A thread for Democrats Only
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Quote:Maybe I will write a story called "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" which would be a retelling of "Indistinguishable From Magic" giving Kaylee a much bigger role -- http://www.fireflyfans.net/bluesun.aspx?bid=5185 In the story about Evil, there will be a contrast between the aimlessness of Mal and the highly directed goals of River and Kaylee, whose first goal is to save Wash and ultimate goal is to save humanity. The trick is that River and Kaylee never, never, never tell anybody what they are doing because either nobody would believe it, or nobody would be a help, or The Operative would stop them, since he is paying close attention to their projects yet doesn't know their goals. Most people will never know what River/Kaylee did because most people need to be told and shown over and over, like ads on TV, before they get an inkling. Let's be rude about this: most people in the last 300,000 years are as aimless as Mal and very few have ever been as focused as River and Kaylee and even the Operative. If Mal does some tiny thing, he lets everybody know, but mostly he struggles to keep flying and put food on the table. When River and Kaylee achieve something huge, they don't slap their name on it Trump Tower style. The billions of Mals and Trumps of the world pretty much accomplish nothing, but imagine they did a lot. It is very telling that most Americans think Mal and Trump are highly significant to the story, but River and Kaylee are actually doing much bigger things than a spaceship captain or a make believe president, both captain and president randomly killing people when the whim strikes them.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't put much value on money. I certainly don't go out of my way to acquire more than I need.
You seem really hung up on that. This sounds like a YOU problem.
Just like I said that I don't need to live off of $4500 per year, but I can, I'm also extremely far from lazy as well.
I do what I enjoy doing. Some days that is more or less nothing. Most days I'm investing by working on my house with stuff I've bought on sale (sometimes even lucking into damn-near-free), or working on my hobbies, or helping other people out. None of my activities are ever going to make me rich. Some will make me money down the road. Some plant obs on other people which will be paid back one day. A lot of it won't ever make me any money at all. But whatever it is that I'm doing (or not doing), I'm rarely found doing anything that I don't enjoy doing these days.
And probably most importantly, none of the money I make is from taking advantage of anybody else... whether that be from scamming people directly, or making money off the backs of other people's work via the stock market.
You sound like a bad guy right now, Second.
Just figured I'd fill you in on that since you're so clueless about yourself.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Maybe I will write a story called "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" which would be a retelling of "Indistinguishable From Magic" giving Kaylee a much bigger role -- http://www.fireflyfans.net/bluesun.aspx?bid=5185 In the story about Evil, there will be a contrast between the aimlessness of Mal and the highly directed goals of River and Kaylee, whose first goal is to save Wash and ultimate goal is to save humanity. The trick is that River and Kaylee never, never, never tell anybody what they are doing because either nobody would believe it, or nobody would be a help, or The Operative would stop them, since he is paying close attention to their projects yet doesn't know their goals. Most people will never know what River/Kaylee did because most people need to be told and shown over and over, like ads on TV, before they get an inkling. Let's be rude about this: most people in the last 300,000 years are as aimless as Mal and very few have ever been as focused as River and Kaylee and even the Operative. If Mal does some tiny thing, he lets everybody know, but mostly he struggles to keep flying and put food on the table. When River and Kaylee achieve something huge, they don't slap their name on it Trump Tower style. The billions of Mals and Trumps of the world pretty much accomplish nothing, but imagine they did a lot. It is very telling that most Americans think Mal and Trump are highly significant to the story, but River and Kaylee are actually doing much bigger things than a spaceship captain or a make believe president, both captain and president randomly killing people when the whim strikes them.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't put much value on money. I certainly don't go out of my way to acquire more than I need.
You seem really hung up on that. This sounds like a YOU problem.
Just like I said that I don't need to live off of $4500 per year, but I can, I'm also extremely far from lazy as well.
I do what I enjoy doing. Some days that is more or less nothing. Most days I'm investing by working on my house with stuff I've bought on sale (sometimes even lucking into damn-near-free), or working on my hobbies, or helping other people out. None of my activities are ever going to make me rich. Some will make me money down the road. Some plant obs on other people which will be paid back one day. A lot of it won't ever make me any money at all. But whatever it is that I'm doing (or not doing), I'm rarely found doing anything that I don't enjoy doing these days.
And probably most importantly, none of the money I make is from taking advantage of anybody else... whether that be from scamming people directly, or making money off the backs of other people's work via the stock market.
You sound like a bad guy right now, Second.
Just figured I'd fill you in on that since you're so clueless about yourself.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Your life is without purpose. That's why you're miserable.
But do go on and project what you wish you'd done with it now that you're too old to do anything with it into made up characters that most people never even heard of.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture
In this book, to repeat for emphasis, I use “the 9.9 percent” to describe a form of life rather than a set of people identified by their supposed net worth. It is a way of thinking and a system of values that characterizes many people who are not and have no realistic prospect of joining the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution. Indeed, it matters most precisely insofar as it is shared by those who are not “paid-up” members of the 9.9 percent, as it were.
Even so, I do not intend in this way to diminish concern with the extreme concentration of wealth at the very top 0.1 percent of the economic spectrum. Quite to the contrary. The point rather is that Oligarchs have never controlled anything with their own bare hands. Their power, like all human power, resides in the minds of other human beings. To understand how our ruling class came to be, and why it gets richer and more powerful with every passing crisis and act of universal impoverishment, it is necessary to know something about the illusions that accumulate down below as inequality rises. The pillars of the system ultimately rest on a ground of assumptions that guide the lives of people who look a lot like you. . . .
It felt as if I had stepped out of that rocket ship to the future and found myself a few blocks down the road, stumbling around some alternate version of the past. We’ve been here before, I thought—only this time, I am part of the problem.
This uncanny feeling of deja vu, I think, will be familiar to many people who have very different family stories, not at all like my own. Really, it can happen to anyone who has tried to relax in recent years with a good history book. Time was when the chronicles of ancient Rome, China, or Mesopotamia would offer escape from the present. No more. The holiday from history is over. These days, you’ll get to the end of a learned tome on the rise of fascism and realize that several chapters remain to be written. You’ll read about the “lost cause” of the Confederacy and wonder when they will finally give up. You’ll consult George Orwell’s 1984, not to speculate about the future, but to analyze the latest pronouncements from on high. Or you’ll thumb through an old novel about the fading American dream, like The Great Gatsby, and wonder which one of the characters is you. The so-called arc of the moral universe seems to have acquired a dark sense of humor.
It’s usually best to imagine that we create our own circumstances in life. But it is often more accurate to say that our circumstances create us. In retrospect, the small dramas of my family story look like a spotty commentary on forces that remain mostly out of view. The same is true for the form of life that I aspired to join, or so I tend to think. The closest thing to a defining attribute of the way of thinking that now dominates American life is our lack of awareness of the causes that brought us to the present state and of the ancient patterns we thoughtlessly retrace in our lives. To an unexpected degree, we are living in the past. We just don’t know it.
In this book, I argue that those forces which have set us rowing backward into the past can be explained mostly in terms of a single fact: the rapid rise in economic inequality over the past half century. At the same time, I contend that language in which we talk about this fact has come to obscure the reality. In particular, we systematically overlook the way in which inequality reaches into our own thoughts and desires and so involves us all. In this chapter—spoiler alert—I lay out all of the main lines of the argument in the book. The evidence in support of that argument will have to wait for subsequent chapters. My aim here is to supply some of the intuitions out of which the argument evolved. The family memories are idiosyncratic, I grant, but the experiences they represent are now close to universal, or so I believe.
From first chapter at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08VJNPMWM/
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They are the beneficiaries of Zipf's law.
The only way you're breaking that is if you refuse the establishment and play by your own rules.
Take JO's alternate language Nooalf, for instance...
There's not a single page on his campaign website that adheres to Zipf's law when it comes to word frequency.
In my case, I've broken the law by living outside the box. With my income, I should be among the most miserable of us living today. But I've figured out a way not only to make ends meet on nearly nothing, but to thrive on it and live a fulfilling life full of doing things that I enjoy doing.
Quote:
Their power, like all human power, resides in the minds of other human beings.
When you don't place a value on money other than just enough money to pay the bare essentials and to acquire the things that you need to achieve that fulfillment, you have no respect, envy or jealousy of those who have more than you do. Only then do you find no sense of fulfillment in acquiring more fiat currency then you need, truly making so a useless endeavor.
I got off the bus. Who's coming with me?
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:What you are suggesting is to become a hippie. Whatever happened to them? Now I remember! Hippies vanished, along with their dreams of a better world. They were so inwardly focused on their own bliss that the external world made no changes for the better. Then even the Hippies got bored with the small time life they lived. Hippies quit being Hippies.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They are the beneficiaries of Zipf's law.
The only way you're breaking that is if you refuse the establishment and play by your own rules. . . .
I got off the bus. Who's coming with me?
It is NOT Zipf's law if you become a doctor with a strategy to extract large sums of money from Medicare. Typical American doctors are in it for the money or otherwise they'd be working half the time at Doctors Without Borders, making a better world for someone other than themselves (Don't forget how selfish the Hippies were).
On a smaller scale than doctors, veterinaries do it for money, too, extracting from dog and cat owners. If it wasn't about maximizing money, there are plenty of stray dogs to treat for free.
As a matter of fact, most of Americans in the top 10 percent of wealth spend nearly all their money on themselves and their children. The lower 90 percent of Americans get their pay cut and their prices raised by the top 10% so that the 10% can have a little more money to spend on their children.
For me, one of the most distressing statistics is that the richer people get, the less they believe in publicly supported child care. It’s not that they don’t want their taxes to go to pay for child care, it’s that they’ve internalized this idea that everyone can do this, everyone can raise their own child or just hire a nanny. “Let them hire a nanny” is the new “let them eat cake.” It just shows how this super-well-educated class becomes oblivious to the basis of its own existence.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What you are suggesting is to become a hippie. Whatever happened to them? Now I remember! Hippies vanished, along with their dreams of a better world. They were so inwardly focused on their own bliss that the external world made no changes for the better. Then even the Hippies got bored with the small time life they lived. Hippies quit being Hippies.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They are the beneficiaries of Zipf's law.
The only way you're breaking that is if you refuse the establishment and play by your own rules. . . .
I got off the bus. Who's coming with me?
They didn't vanish. The ones that didn't die of drug overdoses or STDs sold out and are the Boomers that are running our country and big businesses. They were trash. They are trash.
The only exceptions to that rule are the ones that are still living that life. They do exist, but you don't ever hear about them. Why would you? They're not on social media, and we live in a society that would never promote such an anti-consumerism lifestyle.
Quote:
It is NOT Zipf's law if you become a doctor with a strategy to extract large sums of money from Medicare. Typical American doctors are in it for the money or otherwise they'd be working half the time at Doctors Without Borders, making a better world for someone other than themselves (Don't forget how selfish the Hippies were).
On a smaller scale than doctors, veterinaries do it for money, too, extracting from dog and cat owners. If it wasn't about maximizing money, there are plenty of stray dogs to treat for free.
As a matter of fact, most of Americans in the top 10 percent of wealth spend nearly all their money on themselves and their children. The lower 90 percent of Americans get their pay cut and their prices raised by the top 10% so that the 10% can have a little more money to spend on their children.
For me, one of the most distressing statistics is that the richer people get, the less they believe in publicly supported child care. It’s not that they don’t want their taxes to go to pay for child care, it’s that they’ve internalized this idea that everyone can do this, everyone can raise their own child or just hire a nanny. “Let them hire a nanny” is the new “let them eat cake.” It just shows how this super-well-educated class becomes oblivious to the basis of its own existence.
Yup. Rich people suck.
The thing about the addiction to money is once you have enough money you can never have enough money.
Maybe as a survivor of alcoholism, I have some insight here that you couldn't have. I shouldn't just assume that of you though. Everything you've ever said about yourself here is a lie, and I don't' really know the real you. Maybe you have struggled with an addiction other than money and you can understand it.
Chances are pretty good that you have. I think it's pretty rare for a human to live on this planet without having a constant inner-battle with one demon or another.
Some of them are just easier to hide from people than others are.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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In the 1990s, economists began exploiting “natural experiments” — situations in which the vagaries of history deliver something close to the kind of controlled trial researchers might want to conduct but can’t.
The most famous example is the research that Card conducted along with the late Alan Krueger on the effects of minimum wages. Most economists used to believe that raising the minimum wage reduces employment. But is this true? In 1992 the state of New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania didn’t. Card and Krueger realized that they could assess the effect of this policy change by comparing employment growth in the two states after the wage hike, essentially using Pennsylvania as the control for New Jersey’s experiment.
What they found was that the increased minimum wage had very little if any negative effect on the number of jobs, a result since confirmed by looking at many other instances. These results make the case not just for higher minimum wages, but for more aggressive attempts to reduce inequality in general.
Another example: How can we assess the effects of safety net programs that aid children? Researchers have taken advantage of natural experiments created by, among other examples, the gradual rollout of food stamps in the 1960s and 1970s and several discrete jumps in Medicaid’s availability in the 1980s. These studies show that children who received aid became much healthier, more productive adults than nonrecipients.
And such studies make a strong case for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better initiative, which emphasizes investment in children as well as in conventional infrastructure.
Finally, big changes in unemployment insurance over the course of the pandemic — a huge increase in generosity, then a sudden cutoff, then a partial restoration, then another cutoff, with some states cutting benefits sooner than others — provide several natural experiments letting us test whether, as conservatives always insist, unemployment insurance deters the unemployed from seeking new jobs.
Well, the data provide a clear answer: While there may be some disincentive effects from unemployment benefits, they’re small.
Overall, then, modern data-driven economics tends to support more activist economic policies: Raising wages, helping children and aiding the unemployed are all better ideas than many politicians seem to believe. But why do the facts seem to support a progressive agenda?
The main answer, I’d argue, is that in the past many influential people seized on economic arguments that could be used to justify high inequality. We can’t raise the minimum wage, because that would kill jobs; we can’t help the unemployed, because that would hurt their incentives to work; and so on. In other words, the political use of economic theory has tended to have a right-wing bias.
But now we have evidence that can be used to check these arguments, and some don’t hold up. So the empirical revolution in economics undermines the right-leaning conventional wisdom that had dominated discourse. In that sense, evidence turns out to have a liberal bias.
Again, the research honored by this Nobel isn’t political, but it has important political implications. And most of those implications favor a policy move to the left.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211012140932/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/10/11/opinion/nobel-prize-economics.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Jewel Staite @JewelStaite
Charlie went to put one of our outdoor plants in the garage and I said, “What are you doing?! It’ll die!” And he said, "... It’s fake. It’s a fake plant. Wait. Have you been watering this?” For three years. It was the only plant I was successfully keeping alive.
10:23 AM · Oct 5, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/JewelStaite/status/1445409431802421250
Is our kid a mannequin?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wages did go up, after a year of the highest unemployment benefits we've ever paid out.
Look at the prices.
You're going to have to raise minimum wage a shit ton more, and consistantly forever, if you're going to ever have any chances of fighting inequality.
The only way to do it is to raise the minimum wage every single year at double whatever inflation is the previous year.
I wonder how the "health experts" are going to feel when they're making just as much money as the guy cleaning toilets at Costco.
At least the guy cleaning toilets at Costco is providing a legitimate service.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:More than half of Americans spend as much as they make each month, or more. Nearly the same percentage say they have favorable financial circumstances, which may just mean some of them are too frightened to admit they don’t. Or perhaps they are just too financially illiterate to understand their predicament.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wages did go up, after a year of the highest unemployment benefits we've ever paid out.
Look at the prices.
You're going to have to raise minimum wage a shit ton more, and consistantly forever, if you're going to ever have any chances of fighting inequality.
The only way to do it is to raise the minimum wage every single year at double whatever inflation is the previous year.
I wonder how the "health experts" are going to feel when they're making just as much money as the guy cleaning toilets at Costco.
At least the guy cleaning toilets at Costco is providing a legitimate service.
I think we are finally getting it that the average American brain does not work around money naturally.
I suspect the average American's sense of impotence in the face of financial difficulty is not only a source of disillusionment, but also a source of the anger that now infects our national politics, an anger that gets displaced onto undocumented immigrants or Chinese trade precisely because we are unable or unwilling to articulate its true source.
“Financial impotence” has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly. It may be more embarrassing than sexual impotence. You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems. Much more likely.
America is a country, as Donald Trump has reminded us, of winners and losers, alphas and weaklings. To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation — even a form of social suicide. Silence is the only protection. That, and noisily supporting Donald Trump.
https://bestmoneymoves.com/blog/2018/10/03/what-percentage-of-american
s-spend-more-than-they-earn/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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