251–260 of 687 posts
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The WEF is if anything less than a social club. It's a series of social events . It's nothing. The only potential energy it has at all is people imputing it power on threads about how it's the secret architect of the global economy. That is not something you can say about the BJP, which has real power.
What powers do you think the BJP has that the WEF doesn't?
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If the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the underlying problem, basic needs and housing would be dirt cheap. That's not a problem - it's a good thing for consumers (and therefore the lower classes). It's the plethora of efforts to counter this which capitalists employ (mainly monopolization) to inflate prices anyway despite underlying increased efficiency (and less labor) that's the problem. The main proble…
> It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that. I find it interesting that you point the problem (this is not capitalism but rather the lack of it) and then suggest that the government (which made this whole system possible) somehow fixes this. The government is the problem and a top down approach doesn't work (it didn't work for the soviets and it's not going to work now). Th…
The bigger company can kill all competition despite having inferior product with unfair practices such as - Dumping, market manipulation, self-dealing, wash trading, antitrust, insider trading, collusion, cartels, negative externalities, anticompetitive practices, misinformation, corporate espionage, etc.
If you take off the last remaining government safeguards, you will not have more competition. You will have monopolies for good we need to survive.
We will arrive at neo-feudalism.
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Capital accumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are the objective fundamental causes of inequality in every capitalist society, which is why every capitalist society depends on a plethora of ostensible efforts to counter these fundamental characteristics of capitalism. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to...
If the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the underlying problem, basic needs and housing would be dirt cheap. That's not a problem - it's a good thing for consumers (and therefore the lower classes). It's the plethora of efforts to counter this which capitalists employ (mainly monopolization) to inflate prices anyway despite underlying increased efficiency (and less labor) that's the problem. The main proble…
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There is more than just one issue. A voter doesn’t necessarily agree on everything with the person they voted for.
I'm an immigrant and got really burned during the Harper admin (Kenny's handling of immigration destroyed my life). That basically meant my options are Liberal or NDP. NDP policies seem to think if I make more than 200K, I am a rich fat cat (ignore that I have a freakin PhD at the cost of a delay in buying a house - effectively making me far poorer in wealth terms than someone with a mediocre undergrad who bought a p…
If you make $200k a year, you've got almost 3x the average household income in canada ($75k). You're way up there in terms of wealth, and don't need any help from the NDP or anyone else.
This is a constant across the western world, and it’s not gonna change until middle class families end up living on the street.
The sooner this psychotic, braindead and hateful housing market collapses, the better.
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This is a conspiracy theory about a global suit-and-tie version of TED Talks whose members consistently underperform the S&P 500. The World Economic Forum sounds important, like the IMF is, but it's nothing at all like that. It's a convention, in the ComicCon sense, that happens to be frequented by high-status people, because high-status people go where other high-status people go. Ironically, talking about them as i…
Comparing WEF specifically to ComicCon, like it's a harmless goofy diversion, is deceptively dismissive, and surely not an accident on your part. At the very least you could compare it to an industry trade show, like an annual convention of trial attorneys or of insurance adjusters, which is a key vector for introducing and spreading new concepts and ideas in those industries.
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I didn't word that very well, I meant that they sometimes ally, and sometimes oppose each other and often they are neutral.
So their behaviour is entirely normal?
A key problem in Sweden -- besides the weird interaction of privatization and legacy over-regulation -- is that the current inflation and rising interest rates break the social contract: a relatively even salary distribution allowed many people to have a solid middle-class life style, recently albeit with never-ending mortgages. Now, the interest rates are too high for these mortgages to be even superficially sustain…
It's the same everywhere, not only in Sweden. What a surprise. The government got your taxes AND screwed you with inflation over time. Then COVID happened and they had to print more, postponing and aggravating the crisis. Now it's time to pay and nobody will take the blame. When are people going to rebel?
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> If you want to nitpick that every solution isn't as simple as fizzbuzz then there's no real point having a discussion. No, that's the entire point of having the discussion. If the solution can't answer even these types of questions, then there's no point having the discussion, because it breaks down even upon initial examination. > This is what the IRS is for. It's one of the only government organizations that actu…
> but even they are not going to tax unrealized capital gains You are completely missing the point of the conversation you started. Everything we're discussing is a hypothetical. In this scenario, they would tax that and everything else. Anyway, I don't think that you're arguing in good faith and I'm moving on with my day. Cheers.
> Everything we're discussing is a hypothetical. In this scenario, they would tax that and everything else
Your hypothetical is "the government taxes everything". Then someone asked, "how would that work?" and your response was "everything we're discussing is a hypothetical!".
There are many obvious ideas around taxing wealth. The problem is that when you think about how they would work in reality things get very messy and difficult. Proposing the idea is not the hard part.
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Why would it collapse? There’s insatiable demand for extreme limited property. Interest rate hikes may lower the price of property but the interest will rise proportionately. Do people really think at sone point no one will want premium property and I’ll finally get it cheap? Of course that will never happen.
Eventually death, disease, or divorce will force properties to sell. That will move market values down. Meanwhile, my buddy’s mobile home manufacturer is back to being able to output a home in weeks. Construction has already fallen off a cliff-which makes sense given that’s the easiest to spin up/down of the market. The RE market is responding to the rates. Though, whether it’ll be enough is beyond my knowledge or po…
There are certain places people want to live and this is mainly a 2D geometry, with certain cases of 3D to a limited extent. 3D will always have detractors since it doesn't fit, it kills light, there aren't services to support the density, etc. There's a never ending conveyor of excuses, some which are actually legit. You aren'r building Manhattan again in the West. So as we grow we are forced to grow outward more than upward, and as anyone who has done a 4th grade pizza problem knows how that goes. Geometry! Applying math skillz to "real life"! Who knew?!
Now secondly, lets look at economic and class structures. We like to say "the middle class is vanishing" and that's partially true. But the implied place all these former middle classes are going, the lower class, isn't quite right. Today, the upper middle class is the largest it has ever been. Around 30% of the population (assume the top 1-2% are the upper class). That's huge and these are the people that can actually afford the "nice places in nice places". They throw a bone to a black person or a teacher every now and then via "equitable affordable housing" - just enough to keep the polls working, but never more.
So what we have here is a lot of people who think because they went to college and have an unimportant role in a middling corporation that they deserve a DREAM HOME in a PREMIUM LOCATION. There ain't that many of those. Especially when you consider that 30% of people are really pretty well off due to income in certain cases and inheritance/genes in others. A good friend of mine makes a shit wage and owns a 2M home because RICH PARENTS bought the house. They're still rich even after that! You just ain't one of them. You need to do it the hard way and earn it, like I did.
There are winners and loser and most people feel like they're a winner, or at least did all the things that winners do. But it's a crowded trade today. Good luck.