Forum Post: Ghengis Scam: The Great Con
Posted 5 years ago on Aug. 2, 2019, 10:33 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
I hope you fools who haven't figured out that capitalism is the greatest scam of all time are starting to wake up!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/families-drowning-in-debt-to-stay-in-the-middle-class.html
Ghengis Scam Conquers America!
without firing a shot if you don't count assassinations, police shootings, kangaroo court executions and lynchings.
New entrants to the economy can learn the pitfalls of debt and avoid them. If they are already in debt, "look before you leap," and "leap after you've looked and found your target."
Before spending any money, think about what alternatives may be more desirable than spending it for immediate gratification. Generally speaking, if one only spends money which has a high chance of being paid back later, one tends not to go broke over the long run. As anyone should know, getting the initial capital to start with and a glint in the eye to want to go after an economic opportunity are probably the most difficult things.
When I was a teenager in New York, NY, I took the subway system for granted. (I was "plunked down" in Manhattan after having been a "free-range" kid for years since I knew orientation and could walk to and from almost every place of my interest.) Not having the subway shocked me when I first started working in a rural location. Without a car for transportation, I was de facto crippled.
The U.S. is VAST outside of cities! (Driving is largely a daily necessity for most non-city dwellers and it accounts for our laws about the [low] minimum driving age of 16 and strict [high] alcohol-drinking age of 21. Drinking alcohol was innocuous in our family's culture: Mom told me that she had started at age 5 with a tiny cup of hard liquor from her Dad who shared with his children. I liked eating liquor-tossed salted chickens since age 6 but I never liked the liquor plain all by itself.) It dawned on me on a weekend when I ran out of food and it was over 90°F outside with a full-strength sun in the cloudless sky. I walked for miles while I was hungry or lugging three bags of heavy groceries. I sweat a lot. It was terrible.
Ahhh, as every coin has a flip side, think of the positive side, though: if the DPRK were to send a nuclear missile to hit me while I was walking or driving in a rural area, it's extremely likely that it will miss its target (unless it has a Homo-homing sensor) and create popped corn, fried soybeans, burnt beef steak, or trinitinite. Hmm, I did eat popped corn with the yum-yum butter glaze when my Big Brother took me to a cinema to watch a movie.
I incurred debt and got a car which made life easier and much more pleasant. It's justified because the car allowed me to work at a well-paid job and live with less hardship. The car cost me but it enabled. The net result was positive.
The debt impoverishment/bondage and economic regression of Americans isn't about discretionary spending. It' about rent, mortgages, medicine and food. We're being destroyed by the rich parasites who own the world. Death to the Wall St Oligarchs is the only realistic solution to the evil of capitalism. Anyone who supports their propaganda lies can and ultimately will go down with them.
Rents and mortgages can be minimized with the help of parents. There is a place where the newer generation has grown up in and the wealthiest generation of people ever are the baby boomers who tend to own the place where their children (the newer generation) have grown up in. The baby boomers who have financially successful children tend to keep their empty nests for years and years. Of course, the sharing of the financial burdens of owning and operating the place is a tough subject to resolve due to those who are hitherto getting freebies don't want to "grow up and pay."
Even many countries behave in exactly the same way. As for destroying Capitalism, Red China is doing a very admirable job so all we need to do is to do nothing and wait for its demise due to the rules necessary for its maintenance being shot through and through.
Medicine cost for me was nearly zero year after year ever since I had realized what my body was decades ago. It's a machine with some automatic/triggerable built-in repair mechanisms! I ran it just like how a careful mechanic would run a machine so it had minimal wear and tear and very few malfunctions. I wash my hands with liquid soap and warm water (and dry them to avoid fungal infections) whenever I go out from or come back to my residence as a contagion-containment procedure. Erecting a biohazard "wall" near the entrance or exit of my door made much sense (equally important is to guard my face where most of my bodily orifices are so I wash my hands clean with warm water and soap before touching my face. I believe in germ theory.) I love not getting sick! I do use disinfectants on various handles including my door's but I don't count that as "medicine cost."
My primary school taught me hygiene in a mandatory class of an early grade: having nails clipped short, always carrying a handkerchief for sneezing or coughing, washing hands before and after eating every meal, avoiding spitting in the street by using the handkerchiefs which are washed clean frequently, removing standing water to avoid breeding mosquitoes (Mom, the freaked-out city-girl, did the right thing in destroying my secret micro-submarine base {I possessed the most powerful weapon of mass destruction for launching Operation Neighborhood Microvampires, }) symptoms and treatments for cholera, malaria, typhus, etc. Yep, my school carried out "socialist" mandates of our government, including mass school-based and neighborhood van-based mobile free vaccinations. We didn't leave "health" to the vagaries of families' finances, parents' time, educational level, discipline, or knowledge. Our Big Mom imposed a matriarchal near-dictatorship on good "health" maintenance.
I no longer use handkerchief in the U.S. because we use disposable tissue paper instead. In a pinch for speed, I cough or sneeze into the sleeve (whether it's there or not is of secondary importance; the primary goal is germ containment: a 2-D splatter is usually better than a 3-D aerosol cloud) at the inside of my elbow to minimize the spread of germs to others. Sometimes, a cough and sneeze can come too quickly for getting the disposable tissue paper to cover my nose and mouth or on the occasions when I've forgotten to carry such tissue paper with me.
Food cost is generally relatively low when compared to one's earned income in the U.S. However, it's quite expensive on a purchasing-power basis if translated to other countries' currencies and buying food locally. It's the reason why I think Red China's military budgets have in fact been far larger on the purchasing-power-parity basis. One U.S. dollar can buy a lot more if it is first exchanged into yuan before buying with it the military equipment such as "aircraft-carrier killer missiles." It's the same reason why so many shoppers "buy Chinese," including the U.S. Military ¿still? for the more "innocuous" things such as the U.S. flag.
I cringe at the thought of someone's possibly handing a made-in-Red-China Star-Spangled Banner folded neatly into the triangular shape of a Patriot/Minuteman's hat to any widow(er) whose spouse was killed in action or otherwise by Red China, while "defending the Flag."
Red China has put out a big "Discount Sale" sign on all of its products by weakening the yuan relative to the U.S. dollar. Energy prices have broadly retreated: "Benchmark U.S. crude fell 97 cents to settle at $54.69 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell $2.08 to $59.81 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline fell 6 cents to $1.72 per gallon. Heating oil declined 5 cents to $1.84 per gallon. Natural gas fell 5 cents to $2.07 per 1,000 cubic feet." The cheaper prices may well come through to U.S. consumers. ("Summertime and the livin' is easy... So hush, little baby, don't you cry.")
WTFU!
Seriously! If you believe any of that is generally meaningful we have no way to communicate. Your planet is too far away from Earth.
https://www.facebook.com/democraticsocialismnow/posts/724000514701565
Seriously! Who cares about your personal triumphs within a system that can never work for more than a small percentage of the population? You need to learn the mathematics of probability and ignore the low percentage possibilities. Capitalism is a pyramid scam that makes something for a few out of the hard work of the many.
Do you still recall your allergic reactions to my using the J-word? The only way to discuss redress for a wrong is to trace the wrong and use the necessarily wrong vocabulary for discussing the issues.
Why is the U.S. Government still so hellbent on collecting so much data about race when the latter has already been invalidated years ago as a concept with NO concrete scientific basis? For all those people who still believe in the concept of race, they act as if race is scientifically relevant. Their actions give life to, institutionalize, and perpetuate the concept of race. There were "the stealing from Peter to pay Paul," "the stealing from John to pay Peter," "the stealing from Judas to pay John, " etc. No one wanted to pay for the sins of their fathers' so "let's get Mikey!"
The biological definition of race requires a "geographically isolated breeding population of the same species." Tell me which human population nowadays is geographically isolated? Only an extremely few patches such as the Sentinelese on the islands in the Indian Ocean are. Aside from these, we are all mostly mutts! Maybe that's indeed why we're still here. Mutts tend to be healthier in the long run than the purer bred ones. The analogue in the financial world is a well diversified portfolio which gets annual rebalancing. Such a portfolio tends to perform quite well over the longer term as long as costs are tightly controlled.
Sexual reproduction is such an energetically expensive and obsessive biological means of reproduction that its persistence and prevalence in the majority of various lifeforms bespeaks its great evolutionary survival value. Why didn't most lifeforms simply reproduce asexually which is so much simpler and easier? It's because the existence of sex largely mandates the creation of mutts for each new generation. In contrast with Descartes' "I think therefore I am," whether my ancestors thought or not, they successfully fucked -- therefore I am. I just don't believe my Mom's explanation of my origin as a baby picked up from the extremely stinky public toilet. I knew better by learning while using my Big Brother's used high-school textbooks. I also got contradictory information from him who had objective evidence supporting his claim. My Mom "classified" my birthing information, probably due to my young age at the time and her unease talking about a culturally repressed subject.
Reproduction is such a potent force that all societies evolved elaborate taboos, customs, and rituals to harness it for the greater societal good. Wealth and life's sustenance also largely pass through the reproductive lineage. Without the social rules, societal chaos will ensue. However, we need to recognize the origins of these social norms and traditions and be flexible sometimes when conditions warrant. Things do change over time.
When the original conditions no longer exist, we must re-examine whether these social norms and traditions are still valid, valuable, and necessary. Most cultural dislocations come from applying inappropriate social norms and traditions in new cultural contexts.
The body is in the New World but the mind is still in the Old World. The body is in the present but the mind is still centuries in the past. Ripping apart filtering-paper tea bags to get the tea out made perfect sense to my Mom who was preparing tea on our transglobal flight because she didn't know of the purpose of the filtering paper. The insufficiently hot water didn't sink the tea so asking for and using a spoon to stir and sink the tea became necessary.
I understand why what I had said might not be widely adopted by most people. I guess some just cannot afford soap and water. It does take a certain level of societal development to achieve having soap (from Science!) and clean water. I have to say though that even though I was recycling and doing archaeological research in the neighborhood dump(s), my shantytown was well-off enough to have municipal clean water (there are advantages to living in a "socialist" good "health" maintenance matriarchal near-dictatorship) that can be fetched using buckets and a yoke (yeah, I appreciated my Big Brother for fetching water,) and my family could afford soap.
prolix
There's no point to these last eight words.