They’ve made their decision, now let’s see them enforce it.

Brooks Brothers riot

I wish people would spend 10% of the time that they doomscroll towards activism. 15-30 minutes a day in real life. Join groups that align with your worldviews. Meet face to face, donate, call representatives, volunteer.

If we all did that across the country, our numbers would be so overwhelming that the people pulling this shit would be put back in whatever hole they crawled out of.

But instead, we all sit here, reading this, wringing our hands, doing nothing but worrying, and they pick us off one by one, among the nearly silent tap tap taps of our fingers on our phones.

Never really understood that saying. Cheese is proof that the gods love us and want us to be happy.

When they make up tomorrow, they’ll both be a few billion dollars richer.

Perhaps be more descriptive and abstract?

“The clouds cry tears unto the land.”

My $ is that it’s been someone in the last 30 years who is a big eater with an opiate habit.

It’s log scale.

This seems like a tragedy of the commons line of thinking, with a dash of whataboutism.

I’m reminded of the quote “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

If you wish to reduce plastic consumption, perhaps the single step along that journey begins with you.

And if that journey includes sacrifices that you are not willing to make, then it’s good to be cognizant of that, so that you understand your impact on the world and the consequences your decisions have upon your future self.

Distilling this to an example you mentioned above, if you are unwilling to use bar soap, then perhaps look for bath products where some of the company profits go towards environmental restoration. Depending on the company, it may not mitigate your full impact, but reduce is one of the 3 tenets of sustainability.

I think it’s important that consider that, for now, we only have this one spaceship.

Americans being Americans aside, there is an abundance of beautiful abandoned villas and fincas in Spain. Personally, I would love a chance to immigrate there.

Well they’ll do it in secret, but if you tell the guys about it, they’ll never do it again.

Not to answer why, but I just thought to add this excerpt as I thought it relevant to the conversation.

The excerpt is from Napoleon’s era. This sort of debt borrowing has been happening for a long time. The carousel stops when the borrower can no longer afford the interest and has nothing left of valuable assets to sell off.

Despite Count Bezúkhov’s enormous wealth, since he had come into an income which was said to amount to five hundred thousand rubles a year, Pierre felt himself far poorer than when his father had made him an allowance of ten thousand rubles. He had a dim perception of the following budget: About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank, about 30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town house, and the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was given in pensions and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was sent to the countess; about 70,000 went for interest on debts. The building of a new church, previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in each of the last two years, and he did not know how the rest, about 100,000 rubles, was spent, and almost every year he was obliged to borrow. Besides this the chief steward wrote every year telling him of fires and bad harvests, or of the necessity of rebuilding factories and workshops. So the first task Pierre had to face was one for which he had very little aptitude or inclination—practical business. He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But he felt that this did not forward matters at all. He felt that these consultations were detached from real affairs and did not link up with them or make them move. On the one hand, the chief steward put the state of things to him in the very worst light, pointing out the necessity of paying off the debts and undertaking new activities with serf labor, to which Pierre did not agree. On the other hand, Pierre demanded that steps should be taken to liberate the serfs, which the steward met by showing the necessity of first paying off the loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent impossibility of a speedy emancipation. The steward did not say it was quite impossible, but suggested selling the forests in the province of Kostromá, the land lower down the river, and the Crimean estate, in order to make it possible: all of which operations according to him were connected with such complicated measures—the removal of injunctions, petitions, permits, and so on—that Pierre became quite bewildered and only replied: “Yes, yes, do so.” Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled him to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only tried to pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The steward for his part tried to pretend to the count that he considered these consultations very valuable for the proprietor and troublesome to himself.

Or perhaps the dollars are being factored into to other workstreams in the system. We may be comparing apples to oranges here.

• Do other countries use student busing? If not, are they considering that impact into their public transportation?
• Do other counties have school meal programs?
• Do other countries factor out athletics into its own separate budget?
• what’s the average age of a public school?
• Is sexual education separated into health budgets?
• Physical Plants just cost more in America than most places, as we contract out both the design and construction and sometimes even the planning/permitting. Are these costs being factored in?
• Are the average class sizes per teacher similar?
• Are special needs costs factored in?

I’d first like to understand the diffs of what comprises that 30% more calculation, from there we can explore why the fundraisers are needed.

Most billionaires nowadays are not the type that have the bulk of their wealth in assets. The lot of them got wealthy because the company they founded or initially employed with became very successful and the stock they accumulated became more valuable over time.

In a way, it’s wealth up there in the ether. It’s the investors who give it value. Somebody says “hey $100 for a share of company x sounds like a good deal” founder has 10M shares of company x, and voila, they’re a billionaire.

In a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

A strange thing is happening nowadays with the market though. Markets are supposed to go down from time to time, but due to low barriers to entry so many people are in the market now, investing in ETFs, setting up automated monthly purchases, DRIPs, etc, that markets consistently go up. Even after a major economic shock like the tariffs, the market continues to go up.

And so those billionaires keep getting wealthier.

At some point this carousel will end. Healthy markets do have to go down, it’s one of the mechanisms of how capital gets redistributed from the slovenly to the savvy. There has to be some kind of adjustment or we end up where we are, a new Gilded Age.

China is on the edge of one such adjustment in real estate, but the state is pulling out all of the stops right now to prevent its collapse. What happens there likely is to be a harbinger of what’s to come.

In the US, I’m not so sure. If we keep letting our average population age slip towards middle age and beyond, then we’ll likely see the correction when we have no one left to keep the economic engine running. If we don’t mitigate that we probably have 15 to 20 years left. Unchecked political unrest may be the catalyst for its arrival sooner.

Back to billionaires. The best way to put this back in check in my mind is to tax unrealized gains. Think of it like real estate tax. Every year, you pay a nominal bit of your home’s value to fund the fire department, city planners, etc. if you don’t pay, then they can put a lien on your house. Same should apply with stock. The noninvesting public helped build the infrastructure that made the company thrive, thus, the public should be entitled to a bit of its success. The tax has the nifty little gimmick of distributing a bit of the power too - precisely why the billionaire class hates it.

Don’t listen to these fools, your body is a temple. 🙏

This moment of enlightenment brought to you by Mountain Dew Buddha Blast … like a holy hand grenade to your pancreas ™

According to trump, it was more valuable 30 years ago.

Damn you got this whole angry dude who puts down people and their ideas schtick down.

I already told you why. You have a very narrow, Disne-esque perception of what living under a monarchy is, and I’m telling you, often the “serfs” had more autonomy and authority than that perception.

We must not attribute a modern context to historical times. Rather, we should strive to look at history through a historical lens.

Got to have the right location, resources, timing and motivation. It’s not like wealth falls from the sky. It’s not like workers/constituents will work for the sake of working, at least not most of them. They have to get something out of the deal.

Get some knowledge in your head, read a book. Think for yourself and stop getting your info from the Disney channel.

I think you’ve bought into the Disney trope a bit too much, or at best viewing history from a myopic perspective.

Monarchs provided defense for their constituents, they provided city planning. Wealth extraction was an outcome, not unlike a business. Not all kings were Ivan IV’s, there are far more who served their people well who are not as infamous.

That isn’t to say I’m a monarchist, not by a long shot, just that monarchy serves its place in history.

I was with you until “stolen from the people.” Monarchs back in their heyday served a purpose. It took centuries to build up nation-states and common law.

Hell, it took Germany until the late 1800s to get their shit together, and even after then, it took another 100 years still.