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Davos 2015: Less Innovation, More Regulation, More Unrest. Run Away!
Freshly Exhumed writes: Growing income inequality was one of the top four issues at the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ranking alongside European adoption of quantitative easing and geopolitical concerns. Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion, said there was a consensus that global inequality is getting worse, fueling overriding pessimism at the gathering. The result, he said, could be that the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation. With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said. Looking at studies like NASA's HANDY and by KPMG, the UK Government Office of Science, and others, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, warns that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a "perfect storm" within about fifteen years.
I say let's help them escape, from the planet!
We can sit through it.
I had to check the address/logo of the site I'm visiting ... for a moment I thought I was on abovetopsecret.com.
NEW England? Since when?
Now that they've got theirs, it's fine if regulations hold back everyone else.
I wonder how much raw intel is being gathered.
...that all nerds are big government Keynesians. This reads like some Cultural Marxist's twatterings. 'Revolution in regulation'? Go away and track the volume of regulation (pages/words) since the establishment of your preferred Western democracy. Plot it on a graph, because I don't want all the numbers to confuse you. Hey presto! The revolution is now!
The rich and powerful run the world. They don't. They react to the world just like everyone else. These guys all have to react to the free market to keep their money. They aren't in the driver's seats and they never were.
And they do not even control their own assets, those are managed by other people. And when they go to enact their ideas it often ends up like Virgin Galactic.
Davos is a solipsist beauty show.
I'm not introducing a class-warfare argument, I'm dismissing the idea of class entirely as a component of change.
Smart phones, YouTube, Amber Alerts, standardized tests, vaccines, real-time communications, drunk driving laws, civil rights (or whatever your random list of important things in the last 50 years) --- name one that came from a wealthy pompous guy? Maybe some BECAME wealthy pompous guys as a RESULT, but they were not wealthy pompous guys at the time.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They're wise to fear the people they've stolen from for all these years.
A bunch of rich people with no real military protecting them will be like ripe fruit for the picking (as they have been over and over and over for centuries).
They would really be much better served by being in a functioning healthy country. Give up 10% of their money to taxes and spread it around the population and they will be immeasurably safer.
But I think their greed just gets the better of them. As it has over and over and over for centuries.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Feed them to the poor! (this plan is not without precedent)
It's important to remember how equally regulations apply to everyone. For example, in their majesty, they will stop both a rich man, and a poor man from having to sleep under a bridge.
We should ensure there's more regulations to keep people from such social injustice. /s
Is it the lack of education that keeps the poor taking from each other rather than taking from the rich? I'm sure mine is not the only city that has "Boardwalk" located close enough to "Baltic" that the poor without much effort could take what they want from the rich. Yet still, the poor continue to rob from the poor.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
BBC had an interesting factoid on where "the 1%" live and what it takes to be in the 1%. It seems it takes a net worth of around $800K to be in the richest 1% of the world's population and a net worth of only $77K to be in the top 10%. The research was done by Credit Suisse and interpreted and reported by Oxfam with the Beeb boiling it down to the linked factoid.
Put your pitchforks and torches away mates unless you want to stab yourself with your own pitchfork and then burn down your own castle. "They" is us. Yep, there are a few people with more but a whole lot more people with a whole lot less. And I bet you didn't even know you were "rich."
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
On farmland in New Zealand, ready to pounce.
In other news, shares of Alcoa are through the roof as hedge fund managers shift their portfolio to capitalize on the jump in demand for tinfoil hats....
The "Wealthy" have Billions of dollars.
They own assets that could be converted into Billions, but not in any practical sense. Most of their wealth is in stocks and bonds. You have to sell those to get cash. If Gates sold all of his stocks so he could roll around in a Billion dollars cash with naked teenagers, M.S. stock would probably crash, reducing his wealth by orders of magnitude.
Sure, they have access to a shit ton of money, but it's almost all on paper.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And money is easily moved.
The Occupy movement was almost completely non existent here in Australia. Fergusen style riots don't happen here either. They also don't happen in NZ.
The USA has some terrible social issues to deal with, with some crazy rich living alongside some crazy poor. While that divide exists you will always have problems. But the US is quite unique in first world countries in that regard. Using the Gini coefficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) the US is worse than most countries in the world for income disparity, about equal with China and significantly worse than India. And both of those countries have suffered civil unrest because of the income divide.
But fundamentally money is easy to move and if the US does start to have too many social and civil issues the money will leave. At the moment the US is the place to be if you want easy access to capital and to build a business. But the US has nasty tax rules if you decide to reside somewhere else and keep your US citizenship which means there is an incentive, if you have decided to move somewhere else, to take all your business with you too.
With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes.
If I recall correctly, Mossad was formed by Israel with one of its primary missions being to go around the world hunting down and assassinating former Nazi officers who had gone into hiding.
If the world gets to the point where the underprivileged gather their pitchforks and torches, and the ultra-rich flee from mob justice, why wouldn't those who remain take over their nations' governments and form Inequality's Mossad? If the super wealthy really do check out, the people left behind will gain all the authoritarian powers that are being built up right now to suppress change for as long as possible. They'll also get all the resources and production of the biggest powerhouse nations on the planet, because that's where the rich will be fleeing from. And they will be very angry.
The 99.9% who would still be in their home nations, having just seen the banks get cleaned out, will have the muscle of the G20, the influence of the G20, and the rage of Ferguson. Yeah, super-rich guy, go hide in New Zealand. See how that works out for you.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Get off your high fucking horse, I'm a long ways from 77k net worth as are most people I know. "They" is "you" and people you're surrounding yourself with I imagine.
It doesn't matter. If he wants to have each meal in a different country every day for a year, people will fall over themselves to make it happen as soon as he whips out the black card. The fact that there aren't enough countries to make that happen doesn't mean he somehow isn't wealthy.
Seriously, they are well fed on diets rich in real foods, not that overly processed crap.
It's not all on paper. They can take out loans against their stock. Money makes money.
Let's see. Central planners at the Fed, ECB, and other central banks create massive inequality by artificially juicing the stock market and other asset classes held by the upper classes. Of course, now the central planners want to fix this unintended consequence with more central planning. I'm sure they will get it right this time.
BBC had an interesting factoid on where "the 1%" live [bbc.com] and what it takes to be in the 1%. It seems it takes a net worth of around $800K to be in the richest 1% of the world's population and a net worth of only $77K to be in the top 10%. The research was done by Credit Suisse and interpreted and reported by Oxfam with the Beeb boiling it down to the linked factoid.
Put your pitchforks and torches away mates unless you want to stab yourself with your own pitchfork and then burn down your own castle. "They" is us. Yep, there are a few people with more but a whole lot more people with a whole lot less. And I bet you didn't even know you were "rich."
Cheers,
Dave
Hahahaha, Net worth of "only" 77k. Most people I know are lucky if they're out of debt, let alone have a net worth at all. I say this as a fully employed, college educated, guy living in a major metropolis. If you think that 77k-800k is meager then, yes, I will happily break out the pitchfork for you... Dave.
How would a fall in value of something that you currently own zero of affect you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They are taking the average net worth in the world then apply it everywhere. You are not "rich" or even in the "10%" with 77K$ net worth in the USA or most of western europe. You have to compare against the LOCAL 1% and 10%. Not the global one. As such , there are far fewer of the 10% or 1% on slashdot than you would think.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As an engineer this sort of thing is heart breaking. We have the tech to allow the world to live in comfort and security if we wanted, but due to politics and people's selfishness this will never come to pass.
Even in the tech world greed and ego are ruining everything. Just look at the patent rubbish, trying to jump on every stupid idea and roadblock progress so that some lawyers and trolls can buy a super yacht.
And then there are the liars who spin yarns to the ignorant public to make them act against their own interests. All hiding behind the moral ambiguity that is the free market.
Our economic system has become a fight over existing wealth. We have lost the ability to create much useful new wealth anymore and it will be our undoing in the end.
A friend of mine got into reading investment books targeted at the extremely wealthy. They were pretty funny. These books had to trump up nearly impossible end of days events and then promote investment strategies that will keep the reader amongst the 1% when half the world's population dies from a space disease delivered by a comet impact or some other highly unlikely scenario. Elite Panic is big business.
Maybe the new path to the middle class will be in selling doomsday bunkers to paranoid trillionaires.
ralphbarbagallo.com
Rubbish. Bill Gates only owns 4% of Microsoft. Why would selling 4% of MSFT stock cause a 90% or a 99% drop in the share price?
You don't know what you are talking about, and you are making yourself look stupid in public.
They are funny to you because you do not have any kind of comprehension how different life for very rich is. Your life is struggle for resources to survive.
Their life is the exact opposite - struggle to keep what they have from people like you who are hungry and want a part of their resource pile. A good example of difference is just how little real protection legal system offers them in practical terms - it's always going to be more beneficial to break the law to get the resources. That is why ultra-rich have to have their own protection from such people and cannot count on law and police in a way that people without enough resources to make them a worthwhile target for such an effort can.
And while from average person's perspective that may look like a paranoia, to these people the worries are very much warranted.
It doesn't matter. If he wants to have each meal in a different country every day for a year, people will fall over themselves to make it happen as soon as he whips out the black card. The fact that there aren't enough countries to make that happen doesn't mean he somehow isn't wealthy.
This was a very incoherent analogy. At the last moment you saved yourself from presenting as a typical American, unaware of the approximate number of countries in the world, but then this acknowledgement reflexively renders your first statement incoherent.
For example, are you alleging Bill Gates' wealth and hypothetical desire for eating meals in different countries is sufficient to increase the number of countries by an order of magnitude? I mean, people are "falling over to make this happen", right?
If you're going to use really flawed analogies, I suggest sticking the the Slashdot cliche of flawed automobile analogies. For instance, if Bill Gates wanted to buy a Chevy Lumina for each day of the year it wouldn't mean he wasn't wealthy simply because the OEM had to issue a product safety recall on the front passenger door latches of all these vehicles.
See? Just as coherent as your analogy, now in a more comfortable format. HTH.
Inequality is not a good reason to pick up a pitchfork. There are causes I will die for, but that is not one of them.
Not worth it now, because at the moment, you have enough. Good for you.
Inequality is something to die for when you are already living on a minimum, and THEN a large recession hits. You loose the job while the price of food triples. The rich can still eat - but you cannot. That is the time you become a criminal in order to survive. As a start, you steal to feed your family and yourself. If there are many of you, stealing won't work. But if there are many of you, you may instead revolt. If the super rich won't give up anything, it is forced off their hands. And the easiest way is always to kill those standing in the way of a better future.
The rich and the super rich should welcome (heavy) taxation / ownership reforms, because it will reliably buy them out of such scenarios. Usually, they get to keep at least some wealth. But the dumber among them fight taxes - not realizing that the final battle will then be fought with means that are not 'legal'. The cops won't be there for them - or they'll be outnumbered. The army won't be there for 1% - not when the troops families are all in the 99%. Rent your own soldiers? Only if you can hire over 50% of the population, and then you're effectively performing a money reform anyway. Rely on armed robots & drones? Such items are manufactured by the 99% - where you also find the people capable of hacking & turning them around.
LOL who told you that fib? LMFAO you have no clue about any regulations. It took Zuck-a-turd 3 years just to cash out a few million of his stock supposedly worth "billions of dollars".
A wealth manager for very wealthy makes a distinction between top 1% and top 0.5% (8 million according to IRS and 15 million according to the Feds). The top 0.5% is reached only by people with inherited wealth, or very lucky people who get to top 5% by smartness and hardwork, and end up in 0.5% due to good fortune, or stock options. Professionals, doctors, lawyers, accountants are very unlikely to reach top 0.5%, and increasing not even likely to reach top 1%. He used to see very successful professionals retiring in top 1%. But no longer.
He calculates that a person starting at low end of 1% by income for that age group, and staying at the same band (99% dividing line by income) all his/her working life will NOT end up in top 1% by financial wealth. A persons starting in the low end of 1% by wealth, will stay there if he/she draws the same amount of money our 1% by income professional, and might go up in scale.
In USA money earned by blood, sweat, tears and brains (wages, earned income) is taxed at much higher rate than money earned by money (capital gains, carried interest, qualified dividends, etc). This is the root cause of the inequality. For 30 years, since Reagan, the US Govt has been coddling the super rich by funneling all tax relief to them. They turned their back to the USA, invested all the savings in low wage countries to maximize their profits.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When it comes to your assertions that income inequality appearing in statist countries most, you have the ONLY reason being "Because they are statist countries!", but when it comes to the USA, a non-statist country having the most income inequality, suddenly you know other reasons why it could happen.
A huge lack of self awareness and lack of imagination there, old boy.
They need to build a luxury space station and move to live there. Then the 99% can't get them, when the revolution comes.
They already made a movie about that; now all that remains to be done is implement it for real.
heir life is the exact opposite - struggle to keep what they have from people like you who are hungry and want a part of their resource pile. A good example of difference is just how little real protection legal system offers them in practical terms - it's always going to be more beneficial to break the law to get the resources. That is why ultra-rich have to have their own protection from such people and cannot count on law and police in a way that people without enough resources to make them a worthwhile target for such an effort can.
Really? The legal system protects the "poor" and the "ultra-rich" never break laws? You are too funny.
And while from average person's perspective that may look like a paranoia, to these people the worries are very much warranted.
Actually, that sounds EXACTLY LIKE BEING POOR.
struggle to keep what they have from people like you who are hungry and want a part of their resource pile
HOLY FUCKING SHIT EXACTLY WHAT EVERY POOR PERSON GOES THROUGH EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY.
I seem to remember reading something about the risks of the low profile merely wealthy, people who aren't famous or especially politically connected and whose wealth is never-work-again kinds of money but not Glided Age, family dynasty wealth and isn't tied to control of a specific corporation or revenue-generating entity.
Apparently they are targeted at many levels because they have limited options for their liquid assets. They're at risk from being ripped off by their investments, at risk from embezzlement, targeting by the IRS for tax problems, even possibly targeted by crooked cops and politicians.
When I'm fantasizing about winning the hundreds of millions lottery, I sometimes wonder how someone like me with little understanding of "real" money would structure the money so that it would be harder to get ripped off. Like hiring multiple investment advisors for chunks of money, hiring auditors to check up on the investment advisors and various lawyers kept independent from each other, all of it designed to be a series of checks and balances.
After a while, I can see where the paranoia comes from. It's kind of like being a dictator who has several security services he uses to spy on the others, hoping that it breeds enough insecurity to keep them all more or less honest.
This is what you said:
Those opportunities come from there not being a government telling you what you can't do, meaning there's no cap on your potential for economic growth ...
I am a first generation American, and since I have landed on the American soil several decades back, I have started or helped started (as sole proprietor or as partner or as investor) more than 70 companies
What you said was true, that the fact I have started over 70 companies because there wasn't anyone telling me what I can not do
I came from China, and the China during the time I left was a place where nobody had any right to start any business unless that individual had a death wish
Today's America, however, is no longer that America that I went to, some 4 decades ago
Today's America there are so many restrictions, either from the government (in terms of laws / regulation / rules) or from society ( 'gender diversity in the work place', for example )
Today I have businesses in both America and outside America, and yes, I have business in China as well --- and I can tell you this one thing ... it is much more free-ier to start and run a business in China than in America
Regulation IS the problem. Had we done the principled thing and let AIG and Goldman burn when the time came it would have taken lots of big finance with it. There would have been plenty of churn as far as just who the 1% are. I would even guess some of them would have been left with less than nothing.
Oh but they would still have all kinds of physical property and hard assets. Yes but assets sometimes have a funny way of turning into liabilities when you don't have the case flow to manage them properly. Just imagine if you can't pay your home owners policy on your Mansion you can still get sued when someone breaks their leg while trespassing.
These guys are where they are entirely because of governments and regulation. Income inequality is greater than what existed in the gilded age! These levels of inequality are made possible by regulation and free market impediments, not for lack of them.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Economic growth, or the lack thereof, should have been the main topic at Davos. Income inequality was never improved by socialism. Europe and the other slumping economies is unwilling to inact supply side policies. Instead they resort to currency devaluation and other financial engineering to put of the day of reckoning. The world needs a tax cut and drastic cuts in social spending.
Maybe the new path to the middle class will be in selling doomsday bunkers to paranoid trillionaires.
Too late, this business picked up in a big way not long after the Great Recession hit. Wired had an interesting article and photo gallery on "luxury doomsday shelters" but I can't find it now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because institutional investors react to things like a sudden sale of 4%.
It is criminally sad that the only thing that the super-rich can think to do about this situation (which is mostly their fault) is to grab even more and run away.
Bill Gates still owns 277,992,934 shares of MSFT, as of Oct 31, 2014 (the most recently reported data). That's worth about $13 Billion right now.
Ballmer passed him up as the largest individual shareholder last year (with 333,254,734 shares), but Bill still has plenty tied up in MSFT.
One thing NZ has going for it is a low populatin density in a fairly isolated location (the US also has a low population density but is easily reachable by rampaging zombie looters). If things go hungry, you can always butcher, I mean cull the sheep, which outnumber people 10 to one. Better than NZ but more practicable than Elysium? Antarctica.
The cause of income inequality is Quantative Easing and Zero Interest Rate Policy. It favors financial assets, which of course rich folks and pension plans have most of. It is government policy. The President of the United States appoints a Fed Chairman consistent with his personal goals and beliefs.
Public employee pensions are not defined contribution, but defined benefit, so the only asset backing those up is promises to tax folks in the future. Taxes hurt poor people the most. Most taxes are not income taxes, but sin taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes labor taxes, and thousands more.
The solution is to stop influencing free markets with financial engineering of QE and ZIRP (monetary policy), and also substantially decrease the influence of government in our lives (fiscal policy) so the private sector, which creates all jobs and growth and infrastructure, has more room to run.
In addition instead of targeting +2% inflation and reducing buying power of everyone 10% every 5 years, simply target -2% inflation and get an automatic raise of 10% every 5 years, eliminating the need for minimum wage hikes and improving real people lifestyles year after year.
This runs counter to "progressive" and "socialist" policy proposals. The folks with the answer to the problem are derided as "tea baggers" when they self describe as members of ALL POLITICAL PARTIES, who simply believe Taxed Enough Already. They are not a "traditional political party", but a belief system, inclusive of all parties.
The problem is too much government in monetary and fiscal policy. The solution is the reverse. It really is that simple.
Secondarily fund all pensions with real assets, not false promises. That policy alone would raise over $1T a year for infrastructure spending in the form of Municipal and Infrastructure Bonds.
Why can't grandma earn interest in her bank account like she used to for decades? Hmmmm?
JJ (Have an actual degree in Economics)
Have 100 million? Hire a law firm and buy real estate. Real estate you can pick yourself. Even if you get ripped off you'll lose little money. After that you live off rent. Not very complicated really.
Me, I'd buy a big-ass farm for 50 mill and keep the rest to spend as I learn to operate the thing. The only problem with that is that the US and Europe are expected to dry up in the next few decades, so the farm would have to be in the developing world which is a bit unsettling.
For example, are you alleging Bill Gates' wealth and hypothetical desire for eating meals in different countries is sufficient to increase the number of countries by an order of magnitude?
No, he's alleging that inability to use that wealth does not make him not wealthy. IE Bill Gates is wealthy, not scare-quotes "wealthy".
Not one single leader will step up and address the real problem. The upper crust gang feels threatened that society will collapse and yet we still hear nothing about causes or solutions. The fact is simple. Almost all of our woes are due to excessive population. If we firmly address the reproduction issue we will knock down pollution, sprawl, unemployment and a host of other issues. The next item is to address greed and stop allowing greed to drive bussinesses. For example we have food that is too expensive. If the US has an expense issue with food the simple answer is to ban all export of food. The same is true of energy. We can stop paying a fortune for oil dependant products if we disallow the export of oil completely. Then we have the obvious to deal with. A large ship these days creates more pollution from burning fuel than 50,000,000 cars do in a year. Obvioulsy at the very least we need to ban the burning of the wretched types of oil burned by ships. These ships do not burn diesel oil. They burn the dregs of oil processing which is about like asphalt. In fact on a cold day you can walk on top of a vat filled with that stuff. It is that thick and nasty. Simply ban that stuff completely.
We could have both perhaps. But in general, this is sad, since with a few trillion invested in R&D, we could have fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar, coming anyway, but more slowly) and automated indoor agriculture and near 100% emissions-free recycling of all consumer goods, and so on. And many actions of the wealthy (especially those invested in oil) have essentially blocked these sorts of efforts politically. As Bucky Fuller says, whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Whatever the legality, for those in charge of much of the world's wealth for whatever reason to cut-and-run from the very problems they have helped create is morally irresponsible and very selfish.
And it probably won't end well -- even for them. A private airstrip in New Zealand (or "Elysium" for that matter, even backed by a large force of security robots), will not protect you against nuclear fallout or rogue nano-tech or air-born plagues or a bunch of other things -- including just "drone" cruise missiles with conventional warheads we have had for decades. Those missiles are getting cheaper and easier to make; there way a Slashdot article years ago about a DIY cruise missile for about US$5K. The damage from such things will of course fall mostly on the poor as with all disasters, but cheap drones will be another destabilizing force if we have a social meltdown (which history shows, happens again and again, see Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond Civilization" for example). A better approach is to work to prevent the meltdown in the first place (like Bucky Fuller worked towards), or at least protect everyone you can (Schindler's list).
That is why I have invested all my (potential, mostly never realized) wealth (as far as primarily time) into trying to make the world work for everyone, and also trying to make it possible for everyone to build any scale lifeboats/ships they want.
After all, I did graduate from Princeton with Michelle Obama, and in the next year were Jeff Bezos, the late Phil Goldman, and many others. I could have picked a different path. I also worked for a short time as an undergrad with someone investing the Princeton endowment, who told me the reason a big investor does better than the typical small investor was more information, cheaper trades, and faster trades (enough to discourage me from trying to be an individual investor).
But more than that, I read the book, "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips when I was a teenager. I had gone to the library to read around books on how to become a millionaire. Of about six or seven there on the topic, all but one told me how to do it (the first million is the hardest; start a small business, work hard, be responsive to customers, hope you get lucky -- most small businesses fail in a few years, but keep trying and maybe you'll get lucky when you have enough experience from your failures). But the last book asked me, "Why do you want to be a millionaire?" And that is a very good question to ask yourself...
The basic concepts from that book :
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
http://seeingmoney.org/SevenLa...
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Comm...
"THE SEVEN LAWS OF MONEY
The following laws were published in 1977 in 'Seven laws of Money' by Mike Phillips. Mike, a Bank of America banker, was instrumental in developing Master Charge.
1. Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The first law is the hardest for most people to accept and is the source of the most distress. The clearest translation of this in terms of personal advice is "go ahead and do what you want to do." Worry about your ability to do it and competence to do it, but certainly do not worry about the money.
2. Money has its own rules: records, budgets, savings, borrowing. The rules of money are probably Ben Frankli
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Davos is a gathering of the ultra-rich and the ultra-powerful. When they talk about "fixing the planet", what they mean is policies that keep them in power and keep them wealthy.
Attending Davos is pretty much a sure sign that a politician, activist, or "philanthropist" can be trusted.
Google "Larry Ellison Oracle Shares Loans".
That is one of the risks of "keeping the money".
Other risks include but are not limited to:
1. People taking your family hostage and demanding random.
2. Attacks on your personally, either from family members or fraudsters who will act like such after your death to get your money.
3. Attacks by competition to reduce value of your holdings or take them over (i.e. large corporation owning farms around you).
And many others.
Many forget that legislation works as a set of consequences for one's actions, and when one's actions are so lucrative that potential gain easily outweighs legislative risks, you are going to be in danger. That is why things like criminal law doesn't really help the ultra rich and very rich and they must have their own personal security detail.
If you win 100 million, you either MANAGE that wealth, or you lose most of it.
You might think it's easy to hire "someone" to do the job for you, but it will fail for so many reasons including incompetence and fraud.
On the flip side: Today, you can easily have a 100 million in the bank, and very few people would notice or be able to target you specifically. Smart people realize the current limits of what their play is.
If you're dumb, you advertise and get robbed before you've managed to secure and diversify the wealth.
Alot of wealth is properly preserved by sage advice and experience from family and friends. If you don't have the connections, it'd be very hard not to leak wealth indeed. Even by listening to people who really mean well. Poor people think there is wealth in money, while rich people properly recognize money as just a medium for transactions.
They are not mutually exclusive. Regulation can in fact spurn innovation by forcing people to rethink how they have always done things and trying to invent new technologies to replace it. Regulation can in fact force out old technology which is only in place due to inertia and open a niche for real innovation. Example, smog regulations can spur research into electric cars or better mass transit, or labor regulations can spur interest in more efficient industrial processes.
I predict I will be moderated 'troll' for this post as it is not politically correct.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...
I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).
The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination.
"The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment"
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.
Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
As I wrote here: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal.
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essen
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They own assets that could be converted into Billions, but not in any practical sense. Most of their wealth is in stocks and bonds. You have to sell those to get cash. If Gates sold all of his stocks so he could roll around in a Billion dollars cash with naked teenagers, M.S. stock would probably crash, reducing his wealth by orders of magnitude.
I have not looked recently but many years ago Gates used to sell Billions of dollars work of MS stock per year. You might want to look at insider sales for a number of large companies to see how much some of those people get in cash from their stocks.
The concept "Income inequality" does not make sense. It is based on the false assumption that there is somehow some total amount of income that has to be distributed between people. This is a false notion that is purely the result of political framing.
I am extremely sceptical about all these doomsday scenario media reports.
If you do not know something for sure, "follow the money" is always good advise. For example, why would someone who makes his money on the stock market give free advise to the rest of the world by warning them about an imminent market collapse? It makes no sense. If I knew (or were sure about) such an event, I would put my money into short options and become mega-rich.
But, of course, if you expect the opposite, such a press statement can lead a critical mass of people to disinvest, temporarily lowering prices, convincing others that you are right and the crash has begun, so they do the same, and then you buy at the low point.
The same with all the "super-rich are investing in getaways" bullshit. It's a really great tool to convince the wannabe-super-rich (aka the simply rich) to follow (or believe they are following), because that's what they do. In all layers of society, people tend to emulate the next-higher-up from their own status, because that is where they want to be.
Maybe I'm overly cynical or just blind, but thinking about not only what is being said, but also who is saying it and why seems to me to be a good idea.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There will never ever be income equality so there's no point in even discussing it. But "regulation" is a problem and actually, it isn't so much the regulations as it is the millions of people whose only functions are to a) make more regulations, b) enforce the regulations, and c) hire more people to do both a and b. There are fewer and fewer people who actually make some tangible product let alone a quality one. Meanwhile, there is an ever increasing number of leaches...I mean people who feed off the people making things. Have you noticed how many fees you pay for services every month whether or not you use the service? Have you noticed how often they try to sneak something into that laundry list of fees that's totally bullsh*t? Have you noticed that you're less likely to own something and more likely to be renting it? Have you noticed how many things you have to pay for every month that you didn't have to 20 years ago? I'd be willing to bet that people like Edison or the Wright Brothers would never have been able to accomplish what they did if they had a regulatory system like we do now. And don't get me started on the trial bar who is the epitome of society's leeches. The world is rapidly becoming a place where the people making the most money do so by force of law and not by persuasion.
Steal from successful people. Give to unsuccessful people.
History has proven this works. See: Africa.
No, he's alleging that inability to use that wealth does not make him not wealthy. IE Bill Gates is wealthy, not scare-quotes "wealthy".
...then I guess we can consider his argument completely unsupported by his analogy, effectively rendering his claim null.
I, for one, hope he chooses to post another amusingly incoherent analogy.
or, to hear them whine, if we tax them a dollar more, they will shrivel up and POOF! a wisp, and nothing. end of the uber-rich.
we can call it the Freedom Levy, and let's write our Congresscritters (a division of Big Money, Inc.) ... uh... geez, on to plan B.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Inequality is something to die for when you are already living on a minimum, and THEN a large recession hits. You loose the job while the price of food triples. The rich can still eat - but you cannot.
We have social programs for this problem, even in the US. Even homeless people are overweight.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They could, collectively, save themselves in a fairly trivial manner. All they'd have to do is suck it up, let governments tax them, and purchase legislation benefiting the great unwashed (i.e. the 99%) with the same zeal applied to purchasing legislation designed to maximize profits and minimize business risk.
It won't happen, of course. Rich sociopaths are psychologically incapable of seeing themselves as evil, or as the cause of their own problems, and so we have another "French revolution" cycle approaching. It's evolution in action, of course. The problem will be whittled down a bit as wealthy sociopaths are killed en masse and the world gets its parasite load back down to a survivable level, until the cycle happens again.
And it will happen again.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Luckyo should have explained that he is from the Bizarro Planet where the rich don't the legislation they desire, and the entire legal system is not designed around protecting their property.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Selling stock doesn't work that way. You look for people wanting to buy at a price (or offer a sale at a price and an amount) and then people say yes or no.
Selling it the first way (looking for people offering to buy at a given price) takes time, because no one is looking for a volume of stock as large as what Gates has. Thus, it would take multiple buys. After a few buys at a given price (which show up on the "Big Ticker Screen"), people trying to buy will start lowering their prices. If you want to keep selling, you have to accept that price for the amounts offered. The price will go down as time goes on, because the traders know someone keeps buying even as the price goes down. So the price keeps going down, and goes down faster as you keep buying at their unrealistically low prices.
The other way (offering a massive amount of stock for sale at a fixed amount) will cause traders to go who the hell is selling all that? Then panic will ensue and more people will lower their sale price of MS stock. Since no one is likely to buy all the shares at the price you listed, you know have a similar "race to the bottom" of stock price to try to sell it all
The way to get it sold for a fair value is to sell it off slowly and take the risk of price fluctuation over time. This is what the OP was referring to WRT "it's just money on paper" as realistically getting all your value out of that asset takes time to fully close the deal at the prices against which the persons net worth was calculated.
- Sig
From: http://frac.org/initiatives/hu...
===
Due to the additional risk factors associated with poverty, food insecure and low-income people are especially vulnerable to obesity (see the section on the Relationship Between Hunger and Overweight or Obesity and the section on the Relationship Between Poverty and Overweight or Obesity). More specifically, obesity among food insecure people -- as well as among low-income people -- occurs in part because they are subject to the same influences as other Americans (e.g., more sedentary lifestyles, increased portion sizes), but also because they face unique challenges in adopting healthful behaviors, as described below. (For more information on the influences all Americans face, see the section on Factors Contributing to Overweight and Obesity.)
Key Factors ...
Limited resources
Lack of access to healthy, affordable foods
Fewer opportunities for physical activity
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating
High levels of stress
Greater exposure to marketing of obesity-promoting products
Limited access to health care
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They aren't buying ranches in these remote locations for getaways!
They are creating compounds for the zombie invasion! LOL!
In any case. We're witnessing a very interesting and unique time in history. The Internet and the real world are separating, and we're going to soon see a boat load of real interesting entertainment - ON the internet - for just about everything imaginable...
As Douglas Adams said it - "Don't Panic"
You two really don't understand what I was talking about, do you?
Laws work retroactively, promising consequences for actions. They provide little to no proactive protection, and in general require for the target criminal action to be less valuable to criminal than cumulative risk of getting caught and punishment.
And after you get beyond certain level of wealth, potential gains go high enough that consequences become largely irrelevant. As a result, super-rich are forced to get private protection because law is no longer protecting them.
Then there's the issue of becoming attractive target for other crime such as complex fraud that would not be cost effective against average person due to much lower potential gains.
What you two are talking about is rich pushing the law to help them get richer. That is a completely separate issue from issues I mention.
> Elite Panic is big business.
Or perhaps they got to be the elite by being big thinkers, long term planners and utter realists. Any scientist will tell you that it's inevitable that a major disease, comet impact, climate change, etc. will come and wipe out millions of people. It IS inevitable. But most people hate thinking stuff like that, won't take such things seriously in their lives, and will never feel compelled to do anything. Most feel they couldn't do anything about it anyway. The elite, however, are used to thinking big, aren't afraid to try big things, and are more likely to look reality square in the face - that's how they got there in the first place. Yes, reality - reality is money and power in a human civilisation. (That they created that system themselves isn't a problem or irony in their minds - they are proud of it.)
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
Key phrase: "If Gates sold all of his stocks "...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."