The Economic, Political and Legal systems have for a while been structured to deliver the highest return on investment to rent-seeking (i.e. to the taking wealth away from others) rather than wealth production.
The result of decades of ever more of this is that most of the system is now the machinery that allows a few to pillage it. You see it in the insane house-price to income ratios, you see it in the ever more broad enshittification, you see it in the level of inflation people feel in their day to day lives being way higher than official inflation figures, you see it in the ever shrinking social support systems (more noticeable in countries with more of such things, not quite as much in the US that doesn’t even have Universal Healthcare), you see it in the explosion of inequality and crash of social mobility, you see it in politics being ever less about quality of life for the many and ever more about Moral subjects that mainly affect minorities and have zero impact on wealth distribution or people’s access to resources.
In other words: the snake is eating its own tail.
Further, as shown in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, the “winners” in this and their bought and paid for politicians will never accept any deceleration in the increase of their wealth - the more the system eats itself the less it grows the more the system needs to eat itself to keep feeding the same to owner class that controls it, the more the system eats itself - much less a reversion and trying to go down a different path.
In the absence of some kind of wealth infusion from outside (basically the US doing as Britain did at this stage of its Empire cycle and pillaging wealth from the lands it controlled abroad to feed its homeland elites, which the US was kinda doing via large Tech companies using their market positions to extract more money from foreign operations), this shit is mathematically bound to end up in some kind of nasty collapse as the empoverishment of the many reaches extreme levels and the few extracting rents from the rest get into ever nastier infighting.
Personally I think that how far this keeps on going and thus how stretched things get before they crack and thus how bad the collapse it will be when it finally happens, depends mainly on the population of the US (you will notice how the rest of the World is trying to decouple from the US) and judging by its past behaviour (notice the how the last General Strike in the US was 8 decades ago), things will get pretty damn extreme.
And then you’ve got the death clock of runaway climate change on top of the whole thing.
Oh yeah, it’s unsustainble shit pilled on unsustainable shit.
But if me and the boys do it it’s called money laundering. Smh we don’t even wash our clothes what are you on about feds???
I’m not opposed to this new scam per se if we could tone down the old scam of atomizing society and turning things civilized countries do by default into a GDP boost. Maybe if NVIDIA gives some company run by a cartoon villain $500B to buy NVIDIA cards then we don’t need to charge $900 for an IV bag or we could take the hit to car sales of having functional mass transit. One scam at a time, amirite?
I like how the insurance company’s building is right next to the bank buildings close to DC
You can’t spell “Felon” without “Elon”.
Technically that’s linked; the money Elon makes is from stealing employee wealth and could be used to solve the aforementioned problems.
Not defending the gov though, it’s rotten.
Maybe CEOs should only make 10 times as much as the lowest paid employee?
I always have to laugh when someone argues that CEOs should make million and billions because “they have all the risk”. What risk? As CEO, you can virtually ram a billion dollar company into the ground, and the worst that will happen to you is a multimillion dollar severance package.
So ok 5 times?
Best I can do is replaced by an executive assistant who flips a coin for every major decision.
We might have an opening in product or maybe QA if they’re ok sitting on 3 scrums.
We still need to have ceos, of course.
Where do you want that extra money to go man? Where? 🤣
That would only motivate them to outsource their low level staff to contractors so they could avoid including those people for the purposes of the calculation
If only we could forsee these types of things and plan the rules accordingly. Regardless, even this system would be an improvement. When MegaCorp becomes 20 dudes in an office who outsource everything, they’ll have to sign deals. The more they squeeze, the lower the pay for JanitorCorp’s CEO (for example), who will push back because their workers getting bent over a barrel harms them. The janitors would actually have someone looking out for them. It’d be a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of quasi-unions. Far from ideal, but again, better than now.
I’ve started shifting my investments towards foreign markets. Not that if the US market crashes everybody else will come out unblemished, but you have to do something.
I have been ridding Gold with most of my savings since around 2012, because what I saw in 2008 and its aftermath (during which I was in the Finance Industry) made me believe that the trend in the way the system is operating was unsustainable and traditional wealth holding systems (including currencies) were bound for some kind of crisis.
(Also that was the second time I was in the actual Industry that got the most affected by a Crash - the previous one being Tech in the 2000 Crash - so I’m probably ultra-conservative in terms of how I try to protect my savings)
Essentially I expect Gold will act as a (very, very old) currency which is not controlled by any government so is less susceptible to the impact of the increasing corruption and ineptitude we see all around in the West (can’t really comment on other places, maybe the same?!).
Anyways, in the time since I moved my savings into it, the value of those savings went up almost 5x, though since its peak at the end of January Gold stopped going up and came down, so is now were it was at the start of the year. Since I’m in it with a stupidly long term view (meant to fund my retirement, so measured in decades) and in a position 500% above where I started, I’m not actually worried.
(As somebody who at one point and for almost a decade worked in the Industry, I would NEVER, EVER, EVER put my retirement savings in the hands of the Retirement Fund Industry or in fact in any part of the traditional Investment Finance Industry - as we’re seeing now in things like the Nasdaq 100 index changing its rules to allow insanelly overvalued - and thus bound to fall - IPOs to get into the index almost immediatelly after IPO, even the supposedly most conservative parts of the Industry are now rotten to the core and activelly cooperate in pillaging your savings. I really can’t emphasize enough how we are nothing more than prey for those fuckers and in the absence of Regulators who do their fucking work - which as shown after 2008, they do not, in fact they’re more like willing accomplices whose real task is to provide the APPEARANCE of fairness in the markets - nothing is sacred for them)
Judging by what happenned in 2008, in a Crash Gold will first go down (because when other markets collapse, market players take money from their Gold positions to cover their calls elsewhere) and then take of off (both because as a currency that can’t be inflated any faster than mining rates - which increase the amount of Gold available by 1-2% a year - Gold price will reflect the crash in the true value of the main currencies and because there is a “run for safety” effect in times of crisis that moves money to Gold - because as its own currency, it’s the ultimatelly safe asset for retaining value - from other investment assets.
Ditto, and it’s been great.
But have you seen the Dow though?
The higher the Dow, the more money the rich have extracted.
Oh wow, it actually topped 50,000 this time
and one day the people are going to realise that there is no real value behind these companies and when they stop giving them money the bubble will pop and the world economy will hit a crisis, which is going to lead to even more people losing their jobs and everything getting even more expensive.
One thing that plays in is the percentage of stock market ownership is institutional vs personal (ex for the DOW, it’s 71% institutional). Will a bubble pop if the bulk of shares are owned by companies who are mutually invested in not letting the bubble pop?
It’s so fucked, right? These guys go and get themselves insanely wealthy by playing games with the economy and make the system unstable.
Then people realize it, and the flow stops, and the charade is up, and one or two people get caught in the game and lose while the rest of them get off scot-free. The loser has to spend a couple years at a federal resort facility.
This bubble-popping bullshit is more akin to a game of hot potato amongst billionaires and they have no problem with the collateral damage.
This bubble is popping soon. There will be suffering. There will be starving children. Maybe even yours. Because these people are playing hotpotato.
And they will face no consequences.
Man, is anyone else just tired of this?
We NEED to eat the rich. It’s getting close to a necessary survival response by now… (lol as if global warming will be deigning many ‘winners’ as is…)
Honestly I think most mega wealthy people would be happier if we just ushered them into a regular working class lifestyle in a regular working class neighborhood.
They’ve got this disease that seems to miss most people where their ambition is tied to amassing frankly embarrassing amounts of wealth. It’s embarrassing that they take it that far, but also that we’ve let them.
Like imagine if someone rolled up to your grocery store and bought 1000x more food than anyone needs? Not only is it sick, it’s actively harmful.
Have you seen the rich? They’re all horrible and sinewy
Someday we’ll realize we destroyed the only habitable planet we know of for pieces of paper.
They’re not even pieces of paper these days…just entries in an SQL database that represent the promise of pieces of paper, which themselves represent the promise of a bank to honour a debt.
And when you slosh around cash you pay taxes…
lol maybe if you’re a pleb.
Sure am. But I got an onion on my belt, and a steady hand!
