our brains run simulations of awful situations all the time as a diagnostic self-test system. The fact that we recoil in revulsion from destructive intrusive thoughts is a sign that we are still at least nominally sane. Those who yearn for peace prepare for war. Likewise, those who care for their loved ones prepare to face terrible events that might befall them.
Now imagine riding one with your wife and TWO CHILDREN.
NEVER. FUCKING. AGAIN.
(Disclaimer: nothing happened, but the fucking horror and constant stress. That’s the kind of shit I have no problem doing by myself or with my wife only.)
The money system changed so that the bottom 80-90%'s wealth and income is constantly lowered via inflation and that stolen money is then handed over to the richest and most powerful people/companies via debt.
(side note: when I’m saying wages or wealth are shrinking, I mean in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation, since the money you do get paid is worth less each year)
In this new system Nixon set up, new money is created out of nothing via debt via the banks, that money first mostly goes to the largest companies as loans. The Cantillon Effect describes how these companies can use that money before the inflation from the distribution of that money kicks in.
So not only is it stolen money, it’s also worth more if you sit right at the tap close to the banks and the central banks.
But the biggest effect is that the working class can’t adjust their wage prices as fast as companies can adjust their prices, so they are constantly shrinking compared to corporate profits. only the top income earners can outgrow the devaluation of their income (e.g. tech workers).
As an example, this means Amazon gets the wealth out of your pockets and on top of that profits off of the fact that their workers wages are constantly shrinking in real terms.
Another difference is the one of the working class’s most important way to store wealth is through savings which are inflated away constantly, vs the rich have the ability to invest in a way doesn’t get inflated away.
Another issue is interest rate manipulation, specifically artificially low interest rates. It floods the market with money, preferentially going to already wealthy people since they have an easier time getting loans and bigger ones. This mainly creates a giant bubble in the real estate market, making everything more expensive than “natural”. So anyone with real estate gets richer and richer and everyone else gets screwed over. That’s another reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Inflation also constantly devalues debt, so the rich that hold the most debt are effectively getting their debt paid off via the wealth of the working class.
In this system, anyone who can profit from debt and outgrow inflation wins and everyone else looses big time. Practically that means the bottom 80-90% of society.
Then also global labor arbitrage screwed over workers, so outsourcing.
The groundwork for this system was created in 1971. Some of this has been set up later. It was a takeover of our monetary system by crony capitalists to rig it in their favor.
There were a bunch of other policy changes disadvantaging the working class that others argue are more important, but in my opinion the changes to the monerary system are by far the most important effect.
That system has been cloned all over the world, that’s why everyone has the same issues.
Another issue is that per capita energy production has been stagnant since 1971, energy correlated almost 1:1 with wealth. But that’s at least for a good reason, that being to protect the environment. Still, not only are we not growing richer (besides from efficiency gains), a larger and larger share of what wealth we do have is going to the rich.
If we want to reverse that we need to constitutionally enshrine stable money (i.e. no inflation).
You could also try to redistribute the new money created via inflation to the working class somehow, but that seems silly when you could just have stable money instead. Imagine if you could just build wealth by just saving money again.
Or you could force companies to adjust wages by inflation, but that assumes we can produce accurate inflation numbers. In reality the official inflation numbers are always lower than the real inflation, so workers would still be screwed over. So I’m still for stable money instead.
And unless you want to wait decades to get back the wealth that has been stolen over the last 50 years, you need to redistribute it back to the bottom 80-90% in some way.
For example you could do a 8% wealth tax. The stock market grows by 8-10% each year, meaning if you have money, you just get 8-10% richer each year by literally doing nothing. If you take away that, the playing field is leveled with the working class. it basically means the rich would actually have to work for their money for a change.
We have to change something, because the system is clearly at the breaking point. Economic and well-being indicators haven’t been this bad since WW2. And in may cases they are worse.
We are basically just serfs who only exist to make the rich richer at this point.
I never tipped a landlord, but as a joke I paid my rent in Sacajawea Dollars so as to give him a “bag of gold.” At first he was pissed, but then he asked me to continue. Apparently they turned out to be good tips at the bar.
I don’t remember it being slow, but I think that’s just because the slow pace was part of the intention behind the show. Offices are slow, horrible places to work when we’re talking about corporate environments. So it added to the horror that they made many in-office experiences drag out, and it hit really hard as a result.
So yeah, I agree, but also… I loved/hated it (mostly loved it).
There’s no way farming was only done 5 sporadic months of the year, that livestock keeping would allow you to just fuck off and not work that frequently, and they often did things like produce parts of their own cloths etc which I would count that much sewing/darning to be work let along the rest of the homesteading requirements…
Medieval chores weren’t putting clothes in the washing machine or giving the bathroom a wipe, they were weaving and sewing clothes by hand and then laboriously washing them in the stream, and hauling buckets of shit. Everything was much harder and much less pleasant, and that was how you spent your ‘free time’.
The point is they had all of that to do by hand, and still managed to “work for hire” less time than us in a society where over 90% of the stuff is automated.
You have a misconception of peasant life I believe. They had far more free time for socializing than you’d ever believe and the work they had to do day to day was not this slog you envision.
Peasants had at least a couple changes of clothes, plus the Sunday and festivities clothes.
Also don’t forget that salmon for dinner didn’t catch itself, you either spend the time, or it’s lobster night again. And better remember to get some flour to the baker to get some bread made for the family, or it’s lobster with month old moldy bread. Better hope the chickens lay some eggs for breakfast.
I don’t know why you think modern people have more leisure time?
Peasant work was seasonal first of all, most work wasn’t consistent nor were they afforded wages. Most works resulted in a direct product for the person doing the work, cooking, clothes making, farming.
You don’t understand how much leisure peasants had. Most culture we consider today is from peasant work. Dancing, music, song, joking, and while cooking is work cooking is also a social gathering of work and then eating. Peasants weren’t the working class we are today, we work far more and have far more chores to do. Making clothes by hand was harder but your quality was higher and clothes lasted, they didn’t shop for groceries or deal with car upkeep, they didn’t spend 8 hours at work and an hour traveling both ways.
Peasants were peasants because they didn’t have work to do and generate income with, it was literally mostly chores or leisure.
This is why the black plague was helpful, less people meant workers could make more demands and we see the beginning of a work culture develop.
I don’t get months of holidays? I haven’t had off in years bro. I get two days off from my job a year I don’t request, I am a chef.
Peasants always stopped working, work was probably done before the sun was even close to going down. Hunting, fishing, cooking are leisure activities they aren’t work you imagine.
It took long to produce clothes but you don’t need 47 outfits that are made to fall apart in less than a year.
150 days isn’t a myth. It is a stretch of the truth but we work more, we have less time. We have more ability to do things like travel or forms of entertainment but no.
You are confusing the peasants of then with middle class people. The poors, me, we work 40-60 hours a week sometimes two jobs with no vacations often in the hours office workers aren’t working because we are running the movie theaters, salting the roads, cooking your food, etc.
A 9-5 is probably not actually the peasantry.
People had more free time and less stressors than we do today.
If a dude can crosspost 5 posts into different communities and reach the frontpage, then that means there is a tiny userbase on lemmy and that the issue is interesting to that userbase.
I once saw a man in Delhi with a literal cloud of flies permanently stationed above his head. I thought that was just a cartoon trope but I realised then that it was an actual thing.
There’s bacteria everywhere in the West too, and people who move out of the tropics tend to have a lot of respiratory issues in the new environment.
Sanitary standards are lower, and particularly improper disposal of human waste is a massive problem in the third world, but unless you work in semiconductors or at NASA there’s no such thing as perfectly clean. Let’s not be snooty.
Most third world countries have rivers of plastic and all manner of garbage flowing right through densely populated places. India’s rivers are foaming from sewage they are so bad.
And because the education level is so low, the citizens just frolic in it thinking it’s safe, or worse.
Would love to see some bipartisan support for banning congress members from trading stocks. Both sides are doing it to such a degree that they are more likely to be replaced before any legislation regarding this gets passed. Obligatory Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker link: twitter.com/PelosiTracker_/
Nancy Pelosi gets a bad rap, but she’s actually not one of the most successful traders in congress. Of the 26 traders in Congress who beat the S&P 500 in 2022, Nancy was not one of them.
She also doesn’t actually trade any stocks. She married a man in college who now owns a brokerage. To ban her from owning stock trades would be the same as asking her to divorce her husband or be removed from office.
One of the biggest controversies she’s ever been in was when VISA lobbied her and made meetings with her before an influential vote, at which point her husband bought large shares in VISA, and then she…
voted against VISA’s interests anyways…
The best part of all this is Paul Pelosi still made money selling the shares because society as a whole has duped itself into thinking following Pelosi is the ultimate grift for decades now. The fact is that we only even know about their trades because of legislature that Pelosi helped pass in the first place.
I wouldn’t complain if this happened without needing this kind of legislation.
That said I do agree that people like her would be in a pickle and I don’t think it should necessarily be straight banned, but instead politicians in her situation and their closest associated people should have their trades regularly audited for insider trading.
That’s just the system we have now, then. We have the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the STOCK Act of 2012. Clearly I think more should be done, but I also don’t agree with forcing people to divorce their loved ones and leave their families while in office. Maybe something that makes future members of congress ineligible for office if their spouse trades stocks as an income source?
Of the 26 traders in Congress who beat the S&P 500 in 2022, Nancy was not one of them.
We only started tracking trades in 2021. Pelosi has been in office since the 1987 and her husband’s venture capital firm Financial Leasing Services, Inc. is the primary reason for the family’s $115M household valuation. A big part of the FLS holdings is sports venue real estate. And a big part of the profitability of that real estate stems from city, state, and federal grant money. So… shrug
But no, this isn’t just Nancy Pelosi personally getting in on the ground floor of Facebook, Google, or Amazon, back before they were major recipients of NSA money for data collections and warehousing.
Given EIGA predates the internet, the archives are probably stored as papers somewhere in the library of congress or the SEC, let me know if you find anything online.
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