I guess that's preferable to buying more airline stockSomething is up because Warren Buffett is just holding tons of cash.
Should be radicalizing.
Lol I wouldn't worry about their responses - you were completely fine in what you said.Good lord I meant nothing specifically about podcasters but people in general. My line was not a reference to those suffering but those monetizing everything, including our thoughts.
And yes we're in agreement that it's not that cause but a symptom, especially for those who have to make multiple forms of payment to pay bills. But I've seen people who are well off who continue to maximize profit as if they were paycheck to paycheck, which was the point of my other posts in this thread. It's like everyone is emulating the shareholder/CEO model.
Jesus lay off, we're on the same side here.
Millionaires don't even factor into this stuff.We're not done yet! All of the millionaires, aren't billionaires yet, and the billionaires aren't trillionaires!
It's definitely fucked. The massive amount of greed people have is insane.
Should be radicalizing.
Vast majority of people are just trying to survive day to day and have no time, money, energy to go out and disrupt the status quo.
Though I do believe we will eventually hit a breaking point - just need that catalyst to take place.
Lol I wouldn't worry about their responses - you were completely fine in what you said.
Some people simply don't have any concept of nuance - I've found that on Era a ton of users are extremely binary in their thinking - if you don't explicitly agree, you are wrong/against me.
Making some joke about how podcasters are also trying to wring blood from a stone is completely accurate, while recognizing there are innumerable other entities doing much worse (which apparently has to be explicitly stated lol).
Millionaires don't even factor into this stuff.
To the billionaire class millionaires are just like us, everyday people, as they will never attain that level of wealth.
The order of magnitude difference between them is so insane that millionaires are effectively meaningless.
Like for example - my mom technically would be a millionaire - but only due to the fact that my great great grandfather/mother squatted in (and via this, gained ownership) of an abandoned farm in the 1830s that has remained in our family till today while the area grew up around it. The house is worth nothing today, but the land is valuable. My single mother never made more than like $35k a year for her entire life but yet could be a "millionaire" if she so desired to cash out so to speak (but would never cause family homestead is too important to her).
That's a lot of words to say that millionaires aren't (really) the problem, it's the billionaires above that literally buy legislation/media that mess it all up. They constantly wage the culture wars to distract us from the class wars.
I think people are on average more aware that the system is fucking rigged than we give them credit for, but as you say the necessity to spend so much time surviving means it's harder to engage in physical disruption.Should be radicalizing.
Vast majority of people are just trying to survive day to day and have no time, money, energy to go out and disrupt the status quo.
Though I do believe we will eventually hit a breaking point - just need that catalyst to take place.
Shits fucked but system is fine because everyone has the opportunity to be rich if they put the hard work in.
the great plague probably had huge capitalistic gains; i mean we did have the renaissance after itI could post some of the other replies about it always beeing out of control (and they'd be right) but I do think things have ramped up significantly due to Covid and Ukraine. Opportunists are seeing how much they can pump out of people before they buckle and we aren't going back to anything manageable until their is major pushback.
I know you jest, but I love how factually wrong this statement is.Shits fucked but system is fine because everyone has the opportunity to be rich if they put the hard work in.
The working class flourished after the great plague, as those who were still alive could demand higher wages (I know you were kidding but I always found this to be an interesting point)the great plague probably had huge capitalistic gains; i mean we did have the renaissance after it
ukrain and russia reminds us of the peril of the european borderland
this is my land-border borderland . . . no it's not!
. . . so while they're fighting each other, let's make capital from their misfortune
Shits fucked but system is fine because everyone has the opportunity to be rich if they put the hard work in.
Elites benefitted from capitalism; they influence the system to further enrich themselves, exploting loopholes, avoid paying taxes and happy to buy up public assets like social housing (that are taxpayer funded), then sell it for millions.Late stage Capitalism doesn't even follow the theories of Capitalism anymore.
If only there was someone who wrote about this like a hundred years ago. Oh well.
Exactly. And you can't regulate capitalism anyway. Right wing parties will be elected and regulations will be removed. It's an endless circle of trying to hold back capitalism from eating us all. It doesn't work and it leads to extremely slow progress.i think needing regulation is an implicit admission that capitalism doesn't work. like, if the 'good parts' of capitalism are only possible due to government intervention, then... why do we need the capitalism part. i can't think of the last time i went to a private library to check out a book.
Those saying no, it's "working as designed" are wrong. No, capitalism wasn't "designed" to be this broken. It's not like a bunch of billionaires got together and thought up a way to get even richer, and everyone got on board. Giant corporations didn't spring from the earth once some evil rich dude had an epiphany. It's become this shitty over time, though it has been absolutely broken since...around the mid 70s, statistically speaking.
The problem is that fascists exist and can easily and quickly influence people within the free market nonsense. It's easier than ever to reach people on a global scale.Capitalism needs strong guard rails to make sure it doesn't just eat everything around it, since it concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer people, and wealth brings power, and power is how you enforce your will on others, bringing in more wealth...
These guard rails have in the past been stronger or weaker, depending on lots of things, but an important part was the very clear "if this goes wrong the lower classes will murder us", or "if the state is weak foreigners will come and take everything from us".
For one reason or another, the guard rails seem to be mostly missing now.
ETA:
And while capitalism is our problem now, don't think other systems are immune. Not while they're made of people who have the means and the ability to fudge with the rules to make sure that things go their way at the expense of others, history is filled with examples of civilizations that started in a way, and you had people poke at it and mess with it to make sure they and their family got the results they wanted, until the base of that civilization is eroded away, leading to them being ex-civilizations.
This and the market cap of Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta (7 billion, give or take) being higher than any country GDP outside of the US and China.
The basic idea of capitalism is ''profits go to the owners''. That idea in itself is so fundamentally broken that capitalism cannot work.Those saying no, it's "working as designed" are wrong. No, capitalism wasn't "designed" to be this broken. It's not like a bunch of billionaires got together and thought up a way to get even richer, and everyone got on board. Giant corporations didn't spring from the earth once some evil rich dude had an epiphany. It's become this shitty over time, though it has been absolutely broken since...around the mid 70s, statistically speaking.
It's worked for centuries, longer than any system that's come since trying to replace it.The basic idea of capitalism is ''profits go to the owners''. That idea in itself is so fundamentally broken that capitalism cannot work.
I have realised this cold hard reality recently while investigating history of UK interest rates.
Our monthly mortgage payments are 75% of my monthly salary, house bought last year.
If we had bought the same value house a couple of years ago, then the mortgage payments would be closer to 33% of my monthly salary.
It's nearly a £1000 difference.
A huge difference in our money per month being nearly £1000 down is due to suits making a decision on interest rates. People who were further than us in their relationship and bought a few years ago, on the same salaries as us, are way more comfortable just down to the arbitrary nature of how all this works.
Of course on the same note, someone who can't currently afford a house due to interest rates being even higher, is saying the same thing about us.
And of course I understand that interest rates have been stupidly low in the UK, and understand how it all works.
I thought your comment was spot on, because it highlights that in the modern economy, unless you're in the upper echelons of earners, you aren't supposed to do anything for fun anymore. Your hobbies are encouraged to fuse with hustle culture to turn into another "grind" so you can monetize more of everything you do to try to survive. It's fucking gross.But to that poster's weirdly sensitive and grumpy take to this, I wasn't going at podcasters but how even people with comfortable lives feel the need to monetize things including our hobbies.
Regarding the bolded:Capitalism needs strong guard rails to make sure it doesn't just eat everything around it, since it concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer people, and wealth brings power, and power is how you enforce your will on others, bringing in more wealth...
These guard rails have in the past been stronger or weaker, depending on lots of things, but an important part was the very clear "if this goes wrong the lower classes will murder us", or "if the state is weak foreigners will come and take everything from us".
For one reason or another, the guard rails seem to be mostly missing now.
I thought your comment was spot on, because it highlights that in the modern economy, unless you're in the upper echelons of earners, you aren't supposed to do anything for fun anymore. Your hobbies are encouraged to fuse with hustle culture to turn into another "grind" so you can monetize more of everything you do to try to survive. It's fucking gross.
It's worked for centuries, longer than any system that's come since trying to replace it.