Comment Re:IMPOSSIBLE. (Score 1, Insightful) 180
True communism hasn't really even been applied anywhere...
That's because rational people don't have to actually go through with it to see how toxic it is.
True communism hasn't really even been applied anywhere...
That's because rational people don't have to actually go through with it to see how toxic it is.
Well there's your problem. Nobody is great at making investment decisions. White noise is a better and more stable investor than any strategy
False, if your time horizon is 5+ years. Many people are. Not just Buffett (who cheats by buying whole companies and changing them). I've done better on average than the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, and I'm no investing genius, I just avoid the scams and pay attention to macroeconomics. What is true is that, if you hire someone else to manage your money, whether a broker or mutual fund, most of them do worse than the broad market, and those who do better charge more than the difference.
a large number of small businesses would bear a stronger resemblance to white noise than a concentrated power structure.
But then, most small businesses fail pretty quickly.
So someone who owns million/billions in real estate, investments and all that other stuff is not wealthy? It is solely controlling the means of production? (which if you do you will probably have all those billions) If you are some trust fund baby with no clue but billions in the bank you are not wealthy?
To your general point - "wealthy" doesn't really mean "worth a lot", no. Maybe "rich" is the word you want? Though for your specific examples, most land in private hands is actually doing something useful, and so most property owners are in fact wealthy (how to measure the house you live in as wealth is actually a hard question).
Did you know most trust fund babies have a subsistence income from their trust funds? Strange but true. The usual trust fund is "enough where he'll never starve, but not enough that he doesn't want to work for a living". Anyhow, (a) a trust fund is managed by someone other than the beneficiary, almost by definition, and is usually conservatively invested, and (b) people who inherit lots but don't invest wisely tend to die broke, unless you're talking about the thousand richest people in America or somesuch.
My initial point to everyone enjoying a life of luxury, where all of our immediate needs are provided so that we can focus on other pursuits to better ourselves, had to do with the paradigm shift that would be required. One that humanity itself could not do because we are not hard wired that way. We compete, we keep score. We want to be better than the next guy, either by pulling ahead or putting a boot to their throat to keep them down. I don't lament this, it is who we are.
On this we agree completely. It seems to break the spirit, not needing to work or compete or somehow prove yourself. Which is why, of course, most trust funds are set up as they are.
Since Near Earth Asteroids can supply 30-50 times more fuel, plus the potential for other supplies, it makes that service station cheaper to operate
People underestimate the effect of this. A near-Earth fuel station would be a change in kind for space travel. For example, the logistics for a manned Mars journey suddenly become affordable (by national standards), travel to the Moon becomes something a billionaire adventurer could do. Sending hundreds of probes to the planets and finally seeing more than a mailslot view of our own solar system becomes practical.
The cost of lifting fuel to GEO is nuts - most of the expense of anything you want to do beyond Earth orbit is the cost of getting the fuel up to Earth orbit. Sure, manned exploration still would need medical breakthroughs, but unmanned, well, everything changes.
And as for the medical side, if you can't see the benefit "here on Earth" for figuring out how to "radiation-harden" humans, you're not paying attention.
nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor
Interesting how one has to strain credulity in order to say anything particularly bad about "pure capitalism", but "pure socialism" leaves its failures in plain view. My view on this is that a capitalist society is a very dynamic one. It may as you assert tend to social stratefication, but you are ignore tremendous wealth transfers from rich to poor (such as employment, charity, costly displays of social status, etc) that act to alleviate this disparity.
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
Don't know if you've looked out the window lately, but humanity is a lot bigger than a few hundred people...
I was merely disproving the original poster's assertion by providing a counterexample.
Replace pension manager with CEO and you see the scope of the problem.
There is a big difference. The pension and fund managers are the kingmakers. They have control over a vast amount of voting shares in companies. Their disinterest and short term greed translates into similarly endowed CEOs.
Another factor which I didn't mention is bailouts. A lot of these players, both fund managers and CEOs can rely on some degree of public funding to ease their bad decisions.
The underlying fault to this whole mess IMHO is Other Peoples' Money (OPM). When decisions are made by people who control OPM, this leads to a fundamental conflict of interest and a disengagement between the decision and the consequences of that decision.
Could is different from would, was my point. If we look at the middle class, people earn more than that in take-home pay by 30, yet have saved very little of it. I was the poster boy - I didn't understand money until I was nearly 30, and it was really an achievement for me when I reached a net worth of "0", thanks to a change in habits. It didn't take too many years after that to reach my $350k, since I was saving half my take-home pay,
From my experience with the various poor neighborhoods I lived in through my 20s, the poor are not more frugal than the middle class: status symbols are more important when you're poor. But that was all urban, rural might be the opposite.
You're sort-of making my point. Money can buy both stuff and wealth. Give wealth to most people and they'll sell it to buy stuff, and the wealth will end up concentrated again in the hands of those who like wealth better than stuff. Plus, since there's only as much stuff as we all of us make, there won't be any more stuff for handing out money, so the wealth-stuff exchange rate would swing wildly as most people dumped their stock to buy a better car then their neighbors (and, to be fair, many would pay off their house).
What exactly is your definition of "public" philanthropy?
That it is publicly funded and purports to solve the sort of problems that are associated with philanthropy (improve the human condition, promote the arts, etc).
And how do you define its success or failure?
By looking at how well it satisfies its purported goals, given the money spent.
One liners do not convey a point at all. I guess I could have elaborated. To have everyone live a life of leisure would require sharing of wealth by also foregoing future hording or it.
By the standards of history, we all have a life of leisure already! (Seriously, we live better than a feudal Baron, especially as we age.) Even if we eventually get a "Jetsons" 2-hour work week, we'll still be complaining.
It has little to do with "hoarding" of weath because wealth is not stuff - it's not food, it's not cars, it's not houses wealth is control of the means of production. And we benefit greatly if wealth is hoarded by people who are great at making investment decisions. Wealth is not what you seem to think!
As long as prices for "basics": food, shelter, transportation, and the like keep falling, when measured in hour of work needed, we'll be good. If 3D printing somehow evolves into in-home manufacturing, so much the better.
Another fun number: the total value of all corporate earnings (the number companies exaggerate, not the taxable number) is less than 10% of all American salaries. (Total US pay, total US GDP, and total stock value of all publically traded US corps are all about the same).
No, science can't prove metaphysical beings and basically all gods have some metaphysical properties.
No, being metaphysical doesn't mean that you can't have an observable aspect. For example, an omnipotent, omniscience being should be able to arbitrarily move the entire galaxy an arbitrary distance. But we wouldn't be able to distinguish them from a lesser being capable of the same feat.
There have been many such balloon propaganda efforts - I think the religious ones are common. This is just the latest, and perhaps funniest. Don't underestimate the value of mocking the dictator - it seems petty here, but in a world where no one ever does that, it's powerful. This particular movie is pretty lame, but don't they actually kill KJU off at the end? That's a nice message there.
The American economy in the last 40 years has become increasingly tied to the the stock market and the quarterly expectations of shareholders.
Bullshit. The stock market doesn't do anything more now than it did forty years ago. And why should shareholders have short term quarterly expectations instead of long term expectations? You completely miss the big picture.
Consider this scenario. I'm a pension manager for a large company or municipality and I have absolutely no long term stake in the welfare of the pension fund (an unfortunately common problem in the developed world over the past forty years) with a considerable sum in . I have no incentive to think long term while simultaneously I have voting control over a large amount of stock shares. I'm not a shareholder , but I have the power of a large shareholder.
Moving on, my wealth and hence, my decisions are decided by my end of year bonuses rather than by the long term consequences. Thus, I do things like go with the company that promises 15% ROI, but will fail in ten years over a company that provides 5% ROI indefinitely. I get many years of larger bonuses in the first case and it's not any skin off my teeth, when that company fails. I just need to make sure that no one can prove I knew it was going to fail.
Also in the mean time, I can use that high ROI to transfer money out of the pension fund to other uses. After all, with such high ROI, they don't really need so much money in that fund, right? And the money goes to other important purposes, like balancing a sickly town's budget. So that's another way I can loot my pension fund while appearing to diligently be protecting the assets of my customers.
In other words, we've created a society chock full of perverse and destructive incentives, which encourages short term, foolish decisions over wise, long term ones. So why do we have a zillion Slashdotters vigorously advocating for more of the same? I think it's a complete disconnect from reality.
Well said. The antithesis of casual games, Star Fleet Battles, kept its appeal for years for me for precisely this. You could work out optimal "openings", but as soon as you exchanged heavy weapons fire the first time things could go many different ways. A good player would consistent recover from bad luck in the first volley, while a bad player would count on luck. It was neat that way because the set of situations you could find yourself in was large, and influence both by the basic strategy chosen by you and your opponent, and luck which could quickly change your optimal strategy in very situational ways. The only time you'd find yourself without any recourse for a bad roll was when you were trying a last-ditch desperation move anyhow, which added its own fun.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira