372000+ entries in 0.117s
mircea_popescu: s not less broken. in the russian crisis of the 90s pensioneers bore most of the burden
mircea_popescu: no, he says "transfer a percentage of earnings from working-age people directly to retirees"
mircea_popescu: the question is, what sort of a fool contemplates the notion that direct transfer better, let alone proper.
mircea_popescu: look i know how 401k/iras etc work. after all, we wouldn't have our friendly second market without them
mircea_popescu: no but the other end. a proper system is bismarck's ponzi ?!
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform "Unlike proper retirement systems, which transfer a percentage of earnings from working-age people directly to retirees, this fuffled scheme takes these earnings and invests them in some fuffles" << do explain ?!
mircea_popescu: in the end, money is an expression of culture. the chase for money in se is not much unlike the making of worthless paintings as a "commercial venture".
mircea_popescu: no three ring binder or company policy can help you there.
mircea_popescu: that part is important. you have to understand your story well enough to be able to contextualize it in different contexts.
mircea_popescu: it makes me realise that in becoming very able to preserve through application of technology, we are losing the incentive to re-write and recall, which probably explains why we suck.
mircea_popescu: however, i've retold this joke dozens of times, and it seems to have gotten better every time.
mircea_popescu: intellectually, the main reason my blog exists is that i hate repeating myself.
mircea_popescu: you must be careful however, the lynchpin of this story is
mircea_popescu: indeed. a secure asset of ever-appreciating value, who'd not want fuffel on his books ?
mircea_popescu: quoth the distraught brothers "that stupid girl. and what great business we had with that painting"
mircea_popescu: until one day, a young girl one has hired for the purpose of cleanning the house in between polishing the cock
mircea_popescu: the painting moves back and forth at ever increasing nominal values among the families, as their capital needs dictate
mircea_popescu: and then in a couple months when he was building a new stable, his brother buys the painting back from him, at yet a heftier premium
mircea_popescu: returning the call, itzhak buys the painting back a few weeks later,
mircea_popescu: the next week, hirsz is beating down itzhak's door. for he must have the painting, it is keeping it up at night that his older brother in the pooer neighbourhood should have the piece of art!
mircea_popescu: itzhak tells him the exorbitant sum he has paid, and some theory about its artistic value.
mircea_popescu: he notes the shitty painting, and asks his brother wherefore.
mircea_popescu: his younger brother hirsz, a respectable moneylender in the slightly larger small neighbourhood of Sucker's Lament visits one day
mircea_popescu: so as to not agress the public morals, itzhak upon living her house picks up a worthless old smoked over painting, and declares it to be the payment for the debt.
mircea_popescu: one day an attractive young widdow that can't repay her husband's debts agrees to put out, like every other day, except with different girls.
mircea_popescu: Itzhak is a respectable moneylender in the small neighbourhood of Fool's Crossing.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: the old jew joke, which is why trilema has been making the point since the naughts.
mircea_popescu: this is a better model, they're not so much into socialism per se
mircea_popescu: and also the abundance of time it generously provides.
mircea_popescu: easy to stack games, especially when you have the excuse of material scarcity the prison offers
mircea_popescu: he has a point in that i suspect it's perhaps the easiest way to explain to the layman in laymen terms what exactly is the difference separating "me" or "us" from "them". teh fuffle readily makes sense or not at all.
mircea_popescu: (Perhaps this psychological mechanism accounts for the fact the Anglo-Saxon tribe still has the vestigial word but no longer remembers its meaning.)
mircea_popescu: isarescu squirreled away ~127 tons of the stuff, and that's >6 grams per capita.
mircea_popescu: "It seems that the Russians are better-equipped to survive financial collapse than just about anyone else. They have formidable reserves of gold and foreign currency to soften the downward slide. " << actually, the romanians have more.
mircea_popescu: it's not the language tho. it's the minds. language is but a cloth.
mircea_popescu: then i follow your link, and what do i see ? "In the unfolding global financial collapse, it is not just our accounts and balance sheets that come up short, but our language as well."
mircea_popescu: lmao! re your club orlov : i was persuaded to add a disclaimer to my article, which reads "but before you run to the interpretative races be advised that the “money” sybol is used correctly in its proper sense, rather than in what mistaken cvasi-definition you might have intuited for yourself, and this use colors the meaning of “time” too."
mircea_popescu: but then i'm the guy worth a billion dollars, and if you add their loot all together, you don't get a billion.
mircea_popescu: the irony here being that if you take the list of 100+ scammers they - each and every one of them - were at some point "bigger than me", in a particular "media's eye" view of the table.
mircea_popescu: well equally so for S, he's also doomed being part of that nonsense.
mircea_popescu: the union becomes pernicious in that s's capital could be useful irrespective of him, but S's mental issues lock s out.
mircea_popescu: and that's what the scammer can't, fundamentally, have.
mircea_popescu: capital can be good. minutious attention to irrelevant detail can also be good. both need a lot of central thinking to actualise their potential utility,
mircea_popescu: the sad part of this otherwise heroic arrangement is, however, that it STILL doesn't work.
mircea_popescu: s naturally tries to use his relative advantage to defeat a problem, S equally so. together, they make a team. the alleged "theft" is nothing of the kind, teams reallocate resources all the time on common convention, which is hwat's happening here too.
mircea_popescu: and he has no money, or more properly put, he's not making nearly as much as his less clever peers from kindergarten are making.
mircea_popescu: he is then stuck, but also unable to admit this to himself.
mircea_popescu: for whatever reason, such as having a bad attitude to authority coupled with a duplicitous nature, he has managed to both escape re-education and avoid actually putting his mind to useful purpose.
mircea_popescu: the scammer, let him be known as S, has been doing nothing but contemplating, the minutious detail that is otherwise irrelevant.
mircea_popescu: so basically the sucker's life is this escalating avalanche of unpaid time debts which he keeps extending and extending for more and more ridiculous interest.
mircea_popescu: and as a result learning fa for him is "learn all calculus from fractions onward", which is easily months of HIS time (it'd be a lot less time for someone a lot more literate, because of the way economies of scale work in matters of the mind. however, this is not him)
mircea_popescu: which he mostly didn't have the time t odo because in junior high he didn't have the time to properly consider fractions,
mircea_popescu: the sucker, let him be known as s, is in a rush. he has not the time to completely consider things, and this is built on a lengthy historical tradition of the same : he also "did not have the time" to properly consider functional analysis in highschool,
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the farmer is lamenting that the deer lays dead, no more.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this is an exceedingly difficult proposition. my current belief is that mostly they're stupid in a different way.
mircea_popescu: Duffer1 you recall the guy a day or two ago with the "200% is 200% no matter how you cut it" ?