kingmothMar 5
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES

There are a lot of reasons for the downfall of the #USA but a big one is the purchase of traditional #media by plutocrat goons

Look at this fucking shit:

EDIT: some people are angry that i am potentially misleading because this isn't a recent headline. i am trying to make a point about the decay of traditional media and our current state of things. but yes, this is is from 2014, after #bezos bought WaPo. my point still stands, and you should follow my account for commentary, not breaking news

Mar 5 at 5:19amWeb
Show threadKeithMar 5
@benroyce I know that's supposed to be a dove or something...but all I can see is twitter.
Show threadKevin RussellMar 5

@invadersil @benroyce

The Washington Post Is Hitler's toilet paper.

America dies in Bezos Darkness.

.

#epstein #war #coup #iranians #verycrazy #zealotry #loons

Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@invadersil But wouldn't it be perfectly in line with the Madman Theory for the proprietor of Pravda Social to resolve a falling-out with Darth Melon and with the ghosts of ajatollahs past alike by offering Xitter to Iran as a war reparation?

@benroyce

Show threadJestbillMar 5
@riley @invadersil @benroyce I'm holding out for a Trump public apology in Tehran and the signing of a surrender doc.
Show threadtlarivMar 5
@benroyce
Democracy dies in broad fucking daylight
Show threadSBartsch ✅Mar 5
@tlariv @benroyce It was not a warning, it is a confession...
Show threadBarbabluMMar 5
More like a promise. 😓
@SBartsch @tlariv @benroyce
Show threadProScience 🇪🇺Mar 5

@benroyce

Bezos is a lying fascist, episode 276,305,418.

Show threadJohn Jacob Jingleheimer SchmitMar 5
@benroyce "Imperialism is good, akshually....*burp*"
Show threadJames M.Mar 5
@benroyce name and shame-- who wrote this?
Show threadAurora 🐌Mar 5
@benroyce OMG!
Show threadKanaMaunaMar 5

@benroyce

The ICCPR bans war propaganda. Let's send Bezos to The Hague.

Show threadfilobusMar 5
@benroyce it's not even toilet paper any more
Show threadDying World 🔥🌎🔥Mar 5

@benroyce The "us" in the headline is billionaires.

What a load of horseshit!

Show threadTropical ChaosMar 5
@benroyce that's fucking real??? Appalling!
Show threadᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESMar 5

@tropicalchaos

but old

Show threadΩ 🌍 Gus PoseyMar 5
@benroyce The designer who made that graphic should be slapped.
Show threadbkMar 5
@benroyce
Counterpoint : No, they don’t (bet me).
Show thread🔏 Matthias WiesmannMar 5
@benroyce if only there was a country that avoided wars for many years, we could then check if it’s much poorer as the surrounding ones.
I suppose a small neutral one in Europe that was poor in the 19th century could do the trick. Sadly that does not exist.
Show threadmortonMar 5
@thias @benroyce Sweden
Show threadDeanFarrellMar 5
@benroyce Need I say more about why I pay virtually no attention to the mainstream US media?
Show threadTrezzer (aka Helvedeshunden)Mar 5
@benroyce Why cut out the yellow warning saying it is over 14 years old? It would still be relevant — but more honest.
Show threadᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESMar 5

@trezzer

there's a lot of people angry about this is the comments. i'm thinking of editing it, but at the same time i'm somewhat unimpressed with the idea that i'm misleading anyone. it's a real headline

Show threadTrezzer (aka Helvedeshunden)Mar 5
@benroyce That's true, and the paper is problematic, for sure. Considering the current time and context, though, it is easy to assume it was written at this point in time which would put it in a slightly different light. Not a better one, but a different one.
Show threadᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESMar 5

@trezzer

i edited it

Show threadSaraMar 5
@benroyce my ancestors left Prussia and Alsace because people kept saying shit like this
Show threadMother AnarchyMar 5
@benroyce @jwcph just... So evil.
Show threadSearingTruthMar 5

@benroyce

"I'm still amazed at how quickly Trump and Putin transformed the once proud and noble Party of Lincoln into just another simple rabble of seditious and treasonous playground bullies.

I'm not kidding, it really is startling and amazing. I mean my goodness, it only took two or three years."
SearingTruth

Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@benroyce Hey, he's got a point. Wars are the one reliable reason to extract and recirculate wealth hoarded by sillionaires that they're relatively powerless to lobby against, and this recirculation of stagnant wealth can, indeed, make everybody richer.

Of course, we could be even safer and richer if we recirculated the stagnant money without having any wars.

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce Your point is great. The problem is that how to define stagnant money? For instance, Elon Musk can be hardly called stagnant money, as he invests most of his wealth into creating other new tech companies, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring Company, etc.. to redistribute his wealth would probably mean less new tech created, but also more equal society with a little less polarization probably. This is what EU or Europe in general has chosen mostly by taxing and social welfare.
Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce .. to continue the argument a bit.. the capital accumulation is an efficient way to create something new. It is not very democratic though, as money brings in power to change society and thus reduce democratic principles. Free global trade and accumulation of capital is a kind of race to the bottom in this.. if any country does the redistribution too much, it risks on losing out in the global tech development game and thus becoming a relatively poor country in the long run..
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa Ever heard of banks?

These are devices that can lend out wealth that does not yet exist so that something new could be created without having to hoard stagnant money first.

A sneaky problem is, since these are necessarily time-travelling things, when the society takes a shape that, say, prevents vertical economical mobility, then banks will, on the premise that currently poor people will not have any money in the future, stop lending to poor people the future money that these people have in the future where they can borrow it now, build businesses, and be not-poor in the future, thereby reinforcing the preclusion of the more egalitarin futures.

@benroyce

Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa Likewise, Darth Melon does not fund his new companies with his old wealth; instead, he funds them by borrowing money from the banks, at the premise that since he's a sillionaire now, he will be a sillionaire in the future, and therefore can have the money that he will have in the future now already. If we didn't live in the stupidest timeline, people who have actually good ideas would have a competitive advantage at pulling money from that better timeline's future to its present over sillionaires, whose premise in our stupid timeline is just that the society's shape prevents them from ever becoming non-sillionaires.

@benroyce

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce yes, rich vc or individual can borrow money from banks against their already existing wealth as collateral. Without the accumulated wealth, development would be much, much slower. This in itself would not be a bad thing, imo, but the world does not seem to favor slow cautious development at the moment.. and nobody would like to be left aside from the fast development.
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa So, you don't know how banks work.

Here, read this gentle introduction: https://toot.cat/@riley/115023671302432559

@benroyce

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce so perhaps I don't, but thanks for the link, I try to read through that sometime soon to understand more.
Show threadHuopaMar 5

@riley @benroyce Heh, was a funny poetic description of banking.. so I don't disagree at all with that description in principle.

The original point in the WSJ article though was that stronger governments are better in keeping violence in bay, statistically speaking. War has been a way to form the stronger governments, according to the article. This has hold true in the big picture up until now I guess..

.. but back to the point of how to redistribute wealth.

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce Taxing is the good and proper way, as we can decide about the use of it via democratic means, but I just think it is not easy to do that and there is a tendency to lower taxes overall globally due to the mechanics of how tech development happens today via startups.
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa Taxing is a different mechanism. You can also do democracy by creating money in the future of the projects that the people want to be implemented, and, should that be necessary[1], by ordering banks to suck that money into the present when people want to use it in order to implement the projects and thus ensure that the money in their future will exist and be avaiable to be sucked into the present. Round and round it goes, as Harlan the Technician would have said.

[1] In theory[2], the incentive of the money clearly and credibly existing in specific points of the proper future should be enough to convince banks to suck it out, but experience such as "redlining" shows that banksters are not always greedy bastards. Sometimes, they're racist bastards.

[2] The creditless "efficient markets theory", that is.

@benroyce

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce Well yes, that certainly would also enable development.. but as things stand, out of the top 10 new tech companies created in the last 20 years, I do not know any where banks would have played any significant role.. so yes, this is theoretically possible to do and we could try to plan a path towards it, but currently the speed of development is just so much faster in VC/angel investor drive development that it leaves everything else in the dust. For good or bad.. often for bad.
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa WSJ, as usual, tries to do economics without the equations, and forgets that the kind of governments that would eagerly go to war create, on balance, more violence that needs to be held at bay than they can hold at bay by doing violence they approve of upon the people whom they incentivised to do violence that they disapprove of.

@benroyce

Show threadHuopaMar 5

@riley @benroyce to be fair to WSJ though, this article was Opinion article. I would also say the title of this Opinion is not perfectly chosen, probably for click-bait reasons..

I agree totally though on what you said. The whole economics of going to the war has probably been analyzed many times over.. btw, Thomas Piketty wrote about the egalitarian nature of large wars. Everybody become so poor that Gini coefficient becomes very low.. not ideal solution, but it creates more wealth equality.

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce banks have been the main source of funding for development in the history, but practically none of the modern startups are funded by banks. I have been part of startup scene for over 20 years and banks were just not part of it. The ultra rich have the means and willingness to invest in such highly uncertain endeavors. Also modern bank regulation prevents banks from making large investments into tech startups. Tech startups are those that create the sillionaires..
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa How about "One whose velocity is more than two standard deviations below the economy's average" ?

@benroyce

Show threadHuopaMar 5
@riley @benroyce can you elaborate this quote a little?
Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa It's not a quote. It's a jam-up of the basic practice of reliabiity engineering, where we watch out for statistical outliers in order to find problems that we might not yet know about and might need to work towards resolving, and the common modern scientific convention to consider, by default, the p-value of 5% the boundary of statistical significance. You may also want to check the spoiler.

@benroyce

Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa Did you write "You shouldn't judge the stagnancy of your fellow[1] sillionaire's pot of money!" inbetween the lines of "[h]ow do you define stagnant money?"

[1] I don't think I could consider a sillionaire a fellow, unless, perhaps, they got that way by a truly tragic accident, like what happened to Mojang, but, hey, for the sake of argument ...

@benroyce

Show threadRiley S. FaelanMar 5

@huopa

In case you didn't get the mathonomics joke:

What shape does the frequency function of the velocity of money have in our economy? What shape did it have in the mythical economy that Adam Smith envisioned[1]?

How do statistical tools designed for Gaussian distribution fare in context of these respective shapes?

[1] Forgive Smith for he didn't know what he was doing, as the applicability of Bernoulli's ideas on fluid dynamics on economy had not been discovered yet in his lifetime. That basically grew out of the twentieth-century development of large systems theory, with a few bits of help here and there from category theory, also pretty much a twentieth century thing. But then again, it's also the case that the real economic systems he lived with had substantial parts that could approximate his models well enough for the margins of error that used to be considered acceptable in his time.

@benroyce

Show threadmortonMar 5
@benroyce
The United States doesn't suffer the full consequences of war: the bombing of cities, mass graves, displacement and migration, and cities razed to the ground. My family memories of the war include my grandfather's brother being killed with a shovel by a guard in a camp, and then being relocated. An American civilian watches the war on television and worries only about whether oil prices will rise. He doesn't have to worry about bombs falling on his home.
Show thread"Musty Bits" McGeeMar 5
@benroyce no fucking way
Show threadHeatherMJMar 5
@benroyce Some may be safer and richer, many will die
Show threadBenoît Régent-KloecknerMar 5
@benroyce Well, that is probably true (at least for the "richer" part), and remarkably honest, even in the short run. Of course, the important part is who is "us".
Show threadᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESMar 5
@BrKloeckner ✅
Show threadxs4me2Mar 5

@benroyce

Hitler also made a lot of money from sales of “Mein Kampf” during his reign…

Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 5
@xs4me2
Not the least because it was law to own one, or something along those lines.
@benroyce
Show threadxs4me2Mar 5

@alterelefant @benroyce

Indeed…

Show threadkauerMar 5
@alterelefant @xs4me2 @benroyce There was strong social pressure at times, especially for those connected with the State apparatus. And there was some overt public pressure from e.g. speakers and writers, that owning a copy was the duty of every patriotic German etc etc. It did no-one any harm to have a copy prominently displayed in the home. For a while, newlyweds were offered a copy. There was even a special wedding edition for the purpose. Some sources say it was "offered", some say it was given, some say couples had to pay for it. Maybe it depended on the location or the official presiding. Regardless, it would have been a bit tricky to say "no". Some groups, like the SS, some teachers, journalists etc were required to read part or all of it. The book was a popular school prize (popular to give, I guess probably not to receive). But I'm pretty sure there was never an actual legal requirement to buy a copy.
Show threadxs4me2Mar 5

@kauer @alterelefant @benroyce

True indeed…

Here is an interesting link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Adolf_Hitler

Wealth of Adolf Hitler - Wikipedia

Show threadFrank HeijkampMar 5
@kauer
Due to the extreme societal peer pressure there was no need to put it in law. The result was however exactly the same. To not own a copy or to decline a copy when it was offered by someone would bring one in massive trouble.
@xs4me2 @benroyce
Show threadkauerMar 5
@alterelefant @xs4me2 @benroyce From my reading, societal pressure was there, but it was largely related to official contexts. Most Germans at the time did not own a copy. The population was about 80 million, and only an estimated 12 million copies were printed.