by more and more it cannot deliver the goods.
And we all just stop doing the typical and we all let it collapse.
And new experiments become a thing... but the few who want to rule... the hideous vultures are always there.
We need to prevent an aristocracy from forming... they are a parasitical evil that always... always... has destroyed civilization in all places about the world since recorded history.
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And seriously, you're so concerned we'll "damage".
But if our civilization falls apart, as many have in the past. It all goes back to the way nature has it. Our conviction that we're changing the earth indefinitely via certain things like dams, even climate change, is pathetic. If we go extinct, no more than a few tens of thousands of years to hundred thousand years, traces of our existence would be gone on the surface. A few tens of millions, mountains are formed where none were, and old mountains are laid low into hills and hills into flat lands.
Our concern about climate change has to do more about ourselves, the rate at which climate may change will likely bring about world wide famine. And that means billions die from starvation as well as all the un-fun things that happen when nations have crop failures: disease and war. IF it means our doom, the earth still has at least 600 million years of habitable time in the sun.
We're not even a cosmic fart. That would be the sun.
We're more like a virtual particle; the flickers of the Casimir effect, barely even existing.
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It's an absurdity... a nation that doesn't have universal healthcare, universal education, no high speed rail system, most cities lack good metro rail, we have current interstate and other roads and bridges in serious need of renovation and upgrades, our hydro electric dam networks are in poor shape and need upgrades, other than our share in ITER we don't have any other aggressive direct method of research safer fission and ultimate safe and extremely abundant energy supply of fusion that will quite literally change the world for the better providing a complete removal of fossil fuels for energy, etc.
So no. A wall that would cost minimum of $25 billion plus ongoing operational costs, and really a wall across the boarder would cost the price of an additional 6 lane transcontinental interstate highway which at the tune of $1 trillion to build, and operational yearly cost of about 1% or $10 billion a year. A wall that would give no economic value whatsoever.
And would provide no real exclusion to illegal immigrants... 99% of illegal immigrants come here via legal means (airport, vehicle via boarder posts, seaports) and overstay their visa or violate their passport provisions by working without a work visa.
The ones who come here dirt poor, with no connections... the most vulnerable, are the one's most quickly discovered by immigration control, and generally become the most discouraged and leave since almost all legal employers use E-Verify.
It's pure idiocy. As fucking dumb as our major cities in every state building billion dollar stadiums when they lack sufficient water, electricity, garbage, recycling, and states that are immense geographically having to shutter rural clinics and hospitals... but let's build a fucking stadium.
Clowns. We're fucking nation of fucking clowns.
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They just see the writing on the wall. Doesn't take much knowledge to know every empire that ever existed, any economy that had too much spent on military expenses and an industrial sector that effects the GDP, collapses economically under misallocation of resources to military items, and not on national needs: housing, infrastructure, R&D on medical, energy, mechanics, chemistry, etc.
So they're really just trying to preserve their fortunes. The alternative is to do what all other empires have done: monetize their bloated military and collapse the economy: unrest, rioting, general strikes, massive inflation that makes $1 million = $20 or less in today's dollars means everyone is suddenly very poor.
They're just trying to hold onto what they got.
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But Thatcher was your iron lady, right?
Don't worry, her idol and who she copycatted, our Gipper, we're living through that misery too in the Corporate States of America.
Funny fact though, most utilities in the states particularly sewer and water is more city owned and operated than private. Power it's a mixed bag... some cities in Idaho for instance is city owned and operated like in Idaho Falls. While rest of Idaho, electricity is private Idaho Power company. Either way, all utilities public and private are regulated monopolies that require any price changes up or down via the PUC or Public Utility Commission. And many of our utilities sewer, water, electricity, natural gas piping, etc. are heavily subsidized both state and even more Federal tax dollars.
So even the private utilities are held together in operating expenses and capital expenses via our tax dollars. Which is irony as the Gipper and his puppet masters would say privatizing monopolies means lower taxes and cheaper rates... when it's really the opposite.
Which should be obvious. I mean the profit is simply overcharging, and shortfalls in operating expenses on upkeep and the inability to develop grow where services are needed thus rates and taxes must go up... the idea that oh the private companies will raise their own capital for capital expenses via the stonck market... no... that's not been an on ramping of free money to grow infrastructure, but a way to offramp subsidies and rate hikes into the pockets of the owners of these monopolies.
All that being said, these Gipper lovers and in your country Thatcher lovers, are delusional, Stockholm syndrome only double down. It's like a dogma of witches and magical stuff and going full tilt not just having an inquisition burning an innocent person of supposed witchcraft every week, but how about every 1 hour.. no half hour no every minute and half a minute for year! Only then will we see goodies come raining on us all. Trickle down will truly trickle on us all!
And that's the spooky part. The people have been rendered zombies. Believing in this garbage to the point they're denying the reality was it was all bullshit and requires a complete opposite direction. In this case, stop monopolies including discontinuing private monopolies. And these private monopolies, were not even built on the obviously stupid idea that this would promote competition (I mean you're purposefully giving a monopoly meaning NO competition LOL!), but that a private monopoly would have access to finance like the stonck market and big banks and junkbond market to raise cash instead of raising rates and taxes... whic again that LOL! Didn't happen. Instead the private monopolies made out like bandits and discontinued their proper upkeep going barebones and took on more and more subsidies (tax dollars), and used stocks as a way to cash out on the cash cow that is a monopoly. In the end, raising taxes, rates on the using of the service, and having shittier service to boot due to the skeleton cheap skating of using even the subsidies for operating and capital costs... and oh those junk bonds... even higher taxes and rates because those junk bonds don't come cheap... would have been cheaper to use municiple bonds which come at a lower interest rate.
So yeah, Thatcher, Gipper, the Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman... all those puppets of the oligarch in the 1970's thru 1990's really F'd us all so super hard.
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I study these religions only to know the frame work of history and the irrational stupidity of our species in order to navigate it toward achieving social goals and individual goals.
It's among the best way to understand the framework of the humanity than to educate oneself on the various local superstitions; they're often the reasons of many wars and political structures.
I don't study this to partake in the indoctrinated nonsensical superstition, just to understand why people while in other aspects wise and logical, can conceive or follow horrible often hypocritical and always dumb illogical ideas that often go against their own interests along with many others. So that I may cope and communicate with my fellow upright apes.
Perhaps to at least come to terms with them to at least achieve agreement on and accomplishment of mutual goals.
At the very least I minimize the chance of being raped, robbed, extorted, or murdered or otherwise horrible actions that all animals including our species tends to propound upon one another; in short, at least I protect myself from a species prone to madness.
When I hear various mystics and prophets or whatever you want to call them in their various religious rhetoric as "teachings"... nonsense, they're lies. Pure and simple. Or in the vulgar, bullshit.
So I hear "The teachings of xxx or the teachings of this 'scholar' xxx."
I transcribe this is as:
"The lies of xxx and the bullshit of this liar pants on fire xxxx said some more made up nonsense mixed with another persons made up nonsense and here's how it goes (put your facepalm oven mittens on, this stuff is going to be painfully dumb: full of bullshit and illogical prose and just made up fantasy fiction to come... contradictory shall abound and very frequently hypocrisy: do as I say not as I do... and if I do x: that's fine and dandy, if you do it: how dare you!"
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Under John Adam's 2nd US president and founder adopted and signed the Treaty of Tripoli: Article 11:
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The founders were so concerned about keeping religion out of government, the first draft of the constitution that was actually voted on and passed, had omitted the common 18th century written form denoting what counting was based on: "Year of our Lord" Annu Domini AD. Instead, they simply wrote the numerical year. It was the final draft after adoption had already been completed, in editing decided to explain what year system was being used AD Anno Domini (year of our lord), mostly to make it sound more flowery. Even CE common era was originally used dating to 1615 to reflect the fact its based on Christian belief of the age of their Christ as the Christian Era/ Common Era as most of all Europe at some point under Protestant, Catholic, or Easter Orthodox Christian religions.
CE/BCE wasn't used for secular denotation until about 20th century. That's about as Christian as we get, essentially enough to denote that our year system is based on the Catholic introduced Gregorian calendar that uses the era year based on the Catholic supposed birth date of their Christ.
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This was more likely not a glitch based on evidence thus far, this was enough to warrant probable cause for criminal investigations.
1) Numbers coming at about 64% showing Bernie actually ahead.
2) Media quickly decided not to produce much results for a bit.
3) Then we get the advising of the app glitch.
4) A candidate paid $42K for "software rights" can we talk about conflict of interest?
5) The name of slap bag company called Shadow Inc launched in Jan 2016... Shadow? Really?
6) Then Buttigieg holds a victory speech with only 60% tally and was told as everyone else, the results have been found to be wrong.
7) Caucus supervisors literally were on the phone that night providing results, some couldn't get through and gave up for the night.
8) Others that did get through to report results that night or the next day were randomly not included in the piecemeal results so much so some took to Twitter advising that the results of their precincts were submitted, but are for whatever reason aren't being added to the piecemeal updates.
9) Barely open a full year it touts it's built and implemented technology for Hillary for America, Obama for America, Google, Kiva, Apple, the AFL-CIO, and the DNC, it interesting how a fledgling company barely open for a year without some serious connections that have some serious potential for conflict of interests to occur particularly for setting up a computer voting program.
10) The app caused several mistakes that distributed votes incorrectly not once, but several times adversely effecting the same candidate.
All this evidence points toward a probable cause to conspiracy to either mislead or tamper with public elections; a felony offense. And one that puts our democracy at great harm.
You have to be out of your mind not to be suspicious.
And just "forgetting about it" is a bit ridiculous. A serious criminal investigation should be launched by the attorney general in the state as well as each county prosecutors that experienced irregularities should also join the investigation.
If nothing happened, fine.
But I suspect it was an amateur hit job, and they bungled it, higher ups in the know realized it and bailed, and decided to do an about-face; but not entirely abandoned their attempt to push a particular candidate they wanted and attempting to play-down other candidates or candidate thus releasing reported numbers they wanted to release why holding onto other reported numbers. And there is still a chance since several instances that had to be corrected via Twitter and other news media by precinct supervisors of votes being distributed to the wrong candidate.
Basically, they got caught and felt they would be identified, bailed on most of the tampering, and still brazen attempted a plan b, to mislead and misinform.
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Go speak to lower educated people. They tend to lack basic understanding on how things work from physics, chemistry, biology, government, to economics... they have wrong concepts.
An example that comes up often: Many don't understand how their income taxes work, they suspect that tax brackets mean once you go into a higher bracket all your money is taxed at the higher bracket, which is utterly wrong.
Example of scientific misconceptions many think gravity of the earth has to do with the rotation of the earth; they fail to realize its the mass; that rotation of the earth actually counters the gravitation ever slightly, and most toward the equator.
Speaking to an uneducated person can be easily swayed toward whatever thesis you want them to walk away. Because they simply don't know any better. And hidden tricks can convince them whatever you want them to think was their idea along, and especially if you agree with their utterly false conceptions on things that have no effect on what you're trying to convince them about, so that they'll accept your spiel whether it's to sell them something or appeal to a particular political policy.
They're gullible rubes.
And its sickening. And worse is they get upset and offended when their misconceptions are challenged; fortunately they're vapidity usually means they have a smart phone with google, so they discover the accurate information anyway... for a while... they're forget the correct information though... usually.
I really don't think it was on purpose. I'm not sure how we have such an uneducated or at least how we have so many people lacking basic knowledge.
I think its in our culture; we focus too much on entertainment: sports, movies, music... most guys want to immediately talk about some sports scores and coach and backstory on some players life. Women tend to talk about actors and musicians and the back stories on their lives, the movies and series they're watching on tv, and home decorating. And many are too concerned with attending their kids sporting events or figuring out why they're flunking or otherwise misbehaving.
Very narrow conversations among most of the uneducated. Their horizons are stunted.
And any intellectual conversation is quickly forgotten. Because a few weeks later should that topic come up again, they'll ask the same question that should have been answered, and get the answer again, and act as if they never heard about the topic. And a few days later will do it again. Really, they just don't care. Otherwise they would remember.
So its a cultural thing, a value issue. Our values are terrible.
Our governments spends billions on stadiums. But neglect hospitals; most state and city hospitals are closed. But we can spend tax money which is rather high, often higher on the lower incomes and even somewhat affluent incomes than in Europe. And we get goofy things from it. Like stadiums. And we don't get helpful things like decent schools, clinics, and hospitals.
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Elon Musk translator what he says:
"China rocks, in my opinion, the energy in China is great, people there, is like a lot of smart hard working people, and they really, they're not entitled, they're not complacent."
Musk translator what he's really thinking:
"China really sucked my dick I think... I got to do California on them 10x freeloading off tax payers for free plants and other great freebies that I'll get credit for and profit from, lots of dutiful minions, I can pay them next to nothing, and a dictatorship that will put them in their little peasantry place.
And if I default on any of that debt, which is likely... none of that debt will really be binding, I mean all I have to do is feed the Twits and say China is evil or something, they'll just choke on my dick like they did when I first visited them.... just that the second gargle, they'll just have to swallow. So... yeah... I feel confident."
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Yeah... lot of this is wishful thinking of peasants wanting to be rich.
This entire stuff smacks at Fiddler on the Roof.
"Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!"
Reality, many of the new rich struck it in one of their multiple hustles.
And they tend to lose that fortune just as quick.
They're snakes and ready to push anyone they can under the bus. They seek feedback to know if they can trust you, and also how to get under your skin, or to get you vulnerable.
Ummm everyone makes to do lists.
Ummmm take a fucking peak at hours worked for an American. I work primary job 48 hours a week min... I have side hustle IT thing which is about 10 to 20 more hours. And I do various other side jobs.
Most Americans are forced overtime 12 hour shifts... very small vacations a year... 1 to 2 weeks.
But you know... rich people learn how to perform magical farts and do mysterious "good for you granny smith" things... why?
They're rich! They have to be doing something magical and amazing.
No. Just be healthy. And you might get the lotto of a hustle or two that could make you some serious money.
But don't count on it.
You should do good things like not waste time on carnival shows on tv (get rid of tv, it's a complete waste), eat healthy so you're not screwed up in your elder years or least likely to be and can enjoy life until the end regardless of how much money you got, keep learning and doing things that are enjoyable to you while not destructive to yourself.
And lotto tickets..... those a buck or two A YEAR is okay... more than that is absolutely stupid. Tax on poor people is all these lottery shits are. Instead, you should throw money at a stock. Gamble there. Slap a cash secured put, or purchase 100 shares of some decent cheap enough company to do so, and sell a covered call against it... limit your risk further, use some of the premium you made on selling the covered call to buy a put to collar the trade.
But let's not do lottos or slots or casino table games... tax on the poor. Just as monetary policy that pushes inflation is a tax on the poor and give away socialism for the rich.
One should do these things not to get rich... because that's unlikely and you'll just get burned out... or worse and turn into a sociopath... like Elizabeth Holmes... commit some fraud lose it all and go to prison... or sure you make it big, but you made enemies with some serious evil cartel members and you're sleeping with the fishes before you know it.
Or you're just a horrible human being that everyone celebrates when you have a stroke in your palace shitting yourself and your servants force you to eat soup they all had a turn pissing in.
Be a good person. Live healthy. Work as hard as you like. And find healthy positive hobbies.
Like making stupid ass long comments on youtube...
You can skip that one...
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@nigredoooalgown6245 Usually the standard deduction is always more of a write off than what you spend on work if you're not self employed.
If you're self employed, you own your own business, than you certainly need to write down everything because it's likely A LOT more than the standard deduction.
To be more than the standard deduction you literally need to be spending exactly more than $12,200 on gasoline, suits, tools, hotels, whatever else.
Which does happen in self employment.
But that hardly happens if you're not self employed.
And if it does, it means you make a substantial amount of money, or you are stupid at money, or you work for a slum employer as they should be paying for travel expenses that are work related.
So of course writing down work expenses is legal. If you're not self employed though, even if you add up lots of your spending from food and travel, it's unlikely to be more than $12,200 for individual, 18,350 head of household or $24,400 married filing jointly.
You have to make a lot of money to reach those figures on write offs.
And rich do this a lot as they make substantially more income thus have a greater chance of spending more than the standard deductions.
Hence why these tax cheats have to pay AMT... there is a limit to any deductions... luxury expenses don't mean you can't pay taxes like the rest of us just trying to make enough money to by rent, utility, and save for retirement as well as emergency as well as enjoying a vacation and not just being some plutocrat's little robot.
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At primary 2016, the mayor and some CNN and some DNC officials were there, they act really nice, but they're so phony it's intolerable. Our mayor spoke for Clinton's campaign. I was so glad he was heckled. He acted real nice, until his speech that is. He made a snide comment that if Bernie won, he would shave his head grow a beard and move to Nevada... I was up front sitting at a CNN desk with a friend, and casually, but loudly said, you don't need to wait for that, just do it now!
They act nice, but its so nauseatingly phony it's not that hard to see through it and be to the point: They're not your buddy, they're your elected servant or some jack ass doing a job. No more than your boss or coworkers or customers or random strangers are your buddies; at least those even the boss, acts friendly it doesn't always feel fake and creepy.
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This is what happens when you do "lazy-fair" do nothing on staple goods like housing, water, food, etc.
Look at other nations particularly poorer ones that haven't enough tax dollars to provide any planning on any supply of various sector staple goods while ensuring price ceilings on these staple goods like food and water... or medical... fortunately essentially all nations even poor ones other than the US have some form of universal healthcare.
But food, our oligarchs in the US aren't that stupid to allow us to starve because we'll come eat the bacon at the top, and the swine know it.
And all other nations that are "developed" have various staple have a planned portion whether that's crop insurance, price floors on crops so farmers don't all go bust and the following year shortages occur and thus famine, natural monopolies like internet, electricity, sewer, water works, irrigation, etc. are mixed market economically situated. With robust housing rules to ensure enough supply is made to satisfy demand while keeping prices stable.
So our food sector is heavily subsidized with farmer insurance in case of crop failure to price support should excessive supply crop harvest occur the farmers don't all go bust in over supply of a particular crop any single or multiple years... a smart thing because nobody knows nor can predict poor harvest seasons nor if storage of existing crop will remain viable to supply during bad crop yield periods.
So I'm in full support of a little planning in our economy... otherwise we will literally, at some point, will starve or go hungry... and our oligarchs know this.
Water and sewer in just about all states are mostly publicly owned even the irrigation canal system for farming is also publicly owned and operated.
There's only a few exceptions and of those most states have serious controls over the pricing and methods of citizen accountability on private water works or other utilities in the form of usually a public utility commission. We, unfortunately, have most cities source private electrical distribution companies... which in Texas was a horrible situation where their "market" the bozo clown electrical power suddenly had problems when they had frost a year ago people suddenly faced with $1,000 or for their electrical bill that usually costs $100 to $200 during their winter period... 10x baby! Suck them lazy fair stupidity poison apple berries.
But most states aren't so conditioned into this type of brainwashed disaster to come idiocy. Most utilities particularly water and sewer remains city owned and operated thus planned and held in check for the need and supply and at an affordable stable pricing. Because utilities are natural monopolies straight up. They do not compete because they can't. And forcing competitive markets in such a natural monopoly makes absolutely no sense as you'll just bump prices up with no increase in quality and supply, but rather you'll do the opposite.
Some planning is necessary.
Shelter... is a big one. I mean we have some planning around the edges for those who are in serious poverty and have so many dependents (which is bad because this conditions people to have kids just to get extra income from the local governments and federal government). It should be more robust. And these people only get the handouts if and only if they're already in financial straights, locking these people into bad financial conditions probably for the rest of their lives.
Vienna Austria, look how they do it. Best method that meets supply to demand and continues to keep prices well within the ideal 20% level of income per month expenses. The quality is superior in that even the rich, who are still eligible to partake too in renting these apartments, who subscribe and live in these public apartments with laundries, pools, wash driers and/or hookups, 1 to 4 bedroom units, workout facilities, apartment park and playgrounds, etc.
Instead, we have lazy fair stupidity and as it plays out, all that is trying to adjust is monetarism via the Fed. And that simply doesn't work. All that does is provide exit points for oligarchs to cash out and buy the dips. And cash out again. And relocate abroad when the inevitable failures of a non-planned at all economy falls apart.
Welcome to Laissez faire "lazy fair" economy... such a fairground of stupidity.
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Those "10 or 20 most this or that" Youtube clips are always so full of bullshit poorly researched and hyped clip bait bullshit. I'm hoping people realize it. Because whenever it's cited, people who know are like dude, do a simple a fucking google search; that shits wrong what did you do hear from some dumb asses 10 most poisonous things?
To be strait up, most people are fucking misinformed by all media about most things in particular astronomy, nuclear physics (everyone thinks power plants that "meltdown" literally explode like a nuclear bomb, and they think radiation poisoning thanks to cartoons, make you mutate or grow various weird forms squid arms or turn you into a reptile or bird etc., even chemistry people get wrong you can persuade them to think water is a highly toxic substances just by calling it by its molecular name and hinting that it is toxic (as it is if you drink too much at once), they'll go over board and say I don't want any of that stuff sounds terrible.
People are just fools. And we are all fools at times, and we all like our entertainment. The fools in particular get any actual info from entertainment. And they think this entertainment is well researched accurate info, when it's actually usually embellished and often outright made fantasy to make it more entertaining.
People are literally getting information from entertainment; the clown car is teaching folks.
That's spooky.
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"You would think the media would present the facts."
Yeah, that was like in the early 2000's, maybe 90's. Media has literally consolidated into 6 major media firms. Even LOCAL news, fucking LOCAL YOCAL news which is consolidated into 39% of households able to broadcast 70% of the US population under a the Sinclair Media Group, their affiliation with Fox, then we have 4 other national broadcasters: CNN AT&T WarnerMedia, MSNBC and CNBC General Electric, NBC, ViacomCBS, and ABC Walt Disney Television. 6 major broadcasters with BIG fucking pockets.
And you think the media would present facts? Well, if it was entertaining to do so, and didn't scare sponsors like Boeing... as if Boeing's ambitions are to sell their billion dollar airplanes to anyone.
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A good description of frational reserve banking complete with example and context.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebanking.asp
Essentially, any borrowing/lending has a temporary effect of "as if" increasing money supply.
Borrowing money means you can buy something now rather than later. And you're using money that otherwise would not have been spent on those or that item(s) or any items.
So borrowing/lending money acts a a temporary increase in money supply, or better stated and defined, it's increasing the velocity money, the number of transactions goods and service in a unit of time.
Banks cannot lend beyond their total deposit holdings. So if they have $100 million in deposits , they must hold a reserve of 10% so $10 million must be held.
If a crunch occurs beyond that $10 million they can lend from each other or the Fed Discount Over night rate which is "printed" into existence short period of time, but repaid (zeroed) by the borrowing bank the next day when they receive payments from loans the next day. They go defunct if they remain insolvent unable to repay the overnight rate, and/or no other bank will end them to cover them for the day or until they get more payments from their existing loans.
This velocity of money which effect which looks at the economy as a whole.
Example:
I borrow $100 to buy a phone from Sam.
Sam deposits the money in the same bank. The bank now has another $100 and if it has a reserve requirement of 10% it can make $90 loan to Jerry. holding $10 in reserve.
Jerry buys a printer cartridge from Becky for $90.
Becky deposits $90. Which then allows 10% to be reserve and the other 90% $81 to be lent out.
And you can repeat this until near $0.
So effectively increase the velocity of money... more transactions are increasing acting as if the amount of money in the system is larger.
Same is true if the money was just spent completely by each person involved, not deposited or lent out given a time frame.
Over the course of a day:
I buy $100 phone from Sam.
Sam then buys a clothes $100 from Jerry.
Jerry buys a printer cartridge from Becky $90
Becky buys some bananas for $5
In this economy the money supply started out as $100. Total purchases / money supply = velocity.
So $100+$100+$90+5/$100 = 2.95 times the original money supply.
Even though the money supply in this entire small economy was $100, in this day it acted as if 2.95 times the amount existed, or $295 existed during the day.
So yes, it does effect prices. The higher velocity of money the more transactions occur and often this means bid of prices goes up.
Fewer transactions (lower velocity) lower prices become.
Interesting fun fact about velocity of money particularly M2 supply.
From 1997 to 2019 the velocity tanked from 2.195 to 1.458 a persistent decline since '97.
This means fewer transactions have persistently occurred.
From 1960 to 1990 velocity stayed in a middle range of 1.7.
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It's time for a co-op economy using a Fed Reserve Co-Op Reserve Bank to buy out most of these firms out from the oligarchy and for people to borrow at a discount rate as all private banks do from the current Fed Reserve. Where all workers have one vote regardless of position to all aspects of the operations of the business, the business isn't traded for quick cash to suckers and eventually the ultimate suckers 401K and pension accounts so the financial sector can make a mint off fucking people, instead if you're hired with the company, you're a voting member of the the entire enterprise.
Ultimately the transfer from corporation owned by a few family dynasties to co-ops owned by the very people who work there with voting rights to all aspect to the operation of the business, democracy back into the workplace.
1) You would never see people vote to pollute their own communities
2) You would never see people vote to have a hazard unhealthy workplace.
3) You would never vote to outsource your job, particularly just to add a few more pennies to the earnings per share.
4) You would never hollow out a business going into debt to buy back shares so in the short run you make big on pumping share price.
5) You would never see executive leadership making 350 times that of the AVERAGE no the lowest, but average worker. They would still be handsomely paid, but not so ridiculous.
6) You in fact see better wage/salary compensation in most cases double that of what is paid today particularly for profitable periods, as all worker compensation (wages, pensions, 401k, medical insurance premiums, payroll matching taxes for medicare and social security) only account for 5% to 20% of a businesses yearly profits; and the 20% only applies to businesses that employ union workers which is only 6% of the private workforce and even at 20% that means shareholders walk away with 80% of the profits... if they paid double they would still walk away with 60% or more profits.
7) You would never have less than a few weeks of paid sick time allotments, and minimum of 3 weeks, but more likely 4 weeks paid vacation.
8) You would never vote for capital expenditures that were obviously stupid and unproductive to the business, while obvious shitty equipment continues not to be replaced, upgraded, or repaired.
In the end, you would have a better more efficient, more effective, more quality oriented, more happier business that would out compete any corporation that ever existed.
It's time to move toward a Co-Op enterprise model, leave the corporation to the dust bin of history as was plantations with slaves and poorly paid tenant farmers, workshops with indentured servitude under mercantilism, and the peasant surf to the noble lord are nothing but unpleasant footnotes in the memory of humankind.
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There's a big market for it since more than half our population who can vote don't bother.
45% didn't vote in the last general election. And 63% didn't vote in the last midterm.
And of those who did vote in either like myself, often leave half or more of the ballots blank since there are no contesting for that position on the ballot, or its the member of the same radical insanity choosing nut policy vs nut policy is pointless.
Big problem though with unions, most states now have so called right to work legislation... right to get screwed is what it amounts to, states look the other way when breaking unionization laws, and so do workers (several places trying to form unions, the workers suddenly get big pay raises and drop their unionizing; totally illegal under law, but no enforcement, and workers are okay for the time being because no dues anymore they got their pay raise... until it gets shut down a year later and moved to another county or state or country). And existing unions, people simply don't pay their dues, companies blame any policy no matter what on unions despite most policies being company policies not union ones, which tend to be small anyway. Toothless unions are pointless... a cheese factory non-union pays more than a sugar factory that is union.
I think unions are too late and a dollar short.
We need a co-op system.
So yes, a new party, call it labor or peoples party. But don't think pro-union will magical make things better. Union and union laws are weak and have proven to be dubious at best.
A co-op system and stronger labor structures like Germany's Co-Determination where 50% of the board are appointed by their non-management workers to the board of directors determining compensation, capital expenses, essentially all aspects of business.
But I'm more for a co-op structure where 100% voted by each worker, one vote each to determine the business. And funding via a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank with the ability to lend at a discount to groups wanting to form these particular types of Co-Ops. Even if investors are sought and got to sign up, they would have only 1 vote, no more no less, regardless how much they invested into the co-op.
Co-op system is the way to go. Eventually, workers democratically control their business. Capital formation is from the root of where it is today already from a government bank lending at a discount to private banks... in this would just cut the middleman of the banks and aristocracy trying to live like Caesars of old off other's labor.
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I did a breakdown on an individuals taxes on taxable income $50K (after deductions).
US you pay more taxes than Germany, UK, Japan, Austria, Sweden, and Australia.
And we pay additional to insurance for medical coverage that doesn't cover everything, only the premium.
I was spurred to do so when I was working with an international group of people; one from China, another from Japan, another from Sweden, another from Germany. The Chinese guy was looking over my pay stub and said wow! You pay lots in taxes. What do you get for it?
I said well you pay taxes too. And all of them got in on it to compare each others taxes and and other withholding. Their taxes were lower and included universal healthcare, some even includes higher education like Sweden, Germany, Austria, and the UK.
All I could say was... we we have roads. The German said, we invented the Autobahn, don't give me that. I then said, we have a bloated military... that's all I got.
I still get my Rx from Germany to this day because same price $160 will get me over a year supply 200 tablets vs only a month or so supply in the US or 20 tablets that are $200 per Rx.
I did a sketch on $50K with exact same budget on food and clothing and entertainment to capture their VAT (sales) tax as well as their income tax and payroll taxes.
We pay more than they do on every front; Federal, payroll, state, sales tax, property tax, etc. And then we pay additional to premiums, again not including using that so called medical coverage when it requires meeting deductibles, copays, etc.
I checked for married and dependents; Germany specifically gets huge tax deductions larger than ours about $7,500 per dependent if I remember right. So their taxable incomes are lower too. So the $50K taxable figure I compared, means a German grosses even more, makes even more money than $50K by far if they have dependents and/or are married; their standard deductions are even more generous than ours.
We're an idiot nation being fucked in every orifice of our body and then some.
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Our medical system is a complete farce.
The other thing UK, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Italy, Greece, the many countries that once upon a time were Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia, Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and many other countries do is to treat all medical companies as monopolies in pricing. All providers of equipment to medicine and including services rendered have a fixed operating max profit margin of usually about 6 percent. And usually a capex (capital expenditure) additional 6 percent or so max profit margin.
And thus most of these same countries have a multiple or single payer quasi or fully government insurance or just a governmental program like UK and Canada. And the costs of medical is a fraction that of what it is in the US even without so called medical insurance.
Hence medical tourism is very big, as well as getting Rx medicines from Canada or Mexico or Europe or Japan or Australia or from many other nations already mentioned. Because in the USA we have unlimited profit margin allowed.
Problem with this, is the medical services and products either have an economy of scale requirement in that few people at any time will need the services like a hospital or particular life saving emergency medicine like an EpiPen injector for anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction that can randomly inflict anyone at anytime), and/or all medical services and products have an inelastic demand curve, meaning no matter the number of providers supply as much quantity as possible, the demand curve is so steep not to die or live in misery that people will pay any price. Hence price mechanism doesn't follow something with elastic demand curve with substitutes like a hotdog which can be substituted by many different foods if the price for wieners or the bread becomes too high, the price will go down because all the suppliers can't keep charging high prices to get bloated profit margins.
Our medicare and medicaid system could save 50 percent immediately, probably closer to 80 percent if we implemented the 6 percent max operating profit margin, with a 6 percent capex additional margin as most states do already on utilities like water, sewer, trash, electricity, natural gas, etc. natural monopolies.
Medicare and Medicaid costs combined for 2023 were 1.455 trillion dollars for the year. Cut that in have it would be 700 billion dollars.
The 1.49 percent payroll tax on all gross wage/salary/tips earned income brought in 358 billion in 2023. So we would still have a deficit. But it would be cut down to half. And really, we could just do away with the scam of all these bloated insurance companies and go single payer like many other nations. My current employment contribution medical insurance is $240 a month premium. Rather high for a so called high deductible plan that literally covers shit on a shingle and allows for a "healthcare" savings plan; between my employer and myself can contribute up to 3,600 a year to it, and I keep it forever. But it's a scam as it will quickly vanish if I ever needed serious medical help.
We could just increase that 1.49 percent to something similar to Germany 4 to 5 percent to cover literally EVERYTHING; dental, vision, body, you name it. And it covers everything. Including under context of reconstructive surgery due to injury or illness etc. Would be cheaper than the farce that we have with the bogus insurance scam; my employer pays over 6K a year to my crappy plan. While I pay roughly 3K a year. I can expect to pay highest out of pocket 7K. Deductible max is 3K, but then it still only covers up to 80 percent of the bill until it reaches $7K in that year in which it's to cover everything after until the year ends; then it starts over, having to reach that first $3K and then it pays 80 percent until I have paid $7K max out of pocket.
And we wonder why people go bust even under insurance. And that's if it is "covered". And that you're able to maintain insurance, long term disability means FMLA max 6 months and they can fire you. And then you have to pay COBRA their full contribution 600 a month plus. They try to push you into medicaid at that point so the insurance company gets reimbursed on whatever they paid out if it's retroactively approved, so medical insurance at that point is generally just fronting the cost and getting it all back once they push you onto Medicaid disability.
Other countries have figured out how to simplify and do what is right for their people.
Most states in this country have long figured out how to ensure natural monopolies like electricity, water, sewer, trash, natural gas are setup to ensure quality service and very reasonable affordable prices; save Texas because that state has its finger up its ass in oligarch love; recently they've had cold spells that rendered their power distribution frozen with blackouts, and their "market driven" power for whatever they were able to use for that month, some people got bills for over $1,700.00 plus. Leave it to bozo the clown Texas to fuck their people hardcore.
All other nations with a brain, essentially the rest of the 49 states, have either publicly owned utilities or if private owned have those max margins operating and a capex max margin to encourage and compensate for updates and growth of services; Idaho it's 6 percent for both. And we get reasonable utility bills regardless if it's public or privately owned. Better prices public owned like the city of Idaho Falls owns all water, sewer, trash, and electricity. While oddity like Boise has two private water companies with their own districts. Most of rest of Idaho uses Idaho Power private company; but as all private utilities, the Public Utility Commission regulates rates and ensures any profits above the operating and capex gets returned to customers, recently my natural gas bill a few months ago was chopped into nothingness as they tabbed out on both for the last fiscal year.
I know this is very wordy.
My point is, regulations like this aren't new. They're already being used in the states themselves and abroad.
These medical sectors in the states are screwing everyone hardcore. It's a fucking crime against humanity. Just as medical patent protection is too. Most medical research is done at universities across many of them even across different countries. And research trials can just be refunded and a reward for the organization that comes up with it should be dispensed, but let's not make the monopoly problem worse by granting them an artificial monopoly! Talk about pouring salt in an open wound!
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Had it not been for FDR and the policies put into place by congress and him, we would look something similar to many impoverished rich countries like India, Mexico, Brazil, etc. Quite literally my grandma born in 1933 spent her first 5 years living in what later I got to visit was a shack or shed, she called a cabin. Dirt floor, with 4 other siblings, part of this shack/shed overhung a small creek for water. And a caste iron stove in a small village in Idaho. A cement plant was built in 1929, and would have remained bankrupt had it not been for FDR programs, which required large amounts of cement for the various dams and road construction which required expanding the cement plant, by 1940 my great grandpa was hired by the the cement plant, and that money enabled him to not only buy a car, but build a modern framed home with electricity and plumbing.
Had it not been for the programs of FDR, much of the US would be like China is today, a few major modern looking cities with suburbs and rural areas as poor and impoverished as frontiers of the 1800's.
Interestingly, the cement plant still survives however, in 2010 the production ceased, and several layoffs, part where they mined the silica and limestone is no more, they no longer make Portland Cement, but act as terminal for distribution... a railroad runs through there.
After visiting the "cabin" I forever understood why my grandma and her still surviving sister, my great aunt would only vote democrat.
What FDR did for the US in particularly was to keep us from remaining a sad impoverished hovel, kept us from potentially turning into a fascist state cooperating with NAZI Germany and Italy, and kept us from violent tyrannical authoritarian regimes similar to the violent Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. under the now forever tainted feigning of Marx criticism of absolute capitalism, and the need for social economy for a mutually sustainable prosperous world.
Unfortunately, nearly a century later, those lessons of the virtue to a mixed social-capital system are fading. Aristocracy are at it again, and as always with great avengeaunce.
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I like cash and can't see that ending in the US.
But major purchases I like using a card or some bank to ensure against fraud and as secondary proof of purchase. Way back I bought a used car for $2500 with cash... was only 16 and I only had a savings account with my credit union, and held most of my money in cash. Didn't get a checking account until I turned 18.
I never felt well with paying for large items in cash in case of disputes of the purchase.
But cash should never be let die. It's the only way to do business freely, unless they give us a free merchant transaction clearing house card system rendering VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, etc. useless and obsolete... that part would make me smile. No more freeloaders cutting off the top.
I have since 2002 had direct deposit for tax return... when I was in the military with Air Force and any government job requires direct deposit only. It was faster to get the deposits then waiting for a check, then having to cash it. The government can freeze your bank accounts any time with court orders. In addition, you can have garnishments if judgement is made against you civil court.... so that's not to surprising.
Most people wouldn't stand for losing cash in the US. So I'm not to nervous about losing cash. We won't lose cash. There were various segments of the elites that lobby to keep the penny, let alone other cash because it means a lot to their business that sort coins, make the coins, vending machines, gas stations, various shops, etc. So it's not a forgone conclusion just because Denmark is doing it we will do it.
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I still would go with an H2 fuel cell car. The idea is using nuclear energy to over power the grid, and electrolysis of water to O2 and H2 is fairly efficient at 149 MJ/kg electricity to make 1 kg of hydrogen which contains 141.8 MJ/kg of energy. And based on safety features developed so far, many sensor valves are established for emergency shut off valves if a leak is detected, in addition to emergency jettison method to jet the H2. Compared to lithium batteries that once punctured produce a thermal runaway effect, the vehicle is burning for several hours, putting out lithium vehicles is tough since water ignites lithium.
Neither vehicle types based on present technology would I store in a garage.
I personally think H2 is better so far, and H2 tanks can be made safer, they're already safer than lithium batteries.
For H2 vehicles, I would want to know more about the venting, and then ignition as described by Thunderf00t. Run a test that delays the flame source.
I read and watched the tests he shows with comparing a gasoline and H2 vehicle on fire. Part of the problem they had with the bullet, is that it didn't ignite the H2. They literally had to use an incendiary bullet to get it to burn the H2, and it produced the flame jet of burning H2. I would like to see them just puncture the tank, let it sit for a second the use a spark and flame and other ignition sources to find out what happens.
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That doesn't mean people should physically harm being or property.
BUT to be booed and heckled everywhere you go... because you're not representing people... and the people want you to know that... and we're on to the phony democracy that gest hijacked by oligarchs and bribes... you puppets are pukes that represent only aristocracy, dumb and out of touch... so screaming in your face maybe the last resort before these nuts do in fact become scary.
Nobody wants civil war.
But this body we call congress has abandoned the people for oligarchy.
Fix it before the people fix it.
For all our sakes.
1) Abandon all campaign financing. Public funding only. Funds going to known registers of petitions to the candidate running... and equal in kind payments; media outlets providing air time, web time, and other access to make known their platforms.
2) Require debates at all levels of government offices from state to Federal without exception.
3) Induce equal time on all major media outlets for political views are expressed.
4) End gerrymandering. District forming should be arbitrary based on simple population distributions done in a very starkly absence of political bias algo driven methods; see Germany's method of district forming as a decent example of unbiased political districting so that the candidates aren't picking the voters, when it's suppose to be the voters picking the candidates.
5) Make available the ballots and voting period that can last several weeks and generally done at home mailed in or submitted online as almost all of us do with banking.
6) Allow for a tribunal method to make clear grievances on the Federal not just state level by the citizens of the nation, and allow that Federal Tribune to override any so called representation of congress should it gather a 2/3 majority petition on steps to creating law and then a full ballot for referendum on that law or on details to that law in it's formation and eventual finalization and referendum on that final law. Skip this absurd gangster method if it doesn't work, like the ancient Roman senate of old that time and time again failed as it only tended to represent the oligarchs eventually appointing over its time an emperor, quite literally in name and function a dictator for life, very much a king in all but name.
7) For candidates of judges: all should have term limits. Including the supreme court, and with these terms, mandatory retirement with an immediate pension so as not to work in any sector they may have bias rulings conducted during their tenure.
And all judge candidates must pass a bar exam of the state and/or Federal jurisdiction to the region they seek to be elected.
8) Requirement to run for any office of the government of basic sound education. Equal to the GED certification testing: Basic knowledge testing knowledge of candidate on all areas of knowledge: Math, Geography, History, Law, Economics, Engineering, Physics, Biology, etc. that at least provides a GED level grade testing.
Each time a candidate wants to run for office and even when they want to run of a final second term (no terms greater than 2), they must retake the test to ensure cognitive abilities are maintained. This is less rigger than persons serving in the armed forces, mail, police, fire services, civil engineering, forest services, etc.
Right now, there are no basic exams of a candidates educational cognitive effectiveness whatsoever, other than a dog and pony show and often just thru the graces of proclamations of various bribers, the oligarchs, the rich, the aristocracy.
Just some preliminary items that need to be done to make our nation a functionable democracy and not an oligarchy that is overtly against the will of most of the peoples' interest who are citizens and/or residents of it.
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Type of Stockholm syndrome. Rather very clever propaganda, they've been conditioned aka brainwashed into whatever the pluto-rats have dumped in advertisement.
1) Normalization advertisement like McDonald the fast food joint ads... Coke and Pepsi do the same, constant barrage of ads everywhere and anywhere to drink or eat what people know tastes like battery acid, give you constipation or other problems after eating it, and often look nothing like the advertisement, rather something that someone sat on when you unwrap the sack of high fructose poison.
Yet people continue to feel comforted by what harms them, when they're somewhere traveling unusual, they can depend on that sat on burger that'll give them indigestion and various other digestive problems either the squirts or constipation or a bit of both. They can expect the same sugary flavor. Neither good nor bad in their conditioned sheep mind.
2) Scapegoating distractions. Much of the propaganda is poking fun at various absurdities and they play the absurdities up pointing to things like gender bending cocktail into the realm of beyond ridiculous, and say see, vast majority are going to think how lunatic fringe is this gender thing. So they point to those absurd fools, and conflate the nuts that maybe labeled with otherwise labor friendly policies, and see these nuts can't even figure out what their nether regions are and do nor what to categorize themselves. How can you trust them with economics or anything else?
3) Bandwagon. This is actually in all states left, right, or independent. They want to be on the side of the winning team, the substance of that team matters very little, as they feel they have no stake either way, other than bragging rights, superficial conversation pieces in the lunch room and to feel good at home while otherwise possibly not having the best of day.
4) Futility. With gerrymandered districts where the politician picks their voters. And with bribery the way of the land with so called campaign finance in super pacs and just outright plutocratic bribes that are called "donations" , there isn't much hope for many to even bother. Hence why US has among the worst turnouts in most states than any other nation that has elections and various votes on laws.
This futility is often backed up by entire states and/or counties, why bother vote, I'm on the deepest blue state or red state for this independent candidate or this left or right candidate?
5) Knowledge of what is possible, actual history of the past, etc. This is actually becoming weaker as internet has allowed people internationally to have not just pen pales they seldom write to each other, but to have daily conversations and even travel to each others lands and learn more details. Even so far as to stay and work in each others different countries.
One bad side to this on the regressive side, is that many, usually the most uneducated, but even the educated, and I mean college educated even, forget the basis premise of scientific method on how to discern fantasy idiocy, conspiracy lunacy from credible sources nor how to evaluate how something works and behaves to deduce for themselves what is factual and therefore predictive power. Many are not introduced to objective skepticism. They simply don't know how to figure out nonsense from actual data and verifiable tests. My oldest brother lamented last year how does one know what is true about the thing, and the vaccine, etc. He's college educated, bachelor's degree, makes 6 figures as an IT manager. Very smart guy. I was stunned that he couldn't figure out what credible sources to lookup on even youtube or google on such subjects to weed out the nonsensical fringe... to first understand how something works, and how the credible sources describe how that same premise of how something works can be used in engineering. It has been a while since he attended college and the first thing apparently most forget is how to discern credible sources from bad sources or outright made up gibberish.
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Banking cartel aka the Fed did money printer or rather debt binge aka sell debt go burr... by the tune of adding 4 trillion more to the Fed Balance sheet and reduced interest to near 0%.
This is what happens.
Happened in Japan. And Japan's had a malaise for the past 40 years.
Japan only didn't have as much inflation for two factors... they did have inflation. But consumer goods were kept in check because Japanese don't tend to load up on debt as ridiculously as say S. Koreans or Americans. Japanese tend to be savers of money.
Reduction in couples having children demonstrate the cost savings required, and ridiculously smaller homes in which many Japanese live.
At this point, in a debt based monetary system, the only solution to the banking cartels greed driven mistake is to raise interests rates.
Our current system marveled at pre 1989 debt binge of Japan, the stupidity in manufacturing black belt nonsense and JIT or just in time inventory meant lean inventories. There is no planning for lack of supply because during a debt binge on the supply side (producers were massively going into debt during that time of Japan) there becomes and excessive amount of supply so it trains businesses to think capacity is larger than it really is. Even as over time, the pretzel making supply chain of imperialism, colonialism, globalism whatever hair brain buzz the nether regions to make it sound great when it's absurd race to the bottom economic structure decays supply capacity... can't tell this is happen as demand destruction decays in the race to the bottom, labor of various regions having to compete against serf labor tyrannized labor destitute labor of sweatshops... and of course the consumer debt binge like in the US or S. Korea and several other places around the world to hold up demand as long as possible... until they cannot repay the debts. Boom bust. And in all the oscillations supply capacity along with aggregate demand has shrunk in unison.
Therefore the debt binge over the past decade with just the banking sector going bust fueling the stupidity demand for just a little while in a demand destruction economic structure mentioned prior (globalization, colonialism, imperialism whatever same thing), had a bail out via our currency, a monetization of the debt to which all of us who use the currency paid the price via inflation and the re-inflation of housing and cost of goods.
Then add the doubling of that balance sheet for the pandemic, and they didn't take the punch bowl away quick enough when the scope of the pandemic was mostly understood, some effective vaccinations developed, etc. they allowed the balance sheet to continue to increase along with extending extremely low interest rates... wonder why joke stocks, companies essentially bankrupt were trading like the tulips aka crypto... funny private money that in all periods of time has always, always gone bust? Why currency eventually is put on to the government responsibility. Of course not here in America, we put the currency monetary policy put on by a private banking cartel of all member banks of the country. Fox guarding the hen house... or bank robber guarding the bank stupidity.
Too much liquidity in the system. The banking cartel F'd up royally. They're now stuck either not doing much or anything and inflation becomes hyperinflation and a great depression. Or doing something to tame price stability and halting the rate of inflation perhaps causing a great depression still, but maybe one that isn't as harsh. Maybe.
This situation we're in is that we're hosed as less than affluent people the hardest.
And some affluent or even rich people might end up hanging themselves in the end. Particularly those who were mostly con jobbers spinning yarns and later when the tide goes out, found to have been cooking the books... all the cockroaches sort of reveal themselves when the bust happens... the likes of Enron, Worldcom, Qwest, Global Crossings, Tyco, Microstrategies, etc. etc. etc. < funny how the same actors are often perpetrating yet another con... Microstrategies... gave fake earnings 1997 to 1999, 3 years in a row, Michael Saylor got fined, he paid the fine via selling some of his stocks... what a slap on the wrist... now the joker has for the past 2 years been on a pump and dump scam with BTC telling everyone to just buy buy buy the garbage.
I don't think we humans have the capacity to learn. The quote of Mark Twain was too accurate: that it's easier to convince a person about to be fooled, but near impossible to convince a person they have been fooled. It's as if the ego makes the person become insane... double downing on the same thing over and over expecting different results... as a way to protect their ego. It's rather pathetic.
But perhaps that's what we humans truly are... rather pathetic.
We are and will be if we don't chose to screw the ego, and learn.
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I wonder if his hair lip has to do with his overt evil policy decisions against women, and not being able to abort, and just being a pure oligarch toad master though?
I know its not fair he was born ugly, but sometimes after examine the content of a book, the ugly cover does provide an accurate representation on what was in it. In this case, a Gríma Wormtongue character is as vile as his name and looks.
Makes you wonder, does the cover cause the content to corrupt the person, or does the content corrupt the cover?
Where does such idiocy and overt hate originate in a person?
Does the fact he's ugly outside pollute his character inside? Or did his ugly inside effect is outside into becoming more ugly?
I knew some ugly people on the outside, but it was hardly noticeable by the beautiful inside, you don't notice their homely appearance unless you do a double or triple take, and even then they don't seem to be so ugly outside after all, and you quickly forget they're not so great looking on the outside.
Then there are those that aren't that ugly on the surface, even attractive at first, or long glance, but their inside is so terrible, just a hair out of place, or an ill placed mole on their face suddenly makes them among the most hideous monsters.
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By the way, this video completely depresses me.
I think our country has literally gone mentally deficient.
I'm going to study up on the collapse of various countries like Weimar Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Britain's Empire, France's Empire, Spain's Conquest collapse, Ancient Rome demise, more recent various constant collapse of various Central and S. American countries (from what I do know, usually our nation has something to do with the majority of those treating them like colonies with the title), USSR collapse and the other collapses among those former Soviet States like Yugoslavia and Ukraine and Georgia, etc.
I'll let you all know if I find some correlation with any of those nation's and ours.
Doesn't help we recently had a beer belly putsch in January.
That has to be an outlier right?
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I don't know very many people whose finances are that much of a mess.
But okay, if you think that's why perhaps.
Statistics explains its mostly because they simply don't make shit and cost of living is going up:
Median individual income is $40,010 in 2019. Median family income $75K.
Half of Americans make that or less.
Rent and mortgage payments have risen 4 times than wages in the past decade; most classify as rent insecure in that gross monthly earnings to rent is over the safe 33% into the insane 50% to even 60%... meaning their takehome pay ratio is even more insane at 60% to 75% of take home pay. Tent cities coming near... oh wait they already exist all over every town and city in the US.
School isn't $22K a year for public in state schooling; try $7K for full time credits for two semesters, but not $22K a year; it's not even that much for out of state fees and you can often get residency waivers so you pay near instate tuition and eventually just get residency while there going to resident amount. It's not cheap. So I get that. But not that insane.
But seriously, I don't see that many yuppies at work driving things they can't afford, in fact most are driving some of the mentioned Toyota or Honda's or the like that are cheap.
So... perhaps you're in yuppy central... wanna be land?
I just don't see it here where I live.... wait... trucks... those things are expensive and there are quite a few who do own those.
So maybe I'm just seeing it in a different fashion?
Anyway, statistically speaking most are poor because they don't make very much money to begin with. They're not driving fancy sports cars, they wouldn't have the credit to buy one. And simply don't see that, at least in my neck of the woods.
Sure, there are the few yuppies around here, but they're a very tiny minority.
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Look out for business CLO's... as reckless as ever, larger than the other derivatives of 2007. And those risky businesses have and are using them to buy back stocks... and some of these businesses are on super low cash flow since some are still not profitable, to make payment on interest they're already on highly in debt to pay, or dispensed any extra as dividends and used for stock buybacks, some really need to raise more money like Tesla... but they're already $10 billion in debt.
This is going to end worse than last bust. Read an article in start of this year that October several business CLO's come due, and many of the business likely won't be able to pay nor be able to roll over their debt to pay with new debt; a 50/50 chance that the bust happens. Odd that it's always October.
The way banking and investment; capital formation; works now effects all of us terribly. While for a short period of time make a few extremely rich, wealth not seen since Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. But as unstable.
We need to go to a co-op structure where shareholders are also the workers with voting rights each worker in the business.
Lending can come primarily from a Reserve Co-Op Bank lending at a discount interest rate, just as our Federal Reserve Bank does for private banks that essentially would if they behaved themselves guaranteed profits, and large profits at that.
But as we can see banks and corporations don't behave themselves, they're not functioning as intended.
A co-op system would ensure capital formation wasn't a gimmick, fraud, just to funnel as much money to a few rich as possible before whatever shell they created collapses.
That it gets to capital expenditures to grow industry, and that the workers have ultimate decision on how, where, and what to produce... this would mean they would have voting rights on compensation packages, safe working conditions, and would likely promote environmental friendly decision making... they live where they produce they're not about to poison themselves.
Currently all businesses including corporations keep all profits, employee pay is considered and expense/liability.
But if you add total labor expense to net profits; then divide what yearly labor gets from this total profit; it ranges from 5% to 20%. Meaning companies keep 95% to 80% of all the profits.
A business could quite literally double the wages/salaries and other compensation packages such as medical coverage, pension/401K; to 10% to 40% going to labor; and still keep 90% to 60%.
Demonstrates how insanely skewed so called shareholder redistribution goes, and yes it is redistribution since the workers put the stuff together and service it and sell it.
All the shareholder does is collect the proceeds in their mail.
And of shareholders currently 85% of all shares are among only 10% of the population of the US. That's very skewed on who get the wealth, utterly unstable similar to vicious cycles created through all of history.
At the very least we should have something similar to Germany where they have co-determination where about half of the board of directors of any corporation starting at a certain size must be filled by wage labor.
A co-op system would be even better. Everyone votes for policy, leaders, and management. And eliminates the parasitical nature of an aristocracy; capital formation can come from the nation as it does anyway even under our idiot corporate system. We just removed the do nothing parasites.
Banking and finance effects all of us. And this ass wipe of a politician saying otherwise is a disgusting liar like Oz screaming pay no attention to the man in curtain.
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Essentially, it's a clever pyramid scam... so yes it's a security, a very bad one at that, one that pretends it's decentralized when in fact it's centralized by the monopolist of the funny money.
BTC is also similar in that early on, several individuals and entities monopolize most of BTC. And have created casinos to gamble on, some of these and the main liquidity even merging with spot exchanged like COIN and many others, offer 100x leverage... and their aim is that morons that trade with high 100x leverage is 1% liquidation point, hence the huge swings in BTC prices for the past 8 years. Also the leveraging up with other crypto exchanges often using worthless crypto as collateral to buy more crypto.
Just one giant cluster mug that really solves nothing financially, but only reproduces the same banking nightmares of of the past thousands of years of banking history.
So yes, ETH is a security, and a bad one at that. Another person in the comment section put it, as vapor (Vapor ware). It's a crappy security that likely wouldn't be approved for registration.
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We need to change from corporations to a co-op business system using a Co-op reserve bank for access to large capital formation. The employee and employer relationship would be come bridged as one in the same; as each employee would have voting rights on what, how, where, to produce and what to do with the surplus/profits. Going further, house and renting establishments can be made to ensure rents and housing prices aren't insane by performing co-op housing development and rentals. The owners develop the land at expense only, not trumped up pricing on the lots and construction, and renters get to vote what to do with surpluses: upgrade roads, better parking, amenities, build more units, change rent prices such as actually lower them, etc.
More effective than corporate and land lordships at growing a vibrant economy EVERYONE actually prospers from instead of the top 1%... and the top 20%to 2% would do better under such a system.
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Quit bull shitting people about Webull not paying anything.
You do pay, just not a commission. You pay in the spread between ask and bid price.
If the spread is just 0.50 to as high as $25 or even $50... you're paying per stock you buy half that spread as "market makers" are who you're playing with, not the direct exchange.
So if you buy a stock for eventual price at $100.00 and it the bid was $90 and the ask was $100.00... they the market maker had them at $95 or less. They buy at $90 keeping $10 a share and selling it to you at $100.
If you bought 10 shares at $100... you just over paid by $10 to $5 dollars per share.
Or $50 to $100 dollar too much.
Congrats, you paid $50 to $100 instead of the normal $5.00 or free x amount of free market and stop/limit orders on actual brokers that direct you with the exchange for either a yearly fee or maintaining an account balance above X amount.
The reverse happens when you sell, they just buy the shares from you at the lower bid price and take a higher asking price. You're being fucked buying and selling much harder than a commission... and many brokers give several commission free trades anyway that trade on the actual exchanges.
You're being played.
Keep hustling.
NOT!
Instead, go fuck yourselves. And be honest.
And yes, most people would buy only dividend producing stock. Must keep in mind, companies can suspend or cut dividends at anytime, they're don't have to give any notice on ending or cutting dividends. Hence the trade off when such companies slash or suspend dividends.
Nice hustle, start with something agreeable: a no shit Sherlock that 99% of the comment section can't wait to tell you how brilliant they are, because they already do this.
Then hustle them some bullshit.
And you talk like everyone is just squandering all this money they're making.
People who typically don't invest literally haven't an income to do so. They likely have very little in savings, and savings is first then investments.
Those who are making money know or hire people better than your common knowledge often platitude basic financial education.
Again, check the comments.
You're making them feel real good about themselves on how much they already do this, pat me on by back please LOL! Then in good spirits lead them to the slaughter with a dark pool exchange. Hustle tactic.
Stop with the fucking extra added hustle!
You fucking Suze Orman wannabe!
We don't need another of her ilk.
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He was playing on a protest... as if pushing money onto rich people holding stock is some kind of protest... but meet idiocracy in the full. It's pure unadulterated stupidity.
The morons he cultivated and gave a safe haven, feel rightfully or wrongfully (the entire thing is stupidity mixed with more stupidity just as fake magical internet money is fucking apex of stupidity) he's a salesman... watched Meet Kevin several other times way prior to the pandemic.
His real-estate hype to me anyway, sounded like a big debt trap he was pushing himself into... he has lots of liabilities. He's probably in debt to his eye balls. And I think he saw 2020 and some of the stupidity during the 2021 on meme stocks, that it was a get out of debt quick scheme. A really rich person doesn't bother doing youtube.
He is a grifter... he swaps between real-estate to crypto to stocks.
He sets examples as if he knows what he's doing... when really he's setting people up to failure.
He got what he was coming. He was utilizing the morons protesting throwing money at the rich via buying up meme stocks thinking somehow this was going to make the rich hurt hard, the hedgies the imaginary scapegoats... little brainlets don't understand short sellers are all over the place small and large... and in generally shorting stock is expensive and done quick and fast; literally day trades... swing trades on shorts last about a week at the most or for the period of a dump that happens. And it usually is accompanied by hedging long positions along with shorts. Hence the term hedge funds... it's a contrary to the longs that are much larger than the hedge to the short side.
I think too many movies scrambled the mindless rubes minds seeing the long period Big Short movie has many of them holding onto a short position for a long period of time... that's not normal... holding those shorts wasn't normal... they had to hold them for so long because they literally had to create an entire scheme custom made to short the CDO's of real-estate. And they couldn't just offload them super quick because being newly custom creations, the very people who sold them these instruments weren't valuing them appropriately... of course... was a bit of a fraud... that's why they dumped finally when they did all involved in the big short of real-estate.
That's not a typical short. Neither is the prolonged stupidity of GME... they're looking at outliers and expecting them to be the norm. The norm is that shorts are in for a week or two at the most... most often it's a day trade.
They're hardly never in longer than a month... try shorting anything for longer than that, even if the trade goes your way, interest on the borrowing of the stock and potential hitting your stop loss or getting a margin call can ruin your risk reward ratio.
So basically... Kevin is a grifter... I watched back in 2017 and/or 2019 somewhere around then all his real-estate dealings... he would sort of go over all his holdings and how he would use equity loans to purchase more and more real-estate and think its fine and dandy to have a few homes or apartments paid off with the rest borrowed and borrow more for another property... basically confusing that no matter what on the aggregate he's in debt, expecting and assuming renters are a dime a dozen, and no problem, just get a renter no matter what price for rent they pay... ignoring the fact you could get rental prices that do not pay the mortgage or the several other mortgages and the property taxes on ALL of the properties.
He's grifter.
Was he smart to dump his stuff... yeah... he was losing his ass. And I suspect the grifter is still in debt to his eye balls... if not... he just salvaged the gambling in real-estate leverage he did in the mid 2000's to preserve what he's got. Perhaps he's upside a few million or a million.
I personally think he owes more than he has in net.
So you can blame him.. but the morons following youtubers like this need to blame their own laziness of due diligence. Their absurd dumbness not to investigate this stuff to the max. I mean you're gambling your hard earned money... even your stimi money wasn't "free" particularly if your were or continued to work, it's just a tax rebate... some of your tax money you got back to keep you afloat.
So if you're suddenly like myself interested in crypto to see what all the fuss is about, and also finally want to dabbl in stocks and options because the commissions are way low or completely gone... you do research. Lots of it.
My nephew... an ape who got me to buy AMC (Glad he did) but I sold it at $73 a share... learning what was really going on... a gamma squeeze to the highest strike call option at the time $73. And once price got there, market makers would be fully covered on the calls they sold, and would no longer be buying the stock up to cover their calls. So I sold it pre-market, texted my nephew to sell. He didn't. I explained he could get in at a lower price and buy even more stocks... but nope... all about the conspiracies that they didn't even research themselves... just group think... no scouring and playing devils advocate to find out the realness of what was going on.
Past month, I figured he had been selling covered calls on his AMC shares he has over 100 shares... He didn't even know you could sell covered calls or cash secured puts.
He was upset... as he "knew" AMC would go thru a bearish phase. You could literally have sold a few week expiration calls for $300 to $600 bucks repeatedly... making lots of money.
I was doing that with cash secured puts all summer long on AMC. I told him that at the time in the summer... thinking he understood what I was talking about... obviously he didn't.
I referred him to youtube to learn about covered calls and cash secured puts and appropriate strategies at managing them because they're nuanced... and at the time he didn't seem to believe me.
Which is funny. Over and over I sold BTC right at the correct time... I talked him out of shorting Dogecoin just before it popped to 70ish cents... would have liquidated his position... told him to sell at the top of AMC...
But you can't trust your uncle... he hasn't a clue what he's talking about.
Kids these days LOL!
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Two to three weeks ago, at work we had several people including management and supervisors sick here in Idaho. I hadn't felt that great 4 weeks ago, but felt like a chest cold. Others felt fever. We think it was a normal cold and flu.
The Corona virus infection beginning this week has been confirmed in Boise.
If it's like the "plague" we had last week, we're a soda pop bottler and canning production company... I suspect they would close us down for a week or two if it gets really bad... both since we wouldn't have enough to work the equipment and do the testing of the beverages, and we wouldn't want to be exporting infected soda cans and bottles to everyone.
There is a chance the "plague" that hit us a few weeks ago was in fact the Corona Virus.
The chest congestion I had, which hurt really bad, but no other real symptoms, is gone.
I feel okay. Just weirdly sleepy still.
If you're sick, stay home. Our supervisors and managers were sending people home.
It makes it difficult in that our employer as many don't have a separate sick time bucket.
So you must use your vacation time, and if you have none, it's unpaid time off.
So makes it difficult. Not to mention it costs a fortune even with our insurance... chicken shit insurance, it's very expensive to go to an urgent care clinic, and prohibitively expensive to visit an ER hospital... ambulances that cost $2,000 plus... it's cheaper to call a taxi or uber driver or if able to just drive yourself or have a friend or family member drive you to medical care.
And just grit your teeth when the bill comes. Even with so called insurance.
Drink lots of fluids... and don't under-estimate the power of some really good chicken noodle soup! The salty broth is amazing on the tummy, lots of water that helps hydrate, the salt that acts as an electrolyte to force the water to be absorbed by your body. And as an added perk, it generally tastes the same going in as it does coming out if you start heaving; I personally think it's the least unpleasant of thing to upchuck.
Chicken noodle soup! Don't under-estimate its power!
I personally like the canned Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup. But any works just fine.
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It's the fact that she has a franchise is why here business sucks.
1) she has no control over her inputs, she has to buy franchise required merchandise.
2) She can't charge whatever price, she must meet the pricing established by the franchiser.
3) Franchisers often provide loan setups and charge huge interest on the borrowed money.
Franchises are more often a multi level market gimmick .
It's the business model. It's stupid to begin with. Just in Boise Idaho when I was working for the water utility, one of my jobs was processing bankruptcies so we didn't turn their water off for unpaid water bills; McDonald's and many other franchises were always going into Chapter 11, they were constantly changing hands to one partnership to another. One finally declared Chapter 7 around 2015, and the store went vacant.
And this is in Idaho, where only the Fed min wage exists.
It's business models, many are parasitical, only benefiting a franchiser, and fucking the wanna be business person aka franchisee.
Some rules should exist to protect franchisees from parasitical antics for franchisers: they should allow control of the Franchisee to control pay, prices, most inputs, and strict lending standards on amount of interest can be charged on their loans.
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I don't think it's rigged in the sense they're messing with counting votes, but stacking candidates, and the oligarchs would rather settle with a fascist than someone who holds any mixed market social policies, and they fear to find an actual socialist.
And it's frankly not difficult, many fascists use the same secrets to gain enough votes; play to peoples' ignorance about how things function, scapegoat problems on immigration or pit the moderate income folks against the poor and abject poor, feign dislike for outsourcing while doing policies that do nothing about it in a meaningful or productive way, and do tax cuts primarily for the rich in the guise of huge investment will occur and trickle down in job formation when this rarely ever happens over the past 40 years... if it does at all those investments go bad as wages shrink and/or indebtedness causes eventual demand destruction.
And the oligarchs back those candidates in all parties that are terrible for everyone, but the for the aristocracy.
Stacked the pool of opposition candidates, and error on the side of the fascist right winger if you have to face an angry crowd. Fascists play to the angry mob, while making things great or at least profitable for the aristocracy.
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Too bad they're buying F35's they're a boondoggle, my country, the US, paid billions in development of that fighter/bomber.... and it still sucks. The coating literally melts off in the rain.
The F22 is much better as you still get thrust vectoring and radar absorbent material that doesn't come off in the rain. And a more stable reliable aircraft.
Reminds me of Germany paying for the boondoggle scam of Musk's Starlink BS. When there are several satellite internet providers within the the region that covers Ukraine already via geo-stationary satellites... the constellation of Starlink, Musk's" system, has very little to no coverage, and it's dishes it uses are flimsy and very costly in their price compared to the competitors.
When Europe buys stuff from us... it goes for the junk and/or outright scams. In this case, the F35 instead of the better F22... and the scam of Musk's Starlink nonsense compared to the far better competitors that actually have full constant coverage satellite internet and better quality and cheaper dishes to get reception with no particular order: Viasat, skyDSL, Several VSAT operators, Businesscomm's Dedicated Network, C Band Packages, Ku_band Packages, etc.
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Everyone wants some fake money for some real money honey, so we can pay for stuff for reals... so sucker buy my fake money for your real money and you'll be the honey, and find some monkey to buy that fake money for more real money honey! And you'll be okay... or not... just be a dummy my little honey!
Seriously though, the entire fake magical internet money has been an open scam at this point since about 2016. And only becoming more obvious showing all the players. All of them a big cluster mug of a gigantic wash trading and painting the tape casino stupidity series of scams... Binance, Bittrex (now bankrupt), Bitfinex aka tether, circle, terra luna (now defunct), FTX (now defunct), Deribit, Bybit, Bitmex, Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini (essenetially bankrupt), Geniusis (now bankrupt), goes on and on and on... open series of levered scams.
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Back in 2010-11 while in the Air Force, I went with a Jewish friend to Jewish services just for the cultural experience. The rabbi and several others during the teaching session revealed the Jewish sect in Israel/Palestine are war nuts. The comments were made "We're at war with evils of Islam, and the heathens and fortunately the US military is on our side to put down these people." I gave them the most unusual looks. And at one point stated, that you are in the US Air Force, not the Israeli/Palestinian Air Force.
This was coming from officers in the Air Force, but they apparently don't really identify themselves as Americans, but just using US as a means to their own hideous war thirsty means. Was very irritating to me.
Educated me quite a bit about why Israeli/Jewish are rather hated in that region, they're extremely war like. Reminded me of freaking Klingons. Which I found odd because my friend, a somewhat inactive Jew, not even close to being like that. But the ones that have close interest in that country are absolutely barbarian nut animals. I really think the allied forces should never had allowed the Jewish to take over a country they lost a couple thousand years ago. I know now, there will never be a single government solution to the idiocy that exists there. The Jews won't be happy until all of the others are exterminated, and in retaliation neither will the Islamic. It's a theocratic holy war that only ends the idiot glorified myths that induce hatred goes extinct.
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We should all form a union, several unions, band together and we all need to mass a general strike. It truly is the last ditch effort to avoid a violent collapse.
Otherwise, get ready to attempt to escape the country on a refugee status to Canada or Mexico or whatever country will have you... or as I'm feeling lately very frisky to join a combatant group to go hunt some plutocrat and plutocrat boot lickers, the same shit suckers who told us that nation is our enemy, that person, that group, etc. are our enemy, go kill'em... when they were the enemy all this time. I will enjoy it, especially when I have nothing to lose... so far I have some, but not a a lot.. so many already haven't a thing to lose... maybe their smart phone and perhaps a computer.
The plutocrats have a death wish. And I'll be excited to give it to them along with many others.
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Bryce it does the complete opposite, only a few "swing states" get any attention whatsoever out of 50 states, only 10 "swing' states get all the attention other states the electoral votes (representation) is only 3 or 4 votes... not worth bothering. So nothing changes, and drives apathy.
55% didn't even bother to vote last presidential election, and typically is in the mid to lower 60% on voter turnout still pathetic compared to other democratic countries' turnout.
But lots of stupid shit exist in our constitution that needs amending:
1) Strict campaign limits on personal donations, and prohibition on non-person entities on advertising for or against candidates or policies within a year of an election.
2) Term limits on Senate and House.
3) Limit presidential power of pardon; require an additional ratification of at least 25 in the senate, 50 in the congress to sign off on any pardon or communing of a sentence.
4) Allow the president to be tried in state and federal court normally; the current method makes it even more political requiring congress to hold an "impeachment" process.... WTF? Give it to congress? Our founders were drunk and shit most of the time when they weren't beating their slaves or wives or horses.
Relegate impeachment process would be for removal of office.
5) Require the senate and house to have a declaration of war for any military movements outside the US and US territories; no more wars without congress declaring them.
6) Military contracts are only authorized during congressional declaration of war, and only for that specific war being fought and only for critical necessities to fight the war.
During peace time, military contracts are strictly prohibited. All military production must be owned and produced by the military during peace time; profiteering off war is strictly prohibited.
This would eliminate the military state we've become, and that will eventually bankrupt us as it such a thing has done to every country that became one too like the former USSR, UK, France, Spain, etc.
And that's just a few.
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Face it, the Apollo project combined with Manhattan Project combined with Panama Canal project combined with the Suez Canal Project combined with the US continental railroad combined with the US interstate freeway project super massive program required to fast track ITER/Wendelstein 7x fusion plants as well as hasten LFTR fission to completely get off fossil fuels within a short 10-20 year period will likely never happen.
The generations beyond us, their fate is sealed.
By the time civilizations realize they need such a massive project, too much of the world will be in chaos already... when availability of manpower and resources to do such a project is "cheap" is slipping year by year... civilizations will wait until its not only no longer cheap, but completely not affordable.
We can only be glad, the food shortages start happening probably about 2050-2080 in wealthy nations, and most living 15 or older will be on our way to pushing daisies.
We need a massive project. Not sure what's worse, the bogus pretend we're doing something about it, but not under the Paris accord, or realizing that we're not doing anything anyways... at least the latter puts full awareness we can't act slow on this, because it isn't... entire reason climate change caused by CO2 emissions of us humans is bad, it's the rate of change that makes it deadly.
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California is why our Idaho Power cartel upped rates, the company was able to sell our hydro power for a ransom to California... so did Utah power. And then they came to our pathetic low wage state and raised rates... a shitty winter back in 2016/2017 had power bills quintuple more than usual.
Problem with California is that while yes its rich, it also is the most populated state in the union. It's burden is of its own success. And since many of the low wage serf states like to feel special instead of just special in a bad way, they like to pick on California or other heavily populated states. There's reasons why Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, N/S Dakota, the southern eastern states aren't as heavily populated relative to the more populated states; the jobs don't pay shit, there isn't much room for advancement in income. In other words, we're already a 2nd world... and in some cases like poor Alabama with raw sewage running in their dirt roads (streets)... I mean they don't even have paving. Our nation looks more and more like India; a caste system that's an apathy of immorality.
California simply doesn't have all of its electricity needs; carbon or carbon free.
California brown outs and blackouts date back to my childhood in the 1990's.
Here in Idaho we get them on occasion, usually a transformer blowout and substation breakers due to a big spike in demand... during very hot or very cold peak season periods.
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Look to Vienna housing situation. It's how you implement a good affordable housing and robust expansion of it so it remains very affordable and their very nice, complete with swimming pools, workout facilities, both indoor hook ups for laundry as well as extended laundry facilities and greenspaces for jogging and for playgrounds for kids.
And everyone can rent from these units, rich or poor... rent prices are placed sticker price cheaply at the same time, the price is lowered based on your income, rent is dropped to 30% to 20% to match that take home pay. So if you make so much money that would exceed 20% or 30% depending on that unit range, you would have your rent capped so whatever you paid wouldn't be above your 30% or 20% monthly income. The city of Vienna maintains ownership of the units and surrounding amenities. And continues to expand units by 10K on average new units a year, and recently hyper jumped those figures as many people were moving into Vienna. Allowing flexible supply... first come, first serve basis.
I do believe they have to be your primary residence; these spots aren't for summering in Vienna an renting out or other out letting. So if you're rich and have mansions elsewhere where you primarily live... that you can't have it forever, only during the 3 or 4 months or whatever length you're living there continuously. And no speculative stupidity; again the city retains the housing, and all can apply and it is not restricted on income, it simply goes down on rent price should the sticker price which is generally already low as $600 to $700 USD for 2 bedroom apartments, if that rent exceeds your 20% to 30% take home pay, that rent is reduced so that the price fits in that amount. If your income exceeds to 20% to 30% you just pay the sticker price a month, no matter how much money you make. So again, even rich can and do live in these apartments. It's just they can't sit on them as vacation homes, or subletting.
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Like every crash from the 1908, 1921, 1929, 1951, 1968, 1989, 2000, 2008 etc.
The over speculated insane companies don't all go down at once.
Instead, you have a silent bear market, one by one each dumpster dives.
Until 30% of the over hyped stupidity dumpster dive.
As Jeremy Grantham recently noted; the remaining 70% then like ice breaking into the water to form an iceberg.
So far all these down from their highs:
Quantumscape -85%
Zoom -58%
Teladoc -60%
pinterest -47%
Twitter -31%
Chegg -75%
Activision -38%
Penn National -61%
Roku -45%
Moderna -57%
Zillow -70%
Peloton -72%
In a downturn flight to cash and if interest rates rise enough to bonds, and if hiring turns to firing people need money just to pay for basics even good stocks go down. Everything sells. In fact, in an ETF market, the worst stocks become illiquid, nobody to sell at any price, so they're required to sell their decent companies to raise the funds provide money for those cashing out of those ETF funds.
Peloton was just the silent bust that's here.
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To be frank, market bubbles are often caused my forced buying. Short squeezes, gamma squeezes, margin traders following a ascending trend line.
The opposite takes place when the margin traders stop using much margin, then short squeezes stop happening, and option buying ends with the gamma squeezes, and perhaps drives a reveres gamma squeeze on puts, and a margin call or short squeeze in reverse for those holding long margin positions.
It's the problem with our stock market... forced buying and selling. These side bets with futures and options and use of margin especially, didn't make things stable, but made it more unstable.
CDO and CLO market the banks are still allowed and have been trading it, and the Fed was buying all the worthless trash the banks could lend out, same thing.
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It's not that hard.
Germany payroll tax for healthcare is 7.3% with max yearly tax contribution of $4744.56USD... that tax stops being charged after income above EUR50,850 (USD64,994)
Like our social security cap that stops being taxed this year after income after $128,400 USD.
https://www.expatica.com/de/finance/taxes/income-tax-in-germany-for-employees-108112/
Canada healthcare is 5.10% with max yearly contribution of $2,748.90 based on tax stop being held on income after $57,400 Canadian Dollars.
https://www.bookkeeping-essentials.com/payroll-tax-deductions.html
UK effective NHS tax is about 6% for most income earners. Instead of a regressive (tax cap) method, UK first doesn't tax initial income at all. Then begins taxing firstly at 12% between a small band of income, then drops to 2% after the next band income.
https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance-rates-letters
Their healthcare tax is about the same as US private insurance premiums employee portions pay for an individual, and much cheaper insurance than family insurance covering a spouse and kids. And the employer portions in those other countries are often slightly lower than US employer portion of the premiums.
And they get actual insurance. Meaning extremely low to no copays.
Deductibles don't exist in any of them.
And UK and Germany cover ALL medical expenses including dentist, orthodontist, optometry, hospital, medical clinic, all bodily health and mental health and it includes 6 weeks of 100% sick pay compensation as well as short term disability 70% payment.
Per capita, all these country spend 50% less than that of the US.
So that's how it is done. And that's just 3 countries. You can look at the other 178 of 201 OCED countries that have a form of universal healthcare and see how they go about it.
Some do it better than others including more stuff, while some are cheap excluding something requiring some supplemental insurance; like Canada doesn't include dental and refill pharma Rx, while again Germany's covers ALL medical with very few stipulations generally on orthodontics (if you have to be under a certain age, and commit to treatment or risk paying for the service; it's to ensure you follow the orthodontists instructions on wearing your rubber bands and essentially following treatment so not to prolong the expenses) so for those extras if they feel they made need plastic surgery or more orthodontist work they can buy extra supplemental insurance).
UK NHS covers literally all medical, it's among the more "pricier" but still cheaper than our overall costs per capita in the US by 50%. And the UK consistently ranks number 1 in the last two decades of nations on healthcare.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Oh, and how do they stop medical providers including manufactures of Rx and appliances from racketeering? Easy. They cap their profit margins. They know their costs, and refuse them a racketeering prices. And in some instances where a private supplier refuses to negotiate, the country goes to another provider who will and/or manufactures the supply themselves or opens their own services (hospital, clinics, dental offices, etc.) themselves.
Healthcare violates every competitive market principles causing terrible results under a profit motive system, contradicting any good result from profit motive.
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In the Air Force I met several characters from WV... they're energetic and hoot to be around. Smart folks in a miserable situation, we don't come together as a nation to ensure every state has good economics. It actually surprised me, I thought all southern states were super right wing... every WV and even those in MD, VA, NC, and SC were all liberal/progressive... albeit most folks 40 and under agree of social policies... we see 178 other countries do it like universal healthcare/free healthcare for all and perform better than we, as we twist in the wind.
We see technologies like CERN in Switzerland, high speed rail that Japan, China, other EU member nations already have, LFTR fission fast tracking such as in China and India, and even though we're a joint member of ITER fusion project but in France, and Germany is a member of the ITER program, but they too have a competitive fusion program using even more advance concept of a spiral plasma chamber design to ring the plasma even hotter to achieve fusion reaction Wendelstein 7x, and other great works are passing us by.
We're a nation showing that we're past our golden era on a path followed by so many other nations of being left in the dust twisting in the wind mired in our own delusion that we're still top dog locking is in useless and harmful tradition that prevents us from improving for a generation or several.
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Many myths were Euhemerism (started as myth and then they wanted place that myth within historical events), and then there are the opposite that a historical event took place that became mythologized legends.
Myth means something untrue.
Reason we call the Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, mythologies is because of Christian Catholic Europe naming any other religion as myths... something untrue, because their myth... I mean religion is true to them.
In reality, all religions are myths. As far as historical context, some do. The Odyssey turns out to have a factual walled city called Troy.
The cult of the Emperors for Rome... well these emperors really did reign.
Then there are some with very faulty history usually revealing their ignorance of the locations and times they're writing about, usually set before the authors time when they invent some historical fiction.
In the new testament various gospels, they exclude many fairly large cities that did exist on the routes they mentioned, but make up towns that didn't exist during the time they're mentioning them, they mistaken a lake for a large sea, us a plot element of something completely wrong such as a census somehow requiring people to travel back to their birth city, when that wasn't the point of the census at all, it was to find out where people were at that moment in time as censuses are conducted today. Some gospels that weren't included in King James version, mention descriptive depiction of a phoenix bird burning in ashes and rising in some place in Egypt; the author uses the phoenix as a metaphor on the authors validity stating that what was written is as true as a phoenix rising from the ashes... because the author really thought magical phoenixes really existed, and anyone could see them.
Would be like a four year old describing how elephants fly and being very certain they do because they watched Disney's Dumbo.
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And we need a big plan to get off that addiction otherwise it will be similar to the great bronze age collapse. We use fossil fuel and natural gas products to provide helium for MRI machine super coolant, to plastics, to glues, to clothing to obviously energy (transportation, electricity, heating, cooling, etc.).
SO we need to be making the big plans now. And not waiting when the prices do the same things they did back in 2008.
There is solar, wind, hydro-electric, and safe nuclear LFTR and the ultimate fission power, and other possible methods of space solar to ground methods.
But all this requires a tremendous amount of planning on par with a world war ten times over and global cooperation that would likely only be met if an asteroid was found on a collision course with earth that could destroy all life on it.
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I had to do a report about WW2... was in 9th grade 97/98. Was told I had to interview someone who lived during that time, some family member... I thought she was crazy. I knew several uncles, and some others, my grandpa, but he was in the Korean war the others in Vietnam war... my other uncle Mel served during WW2 in the Navy.
Either way, I decided to just making up stuff. While at my brother's house, I was typing away on his computer, his wife asked what I was doing.
She got her uncle on the phone who served in the Navy. What transpired after gave me chills. He was a gunner on several destroyers and other ships. He named off just about every battle you can think. I asked if he knew when he shot some aircraft down, he said he didn't want to think about that part. I asked about Kamikaze; if he ever saw any of those if they were that much of a threat.. he said oh we we're always aware of them and had lots of problems with them... and started asking his wife for a piece of the plane that had red sun on it.
He was with the fleet and ship that saw the surrender of Japan.
My writing assignment started: I was about to fake this assignment as I knew only a few who have gone to war, and none of them really like to discuss it. After my sister and law learned what I was doing, she put me on the phone with her uncle. And here is his account of his service in the Navy during world war 2 in the Pacific.
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Praxis,
It is, because its absurd the racket we have with our for profit and supposed non profit insurance companies and no cost controls on pharma. Among the most developed richest countries we rank the worst... because we have a messed up racket healthcare system.
It's empirical. Facts speak for themselves.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror
I, in fact, still get my Rx from Germany. Because 1 year supply is equal to one filling or 20 pills in the US.
All my foreign friends from Japan, Norway, Sweden, Germany, UK, Austria, etc. leave here to get anything done; dental and medical... by the way they find it absurd we classify dental as not medical. When it is the prime evolutionary Achilles heel to our species; large majority died in pre-germ theory discovery due to teeth issues.
A Japanese friend scoffed when he had to go in for a broken wrist that the clinic had an antiquated X-ray machine, that was broken at the time, so he had to go to a hospital to get an x-ray. When in Japan they dispense MRI and ultra sounds in their clinics. And adding insult to injury, his return to Japan, the doctors discovered the American doctors set his wrist incorrectly, and had to break his wrist and reset it.
They pay much lower "premiums" in the form of a payroll deduction. And get better quality.
We're a joke.
SO yes. The equivalence is valid here.
And to boot, mid to lower income individuals pay less in taxes in Japan, Germany, Canada, Austria, etc. Those making $50K to $60K as individuals, those married $90K to $110K compared to us Americans in the same income brackets.
And most of our revenue goes to an extraordinary bloated military, one that actually has funded once friendly then became foes; so a military so over bloated and so over used that it makes us less safe, rather more unsafe.
Compared a Chinese, Japanese, German, and Austrian coworkers pay stub. The Chinese balked, you pay lots in taxes and other deductions, what to you get for that. I demanded to see his pay check. And then the rest of them. I was at the same income level as they, and more in taxes were deducted. Then include medical insurance they don't pay, it becomes a laughing stock.
Keep asking to be shit on.
And you assert someone else has diminished mental acuity.
WTF?!!?!?!?!?
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That's what the establishment does, they confuse and scare people.
I guy at work is over $50K in debt for a hospital bill, hates our medical system... but right wing news I just learned about from him, is a tragic end of life situation concerning an infant with a very rare mitochondrial deficiency disease that has left the infant severely brain damaged and on life support, suffering persistent seizures according to brain scans, as well as effecting muscle motion completely immobile. The crisis is an experimental treatment that won't assist in the child's severe brain damage, but would allow the infants muscles to move... later the doctor that has the experimental treatment from the US finally went to the UK, and admitted the child wouldn't benefit from from it, and he had a financial stake in the treatment.
So it was more of an end of life decision... something that happens in the US all the time as all hospitals have their own policy on whether or not to keep people alive; goes to an ethics board.
Has nothing to do with universal healthcare or not.
But they conflate it as being "See this is what happens when the government does your medical care."
When in reality, almost all private hospitals are quick to explain brain death and cut the machine since they know the insurance company is already tweaking the claim not paying anymore at the point of brain death. And then there's the same ethics concerns in all hospitals if certain treatments only prolong pain and suffering for profit gain in R&D.
Not hard to do. Conflate.
The ass hats have been doing this for 40 years already. And that's how they get people to vote against their own interest... and get the other half to two thirds not to even bother showing up to vote.
And yes, it's a shame on our own culture for being simpleton minded morons wanting the quick simpleton answer and scenario, and running away from thinking or anything complicated.
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That's simply not true that stocks tend to go up since the 400 years of stock market history throughout history in multiple nations.
It's an outlier that US stocks have for the past 40 years gone up.
That's the outlier.
1989 Japan market... if you had invested in 1929 stocks at their highs those investments would still be in the negatives.
Rotation of investments for long term capture stupid high markets and avoid a 1989 style losses even after 30 years.
So many will be ruined by the outlier period of the past 40 years acting as if this was normal.
It was absolutely not normal. It was combination of huge interest rate hikes that continued to decline to 0% or even negative as we observe today.
And this was fueled by a sort of race to the bottom infinite supply of labor somewhere and some labor is tyrannized to the point they must do the work, a new type of serfdom or even slave system.
Ask the Brits how this ended. Or the Dutch. Or any nation for that matter.
Even long term investing should have price targets to lock in profits reduce exposure. And allow buying at obvious potential sell of periods... we're a that cross roads.
I mean even the super rich, more interested in wealth preservation than growth, practice this.
Telling the peasant class who have a few chips in the market and likely invested near the tops to stay there is in itself a scam feeding into bag holder pyramid schemes.
The peasant class, essentially most people who have to work to earn money, are the most likely in distressed times, recessions, forced to sell shares to pay for the basics of life.
It's not if I feel like or think I should sell... it becomes I must sell because I lost my job, still making beans on any jobs I have gotten thus far, my savings is depleted, and now I have an emergency this or that... in the US paramount with no universal healthcare, but also no real decent housing system or any sound structural system until you're at retirement and even that has many lining up at food banks and even shelters.
I think this mantra just leave it in the market is dangerous. And people propounding it are dangerously wrong, some to the point of knowing their full of shit, and need bag holders to buy at the top so they themselves can exit at the top.
So many in all these crashes wiped out millions of peoples 401K in the US... the boomers had the solace that they had many of them had defined pension plans to fall back upon. It often happens at the worst of times too either nearing retirement age, recession where you'll need extra income, or emergency periods with unexpected losses property or health.
This time around, defined pensions are nearly a thing of the past in the US. As crumbling country that looks worse off than the former Soviet states when they were falling apart... they had old soviet houses and apartments to live in with electricity, running water and sewage... Americans are now resorting to living in tents and RV's... RV lots are now being built and upon opening day they reach max occupancy. Tent cities continue to spring up all over in small towns to large cities.
The forecast of the economies of the world demonstrate what 40 year stock market boom means... it means it pulled forward all the gains and put it in those moments.
A race to the bottom wage system has come to fruition.
Just as the soviet style tyrannical governance came to its fruition.
Problem has always been the mixing of government type with economics. You can have a capitalistic system with a democracy or a dictatorship. We conflated communism with despotism or dictatorship, which wasn't entirely true in some of those communistic countries... but largely was.
The reality suggests we need a mix capital-social system. Otherwise boom bust disasters that give rise to tyrannical dictators will constantly occur.
I mean where did the soviet system that we all think as scary monsters under our beds come from?
The failure of robber baron gangster late stage capitalism.
Where did capitalism come from?
Late stage mercantilism that favored a nobility elite and included a mercantile elite and banker elite under a monarchy.
Where did mercantilism come from?
Late stage feudalism that favored only nobility and royalty elite.
Where did feudalism come from?
Late stage slave labor that favored an extreme few master class who could not defend against large insurrection and rebellion from a population mostly of slaves, who would often team up with very poor free peoples.
Theme in this situation is that the systems is that the few who benefited outweighed the benefit of the majority.
And that is what we're observing now.
So to put your beans in the stocks and not at least monitor for excesses... is fucking stupid.
When we approach all time highs and it is likely prognostic we enter into a recession, it is only wise to follow the "smart" really the big money out the door before you're left holding bags.
Take profits. You can leave 25% or 10% for gamble sake to suck the potential 3% more before the ultimate dumpster dive.
Just keep in mind, even if we go up another 10% now... and it is followed by a 50% or more correction... you bough more stocks at that higher 10% level... you did your self no service buying in at those higher and higher levels... your realized absolutely no profits whatsoever. You are a bag holder.
You would be better off selling foregoing that 10% more it pumps, hold cash equiv, then it dumps 30% or 50% or 60% or 80%... and start dollar cost averaging back in.
That's what the wealthy do with a substantial amount of their fortune... they're not so eager for growth as they are for preservation of their wealth. As it only takes a small part of their fortune to gamble to potentially grow their wealth a bit more during lows in the market... ie a recession.
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The guy who wrote the article must master bait to Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman photos.
Such fool. Markets don't work in such ways, and markets are only as good as goods get to those who need it the most, not who has the most money to fleece from. It's idiotic.
Even with market concepts; racketeering, gouging, fleecing, rent seeking means they would still produce at the same quantity and quality even at a lower price; but they'll use any means including withholding and taking panic bidders higher price. It doesn't increase supply at all.
In fact, such happen stances can actually cause withholding supply to keep prices up, as well as known longer term outlook, producers will know a disaster has happened and will not ramp up supply knowing it is only temporary; so they won't increase supply.
It's simply just racketeering, the extra revenue goes to profits, not to increase supply. And slows down transactions because withholding so many bidders (suppliers) are willing to wait, because excessive askers.
Rather, if suppliers know in bulk the funds are available, suppliers will increase supply because they have economies of scale at an even lower price per unit. Not an increase. Because they suddenly have demand sufficient for economies of scale.
Concept of stopping stocks from being dumped in a flash crash by stopping trades if it drops to sharply quickly. Because sometimes you have disasters and flat out panics that are irrational.
Markets can produce famine if rules aren't in place to prevent such things happening; hence why the US has a huge farm subsidy in crop insurance and price minimum buy backs. Otherwise we would have famine constantly, several food shortages as farmers would go bust on year and drop in supply if oversupply causing a crash in prices, or particular crop failure could also ruin farmers. So we protect them from oversupply and shortages. Otherwise you have suppliers vanishing, and supply dwindling in mid to long term periods which means potential famine.
Let it be markets don't work that well. They never have worked that well. Hence why all producers for food, heavy machinery, critical utilities, etc. that can cause a hazard to consumers have rules on their production, safety, nutrients, allergens, weights and measures, etc.
Greed is good, let it be markets is wonderful is a fuck up insanity shit show that has been allowed and always blows up on nations that performed them, often territories that aren't quite nations like the old wild west of the US. Some of the stories are hysterical; cattle rancher tycoons with their hired thugs having shootouts, stealing cattle, killing cattle, buying up feed, so none is left sufficient for the other rancher. Water works barons poisoning each others water wells killing several customers. Fuck fest on high mountain.
Markets can be a disgusting disgrace if they're not properly ruled.
Markets are only a set of fucking rules.
We don't live for markets. We invent them and make up rules to ensure what we do live for, peace, prosperity, and happiness. Markets are constructs. Get that through your Ayn Rand / Milton Friedman bullshit heads.
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Why in this country we do the stupidest of things?
A) we don't have a universal healthcare, and what we do have is a medicare and medicaid for those severely disabled and for elderly, and of that program, we don't have direct cost controls ensuring various medicines, medical appliances, clinic and hospitals and other care facilities prices and procedures have a known cost and profit margin and thus a fair balanced price point, that every other developed and many developing and/or poorer countries do just fine. Instead we have insurance companies, the very same companies that often hold a large stake in various companies that produce and thus sell the various medicines, healthcare facilities, etc. to "negotiate" prices.
B) We don't have an organized transportation model that would allow for various high speed or regular rail or any other mass transit.
C) We don't have a robust housing program unit that ensures supply of housing remains robust thereby rents and housing prices remain affordable to the median income earners; thus not only do we have millions of homeless adults, but also millions of homeless children. RV spots have been filling up with people living in cars or RV's since mid 2010's.
D) We don't have an unbiased central bank, but rather a private cartel collusion bank thing filled with unelected by citizens nor representatives by the citizens, but instead filled with bankers voted by the big banks. I mean we have private banks regulating themselves... what could go wrong? I don't know? QE? Monetize the bank debts?
E) We don't have rules on campaign financing thus bribery runs-amuck as oligarchs are able to bribe anyone with a pulse to be their puppet... some of the most hideous sometimes biggest criminal cons are put into office.
F) We don't have unbiased methodology of forming voting districts rather we literally allow the various current representatives/politicians draw up their own districts, and we wonder why they carve up districts that look like spaghetti as they pick the areas where their voters are located and avoid adding areas they know they are unlikely or simply won't get votes.. thus picking their voters rather than the voters picking the representation; no rules gerrymandering. Rather we have methodology that induces gerrymandering.
G) We have term limits for the President of the United States, yet we lack the same for Senators and Representatives nor for the US Supreme Court.
H) And this idiocy of having a "debt ceiling" even though the constitution explicitly states "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Allowing legislation to double talk, say one thing as to procure law that requires spending, while at the same time, not paying those bills that congress legal required to become law on the spending. No other country has such a ridiculous law. Or their own treasury bills would be worth less than Argentina's or other unstable country's as well as command a very relative high interest rate for the higher risk of default.
Many other things this nation does that is back ass backwards such as the way primary education is funded at just the local levels and within the local levels thereby inherently making schools of poorer areas have less funds for the same primary education than wealthier neighborhoods; you have some schools having swimming pools and vast arenas and gyms and stadiums, auto shops to architecture studios and deals with local and regional and state colleges that provide college credits during high school, while other schools can't afford just a basic basket ball gym, basic classroom stuffs funding chemistry classes, geology classes, computer labs, etc. Forget about arenas, and swimming pools,
It's as if this country is doing everything it can to pill off its so called super power status (the wealth and productivity capacity it acquired being among the largest nations to be productive status with minimal damage after the ending of World War II), or rather its just trying to pill off its status of being a functioning country, so it can become yet another failed nation or one that hardly exists as a country at all; but as a clamorous concoction of various oligarchs like old feudal lords of old braying on the various media outfits they've bought up or made propounding to the peasantry how they should best they should serve their "job creators" their oligarchs, their feudal lords in all but name.
It's really ridiculous. For the vast majority who live thru life right now, the economy is quickly becoming similar to that of Russia and many former Soviet States... with homelessness and decay of various infrastructure. The violence is already more pungent with mass murders every month and smaller murders occurring almost every day somewhere in the country.
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I agree. Requires much more training. And it isn't like jumping in a car and going. Requires lots of planning: weather, route of flight, fuel burn, TFRs, alternates TPA Rnwys frequencies, navigation: VORs, Avionic GPS (which are screwy), pilotage, etc.
I haven't looked at the FARs concerning ultralights recently, last I was aware you didn't unless you plan on land/take off at Class B, C, or D airports, I always thought someone not getting aviation training for an ultra would be nuts.
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Urbanization has occurred in major booms throughout recorded history. It's often a result of the area or global economy turning into an unstable mass of stupidity as its next transition is a second bust that in the recent (100 years ago) to ancient past resulted in civil war/rebellion and war among other nations.
Industrialization long ago concentrated people in cities both suburbs and urban portion of cities. Concentration of people to larger cities is similar to pre-industrial as farming became mechanized needing fewer people to work the land. In this case, factory and service sectors need fewer people, people go where they think will be more prosperous and/or desired climate.
The financial collapse wasn't that people didn't need homes, was rather borrowed at teaser rates made it temporarily manageable. Then when interest started and/or shot up, payments were well above 40% to 60% of take home pay.
Then the slow down in those trying domino effected the economy in mass lay offs making even 33% to 45% home payments or rental payments not affordable.
What should have happened was prices immediately re-evaluated on mortgages and rents forced down, and developers building houses and apartments should have been bailed out of debt and provides subsidies on at least the street and utility construction portion to continue developing homes.
The farce was that the real-estate collapse meant too many homes were built. In fact, construction since 1975 35 to 26 housing starts per 1,000 households to 2015 has gone down to 9.5 housing starts per 1,000 households.
Just for the credit crash, housing 2008 starts were 18 per 1,000 households, down from 1970-57 by about 50%.
From 1975 to 2015 housing starts were down by 74%.
Population growing means more housing and apartments need to be built.
And it doesn't help that worker pay among developed countries have gone down, and/or flat, and in real income (adjusted just for consumer price index inflation which excludes major items like housing) purchasing power has dropped at a rate of -9% per year.
Which is astoundingly bad.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246233/economic-growth-workers-wages-economy
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We had the same in Boise, much smaller population, we ensured we have enough homeless shelters, and they were forced to break their camp. But we still have homeless all over the town. Traveling to OKC, Denver, Seattle, Portland Or, etc. it's a national problem of not having universal healthcare. And they literally go to big cities because they often do have more chance for mental assistance than in poorer less populated cities and states... those states just put them into for profit private prisons.
We need national universal healthcare and a drug intervention system nationally similar to what Portugal implemented and saw addiction rates dramatically decline. 2017 we saw nationally over 70,000 deaths for drug overdose. Entire Vietnam war was 58,209 US deaths.
And we need to implement a housing project in developing houses and apartments nationwide.
1965-1980 per 1,000 household construction peaks were 35 to 25... move through the 1980-2017 it's gone from 14 to ridiculous 9 constructions per 1,000 households. WE have larger population, yet construction is cut by 75%. That's a collapsing economy.
Fixes:
1) Universal healthcare
2) Drug reform with intervention programs.
3) National housing project for developing of houses and apartments to reach at least 40 houses per 1,000 households.
ALL NATIONAL. Otherwise you will swamp the boat in any given state or city. It's partly why the do nothing rural states population remain relatively low as people flea from those impoverish shit holes to denser populated areas. There's no where to hide anymore from our collapsing economy.
Not doing these national steps, expect all cities, even those smaller one's in rural states to get even uglier. And more people who never thought they would end up among the homeless not necessarily drug addicted.
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All those bonds you spoke about sound confusing as all get out.
USA the Inflation Series Savings bonds is easy.... you buy them directly from the US Treasury website. Lock up is 1 year, after which you can redeem them. They're not trade-able.
Accrue interest every quarter and compound interest semi-annually.
If you redeem before 5 years of purchase calendar, you give up the last 3 months of interest accrued as a penalty.
After 5 years, you get full interest, no give up of last 3 months of interest accrued.
And they quit paying out after 30 years.
Also they're state income tax exempt. Only taxable Federal income tax. Which is nice for me, as my state Idaho has a little over 6.3% income tax.
And you can redeem them piecemeal.
You can buy an actual printed savings bonds, but the calendar year limit becomes much lower. I think printed savings bonds becomes $5K instead of $10K for electronic purchased.
And it's sort of pointless to have the paper printed I-Series Bond because they're not transferable. You can sell them. They're attached to the original buyer of the bond, and redeemed upon demand (after a year lock up from purchase date) for principle and interest owed... minus the last quarter interest if redeemed before 5 years of purchase date.
And you can buy thru the year toward the $10K limit... so whatever amount $25 increments or higher every week, month, or random purchases until calendar year reach of $10K.
Redeeming comes from the website as if you're logging on to any broker website, in this case treasury direct website... and select the bonds you bought and how much of it you'd like to redeem. Redemptions can be piecemeal too... only need to pull out $500 or $2K or whatever... then that's okay. Even if you bought in different times and allotments. Interest will calculate based on first in first out basis.
And it's similar in that you don't know what rate you'll get every May and November as it's based on CPI data.
The fixed portion pays the going interest rate at the time, and stays fixed for the life of the bond 30 years. Fixed portion never changes... so some lucky folks who bought some of these things and held them back in 1990's or early 2000's had a big combined rate... about 1% to 2% fixed and when it was 9.68% inflation rate portion were making 10% to 11% returns for 6 months.
The ones I bought in 2022 fixed rate was 0%. So they suck for long term holdings if and when inflation goes down.
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And the other point, allow it and regulate it, then confront it on are people doing this due to financial desperation or do they really enjoy playing with anyone's penis to get money?
Because if it turns out in a regulated whore market that most whores hate the job their doing, they're doing mostly out of desperation, we can then confront that by ensuring better job placement, paying for college, vocational training, and work programs, etc. As well as ensuring jobs actually pay well. That cost of living isn't absurd like rent and monthly home prices aren't more than 30% of income, which many place already exceed 40% which is unsustainable; leaves no room for savings for retirement, goal savings, or decent required standard of living recreational activity that makes life worth living.
And above 1/3 it's statistically shown around the world people resort to borrowing well beyond what they can pay back, and in poorer countries, to prostitution and other less desirable activities.
Instead its much easier to deprive the people of decent standards of living, and decry morality on a deprived multitude.
In other words, doing something like this would take the lipstick off our failed economic system and priorities in this country.
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If you didn't buy this last dip a little, having a plan buying carefully, this is take profit time... on a rip your face off dead cat pump that will crash hard core once again very soon.
This isn't a good market to trade (especially swing trade) maybe day trade, but don't day trade breakouts in this market. They'll fail more often than they'll succeed to go up. This is far from 2020 and 2021. You have to place your bets carefully and with some sort of thesis.
TNX couple weeks ago dipped to 1.6% this was stupid considering the inflation and Fed about to raise rates albeit only 0.25 basis point, but ending their bond buying QE program. So buying banks on the dips made sense considering TNX would rise... well it did... 2.3% already... and my bank stock purchase and roll of covered calls and dividend from the bank I bought was good trade.
Dip in energy and food trade was good to buy... but it's a bounce over a small period of time from the rip to the upside and rip back down. XLE is topping back out and will dip... that dip in XLE which includes food stocks including fertilizer companies will be back up... but right now you sell into this rip... and prep limit orders and alerts to sell cash secured puts to acquire these as the dip will be bought again.
TNX will probably dip, TLT over sold, will pump reducing TNX and XLF financials will dip again... for a short period of time... buy that dip.
Seasonality... we will dip one last time, SPY 400 to 390 maybe 360 (but doubt it dips that far). Then Seasonality we will have Sell in May and go away... buy the dip in June or July and sell again in August/September.
SO far that's the strategy to play. But don't fomo into rip your face off bear market rallies... or you'll be holding bags for a while. And stay away from same week or short dated option contracts lotto plays. You're more likely to lose your entire gambling in those... its better to sell upside calls... and cash secured puts in ways of selling and acquiring the underlying. And of the underlying, develop a thesis that makes sense. Don't go after growth stocks, and be reluctant to buy discretionary XLY stuff. Go after XLP, XLU (albeit make XLU a small size these don't move much and they're over valued already), XLP is good... and look for XLE and play the dips in XLF getting good banks aka boring banks that do most of their business in the most stable countries and have a good record of not getting to mixed up in commercial banking activities selling CDO's and the like... that stuff is still the trash legacy of 2008 that never was prohibited and corrected... it's still absolute trash.
And stay away from money losers zombies of the IWM small caps, look for money makers specific to energy, food, fertilizer, consumer stable like stuff for now going into the entire year of 2022.
And flip XLF financials here and there. Buy on the dips and sell into those rallies produced by treasury bond yields popping up and dipping again only to pop up again as inflation will continue all of this year into next. But don't get to heavy on financials... when we start to get bad earnings, marking an imminent recession... XLF will tank and so will QQQ and the rest of the market ending this bull market completely.
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21:05 it wasn't initially "communist" it was a republic. The communists took over by force a coupe commanded by Lenin. Under the new Soviet Republic government that only lasted a year because Romanian Army invaded Hungary and took over.
That's when the ensuing misery and strife, plutocrats that the only way to pacify the mass of people was via stark nationalism, racism, and the mindless masses so accustom abiding by the fear of a king that they would of course install a monarchy again.
(Similar to the messy spats from 1790 to 1958 in France: France revolution and great terror then Napoleon then counter Napoleon then back to Napoleon monarchy then a republic, then that fell part in the invasion of NAZI Germany, then their most resent actual republic constitution 1958... messy... kind of like Hungary... just without any colonial wealth).
So then Hungary became a fascist freak show puppet state of later NAZI Germany.
Then after WWII, it became a puppet state of the USSR under state capitalism aka soviet communism. Then 1989 USSR decided it was far more profitable to quit feigning communistic ideals and go full hardcore oligarchical capitalism, Hungary formed it's own oligarch controlled government 1989 to 2012. 2011 enforced 2012, a new constitution effectively making yet another governmental type with a fiat party with it's controlling party literally declared in the constitution... kind of like many other sham republics today and in the past.
So yeah. It's still a bit of a quagmire in Hungary.
The will of the people just subverted at every moment in favor of monarchs, plutocrats, and ideologues who don't really care about democracy.
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It's stagnation in China, the same in US, Canada, and Australia, and many places in Europe.
Primarily in US. US is the evil empire. Our democracy is joke, a pretend.
China is similar, it's a pretend communist republic/democracy... but it too is a scam.
We're one in the same.
Let's not pretend we're not.
The differences are actually in labels.
Billionaires and oligarchs in the China are considered "bad".
Government officials in the US are considered "bad".
While they're the same fuck faces.
In the US the Government Officials are billionaires and millionaire plutocrats in power.
In the China the very billionaires and oligarchs are also their government officials.
Both nations raise scapegoats to feign they're working to eliminate the "bad" folks out.
In China, it's billionaires that aren't as tied to the billionaires/millionaires who are in government.
In the USA, it's government officials who aren't necessarily that rich, usually the toadies of the plutocrats... affluent toads easily shoved under the bus.
Both nations are held by subsidies.
The entire banking system in the US is a cartel held by the government.
Our military industrial complex is held together by our government.
Food production is ultimately farm insurance and price floor subsidies.
Vehicle manufacturing is provides various subsidies including massive road building and upkeep of such roads; and often random subsidies like cash for clunkers and bail outs.
China does the same.
All nations really do the same. Because letting things die, tend to cause misery for all.
Capitalism by itself is a failure. Always has been.
And the so called socialism of the former USSR and China's Mao regime were also failures... a state capitalism. Same thing with different labels.
A mixed capital-social market works. Dogma is for the stupid, and for the smart to placate to that stupidity of the stupid to get what the smart people want aka politics.
A revolutionary change in economic structure would be a co-op democratize the workforce. This eliminates the supposed need for a plutocracy for capital formation.
A reserve co-op Bank system lends via other co-op banks and credit unions to support co-op enterprise businesses to which all members (employees, shareholders, even residence living in the externality of the business locations) all get 1 vote no matter the number of shares or holdings of any other stake as to all aspects to the operations of the business.
Employees can petition and vote upon the petition of the enterprise.
A truly democratic system where most of us spend often a majority of our waking lives... working.
This co-op economic concept is similar in revolutionary change as the abolishing the concept of divine right to rule and anointed lords.
The vast majority of peoples lives change only when the worker and owner relationship changes:
Slavery to Slave Master.
Voluntary servitude to Master.
Feudal serf to Feudal Lord.
Apprentice to Master Craftsman
Merchant to Merchant Bank
Employee to Employer.
Dissolve the differences between these so that they have more democratic control, they also will have more reward for their labors.
In a co-op structure you would have co-op owner to fellow Co-op owners.
Subject to the collective of that enterprise only. And they subject to you.
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Perhaps your comments were too vague... like completely vague... saying he is toxic and a useful idiot needs to have reasons supporting such comments otherwise you are being tribal and disruptive to useful conversation. I have disagreed with Jimmy and find some of his "reporting" lacking when he gets things wrong... I comment on his posts about what he's not discussing. But it's constructive criticism. Calling people toxic and useful idiot is just a put down. It is toxic. It has no conversation to clarify reality.
Just stick to I think something to the effect "Jimmy is wrong about X because he's forgetting about Z or not thinking about Y". Or he has a misunderstanding on how X works.
He's actually reasonable, when he makes idiot mistakes, he does correct them eventually. Just as everyone... I think too much ego has been going around some of these channels, they all act like they have an vendetta of "See, I told you so." way too prematurely often claiming evidence that isn't supportive, but counter to their argument.
Thus I have actually unsubscribed from your show and his and a few others... I'm literally only subscribed to Captain Big Seltzer LOL! He just sticks to policies. Ego can fuck it. Just fuck ego. Otherwise in movement will collapse under it's own tribalism weight... ego is the key to tribalism... at the heart of it, our culture is very sycophantic... we like to pretend we're all individuals, but reality we love to gravel over super heroes... people from Italy, UK, even Germany with its vestige of old nobility see that we have a weird fetish for royalty... hence why coaches are paid the highest of most states in our country, we worship musicians and actors like they're the second coming or child of one of the pantheon... we have a fucked up culture of irrational boot sucking that must turn toward rationality.
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Our country lost its fucking mind. We've gone so far right, they've gone mentally bankrupt.
"We're not ready for reasonable rationality... in fact we should probably go back to being even dumber and crueler and eviler... kids should probably have to work again, stop the prohibition of child labor... and education, school? Really, these kids are freeloading, no school, let them figure stuff out on their own. And I'm not racist... I'm liberal cuz I'm gay, but I think we should endorse slavery again, get people to work... make them, and not do it based on race, because I might have some Jew or black in me somewhere.... and I'm already working, so I don't need to be owned to get me to work, I'm already working.
Get what I'm getting at? I hope... I'm not that educated as you are probably, but you know... I think sometimes, but it's fun to talk more. And seriously, we should probably do away with fire departments.
You know I just don't think we're ready for public roads anymore either."
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Because they are or were totalitarian right wingers of capitalism even though they claimed to be leftist socialists.
Seriously, they never gave up capital (money). Property rights were still enforced. It's just the "state" owned most of the means of production, and in many cases the "state" meant a few oligarchs they termed "leaders of the proletariat which often power and the wealth and its income passed down to successive family members. Similar to monarchies, mercantilism, patronage/oligarchy capitalism.
USSR always had money. The other term for money is capital. Link below shows all issuance of USSR money throughout its history.
http://russianmoney.info/USSR/1961/
Simon, we see various types of capitalism fail all the time.
This is just a definition setting. Getting hung on terms and not specifics is idiotic.
National Socialist German Workers' Party (NAZI's) were a capitalistic socialism system that allowed oligarchs to retain ownership of production with a strong totalitarian government that kept the oligarchs in check and under control.
I think its better to be specific on policies we want.
Because otherwise you just get people not accepting definitions because they have their preference definition.
It's like saying that bottle is blue, and someone screaming at you saying no, its indigo, and another person say nope its more sky blue, and another saying nope I would say that color is baby blue.
It doesn't matter what anyone calls it. Just use that particular reference of blue be that particular reference, compared to other shades of blue.
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It's still stunning, in Idaho, the level of ignorance and ridiculous pathetic hypocrisy the average worker has still. Despite the insanity going on.
I have had the pleasure... rather displeasure of repeatedly training firstly due to getting better offers or just getting burnt out, a new employee after new one... mostly now temps, making it even worse. Last person was a complete disaster, never worked in a lab, and very unsuitable for the job, not realizing the scope and requirements and the person had no willingness to bother learning instead literally checking the phone out while I was demonstrating the various equipment, no wonder she immediately started busting stuff when attempting it theirselves.
The newest temp, to maybe become regular time, so far she's actually interested. After she broke down about other issues she was dealing with, she complained about the racism of our cops here in Idaho. The other day she then touts how she knew Trump was racist, but wish he'd be back as president, of course declaring prior that she can't vote because she's an ex-convict; which was amusing. This is a lab job the typically requires at least an associates degree in chemistry or equiv job training elsewhere to do. But so desperate for lab techs...
Anyway, she complained the other day moaning and groaning about needing a hysterectomy, but can't afford to do it without insurance and still would want to wait a year so she can acquire the vacation time to use in order to have the paid time off for the surgery. In other countries... such a required surgery would be done no problem with little to no expense and paid time of sorts to recover from the surgery. Not here. Instead that day, luckily we weren't producing therefore an easy day of just training her on the stuff; she could hardly participate in that training, I frequently let her go on breaks for her to do what she needed to do to feel better; could tell she was in great anguish, so much so it made me hurt.
I mentioned Canada and Europe and most countries the other day have vast better medical and sick time and vacation systems then we. And that they're currently: France and now Germany in general strike due to lowering the retirement age for their equiv of social security age.
She discussed how bad it is in Idaho that our min wage for waiting tables, tip employees, is only $3ish an hour. While in Washington state she got $15 an hour and the 20% in tips. Here in Idaho she couldn't wait tables as they don't tip well here AND the employee pay is literally $3.25 an hour (fed min wage for tip worker) not the WA state $15 an hour.
Then she went on to blame Idaho's problems for WA... bizarrely going on a rampage on how easy it is for people in WA state to get on various benefits and become "moochers". And declaring how wonderful that's not the case here in Idaho. Wrongfully stated you don't get food stamps (you do and we actually have more on SNAP/food stamps in Idaho as percentage of the households than WA population does).
A mental disconnect exists among the working class.
The oligarchs did a fantastic job in making many of the people sadists. Ridiculous and pathetic creatures, I mention what this country needs is more love and respect for one another, and she starts shaking in some ridiculous rage that we need more hate and violence to the lazies and deadbeats; those who don't work hard and what not; I didn't speak much about it only interjections here and there, allowed her to say most of the talking as it came to non-work related chatter. She whipped herself into a frenzy, and apparently had an argument with me that I wasn't participating in, she ended with let's stop talking about it's only going to make me mad, you have your opinion, I have mine (despite I really didn't even inject whatever opinion I had exactly or anything, let the crazy lady rant and sound like a lunatic). I smiled and began instructing on the job stuff trying not to laugh... and thinking why me? LOL!
This Saturday she fell asleep twice late from lunch out in her car and in the lunch room by over an hour, I had to get the tests she was supposed to do. Very hard worker she is, all thos moochers should be quaking in their boots.
I don't get people in this country.
It's as if their brains have been emptied and in went a heaps of manure. Ridiculous, nonsensical, hypocritical, insane.
A form of crazy that involves BDSM on themselves like shoving a hot poker up their rear end while eager placing their own gag ball into their mouths.
A form of serious mentally insanity has overcome really most of the Americas. You get similar rage filled jealousy over an imagined mooter class and other scapegoats and a desire to stick in some tyrant that will somehow make things right, despite ironically crying of a racist uncaring and intrusive police state.
And this similar theme among others... maybe less dramatic example from the other over 6 people in the last 1 year that I've had to train (as most quit, and one was dismissed),
I really think this hemisphere has become conditioned into a type of unadulterated insanity. And I don't know if that can be fixed within their generation. Its a cultural indoctrination. very firmly etched into their psyche. It took two world wars in Europe the last one leaving even cities in the UK in rubble, and mass amounts of people dead to bring them out of their various weird cultural stupidities.
I frankly think people are a mixed really dumbed down and made culturally incapable of rational thought. Bravo to the oligarchs. They did an amazing job.
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I have never actually had a cop aim a gun at me. Been pulled over only a few times, but I know and had conversation with unknown police officers many times.
I would shit my self if they pointed at me, I would probably whimper "My hands aren't moving they will remain open as ordered, and I will do as you order me to do so. Please don't shoot me. I am no threat." then I would discontinue talking shaking like a leaf as though I was held up by some mugger.
Then I may decided to file a complaint depending on the circumstances involved.
I'm blonde blue eyes and was in the military. So probably not treated like minorities.
And my former military experience would probably kick in, standing at attention/or at ease, yes sir/ma'am every sentence that comes up. One time was in a hit and run, some one hit me, their fault, and took off, the male and female police officer that had shown up would ask me to do things like turn my engine off, or move the car off the side of the road further, etc. I actually used basic training "Yes ma'am, proceeding ma'am." LOL! She chuckled.
The male police officer let me ride with him in the front seat back to my apartment.
Personally, when police show up, I think its best to put on military barring and no talk back. Just state facts. And do everything you can to control your emotions.
I so don't ever want to be shot.
But that being said, I would find it suddenly very difficult to keep control with a gun pointed at me. Avid hunter, you never point or let someone in front of your weapon, and I disliked having our trainee weapons pointed at one another when I was in the military. You just never point a weapon at someone in normal civilian world. Gives me the willies thinking about it.
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array s the primary reason those few countries "crumble" is of two reasons: 1st they don't really crumble, that's propaganda provided by the countries those remaining aristocrats are enjoying exile and those of other nations who feel their own power slipping: if it can happen there, it can spread here too, can't let that happen, and of course a chance for another nation of aristocrats to expand their dominion.
Which is the natural effect considering economic and political global systems over the past 2,000 years largely feudal and mercantile monarchy and/or oligarchical republics.
Hence why we as democratic people must reject monarchy and oligarchy completely. They're harmful parasites that lie, cheat, using all tricks of marketing to divide and conquer strategy that effective pits the masses against each other leaving the masses feckless and powerless keeping these aristocrats in charge.
Keep in mind, fascism in Italy and Germany, as well as Communism in the style of Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. was an alliance with the aristocrats to keep their economic and/or political power. Fascism was to keep the economic and minor political elites in power, while communism was to keep the new un-elected so called leaders of the proletariat in economic and political power.... they all sought authoritarianism.
You can go back to even the French Revolution, new leaders were established. And the French Terror didn't commence until those leaders sought to defend their positions by suspending their constitution and going on a paranoid killing spree. And that didn't end until those leaders were murdered.
Leaders must be democratically elected, and strictly defined and confined by a constitution. Authoritarianism therefore must also be rejected by any democratic people, and must always insist any constitution never be suspended; always have severe skepticism when calls of such suspension of constitutions are always in the guise of some emergency.
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Simply put, dogma has overtaken our idiot economic system in the US.
Competitive market principles are what is used to apply the test if a sector ought be private or collective/highly regulated.
Health care violates every competitive market principles. Has only negative consequences of higher prices, less quality, and less supply done via the private profit motive.
Just as roads, ports, fire departments, and various other natural monopolies are non-competitive. They're sectors that don't don't belong to a simple private for profit motive method, if you allow them to be that way, you get over priced, shit quality, and scarce supply.
Simple economics every fucking American should understand. But wait, the don't teach micro and macro economics in high school. We have rendered the median American as an ignorant fool over something that impacts their lives the most directly more than anything else in their lives.
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I don't understand this capitalist vs socialist... every country that exists still relies on markets and investment money using aristocratic large sums of money for investment.
Venezuela in the 1990's and through most of the 1900's 80% of all wealth in the nation was and still is controlled by 200 oligarch families. The new regime with Chavez and now the new guy Maduro never banished or kill any of them, despite some of them committing overt coupe attempts to over throw the government under Chavez. Venezuela still relies heavily on investment activity for businesses to exist. Venezuela just nationalized their oil and a few other sectors... Norway government owns most of its oil sector too.
Specifically, the only difference is that Chavez did change constitution that made the power of the president override checks and balances of legislature and judicial. Something that I think can be dangerous for any country.
Currently, the oligarchs in Venezuela continue to try to influence the vote, but often fail since prior to the 1990's before Chavez, Venezuela was among the most impoverished... the people don't have it that great now, but it was a nightmare for most before.
Many Venezuelan oligarchs are still trying to actively get US and other countries to aid in overthrowing their government non-democratically.
What's happening to Venezuela is a story of when oligarchs turn completely tyrannical, and the choice between oligarch puppets is a party that somewhat inept in governing as well as needs the oligarchs much of its economy to function.
By the way, people aren't "eating dog in the street". Shortages exist on very specific food items. When famine or extreme food shortages exist, you don't just get inflation, you literally get people in the streets... go look at anyone taking current footage from there... they're not eating dog or scrounging for food like Sudan or some areas of Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua... to which you see like in Sudan and Libya... thousands migrating in large packs like we see in Mexico.
To be blunt, most nations worldwide are in terrible times using this current underlying economic models of oligarchical model of corporations.
As far as Swedes and Norwegians doing better... 2011 went back to school and stayed in dorms... one girl said she was there because she thought she would take it more serious since she had to actually pay for school... she didn't. She was a party animal. And eventually flunked most of her classes and back to Sweden... another Norwegian 20 year old was a raging alcoholic before he came here... and he left a raging alcoholic when he left just after one quarter semester... I'm not sure if he even went more than two times to classes. None of them took anything serious here, I guess under hopes of themselves and their parents the harshness of the US would make them take responsibility... nope. Didn't pan out for them. The Swedish girl to at least last longer, almost a full 4 quarters before she was actually suspended due to poor grades, and couldn't stay at the dorms anymore. They both had visas to attend school and work while they were here. None of them got a job, which I found funny. Their story was, coming to America to get toughened up, they're screw balls because their respective countries are too relaxed.... either way didn't pan out for them.
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I feel the same, voted for the mother fucker turncoat sell out piece of shit twice too.
I should have known better after the first time, as he was already doing things that were half measure and outright fuck yous by barring graduates from getting pale grants, instead only student loans... his gibbering about "retooling" hey tool for the oligarchs, that means sometimes you have to get a different or graduate degree. Fortunately, and probably why I dropped it, as a vet I had the GI bill and used that anyway for my next major degree.
But so many didn't have that option, EVERYONE should.
Other countries can afford it just fine, what the fuck is wrong with this country a so called super power? I get it, we're only super in that we're super bully to other nations, and to our own people. Everything else, we're fucking disgrace.
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All my insurance after ACA has been shit. More expensive on premiums, and more out of pocket costs covering no longer 100% of something, but maybe 20% if its "basic". But usually 50%. Plus deductibles. And co-pays. When I was in the Air Force, tri-care was great. No cost for any check ups, dentistry, any time needed any Rx for anything.
Our "insurance" is a fucking disgrace.
Funny thing, despite lots of elderly needing care, many small clinics and relatively small hospitals dental and medical are having huge unpaid accounts; they're desperate for patients who can actually pay; so if you seem healthy and employed get ready for several advertisements for all they can sell you; because they're going broke.
Non-medical businesses have been paying even more portion of higher premiums.
Seriously, there's only 2 entities that enjoy this racketeer disgrace: big pharma and big regional monopoly granted private hospitals.
They're few. We're many. Every other business and individual and small doctor and dental office would save and make so much more money on a universal health care system that allows that same system to negotiate and even operate and subsidies some production: clinics, hospitals, and drug manufacturing.
Would save a fortune.
But we squander it on the most asinine of stuff like a bloated military.
"The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.
U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined."
And we just gave the military an increase. And a meager pathetic excuse of an increase to the VA, the very fellow vets who put their lives on the line.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/
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Lot of disinformation among idiots in the backwoods areas around the country spreading bullshit about single payer system, when I myself have used Germany's, still do by my Rx from there, and have used Canadian clinics and bought Rx once from there, and have several friends from Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, UK, Japan, Australia, and Canada, their system is cheaper and better than ours. Objectively every ear WHO and Common Wealth Fund that evaluates healthcare systems specifically the 1st world wealthiest countries, US is always ranked the bottom of the wealthy countries. In fact, some 2nd world countries rank better in overall healthcare.
But you talk to a know nothing idiot at work in butt hole Idaho, and the make up shit where they heard from AM radio about rationing care... but they'll agree either the Hospitals are greedy or the insurance companies are greedy since AM radio and other nut bag propaganda crap is so overtly bullshit, even they know it's bull and can't repeat exactly the same line. But it's enough bullshit to make them think single payer or universal healthcare systems are somehow bad.
The biggest bullshit fib, can't believe its used in Idaho, we're fucking bordered with Canada, is that Canadians hate their system which utter bull. I know several Canadians, if they're ever here visiting, leave here to get check ups or operations back in their home country. And if for whatever reason they need something urgent or emergency and it's not available in Canada, they're covered to go to another country like the US plus lodging expenses, to get whatever needs accomplished done.
The misinformation to the common idiot in the US is amazingly successful.
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Friedman is a con. Feigns markets all by themselves without any or few rules just magically work. When all markets are, are a set of agreed rules based on political interests.
He hides the political and psychological intent of people which is all over the place and includes things he likes to leave out like resentment, buyers remorse or changing of the mind, etc.
Hiding the political sociological psychological nature of economics makes economics he thinks of sound more physical and unchanging; as if there is some economic physical law of nature when there is absolutely not the case at all.
Additionally, as importantly he forgoes the competitive market principle concept as much as possible. A sound logical method to discern what rules should be in place for each sector and industry and their services; ignoring non-competitive actions that markets tend to create such as monopolies or the perfectly inelastic demand curve sectors like healthcare or economy of scale issues such as the case for utilities and services and infrastructure that actually provide lowest possible costs and highest possible quality of service functioning as a monopoly: think utilities like power, gas, sewer, water works, internet/telecom, etc.
Instead he just pretend some magical force of nature created economics and the answer is let markets just do anything without limitation just let pricing and the subsequent supply and demand work itself out. That markets magical fix any problems... they do. It's called a market collapse that often ends in all sorts of misery sometimes depressions, sometimes civil war, and other war... he calls this market correcting itself.
Its sort of like an engineer designing a rocket and first one out we just assume will be just fine, no testing, no other feedback, no other insights from others, just load that up with passengers and cargo and let it rip... if it blows up... cargo and passengers are toast... but the rocket is in self correction mode, as a new one hopefully will work... if not, don't worry, yes more passengers and cargo are toast, but the next one, or some others will eventually lift off safely or mostly safely.
He dislikes any planning outside prices as a way for markets to regulate themselves. Which is absurd. Hence Friedman is mostly crackpot. Doesn't help that his in Memory of Alfred Nobel prize (was Nobel never wanted Economics to be among honors for his original Nobel Prizes because he knew economics is always a social political study, not a physical science and did not want to propound a dogma of any kind by endorsing any political ie economic manifesto), but of that prize he won back in the 1970's, was about price action, his data was phony. And his equations to his claims was faulty, and had to be corrected. But even his data was wrong. So he really didn't deserve such a prize at all. He was fraud there too. Several members of the Nobel Committee still today wanted to reverse the award; but of course that's too embarrassing an ordeal given that the King of Sweden himself presents the award to the winner and reflects upon the country of Sweden. And the actual Nobel Prize awards for the physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace; no award may be revoked. So the add on of memorial prize in economic sciences was added in 1968, how odd the first winner would be a crack pot advocating for essentially plutocratic oligarchy, as let i t be markets, means the ones with most wealth will make the market rules, would be among the first winners of what is not really a science, but a philosophy; one that is political social study in psychology; again NOT a physical science; there is no natural law of economics. Just as there is no natural physical in art appreciation music, dance, government/politics, men's or women's designer clothing and apparel.
I'm sure the idea is to make economics sound like a hard physical science with immutable phenomena, so that people don't realize it's just a human made up construct; and thus open to reasonable discord on making up rules that maybe necessary for better functioning for everyone involved.
Economically, you don't want to allow monopolies or oligopolies to form due to violations of competitive market principles. Price wars and subsidies from different countries can reduce artificially competitors until monopoly or near monopoly is achieved, and jack prices up to regain previous losses and maximize profits. In terms of foreign economics, political advantages can be used to short supply countries; the security issue you're mentioning.
Milton Friedman likes/liked to use half truths when grifting is BS. The last part of his statement; any nation selling directly or indirectly (thru a private company who receives a state subsidy) is not necessarily doing the other buying country any favors. It's anything but aid. Particularly in the long run, and if done with no mitigation such as quota limits or tariff or as a temporary allowance; as price war effects will ruin any non-subsidized same business in either country.
And of course, doesn't help to mark the resentment on both sides of each nation develops among the labor. Just as colonialism created massive resentments among the aristocrats to the labor and the enslaved labor of the various colonies and to the mother countries of those colonies.
What sucks about Friedman is that some portions of what he says is fairly decent economic philosophy, it's just that he abandons the competitive market principle concepts and other more complicated matters, and propounds his own conjectured dogma of let markets do whatever for the most part and they'll behave the best and provide the best possible way; no planning at all... which is always funny because economics literally means in Greek "household management".
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No stupid ass wall, when such money could be spent on an intercontinental high speed rail, universal education, and we as a country out of 201 countries rank among the 28 countries that lack universal healthcare. A wall doesn't do shit. Illegal immigrants mostly come in legally at boarder crossings or airports, and stay beyond their passport authority by getting a job.
A wall is extremely stupid.
And even his GOP control house and senate didn't fund his idiot wall. Trump, don't worry, I figure when Mueller is done you get some walls and bars for state and federal crimes including money laundering, conspiracy, embezzlement, campaign finance fraud, violating sanctions, and violating the emoluments clause. So you will get your wall. In an orange jump suit that matches your fat bloated fake orange spray tan.
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Watch out for USDC too... because they have lied as well firstly stating like tether that $1 for 1 tether or $1 for 1 USDC backing, when finally they admitted USDC has 60% in cash. The other in various other "investments". And like tether, Circle has constantly made and broke promises that they were going to do a full independent audit. Still not happening. And they've promised this all of last year. Nothing. Crickets. The other problem, Circle stated they would (they meaning really one guy show here) that he was going to get a banking license and become a bank. Nothing. Crickets. And like Terra and even many Tether based exchanges, they offer staking these poker chips for high interest rates.
Entire stable coin idiocy is why crypto pumped so high... it was a fractional reserve banking nonsense that always, always ends on a run on the bank. Still does in our current fractional banking system, but we have FDIC insurance covering $250K per bank and deposits in that bank per person. And SIPC covering a little over $500K on all assets stocks, options, and cash in an account.
Look at all stable coin minting... the minting of these coins correspond with the insane price increases in BTC, ETH, and many other crypto.
It's a pyramid scheme with moments of Ponzi when various exchanges and stable coin makers themselves offer high interest rate returns if you lock your poker chips up.
Stay away from crypto. It's garbage. Complete and utter trash. One that will haunt you after you lose all your money by way of the many bad movies, that will no doubt be made from this $2 trillion dollar epic potpourri of scams. At the heart of the crypto is the stable coin scams. And they're all bogus.
Good luck.
Cash out now... or I suppose you can find the mental support group of Terra holders :(
And let's just end this garbage now... this shit will have ruined more people than turned into real money millionaires and billionaires.
There is a reason regulating bodies like the SEC was founded.
I know the indoctrination of stupidity "markets" know best... when markets know nothing... they're dumb efficient at one thing squandering through something you want to sell or buy at whatever the market will bear or you can bear. That's it. You can swap something for something else.
It doesn't tell you if it was wise, dumb, beneficial, good deal, bad deal, what might happen later, what you might need later... nothing.
Rules of markets just as in planning are a necessity to have a prosperous decent fair bountiful economy.
The mindset that markets all by themselves unfettered will magically form a prosperous economy... has always, always resulted in quite the opposite... usually famine as in no planning on food storage for potential bad crop yield, or putting too many food suppliers out of business on a high yield season causing the next year to have to few of suppliers and rendering the population... starving mad.
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Social-Capital mixed market is the method of economics almost all nations have adopted that does better than total communism or capitalism markets which had replaced slavery, feudalism, and mercantilism.
And determining whether to have a sector collective or private owned and operated requires the competitive market principles if it violates these principles severely, and for all sectors to ensure competitive markets principles are increasingly met toward "perfect competitive markets" like food sector does well from farming and manufacturing and retailing at the private sector meeting easier entry to market, price is influenced by supply and demand as plenty of substitutes exist, etc.with only perfect knowledge not always being available thus we require nutrition facts and ingredient lists as well as statements of allergens contained or if processed nearby so people with severe allergies know to use caution or simply not to purchase that good.
Also, externalities exist on food sector, ie. if farmers have a poor crop yield due infestation of fungus, insects, or other disease, or bad weather you can have sudden price increases in food over time as food supply can drastically drop... so a backstop to prevent food shortages and especially famine, all nations subsidize farming in some way using government money in some fashion often via insurance and price floors for crops.
For natural monopolies that violate entry to barrier, requiring economy of scale, severe externality, etc. those items are not competitive markets thus profit motive fails providing better quality and more supply and you get worse outcome (lesser supply, higher prices, and poorer quality). Utilities, roads, ports, etc. are all natural monopolies.
Economics isn't a mystery.
Really, mostly in just our country, the US has just become a dogmatic idiocy founded on pure insanity since Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand cult and politicians horrible return to plutocratic economic policy. Most nations understand economics.
Our nation's thoughts and understanding on economic science/philosophy from professionals to everyday persons has become as misguided, contradictory, and flat out stupid and wrong in violation of not just logic but of observed facts to be tantamount to flat earther, young earther, ancient aliens built everything, and those that mix and match such as flat earthers space isn't real but aliens still somehow did it contradictory lunatics.
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College/university education is only overpriced in nations like the US.
As far as free lectures, many top of the field doctorates post their lectures for free. You get no credit as you don't do any of the quizzes, papers, labs, research papers, nor exams that ensures you really learned anything other than got a general gist (and even if the gist is correct or not) of what they're talking about in their lectures.
Is colleges and universities, particularly private ones, but even so called public ones in the US over priced? Yep. Just as we don't have a comprehensive medical system in the US, we don't have a comprehensive educational system. K-12 or any primary education is very insufficient for various jobs we have today that aren't easy outsourced to impoverished low educated nations.
Most of us are upset many of these colleges and universities even public ones, are charging the same price. I was going to go back for a chemistry degree with a goal to eventually get PhD in nuclear, material, or spectrochemistry.
But decided since summer course are all online, to remain working full time and take one class (a chemistry class). Instead of using the GI Bill this summer quarter, will use my employer reimbursement program.
We're competing with nations that provide low to no tuition, some even pay to go to school so long as evidence via ability to pass boards and exams to go as far as you need quickly in a profession.
We're nation full of under educated fools, and the those with an education due to the necessity to maintain several jobs and often leave school for long periods of time for financial constraints, generally go for whatever degree can be achieved quickly, usually useless degrees like political science or BS in Management or History or English, etc.
STEM is required. Science literacy around the world stinks. In the US, it's astounding lacking. Reflects our idiotic policies in government.
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Frederic Bastiat It's similar to the hours worked by peasants of pre 18 hundreds of most of the world as technology advanced: feudalism gave way to mercantilism as technology advanced, in nations where feudalism peasant serfdom overhang it violently ended toward a mercantile system as productivity gains went to the feudal lordship, and especially early industrial era through the 1800's and early 1900's. Coal wars existing from 1870's to 1935. When nations experience great civil unrest as productivity literally went to about 6% of the population and the rest was poor. Wasn't until social programs such as prohibition on owning slaves and child labor, compulsory education, social security, right to collectively bargain, later medicare/medicaid, public roads and utilities that were often granted monopoly power which is not a capitalistic concept at all whether private or public as its naturally not competitive.
Essentially, its obvious that a system that denies productivity gains from technology to workers which constitutes at least 60% of the population and 95% of all people require some type of employment in order to get by in their life.
Early and pre industrial era people were working 6 days to 7 days a week, 12 hours or more a day.
Now its closer to 40 hours 5 days a week at standard.
Yet pay is more substantial because productivity gains had gone toward workers by voted law. Because it wasn't without voted law.
New technology is making it where even 40 hours isn't necessary. So you could see cutting working to 20 hours with even higher wages. If the operation needs more time to cover they would higher more people to cover that time, as they had to when 12 and 14 hour shifts were pushed toward 8 hour shifts, they hired another shift. And paid all shifts more.
See... this means productivity, at least a portion, went toward labor, not to just do nothing owners. And those precious owners who don't do anything, the loafers in society, often those who inherited their fortunes, still got monster gobs of profits. Particularly because an actual middle class in that most of its people were able to buy the very stuff they were making.
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Almost all nations have a form of universal healthcare for all citizens.
We have it for elderly and severely disabled medicare and medicaid.
But we don't for all people as essentially all other nations have.
And they pay less and get much more and better results.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Not having universal healthcare system in modern age for the past 60 years is tantamount as not having prohibition on child labor, not having compulsory education via public educational system, not having a prohibition on slavery, not having labor laws including worker compensation protections, unemployment insurance, work place safety protections, right to collectively bargain, wage/salary protections, not having public roads or ports; that they're all toll roads and ports, etc. And having some weird desire to burn books and prohibit libraries.
I mean it is absurd to the entire world that we don't have a universal healthcare system. There are very few nations that lack such a program, and the few that do tend to be newly formed nations underdeveloped likely repairing from civil war; and just haven't gotten around to that necessity as the Red Cross and UN has field hospitals assisting them in the interim.
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False. There is some serious roadblocks that prevent large co-ops. Small ones exist everywhere. But they have large barriers of entry in sectors that require huge economies of scale:
1) lack of capital formation... most businesses particularly large ones get investment money. Co-ops aren't a good investment option when you have the choice of putting money in regular for profit sectors. In fact, the type of co-op described by Wolff is that these co-ops would not be trade-able.
2) Banks dislike lending to co-ops because they fear such a business wouldn't want to enter into partial banking ownership contracts, and increased in possibility to default on loans to pay labor and suppliers instead.
3) Bonds are not available or at least few would want to buy a bond from a co-op, knowing again as the banks, that such a firm would value their employees as they are the employees over ensuring repayment on such debt; should something bad happen, a co-op is more likely to seek Chapter 11 or 13 protection and forego any dividend payments for a period time eating into returns.
4) Large and small enterprises don't like competition. They simply hate the idea of having competitors, their entire purpose is to compete, to eliminate the competition, to stomp on it and crow about how better they are than any other firm. Or to buy them out. Or buy off politicians who make laws that make it difficult for competitors to enter their market. As for co-ops or even just non-profits; if there is a for profit company in the same sector, they will claim unfair market distortion that that firm doesn't need to make a profit like we do to stay in business and thus often limit the participation of a non-profit. They do the same with co-ops.
5) Venture capitalists simply don't exist, because such co-ops are not trade-able; so the gimmick of venture capitalists pouring money into a new unicorn, with the hopes of either making real profits and dividends or really just going public and making a killing in the IPO... that doesn't exist.
It's not that people don't want it. It's that we don't have a system setup to build such enterprises.
A method exists to allow for such co-op enterprises to exist would be a Fed Reserve Co-Op Bank possibly with independent co-op credit unions who would analyze and establish creditworthiness and monitor such co-ops issuing them loans at a discount (similar to discount loans made by the Fed Reserve between banks, but different in that this lending could be branched out as to ensure audits are conducts to eliminate any fraud holding such co-op credit unions at risk if such co-op loans were used other than for the purpose of the business ie. fraud/embezzlement, etc.).
Then such co-op firms could literally borrow large enough sums of capital to enter sectors that are forbidden by even most private startups: mining, refining, vast farming, large retail chain, hotel chains, hospitals, dentistry, GP medical clinics, chemical production, durable goods manufacturing, hardware and software development and manufacturing, marketing and advertising, etc.
We simply don't have a system that allows for co-ops to exist, at least short of a small grocery store or coffee shop or pizza parlor or pot shop or you get the point: cheap retail.
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The polls shouldn't be a surprise.
Last 40 years, and us coming up in that era, we no longer have sick pay bucket and a vacation bucket, we no longer have pensions, but a joke of a fucking 401K, insurance that's absurd, rents that soar beyond other inflation, housing that should depreciate not appreciate because they slowly wear out and must be remodeled and often rebuilt as a vehicle does, and wages have bottomed out, and don't keep up with what 1% to 2% inflation that is admitted by the government.
So we're a generation that sees our goofy fucking ass economy to what it is, a failed military banana republic return to robber baron stupidity.
And we have the internet. We know someone from every major developed and many other poorer countries. We're not in a bubble: we know we're being screwed in a vicious cycle of stupidity.
Thus the old propaganda is as phony and hollow as the shit the USSR would push on their people; an open joke nobody pays attention. The 6 major remaining media conglomerates are our version of the USSR state run media that nobody pays any real attention other than to laugh at it.
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What he needs to do is have demonstrations about all other nations' single payer system. Show the Mirror Mirror report and then go to Germany, UK, Austria, Norway, Sweden, France, Australia, Canada, even Mexico. Show clips of people living with chronic conditions like Diabetes, with no problems just for check ups like dental or mild conditions, a broken limb, or eye condition, etc. Just to drive home the absurdity racketeering abusive heinous system that is our medical system compared to the rest of the world, even poorer countries have a better medical outcome in quality, efficiency, and pricing.
Not quite 10% a year of the population are able to travel abroad (excluding Mexico and Canada). So most people never experience other nation's medical system, and even those few almost 10% who travel a year abroad, only stay a few weeks or less so never experience or learn the facts of their medical system.
So it's important to compare and contrast. Demolish the rumor that somehow we have the best medical system when in reality we have racketeering household bankrupting rationed system that serves as a method to extract income and wealth from its working citizens.
Most people are too poor to travel abroad to learn about other nations. And those who do, its often a once or twice in a lifetime experience which usually consists of 1 to 2 weeks excursion and then its over.
Younger folks due to the internet, have lots of internet friends all over the world, and understand the absurdity that is our medical system compared to all other nations. But the middle class and elderly often haven't a clue.
It's about educating them to the stark realities that our country is truly evil when it comes to our healthcare system. And frankly also with our covert foreign policies.
Some of the elderly and now middle age being of the internet are becoming aware of how screwed we are concerning medical system since they're dealing with it now as they come to the age of their lives that medical conditions become inevitable. Hence why medical tourism is on the rise to Canada, Mexico, even to India.
Everyone else that hasn't been hit with a medical problem should be informed, until their too sick to vote and rally for reform from this purely evil system.
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It's the effect of low interest rates for such a long time; and real-estate has always been a hedge on other investments: stocks, bonds, CDs, indexes, Roth IRA, 401K, etc.
And most of the rich, particularly the very rich, when they own stocks, it's often not just a few thousand here and there, but a large or even the majority stake 10% to 17% of the stock of that company.
So to reduce their exposure to a vulnerable stock market, many rich and even not so rich pooling to buy these REITs, has caused housing to become ridiculously expensive both this time not just home prices, but also rents.
And some of these builders were as shitty as he mentions, they're literally falling apart, my 25 year old nephew remarked as we went visiting a cousin noticing the phony stucco crumbling off exposing the plywood and even some of that broken exposing insulation on the cheaply built 2006 houses, the entire subdivision falling apart and all looked very bland un-kept lots, old sorry vehicles parked, he said: "Look! It's American Soviet housing blocks, but instead of free, they're broke trying to pay for the garbage as they fall apart." He held up an example of some soviet style housing blocks on his phone... I chuckled comparing them... but noticed, well that concrete looks like the cheap soviet stuff might just out last this hot mess they call construction.
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Personally, as ex military and government employee I have filled out lots of government paperwork. On forms they demand lots of personal information going back a decade or more. And current information. Among them of high importance is always foreign potential influence. On a secret security form it asked if I had any bank accounts or stocks or other properties in foreign countries. A water works for profit company I was working for is owned by a Paris based French company traded on the French Stock Exchange the CAC. I own some shares as an employee stock purchase program. It was an obvious need to disclose which required an interviewer with security clearance Federal investigator. She asked me point blank questions about the foreign stock ownership. She asked if it was just stocks traded in a portfolio that was traded on an American stock exchange, the form clearly states if the stock isn't traded on an America stock exchange, it's foreign stock. So I told it's my current (at the time) employer's shares of their company, its traded on the CAC French stock Exchange, I get paid dividends initially in Euros that get exchanged into dollars, I get annual updates and proxy votes on the company that are in French. It's a French company that does our water in the US, so my affiliation is I'm an employee in the US that provides city drinking water that is owned by a publicly traded French company on the French stock exchange. When I bought stocks my USD had to be converted to Euros, the value of the shares are in Euros. She initially thought the stocks were in some index fund like the Euro-Pacific fund in a 401K. No, these are individual shares I own direct, not part of some retirement index fund managed by an American firm. It's all foreign, specifically French. Then she understood, she takes the info and passes it to other people who determined later the disclosure was okay enough to get the security clearance.
Anyway, something like that a non-lawyer individual can figure out how to fill out a form that at the end of the pages clearly state if any information knowingly or accidentally is omitted or falsified under perjury of law I may face civil and criminal prosecution to the full extent under the law. It goes on to explain nothing can be changed at time of submitting the information, if after review of your information you provide you find inaccurate to make those known to any investigator that may interview you, or contact the appropriate office as soon as possible to avoid civil and criminal prosecution, and being denied the clearance.
The forms aren't that difficult to understand. There's lots to it. And minor mistakes like not including an apartment number or forgetting a phone number of someone or being off on a date by a few days is one thing.
But something that big (foreign interests) is obscene. And these assholes are supposed to be lawyers.
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$17 an hour isn't even close to extreme since productivity over the past 40 years has gone up so much.
What was extreme was the trillions in funny debt pushing by the Fed that persists even today, they squabble now about just tapering by March 2022... the debt printer go burr is where ALL the inflation is derived. Debt based money system like we have, new money supply is by increasing the debt... lower interest rates allowing all assets to balloon even further up beyond the already stupidity levels of 2019, to beyond stupidity, a new word must be invented to describe the levels of stupidity of stocks, commodities, real-estate, fake internet scam money, NFT's, farts in a jar, etc.
All thank you to the Fed Reserve. The monetary stupidity since the Fed has existed.
Bail out the rich, and create hyper inflation, a tax on all the poor people, because the rich don't want to pay up, they want their infinite mansions and palaces, and yachts, and stupidity and ridiculous trophies of stupidity launching themselves into sub orbit for a few minutes in a rocket shaped like a penis, or the persistent sales hustle pitch of man who hand his butt hairs implanted on his otherwise would have been balled head, hustling and bustle and con job others... while selling all over the suckers' heads.
Fed increased it's balance sheet the new money printer go burrr form $4 trillion to $9 trillion.... and that's just the Fed balance sheet... that's not the amount of debt pooped out by banks and other financial hustlers pooped out and corporations took out and stock traders and real-estate traders and commodities traders, etc. all took out... trillions.
That's where inflation comes from.
As a much detested economist would chime in fairly frequently, but it was already known by other economists since Keynes and even Hayek, etc. Milton Friedman the pluto-rats best buddy himself, would lament, and it is true as it's simple logic... inflation is always a monetary phenomena. Cut the money supply you cannot have inflation. Expand the money supply, you will have inflation.
In a debt based money system, money supply comes from lower interest rates and the issuance of more and more debt via the banking system... people borrow to buy stocks, real-estate, speculate in commodities contracts, silly fake internet money that's a big scam of so called stable coins, farts in a jar, etc.
Wages cannot cause inflation unless productivity goes down... we have a productivity deficit to wages, none was shared over the past 40 years, Net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while a typical worker's compensation grew by 15.8%, according to EPI data released ahead of Labor Day.
Productivity has grown 3.5 times as much as pay for the typical worker.
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We have a republic that limits democracy and causes many to be apathetic (gerrymandering, candidate stacking, electoral college, etc.).
Democracy is really the only way to go... votes. And democracies require a strong constitution, but one that can be amended just a bit easier than our constitution with big majority vote so as no to harm a large minority.
Any other alternative is monarchy, theocracy, military or non-military dictatorship, a select oligarchy/leader of the proletariat to which only a handful of select people are eligible for voting.
What we have in the US is a broken republic democracy where our candidates are essentially legally bribed, must get those bribes to get any advertisement and media attention, current office holders select their own districts which is absurd; gerrymandering, and candidates are not undergoing basic tests: drug abuse, general education/knowledge tests.
Apathy is what often kills a republic democracy... Hitler gained seats because people were apathetic, French put in Napoleon due to apathy and simply being tired after the terror (the terror was caused by too easily and hasty on suspension of the constitution something that should never happen, and even Lincoln who suspended part of the US constitution should be watched closely).
Democracies work better for more people than oligarchies, theocracies, simple/military dictatorships, absolute monarchies, etc.
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Nah, they were doing that almost as soon as 2009. Giving anyone a mortgage. I know as my, then roommate mortgaged a house around that time; zero down. And his income was rather low at the time... for a $145K he was making only about $35K. His total loan payment was half his income of about $1,180 a month. About half his take home pay.
Why? At first it was the TARP. But Frank Dodd act gave authority directly to Fed Reserve to be buyers of CDO/CLO markets. And QE continued for a decade.
So they were giving anyone a loan. Once again, for a decade now, it was the banks giving a loan the highest possible and quickest they could sell it to the CDO market take their principle leant out along with some interest, and take a realized gain; right back to 1997 to 2007 CDO market. And they could care less quality of credit.
The banks did have to pretend to care, so you have a bit more statements being generated that must attest your ability to pay. Often an extra 3% down requirement wasn't that much because ARMs were coming back along with balloon interest only payments to meet that small down payment.
So no. It just continued. Hence the prices rising so quickly from 2015 to present day. Now that Fed is no longer buying CDO's, CLO's which contain mostly credit cards and other signature loans became an investment bubble going up in price as they provide huge yields compared to other collateralized debts.
And if you have a good FICO you have probably been given 0% rates for 3 months out as far as 1.5 years or further... why? They need some good FICO rates to mix with the crap FICOs on their book, mix it together and bam they can sell that CLO for better rates to investors that are still there for now; banks are looking to dump it. CDO market that contain mostly mortgages and car/truck loans, are faltering hence Wells Fargo's exit from originating mortgages several months back.
Truly, this time is so much worse. It's covered up because many like yourself are thinking two things that make it "different this time"... 1) Lower rates are locked in. Which isn't true completely. 2) Banks have been more diligent this time on issuing loans. Which also isn't true.
What's also not being taken in consideration on once different this time on the negative side that makes it worse:
1) Affordability. Even with full employment by the signers of these loans, those with ARMs and balloon payments are particularly vulnerable. But so are those with fixed lower interest rates because the price of the loans are so much; any disruption to employment will spell inability to pay those loans. Refinancing in the red is never an option; and many will find themselves deeper in the red as the first set of ARM and balloon payment folks end up in foreclosure.
2) Collateral or prices due to affordability is unsustainable. Like a game of levered up stock market or the silly crypto market levered to the tits; the prices are not sustainable. So many will be deep in the red. Worse than a margin trading account, that simply won't let you go into the red for very long as they'll require a margin call or liquidate your position so you're just zeroed out; not negative balance.
So nope. They're still giving just about everyone a loan... they just recently stopped that when Fed exited purchasing CDO's aka halted their QE. And allowed what they already bought to mature and fall off their balance sheet. So those with FICO's in the mid 600's are likely not able to get a big enough loan now to afford property that's excess of $280K with an income household of $40K to $75K; they're sort of complaining of being shut out, that banks won't lend higher to meet the current asking price in the are of 300K to 350K... and higher for better properties.
So only now have banks tightened on the seriously risky borrowers. If you're FICO is better however, they are still giving out ARMs and balloon interest only loans.
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Bad turnout.
I would also suspect the new voting booths were interesting. There is a paper ballot. I would have them recounted. Because they just used computers to tally the votes. And we know how that went with Iowa. Seriously, the polls don't indicate the vote we got.
In other nations this happens, it's considered foul play.
I will say, if this is the case, Idaho primaries are lumped together (first DNC primary normally we do caucuses), it would mean public elections are rigged... and we had a city vote on a levy in addition to our ballot. First time with these weird machines; they do produce a good easy countable ballot that is also submitted. But that's not what gets counted unless called for by some official.
So both bad turnout and highly suspicious tallying. I would like them all recounted.
Oh well. 4 more years of Trump, rather have an outspoken servant of the oligarchs than Biden: another double phony fraud pretending he's not. Not to mention the chance Biden has dementia.
You're trying to say media outlets really matter, Bloomberg demonstrates this isn't the case.
Biden hardly spent any money and did essentially no talks, and those he did he was heckled to his face as well as stumbling over his words and only lasting for few minutes, and each was terrible for him demonstrating his dementia.
Media doesn't turnout votes.
Culturally, in this country it's consider school marm like, nerdy, silly, waste of time, delusional to bother to vote.
So vast majority of people don't. People don't even understand the processes of primaries caucuses and other elections.
Some are outspoken proud non-voters.
And others pretend they vote all the time when they later admit they've never cast a ballot in their life. And it's sad when they string you on asking you to look up their precinct writing it down, and then a week later they say they couldn't make it to the ballot.
People just don't vote. They love to complain about property taxes and laws and shitty insurance that really isn't even insurance but some gimmick pretend discount program mostly to bail out the provider should you not be able to come up with more than $10K... at least some of it will get to the hospital or clinic.
So we have the stupid of minority, instead of the wisdom of the crowd.
It's why we're in the shape we're in. Only way is to change the culture. That takes time doing it without the aid of something devastating. It's a constant needling. Normalization, you can't just do it in one brief year period, but every day for decade or more.
Also, have oversight and recounts just to be sure. Because I suspect deviousness; so for peace of mind, all votes need to be recounted in every precinct in the country.
I have no faith in anything nor should anyone else: trust but verify.
Oh well, back to focusing on work and going back to school this summer.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/10/turnout-was-high-in-the-2016-primary-season-but-just-short-of-2008-record/
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To be fair, judging by the size of their house, this kid's parents are well off... like millionaires. I think his dad either owns the bottling company he's working for, or is at least up there in higher management. Bottlers are like franchisees of a franchise. You buy the concentrate, then make it and sell the pallets of pop to the pop market which is big: grocery stores, fast food, cafe', tourism, stadiums, gas station convenient stores, airports, schools, colleges, hospitals, military bases, etc. etc. And its very profitable even as a franchisee.
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Such a bogus issue... the average person... no most fucking people in the US couldn't point correctly to Israel on a fucking map of the world.
This is just right wing propaganda that simulates religious idea of being reborn, repenting, etc. See they once were lost over there, now they're found. I converted and so can you! No money up front! You simply can't lose, so why not come on over too?! The topic of change is extremely phony. But it's reminiscent to Christian born again philosophy.
And Christians even minor not very active ones love The Parable of the Prodigal Son Luke 15:11-32. And if your target audience is rather dimwitted with very little education, set them up with a parable of your own that reminds them or can be reminded to them if their sitting in Sunday by their spewer of nonsense.... see I once was blind and now I see, another song that I actually like... instead though they've been dumped propaganda tar on their face and more blind than before.
Irrational to the rational... but to the point of view of the irrational, makes perfect sense... but so does taking snakes, rib making women, boogie man that goes bump in the night, etc. etc.
Anyway, these testimonies of switching on one issue that is particularly not a very well understood nor consequential issue for most Americans, plays to the superstition and stupidity of their target audience which is always up the Reich Wingers playbook.
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The everything is in burst mode and will continue to hasten into a liquidation problem all around by the end of 2019 into 2020, Trump is just an idiot waiting for is orange jump suit when he is convicted at the state level for money laundering, campaign finance fraud, structuring, and federally on the same as well as violations on the emoluments clause.
He's only president because economically the worker class over the past 40 years has been put through the ringer: suicide rates are at all time highs, opium use and deaths kill more people a year than the the Vietnam war, individual debts are back up to unsustainable levels from credit card to housing to this time vehicle loans that only got to $400 billion, now is at $1.22 trillion... similar to student loan debts that were once only $400 billion is now at $1.5 trillion. Then the new threatening liquidity debt bubble is collateralized debt obligations concerning businesses... business total debt was $4 trillion, it's now $9.5 trillion with these CLO's accounting for about a trillion. Fluff in the market over the past 3 years was brought higher largely due to low interest rates, stock buy backs run-a-muck with large companies literally borrowing money to buy back stock... the most moronic short term sugar high, and midterm disaster.
CLO's I personally think will be the big catalyst that packs the last punch. Vehicle default rates are already on the rise, those were chopped in CLO's, and business CLO's which literally don't hesitate do file Ch 7 liquidation and dissolve will be gigantic. We're seeing a global slow down because other countries also binged on "cheap" debt, and everyone stops borrowing, no more demand, and poof it all falls down. Since borrowing and investment money was what was driving any demand. There was no underlying virtuous demand cycle... real wages have the purchasing power of 1974. And layoffs for good paying companies have already started from GE, GM, Tesla, and a host of others.
He likely won't be president for another 4 years... we'll be in a serious depression... not necessarily caused by him, it was inevitable before him on the idiot policies used to "revive" the economy... nothing was changed, just inflate out of it on the supply side... if the fundamental demand side is completely ruined, you'll get nothing but boom and bust. And this one is going to be a big bust.
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Competition isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is actually helpful. One uses the competitive market principle to first examine of a particular sector should use the for profit motive that uses competitiveness to produce higher quality and highest supply and cheapest price of goods. Problem is, some sectors simply do not belong in the competitive markets like healthcare just as utilities (water, sewer, trash, roads, electricity, etc.) as those are natural monopolies thus have no competitors, and by economy of scale the per customer cost decreases for every additional customer paying into the system. Those items that violate some or all competitive market principles should be collectively owned and operated by the city, county, state, etc. There isn't any actual competition driving anything, but a racket being made from captive customers. This can apply to oligopolies as well.
As for competitive markets for those things that can be competitive, we need to change the employer employee relationship. The employee must also be the employer in the form of a co-op where the workers get a vote in aspects of what they'll produce, how they'll produce it, where, and what should be done with the surplus; how much to use as capital expenditures (to grow the business even bigger and higher more people, buy more equipment, more warehouses, etc.), how much of a pay, should the surplus go to increase wages/salaries, be one time bonus, save for a rainy day-- help with cash flow, etc.
Because in a co-op, people won't vote to pay themselves 5% to 8% of revenue only, but take at least 10% to 20%, essentially doubly to quadrupling everyone's take home pay, as well as ensuring the company grows where they keep their jobs, and does it in a safe manner. They may even vote themselves a pension program again to ensure a decent retirement, instead of the gimmick that is a 401K that's incredibly insufficient.
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Our current insurance model is so fucking bogus, first of all your employer sponsored plan helps to the extent you're employed. The moment something serious happens they immediately force you to apply for medicaid, and they get reimbursed by all payouts that are covered retroactively by medicaid. Additionally, FMLA only covers 12 weeks of unpaid leave; past that amount the employer can fire you, you then pay COBRA insurance premiums which is the full insane amount the employer and you pay which is often $600 to $800 a month, so you essentially lose your insurance anyway during a catastrophic illness after 12 weeks of FMLA leave as your employer usually fires you once they're legally able.
Some employers have arbitrarily added perk that their FMLA unpaid goes up to 3 months or so. But very few employers do this especially for mid level to lower tier workers.
So insurance never pays out big dollar items; they pin it all on Medicaid, and when that's not successful, you're not able to get medicaid, it's only 12 weeks of non-paid work, and whatever paid time off you had then poof fired, and no more insurance; the premium is often 70% or more of long term disability that it would pay you.... just for the premium.
And folks from everywhere other than the US, premium means shit. You still have co-pays and deductibles on top of the absurd premiums.
Simply put: Our private medical insurance system is a fucking evil racket.
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I'm not sure about making me feel like an idiot so much, because this one is doing that for allowing us to have such a process that puts a fucking idiot in the highest office of our nation.
I want a bar like test, similar we have for air traffic controllers, Bar exams for lawyers, pilot exam and practicals to just get a private pilot license, etc.
For governors and president of the US you should be required to pass a governing exam of sorts... covering wide variety of topics for basic elementary understanding from geography, social studies covering the past 200 years at the least, a history portion covering all recorded history in just a very general sense, basic algebra and geometry, basic chemistry, basic biology, basic physics, etc.
They're allowed to study on the test, provide sample questions and pamphlets on what topics and types of questions that would be on the test, and it should be over 100 questions.
Just a basic knowledge test, and I like most tests 70% would be the minimum passing score. Each time you take the test a different set of questions would be randomized with same amount of concentration on topics. Each failure would require a 4 year waiting period.
After the written test which could be multiple choice, another exam would be given called the practical... this one is just to see if the president is capable of coming up with answers on his own, covering all questions missed.
At the very least, it would ensure anyone for the job, that they would have the understanding they're not "like a smart person." We're all ignorant on some topics, that they will need to read books, at the very least research online like google, and know how to pick credible sources like .edu and determine credible non-bias organizations, even know how to access a scholarly journal and look up various topics.
We can't have an idiot serving in the highest office in the land... 2/3's so far have been dimwits. But Trump takes it to a completely different level, where we're getting essentially what is tantamount to idiot royal heirs utterly bereft of basic knowledge. A completely dangerous combination for someone who is ratifying or rescinding first attempt at all laws, committing to various foreign policies, commander and chief of our armed forces, and has the determination on using nuclear weapons.
I know the White House isn't just one person, but an entire administration, but the president himself has extremely dire responsibilities. We can't give it to a buffoon. And succession would be based on those who could pass the knowledge battery too; VP to Speaker and down... your first assignment when you get nominated or elected to any of these offices of succession would be to study and take the exam as soon as practicable.
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Fed Reserve can't go bankrupt because it uses the "reserves" of all banks... and can simply does this by monetizing (printing press) the currency.
Hence why it should never been allowed. Worst thing ever done. All the busted banks in 2008 should even all of them become insolvent should have simply been nationalized and all loans remarked to market from origination to keep people in homes, keep businesses developing homes, allow a deflationary loan rather than reinflate the bubble with debasing currency to bail out bad bank debts...and hyper inflate assets and cause inflation to become fuckery. Allow the still leveraged to the tits from the 2000's stonck market to dump and stay down... stock markets prior to the stupidity the banking carete (fed reserve) could pump the chicken for half a century, prior this was impossible and stoncks didn't go to any moon. They went up and down in an decaying oscillation per name eventually (as all business do as people and others) die. Succumbing to competition and new technology from that competition.
But no. We just allowed the banks to screw us to keep their parasitical excuse for an existence alive via massive debasement of money.
WE pretended some magical hidden hand was a thing. It's not. And if a nation wants a good economic outcome, planning of some kind is always important; just as household planning is important to plan on what to do with your money... you don't just throw money out the window and say I'm going with the hidden ding dong of the market. Spending copious amounts speculating on things like farts in a jar.
Monetary policy should only keep prices stable, with no inflation nor deflation. Not inject a 2% compounding anything. That's an exponential growth that leads to inflation that spikes as any exponential growth does and becomes impossible to sustain. In nature, exponential growths has a stopper to throttle such growth from actually being exponential, but more linear or bound in an oscillation.
And never trust "magic" banking. Banking should be boring. Basic banking should not be involved in speculation on equities or even worse, side bets on equities and other items. Warren Buffett's remark, they're weapons of mass financial destruction. Even options, a very basic derivative on stocks, if not properly traded and kept to a low trade size and not levered on top of the already leverage 100 share contracts of American style options already present to then use leverage on top of this leverage... you're looking at a disaster in the making.
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Economics was propounded by the likes of the oligarchy often using the quack of Milton Friedman, as if economics was a physical science.
When it's not. It's a social and philosophical study. Useful in different ways of thinking. To think about what you think about. But has absolutely no actual predictive capacity as the physical science does. Even the massive variability of meteorology that studies short term weather and attempts to predict short term weather in a vicinity of an area, often gives wrong predictions due to the variables involved become extreme and chaos too far out beyond a week or two in certain areas of the world.
Economics is a complete chaotic structure mathematically and as a productive capacity. Chaos theory in mathematics and game theory is about the only stab you have at not predicting economic outcomes, but gaming various choices that come up along the way; how to hedge against the chaos. Or to be super risky and go tits in to one direction of an economic outcome etc.
Economic has no predictive capacity. It only has ways of thinking about what to do when presented with an economic situation. And how to deal with the economic situation, which way is best to optimize the economy of ones self, everyone else, or you and everyone else. That's it. It's a philosophical social study.
Unfortunately, as Yanis is describing, economics was construed as a hard lined only one approach physical science. Similar to how nobility under feudalism, and even under capitalism, slave masters would describe how some people were born to serve, and others were born to govern; as if it was a physical absolute as the physical sciences are. A big fraud to get people to accept the idiocy of a social construct; social invention, that doesn't work well for almost all of the population, but works very well, too well for a very small minority. Economics was used to pacify the masses.
This is also why Alfred Nobel did not award a price in economics. He stated economics is a political study. And he knew giving an award to a political study as if its a science or more benign philosophy such as that of mathematics, that such winners could become demagogues; giving crackpots an undue unchallengeable position; because what they say must be as solid as Newtonian physics and the even more detailed and more useful for large relativistic masses or very big masses or near luminal speeds Einsteinian physics.
When they're just a crackpot that has now become unchallengeable. Ending the philosophical examination that all, even mathematics, undergoes all the time. It's only use is to sharpen ways to think, but has no real predictive capacity on anything, it's not the point of a philosophical study, to predict anything. It's only point is to become better skilled thinkers. That's it.
And unfortunately, Sweden wanted to use it's massive power with the Nobel Prize, they included in their own extension awards for economics and mathematics those two "in memory of Alfred Nobel". Nice way to memorialize someone by going against their memory of saying mathematics and economics shall not be among those awards to be used for my doury for these awards.
Therefore economics while not a physical science and having absolutely no predictive capacity, should not be ignored. But it should be open to all discussion and understanding of various ways to do economics, there is no one way or "right" way. Just one way to approach a very specific problem with many variables chief among them human sociology which makes it near chaotic. And how to deal with the situation; how to decide a goal, is it all for you at the misery of others? Do you want to optimize yourself first, but try to do a little for others?
And how to go about it given the various situation?
Economics, just alike mathematics, is not a physical science. It's a philosophy. And Economics is a political social philosophy/study. While at least mathematics is more of just a quantity analysis philosophical/study; making assumptions that are more akin to quantities that don't involve that much sociology... other than we prefer base 10 numbers system, likely because we have 10 fingers; but it really doesn't matter which base number system we chose; and some are base 12 or 60... some argue this system is better as its easier to work fractions out.
Economics is loaded with social psychology... leading to chaotic nature as humans aren't always rational. But often irrational prone to panicky or euphoric decision making that can benefit or harm themselves.
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That swine at Home Depot (going to Lowes for now on... which I go there anyway more often) can go fly a kite. I read an article about that jerk off ranting about socialism is making workers in America fat dumb and lazy... fat yes, but that comes down to putting High Fructose Corn Syrup in soda pop to everything else including baked goods and french fries. Poison. HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is used more than regular amalgamated sugars (sugar cane and sugar beats) that is sucrose instead of high levels of fructose if any, because HFCS is so toxic to biology that NOTHING wants to live in it. Or can. Shelf life is much longer sitting in silos and in product mixing tanks. While sucrose liquid sugars or solids have a shorter shelf life. AKA to make more profits we use poison. Fructose does all sorts of horrible things to the digestive system particularly the liver and pancreas; increases appetite because it first breaks down into part sucrose and part glucose the body can use. Then the sucrose takes time to break down a second time into sucrose. In the chemical processes it causes liver fat and excessive pancreas activity that can trigger those prone to diabetes to have various levels of diabetes.
And healthy decent foods cost a lot. Even prior to the massive inflation bailing out the banks and junk bond holders via quantitative easing and beyond, let's call that what that was, monetize bankers' debts they've lent out.
Secondly, socialism? Really?
All other nations have a universal healthcare system.
We have a hustle under a bridge.
The elderly and severely disabled medicare and medicaid often doesn't cover everything, and it doesn't address costs/prices because those two programs are not allowed to negotiate prices as all other nations' versions of universal healthcare not just to severely disabled and elderly, but to everyone, have established.
Why have they established not to have a hustle under a bridge?
Because they know, just as every stock trader or dabbler in stocks knows and anyone with a few brain cells that's functioning knows that healthcare services and goods have essentially a perfectly inelastic demand curve... people will pay any price to get better, not suffer, and/or not die regardless to the quantity supplied. Meaning you can have millions of competitors supplying healthcare, but they all will keep those prices higher because pricing mechanism of more quantity supplied DOES NOT translate into lower prices, because ALL suppliers know people will pay a premium to get better, not suffer, and not die.
Like above, the natural monopoly of utility companies. Requires economies of scale, therefore it is more efficient to have one supplier regulated (generally owned by the very state and thus tax payers and users of the services) to share the cost of operations and providing whatever extra surplus/profits for expansion and updates the utilities. If you we're to privatize it, the costs are huge large economy of scale, and then fraction up all the users, would mean all competitors would have to charge more money to make up for the loss of customer base between the competitors; having 5 to 6 to 8 power lines, or multiple power stations, and substations, or 5 to 6 sewer lines or water lines or you get the point.
Therefore even in the states, most counties and cities have long ran most of their utilities, and even when they privatize these utilities they grant special monopoly rights because competition, competitive market principles don't work due to the economy scale factor mentioned earlier; which begs the question why in the name of stupid (because it stupid) would one want to privatize it in the first place? Of course you'll hear all sorts of fallacious arguments that privatized utilities run leaner and meaner so prices will be cheaper because they want to make a profit; which fallacious because so does a city with voters who want to run as lean cheaply as possible while ensuring they have decent quality water to drink, electrical is always working, sewers aren't backing up and getting sewage in the home, etc. No, the prices tend to be higher, because utilities really can't do much more about the cost to deliver electricity, water, or handle sewage in a safe quality manner. So they charge more. The city can just blame the private utility should a screw up happen; less responsibility for the mayor. But your rates go up, and quality might not be the greatest; check Texas out during some of their recent cold winters; monthly electrical bill in the thousands of dollars.
No, privatized in certain sectors that violate most or all competitive market principles are only privatized so the oligarch class can make a killing, they call them cash cows. At everyone else's expense.
So where this CEO of Home Depot gets off screaming about socialism is somehow causing Americans harm... I don't know what the fuck he's talking about? What socialism?
Healthcare system that's a hustle under a bridge, people going bankrupt due to a medical issue even if they have so called employer or other so called medical insurance?
Even what has long been established by facts of economics like utilities are often privatized to the detriment to the mass of people?
Even some jails and prisons still are privatized? Something that shouldn't even exist in any nation to allow a private company have such power to hold prisoners; that's the responsibility of ALL of us the nation to ensure prisoners are kept safe, fed, and hopefully rehabilitated so they can rejoin society without resorting to criminal behavior in the future to make a living. And what bias is this private prison going to make when parole potential revolves around their evaluation of the prisoner? Oh, Con man was being nasty so we recommend further review before parole 5 more months so we can charge 5 more months worth of prison fees to the state, county, city, etc.
We hardly have any socialism in this country compared to every other developed nation on this planet. And the dirtbag knows it. He's lying out his teeth. Pretending what little social construct of a vaguely hinged civilization we have going is just too much socialism. Before you know it, public schools won't exist, and people will be indeed dumber and probably fatter and lazier then ever.
I say our comparably lack of socialism from universal healthcare to higher education to transportation to utilities to even fundamental governmental functions such as carserations including judiciary which often have private mandatory arbitration private judges aren't even socialized, but privatized.
Which all constitutes a gangsterism like system.
The lack of socialism is our problem. That lack of collective bargaining and ability to actually vote for representation that isn't gerrymandered into the politician puppet selecting their voters; instead of allowing the voters to freely select the candidates.
Lack of democracy which is the biggest socialism thing one can have, is absent. And thereby it should be no surprise we hardly have much of any socialism left.
And we have a carnival barker oligarch screaming absurdities that we have too much. He better hope Americans truly are too dumb and lazy to figure the obviousness of the falsehoods he pukes.
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It was a blatant violation to the 4th amendment. You must have a warrant from a judge and it must include place and exact expected items to be seized, and must be done with probable cause, probable cause meaning potential of criminal activity is happening.
Flat out frisking people for probable cause other than they're walking in public is not probable cause. Essentially every person of all political thought or non-thought even agree to this constitutional amendment more so than almost all other amendments and equal to the 1st amendment: peacefully assemble to protest, liberty to speech, liberty to journalism to write about anything, etc.
4th amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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Newspapers, Tv news, cable news, radio, etc. are mostly propaganda outlets; yellow journalism. And so we don't use those, we look for accredited sources usually university studies, and nonprofits that have no political agenda and are transparent on their funding, and even THEN we cross check this with other such publications.
Because we younger generations have been lied to from the very start and we trust no organization. Many are left feeling powerless apathetic. And those of us who know whether you're apathetic today, you're likely too much of a coward to jump off that bridge or blow your brains out with a gun so the power will inevitably fall in your lap anyway, might as well have some preparation when it does. Because at that time, particularly if it just falls in your lap, means chaos has arisen, and all will want that preparation.
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Nothing New Under the Sun fallacy. Along with Tu quoque in the whataboutism.
Cute. But lame. Someone must have pissed you have when you were downplaying these investigations, loss money or position to make money or something.
Anyway, my personal opinion they likely weren't going to find overt changing of election votes. But money laundering, pay offs, structuring, fraud, etc.
And I think Trump is guilty to an extreme degree.
And IRS, NTSB over the FAA, SEC, all agencies submit to local, state, and federal (FBI) to finalize an investigation then determine prosecution.
"We already have agencies who investigate this stuff." Yes its called the FBI.
And why did they appoint a special prosecutor for Cohen and Manafort had political campaign work and banks, and were lawyers. A special prosecutor is generally always put in place when the potential crime is in the millions of dollars and/or when its complicated.
I think downplaying these convictions and plead for guilty make your whataboutism more sad. You're excusing they're behavior too. And no it doesn't surprise, this can be start of a solid push to get rid of this corruption.
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An aristocracy is a completely unnecessary, actually harmful class of people. A correct "capital formation" would be proper deposit banking along with a Fed Reserve that assists proper deposit banking like Credit Unions to lend to Co-Op enterprises. A co-op enterprise would be composed of every worker with on 1 vote regardless of their title as to all aspects of the operation of the enterprise. Additionally, any shares accumulation that could be trade-able would have not voting authority to that co-op enterprise as a secondary source of capital formation other than borrowing from a bank or floating a fixed bond that would be available to for sell not just to an aristocracy, but to the masses in general... currently owning individual corporate bonds or even stock is very risky for the average, majority of people, but with backstops like FDIC currently on deposit banking, such government backing would make it appropriate to tap a bond market that is made of all people seeking a savings/investment return that is secure; instead of going hat in hand to rich few aristocracy.
This is an economy based on a the mass of people, not of a few aristocracy.
Literally a democracy; both in government and it's economics; while keeping most of the economy separate from government institutions as government needs to be unbiased in the cases of civil judicial intervention and law enforcement.
It also ensures an a elite aristocracy can't buy the government.
So an aristocracy is outright bad. It's as bad as monarchy or a nobility class.
With compulsory education and vocational and higher education universally available tuition free, there is no need to provide fiefdom sized incentives to work and innovate and build new enterprises. In fact, often an established aristocracy prevents smaller business from ever happening as the larger business either price wars them out (they have bigger economy of scale thus can sell at a loss or break even longer than the start up), they can manipulate law that makes their costs cheaper by exempting themselves from certain taxes while others aren't, or established businesses can manipulate demand: advertising over promised claims or normalization the absurdity, etc.
Class war won't go away until we realize an aristocracy is as dangerous as feudal lords and royalty and slave master. There is no good they do, but bad.
Then we adjust to ensure such an aristocracy cannot exist ever again; so when the class war is over, a careful watch for perpetuity... until we develop technology that eliminates all scarcity like Star Trek; then without scarcity and economy we have would be as foreign to them as at least and fortunately today slave trade and overt child labor is to us today.
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Our politics is fucked up. And these rich toady puppets and some are rich themselves are utterly disconnected, HALF the fucking population doesn't vote in midterms... this one was 48% turn out nationwide... often its 37% so people beating their chests... both are bullshit when turnout in other democracies are closer to mid 70% to 90%... and some mandate at least casting a ballot like Australia so 100% vote... if they really want, they can turn in a blank ballot, but they had a ballot... like jury duty... but nope.
To sell policy you explain: IF we don't do it now, other countries are doing it, and we simply won't compete overtime. Western Europe, Australia, Japan, etc. have free to reduced tuition. Even poorer countries like Mexico has reduced tuition.
Obviously she campaigned as a republican appealing to fascist racist fuck twats dingle berries dick nuggets shit stick stink fingers, based on the last story. Which was probably someone else's on her campaign, but she used it as if it were her.... or just completely made up.
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I don't think they will... they already did this in Italy, Germany, Russia.... there are some former Soviet states no independent nations that are extremely batshit. But western Europe doesn't follow the method of our innate governmental oligarchy Roman Mafioso style government. Not country actually does. They all use a parliamentary proportional system to eliminate gerrymandering so they don't end up an oligarchy-republic which is as bad as a monarchy or dictatorship. US isn't historically a leader, but a follower. We only helped in WWI and WWII by giving lots of stuff help ensure victory in the war.
That's it. US actually follows: We were among the last to prohibit child labor, among the last to initiate compulsory education to children up to age 16, the last to prohibit slavery, among the last nation to allow women to vote 1920, and universal voting 1965, Union rights not until 1935 after several labor vs hired men wars from the late 1800's until 1935, last to institute an national pension system for the elderly, and still the last developed nation to provide universal healthcare, etc.
If it wasn't for the fact police, guard, and fire services were being developed in the 18th century, we probably wouldn't have fire departments.
We're a follower nation.
We only pretend we're magical. As most nations do the same.
But objectively, we're a pathetic nation for being the richest super power the most bloasted oligarch and toady rich, but having about 60% of the working population making $30K or less in developed nation criteria poverty levels.
And we lock more people up in prisons nation wide and state wide than any other country on earth.
We're a joke.
Other nations really don't follow us.
We follow other nations.
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Interesting... seems very American centrist... I mean seriously, one president doesn't control world events particularly at this time, when the US was rather a backwater poor country, it's only redeeming quality was it was far away from invading nations, and no nation bothered to send an armada during WI nor WWII. WWII estimates were the Japanese if they did invade mainland US, they would have gotten as far as Chicago before meeting any meaningful resistance that could be hold them back for taking DC.
Likely, you would have had a few social policies perhaps social security concept sooner.
That's about it.
Everything else, WWI and WII would have occurred.. and in fact it would have bolstered Hoover's prospects even more so being president later on.
Economic circumstances in Europe were falling apart... people were very poor and unstable economy over the 1800s and higher populations at the turn of the century made various monarchies like Russia, still in a feudalistic economic structure, and many other areas vulnerable to revolution. Teddy (while being among my favorite people from history) wouldn't have prevented nor could have prevented the robber baron and colonial nobility economics from disintegrating from their own contradictions as they did... the collapse of the various systems were in a way inevitable... when you stack up too much stupid super high like so many playing cards, there's not enough a little not stupid, skipping sticking so many cards on top, that will help it from its eventual collapse.
You're acting like Teddy would have decided for the entire world after they already completed the house of cards, to make their house out of wood instead.... too late, it was already made of cards.
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This is stall tactics on doing useless bullshit for these people to work on nonsense.
Why?
Rich in our country don't want high speed rail or just sufficient rail. They won't use it. They have flying cars aka private jets.
They don't necessarily drive cars to get to remote places further away from airports with 5,000 ft runway their jet can land.... they have a short distant flying car aka helicopters.
Rich have theirs. They're not interested in investing in anything. They won't use it. And it doesn't give them money back to do big transit systems... never has... it's a natural monopoly that only is viable economically when conducted by social market structures... like most utilities. Excluding the US of course... but even in the US most water works, especially sewage, but even garbage and electrical distribution and production is city, county, or state owned and operated.
Because those necessities are not competitive by their nature. They're not something you can invest in, as all excess capital gains must go to either maintain and to grow to the population growth and demand needed.
Rich don't want universal healthcare in the US because current system, they literally make a return on their version of a healthcare savings account (they're own personal insurance company) they setup, they can stash a way a million or 2 million or large family 10 million into such an insurance fund, it invests in T-Bills and even some stocks and REITs and muni bonds (taxes turned lending by the rich, hence why they don't give a fuck about deficit spending, they're tax bill is gone, instead its turned into a lending program where they lend the money and get repaid their otherwise would have been tax money plus interest), back to the current hustle that is our health system in the US, on this savings account geared toward their own private insurance program, they then make a return that is sufficient to pay for a counter insurance should draw downs on utilizing the funds for medical needs become a factor, PLUS extra above this counter party insurance on draw downs, they typically net about a 1% return on their private insurance company they setup for themselves... even on typical draw downs to see doctors or even get plastic surgery or other medical needs.
A healthcare system that provides them not a cost, but a 1% return. The only sad face is that they do have to put up the collateral $1 million to $10 million of their otherwise huge fortunes... so it's just a little bit of an opportunity cost to them. As they could put that money to other investments that could make more returns.
These are the reasons we have Idiocracy becoming full force.
Push bullshit propaganda. Make the masses feel warm an fuzzy while you fuck'em for all they got.
Waste their time.
Pit them against one another.
Shit on their faces, and make it feel like it's their fault you took a big dirty crap all over them.
Make them feel inadequate.
Make them worship you.
The robber baron elite have done a marvelous job.
There is a point though, that people realize the game plan. And then they've left the people without any ability to be scientific or even logically nor critically minded. A babbling mass of people angry.
Hopefully enough people are wise enough not to just go complete stupid.
But at this point it's the same thing feudalism of Russia or the stupidity of Germany and Italy or near disasters time and time again of UK, US, China, etc. where you get gangsters to arise to take the power vacuum that tends to happen when this plutocratic nonsense reaches its end cycle as it always does; it's inevitable; as you can only piss on someone, right in their face, where they visibly see you doing it, and tell them it's raining.
Eventually, they realize if not immediately, perhaps by the ammonia burns and the immediate septic bilge that is urine that they develop painful rashes and infection... they demand you stop pissing by taking a blunt object and ruining the source of the stream of urine spraying all over them.
Seems cyclical. At some point, it fails on a global scale.
When do we learn?
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Private companies don't have to host a platform for anyone for any reason whatsoever.
These companies currently are not utilities in any way. They may constitute monopolies, but unfortunately our idiot legislature seems to love oligopolies and monopolies.
If you want a platform you'll have to build or contract it with someone willing to do so, they're rights as a private entity still exists to not contract with you.
As far as silencing anyone, are you really that weak you can't survive without youtube or facebook just means you're incredibly weak and haven't much support to begin with more than entertainment curiosity.
Secondly, Alex Jones has promoted violence against various people in hair brain conspiracies that the mentally ill and just stupid have actually done. And those prosecutions have occurred along with civil actions from Sandy Hook parents on Alex Jones, they may also sue youtube and facebook and other platforms that provide them the platform, so they're doing it to protect their own interest not to have such people, same as they're code of conduct to bar people posting copy righted material, they don't want to be sued either. Because they are, constantly.
Lazy reporting from you that various parties aren't taking this to court to the fullest extent possible; you can google and see all the law suits being filed as well as criminal cases.
And judges can order prisoners to silence, you literally lose all your rights as a convict other than what legislature allows generally appeals process to that conviction and until the sentence is over including probation, in fact the constitution allows servitude/slave labor when you're duly convicted prisoner. When you're convicted you have very few rights specifically for convicts: prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, right to a speedy trial in the sense of an appeal process set by legislature because its not described in the constitution, not being found guilty due to having family relationship with another duly convicted person which itself is so illogical in our day it's hardly worth mentioning.
Essentially, you cannot be tortured, starved, and treated poorly in an unsafe environment during your prison term and/or probation or community service.
I understand your concern for censorship. I am too. But removing one off a private platform is not covered under the constitution. You're wanting an NPR and PBS type internet platform, than you should petition for it.
And even then, some of the actions by Jones such as death threats, would not be allowed on any platform as they aren't on C-Span and the websites of NPR and PBS and other local public broadcasting systems.
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I don't think Universal Basic Income would be a stable decent concept. Look at social security at constantly being cut (age changes for retirement, goofy tricks on calculating increases due to inflation, etc), and since we get that small amount pensions have been cut to the point they don't exist for a majority, instead a 401K which is not a pension program, especially from the meager match and total amount for people to pay into it.
What's required is a complete employer and employee relationship change. Eliminate the relationship by making it one in the same.
1) Employees cannot get ahead if constantly considered a cost as they are now.
2) Profit sharing generally doesn't exist with employees despite various gimmick stock options that are often required to be purchased... that's not sharing, that's selling shares for potential profit or loss.
What we need is to change corporations into co-op based businesses where each worker has a stake in the company and a vote in what to do with revenue: capital expenditures, benefits expenditures, wages/salaries, bonuses, operating expenses, to basics on regular amount of hours per week to work, where to work, how to work, etc.
Capital formation has always been the plug on most co-ops. Most individuals don't have money to risk starting a co-op business that require heavy amounts of capital like in mining, refining, and even just moderate manufacturing, etc.
So you create a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank, similar to the Federal Reserve Bank that exists in most nations; but instead of having private banks run the show, The Fed Reserve Co-Op bank doesn't necessarily need any deposit bank, and in fact has its own branches and only lends money, you may actually allow savings and checking which would help poor unbanked people, but for the function of capital formation deposits aren't required.
Because the Fed Co-Op Reserve Bank would lend directly at very low rates to co-op businesses only; and like the Fed Reserve we have now, the borrowed money is simply printed into existence when it lends or buys assets to other member banks.
Whenever economic advancements were made were based on worker and employer relationship. Originally we had slavery. Then serfdom. Then mercantilism which included voluntary servitude. Then current casual employee relationship where you're just labor costs; and among the easiest cost to keep down; hence why share of revenue in most businesses labor is only 3% to 10%; share of overall costs is 5% to 15% for most business with some exceptions like easy entry businesses retail sales including fast food and restaurants. Which labor costs can range from 10% to 45% of costs; varies wildly because one shop or location generally never reaches any economy of scale.
Look up Richard Wolff.
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Robin Hood and Webull these so called "non" commission trading platforms are stock scalpers... they direct you to a "market maker" a broker who owns a bunch of stocks already and you buy and sell from them. They make money off the bid and ask price on the actual stock exchange. SO you never get a good price buying or selling.
AND these market makers really screw with the "dumb money" as they call them, as they can use the funds of a bunch of buyers to pump a stock or sells to dump a stock. And other dark pool brokers that have high speed are able to compete among other of these "market makers" in ways that's illegal on the actual stock exchanges, the bid ask auction on actual stock exchanges have first come first serve priority and no high speed trading platform matters; they're not allowed to use such mechanisms.
As for the market as a whole, its over levered both in calls and puts. Illiquid as fuck.
Having naked short positions (brokers lending stock to other hedge funds or shoters when they the very brokers themselves don't have any stock to sell) is typically illegal.
Futures trading via shorting is suppose to happen thus: I'm shorting, so I expect the stock price sometime in the future to go down in price, so I borrow stocks from a broker, the broker hand the stocks over to me or sells them on my behalf.
I'm indebted to pay back that broker in that stock. Not money.
Stock falls in price and decide close my short position: I buy back stock at the lower price and give the stocks back to the broker, I pocket the difference between what I originally sold the stocks and bought them back to return to the broker.
IF stocks go up, the broker my get nervous because I owe them shares that are now higher priced, so they may demand I put more cash on my account proving if need be I can buy those stocks at that higher price, or they may demand I just close my position out, buy those stocks now and give them back.
Now... if the broker themselves had no stocks to lend me, so that I can sell them... what the fuck did they sell to start my short position?
Nothing.
They're not borrowing stock from who?
Nobody.
They think they're that big and bad, that they can at some point just go get some stocks themselves somewhere.
Of course this becomes a Panzi scheme of sorts. They never lent the stocks for you to borrow, they just gave you magical cash for them. And whatever amount in money they gave you never went through an exchange, they just guessed the value of the stock... you could have gotten screwed on that part of the deal too.
The entire stock trading structure is a shambles.
And almost all of us born after 1980 are dependent on 401K as our secondary means of retirement.
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People were conflating problems with rent and/or home prices becoming unaffordable with EU I think.
Conflating on EU issues with actual issues hurting many nations among the EU member nations. As well as other countries like Canada, Australia, USA, etc.
As an American, I think the EU would be better if it had a EU parlament like US Federal government to give representation and democracy to the entire thing.
It's the banking structure, the idiot deregulation of banking and finance along with following USA down it's own ruinous path on privatization on everything and having a democratization on setting rules on markets and giving it to the oligarchs totally and completely. That's what needs to be addressed. Not ending EU. The nations of Europe, particularly in the west have very similar social benefits they all agree upon; reduced to no higher education and vocational training, universal healthcare, a mixed state pension along with a regulated and decent employer or private pensions; even transportation systems from lite rail to longer rail, and other infrastructures are held in more than less similar views.
Some other issues do arise from trying to utilize monetarism or monetary policy to regulate the inflation and deflation or boom and busts of economies... but I would argue monetarism is a bust. It doesn't work to stimulate anything, monetary policy should only be utilized to make stable currency buying power with the aim at having essentially 0% inflation. That growing an economy requires Keynesian social capital mixed market plans to spur and guide economic prosperity. Not handing the rule making and all planning over to the whims of oligarchs and fraudsters and the like, and call the collapse of the inevitable fiasco a "market self healing or correction". You mean it fell apart, right? LOL!
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Without the interplay between my nation (USA) winning independence from the UK, many other democratic forms of government and human rights laws might have taken longer to form. So in that, I'm glad it happened.
I'm jelly as all get out over the UK's NHS though.
Our medical system... we don't really have one, it's more of a hustle "under a bridge". Seriously, finally decided to get a full check up with blood and urine checks in August after getting sick twice this year now with a strange lung chest thing... Feb and July... both times lasted only 3 weeks. COVID19 test in July came out negative... which was good, because a family doctor ie a GP to you, wouldn't see me without having a negative test with having a cough.
Anyway, got a tetanus vaccine, and blood and urine check and all the other routine check ups.
Got a letter from the clinic. Thought it was a bill.
It wasn't, it was an advisory letting me know that clinic is closing end of October.
So I'll have to find another family doctor ie GP.
I hadn't really had a family doctor since I got out of the Air Force back in 2011.
And prior to being in the Air Force, while working I did have a regular dentist and orthodontist. But for medical, we call it going to "doc in boxes". They're various for profit clinics in strip malls all over town. They suck at diagnosing anything, as they're more concerned with spending as little time as possible with the patients and doing as few tests as possible; many aren't able to do many tests as they lack various lab and equipment. Many don't have x-rays let alone ultra sound equipment, they don't even have small lab rooms; unable to even collect blood samples.
Have seriously bad stories of my own and other friends and family.
Sometimes finding a family doctor can take months. You have to find a doctor that is accepting "new" patients. They may still see you for urgent care stuff, but they won't become your regular doctor. New law means certain medication Rx is limited in the amount they're able to write for you. So that sucks. Fortunately, I'm healthy and don't need any vital meds.
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We've been doing this for almost 40 years, first Reagan who had to raise taxes and mostly on the lower brackets fucker, then Bush Sr who said read my lips no new taxes, and then raised them mostly on the lower brackets again. Then Bush Jr., and each time it doesn't do well for workers who have seen pay flat, benefits stupid dumb farce insurance, and no more pension, and the sick gimmick of 401K their matching is generally pathetic at 4% when it would really need minimum of 14% match to really be a retirement plan.
This never works. It's idiotic as saying, oh lets "trade" with dictatorship nations who have lots of essentially destitute slaves and play hot potato with them on producing, they won't buy shit, but maybe someday they will. Maybe. They won't because we play hot potato with those ass holes and switch to the next most destitute nation, and when that nation gets to big for its poverty britches we'll move back to the other place because it will be back to being as poor and desperate the first time we arrived... weeeeeeeeeeee!
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This is when nations need to realize allowing banks to run-a-muck and monetize their own insolvent debt should end.
Theses swindlers have sucked the economic system to death. There are ways to end this stupidity... rules need to be reinstated to end the leverage stupidity that has caused home prices around the world to skyrocket. It's a leverage bubble akin to the stupidity leverage of stable coins in the goof ball shit show we call crypto... worthless trash based on torrent files with ability to modify or append the file (add to the file) not just share it, tech that is over 20 years old... "block chain" not new. And it's mostly useless due to higher broadband speeds and larger hard drive space.
A nation with a busted fiasco leverage scammed asset prices be it stocks or real-estate... particularly real-estate, or other large purchase items... the bank can be nationalized... if we're going to monetize the system rather than inflating the money supply we can all cope with allowing a necessary de-leveraging and deflating asset prices, by allowing the prices to fall and remarking principle debt to market, and acting as all payments went toward that new principle amount... then refinancing it at a FIXED rate... not a variable rate at any time this type of chicanery smacks as usury in the highest... particularly if the banks are granting higher and higher principle mortgages or other loans like auto loans pumping the underlying collateral, but it's only pumped due to the debt creating a domino or house of cards effect.
These elevated home prices have not provided society with enough homes, nor helped with home affordability with the fewer homes being built. It's only constrained markets, making it more expensive and risky for private developers to build more supply with higher and higher property prices as well as other inflation factors such as building material to skyrocket too.
Privatization of utilities pushes all costs on the developer. Instead of on taxable collective trustees (imagine our taxes actually paying for things we absolutely need like sewer, trash, water, electricity, heating, etc. Well it did until these "wizards" in the banking sector discovered ways to make a killing off of scamming and using the game Monopoly to idiotic levels, a pyramid and ponzi scheme that brunts its busts via monetization of the debt the banks made huge stupidity levels of money from. While resulting in fewer homes, worse built homes, un-affordable homes, and inflation that causes material to build and land for the purpose of residential development skyrocket.
Hurting the lowest incomes, essentially all income levels, even some of the big boys last holding the bags.
The entire world banking system is bust. Never allow bankers in charge of currency or money supply, bank sector goal is to sell as much debt as possible at the highest profitable proportion: Low interest rates, look to payment affordability and just jack the asset/collateral price up granting higher and higher loan amounts resulting in higher and higher housing prices... bigger principle mortgage at lower interest rate is equal to lower home mortgage principle amount in a higher interest rate environment... one way or another they'll skin the system dry.
And quite literally, this happens over and over... and this lowering of interest rates also encourage reckless investing causing all forms of debt to be "cheap" and creating nowhere else to saving let alone invest, so we have stampedes into risk and high risk assets like high risk stocks or garbage bonds. Further pushing up over leverage asset prices, creating massive bubbles that will go bust.
This insanity has to end in a new system.
Regardless, history has demonstrated whether we learn from this idiocy once and for all or not, it will end in its own bubble gone bust.
Monetary policy should be via non-banking entities and prohibition going forward for their employment in banks as well as the goal of monetary policy should simply be to keep currency stable, to avoid inflation as well as deflation. That's it.
Stimulus can and should only occur via planning, government transfers... using tax funds and at times government deficit spending on creating infrastructure, funding basic need goods like providing a public housing developer entities to compete with private developers to ensure affordable and quality homes are produced that meet the needs of the population. Going for education and healthcare and police services and fire services and natural monopoly services that include water, sewer, trash, recycling, internet communications, distribution of heating commodities, etc.
As well as plans to assist private development of various goods producing: specific farming, materials refinement, subassembly production, final assembly plants, etc. etc.
Monetary policy strictly to keep inflation and deflation away.
Keynesian policy acting on both supply and demand curves as forms of stimulant to assist in meeting demand and creating demand.
I mean after WWII, the record shows that this lesson should have already been learned. I know it pushes oligarchs down a bit, but these parasites deserve to be pushed out of existence anyway.
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Lying or creating deceptive anything is actually already illegal.
You're free to speech. And you're free to commit crime by talking yourself into committing those crimes, but then once committed you can be prosecuted for them.
For instance, if you yell fire in a theater while there was no fire nor any other emergency and you end up hurting people or worse killing people in some stampede panic to the exit, you can be prosecuted for your use of free speech that you firstly lied about an emergency, deliberately caused a panic that injured people, and possibly killed people which would then include potentially first degree murder.
You can't lie about nutrient facts if you produce foods.
You can't lie about weights and measures. And say it was your freedom of speech to say whatever you felt like about the quantity of a good you're selling. You can't rob a bank by passing a note telling the teller to hand over all the money in a bag and say it was all just some joke or practice of freedom of speech.
So it's not 100 necessarily law.
If you use someone else's image who is public and don't explain that it is parody at the open or at least make it obvious parody, or if the person is a private citizen not public in any way, you can be held civilly for defamation. As well as any other issues that may arise from it which could include injury from a mob or even a single individual acting on that defamation to commit criminal actions including battery, robbery, etc. which make a civil court include a criminal court prosecution.
What I would like to happen is the equal time doctrine when it comes to broadcasting. FCC declared in 1934 the equal time rule which required without much of any exceptions that any political discussion on any broadcast required equal time between in favor of subject matter and those opposing it. 1983, many exceptions were made to the point that it no longer really exists for most broadcasts on radio, tv, or internet.
And what happened? Return of the 19th century yellow journalism on steroids and people so mentally brainwashed they stick that gag ball in their mouths and scream holding that hot poker for the oligarch to ram it home harder and don't stop till it skewers them dead.
It's made just enough minority of people so ridiculous brainwashed that they defend those who harm them, and admonish those who would put policies in place that would benefit them.
Oligarchs did a great job clowning just enough morons to keep their minority power absolute.
We have freedom of speech. But just like all freedoms, when they're used for criminal and civil harmful purposes... you pay. And the use of freedom of speech is not a defense upon committing murder or doing such things that would cause others harm.
The other thing I would like to have happen, is that campaign financing be banned. All that is, is bribery. Instead, you get in on equal publications of your platform running for office once you obtain enough petitions for you candidacy. No more bribery and paying to play. And you travel around with your fellow candidates in the jurisdiction debating sharing a hotel room and bus with them. And taking as little as a month, to a year depending on the office and it's scope and range of jurisdiction.
No more super PACs, nor bribes from the oligarchs... donor class my hairy fucking ass. It's bribery the oligarchs are engaging in, purchasing yet another fucking puppet to ensure nothing gets done other than what the money bag oligarch wants done.
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These polls whether in Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, or the US have become useless anymore. The polls would have predicted many other people recently elected wouldn't have been, starting at Brexit. These polls I think rely too heavily on bad sampling and especially landline phones. Most people either got rid of the landline or simply don't answer it very often. Only elderly tend to still have landlines and answer them.
If you're younger, ask others if they have ever provided polling information. Ask elderly folks, you might actually get a few... my dad was overwhelmed by them, and has since just hangs up when they call.
Now these polls are just as they mostly were in the past, a way push propaganda narratives; aka bullshit.
I still recall the weird idiocy on CNN suddenly trying to push the blue wall narrative loosely based on polling... if you actually read specific polls, she was struggling well within the margin of error as well as even below Trump. I saw that a week before CNN started shouting this idiot blue wall in the rust belt; when CNN started the mantra, I thought, what? Did I miss something?
No. CNN just wanted to make it seem like Hillary was doing well. I suppose to get apathy from people who would vote for Trump, hope they wouldn't show up if they're discouraged.
We know how that went.
Propaganda is dead. Reality hurts too much.
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You can thank the Fed Reserve for making it go completely stupid.
But even prior to the Pandemic era stupidity of the Fed Reserve Cartel Banking system, you can thank Zillow and their ilk for pump and dumping the market similar to that of tether... turning it, if you they would, into an untenable insolvent pump scheme, whereby they would use debt as their form of tethers, to pump prices buying properties on the ask and above the ask, using "cash offers" as their debts were cash advances to speed purchases as well as foregoing the due diligence requirements of having inspectors evaluate and using those evaluations having appraisal analysts to provide a fair actual price.
This speculative bubble was prior to the 2020's.
Homes are like vehicles... they depreciate, they require constant expenditures as they deteriorate over time. Therefore the only thing you can substantiate is the scarcity of the ground the dirt the home sits upon based on the local availability of land. In no nation is there a growing population to substantiate the value of land. Especially non-productive land for the use of residential housing.
There is plenty of land. Like many objects aka assets, prices have gone upwards due to speculative stupidity. Since 2011 many homes were being purchased with a bottom by speculators from around the world, figuring at least a dead cat bounce perhaps would take place thus opportunity to profit on change in pricing. This rush to home purchases both single and multi dwelling units caused instead of a dead cat bounce, but a ballooning extreme wave 5 like blow off top.
This caused both rents and home prices to go beyond affordability based on pay. Extremely faulty governmental inflation reports, particularly in the US, played down those figures. Other countries encountering larger than normal homelessness and widening periods of homelessness saw some nations seek to end the speculative bubble that was causing a feedback loop, homes sitting vacant as to become an easier medium of selling for profit when the time struck the new fomo owner.
Which only added to the burden of less supply of homes available to actually live in. Demand remained essentially constant, but the supply cut even shorter... so Toronto for instance, placed a tariff tax on speculation to help reduce this miss-allocation of resources into empty apartments that only suck supply out despite no shift increase in demand (the speculative bubble feedback loop).
Major flaw in many nations in housing was that many dropped the necessary measures in ensuring homes built both individual and multidwelling units would at least cope with population growth even when population growth isn't as large as it was 40 years ago. They instead focused on the massive bail outs of banks and financial companies. The real rulers at the moment of all nations.
What governments failed to do in many nations (some exceptions exist like Vienna Austria with their housing program which even very affluent sign up for to live in these dwellings), was to assist developers in the poor purchasing of land at the stupidity high prices of the 2000's. These developers fearing a dead cat bounce, many went bust with no assistance than no longer existed, the survivors of these developers just went slower... only building homes when a purchase was already completed and fully funded by a bank; thus supply was slow on the uptake.
It was never a housing supply surplus over the 2000's to the 2008 great recession.
It was an un-affordability crisis caused by massive leveraging and speculation.
It was treated as if there was just too many homes available. Which was quite wrong. Supply was always insufficient.
Market manipulation via over leveraging caused by decreasing interest rates and the entire CBO and selling tranches of these mortgages encouraged ever more lending and borrowing at higher and higher principle amounts of loans banks loved it as this was the filler to pad their bottom line as interest rates went down: financial and banking had a vested interest in pumping the prices of real-estate to offset the persistent lowering of interest rates.
Real-estate prices rose to high, and the quality of the borrowers ability to pay under the terms of variable interest rate loans, requirement of an ARM just for the down payment (aka no down payment but a loan for a down payment; a loan for a loan), holders were paying 2 mortgages: the ARM and the primary mortgage... then top that with variable rates, when the Fed decided to raise interest rates to cool an over heating speculative economy, this hit those poor credit worthy people ability to pay the new monthly payments at the higher interest rates. The entire economy slowing, made even decent credit worth people to become jobless and require them to relocate for new jobs and to sell their homes flooding the market with sellers. During this time people moved back with relatives and/or found roommates or even family mates to shack up in 1 or 2 bedroom homes/apartments as employment became a problem.
At no time was sufficient homes available in many of countries, in particular the US. US and many other nations abandoned the much needed basic good requirements of shelter to ensure the AFFORDABILITY and QUALITY of CONSTANT supply of housing to meet the requirements of a constantly growing population. No nation is really negative in population besides a few.
What we need are housing programs. At no point point in time did a speculative market provide quality and affordable housing to an economy. Such a thing has never happened... in fact laissez faire allow to do markets in basic goods like food, but also housing, literally turns out with horrible consequences, as the term suggests of laissez fair or allow to do... such markets laissez fair allow to the food or housing market to become a speculative bubble miss-allocating basic goods causing abrupt shortages and demand. Cause of many riots, civil wars, and wars alike; an entire collapse of economies.
Markets aren't new, they're not smart, they're just a method of transacting goods and services. Laissez fair is a stupid propaganda nonsense that we now suffer from in the housing market. Similar to banking and financial. These markets are allowed to do all sorts of stupidity things that ultimately ruin everyone. Perhaps a few scammers make out like bandits and luck people in early on the asset and selling at the right time to get in and get out.
But on the whole, such stupidity unstructured and nurtured regulated markets are a butt hole for everyone else. And have been the reason for the rise of many tyrants and riots and civil wars and wars alike a complete chaotic collapse of nations.
It's pure stupidity.
Forget your Ayn Rand stupidity rants of dumbness. She forgets the gangsters that came to rule her home country came about because of the economy prior... similar in its scope of stupidity. Double downing on that would only do more harm.
So we need housing programs. Otherwise the only way housing really becomes affordable in most places in the US is when we hit recession and everyone is broke as they're under employed or flat out jobless aka little to no income... at that point lower prices aren't low enough.
So you'll likely get your lower prices on homes at some point... but you may not have a sufficient income for those homes at that lower prices.
Hence we need a housing program. We had them for most of the 1900's after the great depression. But were faded to the point of none-existence since the 1990's.
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People in America need to stop being cowards and ban together.
We're to pathetic right now. And I really mean Americas because all nations north and south of the United States of America is cowards in the face of the ruling elites including oligarchs of the big heartless business and the ruthless cartels of the Americas, recently a cartel or two has declared war with Mexico itself.
These elites have 3 things in common: they're thugs. They are few. And they are actually very weak against a brave populous.
Take back our communities: our businesses, our welfare, our lives.
The current system just says rely on the corporations and current oligarchs; and pollute the concept of a democratic constitutional democracy by advocating how horrible government runs... sure, if it's not democratic constitutional form and people don't participate in it (vote, attend jury duty, actively petition and interact with petitions, etc.).
Not doing this turns the government into a dictatorship of corporations of cartels; both evil to their core enforcing terror and misery through the ranks.
We need to start participating in our government, quit being a coward. AND VERY IMPORTANTLY
ORGANIZING!
This doesn't just mean holding a fucking rally or protest through the streets.
The dirty work of organizing literally means making letters of demands, critiquing them and detailing them clearly and concisely.
It even means making new parties and new candidates to end the duopoly party stuffing that oligarchs tend to do in so called democratic republics; literally picking either two candidates to chose from... it's not a real choice, both candidates are subservient to the oligarchs.... a hedge so it doesn't matter who is chosen
That type of organizing needs to start happening.
It can happen at coffee shops, zoom or google hangouts or skype or whatever platform.
Until that starts, we're lost.
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Yeah, if, by start of January 1st, you didn't buy a bunch of QQQ and SPY and even IWM either or puts, close all long positions besides XLP and perhaps some XLU and especially XLE positions... you don't know what you're doing.
This train wreck was broadcast throughout Fall and early winter December 2021. And that was before Russian invasion. But even war was on the horizon as inflation turning to stagflation always, almost always leads to war as nations become frisky... Russia tensions were known... same with China's concerning Taiwan... But was Chinese debt collapse with their developers all of them essentially bankrupt... 2008 China said debt bubble in real-estate... hold my green tea. Empty ghost cities known about as early as 2012 and 2013 with tourists videoing and posting all over youtube and other places.
Doesn't help the Fed was acting like nut jobs with their monetary policy. They've painted themselves into a corner, they've caused inflation in a deflationary structured robber baron turn everyone who actually has to work to make money (basically 99% of the population) into a serf economy aka race to the bottom. They've achieved inflation.
And that isn't good. Because you will continue to get inflation while having declines in GDP over several quarters aka a recession. Inflation in recession is called stagflation. Believe it or not, wages were actually on the up even during the 1929 depression... it wasn't immediately deflationary... hence why the Fed cartel was reluctant at that time to lower interest rates much and at all.
Because supply can zap quick, falling in line with the new lower demand... and in some cases fall below even the lower demand... prices don't go down. They go up. Counter intuitive if you're a dogma sucking economic moron of current stupidity thought that is modern economics. Economics is probably the worst philosophical study ever. At least meteorology is accurate to a statistical significant and quantifiable degree. Economists tend to never offer statistical predictions of any kind, and when they do, they're wrong more than right.
Like fading a the collective stupidity of a group who is either overcome with Dunning Krueger Conviction or simply dumb about the subject... you tend to fade them on their decisions. Or suffer the stupidity of the stupids.
Anyway, this was obvious in its coming. And I've only traded since 2001, was watching markets as a teen all through the 90's and studied.
If you didn't understand what was about to happen... you need to learn technical and fundamentals of the market and how they all work together... this was obvious boom bust market... more obvious than the dot com bubble, and that one was pretty obvious. Real-estate induced bankrupt financial system, stocks weren't really that high up and nowhere near their 2000 dot com levels... that one a bit more subtle other than the only real jobs being created had to do with real-estate and serving those in real-estate... and banking.
2006 at a club/bar whatever you want to call it, I was working full time and going to school for finance, talking to a guy, I told him I was majoring in Finance, he quietly let me know he's a millionaire... and that derivatives was where to get your money... I thought calculus? Didn't understand... I researched and googled and other data... discovered the collateralized bond obligations CBO's... realized that's why banks were giving out loans not just for homes, but anything really... Wachovia (remember them, they're defunct since 2008), offered $60K in loans if I wanted to get my fast track commercial pilot license, I didn't take it... was a bit concerned of the price tag and decided to do other things. It all sort of came together... banks throwing money at everyone to borrow... CBO's... people taking out mortgages there was no way they could afford... I was their supervisor, I knew their paycheck... then the sobbing that their mortgage was re-adjusting... that collapse was subtle than the dot com but more pervasive...
This one... was building up all decade long. With a top off with the pandemic, and the stupidity of the banking system... and stampede of people who couldn't visit a casino, to instead, go into the stock market. Bubble of everything just become beyond stupidity bubble of everything. And recessions usually end with commodities going full tilt to the moon. When people suddenly lose their jobs and can least afford higher prices.
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Globalization or whatever nonsensical stupid term they put it, wasn't and is never that red hot. All it is, is new colonialism. Using despotic and or highly destitute nations to become perpetually "developing nations' rendering its population poor over it's supposed super growth period, only assisting a smaller portion of its population to become better off.
It's inauthentic comparative advantage tantamount to slave labor. In the long run, this colonialism does what it does best, makes a robber baron class that becomes so overtly tyrannical as the long term aggregate demand among the masses goes down... a race to the bottom, this plunges all economies into mass a malaise and recession boom bust periods. Only a few do well in such a thing, the robber barons. But they cook their own goose as, again, aggregate demand goes down... again plunging the economies into recession boom bust.
The rich start eating each other consolidating businesses and political power into a fewer cohort faction of oligarchs.
It's nothing new.
And it's nothing good.
You can just call it robber baronism.
And environmentally on resources, it's dumb. Very dumb. It creates very inefficient supply chains that make no sense whatsoever. Because the comparative advantage is not authentic... the nations producing at a cheaper price are only able to do so due to destitute and often oppressed labor. This labor really never enjoys the fruits of their labor and never contributes to a virtual cycle of real buying power, and it ruins other more liberal free and collective labor forces wage/salary buying power.
In addition, subsidies that these corrupt and/or tyrannical nations create supply chains that simply make no sense... requiring various inputs and sub-assemblies to be scattered and collected then sold far from each other wasting vast amounts of resources in terms of transportation costs. Selling at a loss via government subsidies, it puts strain on raw collection of goods. And uses vast amounts of energy than otherwise.
Notice under this so called "globalization" that all nations with authentic comparative advantage: the nation has the actual resources in abundance comparatively, they have a labor force comparatively better equipped and educated, that nation has something the other nation does not.
These nations get the so called curse of abundant resources. They stay miserable crap holes in perpetuity.
Same phenomena under colonialism.
Again, this so called globalization isn't new. It's robber baronism. It's exploit labor and force relatively better off nations into the same race to the bottom boat to the benefit of a very few until it falls apart under it's own contradictions.
In fact, throughout history, the explosion of this type of inauthentic comparative advantage trade often getting a coin from the triangle trade, or olive trade, or silk roads, or fancy ones like Rome's so called Pax Romana under Octavian, or late bronze era collapse...
Today, it's cutely named "globalization".
And that name is recycled from 1920.... as it was used leading up to the great depression, that lead to WWII.
Indoctrination is a horrible thing. Most of economics has become that tool to utter pure unadulterated nonsense. The study that literally can't predict anything with any accuracy, and is just used to manipulate markets and nations. It's why it doesn't actually get a Nobel Prize... Nobel realized early that giving such a prize in economics is propaganda. As economics isn't a real scientific study, but more of a philosophical study and possibly worse, not a science at all. Either way, he knew such awards in that social political study would be a propaganda mouth piece that aristocrats could use to manipulate nations.
Later on, however, and unfortunately, Sweden decided to produce a prize for economic propaganda. Because they wanted that power. And they took it. So they devised a prize given to economists among other economists aka propagandists... called the Economic Prize in Memorial to A. Nobel.
So globalization... or whatever nonsense you want to call it. Is not a sign of good times ahead... but sign that robber baronism is at a late stage nearing its boom bust oscillations into collapse. It's suffering its contradictions to the point of insolvency and consolidating into an implosion.
Trade is good when it makes sense. Trade is not good if it doesn't make sense. Inauthentic comparative advantages only make sense to robber barons... and for the "short" run. Long run, they eat themselves Consolidate. As for the mass of people, they fall in aggregate demand.
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@thejoshman3843 No he hasn't. At least not yet... tariffs put in place by Trump have remained even now of the is commenty 7/31/22.
What you're seeing is companies that had a mad rush to highs in fomo stupidity and leverage cheap as O2 go to the moon, those exposed to more international revenue sources get hammered. Those selling to domestic markets don't. And to be frank, all markets other than the US have a worse domestic market picture;:
China: insolvent developers and debt burden and loss of individual/family savings/investment.
Japan: Malaise persisting.
S Korea: Massive debt trap by both companies and individuals.
EU zone nations: malaise in an energy shortage and monetary policy inflationary stupidity with their own debt problems more located in their businesses than among individuals in most of the EU nations.
UK: drab miserable island that has prior to the Brexit stuff, sold of much of its industrial capacity. Instead shifting to financial sector... selling hopes and farts in a jar and any other silly hustle that might float the boat, until it doesn't.
BRICs nations as a whole have long since had a diminishing economy where long term low interest rates stimulus failed completely and only caused a debt collapse.
Australia: Heavily dependent on China for vast majority of its exports of commodities... so if China doesn't stimulate or can't or even becomes insolvent over time on foreign reserves (which could be the case) or in their desperate gasp to maintain some sort of self imagined dominance, China invades Taiwan.... We lost the borrower of last resort that the world had in 2008... and Australia would suffer the greatest.
Globalization, colonialism, imperialism etc. nothing new. Really, it's the same stupidity over and over since recorded history, one very ancient period was the late bronze age collapse... trade becomes twisted into a pretzel all on the crux of exploiting various regions labor ( outright slave labor in this period of time and many other periods of time)... it's held together with debasement of money and acid of resentment of the vast majority of people (or in this case human chattel) in our case sweat shop workers... you get a complete resentment of the system. One by one, the most vulnerable nations start to go on war campaigns to distract or acquire more resources in hopes of propping up their own regimes popularity or at least diminish the resentment from mass of people.
But you just end up showing the vulnerability of supply chains that get stretched beyond authentic comparative advantage, and are only there due to inauthentic comparative advantage (forced labor, national subsidies to the moon, exploited labor yet cannot actual provide the goods at any reasonable quality level, etc.).
War and civil war busts the entire thing up into one big collapse.
This cycle repeats so often throughout recorded history, it's amazing humans are that insane to keep repeating it over and over and over again.
1929 was the last time similar stupidity had its complete shit the fan moment.
The irony the buzz your nether region word used to describe the "this time is different" idiocy, is the same buzz your nether region word globalization... word firstly introduced in 1870's, but used all thru the 1920's.
This time we didn't even get a new fancy word to con us into insanity of repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again.
We got a hand me down word.
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I think a breaking point will happen... my employer presently again fucked us on annual raises this time providing 0%. Fucker has the asinine fuckery to announce 9% 401K contribution saying how wonderful undisclosed profits made recently. But then double talks that we weren't making enough profit the last 3 months despite being busier than ever. We had two week slow down that usually in spring can be an entire month. But we had a double busy period with only two weeks of slow production, than back to producing even more than ever before.
Some people have flat out walked off the job.
And even the most dedicated are grumbling openly. Their rent, my rent, their mortgage payments that couple property taxes have all gone up.
Not making a raise is a kick in the face, particularly when the company is even more profitable. And that they don't share their financials with us openly, the only shit show I have worked that doesn't do this... was told by a professor in college once don't walk, RUN whenever you work for an organization that doesn't reveal their financials.
Anyway, I see a breaking point card check happening in a day, then forced sped negotiation the next, no deal that day, strike on the third day.
And a possibility of the labor departments of various states drag their fucking feet on card check, flat out non union general strike might happen.
Things are not very happy among us workers.
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@sukhmaidickoff
Last year I experimented with crypto... mostly trading it... but I also mined a little of it, and moved BTC and USDT and USDC and a few other coins from one wallet to another.
My conclusions:
1) It cannot scale. Times when the nodes were busy moving money from one wallet to another (for me it was moving BTC or USDT or USDC from one exchange to another like Coinbase to Bittrex.
The "gas" fees to send the money just to yourself could become as high as $100 to as low as a $2 to $3... some exchanges charged a flat rate of $20 to move your tethers or other coins to your own wallet or to another exchange account you have.
Sending money to one wallet to another is same as spending the money.
Also, at times when the particular crypto's network you were moving was busy, it could take as long as a week to get the required 7 or more confirmations to where the exchange would agree you truly did put this much BTC or ETH or whatever on your account, and credit you with the money.
Tokens like USDT and USDC were faster, as they just simply ride the network of another coin like ETH or Tron... usually completing in a few hours instead of 9 hours to several weeks for the accredited period to say you truly have the money available to sell or withdraw or otherwise move again.
The cost and the time make this stuff impossible for any actual use for real money needs.
And there is no security. If you move USDT that's on TRON coin to an ETH coin wallet... you have a strong chance of losing those funds forever. It's gone.
Somehow you get compromised on your wallets, that money is gone. So no security.
Therefore it solves nothing that traditional transaction methods haven't already provided. Crypto is more expensive, time costing, and less secure than all other transaction types from ACH which is free typically, to AMEX or Western Union or major card companies, Paypal, Venmo, etc.
Really, crypto solves no other problems, but only introduces new ones: Scalability, security, timeliness, affordability, value discernment, etc.
I researched deeper into the MT Gox era and then Tether and Terra and Circle stable Coin eras... and discovered the liquidity of this stuff is one giant gambling pyramid and ponzi scheme farce... hence why tens of billions seem to trade every 24 hours.... it's tens of billions of tether that is trading, not fiat money. Only a fraction of this poker chip like fiat derivatives hit the exit to fiat at any given time. Keeping this going for a long period of time, just waiting for a period of time when a run on these things happen.
And these sorts of pyramid and ponzi schemes always have their insolvency events. As they add no real money inflow via some production value... they're using inflows of other people piling in, to pay out those piling out.
I then checked to see if my USD fiat holdings in Coinbase and Bittrex were FDIC insured... thought they would be. Nope.
So even my cash on the sidelines while I wasn't in any trade on the stuff, was at risk.
I took my money and what profits I made off these "exchanges"... currently US law classifies them not as exchanges, but as payment processors.
Hence why they're not SIPC insured and not a member of FINRA. These crypto exchanges go at lengths to distort their backings too.
Instead of being straight forward about the fact that your account is not FDIC insured... they'll (Bittrex) will mention how they took out over a hundred million dollars of insurance against any losses they may get due to security issues. Coinbase goes to the extent of stating the banks Coinbase uses to do business, that those banks are FDIC insured... which falsely gives someone the impression you get pass through protection... you don't; Coinbase's accounts on that bank are FDIC only for that limit of protection for their account and nothing more, your accounts with Coinbase mean nothing to the banks that Coinbase is banking with.
And worse, they speak about FINRA as if they're a member without directly lying and saying so, instead they go on about how "they're governed" by FINRA. Basically, they report their dealings with FINRA and FINRA just monitors them. But there is no membership between these payment processors... they're not exchanges currently in the eyes of the law as of the time writing this. They're payment processors.
And they're just silent on the fact that they're not SIPC insured.
Lots of legal issues open up whenever crypto gets flagged as a securities. Basically, all the crypto on the market becomes illegally traded non-originated pseudo securities breaching many tests of a securities... and in fact probably aren't a security at all.. at least not the decentralized crypto... they're more of a commodity.
Really, crypto just presents more problems to finance while solving nothing.
So... I'm kind of out of the thing. Will watch the tulip market from a distance.
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If the movie is attempting to be historically accurate, I agree. You prefer an actor that resembles the figures as much as possible.
If the movie or series is attempting only to be entertaining "300" for instance which is a cartoon made movie. Then doesn't matter. Its a joke to begin with for quick thrills. People shouldn't use movies unless the movie itself describes itself as attempting to be historical accurate, should never ever be used as history. They're drama and tend for entertainment and almost always make for bad history; this dates back to Shakespeare plays like Richard III describing incorrectly of a king who was physically incapable. When he was quite capable.
As far as the cartoon you refer toward, we really have evidence it was a mix lot.
Provinces were ruled both military and government as well as merchant class by people from all over the empire. So it would be a mix of all sorts of people around the entire empire in these outpost cities.
Briton in particular had Roman soldiers, merchants, and retirees from all over the empire including Germans, Gauls, Africans (both Nubian and Carthage Berber) and Middle East as far as Palmyra in middle and higher offices and more established in society (had slaves) based on archaeological evidence.
And ancient Rome was an equal opportunity enslavement system. Anyone could be enslaved despite ethnicity. Rome itself was a mix of various Italian tribes like the Sabine and Etruscan. Unless you were already a well known Roman family, it was a good idea to carry some proof of citizenship. For a freed slave, very important to keep your documents that attest to that fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxCzAehdF38&t=80s
Describes a mercenary culture of provincial holdings of the Roman Empire 27:57
Fact of the matter, as the Rome's decline, most of its army and large portions of new settlements were fielded and populated by people of its various provinces; it had to be. There simply weren't enough Italians.
And the evidence shows provinces are showing to be surprisingly diverse in population and well supplied with goods from very far away in the empire.
And we really don't know exactly the mix. So to say you know is also an absurdity. We really don't know exactly if ethnicity in outpost cities was a contentious subject; likely not as much as in Italy. Seriously, the provinces were a place to put what Rome thought were backwoods shit wits barbarians themselves (Germans, Gauls, Poles, etc.)
And even in Italy we see Africans with their bill willies was painted on many bathhouses and other buildings in fresco.
http://da4fu3rmgwiz7.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/20170301144409/IMG_9043.jpg
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Crypto, particularly the "tokens" where I can issue whatever quantity and dump them to morons who will buy them.. and especially sell these tokens as if it's some stake in some "project" is a share or bond security. Same as if I were to make side bets off the larger exchanges stock or derivatives (side bets)... and as stated in this video all such side bets on stocks or other securities must be registered to the SEC. Crypto blockchain tokens can still be thought of as both a security as the developer issued the program and had time to pre-mine these into existence before opening the block to other users to mine them. And of course once mined they're a "collectible". And if promoted the same as a token... they're still a form of a security, more than a collectable.
So really, all this crypto stuff was unregulated sets of IOUs or implied IOUs... or side bets on those IOUs. Something that must be registered and approved by the SEC. And even collectibles like this must be at least approved in some extent as a payment processor thru the FTC.
Really, none of this was happening. Hence the giant cluster mug that is crypto . And the dubiousness of it all, as no merchant long term has really accepted the stuff. Even the dictator who has declared BTC an official currency for El Salvador; the citizens essentially don't use it, and will rarely accept it; even though its required by law to accept it... most don't have any nor want any. And if they get it, they immediately get rid of it for USD.
So nobody other than a few dictators, criminals, and speculators use it for anything. And you can't really buy anything with it outright. You have to find someone to buy regular currency and purchase with whatever you were able to get at the time.
Crypto is sort of a potential problem for a long time. And when tokens and other such chicanery became a thing like "exchanges" what were not really SIPC and FINRA registered and given oversite... the entire thing was a trip down Milton Friedman let scams (markets) be quackery lane. For a bald coke head who loved to rant about unintended consequences... anything in life has them and using that as some excuse not to regulate to ensure various measures against fraud via oversight and audit requirements and the like...
Well, no rules aka regulations and no independent trusted oversight has it's own unintended consequences... chief among them a complete collapse and saying goodbye to whatever real or magical internet money you might have thought you had.
I'm just surprised USDC and USDT still exist at this point. Some long standing, essentially open frauds... ten or so more years from 2023, they're last as long as Madoff's big ponzi.
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And the music hasn't stopped yet... get ready for the most ridiculous scams... many are obvious for us slightly older folks. The many scams of Musk. But then there's the crypto stupidity tulip idiocy an open scam whereby one can see the numbers of USDC, Terra, Tether, etc. goofy fractional reserve pyramid scheme right in front of our eyes.
People look at market cap as if it has any real meaning at all... as it doesn't. If I invent a good or crypto coin or some other item and have so much of that thing supply... say I make a billion of those things... and immediately one person buys one for $1... that now has a market cap of $1 billion dollars. Doesn't mean that much money ever was exchanged or went into the stupidity... literally only $1 dollar... on person bought my thing of 1 billion things outstanding. Suddenly... market cap $1 last transaction times 1 billion things total... $1 billion market cap. Useless notation.
Every idiocy bubble in the last century going wild: robber baron collapse of the 1924 to 1929... to the moronic stagflation induced by idiot monetary policy from 1968 to 1978.... dot com bust... real-estate bust... bankster bust... all at once in the biggest bubble ever... get ready to find out some of these firms were cooking the books... profits reported if they even bothered to report profits as many didn't even need to show they were making money... will be similar to the phony numbers of Enron, Qwest and Global Crossings, Worldcom, etc.
This one, while big in comparison to the exposed frauds now... will be just a tiny footnote in a cornucopia of frauds that are still playing out.
Every idiot scam put in place in the last 400 years is being used upon lots of rubes in the last decade. Lots of shitty movies describing how we were so dumb and unwarranted of ignorance (all these scams have been done repeated since recorded history but nobody bothered to google it, or they just thought they'd scam it up themselves knowing merit driven income and wealth reward is gone and has been for almost half a century only the liars and cheaters make it at all and the productive worker makes absolutely nothing but a mountain of debt they'll never get out of or if they played it safe and saved,just simply a savings that won't amount to anything, so they jumped into the fomo of scams upon scams on scam mountain).
Get ready for some seriously interesting stupidity to come to their eventuality.
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Quit calling retail investors buying the dip... all retail can do is buy some calls and stocks... they make up only 10% of the stocks.
90% is various big money: banks, hedge funds, large trading desks, pensions, really rich persons portfolio allocations, foreign allocations, etc.
Those are dip buyers. Retail... retail is largely upside down. Particularly the reddit and Ape and the like. They don't have that much money to do much, and most of their stampede in meme stocks and other stocks is rather over.
The so called dumb money is already rekt.
This is a battle between big trading desks who was helping pump meme stocks and currently the mega cap stocks in a game of chicken. The dumb money at the top.
We only call it dumb money because we suspect the poorer you are the dumber you are. A bad cultural stupidity pretending we really have meritocracy... frankly we don't.
We have idiocracy. The dumbest stupidity so called assets aka junk and shit and vomit was sold and pumped by con jobbers to big money and small money. The chicanery of the hucksters cashed out at various times and highest prices to lock in profits selling all over all our little retail heads.
The remaining is big money playing a game of chicken with each other. Some using options as a manipulative method to buy up same week expiration contracts to force gamma squeezes, the big money dumps these call options as premium pump. This pumps implied volatility over a few weeks of mechanical manipulation, causing this gaming the call contracts sightly out of the money same week expiration, those calls become so expensive in premium, that actual underlying stock price reaches in the money on the calls they bought, there is little premium increase if any, so they stop.
And when bunch of entities persons or trading desks dump call options and forced a gamma squeeze, the dumping of the calls generally means market makers closed out open interest and no longer have any reason to keep the underlying stock the market makers bought that forced the pump up... so they dump those shares.. price dumps sometimes violently.
Hence the pump and dump in memes... as well as some small cap stocks that were yet to be "meme's" think the phony IWM pump that had the epic break out only to dump back down. It was all part of this options mechanical manipulation.
Since about October in to November these big money options manipulators moved on to mega caps rotating first to TSLA than to AAPL and then trying a stab at MSFT and GOOG and others. They sometimes return to them if IV has come down... but generally it can take couple months or more for the IV to come down to normal again to allow this gaming option market makers to be profitable.
Basically, the markets are broken. An exploit that SoftBank was found to exploit in 2020... buying calls same week expiration and occasionally assisting in pumping the stock price via buying the underlying just a bit, causing market makers of options to buy the underlying forcing gamma squeezes, the profits to SoftBank was then selling the call contracts for the bloated premiums on those OTM now near or ITM contracts... not keeping them open to purchase the stock.
Market makers then dump the stock as open interest remains low... underlying purchases no longer needed.
Sometimes they'll institute put walls to encourage market makers to same week to support the stock price so puts OTM don't go ITM. So long as calls same week are not quite as big as the puts. This put wall manipulation is very expensive and risky... the primary one saw done with this was TSLA with OTM same week puts up to $4 million every week money just going down the toilet... but they were also buying a spread of calls not to create a call wall above to at least break even on that... then once they got a certain price they were targeting the abandon the put wall, and just do call OTM huge volume buying and dumping to force the gamma squeeze they were seeking.
That's what's been going on over the past couple years. Retail is largely useful idiots assisting in price floors, occasionally causing a stampede in lower (under $20 a share) stocks, and big purpose is to put full blame of the manipulation on retail traders as what some of the big money is doing is probably illegal in the amount of options thus potential shares would require intent to hold over 10% of a company requirements... also this exploit will probably end as market makers are probably losing a lot of money; their automated market maker programs may start to cause premiums to pump faster than in the past making this options manipulation no longer profitable.
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I once did buy lots of coffee at various coffee shops for espressos $2 average per cup, almost every day. But last couple years I just brew my own coffee at home. When I travel I buy coffee espresso. It does help. But it's literally small compared to other costs: it doesn't impact rent or mortgage prices and medical costs (fortunately I'm healthy without any chronic problem). But still had medical expenses even now regarding my mouth which was a pretty penny.
But no, many of us older mellennials become increasingly penny pinchers. That's something that comes over time. And even with frugality, it doesn't literally amount to shit.
I'm saving now $45 a month on espresso... I still brew at home which $30 for the coffee a month. So savings of $15... wow! I'm now living high on the hog, just by not buying espressos!
I do agree with Suze on this. And it's not because I trust or like her: she's a phony financial adviser that just got her name in various 24 hour news stations.
Everyone should start pinching their expenses. Perhaps then we'll all get so sick of living on shit ass wages that we actually start demanding higher pay. And last resort, start forming unions. Start actually voting.
Right now, we all live in a fantasy by spending more than we should based on our pathetic wages, which at the very least makes for little to no real savings (6 months to a year worth of net income emergency fund, a vacation fund, a home purchase fund, vehicle purchase fund).
Instead those larger purchases just go on the loan or mortgage.
So if we did, we can show that we're all really just butt fuck broke, and the only thing keeping this economy alive is lots and lots of debt, and very slim to no emergency savings.
By the way, they're so out of touch with prices for mundane stuff like food: avocado toast... fuck just the avocados are just $0.50. They come with a Veggie Omelette at Ihop that costs $9.95... WTF is with this $40 toast? Me thinks a billionaire/millionaire referenced the price by looking at a resort hotel menu card he was staying at.
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Biden is too much of a pathological liar, there is no difference between him nor the other pathological liar. Second, turnout already sucks. So turnout is already showing nobody cares thus Biden is going to lose anyway. Turnout out the votes... yeah Biden can't and the established jack asses no they can't.
If your definition of politics is collusion and corruptions than fine. Don't expect us to vote for phony lesser of two evils. I don't even trust Biden to appoint a decent Supreme Court nominee. Which is my only scruple of maybe electing Biden, and that's only because it wasn't Obama who legalized gay marriage it was the supreme court of whom even appointed by republican judges ruled in favor, and than the coward that was Obama supported it.
But again, I don't even think Biden is competent enough to appoint a decent judicial nominee.
The DNC and RNC are quite literally a phony one party system pretending to be some grand democracy with real debates and participation: we have no real grand debate, we don't have hardly any participation.
We don't even have the one key requirement of a democratic republic: participation.
So what few of us who bother to vote, it's my vote, you want to bitch about my vote, too bad.
Get some of these other ass hats WHO NEVER FUCKING VOTE to go vote.
You probably can't. So sad. We tried too, and we got the typical middle average of total turnout of about 14% of eligible voters. People simply don't vote. And demanding us few who do to vote against our own interest just emboldens me in whatever decision I make.
Who cares about this evil mafia mentality about voting: voting for the so called lesser of two evils. Particularly when neither have one policy that I agree with. Why the fuck would I vote for that.
And this the reason to why we never have an okay 70% or better 80% turnout of all eligible voters. They simply don't even want to waste their time to bother to vote... unfortunately they're passing up other things on the ballot that effect them sooner and more directly.
I don't think Biden will actually fight for any of us.
He's a fraud as much as the fat ass orange blob called Trump.
Therefore I will vote likely for the green party candidate, or, I will write in Bernie, or I will leave that segment of the ballot blank.
I really don't think there's anything Biden can offer for me to vote for him.
And I suspect Bernie wouldn't want the job as VP. I don't know Nina Turner very well. I personally think Bernie has more power in the senate than as VP.
"[Vice Presidency is] the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his imagination conceived"- John Adams
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It took me a while to discover what Canada and UK pay on their medical coverage in their taxes... I figured it was like the US and like Germany and several other countries where it's a payroll tax; that is taxed at gross amount before any standard or other deductions.
It's not. Canada and UK don't have a payroll on their medical program, only their social security pension programs.
I was actually surprised that they pay substantially less than we do with our payroll taxing for both elderly medicare and disability medicaid.
And like all other wealthy nations, not too surprised that individuals with incomes at $60K or less pay substantially more effective tax rate and tax amount than those individuals making $60K or less equivalent in other countries.
Yet they still achieve a universal healthcare program that is substantially cheaper (often limited to no copays, deductibles don't exist the concept of them is absolute absurdity to them as it should be to us).
Essentially their median income workers pay less in effective taxes than we, yet they get more for their taxes than we.
And that's not adding our medical insurance premiums on insurance, let alone any copays or deductibles.
UK does it by owning and operating most medical facilities, hospitals and clinics.
Canada and most other nations do it by a mix of private operated and public operated hospitals, mostly private clinics, etc.
A common theme though between all nations with universal health programs: they control all costs of products and service of medical sector. On the private for profit work; the nations require those businesses to record the actual cost per unit, and place a max profit return usually 6%. 100% or 100,000% profit margins aren't even close to being allowed.
Additionally, and as importantly, for those entities public or private operated and funded, like hospitals that require economies of scale, they're simply subsidized to keep operating. Like we do for our police and fire stations and schools and roads and airports and sea ports and even our rail and our entire farming sector and our military and our judicial system....
It is do-able. Every nation had done it. We already pay more or about the same and don't have it. Which is flat out insane.
Figures to compare between US, Canada, and UK.
Year 2019:
Our social security is taxed based on gross employee portion at 6.20% with social security cap at $132,900.00: max cap contribution at $8239.80 USD.
Canada Pension Plan (CPP) employee portion at 5.10% on the first gross earnings $53,900 Canadian dollars; max contribution tax $2,748.90 Canadian dollars.
UK's National Insurance is complicated:
As an employee:
you pay National Insurance contributions if you earn more than £166 a week
you pay 12% of your earnings above this limit and up to £962 a week (for 2019-20)
the rate drops to 2% of your earnings over £962 a week.
For example, if you earn £1,000 a week, you pay:
nothing on the first £166
12% (£95.52) on the next £796
2% (£0.76) on the next £38.
https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/tax-and-national-insurance-deductions#do-you-need-to-pay-income-tax-and-national-insurance
The Canada and UK fund their medical programs via their Federal income taxes after deductions.
US Standard Individual deduction $12,200 USD
Brackets
Taxable Income Taxes
Up to $9,700 10% of taxable income
Between $9,700 and $39,475 $970 plus 12% of income over $9,700
Between $39,475 and $84,200 $4,543 plus 22% of income over $19,400
Between $84,200 and $160,725 $14,382 plus 24% of income over $84,200
Between $160,725 and $204,100 $32,748 plus 32% of income over $160,725
Between $204,100 and $510,300 $46, 628 plus 35% of income over $204,100
Over $510,300 $13,798 plus 37% of income over $510,300
Canada Standard individual deduction $12,069 Canadian Dollars.
Brackets
15% on the first $47,630 of taxable income, plus
20.5% on the next $47,629 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over 47,630 up to $95,259), plus
26% on the next $52,408 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over $95,259 up to $147,667), plus
29% on the next $62,704 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over 147,667 up to $210,371), plus
33% of taxable income over $210,371
UK standard individual deduction £12,500.
Brackets:
Rate Tax Band Income tax rate Dividend tax rate
Starting Rate for Savings £1 - £5,000 0% N/A
Basic rate £1 - £37,500 20% 7.5%
Higher Rate £37,501 - £150,000 40% 32.5%
Additional Rate £150,000+ 45% 38.1%
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/payroll/t4032-payroll-deductions-tables/t4032on/t4032on-january-general-information.html#_Toc337712789
https://www.taxtips.ca/taxrates/canada.htm
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We want what the rest of civilized industrial nations have, universal healthcare that doesn't bankrupt us. WTF? Who are they fucking kidding? Oh yeah, themselves.
They're so fucking disconnected from the reality of 99% of the people, they haven't a fucking clue even if that clue hit them square between the eyes.
An ambulance in Germany costs in copay: 5 Euros min to 10 Euros max... or about $11 USD or
Ambulance ride in the US Medicare payments range from $324 to $453, plus $7.29 per mile, out of network insurance or no insurance up to $1,000
A day stay in a hospital in Germany up to the first 28 days per year 10 Euros or $11 USD.
In the US:
Hospital costs averaged $3,949 per day and each hospital stay cost an average of $15,734.
Medical devices or Rx medicines per filling ranges 5 to 10 Euros or $5.50 to $11
In the US:
Rx may not be covered at all by Medicare or insurance if they decide you don't meet their qualifications for having that medicine or device; even if your doctor recommends the medicine or device. Depending on the medicine ranges from $15 to $1,000 or even more per filling, and devices tend to be $10K with an idea if you have it long enough you'll rent to own so $100 to $1,000 a month.
Dental visit or GP visit in Germany flat fee (Orthodontist is only covered 50% and only at age 21 or younger in most regions, supplemental insurance is available that covers 80% to 100%) : 5 to 10 Euros or $5.50 to $11
In the US:
Depending with insurance in network and with a PPO low deductible plan $20... high deductible, you pay all of it and get a discount instead of paying $160 to $200, for that 10 minute or less visit with GP usually nurse, it's $90 to $140 per visit... dental depends what they did... Cleanings in network $20 to $50.... out of network with insurance $100 to $150 and more depending if fillings or anything else was done.
Oh yeah, Orthodontist may not be covered by some insurance, and when it is, it's always only 50% but will usually pay out no more than $1,000 to $1,500 over the entire treatment plan... mild orthodontist treatment plan is usually 2 years at a total price tag of $4,000 to $,6000.... so you're holding the bag for more than 50% of that when insurance only pays $1,000 to 1,500 lifetime max.
In Germany: the max pay out on these 5 to 10 euros is 300 euros a year..... you reach that amount, any other visits, Rx, devices, etc. you pay nothing for the rest of the year.
US: Exists only if insured and the item is considered a covered item: the maximum out-of-pocket limit for 2020 plans is $8,200 for individual plans and $16,400 for family plans. (The maximum out-of-pocket limit for 2019 was $7,900 for individual plans and $15,800 for family plans.)
Each country is slightly different and has lower or no price on certain things; Canada doesn't cover any dental and only Rx and devices issued from a hospital, not a pharmacy... but Canada pays nothing for office visits or surgeries at GP clinics or hospitals.
No matter their difference, they all have one thing in common: Their overall expenses are way lower than ours in just about all aspects of medical services.
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/germany/
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Bernie is always very clear on what he means by his socialism, he always states he's a democratic socialist. Similar to that of the party in Germany that calls themselves Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands SPD Social democratic party. One of the two major contemporary (actually in Europe center left party). They still have private enterprise, the even have some billionaires. But what they do have is a quasi governmental union system that ensures trades (various jobs) are paid well, universal compulsory healthcare, tuition free higher and vocational education.
It's not about creating a dictator for the rich private monopoly owners (fascism) nor what slobbering Chris is pretending, dictator with a pretend republic state capitalism that was the USSR and still is the People's Republic of China.
No one wants our civil rights and democracy and representation to go away; in fact the opposite, we want to expand that into the workplace.
All wealthy nations have struck two market systems: social and capital; including ours. We have a state pension system called social security, and most cities and counties have many of their utilities like water, electricity, and/or sewer city or county owned and operated.
Some things work better socially owned and operated, and some things work better privately owned and operated. All depending on which is competitive market principles keep that sector competitive. Competition being the key as for profit motive is only useful in that it encourages competition. And rules aka laws and regulations that keep sectors competitive of which is the only reason in any circumstance that for profit private ownership ever does better is that it uses competition to produce more, and better, and more efficiently than otherwise.
But many sectors simply are not competitive: natural monopolies, they have externalities, or without rules/regulations become vertical and/or horizontal monopolies or they lie with advertising manipulating markets often normalizing the absurd (just keep playing that on radio, tv, at gas stations, stores over their speakers, send printed ad that say the same nonsense and eventually it becomes normal despite it's absurdity it's obvious illogical nonsense).
A new form of enterprise is possible too, and that would be moving toward special co-op enterprises that are able to obtain capital from a similar method that current banks do today that then lend to businesses: A Fed Co-Op Reserve Bank, that would lend at a discount to enterprises wanting to start such special co-ops. These co-ops would be non-trade-able and would present voting right to every worker despite their rank and function as to all aspects of the operation of the business including capital expenditures (what to do with surplus and growing the company) as well as wage/salary, benefits, how and where to produce on their 1 year to 5 year to 10 year plans, whether a supervisor, manager, or executive did well enough they can keep that position or be removed to another and let someone else do it, etc.
Democratizing the work force. And such co-op enterprises would likely out-compete any vintage corporation as they're more likely to have more loyal workers, smarter workers, smarter projects as the workers themselves usually know where efficiencies and capital expenditures should go over a disconnected board of directors; it taps the wisdom of the crowd average. So there would be no prohibition on having a completely private business as today. Let them compete. They'll likely diminish as they should if the democratized co-op system does what it should.
And we can instantly install rules to medium and large corporations as Germany has with laws such as the Co-determination law that requires up to 50% of the board of directors be non-managerial employees voted upon by non-managerial employees sit and vote on the board of directors.
This isn't about restricting democracy as what happened in the USSR and is making life miserable in mainland China and Hong Kong, rather this time it's about invoking democracy as to all aspects of our lives.
It was absurd to think all a nation needed was as democracy and representation at the governmental level, and not at the level of where we spend the vast majority of our waking hours: at the workplace.
This is very much like the monarchies of Europe screaming about the failed attempt of France during it's first revolution to install a republic 1790's, and it turning into the terror and then back into a sort of monarchy via an emperor Napoleon. "See, republics fail. You need a monarchy with lords to rule the masses." This same thing is going on with the failure of so called nations that attempted a new economic system particularly the USSR. They get stumped on China, as they're still in power as the "communist" nation with state capitalism, but now mixing some private capitalism with their state capitalism to become the 2nd largest economy in the world in just a mater of 40 years from which they were among the most impoverished nation.
As of today, most nations are no longer monarchies in Europe, and the few that remain are very restricted as constitutional monarchies acting as figure heads or museum pieces often with old palaces that act as tourist attractions.
We've learned how to do republics and democracy at the government level, now we must enact it at the economic level.
What we need is an economic system that works for everyone. And that is what democratic socialism is all about. Should the normal routine of this return to robber baron economic system be allowed to run it's routine, the oligarchs will wish the opposition was the democratic socialists, because under pressure of misery you get people who will support the hired thug to take out the other tyrannical thug.
And that's what social democracy is.
Chris Matthews knows this, he's playing dumb in hopes that the uneducated 1950's babies growing up in mindless heavily propagandized the "Red Bares Scare" commie reds are coming to get us era. It's dishonest.
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If you wonder why all these idiot start ups including crypto-crap are getting funding: Rich are looking for a return since most nations have low to even negative interest rates.
So all the money is going into stupid, in the hopes they're they next Microsoft, Google, Apple, FB, Amazon, etc. Even if it lasts for a short while like Yahoo or AOL... so much money concentrated in such a few hands, the small $100K to even $1 Million to them is casino money; they're able to risk lots because they all have trillions sitting in cash or equivalence (CD's Bonds etc.).
So throwing money to stupid is okay in the smaller and smaller concentrated plutocrat cum oligarch spheres. So long as one or two or even three make some sort of return, even if they're discovered to be complete flops, who cares, so long as it brings in a return for a year or two or hopefully a decade or two.
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What we need to do is look at criteria to why Finland and some other countries have better results on knowledge assessments compared to our country and some others.
And implement what they do. And see what happens.
You know, a scientific experiment to see if we can use their items and get the same results.
But that would also probably mean our culture of having such inequality in life must change; Finnish tend to be very collective and don't fear being deprived of vacation to interesting places, fearing living in rentals that they can't afford, possibly in a vehicle for a while, etc.
You know, they have economy that isn't a terrible throwback to the 1800's for the workers. So people have aspirations to actually learn and retain knowledge.
Ours retains what sports player, coach, actor, musician, etc. is screwing, doing, scoring, and whatever else.
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There should be a battery of knowledge tests from mathematics, basic chemistry, basic physics, basic law, civics of our federal/state government, basic economics, basic finance, basic world geography, basic geology, basic biology, and reading comprehension.
There is for any job in the military, air traffic controllers, pilots, commercial naval captains and seaman, water works operators, electricians, grid electrical operators and repair, sewer operators, aircraft mechanics, teachers, even vehicle mechanics.
But no empirical knowledge testing standards at all for political offices... that's fucking insane.
It's not too hard to exclude obvious constitutionally and law prohibited items: religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. discrimination. But just empirical exams that EVERY other profession requires.
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It's backfiring big time. People are so sick of hearing about Russia gate and just about Trump when we have real issues... we all dislike him, even those how voted for the fraud mostly out of a fuck you to everyone let the whole thing crash because its a pile of shit.
We want to talk about policies, universal healthcare, regulating big pharma, universal higher education, pegging minimum pay to the total compensation of the highest executives paid annually, co-determination policies where half the board of directors must be filled and elected by non-management/supervisor wager earners, ending the drug wars and using a Portugal style reform that ended the black markets and established rehab facilities that has actually cut their drug problem Between 1998 and 2011, the number of people in drug treatment increased by more than 60 percent (from approximately 23,600 to roughly 38,000). Over 70 percent of those who seek treatment receive opioid-substitution therapy, the most effective treatment for opioid dependence, and much more http://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2018/03/us-delegation-heads-portugal-march-19-22-learn-countrys-groundbreaking-drug
No more cartoons. Quit treating the American Public as if we're a bunch of children capable of only understanding entertainment circus acts.
But I suppose it works. People just drop out. They win by causing apathy too.
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Biden: Younger generation needs to change things by participating in it.
Younger generation: We want what all other industrialized nations have such as universal healthcare system and capping medical profits to a max 6% profit taking for services and manufacturing of medical sector, a no tuition program for higher education and trade school programs, co-determination policy like Germany, a non-trade-able co-op system with a co-op reserve bank lending at discount to groups forming these types of non-tradeable co-ops with an added choice to all enterprises such as proposed by the UK Labor party called right of first refusal: provides a choice to workers to borrow from a national reserve bank at a discount to buyout the enterprise portion to form its own co-op enterprise. Oh, and let's more than halve our DOD spending to something closer to 300 billion to $280 billion within 1 year; oh and let's place a top margin rate of profit on military contracts of only 6%, then all sectors that do not produce and/or service products within the US are not allowed to military contracts of any kind. And let's further invoke during periods where the US has no declaration of war as per the constitution, no weapon producer may be private, but must be an non-profit entity owned and operated by the US; which includes aircraft, ships, vehicles, vessels, direct weaponry such ammunition, firearms, missiles, bombs, mines, or any other weapons of war; this can only be undone during an active full declaration of war and only for the period of the active declaration of war against another country as per the constitution of declaring war; this would prevent war racketeering that has caused almost every nation that has ever existed into an empire to have its economic system completely collapse due to over borrowing and/or debasing its currency as it monetizes its ever growing debt caused by out-sized influence over its weapons manufacturing sector. End it easy by not allowing such a sector to exist in the first place, unless a full declaration of war is made. And of non weapon supplies like food, clothing, utilities, etc. cap at all times regardless of war or not, a 6% profit max margin; and always take non-profit bids over profit bid contracts.
Oh, and a massive energy program the likes of all major works programs of the 20th century that takes us from fossil fuels to non-carbon energy such as solar, wind, and safe nuclear including LFTR fission and ultimately Iter/Wendelstein 7X fusion reactors; energy that would be economically cheaper as per their energy density and available supply by orders of magnitude than fossil fuels, and cheaper in external costs that they're non-green house emitting.
So far policies proposed by Sanders and maybe Warren and Gabbard have our votes.
Biden: Whoops, I don't like what changes you want, and I add that I have no empathy for you.
Com on!
I wasn't serious anyway. I was only suggesting you younger generation were lazy as a way to play into the uniquely weird nature of older generations to be vindictive and hateful toward the younger generation; I mean they hate you younger fucks so much they've been spiting their own faces for over 50 years, just look at the policies and representatives these old fucks have voted for!
I mean they voted for me for fuck-sake, and look how I've shit in their faces time and time again!
So younger generations... just don't say anything. Us old fucks just want to watch you all wallow in the shit as our final dying days come to a close. Don't ask why, we're not sure, maybe it's entertaining, but whatever reason, damn do we love it.
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Very occasionally I have lucid dreams where I become 100% aware I'm dreaming, but remain in the dream state. Often I just mess around always seem to enjoy levitating and attempting to climb altitude. I try to get the attention of the various bystanders in my dream. Sometimes they freak out for a short period of time then other times they act like its nothing: me levitating and flying around.
One lucid dream I, I noticed how real everything felt, and thought let me test this out.
I thought myself to be in a forest at the bank of a river... possibly somewhere in the NW USA.
It was a river in a forest with some sandy mud banks. I began the test to see if I could notice mess ups in this "simulation". I heard birds chirping, smell of pine trees that fishy mossy smell of the river, the sun glinting through the trees, I put my face to the sun and felt that warmth as I closed my eyes and that typical sheen of brighter toward the light and darker facing away with closed eyes.
I decided to test the water sensation, I walked in to the water, put my hands and arms into the water, reached into the water to the ground and dug deep into the sandy mud and pulled out some... it was very sandy, and pulled it out of the water and extruded it through my hands... water felt like water, smelt like water, mud and sand felt like they should. I dropped the mud and rinsed just my hands off. But left purposefully left the mud sand on my arms, I was testing to see if the drying sensation would differ or not form reality.
It dried rather quickly. I scraped some of it off.
I got out of the water. Water dripped from my legs.
A few things I noticed though, many of the things I expected to see as I was testing the observations would reveal themselves usually when I was searching for them... okay: what do I hear: Birds chirping, the water sound of the river stream... the sun how's that feel... warmth...
Occasionally though some things (very few) would cause me to notice them before I thought about them: the mossy smell suddenly caught me off guard and thought wow, I even smell the fishy mossy river smell, and then noticed a breeze of wind that starting causing the trees to gently move.
I did some other things, and noticed though that weren't quite right: the mud/sand dried and was more like just dried sand from a beach on my arm. And not much of it remained after I just scraped off a little. In reality, without washing it all off, I would be shedding sand all day long. Oh, and I don't recall any insects... I didn't think about seeing them either.
But what I did experience fell incredibly real.
I thought even during the lucid dream and still today how amazing it was that my mind is simulating all of this.
But makes sense... it is only through our senses and ultimately our our mind that we experience anything.
I have read that brain scan imaging reveals we experience recalling sounds identically to actually hearing them.
So when get a song stuck in your head, whatever your brain remembers of that song, then your brain is literally playing it as if you're actually hearing it.
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Senator Joe Manchin (name like that you would think it would be a republican wearing a monocle), already in dispute about the other $1,400 or $2,000 in stimulus.
The true colors come out. DNC have proven time and time again over the past 30 years they're better at passing GOP and robber baron policies than those that help the working persons:
1) H.R.6521 - Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008
2) NAFTA
3) 1994 Crime Bill
4) Repeal Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 under the The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) 1999
5) Welfare reform act of 1996 which destroyed public housing and HUD development leading to the ridiculously unsustainable rent and housing prices costing more than the 20% to 30% sustainable levels, now costing 40% to 60% of monthly incomes. In the worst areas as high as 80% to 90% of take home pay, hence the record numbers of working people living in RV's, tents, cars, etc. often with an entire family of kids and wife.
6) Affordable Care Act that was a give away to private insurance never dealt with pharma and hospital pricing and sustainability; devoid of public option with price controls that ALL other nations rely upon as healthcare has a blatant inelastic demand curve: people will pay any price, demand doesn't vanish based on price, to stay healthy, not feel pain, nor die; you can't rely on the hidden hand or rather the price via demand curve. It does not respond the same way. the demand curve is completely inelastic. And then when you do, it's barbaric because it means they're choosing cheaper incorrect medication, or skipping meds like insulin to pay rent or food, or other basics.
Quite literally ACA was a GOP sponsored plan by Bob Dole, and was actually enacted by republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts: it did not solve any of the affordability problems regarding healthcare in that state, nor did it, it only assisted big pharma and hospitals to ensure they got some if not all money for rendering services even after patients filed medical bankruptcies.
7) Congress altered 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(8) 2005 making private students not dischargeable in Chapter 7. This coupled with PUBLIC LAW 98-353—JULY 10, 1984 that had made public student loans non-discharchable in chapter 7.
So... yeah, I'm hoping.
But if past is prologue.... which it usually is... in 4 to 8 years we'll have someone even more insane than Trump.
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In the US, if you didn't have coverage, they would have simply given you pain medication and a timeline on how long to expect to live and a brochure describing tying up end of life "final wishes" ie. picking out your tomb stone, coffin, funeral home, cremation or embalming, etc.
Seriously, not a joke. I know people who had severe cancers, they'll immediately classify you with terminal illness if you have little to no insurance. Even when you're on medicare at elderly age with a supplement insurance like my grandpa. He got lung cancer. They treated him with some radio therapy. But changed their minds and decided he was terminal, sent him home on morphine, and my mom and aunts helped him linger on for about 6 months until he died.
The experience I have had and watched others have in our idiot country has been very bad. We're among the worst countries on medical. My experience with Germany, Japan, and UK is completely night and day different. UK being the best out of all of them, and its completely provided by the government. Some of Germany is the same with lots of private pharmacies and clinics. And Japan also mix of non-profit clinics (for profit medical establishments are prohibited) and government operated with rates strictly set, and 30% of non-elderly co-pay is payed by mandatory insurance; elderly pay 10% copay and that is waived if poor or covered with supplemental insurance. MRI in Japan is $98 USD compared to MRI in the US still at $1,200 USD.
Talk about a racket in good ol' 'Merkah! Derp duh derp duh do!
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Media is mostly a joke. They don't properly cover foreign news, and they're hopeless on reporting economic news. You have to combine all the news stories and data to realize the absurdities yourself.
Seriously, we have the biggest fucking leveraged bubble ever, this time instead of just housing CLO's, credit card debt, total stock margin all time high 2007 $375 billion three headed Hydra we now have a 7 headed Hydra clear as day: 1) sub prime auto loans soaring all time highs $1.3 trillion and defaults on the rise 2) extreme business CLO's (not just mortgages) that rival the mortgage mess by orders of magnitude, 3) mortgage debt and their CLO's again above the peak of 2007, 4 )total stock market margin double the all time highs 2007 of $375 billion, now all time high of $655 billion, 5) credit card debt again at all time highs and beginning to see a steady rise in defaults which are prone to increasing sharply, 6) student loan debt doubling over 2007 to today to $1.5 trillion, and 7) wages that stink paying real income that of average wages 1974.
This 7 headed Hydra should be front page news, seriously the obviousness is that of watching a ship hit an iceberg... it's about to sink. But all you hear are crickets.... I mean reports and data comes out... then it just gets ignored... It seriously feels like N. Korean insanity where they all stand around in a daze acting like everything is normal when they know damn well its not.
Pure insanity.
So don't expect much from the media... its a narrative spinner. Until catastrophe hits and it can't be ignored, than they'll make their own narrative on how nobody saw it coming, blah blah blah.... but they did, they ignored their own individual reports and data, why? I guess it's too much of a Debbie Downer:
Wages stink to the tune of being back in purchasing power of 1974.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/real-wages-are-essentially-back-at-1974-levels-report-shows/ar-BBLUiNe
Corporate debt is bigger and badder than the mortgage leveraged loan mess.
Those companies that have cash on hand are just the 1% of the richest. The other companies are all over leveraged to the hilt $8 debt to every $1 in cash, at their ever all time highs, and 35% more debt than at the peak of 2007 before the bust.
https://banyanhill.com/corporate-debt-time-bomb/
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4130422-u-s-corporate-debt-2018
http://www.leveragedloan.com/leveraged-loan-market-now-10-years-credit-crunch/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NCBDBIQ027S
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSAMRIAONCUS
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=corporate%3Bdebt
Total stock market margin debt reached all time highs of $655 billion in May vs all time hihg 2007 of $375 billion.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4175675-leverage-risk-investment-markets-now-systemic
http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=3153&category=8
http://www.finra.org/investors/margin-statistics
All time record $1.3 trillion auto loans outstanding and increasing while defaults are also increasing. Particularly sub prime auto loans.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-02/never-mind-defaults-debt-backed-by-subprime-auto-loans-is-hot
Credit card debt higher than the last recession 2008 $1.019 trillion now is $1.039 trillion. And last several quarters credit card defaults are increasing.
https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/more-americans-are-defaulting-on-their-credit-cards-analyst/
https://www.magnifymoney.com/blog/news/u-s-credit-card-debt-by-the-numbers628618371/
Mortgage loans at record highs again surpassing 2007 peak.
https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/economy/divided-decade/fed-uneven-housing-recovery-great-recession
Student loan debt doubling from 2007 peak to over $1.5 trillion dollars
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/13/student-loan-debt-statistics-2018/#74b3acb07310
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BTC correlates with the stock market lately... because the stable coin poker chips are into speculative investments... which include the stock market.
So don't bother with crypto... it's scam.
Look up tether and other stable coins...
And further reading... look up private money... it's not new. It's happened all through recorded history... private money always crashes. Our recent history in the US, had wild cat banks and all sorts of stupidity further back colonial period there was Colonial Script. All of them went bust on a big run on their funny money.
It's where lots of sayings come from: funny money, not worth a wooden nickle, etc. Private money would be created in a locality, and always end in a collapse toward stable national currency and money backed by gold or silver or something of intrinsic value.
SO I would stay away from crypto. Junk. It's as bad as buying money losing bozo the clown tech stocks back in 2020. Not a good decision.
And not that many countries are actually "accepting" it. Only one really. And nobody actually accepts the crypto. They accept national money you can sell and give to them from your crypto.
Doesn't help that it's incredibly expensive to manipulate... just to move crypto from one wallet to another costs "gas" fees. So if you want to move money to hard wallet, on your computer off an exchange for safe keeping... that'll cost you. And that cost can vary from a few bucks to hundred bucks worth in crypto to USD. Becomes absurd.
And the time it takes to complete transactions on various crypto like BTC or ETH can take hours to days... and the number of confirmations required for an exchange to credit you with a verified deposit can take a week. And that's before hardly anyone is using it. It can't scale. None of it can.
It's all garbage. Doge coin meme coin, mints 4,000 new doggy coins a minute... hyper inflationary... which does keep the transaction costs down... but that savings in transaction costs is offset by the hyper inflation 4,000 coins a minute creation... miners act as both minting new coins and as a side thing they record transactions happening on the block chain... the big torrent file ledger.
Then there's lots of security problems if miners vanish which can make any coin lose all security... 51% attacks and just hard forking can take place where various big miners no longer agree with periods of transactions that took place. Becomes a real mess.
I would just stay away from crypto... if you feel like gambling on it... put just tiny sums of real money toward it, and not now, but later when everyone says it's dead, the price reflects this. Then throw a bit of money... you could get a bounce or something and cash the fake money real money... but over the long haul... it's the same as all other private money... while all of private money has always failed, this crypto crap is even worse in that at least private money never had insane valuations built on a giant pyramid ponzi schemes.
Be careful touching crypto.
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No. Because the oligarchs no the peasantry are shit out of "disposable" income, that in fact they're addicts on debt just to get basics, screw ability to save. Worse in the US, but UK and Europe not far behind. Korea already insane on this camp. And Japan... well they've given up long ago. China... they lose it in lots of swindle stupidity: their equity bubble 2015 and now the ghost city real-estate decades long insolvency mess.
So the only way to for the oligarch to syphon all incomes from the peasantry that have a smaller and smaller pot to piss in, is to monetize bad debt from banks, pump the chicken on all assets, particularly inelastic basic need things like housing and utilities with frills catering to a few morons who think they're rich, but really are playing debt bing them selves to keep up with the oligarchs they think they've become... so things like TSLA or AAPL over priced junk and to the point of pure unadulterated con... vapor ware.
So make home prices high along with rents and that preserves a cash flow from the peasantry to thine pockets.
Easy to do when you've bought all media outlets and have propounded various idiot notions that favor you and completely screw the peasantry... similar to the churches of old did. A con that has tested challenges of time.
This way, with both hands the peasantry give up their citizenship of being the government and hand it squarely over to you and your few plutocrats.
USA it's fantastic. WE don't have a central bank, rather a private banking cartel that has anointments of the government via some Congressional: "Oh you private cartel can F us and F us hard... so long it's (us) is the peasantry, and we're getting a little in our pockets while the rabbits are doing their thing."
It's stupid on stupid to the perspective to us peasantry. To the oligarchy it's brilliant with one potential draw back... and that's the race to Sri Lanka. But that's where embracing one of their less hated demagogue that pretends to favor the needs of the masses yet with the BS BDSM methods that F the masses hard while ensuring a steady if not huge income stream into the fews' pockets.
Now, this could lead to complete collapse or some really bad gangster insanity where oligarchs literally start eating each other... and I'm not the civil way via making investment bets against one another or talking crap about one another... but literally hiring countries and private militaries and thugs to.... make each other go away.
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Finally time to do some good ol' fashion trust busting.
Amazon is long sold junk at a loss killing other smaller competitors out of existence who cannot sell at a loss.
In addition, they followed Walmart wally world down the same evil pushing production to colonial like destitute nations and all production of goods concentrate into fewer goods and the quality becoming something similar to dung you find in a sewer pipe.
Investor money just kept flowing to Amazon despite their net losses year over year for decades. Plutocrats were feeding a monopoly.
No more... you invested in a money loser... you will not be able to invest in a monopoly that forces other businesses to close shop only to get price hikes after competitors are gone, and concentrated manure that's available at all stores.
Problem with all box stores...
But Amazon has spun in all directions both a vertical and horizontal monopolies.
Bust this trust...
What have the society gotten out of this?
Unable to compete with quality goods as the competitor will copy your good, and is capable of selling for a loss longer than you can stay solvent.
Consumers are stuck with crap goods and no alternatives... I ordered an item that was literally from Walmart... it came in an Amazon box. Collusion?
Most workers get paid very little and treated like crap, in a work place environment that sounds more like the Hunger Games where they literally have been exposed to practices that entailed hiring people only so they can later fire them. Purposeful meat grinders. Shit pay. Shit benefits. Shit worklife. Shit working conditions. Shit management.
An original trust fund baby from the late 1800's, the bloated and creepy robber baron JP Morgan would blush, and his already gigantic disfigured nose would grow even larger at the current robber barons' activities... And this comes from an ass hole who boasted about having a yacht that was so expensive, he would lament to the press, if you have to ask about the price, you can't afford it...
The "gilded age" lost it's outlandishness to our robber barons of today:
We've brought to life a comedy movie with Dr. Evil having his very own dick rocket, so he can go joy ride for a few minutes into sub orbital space. And bring along other rich friends that can possibly share in future expenses or he can screw his rich buddies with a thrill and spill. Like a giant middle finger to everyone in society he lifts off... the multitude hoping it just blows up... or perhaps gets stuck in orbit.
Cornering online market places so even if you want to go into business and have an online storefront... without using Amazon at least a little... your screwed...
And you're screwed if you do use their "market place" because Amazon the evil horrid abomination that they are, will eventually copy your design and sell it themselves and either drop your item completely or not show it in the algos above their copycat item.
They took over the shipping and delivering... so deliverers once decent workplace and wages and salaries go poof...
Now they make shit movies. And we get a selection of trash and extreme trash.
Time to trust bust this abomination.
Robber baron 2.0 has become a fuck fest.
Walmart, Microsoft, Google, the consolidation of media outlets to just 6... that's right six major outlets easily bought by the 100 oligarchs that exist to propaganda dispense whatever they want to and shut down any opposition voices they want, and many other companies are way beyond the limits of an obvious trust busting suit... they're more of a trust than Standard Oil, Carnagee Steel, Bell Telephone, etc.
Yet for 40 years silence because the robber barons came out with vengeance.
And well we see what they have wrought.
Now they threaten war among all nations once again... just have a not even a century 2 world wars... the resentment they have built throughout many nations... at first cowing to horrible dictatorships for cheap labor and subsidies for their operations race to the bottom.
Suddenly that resentment has spilled over and the economies of these places are falling apart... the essentially serfs of these places resentment building up...
The robber barons revisited in just 40 years the same thing that happened in the turn of the last century.
Let's start with some trust busting.... long over due.
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G OA Than we can agree we're not talking about Bolsheviks, just like we can agree we're not talking about the National Socialist German Workers' Party aka NAZI's.
We're talking about what all other wealthy and even just affluent nations have: social-capital mixed market economy (which we in the US already have with medicare/medicaid, social security, city and county owned and operated utilities, public roads including the interstate freeway system, ports, compulsory public free education at least K-12, and state funded universities, still operating state and county hospitals, many of which that when private for profit have already closed shop, etc).
You know common sense economics. For profit motive only works if competitive market principles are upheld or even occur in that sector.
Natural monopolies, healthcare, judiciary, legislative, etc. violate all competitive market principles. Making for profit motive void in producing better outcomes compared to collective democratic ownership and operations. And businesses always need oversight ensuring un-natural monopolies (business cornering a market horizontal or vertical a line of markets).
What we have in the US is a hot mess.
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@patrangela Government checks are done long ago. And those tax credit give away is just a tax return advance.
None of the money provided thus far really does anything to avoid the higher rent and mortgage prices and other prices.
At first, there was the unemployment that potentially could pay out equal wage for loss wage if laid off work. And some employers paying such shit wages that it was more than their actual wages.
That only lasted for a few months last year. It quickly was reduced last year to $300 Fed plus whatever your state contributed to unemployment which in most states is not enough to pay the bills, it just helps draw downs on savings to be not as severe.
Most people I know leaving is as follows by majority situation:
1)They got another job. And it pays more. And aligns with better career ambitions and desires.
2) They were in and out... job hopping... this one was probably a jump at quickly getting the first offer out there, but a better offer quickly came.
Hello goodbye. Employee Churn baby churn!
We can't keep anybody LOL! Not even temps via a temp service.
3) I had pent up plans due to the pandemic. Now I can do those... going back to school, or moving to this region here. Housing market made it easy her in Idaho because it got to goof ball lotto prices and now can move back home across the country and buy a home outright and still have cash left over.
4) I'm near retirement... or well passed it. I'm done. My 401K and all other investments are up, and I can sell my house in this shit stink town and rent for a while and by another from much cheaper already, and soon even cheaper elsewhere.
5) Various infliction: car accident, stroke, heart attack, etc. Cant' work anymore. All elderly workers thus far in this boat.
6) I have sick parents and/or other family elsewhere and have to take care of them. I'm going to cut my hours I work if I go back to work, do part time... but my working wasn't necessary, hubby makes enough money.
7) I have a kid now. We made enough without my work. I'm out to take care of kid and be a stay at home parent for a while until my kids a toddler perhaps.
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The very end part not to do with the subject:
Damn, you're hustler! "You're out of a job, but want to pay me money, no problem, let me sale you some "advise" for a small fee, so you can get a job, and pay me more money!"
Slimy. Sort of diminished your video about the human rights violations in these brainwashing concentration camps.
Frankly, most Americans, Canadians, even Europeans would rather not have engaged in race to the bottom economics, but it was our plutocrats who are in charge who didn't like a middle class that could actually save for rainy days, especially retirement. Allen Greenspan said the best thing achieved in his period as overlord of the Fed Reserve was making labor insecure.
It's our plutocrats that have used China and other tyrannical regimes for their serf and often slave labor.
Most of us wanted nothing to do with it. But the plutocrats bought our democracies and well its like the democracy that exists in the People's Republic of China... only a few elites control it.
Princeton study demonstrates that an individual or even collection of regular median income earners have no effect on policy. But a billionaire or even millionaire has total influence on policy.
Only thing labor sort of has is a small influence with union labor groups, and it's very small... just not completely zero as it is with everyone else that isn't a plutocrat or a toady minion of them.
So you're really going to need to get a plutocrats attention.
And fortunately or unfortunately they're more slimy than you.
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I zig my 7. I got it from my dad. And some teachers did it too. Made sure you still didn't mistake it with a 1 which is always possible even American style.
I only zigged my z's studying Air Traffic Control and pilot training, zig z's, zeros 0, and underline so they're not confused to be 2, O, or 5.
We Americans are extremely casual to the point of aloofness or vacuousness in conversation.... our conversations can be pointless. And we really don't intend an answer when we say how are you? It's more of a long hello there. And all we usually want is "good" or if not good, some sarcasm if not like "living the dream!" Because again we're just saying hi, even though it's "how are you?"
I try not to utter "how are you? unless I want a conversation. But even then I often just get, good, you? And they keep on walking. Which is fine. You just have to figure out who is in it for a conversation or has time... walking past one another on the way to somewhere, it's quick good you? Even if life sucks at that moment.
I like talking with Germans more than most Americans. More interesting and open to talk about detailed topics. In the 90's as a kid when the internet was new I used AOL, I would go into German speaking chatrooms and people who were from Germany, Switzerland, or Austria. Met several who lived in the same town, one actually lived in another subdivision, so we met up. All age groups some elderly, another in her twenties, and the others in their teens. Made pen pales with a friend in Austria. Was nice because she preferred German, so I got to practice the language a lot.
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The attempt to decouple economics from politics the two are literally inseparable was very deceptive by plutocrats... just as technological advancement is also inseparable from the both economics and/or politics.
We live well today not because of magical economics divorce from politics or technology.
This propaganda induced idea that non-political economics has actually acted as force that stifles much of our technological advancement and political advancement... because it allows the political power to be concentrated into a few who have economic power thus have ALL the power: recent Princeton study demonstrating just in the USA the average person has no influence on policies from representatives. And this is nation that has political representation and democratic foundations.
And technology often threatens such status quo wealth: Russian nobility and royalty concentrated their efforts on retaining feudalism... the slave states of the US went to civil war in an effort to preserve their market right to buy a human to their labor or whatever they want to do with that purchased human being; treated as property more than a living feeling thinking being like so much crop or livestock.
Economics is political and it is technological.
Without the discovery and studies of microbiology giving us the theory of germs, as well as further medical studies from genetics to biological development and their malformations and what can cause such deformities; we wouldn't have economic production of medicines today that are effective at better coping, curing, or even more desirable: preventing such maladies or injuries.
Without the political will to ensure drinking water systems are owned and operated by the people and required in development and oversight and much if not all operation of such natural monopoly utilities, you have what we considered third world impoverished conditions with islands of wealthy who purchase such things for themselves leaving everyone else to fend for themselves; in inequality that only festers that holds back advancing technological innovation... we can observe this in the poor nations today around the world.
Economic power can also drown out good innovation when they have sunk costs in some other production chain... say oil becomes obsolete based on technological understanding and is implementable for at least using for energy, such people with economic power and political power can eliminate any required subsidies and planning and allowance to implement new technology, at least until they make their sunk costs back and a tidy profit for their unknown estates and other possessions.
Looking at economics by itself as current economics is taught (normative political economics vs positive apolitical economics) is insane. There is no natural non-political so called positive economics. Even the statements on how an economic system works is derived by political concepts of morality in their respective cultures and philosophies. It's also in the context of the technological know how of the time.
I personally think the drive to teach economics in the so called non-political manner is an effort to make economics appear to be an observable repeatable fact based physical absolute science.
Which is simply not the case. Economics is at the very heart a social philosophy. Not even a science in the absolute qualitative and quantitative means of observation scientific law with hypothesis and experiment discerning into a credible verifiable predictive theory.
No. Economics is a philosophy.
But making economics seem like a hard physical science provides the illusion that countering or even being critical of various economic principles and maxims and other philosophical conjectures seem like fact based unchangeable observational scientific fact. Like the scientific law principle of motions by Newton. It cements an economic invention that favors a few to become considered by the many permanent and unchanging and unchangeable and just observational fact.
Sort of like how in the European past, most nations' people felt that nobility and royalty and the rule of absolute monarch was the only desirable type of government possible ordained by the gods or god, and any alteration would fail as surely as gravity makes a rock in the hand falls when dropped.
We know this propaganda to be untrue today; as most nations have a constitutional representative democracy.
But many of us have taken upon ourselves with a new sort of myth, a new propaganda. That of "positive" non-political economics, even though its dripping with politics and technology from the macro to the micro economics.
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If the US stop paying its Treasury bonds ( the debt), the same as if EU or Japan or other major countries suddenly quit paying their bonds. It would cause a cascading financial collapse around the world. Prices and interest rates on all goods and services would be thrown into chaos. Likely scenario is a massive inflationary very short term shooting interest rates up, followed by immediate price corrections and defaults, business going out due to over leverage and workers/consumers unable to pay their leverage loans forcing massive sell off of assets causing a deflationary spiral.
Of course in between the hyper inflation to deflationary spiral depends what governments try to do.
If they print money like there's no tomorrow, they extend the hyperinflation period until pricing can't be achieved with that particular currency at all... making the currency defunct like after WI the Deutch Mark or currently zimbabwe dollar and likely the eventual case for Venezuela.
If they don't print money at all, or try to spend printed money on productive goods and services needed, you get a spike of hyperinflation at the beginning as interest rates skyrocket and nations try to sell their bonds on the open market, creating a glut of US dollars on the market so US dollar is weak and worth less... but the amount of actual money in circulation is very tiny compared to the amount of debts outstanding... businesses will see price rising too fast for inputs and take huge losses, if those businesses are already in debt which most are, they start to shrink their work force, employees are in debt, they file bankruptcy along with many businesses... they walk away from houses, factory plants, commercial real-estate, and other properties... tractors, conveyors, cars, trucks, boats, aircraft, etc.
And the deflationary period sets in, nobody could pay their debts, everything is now up for sell.
Both cause civil unrest as people would take to the streets. Money being worthless means soldiers are not being paid anything either so you could see internal military divisions separate in to civil war. Even civilians capturing military stockpiles inducing civil war... and given the divide and great distances it wouldn't be a coherent civil war with two factions, but many tiny ones springing up each with their own ideals of what should be done if they achieve victory in a region.
Both would be a mess.
Since all Reserve Banking Systems today are able to just print money, it would be rare for interest payments not to be met... only in dire circumstances such as having blockades and sanctions from many countries like Venezuela or Iran with small resources this can cause their currencies to fluctuate wildly and become unstable and completely fail.
So if the US were to suddenly be sanctioned by many nations, particularly if current allies did so as well as other neutral or not so neutral nations, that would cause serious US dollar problems... but because US Dollar and bonds are held by so many nations, they would be kicking themselves in the balls too causing the worldwide financial bankruptcy.
So that's unlikely.
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Along with invention of various agg tech like processing and cultivation of various plants and fertilizers.... the other technology of medicine has greatly assisted in the growth of population.
Modern medicine with germ theory which introduced firstly innacculation to vaccination, then the big one concerning the infection of bacteria like strep that would turn to scarlet fever via antibiotics like penicillin to the various other surgical procedures like c-sections to save the life of both mothers and their babies.
Prior to such medical inventions, child mortality was great compared to pre-modern medicine.
Reduction of child mortality leads to a great number of people to survive to become reproductive adults.
Going forward in time, a natural human population limit is being introduced, in that child mortality has decreased, therefore developed nations tend to have fewer children compared to poorer developing nations. Then of the developed nations, many are forgoing completely having any children, perhaps going for adoption instead... or if they do have children, maybe 1 child which is reduction to the required 2 replacement of both parents.
In some nations, we see a slow down in birth rates, some in the negatives such as Japan and Germany and many other places. Even the US is experiencing a reduction in birth rates.
The late Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician and staticitian provided compelling figures that human population will reach a plateau of about 11 billion by about 2100, and remain at these levels. And the best way to achieve a flattening of population that ensures sustainability of earth resources, is the developing of all nations. The more developed a nation becomes, the fewer births; raising children are no longer a resource for prosperity, but a cost. Having large families a burden, not a benefit. So families are smaller. No need to have many children when they are expected to survive to adulthood nearly 99%. When before it was lower to the figure of 80% to 50% childhood survival.... or worse.
Food insecurity would bring the population to a horrid catastrophe. Even with modern medicine. Without sufficient calorie intake, medicines such as antibiotics and vaccinations and other procedures effectiveness diminish substantially.
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The type of trade we have going on is abused governments by an oligarchy worldwide to push for subsidized tax payer protected goods, and more often race to the bottom abusing impoverished often totalitarian nations extreme cheap labor, than those nations become abandoned for other cheaper labor elsewhere.
This "globalization" phenomena is not new. Since recorded history; from the late bronze age collapse that saw the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom fall into the intermediate kingdom, Mycenaean kingdoms, of the Kassite dynasty of Babylonia, of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Levant, all collapsed completely 1200 and 1150.
Mycenaean (Greek) kingdoms lost the technology of writing.
We see this through various other empires as their trade becomes so interconnected the system becomes unstable via labor that becomes extremely cheap dropping ability to demand so a vicious demand cycle occurs, sometimes propped up by available credit made to fall even harder and often more severe.
Trade only works well if an authentic comparative advantage exists: resource can only be found, or is more abundant, technological or know how skills provide better quality. But when its simply based on cheap labor, lack of external cost such as no regulation on companies polluting, poor labor practices such as no safety oversight, lack of benefits, etc. and when quality actually worse than from other markets, its no longer authentic advantage, but a short term in-authentic advantage that in the long run will drive a vicious demand destruction producing poorer quality goods and services with fewer capable of buying them over time.
Making nations poorer, and even leaving the exporting exploited nations left with nobody to sell their stuff since their domestic economy isn't strong enough to support sufficient demand either.
The effect then causes nations to immediately protect its failing industries as it expose their economies to extortion from high exporting nations.
The entire system is unstable. And seems to always occur under the same premise that its somehow new. It's not. Its the natural result of markets becoming interconnected based on the aforementioned bad motives. So often from ancient periods dating to late bronze age, to classical Greece, to Ancient Rome to Spanish Conquest of the new world, to the French empire, to British Empire, onward as early as 1920's just before the economic collapse. Always promoting the economy is different because we're not in a global economy. Then after 100, 50, 20, and as technology increases the pace just after a decade of such a repeated declaration that we're now in a new global economy, it crumbles as it did in 1929.
Trade should chiefly be on comparative advantages: better quality, abundance in a resource unable in one's own country, and main ingredient often not taken in account; they must have similar enforced laws protecting externality costs such as pollution, safety, etc. as well as labor right protections such as universal healthcare, paid vacation days, sick days, comparative labor wages and salaries, and other comparable benefits; exploitation where labor has substandard benefits is harmful to everyone in the long run, and only provides a short term to mid term sugar rush of temp low prices for one country while long term job loss and poorer pay and benefits; while temp job gain and wage increase until that nation is no longer a serf cheap nation, then their economy sinks back to where it came from without a strong domestic demand which doesn't tend to happen in totalitarian nations nor even in most republics since they're mostly oligarchies anyways.
Major piece of trade is insurance of similar laws and enforcement of such laws to protect the workers and consumers alike. Otherwise globalization is global exploitation as it always has been and always collapses in breakdown in economies around the world, often civil wars and wars among other nations.
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I agree. That's why any uprising would require beating the current police and military to the punch by turning us fellow vets and current active duty both military and police with the overthrow. To minimize the chaos of such an overthrow; keep some sort of law and order while conventions were held and a new government can be created with a new revised constitution; one that should be done openly instead of in secret like the others were done. And like many major laws have and are still being done.
And popular votes on instructions to representatives of various states or districts should be conducted, UN and other outside organizations should be allowed to test the integrity of the voting and the proceedings.
Presently, our elections are so garbled nonsense, even the UN refused and states they would be unable to authenticate our elections in the US, Jimmy Carter's organization that validates the integrity of elections has also refused to do so for the US elections. We're a mix of that idiotic of a system, and potentially that corrupt or able to be corrupted. No wonder very large sample size polls done by many organizations show overwhelming support for better trade policies, universal healthcare, better infrastructure, lesser expense by half on our military goes ignored.
But to begin such a process would require massive coordination to ensure something terrible didn't get put in its place.
Personally, when people start talking of overthrowing the government which is treason, it won't be well thought out, instead it will be done in desperation from economic collapse, with many groups going off on their own direction. And action would be taken swiftly, not in much coordination as fear of being discovered for treason wouldn't allow for much time for such efforts. Would be rather chaotic time.
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Tariffs are weak and hardly even a short term solution. They can be coupled with domestic subsidies that encourage domestic production, but without the incentives, businesses that have been producing in foreign countries have sunk costs, that is they already spent massive amounts of money to setup their factories, they won't just abandon them and say okay lets come back. You have to subsidize them to sell their factories, and build/buy factories in their home country for longer term solution.
And you can increasingly make it more beneficial to domestically produce, and more punitive to foreign produce; Better subsidy packages, bigger tariffs; even instituting quota limits that simply stops imports at a certain amount from coming in.
The goal in trade between nations should involve a comparative advantage, not inauthentic advantage in that one country has desperate or tyrannized in essence serf or slave labor thus can produce cheaper. They genuinely need to have better productivity and quality on their goods and services to be authentic comparative advantage. Or the have a supply of raw material that is more abundant than the other country.
Using tyrannized or otherwise serf labor or slave labor causes the importing nations' labor to fall in wages to that lower standard over time.
Thus all trade agreements should ensure labor standards are level across the board: civil rights, labor rights, and that they're enforced and can be authenticated by routine and random audits by various other nations.
Hence why it isn't wise to trade with dictatorships. They tend to be tyrannical to their own people. Not all act tyrannical in the same manner, some like Saudi Arabia and Dubai in particular are both tyrannical and pacify their people with monthly checks for just being a citizen... get money frequently then you'll shut up politically usually; form of bribery.
Trade needs to be with nations with similar political systems: Democratic republics with a strong constitution that allows for basic civil rights and legal remedies and equitable enforcement of such laws should not trade with absolute monarchies otherwise authoritarian dictatorships to which you can ascertain any information from that nation is accurate or trustworthy.
Otherwise, said nation will fall in their standards of living.
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And Fox News where even many right wingers and republicans that I know can't stand watching it because they themselves complain its echo chamber outright propaganda network for the rich and the RNC.
As far as youtube ad thing, they were bound to stop paying much to content makers, you enjoyed a second tech bubble, large investment money needing to be used, it was used to promote youtube get a big base watching stuff, this has attracted establish media producers to use their platform for a fee, they got what they were looking for, they used the yokel amateurs.
It's not because they're good (get views on their own to turn up in peoples recommended lists), it's because they're paying youtube instead of fighting them on copyright infringement.
Ultimate revenue stream, and deals to split ad revenues.
I know I'm jaded, but living through several various bubbles from VHS to dialup to broadband to the dot com bubble to the real-estate bubble the apparent startup 2nd tech bubble from crypto coins to youtube stars to kids writing apps that sold to a tech start up or one of the oligopolies FANG companies for a million or more ... everything is transient... hence if you're suddenly making well over the median income almost out of nowhere unexpectedly, you are probably riding that wave, so SAVE as much of that money as possible, those heaps of cash coming in won't keep coming in for long. Some of the booms can last about a decade, and through it can have a few downs and then back up and even go higher momentarily for a year before dropping and eventually fizzling, it's very tempting to think it's permanent.
Anyway, hope all who made any even fairly large fortunes on youtube put much of it aside.
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I'm a new type, From Richard Wolffe I would call it more concise terms a Co-Opist.
Someone demanding we institute a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank ran similar to the function of the Fed Reserve Bank that lends discount overnight rates to private banks.
Differences would be Co-Op Reserve would be able to lend long term at discount rates to groups of people wanting to buy out their current small or medium or even large business or begin their own business that is capital heavy directly.
Co-op charter would require all employees to hold a single vote, not volume shares, to motion for wages/salaries, capital expenditures, leadership, management, and other functions of the business; the employees would be the board of directors in ability to petition and vote for all proposals including leadership who would also provide clear defined plans, and together make business plans.
Currently banks tend not to lend much capital to co-ops for a variety of reasons, current corporate charter doesn't play well with co-ops that provide non-share everyone has a single vote for employees type constructs. So they have to become a regular LLC or other corporate charter Co-Op like WinCo Foods a big grocery store chain. Or they're relegated to even smaller retail like coffee shops, pizza, antiques, etc. But to get big manufacturing even moderate to somewhat small manufacturing or any mining or refining requires tens of millions if not a hundred million in capital to start up or take over existing firms. A method of capital formation for co-ops is needed, and would work.
Nullifying an excuse to have an aristocracy. Capital formation comes from lending from the Co-Op Reserve Bank. Employees don't want to see their business go under, so they would likely manage better when they're put in charge of ensuring it is successful, an they benefit from any profits well beyond what profits are distributed today.
So economically I'm a Co-opist.
And what's nice it only requires additions:
1) Create Co-Op Reserve Bank to lend to groups of people directly to buy out or start up a firm with a decent business plan for success.
2) Write up specific Co-Op Charters that cater to such an organization that its shares are not for sell and single voting decision and petition making belongs to every employee regardless of title of that employee.
Other business can still exist. They would compete. I'm fairly certain over time corporations will lose out to such co-ops since 1) people won't want to work for corporations where they pay so low compared to co-ops that literally share much of their profits and vote on key points on how they operate and do with the revenue. 2) Customers will like the prices and quality of products and services from such co-ops much more than from corporate businesses. Even Corporate businesses buying inputs in a B2B transaction would likely favor the co-op for the cheaper better quality input than from other alternative corporation.
So create the environment and let them compete.
Competition is after all the only reason for the profit motive being effective and providing supply to meet demand.
And of course economically, sectors that violate some or all of the competitive market principles should either be highly regulated by the people with requirements for them to respond to petitions of the people, or be owned by the government body they service; local as possible. All utilities from water, sewer, trash, roads, ports, electricity, natural gas pipelines, heating oil, fall into these categories. Oligopolies may fall into this as well like cell phone and ISP's. Healthcare and education due to several competitive market principles in violation.
Political government a democratic-republic with a strong democracy where various votes need ratification by the people... with the internet it's much easier to conduct such a ratification; similar to submitting your taxes or do online banking. You just submit your vote on a secure website.
I've taken to call it Co-opism or Co-opist.
It would be big. Won't be sunshine and rainbows everyday.
But an advancement in all peoples' well being just as the prohibition of slavery, feudal serfdom, and patronage mercantilism has done so. Just has rehabilitating the democratic and democratic republican form of governments has made life better for more people.
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Let's not pretend those factors mentioned regulate them in any desirable way.
Otherwise we wouldn't have the fucking mess we have world wide. Besides a few places that... oh they don't pretend construction industry, inventory adjustments, rental market, property market magically regulate themselves... such hog wash Milton Fried quack pot nonsense.
AT no point in any historical time when housing was actually affordable to the vast majority, did we just pretend markets run best and these factors "Self regulate' okay they did and they often did it horribly; feudalism comes to mind. But even past feudalism, you had massive emigration to places like Canada, USA, Australia, etc. where in starting in the 1860's the Homestead Act gave away free land to anyone wanting to homestead... also Land Grant Acts starting in the 1860's gave money to such persons either homesteading or buying lots to actually build on those properties; shops, blacksmiths, stables, houses, farms, etc.
And again, horrible times hit latter parts of the 1800's and into the 1900's where housing became very costly... the great depression 1929 gave way to Hoovervilles but most people in the USA were already poor. So what did they do? Many lived in "cabins"... okay they were literally dirt floor shacks made of plywood with a caste iron stove for cooking and heating.
By about 1935 you get the HUD programs that continued, but mostly phased to nothingness by the 1980's... but these HUD programs and the way were implemented; the city developed the lots placing sewer, water, and electrical distributions on the lots; subsidizing these costs; that the buyers and renters of these properties would later pay in terms of property taxes. Same property tax that exists today, but we all got the benefit of affordable housing. NOW it's done by let it be markets. Private developers are tasked to do all the roads and utilities, and at specifications to the local utility companies or organizations, these private developers than pass that cost on to the lot buyer. No subsidy anymore. But that property tax... still there.
Vienna Austria also has a good program that they still conduct today. Best in the world really.
How the world's housing market got stupid starts back in the 90's with the invention of the CDO and CLO market... which incentivized banks to pump the collateral value of real-estate so that they could lend as much as possible and as fast as possible as they were selling these loans to investors and other banks... a big pyramid and ponzi pump and dump. They no longer cared if the value of the collateral was "real" or sustainable. And after it all blew up in 2008 world wide, central banks and banking cartels like the Fed Reserve debased the national currencies to be buyers in this CDO/CLO market to keep the banks alive, instead of taking the banks over and readjusting all mortgages to a lower mark to market price; and nations unable to realize it was never a surplus housing problem that caused the problem, in fact housing construction worldwide wasn't keeping pace with population growth, it was an affordability problem that caused people to default on their mortgages.
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People who think we should just live for markets, rather than what the invention of markets is intended to allow us to live peaceful prosperous lives. Milton Friedman let it be markets is the repeated time proven idiocy of all time. Two kings of France implemented and ended up with famine, and one lost his head over trying let it be markets again; both instances the grain supply become extremely low because a year prior grain was selling for high profits. No more surplus for a bad growing season, and suddenly left with shortages and starvation.
Yeah, let a set of rules go out the window, and you're likely to see whatever mode of exchange fall apart. And the rules go back into place.
Because we don't live for markets. We use markets so we can live. And markets must be well defined and structured. Not let it be bozo the clown idiocy let markets scamper free to murder and pillage.
Even libertarians will put in their exclusions to let it be markets such as "property right protection by force, civil lawsuit to settle disputes over contracts, prohibition on individual coercion via violence". Problem is, that's what you get when you throw out all the other rules and let markets do whatever; becomes the wild west of insanity, and the results speak for themselves. You get no property rights, protection against from being beaten, extorted, murdered.
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Okay, let's let them come on over, and we can finally have government owned oil companies so racketeering isn't taking place, and use that revenue to fund government to reduce the taxes on us workers. As well as other natural monopolies that ought be owned by the people, and surplus can go toward a mixture of more capital expenses to expand operations, upgrade operations, lower prices, offset taxation, fund other programs, etc. Fine with me. And with so much revenue we can have universal healthcare as well as being paid for higher education, not just low to 0 tuition. Cool. We can actually what the study of economics reveals to us. Instead of the dogma passed off as economics in our own country so oligarchs can reign supreme until they eventually collapse their own fiefdoms.
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All discussion about politics and budget should have visual aids and access to the internet and databases. Any speech should have slides and cited source material.
Instead we have circus side show for politics, and most discussions, debates, and speeches are are without visual aids and cited source material of studies or any facts whatsoever.
No wonder various societies are dumb as fucking box of rocks, vapidity that only cares about things that don't even effect their lives directly other than give cheap thrills of entertainment. Ding bats no more about various sports players and coaches lives than they know about basic current events, let alone geography, geology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc.
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Dude, when I was a kid, as I notice all kids do, I questioned everything. So from my own perspective, nope. I even argued with my dad on the ozone layer and CFCs. I realized he was just responding with fear of losing his job at a factory that refined elemental phosphorous; didn't actually emit CFC's but worried the plant would get shut down or something.
And I was shocked at 7 years old that hospitals weren't like the police, fire departments, school, etc. Like they were and are in essentially every other country like Germany, UK, Canada, etc.
Kids think more than adults. And since they're also attending school, are fresh with scientific understanding that gets hazy after not being exposed to it and using it for a while. Case in point, as an adult, 6 years back picking up another degree in aviation, we were talking about the orbit of earth and the seasons, aviation weather class. For some dumb reason in my adult mind, not worrying about it for a very long time, I thought the earth's axis actually wobbled yearly back and forth producing the season as it orbited... don't ask why. But I was certain... but I took a ball tilted it and orbited around a center point, a pencil noted yes the pictures in the book back LOL! The tilt is fixed and the orbit from one side to the other produces Summer/Winter and in between Spring/fall... then I remember doing the same thing at like 8 with a bunch of various sized sports balls...
And of course the tilt has to be fixed yearly for the effect we see, there's no other force making the earth wobble back at that rate, only 11K year cycles like top and not that pronounced only diminishing and increasing the tilt not reversing it LOL!
I thought more as a kid. I think many of us did. As an adult you get the whisper game effect, and it all gets full of wrong thoughts we no longer question.
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I have been to Germany, UK, Canada, and Japan. Used German medical system, so much better than ours in both price and quality. Easy to schedule appointments, and for urgent care they're actually very prompt on initial examination so they can prioritize patients based on injury, illnesses, etc.
I still buy my Rx from Germany. $160 US isn't just enough to cover 20 pills about a month or so worth, same price I pay Rx from Germany covers 200 pills that covers me over a years worth supply. And Germany has 2 different versions of the antiviral that has advantages over the only one in the US.
No, our medical in the US in all terms of quality, efficiency, choice, and cost is the worst of 1st world wealthy nations. And we're supposed to be a super power?
Yeah because of our bloated military and our ueber wealthy oligarchy. USSR with its oppressed large impoverished states was also a superpower. So superpower doesn't mean shit when it comes to quality of life. Just means that nation has an empire.
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Varney acts like laws don't exist, there's no way to do anything about it.
The point is yes, that's why the system of how we organize production, the laws business ownership and shares for instance, need to change, and that's how you stop it, and fix for the benefit of everyone.
Most businesses if you add their labor total compensation with tax cost to profit, then look at that total labor cost and total profit as a percentage; labor gets the range from 5% to 20% net profits. Net profits meaning even after capital expenses to expand (hire and grow the company).
Net profits are mostly completely paid out as dividends, stock buybacks, for indebted companies they may pay down principle debt obligations to reduce their debt thus interest on their debt or eliminate debt earlier than what was scheduled.
This 5% to 20% to labor means 95% to 80% goes to shareholders that don't produce anything, and top 1% own over 2/3 of all shares, and a small 1/4 is mixed in institutional investment, and a small remaining 9% is actually owned by everyone else in your pension for those fortunate to have one, or 401K gimmick, it's peanuts as compared to:
You could literally double labor's share of profits from 5%-20% to 10%-40% and the business would still collect 90% to 60% of the profits. And everyone from the lowest paid employee on up would get double their yearly salary and wages, as well as double their benefits in a pension or 401K since this is literally doubling employee cost.
What we have right now is as absurd: as slavery, then a little less cruel: feudalism, then less cruel mercantilism.
And its utterly unstable in terms of technological advancements that require fewer to produce the same or more amount of service or product, and availability of labor supply. You have a vicious cycle of fundamental demand destruction, peoples' compensation is falling or flat.
So the effects are that you have investment money chasing investment money, consolidating in ever larger booms and busts. And credit that is borrowed for the same investment as well as consumer credit that accelerate and magnify the boom and resulting bust.
The system is becoming so illiquid, that literally every Federal Reserve Bank is literally throwing money at banks, buying their loans so the banks will end more out. Something that the defunct CBO Credit Default Swaps once did to the tune of trillions of dollars, US alone is over $4 trillion on the Fed Balance Sheet.
That will only end in the same bust, since the vicious cycle of fundamental demand destruction remain.
A co-op type of business would work better, one that the employees all have a single vote to determine leadership, management, capital expenses, compensation including benefits, etc. Co-ops do exist today, some are very large. Some still follow the same share ownership model only awarding votes based on accumulated amount of shares. And many have problems getting money to start their business as they don't reward do nothing an aristocracy.
Rather they reward the workers for the work, as its controlled by workers, not the do nothing aristocracy.
So a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank, similar to all banks in the world have a Federal Reserve Bank that lends to these private banks at a discount to promise a profit so things banks have enough cash to payback to depositors and lend out to borrowers; to provide liquidity. This Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank would have the ability to lend directly to co-ops or business who would like to turn into co-ops or a group of people wanting to form a co-op at discounted rates.
That ends the need for a harmful aristocracy, as that resolves where to get capital formation: do what the private banks have been doing for over a century now, get printed money from the government, and pay it back at a discount (making it essentially free borrowed money).
Humans discovered we no longer need kings and queens, then slave master and salves, then nobility and serfs, then merchants and nobility owners, we don't need an aristocracy and employees.
We just need employees being the employers making the decisions they're already needing to make as they do the work in the first place; and they get to chose what to do with the reward of that work as well how to expand on that success to grow the business.
And of course we need to deal with anti-competitive sizes of certain firms.
And we need to deal with natural monopolies that have been privatized. For profit motive is only provides desirable outcomes of an economy if it is based on competition. Natural monopolies violate competitive market principles, and profit motive doesn't supply any competition. Rather it creates mercantilism like cash cows for an aristocracy as they over charge rent seeking prices of their legal monopolized market for power, water, sewer, roads, etc. It's an absurdity. A complete disregard for objective economic thought to ignore the basics of the competitive market principles: the entire thesis on determining if a particular good/service sector should be private or publicly owned and operated.
And other sectors violate some if not all competitive market principles in a violent manner, such as education and healthcare, hence why over 170 countries have a universal healthcare system of some type, while only the remaining 30 countries don't.
We have some serious work to do to fix this idiot return to robber baron economic system we're presently experience today.
Either way, this system has been done before and it collapses, usually in a sudden catastrophic manner, so something else will happen. It's best to do it before we get stuck with something of stupidity like fascism of Italy and Germany or the so called Communism of USSR and Maoist China.
Let's think instead of just react. But let's act, before the collapse.
We're already seeing the reactions of a failed system as people appeal to a bully strong man or woman, appeals to authoritarianism always ends poorly.
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@Pitbull00000 Well that region has done a shitty job of implementing modern sewers, let alone even old school septic holes.
Chronic problem with people, especially in rural areas, taking dumps in fields and on roads leading to various infections like cholera and e-coli.
Not to mention the stink of it all. Human shit really is just terrible.
I can deal with horse, cow, goat, even chicken shit.
Even the occasional dog shit doesn't smell quite as bad as our poop. And our urine is incredibly rank too. Those two lingering in the air, human piss and shit... it can become gagging very quickly.
There are many places around the world, even here in the US, little pockets.
But India, its vast areas that are rank.
Tell you what, I ever become a magical billionaire, I'm going to promote India and other nations and with my own money and other gatherings of money, institute modern sewer systems.
Everyone has the right to have those things. It should be all our business to help others. And sewers are important along with running water both drinking and for irrigation.
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Pay more. People will take up jobs. Markets work both ways. Okay they don't and never had hence the dogma propounding of the illogical nonsensical mantra of free markets... markets are neither free or not free.
But you passing the baton on your small power and our collective power to make the rules of the forum to which we exchange goods and services to the few at the top.... masterstroke! OF course until that musical dogma comes to a screeching screaming buzzer halt.
Also get use to labor becoming more scarce as well as immediate lower than usual labor participation:
1) We had several millions in the US and abroad close to retirement. They actuated that by either dying and not getting there, nearly dying, or seeing others die of their same age group and deciding well fuck this time to retire b4 I'm dead too and can't. Long term labor falling.
2) People aren't having that many children as they're a cost burden. Long term labor falling.
3) Secondly, you have large numbers of people with lots of plans:
A) going back to school or other training program
B) Moving onto another career
C) Something entirely else; stay at home parent, clergy, research, etc.
D) Disabled
Short term.
4) And no growth in wages for the foreseeable future with hot potato that is the (now perpetually) developing or emerging markets. IF there's a dictatorship or hardship nation out there, they're ripe for exploitation on outsourcing everything from textiles to appliances to some foods to various other mechanical and electrical inputs etc. And also for some service sector items such as analysis, customer service, etc.
This will further increase number 2; wages shrinking more, children are simply not part of most peoples plans.
5) Technological advancement without social changes whereby the workers participating are enjoying the profits and not being treated like chattel ie commodity; than this will do the opposite:
A) Turn people into luddites ignorant mass of stupid hell bent on destroying everything that makes logical sense and rejecting reality for insanity of some dumb dip shit dogma; which never ends well. For anybody.
And you can't blame the mass of people turning to Luddite like reactions when they don't benefit but rather get ruined by such technology. The lazy at the top have to realize they have more than enough.
B) Positive potential is that people aren't as dumb as they tend to be in history and banned together in union forming and changing back the economic rule making for themselves: going into co-op enterprises making capital formation via co-op lending structures where all persons have 1 vote in their enterprise as to all aspects of the operation of the business; to democratize the workplace once and for all. So that technological advancements don't just benefit a few at the top at the expense of everyone else... until that everyone else has to send a grim message those at the top have plenty or simply don't need to exist at all. (which really a parasitical existence of these fiends are more harmful than helpful to everyone and everything and even to their own enterprises).
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It probably would take 20 years, but to do just that requires a large massive program the size of every major works of the last couple centuries combined in every country needs to be apart of it and the very least for our nation it would be a project to the combined size of: Apollo project, Manhattan Project, D-Day Invasion, Panama Canal, Suez Canal, US Interstate freeway program, etc. to fast track LFTR fission within less than 10 years, and 20 year the ultimate fusion project that is happening at rather snails pace with ITER and Wendelstein 7x.
Such a program would not be an economic catastrophe, rather it be an economic boom in prosperity both in the short term and especially the long term, a boom without a bust, since the return would be orders of magnitude extremely cheap energy and such a program that would stimulate as many jobs as combining all the great projects of the last couple centuries. Essentially, with such energy density in LFTR and especially fusion ITER/Wendestein 7x, no place around the world should ever be poor economically as scarcity of energy become moot, and we would end the use of fossil fuels for energy purposes completely reducing the impacts of climate change severity.
And with such energy abundance you can actually create various plastic compounds via electrolysis, so it would reduce fossil material use to create plastics... and those plastics can be made via biomass chips so they actually decompose in a few years as compost soil.
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Think its funny all of them are essentially the same thing.
The last one may mean a UK style system where most clinics and hospitals are government operated. Which they perform the best and among the cheapest too.
I can only say the last one differs as the transition to a completely government ran medical system would be chaotic given the fact most dental offices, periodontist, oral surgeons, family doctors, urgent care clinics like doc and boxes, and non-profit often Catholic church owned hospitals, and for profit hospitals may cut back, or go out of business causing shortage in the short and mid run.
The transition first should be a single payer via the governmental system with pricing negotiation ability on pharma appliances and drugs, and to an extent treatment itself with many of the private clinics owned for profit and non-profit. Then introduce government clinics in addition to ensure competitive pricing and ample supply, shifting toward a UK style system.
Even going so far as to produce certain appliances and drugs operated directly by the government to do the same for on big pharma. Would save tax payers lots of money and ensure ample supply of various often used drugs/appliances like insulin, or especially the not so often used items that have no true economy of scale thus the per unit price is always high in a for profit system; such an item is in clear violation of competitive market principles and would never provide affordable end user price.
The entire medical sector violates every competitive market principle. Hence why it needs to be universal publicly organized system.
A single payer system modeled off of Germany, Canada, Australia, etc. would be the easiest to implement with an introduction of government operated clinics and hospitals particularly where private medical isn't available due to rural areas of not having an economy to scale.
And I would abandon providing patent protection on all big pharma drugs and appliances. It's adding insult to injury; medical is already not competitive on all principles, then you add a regulation and interference with the market to market making it even less competitive (such is the hypocritical neo-con/neo-liberal recent mindset; you can't fuck with the market let it be, unless it means a rule that allows me to turn it into a racket!).
Not to mention most drugs and appliances well before the clinical trials done by bio-tech firms, are mostly all researched and funded by state and/or federal government at universities anyways. Reward the biotech with special R&D prize for the researchers and their workers. Currently, the biotech sector often puts in $10 million to $50 million, then sells patent rights to a big pharma for $1 billion to $2 billion; orders of magnitude more. That's an extreme award that harms everyone as the pharma owner now has to charge more per unit to make up for the purchase of the rights, and for several years only one company can supply it so they'll rent seek the fuck off it.
Give the biotech that gets qualified a good medicine $100 million to the firm as a prize or reimbursing of costs spent on the drug a percentage extra on the cost.
And give grants that allow universities to fully FDA trial their research too; not that extremely necessary for private biotech firms.
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This disconnected fuck up is always being booed every time he does some lunatic policy for his burnt coffee stands... one was to "start a conversation about race". He's fucking nuts. This is the oligarchy gone run-a-muck. This is the dangers of oligarchy.
We know what other countries have, we travel, and we talk all the time online... we can visit their fucking websites. We know we're getting fucked in the ass coming and going. Universal healthcare is 50% cheaper in every fucking country per capita with better outcomes than our idiot fucking country's system. 201 nations, 28 don't have a form of universal healthcare, and we're one of the 28.
Our systems are such a fucking fraud racketeering joke, seriously they have us paying to do our easy tax returns, other countries like Sweden, Germany, Japan, etc. if you're taking the standard deduction, the government has a website like Turbo Tax and its all free because its fucking bat shit fuck head stink finger to fucking pay to pay or to pay to get a fucking refund.
We're among the most fucking corrupt country on this planet.
I'm glad we at least have fire departments, police stations, roads, airports, K-12 education, child labor laws and prohibitions, social security while meager its something, medicare/medicaid while meager its something, because the oligarchs today would be screaming, in fact many like the Koch Bros all want us to go back the 1800's and pre WWII 1900's when essentially 90% of everyone were broke as fuck. Electricity and sewer systems weren't available until the early 1960's.
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Gravity works great in other countries, but in our country gravity just can't work, so we don't have gravity. Nor the other fundamental forces... we'll have to figure out our own fundamental forces here in the US.... and gravity only sort of works in the UK and other countries...
We literally rank lowest consecutively on studies on overall quality and availability and affordability.... we pay double of all other wealthy nations and get worse outcomes.... and I have yet to find women who can't get mammograms in Canada that's a bunch garbage... they have several clinics to get such preventative treatment.
The problem Canada has is similar issue US has in rural areas, they have to travel to a city to get some testing and treatments and operations because quite literally there is too few people and medical facilities. But they're able to travel to the nearest city if they're in a rural area and get it... we have the same problem, but next is do you have insurance, and even with insurance, will it cover enough or do you have to meet a huge deductible and pay a giant copay? How many just skip bothering with seeing doctors in the states because of costs, that turn into something chronic like cancer or glaucoma or diabetes, etc.
It's flat out insane to use the excuse, I don't want government to get involved... but you dont' seem to hesitate when it comes to police, fire services, judicial, road, ports, most utilities, etc.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/abh0460
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The problem with the politicians in power, particularly those who have been their fore decades, don't care what you or I or anyone else thinks. They do what they think will make their bribers happy, and ensure they get re-elected with the small minority they need anyway since they gerrymandered their districts so much. Everything else is just what makes them and their bribers more money, and maybe make a "positive" name for themselves in the media, a trophy to stick on their fireplace that strokes their ego.
Seriously, you can have a conversation with a Trump supporter or other right winger, and find out you agree on 90% of the issues particularly the economic issues which presented to them in a non-political way, 100%... that includes universal healthcare, idiot pricing for medicine Rx and appliances as there are no real price controls nor negotiations from Medicare, jobs programs including free college tuition and vocational training, an infrastructure plan that includes continental high speed rail, etc.
We don't have real representation, and the media it's all political theater... if you speak about something in a biased way you can get someone how hates Trump to want right winger crazy stuff just by saying Trump wants the opposite.
Between political idiocy and gerrymandering where half the voters don't bother to vote, we don't have representation.
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All my friends in Canada, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Austria, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, okay EVERY other industrialized nation is think what the fuck propaganda nut fuck do they put on their so called news shows?
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Competitive market idea that is geared toward profit motive always ends in monopoly, duopoly, or a handful oligopoly concentrated firms. The late stage of capitalist cycle before it goes bust and has to reset since it repeatedly destroys itself; that's why elements of slavery and feudalism persist along side so called capitalism even in the 20th century and in some parts of the 21st century with slave markets, concentration camps, sweat shops, etc.
Two parts to that growth that becomes absurd comes from borrowing and lending future value bringing future income to the present.
In order to pay back such insane borrowing that typically takes place under middle stage capitalism, the crunch comes that so much is borrowed that most businesses and individuals cannot pay back parts of the interest let alone the principle.
More is taken from the future and placed into the present that the future production could ever repay.
Leaving the bag to holders of various "assets" like bonds or stocks, but also of currency.
And this becomes a self driven need to continue to lend into the economy, the concept of growing the economy out of the debt, the future just has to produce more than what absurd amount was take from it and given to a few elites in the present.
Otherwise the musical chairs that is financialization collapse: another symptom of late stage capitalism.
Anyway, competitive for profit motive and borrowing into an oblivion are prime causes of the end stage of capitalistic cycles.
Ending in bankrupt nations, businesses, individuals causing a long lasting malaise often resorting at least for small period of time if not a long period into feudalistic and even slavery like tendencies to muddle through.
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If you have ever worked in any manufacturing or most jobs, you'll find that automation still requires people... just not as many. Lots of mechanics, about the same amount of QC sometimes more, but fewer operators. We're still far away from full automation.
When we have machines that can diagnose and properly order inventory and fix itself and the fixing robots can fix each other... that'll be the sign full automation is here.
I suspect we're about 100 to 150 years away from that though.
You should see some challenges to automated certain things from piping of various products and chemicals, batching, conveyor fixing and setup... robots aren't even close to able to do this, and much of the automation today just to produce that part of the product is fragile in a dynamic work environment, those robots often malfunction or have parts wear out and can't do their intended job, let alone agile and sophisticated enough to fix other automation. And operators are often still needed to constantly make adjustments.
We're far from the day of the robots taking over everything.
Oh, another sign you would look out for though that we're getting close to full automation... sweat shops will actually start to decline. Right now, they're increasing as they hop around to the most desperate nation and people.
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It's a bit overt and obvious when Bernie did very well in caucuses, which are difficult to manipulate and rig without extreme obviousness.
Seriously, in Idaho Ada county (Boise) and Bannock county (Pocatello) in the west eastern side of the state, Clinton groupies were a fringe minority group, tiny and small. Overwhelming support was for Bernie.
And the showing was gigantic.
Primaries, where you anonymously vote, much easier to cancel off votes, or simply make up the figures.
Anyway, I'm done with the DNC. It's nothing more than a branch of the Republican party.
Get over it, we're an oligarchy. An entrenched oligarchy.
There is no peaceful transfer of power to democracy, to the people.
An utter financial collapse and brutal civil war is inevitable.
Myself, my parents pass away, they are elderly, and much of my other family members, only reason I stay is families are about all you can count on in life right now, when most family are gone, I have nothing for me here, I'm skipping this country. I speak German, been there many times, love my time in all the German speaking nations, thinking that area or Canada. But we'll see what the landscape looks like because many nations will fall about that time.
But I plan on leaving this place. We're in evil empire hollowed out, in a silent collapse.... not so silent for the working class. But may catch the oligarchs and the underlying toadies off guard when they find a bullet piercing their brains, their mansions and mc-mansions torched to the ground, their hangars with their jets sabotage; blowing up on take off or landing, their yachts scuttled, and their dynastic family members held for ransom, even the toadies' family members; they're easier to capture than the big wigs. Typical shit that happens in many 2nd and 3rd world nations past, present, and future.
I'm outta here about that time... I think Canada would be okay... close to where I'm already at... just cold. May find a better place... warmer place. Whatever seems peaceful and remote from the chaos.
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I'm an avid follower of you Prof Wolff... BUT yes we need to understand the complexities we're faced with so don't sugar coat historical facts... we need sustainable change not repeated mistakes that will only end us back here in the land of stupidity.
1) Nixon's wage freeze was actually voluntary. It's difficult to say how many actually obeyed it. Lower wage workers it was easy... was a green light to all businesses owners to say no wage increases it's your patriotic duty to F yourself. Data shows though, executives and other higher end salaries continued to increase during this time.
And the result either way, it didn't work. The inflation continued.
Because inflation is always is a monetary phenomena which is a half truth or double speak... a way to lie without lying M. Friedman used to propounding his other absurdities.
It is true that increasing money supply (which was done recently in ridiculous sums) via the Feds actions... not only did they lower interest rates to allow debt borrowing to go burrr again adding to money supply to the roof... they also bought these loans from banks so banks can go out and loan even more.... QE. And on top of that, the first time ever, Congress for a period of a year allowed the Fed Reserve to purchase junk bonds... and they did trillions of the junk. Which allowed corporations from Walmart to Berkshire to American Airlines to McDonald's to Black Rock, etc. to issue more junk bonds to do whatever they saw fit.... much of it repurchasing their stocks... repurchasing of stocks add no value and only useful in price manipulation of stock and bond markets.. a short term buying pressure so individuals who have lots of these shares and/or bonds can sell into the high prices.
Government spending has little to do with the inflation. Wages have absolutely nothing to do with this particular inflation... wage inflation can only occur if wages are rising faster than inflation. They're not. Using the CPI numbers (which you can double or triple to read the actual levels of inflation because of what is removed from the figures... Arthur Burns really took a knife to it back in the 70's then realized he was a moron and put some stuff back in, but since then CPI components have been mutilated to the point of near meaninglessness), but using the CPI numbers recently... inflation at 8% while wages growing only 4%... wages aren't even keeping up with inflation... therefore wages are not causing the inflation.
It's monetary policy. The excessive liquidity in the market.
Since money supply is introduced via borrowing, it's large amounts of borrowing. Much of it used in speculation. We've turned into a speculative driven economy... a horrible type of unstable market of boom bust nonsense that oscillates itself to the point of complete collapse.
The price control and ration stamp method of taming inflation is unlikely to be something available to us at present, due to the power dynamics.
It is like the enlightenment to prior demanding an absolute monarchical system to produce a constitutional monarchical system.
Because many bells have to strike at exactly the right time to circumvent this inflation.
Not only would you need price freezes, you must increase supply because this would cause producers (owned by the oligarchs) to both become resentful they can't exploit for profits the imbalance of supply and demand, but also it does cause concern that an oversupply may happen and producers don't want to be stuck holding the bag of oversupplied goods and services.
Therefore you would need a subsidy to produce more quantity supplied on purpose to ensure shortages didn't result from the price freezes.
Then price controls would work... whatever you do to the demand side (price controls) you must also do to the supply side (subsidies to keep supplies going/increasing).
I just wanted to point out, realistically (because we're in the absolute monarchy and what you want is to abolish it and go with a full tilt republic) we're stuck at least for the moment in this idiotic debt based monetary system held in check by the plutocrats (the rich).
So raising interest rates is the only way to bring down the inflation at present.
And of course this will crash the economy... but doing nothing will also crash the economy in a type of hyperinflation and price instability.
Going forward we need to propound better alternatives to this system. As this system will be on its knees. Again. As always.
But we need to be clear minded. There will be no peaceful transfer from this plutocratic oligarchy. It will eventually be violent. And it's likely it will go down under it's own contradictions.
Therefore we need to be as articulate and factual as possible in the devising of a better system. Knowing what happened to prior attempts, the undoing of prior attempts, etc.
A new system that uses co-op driven model for corporations where all parties: shareholders, employees, even customers have 1 vote per all aspects to the operation of the business... ability to petition for various proposals and have them voted upon... no matter the tenure of the employee or the number of shares the person owns... 1 vote and 1 vote only.
In addition to democratizing the workforce... a monetary system that is not a private cartel banking system... but one that is put in place by elected people with defined term limits and sanctions on future employment within the banking and financial system to which they once regulated. And all of government elected officials having for life sanctions on employment or consultancy of any kind afterwards in any sector to which they regulated. Keeping the Fox from guarding the Hen House.
In addition to democratizing the workforce... abolish gerrymandering. No more would district making for votes be conducted by the victors of an election... that's absurd to where we have elected people picking their voters. Instead of the other way around. Therefore we would use unbiased statistical district drawing to ensure the mix of votes are indeed the majority votes of the people electing the persons in office.
In addition we need revamp the banking system... similar to the Glass-Steagal Act that prohibited deposit banking to do speculative investments... placing a firewall on commercial banking.
Banking needs to be back to the heart of what banking was meant to be... a place to deposit and save money, and allow a pool of this deposited money to be lent by individuals and businesses to better their lives with reasonable repayment terms that don't end up in a debt trap.
In addition to lending... new lending rights and methods must be conducted... over the course of a loan should the person default over periods of time and the amount of fees and interest equal over 200% to 500% of the original principle borrowed amount, no more interest maybe charged and compounded. Further more 90% of remaining amount be reduced and held fixed with no accumulating interest. Or even simply written off forever. Because the lender eventually did receive the 100% of the lent money plus an additional 100% 500% of the lent amount in profits... ending potential debt traps. That are absolutely absurd and help nobody on the demand nor supply side.
And let's invoke universal healthcare as all other nations have already done. As well as universal higher education and vocational training as most other nations have already done.
This is a no brainer... I mean we have police, fire, roads (most roads), most ports, etc. even utilities in most parts of the US and all other nations known to be natural monopolies and other competitive market principle violations... form into a collective method.
What we're needing is a complete redo out of this return to robber baron idiocy. This imbalance exploitation economy that always results into an oscillation of boom busts until it tears itself apart.
The concept of market efficiency is way over done and completely falsely propounded... markets are great and efficient at squandering out whatever you don't want for whatever you do want.
I need something, market exists I might be able to go get it at whatever the market will bear.
I don't need something, market exists I might be able to sell it at whatever the market will bear.
That's it. They're not smart. There is no planning no matter how layer upon layer markets stack with futures and options and other nonsense including outright insurance pools... they do not plan.
They can't plan.. that is not their function. There function is simply to trade. To get something for something else as quick as possible. That's it.
They cannot foresee potential bad crop yields to come... or too good of yields to come both causing an imbalance of supply... and they cannot foresee high or lower of demand.
There is no planning... they simply respond. The idea markets do otherwise is completely bogus as evident in the imbalances we constantly see in markets today in the boom bust economic activity over the past 100 years.
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And that's the problem, the propounding of so called market efficiencies benefit only those people making a profit via exploitation of these boom bust cycles.
A fair trade is one that you bought at par an item from the market, got the value from it during your holding of it... then decided to sell at par to someone else so they too can get the value of it, and you got the value of the proceeds at par to buy whatever else you need. Boring market... yes. But boring is good. One might say, without profit motive why did the person buy the item at par? Well, if it were a stock, during the period of holding the person got dividends. It had value. If it was a hammer, they used it for building something. Then they decided to sell the stock or hammer because their desire for the dividends are no longer there, they see some other opportunity elsewhere. Construction is done, they don't need that hammer.
Other person buying now can enjoy those benefits.
Break even trade... the fairest value... nobody is exploited in the trade.
But our economic system for profit needs this imbalance to exploit and take excessive money from one side of the deal.
This is a recipe for instability and eventually a boom bust idiocy. We should be narrowing bid ask spreads, not wanting them to widen as we do today in a liquid market... people like to trade in liquid markets... same concept... less exploitation and more fair market trades.
Therefore the over propounding on gigantic profits is a problem... that is desiring huge imbalances in order to drive economies, and that is outright asking for a collapse.
Lots of things need to change. Because this idiocy we're only repeating is become to potentially devastating in their eventual demise... with advancements in weapons including nuclear weapons, we cannot afford to keep this cycle that is the very definition of insanity.
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No matter what political persuasion one is, tends to be if their economic circumstance at the moment is wonderful, they see nothing wrong in the moment, and subsequently with the future. Even if it's obviously bad in the moment or in the near future, let alone long run (15 to 20 years).
Things are great for me, so everything must be wonderful or at least okay, right?
Once hardship happens, they lose a job, and have to take on a lower paying lesser benefits, housing somehow goes up in total cost as a proportion to their income, their nest egg gets destroyed by collapses in their investments, etc. only then do they start to complain.
This concept is among all types of people.
Case in point, 2012 I was remarking how ridiculous ACA "Obama Care" was to my liberal brother. He know's I'm also liberal. At that time, life was great for him, bought a house at near rock bottom price (the flippers only paid $95K, he paid $140K, but now appraised $205K), he loved ACA, it allowed is to kids to retain under his insurance. And he was making well over $23 an hour, had over 20 years at the plant he was working at, so max 30 day per year vacation, etc. Things couldn't be any better.
Then 2015, the plant he worked at, announced they would (and did) close summer 2016, and moved to undisclosed area; another part of Idaho for cheaper wages.
He suddenly hated ACA Obama Care, as health insurance deductibles soared, and he had to float to a couple jobs until he found one he liked, some he tried paid near what he was making, but he hated it, someone died due to safety problems a few days after he quit, and found the plant he did like, but despite liking it, it pays substantially lower than the other place he worked at for over 20 years, and of course lower pay than the unsafe ones he floated through.
They were forced to use his wife's work insurance which was very expensive, essentially her even lower wage was sucked up by just the premiums. At least the plant he likes and works at now does have better benefits that they all converted toward; the benefit plan still sucks.
Things suddenly aren't so wonderful when it happens to you.
It shouldn't take personal misfortune to realize the obvious dysfunctional system.
Inherent problem with our so called love of "individualism" goes too far. You become snookered into being a self-centered asshole, which sooner or later bites you in your own self centered individualistic ass too. In the way we become a collective rather than individualistic anyways, a collective of declining prosperity and increasing misery.
Because at that point, its too late to do much about it.
You are and everyone else are already beggars without much power to anything about it. You're now too busy trying to just survive.
The next economic crash to happen will leave many of us simply unemployed, the lucky ones will be the underemployed. I don't think there will be the problem induced self-centered individualism when everyone is forced into collective misery by their individualistic dogma that was shoved down their throats.
It will be an equal opportunity depression for at least 70% of the working population.
You're looking at people forming communities to storm national guard armories and the like, to eek out some type of retribution and compensation. But most of the oligarchs and near rich will have likely flown the coop, to some safe haven nation, if any exists.
So any such rebellion would be a hollow victory; they'll still have food shortage, utility shortage, middle luxury goods shortages, increased crime and lawlessness, and basic civil disorder even among their own gangs/communities.
Unless they can pull their heads' out of their asses, and do the much needed reform.
We have, I guess 5 to 7 years tops, to make peaceful change until the system implodes/explodes.
I'm doing fine myself right now financially. But I can see how unstable and dire straights the system is in: over leveraged in everything this time: total stock market margin/debt, auto debt, student loan debt, increasing credit card debt, commercial debt, corporate debt, and housing debt that has now begun default rates not seen since the 2008 real-estate crash already. Even if you have savings of $200K to $500K combined in liquid cash or equivalence, you're not likely to whether this next storm unscathed.
The silly money has already started to leave internet media bubble like youtube, twitter, other miscellaneous internet advertising schemes, etc.
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back in 2011 was doing customer service, some guy was telling me how he just put his entire life's savings into silver; it was I think $30...
I couldn't keep my thoughts to myself, all I could say is oh no... don't do that. And I had to explain as a childhood collecting silver in the 90's and my uncles loss in buying literally tons of silver in the 80's, and gave him some websites on the supply of silver letting him know the biggest consumption of it was use in film making silver iodine, that's basically obsolete. And every metal mine still processes it as a bi product. It's other uses are also declining. It's why you don't see many only silver mines in development. Most of its other non-photography uses, the silver is recycled and not taken out of supply.
I hope he sold about that time because I recall in crashed back to $14 to $20 range. And he bought at $30 or higher... his life's savings.
I think he started having second thoughts of holding on to the stuff.
I said, do it for fun, but don't do it for investment. If that's your life's savings, get rid of that silver! Gold would be better. But really consider all investment options; and make sure you have cash savings for immediate needs: rent, food, transportation, etc.
Don't put all your money in one place. Nor all your savings and/or investments.
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Hmm I wonder if he'll have my area in the rapid fire...
BOISE IDAHO THE BIGGEST BUBBLE OF'EM ALL.
Okay. He did.
LOL! ;)~
And it's a joke here. Low wage serf state.
People from CA and back east NJ NY etc. many are not "work at home" folks, but literally just wanna try the west out for size. So their wealth, if any, was selling what they owned there for relatively large sum, and misunderstanding the prices as they conform to the job they will likely get... you thought you could make $20 to $30 an hour or $60K to $70K... nope. Try $14 to $18... or $28K to $39K; they thought wow! Look that home is going for $140K or $180K or $200K (depending the size and location in the state)... what a steal!
With cash from selling the other home, they have $60K to $300K... and slam down full cash to buy out right, or also take out a bigger loan to pay up asking or beyond the asking price.
Their wages will never support them.
Some realized this pre-pandemic, and have taken advantage of the pandemic extra boom to get out while they can.
It is a culture shock to some on how despotic employers are compared to other places around the country.
Renters are chief among them who have left (as it's easier for them to do so), some thought they could rent for a while and wait for a correction as it was already absurdly over priced according to wages/salaries in 2016 thru 2018.
But rents now are surpassing mortgage payment resets after teaser rates that forced many to default.
RV camps are full in every city in Idaho from tiny towns to the few larger ones. And in between.
Just sort of funny that we came up as the number one disaster area.
I mean, I understand it's insane loony toon, but thought that could be happening in other places and even more crazy way.
Guess we get the craziest award.
So his thesis, they "remember" is not true at all.
There are reasons some areas hit hard haven't built again, they truly did over build supply to the job and population ratio.... or the economy itself just sort of continued to sputter.
Low wage state Idaho has the best commodity ever for an overall demand diminishing macro economy:
Super cheap labor.
This doesn't support housing price increases though.
In general it was never a glut in housing construction both in multi-dwelling nor in single dwelling in the USA.
For decades now, construction per 1,000 households have declined due to various policies that hurt all people: owners and renters.
Old school way of city planning was our taxes actually went to the development of utilities and roads, etc. You know, to all our benefits. Amazing.
So that cost wasn't passed on to the buyer; as the builder who owned the property and house never paid for those things or only paid a small portion of any of that; they only paid for the construction of the house itself and were willing to sell at that marginal cost to marginal revenue.
Introduce to the changes since about the late 80's thru the 90's, city planning changed to developer driven planning.
Passing on the burden to developers for paying construction on all utilities and roads, these developers spend the money and hand them over to the local utility companies or authorities for operation for free; then sell the units built with that added utility and road and parking construction expenses.
Causing the price to go up; passing them onto the buyers.
Cities and utilities alike love it as they pay nothing to expand their roads and utilities.
Builders and home owners take it in the pants. This reduces the supply over time. Both on demand and supply side; as it puts barriers to both builders and buyers.
In addition, poor housing regulation enforcement in pushing away speculative fervor monopolizing sort of occurred; loop holes in getting around max existing home purchases per person or entity.
This results into asked up housing that sits mostly vacant. Or empty lots that sit vacant for years... especially for some who want the casino of 10x to 100x their windfall if they can convert the land for commercial zoning. Another speculative stupidity that should have been nipped in the bud; commercial real-estate.
This only encourages reckless slum lords full of debt taking on more debt speculating on real-estate for rental purposes, much of which sits empty and in repeated foreclosures which can take a while to resolve.
As well as reducing housing if they become abandoned blight.
And of course grants and subsidies to build housing have diminished to nearly non-existence.
Supply of housing has for 40 years diminished. We have vast housing problem.
Construction starts per 1,000 households from 1960 to 2017 including single family and multi-family houses:
1960-65 peak 29.0 units
1970-75 peak 35.3 units
1975-80 peak 26.8 units
1983-88 peak 20.0 units
1990-94 peak 15.0 units
1995-2000 peak 16.0 units
2001-05 peak 18.2 units
2006-10 peak 5.00 units
2011-17 peak 9.5 units
As you can see, the goods weren't met.
It was simply a pricing speculative bubble not met by supply of homes going up.
Rather supplies continues to trending down.
Financialization does nobody any good.
It makes goods and services over time more scarce; destroys supply.
And that's how finance sector is taking advantage of the situation of the over all macro economic trend for the past 40 years:
Macro economy that destroys/diminishes demand, the only way to make money is to destroy/diminish supply.
And this they have succeeded.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
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You are not the only one I've heard reports to this, and benign channels that talk about how to make a computer to composing music to discussion on Tolkien or Ancient antiquity etc.
It's not about silencing, it's about preserving cash to show they're able to make the already revised downward revenues. Again, Ad revenues have been dying. Lots of companies since 2021 halted buying ads as they didn't need to, and also wanted to fluff margin, instead they've cut back on ads since everything was selling like hot cakes and continues to do so, while cutting back on ads, they've raised their prices... they can reduce ads and increase prices is a glory to retailers and manufactures alike. Including service sectors.
That's the reason for the big decline in tech stocks during 2022, and still tepid bear market rally on the handful of the once high fliers. Ad dollars are vanishing. No need to advertise, and can raise prices at the same time.
Won't get better until after a recession hits and sales on manufactured and service goods goes down; and even then there won't be immediately the money available for much advertising; that during advertising during a recession generally doesn't increase quantities goods sold. Only price cuts do that.
So not a conspiracy on your content. It's more likely just an economy heading for either a deep recession or stagflation recession.
Economically, things are in a changing point.
The next 10 to 20 years we could literally see various companies like Facebook now Meta become the AOL of the 90's. Google could become the yahoo of the 90's. Amazon could also implode as their margins were always very small, feeding on investment and debt from junk bonds to loans to shares issuance to stay afloat, often making losses quarterly if not yearly; could become the first internet style Kmart or Shopko's. Even Walmart WMT has been closing many stores over the past 5 years in the USA as many parts of the country have fallen that far into poverty that even Wally world is too expensive for shopping, and WMT relies on bulk selling activity to make a profit or break even.
It's economics.
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German, the days of the week are a greatly changed than in English from the former god names. Montag, Sonntag, and Donnerstag (Moon day and thunder day, and sun day) is the only really close remaining one... Dienstag/tuesday is "service-day", Mittwoche/Wednesday (midweek), Frietag/Friday "Free day", Samstag/Saturday comes from Sambatztag or Sabbath day.
English Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday are all literally pagan still. You could argue Friday is much changed closer to old English and closer to modern German Frei "free". But if you do include Friday, than all our days in English have still their obvious ancient influences.
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We need to give land votes, because giving people votes is too much democracy. With must be center of the road, and proportion the sticks where no-one lives with more votes to pretend there are more people there.
WTF? What a bullshit system. Rural gets magical more weights? And we wonder why we have dip shit in chief today?!?!?!
We wonder why we have a fucked up system:
1) We pay to get our refund for over paying our taxes as required by our proportional tax quarterly system; our congress so corrupt Turbo Tax and H*R Block lobbied to block the IRS to come out with a quick online calculator instead they must list those "free" services that you find out are nothing free when this form it needs an upgrade $14 or $28 or $75 to do one fucking form to get a foreign tax credit because I paid foreign tax on a dividend so pay $14 for the "upgrade" to get $4 fucking dollars... or try the other contractors to see if they are truly free for that particular form you need. One required more an fee for doing a Healthcare Saving Account forms. WTF?
2) We have no universal single payer healthcare system.
3) We have indentured servitude loan method for colleges to racketeer of the student loan system instead of free tuition for higher education or vocational education.
4) We no longer have a robust housing subsidy system building houses, developing properties with sewer, electricity, etc. and apartments and we scratch our ass wondering why rents and home prices keep going up, even during the so called boom, it wasn't a boom in construction, but a boom in prices, construction per 1,000 house holds during the 60's and 70's was 32 to 28 new constructions, boom era 18 and currently only 9 units per 1,000 since 2015...
We're not building enough homes for people throughout our country, WE DON'T HAVE A BOOMING ECONOMY BUT A STAGNANT SHIT HOLE DEAD ZOMBIE ECONOMY.
5) We have a mess with no oversight monopoly formations in medical, financial, ISP, and tech. 6) Our foreign policy has been a nightmare to Central and S. America with coup d'etat just in the last decade in Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, Columbia, Panama, and attempting outright in Venezuela with embargos. Assassinating military and dignitaries similar to how tyrannical dictatorships like Saudi Arabia did to a journalist, we spend $700 billion in DOD spending while the next 8 highest spending combined don't spend that much on their DOD, and that $700 billion doesn't account for up to $300 billion in contingency spending (costs for replacing spend arms and deployment costs).
We're such a fucked up nation it's painful.
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Table of elements based on each additional proton in nucleus creates a heavier element from 1 proton hydrogen all the way to Uranium at 92 protons.
Number of protons at the center of a nucleus of an atom is called the atomic number.
Very important because that proton determines how the element chemically behaves.
You can predict a new element by just adding another proton. So 115 means that's how many protons. That's the beauty of the table of elements Mendeleev invented, is that you can use it to predict elements by just adding protons knowing that's what distinguishes one element to another. And more sophisticated methods later on can somewhat help determine how many neutrons may cluster with the proton at the nucleus. As elements increase more neutrons than protons occur. Due to the weak force neutrons and protons can fall away (nuclear decay) and either just lose a neutron keeping same amount of protons sometimes becoming a stable form of that element, or lose a proton going down an element or even splitting going way down in protons to two liter elements.
"Based on other elements in the same group he predicted the existence of eka-aluminum, eka-boron, and eka-silicon, later to be named gallium (Ga), scandium (Sc), and germanium (Ge). Mendeleev predicted the atomic mass of each element along with compounds they each should form."
I can predict an element 120 will exist. The highest so far created (because they're all unstable and decompose usually within a fraction of second).
And that's the other part, not only did he just add a proton which anyone who understand the table of elements can do, and understands we can artificially create these higher elements by neutron and/or proton bombardment that eventually causes an extra proton to develop.
Lazar said the element 115 would be stable; that it wouldn't decay; not be radioactive.
Element 115 has been created, and it decayed within microseconds, it's as unstable as all the other elements above uranium.
In fact so far no element above uranium appears to be stable, and most do not occur naturally in our solar system as elements if they do form by the normal methods of a collapsing star, only last for as little as years to only a few million years. Our solar system is 4.5 billion years old.
So that doesn't provide any evidence Lazar's story. Any school kid who's educated on the period table of elements can come up with any element. Element 120 or 140... at some point we'll create it. That's no prediction.
It's like saying we can have a 20 cylinder car. And someone builds it. There is no prediction value.
And worse, he did make a prediction the element 115 would be stable. It isn't.
So it's evidence he is bull shitting. It's not positive evidence either way.
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Our political system is a phony gimmick pretending to democratic representation, but is actually a mafioso oligarchy. Seriously, 45% of the voting population didn't even vote in the general election, this is what you observe in dictatorships when they hold their phony elections to reinforce their divine bullshit to rule.
And of course they don't want us to vote, but if we don't pay our taxes, attend jury selection for jury duty, fail to attend any other court subpoena, avoid the draft, not sign up for selective serve (draft), you're going to not only pay a fine, but possibly serve jail time.
Oh but don't worry about voting, you'll be fine if you don't show up, no fine, no jail time, no court trial...
Again, dictator methodology of rule.
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This is the same group that would be pushing to keep slavery, child labor, prohibit collective bargaining, keeping monopolies, no labor rights whatsoever including no safety in workplace or in housing development, anti infrastructure building such as roads, rails, ports, electric grid, sewers, water works, R&D for medical, electrical, food, etc.
They're pro cruel and death and stupidity; if something could be described as evil, there you go.
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Musk put a lot of people in harms way pretending as a con he is that he developed a a battery worthy of storing such amount of power in a lithium battery. Rather he did nothing of the sort. The con just said, okay let's use the same lithium batteries that were already known to not handle over time small wattage power of a lap top and cell phone. Which are notorious of thermal runaway. And that's storing milli amps of power. Not kiloamps or mega amps.
So China is demonstrating these fire starters are all they are. Even prior to the craze in electric vehicles, little electric powered go carts using lithium batteries are known to thermal runaway. Along with golf carts that used lithium batteries. Most electric forklifts and the like that have been used for over 40 years, us chemical sulfuric acid batteries the same type of batteries used in regular combustion cars.
All EV's are a danger, and only made worse with cheaper half baked manufacturers in China. But they're all horrible.
Musk was a con. Pure and simple.
TSLA does have fires not daily only because very few are actually sold, rather its more weekly. And of those who buy these things, they're mostly a trophy that's not used very often. So they're not exposed to the elements and subjected to potential battery damage... bumpy roads and the like.
I suppose we can be thankful the con Musk didn't try to immediately push the better yet even more potentially dangerous hydrogen fuel cell systems... these are better in that they are way cheaper to produce not requiring the lithium or cobalt or nickel for the battery, but just a tiny amount of nickel and some other metals to produce some small rods to produce electricity from the hydrogen that turns into water. But hydrogen gas is explosive when mixed with atmospheric air, so a break thru in safety in both the tanks containing H2 (hydrogen) as well as safety in refueling the vehicle with hydrogen is needed... also another bonus on hydrogen fuel is that it's relatively cheap to produce via reverse the same electrolisis from H2O to H2. So the H2 gas stations can be produce at your home and right at the fueling station. And refueling H2 is as fast as normal fossil fuel vehicles. But again, a series of safety protocols need to figured out in order to keep re fueling staitons in becoming bombs.
Lithium batteries to power things more than a lap top and cell phone were known not be commercially viable as the batteries are known to degrade substantially over time and any damage to the battery only makes it worse. So holding megawatts to killowatts of power is just turning those batteries into immense fire starters. Lithium burns and can even become explosive in the presents of water; just as all alkali metals: sodium, potassium, etc. does. Exception is H1... that is always bonds with another H1 atom so its H2. Hydrogen just becomes immensely explosive in the presents of a spark, any heat ignition form static electricity, if sufficient mixed with atmosphere air becomes a big boom. If H2 is not mixed and gets sufficient heat or flame or spark, it will create a torch immediately burning itself out, leaving steam of water and liquid water as it H2 burns in the air creating water H2O... but also lots of heat... and again mixed with N2 and O2 in the air, becomes explosive rather than a stream of H2 torch if burnt in concentration.
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On MSN.com money segment nothing but articles about how the rich would just avoid paying any tax, it's enough to say fuck you, none of us workers can get away with tax evasion, and neither will anyone else. If the legislation is written well, as is income tax and payroll tax, you try you go to fucking jail. And no more pathetic slap on the hands penalties, for tax evasion for anyone, you avoid taxes on purpose the penalty is a large percentage of your wealth like 25% for every count found guilty.
And no, high margin tax rates wouldn't as per historical tax periods throughout human history.
1) Companies and individuals tend to spend the money on capital growth investments which employs more people, they tend to also be more generous on employee compensation.
2) It reduces inequality and dampens oligarchy which is an incredible threat to democracy and prosperity for all.
3) In our unfortunate trickle down piss on the mass of people economics, it's where most of the money has been accumulated toward. Almost like 18th century France where the nobility weren't taxed nor the clergy, only the "3rd estate" were taxes: mass of workers, peasants, and merchants. They hadn't enough income to tax to make up for the national budget. Simply put, all the fucking money and most of the wealth was in the hands of those not being taxed.
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I really figured after it spend all its investment money buying out competitors it would be bankrupt and some other one would become a fad.
Never realized they would make money with ads and other constant stream income deals with phone manufactures and telecoms as well as with other media giants.
Keeps their monopoly intact. It's why I'm very sure Facebook should be broken up. So should google. And face it, Microsoft long ago should have been broken up or made into a utility.
Fact of the matter, most of what's on the internet including the ISP itself is a utility. Requires huge numbers of patrons to produce any revenue thus profits, and the barriers to entry are smaller than posting an ad in the local newspaper or Craigs list or thrifty nickle or whatever.
The only way profit can be made is via monopoly, which makes the profit motive moot because profit motive is only desirable in that it can drive competition. In this case, it does the opposite just so someone can make profits.
Oh well, same story about many other sectors of the economy: education, medical, emergency protection services including ambulance, fire service, police, judiciary, natural resource extraction, utilities such as water, gas, electricity, internet, telephone, etc.
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Being close to Utah having several extended family members and friends living there, Utah isn't as right wing as people would think. They're like Idaho, they don't vote much to begin with, most don't even know their local state rep or even mayors.
And of the large Mormon influence, several including many of my older relatives like my great aunt, and my late grandma are deep liberals; they lived through the great depression in cabins (dirt floor shacks/sheds) as children and remember the actions of FDR that quickly provided decent pay and modern housing with plumbing, electricity, an complete foundation floors.
So you have a faction of liberal Mormons and right winger Mormons. The younger generation of Mormons were brainwashed by the 80's Reagan era. The older generation still hang on with liberal concepts and still shun GOP due to Nixon.
So you mostly have people who don't bother to vote. A huge amount that don't. So all that has been winning GOP right winger legislation has been a small plurality that actually bother to vote.
If people feel compelled to vote and become politically active to at least sign petitions and follow up in elections and primaries, you can see things change quickly even in Utah.
And of the right wingers, they hate Trump. They don't even try to defend him. Instead they'll change the subject to anything but politics while decrying how shitty Hillary is. But they won't defend Trump a Dump like they did with Bush.
And that's a state that's essentially a theocracy, or as close to one can be without completely trampling on the federal constitution.
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I know some genuine gender dysphoria and some who are probably having something else.
Either way, it's such a small tiny minority, most stay in the dark, one I know you wouldn't know and she never told me, but I did know others in the LGBT community and they confirmed. She wouldn't wear a swim suit, as she hadn't gone through the surgery. But body frame was indistinguishable from a woman. A very sexy woman too.
I guess I just don't care, and don't see any harm in them thinking their women. I do draw the line if they're completely male looking in a dress, or particularly if they compete in sex divisional competitions particularly athletics as this isn't fair based on average body difference.
What I think her stick is, someone with a stub or still with a dick is starting to bounce in her vagina playground. Women are their worst enemy. Vicious cats. Hell hath no furry like a woman ticked off... and just about anything can tick them off, especially invasions on "their turf".
They're like this in social strata from work places to friend places... women are mean to each other... again their worst enemy. Catty as fuck. So glad I'm a dude. :) A non-tran-dude! :)
And I feel bad for those who have potential or actual gender dysphoria.
As for the kids, they shouldn't until they fully develop 18 or older to even begin any type of treatment. That stuff can really cause physical and mental problems forever if misdiagnosed.
That's easily agreeable along with athletic competition for transgender in sex divisional athletics as it can create an obvious disadvantage to non-transgender women.
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The games should pay for themselves, not tax money.
Flat out.
Tax money needs to be to the public good, infrastructure, healthcare, housing, education, utilities, etc.
Entertainment is among the items that include luxury goods, and even most basic goods foods, clothing, containers, electronics that can use non-tax revenue sources. I make a small exception for farming to ensure stability in raw food inputs.
Entertainment like these other goods are not natural monopolies like utilities, do not have inelastic demand curve like healthcare and education and roads and rents and house/condo prices.
So stop supporting subsidies for stadiums for games using tax and other governmental based revenues. It's pure idiotic as having a bloated military you don't need, or subsidizing already profitable enterprises.
And I wouldn't do Rio because quite literally the buildings weren't quite finished when the Olympics started: already in neglect, and it damn near bankrupted the budget. They're in even worse shape today. It wouldn't do the stimulus your hoping. Rather a resource drain. Money would be better directed toward improvement in housing, education, utilities, infrastructure, etc. again directly. Not for the motive for putting on a game every 4 years. It's throwing a mountain of money at a problem and hoping a few currency notes will go to where it's needed. It's absurd.
So to solve the problem: the locations and the source of revenue must be obtained first by private non-governmental entities.
If games have to be smaller scale, so be it. That's what's actually affordable.
Perhaps if you want a show of world solidarity and peace put together a Golden Era Refurbish campaign in which the most needed country all nations including some government money and investor money goes into these nations to provide funds for such items: Schools, sewers, power systems, update mass transit and new transit, roads, ports, etc. fully funded so not to leave the nation with a mountain of debt.
And a big firework and small mini Olympic like celebration at the beginning and end of the event.
At least the effects would be well worth it for everyone instead of entertainment for the drooling idiot fool masses and ego stroking for the aristocracy.
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Our country (US) spends about 1/3 of Federal income tax money (excluding social security and medicare payroll tax) on military (DOD) budget; 2016 $1.836 trillion Federal income tax revenue so 33%.
But if you including payroll taxes like social security and medicare since that money does go to the general fund, it becomes diluted down to a range over the last 30 years from 17% to 20.9%, back to about 16% in recent yearly budgets.
Since medicare/social security revenue does go to the the general fund, your social security and medicare dollars are going to fight wars instead, congrats.
Our GDP is $18.57 trillion dollars 2016. We spend about $600 billion a year or 3% of GDP.
Our country spends a fortune on our military.
Hence why our people haven't a pot to piss in; no universal healthcare, drug epidemic particularly opium drugs are killing 64,000 per year, more than the death count per year than the Vietnam war, suicide rates are higher than ever calculated at 44,000+ a year.
So yes, war costs even in modern era, a fortune. And hollows out the nations that thinks they need to form an empire or be world's police, or is controlled by an oligarchy that is momentarily making fortunes off providing all the war inputs.
This puts such nations in a nasty unstable position that eventually sees their empire collapse.
https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
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Capitalism. It's a complete fiasco. There is a level of planning that is required. It's not all about profit motive. Macro ECON 101 teaches us this. Competitive market principles apply to ALL sectors of the economy when evaluating the how much planning aka regulation and whether one sector can even function fully in profit motive... natural monopolies nope. They're not even competitive, hence why most water works, sewers, garbage, electrical distribution even electrical generation is city, county, and/or state operated. Same with most roads, ports, fire departments, schools from K-12 to universities which are (surprise) public state universities.
We can't pretend "capitalism" or "let it be" laissez faire capitalism works. It has never worked. And when attempted with various sectors it falls apart sometimes in the same year it was attempted sometimes after a boom up to 4 year period than bust in a disaster that leads to war, civil war, famine, plague, and outright misery.
Events concerning the first French Revolution was due to attempt to use laissez faire market on grain, they sold all their grain, record profits, went great for 4 years. Suddenly, series of bad crop seasons ended in famine and the beheading of the king.
It's why in today's democratic world, most nations subsidize food from farm production to food processing.
It's ensure there is always an oversupply. In profit motive sense this couldn't be achieve achieved as most of these farms producing food would be bankrupt when it has too good of a growing season plunging prices to rock bottom, followed by poor yield seasons, and it takes time to setup certain farms. It's unyielding to not plan economically at least a little.
It's why there's zoning.
It's also why most nations even in the US, utilize a development planning models and methods to ensure housings constructions are subsidized (part of why we pay taxes to develop the roads and utility hookups) and maintenance codes are strictly followed.
It's why there's social security. It's why compulsory education and prohibition and strict rules on any child labor. It's why most nations other than the US have universal healthcare programs, US just has it for the elderly which is in its own way insufficient as it doesn't extend dental care to them requiring them to pay even more money for supplemental medicare insurance which most elderly can't afford to add the dental add on portion.
We have to pull our heads out of our collective asses and wake up to the fact economic planning is a fact of life. We ignore it at our peril.
Even our military and government plans potential petroleum hence the US strategic oil reserve. Markets all by themselves are not the end all be all, and some planning must be done.
Markets literally are a rationing system after all. Somethings we simply can't ration. We have to be prepared so that ALL needs are met, not rationed to the highest bidder, and screw those who can't bid so high or were late to the bidding.
Learn.
But we collectively probably won't.
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My dad does too, American served during Vietnam, fortunately he got VA coverage for everything... not sure how, but glad he did or he would be dead already, 2 years ago diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, his treatment bills covered by VA is $50K a dose he gets every other week, lately he's skipped treatment as his cancer and tumor size is reduced greatly and his numbers are good, and so he can properly eat.
Unfortunately, my mom had an injury that left her unable to walk, we were trying to get her rehabilitated at a nursing home so she could go back home. But during her very brief stay she was dehydrated to the point of death... only takes 2 to 3 days.
Her other doctor that came to visit her spoke with the manager on why she hadn't called for the ER sooner.
The manager had the gall to say that sometimes we have to let god do his work.
The place only had one doctor on staff for several hundred patients and he only came once a month. They were grossly understaffed. But there were no other nursing homes at the time. And all we have are private nursing homes.
Supposedly, private for profit free market shit was suppose to keep from having shortages and bad quality. Quite the opposite.
I mean we regulate natural monopolies here in Idaho with max operating margin of 6 percent and an additional 6 percent on capex for any private utility and we have excellent public water works and sewers, natural gas, and electricity as well as the few private utilities like Idaho Power that serves most of Idaho except Idaho Falls which does all their own utilities themselves as a public city.
My mom was only in there for 3 months and died in 2022 a few weeks after her birthday, just a week before she died we took her to see the Elvis movie at the theatre.
Those are the people I mourn for. That CEO can burn in hell if one actually exists for all eternity, or rather I hope he reincarnates as one of us poor serfs and gets denied on some medical problem and goes and he himself goes to seek justice the same way he was brought to purgatory, but as he pulls the trigger he feels as both the poor lame bastard seeking justice and as the CEO with the bullet ripping through his empty heart. Have that happen a few life times and I think his soul will be corrected and justice will have been served. Then he can go get another life with a convicted felon on his record. Maybe he can come back as a stink bug. Who knows.
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Paul Krugman doesn't know his ass from his head.
I'm sure he knows he simply doesn't know and wonders if he's a fraud himself. I know Robert Reich (labor secretary under Clinton) in a speech and QA mentioned he thought of himself having huge doubts.
They know something is wrong, but they haven't a clue.
And Krugman is in that camp to the extreme. He knows things aren't stable and pitch forks or just simply put the system is utterly untenable, but doesn't have an idea how to fix it, so just throw band aids on it forever... or rather until he's dead and his apple cart he's protecting doesn't really matter to him anymore.
I don't think he's intentionally mealy mouth in a conspiracy way, he's just clueless. They want their cake of keeping their apple cart that comes from what the current aristocracy by throwing small tweaks.
You can't really tweak a private medical system with private insurance. You have to do a single payer system with ability to negotiate prices, and to ensure their is teeth in those negotiation, to provide ability for the single payer system to produce their own drugs to provide at cost, without any profit margin, if need be.
And in many cases, to ensure sufficient clinics and hospitals particularly in rural areas where economies of scale make private enterprise near impossible, you must go collective owner/operation.
It's more radical than what he wants... band aids... oh just through some subsidies on some private insurance for some "poor" people. Put even more subsidies on R&D for drugs with more grants and it will trickle down from the pharmacies with new drugs... when it hasn't for at least the past 40 years.
Small tweaks don't work. And evident from all other major developed countries, including essentially most other poor countries. Private medical is as insane economically and morally as not having compulsory public education, prohibition on child labor, no public streets/roads/highways, ports, fire departments, etc.
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I think you missed the point of these same day expiration options with market makers.
At first it causes that gamma squeeze; the problem has become that these market makers are required (or the go bust) to hedge. They do now with aids of computers; as delta goes up on the number of call options bought, they have to buy more stock, and as the price actually gets close to being at the strike or into the strike price of that option; they have to buy even more shares for the potential of being assigned.
Here's where this gets to become an unstable phenomena... as gamma squeezes to the upside happen, market makers are buying lots of stock causing stock prices to go up in the short term; the holders of these options contracts vast majority are not exercising them, therefore market makers are stuck with the shares they bought thinking they would need them with all the now in the money call options they wrote, they'll have to sell those shares to the option holders who would be exercising their call options.
BUT that's the problem. These options buyers are flipping them, with no intention of exercising these options... many retail traders don't even have the funds even in margin accounts to exercise their 100 contracts on say AAPL or some other stock... since they all get sold off, and whoever ends up with the bag can't exercise most if any; the market makers who bought driving the stock price up at some point no longer need those shares to hedge.
Since these gamma squeezes have been going on all since January and into Feb; lots of these options market makers kept their shares anyway; making the spikes up not as violent; lesser dramatic gamma squeezes... this in turn causes a depressed purchasing in call options... buyers of these options are deciding, okay gains are not as good or not even good.
Suddenly normal price action returns, and the stock prices start dipping. Market makers are holding lots of stock now, need to dump all their holdings realizing the parties over, and down we go big time.
And this can be triggered by many market makers unsure what their hedged positions really consist of.. they're not really sure who is really going to be exercising and therefore dumping their stocks... market makers really don't want to not be assigned; the entire goal of their model is to sell premium and if they need; have the stock purchased at least below the strike price and if they have to deliver the shares, that's great, they sold made some money on that end, and primarily made money on the premium for selling the call option. But if they're stuck holding bags of stocks that are rapidly now decreasing at cost they bought them... that's bad news. Market makers don't want to be holding the bag. That's their job to make others hold the bag. LOL!
Anyway this can cause a stampede if the stock naturally falls, or if market makers just can't make money because they're writes aren't being assigned (option buyers aren't actually exercising).
So you get two scenarios:
1) Natural pricing action not lead by market makers covering (gamma squeezes); prices fall forcing market makers to dump their shares.
2) As potent; market makers not making profits in this environment deciding to delta down, stop writing options and just dumping their shares to halt their operations so they can discern a better strategy that ensures profitable market making. So they dump all their shares that were hedging the call writes, and not selling anymore.
Both scenarios can lead to one another. And both make a down turn in the markets bigger.
And with all the gamma squeezes lately, market makers are sitting on huge piles of stocks. So a sell of with them would in turn become a big dump.
This could get more extreme if option buyers start purchasing puts. Causing a reverse gamma squeezes on the way down, so those few option market makers still trying to market make; still writing options start selling puts and need to cover their puts with cash, they too have to sell.
So this makes markets not stable at all. It becomes big rip up followed by big rip downs. And just small pressure one way or the other can trigger these drastic moves up or down.
I think the Volmageddon is that these market makers eventually give up, not able to cope with proper hedging and are losing money. So they just delta down, dump all holdings don't offer any options at all to reset their strategy. This would mean lots of dumping of stock. And that's what the one article that came out described might happen; market makers are sitting on huge piles of stocks right now; therefore at this time the risk is to the downside. Would be opposite if we were having reverse gamma squeezes due to this options activity with too many puts being purchased over and over and stock prices were spiking lower and lower over the past few months.
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Buttigieg is a puppet to absorb a bunch of gay votes in the primary as lots of us gays are often active in voting. That's all that turd basket is about. Nobody I know at work knows who the fuck he his nor do they care. And unfortunately, when they find out he's a married gay man married to another man, they then laugh, not because he's gay nor married to another guy, but because they know there's no way he's fucking winning. And if he does win, he would try to pull off the conservative leave it to fucking Beaver, I'm a wholesome grandparent like Obama.
He's a useful tool by plutocrats/oligarchs as a desperate attempt to get gay vote away from Bernie and Warren and Tulsi.
And it's funny how various news sites talk about him so much lately when he says absolutely nothing on policies. What people are actually tuning in for whenever they listen to or read political stories. He's the most empty suite of them all.
The plutocrats know he won't win. They don't care, he's being paid to divert votes.
I hope it doesn't work. And so far I don't think it really will, as I think they over estimate the number of the LGBT group. We're frankly not that many. But in their circles, it must be rather large or perceived to be big enough. I don't think it is.
So seriously, he's just a tool... and sadly I think he doesn't realize it himself even though its incredibly obvious. "Oh golly they want me to be president, they're giving me all this money to run."
And since his performance on polls are terrible with younger voters who are very supportive of LGBT group, and does even shittier with older voters who are still often outright hostile if not just indifferent with a slight suspicion toward someone of the the LGBT group. So... it's not working. Who know, oligarchs and plutocrats are so fucking disconnected.
Fortunately.
But this shows the level of desperation stop Warren or especially Bernie or Tulsi.... the smears on Tulsi were the worst.
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I sort of considered police work as an option in high school. In the late 90's I took a course that had us go out in our town to visit with various professions including police.
Speaking with an officer, it wasn't the risk of a bank robber or some other suspect shooting me that discouraged me from ever wanting to be a policeman, but his stories mostly resolved around some observation of suicides and largely the morbid aftermath of car accidents.
I didn't want to see people maimed.
He described a car accident involving a high school student, she was ejected. That night at home he was taking his boots off, and he said he lost it that night when he noticed piece of her bloody matted hair on the soles of his boots.
I was more concerned about seeing others injuring themselves and having to see that on a frequent basis.
Was in the Air Force. Our combat orders on the use of deadly force were more reserved than what these police have recently been caught doing.
Seriously, if this was a military operation, it would have been observed the person appears to have headphones, he can't hear. Instead of running up to him like a dumb ass screaming, the next step would be to keep distance to maneuver around them to see what was in their hand, not a weapon, then become visible to the person to motion for them to take out their head phone to be questioned... at a distance... no shots not even pointing a weapon at the person required.
Serious training needs to be done with all our police force. They're all idiots and/or cowards.
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Every country became insolvent and has monetized bad debt.... this started with Japan in 1970's and fell apart starting in 1989.
Every nation made up magical fantasy stories about Japan's rapid return to an economic power from 1960 to 1989... so they invented idiocy cults called black belt certifications and JIT (just in time inventory). But none of that was why Japan had hyper growth...
IT was all about their debt binging during this time.
Every nation was on course to follow this debt bing lower interest rates idiocy... USA started at stagflation in the 1970's already doing a bad monetary policy stint from the 1960's to 1980... by 1984 USA had to raise rates over 20%. That finally not completely, but slowed inflation, halted the "stagflation".
USA was starting at a high interest rate of over 20% 1985 and over until now reduced that down to near 0%.
Race to the bottom kept or neo-colonialism of the USA using Mexico and many other nations including China and Central American nations as sweat shops and slave labor and the like pushed many mineral and industrial production there, sub assemblies to closer locations like Mexico. Even full assembly goods went to nearby countries.
This created an aggregate demand slump in the US because people overall were not making as much money in real (adjusted for inflation) income.
To stimulate the economy out of this interest rates were lowered, which encourages and already encouraged population to make up their lost income via borrowing.
AND here comes the borrowing binge in the USA.
Other nations similar. Europe isn't alone, using nearby nations as sweat shop labor and essentially slave labor.
So all nations binged on debt.
China was the last one borrowing in 2008 which bailed out many of the business chains of Europe and the USA, and especially Australia. Australia nearly felt nothing during the 2008 debt insolvency crisis. Because China (including all their provinces and their private businesses) kept spending like no tomorrow, via borrowing and borrowing.
As early as the 2012 and 2013 we've had tours of ghost cities built in China all over the place.
That buyer of last resort sort of kept things from limping along with other nations.
But QE in many nations including Europe, USA, etc. even Japan has never stopped its easy money system, Japan since 2017 the largest holder of Japanese stocks is the Japanese government...
The pandemic hit at the worst time, as the debt bubble was already poised to end on its own... instead it had one last gigantic monetizing debt pump... where the USA's Fed Reserve (bank cartel instead of a central bank) started even buying junk bonds from all corporations from Walmart to Verizon to McDonald's to Berkshire Hathaway to Block Rock... and slashed the Fed Fund rate from about 1.5% to 0.1% essentially 0%.
Other nations did the same thing to cope with the pandemic.
However, none of these nations had the brain power to learn from the past, that you cannot manage an economy strictly via monetary policy... in fact the only thing you can do with monetary policy is ensure stable prices, but this doesn't promise supply or demand... only stable prices.
If you try to pump demand... you risk severe inflation.
As well as debt domino collapse as even normally healthy financial individuals and companies borrow into an oblivion, and often spend it on bad return (stupid shit)... often scams.
This massive borrowing spree and easy credit where stocks get lots of cash, new warrants to issue more shares can be done by the most debt insolvent company... life support for a more than dead zombie company.... until later on.
Creating a tinder box of insolvent companies, ones that are horrible, and others that were made horrible via the monetization of debt.
Inflation forces the Central banks and Fed Reserve to raise interest rates which sparks the collapse of all the misallocation of money into the risky or flat out fraud companies including those that were on life support via issuing new shares or other junk bond financing.
This time, there is no buyer of last resort... nor producer of last resort.
2008 Brazil was a big commodities king, but 2015 commodities went bust... 2008 China was still borrowing and buying like no tomorrow...
Both those two nations are down and out. And other nations similarly were borrowing and being buyers of stuff as last resort and too in big trouble... Turkey for instance.
We're in a late stage capitalism debt fiasco.
Late stage neo-colonialism capitalism on steroids, that always falls apart in complete societal collapse as nations start to lean toward dictators and scapegoats.
Fact is, nations should never have used monetary policy to stimulate the economies of the world.
Monetary policy should strictly due price stability not allowing inflation nor deflation.
An stimulation of an economy should be fiscal in the needs of the citizens of their nations... fire, police, healthcare, utilities, assisting in comparative advantage resource collection and refinement, mass transit, education, research and development, great works projects that produce added benefits such as hydro-electric, irrigation, grand shipping canals, various types of railway, research of energy such as better fission reactor types and progress to fusion etc.
Letting the banks play monkey meat with a doomed neo-colonial capitalist system, a race to the bottom that has always fallen apart since recorded history.... is asking for trouble.
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The next downturn is going to be insane. 2007-8 Debt bubble was in 3 categories: chiefly residential housing mortgage, then credit card debt, and stock market margin debt record high at $378 billion.
This time same 3 are even worse and surpassing those 2007-8 pre crash levels.
And 4 more items added:
1) Auto loan debt that was only $400 billion in 2008, now $1.3 trillion surpassing credit card debt.
2) Commercial real-estate debt is well above the 2008 high levels as well, while retail markets are crumbling, consolidating toward box chains like Walmart, and the increasing near 50% all online purchases via Amazon.
3) Student loan debt ballooned to from about $400 bill in 2008 to $1.5 trillion 2018, and default rates are high and increasing, and those that don't pay on them legally are high, but those debts are not discharge-able in bankruptcy and continue to compound interest.
4) Corporate borrowing has grown well beyond 2008, and most companies are not sitting on cash, only the top 40 companies have or had a cash pile. GE, 3M, DuPont, Caterpillar, etc. industrial and large manufacturers are heavily leveraged, and their revenue is in decline... and recently automobile sector is too.
This debt is a mixture of Corporate bonds, and spooky is that of collateralized debt obligations of corporate loans.
Spooky still, many of these companies literally were issuing these bonds, and taking out these loans to finance stock buy backs... an artificial boost to their stock price in the short run, while doing nothing to make the company produce more, sell more, or otherwise be more productive.... that debt becomes immediate dead weight (no assets backing it) as shares bought back are retired.
Many financial experts have noted the debt bubble in all sectors and the corresponding asset bubble prices in real-estate and stocks.
A few names have been attached to it "The Everything Bubble" to the "Mother of All Bubbles".
You can examine the insanity for yourself:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2018/08/29/the-u-s-is-experiencing-a-dangerous-corporate-debt-bubble/#28692f59600e
https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/beware-the-mother-of-all-credit-bubbles
https://www.hudson.org/research/14521-when-will-the-corporate-debt-bubble-burst
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/corporate-debt-bubble/
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Trump, Schultz, Diamond, Bezos, etc. the whole oligarchy is demonstrating that there is a limit to wealth and its income to one person until it becomes a disaster to us all.
Nations with universal healthcare pay 50% less per capita, with better results for it. It's fact year after year from various WHO and Common Wealth Fund Reports Mirror Mirror reports since 2000 to present.
Anyone who has friends and has traveled abroad in these countries have first hand experience how backwards our medical system in the states truly is.
Employers actually save money in these other countries as the range of matching payroll on healthcare is ranges like in Canada 5.3% to Germany's 7.3% with max caps in both countries Canada it's about $2,800 max healthcare contribution tax and Germany its about $4,800 max contribution for both employee and employer matching contribution. UK though 13.8% match remains for most situations on employer with no cap.
My shitty high deductible plan with HSA company contribution of $500 cost the company $6,300 for the year and my premiums I paid were $1,300, and since I had an oral surgery and a normal Rx I take for cold sores last year I paid out of pocket additional $1,200.
It would cost less for employers. And it would ensure lower copays, no deductibles, and no more gambling on healthcare. I literally wait to see a doctor or dentist (other than 2 cleanings a year) until things get bad. I still don't have a primary physician. It's just too damn expensive even with what can hardly be called insurance, it's more of a silly ass gimmick discount program.
I would rather pay 6% to 7.3% (as the Germans) with a max annual contribution cap.
Or do what the UK does in terms of taxation on their NHS which is a progressive payroll structure:
£118 to £166 a week (£512 to £719 a month) 0%
£166.01 to £962 a week (£719.01 to £4,167 a month) 12% for most situations
Over £962 a week (£4,167 a month) 2%
Employers contribute 13.8% on income in the middle and over for most situations (it's categorized by are you disabled, retired, single, married, taking care of someone disabled or elderly, age, etc. with letters on their chart).
https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance-rates-letters
Either way, all these nations pay half the per capita cost we in the US do, and they get better results. Probably because people are more likely to go to the doctor since they don't fear a big bill, getting treatments early before even more expensive things develop.
The other component that ensures they don't pay ridiculous amounts, the single payer government systems negotiate prices with all medical providers: pharma, medical appliance makers, clinics, hospitals, etc.
Our medicare/medicaid system does not negotiate at all. It relies on the chicken shit insurance companies' negotiating prices regionally.
These other nations avoid racketeering.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
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If it wasn't for FDR, his wife, and his administration the US would be some sort of dictatorship under the guise of fascist or so called communist regimes.
The very robber barons that have, over the past 40 years, come back with a vengeance only to put us on the same ruinous path of economic inequality under a repressive robber baron elite; resentment is on high in all nations, a recent failed coupe in Germany, the insanity of the UK regarding Brexit, Brazil's foolish recent president, the turmoil of Spain, Italy, and with the recent 3 year so far yellow jacket movement of France, and culmination of a right wing losing their cultivated nut jobs in the presidency that was more a cartoon come to life, than life could make of it into a cartoon and a lunatic fringe incitement in the capitol in DC.
Lessons from FDR's administration and policies were not learned.
They were rejected by the robber baron class to whom many hired thug and lunatic fringe propounded themes of conspiracy, ignorance, scapegoating, and mysticism; and now the world is doomed to repeat the same persistent failed robber baron social-economic systems.
FDR's administration was among the best we had, he literally won 4 elections.
Generally, most, even George Washington's approval ratings become terrible nearing the end of their second term.
FDR administration finally gave substance to the multitudes of the people: social security (pension at elder age), jobs programs, bank deposit insurance, unemployment schemes, and laying the foundation for medicare/medicaid that would take another 20 years after JFK not until LBJ would we have an actual medicare/medicaid medical care for the elderly and severely disabled.
The nation has instead stagnated, and then even reversed; housing and many other economic necessities given to a robber baron class to which to engage their parasitical suction cups direct deposit to their bank accounts. Turning their taxes into loans to be repaid with interest.
The robber baron propaganda, have cultivated a delusional lunatic and ignorant populous that they, the robber barons and eager to become one too toadies, have lost control over; feed people crazy and dumb you get them to do crazy and dumb: all to stomp out any lessons learned in the 1940's under the FDR's administration.
Their contempt for all things save their fortune has lead us to a terrible repeat; this time with technology that can literally annihilate all of humanity, and most species on the face of the earth.
He was a good president and is administration was good.
But we did not learn that it was indeed good, and why it was so good.
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Venezuela was a corrupt oligarchy rating the poorest of the S. American and Central American countries since the late 90's. It's still not in the best of situations, but actually had some modest improvements... hence why the people keep voting for the Chavez party. So modest gains are bad. Keep it an absolute shit hole... good? WTF?
Secondly, we're not in the circumstances of Venezuela.... 168 countries have universal and or free healthcare... 33 don't. I would like to be among the 168 countries that have universal or free healthcare among them are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, France, UK, Australia, Austria, Japan, etc.
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Prior to the big push in home prices from the pandemic, people who worked as temps and not that much money $30K to $40K household (usually two income earners) were being approved loans of cap $200K to $250K just in the Boise area... I know only because some who were are now still unable to use that pre-approval because homes are now from $300K to $500K (for smaller 1,100 to 1,400 sq ft homes). These homes for the past 20 years typically were priced in at about $100K to $160K, the top 160K price was rejected in 2008 and fell to about $130K to 140K before going back up surpassing $180K and then quickly climbing to $200K... now at their very bloated figures of $300-$500K prices as cash offers keep coming in from various people selling from a more expensive market to this one as well as the constant purchasing of various REITs and other firms either to flip or rent out these homes. My understanding, some of REITs have actually tapered their purchases, and some have sold homes during this melt up in housing prices. But there are still enough other investment firms that act like REITs with lots of money behind them that persist in these higher prices (gotta have a buyer to reach these all time figures)... how leveraged those investment firms are, I'm not sure.
REITs themselves tend to be very liquid, getting much of their funds not from borrowing, but from IPO and other stocks offerings they never have to repay. But some have floated junk bonds and borrowed; there some leverage there... hence their discontinuing for purchases and some have sold a few units currently.
The retail buyer who actually lives in it, are moving to other places of typically lower price range, but they quickly forget the wages of that area are low commensurate to the price of rent and homes.
Similar happened in the Boise area during 2004-2008... lots of various people moving here only to buy and realize they just bought way too high to the wages they were going to get and had affordability problems; many ended up selling as they also then lost their newly acquired low wage job. Making affordability a little more troublesome. And the homes subsequently went into foreclosure.
Similar is happening again.
Lots of people from California, New Jersey, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, etc. moving here lamenting about the wages/salaries are too low and that they think they made a mistake buying above the asking price, they thought a cool $288K or $380K to quickly grab the home was such a steal at the time. But they had to take out mortgage to do that, call it a cash offer because they $200K in cash, and borrowed a cash advance secured by a future mortgage to go beyond the asking price. Their two incomes or household incomes though now is only $40K to $60K compared to their $75K to $120K or in some instances much more depending on their profession.
Those able to maintain at the moment work from home jobs, have bought larger and even more expensive homes, but on the same boat. The problem becomes the constant nagging of employers which can eventually turn into an ultimatum to move closer to the office or find some other work. My brothers in that lot in eastern Idaho, but on the reverse end, the company let go all of its offices here in Idaho, and moved elsewhere AZ and MN, he was able to maintain his job by working at home thus far remaining in Idaho. But there's that constant nag and threat that he must move to St Paul MN at some point. Particularly as his entire team is in that location. COVID bought him some more time to stay here for a while.
Similar with many others moving in from elsewhere.
The work from home gig has been alive for a long time, problem is that it's always very sketch:
1) They know you're less effective at managing others and projects. Particularly if you workers are all living and working and routinely meeting at location, and you're not.
2) They know you're not able to very quickly handle emergencies that require on sight maintenance and work.
3) They already have on sight people they can have fill your role at any time.
4) You're identifying yourself as expendable... can work from home, when most meet in the various necessary locations so how necessity and/or productive is this position really? Putting yourself right in the cross hairs of any cost cutting measures during periods of poor earnings.
And this also means even if your position has a point, they might consolidate it to an on sight person's responsibilities.
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Modify it to fit an actual economic model that uses private for profit motive when that sector doesn't violate competitive market principles. When it does, profit motive doesn't work, and achieves only oligarchy eventually, oligopoly, duopoly, monopoly a tyrannical kleptocracy-- thief-power.
Inspire to end the employer employee relationship using co-op structured business that provides democracy to workplaces as well as renting and housing, as well as a choice on what to do with those profits; how much to set aside for even more growth, how much to use update equipment, how much to share as bonuses, pensions, and wage/salary increases.
At present, our system doesn't share profits. Workers are an expense. Out of all profits, workers in most sectors of the economy tend to be 10% to 20% of costs. And of profits, they tend to make about 10% of profits. Essentially 90% of profits go to a few owners, if its a sole proprietorship goes to one person. They literally could pay everyone in the business double and still walk away with 80% of the profits. That's how morbid our system is. And the profit that I'm describing includes capital expenses (growing the company), this is the profit that gets usually distributed as dividends to shareholders or to the partnership or to the one lady or guy that owns the entire operation.
We must have a co-op reserve bank that lends at extremely low prices to co-ops so they may penetrate sectors of the economy that are currently require intense amount of capital/money.
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We need to go for a two house co-op structure, move away from corporations or LLC's.
A Co-Op Federal Reserve Bank must be created. It worked wonder berries for the private banks and corporations with the Federal Reserve Bank.
The Co-Op Federal Reserve Bank would be allowed to lend directly, having its own branches without requirement of deposit banking, have access to the treasury printing press and lend at low interest for capital formation instead of using racketeering oligarchs taking all the profits as happened since at least last 40 years.
Under a Co-Op structure, the workers literally own a voting share in their business they work. And vote on subjects such as what and how much to reinvest in growing the company (capital expenditures), wages and salaries, benefits including sick time allotments and vacation allotments, retirement plans like 401K contributions and pension building, and what to do with profits after taxes, compensation, and capital expenditures, etc. such as maybe more capital expenditures, maybe more salary and wage increases, maybe a bonus, maybe little bit of all of it. But he workers would get the vote.
Under a Co-Op living structure which exists even today in many places, the renter owns a stake in the revenue and voting voice on what to do with surplus after paying mortgage, upkeep, included utilities, etc. Since profits, which are typically 25% to 50% depending on the balance sheet, and if free and clear of mortgages, aren't going to an investor or group of investors, rather to the renters who also are member owners, they have been able to upgrade roads, parks, build swimming pools, and lower rents significantly. They could also use the proceeds to grow more unit spaces where applicable.
Co-ops change the owner worker and owner tenant relationship. It's literally the only way for the average person to really share in the profits of advancing technological society.
It still works competition via profit motive to an extent, but that profit motive is in line with the average person's needs, not some oligarch or wanna be oligarch parasite on all the profits: nobody will vote to outsource their work, nobody would vote to not upgrade streets, not build lower rents if profits exceeded needed upgrades like a nice swimming pool, park, nice road, garage, etc. Nobody would vote to have all the profits go into a few peoples' hands.
The only problem currently with co-ops is that banks tend not to want to lend to them that easily. And other forms of investment are at conflict with the relationship required... the investor has stake by virtue of the invested money thus has more votes to than the workers or tenants. So a Reserve Bank steps into be the lender/investor of last resort at low interest, directly from the government's own printing press, just as private banks do with the current Federal Reserve Bank.
It's a type of reserve bank system that should have had a hearing when the current Reserve Bank was secretly and originally formed by oligarchs in early 1900's and quickly passed by congress and signed by the president.
I see in the long run, a way to move away from corporations that create an extremely unequal oligarchy, toward co-ops that create a very equal society that is truly prospering.
And it doesn't exclude the use of much needed specific subsidies in building more houses and apartments. This should have been a concern when the real estate busted, people still needed homes, it wasn't that people just didn't need an extra house or two.
It was simply, the prices of those homes became so inflated via over borrowing, people couldn't afford the payments on those inflated prices.
And they should have realized it would put many developers out of business, making an extremely lack of supply when people could finally afford homes again at some point.
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If they care about competition so much, prohibit medical patent protections so that once a medical appliance or drug is invented it is available to all producers to produce and compete. And when certain medicines don't have economies of scale because only a very small customer base exists, government can step in to compete to produce such items to keep costs down. Allow imports from other countries.
Frankly, pharma and hospital violate many competitive market principles. In particular, the have inelastic demand curve, meaning price doesn't influence quantity demanded.
So pharma can charge as high price, and their stuff will still sell. Because the consequence to the consumer is further pain, advancing illness, and/or death.
They'll pay any price to get relief. Despite the number of suppliers, the suppliers will be influenced to the fact they can sell at a premium due to the nature of their inelastic demand product of buy or suffer and or die.
That's why let it be markets (often referred to as free markets), don't work well. Many markets are at odds with competitive markets. And collective means become better at keeping prices down, and ensuring quality.
Its why let it be markets throughout history as far back as France, UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, and several times in the US have failed, and require rule setting. Some failures of let it be markets have caused famine, disease, war, civil war, repressive regimes, terrors (killing of people who appear or are political opposition), and genocide.
For profit motive only works well in competitive markets when all principles of competitive markets are functioning. And some sectors, you cannot make them achieve competitive principles in an efficient manner, the results become worse than a collective system in those markets that violate severely and/or many competitive principles. It's why fire departments, police, judiciary, prisons, utilities like water, electricity, roads, ports, schools, parks, etc. are generally always collectively owned and operated. Those sectors violate many competitive market principles to the point forcing them to be in a market results in worse quality, higher prices, less supply, and less ability to demand supply. Where as collective methods for the same allow for higher quality, lower prices as costs are lower, larger quantity supplied, and larger ability to demand supply.
This is economics 101.
Somehow economics has become perverted into something utterly irrational empirically. And ethically its become completely disgusting.
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Actually, the Roman state did have a welfare program in all Roman and conquered cities. Bread handouts, worker programs, state and oligarch funded games, healthcare, barbers, baths and toilets, roads, ports, etc. were available to all free people of the Roman Empire, and citizenship was rather early on 212 CE by Caracalla was given to all provincial free people, as well as to any eventually freed slaves.
While education was not compulsory nor fully funded in all cities, ludus litterarius (cheap makeshift elementary schools) were available to those of humble means (poor people) to send their children to ensure they learned basic reading and writing and basic math and some logic and literature to assist in critical thought.
Some ass wipes like you were upset about giving citizenship and all it provided to provincials and free foreigners.
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Let's make K-12 $50K a year tuition... and start child labor again!
We're a fucking barbarian idiot nation.
Let you in on my recent oral surgery.
I have a PPO dental insurance via my employer: I initially paid $987.60 as the oral surgery office quoted that would likely be my responsibility.
So I paid it the day of the surgery. I have an HSA account I never use and had contributed quite a bit to it, and thus full of money so wasn't too bad... but still way expensive. My main medical insurance is that goofy high deductible plan, hence why I'm able to have an HSA.
Insurance then paid out $826.40. On the itemized portions they refused to pay the quoted amount since they have contracted prices for the office to be part of their insurance network, and some of the work, bone graft was originally billed for $554.00, insurance only paid $353. General anesthesia was $185 for every 15 minutes, so x 3. Insurance only paid $115.00 x 3.
Anyway, the oral surgeon office charged $1,687.00. Insurance paid $826.40. And then my insurance quoted to them my max portion is $256.60, because it was considered medically necessary, I pay 20% and insurance pays 80%.
I got a check back for $731.00 from the oral surgeon's offics as an overpay refund. It's nice, I'll put it back into my HSA.
But that means someone without insurance or doesn't have my insurance that lacks a network contract is getting fucked by paying $604.00 more for the same work. Nearly twice more.
So both the insurance companies and the medical facilities/clinics are deep in this racketeering bullshit. Seriously, if they can make profits at the "lower" contracted price, they're really raking in the dough at near double their "market" (lets be blunt), they're racketeering rate.
It's insane.
We so need universal healthcare, cut this nonsense down.
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From the side of those who say there must be life elsewhere due to the size of the universe.
Even if just 1 in so many galaxies has life, there's so many galaxies that even that diffuse amount of life could be considered a lot.... hundreds of billions of galaxies just in our observable universe, if 1 and every 100 galaxy has life that's still a billion different occurrences of life forms in our observable universe.
So when considering the vastness of just the observable universe that is either infinite or finite with the observable universe to the entire universe being in ratio of atom is to the observable universe.
Even a finite universe on that scale atom to the observable universe ratio: that's a ridiculously big universe.
And if its infinite in size, infinities do funny things like any possibility must happen an infinite times, so the number of lifeforms of more than microbial to large multi-cell life is infinite.
Which infinite being never ending number, that's pretty big and full... that being said, it doesn't say the density at all... it could be "dilute" to the point that life only occurs within the radius of 5 observable universes.
Due to the universe being so ridiculously large:
The question becomes, how dense? And how do we evaluate that density as being scarce or being abundant?
We just don't know, as we haven't enough data points for any of those questions yet. But we can make a guess... infinite universe makes it easy, the answer is infinite life forms... finite universe there's a finite answer 1 being a possibility, us; but unlikely given the size of the universe.
There is a slight favor in thinking there is definitely life elsewhere in the universe just based on the size, even if the size is finite.
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It's only 50 to 67 percent of a persons average pay.
"The state average weekly wage is currently $1,357, according to the Department of Labor, which means the most anyone can currently collect is about $680 a week."
It's peanuts anyways, so people would only use it if they were truly traumatized.
Germany, France, Austria, etc. have a month or more vacation on top of holidays, and they have a separate allotment for sick days.
This NY bill goes into effect 2020 if the governor signs it.
The aristocracy has lost their ever loving freaking mind to downplay such a law. This is worse than let them eat cake which was actually made up. This outrageous remark by them is for real. And to Varney the millionaire butler's point, that's why this law should be a federal one for all states in the union.
Just as Germany's Co-determination legislation for businesses of a certain size must have about half the voting board be comprised of wage earning employees via employee elections.
And really, we should have a Federal Co-Op Reserve Bank that lends directly at a discount to any group wanting to start a Co-Op where all employees have votes on key issues such as leadership, management, compensation, capital expenditures, etc. No need for a do nothing but patronize, tyrannize, and parasite aristocracy. Still private competitive business model for those markets that don't violate severally any or all of the competitive market principles. It's just we know profits won't find their way into a very small 1% hands while everyone working to do accomplish all those profits is either just getting by, or in some areas of the country, living in their fucking car.
https://nypost.com/2018/08/01/bill-would-grant-12-weeks-paid-bereavement-leave-to-all-new-york-workers/
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2017/s8380
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It was forced gamma squeezes after gamma squeeze.
Buying options same week close to the money, and often also buying the underlying to pump the price to make those calls go closer to the money.
This forces the market makers who wrote the shares who didn't sell covered calls, but naked calls.. having to cover to get the shares.
A call option is a right for the option holder to buy the stock at the strike 100 shares from the call writer.
So the call writer must have the stock in order to sell it to the option holder.
These call writers often write them and sell them without actually owning much of if any of the stock.
So they're forced to cover their position by buying the stock, and each contract is 100 shares... so huge volume on contracts mean suddenly the writer must buy a bunch of stuck in case the option holder exercises their option.
Key is that this idiocy happens last week of expiration when options tend to be exercised.
Until that point, traders of option contracts don't tend to exercise early because of extrinsic value that comes with potential of getting closer or further into the money.
Same week means call writers are unlikely to be holding much of the stock to cover their call writes if it's far out of the money... the chances are so little, covering is considered not that necessary.
Suddenly price gets closer and especially at the money or in the money, market makers start buying the stock quickly which pumps the price.
These buyers of the call options are only in it for the premium increase not to hold it to expiration and if in the money to necessarily exercise their options to hold the stock.
And some big trading desk or desks have been doing this all year long with meme stocks then onto small caps then recently every large cap stock has had it's party including Amazon, TSLA, and AAPL.
The problem is that this is phony pump and dump scheme... as soon as the options buyers sell their options at a higher premium, open interest remains relatively low to the volume, and the market makers dump their shares as there is no need to cover their calls.
Nobody really is buying here for long term purchase and investing. It's all a pump an dump.
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GME is very different. It was outright shorted... many of these others were to a lesser degree... GME was heavily shorted. Shorting is different than this options stupidity.
In this case, even big whales like Michael Bury and the Kitty guy who is actually a licensed broker, he knew what he was doing... notice shortages sitting on GME and not closing their shorts out when the stock was about $1 a share. So they went to town with their big capital. Kitty guy got retail in on it to help buy up the stock causing the price to get higher and higher past the stop loss or stop take profits of these shorters... shorting is borrowing the stock to sell it on the market, to complete the short you must buy back the stock at a lower price, you keep the difference as profit.
A big hedge fund was very greedy waiting to never have to buy back the stock to close the short, hoping GME would go bankrupt thus share price would become $0. Lenders wouldn't even want the stock back because the stock is worthless. Always dangerous because even in bankruptcy if it's Chapter 11 reorganization, stock holders can be redeemed and returned to trading once again once their bankruptcy proceedings are done, and successful re-emergence from bankruptcy happens. Chapter 7 liquidation means the company no longer exists, and shares will always be $0 forever.
The big hedge fund remained in the stock despite going way past the point they shorted... and remained in the position as the stock price went higher and higher. They even doubled down on the short at these higher and higher prices battling the whales of Bury and retail fomoed on by Kitty guy.
Price just kept going higher.
Now options comes in here with GME: Playing the options call gamma squeeze thing also incited market makers to have to buy the stock to cover their options calls they wrote, making the stock price go higher and higher.
Capitulation with lots of these hedge funds doubling down battling the longers, they finally had a margin call... there wasn't enough stock to short with, and they had to simply close their positions by buy the stock back at any price. And then we have the master class boom up in price.
Gamma squeezes can only go as high as the highest available strike price on the chart for that week expiration or possibly a future week expiration. Because that's the only call option writes have outstanding they sold naked. Once they buy the stock, they're covered and don't need to buy anymore.
Additionally, demand for the option contracts begin to cause the premiums to increase less related to the price of the stock... so it becomes more expensive for the gamma squeeze game to happen in following weeks.
Until it's not profitable at all... as the market makers will demand a higher premium for out of the money call contracts... this is called implied volatility. So these big trading desks causing gamma squeezes eventually move on to another stock to pump and dump.
This is what's been going on all year long with meme stocks and even normal stocks and most recently lots of large cap tech stocks. And one can tell this is not just done by retail buying up same week expiration contract calls out of the money/ near the money call contracts... Amazon and Google for instance these premiums for near the money or just slightly out of the same week expiration are $1,000 to $2,000 in premium for just one contract, for a contract that will expire that Friday. This is too expensive to load up on by retail when the volume easily exceeds 75,000 to 250,000 contracts traded. And the bid ask spreads tend to be hundreds of dollars... very risky to know if you're buying at a good premium or bad one based on the pump that's in commencement.
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Advent of Zillow and Dave Ramsey AM propaganda radio show and his chicanery grifting in his churches to wanna be land lords lamenting even in a declining rental market it is urgent that you ALWAYS up rental prices even if just $10 after a lease or after a 1 year period on a month to month rental.
Any increase in incomes immediately follows that landlords want that increase immediately therefore they pump the prices of the rent... similar home sellers see an increase in incomes real-estate brokers jack the asking prices on properties they're selling.
What we need is competition that forces landlords to accept appropriate prices as well as push property prices (and resultant property taxes down)... public sector building is what is really necessary, at least in as so far as just the development... prior the 1980's developers only had to contend with building the house and maybe some landscaping on the lot. They weren't building the road, installing all the utilities: water lines, gas lines, electrical lines, phone lines, cable lines, etc. The development practices in almost all cities now is that the developer at their own cost builds EVERYTHING including the roads and sidewalks and parks and utilities... of which the developers now must and do pass that cost on to the home buyer.
The city or private utility whichever operates which ever utility water, gas, electric, cable, etc. these utilities are built to the specs of the utility operator public or private, the developer than hands it over "for free" to the utility operator to manage upkeep and operation... the developer again therefore at this time has to price in that development costs into the finished housing lots to the buyers. This slows development of new homes tremendously.
In the past, again, the housing developer was just a home builder... they build the house and done.... maybe a little landscaping costs if you want to be specific. But that's it.
Use city, county, state, and Federal tax dollars to do the developing itself... in every state in the USA property taxes exist... uses some of those funds as well as other tax revenues to develop the roads, sidewalks, utilities AND DO NOT pass that cost on to the price of the lot and home. That will be repaid via taxes over the years of actual usage.
Secondly, direct development by the government competing with private builders is also a must.
In every situation in the last 500 years, all villages, towns, cities, etc. only prospered when housing was affordable and almost nearly free or a fraction of the cost... and how was this possible in those moments? Using collective means of tax dollars... and also strong prohibition on real-estate monopoly classifying monopoly as purchasing more than 2 or more existing units as the limit, beyond which constitutes a monopoly purchase and is banned... only 2 existing units per buyer in this city and around the edges... any new properties must be built anew to add to supply.
No more playing the Monopoly game... which was devised for the very reason of housing becoming a bain on all workers over centuries.
The only time prosperity was high was when property was cheap... in many cases "free" such as the Homestead of 1862 and the Land Grant Act following closely.
The HUD programs coming from the 1930's FDR policies and expanded on until the mid 1970's and then being shut down in the 1980's... when (surprise surprise) housing became yet again a
leverage pyramid scheme via the banks.
If the banks want to play tulips pyramid scams, let them do that with public and private bond markets and stock markets and the newly scam of the century tulip market the crypto scam.
But leave out wreckless leverage pump and dump speculative idiocy on an actually necessary need like housing. As most states and cities do with utilities like water, electricity, natural gas, sewer, etc.
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Well, democracy maybe difficult to achieve, an actual democracy and not an oligarchy... but the difference between even a sort of democracy and absolute dictatorship either it be clothed in the most popular superstitious nonsense of the day often coined the term religion instead of the hysterically unpopular superstition coined cults, in a theocracy, monarchy, or just a secular dictatorship, they're all tyrannical with no peaceful solution to overthrow.
While an oligarchy is tyrannical, two methods exist to overthrow it, education that leads to peaceful overthrow by disabling their monopolies on the system, or violence.
Hence why authoritarianism is infinitely worse.
It's why the so called communist systems under despots of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot failed miserably and cruelly.
Dictatorships fail at an astonishing rate, faster than any democracy, and those dictatorships that survive for any length of time are at the majority of a tyrannized people living in misery to the point fear means nothing, desperation and compulsion marks the day, and dreams are only to survive or find method to a fast suicide.
Democracy, an actual democracy (that also protects to civil rights of a minority) should always be an objective of any civilization.
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The biggest problem though is for most states and nation-wide, unions are only 6% of the private workforce. You can't just strengthen union bargaining, but have to make it easier to start them. Because right now, they carry no influence on other non-union workplaces as there's not enough of them to do so. Case in point, a prior employer has union and non-union workers. The unionized workforce portion had substantial pay contract for their work starting no lower than $21 as high as $38 an hour rate depending on their job function and differential pay scale for working late, middle of the night, and weekend. And in the contract a promised 0.74 increase every year for that 5 year contract. And on call work promised to pay 2 hours even if the work only took a few minutes, to compensate for having leave to work on call.
Compared with the same company with the non-union part of the company, the lowest starting pay was $12.00 an hour and capped at $17.00. No differentials. No on call 2 hours work even if it only took less than two hours to complete the work. Pay was arbitrary and hidden from other workers unless you asked them directly how much they get paid, and it broke down that most were pay first 5 years about $13.50, 10 years 16.00 an hour. And 20 years nearing their cap at $17.00. The company was highly profitable and could easily afford to pay these 20 workers the same rate as union contract, but they could get away with it since that group wasn't union. There is very littler pressure even within the company to "compete".
So the goal needs to be to make it easier to start unions, and expand unions to other divisions in a company.
Potential solutions:
1) make right to work legislation illegal. a) all union workers must pay their union dues, no free riders.
2) To get people okay with union dues. a) establish caps and expenses that unions can do with such dues; no racketeering from union bosses or union organizations.
3) Just make union dues essentially not be a factor by subsidizing those via government; a) government pays for the legal services that unions need. Which is essentially what 90% of union dues go toward anyway: lawyers to assist in contracts and holding decisions in union meetings as legally binding changes, and enforcing union contracts with grievance processes. Just have the government pick up the usually small tab for union dues instead of making the workers to do it would drop any perceived sense of loss of money that causes this contention within the workers to unionize.
Union dues have been a huge contention used within workers (usually irrationally because the dues are often small as $20 a month) and by management spread such contention to prevent or bust up unions. Take that weapon of contention off the table.
And it becomes a nothing to lose only to gain proposition; you'd be absolutely stupid no excuses to not join or start a union. You can't pretend $20 month ($240 year) union due is too expensive as it only provides a minimum $41K a year wage, so you would rather pay $0 monthly due and make $29K to 35K a year instead.
Peoples ability to do math and think rationally is astoundingly poor.
It's surprises me we're not all still nomads wiping our asses with our hands.
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We're going a similar way the soviet states went: the mainstream media is a farce and everyone knows it. Everyone is deprived and poor and dying of various dumb things even if healthy and fit it's not uncommon for someone slightly older from 30 to 50 to come down with septicemia either due to very bad diagnosis from "doc in a box" joke care, had a very fit beefy even former police officer just in his late 40's back in 2016 die of bad diagnosis; treating his symptoms of vertigo, but he was having a horrible infection, it wasn't diagnosed until he was in the hospital due to blood clots that were causing him to lose consciousness and later a coma, they finally discovered his blood was septic; and died soon after developing a few strokes while in the hospital.
And then there are those who can't afford medical even with so called employer insurance, a scam of the century as dumb and moronic as NFT's or crypto fake money that nobody really accepts but you can gamble with it on various crypto casinos so long as they too don't go 404 bust before you take either your fake magical internet money or real money.
Even NPR is bogus, riding early to work they had a discussion about "coping" with how ridiculous USA has become, focusing on the youth Z and Y generations becoming more gloomy about how things are going, instead of focusing on the fact they cannot afford rent let alone with roommates let alone anything... they don't want to follow the ruinous debt path of millennials on loans that cannot be discharged even in Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy... no LLC or corporation is indentured to their frequent debt binges that often go to carnival stupidity and mostly a scam to convert borrowed money into free and cleared wage/salary/dividend money in their pockets before the zombie company just dies and vanishes.
At no point during the NPR conversation ever mention the obvious FAT elephant in the room: the economy is a joke. Can't afford Medical, housing of any kind, many living in RV's or their cars, or even tents, can't afford higher education or vocational education, when you do work very little vacation available to do anything, let alone no sick time, and being forced now with 12 hour shifts mandatory overtime working weirdo shifts thru the night and into the next day, skeleton crews who most haven't a clue how to operate their machines, etc.
But they focused instead on what they were sure not the culprit: social media, they made a big booger about how social media is too much a target on youth and young adults depression.
They considered climate change being a big one... which sure, it's not great that we're seeing nobody really care about the issue; but that's more of a problem that comes AFTER the basic needs are met which aren't: economic issues: housing, healthcare, decent enjoyable employment: availability of paid time off, decent hours not over doing it, cost of education both higher or vocational, etc.
What the media does report on has become indistinguishable from parody of the Onion News or SNL.
A recent article came out about "missing Americans". A term they are placing on the fact American life expectancy has fallen remarkably even prior to the pandemic 2015 to 2018 3 years in a row life expectancy had fallen, and resumed falling yet again during and after the pandemic 2020 thru 2023.
From death from despair: suicide, drug overdoses, bad medical treatment as we don't have a medical system in this country but a hustle under a bridge spanning putrid water, etc.
The ridiculousness of the article to term it "missing Americans" instead of dead young Americans.
Life expectancy falling is not something observed in any country in the modern era unless due to famine, civil war, or war. It's not normal in any other nation. Therefore it's not normal.
It's called failure of our civilization coming unglued. Similar to the Soviet States and the countries they became after and still are in many of those former Soviet countries.
Fortunately, they actually allowed a discussion board on the article. And it was entertaining to read various responses... it was not lost on many the hideous term they were using "missing Americans". Instead of what it is, they're not missing, they were young and fucking dead.
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Let's increase our already bloated DOD budget by adding an unnecessary layer of useless overpaid admins and their facilities... Air Force Space Command tracks all orbital debris about earth. And NASA has a program with Jet Propulsion Lab identifying and tracing asteroids along with several other national space agencies.
JPL hosts the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies for NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program, an element of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the agency's Science Mission Directorate.... and Trump now wants to add another named office LOL!
NEO Observations Program is to discover 90% of the NEOs down to the much smaller size of 450 feet (140 meters), and to do so by the year 2020.
Neil should know this program exists, The US program has been fully funded for 20 years.
Pretending NASA's NEO Observations Program doesn't exist is moronic.
Both NASA, NOAA, DOD with US Air Force work together to analyze, predict, and disseminate weather, solar weather, orbital debris, near earth orbits of asteroids, military and civil public communication and recon satellites including GPS.
Each agency has its own expertise which they share with one another, and make available to the public or defensive purposes like recon, military communication, and extra GPS keep secret.
There is no need for yet another admin branch... it's just stupid.
Perhaps when we no longer use fossil fuels, and have some method like Star Trek to cheaply go in to space (lithium crystals right?).
Such dubious stupidity.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7194
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I'm not 100% sure why they didn't just wait out the EU. It's literally collapsing several nations economy since they can't deficit spend nor control their own monetary policy that fits their economic needs (lower interest, or raise interest, or produce deficit spending to stimulate the economy, or lower taxes creating temporary deficits to jump start the economy), and have no direct representation in Brussels.
The shit will collapse on its own, and then UK could reach a decent trade agreement with all former EU member nations. Funny part too, UK didn't even join the monetary Euro cluster fuck in the first place.
If Western Europe was going to do something like the EU, they critically forgot to realize the USA over two constitutions in the first decade of its existence, and a civil war about 60 years later, meant that member states, in order for such a vast territory of even minor difference of people, had to subordinate to a Federal (union) government; and to do this you would elect representation among the member nations.
They failed to create a democratically elected representative body.
And this is what you get. I thought this in 2001 visiting Germany the last year of the Euro. I thought wow, this is probably not going to last 40 years. If it does even get that far, for the average worker it's going to a be an ever increasingly miserable couple of decades leading to its disbanding.
But I also, as a kid in grade school, figure that NAFTA and permanent normal trade relationship with China and several other nations that at that time didn't enjoy similar labor rights, and frankly just places where destitute desperate impoverished people can be exploited, that a race to the bottom would be the long term results.
And now we have it come full wrought world wide with know nothing morons and cartoons like Trump winning elections as this system falls apart.
Trade agreements, as they should be, must be on authentic comparative advantage, that they literally have a resource or finished good that cannot be obtained, or that they're literally better at producing it, not that they can produce and sell it at a loss due to government subsidy or ownership of production, or have no or no enforced labor laws, or insufficient civil rights.
It's like a nation that prohibits slavery, but allows trading with countries who use slave labor.
Eventually that nation's prohibition of slavery will go away, or work will become nearly indistinguishable from slavery.
Trickle down exploit every impoverished nation, privatize everything including prisons and utilities (natural monopolies) and other sectors that violate completely the competitive market principle thus void any benefits from profit motive for the majority, and create the world's most insanely rich oligarchs the world has ever known, owning more wealth than many countries annual GDP, allow banks to regulate themselves, and oligarchs and aspiring (toads and puppets) oligarchs to write the laws; this is what happens.
Protests in just about every country in the world: yellow vests France, Italy, Hungary, demonstrations in Germany, Austria voting for the nationalist, Brazil in economic collapse voting an oligarch's oligarch nationalist, even protests in Mainland China over their slowing economy and the collapse of their pier to pier lending schemes that still to this day are fueling the construction of empty high rise apartments, Japan that still hasn't come to grips with its own bubble, S. Korea realizing its disgusting oligarchy and ridiculous corrupt government with a recent president serving 15 years for corrupt conviction. Most of the Middle East a complete basket case due to various interventions between various major military powers, from Libya to Egypt, famine in Sudan, an internationally illegal siege of Yemen by the oppressive Saudi Arabian monarchy, Syria's civil war, Iraq in a cluster in an economic and theocratic cluster fuck along with Afghanistan, India with a nationalist still in power while much of its nation still lacks modern sewage systems, etc.
It's 2019, but economically and even politically we look almost identical to 1919.
Only major difference, this time many nations have nuclear weapons.
Anyone with half a brain and some understanding of economics should have realized how this race to the bottom ends in the long run.
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Big reason we're a collapsing empire;
1) We spend more on our military than the next 10 highest spending nations COMBINED.
In billions yearly military spending:
1 United States United States $732.0
2 China China[a] $261.0
3 India India $71.1
4 Russia Russian Federation $65.1
5 Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia[a][b] $61.9
6 France France $50.1
7 Germany Germany $49.3
8 United Kingdom United Kingdom $48.7
9 Japan Japan 47.6 $49.1
10 South Korea South Korea $43.9
11 Australia Australia $27.5
Sum China to Australia is $727.7 billion... and we're still not at our $732 billion.
And that's 2019.
2020 is even worse at our spending became 13 next highest spending COMBINED!
1 United States United States 738.0
2 China China 193.3
3 India India 64.1
4 United Kingdom United Kingdom 61.5
5 Russia Russia 60.6
6 France France 55.0
7 Germany Germany 51.3
8 Japan Japan 49.7
9 Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia 48.5
10 South Korea South Korea 40.4
11 Australia Australia 31.3
12 Italy Italy 29.3
13 Brazil Brazil 22.1
14 Canada Canada 20.0
SUM total from China to Canada $727.1 billion still not all of our $738 billion.
And all those tax cuts to the top 5% and especially 1% who have all the wealth and its income.
And their pocket books aka corporations that are among the lowest taxed in the WORLD, and especially among the oligarchs, our robber barons typically pay less as a percentage of taxes of their own individual tax return than someone making earned income.
And we in the median or even 25% above median income ie the somewhat okay and maybe even affluent middle class pay more in taxes than any other nation, even those so called "socialist" nations like Germany, UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, etc. etc. etc. as they provide universal healthcare that is cheaper in terms of tax premiums and out of pocket use costs, some provide no to reduced tuition charges for higher education or vocational education, some have robust housing planning for both private and public housing programs like Vienna Austria.
Why is this the case?
We have a plutocratic robber baron class that has a death wish.
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Crypto nothing but a big scam!
I explored the wonderful world of crypto back in Feb 2021. Traded some BTC and other altcoins... Feb my first crypto purchase was Doge for 5 cents a stupid thing... and BTC thru in a few hundred real money USD. And then traded it with a few thousand more real money and other altcoins... BTC traded back and forth made decent realized real money gains... I think near end of May was my last big BTC trade. Figured it would crash for whatever technical reason... and it did... first part of June it dipped I bought some for a quick day trade and flipped it for real money USD.
Then was busy learning about gamma squeezes as I traded AMC LOL! 2021 was the Wood Stock for capitalism.
All that summer other than trading meme stocks like AMC and some others... sold lots of CS puts way out of the money making premiums, I explored the hinter lands of what was really behind crypto. By the time June rolled around, I had many tools on trading crypto from various platforms... and was shocked by the amount of liquidity tens of billions of dollars trading every 24 hours.
Various platforms even show the "futures" like market for BTC like Bybit, BitMex, Binance, Derbit, etc. that allow you to 100x (yes 100x) positions long or short. And you can see open interest on this one platform to see when various size orders are opening long or short.
Also read all about Tether involving creator of Inspector Gadget cartoon, Mighty Duck's child actor and busted with a friend guilty of Pedophilia in Spain, the CEO a convict of pirated MSFT programs, and a shady lawyer spokesperson who was involved with a defunct busted online gambling site that was found guilty of cheating customers,, Gemini with the Twinkle Toes twins, Terra Luna ponzi, Celsius stupidity, ADA or Cardono nut cake, and the fact that all these casinos all engage in a form of wash trading to present volume being traded to give the illusion of liquidity... problem becomes, when people really are trading in and out of this during their wash trades, they lose over time lots of real money USD and even crypto as withdrawals or selling happens.
Then learned about all the pyramid schemes gone Ponzi with staking and the like earning huge rates of return. FTX with poodle hair guy Sam "bankrupt fried" who I never heard of until about late summer or fall period... as lots of youtubers were using him as a sponsor.
With all the weirdness behind the scenes I realized this was a cluster mug of a type of pyramid/Ponzi scam leveraged to the hilt. I just assumed since the two crypto exchanges I used Coinbase and Bittrex were licensed in my state, that they also had FDIC or rather SIPC like any broker would. So I went to both their websites... neither really explicitly stated they're not FDIC or SIPC... Coinbase was the worst, they instead had a paragraph on how the banks they do banking with have FDIC... giving you the illusion that your funds are therefore also FDIC insured.
At least Bittrex stated while they weren't FDIC nor SIPC insured, that they had taken out a $300 million dollar insurance policy in case of hacks or other losses of customer funny money crypto or real money.
Either way, at this time I had accumulated quite a bit of real money USD sitting on the sidelines... so I decided... gonna take that back to my bank and real SIPC brokers.
Then went on to warn folks on youtube of this gigantic cluster mug of scams that is crypto... entire thing is a fraud... not just one fraud.... but a bunch of clusters of frauds... some indirectly and/or directly work together in their stupidity. And that sure... you can trade this stuff, short or long... making any real gains in real money USD or other national currency... good luck taking withdrawals.
I was really pissed of the SEC hadn't stepped in sooner to halt all this crap. Much of it is very much a security that's being offered... staking is a form of a security ... or worse a certificate of deposit ie a bank.
Gary Gensler really should be sacked and investigated with any potential collusion or cover up with many of these characters that continue still to push their unregistered essentially fraudulent junk. The collapse has only started.
Had this happened in the early 2000's or 90's, or earlier... regulators would have shut this shit down way way earlier to prevent millions from being defrauded.
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Our elections aren't holey mystical woowoo relics to hang onto that somehow democratic representation and voting on propositions, etc. can only be called such if it's on a Tuesday, or the Augurs of Rome will be cursed by the gods of Olympia.
Early voting allows more people to participate. Many democracies have more than one day to vote, they try to put it out on a weekend, declare voting days a paid holiday, and/or require all citizens to turn in a ballot they receive by mail, and can turn it in at a voting collection area or mail it in.
Lou Dobbs has gone so wacko over the years, not sure what happened.
I was with him late 90's early 2000's condemning idiot NAFTA and other trade agreements that didn't require trade partners to provide the same enforced labor rights or better than our nation's enforced labor rights, and still require the same EPA protections or better than our nation requires.
Basically, wide trade of all or mostly all goods and services require in such trade that an actual comparative advantage exists, instead of an inauthentic comparative advantage. Inauthentic comparative advantage would be endorsing the use of enterprise to use for workers as impoverished people, tyrannical and/or corrupt government/business, insufficient labor rights, not enforcing and inability to gauge their enforcement of laws they may feign existing yet not abiding, China among other countries are notorious doing just on domestic laws and enforcement thereof.
Because inauthentic comparative advantage is a harmful distortion in markets that will lead to a boom bust cycle, ultimately in the long run eventually a race to the bottom vicious cycle occurs between such nations. Which we're seeing across the world.... we're in the latter stages of the this inauthentic comparative advantage... in the bust stage, it was prolonged, a last burst of activity yet for the long run made even worse for the final eventual bust with all the borrowing and monetary loosening from China, US, Euro member nations, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Greece, Mexico, USA, etc.
I'm fine with trade, but we must ensure it actually does lift all boats in those other countries as well as ours.
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But 2000 tech bubble interest rates were still falling from the 70's and 80's.
As a kid opening a savings account at a credit union, I saw first hand the interest rates were 7% then a quick dip in 3% then up to 5% then a dip to 4% then a quick spike to 6% by 1999.
Interest rates were all over the place in the 90's.
But since 1980 when interest rates hit 20%, essentially busting the economy to pieces, it's been a slow accommodating to load up on more debt or to refinance old debt to lower and lower rates ever since.... a big massive debt inducing binge fest that induced more and more borrowing and buying and thus bidding up of assets prices ever since.
Inflation itself is the price of ALL goods going up.
Between purposefully destroying the economy about the 80's with hyper interest rates to combat the stagflation of the ending 70's, is that it pushed that inflationary pressure (price rising across ALL goods and services) to be diverted into asset items like stocks, real-estate, commodities, etc.
Globalization assisted in the same asset bubble, the filthy masses now competing with essentially destitute sweatshop workers aren't able to buy near as much and they're soon tapping out their credit lines even with lowering and lowering interest rates, put money into assets like real-estate and equities, and junk bonds, commodities, etc.
Was a giant asset bubble up. Which can cause the cost of living to increase.
Cost of living prices can be and are often worse than inflation:
Even early or pre-industrial times, you only needed so many chairs, tables, shirts, clothes, only so much coffee or tea or food... but everyone needs shelter, energy, healthcare/medicines, etc.
Make basics like housing, education, or medical go up, and nothing else matters. In fact, food and small or large durable goods can be deflationary.
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He's conflating democratic socialism as if its communism. The only type of transition would be from corporation based enterprise and developing along side old school corporation into co-op enterprises which would be co-owned by employees with one vote per every employee/employer on all aspects to the operation of the business from leaders, managers, capital expenditures, benefits, compensation, etc. And those co-ops would likely be profit motive most of the time, and then they would vote on what to do with the surplus/profits rather than a few do nothing shareholders take it all as is the case today with corporations.
Brings democracy to the workplace and nobody sane would vote out their job in outsourcing just to fluff profits a little more, polluting their own communities as they live in that location, or paying insane compensation to top executives; you know actually reward merit.
As for UK Kyle nails it.
And UK medical system time and time again has the best results and is among the lower per-capita cost. Reason many even us on the left don't want to push that far into a UK system is that it would be MASSIVELY disruptive as our current system many dental offices and clinics are privately owned by the very doctor or group of doctors; it's much easier to do what Germany and France and Canada has, allow them to have their sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or even co-op. Government will ensure inputs from medicines to medical appliances are negotiated to be lower priced not to constitute as it is now a racket; 18 or more drug companies producing 300 generic Rx are being investigated for colluding of which many have already admitted their collusion and are in the settlement process while assisting in divulging more companies that were part of the collusion.
UK ranks 1 for the past couple of decades in terms of overall results and price.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
And dentists, orthodontists, medical doctors, surgeons, nurses, licensed nurses, techs, dental hygienists, etc. make the same if not more.
Dental hygienist 2017 makes average $35.91 per hour in the US vs £29.83 $39.30USD per hour in the UK... so in this case they make even more money.
Really, UK pays nursing and lower techs better than $10 or $12 that is paid for lower medical workers in the US anyway; yet their overall spending is 50% lower per capita than our own.
So it would be nice to shoot for UK system, but that would require a long transition period and only if non-profit and for profit hospitals and clinics and big pharma act like pigs and try some weird ass revolt and stop operations.
Part of any pricing negotiation would be the threat that if they try to racketeer beyond a certain margin cap, that the US would undertake production of a particular generic drug and supply it at cost. Rural areas would see a reopening and rebuilding of new clinics and hospitals as the current profit and even non-profit (usually church funded) have closed under this idiot private racketeering healthcare model.
But most of us realize going straight toward a UK model method would be massively disruptive and likely result in a catastrophe in healthcare supply. And we see other countries not needing to go to the extend of the UK.
UK developed their NHS in England, Whales, and Scotland in the aftermath of WWII 1948 where their entire region was under heavy bombardment and war time blockades; they basically had a clean slate in order to begin such a program.
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FB helped get Trump elected.
But seriously, 45% didn't even bother to vote in a presidential election, it's a record low. 63% didn't bother to vote in the last midterm.
Two candidates that simply sucked. And the winner didn't actually get a plurality, it simply won the electoral college.
We're stuck with a vicious cycle of cheap labor world wide since the 80's. And people are angry. Gerrymandering, poor candidates, and stinky economy world wide for the worker and even small business owner which is essentially most of the people: 90% of the population; things suck.
I didn't vote for either Trump the cartoon character or Hillary the continue with retrenching toward robber baron economics until we repeat the first 4 decades of the 1900's.
As for FB, I realized in 2016 that my info was not safe. Had a long lost friend from Houston call me while I was on business for 6 months in OKC, I asked how he got my number, he said from FB. Was glad it was him, but then realized why about 2010 during my duty in the Air Force when I put my cell number in, that I suddenly got lots of spam phone calls, never prior and I had the same cell number since 2004.
Due to various reasons including that, I deleted most personal data.
Date of birth is required, so I put something insane, birth town and home town deleted, all colleges and degrees deleted, prior work places deleted (one was a government department and we had been warned to do that on social media to avoid issues with some laws).
All that's on it right now are some pictures and videos, and an old Air Force address that has since been demolished.
I thought FB would eventually go the way of myspace. And its already happening, hardly log in, same as I did with myspace.
And just one step of deleting it.
I wondered why all the younger folks, several refused to post their real name, and one, he posted being an old lady and being a model for Ketchup LOL!
We used FB as a quick way to share ppt, doc, files, and IM for meetings and gatherings.
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Especially if there is possible means to traverse through time or alternate causal events, it wouldn't exist with our current technology within any of our live times anyways.
And I suspect if there is a way to such a thing, it would be incredibly expensive to those people in that era of technology as it is to us to launch into space; probably why you don't notice being in other timelines, no contradictions, nobody showing up with evidence and all proclaiming to be time travelers, events being thwarted that otherwise would have happened.
It's just so expensive such operations would be too expensive for the common technologically advance civilization, possibly required an entire galactic or region of galaxy to spend the resources to modify causality.
Just as it was as expensive to traverse across the oceans just 300 years prior to our current year.
Because of relativity in a nutshell, and how weird quantum mechanics is, causality is "break-able". My suspicions about oddities about QM such as particle duality, especially entanglement, as well as quantum tunneling and virtual particles has to do with the fact these particles and sub-atomic particle indeed move in motion at relativistic speeds, beyond the confines of event horizons, and thus often bust causal chains. Hence to us seem so weird.
They are transferring between past and future and present etc.
We all are in motion and amidst the mass similar frame of reference.
We vary those frames of reference in such small minute amounts, and constantly re-merging with each others frames of reference; that we are bound by casual continuity very firmly. But not completely impossibly.
Again, just like going to space, it takes enormous amounts of energy to reach escape velocity of earth, but it is achievable.
Time is relative to each frame of reference. Merging frames of reference under low relativistic oscillations well below even slightly noticeable dilation of time and space produces very consistent causal events. When times that are at or very near relativistic frames of reference then merge, all bets are off. And causal events can become blurred or begin to vary in probabilistic ways, just as we observe in quantum mechanics. Time becomes space like, transferable, probably not in just back and forth but in it's version of width too (whatever that means).
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Based on prior end of bull markets that were rather insane, you'll have several head fakes. In this is one, we already had a few head fakes in 2015 and 2018 (Fed started selling assets) then 2019 (then the Fed restarted QE September). COVID19 just pushed the over leverage crisis to the forefront. There's not much saving it. So expect several head fakes going back up. And more outbreaks are immanent which can cause panic in the real economy as well as in stocks.
If you were caught unaware and want to take profits, these head fakes are great at cashing in locking in whatever gains. And since it's rather obvious over done, option hedges puts would be a good place to gamble; you're 90% likely to make money on a dive in most sectors in the next 3 months from June... so 3 to 4 month contract puts you'll probably make money in most sectors.
Right now, info tech is what's holding up this market; FANG stocks: Face Book, Amazon, Apple, Google (Alphabet), Net Flix, etc. As they're still buying back stock... most other sectors have ended their buy back operations which has caused great foaming of the market over the past 7 years.
Outflows are much more than inflows still during this run up too. So quite literally a handful of stocks are making the indexes look nice.
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There were serious moments he sounded more liberal or at least understanding to us workers than Hillary. And it was under the GOP controlled house and senate with Clinton that voted to remove Glass-Steagal banking act, passed NAFTA, established bilateral trade with China putting us on path for using every despotic and failed state as a plantation for cheap serf/slave/desperate labor, increased sentencing that blew up the prison population that we're number one in the world in number of our citizens in prison, de-funded HUD and low income affordable houses and apartments which then required people to take out mental case loans well above their annual income, de-funded low income welfare to ensure poverty was avoided, etc.
Most people I spoke to either wanted to vote for Bernie, but if they only had the choice between Hillary vs Trump, they went Trump.
People are fucking angry in all developed countries. Even many of the countries that were gaining for a short sugar rush, but crashed too around 2008-10 like Brazil, even in China, S Korea, etc. Most nations of Europe, particularly UK which since Thatcher and even with Blair, their working class completely bombed making in real income 10% less than they did 30 years ago as the median. And their faced with a similar housing and apartment shortage and of their supply that was privatized, apparently it was done to maximize profits regardless of safety as the Grenfell tower fire demonstrates.
This economic system is completely untenable.
We're repeating the turn of the last two centuries 1880's to 1930's.
Society didn't learn its lesson last time.
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I think a basic wealth co-ownership for its dividend income.
What makes a co-op ownership with share dividend better is that it reduces time worked so we're not still stuck on basic income as well as having to work long hours at low income; basically businesses start to use the universal basic income as a subsidy in lieu of higher pay.
Also over time, a basic income would start shrink as all government programs tend to do over time both in terms of nominal shrinkage, but real shrinkage as people tend to think inflation maybe caused by the universal income increases; when actual inflation tends to happen during large leveraging from banks in the fractional reserve system, and a labor market that's extremely tight; with global exploitation, labor markets are extremely loose.
Share ownership co-op structure would require businesses to provide shares to employees. A reserve bank of Co-ops like the Federal Reserve bank does for big businesses and banks today; would have the power to lend to co-ops to provide high capital amounts for sectors like mining, refining, heavy manufacturing, expensive electronics, R&D for medicines and other goods, as well construction development.
Such a bank could provide a universal shares income in a basket of co-op share systems; maybe an index of co-op shares. Whereby the dividends from these co-ops would provide a basic income.
Compensation wouldn't just include wages/salary, but also shares. And if unemployed for schooling or whatever reason, or perhaps in a new small not yet established co-op with any surplus/profits thus no dividends, you would be given via the Co-op Reserve bank the larger shares as well as public corporate stock indexes to gain a portfolio of shares that pay dividends.
A wealth model is better as it actually would reduce the 40 hour work week into half 20 hours; allowing more people to participate in a shrinking automated work environment. As well as ensuring even higher income than what you would get from a universal payment every month; it would increase as you got older and accumulated more shares; retirement age you would be set. These accumulated retirement shares would mostly not be passed to survivors of the family; perhaps only 50% or less would unless married.
The remaining shares after death would go back to the reserve bank to distribute; so quantity of shares always exist.
Avoids the squabble over raising universal income, and its potentially its worthlessness as time goes by. Like a 7.25 Federal min wage is currently a joke.
A universal wealth co-op structure would be the best method of ensuring everyone has prosperity.
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Since the fundamental foundation of currency today is based on fiat currency backed by a Federal Reserve of a nation that lends to private banks at a discount to keep them liquid since they only hold 9% of all deposits in fractional reserve lending systems, and when such banks lend already lent money in the multiplier effect essentially make money come into existence, we could do the same directly with a Co-Op Federal Reserve Bank that lends directly to groups and existing companies wanting to form a special Co-op that provides 1 vote non-trade-able ownership to all employees to vote on all topics of operations of the business.
Aristocracy is no longer necessary as capital formation jumps the middleman of banks and investment firms.
Employee owned firms, you would never see them vote to give pay packages 300 times the average employee pay... worker pay on profitable enterprises wouldn't be 5% to 20%, but could easily be doubled and still produce 10% to 40% profits to do more unexpected capital expenditures to grow the company and/or fund more pension program, or to keep in cash flow for a rainy quarter or year. And you certainly wouldn't see them vote to outsource their jobs, or do something that would pollute their locality so they would ensure they built proper methods to take care of waste.
I think turning corporations into these special defined co-ops is a way to move passed robber baron oligarchy and often dissolves into kleptocracy as defined by when oligarchs start hiring their own police forces, military armed forces, and/or judges directly.
Humanity evolved past slavery, feudalism, and mercantilism by changing worker and employer relationships. And this co-op method does just that. Employee becomes part employer in a meaningful manner by providing them a powerful vote of operations.
And it finds funding via borrowed money at a discount via a special central bank that would screen applicants based on the merit of their business plan and if already in production how well they're already doing as a business. So aristocracy isn't necessary... Uncle Money Bags not needed. There could be Co-op businesses for that very purpose to screen Co-Op loan applicants to ensure viability and curtail fraud.
And it still allows for investment in co-ops and even existing corporations to try to compete... when co-ops pick up steam and enter every sector of the economy though, I'm fairly sure the quality and quantity supplied would be superior to that of the same from any existing corporations: you would have happy employees, more informed employees to make critical adjustments and now where capital expenditures should go.
Economist Richard Wolff's Co-op enterprise system idea is very realistic and much better than any form of economics we have had in human history thus far.
It answers critical questions on how do we get capital formation, who should be in charge and how to segment these outfits... workers should be in charge, and the form a business co-op in sectors and specialties of their interests and talents similar to how we do business today; and this learns the critical lesson that should be learned from the failed USSR and others that simply having the government do all enterprise just changes labels, but keeps the same aristocracy characteristics. This puts it to groups of individuals still competing. So those sectors that do better with a profit motive would still do so, just that those profits go to the workers, not mostly the aristocracy eventually in the long run creating boom and then busts, and ultimately creating a vicious cycle of demand destruction as wealth and its income pools to a fewer and fewer households, leaving that wealth eventually worthless, because it can no longer draw an income since everyone else is too poor to buy the stuff anymore.
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Just wanted to brief about social security or national pensions vs privatize.
Our social security system is actually solvent, it still even now puts in more money than what is withdraws for payments.
It's narrative. Oligarchs of the USA wants to take those payroll taxes and stick in their pockets via stock buy backs, and selling all over our little heads.
Social Security since it's inception has generally paid more in than out. In fact, as of 2021 asset reserve of 2.852 trillion surplus on social security funds.
We've only had more withdraws than revenues from social security a few times: 2021 during the pandemic net draw down was 56.2 billion of the then 2.908 trillion social security reserve.
To see net withdrawals over revenues you have to go back to 1975 to 1981... 1975 1.5 billion net draw down on a 44 billion reserve.
Those were the only times the net reserves were drawn down. Ever.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4a3.html
That was the point why social security system was intended NOT to be private, but be backed by the USA government, held in special social security savings bonds that earn 6% return on those reserves every year along with collecting those social security tax revenues.
Oligarchs hate this because they can't get their hands on those funds to play scams with it; it also means this system must always be brought to a net savings not allow deficits for long periods of time, concept is that its better to have more social security revenues to earn interest of 6% compounding, than to have deficit social security which would reduce future payments.
And it's largely the little guy that foots this social security payments... 6.2% on all gross income no deductions whatsoever.
And if self employed, the little guy takes the other match of full 12.4%.
While the employer pays 6.2% and you pay 6.2% when employed by a business.
Currently, max social security tax payment ends after $160,200 gross income; of which income above that for 2023 is no longer taxed at the 6.2% if employed, if self employed 12.4% goes away on income above that $160,200. This greatly reduced your taxable income for the highest of the wage earners out there.
And dividends from banks, CD's, or short or long term capital gains are NOT subject to social security taxes whatsoever.
Only the ordinary income tax that is subject to deductions and tax credits to determine your taxable income.
So those who only trade stocks or make dividends CD's or stocks or otherwise sit on their comfortable privy behinds pay no social security payments. A savings self employed of 12.4% or 6.2% employed... a big off the top effective tax rate deduction indeed.
Again, social security really is primarily garnered from the lowest tier income earners. And it is solvent.
Only drawing down recently due to the COVID19 mess in 2021.
And there are ways to make it more solvent or rather bigger reserves, for future retires that are already happening quickly; simply remove that tax cap or provide a bubble area so $160,200 current cap, we could say $160,200 to $200,000 you pay no 6.2% or 12.4% on that gross amount over until above $200,001 income then resume as normal.
So allowing the well paid to have a bit of a Social security tax holiday on that extra $40kish.
We could procure social security tax on ordinary income for capital gains short and long term and dividend income say on such income over $50,001 you begin paying 3.1% half the amount.
Keeping in mind we would like to have those able to make $50K in retirement from fixed income dividends from CD's and other stuff not to be taxed that much; preserving their $1 to $2 million retirement accounts for as long as possible. Yet those making well beyond this amount, can afford to pay 3.1% without drawing down their principle fixed income investment/savings.
Ordinary income above $201K would be subject to the regular 6.2% employed social security tax. And this would make such the reserves not only stave off future reductions on projected retirees, but make the reserve grow huge. Preserving and allowing inflation adjustments COLA to increase for current and future retirees benefit better from social security retirement withdrawals.
Simple easy methods to ensure our national pension system, social security, is not just better positioned for reserves, but better to handle COLA.
We already have a "private" aspect of our pension system in either a defined pension scheme which unfortunately has become no longer offered, or the gimmick that was originally just a tax dodge for the executive class in a 401K very horribly option provided investment account; not even close to the millions of investment options an IRA allows.
And... those typically don't go so well... the defined pensions the oligarchs scream about how they can keep it solvent, or in order to make defined payouts, these pensions pile into highly speculative stuff like meme stocks or crypto. And go bust. Or 401K the matching contribution is so pathetically ridiculous or non-existent, market volatility is that of Japan 1989 to present, and the fees are so huge that they eat much of the savings compoundment away and vanish over a period of just a few down turns in the economy.
Not to mention incomes not keeping up with inflation means personal contributions are lacking despite the ability to tax defer such contributions, the vast majority of people don't have any money in a 401K. And of those that do, since you can't time the market to enter, you can't time it to exit, many hit retirement age just as a recession or big down turn, losing all matching contributions or worse; they're an unsafe gamble for retirement.
At least an IRA has multitude of various savings brokered CD's to stocks, to ETFs to mutual funds, to US Treasuries to Muni bonds, etc. For investment. And it is up to the IRA holder to invest that money and watch it carefully taking profits when it looks like period to book them, and enter into positions when it looks good to do so. Little more hands on.
A safety net of a non-private pension like social security is the best bet.
It was built to be that thing that so long the nation exists as a nation, elderly will have an income during retirement.
Any other retirement privatized thing should just be thought of as an extra cherry on top.
Doing away with such a safety net would have dire consequences for the prosperity as well as just the very existence of the country.
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You need to explain empirical economics; we are a mixed market economy. We are a social-capital system. .
Some items make sense for a democratic government provide everyone with certain goods and service: fire, water, electricity, sewer: monopolies because for profit motive breaks down when violations of some or all competitive market principles occur in a particular sector.
It's called economics, you should have told her on national tv to learn it because she obviously doesn't, that she only knows mind numbing dogmatic propaganda. And this nonsense about privatizing monopolies and oligopolies, no longer supporting worker rights in favor of an oligarchy is a recipe for a repeat the likes of 18th century France, 19th/early 20th century Russia, near mid western Europe through China with fascism and communist authoritarianism; you're leading us down the collapse that will lead to the authoritarianism you're bitching about... Venezuela is case in point, everyone wants to decry their hyper inflation taking place currently, but the forget before their current party, the majority of the people were outright poor with massive homelessness, illiteracy and poverty was the highest in S. America, it's no longer. It would be true that the current party is very bad with financing, and the countries need for imports spooked off investors making their currency very weak, but they still have an oligarchy that's allowed to live there and protest and some have actually conducted violent coupes and are still allowed to be free and have their mansions and sell stuff.
Essentially, they are the collapse of capitalism. The vast majority of the people may not necessarily like the current party, but the alternative they fear is going back to an even worse economy and livelihood.
What we're doing is driving toward a more mixed economy on the social aspect, so we have an actually growing standard of living among the majority of people instead of shrinking one that we have had for the past 40 years.
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Rehashing of the old with a different arbitrary name; robber baron plutocracy with gig economy Neoliberalism.... the plutocrats and/or their toadies hate that neolibral word so much it's yet to make it into spell checker. They know defining the problem in a concise way leads to resolving the problem... a problem they don't want resolved, their return to robber baron plutocracy. While it's not concisely defined, in the confusion, they themselves can tap dance feigning various solutions such as a oligarchs bill of how soft and gentle they will be declaration, or donating to a charity or other tiny give-away to pretend things are great otherwise the peanuts handed out to assist in building a park wouldn't have happened... despite the fact nobody wanted that extra park, we have plenty of parks, we need more housing thus making it more affordable, instead land availability is reduced raising prices making it even less affordable to build needed housing... congrats.
They pretend markets on their own are wonderful, and anyone else other than themselves is a gross manipulation of markets... again all while they manipulate the fuck out of markets. The hypocrisy is palpable to the point it's difficult to understand how anyone could honestly subscribe to their insanity.
As a teen I took a job unknowingly as an independent contractor at an hourly rate. Fortunately, I saved most of what I made, and could pay my double social security tax as well as Federal and state taxes that weren't being withheld at all.
I then thought, shit, at some point these fucking employers will do just that, just as they've outsourced to the most dictatorial and/or impoverished nations on earth for abundant serfs... I mean labor.
The gig economy is aptly named. It's a giggle at the workers, as the supple siders at least for the short and mid run laugh in their faces.
Of course, like robber baron oligarchy, this same thing rehashed into a new name, will leave nobody laughing. And everyone is in misery until it is actually once again fixed. And in that fixing, there maybe some rehashing of some seriously bad methods as worse as robber baron economics.
That's why it's better we fix this return to a doomed system sooner than later. We wait until it crashes mostly or completely while everyone is in desperate straights and in utter chaos, an increased chance we get some very bad systems.
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What I find funny over the past twenty years how our media loves to call out various other nations, usually of poorer economic means often due to our own influences and covert action, for their corruption or supposed corruption such as immediately identifying Russian rich that influence that nation now as "Russian Oligarchs" or various South Americans often non-illegal drug trafficing rich as king pens to associate that their similarity to illegal drug dealers.
But our rich are just hardworking people, to which everyone will someday become. When in fact, statistics have shown US social mobility in the US is less than even UK which has vestiges of a class system that continues to have a House of Lords and House of Commons; they literally have a better social mobility, more chance to do better for themselves than our country that over century has prohibited indenture servitude and slavery of any kind. And a Kingdom still has better chance, albeit still among the lowest of the wealthy nations, at a person doing better on income than our country.
Any journalism would be extremely skeptical on why this is the case and eating it alive. Instead, we get propaganda on how wonderful this country is despite the data of reality.
Recent interview with Varoufakis, his last statement rings so true and should be heeded everywhere for all times by everyone:
"Don't take anything for granted. And don't forget that every system of oppression, every system of government (corporation, religion, bureaucracy), if you want, wants to envelop you in its superstitions and ideology until you can't see it anymore, and you think you live in the best of all possible worlds. You don't."
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It is until it isn't.
That's the big problem. Right now, sure. But fracking literally is licking the bottom of the barrel of what's left. And recent studies of actual procurement of fracking sites were over-estimated to have 25 years worth, actually only have about 15 to 18 years worth, some were already producing very little, and the oldest were already non-productive.
So sure... it's like someone dabbling with cocaine, ain't the sex even better you can go all week! Sure. Until you can't stop and become an addict who now has heart troubles after being rushed to the hospital several times for coke induced heart-attacks.
Feels great today, the hangover sucks tomorrow.
And it delays alternative energy development. Which makes the pain on getting an alternative that's cheaper available that much longer while energy suddenly becomes even scarcer making that even more expensive to develop.
It's not the best thing.
And if the prices dump for too long, it also becomes a short term sugar rush as that glut just vanishes faster as bankruptcies just stop production. And that production doesn't come back. Mid term spike in price. Followed by the aforementioned long term price hike.
So yes for now, and mostly no because it won't be for that long. It also has geopolitical ramifications too.
One other positive though, we get to witness what it will be like when oil becomes essentially obsolete as far as an energy product relegated to only plastics production; such as whenever LFTR fission and ultimately ITER/Wendelstein 7x fusion comes on line. But that also explains why ITER is so slow compared to the most recent German Wendelstein 7x program and is surpassing ITER in their experimental phases... it's as if they're delaying ITER program as long as possible. ... to get some return on all that last decade oil investment.
Germany has no oil of its own nor does China, so it's like fuck this shit. China started 2014 their 10 year LFTR program, and Germany is conducting their Wendelstein 7x again way ahead of ITER already in the experimental phases, while ITER is still under construction.
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She was smart on explaining she didn't feel like answering questions, when you're busy with other things you're not going to make a good debate. Some get star struck when Leno and others do their quizzes. Brain goes bye bye. And say as little as possible.
There's times when to do such debates. So that it is specific and coherent.
Personally though, I have facts about healthcare and world politics and armed with a phone with google, the common thing at work when we discuss things is to verifying them with a quick easy search.
1) every other developed country has a form of universal healthcare and since 2001 WHO and Mirror Mirror reports have shown they all do better overall and in costs than the US.
2) We cannot compete in all other sectors of the economy without universal healthcare becoming law in our country because businesses are struggling to pay the employer portion which they usually cover 90%, its already puts them at an non-competitive advantage worldwide. Only big pharma, hospitals, and insurance companies admire our failed economic system; its the racket that keeps on bringing in the big bucks, and everyone else's expense. And its utterly immoral.
3) And we are already a social-capital mixed market system. Some more so and enjoy better standards of living for more of their people than our country. Roads, rails, power, gas, sewers, water works, airports, sea ports, city parks, national parks, fire departments, labor safety departments, consumer protection departments, civil departments from state appointed attorneys, libraries, federal and state weights and measures bureaus, social security, medicare and medicaid, housing and urban development, NASA, the military, police departments, courts, legislatures, governors, sheriffs, etc. are all forms of socialism.
Capitalism works when none of the competitive market principles are violated or only a few that can be impeded by regulations and other fixes to ensure a competitive market for that sector. Most of described are natural monopolies hence why the governments of the world do a better job than for profit motive capitalism, which no longer has the benefit which is only competition. For profit motive no longer works when the market for that sector has no way of being competitive. You just get racketeering.
Now go back to info wars and educate your dim wit of con jobber fat fuck.
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The moments just before totality where my nephew and I were, on top of a mountain peak between Idaho City and Lowman, the temperature rapidly dropped, from a hot 90 something to a low 60 to almost what felt like 50ish windchill as small breezes would come in with the coldest of wind which persisted even after totality ended for about half hour, an airplane in the distance at about 30K MSL or higher could be seen, noises of various birds and animals stopped, was absolute silence. Then a roaring of the airplanes engines as if on take off... I figure the aircraft was a passenger jet who saw the path of totality coming, and it's route was crossing totality, so I supposed the pilot increased power to speed up in time to get into totality.
The lighting seemed like a glitch in the matrix as my nephew put it. The roar of the engines of the aircraft as if on take off, not at cruise was at first disconcerting, as if something bad was about to happen, my nephew said he felt like some impending doom... what's that noise, do you hear that, what's going on? The lighting was like at dusk, but more rapid and odd, tint of color was yellow then orange to almost a red as it got closer to totality.
The bead of light just before and especially after totality is so beautiful. I got it on video after totality, you could look at it without pain unaided... not sure if that was a healthy thing to do, but it didn't hurt.
Nature went completely silent at totality. Prior to totality you could hear some grouse and pheasants, at one point making some goofy noises. At totality, absolute silence.
Was amazing.
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If you were describe a person 6'3" and as fat as he is, you wouldn't say 230, you would say 300 to 320 pounds, no police report could identify Trump with the description in on his weight and height. Those two points make anything else questionable. Being in the military and even non military medical places, often they'll just ask for your height and weight without actually weighing me. Unless I insist they weigh me. So those figures are fluffy. Despite being important on dosage of any Rx. I want to see raw data: blood results, actual Cardiogram data showing heart heart rhythm, pulse rate, blood pressure: control, stressed, then de-stressed conditions.
Would be more meaningful. What was provided is just fluff. If something were to later come out in contradiction, they could say we just asked him for his weight and height. And oh, we must have had problems with our blood pressure apparatus reading wrong at that time.
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This bubble is seven headed Hydra... the last one was 3 headed one:
1) Housing prices inflated beyond the income ratio of affordability along with collateralized loan obligation.
2) Credit card debt at the time was record high.
3) Stock market margin debt at record high at the time $378 billion 2007.
Now the 3 same but even higher... stock market margin total debt is now record ever $655 billion. But 4 more new ones:
4) vehicle loan debt at all time highs of $1.3 trillion... was half that in 2007, defaults rising over the last few years, but more debt piling on.
5) Student loan debt that was half the amount it is now at $1.5 trillion with lots of defaults already.
6) Real Wages are that of 1974, 2007 wages we're about the mid 1980's slightly better than now; while rents, home prices, foods, medical, etc. all have gone up tremendously in price.
7) Business loans at $8 trillion bigger and worse than ever, $1.3 trillion in collateralized loan obligations 11% due in 2019... was only $400 billion in 2007. Leveraged loan market total is insanely hot, defaults already very high, and makes the mortgage melt down look much smaller in comparison.
And there is no backstop. After 2008 crash, China, Brazil, and several other emerging markets put themselves in large debts public and private, currently many of their own debt bubbles are bursting, in China P2P lending has gone completely unwound. So there's very few spenders of last resort internationally.
I think this bubble burst will be more severe than 1929 great depression... something we literally have never experienced in the US at least in the 1900's and the few decades in this century. My suggestion to people, just save as much money as possible. Keep money in FDIC even though that may come under pressure as it nearly did in the 2008 crash. At least you stand a chance to keep whatever money you have.
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I'm an American, Idahoan, born and raised. So a country bumpkin, sort of. Raised on hunting and fishing and hiking swimming, boating and many other outdoor activities.
That being said, it is odd that one must take a hunter safety course from the Idaho Fish and Game department to be allowed to then purchase annual hunting licenses and various tags for big game. The course is a couple months if I recall, and one can take it at age 12 and older. One cannot hunt with firearms nor bow or any other method of hunting until passing the course.
It includes a final exam, and when I took the course when I was 12, a practical mock pheasant hunt with three other students and examiner/instructor watching and grading and simulating the entire hunt.
Yet one can just randomly show up at age 18 and purchase whatever firearm with minimal of any background checks. Convicted probation or former convicted felons are often not allowed to own firearms nor be in the presence of them, particularly while on probation.
It's the weirdo concept that the way the nation was founded was from a bunch of musket wielding people. Which wasn't exactly accurate. Muskets were expensive, and often commandeered by those who couldn't fight (wounded) and all weapons were registered to that effect, and if possible the firearm would be returned to the owner, and/or payment was provided at some point in the future.
So they think that they can become their own army (against them government that might oppress them). A weird sense that everyone is their own army general or Rambo, a weird creepy fetish fantasy that is far from historical accuracy.
Doesn't help that many also think of the pioneer days in the west. They think gunslingers and shoot outs and every cowboy in the two had their pistol strap on when they were in town for protection, when often many small or even large towns had many restrictions on fire arms when entering the city limits. Wild Bill Hickok law enforcer implemented a strict policy that any cowboy visiting in town to the taverns or brothels or general stores or hotels etc. had to give up their weapons to the him in person or at their sheriff's office while being in the city limits. Was done to prevent the already insane amount of murders that lead to Hickok's recruitment in the first place. And many other places had such rules.
So the idea everyone needed a firearm to protect themselves in town in the pioneering days was also bunk. The lawlessness literally without laws or general rules, having those fire arms in close proximity to gambling and drinking establishments increased the numbers of fights that would turn into murderous shoot outs, and rule were put in force to halt that consequences of such stupidity... everyone being armed to the teeth doesn't prevent violent murder by firearm, but only increases such horrible outcomes.
We value it before even transportation. It is not a "right" to drive a vehicle or any other transportation device be it aircraft, vessel, train, or vehicle, etc. We all understand it to be a privilege to drive and maintain a license to do so. And thus requiring an exam, at younger ages, a driving education course complete with various exams and final exam and final state exam as well as a physical exam (eye sight), and even a practical exam with police or an designated examiner.
And the unfortunate horrible inept or just complete lack of planning and will to produce mass lite mass transit within even some of the larger cities, motorized transport is essentially the only dependable source of transportation.
Something we use on a daily basis. Yet most of us who own firearms, we use them generally much sparingly, myself, I hardly use my rifle. But depend daily on being able to drive my car to and from work, and days off, to do everything else about life.
Yet something we need so absolutely and everyday, we're okay with that having physical, mental, and educational requirements that must be maintained in most states every several years, and registration of the vehicle annually.
With among the deadliest tool, something that's entire purpose is to maim, destroy, and/or kill an object or thing or creature... that is something we press for extreme unconstrained access.
And it has come to the point that we have valued the "right" to bear an extremely deadly weapon, even more deadly then a knife or sword or bow, we value these deadly mechanical devices more than we value the right to full quality affordable healthcare. This one can even prevent some of the people who committed these disgusting acts of mass murder, if they only had access to affordable quality healthcare like just about every other developed nation, even some of the poorer or poorest of nations provide. To the rest of the developed nation, not having universal healthcare is tantamount to not having police stations and/or fire stations or a fully functioning 24/7 water works and electrical grid. It's unthinkable not to have such universal healthcare, access to quality doctors without even having to think about the cost or being faced with bankruptcy, and having to make critical choices on which doctors or which procedures or mode of care for particular ailment.
A very fundamental need of health. We forgo.
And instead concentrate on a right to trade and posses a lethal weapon.
We have an extremely bad set of priorities and values in this country that makes completely no sense whatsoever.
We are a pathetic people, a broken delusional people.
We need to reflect and realize our problem, our priorities are completely out of wack. And it doesn't help that the drive from various oligarchs and their big business (in this case firearms trade) plays on those earlier discussed misconceptions, and they foment them, even though complete lies.
And the very distrust of the "government" when in a democracy, you and I and every other citizen and even to an extent residents, are the government. To be so paranoid of "government" is to abandoned yourself to democracy, to lend it over to a vacuum that will be filled by oligarchs pitching/propounding this fear, as they fill that power vacuum. The very paranoia of the "evil they Government" hiding under your bed is only then born to fruition. The oligarchs have succeeded in you handing over with both hands any power you had to them. And you are less safe and less secure and less democratic and less likely to keep any other rights we hold dear: right to speech, right to religion, right to a speedy trial by jury ie due process, right to peacefully assemble and petition and protest, etc. etc.
If everyone were angels and we hadn't the other problems in society where we have these frequent mass murders or even the horrible single murders we have daily in every city in this big country, we wouldn't need to concern our selves so much with laying down restrictions or rules that make gun purchase and sales and ownership. But with the insanity going on, it is time we place some barriers to at least attempt to catch someone who may have ill intent regardless of motivation (mental problem or just mean spirited motivations or political motivation) from acquiring a fire arm.
And perhaps we should address priorities toward needs and rights like healthcare or even transport or even shelter, a nation with many in distressed rent prices and/or mortgage payments or record homeless including an extremely large number of homeless children exceeding many poorer nations, when we're supposedly the richest and primarily only remaining mega super power.
Elementary school kids unsafe in a school, or even the mass murder in a Church in Charleston.
This is not acceptable. Nor should it ever be.
This is not just red flags that our nation is falling apart.
There are many things we all need to critically think about and realize we have an extremely bad set of priorities... and perhaps who is shaping the overall tone of these priorities and values? Who is manipulating us into such sheer madness and outright stupidity and outrageous mismatch in values and priority to value an instrument of death more highly than the instruments and persons of medical expertise in healing.
Our present priorities are truly bat shit.
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CCP made these oligarchs granting them monopolies... these oligarchs debt binged. And now they're concerned.
The entire global financial system is... at the breaking point.
Race to the bottom my dear boy.
An idiot with the brain the size of a walnut could explain:
Oh, you're going to "globalization" or whatever new or recycle term you want to describe this... recycled term in the 1920's... prior it was called colonialism recycled throughout the 1600 thru 1875. Until a new term was made.
But it just means exploitation the most destitute nations and if you can't find that many find the destitute AND tyrannized nations... inauthentic comparative advantage of slave/serf/destitute/tyrannized labor.
Other nations' labor that's better off... fall in wages and thus so does aggregate demand.
In financial periods where bankers run the roost, this nonsense carries on well beyond its natural inevitable collapse via debt binge... and oh have we debt binged since the 1970's globally.
But that only kicks the aggregate demand decline down the road until the debt just simply cannot be repaid.
Ding dong. The witch is dead. Again and again and again and again.
Results... collapse economically, malaise, outright misery (US has both with millions living in tents, cars, and RV's instead of actual homes and those numbers are increasing at parabolic rates), then there is famine in food scarce areas particularly harsh should harvests not be decent due to climate and weather... then add the civil and boarder unrest with war... Arab spring with famine all through the not that "fertile" crescent region... famine in Sudan and Somalia and Yemen... war continuing with the oppressive Saudi Kingdom of pure unadulterated evil, Syria disaster, Libya disaster with open slave markets.
Now we move forward, Turkey falling apart with hyper inflation. Russia invading the remaining former Russian Empire regions like Georgia and Ukraine... now back at it to finish the job I guess.
S. America is nothing but a basket case, only made worse with US attempting it's own "globalization" attempts of installing various ridiculous murderous dictators so that our oligarchs have access to resources and cheap cheap cheap labor... with the cherry on top that they're tyrannized... must work or else....
Again... a moron with a brain the size of a walnut could figure this mess out.
To be serious, though... just a somewhat comprehensive understanding of recorded history would suffice to figure out where we were all headed... what cycle we were in.
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Out of 201 recognized nations, 170 of them have either or both free or universal healthcare, only 30 among us that don't. And we spend double compared to the most wealthiest other nations per capita, and have the worst outcomes thereof.
Here's an idea... create a universal healthcare that takes the place of all medical insurance, that includes all medical expenses from mental, physical, and dental as 170 plus nations already have, and mandate negotiation power for the medical program as 170 plus nations also have.
And it would be more than the nominal rate over 10 years not doing so $34.6 trillion using the last 10 years of healthcare inflation, price of not doing so over 10 years would be over $42 trillion. The $32.6 trillion considers the last 10 year inflation and suppression of negotiation power.
This is such a no brainer as: prohibition on child labor, compulsory and universal education, universal suffrage, fire departments and police departments, laws against: murder in all degrees, theft and robbery in all amounts, trespassing, assault and battery, etc.
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@bitteroldman701 The hustle to unwind billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of something requires enough liquidity (suckers) to pay near or top dollar to get those paper gains and turn them into real money sitting in several bank accounts and CD ladders to live off for the rest of their life.
Basically, the big money that has most of their wealth in solid cash and other things like CD's and treasuries of various developed nations, and a relative small stock and other risky junk, you don't see them conning anyone nor running any businesses just living off the dividends and interest and occasionally rotating from one sector to another in the dreaded idiotic "business" cycle ie. when the central banks or cartel banks start to hike or ease interest rates and as the entire system becomes futile, the new invention implemented first by Japan: QE ie. monetize bank debt.
The hucksters that have to be out and front, generally are paper rich, but cash poor. Some cons yet to be called out include Musk, for example... needs to keep coming up with one scam after another they hype his shit, get something to stick... Boring company... nope, Space X... well that one was saved strictly by us tax payers getting lots of governmental contracts and subsidies, Neuralink nope just plagiarized scientific research done in 2003 in 2021, Open AI can't even do what individuals competing in the VEX Robotics Competition a decade ago in 2022, Zip2 a cheese web page provider was sold to Compaq for over 300 million in 1999 and that portion defunct by 2013. Buying and promoting Tesla like there was no tomorrow and later combining insolvent Solar City from his cousin and recent court action against him involving that debacle having an actual product like an electric car he's pumped all that fomo an idiocy that he was able to achieve a car maker that sells a tiny fraction of vehicles to be valued at the sum of all major car manufactures combined plus 500 billion. And has he been cashing out like crazy or what? Of course, one of his hustle to make it look like he wasn't was staking some shares going on a Twitter escapade purchase... which is likely a knee jerk reaction of some sort in some way to give an excuse to sell more Tesla shares after each time he states he's done selling (needs those share prices to take his real billion dollars selling to suckers even half from the top). Of course, he's not that smart as his hustle would make one believe and sort of screwed himself into entering into a binding agreement to buy the money losing Twitter stupidity way over priced... but doesn't matter because he's already pocketed several billions in cash with Tesla share sales prior to staking many more for the purchase of Twitter.
Basically, these scammers have to work for their hustle... to turn it from paper wealth to real wealth... watch and see Musk, if successful at getting all the cash he wants, to sort of go silent for a while... if he can IPO Twitter again, that'll be his great escape into retirement, and you certainly will never hear from him on his own self advertisements ever again..
If Twitter ends up being a mistake too many, he could lose a significant chunk of his fortune, thus motivating him to man the clown car and hustle hustle hustle til the day he drops dead.
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I think hero worship is among the worst things ever. You can enjoy their works... I like Mozart and Beethoven and Mahler and Brahms and Williams and many other composer's works.
But I don't see them as magical beings. You can even learn about their biographies, understand their life and times, their highs and lows and about the history of that period.
But don't consider the person to be all knowing and mystical magical. They're human. Their works that are good are what is amazing. And their works that less than great or even suck or are terrible are to be noted.
As for Musk, he's no genius. He got lucky with X.com that became PayPal, he was saved from himself when the board kicked him out so his shitty management style wouldn't ruin the company, this made him a hundred millionaire twice over. And he sold out when ebay bought it all up and Musk took some of that money and dumped it into SpaceX and later a little bit into Tesla then he went around selling his risky ideas to investors and banks and hyping it to media for essentially free advertisement campaign... they came piling in both investors, banks, government subsidies and contracts, and customers alike. Especially for Tesla. His hired engineers in all these businesses are doing the actually skilled work of getting the stuff accomplished.
Musk is a genius if at anything is marketing himself and his stuff... similar to other showman from PT Barnum to Walt Disney. He's a showman. That's his genius. Actually making the stuff... not so much, but that's okay, he hires the engineers to do it. And if the idea is really stupid, like Hyperloop, he converts it to something else like the Boring company or he lets it sort of peter out without anyone paying any attention.
And you can see all he does is flip from one topic to the next in some of his more hair brain ideas like the hyper loop... which is not a unique concept. It's actually stems from another idea in the 1920's when subways were being developed. And it was squashed because a vacuum sealed tube requires well more energy to create than energy to push an airplane... and it takes a lot of energy for aircraft.... safety of such a vacuum tube is much more dangerous and risk reduction more costly than aircraft risk reduction, and the utility of such a thing if you take in consideration of the energy consumption required and safety features required is really stupid... it's like using gasoline to fuel a orbital rocket ship. It's not worth the effort as it does nothing to perform the goal intended: a fast cheaper way to commute.... it's neither fast nor cheap... instead its the opposite.
And his boring company... the cost of the size of his tunnels are equal to that of competitor boring companies when you scale his relatively tiny tunnels he's dug so far, to the large ones dug today like Boston's underground freeway or UK to France Chunnel.
What Musk is good at is marketing, and using genius to get more investors and banks to lend money as well as the government to throw money at him to keep Tesla alive, as well as to get the much needed Space X contracts, there's simply not that many commercial contracts out there, but governments... they love sticking stuff in orbit. And governments even during NASA's Apollo project to the moon, love contracts... even the Space Shuttle... the O'Ring problem that caused the Shuttle to blow up was placed on that outfit that made them... convenient scapegoat, and no government employee needs to worry about losing their jobs or budget cuts in their own department... or at least its less likely than if the buck stopped with a governmental department in which if they found fault with directors and managers, they're likely terminated.
Part of learning about some of these famous people who discovered or invented or implemented something amazing is to learn what inspired them, and how they came to do it.
In all cases: from Mozart to Einstein they have one thing in common: they had some ability that was very good, but they also learned from many in their day, often being tutored and studying along side them. Mozart had many teachers, the most famous in his adulthood was Hayden, Einstein had many physicists and mathematicians of whom he used their works avidly most famous was Max Planck without his Planck's Constant Einstein wouldn't have come up with his photoelectric effect equation about photons. Tensor calculus and Riemannian geometry, the latter developed by the mathematical genius Bernhard Riemann, without that non-Euclidean geometry, Einstein's Special and General Relativity would never have been formulated.
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These fuck twats are a disaster. Pay in decline at the purchasing power of 1974, indebtedness never before seen with vehicle debts $1.5 trillion, credit card debt $1.3 trillion, mortgage debt surpassing the peak before the real-estate crash, and pensions no more for the younger generations which will screw us hard, my parents are only okay because of pensions along with social security and VA, we won't have pensions, and of the elderly who didn't get a pension during their time, life sucks for them, I know, I work with them still today.
We have no representation based on reason, objectivity, or anything.
We're a bunch of clowns suffering apathy, powerlessness, and denial.
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We don't buy into their shit... well mostly. 90% of the country own no stocks so that's that.
It's really other rich falling over themselves to proclaim how being rich makes one rich, and they point to ass holes that are loud mouth among the rich who look for other rich fucks money to create a pyramid and ponzi scam.
And Musk in particularly has taken out our tax money getting politicians to pump our tax dollars (while we in the USA have no healthcare system let alone a housing program that actually ensures affordability at all nor protects tenants hence even over million homeless children and many more millions adult are homeless in this very much uncivilized nation, I mean you can't call a nation that can't provide healthcare just basic insulin and has large murders every week and mass murders about every month that makes international news, a civilized country).
Musk has lots of scams, and dto keep them going, he moves on to another scam... he wanted to tap his over valued scammed up only decent company like Tesla that he bought and then fired in bad way couple actual founders. He's no good at anything. His Space X is nothing but a drain on our tax dollars. Rockets that land were already developed and discerned to be bad, they don't help control costs, but make them go up because the 90% of the cost of rocket launches are the fuel... and power landing a rocket increases the risk of failure as well as the biggest factor, making the costs go up... reducing the payload too. Because you need more fuel to land a risky landing. NASA decided, never mind, parachutes less risk and saves immense amount of money in extra rocket fuel and provides for even more weight for payload in launching stuff into orbit beyond. Musk admits being bitched at in the mid 2000's by a well known astronaut, as the astronaut in question realized Musk was a big tax dollar scammer and would only ruin the space exploration activities by driving up costs and adding up much more risk destroying many plans in replacement for the space shuttle and other larger plans.
Lots of scammers. Bunch of bullshit con jobbers who were promoted by prior scammers like:
1) Michael Saylor lied about Microstrategy earnings 3 years in a row 1997 to 1999 stating profits when reality his shitty company made losses 3 years in a row.
2) Mark Cuban developed a shitty ass company dumped his stocks on IPO and the company shit itself: Carbon Copay, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.. CompuServe that was later acquired by AOL then back to Verizon... shit.
3) Kevin O'Leary Softkey (another shitty software junk company) his shitty company acquired a slightly yet broke legit company The Learning Company, Mattel (the big company) bought his shitty Learning Company (TLC), sales dropped in TLC and Mattel fired O'leary for being a big fat fucking fake.
4) Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos disaster fraud pretending she had magical tech that could do all sorts of blood tests with a single drop of blood which is physically impossible as many tests are based on larger portions of blood; physically impossible to get a decent statistical makeup. Even Star Trek technology would say, the scanner would have to scan larger portions of your blood to get a statistical meaningful data collection of the composition of your blood. Basically this is akin to saying you can travel to another city on a hover craft the size of a post it note. And many of our oligarchs were investors in her shitty fraud.
There are so many others to name. Just a short list that goes on and on.
Robber baron stupidity economics, or Ayn Rand inspired idiocy, as they're all inspired by that now very dead bitch with bad ideas and horrible books (don't believe read some of them, they're complete disgusting... and don't say I didn't warn you), all that nonsense inspires is hucksters galore.
And that's what we have, an insolvent debt trapped economy with ever revolving door of very rich and some affiliated to the rich hucksters and scammers.
There are ways to make a very prosperous for all economy, but it's not via sucking the nether regions of robber barons, their clowns, and their hired thugs and ridiculous carnival barkers... that's actually nice way to catch a disease and go broke very fast.
Here's hoping the scams become so obvious these clowns fall on deaf ears and can't screw us in the proverbial ass anymore.
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The Guillotines actually began after the revolution, when the new powers that be feared another revolution on their own, and instituted the period of time as The Terror or the Reign of Terror when their newly adopted constitution was suspended.
That type only gives way to the same level of misery as doing nothing.
The point of doing anything means non-violent over throw of the government, it means getting 45% who didn't even bother to show up to vote, and 93% that didn't vote in primaries/caucuses to have a different party to vote for candidates that will get the other 45% to vote and leave the tired oligarch puppet parties to the dust bin.
The point is avoiding a collapse in society. As things be, it'll happen on its own and you likely get nothing but terror under such circumstances and a grotesque lie that makes setting up real change even more difficult for a century or more like the idiocy of Communist Russia and China marring the very useful critiques of Karl Marx; everyone thinks Marx described exactly how Mao China and Stalin Russia operated, when it was nothing like what Marx described as being solutions to a better economic structure, he never proposed that government own the means of production, nor forgo democratic and republic processes, nor close of means of peaceful protest and peacefully assemble, freedom of the press and speech, right to speedy trial by peers, etc.
But that's what happens in a collapse, one set of sociopaths and psychopaths and sociopaths are replaced by an even more cunning and sinister oppressing set, leaving many people even indirectly effected with false assumptions.
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His defensive talk makes me think he actually literally colluded with Russian or who he thinks were Russian agents, whether they were just hustlers chasing after a buffoon hustler, Trump either knows he's guilty or thinks he might be guilty of something.
And I'm on the stance Russia and other countries use propaganda and other methods to influence elections just as most countries tend to do; that's not what lost Hillary the election, she lost because she was terrible, our country is in terrible shape as far as 70% or more economically, our governmental systems are idiotic from elections to local state and federal being more bought by same level of oligarchy. No matter what influence Russia made, I'm certain Trump would have won the same manner, which in itself demonstrates how idiotic our governmental system actually is, no other nation models our system based on a defunct ancient hideous tyrannical mafioso oligarchical empire.
Personally think he's more guilty of money laundering.
But now, I think addition to money laundering, he might have sought help from people claiming to be or actually being Russian agents and he's scared.
You can't be this utterly defensive as he is on something like this.
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300 generic drugs with over 16 companies are being litigated for price fixing. Demonstrates this system is insane: as described in the video insurance companies are make well exceeding the price they pay out anyway, so if a few drugs hike their prices to ridiculous levels, insurance companies are well capable of paying. But individuals with out or with insurance who has negotiated or cover that medicine, individuals cannot afford such prices.
It's an absurdity. Monopoly and oligopoly power has been known to be detrimental since the 1800's. From natural monopolies like utilities in those cases often complete production is taken by the city or county. And for those firms that have grown so large, or literally are the market platform itself (monopsony). Or become concentrated in supply of a good they have complete command over supply and price regardless of demand: monopoly.
"One example of the price-fixing included a much older drug, albuterol, sold by Mylan and Sun Pharmaceutical. Used to treat asthma symptoms, the price of the drug exploded more than 3,400 percent, from 13 cents a tablet to more than $4.70. This particular example is described in a lawsuit filed by grocery chains including Kroger against the generic drug industry."
https://www.biospace.com/article/at-least-16-generic-drug-companies-and-300-drugs-target-of-price-fixing-investigation/
https://www.ft.com/content/4688a0ea-7586-11e9-be7d-6d846537acab
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/health/teva-price-fixing-lawsuit.html
Solution on a non-capitalistic way:
1) Medical patents are prohibited.
2) R&D merit awards would be given by the government to organizations that develop a useful drug... that's their form of compensation; similar to the Nobel Award, but given more frequent and possibly larger sum than a million dollars.
3) Pharma producers must declare exact margin; those costs must be audited to ensure they're not phony or otherwise misleading. A max profit margin up to 6% is allotted. If profits exceed, the price per unit must be lowered to the amount to diminish such profits to no higher than the max.
4) Direct government operation and ownership of the production should insufficient supply be available from private production sources or if private production sources refuse to negotiate. Government must sell at cost; no profit margin. Private companies are allowed to compete with the government and enter at any time. The competition cannot be simply a price war to force such operations to end or diminish, so that at a later date such private enterprise can exceed the price the government was offering it at. A clear declaration on exactly what the absolute costs must be provided to ensure it's actual efficiencies and not selling at a loss for a short time.
5) Single payer government insurance to which all pay the same rates, allowing the government to be the single adjuster for the price: all business must provide their exact costs and provide their services at no lager max profit value set like no higher than 6% return. Single payer ensures everyone is covered and backed with a task to ensure prices are not being gouged. Effectively most pharma producers have such inelastic demand curve (prices don't change due to demand) because if you don't purchase the product you suffer and/or die; they have the same harmful effects upon all economies as does a monopoly, monospony, oligopoly, harmful externalities, etc.
This all should be common sense stuff if one has any understanding of micro and macro economics.
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These for profit businesses have no business going into space because it's not profitable. It's not a for profit competitive enterprise human objective... just like judicial, police, military, healthcare, education, basic natural monopoly utilities: ports, roads, sewers, water, electrical, etc. are not the domain the business of for profit enterprise. Forcing as such simply doesn't work as for profit is not efficient in providing the goods, the quality, the advancements, nor the moral pre-requirements of objectivity and impartiality.
Our current technology does not allow space to be "cheap" enough for money hungry sociopaths and psychopaths to exploit. There is no exploiting economy of scale... in fact that is the reason why healthcare, basic utilities, education and research, etc. have no place in such sectors: they have inelastic demand curve (healthcare) and huge economies of scale requirements. There is no margin for them to pig themselves out on without diminishing and destroy the very service they're pretending to offer. You just get pretending. Bogus bullshit.
Research? There is no immediate reward for a robber baron parasite to feast is fungal fangs into. Nothing. They can go stay in the casino business of scams and hustling people to buy another juice it like mechanism that does nothing but squish fruits and veggies an over priced pure' machine.
Leave them in the realm where they belong, that of grifting and hustling; those without much ability to spot hype and stupidity can get eaten alive and learn from being duped. And the rest of us will know to stay well clear of their cons, and avoid getting the fungal infection from the spores of these human fungi.
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People in general are fucking contradictory dumb asses.
Conversation with two other coworkers about medical in the US, we had a long conversation about how it shouldn't be a for profit, how pathetic high deductible plans really are, how over priced Rx, and that most family doctors are not taking new patients rather doc and box primary care clinics are popping up everywhere, and the medical staff suck as diagnosing anything. Last bit we were talking about was coworker X said medicare/medicaid is great since there's no price associated with what it covers, but now some places aren't accepting it because doctors can't charge whatever they feel like which is slightly true, medicare/medicaid doesn't negotiate prices, but go off regional private insurance network rates, there are procedures and items like dental that medicare doesn't cover at all. He also mentioned he had a scare where he had a family emergency and thought he had the high deductible plan, but somehow something wasn't setup right, and would have had to pay a hospital bill of over $60K... I missed how that turned out.
I left to do my rounds, and came back to the lab, and the other coworker still in the lab said to me did you know coworker X despite how much he hates our medical system said he's still against socialized medicine.
What? I just assumed based on our conversation he would be pretty much for it. I screamed this is why I hate fucking stupid so many people are in the 'Mericuh! They're flat out mentally incompetent.
No the only reason why bozo the clown employee X is against it boils down to magical thinking and the effectiveness of various forms of propaganda.
He's an outspoken magical worshiper of sky daddy and son similar LSD like trip story Isis and Osiris of ancient Egypt. And likely since the churches around here are all funded by a few rich fucks who are ardent supporters of oligarchy, tell them social medicine bad, union bad, be worker peon idiot good only way to magical place when you're dead, I prove it: all in magic book of yours you never actually read.
The fuck head employee X described a socialized medicine that he prefers over our idiot system, but when given the label, he shits himself as programmed.
And that is why our system in local, state, and federal government and economic system are an utter cartoony mess. Propaganda is wonderful for any aristocracy particularly well for people with the propensity for mystical irrational thinking, and who are already under educated; and that sums up at least 80% of the America.
Stupid and irrational people are easy to manipulate.
And you see this same thing throughout the world that has the same deadly combination.
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Aristocracy is a parasite utterly harmful to civilization as it causes depriving of everyone initially with tokens of farts and pies called beggar giving... some people like handouts apparently you do. But most of us rather prevent the deprivation that causes the horrors in the first place, waiting for some aristocrat to bless us with building a museum for the masses, putting on a nationalist firework display to show their mystical ordain power, or for a few years showering a few poor people with some food and medical attention in some random 3rd world nation, and even more funny is was the sad effort to educate these 3rd world famine stricken riffraff into mystical magical entrepreneurs even funding their initial businesses... then it all failed because there wasn't an economy to whom to sell the new found mystically produced entrepreneur stuff as the World Bank and a group of aristocrats failed attempt at what it called entrepreneurship education and seed money. They built businesses... but nobody came. Because everyone was poor in the country.
WHOOPS!
But alas, the aristocrats so disconnected don't realize that's happening worldwide... eventually their billions or millions will not mean anything as an economy wouldn't even exist in the same sense as we continue on this absurd economic system in a few more decades.
We must switch to a co-op based business models to which workers are the owners and vote on how to operate, rather than a corporate model where all the funds are funneled to a few owners. The workers ought to be shared owners with every worker having votes on compensation, production, capital expenditures, leadership, etc. We can use the same Federal Reserve type system, call it the Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank with the duty to lend to co-ops at discount interest rates directly, similar to the liquidity discount lending our current reserve bank does to keep all of the private banks that are otherwise essentially bankrupt/insolvent afloat. Same can be done directly to co-ops.
No need for an aristocracy to go hat and hand so they can continue to parasite off our labors. Capital formation becomes literally a democratic process, and the co-op brings democracy to the workplace, and democratizes the fruits of the labor as well.
As you can see, aristocracy are as useless as the former mercantilism and feudalism of nobility and royalty.
Not only are they useless, they're harmful.
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And be concise with examples. He has all the facts on his side.
1) want workers on the board... like Germany's co-determination law. Not fairy-tales nor some hideous communist thing, but democracy in the workplace. Like they have in Germany.
2) Universal healthcare... like the rest of the civilized world.
3) Universal higher and vocational educational like most of wealthy nations: UK, Germany, Austria, etc.
4) Be competitive by canceling all student loan debt
5) Energy and Infrastructure program that's like combining the mega projects of the Panama and Suez Canal, Hoover Dam, Manhattan Project, Apollo Missions, etc. This time toward energy for solar and wind as well as our own LFTR fission as China started 2014 10 year program that's 90% more efficient and much more safer than uranium, and ultimately a fusion tokamak program like ITER and Germany's Wendelstein 7x.
Inter-continental high speed rail like Japan and China have built that makes long distance travel orders of magnitude cheaper than by plane or car.
Rebuilding of our dams, locks, bridges, and modernize electrical grid systems.
These massive projects would assist already displaced coal and other fossil fuel workers as well as any future ones.
6) Strengthen social security so it follows a cost of living index that reflects the costs of seniors: housing and of course medical solved by universal healthcare that is free at point of use.
7) A major housing project that brings up our dismal 9 units per 1,000 new constructions to at least 30 units per 1,000 new constructions as it was in the 1960-70's throughout the country, targeting affordability housing; put taxes to use in development (roads, electric, water, sewer, etc.) instead of having developers pay it themselves thus pass it onto the buyer. And subsidize as many houses and multidweling units throughout the country along with places max returns and put an end to boom bust real-estate pricing.
Buildings are like cars, they depreciate over time, they do not magically gain in value; all appliances from hot water heater, AC, roofing, fixtures, etc. must be eventually replaced. Values going up beyond the replacement is an absurd desperate move by oligarchs and plutocrats to seek a return on this ongoing low interest rate environment, and this is pushing rents and property prices to unstable unaffordablity.
A major housing works across the entire nation is required to affordably and with luxury of modern technology dignified very comfortable affordable housing provisions for EVERYONE. End a form of feudalism under the obscene "gentrification" nonsense.
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The medicare for all plan would need to cover all medical, dental, and vision 100%.
Current medicare/medicaid doesn't cover dental nor vision. And since we pay 1.49% and employer matches at 1.49%... we could make it 5% with 5% employer match, and it would be cheaper than what employers pay today, and cheaper than what we pay particularly when you add all our deductibles, copays, and Rx copays or deductibles.
The details are important. For it to work, requires a major change on our pricing is conducted, right now its the wild west quite literally. Medicine that is over the counter in Germany for not quite $10 USD is as high as $850 in the US.
FDA also has to get do something productive, not just wait for trial studies to come to them, but to conduct those studies themselves. It means sourcing medicines from reliable countries like EU member nations, Australia, UK, Japan, etc. As well as being a producer of last resort as to not be hostage to a single producer... means also eliminated completely medical patent protection, this artificial monopoly doesn't work in getting biotechs and pharma to research needed medicines... biotech and big pharma has essentially abandoned R&D trial studies on new antibiotics, because such medicines aren't intended to be maximized in sales, but distributed in a controlled manner as not to create bacterial resistance yet again, and to ensure a large enough dosage is provided and to encourage the patient to take all of that dosage as to not leave somewhat resistant bacteria to spread and evolve to very resistant bacteria.
A small chain of things even in a single payer medicare for all plan must occur. Must be comprehensive. And it would be similar to Germany's and Canada's system where most medical and dental clinics are privately owned and operated either for profit or non-profit as they already are in the US.
And we can begin to build more county and city hospitals that once existed in more numbers, but many have closed down... hospitals in particular to be affordable need to be ran as a collective... the economies of scale are too high to pretend they have any competitiveness to be run for profit. So a plan to bring back hospitals, particularly to rural areas should be on the same agenda, it would end up being cheaper in the long run, than to use for profit hospital contracts.
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Medical doctors including dentists, oral surgeon, and other specialists realize the for profit insurance model is fucking them too... many specialist and dental clinics are struggling to get patients in the door just for semi annual cleanings or annual check ups, or post operative check ups, or to do other treatment they should get, but can't afford it. And they're burnt by insurance as well as the patient in that the bills they expect to get paid, aren't.
Just here in Idaho, several dental offices have closed up... if they had two locations, they got just one now. And that one isn't doing well.
It's starting to burn them; the doctors. So now they're getting upset.
Funny how you can witness so many of your patients struggling, but take no heed, until that struggle becomes yours too.
Markets are great until they're not.
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Should be interviewing a pharmacologist on vaccine manufacturing.
What I have read, old COVID type vaccines were developed, about two of the best ones had a 20ish% success rate with a 28% hypersensitivity reaction making it overall ineffective and actually worse to take it, therefore they were abandoned.
An antiviral medications like Remdesivir will need development to get it to target COVID19, Remdesivir initially developed for Hepatitis C which was ineffective, and repurposed for Ebola and Malburg virus in which it worked, but not as effective as antibody treatment.
For SARS and MERS studies it shortened the viral infection period, and in current COVID19 demonstrating same shortening of viral infection period.
Other antiviral medications that target single strand RNA viruses especially those that target different mode of actions that stop the viral replication is likely the best option we have in the shortest time. And antiviral treatments like this are very effective once developed.
Couple this with appropriate immunosuppressant and dosing like corticosteroids.
A set treatment like this would be very effective in treating people. And I think that's what we're going to have to hope comes quickly. A vaccination is likely to be ineffective, and even more harmful if it demonstrates such high potential for hypersensitivity.
There is hope, don't hope for a vaccine. Watch for a treatment plan of antiviral medication and immunosuppressant medication as the most effective means of treatment. Similar to how tuberculosis is treated in that it is an entire regime of various medicines given in a sequence over a period of time.
If such a treatment regiment isn't developed, expect this to be very long and deadly.
And our world's economies are utterly over leveraged.
Expect a great depression either way. Just one will be even worse than the other if such regiment antiviral and immune suppressant isn't developed, and we wait for a rushed and likely ineffective and worse likely harmful vaccine ( creating hypersensitive response inducing SARS and leading to ARDS much quicker).
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Used general for wisdom teeth extraction, and another one recently in the mouth.
They give locals for both during the work and when you wake up.
I've been out 4 times. The first time, I did in fact dream... when I woke the very first time, I thought I dosed off, was very tired that morning. The other two times, no dreaming at all, pure time warp. The last time, I kept talking to the doctors, told them the last 3 times I play a game to see if I recognize the moment I go out... kept talking and my speech become obviously slurred and my eyes began to feel very heavy and I felt them roll up into my head, last thing I recall was "I think... I think this is the moment, I'm about to go out, finally got it!"
From my perspective, it literally felt like the oral surgeon further reclined by chair, opened my mouth, and with a few jiggles ripped my molar out, then showed it to me, and I thought wow, that was quick.
In reality it took 15 minutes... they gave a local as soon as I was out, and the proceeded to remove the molar, then cleaned the are very well, ensuring the cyst that caused the bone jaw absorption that required the removal of the tooth was removed. Then used bone grafting material giving me a total of 4CC, then took a suture device to stitch the area closed.
As I woke, he did show me my tooth they pulled. He told me to keep biting down.
I had a hard time remembering things for 3 hours after, needing to repeat questions, I knew I had asked the questions, I just couldn't remember the answers. I don't recall the other times having such time distortion effects afterwards, but those were over 10 years ago with my wisdom tooth and cyst removal.
Get rid of your wisdom teeth asap, especially if they're impacted. They can cause cyst formations, and some cysts are incredibly aggressive and bad coming back and reabsorbing bone and ruining more jaw and thus other teeth. I waited til I was 25 to get my wisdom teeth out. I should have had them out a lot sooner.
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We the people really need to come together and announce our own constitutional convention.
Because our constitution in general needs some serious updates that the powers that be will never put forward themselves. And they're zombifying our nation economically and socially. A disaster that has millions of children without homes, adults unable to afford housing either renting or mortgage therefor KOA campsites are so full they're not accepting reservations. And various public areas have a camper or car with someone living in it... other places have tents and people just sleeping somewhere on bench or where ever.
Walmart (Wally World) initially did it to play to the masses love of camping, allowed RVs to park in the far extended parts of their parking lots. Knowing they would be avid customers of their stuff while transiting thru. But because the past 10 years, Walmart realized... wait, many of these people aren't on vacation anymore... that in fact their car, RV, tent, etc. is actually the residence... parking in their parking lot. Even having mail delivered to them at that address.
And suddenly most Walmart locations prohibit the parking of RV's over a 24 period, and will call tow trucks to vacate the person if they do so.
Of course, this comes as Walmart store locations can't even get the poorest of the poor to routinely shop enough at their stores to keep them open as the past 10 years they've closed numerous stores in areas such as West Virginia and many other states and their counties where people are so poor, that shopping at Walmart is now a luxury.
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I was thinking about seeking refugee status when we fall into a failed nation state ... but I'm feeling frisky lately, so long as my health continues I think I'll enlist to blow the plutocrats and ding bats faces away. Kind of sick. But I'm fired up. And running away like a scared rat isn't becoming of anyone.
Someone doesn't give you liberty or a good society, that's something you must take and create.
In other words, you don't sit on your ass expecting some magical leader to give you stuff. You gather with others and take it, do it, create it, work it, and make it be.
And at least how I have been feeling in the last few weeks, I would take some delight in blowing away some of these evil corrupt people. They're more of an enemy than our nation has publicly announced as enemies of our nation and sanction us to kill without remorse.
When all this time, it was they who were the enemy.
Right now, it would be too much fun to blow their brains out of their skulls. Particularly if they end up forcing us with nothing to lose and we're in economic misery. Which comes with the collapse of a nation state economically as well as politically.
These people will be hunted to wherever they go, just as Jews hunted the hideous fascists who fled Germany. But likely won't be taken to some court. No court will likely exist to trial these plutocrats. They're judgement will come from some other way that will render them in some level of misery that reflects what they caused all of us people to suffer.
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Beware of crypto... the heart of the scheme are stable coins USDT and UDSC mostly but Terra too and there is Binance "stable" coin.
They function like poker chips inflating the price being dispensed by crypto margin exchanges 100x leverage to any fool with a VPN (because it's illegal for these entities to allow unregistered derivatives to be traded by American citizens, an none for the most part have been approved by the SEC as they're well aware of the bogus leveraged nonsense going on, several meetings by the SEC and Treasury department have been conducted, and there is an active DOJ investigation on Tether itself).
These poker chips have been minted in exponential amounts since the big pump leading into August 2020 and last large minting of these poker chips was November of 2021.
They cannot hide such a scam since both USDT and USDC mint their tokens on the ETH block chain... along with the Tron block chain and it is an open ledger all can see.
And we can also calculate actual real money inflows and outflows... since November there has been a net outflow of real money from crypto.
Anyway, google tether and read some very detailed articles. USDC is also a scam. All of it. Terra, right now, is an open Ponzi promising 20% or more returns if you lock them up using investor money to pay these depositors... net inflows are draining this investor pool and that real money inflow is also net negatives... investor pool is nearly drained and losing its ability to maintain any function, Terra started a daisy chain of crypto as collateral buying up BTC and ETH and other crypto as collateral.
Just be careful because all of them require constant real money inflows... and that has become negative since last Fall. Really last large inflow of real money ended last June... rising a little in August to net positive... but overall there is lots of real money leaving.
Very important to know, as these poker chips are excessive and a run on them will collapse the entire market... tether alone accounts of 80% of the liquidity of crypto in general and that of BTC.
And if you look a the peg rates on various exchanges with tether or circle you will see huge outflows and a diminishing struggle of buyers (yes these poker chips have to be sold to the open market to get your real money back, that's the insanity, they do not redeem tethers for dollars... USDC for now you can redeem on coinbase).
A beginning stage of a run on these poker chips is apparent.
Whatever you do... I would suggest not touch crypto.... allow it to crash... one way tether and circle have been able to keep their scam going for so long is that they have other crypto BTC and ETH and the like and will sell their holdings at spot for real money and use the real money to wash trade up the order books on the ask price to keep their $1 to poker chip peg. But when all of crypto falls, so does their collateral to keep wash trading and maintain this peg.
And crypto in general can't continue to pump up if real money inflows continue to vanish, and net real money outflows continues.
I foresee a sudden death in all of them, as they're so highly leveraged and interconnected.
And of course, you have all the relatively small scam coins built for rug pulls and built on the stupidity of NFT's and the like.
My advise: forget about crypto. Just let it vanquish on its own giant cluster mug of scams.
When it falls, and you'll know when this collapse has happened... BTC will be relatively worthless... then you can gamble and throw a few bucks hoping miners still exist and maintain the network integrity and don't allow 51% attack or endless hardforkings to occur rendering the block chain aka the coin worthless.
Be careful with crypto... it really is garbage... yes the scam has persisted for 15 years... but various times it buts and came back. But keep in mind, Madoff's scam lasted for 30 plus years, WorldCom and Enron lasted for about 15 years too. When the stuff is garbage and nobody wants it, and you decide to gamble on it, even then just throw so much money at it you are willing to lose completely. Because you probably will.
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Science has many studies, different techniques and methods to measure things, the findings are convergent across all sciences. Similar to the way fossils or artifacts are dated... not one method is used nor one science genre is used, but many methods and genres are used: radiometric dating, to dendrochronology, to chemical dating, to paleomagnetism, to stratigraphy, etc. Not one method is used for most samples, the attempt is always to use as many as possible that can apply to the specimen.
The starkest is the fact that CO2 levels are over 400 ppm had occurred since well before all of human existence 2.2 million to 3.6 million years ago.
Only during the industrial revolution did it come up from 160 ppm that it had remained at over a million years. The correlation is rather obvious inference to the abruptness particularly where the solar activity is actually weaker over the last century prior and continues to weaken, and volcanic activity over the past several thousand years is very low, yet global temperatures continue to rise as expected with climbing +400ppm of CO2.
It's obvious to where the CO2 is coming.
And it isn't elves or pixies or magical deity farts.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-free-arctic-in-pliocene-last-time-co2-levels-above-400ppm/
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What I find interesting about history in general... sometimes, maybe 50% or maybe more often, the most triumphant or acclaimed or revered the ruler or rulers of a given period of time, typically were worse than the most deviled and hated in recorded history; in that they murdered more people as well as treated the vast majority in a more miserable manner.
They were just so much better than the hated ones, in that they killed all opposition that were capable of writing and spreading such information. And what copies of writing were available, were eventually culled.
And some did the same, as well as placated just enough of the "winners" usually a small minority of the population, with some great works. Vespasian demonstrated such a man of the people that he did a real good job of siding with the people or at least with the Senate (small minority) that Nero was a monster that he completely destroyed the Golden Palace and constructed the amphitheatre (Colosseum) literally bringing bread and circuses to the peasantry/plebs and demonstrating he was on the side of the senate the few.
But at the same time to keep the war machine that was Rome going, he created yet more taxes to include taxing what was originally a "free" to use public restrooms.
Of course, he was good at ridding his detractors, and keeping his PR and yes men, as we get a wholesome fiscal discipline narrative; summed up in "Money does not stink".
Vespasian also lead a religious and philosophical persecution which either expelled such persons from Rome or even Italy itself, or simply killed them; Stoic philosophy outright prohibited by law.
And of course, such wonderful wholesome leader who really paid and promoted the living historians of the day would like us to believe Vespasian was... the "old mule driver" which is laughable as he was an aristocrat from birth, and owned such services among farms, and had slaves to the mule driving, this guy was not doing the mule driving rather, counting the revenues and giving orders to his slave overseers of which some were likely slaves themselves on the make to buy their freedom.
The saying: history is written by the victors.
This doesn't always happen and sometimes is grayer. But when praise becomes very big, but look over the achievements and they're dubious or non-existent.... this should give you cues to read between the lines. And to hopefully find any other contemporary records that may still exist and examine them carefully; and you may find them even bigger monsters than their predecessors.
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I think its not a complete waste of time.
The comments you got were from the mentally ill who are rampant among anyone irrational and gullible enough to support right wingers, particularly the odd ball buffoon Trump with his tariffs already hurting businesses nation wide. Economic reports already showing many direct and indirect business dealing with steel and aluminum as an input are having to cutback and even stop production for long periods of time.
My place of work uses lots of aluminum, and decided to only give everyone a 1% raise this spring for the year citing cost of inputs increasing... yeah the fucking aluminum tariffs.
Anyway, it's somewhat worth it. If they completely edited our comments than it wouldn't be.
The four minutes is shady; cutting off because they don't know how to respond is very shady. They're a propaganda outlet. Just as MSNBC and CNN with occasional fact based news. Most of the time they want to submit a narrative, throwing things out there to see if it sticks to move what they want to achieve forward.
CNN's recent article about current front runner for DNC presidential candidate placing Biden number 1, and Sanders number 5.
Most people at work, friends and family either don't care for Biden, and shouldn't be too surprising they don't even know how Biden is, yet they do know who Bernie is. And they like Bernie... even Trump voters lament they rather have voted for Bernie because they trust him more, it was that Trump was speaking more like a democrat than Hillary on economic issues.
Whether its completely worth it is up to you... you're the one having to catch flack and even insane nut who might decide stalking you is a good idea... a 4 minute segment on a bland propaganda network you actually got comments, and that some of these commentators described researching you?
LOL! WTF? Do these people have a life?
Good news, they looked you up. It means what you said got to them. So they're at least trying to think. Albeit like most paranoid nuts, its for confirmation bias that what you have to say must be wrong, because they have already determined it.
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Essentially, all you have to do is point to every other wealthy 1st world nation. Every nation other than the US has a form of universal healthcare and it outperforms ours in price and availability, effectiveness, and quality. Even Canada's which only covers GP clinics and hospitals excluding prescription outside a clinic or hospital and doesn't do any dental; still out performs ours in pricing and effectiveness.
We could easily ensure better coverage to include dental even orthodontist, and prescription coverage: total health coverage. And prohibit any state using "recovery" as they do with medicare today on long term living; where the state gets dibs on assets of the elderly person. We're a wealthy country. We don't need to take from poor or middle class people, especially when the wealth tax doesn't start taxing anything until inheritance above $11.8 million.
Someone with $100K or $200K or even $500K or even $1 million in net assets should have to fork it over to pay off their medicare bill. Their taxes paid for the coverage, and so does mine.
Anyway, we can do a cost effective universal healthcare program that covers everything without any deductibles, and possibly no copays or very little with a tight annual cap of copays at about $300 or less doing it in increments of $20 per medical visit, Rx refill, etc. And matching contribution of 6% with a cap at $4K to $5K per individual's gross payroll income. And to assist the program revenue further reinstate the 2% or 3% or the full 6% above gross income above $300K.
This would be cheaper and more secure in ensuring all medical needs are met.
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Time to just make internet like most cities utilities like water, sewer, power, etc. and already many cities in just about ever state have at least one or more cities already have city broadband some its public wifi free, some offer wired service in homes usually for $40 or less, and its competitive broad band speeds. Cities find it easy because they usually already do work such as water, sewer, power, roads, etc. and just bundle that construction with installing broadband lines, and the equipment required is very cheap now. Fuck the for profit sector on a natural monopoly. Let's stop being stupid with economics. Econ 101 states competitive market principles violated, collective markets work better, and for profit markets no longer serve a point, and in fact deliver worse service at higher prices than a collective or highly regulated supplier.
https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
Cable and phone and other telecoms want to get greedy... fine. Get rid of them. Their greed has removed their harm completely. Thanks telecoms for overtly revealing your unnecessary need to exist, and in fact your harm for existing in the first place.
Next are for profit hospitals and medical insurance rackets.
Let's get smart about economics instead of stupid.
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That's not necessarily a good premium... I bought private insurance when i quit a job early in 2009 before Obama Care rolled out. I immediately got private insurance, a PPO that included dental insurance for $100 a month, $10 office and urgent care visits both dental and medical, covered Rx 100% with a $20 co-pay per filling. Covered any medical surgery 100% with $250 deductible. Dental covered up to $3,000 per month on any work. Covered 50% orthodontist work which had a separate $3,000 lifetime max.
ER was a $100 Co-pay. Medical (non dental) covered up to $2 million lifetime max, that was a little bit of the catch. If you got serious long term illness or terminal illness it probably wouldn't have held up for a decade... but at that point you're pushed into medicaid anyways by all insurance even today.
I was and still am very healthy. No chronic conditions of any kind.
My younger brother is forced to do ACA because his employer is a cheapskate, and his premium out of pocket is about $100 for a high deductible no dental piece of shit insurance, high deductible is $2,500. And then only covers 80% with a 20% co-pay until max out of pocket $4,400.
It's essentially not really having insurance unless something catastrophic. And even then you're at least $4,400 in debt if you don't really have the money in the first place, and if you're disabled during the period, you qualify for medicaid and the insurance pushes you off their stuff onto that anyways.
He still doesn't visit the dentist office, which he hasn't since he was 20... he's now early 30's. I'm in my mid 30's.
I told him he really needs to see a dentist for a cleaning, but if he does, he'll likely need a debridement which means at least two visits within a few days, then he'll need to see dentist in 4 months since his gums will be open and prone to infection to ensure his gums heal properly for about a year (3 visits over 12 month period) then if everything seems healthy the 2 every 12 months. And who knows what cavities maybe needed, and if they find something that needs attention.
ACA is a fucking disgusting joke to which people who are stuck with it, are the brunt.
We need universal healthcare that covers head to toe full coverage, no deductibles nor copays. Just up medicare/medicaid tax to 3% instead of its 1.49%, and that should be enough to cover it. That would mean $100 a month for Gross Income of $40,000. About what I pay for a high deductible plan, with a PPO dental right now.
If necessary, allocate part of the initial Federal Income Tax that goes to a general fund, to pay for it, ear mark very first brackets or first 2% to 3% of any Federal Income Tax that we already pay, and claim it directly to Universal Healthcare. It cannot go to the general fund for bloated military, or some ass hat politicians trip to Disney Land, or Trumps many dumb ass weekly vacations, etc.
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While there probably needs new elections, Venezuela's oligarchs who still live there have long since tried violent coupes back in the late 90's when that party first won elections under Chavez. So it's difficult to trust any of these parties' intentions.
Only negotiations now would be to have a UN and other parties define how a new election is to be ran, and provide oversight on fairness of campaigns, and ensure the voting polls are established properly, and votes are properly counted.
And putting sanctions on the country has only caused their hyper inflation, it won't help it.
I think most of us know the real motives, we're helping other oligarchs some of whom are friends of our oligarchs and might stand to racketeer off the nationalized oil. Like some other countries like Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya.
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Obama brags he essentially is and as president was a moderate republican.
Hence why:
1) The regulations put in place was nothing like the Glass-Steagal act; and we're band aids were placed on leverage that's now record all time high in auto loans over trillion, total stock market debt all time high $550 billion (August 2017), last all stock market margin (debt) was $381 billion July 2007, loan default rates are climbing back to the levels of 2007-8
2) So called Affordable Care Act even with subsidies still has premiums and deductibles soaring, as there's no negotiation cost controls on price gouging by clinics, hospitals, and pharma.
3) Business have consolidated into even fewer businesses, and small business diminishing to lows not seen since the pre-anti trust years of the 1920's and prior robber baron periods.
4) Push for another lousy trade agreement (TPP) that sought to extend medical patents, and absurd protection on product that is already has an inelastic demand curve (price doesn't influence demand, as one will pay any price to not be sick, recover from an injury, feel pain, and/or die) always gets me because they say let it be "free" markets, but somehow we have to intervene here. Right wingers in the DNC or GOP aren't about "free" let it be markets, they're simply let it be my way markets, and fuck you. As well as some other fairly bad trade with more dictatorship tyrannical human rights violating countries for cheap servitude destitute labor.
Worst economic recovery for the working class; those in the lower 80% income level. And it will all crater at some point. For whatever somewhat recovering us lower 80% income level have achieved, it likely will be short lived, as the next crash will be orders of magnitude worse.
It's why Trump a Dump running as kind of a populous (anti-NAFTA), but still showing how stupid and vulgar he is, won... at least the electoral college.
No shit Obama, you were as GOP as Bush 1 and 2, and as phony a democrat as Bill Clinton.
The results speak for themselves.
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Life expectancy was actually going down 2015-2018 for 3 years in the US.
Death to despair in the US and many other nations have been up over the past 10 years: suicide, mass murder and murder suicide, drug overdose.
So fuck you and everything is better; you're conflating the helpful but really a thin facade of advancing/improving and implementing technology; that frankly has advanced rather than held flat or worse gone backwards in regions of Europe and rest of the world for the past 400 years; when a region of the world loses technology typically historians earmark those periods as dark ages, those periods don't happen that frequently; Europe and middle east region this has only happened by record about twice: great bronze age collapse and the European Dark Age followed by the Islamic Dark Age; when a region just freezes in technology historians typically call it a isolate technological stagnant region or nation.
Most nations and regions of the world haven't been in a dark age for 400 hundred years for region of Europe and Middle East; and the past 100 years many places broke their technological stagnation.
But through those advancing times, many terrible times have happened, but one could always point to improving technology that made things more comfortable, all while more people dying or suffering famine or war or oppression or genocide.
It's comparing apples to oranges.
It's similar to saying: The slave trade in the 1800's wasn't so bad because railroads helped reduce travel time significantly. Or the genocide committed by the NAZIs in Germany wasn't so bad since indoor plumbing was available for their showers.
It's absurd.
As far as capitalism: it destroys itself. It literally puts itself out of business: if it produces more it eventually can't sell it, and it hates competition despite the entire purpose of profit motive to bring about competition: it kills its competitors in consolidation.
Fun fact: first form of capitalism was mercantilism; was an advancement from feudalism; it allowed capital from the few allowed rich merchants to form up with usually nobility or in republics the plutocrat oligarchy that were the only ones who could participate in the democracy of that republic (yes republics existed before the US, like the Dutch and various Italian and German city states). It was to preserve monopoly or oligopoly. Not really intended for profit motive to induce competition. That came later with Adam Smith trying to idealize a purpose for profit motive; he came up with the idea it induces competition... or can anyways.
Really depends on the sector... utilities are natural monopolies in that competition is absolutely not practical as water, electric, sewer, etc. lines require economy of scale to make it cheaper for everyone on the system.... even an oligopoly system of 2 or 3 more water line services would double, triple, etc. the cost of such an expensive system that cost multiple increases with every competitor; making prices higher not lower for competition.
A new form of economic system will ultimately be a co-op system where employee and employer relationship is ended. It's the only significant change in economic systems from slave to slave master, to feudal serf to feudal lord, to employee to employer that changed and made significant advancements to ALL people in time.
So let's remove the pitted relationship of employee to employer: co-op system that provides one vote to all workers of the enterprise for all aspects to the operation of the business. Democratize the workforce; and the labor isn't labor, as a worker you are also a co-owner.
Capital formation can still come from credit unions or banks which themselves can be co-op enterprises, as well as a National Reserve Bank or akin to our Reserve Bank that already backstops private for profit banks; they would lend to co-ops. No absolute need for an investor class; hence why such a thing would freak out every oligarch and mini-plutocrat worldwide, but so did the concept of a democratic republic a century ago, and still does today in many countries.
But fuck them. It's time to advance beyond and all of us live better lives, and to finally be able to be better custodians of world.
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Anyone who actually objectively looks into various gods or god or supernatural beliefs realize its about a mix of ignorance, gullibility, and those in charge using it control the mass of people who tend to be ignorant, gullible, and endowed by their actual creators (parents, grandparents, aunts uncles) in culture that demanded them to believe whatever nonsense their tribe believed or be ostracized.
So yes. Mystical belief without objectivity is absurd. And of things that have potential to exist like a ET from space or some other dimension still requires evidence. It's not the same as saying I saw a person with a blue shirt in the park. We know blue shirts exist, and parks exist, so that has statistical evidence that you probably did see someone with a blue shirt.
We don't see ET's, gods, unicorns, etc. No statistical evidence to make an inference. So someone claiming to communicate with ET's or visited with them, requires objective evidence... an artifact from them, remains, bio evidence, something physical to create a statistics to draw inference.
God has the same non-statistical objective data as ET, Loch Ness, Big Foot, unicorns, Zeus, Pegasus, etc.
Like how propaganda network Fox is playing to their base: Culturally superstitious and largely mostly elderly senile shitting their depends in a assisted living facility entrenched in their local tribal sect of American Christian d'jour.
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Homes shouldn't appreciate. They're in constant decay. Eventually they must be completely rebuilt over a period of time. Even the White House was gutted and rebuilt, only the outside facade was kept during the Truman's presidency.
It's like buying a vehicle or boat or airplane. Typically, they don't appreciate.
Even collectibles won't appreciate without essentially being rebuilt fully to which you're dumping money back into something that has depreciated.
It's a moronic thing to have housing appreciate.
As for the dirt, this is also moronic as this sums to poor planning in cities, counties, and states on their ability to appropriately grow these areas.
Do a shit job, you get shit prices: Boom bust.
Do a decent job, you have stable prices and generally a prosperous economy for everyone.
The way cities in the US are being planned and built via developer gravy train was passing the back first to the developer to build the roads, utilities, etc. Then developers passed that to you.... to the buyer.
Our collective taxes that are suppose to be used for this collective growth of expanding roads, utilities, etc. just goes to subsidies for some pluto-rat to not pay property taxes on their factory or apartment complex or mini-mall or whatever else; to get subsidies either for the property to grants to build there... they're job creators don't you know! LOL!
Job creation of more slave wages that make it difficult or impossible not just to borrow for
a home, but just to rent an apartment.
Record numbers live now in RV's. Fuck'em.
But that lifestyle isn't comfortable. It is a wreck and damage to many people's health mental and physical. And RV's weren't really meant to live in for long periods of times.
The area I live in Idaho, from Boise to Pocatello... all the RV lots are full. Overloaded.
New one pops up, and already completely full.
Our taxes fund the lavish lifestyles of the American version of the Downton Abbey parasites.
I mean that's why so much goes to jails and incarcerations of which our nation has the most than any other nation to which you can trust their numbers.
Nationally, our country spends more than the next 11 yes ELEVEN of the highest national spenders on military COMBINED.
It's a military tyrannical dictatorship. And many are befuddled into some grand worshiping that freak show. Wanna know the conception of the world via the average N. Korean... look no farther than the average American.
The elites in our country did a horrific (good) job of turning us into the land of Mordor... in this case where the plut-rats lie. And still a sufficient amount of Americans gobble that lie up.
We are reaching that point though, the lie is becoming even absurd to the kool-aid drinkers.
When the cult members abandon ship, perhaps change will happen.
Maybe. Who knows. Maybe they'll make they're own horror story into reality. I mean the brainwashing is kernal files of the brain of stupidity: mystical magical words like capitalism real capitalism shoe straps and let markets be free as the birdy... and then there's a fascist element of race baiting.
So it could get better or worse!
Let's hope it gets better.
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Let's be frank, the average American was living on low income or in absolute abject poverty. Much of the USA looked similar to many 2nd world nations. Islands of prosperity existed and in those islands abject poverty. They're literally talking about the very top 1% and their version of the middle class was only among the top 20% earners.
80% of the people in the US were very poor living in dirt floor shacks with a cast iron stove. Saw the one my grandma lived in and my great grandparents in Idaho on my mom's side. One shack still existed, but a week after our visit to it a tornado or small dust devil destroyed... an odd place for something like that in a mountainous area and in a deep ravine in Inkom Idaho.
On my dad's side, Germans who arrived in Texas late 1840-50's. Those in early 1900's built homes that if any exist are in ghost towns. Mostly demolished or abandoned hulls today. You can see the rocks acting as foundations of their hovel.
No family members around here were ever "middle class" with a modern home with indoor plumbing and electricity until the mid and late 1930's. It was a novelty in the 1920's to have floor boards of any kind and not dirt floors. And to have a home that had a bedroom in it or even two was a mansion in their eyes until again the mid to late 1930's.
When farmers were promised various minimum pay for their crops, livestock, insurance against crop yield, workers joined unions to demand pay that could afford more than just barely feeding themselves, a great works program that actually turned dirt highways into paved roads. FHA and other use of local and federal tax money that went to modernizing housing requiring foundations and floorboards along with various utilities including indoor plumbing and electricity. Is how my great grandpa was able to build his "mansion" as he called it in Inkom in 1938, still stands today looks like a normal 3 bedroom and a living room and kitchen 1,300 square foot home as he worked on the Portland Cement Plant that provided the Portland silicate lime that was mined until recently in Idaho.
Before then he was a farm hand both for other people and other extended family members, on some of his own plots, and was a clerk at various stores.
And of course he was able to buy an automobile, instead of walking or renting a horse.
Prosperity for at least 80% of the people began about 1938 and beyond.
And it had fits and starts all through 1940's and 1950's. Then you could say at least in rural areas most people were doing decent about 90%... they actually started getting party lines (phones) in the 1960's. Their internet dial up of the day.
And they weren't stupid. They knew of its vital nature of an advancing technological nation, and deemed it a utility regulating the monopoly and demanding their revenue go to capital expenditure to grow it into private phone line upgrades and into more areas; instead of putting that money in their 1% pockets.
Social mixed markets is the only way any nation distributes prosperity that doesn't get choked down to throats of only a top 20ish%. While leaving everyone else rather not so well off.
The 1920's were mostly a stock market speculative bubble. The economy in general was about the same miserable slop of the 1800's.
Depression of 1920–21 Jan 1920 –July 1921 Business activity declined 38.1%, a very harsh depression, short, but even many rich were sent to suicide.
The average American, 80% poor: didn't really notice much, same shit, same stink.
1923–24 recession May 1923 –June 192 Business activity declined 25.4% Was a mild recession for the extreme rich, but stunk for the worker and farmer.
1926–27 recession Oct 1926 –Nov 1927 business activity declined 12.2%, very mild.
Only people who thought the roaring 20's were so roaring were the affluent and well to do. And run on banks were fairly frequent so well before the 1920's the average American never really trusted banking. Keeping lion share of money in a hidden spot on their premise.
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Reddit people didn't necessarily by the stock, they bought call options the opposite to what the hedge funds were in put options (shorting). This added pressure on the stock price. Eventually it got to a stock price that was very high that it triggered some hedge funds to then buy the stock or put up money to repay their broker whom they borrowed the shares to do the shorting.
This has a domino effect because many hedge funds were shorting it, and one after another were required to either put up money (sell something else) or buy back the shares to give to the brokers from whom they borrowed the shares.
The trick was they found that particularly magical number in which it started causing the dominoes or cascading effect.
And this entire stock market is very much on borrowed money right now, meaning there's not a lot of actual cash/money circulating, illiquid. Not allot of cash. So when things suddenly go wrong for options traders or the more riskier futures traders, they have to sell something else or forced to buy back other shares they've borrowed to get out of the trade quickly.
Hence why you also saw stocks fall a bit.
It's a liquidity problem; there really isn't that much actual cash floating in the system, its all borrowed IOU's in option contracts and even the most risky futures.
They didn't quite get enough to ignite the same thing on American Airlines, they got close, a little spurt happened which means one or a few hedge funds had to or decided to buy back some shares to get out of their position a bit forcing prices up, but the other hedge funds didn't hence the immediately fall back in stock prices.
Far as I know, this is perfectly legal to do. Normal market conditions, not illiquid bubble indebted idiocy we have to day, this type of thing wouldn't have worked. Simply put, you wouldn't firstly have so many in shorting positions and certainly not futures which is 100% borrowed position to be in. Options contracts also would be so far into the put (short) position either.
This market is tinderbox with kerosene sitting on a cage of gun powder, the smallest spark is about to blow it up.
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Not only does his comment completely backfire in his bloated idiot face:, US invaded Canada in 1812, US was repulsed, and Britain retaliated in 1814 invading DC and burning governmental buildings down. And that was over 200 years ago, quite a bit of things changed... civil rights, labor rights, universal suffrage, AC/DC electricity, table of elements/modern chemistry, steam power, the reciprocating engine, aircraft, metal ships, etc. etc... oh and Canada actually became its own country in 1867.
And what about China? No tariffs there on steel... and then you suddenly were concerned about Chinese jobs and a company specifically the cell phone manufacturer ZTE after you Trump received $100 million loan from China for your Shanghai resort construction.
Not only is he a charlatan, he's a terrible one at that. Demonstrates the few less than plurality that support him on how fucking mentally stupefyingly dumb they must be to eat his shit on a daily basis while he fucks them over their own ass.
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Call it whatever you want: Universal healthcare, college, better wage, law requiring vacation and sick pay allotments, ensuring affordable housing including house development and apartments rents (Vienna Austria over 60% live in public owned apartments with apartments the size of 1,000 to 1,300 square feet pay only $400 to $600 a month while people in NYC, San Fran, and other places are living in the car or in a crumbling privately owned shit hole for $700 to $1,300, and a major city like Vienna in the US you're looking at 400 square feet to 600 square feet for those prices).
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SPZ Max, we caused 9/11 in many ways by supporting the very terrorist organizations like Taliban during the 80's. Then we left the place without assisting rebuild and destroying Russian mine fields. Resentment took hold, and crazy religious nut bags took over. Our interference in some of these places is what's causing terrorist activity to come back on us. WE put these dictators and theocrats in power because they're easier for our oligarchs to extract resources, get a profitable contract from with minimal taxes and minimal pay for labor.
And if we can't, we leave them high and dry with weapons. Lots of military grade weapons.
Our interference builds these terrorist freak shows.
So keep doing this nonsense, and you'll get another 9/11.
We already get enough small 9/11 from our own citizens in crazed mass shootings. In fact, we get several thousand times 9/11 from our defunct depressed economy killing 60,000 people year in drug overdoses, 40,000 year in suicides. More people locked up in jail than in any other country. ANY other country including freak show tyrannical nut job nations like Saudi Arabia, which is unfortunately an ally of ours, somehow... and oh they were all Saudis that committed mass murder suicide on 9/11.
SPZ Max, only person forgot about 9/11 appears to be you.
We invaded Iraq in the guise of 9/11 retribution... well now we fucked that particular region up and created ISIS. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, in fact Al-Quada and the Taliban were at odds with what they saw as a secular bad power in Iraq under Saddam. Again, they were all Saudis... but Saudi Arabia is our ally?
SPZ Max.. your brain washed to the max.
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It's actually a good thing to have those prices come way down.
Canada Vancouver purposely put on a foreign tax as apartments and homes were being used as commodities like gold for foreigners to just park money. Most of them empty and just sucking up supply causing prices to not be affordable by residents.
And most of the towns and cities across the country were pushed up by various nations' semi wealthy and ultra rich oligarchs from Brazil, China, Greece (yes even Greece), Russia, etc. in fear of their own economic downturn and in particular to China their autocratic government, they stick money in foreign other wealthy nations like US, Canada, UK, France, Australia, etc.
The rent and housing re-inflation was due in part to these foreign investors snatching up homes and apartments. London has entire apartment blocks empty due to various oligarch monopoly game.
The lowering of these higher prices are a good sign that at least the idiotic inflated prices are diminishing. Unfortunately, many of these properties are not sized for affordable living. Boise we have new homes going in, but most of them from 2013 to 2015 were all 2,500 sq ft to 6,000 sq ft homes that most people don't want such as myself, electrical bill alone is not necessary. Smaller homes 1300 sq ft to 1900 sq ft have started to be built, but in smaller amounts than the bigger ones, ones people really can afford and would prefer for savings for other things.
So I wouldn't say Toronto and Manhattan real-estate collapsing a bad thing necessarily.
The prices are too high. What's bad, is now supply will decline as developers stop producing, when demand is still there, we have a growing population around the country particularly in capitols and large cities. Its affordability that's in question. We need to make it more affordable for renting and/or ownership.
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Income of medical doctors, nurses, and staff in single payer systems actually get paid about the same on average. In fact, many get paid even more than in the US like in the UK or Germany or France. I love how business always looks at worker wages, literally per cost of most businesses including medical sector, wages are only 5% to 10% of revenue, or of costs only account for 5% of total costs.
Workers literally take in very little compared to all other costs. Inputs in most sectors and especially medical (medicines and appliances like MRI's or Xray machines) make up 70% to 80% of the total costs. The other 10% to 15% is usually real-estate and utilities.
And this anchor was fucking flat out lying. UK in particularly is rated number one for the past two decades. And they even have BBC drama documentaries that often use their NHS... they show people terrified of going to dentists, they pay nothing, and get even better care their here, they actually do teeth transplants. Try that here to find a specialist that can even do that, let alone afford the $25K price tag.
They're all fucking delusional liars about it having cost control problems when we're showing in EVERY fucking nation with universal healthcare actually pays LESS per capita.
They're the fucking cigarette companies arguing smoking doesn't cause cancer; they're fucking frauds.
https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
Take a peak at their dental clinics; they're as good if not even better than ours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPcs4O_gi2g
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While the concept of royalty and theocracy of any kind should be revolting to all peoples in the universe, our species is one big bouts of inbreeding; populations for most of human existence were so low and child mortality rates so high, that all throughout the world have many loops in our family tree... otherwise extinction would have occurred or we would have had essentially essentially no real difference between our African origins.... we would all have essentially the same ethnic appearances. And well, we don't.
And it's also the forcing that caused ethnic differences that are vast from our African origin to European to Asian to Americas differences; even the differences between western Nords between to Slavic Finish to eastern Russian to Saxon to Angles to Celtic to norther Athenian Greek to Ionian Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamia, to Arabian, to the pool pockets of inbreeding that gave us N. American tribes of the Heron, Eskimo, Shoshone, Peblo, etc.
And the big migration from Africa happened only about 75,000 years ago based on Y and X chromosome mapping of the very predictable periodic mutations.
For the amount of trait differences in such a short time, means lots of inbreeding took place; this was dice roll of evolution to trap those surviving able to at least breed genes, or trap bad genes that would just snuff out that tribe or band of people completely. It was evolution forcing on steroids. Lots of inbreeding and lots of death.
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Things are so absurd, it's hard to even think civility. Trump despite losing an actual democratic plurality, winning the electoral college was largely because people are so fed up with the establishment, we know we're all being fucked in the face, and MAJOR changes must occur. Many of those changes conservatives and liberals actually agree on many points: term limits for congress and senators, money out of politics, universal healthcare generally via a single payer system that covers all health (medical, dental, vision), a new housing program that actually ensures development of more affordable homes paying for roads and utility construction to do so, etc.
Simple things that the so called party opposition of the people actually agree.
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My mom in the 90's hated when I would be the nerd watching the news channels MSNBC she would say ew turn that guy off, he sounds like he's whining, and his face looks like a frog... and look he's slobbering. I would just laugh. But she really didn't like him.
So, no. Even older folks don't like that self absorbed talking head.
I personally didn't mind him, but his voice and his whiny pompous nature made me irritated; always thought, independent minded and easily influenced on AM radio are going to hear this pompous ass hole and think all lefties who worked on Kennedy's staff are loud self absorbed pricks.
I don't know why anyone watches these talking heads. They're all millionaire ass clowns. They don't know you nor care about you, anymore than any other person doing their job. So glad I cut cable now over 10 years ago. Money in the bank, and I only have to hear them occasionally on youtube clips.
And good for them, they made a fortune with a disturbingly shrill whiny voice.
Let us now enjoy what I recall as my mom's rant and ultimate takeover of the remote from my hands, when this guy reared his funky face across our television screen in the mid to late 90's:
"Ewww, turn it! I don't like him, he sounds like he's shouting and whining, and looks like a conceded frog... Look at him!!! He's giving me a head ache! TURN IT! GIVE ME THE REMOTE! GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK! WHY DO YOU WATCH THIS SHIT ANYWAYS?!?! (Well, he worked as a staffer for JFK)... He did? He looks young... and he sounds like a cry baby... I still don't like him, give me the remote, give it here! Now! (mimicing his face and whiny voice)... HARD BALL!! Baaah! BAAA! Waahh! He's still obnoxious. Seriously how can you stand listening to him, sounds like a baby." Remote: Click.
Mom... I love you! :)
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People need to understand the morbidity of the very rich.
Median individual income is $31,099. If you made on average your entire life exactly the average, meaning you likely made much less for the first decade since half the population makes that or less, may have gotten close or at or slightly above the next decade or two, and maybe started to making more the last decade of your working life, and that may factor into your average 40 year income.
40 years x $31,099 = $1.243 million.
Not even $2 million.
$1.243 million is in general more than most make in a life time on average.
Now think multiple millions in a year. Then tens of millions. Then hundreds of millions. Now thousands of millions or billions.
It's several lifetime earnings of 80% of the population in dividends that some of these rich make in just a quarter or less. Some its every month, and the super rich (billionaires) its every week.
Now, look at any businesses income statements, balance sheet statements, and if you want, cash flow statement. In a profitable business making tens of millions in revenue a year, generally if you consider as part of the profits instead of a cost, total labor compensation that includes wages/salaries/bonuses, (social security/medicare matching tax), insurance benefits, and pension/401K contributions, uniforms, shoes, etc. if they provide them... total labor compensation ranges from 5% to 20% of net profits.
This means they take 95% to 80%... this means many companies could pay double the wage for a year, and still make out with 90% to 60% of net profits.
And yes net profits meaning even after capital expenditures, money they put into grow the business. So that's already accounted. Net profits are what businesses do to either do stock buy backs to raise the price of stocks, or payout dividends; most businesses tend to just payout dividends, but lately many very large companies still have mountains of cash, so they they have been literally buying back stocks too.
A better system exists. Co-op business structure with a Federal Reserve Co-Op Bank that can lend directly to people wanting to start or change into a co-op business at discounted interest rates just as the Federal Reserve Bank does to private banks to essentially backstop their illiquidity and essentially guarantee a profit. Co-op in which all workers get a vote and say on wages/salaries/capital expenses/leadership/management etc. Do you think such ridiculous profits would just go to a few owners? That certain necessary equipment to produce more effectively would be continuously put off for a later date until it becomes impossible to produce at all? Would workers vote to outsource them?
That's the way we need to go. Corporations and their oligarchy are not just useless, but are as harmful as nobility of old, and slave masters of old.
Time to change our economy so it functions with prosperity for all of us, and eliminates such morbid wealth and its income that it essentially purchases any government that exists around them.
This is an economic system that simply doesn't work for us. It works for those taking 95% to 80% of all the profits... multiple times yearly earnings goes to a few who often don't even work, but collect the money via dividends.
You produce it, they take it.
Must change.
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The only thing we know is that this pandemic only killed elderly and those with chronic issues and the brunt was mostly on the same category who were mostly poorest of the poor.
Should we ever have a pandemic that is less discriminating... we know the panic would be severe.
The gambling on stocks, joke stocks, and fake money for real money and the extension of NFT's and other hair brain stupidity would never have happened... the concept of quick recovery because "I wasn't effected because I have no chronic problems, I'm younger than 59, and I'm not poorest of the poor." Instead, it'd be fuck I'm sick as shit... and already been to the hospital twice... the hospitals are full and they sent me to an old folks home and make shift hospitals in now many dormant vacant retail outlets, and several friends, family members, and former coworkers (former coworkers because they just laid us all off) recently died.
With even bigger deaths, a general worldwide population reduction would correspond with a huge demand hit along with loss in 95% who must work not being able to work and needing savings not to gamble in stupidity, but to ensure they can buy necessities. In the US, those necessities include medical costs because unlike essentially all other countries, we lack a healthcare system... instead forced to play the hustle under a bridge and confront even with so called insurance, bankruptcy, should the prognostic be prolonged and expensive... no job, huge medical bills, little to no savings, and economy falling apart with bad prospects on finding another job, inflation due to supply drastically going down without rationing of essentials a run on more than just toilet paper (we kind of got a little run on other foods... recall partially empty shelves at grocery stores on foods particularly canned foods).
The way this was handled was moronic... and we can only be glad it wasn't a indiscriminate and with a much higher fatality rate.
We get a "real" pandemic... at least one that's more vicious... we're looking at the chaos that happened during the Justinian plague 541-549AD which lasted 8 years or the Black Death 1346-1353 which lasted for 6 years plagues.
Just like then, we'd enter into a great depression and mimic similar famine and insanity that happened around the world in 1929.
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His show with Cramer in 2000-2004 I always called their show "Kudlow and Cramer" "Cut-throat and Crammer"... to this day that nick name still works perfectly for the two. Larry Kudlow is still an advocate of cut throat extortion capitalism, and Jim Cramer is still hustling to cram selling stocks.
Min wage is the simplest form to ensure wages/salaries increase... it's difficult to determine at what wage and salary... I think min wage law should apply both to hourly wages and a min salary.
I would even like better to adopt co-determination and national/state trade labor unions similar to Germany's German Trade Union Confederation. And as importantly, a Co-determination policy like Germany's that puts 1/3 of the board of directors are wage earners voted on by the workers... but I would up it from 1/3 to 1/2.
And beyond even trade unions ensuring private and public share offered corporations pay fair and living compensation, we should go toward a Co-Op Reserve Bank... similar to the Federal Reserve Bank. It would lend directly to any group and current enterprise wanting to form a Co-Op Corporation as defined as all employees and any other investors only get 1 vote as to the operation of the business including all employee compensation, capital expenditures to grow the company, leadership and management elections and proposal ratification, and profit/surplus determination, all matters of financing, etc. would be voted on by all workers all having 1 vote each. Capital formation no longer necessary to come from an aristocracy, but reviewed for viability and if approved lent by the Federal Co-Op Reserve Bank at a discount rate. Federal Reserve system works well for the private banks, it would work well for specially defined Co-Ops that would be infinitely more democratic at the workplace than our current oligarchical system that only gives votes generally to non-employed aristocracy. Capital formation becomes available by other means, and finally so many co-ops would no longer be relegated to low capital sectors like retail and cafe', but could secure sufficient capital for essentially every sector of the economy possible.
Watch these Co-Ops compete and utterly crush the current corporate structure. With literally trillions a year no longer going toward paying a few aristocracy a return on their investments for doing nothing, workers would be taking their fair share in profits, productivity to wages that has become completely uncorrelated, would again directly correlate, and not just in wages/salaries, but in other benefits such even higher wage/salaries while working fewer hours... from 40 hours to 30 hours. No more skeleton crews that increase risk to work injuries that haunt a person for the rest of their lives. Lots of benefits from essentially going around a do nothing aristocracy.
Very similar to how most nations ended or at least curtailed their nobility and feudal lordships and slave masters by rendering their parasitic nature moot.
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I'm trying to imagine how minimum amount of vacation, free daycare, secure retirement plan, giving up my shitty insurance that would only cover me for not quite a year if I had a catastrophic illness since FMLA is only good for 12 weeks and my company only carries it for 24 weeks until they fire people, and then COBRA kicks in which would mean I would be $500 a month just for insurance premiums, and my buy in long term disability only pays 66% of my income, and my deductible is $3,000 then only covers 80% to 50% whatever it happens to be and if the catastrophic illness is in network or not, easily having to go to the max out of pocket of $7,900 for the year. With this type of so called insurance, I would be bankrupt regardless if I came down with some really serious catastrophic illness.
Seriously, do they just say... NO! I need to be shit on some more, fuck me harder with base ball bat, make me bleed, we need to serf more, more over time, I don't ever want to take vacation, who needs sick pay. Shit on me! Shit on me more! I haven't been shit on enough! And neither has everyone else! FREE? WTF? NO! Shit on me instead!
WTF?
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The sweatshop of the world nations have busted the developed nations. It's a race to the bottom.
Determining trade among nations must be based on nations that have an actually enforce labor rights: collective bargaining, universal healthcare, universal education (means we need to also come to the table on our lacking labor and civil rights), means minimum wage or some wage/salary or Codetermination requirement where 50% or more requiring labor to sit on the board of directors to have as much influence and decisions as share holders, labor standards that require both vacation time every year and so amount of sick time (again the US would need to stand up because we have no legislation requiring any sized employer to provide paid vacation and paid sick time allocations), safety standards, etc.
The free market horse shit was pushed by a bunch of rich fucks, their toadies, and idiot fucks wanting to screw others, ie, its a market that they control to tyrannize and screw labor who is also the consumer.
Our entire banking system isn't even a "free" let it be market, since it's constantly insolvent and needs some discounted sweet money printed on demand as the biggest for profit banks vote under the entity of the Federal Reserve Bank that then has immediate access to the US Treasury and the corresponding Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Let it be markets have always crashed, and crashed hard.
King Louis XV of France was told by an economic adviser to establish let it be economics with grain that it would spark prosperity. Was boom in selling grain for the first 2 years. Then famine. Starvation. So much for prosperity. Nearly lost his thrown to revolt. He immediately halted let it be activity and required enough grain stores for bad harvests.
King Louis XVI of France, his child, didn't learn the lesson. Did the same thing. Famine. He lost his head. And so did most of the nobility, and those that didn't fled.
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This isn't about Biden. Biden's an absurd ass hole and caught way too frequently being a liar pants on fire.
This has to do with your dogmatic view on "how simple the answer is"
You stated:
"Allowing more companies to enter the market, reducing the barriers to entry, let the entrepreneurial spirit and capitalism take hold and actually drive prices down because that is what capitalism ultimately does."
Funny you say this: let's compare US vs UK healthcare system vs our US healthcare hustle stands as great testimony to your falsehood that magical capitalism will resolve anything.
Firstly:
1) Price mechanisms for many sectors of the economy simply doesn't work.
a) Judicial
b) Police
c) Fire service
d) Natural monopolies like utilities: water, sewer, trash collection and placement, electrical distribution and generation, transportation infrastructure, etc.
e) Education
f) Healthcare
2) Why does "magical capitalism no work for these sectors and some others as well?
a) Inelastic demand curve such as that in healthcare... no matter the amount of quantity supplied (suppliers), and those able or not able to afford the prices (demand) people will pay any price to not suffer or die.
b) Economy of scale: utilities like sewer, water, electricity, transportation infrastructure has a barrier to entry in that the expense to duplicate water systems or electrical grids or provide more airports or more and more ship yards cost even more money per user with no added margin. It requires a large number of customers to use these items to just break even, and duplicating this would make that break even cost even higher thus raising prices per each new supplier added... doubling tripling quadrupling water works or electrical grids or adding 10 airports or flooding 5 or 6 areas along a coast of a city with ports and more ports makes each break even cost that much more expensive raising just the break even margin price per customer. Not reducing the price.
It's why even in the US, most cities have mostly city owned and operated water and sewer and garbage and even power systems and where there are a few private owned utilities in operations they are required to provide services when and where it might not be "profitable" in the immediate term or ever just off those few additional add ons into their service area, they cannot just increase whatever price to the point that people are going bankrupt (okay certain parts of Texas does with electricity and well we saw that stupidity play out, several deaths due to inability to pay for electricity and keep their power on thus no heat and well they died of hypothermia). For the few for profit utilities (in the US most private utilities are electric distribution companies... water and sewer is largely a city ran enterprise), most states, even good red state of Idaho, has a Public Utility Commission regulatory body that also takes on public petitions and determines rate cases on lowering or increasing the utility bills.
Since there is essentially no actual competition on these grids: water, sewer, trash, etc. they get margins no matter what. That margin is established to ensure enough money is provided to run the operation as well as grow as needed. And still leave left over for owners of the power company to have a cash cow (as they often call them)... because they're always profitable. They're just not allowed to ever mark prices to whatever the market will bear... because the market can bear death. Literally, take a peak at Texas. Was horrible.
But don't stop there: take a peak at our mostly non-regulated no universal healthcare system in the US. Medicare isn't allowed to negotiate prices, instead medicare can only take prices that were negotiated via private insurance companies... and well the insurance companies are often extensions to the very pharma and large health conglomerates of clinics and hospitals around the country.
c)spill over costs like those if one person can afford fire service or police service for protection... well there goes the fire blazing out of control and the entire area burns down and some deaths along side. Some one is burgling, can't pay the police bill... well looks like you're about to be robbed.
Let's determine guilt or innocence in court to the highest bidder to the jury! Enough said here.
Price mechanism doesn't always work in certain periods (times of war or natural disaster like earthquake, hurricane, tornado, etc. etc.) as prices will not provide more supply into the market to bring prices back down when goods are needed. So a period of rationing is often used to prevent an complete breakdown in society from looting to rioting... a hungry, desperate populace unable to get at least what they need to not be hungry, not to be un-sheltered, etc. will not provide you with any civilization to let your magical dogmatic entrepreneurial spirit take flight... well it might turn it into a spirit as it kills it in the flood of violence.
Price mechanism as mentioned prior does not work in many sectors of the economy. Healthcare chief among many others. Due to the inelastic demand curve and economies of scale required in these sectors... competitive market principles simply don't exist and if forced to exist don't provide the benefit rather they become an unnecessary burden and cost in providing the natural monopoly good and/or service.
You above all people living in the UK, with a medical system that is the envy of the world with the NHS, should know the utter bullshit you're propounding.
NHS gets its funding via the UK income tax.
Not as we do it in the states with a payroll tax that taxes ALL gross income of 1.49% for medicare/medicaid.
Their version of Federal income tax actually pays for something they all need... and not a ridiculous useless military industrial complex.
On top of our taxes being more, and we in the US getting less for those taxes, we also spend another $2,400 per person per year on employee sponsored health insurance that still doesn't provide essential coverage... out of pocket expenses can still even with so called insurance exceed $7,000.
No sir, your living in dogma stupidity.
And that must end. Or we will never address the real problems we have.
Inflation we are suffering today won't be solved by magical blood sucking entrepreneurial spirit of exploiting whatever the market can bear fairy dust.
Inflation is and always is a monetary phenomenon. The Fed Reserve must raise their overnight funding fee to exceed the inflation rate to end inflation. They additionally must end any other monetary loosening policies.
Otherwise inflation will continue, because low interest rates and other loose monetary policy literally expand the money supply. The money supply is too much... too much money is chasing to few of goods.
And the shortages we face is brought to you by imperialism, colonialism, globalism, name it whatever you wish, they're the same thing, different name to buzz the masses with magical thoughts of "entrepreneurial spirit" and other nonsense... causing supply chains that were never rational, always costing more resources in terms of transportation resources including energy, etc. into a pretzel. Inefficiencies covered up via reliable servitude labor often under tyranny of a despotic regime, but sometimes just facing a weak and destitute region of the world... and often spurred on by subsidies by those nations (no pollution controls, no labor protection requirements, no wage/salary rules, etc. etc.)
I mean this structure of the economy isn't new, keeps popping up since the late bronze age collapse... and since then this moronic economic structure always comes down in a bust.
So the monetary system must get tightened. Or the inflation will continue.
Additionally, the race to the bottom imperialism, colonialism, globalism whatever you want to call it, must end. Genuine authentic comparative advantage supply changes must be established. Not ones wildly distorted via exploitation of a tyrannized people of one nation or another, and subsidies of the same.
And some actual planning on economic necessities. No planning... let it be to the market... well it'll fall apart faster than Terra did when it lost it's peg.
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Yes, it's been done in the past.
It involves not allowing housing to become a leverage stupidity via the banks, who are owners of central banks of many nations, and especially the Fed Reserve which is a banking cartel, not much really governmental about the Fed Reserve despite its name.
So you halt the leverage stupidity.
You use our tax money on ourselves: develop roads and utilities and lots, builders simply get paid to build the house, and provide various other public housing subsidies.
It's been done in the past, it's not difficult.
This let it be market nonsense is just that, we're living thru it... once again. It's a horrible thing that usually sees revolution/civil war and/or collapse in economies.
Basics that become screwed by idiot no planning economics like food, shelter, water, etc. causes basic shortage and you have a collapse in that nations economy.
That entire "government not being involved" is propaganda.
So you don't have government much involved anymore, stupidity of the markets... and now we have people living in fucking RV camps or tents.
So magical government so bad... well in a fucking democracy you are the fucking government.
To say government bad... you are handing that baton to the oligarchs. And we can see, we're living thru it. It shits in your mouth.
So that government bad nonsense was just propaganda from the oligarchs.
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I hope our generation, 30 and younger know better. None of my friends or coworkers or anyone I have met are racist in anyway. Makes no sense to me this exists today.
I have noticed particular instances other minorities explaining themselves to me, or expecting me to query them. A small commercial office plaza in Boise with a series of man made lakes near the greenbelt that surrounds several apartment complexes, walking through the arch walk way of the small office to the fountain plaza view of the lake a black guy had a tripod taking pictures, I was just going for a walk/jog approaching him along the sidewalk and to walk past him.
He made a point to tell me he was just taking pictures.
I said its a beautiful day out, and its pretty area isn't it.
Walking away, I thought two things, well of course I can see you're taking pictures, and second realized the "just" part. He probably thought I was some management of the property or one of the tenants to find out what he was doing.
I thought, man, he must get questioned/harassed a lot even on what is essentially a public space.
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Oligarchs are disconnected with reality... they're nuts and a parasitical clowns, a farce on the play of acting as modern day Pharos... or masters of the universe. When in reality they lack any sound judgement on just about all fields, most of them never actually worked an day in their lives. And if they have, it's only in some scam stuff that made their fortune, or fluff work that we (the unwashed masses) would take as errands and/or playing... not working. And some just got lucky being "that guy" that got promoted and established and wrote some books that made them millions.
They live in their own bubble. And have immense power in money and in government.
And this makes them not just dangerous to themselves, but to everyone else living in the same civilization. Think nobility and royalty of old with absolute or even just constitutional monarchical authority.
Thus we get wack a doodles, some rich already like some guy who is on the headlines everyday... som others with googly eyes and a rocket of his own, and others see a poodle haired youngish guy supposedly arbitraging digital fake play money for real money between Japanese Yen and USD between the play money.
And of course, they are also putting on a show too, to attract more investment money to sell all or a portion of their initial shares, and to IPO and sell at will whatever amount they want on the public con market... (caugh) I mean stock market, they see a clown and say sweet this will get notice like masket... the clown of McDonald's... turn the clown into a household name and we have hordes meme stampeding into any IPO to offramp our investment into more mountains of cash than we invested... ie. it's all part of the gimmick... find an outlandish character and they become part of the advertisement campaign in both getting customers and investors. Money honey.
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The exact reason a bubble bursts isn't really known... often its because leverage (in debt) just becomes so severe that nobody is lending and/or borrowing. There was various preludes with downturns specifically in the stock market in the US in the 1920's: Depression of 1920–21, recession of 1923–24, recession of 1926–27.
The overall economy particularly in the US was not that swinging for most. 80% were low income to poverty. Jobs of any type were incredibly unstable.
Coming off of the 1800's, halve that century was in a recession, long depression, great depression, and or panic.
What triggers them is a variety of things from wars, direct wars, civil war, rebellion, crop failures, mineral depletion, trade shift and policy changes, and most often when during peaceful times: over capacity is reached and immediate deflationary pressures force an over leveraged system to collapse that over capacity in attempt to bring prices back to pay off those debts and stop closing businesses and evicting people who bought their homes or farms or whatever else on credit.
Noticeably, these depressions or panics happen with pre-shocks mini-recessions foreshadowing their demise; at least revealing instabilities. It doubles down investment money that can't find a reliable or desirably high enough return to stampede into whatever looks hot... contributing to a bubble. 1929 the biggest items were stocks and lesser degree commodities.
Add borrowing to the equation it makes the bubbles or an "overheated" economy boom even more, and the bust even more violent.
Overheating economy you may ask, isn't that good that things are going well?
Yes. Problem with economic systems then and just as today, it isn't efficient. It can't handle the ability of industrialization to provide essentially very high capacity; to much capacity and especially utilizing it eventually causes deflationary pressures. When debt is involved, falling prices causes the debt to become difficult to repay, at some point lowering of prices due to extreme quantity supplied, then the debt comes impossible to pay.
Our current system is inefficient and unable to distribute goods and services properly; a disconnect from growing both supply and demand in a dependable manner. It often does one or the other; and when one is out of equilibrium, it's like 3 legged stool, the entire thing topples.
And it usually does; our current system simply can't handle its own success at growing capacity and especially at actually utilizing capacity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlSxPouPCIM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtttXC9tFPU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
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Around August and into September, I had noticeable speed problems on youtube, facebook, and just google searches... my online based email and other websites were unaffected, normal speed, and other speed checkers testing my connection were showing unaffected speeds. I got a few VPN's and youtube and goolge searches were back to normal speed again. Because I'm using free VPN's they have a cap, about end of September, I paused my VPN usage, and back to normal. A few times I had some issues, switched to VPN for a few hours, than turned VPN off, and my connection remained normal.
The cable companies and other ISP's are already testing the water.
It's very irritating.
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Funny thing is the opposite for my dad, he can't stand the fat fuck on dead AM radio as he calls him, and various overt propaganda on stations like Fox. Back in 2003 he affirmed to me something I said in passing that the Fox so called news station seemed like an advertisement for GW Bush. He has long since cut the cable, and only has radio for news. So you would think talk radio would have turned him right, but it just pisses him off so he simply doesn't listen to the news very often.
I just recently heard someone at work made a smart ass comment about Trump to his boss, my boss too now, after the election of Trump. I guess my boss is a hardcore right winger, and he made the comment prior that "now we have someone who won't take vacation while in office." Man was he wrong, Trump has done nothing but take vacations. The coworker said "As if GW didn't take vacations." It enraged my boss so much, he pushed and tackled my coworker. He later apologized to the worker, and treats him more than well. And I like my boss. He's a good guy, hard working and very fair. He's in his 60's.
It's just like a cult. It has whipped otherwise good people into a weird ass frenzy of anger. Weirdest shit ever.
I remember when that fat ass Rush had a tv show. I was watching it, my dad came home from work, and we watched a little, he then walked told me you should probably turn that trash off. He began to even cut back on listening to the radio, he asked me if I ever heard of this bloated gas ball Alex Jones... I really hadn't, just new he was a nut. My dad just said they're putting nothing but trash on radio and tv, i just can't listen to that nonsense.
He's not a saint, he believes in some weird ass conspiracies about the elites wanting to make everyone poor, and at some point diminish the population by some means.
But the effect either way is to just anger older people.
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Americans just like many other nations, don't trust their plutocrats for obvious reasons, and that means our government which is a corporation that helps pad our plutocrats pockets.
And they raised a mass of idiots on advertisement, frying their brains making them dumb as dog shit... actually the bacteria on dog shit is likely more intelligent than some of these brainwash paranoid meth, heroin, and any other narcotics they can blow their brains on to escape their miserable lives living in their cars or if they're lucky leaky trailer.
Pitch forks my friend are going to catch everyone other poor and of course the rich too.
But it's going to a free for all massacre in our great depression 2.0... this time you have people stark raving stupid in the US... you had that in Russia, China, Italy, Germany, etc. and we know what insanity transpired there, albeit things really sucked as in those countries some for a very long time.
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People are just sitting out of renting and buying opting to live in RV's here in the northwest.
Similar phenomena happened in 2006-2013 before and after the last real-estate affordability crisis... I mean rents here in Idaho have topped the prices of mortgage resets that had employees confide in me in tears they were giving back their keys and or being foreclosed on... that price was $1,000 to $1,200... rents now top that price to as high at $1,400 to $1,600 that's an impossible monthly housing then and now... as wages in Idaho have gone absolutely nowhere... many still make from $12 to $13 an hour as if that's a humble yet okay income.
RV lots some even endorsed and subsidized or even owned by towns around the state and in my town are popping up all over the place and immediately become max filled... all the rich annoyance push to remove tent cities, they vanish only to relocate somewhere else this has never been resolved.
And where those that don't get RV's, they're moving back with relatives, and many have already left Idaho for good... particularly those who have family elsewhere.
Starting to see for sale signs accumulate around me. And vacancies at apartments and town houses starting to accumulate.
Consumer confidence dumping in August and continue to go down significantly is probably a big sign... total repeat on the crisis meltdown as coworkers freaking out about their mortgage insurance and taxes going up, renters really upset some have already quit my employer and moved out of the area, others are strongly considering it, looking to other states.
Reminds me of 2007-8... and so many left the Boise area, felt like it was abandoned. Great for traffic. But even I spent time away from Idaho while duties in the Air Force and college about that time.
The stupidity for the longest time was "investors". 2014 to 2016 rebound was flippers... working at the utility in Boise area, it was flippers coming back... but there were some odd big flippers we couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I'm fairly certain it was the ilk of moronic algo using parasites to the likes of Zillow and Offerpad like stupidity. And that only got more intense and stupid this summer until Z realized their "market maker" strategy for real-estate was not just flawed, it was impossible. You can't be market maker on real-estate, there's to many variables; it's not like stocks or options or bonds which are all identical allowing for quick access to a buyer and sell for a certain spread to exist.
Not sure how fast it'll all dumpster dive... but home prices in Idaho last I read have fallen 20% from their highest stupidity levels... but they're still well beyond the stupidity levels of 2006. And rents haven't quite budged yet despite the mounting vacancies and continuing building... We do need the supply the entire country does. The problem with this unstable stupidity housing market from 2008 instead of bailing out builders and municipalities to encourage housing growth commensurate with population growth, we bailed out the blood sucking parasitical banks that inflated for their own greed the housing market in the first place... interest rates persistently going down, the bankers were allowing principle to increase so that what they lost on interest rates, they made up by inflating housing prices and the resulting principle mortgage... can't make $x in profits on this higher interest rate... we'll make it by allowing and higher principle mortgages... and we all know the way people shop for homes is pre-approval by bank, and that pre-approval is always used to the max when making an offer.
The banks are really in charge of the bids. And even to an extent the asks.
We lack affordable housing. And have done so for some time. Worshiping the banking cartel and thinking it's so critical is tantamount as any sector, shoe sector... and having them have reigns of the economy... the result would be instability with in their domain... with shoes it would be an over supply of shoe stores with hiked up over priced shoes, resulting in not many shoes for sell as nobody could afford them and supply would diminish thereby only keeping prices for shoes sticky.
It's moronic. You don't let a cartel of a sector or any cartel for that matter manage a nations economy. Doing so is of grim miserable consequences. As we repeatedly see in this race to the bottom stupidity boom and bust nonsense; the oscillations getting bigger each time until it eventually rips not just itself apart, but plunges us into miseries most of us Americans can't imagine or just don't want to.
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You were talking about taxes in the late 1800's in the US or Henry George in 1881 saying there were all these income taxes and payroll taxes.
There was only property tax in most states during that time.
1873-1893 and 1895-1912 there was no income tax. And the few times prior that it was invoked, was initially during the civil war and slightly after it ending 1873.
So the entire property tax argument wasn't new. States were already charging property tax. And thus even today property tax is not something of the Federal level.
Payroll social security didn't start until 1937 at 1% matching employer and employee gross income as it is today. Medicare not until the 1960's after LBJ.
US government was mostly tiny and oligarchs fantasy action land. Yet the roads and ports were largely crap. Housing was shit in the dense populated areas and in the west, often shacks. People would call cabins. But really they were dirt floor sheet wood slapped together shacks.
Income taxes didn't become a thing in 1913.
And most regulatory bodies didn't happen until 1934 and onward.
Property taxes has been something the states have collected in taxes either based on the value of the property, sometimes value of goods on the property as many still do, and some only on the income... now all just have property tax appraisals and tax based on those values in all states.
Sales tax was a thing most states charged at some point or another or on special goods. But some states never had a general sales tax too.
The only federal sales tax were excised on certain goods. For instance gasoline sales tax. And all states do the same. So on gal of gas in the US baked in the price is Fed tax and state tax. Ironically, general sales tax on other goods the prices posted don't include the taxes on the store. Which is annoying, particularly staying at hotels, the tax is often 15% to 30% the sticker price; special city and state tax. It's to reduce the speculative nature of hospitality dooming housing to go toward daily hotel, and not more affordable longer term housing.
Unfortunately Arbnb and others of that stupidity broke laws, which many states and cities are now enforcing; it's illegal to have a hotel or motel or daily or short term hotel/motel/inn on residential zoned properties... this takes long term housing off the market making rents and house prices higher. Texas actually just recently started enforcing it, along with Nevada in Vegas.
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Crypto is such a scam. Had fun trading it last year and experimenting with the stuff... it's garbage by the way.
Watch out for all these so called stable coins, they account for essentially 92% of all liquidity... only 8% is real money. These poker chips like tether and circle... and I once would note Terra but that one has already come to fruition... it's done dead. And I might even mention Celsius, but that one is dead too. There's Dai... watch out for that one... Celsius borrowed lots of Dai.
But tether or USDT has lots of lent poker chips on that.
It was all bogus. Circle has a circle jerk offloading thing with Coin Base... good puts on that printed well :)
Just watch out... crypto is nothing but a extremely leverage pyramid and ponzi scheme sandwich cluster fuck.
Stay away from crypto... even shorting this shit on crypto "exchanges" which you can only legally do with Bitget, they all trade with tether aka poker chips... that should make huge profits in the short, you're profits are in the form of tether... and well shorting crypto using Terra, you'd be screwed along with those who had long positions.
Just stay away from crypto. It's one giant cluster fuck of scam sandwich. Google Tether scam... it reads like a creepy goofy comedy that you think can't be made up.
Circle is just the same.
Entire crypto space is nothing but completely farcical and stupid. I was trading it last year Feb to May 2021... just prior to the first dump to 29K on BTC... I had traded several cryptos ETH ADA BTC BCH etc. Made profits trend swing trading short term on few days basis reaching lows of the trend and selling at highs of the trend. Was fun. Someone with voodoo technical analysis charts warned a big dumpster dive in the Dow come Summer 2021 along with BTC... so I thought okay I'll sell what BTC I hold once it gets to my $57K market had about $1k worth on the trade... made $50 more bucks on the trade... and stayed out... and sure enough it dumpster dived a few weeks later... my last trade was when it dumped to $29K and rapidly came up to $36Kish... I caught the falling knife buying $100 worth at $29K and sold at $36K whatever gain that is. And then stayed out.
Read about the stuff all summer long as it was trading range from $29K to 46K... read about tether and circle and other stable coins... complete bullshit is what this market is made up as.
Some millionaires and billionaires that pumped the chicken, most of them are actually oblivious of the scam sandwich the millionaires though know it's complete trash and they work on selling for real money when they pump the price on it via offloading places like Coin Base or Bittrex or Kracken etc.
Anyway, I further discovered NONE of these "exchanges" for crypto: Coinbase, Bittrex, Binance Kracken, etc. NONE of them are FDIC nor SIPC insurance they're not considered exchanges, rather they're considered as payment processors. So your real USD money sitting on the side lines occasionally trading lows and selling in highs of a trend... that real money isn't even secure.
The exchange goes bust... so does your real money sitting on the side lines. Including any crypto junk you might have had in their trading account.
I took my $4K off all Coinbase and Bittrex etc. fast.... I just stuck to trading stocks and options. Screw crypto.
Good luck for those late to the party gearing up to be major bag holders.
The scam is about to come to its end.
Saylor is a drug addict nut job by the way. The con is not a good person. His company was caught lying about net revenues on his Microstrategy company 1997-1999 3 years in a row.
Then he was hit with a huge fine by the SEC... DOJ didn't charge him with criminal suits citing they were busy with Enron and WorldCom and Qwest and other executives.
Instead, Saylor diluted his stock by issuing and selling more to pay his SEC fines for lying about his net profits for those 3 years, each year they reported a gain, but actually each 3 years in a row had a losses.
Then Saylor went on a drug binge in the Bahamas for a decade... perhaps he snorted much of his money or something... but since 2020 he's been scamming BTC.
He's a mess.
Just stay away from crypto.... it's all falling apart... there was a BTC machine at a nearby gas station... they took it out, and so did a liquor store nearby... both cited... it's all a scam and we want nothing to do with it anymore.... and more, nobody was using it anyway.. fortunately for anyone who thought of using it.
Crypto solves nothing in the financial world and only creates more problems as torrent file structures of "blockchain" which isn't new... I mean I've used torrent file to share all sorts of files since 2006. Anyway, it cannot scale. What this means... just the few morons like myself jumping into this stupidity last year... sometimes just to move crypto from one wallet to another... even if you're not spending it, you're just taking money from one wallet on an exchange to another exchange or to your own personal wallet on your computer/phone whatever... can vary in costs from $3.00 to $100 just to move your crypto... more expensive than any other payment processor.
Additionally, it takes several confirmations on the node to complete a transaction. It takes 7 to 9 confirmations... just one confirmation can take an hour. Full confirmations can take weeks.
Funny thing, my BTC transfers from one exchange to another... often only confirmed 2 times... they just gave me credit for the BTC gave up hoping 5 more nodes that really don't exist, will eventually confirm the transaction.
You can't use this shit.
Doggy coin or Dogecoin that Musk pumped and dumped last year, the meme, the joke was that that crypto is purposefully hyperinflation, miners can easily exceed 4,000 new doggy coins every minute. This does keep transaction costs down, but because every minute at least 4K new coins are added to the already billions... they lose value quickly.
So yeah... crypto is a scam. Stay away.
Even if you've been trading this garbage... especially on the casino exchanges that require a VPN because they're not allowed to allow you to trade on their exchanges like Bybit, Binance, Derbit, etc etc. with 100x offered leverage... it's all in tethers... all you'll come away with is bogus worthless tethers... just like Terra and Celsius.
And even on the spot exchanges... when tether goes... so will circle and so will Coin Base.
The entire thing is the modern day equiv of those mail out $1 to everyone on the chain letter pyramid schemes that are illegal in most nations including the USA.
Shits garbage.
Gamblers you've been warned.
In fact, gamblers, you would be better off trading short term options contracts than playing crypto at this point. At least if you make it big, you keep the proceeds.
You make it big in crypto... you got a lot of worthless poker chip defunct stable coins.
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You created him, CNN, Fox, MNSBC, ABC, CBS, etc.
You fuckers can't get enough of his shit. You keep giving him air time.
Enjoy your monster that on the next leg of the depression to hit will turn our country into what Balkan nations crumbled into; a disgusting nightmare Mad Max world.
Just stop reporting on his ass. He's con jobber president. So ignore him.
Do real journalism on matters that effect people... Flint still has shit water, and turns out other municipalities around the country do too, we have an opium crisis that kills more per year than Vietnam War did its entire period, more people are uninsured or under insured, wages are essentially flat for 60% of the workers in this idiot country, etc.
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I think a sweetener for those who paid their student loans off in the past 40 years should receive up to $30K back possibly more.And for medical graduates up to $100K Fed student loan sum repaid; we need medical professionals and they should not be faced with any debts whatsoever; I respect for doctors, nurses, radiologists, and other medical professionals.
I'm not in that camp, I still owe quite a bit, and I'm not in the medical field.
But I feel bad for those who paid off their debts.
They should be re-compensated for having to pay for something they shouldn't have in the first place.
And we can afford that too.
One method to budget for paying back those who paid off their Federal Student loans:
If you still owe money, you won't get anything you paid refunded, you simply get whatever is left zeroed out.
And those who paid it all off, get up to $30K for most degrees.
And for those who completed a medical degree including associates to doctorate in the past 40 years get up to $100K in total sum payments they had made.
Private loans you would simply allow people to declare chapter 7 as any other debts under the Bankruptcy Law.
We can afford it. Wouldn't be "cheap".
Particularly the outstanding debt of $1.6 trillion. But it could be just monetized. Similar to how lending at a discount to banks, and QE was paid via monetized by demand by the Fed Reserve in the tune of $4 trillion to which Fed Reserve still has $3 trillion of the garbage that's unlikely to find any buyers for the junk debts.
So it is manageable fairly easily and actually finally takes priority on the people instead of the military contractor handouts, and Wall Street handouts, and big business handouts.
Going forward, college tuition is completely free. And associates to bachelor degree get a stipend. Master degree and PhD would go through a grant program, and you could still borrow at a discount if necessary. But Federal loans of this nature including private loans would be under regular Bankruptcy Law protection.
And medical graduates would be tuition free all the way to PhD/MD.
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If I was made President with full support of congress and the senate:
1) I would declare nuclear weapons a crime against humanity and dismantle all of them save maybe a 10 or so for potential asteroid or transport purposes non war purposes.
2) Begin the master work of our era to fast track LFTR fission and ultimately ITER and Wendelstein 7x fusion reactors.
3) Massive rail building throughout the US and lite rail within all cities and towns.
4) Massive new home and apartment building; 1960-1970's 30 homes per 1,000 households constructed, now only 8 homes per 1,000 households... and we wonder why homes are no longer affordable both in purchase or in rent. People with near 6 figure income living in vehicles in some cities.
5) Universal healthcare for ALL covering ALL medical including dental, vision, and the rest of the body.
6) Legalize all drugs in their use; prohibit and control the manufacturing of others, and create a rehab program sometimes mandatory rehab for those addicted beyond ability to reason similar to Portugal's method.
7) Universal education.
8) Create a Federal Co-Op Reserve Bank and co-op branches that lend to groups with verifiable and constant audit to borrow at a discount to form co-op enterprises where all workers regardless of rank get 1 vote as to all aspects of the operation of the business; similar but even more extensive than Germany's Co-determination policy where 50% of the board must be employees voted in by employees.
9) Cut the military spending by 75%. All but a handful critical bases that aren't on our territory would be closed. During non-war and non-war activities no production whatsoever in weapons maybe contracted by a private enterprise: any military weapon producer is by default a non-profit government co-ops the co-ops providing competitiveness between themselves. War racketeering vanishes. Can't exist. And we still maintain a competitive advance military for our protection.
10) Introduce a science advancement competition in all sectors that effect all our lives to develop: medicines and treatments that prevent or even cure diseases from Alzheimer's to Diabetes to HIV to all various types of cancer to repairing damaged spinal cords and other nerves. To develop better transportation methods land, sea, and air. To develop better living quarters in housing and apartment construction.
11) Once LFTR and/or ITER power methods have found viable a massive implementation project that would over power our grid (and grid would be modernized) and use the grid in such a way that fossil fuels become essentially as obsolete as candles for lighting when electricity was installed in homes. Over power grid that is carbon neutral allows electrolysis to be uses to manufacture fuels carbon neutral and even materials in a carbon neutral way at a fraction of the cost today.
12) Fund NASA to begin moon colonizing and Mars, and make viable a mining operations on asteroids. But again, actually fund NASA specifically to do these things.
And there's probably more... but so far I think this would set us on an okay track.
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We have same day registration in Idaho.... and if it comes to it, just signing an affidavit you can register... they do everything including lying to try to get photo ID and/or bank statements, but it is unnecessary according to state law. If you lie you will be prosecuted criminally... you do lose your voting rights when convicted of a criminal crime, and must petition for them back.
But if red state Idaho can do same day registration, any state can do it.
It's not fucking rocket science... you have them produce a utility bill and photo ID at the poll, or sign an affidavit, and finger print the document if you're really concerned about ballet stuffing, as well as a photo... poll workers usually look out for ballet stuffers.
And ultimately we need to invite international non-profit unbaised as possible organizations to use as mirror to assist in verifying fairness in the voting process, and during the counting of the votes.
This shit isn't difficult. It's fucking easy, or we wouldn't be able to conduct business with credit cards, banking with checking accounts, etc.
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The way the National Reserve Banks act today is essentially a complete backstop to liquidity by allowing private banks to produce loans beyond their capacity to stay solvent, no problem, the National Reserve will just buy those "assets" debts beyond the banks ability to remain solvent... before the player was the investors and commercial banking sectors that were buying sub-prime debt.
Now national banks are doing it. Because they can do this perpetually; there is no real limit as most national banks, like the US, have access directly to command the National Treasury to print the money to do so, even if their Reserve Bank fund isn't enough.
I'm not 100% sure if the Euro has the same ability like the US.
But they're all playing the same game... they were trying to do what happened shortly after WWII, pump money supply into the system to overtake the debt... instead it just grew the debt, income didn't really grow, particularly individual incomes, only a short term boom for corporations.
There were a few difference after WWII, individuals made more and increasing more of real money/income; and income for households grew at the pace of productivity. Now, it's completely different incomes are flat to dropping, and have remained uncorrelated with productivity, productivity due to various new technologies had continued to advance substantially.
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Oh weren't those pilots so brave bla bla blah.
When the real story was they were doomed to die for profit because of a ridiculous carless set of oligarchs wanting hoink like the piggies.
While these executives and owners should be consigned to prison or at the very least.
If such idiocy happens in the way of the peasantry classes for instance if just being caught with a little bit of pot or other illegal drugs on them, civil rights forfeiture; all assets (very little for the 60% or even 80% of the US population as most don't have a pot to piss; half can't even cover a $400 emergency without using their credit card... if that's not already maxed out), whatever little assets you might have, checking in the bank, savings, home, car, etc. is gone poof EVEN before you're actually convicted or even indited.
But we'll say: oh good ol' soldier, they fought their best!
NO. These pilots and the passengers and flight attendants were murdered for profit. Victims of greed and stupidity.
This is why FAA and other organizations need a bit more hands on auditing. This BS of self regulation just ends in murder, death, and mayhem. In the financial sector in ends often in mass murder to suicides and many people losing all their savings and/or investment leading to more mass murder and/or suicides.
This moronic idea that a company will self regulate... is absolutely absurd. You still must place audits to see if these companies are doing what they're required to do, even on their own drawn up rules they wrote for themselves, as they often don't.
Working in many sectors from financial to communications to water works to food manufacturing even a little in the aircraft industry.
NONE of them follow even their chicken shit rules they wrote themselves.
They simply wait until the peasants end up dead.
Then and even then they'll begrudgingly react. All while the big piggies will being hoink themselves all the way to the bank. Big money. At the death and misery of everyone else.
And their grunt and squeal like deprived swine at an empty swill, if you suggest such audits would increases costs so much oh they'll be in the red and the world will end.
While reality the opposite: the pork chops would save the expenses of the deaths and/or injuries, so their fat bloated hog faces would have a 16th chin instead of only 3 chins. While also keeping everyone else much safer... and a lot less dead.
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And any market whether you want to label it "free" or whatever, is always just a set of rules devised to trade goods and services among people.
It's that the elites increase their power to control those rules that increase their power absolutely away from democracy and the needs of the citizens of a nation and of the workers of enterprise. Even makes it difficult for those wanting to free lance or start their own businesses.
We need to restructure the economy via co-ops... instead of corporations with a few oligarch toadies and oligarchs themselves at the board of directors, all employees are at that board, similar to Germany's co-determination requiring about half the board be seated by union elected wage earners.
But the described co-op would be all employees would get 1 vote each for leaders, supervisors, proposals on production methods, safety, compensation including pay, differentials, vacation and sick time allotments, retirement plans, etc. and capital expenditures, etc.
You wouldn't have profitable businesses as they do today, keep 95% to 80% of profits when considering employees as if total labor costs including payroll matching and all labor compensation is added back as net profits because today that's not how accounting works, total employee costs are just that a cost to be subtracted to get net profits. And that profit is also after capital expenditures.
A co-op reserve bank could be devised to lend at a discounted rate similar to the way federal reserve bank lends over night other range amounts at a discount essentially promising them a profit so long as they don't agree to too many risky loans, and keep a sufficient reserve balance.
If it's good for the banks, it's good for business in general, so a co-ops would thrive... this cuts off the need to have an aristocracy for investment... capital formation can come from this Co-Op Federal Reserve lending directly to various businesses, they would apply at branches and deliver their business proposals, just as any business does today with banks and investors to demonstrate viability and determine if they will be granted loans.
Investors and workers could still contribute if they wish to investing into a co-op as well, but they would still only have 1 vote as an investor and/or employee, no matter the amount of that investment to manage the business.
No co-op would outsource itself to oblivion, take on massive amounts of debt just to buy off competition in the short run, only to be eventually entrenched with so much debt unable to then do capital expenses to grow and revitalize the business as they do today, no co-op enterprise would see their workers living on peanuts if they're highly profitable some hefty profit sharing... today profitable companies pay 95% to 80% to investors a dividends if you consider the total compensation to employees as part of the full 100% profit. They could literally double everyone's wages and still walk away with 80% to 60% of the profits.
We're talking about doubling everyone's income, a seriously life changing event for every employee at a business.
That's the stark contrast we have from current corporate business to a co-op business, such insanity would not exist when employees submit and vote on operational proposals.
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The truth... and they freak. We're a disgrace... were an overt corrupt oligarchy, and we contribute to coupes currently, and our past has revealed many alliances with despotic regimes responsible for many genocides and/or murders.... everyone in our own country knows this, and all other nations outside including your most friendliest allies know this... even our more evil allies like Saudi Arabia... in fact that's why they like doing corruption with us.. I mean business with our nation and its oligarchs' apple carts called their corporations.
And our domestic affairs are no better... medicines that cost in Canada or Europe or Japan several times the price... a antibiotic ear drop costing $300 in the US when its $10 in other countries... or antiviral cream that's over the counter in Germany that costs $10 is $600 and is Rx.
Rents that are becoming 40% to 60% of take home pay... worldwide economists agree that 20% to 25% of mortgage or rent payments is the limit on ensuring a long term healthy economy. Some making above our national household median income of $56K in some cities forced to live in campers on the road.
Higher education that requires working other jobs that disrupt the efficiency in attending the courses and graduating, and the prices so high for tuition either prohibitive or putting people in debt that cannot be discharged in Bankruptcy... now $1.5 trillion in student loan debt... up from about $480 billion in 2006... that's 3.125 times increase over 12 year period.
Wage/salaries are in purchasing power same as 1974. That in itself demonstrate supply side trickle down economics was literally piss and shit on everyone economics and outsource to every impoverished often corrupt and/or tyrannical dictatorship country with no regards to labor rights and standards of living for workers economics... that it was an utter failure.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/real-wages-are-essentially-back-at-1974-levels-report-shows/ar-BBLUiNe
People know we're a crumbling so called super power, in the malaise portion of a crumbling eventual collapse in that status something similar to Spain, France, UK, Russia, and USSR's fall.
Truth hurts those in denial as these millionaire puppets of the richer aristocracy have lots to lose.... they don't want to admit they're going to lose it all should we not change our ways, and fast. So they stick to delusion and spinning a narrative about patriotism or other horseshit that has long since fallen on deaf ears by most... the system isn't working. You can't piss on someone's leg while telling them it's raining and not except a swift kick in the region of where that piss is coming from.
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You may have heard in the lead up to the 2008 real estate crash there were simply too many homes built for the amount of people. WRONG.
In fact since the 60's the number of new constructions per 1,000 households went from 29, 1970's to 35, then during 1980 to 25 then 90's to 15 2000's was only 18. After 2008 and since only 9 new constructions per 1,000 households. New construction includes full house and per unit apartments.
Fewer and fewer homes were being built over time, despite the insane prices.
Conventional wisdom would say price on a good going up means eventually more supply because more competition would flood in and build more supply to take advantage of the higher prices. Never happened, and isn't happening still, and hasn't since the 70's. The past 40 years home prices exploded, but new construction imploded.
It wasn't too many homes were sold during the real-estate bubble, it was peoples' wages were so shit that they couldn't afford to pay for them or continue to rent them.
It's a major failing of Obama's administration not to realize this very solid fact.
They should have nationalized all the banks, and re-adjusted their price to then fallen prices. To allow the prices to be affordable so they would remain in them.
And they should have done the same with developers and construction companies with a stipulation on such a subsidies and other subsidies on a price ceiling.
And of course they should have under taken a massive home building project across the country.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/629410064/the-new-housing-crisis-shut-out-of-the-market
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The crux is on labor rights and laws from wages, 40 hour work week then time and half, is all about providing negotiation power.
Ensures a minim standard of work-life. Because individually with no such standards, we observe in many other countries that their work-life standards are terrible: more injuries at work, poverty wages, export driven economy because most people are all butt fuck poor and can't buy the very products they make. Perpetual developing countries, some have touted their pockets of rich cities, but in the very same cities exist vast slum, and nationwide is very poor.
The negotiation ability is often very low for workers without unions, and/or government min wage or some wage regulation structure. That's negotiation not just to be hired, but for safety and for working long hours for a particular duration.
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Ours did it immediately. Unfortunately, our raises final issuance comes in March/April. Right when the quarantines started. They immediately froze our pay stating maybe later this summer we will get notified if we will get a yearly pay raise.
About May the company announced a 9% of our prior years gross allotment put into our 401K remarking "putting their money with their mouth is" that they did well last year.
Sounds great on paper until you know the details.
Their 401K contributions come with an annual 10% vesting periods where it takes 10 years of employment to get 100% vested (to keep that money). Most of their workers more than half only work there for about 3 to 6 years at the most. So they know they'll get most of that back with accumulation of whatever grew in their 401K accounts.
And we're told to still wait to see if we get annual raises... all while my rent just went up $80 this July. $80 x 12 months = $960 more a year in rent costs divided by 2,080 work hours in a year is $0.46 an hour more needed just to make what I made last year in purchasing power. Their raises have been far less than even what I formerly thought was customary minimum of a fifty cent raise. More if your performance or market and retention re-assessment warranted.
We did have a slow down about end of April start of May for two weeks. I have worked there for about 3 years. We usually have slowdowns about the same time and usually much deeper about a month or month an half as they build up inventories all winter and early spring. Not until mid May it usually picks back up. We only had a slowdown for 2 weeks; and the slow down was nothing like prior ones as we still usually produced something, just finishing a bit earlier, instead of the normal 12 hour days we got to put in 8 or 10 hours and go home early. And then hit with tons of orders as we produce for grocery stores and vending machines and service stations, putting in more than 12 hours a day, and shifting others all over the place.
We have produced more this year than any other year; and when we produce it gets sold immediately to a distributor turned immediately in to money, we keep very little finished goods as inventory.
They never share their financials with us other than to say in a rather meaningless way how many units of goods we produce.
This is the same chicken shit company that when Trump and Congress gave us the 2% tax break, the company decided to give us just 1% pay pump for our annual raise and none for salary workers. That year I did several 14 and 16 hour shifts, often with only 1 day off for a "weekend". A few around the week. I thought we were really doing great. Again, just about all of the stuff we produce is immediately sold to a distributor or grocery store... we don't keep finished goods long term inventory.
Some companies literally are the horse's asses that you might exaggerate doing something shifty or money grubbing beyond realms of decency, but you can't even dramatize your exaggeration beyond your own darkest imagination because they have proven to meet or exceed any amount of pessimist fantasy. Their greed and cruelty is beyond one's ability to embellish or parody.
Even the cartoon like fictions of Ebenezer Scrooge don't suffice to describe the non-fictions of working life these days.
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DNC is incrementalism to the right. And since Bill Clinton, it's gone incrementally until we're bat shit right wing resembling no other democratic republic in the world. They look at us and think wow you fucks are as dumb as the USSR, but you have right to free speech and gathering. So you fucks are even stupider: prohibiting medicare/medicaid from negotiating prices, having a bloated military that's more spend than the next 7 higher all which are allies, no universal healthcare, tuition prices skyrocketing and no universal education plan whatsoever but a gimmick of student loans that just cover tuition, completely abandoning housing development and allowing rent and home prices to exceed well above the affordability index exceeding in most places in the country already 40% to 60% of peoples' income and the homes and apartments have the quality of some soviet block style house, some homes built in 2004-2006 are already have shingles falling off, outside phony stucco falling off and the pawn them off at this time for 1300 square feet for $180K to $200K and that's in the poorer cheaper areas of the country, other places that soviet style horse shit will cost you half a million or more. WTF? At least the soviet shit holes were rent or mortgage free. How did they deliver shit to us and have us pay up for the shit? LOL!
Propaganda has fucked us all over.
And has people more interested in bullshit brain rotting sports and other celebrities than their own well being. We can't have a city hospital because we need a $5 billion or $10 billion stadium, then charge the same tax payers for tickets to attend the shithead game.
We're fucking stupid as a nation.
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Only reason shit head got elected, and same with shit head lady in the DNC, so many don't vote. 7% are all that participate in primaries, insanely grotesque sometimes due to state laws that are idiotic like NY. But even Idaho, where you can show up and register at the caucus or primary people don't bother. Disenfranchisement has been a success via the oligarchy, make the mass of people feel like peasants, and they will act as peasants.
All representative and democratic forms of government end when turn out stinks.
45% didn't bother to vote in last presidential election, and 63% in the last midterms.
The idiot stupid then have a greater push toward stupidity.
Seriously, those comments are a minority ignorant and nuts you can find anywhere, but for the wisdom of the crowds to work, for democracy to work, all people available must vote.
Otherwise you get the idiocy of the crowds and the following misery that comes therewith.
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I know that's not what they would do with the savings. All for profit business don't pay employers that way, they either have to collectively bargain in unions, 6% of labor currently. Or 94% of wages/salaries, they look at other businesses and similar positions and say that's the market wage/salary a form of collusion, and that's all they will pay. They don't share profits. And when they do they tie that sharing back as a percentage of your wage/salary, like 1% to 5% for wage/salary workers at the middle and low range.
Businesses pocket 90% of profits. They do not share them as wages/salaries.
Case in point a water company with a cash cow monopoly in our area revenue 2016 was 46 million. Total compensation to current employees 2.1 million. Pensions were 1.6 million. 3.7 million paid out in total compensation to retirees and current workers; this includes uniforms and insurance premium, 401K contributions, etc.
Their profits were 16 million after all other expenses were paid including total employee and retiree compensation, business operations, and increased capital expenses (building more wells and upgrades). 34% more than a 1/3 in profit margin. Total compensation is only 8% of expense of total revenue.
Companies don't pay wages/salaries based on their profits. They pay only based on what they can get away with as they observe others paying for similar positions. So there likely won't be any increase in wages/salaries via a corporate tax cut to wages/salaries. Simply that isn't how businesses determine employee pay and compensation.
All savings will be added to profits which are paid to shareholders (owners) of the business. This is basic finance and business management.
If it were the case corporate tax rates lowering saving trillions over the past 40 years, should have increased wages/salaries by double their current median income. But we have actually seen such wages flat, and the lower quintiles fall. It's not even a theory/hypothesis on paper, nor is it an observational phenomena; in fact, you could make the claim based on observation that salaries and wages actually drop, but that's not directly related to the flat and falling wages. That has to do with trade with despotic and/or chronically corrupt nations using their serf labor to offshore production, and falling union participation made easier by so called right to work legislation that makes forming or maintaining unions next to impossible.
In the case of the water company in our area, if they were to actually share profits, just another 8% of total revenue, so increasing employee and retire compensation from 8% to 16%, making 3.7 million into 7.4 million, their profits of 16 million they're sharing 3.7 million leaving still 12.3 million in profits, they could double everyone's wages and pension pay out for that year.
They don't do that. They keep all profits for shareholders. And its not small, as you can see from this example if they actually just doubled their compensation as a share of profit, they still retain 76% of the profits which is 3.3 times total retiree and active employee compensation. What they don't pay out is 4.3 times total retiree and active employee compensation. Meaning they have over 4 times all compensation they pay out; they could pay employees 4 times everyone's wage/salary, this includes CEO pay, utility workers, supervisors, to the janitor and customer service rep and billing rep. But they don't. They retain those as profits.
Workers are a cost to a businesses. Just as other inputs from paper, pipes, tractors, truck leases, etc. You're a cost. Not an asset. That's the system we have. It's ECON, MGMNT, FINAN 100 or 90 not even 101.
A corporate tax deduction doesn't increase wages/salaries of workers. Only using the Laffer curve, if the effective tax is over 77%, businesses may not grow as fast, thus not have need to hire more people and produce more goods/services thus generate more tax revenue, effective tax just under 77% business will retain the ability to grow whenever the quantity demanded is apparent for them, but at or below this rate will have a diminishing tax revenue effect, not an increase in tax revenue.
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We're such clowns of the universe. It's like a campaign to assist people in understanding why it's a bad idea to eat laundry detergent, and why eating a balanced diet is also a good idea.
Or why jumping off a 100 foot bridge might result in severe injury and possibly death.
Or why murder is a bad thing.
"I loved our US healthcare system, until I actually had to use it."
And we have the internet, you can talk to a British person, German, Japanese, Canadian, Mexican, Australian, Austrian, etc. We all travel lots. You can find out why many of them steer clear of American medical system, if they're touring here, if the problem can be stablized they go back to their country. Because A) the doctors here, particularly in doc and boxes, often in a rush and need to see as many customers as possible thus fuck up and can't set a broken bone correctly, and it will need to be re-broken and reset again anyway. *That actually happened to a Japanese college dorm-mate of mine; went back to Japan the doctors discovered his broken wrist was set wrong, and had to reset it. B) It's prohibitively expensive for foreigners to use our idiotic medical system unless they're rich. *Japanese dorm mate was billed $7K for an incompetent casting of his wrist. Far as I understand he never paid them fully and refuses to do so. I don't blame him. He said he doesn't care, he has no intentions to ever live in the US, he was here for a year to immerse in English. If he wants to further his English education he has many other countries to choose from.
He said he paid equal to $300 USD back in Japan for the reset setting and casting of his wrist.
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Banks should have never issued such loans on various valuations even during the "Easy" period that they did, they did the same in the run up through the 90's and 2000's they acted in concert like a cartel; they had a hideous motive in two major reasons to approve such loans that turned the banking system in to one fat hairy Ponzi mixed with pyramid scheme; neither two ever end well. They ALWAYS collapse.
1) Low interest rates; banks wanted the same return, therefore to do so, they allow the principle valuation to increase: despite the lower cost to produce homes (building of homes have become less expensive with various technology) and wages/salaries that have been flat and in many cases lower; and outlook is not good in labor with productivity increasing and global labor glut among dictatorship serf like labor availability.
2) Invention and persistent collateralized loan obligation market... the chopping up of mortgage and selling them to some other market pushing that 15 year to 30 year value of the mortgage into the present immediately profit and freed reserves to rinse and repeat super fast allowing number two to become less risky: they make the loans and dump them into the CLO markets for quick flip profits and ability to allow more riskier higher appraisal prices. This method also means a race to do this at the same time, required to pump housing or underlying (because now even commercial real-estate as well as business debt has done the same on steroids compared to the run up in 2000's and collapse in this garbage in 2008), this aids in providing "proof" that such underlying assets such as equities and real-estate and private business equity is really worth the run up price... when really it's the banks in a rush to make loans knowing full well they will dump these loans profit taking immediately taking the interest and loan immediately to do the same and they know other banks are doing the same.
It has nothing to do with current and real probabilistic value of these loans and ability to repay.
Solution:
Prohibit the CLO markets completely. They defunct the ability for banks to properly appraise underlying collateral of loans; and in fact they abuse these markets: both residential and commercial real-estate as well as business loans, to add justification in the appraisal of the run up price in the these underlying collateral.
The banks are responsible for deciding whether a house or multi-dwelling unit or office complex or retail or industrial complex is worth what it is. When they all act in concert to fomo into it because they have no long term consequences if they're wrong (they're immediately or very soon after selling that loan to the CLO markets) they only have motive to approve all and any appraisals regardless regardless of income streams for ability for repayment.
This was never ever resolved in the last credit crash.
And that's what it was. Not a housing crash; housing was needed and wasn't keeping pace with population growth. It wasn't a glut of homes, but affordability of homes available and insufficient homes built. Mortgages reset from teaser rates or 0 interest rates defaults started, and much of the underlying economy about the entire decade of the 2000's was the housing market; so all those income paying jobs declined significantly causing a domino effect in defaults.
These principle loan amounts were never justified.
Resolution?
Banks should not be allowed to determine valuation of underlying asset; they have a vested interest in most cases particularly in low interest rate environment to adapt higher and higher appraisal prices to increase the principle lent to make up for the lower interest bearing yield on the loan.
Governments, particularly local governments, have a conflict of interest in wanting to appraise real-estate higher too as a large if not only portion of their revenues come from property tax; higher appraisal the more revenue for that local municipality.
So a creation of an independent body; some third party mediator and one other that audits that appraiser, that has no vested interest in whether the appraisal is larger or smaller to whatever the asking price for the sell is.
Since Federal government (at least in the US) takes in no property tax, it could be an agency from the government or even a judicial court like entity; whose job is to work out appraisals in an unbiased method.
Or perhaps something similar, but placing price cap appraisals on these entities.
All to avoid massive speculative bubbles that only benefit a few, even the banks, but everyone else gets hit with the inevitable life ruining bust.
Particularly with real-estate
Avoid the misnomer real-estate is king, it isn't. It's as any business and even more critical as its a basic necessity. And should therefore be bound my protections of such boom bust speculations; rent prices should always be in ratio of incomes; therefore putting a wet blanket on insane speculative fervor into the rising of rents because everyone else is doing it; and since everyone else is doing it, there is no competition against it, and since it's somewhat an inelastic demand curve (people will pay any price not to live on the streets, car, tent, etc. to get shelter) the bust happens when they simply cannot pay and are evicted.
This is gambling with a complete collapse of society.
If incomes aren't rising, rents cannot therefore increase... therefore one knows and understand the return on investment and therefore won't offer double that prior purchasing price of a rental unit if it is for sell. In fact, they will take in consideration the depreciation and likely offer the sounder logical price of less than original purchased price a decade or two by the present owner because more money will be required in required 15 to 20 year maintenance costs such as replacing roofing (a very significant cost to owning), electrical systems including air conditioning, plumbing, as well as the shorter term maintenance of carpet and cupboards and walls and windows and doors etc.
The asset of such things don't increase but decrease in value as they require renovation. It is only the rent that provides the income stream. And this income stream is commensurate to wages and only to about 20% to 30% of such income as it is not new income to the economy but redistribution from the wider economy's production.
These boom busts are nothing knew. And they are and always will be a blight serving nobody accept a few lucky winners who got in early and out early, and in many instances of such boom busts, nobody got out early enough. Or if they did, they won their lottery only to live through an immediately collapse in that nation thus currency of that lotto' nation's value; congrats! You won the lottery, too bad, it's in worthless Monopoly board game money!
Markets are not smart. Nor ever have been.
Markets are a vital necessity in the exchange of goods and services.
They function only as logically consistent as the rules we design them thereby.
All other philosophical premises on markets are dogma sales pitch gimmickry.
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We have too many ignorant stupid people... it's why we can't have nice things like universal healthcare, universal education, co-determination where half the board of directors are elected by wage earners and the candidates are wage earners (you wouldn't have 10 billion in stock buy backs then cut 6 billion to lay off 14,000 workers to save another $4 billion), plan for recessions by implementing short work policy whereby all workers keep their jobs, but all worker hours are cut, and their pay remains the same as a pool of cash saved as well as government under/unemployed benefits pay the difference for hours not worked so the workers remain whole in pay making the recession briefer and less severe as well as saving money as it's cheaper to come up with 20%-30% half a year or year, instead of 60% for year or in our case in many states extended to 2 years, and lose all that technical skill and ability to do your job... cheaper and more effective... nope can't have that.
Just make do with being stuck in the past with K-12 (at least we have that... for now), fire department (at least we have that... for now), a crumbling interstate and local roadway (sadly much of it is becoming privatized via toll roads), if you're in a metro area you might have light rail, and forget about a high speed heavy passenger rail, got to spend big bucks on an airplane tickets, closing county hospitals in urban areas, most rural ones already closed long ago, water and sewer systems that apparently aren't being maintained because the push to privatize such natural monopolies because a few assholes realize people are fucking ignorant on economics so taking over and holding private a natural monopoly is a great way to fleece all these fuck twat dick heads, and they'll stand back and admire us for our entrepreneurial spirit of taking on a natural monopoly sector, wondering "how do they do it?".
Because their all a bunch of ignorant dumb asses... and again that's why we can't have nice things.
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The politician is so full of shit. All you have to do is provide the websites to how Germany, France, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. etc. do it, and spend 50%. Some have more robust universal healthcare like Canada still requires a supplemental insurance for dental and prescription medicine outside a hospital or clinic. The other countries cover ALL healthcare including dental, prescription, vision, etc. and still spend 50% per capita that we do. And they all have lower copays, some no copays. And none have deductibles in what they do cover. And their taxes are cheaper than our insurance premiums, deductibles, and copays. What we have as insurance, these other countries would call it a pathetic discount pyramid gimmick, not a insurance, those other countries often do allow private or supplemental insurance, but those insurance must meet or exceed the standard compulsory insurance provisions.
Our insurance medical system is a fucking joke to which all of us are the brunt.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2017/jul/mirror-mirror-2017-international-comparison-reflects-flaws-and
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And private insurance is a fucking joke in every country for the most part.
It's essentially paying a huge price for a joke of a "discount" program.
They quite literally don't cover shit on high deductible plans (until you spent $3,000) for the year. And even then they still only cover 50% to 80% of certain stuff until the max yearly out of pocket of 2019 this year is $7,900 per individual and $15,800 per family.
That doesn't include premiums you paid or your employer paid.
Just the deductibles and the copays, and most do not declare max out of pocket lower than the "market" one set by the current ACA again is $7,900 per individual and $15,800 per family.
No, our insurance in the US is a farce beyond the word STUPID!
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/
And we wonder why most bankruptcies in the US are often related to medical debt by about 60% of all chapter 7 and and 13 bankruptcies.
https://www.natlbankruptcy.com/us-medical-debt-statistics/
Massive joke of any healthcare system is private medical insurance.
I can understand taking on extra complimentary healthcare insurance, supplemental insurance for small extras, like in Germany they offer extra Orthodontist coverage then what public insurance already covers, about 11% of Germans buy supplementary insurance... I mean unless your teeth are totally fucked or you want to see a particular asinine orthodontist over charging, orthodontist work is already covered.
And only 11% of Germans rely on private insurance as their primary healthcare.
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/germany/
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I'm not 100% sure either, and I'm from Idaho.
Each state and county devise their own school lunch pricing. Idaho it's full price, reduced lunch, or free lunch. All depends on your parents income. My parents made enough that mine was full price... it varied the 89 to early 90's to about $0.90 then up to $1.25, by 1996 and into 2000 it was $1.80 full price.
If you lost your money or mom forgot to put it in the backpack, the lunch cooks would at least serve up a peanut butter sandwich or something small, one of the lunch ladies was from Switzerland, with her accent she would say she wouldn't let any kid go hungry. I think she even paid for some kids lunches if they lost their tickets. You could also get free lunch when you helped do dishes (like military KP duty) but it was fun; you got a free lunch (so I got to keep my lunch money for other things) and extra milk or chocolate milk and an extra side treat.
I don't remember anyone having "lunch" debt.
Only student "debt" we could get into at elementary was sometimes our principle would lend kids (myself included) a quarter or fifty cents whatever it was to buy a scone or cotton candy on special days and fund raiser days. What the funds were for, varied from donations to breast cancer research (March of Dimes) or Salvation Army, etc.
My mom got mad when I borrowed from the principle. Not because of the sweets, my mom let us eat junk food all the time, had to do with the money. I don't think she liked the idea of us borrowing money from anyone. Being in debt even through the 80's 90's and early 2000's is considered something to be ashamed.
Unfortunately, today including myself with only student loan debt, we all have debts of some kind. It's impossible not to, especially if moving or attempting to buy a house. And vehicle debt is another near impossible thing to avoid.
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Biden wasn't even viable, and Bernie won substantially. DNC is freaking out. It's so fucking obvious. Nobody is fooled, even a-political types are laughing at how phony our election system is concerning this. We're Rome showing its mafia creepy shit.
And it's so cartoony obvious too: Shadow is the name of the shitty programmers that a high school student with an A+ and C++ certification could have done better, overpaid twenty million for this supposed shitty app, and Buttigieg contributed money to this App company, Hillary connections funded it along with Mitt Romney affiliates.
This is insanely obvious. This shit happened in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, there would be people in the streets.
This is comic book shit.
By the way, anyone going to caucuses or any events, don't get star struck nor follow nonsense like "stand behind the candidate" If you do, be honest and either stand without clapping or even just stare. Even boo if you feel so inclined.
This shit is so manipulative and enraging.
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Since net neutrality was removed by FCC chair person Ajit Pai (man with the most punch-able attitude ever) the cable and other ISP's particularly cable provider ISPs or those with their own website for movies, music, news, etc. they're slowing down access to various websites. Mine went down about a month ago, youtube, even the search bar for google was lagging... all tests shown my connection and download speeds were great... I thought they were just having some issues... lasted over a week, so I checked both lap top and computer, nope both having the same issue, no viruses/maleware.
In short, I'm using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) normally this would actually slow your connection down a little bit. But it's now fast again, no more lagging playing a video every 20 seconds.
Or taking a minute to load the google search bar.
There's free VPN's available, you'll want to install them into your browser.
By the way, no other options, any people a brain would know this is called a natural monopoly, that for profit motive provides the worst service possible at the highest price possible, it fucking doesn't work. So we generally have natural monopolies like sewer, trash, water, electricity be city, county, or state owned and operated to ensure prices remain low from economies of scale and at cost.
Basic ECON101. But who care about competitive market principles... for profit motive means the aristocracy can be the new kings and feudal lords and slave masters.
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It's like our country USA. Always needing a country to invade to feed our bloated armada military. And sounds the same, our younger generation like myself here in the US like in China know we're corrupt and fucked up, but left essentially powerless to change stuff as of yet until the older generation all kick the fucking bucket. Or the economic stupidity they've reinvented (robber baron nationalist insanity) just collapses on its own weight as we repeat the 1800's and early 1900's that gave us fascists and communist dictatorships.
We know, we cannot have hate, we cannot be in fear, we cannot pretend to be living something we're not. Or we're doomed to repeat all the miseries of the past. And about the past, we cannot forget the past, we cannot sensationalize the past that there was some mystical wonderful yesterday or we overcame some evil that means we are now mystical fantasy action heroes making us fart rainbows, and shit candy.
We have to be rational and logical and skeptical, and optimistic.
Anyway, I expect the next 50 years to bring about several crisis around the world.
The global banking crisis was papered over by more debt and money printing just holding it off making an even bigger crash to come.
Then climate change effects of which the first effects will be food shortages from crop yield declines, and these will happen faster and faster.
Our younger generation, we have our work cut out for us. We won't have time to complain about the dead older generation, and they won't hear us anymore than they hear us now as they are alive. Let them rot.
We just need to learn the lesson so not to repeat their misdeeds, remember these older generations were highly corrupt and indoctrinated, and we can do, and must do a lot better, or we will be in severe misery and even more so will be our next generations after us.
Us in the younger generation have lots of work to do.
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Point is our system must be changed. A way to change it so this doesn't happen in the fucking first place: co-op based production using a federal reserve co-op bank.
It's the only fucking way. Otherwise get use to re-label slave masters, monarchs, nobility, lords of mercantilism, robber barons.
With backlashes every 50 to 100 years either similar to NAZI like fascism or similar to Stalin/Mao like communism.
Because that's all this system provides.
Nothing to do with banishing these people, that's taking the other two authoritarian stance.
Change the system. A co-op system.
This system isn't reasonable. It's an absurdity that's utterly unstable.
Not to mention much of this wealth they have isn't stable either, much of it is a ghost. It doesn't really exist until its cashed out, what does exist is their several dividends coming in monthly, quarterly, and/or semi annually or annually in the tune of several times the lifetime individual median income, right now that's just 2016, $31,099 if you made that on average for 40 years $1.243 million.
People haven't the concept of what a million dollars actually is.
They lost understanding of budgets and affordability. Housing either mortgage to eventually outright own, or renting should never exceed 33% of your income, and more healthy is closer to no more than 1/5 or 20% of your income for healthy ability to save money for all things including retirement, life enjoyment of vacations, and the much needed emergency fund. Rents and home prices have exceeded that 1/3 or 33%, and have gone as high as 1/2 to nearly 2/3, which worldwide has proven to be utterly unstable; in poor countries they begin prostitution and other black market illegal activities including kidnappings.
In rich countries more or less the same, minus as much kidnappings, but many tend to go into debt to their eyeballs.
And all debts consumer, mortgage, vehicle, etc. debts are at their all time highs, higher than 2007 real-estate bubble peak.
We need another system. And a co-op system is the best. Workers are the voting employers of the company, voting for leadership, management, benefit pay packages, capital expenditures to grow the company, etc.
And co-ops can be made for rents and even for home ownership development projects to keep lots and house prices lower, better quality (community pools and other recreation in the subdivision) and eliminates an HOA because everyone in the community are the HOA.
Apartments, townhouses, etc. co-ops are the landlords, choosing what to do with the surplus rent money... they don't just funnel that to a few owners to buy expensive cars and mansions. But to build recreational activities like pools, club houses, maintain streets, etc. and when practical reduce rents to more affordable pragmatic prices.
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Sometimes I just give up, not just on political dumb people, but on all subjects. I just listen in amusement, and only talk when they ask for my input. Sometimes claims being made by the person is so uninformed full of ignorance it's hard not to hold back point by point... I don't think of them dumb, just confused... we're not all knowing and we forget or get things jumbled.
What I do dislike though is claims positioned as if they know much about the topic, when evident they know nothing, but what comes out of comic books, cartoons, and well known dogma talking points, or just out of their own butts.
A coworker I like quite a bit, good guy, started conversation about how dinosaurs might have existed along with humans, that carbon dating fossils isn't that reliable. I had no idea where he was going, just kept working and listening, particularly he was closer to another coworker than I so wasn't sure if he was even talking to me. Until he asked my opinion about the subject. I was busy and about to end my shift, so I quickly went through several bullet points of the many methods that are used in dating anything... but I started of with agreeing with him on the carbon dating fossils... I said something to the effect, Well carbon dating fossils is not reliable because you can't do it, fossils are mineralized remains and/or impressions, there isn't any carbon left from when the biological specimen was alive. Instead you use other forms of radio-metric dating, and any dating it is desired to use as many as possible depending on the minerals of the fossil. I explained how carbon dating and other radio metric dating works thus it's limitations, can't use on marine animals since they don't accumulate (eat and breath) as much atmospheric CO2 to have the same level of carbon 14 so you get skewed and often very wrong dates if you do. That you must consider the mineral of the fossil to determine the best radio metic dating methods, and do more than just one type of radio dating if possible.
Most importantly that archaeologist use other methods like tree ring dating, rock layer dating (KT boundary above no dinosaurs but large mammals including humanoids, below KT boundary no large mammals and dinosaurs), chemical layer dating, for younger things not fossilized one can use genetic dating methods, etc. These dates converge and agree on a narrow date range. The key is using as many methods of dating any specimen as possible as each method converges on a date eliminate margin of error. If any one of them is wrong, the others will point this out.
Most important, is be nice, and explain why it is you know something they may not know, and biggest importance how to look up sources. The ability to discern fact from fiction is the biggest problem we have today, people don't know how to be proper skeptics or scientists.
He did seem a little flustered though, his last comment was I don't think scientists know as much as they think they do. I said, nope. That's why various studies are constantly researching and experimenting and measuring. And as data comes in, one can be more as certain as possible particularly with completely different methods that converge on the same results. Science is the only method that provides any level of certainty in discernment on reality. No other method exists, no other method likely exists that does as good a job as the scientific method.
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Well, globalism, colonialism, mercantilism/feudalism, imperialism whatever you want to call it was never a good thing in history and always ends in civil war, war, and just pure misery for most.
And even the oligarchs who parasitical feast on the flesh of this exploitation setup eventually start eating themselves.
I mean this is just a faction of oligarchs warring with another faction now in Russian and Ukraine. The pressure on labor to be exploited more and more means aggregate demand declines... hence the 40 year lowering of interest rates to get the borrowing stupidity on full tilt to flood the system with artificial demand... because the intrinsic demand from workers producing was gone along ago and continues to decline in a race to the bottom for labor.
The trade trade itself is at that crux of inauthentic comparative advantage... they can force labor or pressure labor to work for next to nothing. Cheap labor.
Additionally, many nations will subsidize the raw material costs of inputs. Cheap labor and cheap inputs.
Additionally, many nations will forgo normalized social expenses such as pollution controls, infrastructure expenses, etc.
Cheap labor, subsidies taxes, subsidized inputs... you can then make a spaghetti of cost ineffective, and thermodynamic expensive trade networks that make utter nonsense, costing a fortune... only because of the temporary misery factors of the desperate and oppressed labor, the always crumbling infrastructure or lack thereof, and the credit/debt hole of subsidized taxes and adding insult to injury the subsidy of input purchases. A supply chain that is actually insanely expensive.
The cost of diminishing authentic demand in aggregate demand slump mixed with the increased cost of the trade as described has to be paid back.
There is no free lunch.
As always, this structure of economics eventually collapses.
This type of setup whatever buzz word you want to call it is self refuting and defeating, generally ends catastrophically.
First use was the late bronze age collapse. Very sudden (however doesn't need to be a sudden calamity, it can linger in a state of malaise) and apparently catastrophic.
It's always ends catastrophically... about 80% it's sudden and history shows 20% it can linger on for a century or four.
But we saw this with Classical Greece collapse, and the Roman Empire collapse... smaller regional examples goes to the Assyrian collapse.
And we can go through all through the AD/CE periods and see the same thing. Over and over and over again.
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First person to really hear from the financial sector screaming deregulation is a risk... here in the USA it's always the other way around... deregulate! LOL! Let markets go completely bat nuts crazy for short term bonus money and other quick profits, who cares that the LLC or publically traded company is limping into insolvency and bankruptcy... so long as we got in, did our little pump and dumped it all over the tax payers heads.
And that is exactly what happens with deregulation. One notable was the Financial Modernization Act of 1998... essentially repealing Glass-Steagall Act that kept deposit banking separate from investment banking firewall... and a decade later we got 2008, a super levered real-estate stupidity; pumping the price of dirt via leveraging and idiot CDO market; so banks didn't care about the quality of the loans, and loved that assets were going up largely due to other banks doing the same pumping those prices up; a way to lend even more out to sell to the CDO market... until that became illiquid nobody wanted to buy them as they were toxic resulting in the Fed's QE debasing currency and reinflating the same assets this time adding car loans into the equation; many new car loans are over $1K a month. And that's spooky even at $600 a month for a car payment here in the states. And now also rents and home payments are $1,200 to $1,600 while even nominal wages/salaries haven't really done anything... and again people taking out adjustable rate mortgages and arms to boot.
Big quagmire in the banking sector. Particularly with the Fed not being the primary collateralized Debt Obligation buyer; removing that from the banks' balance sheets so they can dump those loans for money and some of the interest for profits, to turn out more loans. Now they're stuck holding the bags. And hoping other banks are interested in buying their CDO's because the biggest and often only buyer, the Fed, isn't buying; there was a reason Powell decided instead of selling those CDO's on the Fed's balance sheet into the CDO market, they instead opted to just let them "mature" get repaid, and thus fall off the Fed balance sheet; not add more selling of CDO's that already were happening. Many with the same problem with treasuries... mortgages and auto loans at original principle amount well beyond what is likely to be the case thus underwater collateral, at very low rates... while new loans are now 6% or higher... so nobody will want the old stuff at low yields... while both being equally vulnerable to having negative collateral in the bubble origination amounts of car prices and home prices.
All we need to do is keep doing the same thing, and we'll all be insane. As per the definition of insanity... keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results... but the mantra in the states continues to be... deregulate, "get rid of red tape". Just means... screw tax payers, investors, depositors, and buyers of these assets like cars or homes, pump those prices get them upside down, and worse lend to those at highest risk of default doesn't matter... so long as we make that loan and dump it on the CDO market... we'll make money right away... and leave the bank and everyone else on the verge of insolvency. And more and more people unable to let alone buy a house, unable to afford rent, living in their car or RV at some camp ground that's filled to the brim already not taking reservations. And developers scarred from 2008, reluctant to buy the over priced land, and build units without a buyer that's attached right away... thus slow to build new housing units. Which over the past 2 years now.... sort of went out the window; a new multidweling housing boom has developed; much needed housing capacity. But all of it at inflated prices due to risky levered lending... that is unlikely to be sustainable by those footing the bill, the mortgage holder and renter; as again, wages have really gone nowhere while this inflationary bubble was pushed up via yet again a stampede of borrowing speculation.
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The Medicare for all program is similar to Germany's in that it covers ALL medical.
Canada covers all bodily excluding dental, vision, and Rx that is filled out side a hospital.
Even Canada's insufficient universal healthcare is better than our nonsense: premium in their case tax is cheaper than our premiums, particularly on what employer portion pay; mine was $5K and my portion was $3K. It would be about the same or less for myself, and the employer portion would be the same as my portion that's lower. Providing room for real raises not some silly ass 1% or 2.5% annual raise.
And my insurance is the cheaper high deductible price (since I have no medical problems), we would all pay that lower premium price for full health coverage. And will no deductibles, and either very low copays to no copays.
Germany, the copays are capped at about 300 Euros a year. Copays for medicine are from 0 to 10 Euros per Rx filling. Hospital stays are 10 Euros a day. Ambulance fee is 10 Euros (imagine that, cheaper than a fucking taxi).
They don't allow hospitals, clinics, and especially big pharma to charge whatever.
Insulin in the most advance form only costs up to $5 a vile. In the US that same vile may sell for $300. In Germany it's $10 Euro copayment. Canada you can pick it up for about $20 - $30, and in Canada you don't need a prescription to get insulin... why should you? It's idiotic to even require that, nobody would buy the shit if they weren't diabetic.
Antiviral medicine in the US can cost $50 to $300 and some as high as $600 for the same tube of over the counter Zovirax (Acyclovir 5%) cream for 8 Euros or roughly $11 in Germany. 1 gram Valcyclovir tablets cost $5 a pill in the US, it's $0.50 in Germany and since Valcyclovir does require Rx that one is covered via their compulsory insurance at $10 Euros for 20 tablets. It only costs $0.07 to produce one tablet of either either acyclovir or valcyclovir.... about the price of a OTC pain relievers like an aspirin and/or acetaminophen or ibuprofen.
And their antibiotics are cheaper, antibiotics per unit dose ranges from $0.10 to the newest antibiotic used to combat antibiotic resistant infection at $1.00 a unit. And there is no economy of scale thus profit motive doesn't work, dosage is short to simply kills the infection; you don't have an ongoing strep infection. The entire point, we don't want people taking antibiotics unless they really have an infection and to take all dosage required to kill all the bacterium. Problem in the US becomes, people skimp on their antibiotics... which risks resistant infection.
Our system in the US is quite literally criminal economically, morally, and biologically.
https://international.commonwealthfund.org/countries/germany/
https://www.eu-patienten.de/en/behandlung_deutschland/ungeplante_behandlung/wer_traegt_die_kosten_1/behandlung_wie_gesetzlich_krankenversicherte_3/krankentransport/krankentransporte_1.jsp
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This is modern history... but we don't go over any of it school.
Even the Vietnam War, just a summary and a small report on it, we had to have teachers ask the students if it was okay to discuss it, and if there is something raw about it, the teacher could assign other subject to the student. This was 1990's Jr. thru High School.
Part of the censorship is a mix of government, but also "sensitive" or rather conspiracy riddled nut job parents...
Politicians not wanting to entertain history that's too recent, nor puts a bad light on our own country (unless it was long time ago, and token "we're so sorry" memorials have been put up in their place).
Parents, some, and rather a minority but often a vocal minority will squeal about "brainwashing the child" when presented with anything other than the parents' own narratives... often false or just flat out biased narrative.
So lot of people don't know about this stuff going through school... through the 70's and present day.
Hell, people don't even recall how we got social security, the typical 40 hour work week with time and half over time pay, holiday pay, sick pay, unions... the term redneck coming form robber barons and big shootouts that the robber barons hired men (thugs) would kill the striking workers. These coal workers donned red scarfs in their protests hence the term redneck.
But now it's reduced to some wrongfully term for someone who likes the outdoors.
Wasn't really legal in the USA to form unions in many enterprises until 1935 which finally made it legal for ALL workers to collectively bargain.
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My dad hardly ever votes, he was the one telling me this time he's voting. He refers to Trump as Emperor Trump. He's voting democrat straight down... even my mom said she's voting and she literally never votes. I think the last time she voted was in the 90's.
I do hope a better turn out, midterms are even worse than our last 45% not voting in the presidential election... last midterm was 63% not voting.
All working people have become disenfranchised. Only 7% bother with the two party primaries/caucuses. Essentially, both DNC and RNC have become one in the same with very small platitude issues that most of everyone has already agreed toward: concern for LBGT and their rights, and a woman's ultimate choice within reason in the stage of pregnancy for abortion.
Economically, we're backwards than all other wealthy nations. And soon we won't be among those wealthy nations, we will be among those nations that has a few extremely wealthy among a sea of poor. But among most nations wealthy or poor, of the 201 recognized nations by the UN 170 have free and/or universal healthcare systems, we're among the 30 that don't. It's as if we don't have laws prohibiting child labor, or even slave labor, or capacity to produce fire departments or public schools.
We're a disgrace. And that must change.
We need to either take back from the rich the RNC and DNC, or rather just build a viable other parties. Perhaps start with a third one, that cannot be given super PAC money, no donations from corporations, only individual contributions. The vast majority of all people no matter their prior old party affiliations haven't been recognized and properly represented for decades. This worship of the absurd rich as tantamount of monarchy worship or dictator worship. It's insane. And at odds to the history of what this country gradually became to stand for.
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This is as stupid as Victorian era with the over done prudish nonsense of the past, acting a fiction as if sex doesn't exist. And here we go again similar delusional based sex doesn't exist, and using a phony delusion to placate reality.
No. Treat them as a boy or girl, let them know they're a boy or a girl, and that you think there's a false assumption about femininity and masculinity; that a boy can have emotions, and a girl can is capable... done. No confusion, no ambiguity, lesson learned.
Pretending sex doesn't exist can only lead to extreme confusion even harm psychologically to these kids. We're sexual biological organisms, and this does make one's body different from one another, ignoring those facts is absurd. Next we'll be physics neutral, I don't think gravity or electromagnetism is real, so I'm going to tell my kids something makes it work, but we don't know what it is exactly; could be ferry winkles and happy tooth past elves or Zeus or maybe its my own pet theory that mystical beavers help us make all these things work.
Future relationship with these kids will have a strong chance of becoming resentful to these parents, similar to as a person from an overtly strict stupid religious family up bringing can have resentful feelings; ie. they're more likely to blame you than thank you for acting like a overt delusional nut.
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The biggest con jobber of them all Musk isn't just burning dip shit oligarchs' money.
He's burning our tax money too. Literally, he embezzled NASA funds to buy his cousin's failed (and at the time failing) Solar City Junk bonds. That's my fucking tax dollars right there... legally given to NASA, NASA provided the funds for contracts specific to Space X (stupidly since Space X launches are as expensive as the shuttle that was canceled due to its high cost, but we're giving the same amount per launch for small unreliable rockets... Facebook contracted Space X and the rocket blew up along with their 200 million dollar satellite... Facebook used the French Space Agency and their rocket Arianespace Vega in 2020.
Some bozo the clown little oligarchs' feud between the two took place... Musk lamenting like a dip shit that he offered a free launch to make up for the other failed one, and said they had some insurance he thinks.
Problem is, the insurance company or any other probably had stipulations not to use Space X for future launches, but either a NASA or French or other governmental space agency. Insurance companies aren't going to get conned twice.
And apparently neither is FB. Well, they're hoping to sucker people with Zuckerberg's meta-whatever thing. But by the stock price recently...
I really think the stupidity over these oligarchs are coming to an end even between the oligarchs... the days of eating each others bullshit has given them a bad case of E Coli.
Now our governments puppets of the oligarchs need to halt squandering our tax dollars into this garbage.
I know Musk has all sorts of court cases going on right now, and I think the embezzlement of NASA subsidy funds is among the possible criminal charges that might result from a civil case of TSLA investors who were duped into allowing Musk to buy no bankrupt Solar City.
As this embezzlement of NASA funds with Space X funds that bought Solar City junk bonds is part of the evidence against Musk on screwing investors in TSLA. And the sick thing is, TSLA a year ago entered into the SP500 group of companies... that means everyone who has a 401K investment and other pensions has their retirement funds being screwed around with this con.
He's fucking normal tax payers and our retirement accounts.
He's fucking us hard.
Doesn't help the con jobber openly admitted on SNL he was just hustling bastards on the joke coin dogecoin crypto, and in fact all crypto is nothing but a joke solving absolutely nothing about banking or finance, and only adding more dilemma's as it opens up nothing new yet again but wild cat banks of the 1800 in the US... private money is very old, and in all cases everywhere it went bust in 20 years or less.
Hence why every nation on earth has always, ALWAYS, minted their own money and currency. Even while wild cat banks co-existed for a period of time then went bust like the pyramid scams they end up as.
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$9 trillion in business debt, and much of it is not going to be repaid...
Real-estate mortgage CLO's higher than that of 2007-8 peak.
$1.3 trillion in auto loan debt that is also in forms of CLO's, and delinquencies are on the rise.
$1.037 trillion credit card debt higher than that of 2007-8 peak.
$1 trillion in business loan CLO's of which 18% are due 2019, and much larger portion due in 2020 of which many of these companies are already defunct or unprofitable, highly leveraged, and illiquid.
$665 billion in stock market margin debt, nearly double of the $378 billion 2007 peak.
Commodity demand decades low which wasn't the case at the peak and during the immediate recession which makes this one very odd, there are no buyers of last resort countries, this time developing countries are already in an over borrowed recessionary bust from Brazil to China.
This bust is going to be big. And it's not that difficult to figure out how and why.
No structural changes were made in the last bust, only re-inflating the bubble and making more bubbles along the way. This time, many backstops don't exist to easily re-inflate out of it. This is going to be a long deep booger.
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And the private banking system continue to get the extra cash that eventually causes prices in any sector that has demand to bid way up in to an "investor" or rather often speculator bubble. 2008, I recall watching all commodity prices soar to the sky from copper to oil to cotton... the only commodity that took a dump was lumber and only for a while.
Then when the commodity market bubble started to fart away, the money rushed into stocks, then real-estate once again this time for purposes of rentals and only developing large homes excess of 1,800 sq feet more often 2,200 sq ft; no small or mid-sized homes (1,100 to 1,600 sq ft).
Same with apartments, all branded with "Luxury" apartments.
And with interest rates near 0%, investors and savers alike are in a panic to find a return on their money. So they jump into real-estate and stocks.
Their hopes that the stocks would fund businesses that would produce what people need, but didn't. It produced what people wanted and those who can fulfill that want... had the money to do so.
Ends up being a game of musical chairs among the investor classes, and we're all musicians in serfdom performing the music until we're to broke to play further, they take a chair away (last investor out gets screwed) and they get to join the band of serfs to play another round.
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It was never that affordable to ship goods back and forth in such a huge amount and in the manner that current global trade is conducted.
What made it temporarily "profitable" and that's all it was and is, is the gigantic subsidies of various goods of various nations coupled with often in the lowest income nations, the inauthentic advantage that is essentially free labor; tantamount to slave labor; this is often transitory at least most hope it is, but sweatshop economies can last for decades leaving those people forced into it, and yes they're literally forced as they often are under corrupt or despotic governments and have no other source of livelihood.
Some of these nations sweatshops are becoming less profitable as wages have increased in those nation, and shipping costs are no longer made up by cheap labor.
Subsidies in certain industries still persist though.
And there are plenty of sweat shop nations in perpetual development status.
It's not just the building, its the fuel to ship the stuff. It's a big waste on how things are transported in our current system, it uses TONS of resources that otherwise if shorter inputs to sub assembly to full assembly supply chains would otherwise save.
Generally, it has only been decent for such trade only for those with authentic comparative advantage: the good is simply only available from those particular locations that are indeed far from the other market sourcing it. And/or they can authentically produce more of that good with fewer resources spent, not financial resource funny money, but actually less energy consumption and less waste to poor quality etc.
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This guy goes from asking questions and responding like some bumpkin from dip shit-ville to flat out crazy nut job cult fuckery. WTF would you even bother wasting your time with this nut job???
And a side note, this fuck head hasn't a clue how our legal system works... accusations require probable cause not innocent until proven guilty... investigations begin initially when police or other investigator finds probable cause to launch an investigation, warrants maybe issued by a judge when such investigations begin, then a Grand Jury decides based on probable cause, not on presumed innocent until proven guilty, if found probable cause the person is indited to a trial jury, and so that only evidence maybe used to determine guilt, the indited should be considered not guilty until the evidence is provided in making their final judgement on guilt, that the burden of evidence is on the prosecutor foremost.... null hypothesis.
Anyway, this guy was a wacko, similar freaks you find in any major city wandering the streets talking to dumpsters, fire hydrants, and passing out pamphlets that describe how the voices in their head are trying to help you somehow.
He makes uncle Ruckus on Boondocks look sane... and that character was nuts.
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If they could do appropriate primaries with advertising to get people involved.
Only 7% of the population bothered to attend DNC or GOP primaries and caucuses.
And 45% didn't even bother to vote in a presidential election.
So it could be done. But people appear to be vapid. They wait for normalization via advertisements. You have to advertise the new party, its debates, and its primaries.
And you must allow same day registration at such primaries.
But advertising on the internet, tv, and radio is a must. If it hasn't been on the boob tube, it must be very iffy, so I'm not going to bother. That's the herd mentality we have.
And you probably need to extend that to Twitter, because face it, the people in general have become a bunch of twits.
WE have other parties. But they're always poopooed, and nobody bothers. Only thing absent is a good PR campaign with lots of advertisement. Its why Coke and Pepsi, Burger King, McDonald's etc. get traffic, normalization. Its a type of brain washing. They come to expect it as normal no matter where they are, they find the golden arches, they suddenly feel comfortable despite their burgers tasteless and appear as though someone sat on it, their sauce is flavor of pure fructose corn syrup dumped all over the burger, sauce, and bun... same with the fries.
"Give us someone to actually vote for."
There you go. Give us someone. They're waiting to be spoon fed. To have something to normalize toward.
People in general are frankly shallow mindless idiots when it comes to much else than sports and entertainment (movies, tv shows, and music)... pop culture.
Bubble gum chewing vapidity on an open fire.
"Give us something fun to do. We won't make it. We'll just wait until someone else advertises something to nausea, even if that thing is a remake or redo of some old boring thing... its being advertise anew, so it must be new."
So there you go.
Secrete recipe is to advertise insanely.
Think about Trump got his minority that played to the majority of state electorates by getting air time constantly by all 6 of the remaining major news oligopolies. He was insane, disgusting, flat out stupid. But constantly showing his ass on tv, he got enough votes.
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Not sure why he wants to talk about Greece, they have an even lower min wage of $5.13 an hour equivalent, and Greece works even harder than we do at 2,035 hours per person; this takes in account by subtracting vacation and holiday pay. US 1,783 hours a year.
If you only worked 8 hours a day 5 days a week all year we get 2,080.
In fact, 2012 Greece lowered their min wage to $6.58 an hour equivalent. And their economy over the past 5 years, 2 year after lost another 8% of GDP. Greece median income has fallen from almost 1,350 Euros a month to under 1,110 Eu or $1623.51 USD to $1,334 USD a month.
The US has a higher min wage, but better overall median wage and while sluggish better improvement economically than Greece which never had a very decent economy for workers in the first place. They have already been making less for more work. Hence why so many Syrian refugees pass through Greece, as well as some other places, its kind of an economic crap hole before they faced the real estate collapse. Now its even worse.
To put in perspective median individual income of $31K a year in the use or $2,392 a month compared to Greece's $1,334 a month; our individual median income is about twice Greece's. Their economy in general has always been lousy. I wouldn't use their practices which have been more libertarian right winger than ours.
Greece's only "advance" economic structure is free healthcare for those making less than 2,400 euros a month, a little over half the working population. But I don't see us bragging that we have fire departments.
The statistics show lower min wages, lower underlying demand is the biggest factor from being a 2nd or 3rd world failing economy, or being a strong economy.
If there is no underlying demand in the country, it's an economic shit hole that works for low wages barely scrapes by as it exports its way into poverty with a rising entrenched tyrannical oligarchy.
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/minimum-wages
https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/wages
https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/wages
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That's why countries with lower or no min wage structure or no bidding quasi governmental trade union have shit hole economies relying heavily on export because more than half their population are too damn poor to buy any of the stuff they produce. Many are in poverty levels that are considered 3rd world, tend to have the most child homelessness and adult homelessness. What you want is us to mimic that of the 1800's.
Economics 101. You don't care about demand side with the supply side, you ain't got squat, an economy a house of cards, and 1920 great depression.
1800's Robber baron years were full of depressions with hardly any worker protections, no min wage, child labor was still legal and heavily used, midway through the century slave labor was starting to become illegal in most nations, unionization in most cases were absolutely illegal with many union wars between hired men (oligarch thugs) and workers as workers protest, unions not becoming full legal in all sectors until 1935.
But morons like you who subscribe to dogma instead of empirical economics would contest ending slavery, child labor, universal suffrage, union full legalization would scream this would cause inflation and a terrible economic cycles, when it actually continuously slowed down the boom bust cycle, as well as making the bust periods less severe and less in length.
You should really read Thomas Piketty, but you might want to start with some economic text books, and some easier to read economic history books.
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The fact of the matter, internet like roads, schools, ports, water, sewers, trash violate every competitive market principle, they're natural monopolies, they require huge economies of scale, and the bigger volume of customers the cheaper the per unit price and better quality on upkeep, upgrade, and expansion, too much externality costs and benefits, running more and more cable to do the same thing becomes incredibly inefficient as water, sewer, trash, etc. in fact most places including cable and DSL actually share each other's fiber optic and major trunk lines as well as switch into major university routing hubs that are paid, thank you pigs who make money off our tax dollars and want to screw us harder, by our taxes.
Just as healthcare violates every competitive market.
There is a thing called economics, the empirical philosophy (a type of science that isn't necessarily a discrete physical science since it's like mathematics, a complete construct of human, math is a philosophy as it is arbitrary that we have chosen the base 10 number system as primary mode, probably because of our ten digits of our hands).
Basic economics explains for profit motive is only provides desirable results (better quality, cheaper supply, cheaper costs, cheaper upkeep, etc.) only and if only the market does not violate any competitive market principles; as long as they're competitive.
When they are not, then for profit motive does the opposite compared to other models like a collective government owned structure or highly regulated structure with lots of free-be subsidies to grow their stuff, like the railroads enjoy even today, but especially during the 1800's.
The internet is 54% of the US a monopoly, and the rest a duopoly at best. Even under oligopolies you tend to pay higher prices at below standards if not properly regulated or even having a city, state, national provider.
The internet and world wide web was invented by tax payer money from the DOD (internet and email via the program called ARPNET) and foreign scientific agency CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research (world wide web). They additionally created email as well as the internet. Many major Internet exchange point, hubs in most 1st world are still located on or co-operated with public universities, some have been eaten up by private sectors to which they none of the major for profit companies know who owns what, in fact none of them own any of it because its the same equipment, so they form a co-op between these private corporations paying a equal membership fee, socialize the losses and the costs, and privatize the profits.
So it is entirely appropriate to regulate the internet under title ii of the communications act of 1934. Doing otherwise would be grossly inappropriate to scientific and philosophical empirical understanding, it would be subscribing to overt racketeering.
In fact, the backbone of the internet should actually be owned and operated by a co-op structure under a quasi-government board to ensure protection for hacking, government and private spying, and constitutionality of the use of the internet is properly carried out such as protection against unlawful search and seizure. And as critically, aid in expanding broadband internet services to all areas of the country including outside the continental US, and ensure is upkeep, and benefit from huge economy of scale as to be able to pass on the lower cost per unit to having the lowest price per unit to end users and business users alike.
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World's so called richest country in the world, with the among the world's poorest.
Are we truly the richest country on earth, or is it collective illusion cultivated by those tiny few who truly have all the wealth and its income?
Things will only get worse until they become better... we will fall rock bottom just as all empires have in the past. Most empires had to fall apart, hit rock bottom until they were no longer a walking talking bullshit factory sniffing their own moldy farts.
Lost generations, not just one. But many and still counting.
All those abandoned places, the USA will have many.
World's richest nation on earth reduced to a beggar nation for the simplest things: healthcare, education, even paid sick time is not provisioned by law, nor vacation, most in prison/jail, civil court frequently prohibits lawyers, and of grand civil court lawyers are not appointed by right, only in criminal court.
The world's richest country is the world's biggest farce.
It will be the task for us all to throw away the tired dogma, the neo robber baron propounding unadulterated ruin that "greed" was some how good and markets unfettered to robber baron delights and whims produce anything other than a boom bust cycle that oscillates in a more violent fashion until it rips itself apart leaving full wrought a collapsed nation with many lost generations. Even the begging begins to fall on deaf ears as nobody has spare cash to give.
It's up to our lost generations to learn from this disaster that is the repeat of the robber baron 1800's insanity.
Throw off the dogma, to catch up with other nations, and to love one another again and in doing so become a happier more prosperous people again, and perhaps we will rather than ignore the various resource and environmental problems, but help in solving them, treating them as an opportunity than a threat we must ignore so to protect some robber baron so they don't decide to fire us from some shit job that doesn't even pay enough for rent or mortgage anyway.
Some robber baron who doesn't give one shit about you or I. Nor whether we voted one way or another, they'll get their way anyway. And even when they get their own way, your job won't be saved if it can add another penny to their earnings per share.
Or whether we even eat their dogma and shit it out: voting for one of their puppets time and time again in a so called democracy; when in fact it is well known among our own people, and all too well among other nations, that we at least currently are a plutocracy.
Rip the plutocracy down.
Build a true democracy.
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They have the right under US and international treaty to seek asylum.
Additionally, those who are granted refugee or asylum status should be provided a cultural and language educational facility living quarters as well as later long term rental apartments at HUD home rates developed to increase housing supply and keep rents from going through through the roof for them and for us, and to assist them to obtaining a job at going wages/salaries, not to be under cut or abused by employers, being able to take care of basic living needs like setting up utilities: water, electricity, gas, etc., transportation needs are met, understanding of basic laws of the country, initial clothing and food needs are met upon leaving the facility that is keeps the families together to set them up for success.
Currently, many refugees often struggle being placed in a private apartment complexes that aren't often not affordable requiring them to cram together in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment with 5 or 6 adults and 2 or more children. They don't know how to run a washer or dryer, don't no common customs and culture forgetting that they have a beautiful park with benches, instead sit on a gutter sidewalk in a parking place which is often hazardous for their children. Often they cannot speak enough English to have a sufficient conversation to take care of basic needs like paying and getting water turned back on (personal experience) just simply giving their address is difficult. So far, they're at the mercy of small non-profit assistant groups who cannot handle the amount of inflows in certain cities, and churches, or their supervisor who in my experience eventually drove him to our office to speak for him to get his water back on, his family of 4 was without water for over two weeks. And at some point they're required to pay back their airfare if they flown on US expense like many of the Somalian refugees.
We can be a more efficient and compassionate nation. What we do is hideous throwback to early 1900's and later. And there is a humane way to treat those seeking refugee status at the boarder, and for undocumented immigrants. We don't want them being paid under the table, being abused by employers with extremely low wages/salaries and benefits which subsequently harms the rest of the labor force in reducing the labor market pay and benefits. Instead, you make it clear that if you hire anyone they must be paid fairly even if they're undocumented illegal and going through a process to demonstrate they can be a good US Citizen. These people are often desperate economically and socially particularly for those trying to escape social political humanitarian crisis in their home countries.
Unless you're a Native American of a tribe in the US territory, you're at least a product of immigration of some type: illegal, legal, result from slave ancestry, etc. We can all co-exist. Our country is huge. And is capable of absorbing the amount of immigrants that come here. And keep in mind, US is usually on the bottom of their list to come. Many would rather go to various nations of Europe like Germany, France, UK, Austria, Australia, etc. But due to geographic location, or simply those other more population dense countries simply can't take any more economically; Germany literally has excepted over 1 million Syrian refugees along with another million other immigrants in one year, and they're state is geographically the size of OR and WA with a population twice the size of CA. Would be as if we took 3 million immigrants/refugees in one year. We take on about 1.05 million immigrants a year.
If they're capable of at least trying to make their situation work, we can do it given our larger geographical area.
Fearing refugees or other immigrants something we shouldn't. And we should be treating them much better, setting them up for success so they're not being taken advantage of, and have a more dignifying life here. We need some solidarity in this fucking country.
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The pay sucks at the beginning. Most don't serve all their life, usually 1 or 2 terms consisting of 4 or 6 year increments. So no, most don't stay in the military all their lives... most like myself rejoin civilian life. The concept of basic being rough is to train quickly and to instill instant discipline. Things have to happen quick to get through all the training required, and certain military customs and courtesies are supposed to become brainwashed cultural reactions that require no thinking... an officer enters the room, you're the first to see the officer you immediately call the room to attention. Or if such a room is called to attention, you get up at attention. Or outside you salute per custom in saluting areas. It's a boarding school they want people to instantly shut up and listen up. I think most militaries around the world do this intention training save a few smaller nations. Bad discipline has caused units to become rioting out of control mobs, hurting civilians and/or themselves; all about restraint and discipline. It sucks though. Because just about everything you do is wrong in the first couple weeks... even if its right the drill instructors or MTI will scream at you to do it even better. It's why you still march in drill... to instill a sense of unit and single purpose discipline, follow chains of command... recruits called trainees is the Air Force will get assigned duties as Dorm Chief and 4 element leaders and other tasks like Latrine Chief or Entry Control Chief etc. And you'll follow these chains of command when things arise.... you don't just go immediately to the MTI if you lost something, you go to your wing-man or elemental leader then dorm chief... if needs to be escalated further the dorm chief will do this for you going to the MTI. Not that you can't go directly to the MTI or even section supervisor or someone else if you think its urgent or haven't gotten redress of whatever it is. But simple stuff... follow the chain of command. And you'll be surprised how efficient it is. Military isn't the civilian world where you can demand to speak to someones supervisor or manager over every little thing. This simulates combat, where you don't have time for that nonsense; you have to learn to trust the chain of command that whatever you need will get redressed in it's appropriate time.
At least in the Air Force, communication is key... the jobs in the Air Force require the soldier to often think and make decisions on their own, so communication is important so learning to constantly communicate within the chain of command is critical.
But there is a benefit in medical (all medical is paid for no premiums and deductibles or co-pays literally free for ALL medical) during your activation in active duty and even as a guard member.
And GI Bill pays all tuition and a stipend so you can go full time to finish higher education quickly without needing a separate job to pay for things. You get after your first term in and when you leave with an honorable discharge. During your military time, you get a different benefit that doesn't subtract from your GI Bill that pays for tuition; key here is trying to go to school while in service is difficult... usually relegating such classes to online courses.
If you go beyond E4 and get married or E5 or beyond you get housing stipend that can pay your mortgage if you buy, or at least your rent, on top of your E4 or E5 salaries. E5 and up salaries with housing stipend is actually fairly good, you get time in service at that rank.
The rank base pays are the same in all branches and they're all coded in rank E1 to E9.
Officers the same for all branches base pay O1 to O10. All other branches, except the Air Force has ranks called Warrant Officers W1 thru W5; they're in the middle of an enlisted officer and a commissioned officer. They're essentially a commissioned officer; usually rising from enlisted ranks, and ultimately transition to full commissioned officers. Kept hearing they were phasing all those out, but they haven't still.
https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/ranks
During basic and in the Air Force tech school tobacco use is prohibited. Tech school people still often do anyway. Basic, no way. You're not able to do much during that time anyway. So chances of getting them is rare. And in the Air Force soda pop and especially coffee is also something you can't drink... soda pop was more okay so long as you're MTI allowed it, rare. But coffee was almost strictly prohibited as they're always concerned in the Texas temperature of dehydration... the order to hydrate or comment "You're not hydrating enough are you!?!?!?" Get a cold "You're not hydrating!" Hurt your leg "You're not hydrating enough!" Have a stomach ache, "You're sick because you're not hydrating enough! HYDRATE!"
The coffee thing killed me. I love my coffee! A few times in basic I was doing chores in basic outside of the squadron area at the hospital usually, and would get some on a meal break. Was heaven. Felt more awake than all of my flight, felt like I could really think!
Coffee thing is really just during basic. Tech school and after you can drink coffee. There's other training that may include such deprivation like SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training.
It was recently changed about 2011-12 one can be openly homosexual. Since no sex of any kind in basic training should take place, it has no problem. I was in basic during the transition form Don't Ask Don't Tell policy (gays had to remain silent about it, and nobody would ask them). Now they can openly state their homosexuality and not fear being kicked out.... ironically that was the common way people in basic training would try to get kicked out, they would say they were gay... the drill sergeant or in the Air Force they're called Military Training Instructors, MTI they would be told I don't care if you're gay or straight or bi or like dressing up as Joe or Nancy, you're in the military now, and that's not getting you kicked out! Sometimes it was more colorful... one admitted he was gay and thus he should be let go, the MTI yelled I don't care if you like sucking dick or pussy makes no difference to me, you made the oath to serve and serve you will!
So in a way, it really never mattered for the most part. What did get people in deep trouble was in basic a few people couldn't keep their pecker to themselves and in the latter weeks of training a few guys would meet with a female flight (usually a sister flight, a female flight that was training at the same time as a male flight). Women found to be pregnant during basic training, or any fornication discovered during basic, especially in basic training usually leads to discharge, possibly dishonorable discharge.
So one must control their sexual urges. If they can't, they fail. Gay or straight. Doesn't matter. This type of discipline is vital in keeping restraint, military units are not to be raiding raping mobs.
There was a nice 20 year pension from the military, but recently this was phased out in favor of a lesser beneficial 401K like savings system.... which sucks. These savings schemes are no match for a well defined pension system. Happening in most businesses today. My millennials generation are going to have a great depression in the meager saving investment accounts and no defined pensions when we hit retirement age.
But I suspect the US empire crumbling as it is economically from within, we'll have other things more severe to worry about than pensions. I hope I'm wrong.
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