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On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Show nested quote +Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing.
Perhaps we should just do it the french way, kill the rich and put their head on pikes and put that into our national anthem
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/eYbUx.gif)
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On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Show nested quote +Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing.
Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing?
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On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing?
in some senses it is, but the demands on the occupy wallstreet website are hardly akin to "fair taxation"
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On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing?
Sounds more like he's under the impression that unnecessary write-offs are not stealing.
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On October 11 2011 11:00 Endymion wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing? in some senses it is, but the demands on the occupy wallstreet website are hardly akin to "fair taxation"
taxation is legal.
OWS has made no demands.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
rent seeking behavior constituted a lot of the original claims to property. if we go down the 'it's mine!!!' chute it'll end up in some rather arbitrary and dodgy places rather quickly.
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On October 11 2011 09:55 Endymion wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 09:42 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:28 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 07:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:51 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 04:31 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:20 XerrolAvengerII wrote:On October 11 2011 04:07 aksfjh wrote:You can't pin even most of this on "unsustainable welfare states" when most of the debt created in the past decade were direct results of tax cuts....
....and the waging of new wars that were paid with American money instead of American lives. Dude, wtf does that even mean? he wants to fund the development of mobile dolls, seen in gundam wing, so that war between countries relies wholly on economic costs rather than human costs. Well the cost of war for super powers anyways. I found a photo of aksfjh off of google. ![[image loading]](http://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/characters/4/40379.jpg) Wait, I thought he (or I in this case?) was against the increased use of mobile dolls... Anyways, I was merely providing commentary on the subject. When somebody employed at Haliburton loses 3 limbs or dies, the public doesn't hear about it or care. When somebody who is in service of their country dies, it's a much bigger deal and American citizens begin to turn against the war much quicker. I can't comment either way on this, since there are benefits to both approaches and it's already said and done anyways. =/ yeah you're right, sorry it didn't hold up i guess. he's a bit of a hypocrite then because he ends up using mobile dolls in the battle before he dies. But you're wrong in terms of the Haliburton example. Everytime someone in the private sector dies, you can be damned sure that it's very public to stakeholders, just not every single person in the economy. Saftey is so highly valued in most (the ones I've been exposed to) if not all oil extraction/enrichment companies that some investors question its worth in the long term. Someone getting injured on the job is really, really bad for the PR of any company, and they tend to be very forthright about it because if they're not and the media discoveres that they aren't forthcoming about saftey issues then a fierce bloodbath will ensue. If the US military was looked at as closely as the oil industry has been since the BP spill (redundant because the blame should have been spread across half a dozen companies involved in the rigs development, construction, testing, and operations) in the gulf (and that they cared to improve as much as BP did), you would see an immediate increase in combat efficieny and overall reduction of wasteful deaths. BP could never sanely withhold corporate assets to not increase safety, or investors and employees would note it and jump ship to a competator. Where are US soldiers going to go if they don't like the military's practices? No where, they'll get court martialed if they say anything against the upper echelons. I don't mean to target you personally or your example, but I don't think people see just how much effort corporate America puts into being sustainable and being heavily tied to them I find it frightening. It's not just Haliburton and combat contractors though. It's construction, lodging, food, etc. Anything that the military can't find the people for is being filled by private contractors. Paying somebody to cook meals and answer phones in Afghanistan costs a lot simply because of risk of being there, but not because of the skill required to do it. We pay soldiers so little (sadly) that it's really cost ineffective to turn it over to profit centered entities (including people). Certainly, there is a lot of waste in the military compared to the private sector in some regards, but they tend to get more done in the way of combat operations and occupations dollar by dollar. RND is possibly the biggest culprit on the opposite, inefficiency side, investing in technologies for wars we no longer fight, then selling 5-10 year old technology to enemies to help fund said research. I also think the corporate analogy doesn't work for the military now that i think about it because corporations cut costs to maintain retained earnings while governments cut corners because they're lazy and have indefinite retained earnings from tax payers. Government controls their income and expenses, and their only risk of taxing the fuck out of the US taxpayers to make up for tax inefficiency is the risk of revolution, which won't happen. They're not even mostly lazy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely cases of, "I get paid by the hour, not by the box!" but they're not what drive the labor force in the government. In many ways, the quality of a government job is continually stressed because there are always looming budget cuts. Teachers and police officers especially face a great deal of scrutiny every day/month/year in order to make sure nobody is being dealt the short end of the stick (compared to other people). Also, this is the first serious talk in tax increases in the past 20 years. If you think for a second that increasing taxes is an easy task, I suggest you take a look at the political atmosphere 2+ years ago. I know it's not an easy task, but more importantly I know that changing the political climate of the united states is an even more difficult tax. I think it's a problem of democracy more so than the US in general. Power is decided by the majority, but the majority has less claim to the power than the minority (100x the case atm with this whole occupy wallstreet movement. people thinking they have the right to the money they haven't earned or inherited.) Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 09:34 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 08:25 Kickboxer wrote:
I can never understand why people equate riches with hard work. It's a retardedly false platitude and yet everyone and their monkey throws it around like feces and no one even objects.
Out of the ten or so people whom I personally know to be rich two are true workaholics who built businesses from the ground up and another two work about as much as the average Joe. The other six are either inbred descendents of old money who, apart from copious amounts of cocaine and their cars, don't even have hobbies let alone jobs (some of the dumbest, vilest, hopelessly empty people I've ever met) or are well known mobsters.
On the other hand a great majority of poor people I know work very hard just to make ends meet. Even my friends with amazing jobs (like district attorney or hotel manager) who are from middle class families are still middle class, with loans to pay off for run-of-the-mill housing.
I guess these schmucks who apparently "earned" their 50 million work 572 hours a day or? Society should go back to where money is earned by actually doing something productive. People who shove money from left to right and leech it out of the system aren't hard working, they are a cancer and should be treated as such. Boo fucking who then, keep your 'honor' and i'll keep my 'wrongly/unfairly obtained inheritance,' the day the government tells the private sector to seriously even consider giving money away because it was 'unfairly gained' from a poor person's perspective is the day that the US falls from grace as a corporate superpower. And then China will 'have your money,' not you. tl;dr for you illiterates out there, be that 1/10 guy who makes millions, not that 99% who qqs in a corner begging for money. E hh, you'd be pretty hard pressed to make the case that somebody making money through trading is working harder at a higher skill job than quite a few Americans with college degrees. Not saying that some don't work JUST as hard, but part of the payout of being in the financial sector is accepting a great deal of risk. The only problem was that a lot of the overall risk was mitigated when the market screwed up bad and the government felt required to come to the rescue lest there be a HUGE run on the banks and another recession. We saw people who were in charge when all this went down see little punishment for taking the wrong risks, while the punishment "trickled down" to many of the working class. Honestly, if you can't see why people are angry (or think it's stupid) at those who are still sitting on money then I question your ability to use empathy as part of a rational conclusion about anything. I will hand it to you that many people protesting are doing so while looking like hippies and irresponsible idiots, but they're suffering for their mistakes right now, while there are a lot of "investors" who aren't. I think that the bolded statement is wrong, and it's what this whole problem is originating from. People think that the financial sector is some joke, and that the people who work there don't stress every minute of every day about it. No matter how rich you are, it isn't easy to swallow losing 20% of your assets over the course of the day. I think it's easier not working in the financial sector, there's so much less stress.. T he people that are sitting on money have the right to do whatever they want with their money. Who are you, or the government, to tell them to spend it, invest it, or shit on it? That's the beauty of the American corporate culture, we could all go down tomorrow if we wanted to. I see people crying because they want the money that people are sitting on, and I'm not empathetic with them in the same sense that I'm not empathetic with a kid crying about his neighbor in school getting a 100% on a test while he failed because he was drinking instead of studying.
You are either just trolling now or you are missing the point of money.
Currency came about as a form of exchanging services. Services and products have different values, so its hard to just trade some cheese for a sword, so gold became the standard of measurement which eventually became paper which eventually just gets ridiculous.
That is incredibly simplified of course, but the point is that people with money who just take money to make more money contribute absolutely nothing to society and the progress of mankind. That is why people are upset. That is why people should not have the right to do whatever they want with their money.
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On October 11 2011 10:42 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 10:37 alffla wrote:On October 11 2011 10:24 Bigtony wrote:On October 11 2011 10:11 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:55 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:42 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:28 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 07:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:51 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
Wait, I thought he (or I in this case?) was against the increased use of mobile dolls...
Anyways, I was merely providing commentary on the subject. When somebody employed at Haliburton loses 3 limbs or dies, the public doesn't hear about it or care. When somebody who is in service of their country dies, it's a much bigger deal and American citizens begin to turn against the war much quicker.
I can't comment either way on this, since there are benefits to both approaches and it's already said and done anyways. =/ yeah you're right, sorry it didn't hold up i guess. he's a bit of a hypocrite then because he ends up using mobile dolls in the battle before he dies. But you're wrong in terms of the Haliburton example. Everytime someone in the private sector dies, you can be damned sure that it's very public to stakeholders, just not every single person in the economy. Saftey is so highly valued in most (the ones I've been exposed to) if not all oil extraction/enrichment companies that some investors question its worth in the long term. Someone getting injured on the job is really, really bad for the PR of any company, and they tend to be very forthright about it because if they're not and the media discoveres that they aren't forthcoming about saftey issues then a fierce bloodbath will ensue. If the US military was looked at as closely as the oil industry has been since the BP spill (redundant because the blame should have been spread across half a dozen companies involved in the rigs development, construction, testing, and operations) in the gulf (and that they cared to improve as much as BP did), you would see an immediate increase in combat efficieny and overall reduction of wasteful deaths. BP could never sanely withhold corporate assets to not increase safety, or investors and employees would note it and jump ship to a competator. Where are US soldiers going to go if they don't like the military's practices? No where, they'll get court martialed if they say anything against the upper echelons. I don't mean to target you personally or your example, but I don't think people see just how much effort corporate America puts into being sustainable and being heavily tied to them I find it frightening. It's not just Haliburton and combat contractors though. It's construction, lodging, food, etc. Anything that the military can't find the people for is being filled by private contractors. Paying somebody to cook meals and answer phones in Afghanistan costs a lot simply because of risk of being there, but not because of the skill required to do it. We pay soldiers so little (sadly) that it's really cost ineffective to turn it over to profit centered entities (including people). Certainly, there is a lot of waste in the military compared to the private sector in some regards, but they tend to get more done in the way of combat operations and occupations dollar by dollar. RND is possibly the biggest culprit on the opposite, inefficiency side, investing in technologies for wars we no longer fight, then selling 5-10 year old technology to enemies to help fund said research. I also think the corporate analogy doesn't work for the military now that i think about it because corporations cut costs to maintain retained earnings while governments cut corners because they're lazy and have indefinite retained earnings from tax payers. Government controls their income and expenses, and their only risk of taxing the fuck out of the US taxpayers to make up for tax inefficiency is the risk of revolution, which won't happen. They're not even mostly lazy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely cases of, "I get paid by the hour, not by the box!" but they're not what drive the labor force in the government. In many ways, the quality of a government job is continually stressed because there are always looming budget cuts. Teachers and police officers especially face a great deal of scrutiny every day/month/year in order to make sure nobody is being dealt the short end of the stick (compared to other people). Also, this is the first serious talk in tax increases in the past 20 years. If you think for a second that increasing taxes is an easy task, I suggest you take a look at the political atmosphere 2+ years ago. I know it's not an easy task, but more importantly I know that changing the political climate of the united states is an even more difficult tax. I think it's a problem of democracy more so than the US in general. Power is decided by the majority, but the majority has less claim to the power than the minority (100x the case atm with this whole occupy wallstreet movement. people thinking they have the right to the money they haven't earned or inherited.) On October 11 2011 09:34 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 08:25 Kickboxer wrote:
I can never understand why people equate riches with hard work. It's a retardedly false platitude and yet everyone and their monkey throws it around like feces and no one even objects.
Out of the ten or so people whom I personally know to be rich two are true workaholics who built businesses from the ground up and another two work about as much as the average Joe. The other six are either inbred descendents of old money who, apart from copious amounts of cocaine and their cars, don't even have hobbies let alone jobs (some of the dumbest, vilest, hopelessly empty people I've ever met) or are well known mobsters.
On the other hand a great majority of poor people I know work very hard just to make ends meet. Even my friends with amazing jobs (like district attorney or hotel manager) who are from middle class families are still middle class, with loans to pay off for run-of-the-mill housing.
I guess these schmucks who apparently "earned" their 50 million work 572 hours a day or? Society should go back to where money is earned by actually doing something productive. People who shove money from left to right and leech it out of the system aren't hard working, they are a cancer and should be treated as such. Boo fucking who then, keep your 'honor' and i'll keep my 'wrongly/unfairly obtained inheritance,' the day the government tells the private sector to seriously even consider giving money away because it was 'unfairly gained' from a poor person's perspective is the day that the US falls from grace as a corporate superpower. And then China will 'have your money,' not you. tl;dr for you illiterates out there, be that 1/10 guy who makes millions, not that 99% who qqs in a corner begging for money. E hh, you'd be pretty hard pressed to make the case that somebody making money through trading is working harder at a higher skill job than quite a few Americans with college degrees. Not saying that some don't work JUST as hard, but part of the payout of being in the financial sector is accepting a great deal of risk. The only problem was that a lot of the overall risk was mitigated when the market screwed up bad and the government felt required to come to the rescue lest there be a HUGE run on the banks and another recession. We saw people who were in charge when all this went down see little punishment for taking the wrong risks, while the punishment "trickled down" to many of the working class. Honestly, if you can't see why people are angry (or think it's stupid) at those who are still sitting on money then I question your ability to use empathy as part of a rational conclusion about anything. I will hand it to you that many people protesting are doing so while looking like hippies and irresponsible idiots, but they're suffering for their mistakes right now, while there are a lot of "investors" who aren't. I think that the bolded statement is wrong, and it's what this whole problem is originating from. People think that the financial sector is some joke, and that the people who work there don't stress every minute of every day about it. No matter how rich you are, it isn't easy to swallow losing 20% of your assets over the course of the day. I think it's easier not working in the financial sector, there's so much less stress.. The people that are sitting on money have the right to do whatever they want with their money. Who are you, or the government, to tell them to spend it, invest it, or shit on it? That's the beauty of the American corporate culture, we could all go down tomorrow if we wanted to. I see people crying because they want the money that people are sitting on, and I'm not empathetic with them in the same sense that I'm not empathetic with a kid crying about his neighbor in school getting a 100% on a test while he failed because he was drinking instead of studying. Or how about the kid getting a 100 on the test because his dad is the teacher. That seems fair, right? ...how is that not fair? Unless you're saying the teacher is helping him cheat, why is it not fair for someone's parents to help them? i think he means gettin 100 regardless of how well he did cuz his dad is the teacher and is in charge of giving the grades. Somebody made a 100 today. 
This is such a rare situation and has very little do with the topic at hand (OWS) or the post you quoted.
Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed.
Because if I work hard so to provide for my future generations that makes me a bad person right.
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On October 11 2011 11:01 Hamski wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing? Sounds more like he's under the impression that unnecessary write-offs are not stealing.
Last I checked, it's pretty hard to steal money that's already yours.
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On October 11 2011 09:43 DrainX wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 09:34 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 08:25 Kickboxer wrote:
I can never understand why people equate riches with hard work. It's a retardedly false platitude and yet everyone and their monkey throws it around like feces and no one even objects.
Out of the ten or so people whom I personally know to be rich two are true workaholics who built businesses from the ground up and another two work about as much as the average Joe. The other six are either inbred descendents of old money who, apart from copious amounts of cocaine and their cars, don't even have hobbies let alone jobs (some of the dumbest, vilest, hopelessly empty people I've ever met) or are well known mobsters.
On the other hand a great majority of poor people I know work very hard just to make ends meet. Even my friends with amazing jobs (like district attorney or hotel manager) who are from middle class families are still middle class, with loans to pay off for run-of-the-mill housing.
I guess these schmucks who apparently "earned" their 50 million work 572 hours a day or? Society should go back to where money is earned by actually doing something productive. People who shove money from left to right and leech it out of the system aren't hard working, they are a cancer and should be treated as such. Boo fucking who then, keep your 'honor' and i'll keep my 'wrongly/unfairly obtained inheritance,' the day the government tells the private sector to seriously even consider giving money away because it was 'unfairly gained' from a poor person's perspective is the day that the US falls from grace as a corporate superpower. And then China will 'have your money,' not you. tl;dr for you illiterates out there, be that 1/10 guy who makes millions, not that 99% who qqs in a corner begging for money. Ehh, you'd be pretty hard pressed to make the case that somebody making money through trading is working harder at a higher skill job than quite a few Americans with college degrees. Not saying that some don't work JUST as hard, but part of the payout of being in the financial sector is accepting a great deal of risk. The only problem was that a lot of the overall risk was mitigated when the market screwed up bad and the government felt required to come to the rescue lest there be a HUGE run on the banks and another recession. We saw people who were in charge when all this went down see little punishment for taking the wrong risks, while the punishment "trickled down" to many of the working class. Honestly, if you can't see why people are angry (or think it's stupid) at those who are still sitting on money then I question your ability to use empathy as part of a rational conclusion about anything. I will hand it to you that many people protesting are doing so while looking like hippies and irresponsible idiots, but they're suffering for their mistakes right now, while there are a lot of "investors" who aren't. Socialize risk, privatize gain is the name of the game.
This. This. This. The government subsidizing failures but not profiting from booms is a broken system where the true risk in the private sector is much lower than what you might see on paper. These financial problems with the government will continue as long as that failed policy continues. The corporations that everyone is angry with only made good business decisions. The government (read: everyone in Washington since at least the 80s in any party) is responsible for this recession and the trend of increased wealth for top executives compared to the average american.
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it reeks of objectivism in here. but corporations are stealing from US! i want the money that the government payed to the banks back. i dont want to pay for the roads or grants that companies receive from the government. i dont care about cancer reaserch on anti terror operations. but i pay for all these things. what is the biggest expense on taxpayers? war. who payed for this war. united states citizens. who wanted this war? big business. who profited from this war? everyone except the 99% i dont think it is unfair for the lower 99% to ask for a saftey net when people with the most money all but steal everything straight out of the pockets of the poor. all the mismanaged money in the government is not from lazy politicians, it comes from these politicians sending kick-backs and to the big money backers that bought them their seat in the government. until now it has been almost impossible for everday citizens to be heard. with the internet we are getting closer to a time when a true democracy can be feasible. but it will never happen if we let those in power try and divide us with lies.
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On October 11 2011 11:16 Bigtony wrote:Show nested quote +Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Because if I work hard so to provide for my future generations that makes me a bad person right.
Within reason, not at all. I have nothing against people working to provide for their descendants. It's when those descendants take the money they did nothing to earn and use it to hoard a greater percentage of the available wealth that I find myself annoyed, because it makes it harder for others to do the same thing those hoarding descendants' ancestors did.
I don't really have anything against rich people in principle. However, most of them do things that make me dislike them as individuals.
However, that wasn't really the thrust of my sarcasm. My sarcasm was directed at Endymion, who had the temerity to tell people who are working as hard as they can in a bad economy, as their employers fire their coworkers and cut their benefits, to stop complaining about it and just be rich.
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On October 11 2011 11:21 LeSioN wrote:
it reeks of objectivism in here. but corporations are stealing from US! i want the money that the government payed to the banks back. i dont want to pay for the roads or grants that companies receive from the government. i dont care about cancer reaserch on anti terror operations. but i pay for all these things. what is the biggest expense on taxpayers? war. who payed for this war. united states citizens. who wanted this war? big business. who profited from this war? everyone except the 99% i dont think it is unfair for the lower 99% to ask for a saftey net when people with the most money all but steal everything straight out of the pockets of the poor. all the mismanaged money in the government is not from lazy politicians, it comes from these politicians sending kick-backs and to the big money backers that bought them their seat in the government. until now it has been almost impossible for everday citizens to be heard. with the internet we are getting closer to a time when a true democracy can be feasible. but it will never happen if we let those in power try and divide us with lies.
You can't blame the corporations. They're just asking for money from the government and getting it. The government is responsible for this. You can't blame the corporations for making profits by legal means. Everything happening in Washington needs to change and the corporations will find new ways to do legitimate business.
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On October 11 2011 11:13 seaofsaturn wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 09:55 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:42 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:28 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 07:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:51 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 04:31 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:20 XerrolAvengerII wrote:On October 11 2011 04:07 aksfjh wrote:You can't pin even most of this on "unsustainable welfare states" when most of the debt created in the past decade were direct results of tax cuts....
....and the waging of new wars that were paid with American money instead of American lives. Dude, wtf does that even mean? he wants to fund the development of mobile dolls, seen in gundam wing, so that war between countries relies wholly on economic costs rather than human costs. Well the cost of war for super powers anyways. I found a photo of aksfjh off of google. Wait, I thought he (or I in this case?) was against the increased use of mobile dolls... Anyways, I was merely providing commentary on the subject. When somebody employed at Haliburton loses 3 limbs or dies, the public doesn't hear about it or care. When somebody who is in service of their country dies, it's a much bigger deal and American citizens begin to turn against the war much quicker. I can't comment either way on this, since there are benefits to both approaches and it's already said and done anyways. =/ yeah you're right, sorry it didn't hold up i guess. he's a bit of a hypocrite then because he ends up using mobile dolls in the battle before he dies. But you're wrong in terms of the Haliburton example. Everytime someone in the private sector dies, you can be damned sure that it's very public to stakeholders, just not every single person in the economy. Saftey is so highly valued in most (the ones I've been exposed to) if not all oil extraction/enrichment companies that some investors question its worth in the long term. Someone getting injured on the job is really, really bad for the PR of any company, and they tend to be very forthright about it because if they're not and the media discoveres that they aren't forthcoming about saftey issues then a fierce bloodbath will ensue. If the US military was looked at as closely as the oil industry has been since the BP spill (redundant because the blame should have been spread across half a dozen companies involved in the rigs development, construction, testing, and operations) in the gulf (and that they cared to improve as much as BP did), you would see an immediate increase in combat efficieny and overall reduction of wasteful deaths. BP could never sanely withhold corporate assets to not increase safety, or investors and employees would note it and jump ship to a competator. Where are US soldiers going to go if they don't like the military's practices? No where, they'll get court martialed if they say anything against the upper echelons. I don't mean to target you personally or your example, but I don't think people see just how much effort corporate America puts into being sustainable and being heavily tied to them I find it frightening. It's not just Haliburton and combat contractors though. It's construction, lodging, food, etc. Anything that the military can't find the people for is being filled by private contractors. Paying somebody to cook meals and answer phones in Afghanistan costs a lot simply because of risk of being there, but not because of the skill required to do it. We pay soldiers so little (sadly) that it's really cost ineffective to turn it over to profit centered entities (including people). Certainly, there is a lot of waste in the military compared to the private sector in some regards, but they tend to get more done in the way of combat operations and occupations dollar by dollar. RND is possibly the biggest culprit on the opposite, inefficiency side, investing in technologies for wars we no longer fight, then selling 5-10 year old technology to enemies to help fund said research. I also think the corporate analogy doesn't work for the military now that i think about it because corporations cut costs to maintain retained earnings while governments cut corners because they're lazy and have indefinite retained earnings from tax payers. Government controls their income and expenses, and their only risk of taxing the fuck out of the US taxpayers to make up for tax inefficiency is the risk of revolution, which won't happen. They're not even mostly lazy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely cases of, "I get paid by the hour, not by the box!" but they're not what drive the labor force in the government. In many ways, the quality of a government job is continually stressed because there are always looming budget cuts. Teachers and police officers especially face a great deal of scrutiny every day/month/year in order to make sure nobody is being dealt the short end of the stick (compared to other people). Also, this is the first serious talk in tax increases in the past 20 years. If you think for a second that increasing taxes is an easy task, I suggest you take a look at the political atmosphere 2+ years ago. I know it's not an easy task, but more importantly I know that changing the political climate of the united states is an even more difficult tax. I think it's a problem of democracy more so than the US in general. Power is decided by the majority, but the majority has less claim to the power than the minority (100x the case atm with this whole occupy wallstreet movement. people thinking they have the right to the money they haven't earned or inherited.) On October 11 2011 09:34 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 08:25 Kickboxer wrote:
I can never understand why people equate riches with hard work. It's a retardedly false platitude and yet everyone and their monkey throws it around like feces and no one even objects.
Out of the ten or so people whom I personally know to be rich two are true workaholics who built businesses from the ground up and another two work about as much as the average Joe. The other six are either inbred descendents of old money who, apart from copious amounts of cocaine and their cars, don't even have hobbies let alone jobs (some of the dumbest, vilest, hopelessly empty people I've ever met) or are well known mobsters.
On the other hand a great majority of poor people I know work very hard just to make ends meet. Even my friends with amazing jobs (like district attorney or hotel manager) who are from middle class families are still middle class, with loans to pay off for run-of-the-mill housing.
I guess these schmucks who apparently "earned" their 50 million work 572 hours a day or? Society should go back to where money is earned by actually doing something productive. People who shove money from left to right and leech it out of the system aren't hard working, they are a cancer and should be treated as such. Boo fucking who then, keep your 'honor' and i'll keep my 'wrongly/unfairly obtained inheritance,' the day the government tells the private sector to seriously even consider giving money away because it was 'unfairly gained' from a poor person's perspective is the day that the US falls from grace as a corporate superpower. And then China will 'have your money,' not you. tl;dr for you illiterates out there, be that 1/10 guy who makes millions, not that 99% who qqs in a corner begging for money. E hh, you'd be pretty hard pressed to make the case that somebody making money through trading is working harder at a higher skill job than quite a few Americans with college degrees. Not saying that some don't work JUST as hard, but part of the payout of being in the financial sector is accepting a great deal of risk. The only problem was that a lot of the overall risk was mitigated when the market screwed up bad and the government felt required to come to the rescue lest there be a HUGE run on the banks and another recession. We saw people who were in charge when all this went down see little punishment for taking the wrong risks, while the punishment "trickled down" to many of the working class. Honestly, if you can't see why people are angry (or think it's stupid) at those who are still sitting on money then I question your ability to use empathy as part of a rational conclusion about anything. I will hand it to you that many people protesting are doing so while looking like hippies and irresponsible idiots, but they're suffering for their mistakes right now, while there are a lot of "investors" who aren't. I think that the bolded statement is wrong, and it's what this whole problem is originating from. People think that the financial sector is some joke, and that the people who work there don't stress every minute of every day about it. No matter how rich you are, it isn't easy to swallow losing 20% of your assets over the course of the day. I think it's easier not working in the financial sector, there's so much less stress.. T he people that are sitting on money have the right to do whatever they want with their money. Who are you, or the government, to tell them to spend it, invest it, or shit on it? That's the beauty of the American corporate culture, we could all go down tomorrow if we wanted to. I see people crying because they want the money that people are sitting on, and I'm not empathetic with them in the same sense that I'm not empathetic with a kid crying about his neighbor in school getting a 100% on a test while he failed because he was drinking instead of studying. You are either just trolling now or you are missing the point of money. Currency came about as a form of exchanging services. Services and products have different values, so its hard to just trade some cheese for a sword, so gold became the standard of measurement which eventually became paper which eventually just gets ridiculous. That is incredibly simplified of course, but the point is that people with money who just take money to make more money contribute absolutely nothing to society and the progress of mankind. That is why people are upset. That is why people should not have the right to do whatever they want with their money.
marxist statement spotted.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
marx was pretty good you should actually read him.
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On October 11 2011 11:20 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 11:01 Hamski wrote:On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing? Sounds more like he's under the impression that unnecessary write-offs are not stealing. Last I checked, it's pretty hard to steal money that's already yours.
And last I checked, 35% of your money is not supposed to be yours.
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lol I love how invoking Marxism is somehow a rebuttal...
I don't even agree with seaofsaturn. Of course people have the right to do what they want with their money. I don't think the whole argument about people sitting on their money is going to go very far by itself. Now if we talk about what 'rights' they have after taking a trillion dollars in bailouts, we can start making some normative statements. But the whole culture of bailouts is the government's fault too.
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On October 11 2011 11:45 Hamski wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 11:20 xDaunt wrote:On October 11 2011 11:01 Hamski wrote:On October 11 2011 10:58 DrainX wrote:On October 11 2011 10:49 DeepElemBlues wrote:Hmm.. I guess I'll just work harder next time I'm reincarnated to be born to rich parents, because apparently you think that's the best way to succeed. Better than legalized stealing. Are you implying that fair taxation is stealing? Sounds more like he's under the impression that unnecessary write-offs are not stealing. Last I checked, it's pretty hard to steal money that's already yours. And last I checked, 35% of your money is not supposed to be yours.
Spoken like a man who's probably never earned a buck in his life.
Your entire notion of property rights is ass backwards.
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On October 11 2011 11:34 oneofthem wrote:
marx was pretty good you should actually read him.
I have read Marx, Das Kapital may have been the most delusional piece of literature I've ever picked up.
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On October 11 2011 11:13 seaofsaturn wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2011 09:55 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:42 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:28 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 07:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:51 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 04:31 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 04:20 XerrolAvengerII wrote:On October 11 2011 04:07 aksfjh wrote:You can't pin even most of this on "unsustainable welfare states" when most of the debt created in the past decade were direct results of tax cuts....
....and the waging of new wars that were paid with American money instead of American lives. Dude, wtf does that even mean? he wants to fund the development of mobile dolls, seen in gundam wing, so that war between countries relies wholly on economic costs rather than human costs. Well the cost of war for super powers anyways. I found a photo of aksfjh off of google. Wait, I thought he (or I in this case?) was against the increased use of mobile dolls... Anyways, I was merely providing commentary on the subject. When somebody employed at Haliburton loses 3 limbs or dies, the public doesn't hear about it or care. When somebody who is in service of their country dies, it's a much bigger deal and American citizens begin to turn against the war much quicker. I can't comment either way on this, since there are benefits to both approaches and it's already said and done anyways. =/ yeah you're right, sorry it didn't hold up i guess. he's a bit of a hypocrite then because he ends up using mobile dolls in the battle before he dies. But you're wrong in terms of the Haliburton example. Everytime someone in the private sector dies, you can be damned sure that it's very public to stakeholders, just not every single person in the economy. Saftey is so highly valued in most (the ones I've been exposed to) if not all oil extraction/enrichment companies that some investors question its worth in the long term. Someone getting injured on the job is really, really bad for the PR of any company, and they tend to be very forthright about it because if they're not and the media discoveres that they aren't forthcoming about saftey issues then a fierce bloodbath will ensue. If the US military was looked at as closely as the oil industry has been since the BP spill (redundant because the blame should have been spread across half a dozen companies involved in the rigs development, construction, testing, and operations) in the gulf (and that they cared to improve as much as BP did), you would see an immediate increase in combat efficieny and overall reduction of wasteful deaths. BP could never sanely withhold corporate assets to not increase safety, or investors and employees would note it and jump ship to a competator. Where are US soldiers going to go if they don't like the military's practices? No where, they'll get court martialed if they say anything against the upper echelons. I don't mean to target you personally or your example, but I don't think people see just how much effort corporate America puts into being sustainable and being heavily tied to them I find it frightening. It's not just Haliburton and combat contractors though. It's construction, lodging, food, etc. Anything that the military can't find the people for is being filled by private contractors. Paying somebody to cook meals and answer phones in Afghanistan costs a lot simply because of risk of being there, but not because of the skill required to do it. We pay soldiers so little (sadly) that it's really cost ineffective to turn it over to profit centered entities (including people). Certainly, there is a lot of waste in the military compared to the private sector in some regards, but they tend to get more done in the way of combat operations and occupations dollar by dollar. RND is possibly the biggest culprit on the opposite, inefficiency side, investing in technologies for wars we no longer fight, then selling 5-10 year old technology to enemies to help fund said research. I also think the corporate analogy doesn't work for the military now that i think about it because corporations cut costs to maintain retained earnings while governments cut corners because they're lazy and have indefinite retained earnings from tax payers. Government controls their income and expenses, and their only risk of taxing the fuck out of the US taxpayers to make up for tax inefficiency is the risk of revolution, which won't happen. They're not even mostly lazy. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely cases of, "I get paid by the hour, not by the box!" but they're not what drive the labor force in the government. In many ways, the quality of a government job is continually stressed because there are always looming budget cuts. Teachers and police officers especially face a great deal of scrutiny every day/month/year in order to make sure nobody is being dealt the short end of the stick (compared to other people). Also, this is the first serious talk in tax increases in the past 20 years. If you think for a second that increasing taxes is an easy task, I suggest you take a look at the political atmosphere 2+ years ago. I know it's not an easy task, but more importantly I know that changing the political climate of the united states is an even more difficult tax. I think it's a problem of democracy more so than the US in general. Power is decided by the majority, but the majority has less claim to the power than the minority (100x the case atm with this whole occupy wallstreet movement. people thinking they have the right to the money they haven't earned or inherited.) On October 11 2011 09:34 aksfjh wrote:On October 11 2011 09:24 Endymion wrote:On October 11 2011 08:25 Kickboxer wrote:
I can never understand why people equate riches with hard work. It's a retardedly false platitude and yet everyone and their monkey throws it around like feces and no one even objects.
Out of the ten or so people whom I personally know to be rich two are true workaholics who built businesses from the ground up and another two work about as much as the average Joe. The other six are either inbred descendents of old money who, apart from copious amounts of cocaine and their cars, don't even have hobbies let alone jobs (some of the dumbest, vilest, hopelessly empty people I've ever met) or are well known mobsters.
On the other hand a great majority of poor people I know work very hard just to make ends meet. Even my friends with amazing jobs (like district attorney or hotel manager) who are from middle class families are still middle class, with loans to pay off for run-of-the-mill housing.
I guess these schmucks who apparently "earned" their 50 million work 572 hours a day or? Society should go back to where money is earned by actually doing something productive. People who shove money from left to right and leech it out of the system aren't hard working, they are a cancer and should be treated as such. Boo fucking who then, keep your 'honor' and i'll keep my 'wrongly/unfairly obtained inheritance,' the day the government tells the private sector to seriously even consider giving money away because it was 'unfairly gained' from a poor person's perspective is the day that the US falls from grace as a corporate superpower. And then China will 'have your money,' not you. tl;dr for you illiterates out there, be that 1/10 guy who makes millions, not that 99% who qqs in a corner begging for money. E hh, you'd be pretty hard pressed to make the case that somebody making money through trading is working harder at a higher skill job than quite a few Americans with college degrees. Not saying that some don't work JUST as hard, but part of the payout of being in the financial sector is accepting a great deal of risk. The only problem was that a lot of the overall risk was mitigated when the market screwed up bad and the government felt required to come to the rescue lest there be a HUGE run on the banks and another recession. We saw people who were in charge when all this went down see little punishment for taking the wrong risks, while the punishment "trickled down" to many of the working class. Honestly, if you can't see why people are angry (or think it's stupid) at those who are still sitting on money then I question your ability to use empathy as part of a rational conclusion about anything. I will hand it to you that many people protesting are doing so while looking like hippies and irresponsible idiots, but they're suffering for their mistakes right now, while there are a lot of "investors" who aren't. I think that the bolded statement is wrong, and it's what this whole problem is originating from. People think that the financial sector is some joke, and that the people who work there don't stress every minute of every day about it. No matter how rich you are, it isn't easy to swallow losing 20% of your assets over the course of the day. I think it's easier not working in the financial sector, there's so much less stress.. T he people that are sitting on money have the right to do whatever they want with their money. Who are you, or the government, to tell them to spend it, invest it, or shit on it? That's the beauty of the American corporate culture, we could all go down tomorrow if we wanted to. I see people crying because they want the money that people are sitting on, and I'm not empathetic with them in the same sense that I'm not empathetic with a kid crying about his neighbor in school getting a 100% on a test while he failed because he was drinking instead of studying. You are either just trolling now or you are missing the point of money. Currency came about as a form of exchanging services. Services and products have different values, so its hard to just trade some cheese for a sword, so gold became the standard of measurement which eventually became paper which eventually just gets ridiculous. That is incredibly simplified of course, but the point is that people with money who just take money to make more money contribute absolutely nothing to society and the progress of mankind. That is why people are upset. That is why people should not have the right to do whatever they want with their money.
They have to spend or invest that money somewhere to "make more money." No one that is rich has their money just sitting and rotting. If they build a big house, that sends money to the contractors and material suppliers that all employ members of the "99%." If they invest, those companies they buy into likely employ members of the "99%."
Corporations and the wealthy are the reason we have so many cheap amazing things in our living rooms. The government is the reason the peaks and valleys are so large.
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EPT
