#rich rentiers

[thepowerisyouth]

The news is grossly misinforming the public about an inherently flawed financial system.

We need to step back from any very very specific type of analysis and think of this as a centuries old problem

Wealth disparity

The "rentiers" (landlords, anyone who makes money lending out their assets and taking a fee for that lending) is inherently a supplier to the economy

Any person who is being forced to rent out assets from a rich rentier is, by nature, their demander

Demand sets the price first, so long as suppliers are slow to wake up to the reality of lack of demand in their world

Its the most basic economics in the world: wealth disparity must end unless they just kill us all and shoot off to space

When the PRICE to rent someones assets (no, not just the interest rates, but also renting a house or renting an underpaying job with the future promise of a better paying life) is too high that demand is faltering, and people are maxing out credit cards to afford bills-- we know it will all end soon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things

Today (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.

Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

Washington State enacted a 7% capital gains tax levied on annual profits in excess of $250,000, and made a fortune, $600m more than projected in the first year, despite a 25% drop in the stock market and blistering interest rate hikes:

https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/06/01/lessons-from-washington-states-new-capital-gains-tax/

Capital gains taxes are levied on “passive income” — money you get for owning stuff. The capital gains rate is much lower than the income tax rate — the rate you pay for doing stuff. This is naked class warfare: it punishes the people who make things and do things, and rewards the people who own the means of production.

The thing is, a factory or a store can still operate if the owner goes missing — but without workers, it shuts down immediately. Everything you depend on — the clothes on your back, the food in your fridge, the car you drive and the coffee you drink — exists because someone did something to produce it. Those producers are punished by our tax system, while the people who derive a “passive income” from their labor are given preferential treatment.

The Washington State tax is levied exclusively on annual gains in excess of a quarter million dollars — meaning this tax affects an infinitesimal minority of Washingtonians, who are vastly better off than the people whose work they profit from. Most working Americans own little or no stock, and the vast majority of those who do own that stock in a retirement fund that is sheltered from these taxes.

(Sidebar here to say that market-based pensions are a scam, a way to force workers to gamble in a rigged casino for the chance to enjoy a dignified retirement; the defined benefits pension, combined with adequate Social Security, is the only way to ensure secure retirement for all of us)

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Washington’s tax was anticipated to bring in $248m. Instead, it’s projected to bring in $849m in the first year. Those funds will go to public school operations and construction and infrastructure spending:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/was-new-capital-gains-tax-brings-in-849-million-so-far-much-more-than-expected/

That is to say, the money will go to ensuring that Washingtonians are educated and will have the amenities they need to turn that education into productive work.

Washington State is noteworthy for not having any state personal or corporate income tax, making it a haven for low-tax brain-worm victims who would rather have a dead gopher running their states than pay an extra nickel in taxes. But places that don’t have taxes can’t fund services, which leads to grotesque, rapid deterioration.

Washington State plutes moved because they relished living in well-kept, cosmopolitan places with efficient transportation, an educated workforce, good restaurants and culture — none of which they would have to pay for. They forgot Karl Marx’s famous saying: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The idea that Washington could make up for the shortfalls that come from taxing its wealthiest residents by levying regressive sales taxes and other measures is mathematically illiterate wishful thinking. When the one percent owns nearly everything, you can tax the shit out of the other 99% and still not make up the shortfall.

Meanwhile: homelessness, crumbling roads, and crisis after crisis. Political deterioration. Cute shopping neighborhoods turn into dollar store hellscapes because no one can afford to shop for nice things because all their income is going to plug the gaps in health, education, transport and other services that the low-tax state can’t afford.

Washington State’s soak-the-rich tax is ironic, given the propensity of California’s plutes to threaten to leave for Washington if California finally passes its own extreme wealth tax.

There’s a reason all these wealthy people want to live in California, Washington, New York and other states where there’s broad public support for taxing the American aristocracy: states with rock-bottom taxes are failed states. All but two of America’s “red states” are dependent on transfers from the federal government to stay in operation. The two exceptions are Texas, whose “free market” grid is one nanometer away from total collapse, and Florida, which is about to slip beneath the rising seas it denies.

Rich people claim they’d be happy to live in low-tax states, and even tout the benefits of a desperate workforce that will turn up to serve drinks at their country clubs even as a pandemic kills them at record rates. But when the chips are down, they don’t want to depend on a private generator to keep the lights on. They don’t want to have to repeatedly replace their luxury cars’ suspension after it’s wrecked by gaping potholes. They don’t want to have to charter a jet to fly their kids out of state to get an abortion.

This is true globally, too. As Thomas Piketty pointed out in Capital in the 21st Century, if the EU and OECD created a wealth tax, the rich could withdraw to Dubai, the Caymans and Rwanda, but they’d eventually get sick of shopping for the same luxury goods in the same malls guarded by the same mercenaries and want to go somewhere, you know, fun:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

We’re told that Americans would never stand for taxing the ultra-rich because they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” It’s just not true: soak-the-rich policies are wildly popular:

https://balanceourtaxcode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WA-State-Wealth-Tax-Poll-Results-3.pdf

The Washington tax windfall is fascinating in part because it reveals just how rich the ultra-rich actually are. Warren Buffett says that “when the tide goes out, you learn who’s been swimming naked.” But Washington’s new tax is a tide that reveals who’s been swimming with a gold bar stuck up their ass.

It’s not surprising, then, that Washingtonians are so happy to tax their one percenters. After all, this is the state that gave us modern robber barons like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. And then there’s clowns like Steve Ballmer, star of Propublica’s IRS Files, the man whose creative accounting let him claim $700m in paper losses on his basketball team, allowing him to pay a mere 12% tax on $656m in income, while the workers who made his fortune on the court paid 30–40% on their earnings.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine Ballmer’s also a master of “tax loss harvesting,” who has created paper losses of over $100m, letting him evade $138m in federal taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

These guys aren’t rich because they work harder than the rest of us. They’re rich because they profit from our work — and then, to add insult to injury, pay little or no taxes on those profits.

Washington’s lowest income earners pay six times the rate of tax as the state’s richest people. When the wealthy squeal that these taxes are class warfare, they’re right — it is class war, and they started it.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

[Image ID: The Washington State flag; the circular device featuring George Washington has been altered so that it is now the head of a naked man clothed in a barrel with two wide leather shoulder straps.]

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.5.6 Why are mutual credit schemes important?

Mutual credit schemes are important because they are a way to improve working class life under capitalism and ensure that what money we do have is used to benefit ourselves rather than the elite. By organising credit, we retain control over it and so rather than being used to invest in capitalist schemes it can be used for socialist alternatives.

For example, rather than allow the poorest to be at the mercy of loan sharks a community, by organising credit, can ensure its members receive cheap credit. Rather than give capitalist banks bundles of cash to invest in capitalist firms seeking to extract profits from a locality, it can be used to fund a co-operative instead. Rather than invest pension schemes into the stock market and so help undermine workers pay and living standards by increasing rentier power, it can be used to invest in schemes to improve the community and its economy. In short, rather than bolster capitalist power and so control, mutual credit aims to undermine the power of capitalist banks and finance by placing as much money as much possible in working class hands.

This point is important, as the banking system is often considered “neutral” (particularly in capitalist economics). However, as Malatesta correctly argued, it would be “a mistake to believe … that the banks are, or are in the main, a means to facilitate exchange; they are a means to speculate on exchange and currencies, to invest capital and to make it produce interest, and to fulfil other typically capitalist operations.” [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 100] Within capitalism, money is still to a large degree a commodity which is more than a convenient measure of work done in the production of goods and services. It can and does go anywhere in the world where it can get the best return for its owners, and so it tends to drain out of those communities that need it most (why else would a large company invest in a community unless the money it takes out of the area handsomely exceeds that put it?). It is the means by which capitalists can buy the liberty of working people and get them to produce a surplus for them (wealth is, after all, “a power invested in certain individuals by the institutions of society, to compel others to labour for their benefit.” [William Godwin, The Anarchist Writings of William Godwin, p. 130]). From this consideration alone, working class control of credit and money is an important part of the class struggle as having access to alternative sources of credit can increase working class options and power.

As we discussed in section B.3.2, credit is also an important form of social control — people who have to pay their mortgage or visa bill are more pliable, less likely to strike or make other forms of political trouble. Credit also expands the consumption of the masses in the face of stagnant or falling wages so blunting the impact of increasing exploitation. Moreover, as an added bonus, there is a profit to be made as the “rich need a place to earn interest on their surplus funds, and the rest of the population makes a juicy lending target.” [Doug Henwood, Wall Street, p. 65]

Little wonder that the state (and the capitalists who run it) is so concerned to keep control of money in its own hands or the hands of its agents. With an increase in mutual credit, interest rates would drop, wealth would stay more in working class communities, and the social power of working people would increase (for people would be more likely to struggle for higher wages and better conditions — as the fear of debt repayments would be less). By the creation of community-based credit unions that do not put their money into “Capital Markets” or into capitalist Banks working class people can control their own credit, their own retirement funds, and find ways of using money as a means of undermining capitalist power and supporting social struggle and change. In this way working people are controlling more and more of the money supply and using it in ways that will stop capital from using it to oppress and exploit them.

An example of why this can be important can be seen from the existing workers’ pension fund system which is invested in the stock market in the hope that workers will receive an adequate pension in their old age. However, the only people actually winning are bankers and big companies. Unsurprisingly, the managers of these pension fund companies are investing in those firms with the highest returns, which are usually those who are downsizing or extracting most surplus value from their workforce (which in turn forces other companies to follow the same strategies to get access to the available funds in order to survive). Basically, if your money is used to downsize your fellow workers or increase the power of capital, then you are not only helping to make things harder for others like you, you are also helping making things worse for yourself. No person is an island, and increasing the clout of capital over the working class is going to affect you directly or indirectly. As such, the whole scheme is counter-productive as it effectively means workers have to experience insecurity, fear of downsizing and stagnating wages during their working lives in order to have slightly more money when they retire (assuming that they are fortunate enough to retire when the stock market is doing well rather than during one of its regular periods of financial instability, of course).

This highlights one of the tricks the capitalists are using against us, namely to get us to buy into the system through our fear of old age. Whether it is going into lifelong debt to buy a home or putting our money in the stock market, we are being encouraged to buy into the system which exploits us and so put its interests above our own. This makes us more easily controlled. We need to get away from living in fear and stop allowing ourselves to be deceived into behaving like “stakeholders” in a Plutocratic system where most shares really are held by an elite. As can be seen from the use of pension funds to buy out firms, increase the size of transnationals and downsize the workforce, such “stakeholding” amounts to sacrificing both the present and the future while others benefit.

The real enemies are not working people who take part in such pension schemes. It is the people in power, those who manage the pension schemes and companies, who are trying to squeeze every last penny out of working people to finance higher profits and stock prices — which the unemployment and impoverishment of workers on a world-wide scale aids. They control the governments of the world. They are making the “rules” of the current system. Hence the importance of limiting the money they have available, of creating community-based credit unions and mutual risk insurance co-operatives to increase our control over our money which can be used to empower ourselves, aid our struggles and create our own alternatives (see section B.3.2 for more anarchist views on mutual credit and its uses). Money, representing as it does the power of capital and the authority of the boss, is not “neutral” and control over it plays a role in the class struggle. We ignore such issues at our own peril.

[argyrocratie]

"The rich already have more money on their hands than they can find profitable investments for; they’re not going to put more money into expanding productive capacity, because working people can’t afford to buy enough stuff to fully utilize existing industrial capacity. That’s why they wind up dumping money into FIRE economy speculative bubbles instead.

(...)

Capitalism is utterly dependent on waste production, financed by government spending, to absorb surplus investment capital and keep the wheels of industry turning. Government military procurement and investment in the automobile-highway-sprawl industry employ enormous amounts of productive capacity and capital that would otherwise be idle, and social spending increases the purchasing power of people who buy stuff and likewise keep the wheels turning.

And government debt is soaking up (and providing a minimum return on) trillions of dollars that would otherwise be dumped into the capital markets and make Black Friday look like the biggest bull market in history by comparison. U.S. bonds are, for capitalist rentiers, the equivalent of USDA subsidies that pay farmers to hold land out of use and thereby effectively turn idle farmland into a guaranteed real estate investment.

To show just how easy it would be to cut spending if those pointy-head gummint wonks would get out of the way, Mr. Dunning Kruger tries his hand at the Washington Post budget game:

By slashing military spending, getting the federal government out of education, raising the retirement age, and eliminating whole areas of spending, I was able to run a budget surplus starting in 2023 and move the federal government 163.2 percent of the way towards a sustainable budget. Hmmm. Looks like I have some room for tax cuts.

Congratulations, J.D.! You’ve removed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of demand from the economy (particularly would-be retirees who’ll wind up in the labor force either unemployed or driving down wages), dumped it in the laps of rentiers who already can’t find profitable things to invest in, caused the value of investment assets to collapse, and caused another Great Depression. Last time around, the only thing that saved American capitalism was a world war; let’s just hope they don’t use nukes in this one.

There’s a real solution that will make deficit spending and public debt unnecessary, but I don’t think J.D. will like it. It would involve abolishing all the state-enforced privileges and artificial property rights — like landlordism, intellectual property, and credit monopolies — that shift income from workers to property owners, and all the entry barriers and cartelizing regulations that shift income from consumers to business owners. There would be a lot less idle capital and idle industrial capacity, and a lot more demand for labor from the purchasing power of ordinary people."

-Kevin Carson, "No, Deficit Spending Isn’t the Problem…"

[alioshakaramazov]

The third reason is semantic, but not merely. During the Revolution the words 'bourgeois' and 'bourgeoisie' are highly uncommon in speeches, debates and newspapers. I have sought for them in Robespierre, in Brissot, in Loustalot, in Marat and in Hébert: I have found 'the rich', 'hoarders', 'aristocrats', 'plotters', 'monopolists', 'rogues', 'rentiers', but scarcely a single 'bourgeois'. This rarity of the word, to my mind, means something very clear, expressing the absence of the thing. The bourgeoisie did not exist as a class. There were certainly rich and poor people, haves and have-nots, but this does not amount to a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. Was the revolution bourgeois or not? That is a question I refuse to ask, as it basically has no meaning.

A People's History of the French Revolution, Eric Hazan

[threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat]

"What can humans do that machine learning can't? Can you prove it? Prove that machine learning can't!" I've seen a lot of versions of this question now, and it's often framed like the progressive take, like someone who can't consider the shiny AI future is the close-minded one. What makes humans special basically. This is the question. This is called science now. And we all agree here that underpaying artists and propagating stereotypes via AI is bad, but this specific question is personally really hard to actually answer. Lack of intent and responsibility and dependence on plagiarism are answer enough for me, but it's fuzzy. I want a stainless steel discussion devourer.

The computational linguist Dr. Emily Bender has written a lot on the limits of large language models, and if anyone has a definitive answer, I thought it'd be her. But she doesn't. When it comes to the outright question, she actually refuses. "I'm not going to converse with people who won’t posit my humanity as an axiom in the conversation." (interview with Elizabeth Weil, New York Magazine) I was disappointed at first, but I've since processed this as the mark of a professional at asking the right questions. The wrong question is the provable difference between a human and a computer; the right question is why so many people are asking that wrong one. The right answer to the right question is labor.

"Eighteen-century race theory saw, within the human category, a hierarchy of races. And of course, the architects of this theory were white Europeans, so they modestly placed themselves at the very pinnacle of the human category. The lower edges of the human category merged into the apes, according to this way of looking at things." -David Livingstone Smith (interview with Neal Conan, NPR). He discusses in the same interview slavery, nazis calling Jews rats, and ancient Mesopotamian political dehumanization. Animals are cheaper labor and are easier to slaughter. When there is profit and conquest to be had, people start asking if there really is a difference between those other people and animals. This was called science then.

These "other people" can't be pointed out so publicly now. And yet, thanks to advancements in neoliberal theory, the bigotry persists along the scenic route. It goes like: dehumanize all humans without regard to race, but especially humans' labor, which targets the working class, and therefore the rich get richer anyways. Diversity win! It starts with art and prose, but these arguments are being wheeled out to underpay people in every industry. I thought the question inconveniently annoying when it seemed useful for rentiers and ceos. Now I believe the ruling class indirectly created the question. So I refuse to answer it too. Except to say this: Humans are already doing the work, all of it. Human labor is proven.

[askponycrayontine]

We all know Gallus is Whorb's most frequent customer. Who's Red's? And does this customer have as weird a relationship with her as Whorb and Gallus'?

The title of her most faithful customer is Rentier Bliss. (Bliss works just fine.) A rich mare that fell hard for her when she say her in a window.

[hyperfixatinglove]

how about The Man, Cornelia Street and Daylight for Jesse? -ofloveandknights

@totallynotgayforyou Just bc you love Jesse too so maybe you appreciate my ramble

The Man:What strengthens your f/o in your opinion? What do they believe strengthens you?

Jesse seems to value physical prowess above all. His starting point is quite normal man with metal gauntlet and few firearms. He seems to favor punching vampires too.

He dismisses intelligence and knowledge and calls official paperworkers as "pencil pushers".

He seems to trust fellow Institute member Edgar, to guard his back and provide backup from time to time. Therefore comrades and people he trusts are most likely things that strengthen him.

I think him seeing his own country when travelling could be another point for him, riding on horseback for hours through towns and wilderness must be tiring otherwise.

Cornelia Street:Do you and your f/o live together? If so, what is your domestic life like? If not, what would it be like if you moved in together?

I haven't actually thought about this yet!

In canon Jesse lived in grand mansion, with big & long entrance (it had even fountain!), the house had intimidating elegance to it, huge pillars and expensive taste in furniture. Clearly the Institute had made his family rich & privileged, but it is also mentioned Jesse's family was all that before Institute (at least I think so).

For him to suddenly lose his home & almost every comrade he had must've been huge shock. It would most likely take years to restore even fraction of that same wealth, and the question is, would Jesse even do that?

To me he doesn't seem someone who enjoys massive mansions and servants. He just goes out in the world to do dirty work. He might've grown up in place like that and even then he certainly wasn't sheltered, as he himself says he has hunted vampires since he was 10, so I doubt he had privileged childhood after he hit 10, possibly even before that. We are not given details how William Rentier trained Jesse.

In the game, I'm not even sure where he sleeps! Does he have his own room? Actually he most likely has a room, either in the upstairs of the bar or where-ever Emilia and Vergil sleep. My s/i would also have a room, maybe close to Jesse's own? They'd stay late with one lamp lit to wait him back.

I think Jesse, in time, would move in a mansion, not only to restore some of the dignity he lost, but I'm certain he promised his father, when he died or when Jesse mercy killed him, to fight tirelessly so his sacrifice wouldn't be in vain, so his comrades lives would mean something.

And also to have bit of privacy.

It wouldn't be as grand as where he and his father lived, but still mansion. Tad out of the way of hustle and bustle of Calico, but close enough so he can go to check up on Vergil and others. He'd never be pencil pusher, so he'd stay on the field as long as he can. I think Jesse would internalize what Edgar said to him, that there's no normal for him. I don't think he dares to even think of domestic life with someone, with all the mayhem and brutality of his job. He thinks it's more likely he dies during one of his missions.

But I'm not sure yet what role my s/i would serve in Institute, thus I'm bit hesitant to imagine domestic life with Jesse.

But if my s/i moved in, I think they'd be alone a lot, as Jesse is out in the field. He'd come for few days, exhausted but smiling, glad to be home and crash on bed, hum as my s/i would pet him quietly and he'd be out like a light. He'd be pampered on, though, with meals and whatever he enjoys out the field. I'm not done headcanoning Jesse's interests yet. But I definitely will play up to the fact he's canonically a rebel against his father, so something he would not wish him to like.

Daylight: How has your relationship with your f/o changed your opinion of love? How has their relationship with you changed their opinion of love?

Jesse never knew mother's love, or by very least he doesn't remember her or her love, since he lost his mother in early age, after which his father forced him to train to become vampire hunter. He seems outright baffled by simple physical affection his father gives him after he gets temporary "cure" for his vampirism.

Look at him! He looks like he hasn't received a ton of love nor affection! Furthermore, what we can see from his relationship with his father seems very strained, as his father does not listen to him when he insists Edgar, his partner in hunting, is family. I think William raised Jesse to yield to him and I think Jesse resents this fact and his father to extend. He also rebellious side, which unfortunately does not get demonstrated.

All this in mind, I don't think Jesse has any positive ideas of love nor affection. Yeah, he teases Edgar about giving him flowers and asks if Edgar would kiss him next (Jesse's not straight ok, at least bi king) but I truly do not think he considers things like marriage or romantic partner.

Perhaps he feels he can never have it, with him being so busy. Maybe he fears his partner will die like his mother did. Marriage and love are normal things, things he can't have, due to his profession. Once again like Edgar said, there is no normal for people like him & Jesse.

Then there's the other side, the flip side of things. Who would continue the Rentier Institute if Jesse's gone? Would he appoint someone else & the name stays as legacy? Would Jesse feel obligated or worse, forced into having an heir in loveless marriage?

I don't think he'd adopt either.

Jesse was baffled, at first, when my s/i was around him. Smiles, hugs, pats, the overwhelming affection he gets is something he has hard time adjusting to and wrapping his head around. He's waiting someone to pull a rug underneath him. Someone who listens when he talks about something other than hunting ticks, even if those words and ideas aren't most elegant nor eloquent nor most groundbreaking nor most intelligent. He would feel, odd, being heard and openly loved.

It would take months by the very least for him to give it back, in little steps. Start in smiles and smirks and low chuckles my s/i misses, evolving in pats on shoulder and crude jokes, culminating in something else like hugs and him being so open someone like Emilia would be surprised to see Jesse that way.

Jesse would by the very least see love as something precious, not just as something that hurts you. Not just something that causes you grief down the line. I don't think he ever saw love as weakness.

[christophe76460]

Il y a trois choses qui sont trop merveilleuses pour moi, et même quatre que je ne comprends pas : la trace que suit l’aigle dans le ciel, celle du serpent sur le rocher, celle du navire en haute mer et celle de l’homme chez la jeune fille (Proverbes 30:18-19).

La même expression chose merveilleuse se trouve dans un psaume qui célèbre la formation de l’enfant dans le ventre de sa mère (Psaume 139:13-15). Ces 4 mouvements ont pour théâtre l’air, la terre, l’eau et les sentiments. Ils ne laissent aucune trace visible durable derrière eux.

Rien n’indique d’où vient l’aigle ni où il va. Il en est de même du serpent qui glisse sur le rocher et du navire dont le sillage disparaît promptement. Quand des jeunes sont amoureux, on voit tout juste qu’ils paraissent un peu gênés quand ils sont ensemble, mais les sentiments qu’ils éprouvent sont indescriptibles et invisibles.

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

Voici comment agit la femme adultère : elle satisfait ses appétits, s’essuie la bouche et dit : « Je n’ai rien fait de mal » (Proverbes 30:20).

La femme séductrice utilise une façon imperceptible, mais efficace pour séduire les hommes (Proverbes 2:16-18; 5:1-14; 7; 22:14; 23:27-28). Elle a une attitude très désinvolte vis-à-vis de l’adultère qu’elle considère seulement comme un repas. C’est un peu comme ça que de nos jours les gens voient l’acte sexuel. Il a perdu son mystère et son sens du sacré pour devenir une cuisine ordinaire et banale. Mais les Écritures condamnent fortement les relations sexuelles en dehors du mariage.

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

Il y a trois choses qui font trembler la terre, et même quatre qu’elle ne peut supporter : un esclave qui devient roi, un insensé qui vit dans l’abondance, une femme odieuse qui trouve à se marier et une servante qui supplante sa maîtresse (Proverbes 30:21-23).

L’élévation soudaine de personnes inexpérimentées ou non qualifiées à un haut statut est intolérable. Ce bouleversement rompt l’ordre social. Un esclave qui devient roi commettra des bévues ou des cruautés pour se venger de son abaissement préalable. Un insensé rentier satisfera ses goûts vulgaires sans se soucier des pauvres. C’est ce que fit le jeune homme riche de la parabole de Jésus (Luc 12:16-21). La femme odieuse et la servante deviendront toutes deux hautaines, égoïstes et provocantes dans leur nouvel état.

[crimechannels]

By • Olalekan Fagbade How to reset Nigeria's Econony - Former Emir of Kano Sanusi Lamido Sanusi Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the 14th Emir of Kano and former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), says reduced dependence on petrol will be the long-term solution to the petrol subsidy removal crisis. “In the short term, the most effective measure to offset the removal of fuel subsidies is cash transfers. “The design of individual cash transfer programmes varies considerably in reach and coverage. “The long term solution is to reduce dependence on PMS,” Sanusi said on Thursday in Lagos. He made the assertion at the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos. The lecture series had the theme: “Resetting the Nigerian Economy for a Brighter Future”. It sought to diagnose issues surrounding Nigeria’s economic predicament and propose practical steps to address the situation. The former CBN governor said that Nigerians would need to appreciate, across board, the economy’s importance. According to him, many citizens do not understand it. Sanusi said that, in resetting the Nigerian economy, it would be important to bring economics into public discourse. He emphasised the importance of recognising the primacy of politics in economic matters. According to Sanusi, an economy is run on the basis of the ideological orientation of those who control the state. “If the state is a rentier state where the people in control see it an avenue to make money for themselves and their families, they are never going to run an economy in a manner that encourages production and growth. “If it is run by people who are thinking long-term and of the legacy they will leave behind for their children and the future of the country, they will run different sets of different policies. “I think every economist knows that multiple exchange rates are a problem, but as long as politicians are able to give themselves a dollar at 400 Naira and sell at 700 Naira, they are not ready to listen to the economists,” he said. The former CBN governor noted that Nigerians had been talking about fuel subsidies as far back as 2011. “We said, if we did not do something about those subsidies, we would end up where we are today.” He said that the civil society should be blamed than politicians for the current economic situation of the country. Sanusi also said that the governance of the economy was an important aspect to note in resetting the economy. According to him, the country cannot continue doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. On Nigeria’s gross domestic product and debt ratio, Sanusi said that Nigeria had a huge revenue problem. He said that one of the solutions to Nigeria’s fiscal problems would be to raise revenue. He urged that the image of the country should be improved to make it an attractive destination for investments. “Oil is not enough to make us rich but enough to put us in trouble. “Nigeria will never get rich from producing oil. “At best, it represents working capital that can enable the launch of other industries. “Nigeria produces just 2.3 barrels per person per year compared to Saudi Arabia’s 91.4, Kuwait’s 221.6 and Gabon’s 31.7,” he said. The Director-General of NIIA, Prof. Eghosa Osaghae, described Nigeria as an endowed country and Africa’s biggest democracy. He noted that the country had been through challenges but expressed optimism that it would surmount all challenges. “We have continually proven to be the giant, and we must lead others there,” Osaghae said. (NAN) #HowtoresetNigeriasEcononybyformerEmirofKanoSanusiLamidoSanusi

[mandrocles]

The missing detail

I was belately reading Cory Doctorow's The End of the Road to Serfdom article about the fight by the ruling oligarchy of "the west" against too many resources being consumed by their working classes, and much of the content is a clear depiction of how successful that fight has been:

“Once that inequality tipping-point is reached, society grows inexorably more unequal and more unfair, as our rules change not merely to favor the rich, but to disfavor the poor”

“The thirty glorious years came to a halt at the end of the 1970s, when the wealth of the few had recovered to the point where the richest 10 percent could begin to nudge policy to their favor and everyone else’s detriment.”

“Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and other neoliberal politicians swept into office on the back of a campaign to blame social mobility for oil shocks. Once these plutocrat-friendly politicians captured politics, they set about refashioning it, striking hard against labor rights and public institutions.”

“We’d go back belowstairs, we’d learn to tug our forelocks again. We’d stop competing with their inbred darlings for spots at top universities”

There is however a major issue with that story: it is missing an explanation of how it is possible that in developed countries where 80-90% of families derive their income from wages and pensions and social insurance, so many voted for cutting workers wages and pensions and social insurance. That is not consistent with only a small minority of “the rich” benefiting from big upward redistribution.

That missing explanation is both absolutely crucial to understanding the politics since Reagan and Thatcher and quite simple:

A large minority and perhaps even a plurality of workers have made a lot of money from rentierism, 20% to 40% of voters, so vote for more plutocracy, because they regard themselves as rentiers more than workers.

A lot more workers survive into old age and enjoy good pensions thanks to social-democratic policies, but have therefore turned from workers to full time rentiers. making rentiers a much larger percentage of voters. In the past many retirees lived thanks to the support of their working children, so had a direct stake in better wages and working conditions, now that they derive most of their income from their pension and real estate assets to them better wages have become an increased cost.

Those voters profited from enormous upward redistribution from those poorer than them thanks to being also owners of real estate assets (and stock shares in the USA), which have been doubling in price every 10 years for a long time.

The ruling class have not fooled many middle class voters into voting for lower wages and pensions and social insurance against the self-interests of those many voters; they have ensured alignment of interests by ensuring that decades of rising asset prices and rising rents redistributed to both the many middle class voters and the ruling class enormous amounts from the lower classes.

It is astonishing that the author of that article does not wonder why the governments of the past several decades in most of "the west" have been voting to lower wages, pensions, social insurance, and does not come to the obvious conclusion that for many middle class voters the colossal profits they make on their real estate (and stock shares) drive their voting (“From the minute the average couple buys a home they're constantly calculating how much they'll make when they sell it””). The past several decades have been the era of mass rentierism.

It is largely futile to complain about the increase in inequality without taking into account mass rentierism, and in particular that many if not most of the potential political leaders of the workers are real estate (and stock shares) speculators and are making enormous profits from them and badly want to continue to make them at the expense of everybody else.

It is not at all surprising to me that those potential leaders and so many middle class voters are keen on the politics of identity conflicts rather than on the politics of conflicts of interests, because their interests are not aligned with those of most workers.

It will be possible to change policies only when a large part of the middle class reckon that good wages and pensions and social insurance are more valuable and more secure than the enormous profits they have been making on asset speculation.

[thepowerisyouth]

Wah-wahhhh. Poor Mr. Trump cant get a small loan of $500 million USD to help cover his legal fees.

I wonder though-- is this a sign of troubled times in rich circle funding?

Yes, Trump is unpopular, but still-- Rich folks are used to getting loan offers thrown at them like pebbles on a bedroom window. And $500 mil is a drop in the hat in 'good times'. Just a thought. Financial crisis...

(Trump absolutely has collateral worth the bond amount, even at liquidation discounts, which raises even more questions about cashflow problems in New York funding circles)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Five years ago, some anti-fascist counterdemonstrators hit on the clever idea of blaring top 40 music during neo-Nazi marches, on the theory that this would prevent Nazis from uploading videos of their marches to Youtube and other platforms, whose filters would block any footage that included copyrighted music:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

Thankfully, this didn't work, but not for lack of trying. And it might still work, if calls for beefing up video copyright filters are heeded. Cops all over the place are already blaring Taylor Swift songs and Disney tunes to prevent their interactions with the public from being uploaded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

The same thinking that causes progressives to recklessly argue in favor of upload filters also causes them to demand that web scraping be treated as a copyright crime. They think they're creating a world where AI companies can't rip off their creation to train a model; they're actually creating a world where the Internet Archive can't capture JD Vance's embarrassing old podcast appearances or newspaper editorial boards' advocacy for positions they now recant:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's not that Nazi marches are good, or that scraping can't be bad – it's just that advocating for the use of IP to address either is a cure that's not just worse than the disease – it's also not a cure.

A problem can be real, and still not be solvable with IP. I have enormous sympathy for gamers who rail against cheaters who use aftermarket hacks to improve their aim, see through buildings, or command other unfair advantages.

If you want to tell a stranger how they must configure their PC or console, IP ("any law that lets you control your competitors, critics or customers") is an obvious answer. But – as with other attempts to solve real problems with IP – this is a cure that is both worse than the disease, and also not a cure after all.

Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.

But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.

Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.

Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.

Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!

This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:

https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:

https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.

Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web on your behalf and bring back things for you, which it displays in the way you prefer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Want to block flickering GIFs to forestall photosensitive epileptic servers? Ask your user agent to find and delete them. Want to shift colors into a gamut that accounts for your color-blindness? Ask your user-agent:

https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

Want to goose the font size and contrast so you can read the sadistic grey-on-white type that young designers use in the mistaken belief that black-on-white type is "hard on the eyes"? That's what Reader Mode is for:

https://frankgroeneveld.nl/2021/08/24/most-underused-browser-feature/

The foundation of any good digital relationship is a device that works for you, not for the people who own the servers you connect to. Even if they don't plan on screwing you over by directing your user agent to attack you on their behalf right now, the very existence of a facility in your technology that causes it to betray you, by design, is a moral hazard that inevitably results in your victimization:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

"IP" ("a law that lets me control how you use your own property") is a tempting solution to every problem, but ultimately, IP ends up magnifying the power of the already powerful, in contests where your only hope of victory is having a user agent whose only loyalty is to you.

The monotonic, dangerous expansion of IP reflects the growing victory of rents over profits – income from owning things, rather than income from doing things. Everyday people may argue for IP in the belief that it will solve their immediate problems – with AI, or Nazis, or in-game cheats – but ultimately, the expansion of a law that limits how you can use your property (including your capital) to uses that don't threaten neofeudalists will doom you to technoserfdom.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

[sasquapossum]

(Wrote this elsewhere, and figured people here might appreciate it.)

It's unfortunate that his [Tolkien's] heirs are ruining his legacy. JRRT himself stood on the shoulders of giants - the creators of the folk stories and legends on which he based much of his own work. He was never shy or deceptive about that fact, to his credit. The people running the Tolkien Estate (at least since Christopher died) work relentlessly to prevent anyone else from honoring his oeuvre the same way, even as they add nothing to it themselves. It's the worst kind of dog-in-the-manger behavior, and I'm sure the great man himself would have no patience for it either.

[argyrocratie]

"Absent subsidized highways and car-centered zoning, the automobile would have remained a plaything for the rich; a cheap, stripped-down version might have served as well as a useful tool for niche markets (e.g. farmers) not served by the compact mixed-use communities that predated car culture.

In Illich’s view of things, it is the tools or technologies which precede the power structure, with the latter inevitably growing out of the former.

The truth is directly the opposite. Technology does not spontaneously proliferate like tribbles, absent the imposition of external bounds, until it spawns authoritarian bureaucracies. Rather, the technologies are imposed because they suit the needs of power structures. A technology, industry, or institution is able to grow beyond the second watershed and into the realm of negative returns, only because institutional power structures are able to internalize the benefits for themselves while externalizing the negative effects on a public to whom they are unaccountable.

“…O]nly within limits,” Illich says, “can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom.”

Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information.[54]

This is true. But the necessary limits are not those imposed from without against technologies whose inherent nature — “excess efficiency” — causes them to otherwise grow without limit. The limits are those set by the people who experience both the benefits and negative consequences of the tools they adopt, when governance authority is vested directly in those who are affected by the policies of institutions and do their actual work rather than in an unaccountable hierarchy that serves its own interests or those of absentee rentiers."

-Kevin Carson, ”The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis“

[novaciaconsulting]

Instant lecture. Une référence à lire ou à relire pour ma part.

https://amzn.to/2QRgrCc