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Forum Post: Control

Posted 4 years ago on Sept. 28, 2019, 12:30 p.m. EST by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

Control of the work of many, not one's own hard work, is the only way to get rich.

How much must one have to be rich? If most people had 10 times what they have now, say income of $500k and net worth of several million, they would consider themselves rich. They're not, by today's measure, but let's say possession of ten times the average material wealth is rich.

How does one acquire ten times the average? Well ... it's plausible to say that if 20 people work for a one who takes half of what each produces by their individual labor and what the workers have left after the extraction is average, then the rich one has ten times what each ordinary person has.

I know that last sentence is awkward. If you didn't quite get it, read it again. Repeat until you're quite sure you understand it. Without thorough comprehension you can't grasp what follows: If it takes the work of ten people to make 1 person rich, then only 1 in 11 of us, or about 9%, can ever be rich. And by today's measure of great wealth I doubt that the real ratio is even one in a thousand. Those who have 2 to 10 times the average make the odds even slimmer for the rest of us poor muted schmucks!

The preceding is about the quaint old fashioned acquisitiveness of those who get rich by appropriating the value of the labor of workers that produce material products and services. In the 21st century, most of the rich acquire their excess by abstract financial means that have little to do with any real production.

Michael Hudson, as always, has a lot to say about real economy and concentration of wealth.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/michael-hudson-asset-price-inflation-and-rent-seeking.html

16 Comments

16 Comments


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[-] 1 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

We work to live. We work to produce the material sustenance of life. Rich capitalists claim to live off their wealth: the things they own. In reality they live off our hard work too. Our work produces the things they own and develops their real estate. The difference between us and them is that we work to live and they live off us.

[-] -1 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

"Your land must not be sold on a permanent basis, because you do not own it; it belongs to the [CCP], and you are like foreigners who are allowed to make use of it." Leviticus 25:23

Hong Kong's land-use policy imported from Red China obeys the Biblical mandate.

[-] 1 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

Read it all, Fool!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

Only motley fools who hold near-real cash can smother the debt bomb of control. Control has two ends, with the difference between the end being held by the controller and the end being held by the controlled not being well demarcated. Are their security guards dictating where the wealthy people can go or are the wealthy people dictating where their security guards can go? Are their wants dictating where the poor people can go or are the poor people dictating where their wants can go? Kim Il-Sun's Juche Principle has a grain of important truth in its message:

"..whoever treasures freedom, like the swallow has learnt to fly.."

Think of how the U.S. became a net energy exporter in recent years: the Soviet Union tried using hydrogen-bomb detonation in the 1950s to enhance oil recovery to no success but U.S. companies didn't give up over the many decades and eventually succeeded. The U.S. is notoriously great at shutting the barn door after the horse has already bolted and escaped from the barn (the calf didn't escape, nor did the cow and the buffalo so there would still be veal and cheap animal labor galore for the 1% -- fucking raw is s o very i m p o r t a n t for producing excess labor in order to cheapen it so that the 1% can buy m o r e; getting any country to be strong { numerous in population count } and prosperous { having a large consumer market,} being sung of in many national anthems as the tiny redtube book about why rhinos lost their horns says, "strength comes out of the barrel of a erect penis," starts with the people getting great at fucking raw and reducing abortion-loss rate, such as it was with the Catholics and Muslims; women being subservient serves the great purpose of strengthening the religion via fucking raw to produce numerous offspring to expand the power and prestige of the religions and the associated elites; why are so many people impressed by Red China? it has the market with the most consumers { i.e. most cattle for the 1%er to exploit } which was created through the karma of numerous successful fucking-raw encounters.) I lived through the terrible effects of the oil shocks of the 1970s so the current situation of the U.S. being relatively independent from them is definitely good.

The U.S. economy doesn't get sunk by the vagaries of the tempestuous quarrels of the Middle-East, thereby reducing the economic impact on the trading partners of the U.S. In a globally slipping-into-recession economy, having the stronger economies alleviates the pressures that the 99% peoples feel and thereby reduces armed conflicts, perhaps like this in Hong Kong.

The Libyans made a shish-kebab with Muammar Gadhafi. The Iraqis hanged Saddam Hussein so dictators are not exempt from getting the dying peace-dove treatment. When a dove was being suffocated by Mom with her three fingers (with the thumb below the dove's beak,) I observed that its two nostrils being covered by Mom's index finger and the middle finger were not pointing downward so it couldn't be a terrorist according to her tried-and-true criterion for identifying child kidnappers and terrorists. After its short wing-flapping struggle, being de-feathered, and cooked in a smallish slow-cook ceramic crock but before my Big Brother and I started to eat it, he asked me which body parts I wanted. Having eaten chickens before and found their tastiest, juiciest, and best-textured parts, I said, "the thighs." (as the chicken's breast had little fat from the skin so despite their being meaty it had tasted too dry and powdery) He ripped off the dove's two p u n y little thighs to give me to eat before he started devouring the large wing muscles. I blinked my eyes and stared at him. He sheepishly gave me a lesson about eating the appropriate body parts, the moving ones: the muscles that flap the wings of the flying birds (e.g. the dove) and the muscles on the thighs that move the legs of the walking/running birds (e.g. the chickens.) The exercised muscles grow bigger and less powdery (like the chicken breast.)

Coming from a background of extreme ancestral poverty and wealth, global trades and wars, I am of the opinion that having access to moderate wealth (the Middle Way of Buddhism) is better than the extremes and also trade (a form of dependence) is often better than war. For the sake of stability during any transition towards Juche, one should obtain the new extra support before knocking out the existing to-be-obsoleted support. Usually, seeing things literally but with imagination and fantasy help. There's a reason why rundown urban areas are often revitalized by artists who have the creativity to follow the same advancement path used by modern science born during the Renaissance: observe the real data from experiments, concoct theories grafting onto existing well-accepted ones, have free and openminded discussions, and act in new experiments. Mix a bit of the new with a lot of the old.

The cat's-whisker-crystal radio has been around at least since the early days of the discovery of electromagnetic waves in the late 1800s but the invention of the transistor didn't happen until after WWII in the mid 1900s. Why did it occur after the war? Radar became of supreme importance during the total war but the underlying reason why a central lighter-weight radar component had worked during the war (for aircraft since a radar's weight was of paramount importance for the aircraft to become and stay airborne for a long time to achieve long range) was not understood in terms of quantum theory and atomic structures. When I was reading the instructions for making a cat's-whisker-crystal radio, I also thought it odd that there was no specification of what metal the whisker had to be made out of. In fact, it was nearly irrelevant.

There were multiple paths to the same end but the probability of randomly getting there in certain situations is zero. Did you know that the instructions for setting up a computer could be misleading as they asked you to press any key on the keyboard but that key with the 'any' marking was nowhere to be found on the computer keyboard? A kid who seemingly didn't like to go along with what I wanted to do kept on asking me, "why, why, why..?" Was the kid truly inquisitive or not? Yeah, it's time to fund another study about why my shit is often brown in color. I have already discovered why it's sometimes green (having eaten a lot of green vegetables,) yellow (having eaten a fair amount of animal fat and drunk too much water with shit coming out fast,) and reddish (having eaten a lot of watermelon,) but brown, the "mode" of all the shit colors, still eludes an explanation. I wish that I had a very innovative German shelf toilet @5:05 built with a flat shit-examination platform to assist me in my scientific curiosity quest. I may be able to secure U.S. Congressional funding to pay for this research if I go to lobby in Washington, D.C. During my one-and-only scientific research visit to our public toilet on the outskirts of our shantytown, I saw brown shit islands bathed by slush in the white-porcelain bowl buried into the dirt floor. I didn't think that draining the swamp would help uncover any baby from down there, as there's just too little space. Mom lied about having retrieved me from there. I like better the German fairytale told to inquisitive kids: babies are delivered by storks.

My Mom was adept at issuing instructions so an unrecognized person whose nostrils were pointing downward was an excellent criterion for identifying a child kidnapper to be. It worked; even for terrorists, too. Terrorists are almost everywhere! Hmm, I've just thought of a few Nobel-Peace-Prize-worthy ideas and options to win the war on terror: have cosmetic surgeons operate on all of the people who have their nostrils pointing downward. Another idea is to make them lie down permanently so that their nostrils point sideways. Yet another option is to cut off their noses. Orientation of nostrils cause terrorism. Picking up a baby from the cradle it's lying in is therefore a terrorist act subject to our P.A.T.R.I.O.T. law. If Australians are standing in the opposite direction as we do in the northern hemisphere, can they be terrorists at all?

Before the Jews were carted away and murdered by the Nazis, they had this song so those who had listened and concocted plans to escape might not have perished but have abundant life. There are (probabilistic) transition rules for everything. As a matter of fact, all of us are gamblers in the game of life. Knowing ahead of time of the most probable results is helpful for "educated" gambling using data. AI didn't get a huge breakthrough until it started crunching much real-world data. "Look before you leap," my grade-school teacher taught me. If one doesn't look, one cannot leap well.. elementary! In the long run, a dictatorship tends to go amok due to not looking or not allowing others to look or speak freely of what they have seen. Most shithole countries don't allow free speech so they stay as shitholes even after billions upon billions of dollars, euros, and yens worth of aid was given to them. Much of that money probably ended up in secret bank accounts or squandered on projects that couldn't be maintained with local capabilities.

Nobody was around at the time of the dinosaurs so how could paleontologists talk about them as if they were real? It was done through inferences into the past. Exactly the same probabilistic law applies into the future as it does into the past. Thanks to the realization of the great French polymath Marquis Pierre Simone de Laplace that seeing into the past and into the future involves using the same probabilistic formula.

[-] 2 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

We must kill capitalism!. It's killing us. Only the most profoundly foolish fail to fight for their survival. The survival of 1%, the richest capitalists, is death to the rest of us ordinary, ungodlike, human beings. WTFU!!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

Is it killing us through the debts you owe to the capitalists?

[-] 1 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

We do the work. In a sane world they owe us. The debt in this insane world is the fraudulent means by which the parasites who own the world control us. WTFU!!!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

"We do the work."

Your premise will be falsified in the future if you resist or you are identified as a likely or potential dissident. Our future is happening right now in the new Berlin of the Orient, Hong Kong. The CCP has already stationed lots of troops in the barrack in South Berlin. The West is Red. The Sun is rising. The Red tide is coming. The East is Red. The North is Red. Red, Red, Red but it's not quite Read, Read, Read, yet. It doesn't take a precog to discern that! When a state's apparatus goes against any individual, business, or corporation, who will win?

Jailing millions (by Red China) has already been done easily. Eliminating them altogether is even cheaper and easier. Highly technically capable Google couldn't resist Red China without getting help from the U.S. Government's No Such Agency when it had discovered that Red China was hacking Google's customers' "Red China political dissidents' "data -- in particular, anyone whose nostrils had ever been video-recorded as masked, nonexistent, or pointing downward.

Trump 2020! He's our bulwark for Freedom worldwide. He's the BEST Supreme Leader the U.S. has ever had. The information of anyone (and their children, friends, and relatives) who seeks to impeach him may very well be sent abroad (to Red China, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba perhaps?) for rendition. Infowar against U.S. citizens (and other countries') were started years ago. The Matrix is real!

Remember that information is physical. Non-descript installations hold them but they consume electricity, dissipate heat, and connect to cables (buried underground, on towers, or high-strung in plain sight.) Marxism and Leninism are defective due to the ¿deliberate? failure or omission to recognize the similar repositories in the states of minds of the people which hold information. Incomplete [UNscientific materialism -- ignoring at-the-time-invisible(Marx and Lenin didn't have fMRI or super-mnemonic-fMRI for sure)-and-suppressed-by-political-fear states of minds of people makes the socialist theories surreal and eminently corruptible so they have failed in their practice in reality] Socialism and Communism have been amply proven to be failures worldwide.

However, Denmark succeeded in recent years in achieving happiness because it had recognized the importance of the states of minds of its people. In between the lines is the spirit of love, the spirit of connection or more concretely the way of 》die Zustandsumme《 built up from what is between any two elementary particles, things, or people: 仁 = 人 + 二。 Connection between events is described by the Bayesian probabilistic formula emerging from a causality-diffusion equation of waves in imaginary time such as Schrödinger's Equation. Energy is conserved but which partitioning of energy will a system evolve to next depends on the degeneracy of the various states of the partition. Time is just the system's evolution towards a more probable state so time can indeed oscillate in a loop or even run backwards for systems involving very few particles. Stabilization without repression is ALL about matching the benjamins to the fertilized ova!

Life is electric fire burning slowly in water. Keeping the fires burning steadily without having their being snuffed out or turning into a conflagration is the aim of stabilization. The operation is analogous to that of operating a nuclear reactor. Homer Simpson has that kind of experience! "U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!" God's work on earth must truly be our own, give a hand up, not a hand out.

God being just could have killed Adam and Eve after their fall to satisfy justice and that's that. However, God is love so arrangements were made for them instead of plain and simple death. One who was made in the ever-lasting-life-granting-eternal-loving-God's image cannot "die." Achieving eternal life and temporal death are not mutually exclusive of each other, depending on where one draws the boundaries (smaller souls draw smaller boundaries and larger souls larger ones; being Buddhist-"awakened" means being cognizant of the arbitrary and karma-determined mental act of drawing the boundaries, as NOTHING has EVER been gained or lost as described by the conservation laws,) just like for time itself in the spacetime discretum. Out of many, time, tough time, cyclosporin, socialism, fruiting, death, and rebirth via the spores. The life cycle of the slime mold illustrates this cycle. When does "a" slime mold "die," if at all?

Statistics' law of large numbers shows how time and "order" emerge from chaos. Fundamentally, randomness reigns so order also comes out of randomness and vice versa because the number of distinguishable states is finite. Infinities are reification products of our minds; the physical world does not have them.

[-] 1 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

you're off your meds! Gonna check in soon? I hope you don't own an AK!

[-] 0 points by grapes (5232) 4 years ago

I'm glad to be off of ALL medicines. I've no need to check in soon because I had already checked in to the U.S. decades ago and I'm still in this asylum. I don't need an AK because I won't need it to shoot at the legs of the asylum seekers.

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

''Neither Democrats Nor Republicans Will Admit the Problem Is Capitalism Itself'' by Prof. R. D. Wolff:

''The basic cause of current and past downturns in capitalist economies is the system itself. It has been plagued by and subjected its people to the plague of cyclically recurring economic downturns for the last 250 years. They happen on average every four to seven years, although particular conditions of time and place can occasionally make the period longer or shorter. They happen wherever in the world the capitalist system came to prevail. As that prevalence became global, so too have the cyclical downturns.

''Profit-driven market capitalism has mechanisms and incentives that generate growth but also repeatedly produce imbalances in the supplies and demands for inputs and outputs. Those imbalances cause price movements that eventually and adversely affect profits. Capitalists then cut back their investments resulting in the unemployment and reduced production that comprise and define recessions and downturns. The downturns offset the initial imbalances enabling capitalism’s cycle to repeat.

''The recessions are thus not instances of market failures nor instances when markets function imperfectly because of government interventions. Rather, recessions and downturns are how market capitalism “corrects” the imbalances it also causes. In other words, market capitalism has mechanisms of self-healing alongside the mechanisms that make it sick. Those who live in capitalist systems repeatedly suffer through both mechanisms so long as that system prevails.''

omnia causa fiunt ...

[-] 2 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

We work for them to prosper. If they don't feel they profit enough from our hard work, they cut back and we grow lean because we can't work to make the things we need to live. They own the means to produce our livelihood. If they are unhappy with their parasitic profit we are the ones who suffer - during those "cyclic down turns."

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 4 years ago

"By understanding the psychological buttons they're pressing, we can stop people like Trump, Johnson, Modi and Bolsonaro from driving democracies into a death spiral. (Monbiot) explores some fascinating research." - from ...

verb. sat. sap. ...

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23767) 4 years ago

Capitalism hasn't won, the fight isn't over. Read this excellent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/29/no-alternative-capitalism-workers-take-back-control-class-politics

"We were told capitalism had won. But now workers can take back control" by Grace Blakeley

"...class politics has returned with a vengeance since 2008. In 2017, the Economist again conceded: “Marx has a lot to teach today’s politicians.” Decried as populists by many of the liberals who remain rooted in the 90s, politicians who identify the fundamental antagonism that exists between the many and the few – between those who live off work and those who live off wealth – have fared remarkably well in recent years."

"The only way to bring about such a shift is to promote state, worker and community ownership of society’s most important resources. In an economy in which ownership is mediated by the finance sector, this requires a socialist government to take on the banks the way Thatcher took on the unions."

"Today, the greatest challenge for the left is to remind people that history isn’t over, that capitalism hasn’t won, and that we still have the power to change the world."

[-] 2 points by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX 4 years ago

We do the work but they, the parasites that live and grow wealthy by our work, control the work we do.

[-] 1 points by beautifulworld (23767) 4 years ago

Used car prices are controlled and kept high harming the poor who need affordable transportation.

It's not only our work they control but the price of all the things people need in order to live decent lives.

Sometimes, it's lack of control such as the lack of the government to control rental prices and the cost of education. The government, instead of looking out for the general welfare of the people, just allows the free market to set prices that do not jive with income!

So, here is an article about why used car prices are so high in the USA. I found it to be very enlightening, though depressing.

"Rising old used car prices help push poor Americans over the edge"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-usa-used-analysis-idUSKBN1WQ1AP

"For America’s working poor, an often essential ingredient for getting and keeping a job – having a car – has rarely been more costly, and millions of people are finding it impossible to keep up with payments despite prolonged economic growth and low unemployment.

More than 7 million Americans are already 90 or more days behind on their car loans, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and serious delinquency rates among borrowers with the lowest credit scores have by far seen the fastest acceleration.

The seeds of the problem are buried deep in the financial crisis, when in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, automakers slashed production. A decade later, that has made a relative rarity of used 10-year-old vehicles that are typically more affordable for low-wage earners."

"Expensive older used cars are exacerbating the problem and it may take years for them to return to more affordable levels.

George Augustaitis, director of automotive industry analytics at CarGurus Inc (CARG.O), an online marketplace for new and used cars, said late this spring his team started to notice an “accelerating decline” in the number of available vehicles under $10,000, which typically would include vehicles between eight and 12 years old."

In my opinion, a government doing it's job to protect people's ability to live decently wouldn't have allowed this to happen. Shameful.