ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESMar 5

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

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. Faelan

@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

Mar 5 at 1:56pmWeb
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..