"And a lot of this excessive complexity lodges itself in finance, because using operations that few people can understand serves beautifully in the engineering of frauds and swindles."
Jim - just my opinion, but both are socialist. Social even in the name. They were never meant to be entitlements. Both should be means tested. They are both a safety net for widows and orphans.
Absent a mechanism to force society's hand for the common good, people would have the widows and orphans starve.
I hear the refrain every time, "It's my money!". Yes, collected because you would not willingly feed the widows and orphans. So, we have collected on their behalf.
Orphans I can see, but aren't "widows" women? Aren't women strong and equal? Don't they have agency? If so, why aren't they responsible for feeding themselves?
Some degree of socialism is inevitable. Between the Unions, wise Anti-trust legislation and social programs - it's the only reason we had a viable 20th century to the extent we did. Private charity ain't gonna do it - as you yourself say above. That dog don't hunt. As Madison said, If men were all sages we would need no government at all, but since they are not, let us proceed.
Ditto with Get Off My Lawn patriotism - unless that lawn is the White House's.
SS, without some major correction, will wrap up broke in 2032. It’s gonna be a race whether SS or the national debt ($40T) will kill us off first. My money is on the debt, and sooner than later.
True social security and medical care should be provided from/by your social capital - your tribe, so to speak. If you've invested wisely, you'll be fine.
Right. Not advertised. Tax lawyers and accountants swim right through them. The benefits obviously outweigh their fees, but very few have tax lawyers and accountants on speed dial.
Andrew Jackson viewed bankers as a dangerous "moneyed aristocracy" that threatened American liberty and democratic governance. He famously declared to a delegation of bankers, "You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out." Jackson believed bankers used their concentrated power to speculate in essential goods like breadstuffs, profiting privately while charging losses to the bank.
Jackson argued that bankers bent government acts to their selfish purposes, creating artificial distinctions that favored the rich over the "plain republican." In his 1832 veto message, he warned that the bank's attempt to control the government was a "premonition of the fate that await the American people" if such an institution were perpetuated. He maintained that if Congress had the constitutional right to issue paper money, it should exercise that power directly rather than delegating it to corporations.
Jackson's hostility extended beyond the national bank to a general distrust of all banking establishments. He stated, "I have always been afraid of banks," and later warned in his Farewell Address of an insidious "money power" that could subvert the republic. He believed banking establishments were "more dangerous than standing armies" and advocated for a return to gold and silver "hard money" to prevent what he saw as financial oppression.
Lugh: By the grace of the Eternal God may they be routed out again.
The Code is easier to work with than other laws. Doesn't help much, though, does it? All it takes to master the code is a graduate degree, a CPA and a JD, and ten to fifteen years experience. Imagine trying to understand, say, immigration law. Almost as if some were certain immigration laws might be exploited to political ends without consequence.
The tax code appears to be a mechanism that protects the Uber-Rich and maintains a minimum level of survival for the non-producers, at the expense of the majority that fall in between income and wealth extremes. Part of the Great Reset will be to raid the 401Ks/IRAs of the upper middle class that have prudently saved for their retirements to prolong "The Game". That's the part of "spending other people's money" coming into play.
And that's where both Trump and Musk fail to provide effective 4th Turning leadership. Both recognize the complexity and waste, but treat the current Predicaments of Western Civilization as problems that can be solved while maintaining our standard of living. Both take advantage of the financial gimmicks of the Neo-Con economy for their own benefit, under the guise of The Religion of Progress - ignoring the inconvenience of Decline.
Americans can handle the truth, and leaders who speak of mitigation, living with less energy and resources, and transitioning "defense" spending to localized and sustainable economies are in the pipeline, but for now we're thrashing around lying to ourselves that end game can still be more Jetsons than Flintstones....
Could AI and all the gashing of teeth actually be like climate change. As in fake, blown up out of proportion. Data centers are not new. I worked data centers inside large manufacturing plants as an electrician in the 70-80s. Asking for a friend. And your article is again 100% correct.
I think you are right. I am no techie but I have read some articles by Jay Valentine (Omega4America) wherein he says that all the AI stuff can be done one small computers, that the giant facilities aren't necessary. He's been spot on about a lot of things, especially the voting chicanery.
Once again, I am amazed at what you are able to do with several paragraphs. Another outgrowth of this "something for nothing" society are these newly packaged casinos for the Palookas called "Prediction Markets." Endless waves of ads are attempting to addict and destroy a huge number of Dufi (plural of Dufus) by encouraging them to pick up their cell phones and bet, uh predict, on anything and everything. Every ball game has a pop up ad telling the Dufi they can bet on how many pitches, hits etc. will occur in that inning. Even the WNBA has Lisa Leslie at every game break doing ads for Prediction Markets. The Evil Ones must just love this. They can destroy people financially driving them even deeper into despair for fun and profit. Oh, and don't worry. The "experts" say only eight or nine percent of the population might become addicted to this repackaged gambling craze, so only thirty million of our fellows will be ruined. No biggy, right?
You’re so right John! As our society becomes increasingly stupid and high, these same zombies waste everything their parents worked for on gambling and drugs.
Draft Kings and Fan Duel ads have rendered professional sports nearly unwatchable. You can be on anything to how many times Taylor Swift will appear at a chief's games to the color and fabric of Pat Mahommes jock. It is no surprise to me that all professional sporting games are rigged. Enormous amounts of money are riding on these games thanks to the fantasy betting that is proliferating like a rotten cancer. Hence the reason coaches like Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco completely alter their dominating game plan during the middle of the third quarter and end up losing the fucking championship game or why referees will call penalties where fouls do not exist or not call penalties when blatant fouls are clearly demonstrated. Money corrupts everything. It always has and it always will.
Next time a Draft Kings ad comes on, pause your television set and read the fine print. Gambling is a sickness. They acknowledge this evil but money trumps everything.
At one time drugs were a great menace to the well being of adolescents. Efforts to curtail opportunities for drug use were resoundingly condemned and mocked. This went on for decades but then came fentanyl (and even worse iterations) and nobody is laughing now.
John - Not so fast! The "Prediction Markets" are being painted as purely gambling on an outcome, and I'm afraid they will be heavily regulated, if not outlawed completely. This is actually what the Evil Ones want.
Here's why: Looking deeper, prediction markets function as a nexus of crowdsourcing up to the minute information in real time. There are vast sources of information from nearly limitless angles in real time. People may have various inside sources, confidential information, expert information, you name it. Odds change, as the information flows in. People have skin in the game - "betting" based upon their sources.
When any event occurs, it takes 2 to 3 days to shape, build and control the desired narrative. This is what has the Evil Ones in a panic, what they fear most - loss of narrative control. Prediction markets destroy their ability to create narratives and push them out through the MSM and other channels.
In reality, prediction markets (crowdsourced, real-time information) beat them to the punch, stealing their lies and propaganda thunder.
Throw out the bathwater? Sure, but we need to keep the precious, indispensable baby. The Evil Ones are betting we'll throw everything out, and from the misguided tenor, they are probably right. Gambling bad.
I understand that and totally reject that premise. The wagers can be manipulated just like everything else. Surely "Them & They" are already taking notice of whatever mischief might be made in this regard.
Yes John, gambling, bad, bad, bad. Shut down the Prediction Markets. Go back to getting your "facts and information" from the MSM. You reject the premise precisely because you don't understand it. Good luck.
Not so, John. I saw it exactly as you did. The sheer ridiculousness of it. Then I read an article on ZeroHedge, maybe a week ago, that laid it out clearly - the guy was shocking in his genius. Not sure if I archived it, but I'll try and find it and post a link. He explained it more clearly and succinctly than I ever could. His argument is convincing when understood, and he gets the credit. Such a unique perspective, I just tried to amplify it. From the totality of your comments, which are always appreciated here at CFN, you're no dummy.
At the end of the day we should have evidence of whether or not they are of value. Fall sports and a midterm ought to deliver substantial examples for us to draw conclusions from. No need to argue about anything. It will be what it will be. Thanks for the link.
I'm fond of that one! I am NOT enamored of AI! (Too many Terminator movies?) I think it's all going to fall apart before long. Depends on the 2028 vote.
In the 80s it was discovered by the sons and grandsons of the Builders that engineering money directly paid better than engineering Stuff. Unless that syndrome can be addressed -- 110% taxes on unearned profits? -- we're Done.
The productive side of the Hamiltonian model – without the financial chicanery – is certainly what we need for a desirable future. Unfortunately, our productive infrastructure has atrophied and been sold off in favor of fantasy wealth consisting of pixels on screens. (Eighty thousand dollar Bitcoins? Puh-leeze.)
Perhaps Private Equity and the oligarchs will awaken to their civic duty, and plow their notional wealth back into reindustrializing America. (for which Mr. Trump’s tariffs will be an essential part of the process)
Perhaps those speculating on an AI Utopia, and counting on us proles to subsidize their dream with our generated electricity and municipal water supplies, will awaken to their folly, and redirect their investing in that which is real.
Perhaps we’ll all wake up back in Kansas, with Auntie Em mopping our fevered brow. But I suspect that we are still in Oz.
Private equity and the oligarchs will not awaken to their civic duty. Private equity and the oligarchs have devoted, are devoting, and will continue to devote significant resources to drowning the very concept of civic duty in the bathtub. It interferes with their accumulation, you see. They cannot be brought to enlightenment, they have to be taken on and defeated.
The problem with capitalism is that it systematically diverts the value of millions upon millions of people's productive work into the pockets of owners. Mind you, there is no system where workers can keep 100% of the value of their work, since there will always be people (infants/children, the elderly, the infirm, people in general who are allowed to be idle in ways that society finds acceptable, such as clergy) who don't work and thus live on work done by others. It follows, then, that living on other people's productivity can't be all bad. Demand that everyone work for every crumb of their daily bread without exception and we would all end up saddled with indenture contracts at birth (otherwise known as slavery, an institution which happily has been exterminated with extreme prejudice).
If you want an example of entropy, look no further than the piles of wealth accumulated by Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and others. The process of alienating most of humanity from the value of its own work has spawned a species of monetary black holes that now exist simply to accrete, ever more and more, without end. Left to do as they will, the oligarchs will swallow everything and the rest of us will indeed be reduced to 'indenture at birth'.
Easy, do your part, do not “buy” anything these people have created? No Facebook, no MAPS, no Amazon, no PCs. The Leftist BS about the wealthy is just that, BS. How much of those fortunes are investments in their own stock? Stock is only wealth when it is sold. The Dems want to tax those assets that are really not wealth.
Musk has sunk most of his wealth into the next creation he has developed. Trump has put his $ into future projects, some of which made him money, some of which bankrupted him.
Tax the rich is Leftist propaganda to “save the nation”. Those with ignorance of what wealth is are suckers for their tripe.
If individuals acting individually were any kind of threat to oligarchic power, they would make it illegal. The reason it's not a threat is because what oligarchic power does is to shape the playing field everyone is playing on, so that ever more of the outcomes of the work people do just happens to belong to the oligarchs. The goal state of every oligarch is to be the last man standing, to own everything. The oligarch wants to be the ground under everyone else's feet, and have all of humanity living out their lives in their gravitational pull.
Property is power. Ownership is control. To own something, such as your own home, is to have something that no one can deny you. To live in a world of oligarchs is to live in a world where you have been denied control of your own life. A society that allows unlimited accumulation is one that tends toward slavery, where none but the few have even the power to direct their own lives or control their destiny. You can pule and mew for a world like that if you want; I will not.
Capital centralizes as the winners absorb the losers. They then declare, competition is a sin and cooperate for the interests of their class. John lives in Newtonian Adam Smith universe where this doesn't happen. Where markets or space are not influenced by planets or corporations.
And the Chicago School actually got away with inverting Adam Smith's prescription. Smith called for taxation on properties and rents - not on labor or production.,
That he did. Adam Smith is widely (and very intentionally) misunderstood. Take the famous 'Invisible Hand'. In Wealth of Nations, Smith uses the term to refer to a merchant naturally preferring and supporting his domestic economy. “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an Invisible Hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” (Credit: https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/adam-smith-peter-foster-invisible-hand)
Got that? In The Wealth of Nations, the role of the Invisible Hand is to lead merchants to support their domestic economy and not any foreign economy. This is a pretty dramatically different from the idea of the Invisible Hand that you usually hear. In The Wealth of Nations, at least, it just doesn't mean that at all.
It's in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith uses 'Invisible Hand' in the way it's usually understood. And in my opinion, he makes a poor showing of it:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor..."
Huh? Citation needed, Adam.
"... and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity ..."
<Nods vigorously>
"... though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires ..."
Still nodding...
"... they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements."
Facepalm. They leave the poor with just the exact minimum they can get away with. By which I mean, enough so when the poor get up again the next morning, they will be liable to do another day's work for another day's pittance, rather than show up on the rich men's doorsteps with pitchforks and torches.
"They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants ..."
This is an objectively false statement. Had the necessities of life been 'divided into equal portions among all the earth's inhabitants' (or 'nearly the same' distribution as that), surely all its inhabitants would then possess an equal portion of the necessities of life? Rights or wrongs aside, they manifestly do not. The exception would be hunter-gatherer societies, to which the Invisible Hand is not applicable.
"... and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species."
Here at least we get to the part of capitalism that pretty much everyone likes: the growth and development of productive capacity. This is what lifted hundreds of millions into industrial prosperity, first in Europe, then in North America, and most recently in China.
And when I say everyone likes this about capitalism, I mean do mean everyone, including Karl Marx. Marx wrote admiringly in numerous places (including the Communist Manifesto) of its 'colossal' productive forces that could not, or at any rate had not, been developed any other way.
It seems that Main Street "manufacturing capitalism" has been eclipsed by Wall Street "finance capitalism," the latter more easily degenerating into crony capitalism. Part of the problem with today's capitalism is that it has become greatly intertwined with the government, e.g. the military-industrial-Congressional-complex (DDE's original description which didn't make the final version of his speech.) So enmeshed, in fact, that certain key industries have become de facto arms of the federal government.
Or, in fact, that certain "industries" (if you can use that word about a line of business where actual manufacturing has been reduced to a line item on a spreadsheet) have turned the federal government into their own financing arm. The smartest way to spend your money in Washington, DC is to buy politicians, and in turn government policy. The return on investment is huge, you're buying dollar bills in exchange for pennies.
The corruption of American government is completely blatant and conducted openly. Bribery, under the auspices of campaign finance, is fully legalized and anything resembling the interests of the general public is swept aside by torrents of dark money.
Disgusting. I will make an even worse statement. The government is not only a supporter of the money interests, they are supporters and beneficiaries of the crime families in the country. Obama’s reign saw the movement of much of the industry out of the country and I believe that crime has filled in since then. This government benefits from the proceeds of that crime.
The problem with communism is that it systematically diverts the value of millions upon millions of people's productive work into the pockets of the state. FIFY
Did I say otherwise? I point out the problem with capitalism, and your reaction is to point out the problem with a different system that isn't what I'm talking about? A system where people keep more of the value of their own work, instead of giving it away to investors, is not communism. Nor is it a system where people give up all the value of their work to the state. I'd call this a straw man and be done with it, but there's a reason why people deploy these red herrings: narrative control. The point is to prevent discussion of the matter at hand: the fact that American capitalism is now in a very serious (possibly terminal) crisis, and everyone's freedom is at stake and that alternatives are available.
You may be one of those who hold that capitalism, hence plutocratic oligarchy, is natural and needs to be defended because it's 'human nature'. If that or something like it is your position, I would respond that appeals to human nature are largely empty. Every society or system that has existed, exists now, or ever will exist is an expression of 'human nature', tautologically, because societies consist of human beings, full stop. What differs between societies is the kind of solutions to human concerns they try to implement, and the sets of values they act on. Both the solutions and the values are ones that humans come up with, because it could hardly be otherwise. It follows that communism is no more or less an expression of human nature than capitalism is, and neither one is to the purpose. I'm not interested in human nature; I'm interested in the solutions, and in the values.
Your knee-jerk reaction is that I must be a communist. But in its day, the George W. Bush administration promoted something they called the Ownership Society, and that's a concept I could actually work with:
There are some key differences between the Cato Institute's version of an ownership-based society and my own, though. For one, a libertarian institution like Cato takes for granted that there must be no upper limit on accumulation of ownership; they're completely fine with plutocratic oligarchy, while I am not. Libertarians like the Cato institute promote the false notion that any outcome of a very particular definition of 'free markets' must be the best outcome possible. This is how you get things like, for example, America's vastly bloated, wasteful, fraud-riddled, abusive, financially ruinous, universally hated health-care system -- a textbook example of misaligned incentives that only exists because insistence on the profit motive above all else forces everyone into an extortion racket they have no way out of.
I could go on. To make a long story short, my idea of a good society looks a lot like the one that exists today, but without the extortion, con-artistry and piffle that leaves so many people on an endless treadmill that drives other people's wealth, instead of their own. It's the one that actually dares to peer into the gargantuan blind spot where today's oligarchs did the work of taking what everyone else created for them.
"A system where people keep more of the value of their own work, instead of giving it away to investors..."
"Investors"? Giving it away to investors? One invests voluntarily. The word you are looking for is the "government" (via taxation, which is taken through coercion). In short, government is the real thief here.
You seem unaware of Private Equity's systematic appropriation of entire sectors of our economy: veterinary clinics, HVAC services, funeral homes, home builders...
They are permitted to become illegal de facto monopolies and then jack up prices to exorbitant levels. That may not seem like an issue to you, but it's daily becoming an existential problem for more and more households.
I'm well aware of the PE bugaboo; but that has NOTHING to do with Mole's point, which was that wage earners are unable to invest at all. The fact is, wage earners can and do invest everyday, whether it is in individual stocks, ETFs, their retirement funds, their own businesses, or even their own education.
You know what's extra fun and delicious? While Massachusetts' political leadership gut the public coffers to support newly arrived populations, private equity is scooping up anything and everything of value that is left to grab.
Even semi-sentient Massachusetts residents see that the elected officials are not on the up and up. But of private equity bargain basement shopping days there is no mention.
He still believes its "private" when a few companies dominate entire essential sectors. We would have never had a viable 20th century with minds like this in control. No utilities whatsoever. Just grifting (as in the medical industry) forever. A boot stamping on the human face.
"One... invests... voluntarily." Okay, what's the argument here exactly? As a riposte to what I wrote, I can only make sense of "one invests voluntarily" if this somehow means it's the waged worker who is acting voluntarily. But in almost every case, the waged worker and the investor are two different people, and it's investors who invest, no? This is incoherent.
In a realistic situation, the 'investor' is something like a hedge fund or a private equity scheme. These are abstractions that obscure the agency of real, physical people who own things for a living instead of producing value. They buy shares of ownership in enterprises, extract as much value from it as they can, and shut it down or leave it behind as soon as it runs dry. They make numbers go up not by bringing new value into the world necessarily, but by moving value around and playing shell games. They take away as much for themselves as they possibly can, padding everything with fees for good measure, and private equity in particular is known for saddling businesses with debt to push the asset-stripping process as far as it will go. They much through viable businesses like a glutton through a bucket of chicken wings, leaving the businesses, employees, and their pension plans with nothing but the bones. On and on it goes.
As for taxation, the idea that it is uniquely evil while rent-seeking by private equity ghouls and hedgies is only ever benign, useful and godly is an utter delusion. Everyone needs to get over it and learn exactly who their real enemies are.
Of course my comment was incoherent to you because you insist that only a small subset of the population out of reach of the working class is capable of investing. That is total rubbish. Like it or not, wage earners choose to invest their money every day in stocks, new products, their own businesses or even their education. This is anathema to the class warfare crowd, who also continue to look the other way when told that the real theft of the working class is being perpetrated by the government they worship in the form of excessive taxes on everything from income to everyday commercial transactions.
Years ago I got sick of those libertarian idiots, and stupid "anarcho-capitalists", and what not, with their "taxation is theft" mantra. They have no viable alternative. "Private Equity" is proving how bogus is the idea that the "private sector" is any more virtuous than the "public sector". We DO NEED far more forensic auditors & accountants, and holding "officials" of all kind to account. Yes, easier said than done, but it must be done! Or else! lol, but srsly, too....
You are supposed to be cowed by the weaponized term "Communist" and give up any further reasoned argument. The latter is too threatening to their Panglossian worldview.
Alas, if only reasoned argument were more useful than it is. Too many here are invincibly armed and armored with ignorance, which as Orwell correctly observed is strength.
The either/or mind. Talking about one thing and you start talking about its supposed opposite. The classic is Muslims or Jews: Choose! How about neither one?
Jews suck. They refuse to abandon the archaic barbarism of male infant genital mutilation, which is the ancient root of the contemporary "trans" cult and Psy Op. Also, the blasphemous and specious, self-defeating false doctrine that they are "God's chosen people". God neither plays dice, nor favorites with either the universe, or mankind. Sorry, Einstein, you're not the genius you've been hyped to be.But yes, overall, Muslims suck more than Jews. Bur it seems that you just can't have one without the other. One of the largest orgies of perversion on the planet, is the yearly so-called "Gay Pride Parade" in Tel Aviv. But Islam still practices female genital mutilation and subjugation and enslavement of women, along with allowing the gay rape of boys by men. If you want to know who controls you, look at who you're not allowed to criticize....So long as the Jewish & Muslim slave masters exist, mankind will never know the true & total freedom of God's loving grace....
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, by GOD!....
I entirely agree. But you'll note that many of the participants on this forum remain eternally priapic with the fantasy they they will somehow join the select ranks of the Eaters, rather than be eaten.
I have known several Libertarians who seemed bright enough until you engaged them in debate about their philosophy. Libertarianism concerns a single interest: "protecting what is MINE." It does not provide for any of the innumerable road-building type needs of a functional society. And it's even half-assed regarding property, defending your right to piss in your stream but not addressing the problem of having someone else upstream from you also piss in it.
The libertarian mindset is a kind of brain damage. It results from committing to a world view that is utterly, terminally transactional, at all times and in all ways. Everything about humans and human society must be cast in transactional terms. And wherever people and/or physical reality resist transactionality, such resistance will be either dismissed as irrelevant or defined out of existence.
The essence of a transaction is (a) a change, that is (b) self-contained, meaning it (c) has no side effects, and therefore (d) can be left to the transacting parties. If I have a dollar and you have a chocolate bar, and I give you the dollar and you give me the chocolate bar, and both of us walk away satisfied, then no one else can possibly object. Right?
Sure, but what if the chocolate bar is electricity from a coal-fired power plant instead? You get paid, I get the electricity. Both of us win. "But what about pollution?" asks a sensible third party, choking on soot. In response, the libertarian points at (d) and says "You use electricity too, don't you, Mr. 'Sensible'? So either stop using electricity or keep quiet." As if giving up the use of electricity would make the libertarian apt to be less transactional.
“Sure, but what if the chocolate bar is electricity from a coal-fired power plant instead? You get paid, I get the electricity. Both of us win. "But what about pollution?" asks a sensible third party, choking on soot. In response, the libertarian points at (d) and says "You use electricity too, don't you, Mr. 'Sensible'? So either stop using electricity or keep quiet."
Though libertarians have some hurdles to climb your example seems fictitious. Since it is supposedly founded on the non aggression principle a libertarian would find “soot” an aggression on his physical being. He would be quick to ask courts to do something about this. I’m unaware of any libertarian policies that recommend doing away with civil courts.
In reality the pollution battles we’ve had in this country, from smog to other forms of industrial pollution have been much more enabled by the reluctance of government officials to offend corporations. It’s only been public outcry including libertarians that finally lead to government enforcement against these activities.
The latest figure I've seen is about three hundred thousand per household. Don't worry: we'll soon have wheelbarrows full of Greenbacks, and be able to pay off the national debt for less than the cost of a dozen eggs.
Two ways we get out of this national debt problem.
1. Money printing to monetize the debt. This is the chosen path of our elected "representatives" and they are already doing this. If you want to know why homes are so fucking expensive, it isn't because there is a lack of 2x4s. It's because the value of the dollar is being wiped out by money printing.
2. Defaulting on the debt.
Either way will result in a lot of people, a real lot of people who just don't have any money anymore.
There ARE at least 3 or 4 ways of solving the problem , but you can bet that the way chosen ( by default ) will be the one that kicks the painful consequences can down the road the furthest and exacerbates the problem even further . hell we cant even agree on what a woman is let alone come together in unity to agree to delay any gratification in the service of a better tomorrow , lets get real Bill . Can I get any action on this wager from anyone ? Beuller ? Jeff the Un Original ? Lugh ? Somebody ?
Hasn't that been actually one of the stated strategies for dealing with it ? The government is printing its way out of debt . I have no debt outside of what the government calls my share of the debt that they have racked up in our names . Maybe I should just print up enough doll hairs to cover me and Mr's Craftsman's part of it ?
Further more I don't recall agreeing to this arrangement upon arrival thru my mother's birth canal into this reality ? Its why I refer to it as 'odious 'in nature to begin with , as a legal and economic' term of art' that is . So when the government says " We " owe , I simply have to ask who is" we ", do you have a squirrel in your pocket or somethin?
“Further more I don't recall agreeing to this arrangement upon arrival thru my mother's birth canal into this reality ?”
Congrats, you are channeling the great 19th century iconoclast Lysander Spooner:
“And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made……..by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.”
My parents essentially sold me as a slave when the issued me a SS# lol .Kidding , kind of , It is never the less a thought provoking probe into the origin source of human liberty . From whence does it originally derive ?
$117,000? You are being very conservative. I heard that it was somewhere around $374,000 that every man, woman and child owe as their share of the national debt.
Unchecked capitalism is evil. Communism is evil. There needs to be a balance. Capitalism needs to be checked. There must be a limit on the amount of money one person can accumulate. What is that number? $100 million? $1 billion? $100 billion? How much money does one person need? I tell you this much, you give me $10 million I'm gone. You'll never see or hear from me again. I'll disappear like a twinkie at a starving fat man convention.
Unfortunately, it is going to take people far smarter than me to figure this out. But, capitalism unchecked stratifies society and directs all the money into the pockets of a very view leaving the many in the majority destitute and broke.
As in all things associate with humanity there must be moderation in all things. Capitalism cannot continue unchecked. It must be regulated to some extent. This, of course, would require morality or a moral people to self check themselves. That doesn't exist currently in a world obsessed with the acquisition of wealth, power and stuff.
There’s an entire generation of young workers in this country who struggle mightily to make a go of it by working a regular job — enough of a go, anyway, to afford basic health insurance, housing, food, and also be able scrape together the economic wherewithal to actually raise a family.
Hence the insane popularity of get-rich-quick-for-nothing schemes like cryptocurrency and sports betting, especially for the youngest generations. Both of these are growing at exponential rates, while producing exactly nothing of value for society. Nothing alarming there.
Meanwhile, our federal debt has quickly ballooned to $40 trillion — roughly 25% of which was accumulated just during the 5.7 years of Trump’s presidencies. Who would have thunk that huge tax cuts to corporations and billionaires wouldn’t pay for themselves, (just as they haven’t paid for themselves for the past 40 years)? And — whoops — so much for the “trillions” in promised DOGE savings, and the magic of tariff revenues. Those tariff refund checks will appear in your mailbox any day now. Have patience.
This house of cards will inevitably collapse, sooner or later. When it does, I seriously doubt your unique Bitcoin or TrumpCoin sequence of ones and zeroes housed on computer CPUs around the world will feed and house you. Good luck. You’ll need it to win big at sports betting.
Both AI, and "data centers", are simply architectural structures of the Globalist digital prison being built by the Totalitarian Transhumanistic Technocrats....that's too obvious!.... We're still in a movie theater, watching the original theatrical release of "The Wizard of Oz", and we're either a cowardly, scaredy-cat lion, a stupid, brainless scarecrow, a useless, rusty old robot, a dog, a young, fertile woman, flying monkeys, or an image much bigger but false than we appear. We're all that in the reality of the movie. Can't you imagine a re-make of WoOz, with a fully digital Emerald City?....That's what's happening now....The Wizard of Oz was a speculative documentary, just like "The Matrix", and "Terminator"....see?....
Those Totalitarian Transhuman Technocrats will make Hitler's SS look like Tele Tubbies....
....but only if WE THE PEOPLE let them be that....
The book was a commentary on the Gold Standard. The Yellow Brick Road was of course that standard. The magical Ruby slippers of the film were Silver slippers in Baum's novel. The slippers represented the movement of the time which was the free minting of Silver. Back then you could deliver a wagon load of Silver to a mint and they would turn it into Silver Dollars for you.
Baum said the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan. The Tin Man was the industrial worker. The Scarecrow was the farmer.
I wish I was more familiar with that interpretation....The WoOz has also been taken as metaphor for OTHER things, too.... What was Baum's conclusion, as ragards money, finances, economy, etc.?....
Wow , cool that I'm not the only one to speculate on the deeper subtext of the movie . I always saw the Wizard Of Oz as the false promise of a technocracy that could solve all of our problems like the Wizard did at the end of the movie . He gave the Lion courage , The Scarecrow a brain , the Tin Man a heart ,and made it possible for Dorothy to get back home .
It can no longer be stopped. Peter Theil, along with his protégée, JD Vance, occupy the White House, and President Trump is allowing them to create a vast police state: Flock cameras, surveillance centers etc, along with Theil’s open and avowed dedication to Fascism (yes he’s American but yes, he’s full German: Heil!).
Musk, a likable guy, also embedded in the White House, speaks of literally billions of robots with extreme IQ, the elimination of human productivity, and universal basic income.
Is it rude of me to meekly ask: who decides who gets what? Does this ring a little German twentieth century bell? Either fascism or straight on East Berlin communism.
Frequently, the entire elimination of humans on earth is casually brought up: they’re redundant after all once AI aliens proliferate and exterminate their own creators.
Three hundred million Americans are helpless in the schemes of a few psycho billionaire AI creators who brush off ‘silly’ talk of our children having no future.
Voting for Trump was the only choice. Harris was a predictable disaster but never would I have envisioned Trump as collaborating with unelected, despised, destroyers. I’m not sure he is any longer president: blackmailed, bought…these AI creeps are not above anything.
I don't disagree. The idea that the oligarchs, after eliminating any need for us, will support us all indefinitely with a UBI is ludicrous. It will not happen. An inevitable uprising of the dispossessed is probably already being gamed for by the robot programmers, and good luck prevailing over the future's robots.
Perhaps the most damning thing for our society is that we would have devolved to such a state that we would be limited to a choice between such atrocious leaders.
The quantum field is diverse. Protons, Lepons, Electrons - all so many gods the sum of which is the very God itself? All just matter, thus devoid of meaning much less immortality. What a POOR God!
The author of the series was a big gold guy, apparently. Germany became rich and powerful after the Allies had stolen all their gold. The real wealth being brains and brawn directed by a beneficent system as created and directed by a wise and beneficent elite. Such a system can only come into being once the banker trash are driven out.
Look at the entire infrastructure of the US, is it equal in value to the money that has been spent? IOW, do we have something we can see or touch for every dollar that has been spent? Or has fiat money taken the place of say 40% of the “wealth” and we have nothing to show for what we have built as a society.
A good example is a house. What does it take to build a house, labor and materials? How can a house be “worth” 3-4 times the value it represents? Inflation? Fiat? Or both?
Yes. The infrastructure does not live up to the money spent. Our highways and airports look like third-world shit holes. $195 billion given to Ukraine since 2022, not a penny spent in USA.
Just yesterday Zalenskyy and former VP Mike Pence on CNN saying we need to give more money and missiles to Ukraine to keep the war going. Inflation running wild while they continue to print more fiat.
$195B to gaze on rubble and a drone filled sky? Out here I am hearing commercial build is $400 a sq.ft. and the housing market is selling at $300+ a square foot. Ridiculous.
The premise was brilliant but I couldn't get thru the actual execution of the film . And its not because I don't enjoy campy when its funny , like Z nation , the spoof on Zombie films and series . Heck I even got thru " They Live !!" because it wasn't as bad as Idiocracy IMO . Theunderlying implications in " Dont Look Up" despite it being woke Netflix Trash was also pretty good , it had to do with the difficulty of getting people to realize something important was going on on a societal level , or rather their inability to do so , which in my opinion is a real issue . You didn't have to tell people not to look up because they were so locked into their subjective states of hypnosis that aliens could literally land on the Whitehouse lawn and nobody would bother to notice The ruling elite , portrayed predictably as " right wingers " given who produced it ,bugged out in a space craft leaving the rest of us to die, only to become quick food for the strange bird like occupants of the planet they escaped to lol . I thought that was amusing and karmic
Fiat is inflation or the vehicle for inflation. It is an instrument of theft and stealth taxation. An instrument of enslavement. According to the Austrian School, you can tighten your belt and make the hard decision to fix things, or you push the pedal to the metal with inflating to oblivion until it blows up. They have obviously chosen the latter. We are in the Katastrophenhausse or "Crackup Boom" where it looks likes like everything is going to the moon but is just the extra money being put to work in the Flucht in die Sachwerte or "Escape to things of value." Signs of this are hoarding of precious metals, collectibles, Prepper items etc. The World's central banks are suddenly believers in the metals they only a few years ago dismissed as "barbarous relics." As Nixon once said "We are all Keynesians now," one may now state "We are all Barbarians now." At least the students of monetary history are.
Yep , I have tried many times to use that scene from Dumb and Dumber when the gangsters finally catch up with the dumb duo to retrieve that suitcase of money only to find it full of IOU;s and assurances from the duo that they are good for it as an allegory to today's out of control government borrowing and spending but I never quite am able to nail the landing . I tell ya you gotta laugh about this stuff otherwise youll just spend all your time crying about it . It is what it is and we have no other choice but to work from that present reality . "Crying wont help ya , cryin wont do ya know good "; When The levee Breaks , Led Zeppelin .
"I'll be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender, where the ads take aim and stake their claim to the heart and soul of the spender..." The Pretender, Jackson Browne
I'm definitely what would be referred to as " sales resistant ". Great song by the way , and then of course there is the Don Henley tune " The End Of Your Innocence "
I hope you're wrong, but afraid you're correct. There IS a solution, but the barriers to that solution are largely political....not technical, or environmental....and, let's make "PERHAPS" REAL....
The USA's old operating system wasnt the Hamiltonian system, it was the created when Hamilton's system was rejected. Alexander Hamilton’s System was never fully implemented and then was destroyed during the Bank War. From the 1830s until well after WW2 the United States pursued a policy of deliberate economic, governmental, scientific, fiscal redundancy and operated with substantial legal/regulatory and policy variability, a diffused and pluralized academe, infrastructural decision making was mostly done by states and localities (in the NE, Mid West, and West it was a bit more so by localities), its business landscape was one that was structurally biased towards being one dominated by geographically diffused, heterogeneous, and redundant mid sized firms; and its banking/finance/monetary system was decentralized, heterogenous, and had very pluralized capital formations. And the Federal government was the smallest of the three levels of government in regards to overall revenue intake and spending. Thats very different and in sokme important aspects even the opposite of the Hamiltonian system
For the sake of today's discussion I am using the widely-used term, but care little what you call it.
The point is that the various transmogrifications of our economy during that era were focused on production, and assuring that producers had the wherewithal and environment in which they could keep producing.
The folly in this country in recent times has been to pretend that it doesn't matter if we know how to make anything any more because we can always arbitrage the labor out to some wretched foreigners who get paid a few cents per hour. Of course, that has resulted in appliances that fail a few minutes after their brief warranty expires, but we sure got a good buy on them.
We are on the eve of an age when it will be important to have native manufacturing competence again or, if we don't, do without.
The people we have exploited in the past won't be interested in our worthless currency, and won't have much sympathy for us being helpless ex-traders and ex-investors.
I point it out because the system we adopted from the 1830s on until after WW2 is in some ways very different in some ways even the opposite of hamilton’s system, key features we ended up adopting circa 1970s. Hamilton’s system was one that was to pursue very centralized decision making and full on standardization within banking/finance, infrastructural matters, ed/training, and regulatory matters. In whole key economic areas it was a form central planning, not as much of the soviets, but still within the category. We’re probably better served by re-introducing plurality, variability, and economic planning that is done in a much more diffused and bottom-up-way
You are still preoccupied with changing the organizational details of finance. The whole point of today's forum is to recognize that our economy should not be about finance. It should be about production.
I do not pretend to understand today's fantastically Byzantine financial ecosystem, except to recognize that it functions as an end in itself. Legitimate wealth production requires producing goods and, to a lesser extent, providing services.
Most of today's financiers don't give a rat's ass whether wealth is produced or not. Their job is to see to it that wealth is transferred to certain accounts. In the post-collapse world those financial technicians will be worthless - perhaps sweeping the shop floors of people making things.
We frequently have had differing opinions but I gotta say you knocked this one out of the park Mr Skillington . Those bronze age goatkeeps ( an exaggeration of the truth of the iron age clerics who actually wrote The Old testament but hey , I'm partly doin comedy here ) warned us about the evils of usury .
you cant make the economy about production and not about finance without changing the organizational details of finance. The USA’s political system, for over a hundred years, explicitly rejected doing what we ended up doing in the 1970s/1980s, the prevention of the “financialization” of the economy was one of the bid reasons it had the organizational details it did. And people’s predictions about what would happen if we did ended up being right, they were right all along about some things
You are so wedded to seeing the world through a financial lens that you just don't get it. In the new/old world that is in the offing financial people will be so useless that they may be regarded as a food source.
I don't care how slick you are with manipulating financial instruments, if you can't do or make something productive you will be useless baggage in the world that can't afford to pretend any longer that pixels are wealth.
First, you mentioned "entropy". OK, fine, but have you considered the "entropification of entropy"? No, I don't know whether that's a real thing, or not, but I do NOT fear any stupid old "entropy". Not in any human affairs, and scientific entropy won't really be a problem for bazillions of year, so, so what? And you're spot on about the historical part of your analysis. but I don't think you've gotten the present/near future quite right. We are well into a TOTALITARIAN TRANSHUMANISTIC TECHNOCRACY - "3T" future.... with Elon Musk & Klaus Schwab as the Technocrats....
So what we need NOW, is a re-humanization. Mother Earth, Mother Nature, is pregnant with human possibility. Mother Earth is actually giving birth to her human race species baby. Baby Humanity, being bore out of the Mother's body into SPACE. Trump has given us "Space Force", right? See where we're going? It's fine to have our heads in the clouds, or even in outer space, but we need to keep our feet solidly planted on the ground of Mother Earth, and keep our lives in harmony with Mother Nature. Sure, we can make robots, but we shouldn't keep making human robots. Cyborgs are cool in science fiction movies, and Star Trek, but a human-Borg merger is NOT in our best interests! Neither is "SkyNet-AI"..... We need the calm, rational, logical, male mind of Republicans. NOT the angry-hot, irrational, illogical, female mind of the demon-rat Democrats. Both parties are leading us into Technocracy, but the leftist/liberal/Democrat technocracy is 100% DYSTOPIAN.... Only the more rational male-brained Technocracy of Republican values can save us now....Read: Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution. Of course I'm biased. I'm a man. And a life-long Independent voter. We need hopeful, unafraid, not-angry or scared, FREE thinking and living. That government is best, which governs least, and that is NOT Democrats! And having first given us everything, and now well into taking it all away, Gov't needs to do a much better job of GIVING BACK, to WE THE PEOPLE....
A simple example of the Big Picture problem is being played out in the Southwest right now. Technology tamed the Colorado River during a time of less population that allowed a repository of water to balance out shortfalls during drought and more so population increases. Like the rest of the world’s resources, the water is running out due to limited resource availability but more so due to overpopulation. The world is facing freak water depletion, but the Southwest is the poster child.
The answers are going to be forced down humanity’s throat, creation of new resources, alternatives or less people. It will not be pretty, and it will take the form of increased competition for those resources. People are going to die.
Over population is the biggest problem on this planet. If that can't be managed in some better way, things will become exponentially worse. Personally, I don't think anything will change until the shtf. I am old and decrepit, so maybe I won't have to deal with the worst of it.
Trump made brokering Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel (anagram: The Reptile) et al. one half of a TRILLION[!] dollars to develop AI (that will make 2026’s ChatGPT look like kindergarten) a tippy-top priority immediately following his creepy Apotheosis of George Washington Illuminati inauguration (where he refused to place his hand on the Bible!).
Trump then wrote into his Big Beautiful Bill [bbb = 666] that not one of the 50 states in the union can impede this new beast in the slightest.
But he wuvs you. Pretty sure.
Mankind is not stumbling into this Orwellian nightmare, Jim. There are people here on this earth who have sold their souls to the Devil. This has been planned and executed since before any of us were born.
Isn’t the real deal about AI is the threat that the reason for human existence, productivity, will be removed. Leisure time is bunk. The cartels will give us lots to do during our leisure time.
remember the old college bathroom graffiti?: "GOD IS DEAD! - Nietzsche", and next to it, "Nietzsche is dead" - God"?....that puts Nietzsche in his proper perspective, LOL!....God bless good ole' Nietzsche!....
I recall the many comedy albums we listened to fifty odd years ago. The bawdy Gene Tracy "truck driver humor" recordings, Monty Python's Crepitation Contest, Richard Pryor's "That Nigger's Crazy," David Frye's "Richard Nixon: A Fantasy." Redd Foxx' "You Gotta Wash Your Ass" and Cheech & Chong. I don't recall the name but the album cover was like a car festooned with weed and them in stocking hats.
"And a lot of this excessive complexity lodges itself in finance, because using operations that few people can understand serves beautifully in the engineering of frauds and swindles."
See: The Income Tax Code
Yes, it works very well, exactly the way it was intentionally designed to work!....
Crafted with many loopholes, most just can't afford to navigate them.
Social Security and Medicare rules so complicated you need PHd to navigate.
Social Security and Medicare rock.
Jim - just my opinion, but both are socialist. Social even in the name. They were never meant to be entitlements. Both should be means tested. They are both a safety net for widows and orphans.
Absent a mechanism to force society's hand for the common good, people would have the widows and orphans starve.
I hear the refrain every time, "It's my money!". Yes, collected because you would not willingly feed the widows and orphans. So, we have collected on their behalf.
Orphans I can see, but aren't "widows" women? Aren't women strong and equal? Don't they have agency? If so, why aren't they responsible for feeding themselves?
Some degree of socialism is inevitable. Between the Unions, wise Anti-trust legislation and social programs - it's the only reason we had a viable 20th century to the extent we did. Private charity ain't gonna do it - as you yourself say above. That dog don't hunt. As Madison said, If men were all sages we would need no government at all, but since they are not, let us proceed.
Ditto with Get Off My Lawn patriotism - unless that lawn is the White House's.
That's no excuse.
SS, without some major correction, will wrap up broke in 2032. It’s gonna be a race whether SS or the national debt ($40T) will kill us off first. My money is on the debt, and sooner than later.
You're kidding, right? I have both, and they both suck dog poop....
True social security and medical care should be provided from/by your social capital - your tribe, so to speak. If you've invested wisely, you'll be fine.
Lib - see below.
Most just don't know the loopholes exist, or that they can be navigated through, right?....
Right. Not advertised. Tax lawyers and accountants swim right through them. The benefits obviously outweigh their fees, but very few have tax lawyers and accountants on speed dial.
Do we need more accountants & lawyers, or fewer loopholes, or BOTH?....seriously, I think BOTH....
You are correct, sir.
Andrew Jackson viewed bankers as a dangerous "moneyed aristocracy" that threatened American liberty and democratic governance. He famously declared to a delegation of bankers, "You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out." Jackson believed bankers used their concentrated power to speculate in essential goods like breadstuffs, profiting privately while charging losses to the bank.
Jackson argued that bankers bent government acts to their selfish purposes, creating artificial distinctions that favored the rich over the "plain republican." In his 1832 veto message, he warned that the bank's attempt to control the government was a "premonition of the fate that await the American people" if such an institution were perpetuated. He maintained that if Congress had the constitutional right to issue paper money, it should exercise that power directly rather than delegating it to corporations.
Jackson's hostility extended beyond the national bank to a general distrust of all banking establishments. He stated, "I have always been afraid of banks," and later warned in his Farewell Address of an insidious "money power" that could subvert the republic. He believed banking establishments were "more dangerous than standing armies" and advocated for a return to gold and silver "hard money" to prevent what he saw as financial oppression.
Lugh: By the grace of the Eternal God may they be routed out again.
The Code is easier to work with than other laws. Doesn't help much, though, does it? All it takes to master the code is a graduate degree, a CPA and a JD, and ten to fifteen years experience. Imagine trying to understand, say, immigration law. Almost as if some were certain immigration laws might be exploited to political ends without consequence.
The tax code appears to be a mechanism that protects the Uber-Rich and maintains a minimum level of survival for the non-producers, at the expense of the majority that fall in between income and wealth extremes. Part of the Great Reset will be to raid the 401Ks/IRAs of the upper middle class that have prudently saved for their retirements to prolong "The Game". That's the part of "spending other people's money" coming into play.
And that's where both Trump and Musk fail to provide effective 4th Turning leadership. Both recognize the complexity and waste, but treat the current Predicaments of Western Civilization as problems that can be solved while maintaining our standard of living. Both take advantage of the financial gimmicks of the Neo-Con economy for their own benefit, under the guise of The Religion of Progress - ignoring the inconvenience of Decline.
Americans can handle the truth, and leaders who speak of mitigation, living with less energy and resources, and transitioning "defense" spending to localized and sustainable economies are in the pipeline, but for now we're thrashing around lying to ourselves that end game can still be more Jetsons than Flintstones....
✅
Could AI and all the gashing of teeth actually be like climate change. As in fake, blown up out of proportion. Data centers are not new. I worked data centers inside large manufacturing plants as an electrician in the 70-80s. Asking for a friend. And your article is again 100% correct.
I think you are right. I am no techie but I have read some articles by Jay Valentine (Omega4America) wherein he says that all the AI stuff can be done one small computers, that the giant facilities aren't necessary. He's been spot on about a lot of things, especially the voting chicanery.
Ya think? ...begging the question, what's the agenda?
Your home library is a data center.
So is my bathroom 😁
Mine too.
We have a small data center that is part of my office.
Most every place does. It’s crazy. And you tie computers in a series it’s not gonna increase the power. Does it make sense.
Once again, I am amazed at what you are able to do with several paragraphs. Another outgrowth of this "something for nothing" society are these newly packaged casinos for the Palookas called "Prediction Markets." Endless waves of ads are attempting to addict and destroy a huge number of Dufi (plural of Dufus) by encouraging them to pick up their cell phones and bet, uh predict, on anything and everything. Every ball game has a pop up ad telling the Dufi they can bet on how many pitches, hits etc. will occur in that inning. Even the WNBA has Lisa Leslie at every game break doing ads for Prediction Markets. The Evil Ones must just love this. They can destroy people financially driving them even deeper into despair for fun and profit. Oh, and don't worry. The "experts" say only eight or nine percent of the population might become addicted to this repackaged gambling craze, so only thirty million of our fellows will be ruined. No biggy, right?
You’re so right John! As our society becomes increasingly stupid and high, these same zombies waste everything their parents worked for on gambling and drugs.
If you haven't already, watch the film "Idiocracy". We are almost there.
We have been at Idiocracy for several decades now.
Small compared to giving every kid an I phone with access to the internet.
Draft Kings and Fan Duel ads have rendered professional sports nearly unwatchable. You can be on anything to how many times Taylor Swift will appear at a chief's games to the color and fabric of Pat Mahommes jock. It is no surprise to me that all professional sporting games are rigged. Enormous amounts of money are riding on these games thanks to the fantasy betting that is proliferating like a rotten cancer. Hence the reason coaches like Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco completely alter their dominating game plan during the middle of the third quarter and end up losing the fucking championship game or why referees will call penalties where fouls do not exist or not call penalties when blatant fouls are clearly demonstrated. Money corrupts everything. It always has and it always will.
Next time a Draft Kings ad comes on, pause your television set and read the fine print. Gambling is a sickness. They acknowledge this evil but money trumps everything.
At one time drugs were a great menace to the well being of adolescents. Efforts to curtail opportunities for drug use were resoundingly condemned and mocked. This went on for decades but then came fentanyl (and even worse iterations) and nobody is laughing now.
Kind of a tough learning curve, eh?
A little bit slow for many tastes.
Gambling among adolescents is a very big deal.
No one is talking about it.
How about that.
John - Not so fast! The "Prediction Markets" are being painted as purely gambling on an outcome, and I'm afraid they will be heavily regulated, if not outlawed completely. This is actually what the Evil Ones want.
Here's why: Looking deeper, prediction markets function as a nexus of crowdsourcing up to the minute information in real time. There are vast sources of information from nearly limitless angles in real time. People may have various inside sources, confidential information, expert information, you name it. Odds change, as the information flows in. People have skin in the game - "betting" based upon their sources.
When any event occurs, it takes 2 to 3 days to shape, build and control the desired narrative. This is what has the Evil Ones in a panic, what they fear most - loss of narrative control. Prediction markets destroy their ability to create narratives and push them out through the MSM and other channels.
In reality, prediction markets (crowdsourced, real-time information) beat them to the punch, stealing their lies and propaganda thunder.
Throw out the bathwater? Sure, but we need to keep the precious, indispensable baby. The Evil Ones are betting we'll throw everything out, and from the misguided tenor, they are probably right. Gambling bad.
Think deeper, John.
I understand that and totally reject that premise. The wagers can be manipulated just like everything else. Surely "Them & They" are already taking notice of whatever mischief might be made in this regard.
Yes John, gambling, bad, bad, bad. Shut down the Prediction Markets. Go back to getting your "facts and information" from the MSM. You reject the premise precisely because you don't understand it. Good luck.
You nailed it Ron. I'm just a dummy.
Not so, John. I saw it exactly as you did. The sheer ridiculousness of it. Then I read an article on ZeroHedge, maybe a week ago, that laid it out clearly - the guy was shocking in his genius. Not sure if I archived it, but I'll try and find it and post a link. He explained it more clearly and succinctly than I ever could. His argument is convincing when understood, and he gets the credit. Such a unique perspective, I just tried to amplify it. From the totality of your comments, which are always appreciated here at CFN, you're no dummy.
Here you go, JS, enjoy!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fear-signal-why-state-urgently-wants-bind-prediction-markets
At the end of the day we should have evidence of whether or not they are of value. Fall sports and a midterm ought to deliver substantial examples for us to draw conclusions from. No need to argue about anything. It will be what it will be. Thanks for the link.
What a beautiful Monday lyric: "...the rackets and hallucinations that magically levitate them dissolve in foul mists of reveal."
Thanx for that.
“For instance, the acid trip of artificial intelligence (AI).”
I'm fond of that one! I am NOT enamored of AI! (Too many Terminator movies?) I think it's all going to fall apart before long. Depends on the 2028 vote.
Wait until you come down....
Isn't that just the best prose ever!!! I read it over and over.
Shockingly good.
If we're going to have Armageddon, please, powers of the heavens, let us have a little something to read that has style.
Debauched finance begets a debauched society.
Yes, how can a society exist without some form of exchange between its people.
Language
Money
Heritage
Thus, here we are in the new Babel.
Jim, one of your finest! Back to truer form, JHK content at it's finest!
In the 80s it was discovered by the sons and grandsons of the Builders that engineering money directly paid better than engineering Stuff. Unless that syndrome can be addressed -- 110% taxes on unearned profits? -- we're Done.
The productive side of the Hamiltonian model – without the financial chicanery – is certainly what we need for a desirable future. Unfortunately, our productive infrastructure has atrophied and been sold off in favor of fantasy wealth consisting of pixels on screens. (Eighty thousand dollar Bitcoins? Puh-leeze.)
Perhaps Private Equity and the oligarchs will awaken to their civic duty, and plow their notional wealth back into reindustrializing America. (for which Mr. Trump’s tariffs will be an essential part of the process)
Perhaps those speculating on an AI Utopia, and counting on us proles to subsidize their dream with our generated electricity and municipal water supplies, will awaken to their folly, and redirect their investing in that which is real.
Perhaps we’ll all wake up back in Kansas, with Auntie Em mopping our fevered brow. But I suspect that we are still in Oz.
Private equity and the oligarchs will not awaken to their civic duty. Private equity and the oligarchs have devoted, are devoting, and will continue to devote significant resources to drowning the very concept of civic duty in the bathtub. It interferes with their accumulation, you see. They cannot be brought to enlightenment, they have to be taken on and defeated.
The problem with capitalism is that it systematically diverts the value of millions upon millions of people's productive work into the pockets of owners. Mind you, there is no system where workers can keep 100% of the value of their work, since there will always be people (infants/children, the elderly, the infirm, people in general who are allowed to be idle in ways that society finds acceptable, such as clergy) who don't work and thus live on work done by others. It follows, then, that living on other people's productivity can't be all bad. Demand that everyone work for every crumb of their daily bread without exception and we would all end up saddled with indenture contracts at birth (otherwise known as slavery, an institution which happily has been exterminated with extreme prejudice).
If you want an example of entropy, look no further than the piles of wealth accumulated by Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and others. The process of alienating most of humanity from the value of its own work has spawned a species of monetary black holes that now exist simply to accrete, ever more and more, without end. Left to do as they will, the oligarchs will swallow everything and the rest of us will indeed be reduced to 'indenture at birth'.
Easy, do your part, do not “buy” anything these people have created? No Facebook, no MAPS, no Amazon, no PCs. The Leftist BS about the wealthy is just that, BS. How much of those fortunes are investments in their own stock? Stock is only wealth when it is sold. The Dems want to tax those assets that are really not wealth.
Musk has sunk most of his wealth into the next creation he has developed. Trump has put his $ into future projects, some of which made him money, some of which bankrupted him.
Tax the rich is Leftist propaganda to “save the nation”. Those with ignorance of what wealth is are suckers for their tripe.
If individuals acting individually were any kind of threat to oligarchic power, they would make it illegal. The reason it's not a threat is because what oligarchic power does is to shape the playing field everyone is playing on, so that ever more of the outcomes of the work people do just happens to belong to the oligarchs. The goal state of every oligarch is to be the last man standing, to own everything. The oligarch wants to be the ground under everyone else's feet, and have all of humanity living out their lives in their gravitational pull.
Property is power. Ownership is control. To own something, such as your own home, is to have something that no one can deny you. To live in a world of oligarchs is to live in a world where you have been denied control of your own life. A society that allows unlimited accumulation is one that tends toward slavery, where none but the few have even the power to direct their own lives or control their destiny. You can pule and mew for a world like that if you want; I will not.
Capital centralizes as the winners absorb the losers. They then declare, competition is a sin and cooperate for the interests of their class. John lives in Newtonian Adam Smith universe where this doesn't happen. Where markets or space are not influenced by planets or corporations.
And the Chicago School actually got away with inverting Adam Smith's prescription. Smith called for taxation on properties and rents - not on labor or production.,
That he did. Adam Smith is widely (and very intentionally) misunderstood. Take the famous 'Invisible Hand'. In Wealth of Nations, Smith uses the term to refer to a merchant naturally preferring and supporting his domestic economy. “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an Invisible Hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” (Credit: https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/adam-smith-peter-foster-invisible-hand)
Got that? In The Wealth of Nations, the role of the Invisible Hand is to lead merchants to support their domestic economy and not any foreign economy. This is a pretty dramatically different from the idea of the Invisible Hand that you usually hear. In The Wealth of Nations, at least, it just doesn't mean that at all.
It's in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith uses 'Invisible Hand' in the way it's usually understood. And in my opinion, he makes a poor showing of it:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor..."
Huh? Citation needed, Adam.
"... and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity ..."
<Nods vigorously>
"... though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires ..."
Still nodding...
"... they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements."
Facepalm. They leave the poor with just the exact minimum they can get away with. By which I mean, enough so when the poor get up again the next morning, they will be liable to do another day's work for another day's pittance, rather than show up on the rich men's doorsteps with pitchforks and torches.
"They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants ..."
This is an objectively false statement. Had the necessities of life been 'divided into equal portions among all the earth's inhabitants' (or 'nearly the same' distribution as that), surely all its inhabitants would then possess an equal portion of the necessities of life? Rights or wrongs aside, they manifestly do not. The exception would be hunter-gatherer societies, to which the Invisible Hand is not applicable.
"... and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species."
Here at least we get to the part of capitalism that pretty much everyone likes: the growth and development of productive capacity. This is what lifted hundreds of millions into industrial prosperity, first in Europe, then in North America, and most recently in China.
And when I say everyone likes this about capitalism, I mean do mean everyone, including Karl Marx. Marx wrote admiringly in numerous places (including the Communist Manifesto) of its 'colossal' productive forces that could not, or at any rate had not, been developed any other way.
It seems that Main Street "manufacturing capitalism" has been eclipsed by Wall Street "finance capitalism," the latter more easily degenerating into crony capitalism. Part of the problem with today's capitalism is that it has become greatly intertwined with the government, e.g. the military-industrial-Congressional-complex (DDE's original description which didn't make the final version of his speech.) So enmeshed, in fact, that certain key industries have become de facto arms of the federal government.
Or, in fact, that certain "industries" (if you can use that word about a line of business where actual manufacturing has been reduced to a line item on a spreadsheet) have turned the federal government into their own financing arm. The smartest way to spend your money in Washington, DC is to buy politicians, and in turn government policy. The return on investment is huge, you're buying dollar bills in exchange for pennies.
The corruption of American government is completely blatant and conducted openly. Bribery, under the auspices of campaign finance, is fully legalized and anything resembling the interests of the general public is swept aside by torrents of dark money.
Disgusting. I will make an even worse statement. The government is not only a supporter of the money interests, they are supporters and beneficiaries of the crime families in the country. Obama’s reign saw the movement of much of the industry out of the country and I believe that crime has filled in since then. This government benefits from the proceeds of that crime.
The problem with communism is that it systematically diverts the value of millions upon millions of people's productive work into the pockets of the state. FIFY
Did I say otherwise? I point out the problem with capitalism, and your reaction is to point out the problem with a different system that isn't what I'm talking about? A system where people keep more of the value of their own work, instead of giving it away to investors, is not communism. Nor is it a system where people give up all the value of their work to the state. I'd call this a straw man and be done with it, but there's a reason why people deploy these red herrings: narrative control. The point is to prevent discussion of the matter at hand: the fact that American capitalism is now in a very serious (possibly terminal) crisis, and everyone's freedom is at stake and that alternatives are available.
You may be one of those who hold that capitalism, hence plutocratic oligarchy, is natural and needs to be defended because it's 'human nature'. If that or something like it is your position, I would respond that appeals to human nature are largely empty. Every society or system that has existed, exists now, or ever will exist is an expression of 'human nature', tautologically, because societies consist of human beings, full stop. What differs between societies is the kind of solutions to human concerns they try to implement, and the sets of values they act on. Both the solutions and the values are ones that humans come up with, because it could hardly be otherwise. It follows that communism is no more or less an expression of human nature than capitalism is, and neither one is to the purpose. I'm not interested in human nature; I'm interested in the solutions, and in the values.
Your knee-jerk reaction is that I must be a communist. But in its day, the George W. Bush administration promoted something they called the Ownership Society, and that's a concept I could actually work with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership_society
There are some key differences between the Cato Institute's version of an ownership-based society and my own, though. For one, a libertarian institution like Cato takes for granted that there must be no upper limit on accumulation of ownership; they're completely fine with plutocratic oligarchy, while I am not. Libertarians like the Cato institute promote the false notion that any outcome of a very particular definition of 'free markets' must be the best outcome possible. This is how you get things like, for example, America's vastly bloated, wasteful, fraud-riddled, abusive, financially ruinous, universally hated health-care system -- a textbook example of misaligned incentives that only exists because insistence on the profit motive above all else forces everyone into an extortion racket they have no way out of.
I could go on. To make a long story short, my idea of a good society looks a lot like the one that exists today, but without the extortion, con-artistry and piffle that leaves so many people on an endless treadmill that drives other people's wealth, instead of their own. It's the one that actually dares to peer into the gargantuan blind spot where today's oligarchs did the work of taking what everyone else created for them.
"A system where people keep more of the value of their own work, instead of giving it away to investors..."
"Investors"? Giving it away to investors? One invests voluntarily. The word you are looking for is the "government" (via taxation, which is taken through coercion). In short, government is the real thief here.
You seem unaware of Private Equity's systematic appropriation of entire sectors of our economy: veterinary clinics, HVAC services, funeral homes, home builders...
They are permitted to become illegal de facto monopolies and then jack up prices to exorbitant levels. That may not seem like an issue to you, but it's daily becoming an existential problem for more and more households.
I'm well aware of the PE bugaboo; but that has NOTHING to do with Mole's point, which was that wage earners are unable to invest at all. The fact is, wage earners can and do invest everyday, whether it is in individual stocks, ETFs, their retirement funds, their own businesses, or even their own education.
You know what's extra fun and delicious? While Massachusetts' political leadership gut the public coffers to support newly arrived populations, private equity is scooping up anything and everything of value that is left to grab.
Even semi-sentient Massachusetts residents see that the elected officials are not on the up and up. But of private equity bargain basement shopping days there is no mention.
He still believes its "private" when a few companies dominate entire essential sectors. We would have never had a viable 20th century with minds like this in control. No utilities whatsoever. Just grifting (as in the medical industry) forever. A boot stamping on the human face.
"One... invests... voluntarily." Okay, what's the argument here exactly? As a riposte to what I wrote, I can only make sense of "one invests voluntarily" if this somehow means it's the waged worker who is acting voluntarily. But in almost every case, the waged worker and the investor are two different people, and it's investors who invest, no? This is incoherent.
In a realistic situation, the 'investor' is something like a hedge fund or a private equity scheme. These are abstractions that obscure the agency of real, physical people who own things for a living instead of producing value. They buy shares of ownership in enterprises, extract as much value from it as they can, and shut it down or leave it behind as soon as it runs dry. They make numbers go up not by bringing new value into the world necessarily, but by moving value around and playing shell games. They take away as much for themselves as they possibly can, padding everything with fees for good measure, and private equity in particular is known for saddling businesses with debt to push the asset-stripping process as far as it will go. They much through viable businesses like a glutton through a bucket of chicken wings, leaving the businesses, employees, and their pension plans with nothing but the bones. On and on it goes.
As for taxation, the idea that it is uniquely evil while rent-seeking by private equity ghouls and hedgies is only ever benign, useful and godly is an utter delusion. Everyone needs to get over it and learn exactly who their real enemies are.
Of course my comment was incoherent to you because you insist that only a small subset of the population out of reach of the working class is capable of investing. That is total rubbish. Like it or not, wage earners choose to invest their money every day in stocks, new products, their own businesses or even their education. This is anathema to the class warfare crowd, who also continue to look the other way when told that the real theft of the working class is being perpetrated by the government they worship in the form of excessive taxes on everything from income to everyday commercial transactions.
Years ago I got sick of those libertarian idiots, and stupid "anarcho-capitalists", and what not, with their "taxation is theft" mantra. They have no viable alternative. "Private Equity" is proving how bogus is the idea that the "private sector" is any more virtuous than the "public sector". We DO NEED far more forensic auditors & accountants, and holding "officials" of all kind to account. Yes, easier said than done, but it must be done! Or else! lol, but srsly, too....
You are supposed to be cowed by the weaponized term "Communist" and give up any further reasoned argument. The latter is too threatening to their Panglossian worldview.
Alas, if only reasoned argument were more useful than it is. Too many here are invincibly armed and armored with ignorance, which as Orwell correctly observed is strength.
Oh, the irony.
Wonderful comments.
You've got old JC down to a t. Be against the War and he'll call you a Muslim.
The either/or mind. Talking about one thing and you start talking about its supposed opposite. The classic is Muslims or Jews: Choose! How about neither one?
They are BOTH Abrahamic!....and both false doctrine! BOTH, or NEITHER!....
Jews rock, Muslims suck, and that's the end of it.
Jews suck. They refuse to abandon the archaic barbarism of male infant genital mutilation, which is the ancient root of the contemporary "trans" cult and Psy Op. Also, the blasphemous and specious, self-defeating false doctrine that they are "God's chosen people". God neither plays dice, nor favorites with either the universe, or mankind. Sorry, Einstein, you're not the genius you've been hyped to be.But yes, overall, Muslims suck more than Jews. Bur it seems that you just can't have one without the other. One of the largest orgies of perversion on the planet, is the yearly so-called "Gay Pride Parade" in Tel Aviv. But Islam still practices female genital mutilation and subjugation and enslavement of women, along with allowing the gay rape of boys by men. If you want to know who controls you, look at who you're not allowed to criticize....So long as the Jewish & Muslim slave masters exist, mankind will never know the true & total freedom of God's loving grace....
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, by GOD!....
I entirely agree. But you'll note that many of the participants on this forum remain eternally priapic with the fantasy they they will somehow join the select ranks of the Eaters, rather than be eaten.
The very essence of Capitalism. Social Darwinism reborn as Libertarianism with an inhuman face.
I have known several Libertarians who seemed bright enough until you engaged them in debate about their philosophy. Libertarianism concerns a single interest: "protecting what is MINE." It does not provide for any of the innumerable road-building type needs of a functional society. And it's even half-assed regarding property, defending your right to piss in your stream but not addressing the problem of having someone else upstream from you also piss in it.
The libertarian mindset is a kind of brain damage. It results from committing to a world view that is utterly, terminally transactional, at all times and in all ways. Everything about humans and human society must be cast in transactional terms. And wherever people and/or physical reality resist transactionality, such resistance will be either dismissed as irrelevant or defined out of existence.
The essence of a transaction is (a) a change, that is (b) self-contained, meaning it (c) has no side effects, and therefore (d) can be left to the transacting parties. If I have a dollar and you have a chocolate bar, and I give you the dollar and you give me the chocolate bar, and both of us walk away satisfied, then no one else can possibly object. Right?
Sure, but what if the chocolate bar is electricity from a coal-fired power plant instead? You get paid, I get the electricity. Both of us win. "But what about pollution?" asks a sensible third party, choking on soot. In response, the libertarian points at (d) and says "You use electricity too, don't you, Mr. 'Sensible'? So either stop using electricity or keep quiet." As if giving up the use of electricity would make the libertarian apt to be less transactional.
“Sure, but what if the chocolate bar is electricity from a coal-fired power plant instead? You get paid, I get the electricity. Both of us win. "But what about pollution?" asks a sensible third party, choking on soot. In response, the libertarian points at (d) and says "You use electricity too, don't you, Mr. 'Sensible'? So either stop using electricity or keep quiet."
Though libertarians have some hurdles to climb your example seems fictitious. Since it is supposedly founded on the non aggression principle a libertarian would find “soot” an aggression on his physical being. He would be quick to ask courts to do something about this. I’m unaware of any libertarian policies that recommend doing away with civil courts.
In reality the pollution battles we’ve had in this country, from smog to other forms of industrial pollution have been much more enabled by the reluctance of government officials to offend corporations. It’s only been public outcry including libertarians that finally lead to government enforcement against these activities.
We already are indentured at birth to the tune of $117,000 and climbing . I consider this 'public debt ' entirely Odious in nature .
The latest figure I've seen is about three hundred thousand per household. Don't worry: we'll soon have wheelbarrows full of Greenbacks, and be able to pay off the national debt for less than the cost of a dozen eggs.
Two ways we get out of this national debt problem.
1. Money printing to monetize the debt. This is the chosen path of our elected "representatives" and they are already doing this. If you want to know why homes are so fucking expensive, it isn't because there is a lack of 2x4s. It's because the value of the dollar is being wiped out by money printing.
2. Defaulting on the debt.
Either way will result in a lot of people, a real lot of people who just don't have any money anymore.
Either way, we are boned.
There IS at least a 3rd, and probably 4th way....but you fools wouldn't understand it, even if you COULD listen....LOL!....grow up, kids....
What are they? Please share. I'd like to read your opinion.
There ARE at least 3 or 4 ways of solving the problem , but you can bet that the way chosen ( by default ) will be the one that kicks the painful consequences can down the road the furthest and exacerbates the problem even further . hell we cant even agree on what a woman is let alone come together in unity to agree to delay any gratification in the service of a better tomorrow , lets get real Bill . Can I get any action on this wager from anyone ? Beuller ? Jeff the Un Original ? Lugh ? Somebody ?
Hasn't that been actually one of the stated strategies for dealing with it ? The government is printing its way out of debt . I have no debt outside of what the government calls my share of the debt that they have racked up in our names . Maybe I should just print up enough doll hairs to cover me and Mr's Craftsman's part of it ?
Further more I don't recall agreeing to this arrangement upon arrival thru my mother's birth canal into this reality ? Its why I refer to it as 'odious 'in nature to begin with , as a legal and economic' term of art' that is . So when the government says " We " owe , I simply have to ask who is" we ", do you have a squirrel in your pocket or somethin?
“Further more I don't recall agreeing to this arrangement upon arrival thru my mother's birth canal into this reality ?”
Congrats, you are channeling the great 19th century iconoclast Lysander Spooner:
“And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made……..by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.”
My parents essentially sold me as a slave when the issued me a SS# lol .Kidding , kind of , It is never the less a thought provoking probe into the origin source of human liberty . From whence does it originally derive ?
$117,000? You are being very conservative. I heard that it was somewhere around $374,000 that every man, woman and child owe as their share of the national debt.
Unchecked capitalism is evil. Communism is evil. There needs to be a balance. Capitalism needs to be checked. There must be a limit on the amount of money one person can accumulate. What is that number? $100 million? $1 billion? $100 billion? How much money does one person need? I tell you this much, you give me $10 million I'm gone. You'll never see or hear from me again. I'll disappear like a twinkie at a starving fat man convention.
Unfortunately, it is going to take people far smarter than me to figure this out. But, capitalism unchecked stratifies society and directs all the money into the pockets of a very view leaving the many in the majority destitute and broke.
As in all things associate with humanity there must be moderation in all things. Capitalism cannot continue unchecked. It must be regulated to some extent. This, of course, would require morality or a moral people to self check themselves. That doesn't exist currently in a world obsessed with the acquisition of wealth, power and stuff.
There’s an entire generation of young workers in this country who struggle mightily to make a go of it by working a regular job — enough of a go, anyway, to afford basic health insurance, housing, food, and also be able scrape together the economic wherewithal to actually raise a family.
Hence the insane popularity of get-rich-quick-for-nothing schemes like cryptocurrency and sports betting, especially for the youngest generations. Both of these are growing at exponential rates, while producing exactly nothing of value for society. Nothing alarming there.
Meanwhile, our federal debt has quickly ballooned to $40 trillion — roughly 25% of which was accumulated just during the 5.7 years of Trump’s presidencies. Who would have thunk that huge tax cuts to corporations and billionaires wouldn’t pay for themselves, (just as they haven’t paid for themselves for the past 40 years)? And — whoops — so much for the “trillions” in promised DOGE savings, and the magic of tariff revenues. Those tariff refund checks will appear in your mailbox any day now. Have patience.
This house of cards will inevitably collapse, sooner or later. When it does, I seriously doubt your unique Bitcoin or TrumpCoin sequence of ones and zeroes housed on computer CPUs around the world will feed and house you. Good luck. You’ll need it to win big at sports betting.
Prediction Markets Don! Prediction Markets!
Ah, yes, I forgot -- Prediction Markets!
Those will be our path to prosperity!
Thanks, John, for the reminder.
Or the elimination of the income tax thanks to the tariffs. Always empty promises.
Both AI, and "data centers", are simply architectural structures of the Globalist digital prison being built by the Totalitarian Transhumanistic Technocrats....that's too obvious!.... We're still in a movie theater, watching the original theatrical release of "The Wizard of Oz", and we're either a cowardly, scaredy-cat lion, a stupid, brainless scarecrow, a useless, rusty old robot, a dog, a young, fertile woman, flying monkeys, or an image much bigger but false than we appear. We're all that in the reality of the movie. Can't you imagine a re-make of WoOz, with a fully digital Emerald City?....That's what's happening now....The Wizard of Oz was a speculative documentary, just like "The Matrix", and "Terminator"....see?....
Those Totalitarian Transhuman Technocrats will make Hitler's SS look like Tele Tubbies....
....but only if WE THE PEOPLE let them be that....
The book was a commentary on the Gold Standard. The Yellow Brick Road was of course that standard. The magical Ruby slippers of the film were Silver slippers in Baum's novel. The slippers represented the movement of the time which was the free minting of Silver. Back then you could deliver a wagon load of Silver to a mint and they would turn it into Silver Dollars for you.
Baum said the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan. The Tin Man was the industrial worker. The Scarecrow was the farmer.
I wish I was more familiar with that interpretation....The WoOz has also been taken as metaphor for OTHER things, too.... What was Baum's conclusion, as ragards money, finances, economy, etc.?....
Wow , cool that I'm not the only one to speculate on the deeper subtext of the movie . I always saw the Wizard Of Oz as the false promise of a technocracy that could solve all of our problems like the Wizard did at the end of the movie . He gave the Lion courage , The Scarecrow a brain , the Tin Man a heart ,and made it possible for Dorothy to get back home .
but they never really fully explained about those flying monkeys! those scared the crap out of me as a little kid! lol
I don't honestly know. I shall look him up and see what else he may have had to say.
So far We the People are doing a pretty good job of letting them.
And the longer we let them, the harsher will be the methods necessary to make them stop.
It can no longer be stopped. Peter Theil, along with his protégée, JD Vance, occupy the White House, and President Trump is allowing them to create a vast police state: Flock cameras, surveillance centers etc, along with Theil’s open and avowed dedication to Fascism (yes he’s American but yes, he’s full German: Heil!).
Musk, a likable guy, also embedded in the White House, speaks of literally billions of robots with extreme IQ, the elimination of human productivity, and universal basic income.
Is it rude of me to meekly ask: who decides who gets what? Does this ring a little German twentieth century bell? Either fascism or straight on East Berlin communism.
Frequently, the entire elimination of humans on earth is casually brought up: they’re redundant after all once AI aliens proliferate and exterminate their own creators.
Three hundred million Americans are helpless in the schemes of a few psycho billionaire AI creators who brush off ‘silly’ talk of our children having no future.
Voting for Trump was the only choice. Harris was a predictable disaster but never would I have envisioned Trump as collaborating with unelected, despised, destroyers. I’m not sure he is any longer president: blackmailed, bought…these AI creeps are not above anything.
I don't disagree. The idea that the oligarchs, after eliminating any need for us, will support us all indefinitely with a UBI is ludicrous. It will not happen. An inevitable uprising of the dispossessed is probably already being gamed for by the robot programmers, and good luck prevailing over the future's robots.
Perhaps the most damning thing for our society is that we would have devolved to such a state that we would be limited to a choice between such atrocious leaders.
Have a nice day!
The quantum field is diverse. Protons, Lepons, Electrons - all so many gods the sum of which is the very God itself? All just matter, thus devoid of meaning much less immortality. What a POOR God!
The author of the series was a big gold guy, apparently. Germany became rich and powerful after the Allies had stolen all their gold. The real wealth being brains and brawn directed by a beneficent system as created and directed by a wise and beneficent elite. Such a system can only come into being once the banker trash are driven out.
"Banker trash", meaning....????....I'll let that one hang, so to speak.....
lol, but not funny....
Waiting.....
Nice gets us nowhere. Never did, never will. You think we niced the Indians into giving up their land?
Bloody Bill Anderson did tell Josie Wales "You'll find them in Kansas."
Look at the entire infrastructure of the US, is it equal in value to the money that has been spent? IOW, do we have something we can see or touch for every dollar that has been spent? Or has fiat money taken the place of say 40% of the “wealth” and we have nothing to show for what we have built as a society.
A good example is a house. What does it take to build a house, labor and materials? How can a house be “worth” 3-4 times the value it represents? Inflation? Fiat? Or both?
Yes. The infrastructure does not live up to the money spent. Our highways and airports look like third-world shit holes. $195 billion given to Ukraine since 2022, not a penny spent in USA.
Just yesterday Zalenskyy and former VP Mike Pence on CNN saying we need to give more money and missiles to Ukraine to keep the war going. Inflation running wild while they continue to print more fiat.
$195B to gaze on rubble and a drone filled sky? Out here I am hearing commercial build is $400 a sq.ft. and the housing market is selling at $300+ a square foot. Ridiculous.
Idiocracy, the movie!!!
The premise was brilliant but I couldn't get thru the actual execution of the film . And its not because I don't enjoy campy when its funny , like Z nation , the spoof on Zombie films and series . Heck I even got thru " They Live !!" because it wasn't as bad as Idiocracy IMO . Theunderlying implications in " Dont Look Up" despite it being woke Netflix Trash was also pretty good , it had to do with the difficulty of getting people to realize something important was going on on a societal level , or rather their inability to do so , which in my opinion is a real issue . You didn't have to tell people not to look up because they were so locked into their subjective states of hypnosis that aliens could literally land on the Whitehouse lawn and nobody would bother to notice The ruling elite , portrayed predictably as " right wingers " given who produced it ,bugged out in a space craft leaving the rest of us to die, only to become quick food for the strange bird like occupants of the planet they escaped to lol . I thought that was amusing and karmic
Fiat is inflation or the vehicle for inflation. It is an instrument of theft and stealth taxation. An instrument of enslavement. According to the Austrian School, you can tighten your belt and make the hard decision to fix things, or you push the pedal to the metal with inflating to oblivion until it blows up. They have obviously chosen the latter. We are in the Katastrophenhausse or "Crackup Boom" where it looks likes like everything is going to the moon but is just the extra money being put to work in the Flucht in die Sachwerte or "Escape to things of value." Signs of this are hoarding of precious metals, collectibles, Prepper items etc. The World's central banks are suddenly believers in the metals they only a few years ago dismissed as "barbarous relics." As Nixon once said "We are all Keynesians now," one may now state "We are all Barbarians now." At least the students of monetary history are.
Yep , I have tried many times to use that scene from Dumb and Dumber when the gangsters finally catch up with the dumb duo to retrieve that suitcase of money only to find it full of IOU;s and assurances from the duo that they are good for it as an allegory to today's out of control government borrowing and spending but I never quite am able to nail the landing . I tell ya you gotta laugh about this stuff otherwise youll just spend all your time crying about it . It is what it is and we have no other choice but to work from that present reality . "Crying wont help ya , cryin wont do ya know good "; When The levee Breaks , Led Zeppelin .
"I'll be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender, where the ads take aim and stake their claim to the heart and soul of the spender..." The Pretender, Jackson Browne
I'm definitely what would be referred to as " sales resistant ". Great song by the way , and then of course there is the Don Henley tune " The End Of Your Innocence "
....and to think I could have bought Gold Eagles at $300 a piece back in the 80's.
I recall sometime in the late 70's when they became available, Krugerrand one ounce bullion coins were $125.
I hope you're wrong, but afraid you're correct. There IS a solution, but the barriers to that solution are largely political....not technical, or environmental....and, let's make "PERHAPS" REAL....
The USA's old operating system wasnt the Hamiltonian system, it was the created when Hamilton's system was rejected. Alexander Hamilton’s System was never fully implemented and then was destroyed during the Bank War. From the 1830s until well after WW2 the United States pursued a policy of deliberate economic, governmental, scientific, fiscal redundancy and operated with substantial legal/regulatory and policy variability, a diffused and pluralized academe, infrastructural decision making was mostly done by states and localities (in the NE, Mid West, and West it was a bit more so by localities), its business landscape was one that was structurally biased towards being one dominated by geographically diffused, heterogeneous, and redundant mid sized firms; and its banking/finance/monetary system was decentralized, heterogenous, and had very pluralized capital formations. And the Federal government was the smallest of the three levels of government in regards to overall revenue intake and spending. Thats very different and in sokme important aspects even the opposite of the Hamiltonian system
For the sake of today's discussion I am using the widely-used term, but care little what you call it.
The point is that the various transmogrifications of our economy during that era were focused on production, and assuring that producers had the wherewithal and environment in which they could keep producing.
The folly in this country in recent times has been to pretend that it doesn't matter if we know how to make anything any more because we can always arbitrage the labor out to some wretched foreigners who get paid a few cents per hour. Of course, that has resulted in appliances that fail a few minutes after their brief warranty expires, but we sure got a good buy on them.
We are on the eve of an age when it will be important to have native manufacturing competence again or, if we don't, do without.
The people we have exploited in the past won't be interested in our worthless currency, and won't have much sympathy for us being helpless ex-traders and ex-investors.
I point it out because the system we adopted from the 1830s on until after WW2 is in some ways very different in some ways even the opposite of hamilton’s system, key features we ended up adopting circa 1970s. Hamilton’s system was one that was to pursue very centralized decision making and full on standardization within banking/finance, infrastructural matters, ed/training, and regulatory matters. In whole key economic areas it was a form central planning, not as much of the soviets, but still within the category. We’re probably better served by re-introducing plurality, variability, and economic planning that is done in a much more diffused and bottom-up-way
You are still preoccupied with changing the organizational details of finance. The whole point of today's forum is to recognize that our economy should not be about finance. It should be about production.
I do not pretend to understand today's fantastically Byzantine financial ecosystem, except to recognize that it functions as an end in itself. Legitimate wealth production requires producing goods and, to a lesser extent, providing services.
Most of today's financiers don't give a rat's ass whether wealth is produced or not. Their job is to see to it that wealth is transferred to certain accounts. In the post-collapse world those financial technicians will be worthless - perhaps sweeping the shop floors of people making things.
We frequently have had differing opinions but I gotta say you knocked this one out of the park Mr Skillington . Those bronze age goatkeeps ( an exaggeration of the truth of the iron age clerics who actually wrote The Old testament but hey , I'm partly doin comedy here ) warned us about the evils of usury .
you cant make the economy about production and not about finance without changing the organizational details of finance. The USA’s political system, for over a hundred years, explicitly rejected doing what we ended up doing in the 1970s/1980s, the prevention of the “financialization” of the economy was one of the bid reasons it had the organizational details it did. And people’s predictions about what would happen if we did ended up being right, they were right all along about some things
You are so wedded to seeing the world through a financial lens that you just don't get it. In the new/old world that is in the offing financial people will be so useless that they may be regarded as a food source.
I don't care how slick you are with manipulating financial instruments, if you can't do or make something productive you will be useless baggage in the world that can't afford to pretend any longer that pixels are wealth.
Great podcast with Jeff Tucker, sir.
First, you mentioned "entropy". OK, fine, but have you considered the "entropification of entropy"? No, I don't know whether that's a real thing, or not, but I do NOT fear any stupid old "entropy". Not in any human affairs, and scientific entropy won't really be a problem for bazillions of year, so, so what? And you're spot on about the historical part of your analysis. but I don't think you've gotten the present/near future quite right. We are well into a TOTALITARIAN TRANSHUMANISTIC TECHNOCRACY - "3T" future.... with Elon Musk & Klaus Schwab as the Technocrats....
So what we need NOW, is a re-humanization. Mother Earth, Mother Nature, is pregnant with human possibility. Mother Earth is actually giving birth to her human race species baby. Baby Humanity, being bore out of the Mother's body into SPACE. Trump has given us "Space Force", right? See where we're going? It's fine to have our heads in the clouds, or even in outer space, but we need to keep our feet solidly planted on the ground of Mother Earth, and keep our lives in harmony with Mother Nature. Sure, we can make robots, but we shouldn't keep making human robots. Cyborgs are cool in science fiction movies, and Star Trek, but a human-Borg merger is NOT in our best interests! Neither is "SkyNet-AI"..... We need the calm, rational, logical, male mind of Republicans. NOT the angry-hot, irrational, illogical, female mind of the demon-rat Democrats. Both parties are leading us into Technocracy, but the leftist/liberal/Democrat technocracy is 100% DYSTOPIAN.... Only the more rational male-brained Technocracy of Republican values can save us now....Read: Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution. Of course I'm biased. I'm a man. And a life-long Independent voter. We need hopeful, unafraid, not-angry or scared, FREE thinking and living. That government is best, which governs least, and that is NOT Democrats! And having first given us everything, and now well into taking it all away, Gov't needs to do a much better job of GIVING BACK, to WE THE PEOPLE....
A simple example of the Big Picture problem is being played out in the Southwest right now. Technology tamed the Colorado River during a time of less population that allowed a repository of water to balance out shortfalls during drought and more so population increases. Like the rest of the world’s resources, the water is running out due to limited resource availability but more so due to overpopulation. The world is facing freak water depletion, but the Southwest is the poster child.
The answers are going to be forced down humanity’s throat, creation of new resources, alternatives or less people. It will not be pretty, and it will take the form of increased competition for those resources. People are going to die.
Over population is the biggest problem on this planet. If that can't be managed in some better way, things will become exponentially worse. Personally, I don't think anything will change until the shtf. I am old and decrepit, so maybe I won't have to deal with the worst of it.
Me, too. Until dying becomes more popular that procreating, I think you are right, no change.
I really do believe that advancements in high tech are going to lose the ability to offset population increases, with disastrous results.
Edward Abbey called it 50 years ago.
What about the industrial uses of sea salt? Surely it doesn't have to just be dumped back into the sea?
Lovely post! We are living in the Twilight Zone imo. 🤣
Trump made brokering Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel (anagram: The Reptile) et al. one half of a TRILLION[!] dollars to develop AI (that will make 2026’s ChatGPT look like kindergarten) a tippy-top priority immediately following his creepy Apotheosis of George Washington Illuminati inauguration (where he refused to place his hand on the Bible!).
Trump then wrote into his Big Beautiful Bill [bbb = 666] that not one of the 50 states in the union can impede this new beast in the slightest.
But he wuvs you. Pretty sure.
Mankind is not stumbling into this Orwellian nightmare, Jim. There are people here on this earth who have sold their souls to the Devil. This has been planned and executed since before any of us were born.
I like it but don't forget "6uild 6ack 6etter" also had a similar configuration . "Let he who has wisdom calculate the number of the beast "
Note: A lot of that $500,000,000,000 was Saudi money. You know how Saudis love their freedom. Sheik yer booty.
The current AI and data center hysteria is a nuclear weapons circa 1950 redux - without the great campy sci-fi movies.
Isn’t the real deal about AI is the threat that the reason for human existence, productivity, will be removed. Leisure time is bunk. The cartels will give us lots to do during our leisure time.
Yup. Radiation is actually good for people. Watch the movie, Repo Man.
Terminator 2
Just this past weekend. China is way ahead of the US.
https://s.yimg.com/lo/mysterio/api/6f5b784826185a2c3e95647f46b82e842a7333a6e489fb0931ebf53161179dcb/lightyear_networkapi/resizefill_w1200%3Bquality_80%3Bformat_webp/https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.zenfs.com%2Fen%2Fafp.com%2F71d793df31c89ca8ddb80023d23973d2.jpg
https://www.reuters.com/sports/chinese-humanoid-robot-lightning-beats-human-100m-world-record-state-media-says-2026-08-22/
Lightning? Been there, done that...
https://black-face.com/Nick-Lightnin-Stewart.htm
“ we have invented happiness, say the last men, and they blink”
—Nietzsche
remember the old college bathroom graffiti?: "GOD IS DEAD! - Nietzsche", and next to it, "Nietzsche is dead" - God"?....that puts Nietzsche in his proper perspective, LOL!....God bless good ole' Nietzsche!....
Shakespeare: “To be or not to be.”
Nietzsche: “To do is to be.”
Sartre: “To be is to do.”
Sinatra: “Do be do be do.”
Cheech & Chong, "Dude, pass that doobie!"
Buddha(not): Be a human doing, do a human being." & "Do a human being, be a human doing."....
Cheech & Chong, redux: "Dat Do be de doobie-doo"....
....wait, who the hell started this crap?....lol
Cheech: Hey man...am I driving ok?
Chong: (After looking around) I think we're parked man...
I recall the many comedy albums we listened to fifty odd years ago. The bawdy Gene Tracy "truck driver humor" recordings, Monty Python's Crepitation Contest, Richard Pryor's "That Nigger's Crazy," David Frye's "Richard Nixon: A Fantasy." Redd Foxx' "You Gotta Wash Your Ass" and Cheech & Chong. I don't recall the name but the album cover was like a car festooned with weed and them in stocking hats.
In a room with black light posters!!
Kroll!
Faith without works is dead - James the Apostle
She offered her honor,
He honored her offer,
And all night long,
It was honor and offer....
thanks for the laugh, and I do remember that one.
We need WAY, WAY WAY, MORE laughter these days!....thnx, ttyl....
It's as if nobody has read or watched I, Robot or the Terminator series, for some perverted reason, there is a rush to let AI take over our lives.
Or maybe we just see every thing as predictive programming and propaganda ( because most of it is ) ? Life imitating art ?
"So it is written. So it shall be done."
If only we could take down Brennan, Comey, Wray et al with it.
AMEN