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cuprohastes · 4 months

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Things to Come

It is the year 2024: Amazon wants to have wholly owned company towns to persuade poor people to enter into indentured servitude. There is an election between an old guy who's quietly doing a generally good job, and a very loud serial rapist conman who's being taken to court for his many crimes including treason. Somehow there is still a debate as to who will win.

It is the year 2030: There are now four Amazon towns powered off grid by Tesla batteries. There is no news in or out. People are starting to notice this. Jeff Bezos and Elon musk are having a public fight over who owns Mars. Bezos brought up Twitter and Elon's announced X-Mart a direct competitor to Amazon. The Cybertruck's been recalled again, this time after the 50th person was cooked alive by the burning battery pack, which also locked all the doors.

It is 2040: Elon's died on Mars ina. 8ft cabin from every cancer known to man and three that are getting named after him. Apparently he declared that radiation shielding wasn't needed because Mars is too far from the sun for radiation to reach it. Jeff Bezos freeze dried corpse is still circling hte earth as of two years ago. The world watches with glee as Amazon is torn to shreds by ten thousand parties all of whom are laying claim to the 3 trillion dollars held by the company. Nobody is trying to take over Space-X or Teslas due to the historic 1.4 trillion dollars in fines and debt they collectively owe. Mark Zuckerberg is replacing all his organic parts with life support machines to keep his brain alive until a perfect way to upload himself to the metaverse is available. The metaverse is still shit and has only 1008 concurrent users.

Is tis 2042: Donald Trump has choked to death in his cell. The rumour is it was corpophilia: This will persist even after a FOIA reveals it was a cold two day old Big Mac smuggled in to him. The world rejoices. There is still a 24/7 video feed of Elon musk slowly mummifying in the remains of X-Mars. Questions regarding the rest of the colonists are answered when a Marsbot finally accesses the dome and finds that Elon turned off the oxygen after the twenty three women in the first wave of colonists refused to breed with him. There were twenty eight colonists and four of them had received vasectomies two months before liftoff. They had to take an axe to the thing Zuckerberg because it wouldn't stop screaming. In the UK, all politicians from the last 30 years have been placed in Wadsworth prison and are tried and guillotined daily. The Scottish won't stop laughing. The Irish have been drunk of their tits for the last six months. The Welsh have banned speaking English. This is not going well but they get much respect for taking a stand.

2050: Republicans are now legal to be hunted for food if you have a bow hunting license. Guns are finally restricted. Republicans state that this will result in a civil war. Gun crime and school shootings are down 1000%. The most popular book in the US is "Eating the Rich" a combination how-to on bow hunting, butchering and serving human flesh. The rest of the world is watching this with interest. The Russian federation is taking special notes. This year 80 clones of Vladimir Putin are euthanised in their tubes and eaten.

2055: There is no civil war and surprisingly few instances of Kuru. Texas has built a wall around the entire state to keep "the left" out. All jokes about marrying your cousin are now attributed to Texas, now known as the Lone Surname State. They have still managed not to secede.

2060: Gender is abolished, not through decree but by common agreement of the third generation brought up by Millenials, Gen Z and Gen Blue: The Green Generation. Cities are walkable. It is considered weird if you cannot walk to the shops in bare feet safely for at least half a year. Air quality has improved, winters are returning. Urban deer keep grasses down and provide local meat. Men and women wear dresses, biological sex can now be changed trivially with around 60 months of treatment. Marriage is now merely a fun tradition and churches all pay tax after the 2056 ruling that if they cannot provide evidence for their god that they have no more claim to universal truth than a social club. World hunger is solved by levying back taxes on jsut three megachurches. Summers are brutal but can be managed by passive cooling, and thermal gradient power generators for cooling.

2070: Everyone has UBI. Work is 4 hours a day, 4 days a week for most people. Many people have two or three jobs, not for money, but because they have diverse interests. Most companies are profit sharing or Co-operatives. The biggest global trauma is the English wearing socks with sandals. Global temperatures have dropped. The kids are kind and bemused by their aging relatives. Texas is still Republican and angrily making memes about "This is the future the left want" that are still really cool and fun looking suggestions. The southen US has replaced it's statues with Dolly Parton, who's revered as a saint. 40% of men have great tits. The President of the USA is catgirl. Things are going to be OK. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day the last Boomer died and everyone's going to get their grill out. Life's good: We're going to to be OK.

#shitposting #the future

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girl-hobbit · 8 months

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3,4,9,10,14,49 for the ask game ! I know it’s a lot sorry not sorry

@ofdirtandbones yay!! i love asks :3 🌿

3. do you leave the window open at night?

Not really, it's too hot usually and i don't want to let any cold air that might grace me with it's presence to slip out :(

if it's a nice cool breeze kinda night then yes :) 🏠✨

4. which cryptyd/being do you believe in?

Ohoho, Bigfoot and the Lock Ness monster are 100% real, they're just too similar to real animals we know exist/have existed to be a coincidence (giant bipedal ape? aquatic dinosaurs with long limbs and neck? c'mon man!)

And the Greys (aliens) are probably real too, they just aren't what the government wants us to think they are *X Files conspiracy theory music plays* 🦕🐒👽🛸🌌

9. which do you prefer, hot coffee or cold coffee?

ooughhh that's tough, i think it depends on the situation?

i do love a plain black coffee with hot chocolate mixed in on a cool rainy day so i can pretend i'm camping ☕

but a cold iced coffee that's mostly milk sure is good at other times!

i think iced coffee is the one i have more often, with whipped cream and caramel syrup :3

10. would you slaughter the rich?

We talking Jeff Bezos? American Politician? or one of the Royals?

✨inserts guillotine emoji cutely✨

for legal purposes you didn't see this and i plead the 5th<3 (cops dni) 🙇‍♀️

14. do you love the smell of earth after it rains?

Absolutely!! petrichor my beloved<333

if i could get it in cologne form i would, and i'd smell like the Earth all the time 🌱🌿

49. can you skip rocks?

i don't think so 😂

i've tried a few times and they always just go *plunk* straight to the bottom 😭

they have to be smooth, flat stones and ya gotta get the angle just right, or it's a flop :( 🪨

That's it!

hehe thanks for the ask!! and it's not too many questions don't worry :3 🫶💚🌿

#ask #asks #ask game #number ask game #mutuals #ofdirtandbones #hehe!#my post #look at my posts boy #hobbit girl speaks #🌿#goblincore #eat the rich #long post

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Inequality, not gerontocracy

The received wisdom among economists is that the US’s historical low interests rates are driven by high savings by aging boomers who are getting ready for, or in, retirement.

The idea is boomers have salted away so much cash that banks don’t bid for their savings, so interest rates fall.

But at last week’s Jackson Hole conference, a trio of economists presented a very different explanation for low interest, one that better fits the facts.

In their NBER paper “What explains the decline in r∗? Rising income inequality versus demographic shifts,” Atif Mian (Princeton), Ludwig Straub (Harvard), and Amir Sufi (Chicago) show how inequality, not demographics, is to blame for low rates.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/8337/JH_paper_Sufi_3.pdf

The problem with the “boomers have so much in retirement savings that interest rates are low” theory is that boomers are incredibly unprepared for retirement. There’s a small cohort — ~10% — of very well-off boomers sailing into their sunset years. The rest? Fucked.

It’s true that boomers put in most of their working days before wage stagnation kicked in, that they paid hilariously low university tuition, and enjoyed low housing costs and substantial down-payment assistance from their New Deal-subsidized parents.

But! They also were the earliest cohort of workers that were forced to rely on gambling in the stock market for their pension, and their savings were eroded by multiple crashes that revealed them for the suckers at the poker table.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/30/meme-stocks/#stockstonks

Their homes have hugely inflated values, but they’re being liquidated to pay for eldercare, medical debt, and their kids’ and grandkids’ usurious student loans and otherwise unattainable down-payments.

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

So we can’t really say that low interest rates are being caused by an aging population with high retirement savings, because while the US population is aging, it does not have high savings. Quite the contrary.

And, as Robert Armstrong points out in his analysis of the paper for the Financial Times, even in places like Japan, with large cohorts of retirees and near-retirees who do have adequate savings, rates are scraping bottom.

https://www.ft.com/content/256acf1b-5bbb-475b-9df3-6d0b3a59389a

So why are rates so low? Well, the paper says it is being caused by high levels of savings — just not aging boomers’ savings. Rather, it’s the savings of the ultra-wealthy, the 1%, who are sitting on mountains of unproductive capital, chasing returns.

Making the rich richer is terrible economic policy. Wealthy people simply can’t spend all their money — I mean, once Jeff Bezos has bought a superyacht for his superyacht and flown to space, he’s still got hundreds of billions in the bank.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/10/business/jeff-bezos-yacht/index.html

An Amazon warehouse worker’s paycheck immediately enters the economy — it’s spent on groceries, and if the grocer is a local smallholder (and not Whole Foods), that dollar is spent again, on school supplies. The local stationer spends it at the local mechanic, and so on.

Once a dollar disappears into Bezos’s bank account, it is frozen in amber. No matter how many Subzero fridges Bezos fills with vintage Veuve, he’ll barely dent his fortune.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

Those dollars that pile up in the accounts of the wealthy are like oily rags piling up in the economy’s garage. They can’t be used for consumption, so they’re pumped into assets, causing massive spikes in things like housing, raising the cost of living for everyone else.

But there aren’t enough assets around to gamble on — not even after new, idiotic asset-classes like NFTs and freeport shipping-containers full of fine art hit the market — and so the savings pile up, depressing interest rates.

These low interest rates fuel more borrowing by the super-rich, who can take out loans at- or near-prime, making the money effectively free. These borrowed billions are pumped into asset markets, further inflating them.

Once the oily rags start burning, the flames blow out the economy’s garage door, and more oxygen (cheap money) floods in and causes the blaze to burn higher and hotter.

Just like a fire can create its own weather system of lightning storms that start more fires, the oily rags the super-rich have filled our collective garage with also set off secondary crises.

That was made clear by Propublica’s Secret IRS Files: low rates let the 1% evade nearly all taxation, by allowing them to borrow against assets (tax free) rather than liquidating them (taxed at 20%). So the rich get richer, and the rags pile higher.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

Boomers may be richer than Gen X and Millennials on average, but only because the top 10% are skew the average. The reality is that we are not in the grips of a battle for generational supremacy — rather, we’re fighting a class war.

The rich — old, young and middle-aged — set the world on fire. High savings cause low interest rates, to be sure, but the savings — like all forms of wealth — are in the hands of the rich, not the old.

#pluralistic

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morguenecrosis · 3 years

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Jeff Bezos x Guillotine is my OTP and if you don't agree I'll compress your spine and eat it like a pancake

#shipping #my otp for life #otp #jeff bezos #guillotine #omg they would look so good together 😍#eat the rich 😏#capitalism #capitalism fandom #shitpost #eat the rich #guillotine the rich #bezos #amazon

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godgrima · 6 years

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jeff bezos x guillotine lemon don’t like don’t read

#fdgnjdfgndfjkgdf #grima.txt

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giancarlonicoli · 3 years

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An exclusive excerpt from Scott Galloway’s new book, ‘Post Corona’

The logical alternative to capitalism is socialism, and on its face, there is a lot to like. Socialism is rooted in altruism and humanism; it seeks to build up community rather than the atomized individual. These are noble goals. But the sacrifice in productivity is immense, especially with the compounding effects of time. Capitalism creates dramatically many more spoils, so any of those noble goals have more to work with.

The toxic cocktail, however, is to combine the worst of both systems. For the last 40 years, we’ve been doing this in the United States. We have capitalism on the way up. If you can create value in this country, you can be rewarded with spoils vastly beyond anything comparable in history. If you can’t create value — if you’re born into the wrong family or you catch a bad break — you’ll likely live on the edge and pay dearly for your mistakes. A Hunger Games economy.

Should you reach the heights of wealth (or more likely, be born into them), circumstances change. Despite our rhetoric about personal responsibility and freedom, we’ve embraced socialism — at the top and on the way down. We don’t tolerate failure here in our socialist paradise. Rather than let companies fail — a defining and essential feature of capitalism — we have bailouts. But bailouts are hate crimes against future generations, sticking our children and grandchildren with the resulting debt.

Crisis after crisis, our rationales vary: After 9/11 it was national security. In 2008 it was liquidity, and in 2020 it was protecting the vulnerable. But our response is always the same. Protect the shareholder class, protect the executive class. Keep these firms on life support so their owners and managers don’t suffer. Pay for it with debt, a burden to be borne by middle-class taxpayers and, ultimately, by our children. However, history tells us, nearly every bailout, whether it’s Chrysler or Long-Term Capital Management, only creates a moral hazard that results in a bigger failure and a more costly bailout. Every time, we’re told “this is different, historic, and requires intervention” and that taxpayers should bail out shareholders.

Corporations are simply abstractions. They feed nobody, house nobody, educate nobody.

But so too is an 11-year bull market a historical event. That was the unique event that accrued unprecedented wealth to a fraction of the population. And the corporations that benefited didn’t save for a rainy day — which always comes — or pay it out to their workers so they could build up a protective cushion of wealth, or invest in capital projects that would grow the economy. Instead, they poured it into dividends and stock buybacks, juicing executive compensation (from 2017 to 2019 the CEOs of Delta, American, United, and Carnival Cruises earned over $150 million in total compensation) and shareholder returns. Since 2000, U.S. airlines have declared bankruptcy 66 times. Despite the obvious vulnerability of the sector, boards and CEOs of the six largest airlines have spent 96% of their free cash flow on share buybacks. That bolstered the share price and compensation of management but left these companies dangerously exposed to a crisis.

Now that the crisis is upon us, this small population of rich people has found socialism, and they have their hand out. That hand should go back in their damn pocket.

The virtues of failure

Failure, and its consequences, is a necessary part of the system. Economic dislocation and crises have real costs, but they are also opportunities for renewal. Old relationships are severed, assets are freed up, and innovation demanded. A forest fire brings life as it destroys — so too, economic upheavals create light and air for innovation to flourish. The 1918 influenza epidemic was devastating, but it was followed by the Roaring ’20s. The strongest businesses are those that are started in lean times. Wages rise after disruptions like pandemics — if the natural cycles of disruption and renewal are allowed to function.

We’ve let ourselves confuse corporations with the things they own and the people they employ. Corporations are simply abstractions. They feed nobody, house nobody, educate nobody. When a corporation fails, those who have risked their capital to support it lose their investment, but the workers are still capable of work, the assets remain available, and whatever need the corporation was filling remains.

Letting firms fail and share prices fall to their market level also provides younger generations with the same opportunities we, Gen X and boomers, were given: a chance to buy Amazon at 50 (vs. 100) times earnings and Brooklyn real estate at $300 (vs. $1,500) per square foot. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the high growth recoveries that follow economic shocks are periods of real wage growth, whereas slow and steady growth tends to favor the wealthy.

Once the government gets into the business of propping up the losers, you can predict who will be first in line for the handouts: the people with the most political power — corporations and rich people. It’s not just a matter of their lobbyists and their lawyers and their press flacks, though that’s a big leg up. There’s also something more insidious: cronyism.

Cronies gonna crony

The federal government’s response to the pandemic has been true to form. Under the cloud cover of “protecting the most vulnerable,” we’ve handed trillions of dollars to the most powerful.

The only bipartisan action is reckless spending that benefits rich people while throwing some funds at the neediest for optics.

The $2 trillion relief package passed in March 2020 was a theft from future generations. Personal income was 7.3% higher in Q2 versus Q1 of 2020 because of stimulus payments and extra unemployment benefits. The personal savings rate hit a historic 33% in April, the highest by far since the department started tracking in the 1960s. The relief package included a $90 billion tax cut that benefited almost exclusively people making over $1 million per year. The richer you were, the more you gained. At the beginning of August, U.S. billionaires had increased their wealth by a total of $637 billion. It appears, as has been the case for decades, that the only bipartisan action is reckless spending that benefits rich people while throwing some funds at the neediest for optics.

Not every dollar will be wasted. Maybe a third of it will go to the needy. But the majority of the money we are asking our children to repay has done nothing but flatten the curve for rich people. Rich people have registered disproportionate benefit, their preexisting relationships with banks getting them to the front of the line. Look no further than the refusal of the administration to reveal who is getting the money — until after the election, of course.

Instead of letting market failures play out, we propped up the shareholder class using money stolen from the next generation. “We’re all in this together,” they tell us. Bullshit. The really ugly truth is this: For the wealthy, the pandemic means less commuting and emissions, more time with family, and more wealth, with markets at all-time highs.

Cronyism and inequality

The obscene $2.2 trillion Covid relief package was just a symptom of our cronyism. The systemic flaw is that our government is no longer keeping capitalism’s winners in check. Instead, it’s a co-conspirator in their entrenchment.

The wealthy have done well over the past few decades, in a supernova kind of way. A ton has been written on this because the data is abundant. There is shocking data at the extremes: The top 0.1% now own more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 80%. The three richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50%. And there is bad news in broad strokes as well: Since 1983, the share of national wealth owned by lower- and middle-income families has declined from 39% of the pie to 21%, while upper-income families have increased their share of national wealth from 60% to 79%.

No entrepreneur starts, or doesn’t start, a business because of the tax code.

For purposes of self-preservation, you’d think the rich would be concerned with this level of income inequality. At some point, the bottom half of the globe by income realizes they can double their wealth by taking the wealth of the richest eight families, who have more money than 3.6 billion people. Here in the U.S., the bottom 25% of households (31 million families) have a median net worth of $200. Most recently, a group of protesters built a guillotine outside the Manhattan home of Jeff Bezos to commemorate his wealth passing $200 billion.

This trend is only getting worse. Once, we elected leaders who cut the tops of trees to ensure saplings get sunlight. Today there is less and less sunlight. A recent study of historical tax-return data concluded that the uber-wealthy paid a tax rate of 70% in the ’50s, 47% in the ’80s, and 23% at present — a lower tax rate than the middle class. Whereas poor and middle-class tax rates have largely stayed the same.

My own experience provides a case study in how the wealthy lock in their gains. When I sold my last company, L2, in 2017, I paid an effective tax rate of 17%–18%. I paid 22.8% federal, but the first $10 million were tax-free, thanks to Section 1202 of the tax code. Section 1202 is a tax break for early shareholders, meant to encourage startups. Only it’s nothing but a transfer of wealth from other taxpayers to venture capitalists and founders. No entrepreneur starts, or doesn’t start, a business because of the tax code. It takes a special kind of crazy to start a company and a lot of talent, work, and luck to build it to be something you can sell for millions of dollars. The decision has nothing to do with the tax code. Tax breaks for the successful are just another way we deepen inequality.

Once people make the jump to lightspeed, advantages like this let them pull away. Access to more resources, investment opportunities, lower taxes, tax specialists, political contacts, friends who can help your kid get into school, and the wheel spins. It’s never been easier to become a billionaire, or harder to become a millionaire.

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ramialkarmi · 6 years

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The real reason we get freaked out by self-driving car accidents (TSLA, GOOG)

Self-driving cars have the potential to save lives.

But as the technology is being tested in public, the companies leading in the space need to do a better job at responding when one of their vehicles are involved in an accident.

Tesla's response to accidents involving Autopilot — blaming the victim and citing statistics — makes it harder for the public to place trust in the technology.

It's hard to dispute the upside to autonomous vehicles.

Fewer accidents. Fewer deaths and injuries. No more worries about speeding or people driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Increased accessibility to affordable transportation in communities that need it most.

So far, the data show that an autonomous future is full of benefits with very few drawbacks. Humans are flawed creatures and make mistakes behind the wheel. And when they do, people can die. Self-driving technology has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year in the US alone.

But in the meantime, the companies testing autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles — the Waymos, Ubers, and Teslas of the world — are setting themselves up for greater scrutiny than traditional automakers with each accident they're involved in.

It's not because their robotic vehicles aren't technically safer than human-operated vehicles. They almost certainly are. It's because when there is an accident involving a self-driving or semi-autonomous vehicle, especially one where there's a death or injury involved, there's an added level of discomfort. It's technology making — or at least contributing to — the accident. It's easy and understandable to blame a human for a car accident. It's not as easy to understand when a car powered by a bunch of algorithms and AI is to blame.

In these cases, it's a company's product that's contributing to death, injury, or property damage. And when a company's product is involved, it's up to the company to take responsibility, not shift the blame back to its own customers.

Tesla is the biggest culprit here.

The handful of accidents involving Tesla's semi-autonomous system Autopilot have happened because the driver wasn't using it properly. (Drivers have to keep their hands on the steering wheel while Autopilot is engaged in case they have to take over, for example.) But the problem with Autopilot is that it blends autonomous driving with human driving, which sets itself up for misuse and error. And as we've seen in a few cases, that misuse can result in an injury or even death.

Tesla's response to each of these accidents has been to blame everyone but itself. The company routinely points out how a driver misused autopilot and that the data and statistics show that Autopilot-equipped cars are far safer than regular cars.

Here's part of the statement Tesla gave after one of its customers, Walter Huang, died while using Autopilot in his Tesla Model X in April:

"We empathize with Mr. Huang's family, who are understandably facing loss and grief, but the false impression that Autopilot is unsafe will cause harm to others on the road. NHTSA found that even the early version of Tesla Autopilot resulted in 40% fewer crashes and it has improved substantially since then. The reason that other families are not on TV is because their loved ones are still alive."

Tesla's rebuke may be technically and factually correct, but it's wrong in spirit and lacks empathy. When one of your users dies, it's not time to blame the victim or the media for covering the incident. It's time to talk about your plan for preventing it from happening again.

But Tesla's stance seems to be to fight back against its critics, naysayers, and the media covering each of these accidents.

Here's Tesla CEO Elon Musk's tweet from earlier this week about an accident involving an Autopilot-equipped Tesla that resulted in a broken ankle:

I'll take a stab at answering Musk's implied question.

The outsized media coverage of these accidents happen because there's an extra level of creepiness when humans aren't involved, or in Tesla's case, not supposed to be involved. There's going to be outrage when a corporation could be at fault for creating a flawed and dangerous product, especially when those products are effectively being beta tested in public where human lives may be at risk.

It's easy to understand when a human driver causes an accident by driving while drunk. We're still exploring the ramifications of a traffic accident caused by a robot.

Even a recent accident involving a self-driving car from Google's sister company Waymo gained a lot of attention, even though the Waymo vehicle clearly wasn't at fault. (A video from the Waymo vehicle's dashboard camera showed a driver swerving over a median and hitting the Waymo vehicle head on.)

Uber took a better approach recently. After one of its self-driving vehicles hit and killed a woman in March, Uber pulled all of its self-driving vehicles off the road until it could study the problem and figure out what to do next. Maybe Uber didn't need to make such an extreme move, but it was a demonstration that the company was taking responsibility for the accident instead of blaming the victim and citing a bunch of statistics.

The problem isn't the fundamental technology behind self-driving cars. It's the attitude of the companies operating those vehicles and a failure to come to terms with the publics unease and lack of knowledge of this growing trend. They're not beta testing a new version of iOS or a new Snapchat filter. They're testing vehicles carrying human beings on roads where other human beings drive, walk, and cycle.

And the communication from the leaders in the space should reflect that new reality.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk says flying cars are a bad idea because they could 'guillotine' people on the ground

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos reveals what it's like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life

#Tech Insider #Arab #Entrepreneurship #sillicon alley insider

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