from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:45AM
> What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
Or more simply, dumb luck. All those other risk-takers who thought they could see the future, they are broke, maybe even living in a ditch. You won the lotto dude.
At least he's half-way to figuring that out. Better than most lotto winners.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by keplr on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:12AM
There is a baseline level of competence and the often overlooked social intuition that is required. The latter is why you see so few brilliant-but-socially-awkward-nerd billionaires. You can be eccentric, as long as you've got enough charm, charisma, style, and/or sex-appeal to balance it out. If you're weird and off-putting, few people will do business with you no matter how good your ideas are.
But after you clear that bar, it's basically luck.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:16AM
He started in a fortunate position (a family with some space capital), had the luck of knowing someone with a good idea (Jeff Bezos) who needed investors. He deserves credit for looking at the Amazon business model and thinking it could be a success, but he acknowledges that this isn't enough.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:41PM
> He deserves credit for looking at the Amazon business model and thinking it could be a success,
I dunno about that. How many other places did he invest in that went nowhere?
IIRC, the typical venture capitalist model is that 9 out of 10 investments are failures (return less than or equal to the original investment), so they rely on that 10th investment to hit it out of the park to cover for all the others. But a 90% failure rate sounds like dumb luck to me.
To give him credit for picking Amazon is reminiscent of the 'perfect prediction' scam. [skepdic.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:15AM
When I was 12, a theater in town had a deal with the junior high school.
Once a month they ran a film of a classic story.
One had a scene I really remember.
I lived in a military town in the South.
Things were very regimented and conformist.
(You never would have guessed that. Right?)
There's a scene in A Tale of Two Cities where a rich guy's carriage runs down a 99 Percenter's kid.
The asshole blows it off like it's nothing.
Chapter 7 [googleusercontent.com] (orig[1]) [adelaide.edu.au]
That night the dead kid's dad sneaks into the asshole's house.
Chapter 9 [googleusercontent.com] (orig[2]) [adelaide.edu.au]
A massive cheer went up from the crowd when his hand plunged downward.
That's when I knew the '60s had arrived in my hometown.
[1] "He was a man of about sixty"
[2] There's a small rehash at about the 80 percent mark which includes "the tall man".
(You can really tell Dickens that got paid by the word.)
The last couple of paragraphs are the nugget.
(A Gorgon is a mythical creature with hair made of serpents.
A human who looked at one turned to stone.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by CRCulver on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:20AM
With Mr. Hanauer's concern lead to billionaires accepting a hit to their earnings for the sake of social tranquility, or will it lead to increasing purchases of drones and further coopting of national governments into defense forces for the uber-rich, so that the mere pitchforks of the rabble are no threat to them?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:42AM
We already know its the latter, what with universal spying and militarized police forces. The tiny sliver of hope on the police side is that police forces often have National Guardsmen amongst them, and soldiers take their oath to defend the constitution a lot more seriously than civilians. That is the seed we need to work on growing (as we know from the original civil war, even the military will be split, so any future civil war won't be "civilians vs. Army", but closer to "Army vs. Army", and if we're really lucky, "Army vs. corrupt government, but not a coup since restoring the Constitution is the primary goal").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:06AM
Take your Oathkeeper crap and, well, go join a militia, you traitor! There, I said it. Soldiers are hired guns, the Iraq war proved this. We surround you, you traitorous scum! Restoring YOUR idea of the Constitution is not restoring the Constitution, it is treason, rebellion, perfidy, and being an asshole. I suggest you stand down, before those smart enough to be citizens squash you and your camo-bedraped comrades.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:54AM
I believe it will involve moving away from the 99.9%er's. probably a decent amount of ocean and a lot of armed men between them and the nothings.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:22AM
That's not a sustainable situation. You'd still need somebody to manufacture those drones and operate them, two things that aren't contributing to the survival level (food, shelter, energy).
Thus, either you revert to forced labor or decide to give the rabble enough so they continue to work for you "on their own accord" (rather than hunt you with pitchforks). If the later, someone will have to pay (give away some wealth). So who's the one to pay?
* if it is the oligarchy, why not cut the unproductive activities (manufacturing drones and maintaining a military police) and start paying "some rabble you still need" already? (more or less, this is exactly what TFAuthor suggests)
* if it is the govt, either the oligarchy will need to support military police indirectly by paying taxes (so, why not cut the middle man and form your own army?) or the govt will issue money to "pay" (so the oligarchy's "wealth" will be eroded by inflation anyway).
The quickest way would be to revert to forced labor with a short detour through indentured servitude (borrow money then accept whatever work conditions are offered to pay the loan. Hang on! This is already happening, right?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:52AM
Thus, either you revert to forced labor or decide to give the rabble enough so they continue to work for you "on their own accord" (rather than hunt you with pitchforks). If the later, someone will have to pay (give away some wealth). So who's the one to pay?
The oligarchy pays directly to people who are still useful to them. The ranks of these are shrinking, as more and more R&D is moved abroad. Just owning a building in a US city costs you millions per year in property taxes. You could sell this building, stop bleeding money, and instead hire people in India or China. Same output, but far lower expenses.
The government pays to the people who are NOT useful to the oligarchy. The purpose of those payouts (also known as "social security") is simply to render them harmless.
This system filters the labor pool by age, competence, experience. Those that are useful get employed, and they are paid far better than the other. For a while. Then they are cast away, and new workers are hired, younger and with more recent education. Those that are not useful anymore... they are left to rot, in every meaning of the word. Drugs and crime are *necessary* ingredients in this scheme; consequently, strong and violent police controls those ghettos.
This happens not because oligarchs are inherently evil. They are not. They would gladly hire a man from a ghetto if they can make a buck on him. This happens in sports all the time, even though those athletes retain a piece of ghetto within them, and it often bites them. But team owners have to deal with this, as it is their job.
The problem occurs because oligarchs simply cannot use most of those unwanted persons. A bank does not need a hundred clerks if ten clerks + 10 ATM + Internet are sufficient. What those 90 unwanted clerks are to do? New, high quality cars require less service. New TV sets are so cheap that repairs are impractical. Industrialized farming has no use for men with scythes to harvest the grain. Assembly of modern electronics cannot be done by hand - the parts are too small to see. This is happening everywhere. Too few people can actually be productive today, just as a Neanderthal would be not very much in demand in America of 1900's. The government, on request of oligarchy, chose to kick the can down the road by taxing the still working people and sharing their labor with those who do not work, for one reason or another. Better than euthanasia, I guess...
If we extrapolate the process, we will end up with an island where a few people live surrounded by their robots. They do not need humans to service them, outside of very few special jobs (medical, for one.) Just like Solaria [wikipedia.org] of Isaac Asimov:
What will happen with other 5,999,999,000 people that currently live on Earth? I guess we better not ask, since there is no place for them in that Paradise. If they are lucky, they will be shoved underground [wikipedia.org], fed with yeast, and safely confined there as they develop agoraphobia. If they are not so lucky, they will simply disappear as a waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:09PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:43PM
You forgot to mention the horse and buggy whip makers....
The whip makers were lucky, for a while, that their woodworking and leather handling skills were still useful in other industries, like furniture. But how many furniture items do you have today that are NOT made at a huge factory by huge particle board presses? I do know of few sellers of handcrafted items, and I do buy from them from time to time - but they can provide employment only to one ex-whipmaker out of a thousand.
For hundreds of generations human societies developed without much need for advanced intelligence. Everyone was smart enough to be employed. The first deviation from this happened during early industrialization. It did result in destroying ancient trades (guilds) and creating the proletariat. We are now in another state of industrialization, where the very ability to perform useful work depends on worker's intellect and education. Employers have no use for monkeys who pull a lever whenever a light goes on; and they don't need hordes of those monkeys, one per machine. The new worker has to be smart, well educated, and very flexible, as it's unlikely that he will be working at the same factory from cradle to grave. The demand for such workers harvests only the best and brightest from the labor pool. Since the demand is limited in volume, employers have no need to dip deeper into that pool. The unclaimed labor remains unclaimed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Han Held on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:32AM
...that's one of the reasons for the militarization of the police (in USia, at least), also that's the reason for the "enemy combatant" ruling (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031302371.html ) among other decisions.
They're preparing to go to war with their own populace, and have been for decades.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:51AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:04AM
So how much do you pay your 99% bodyguards to protect you from the rest of the 99%? Not so much that they become the 1%, in which case they will quit, nor so little that they would benefit as much as anyone else from your overthrow. Perhaps if you could breed a group of insanely loyal bodyguards, say children of another religion that you kidnap, we could call them Janassaries, or Marmelukes! And then they would love us, and protect us, and Indira Gandhi would still be alive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:18AM
Thats not a worry because isn't impossible. You can not get rich just by working, otherwise things like a middle class would still exist. The lack of a middle class proves that people who work will be poor forever.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:37PM
Just what do you think a "middle class" is? The US middle class has always been workers. Workers and middle management. In the 50s, a factory job was "middle class:" show up with your lunch pail at 8:30, 15 minute break at 10, lunch at 12... The same schedule as a call center; the pay was a little better. You didn't send your kids to private school, you didn't live in a 2000 square foot mcmansion, and you didn't fly to Costa Rica on vacation. Middle class means, if you manage carefully, then you can retire one day. Middle class means, if you're spendthrift, then you can appear upper class at the expense of working until death.
US socialism means most people end up more-or-less middle class, able to retire on their government pension and government health care. But that's not good enough for people anymore. Now they seem to want trappings of wealth - someone to cook for them every night, someone to raise their kids, a big house without boarders, passive entertainment every day. I'm trying hard not to go all "back in my day" here, but I don't think you people posting about the death of the middle class from your smartphones have any idea what "working class" really means.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:43PM
I probably wouldn't agree with the parent poster in a lot of things, but getting rid of the $200 monkeys of cable and cellphone bill off one's back will do a lot for one's security.
(Score: 1) by ah.clem on Friday July 04 2014, @02:32AM
Respectfully, no one is forcing you to pony up that money for cable or smartphone. If you understand how wealth is accumulated in the US, you could start investing that $200-$400 a month and see very significant returns over the years. I am not being snarky, it took me a long time to figure this out. Unfortunately, it's the way money is made in the US. And it works. No amount of complaining is going to make it any different. You either have to live it, or live with it (to paraphrase the Firesign Theatre).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:58PM
I don't know, but I tend to trust good movies and/or sitcoms to reflect well enough the reality of their times (otherwise how would the audience relate with them?). So, let me pick some examples:
* Bewitched [wikipedia.org] - '64-'72 - single bread earner in the family, wife staying at home with a small kid
* The Flinstones/Jetsons - started early '60-ies. Single bread earner in the family, wifes staying at home at home with one small kid each.
* The Deer Hunter - filmed in '78 with events place in '72. The blue-collar guys have time to go hunting in the mountain every weekend. There's no indication their girlfriends are working
Ummm... looks like a different middle class... was it all smoke-and-mirrors then, or is smoke-and-mirrors now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:44PM
2000 sq foot a McMansion? Hardly. More like a modest sized rancher.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:39PM
It was a term made up by lamestream media.
There are only 2 classes: people who make money from labor and people who make money from money--The Proletariat and The Bourgeoisie aka The Working Class and The Idle Rich.
The term "middle class" was invented in pursuit of the elite's Divide and Conquer strategy:
Get non-rich people to squabble among themselves and not to concentrate on the source of their affliction (the rich and politically powerful).
The proper term (if you are going to use such a stupid, useless term) would be Middle INCOME--and the lines can arbitrarily be drawn anywhere.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @02:32AM
A third class is lazy ass movement-co-opting layabout intellectuals who crave power leading people that they themselves have nothing in common with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:44AM
If we continue this way, I think what's going to happen first is that the 1% will find out that you can't eat money, and the 99.9% finds that you can't eat pitchforks.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:21AM
But you can use pitchforks to steal food and the means to produce food. And divert infrastructure to support a decent life.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:23AM
But, you can eat the rich!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:55AM
Not to mention that, as fodder, they are quite expensive (think: with $1B, how many kilos of truffles one can buy?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:20AM
I'm serious. Please show me one time, so I can hope that there will be a second and we can avoid a lot of lives lost and major damage to society. Because we have a global society today, and the coming Revolution will be global as well.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:35AM
So the system will continue to redistribute resource balance until some core function fails. Questions is then which one? when? and the outfall?
Has any cracks showed up so far that could actually halt the day-to-day essentials?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:03PM
those who have money and/or power will never, and I mean NEVER, willingly and of their own free choice give them up
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." --Frederick Douglass (1857)
[Have] any cracks showed up so far that could actually halt the day-to-day essentials?
In "the richest nation in the world", every day, 17 million children go to bed hungry. [sodexofoundation.org]
There are people who have to make a choice between e.g. buying food or buying medicine.
Does that answer the ignorant question you got from Fox so-called News?
You need to switch off your TeeVee, get out of your gated community, and experience the real world.
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Funny) by EvilJim on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:43AM
Alistair Crowley gave up his fortune for drugs, sex and satanic rituals, does that count? }:)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:19PM
If you think Crowley engaged in satanic rituals, you don't understand either Crowley or satanism. Anton LeVey(sp?) was closer to being a satanist, but I actually think he was just a con-man. Some of his disciples, however, WERE satanists.
Yeah, I know that's off the main point. And I sort of agree with you. There are individuals who from an ecstatic belief (or just fanaticism...it may not always be ecstatic) will do unusual things, even to the point of impoverishing themselves...or worse. People have willingly put themselves into the hands of torturers in the expectation that it would eventually kill them.
The real thing is, however, that that kind of government is usually only overthrown by a coup. The Menshevik revolution was an extreme exception...and you'll notice that they were quickly overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Usually what happens is that the government is so weakened by internal strife among the upper classes that someone outside steps in and takes over.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:23PM
quite possibly, my info only comes from a couple of youtube docos so really not sure how reliable they are. also I only have a passing interest in Crowley, not something I'm deeply studied in :)
(Score: 1) by NickM on Friday July 04 2014, @12:58AM
He was not a satanist he was a nietzschean uberman actualizing his will to power in a dramatic way.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2, Informative) by CRCulver on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:29AM
While you may be right that no entire class of rich, powerful people willingly gave up their money and power, history has plenty of examples as individuals doing so. In medieval and early modern Europe and Asia where there was a strong Christian or Buddhist monastic tradition, a number of rulers abdicated and retired to a monastery in old age. Some were forced to do so by intrigue, but there are a number of examples of rulers just worn out by years on the throne. Even Siddharta Gautama, the historical Buddha, was a member of the societal elites who became a total renunciant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:01PM
you don't deserve to know.
maybe you should have paid more attention in philosophy class? or did you just climb the ladder and then throw it away?
(Score: 1) by Stuntbutt on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:02PM
George Washington.
He abdicated power over the colonial army, despite the very real, very easy possibility of taking over.
That's American History - I am *sure* there are other examples in other places.
Counter-example provided, the sentiment expressed is valid - people generally don't give up money and/or power. I wouldn't say NEVER, but it is not the norm. :(
(Score: 2) by Rune of Doom on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:42PM
Emperor Diocletian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian [wikipedia.org]
(Not that the end result was particularly better for anyone, but he went from 'Emperor of the Known World' to 'rural aristocrat growing cabbages')
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:29AM
So a person with a lot of money figures out that the society system control loop has gotten several positive poles in its transfer function. As long as some conditions are avoided those poles will not be felt. And in other conditions or system disturbance the system goes awry. Kind of like when a autopilot will try to compensate lack of altitude by pointing the nose down which looses altitude so it points it further down etc.
Either the system is reshaped or laws of unintended consequences shape one for us that nobody may like.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:01AM
The issue isn't him, its the whole rotten infrastructure. Appealing for rationality in a segment of society that willingly and gleefully drove the entire world into the dirt in 2008 (and has been attempting to do so since) isn't going to work.
If there's one thing that you could draw out of the behaviour of capital in the last ten or twenty years, it's that greed is bottomless. To them, there's no line that shouldn't be crossed. Neoliberalism, it seems to me, cares about nothing except money, even when faced with its own eventual destruction.
He's probably right in that the way to avert the disaster is to reduce inequality and bring back the sort of economy that prospered in the immediate post war years. Yet, when the prevailing ideology is concerned entirely with the accumulation of money, there's no room for social security or a minimum wage, even if it was to the eventual benefit of the rich. Indeed, there's no room for any sort of discourse other than how to extract more money from more people.
Our economic system prides itself on being the product of thousands of years of civilisation, of being the one that survived while the alternatives crashed. Yet it seems to me that it isn't an intelligent system, run by intelligent people, capable of understanding subtlety and making adjustments.
It's a stupid, pig headed creed, squawked and parroted by wide eyed zealots. It just happens that these zealots are rich. They own newspapers and lobby governments and hold enormous power. But that barely masks that they're incredibly stupid.
I don't think it'll even need pitchforks to take a system like that down. It'll eventually devour itself.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:37AM
No.
People, all people. Are good.
Even the those who have done the most horrible things, are horrified by their own actions, and want to be good.
What happens is, to cope: They just can't feel at all.
The biggest hearted people become overwhelmed, and then numb. And it is easier, so very much easier, not to feel anything at all.
Even as I type this, my ex-fiancee is outside in an ambulance. She has multiple illnesses but I just can't find it within me to care, to feel for her any more. I would have given her a lift to the hospital, again. But I would have merely dropped her off, not sat with her all night as I had done so many times.
I read books and am brought to tears by the fake emotions within them, but I can't feel anything anymore for her sad situation.
Am I Evil? I don't feel so.
I don't think "Evil" really exists at all. It's nothing more than a childish bogeyman. A convenient lie.
"They" arn't out there.
Pointing at the sad shape of the world and saying it's the fault of the rich does nothing to solve the problem.
The problem is, that people believe that evil people, that a group of evil people, a category of them, exist out there somewhere.
But never ourselves.
So the rich think: "If I don't profit, some other greedy bastard will... It might as well be me, rather than someone worse.
And so we justify taking the easy, seductive route. Justify not looking too closely at the pain we inflict. We put ourselves in a class of "people" who are all we allow ourselves to feel for.
So we can be inhumane to all those not human.
Sharks are gentle creatures. A research vessel found a shark, and tagged it. It swam away in fear, bleeding from a trivial wound.
Its mate did its best to destroy the research vessel, knowing that the trivial wound was a death sentence to its mate.
Sharks stay hungry until they smell blood, you see. They don't want to kill, but they must eat. So if their prey bleeds, they can justify killing it as a mercy. So you don't find many small, wounded sharks. They're food the moment another, bigger, shark smells its blood.
But they're not evil monsters, out to kill anything that crosses their path.
So how about this rich guy? He seems nice.
All thats necessary for the situation to be fixed is for the rich to realise that by accumulating wealth, they have accumulated responsibility to DO something with it.
And not just collect more.
For it isn't money they have "made", it's merely currency they have collected.
The poor criminals who thieve and yet somehow never stay rich for long just made an early optimization, that no money is bad, some is good, and more is best. Childish linear thinking.
But wealth isn't linear. It's sets a threshold. If you Have Not, you Can Not.
Not enough to eat? Then you cannot just keep conforming to society.
Might makes Right? Social darwinism?
Evolution by Natural Selection is merely the default process in the complete absence of any better organization.
All that lives is in the same boat in this universe: A little blue planet.
(Until we find evidence otherwise).
The second law of thermodynamics is trying to kill us: But it sure seems like a malevolent intelligent force, how things go wrong at the worst, how the worst of people seems to have the easiest time.
How problems fester if shoved under the carpet.
How certainty implies belief, not knowledge. How easy it is for those so certain to take drastic action, because they *know* they are doing the right thing. How hard it is for the truly wise to act, appreciating full well how wrong they could be.
In this world, things need maintenance. Else mess increases. Only life cleans up.
Everything else just gets worse.
We already have a common enemy, one eternally sufficient to unite all in cooperation: Death.
But so long as we believe in a "good god" because there clearly seems to exist a bad devil. So long as we believe the lie that people must be fundamentally evil. (that evil can even exist!)
We will continue to treat the masses as if they are evil. And the masses will continue to behave as they are expected to.
The solution is quite simple. It's the old golden rule, plus a small correction.
It's got a name, but I can't remember it.
I'm bad with names.
Goes like this: Be flexible in your acceptance of the behaviour of others, and be mindful of your behaviour, when you're at your worst. Try to make your worst behaviour better than that of others.
This isn't easy. It's hard. But it matters.
You'll just have to do this, and just trust that enough other people will have the wisdom and decency to "get it" and also lift their game.
Along with this, realize that the standard you walk past is the standard you set. Fix any problem you can see, as soon as you can see it. And if you can't, at the very least bitch and moan about it to raise awareness! (preferably online) so others who might be able to fix the problem get a chance to see it!
And also so the problem doesn't become forgotten. It's the least you can do.
Good luck.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:59PM
You are wrong that evil does not exist. It does. There is evil in this world. Pure naked malice. There is a God, there is a devil, and there are demons. I know because I've met those demons.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:24PM
Sometimes, when you meet demons, they are in a mirror. Just like in that movie Constatine with Keanu in it. Well, not exactly like that. But any non-superstitious Christian theologian knows that evil is only bonum privatum. So there is that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:08PM
Before money existed, there was no logic to owning way more stuff than you could use.
...then somebody invented coins and credit and it became a dick measuring contest for guys who are insecure about their manhood, gathering up more wealth than they could spend in multiple lifetimes.
Back in the days before cities, when clusters of humans didn't get larger than about 150 individuals and COMMUNITY was still an actual thing, this kind of behavior would get you banished as an anti-social asshole.
The community spirit was still working great in the Stone Age cultures of the Western Hemisphere [wikipedia.org] when white guys first showed up.
Everywhere that the pestilence of European conquest touched, that served to displace and destroy The Sharing Economy.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turonah on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:23AM
This is the first time I've read anything from the "1%" that not only recognises that they are, in fact, the "1%", but also doesn't read like it should be sprayed over fields as fertilizer. While other big names are calling for abolishment of the minimum wage (Koch et al., for example - http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/07/10/2280101/charles-koch-minimum-wage/ [thinkprogress.org]), this guy at least recognises the fact that being paid minimum wage means that "they'd pay even less if it weren't illegal."
Realising of course, that he's really only out to protect his own ass and assets, he makes a very good point on keeping the current system sustainable. The real question is do we want sustainable, or do we want equitable?
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:37AM
> Realising of course, that he's really only out to protect his own ass and assets, he makes a very good point on keeping the current system sustainable. The real question is do we want sustainable, or do we want equitable?
I think his point is that the sustainability is derived from the equitability - people won't revolt if they don't feel that they are being unfairly treated. So it's not a choice between the two, it's that you can't have one without the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:27PM
If you buy into the "People act in rational self-interest" theory, then his point is supposed to be a central consideration in all business behavior. That is, you pay your people the highest possible wage in order to recruit the best possible talent. You invest in your company, your neighborhood, and your society in order to improve over the long term. Think about Henry Ford's work to educate his employees, to make sure they were well paid and happy. Think about Starbucks' plan to get all of its employees "free" ASU degrees.
The hardcore Randians will tell you that those companies embody the utopian ideals of Rearden Steel or Wyatt Oil. Companies intent on paying as little as possible, even to the point of demanding the government provide nutritional support to their employees, are the antithesis of utopian capitalism - they are Boyle's Steel and Taggart Rail.
But people aren't rational. Few of them will not eat the marshmallow [wikipedia.org]; Ayn Rand's ridiculous utopia will never come to pass, and no one is going to listen to Nick Hanauer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:42AM
Mind you, I took a university job over a couple of offers to make 4 or so times more, because I considered flexible working hours and being able to tackle problems that I found interesting (with lots of resources to help) more important than the extra income, so I'm possibly not in the best position to judge.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tathra on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:38AM
everyone should, at bare minimum, be able to survive. being unemployed, through injury, sickness, or whatever, should not be a death sentence for you and possibly your whole family like it is now. there doesn't need to be an upper limit, but "work or die" should not be the basis of society. "survival for everyone, and all the luxuries of the world for those who work for them" should be society's goal.
is it even possible? who knows? nobody can get over their own greed and selfishness to even consider it, everybody just starts at the conclusion of "its impossible" and stops there.
(Score: 2) by khakipuce on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:03PM
At it's peak probably 2 to 3 decades ago the UK welfare system was as you describe if not better. Then a big argument about taxation broke out that the rich won, ever since the social security budget has been under huge pressure.
Even now the state generally provides enough cash and health care to keep everyone who can access it alive (so pretty much everyone).
(Score: 2) by tathra on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:20PM
so it did work just fine in the UK until the rich started getting too greedy, saying "fuck society"? good, so its already been proven it can work and be stable.
this is absolutely the model we need moving forward, since more and more people will be put out of jobs as society and robotics/automation advances (unless we're going to be merciful and simply kill all the unemployed, which would also serve to prevent any revolts).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:06PM
> Would a factor of 10 in each direction be enough?
No. There is some lower bound at which the poorest will not be able to survive. But there is no upper bound. If someone tells you that you will never earn more than X, that is exactly where you will give up "working to your full potential".
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:26AM
You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state [...] not if, it’s when.
The guy spends too much time on his yacht and in his airplane. He does not debase himself by walking the streets, where the police state is already in full swing.
With some difficulty I read through his tl;dr manifesto. Yes, in part he is correct: the society is full of contrasts. But his proposals (to increase minimum wage?) are laughable. The society exchanges labor for labor; it uses money only as an accounting unit. Would you arrive faster if you fix the speedometer in your car so that it measures higher speed than it really is? But his proposal amounts to exactly that. In the language of proverbs, it's robbing Peter (the customer) to pay Paul (the seller.) The market already manages salaries; and if some job comes with a salary that is below the minimum, it won't be offered. Someone else will work two such jobs for one minimum salary. Should the author then make a law that defines not only the minimum salary, but also the maximum effort that the worker may put in? The market deals with this naturally: if the salary is too low, the owner of the business will be doing the work himself.
There is also that concept of fairness. Capitalism is not built on it. If someone invests $1 and gets back $1M, good for him. It's not fair, probably - if you can agree on some common definition of "fair." But that causes tensions within the society. One would say that the society at large benefits from rich rewards given to few for their great contributions to the society. Perhaps that's true, as examples of socialist countries demonstrated that lack of reward causes lack of progress. But is it fair to reward a CEO with a $10M/yr salary? These figures look more and more like a closed club of privileged individuals; the new elite, the new aristocracy. This guy is relatively young; he is probably not aware yet of how things are done. He should go into politics - they will recalibrate him in no time.
But in general the problem of fair distribution of benefits is very complex. There was no society on the planet yet that managed to do this. It may be that this problem cannot be solved at all, since everyone values his own labor with his own, unique measure. It may be easier to bypass the problem completely. For example, a society with infinite energy supplies and with replicators does not need to bicker about how many man-hours John Doe put in this week. It would be irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant for a common man to claim a certain number of books that he read during last year. Nobody cares.
As technology develops, more and more humans will be out of work. The minimum wage law cannot help if there are no jobs. As matter of fact, it makes the problem worse. As the lawmakers make human labor more and more expensive, even fewer humans will be employed. It is happening not just now - it has happened decades ago; that was one of driving forces behind outsourcing and offshoring. (Among others are red tape, ecology, taxes...) The US society has approached a point where no new jobs can be created by any rational person because that would not be profitable. As long as the society remains capitalist, this is the most important problem. But it is not easy to solve, as value of human labor decreases with every year. There are already sandwich making machines - goodbye, fastfood restaurants. Computers, robots, and Chinese - they all do more work for less money than Americans. It appears that Americans are no longer needed in the USA, aside from farm work and a few high tech industries. But most people cannot become programmers, engineers, or musicians. They are simply not capable of that. They need simpler jobs - and outside of trades (plumbing, car repair, etc.) there are too few such jobs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:30AM
Did you? It seems to me he directly addressed some of things you accuse him of not seeing.
[citation needed] TFA cites two cities where raising the minimum wage has increased prosperity for everyone - the rich and poor alike. Please give us your couterexamples.
I'm not really sure I understand your argument here. Yes, money could be viewed as an abstraction for trading labour for labour. But it sets the exchange rate for that exchange, and that exchange rate is currently badly out of balance. Is one hour of Mr Website-Startup-CEO's labour really intrinsically worth 1000 or a hundred thousand times more than one hour of Mr Would-you-like-fries-with-that's labour? 50 years ago it wasn't. Nowadays, the rich would have you believe that it is. That's the question being asked by the article.
You also fail to address TFA's counter argument, that if nobody can afford to pay high wages, how is the economy able to support more millionaire CEOs than ever before?
Nobody is saying that it is. In fact, TFA explicitly says that campaigning for the minimum wage on the basis of fairness is pointless. You can view a more fair, more just society as a side effect of stimulating the economy. Whether you think that's a welcome or unwelcome side effect depends entirely on whether or not you're a sociopathic turdgobbler.
He says in TFA that he has started dabbling in politics.
Again, nobody is arguing for a completely fair distribution of benefits.
This is a possibility in the future, yes. Not the only possibility, but definitely one we need to look at. It's a different issue though.
Plenty of new jobs are being created. Look at SpaceX, there are creating a whole new industry out of thin air. They are employing people, and paying them too. The "race to the bottom" of outsourcing makes it hard to sustain decent wages in an economy where every is blind to everything but price, but you have to convince your customers to value things other than price. Of course, that's a lot easier if your customers aren't struggling to survive on a less-than-living wage...
Then create new jobs. New classes of simple jobs that a plumber or a car repairer or a streetsweeper could retrain to do. Use your imagination. If people had spare money to spend on luxuries instead of putting everything they earn into rent and dried noodles, then the economy would be able to support all sorts of delightfully frivolous services that just aren't economically viable today.
Thing about economics is, it's not about where the money is, it's about how money flows. Money is a strange thing, when it flows, it grows. As long as it's moving about, new businesses and industries and jobs are emerging and the economy grows to encompass things that didn't even exist before. Look at the internet. If you could go back 50 years and tell people that their grandkids would one day be taking out contracts and paying dollars per month for a bunch of imaginary 1s and 0s they'd lock you up.
Conversely, when money stops moving, it shrinks. What we are seeing now, and what the author talks about, is more and more money being diverted in to great big stationary pools, where it stagnates. The uber-rich are hoovering up an ever-increasing slice of it but they simply can't spend it all. A rich man has one mouth, one stomach, one dick, one body. So the rich guy buys a fleet of supercars and a hundred overpriced suits and a yacht and a jet and 5 houses and the remaining 99% of his 6 billion dollars go into his giant swimming pool full of gold coins ^H^H^H savings and investments. There, the money does nothing useful except gravitationally attract more money to itself. As the moneypile gains mass it influences more power, which means that the labour exchange rate I mentioned above becomes more and more disproportionate. The poor people have to work harder and harder for less and less, just so some guy can add an extra zero to his bank balance that he will never spend. As the author says in his article, one guy with ten million dollars will spend less than ten guys with a million each, who spend less than a thousand guys with 10K each. Yes, you need some disparity in wealth to motivate people to work, but would you really work any harder for 10 billion than you would for 1 billion? Or for 10 million? If you answered yes, are you sure that's sane?
But more importantly (because this isn't about fairness, remember) all that money sitting in his savings account can't be used by his customers to buy his products. What's he going to do, buy more of his own stuff? Pretty sure he's already got plenty of whatever it is he makes. Meanwhile, the world is going to shit outside his gated community, and he's wondering why nobody's queueing up to buy his $1600 chocolate-powered bluetooth-enabled rocket ipoodles any more. He can't understand why it's harder and harder to employ well-educated people (poor people have less time and resources for education) and why crime is going up (more poverty==more crime) and why his workers are always taking time off sick (can't afford decent healthcare) and the roads and infrastructure are going to shit... It's a cycle, a feedback loop, an ecosystem. It's all connected. You screw with the balance and it will come back to bite you. If I were a hippy I'd call it Karmic or holistic or something and not be far wrong.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:34PM
Then create new jobs. New classes of simple jobs that a plumber or a car repairer or a streetsweeper could retrain to do.
So your solution is make-work jobs? How about we set up a factory with two sides: on one side, people busy assembly wooden shipping crates. Then these crates are moved to the other side, where a different team of workers disassembles these crates for recycling. The wooden pieces are then moved back to the first side, where they're used to assemble wooden shipping crates. Repeat ad infinitum.
You think people should spend all their time and effort doing this?
This is why we need to just enact the Basic Income scheme.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:16PM
I have a better idea. Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods. It would be awesome for PR if a corporation publicly advertised that they were employing more people at better wages.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:30PM
Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods.
Ok, how do you propose that humans build microprocessors which have features only tens of nanometers large? No one has that level of fine motor skill.
Lots of things are made by automation these days because the quality is far superior to human-made stuff. You want to go back to hand-knitted fabrics, so we can all look like serfs from the Medieval days?
When has charging more for something of lower quality ever worked as a general rule? It might work for a few markets when you're catering to rich people who like to show off, but in general places like Walmart thrive because they have the lowest prices.
And finally, why should people spend their lives doing boring, monotonous work that a simple robot could do much better? How is that improving human dignity? It's not. We should all be benefiting from the labor of robots and automation (as long as we keep them dumb so we don't have a Butlerian Jihad). We should be spending time enjoying our lives and doing creative things, not toiling away at mind-numbing jobs just so we can survive. We have the technology to do this now; we should be enjoying the fruits of this technology we've built.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:36PM
You need not be so pessimistic. There's plenty of areas we could put more people into if society deemed it worthwhile. Care of the elderly and children for example. More people to keep our cities/town clean, more frequent garbage pickup, more people to fix the various decaying infrastructures we have etc. Hell, even relatively trivial things like home cleaning would be doable if we all had more cash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @08:18AM
He wasn't suggesting that jobs should be created purely for the sake of creating job, but to do things others would find beneficial. Take a look around, around where you live and where you work. Do you really not see things people could be employed to do, or is the environment you live and work in perfect already?
Although that said, it may be beneficial to impose a maximum work week along with a minimum wage, this would help distribute the available work more evenly and give people more free time which they could use to take care of their health (e.g. exercise and get a bit more sleep) or learn something, this would lead to healthier, happier workers who are less likely to need to take time off sick.
I don't think we are quite ready for a basic income scheme just yet, there is still plenty of work that needs doing, though someday, probably in the not too distant future it will be necessary. That isn't to say that people who are unemployed shouldn't get a basic income, but they should be trying to get work if they can work and can't support themselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:25PM
Having been cheated of my legitimately earned pay by members of the wealthy, and been told that I should feel sorry for them not myself because their precious ideas didn't pan out, their businesses failed, and they're hurting, I have a very low opinion of them. They kept everyone in the dark about the money having run out and not being able to make payroll. Deluded themselves into believing that the business would finally take off this month and they'd be able to make payroll, perhaps helped by the do-or-die pressure. Two had the cheek to ask me to continue working for them for free, would hate to see me go. I told them yes, but with some conditions so that it amounted to no. If they can persuade my landlord to let me live in my apartment for $0 rent, and can persuade grocery stores to give me free food and gas stations to give me free gas, and I can get whatever else I need for free, then sure, I'll work for free.
The wealthy are like those sorts of dogs who cannot stop eating as long as there is food in front of them. Put unlimited food in front of them and those dogs will eat themselves to death. The wealthy are like that with money and power. They can't help themselves, they just have to grab and hoard everything in sight, no matter how senseless, unfair, or harmful to society that may be. They go further. They concoct tons of rationalizations to justify the situation, and start believing their own bull, become very arrogant.
We as a society have really fallen down on this. We've let these dogs get away with it. Not good for us, or them.
As to technology, yes I think robots will eventually be able to do all our manual labor. A big change we may see is a scrapping of the notion that everyone should aspire to having a job. And would that be so bad? We should think more about what kind of world we will have and want. I'm not too sure that heaven is so heavenly, the good life is so good. Can we feel fulfilled spending all our time on leisure while robots do the labor? Maybe we can.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:20PM
A big change we may see is a scrapping of the notion that everyone should aspire to having a job. And would that be so bad?
It is very bad, but not because of some law of nature. It's simply because idle hands are the devil's workshop. You already have ghettos that are full of people who are perfectly acclimated to not having a job. What do they do instead? Humans cannot sit idly for years; humans are not plants. So they look for an activity that fits their education and IQ. (Not that they got much of education, with everyone knowing that they have no use for spherical trigonometry.) What occupation then befits them? Among non-violent, that would be drugs and alcohol. Among violent that would be crime. This is simply because people always want something that they don't have. But that's not all. Crime will exist even in a society where anyone can have anything without paying. This is because there is one more item that you cannot get in a store: power over others.
Human societies always depended on high employment and on hard, long work hours to pacify the common man. It is just a handy workaround. Officers in the army know it well; that's why they try to keep the soldier busy with something. Remove the need to work, and you get the whole world that is full of people in search of things to do. Even if you personally have no desire to become the King, there is always someone who doesn't mind that - and he will find enough henchmen to make it so. Democracies are weak; they exist only until the new team walks into the Parliament and announces the new order. How many of those lazy, weak people will rise to defend the democracy if that democracy doesn't really give them anything? Will *you* care if instead of a collective dictator you get a singular one?
This problem is not new. It is depicted in many futuristic novels. The root of the problem is in psychology of a man. Do you have a solution? (Please skip mind control lasers from the orbit, they were proposed already, but they simply exterminate humans as we know them, replacing them with something else.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LaminatorX on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:21PM
Thing is, we actually have a whole-lot of trades-style work that needs doing [infrastructurereportcard.org], but no one is willing to pay for it. Most cities in the US are sitting on top of pipes that are breaking left and right(lets lay fiber all over while we replace'em). Our roads and bridges are falling apart. Communities are milling asphalt down to gravel rather than re-paving. Storms become logistical crises because so many of our power lines are strung on poles rather than buried. We have coal plants that need to be replaced with sun and wind farms (and here and there a small modern reactor where constant high-current is needed). There is a whole lot of work that we could be doing, but instead of a 21st Century New Deal, we're getting moves to privatize what's left of the old one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:53AM
What is he complaining about? He conned MS out of billions. I thought that was the way the system was supposed to work. Whoever runs the best scam gets paid. Look at all the companies Yahoo bought recently. Are any of them really worth anything? Venture capitalists are throwing money at Yo, an app that took 8 hours to write - couldn't any other messaging app add the same functionality in 8 hours? What is the value of this thing?
We live in a country where David Pogue passes himself off as a technology expert, Herbert Schildt passes himself off as a programming guru, and so on - they're all getting paid for the perception they create, not their abilities.
Most of these tech companies have no intrinsic worth. They have no revenue model, no realistic way to ever earn revenues, and are propped up by venture capital until they are sold. If you look at the VR company Facebook bought, it's all a scheme because FB was backed by the same venture capitalists, and a former VC involved with FB wrote a gushy piece at Wired about how great this deal was. They're just paying it forward.
Sure, I'd love for technology to be innovative, and for true innovation to be rewarded, but that's never really happened.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GlennC on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:39PM
I read the article as well. As I read through the replies, it seems to me that there are two divergent views.
The view from those who agree with the article seems to be that money is a form of wealth, and that while there should be no ceiling on wealth accumulation, in a just society there should be a floor. Their view of wealth can be summarized as, "As it flows, wealth grows."
Those who disagree seem to view money as a method of "keeping score." Their view appears to be that they win when they have more than others, and that they want to keep and gather as much as possible while depriving others of the opportunity to do the same. This view can be summarized as, "I got mine, screw you."
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:44PM
history seems to be a bad beacon on this one.
in the past people were "confined" to towns and cities. the injustice and inequality was glaring. most importantly: everything was produced by humans. so it hurt alot if you had to give away your really really hard earned stuff, as in like 10% of your stuff. also wars were fought "hand to hand".
today a big portion of "stuff" is machine produced and the 99% is "getting by", mostly shuffling paper. everything comes from the supermarket and mega malls.
so whoever owns the machines will in the end automatically receive all money. even if they throw away the goods for jump change, the money will end up in their pockets anyways, like gold in river bends
the only way i can see a "revolution" happening (and it won't because it's a global market and you cannot organize a global revolution) is if the machine owners (rich people) get lazy, that is, the machines break down.
they cannot cash in ... every!
And they need to watch for other "machine owners", because if one gets complaisant, then this threatens them all and they will have to "get rid" of this bad cog-wheel FAST!
There ARE like 99% disillusioned people out there to denouce anyone for a quick buck!
as for culture and arts and other "useless" stuff, i think the "machine owners" are perfectly fine to live in a stealthed, near-invisible golden castle surrounded by high walls in the middle of a slum.
what do they care if people are friendly, educated and the biosphere is healthy?
I wouldn't worry as a rich person. the PR machine is spinning new lies and fantasies about the "scared 1%" everyday to placate the 99% ...
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:01PM
I will selflessly accept whatever amount of money from this guy will help fix this glaring inequality.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by gidds on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:12PM
While it's refreshing and even cheering to see someone in his position speaking in such a (relatively) humble way, I think he still misses one important point:
I don't know his details, but I suspect that to a large degree, what sets him apart is less his judgement and intuition, and more sheer blind luck.
It's a common human failing to overattribute misfortune to chance, and good fortune to talent. Of course, it's often hard to recognise just how much a part chance plays, but some lucky breaks and happy coincidences must have factored in his success.
This is important, because if the main reason is luck, then he is fundamentally no different from us. He may have been better able to capitalise (ha!) on his circumstances, but how many others would have done so were they in his position?
And if we're all fundamentally alike, then wealthy people's success wasn't achieved entirely through their own merits; and unsuccessful people's failure wasn't entirely due to their own bad decisions or judgement. Not everything we get is deserved. In material terms and in the short term, at least, this life isn't fundamentally fair. (This isn't an atheist or nihilist position; one of the oldest books of the Bible, Job, takes a lot of effort to address this.)
In short: the wealthy cannot look down on the poor and assume that either position is deserved.
They can't claim that merit or talent or skill or breeding or anything else entitles them to their position. It does not set them apart. It does not excuse them from concern about others.
Perhaps some people might view their wealth differently without that psychological crutch?
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:34PM
It won't be pitchforks, instead it'll be lots of legal and illegal guns, Molotov cocktails using glass beer and wine bottles, and perhaps a few carefully placed Timothy McVeigh-like fertilizer/diesel fuel truck bombs in front of certain buildings. When this happens, I'm going to enjoy watching it--albeit from a distance and with binoculars. It'll be like watching the French Revolution in person, minus the guillotine.
However, I think the Congress will eventually start to sense that they themselves are at risk and will start to tax these rich bastards more appropriately. It may not stop the rage but it might help to temper it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:07PM
Your sense of invincibility is, how shall we say, naive? Reality check: when the pitchforks and guillotines come out they will, most likely, be used on other 99-percenters. Do you really think that the one-percenters are going to stick around for this blood bath? Hell, NO!!! They already have off-shore bank accounts that they have stuffed with money as their insurance policy. They will merely hop into their private jets and take off for some place which is "more politically stable". (You do realize that this is one of the major reasons for having an off-shore bank account, right?) Meanwhile, those of us with 401(k) retirement plans will most likely end up branded as "traitors to the people" or "collaborators" and pay the penalty for our sins, accordingly. So, just remember, Madame Defarge, don't be so eager to cheer on the revolution because you may end up as just another bit of collateral damage in the process. 'Nuff said?
(Score: 1) by mrkaos on Friday July 04 2014, @12:04AM
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable"
I don't really think anyone has summed it up any better than Kennedy did.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.