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Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Discussions about the economic and financial ramifications of PEAK OIL

Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 14 Nov 2017, 17:09:32

asg70 wrote:
SeaGypsy wrote:The rentier class is bleeding the working poor to death...


Yep. How about that PStarr? Enjoying bleeding the working poor to death?


NO TROLLING.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby dolph » Tue 14 Nov 2017, 17:46:04

There's nothing you can do. With capital and labor mobile throughout the world, capital can invest anywhere and labor can move anywhere. That means capital flows into real estate and workers flow in, keeping wages down and prices high.

The only cure is specific government policy. But nobody will do that, right. They all come from the same parasitic class and then say "government is the problem" as they load society with unpayable debts and make out with billions.

The end of the Anglo world is....real estate speculation. Who would have guessed? I can't think of anybody who said this is the way the UK, America, Australia, etc. would actually end.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Ibon » Tue 14 Nov 2017, 19:41:17

GHung wrote:
I wonder how the 400 million chinese feel about this ...you know...the ones who abandoned the toil of rural agrarian subsistence farming to the factories of mega metropolis urban areas during the past 25 years


I wonder how many wish they could go back but are now trapped in lives where the grass was supposedly going to be greener.


Very few. Because the grass is greener in their polluted over crowded urban environments. Due to globalism those Chinese living in urban areas today are eating better, are working actually less than when they were farmers. per capita they are eating more pork for example, they are very well socialized actually for urban living. You would be very hard pressed to find any willing to go back to their agrarian past.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 06:17:50

Somewhere the novelty drive meets pragmatism. Agrarian life is nearly utterly predictable & largely mundane. The non predictable is even predictable- climate crop wreckage, plagues etc. People want light at the end of their tunnels, doesn't seem to matter much if it's an illusion or being dangled like the proverbial carrot.

The clear issue is the absurdity of a few cubic meters of space in a concrete & glass box is worth decades of work for the average mug punter. Only two things make this so- deliberately restricted supply & collective obeyance (thou shalt not gang up & build slums).

The article i pasted a link to above & my OP point to the fact the world is running out of worthwhile investment opportunities. There's still surplus wealth being created, but investing in social capital per-se is a no-no, giving stuff away for free, anti capitalism. Capitalism being so damned good, everyone wants to be a successful capitalist first & foremost- philanthropy barely rates a mention & even then it's as a quirky guilt appeasement for multi billionaires.

(Ibon, you are in my mind a philanthropist. You don't have any lavish conspicuous consumption in your life that I'm aware of. You support dozens of people directly through creating some pretty amazing looking jobs. If everyone as wealthy as yourself was similarly inclined, the world would be a much different & much better place).
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 09:48:48

SeaGypsy wrote:The clear issue is the absurdity of a few cubic meters of space in a concrete & glass box is worth decades of work for the average mug punter. Only two things make this so- deliberately restricted supply & collective obeyance (thou shalt not gang up & build slums).

The article i pasted a link to above & my OP point to the fact the world is running out of worthwhile investment opportunities. There's still surplus wealth being created, but investing in social capital per-se is a no-no, giving stuff away for free, anti capitalism. Capitalism being so damned good, everyone wants to be a successful capitalist first & foremost- philanthropy barely rates a mention & even then it's as a quirky guilt appeasement for multi billionaires.


This is a point I have struggled to make many times here SeaGypsy. Up until the 'Robber Barons' of the 19th Century became figures to be admired by business schools in the 'First World' where the USA held dominance and very deep influence on culture things were different. Historically 'Elites' whether they were nobles, high church officials, or just plain successful merchants all understood a fundamental fact. You may not like people of the lower classes, you may even despise and revile them individually. But if you are going to be a successful elite you have a responsibility to encourage the 'social order' to remain in place with you and your fellow 'Elites' at the top. This can not be done with just naked force and coercion, such systems are always unstable and generally collapse after the leader dies or makes such an egregious faux pas that his authority dissipates rapidly. If you are an Elite and you want your family to remain Elite and your distant descendants to be born Elite then as an immutable law of nature you need the respect of the lower classes, not just the fear and grudging submission. When you have that respect then the lower classes will also seek to perpetuate the system by training their children from infancy to hold that same kind of respect for the 'social order'.

How does an Elite gain respect from the lower classes? It isn't difficult actually in practice. You treat your social lessors with a kind of respect due to themselves for hard work, or skilled trade-craft, or simply being steady and reliable workers. You do not under any circumstances simply discard them when the burden of your position means you are supposed to help them get through a tough spot whatever the spot might be. You provide law and order with a court system that adjudicates in a fashion that at least nominally provides justice to the lower classes in their disputes with others of the lower class, and that also occasionally rules in favor of the lower class if the 'elite' in a case is acting in a particularly egregious manner than makes other Elites look bad in the eyes of the lower class.

As an Elite you one real job is to maintain the respect of the lower class so that you can continue to benefit from Elite status. Modern business theory in the USA/Europe and those places where the World Bank holds sway are based on strict financial accounting and completely ignore the social accounting that goes with long term stable elite status. This is a fools task of the nth degree. Who are the 'Elites' the average lower class westerner looks up to and follows breathlessly in gossip? It isn't the successful business person nor the successful politician. No today the person the gossip of the lower classes is about are the Hollywood (or local equivalent) stars who appear in public and say nice things about the lower class from time to time in public settings. The Adulation that used to go to your local noble or high church leader is now invested in the celebrity elites. It has almost nothing to do with the extravagant lifestyles every elite lives with, and everything to do with the social connection those celebrities make with the lower classes.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby GHung » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 11:26:41

Modern business theory in the USA/Europe and those places where the World Bank holds sway are based on strict financial accounting and completely ignore the social accounting that goes with long term stable elite status.


I've been watching the tax reform proposals for a while, and though I don't have a specific link, the consensus (from the horses' mouths') is that corporate CEOs plan to use tax cuts to "buy back shares and pay dividends" rather than create more jobs and paying higher wages. From a bottom line standpoint, this is the "expedient" thing to do, social accounting be damned. Just the suggestion that tax rates will drop and the benefits will go to shareholders can boost stock prices.

Why big CEOs love the GOP tax plan

The Republican tax plan offers multiple benefits to Cohn’s “big CEOs”:

It reduces the corporate income tax rate, which boosts corporate profits and therefore share prices. Since most CEOs’ compensation is linked to share price performance, that means CEOs benefit directly.

It lets companies take cash that’s been stashed tax-free in foreign subsidiaries and use it for dividends or buybacks that also boost share prices.

The changes to the rate structure mean that very high-income people will pay lower income taxes.

Repealing the estate tax helps you if you manage to amass an $11 million fortune, which big CEOs tend to do but family farmers don’t. .....

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... n-tax-plan
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Ibon » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 12:55:33

Tanada wrote: The Adulation that used to go to your local noble or high church leader is now invested in the celebrity elites. It has almost nothing to do with the extravagant lifestyles every elite lives with, and everything to do with the social connection those celebrities make with the lower classes.


I was wondering if this is as powerful with the emerging generation as it was with ours. Celebrities got a lot of attention when the major venue was television and movies. Today's generation is immersed in their inter active digital worlds are entertaining themselves and each other. Who needs a celebrity when being a narcissist is more than enough?
Don't celebrities play an increasingly minor role? TV viewership among millennials is dropping fast.

Who are the celebrities today actually? I am so out of the mainstream pop culture I have no clue.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 13:55:20

Ibon wrote:
Tanada wrote: The Adulation that used to go to your local noble or high church leader is now invested in the celebrity elites. It has almost nothing to do with the extravagant lifestyles every elite lives with, and everything to do with the social connection those celebrities make with the lower classes.


I was wondering if this is as powerful with the emerging generation as it was with ours. Celebrities got a lot of attention when the major venue was television and movies. Today's generation is immersed in their inter active digital worlds are entertaining themselves and each other. Who needs a celebrity when being a narcissist is more than enough?
Don't celebrities play an increasingly minor role? TV viewership among millennials is dropping fast.

Who are the celebrities today actually? I am so out of the mainstream pop culture I have no clue.


Millennial's have their celebrities too. They are Twitter/FaceBook stars as much as entertainers in the traditional sense.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby asg70 » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 15:41:44

Ibon wrote:Don't celebrities play an increasingly minor role? TV viewership among millennials is dropping fast.
Who are the celebrities today actually? I am so out of the mainstream pop culture I have no clue.


Celebrities are still a thing. Taylor Swift for one.

This video is a good representation of the way youth think today, technology-obsessed, hopelessly narcissistic, and an aesthetic that is all about style over substance. All sound and fury signifying...nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIft-t-MQuE

Almost 95 million views so far in less than a month.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 17:22:52

Yeah, it's obvious when listening to mainstream radio- you have to see the music videos to 'get it', like MTV has hived off from music per-se & taken over the market; the music mostly can't stand on it's own, it's robotic garbage, pointless & shallow, devoid of meaning without the video aspect. Watch these same pop stars live performances, they universally rely on extravagant lighting, huge video screen, replicating the in home experience fans expect.

(Tanada, i get what you are saying about the lack of basic comprehension of the status quo, from top to bottom. Underneath this is just a NQR gnawing feeling. Someone in deep debt is called 'home owner' because their name is on the title, the bank's lien on the property is ignored. 'Average wages' are touted as calculated by the total wage pool divided by the total wage earners- skewed massively by the top few percent. Very few people are educated/ learned enough to realize the fabrication of reality we are fed daily through all forms of media.)
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 17:58:34

SeaGypsy wrote: Someone in deep debt is called 'home owner' because their name is on the title, the bank's lien on the property is ignored. 'Average wages' are touted as calculated by the total wage pool divided by the total wage earners- skewed massively by the top few percent. Very few people are educated/ learned enough to realize the fabrication of reality we are fed daily through all forms of media.)

That's why the terms median and average are both used and both calculated (and may or may not be reported on, of course).

The fact that such a small percentage of the electorate seems to grok the difference or realize why it's important to have both numbers is increasingly ironic, given the educational requirements to get and keep a decently paid job in the increasingly competitive global economy.

I blame a lot of this on the clowns in the Beltway on both sides of the aisle who WANT their constituents to be ignorant, so they'll keep being re-elected. Given how little their actions reflect society's needs, and how little it seems to matter (i.e. they keep getting elected for the same clownish behavior), I see no realistic way to fix that any time soon, unfortunately.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Ibon » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 20:07:04

SeaGypsy wrote:Someone in deep debt is called 'home owner' because their name is on the title, the bank's lien on the property is ignored. '


Think of modern industrial farmers, the bank owns their land and machines, the agro companies have patents on the seeds, the "farmers" never touch the soil which isn't even really soil anymore, vast monotonous mono culture fields as mindless and numb as you drive your air conditioned combine through them as is the MTV video his kids listen to, as is the taste of the tomato he grows, as is the plastic shit they buy at the faceless box store down the road, right passed the shuttered old main street. Plastic shit made by chinese factory workers on the other side of the planet equally enduring the same monotony on the factory line.

This is a truly dystopian nightmare world that many have become so habituated to they can not recognize the nightmare.

There are crickets and frogs I can hear out the window, Chopin is playing on the stereo, the rains of the afternoon have cleaned the air and the stars are brilliant, no electric lights in this whole valley except what we generate here off the grid.

I think of all the robots out there happily consuming monotony. I have a mixture of compassion and utter disdain.

Folks, it really didn't have to be like this did it?
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby asg70 » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 20:22:05

Ibon wrote:This is a truly dystopian nightmare world that many have become so habituated to they can not recognize the nightmare.


Perhaps, but think of the perspective of JRR Tolkien 100 years ago. His Middle-earth is a paean to a pastoral countryside that was ceding to industrialization from his birth in the tail end of the 19th century and into the 20th. To him, even the 40s and 50s were dystopian. To someone like me, even the 1980s feels like a lost golden age. To millennials, many of them think today represents the best of times thanks to Netflix, XBox, free streaming porn, and Tinder hookups.

Go read all the comments under the music video link I posted. Read all of the glowing feedback. People who actually think the song and/or the video carries deep meaning. I simply do not operate on their wavelength. This is the generation gap in full bloom.

My point being that dystopia is only a "thing" when people perceive life to be dystopian. Of course you can present modernity as dystopian, but you can also portray the 1950s cold-war mad-men era as the height of racism, sexism, and red-scare hysteria. Then go back before vaccination when kids had to deal with serious fear dying before they reached adulthood, and on and on.

If people don't value what they don't have anymore then you can't impose any sense of grief over it.

When might we see a sea-change of people starting to perceive today as a dystopia across all generations? When jobs and basic necessities start getting a LOT more expensive or outright scarce. We may be a vacuous society, but we are ultimately a spoiled one, and so there's a limit to how much dread we feel, Trump not withstanding.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby Ibon » Wed 15 Nov 2017, 21:02:58

asg70 wrote: To someone like me, even the 1980s feels like a lost golden age. To millennials, many of them think today represents the best of times thanks to Netflix, XBox, free streaming porn, and Tinder hookups..


I recognized the dystopia when I was in my 20's. It hasn't changed much. I took distance from it back then already by immersing myself in the natural world. Going on over 40 years now.
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Re: Service Economies=Rentier Leech/ RE Bubble Economies

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Thu 16 Nov 2017, 02:57:06

Has always seemed to me the more intelligent people are the more likely they perceive dystopia as a constant. The world is crazy, probably always was. I imagine intelligent cave men working out how to poison or otherwise delete the physically superior alpha. Probably this did happen.
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