billionaires

Things That Are Absolutely True…Maybe

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The driver in the car behind me with his high beams on is a fecking shitehole (FS).

The driver approaching me with his with beams on is an FS.

I have 74-year-old eyes and all headlights look like high beams. Who is the FS?

All politicians are FSs who will “fight” to win more than they will “work” to fix. Donations, anyone? Now, whenever politicians use the word “fight” we must assume they actually mean it. Maybe there will be a Political Weight Class in the next UFC fight card? Imagine the youtube videos as congresspeople duke it out on C-Span.

Citizens United is the dumbest court case ever. Not even sure why the Supreme Court heard it. Oops, what an FS for not remembering it was all about political donations…and money.

My girlfriend of 20 years left me, sold all my possessions, took my pets, and moved 2,300 miles across the country during my treatment for The Calamities. I still care for her. Am I an FS?* Again? She says the breakup was “both our faults.” No comments, please, but a therapist used this phrase to help me understand: “When the going got tough, your girlfriend got going.” It was easy to get “going” since she took all the money. With every day of recovery, what she did bothers me more…

Speaking of The Calamities, they “reset” my health graph. Picture a “bell curve”** where we get better and healthier with each year until about middle age. Then we head down the backside as we start “not” getting healthier each year until the end of the tail of the Bell Curve and we meet our Maker. My bell would have a huge, humpbacked dent midway down the back side, keeping in mind we have no idea of The End of the curve. This allows me to truthfully say “I am getting better”, as the dent straightens out, a truly remarkable phrase to be able to correctly use at age 74. In re-reading this, it might be only old people who will understand my happiness, so the rest of you can feck off. With all due respect.

A certain per cent of any population is going to fact-challenged*** in any society. It isn’t a criticism until the members of that “certain per cent” don’t understand themselves, and begin to think they are smarter than everyone else. Public conversation in The United States of America is currently being dominated by “these” people. Generally speaking, a medical doctor knows more than a patient. A teacher knows more than a student. Even simpler: an older person knows more than a younger person. There are exceptions to every rule, but you can—currently—see what will happen when every person thinks they are The Exception. Trey Crowder, The Liberal Red Neck, said one time, paraphrased, “I wouldn’t want my high school football team to be coached by my English teacher.”

As an addendum to that thought, over 50 percent of my news feed is “opinion”, hearsay, or comments on some other article. To my Ai content manager: I didn’t care about the first opinion, why would I care about an opinion about the first opinion? One article was nothing but reader comments. Ugh.

Almost everything is about politics these days and it sucks. Quantum Entanglement is getting closer to functional reality. Some monster telescope “people” think they found evidence of the possibility there may be life on a planet 120 light years away. Canada made the knock-out round of the World Cup. So did America. So did Mexico. Are we going to be better neighbors, now?

Under Sadly Believable heading: Billionaires think they pay too much in taxes in NY and California so they are relocating to lower tax states. Wonder how often The Billionaires have changed locations to save taxes? Hm. How much do The Billionaires pay lawyers and accountants to find ways to PAY lower taxes? Will NY and California taxes have to be increased?

Wonder if we can time travel back to 1789 France? Or at least send The Billionaires**** back there…

*Should it be “a” FS? Can’t get the fingers to type it. F is a consonant, but the name “eff” begins with a vowel…oh, the humanity…UPDATE: Emma says “a” before the SOUND of a consonant, and “an” before the SOUND of a vowel. It took 70 years for me to learn this just now. Old dog meet new trick.

**The Bell Curve was “discovered” by Abraham de Moivre in the 18th century and is used to illustrate distribution of statistical data. My reference to the “Bell” is to the resulting image a standard “x-axis is time and y-axis is health” graph would yield. For a healthy person. Who never had a health problem. Generally speaking.

***It means just what it says and does NOT mean stupid or ignorant. It means ill-equipped. Ill-prepared. Like letting 4-year-olds drive cars. Or making me a Ted Lecturer.

****Hope it does not have to be said there are some good Billionaires doing good work. Someplace. And in 1789 France, they’d learn a lesson to bring back to our time. Hopefully.

Last T@#$% Column, promise

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I can’t resist talking about how happy billionaires are over the Trump presidency. They are all giddy with excitement. Jubilant.

Why? To the rest of us, the “game” of making money is nice and distracting, but most of us “work” to get money. We make things. We fix things. We help others make things and fix things. We might even talk about how others make and fix things.

Not so in the Game of Money (GOM). In GOM the idea is to make as much money FROM other people as possible, and it’s even better if you don’t have to do any work. The Stock market, for example. Even those of us who work for our money, know you can make big bucks by betting correctly in the Stock Market. But we are careful to bet because we know we can lose, and when a worker loses money, it hurts.

But in GOM, a billionaire can bet one of his millions on a stock and if the stock comes in, the billionaire makes more millions. If the stock loses, the billionaire lost .001% of his worth. No pain. Imagine how it warps GOM for un-rich players.

Trump intends to skew GOM so billionaires can make more money, more millions, more billions. Lower taxes for me mean about $100 extra a month in income. Lower taxes in the GOM world, mean millions of dollars in new income for the billionaires.

Wonder what they’ll do with all that money? I’ll tell you. Most re-invest in GOM and make more.

Anyone of us can enter the GOM but how many of us see value in work? In helping others? In getting things done? In getting things fixed and running? I’ll bet most of the Trump voters are hard-working people who want that extra $100 a month. Sadly, the cost of that bonus is going to be steep.

Will Rogers labeled it “Trickle Down Economics” in response to then-president Hoover’s policies. Ronald Reagan picked it up in the 1980’s. “Trickle Down Economics” pretty much means that when the billionaires have taken as much as they want, some of the rest might trickle down…

What’s different this time is we have a new class of billionaires who don’t even care about “The Trickle”. Trump and Musk and their ilk just want more. And now it’s not just money but power, too. They talk of buying up entire companies and industries so they can shut them down. Entire existing Departments of Government, too, Shut them down.

It’s important to remember history. In the history of Capitalist America, the only thing standing between billionaire wanna-be-kings, (Carnegie, Mellon, et. al.) are laws, regulations, and enforcement by a centralized, powerful government.

Can you see why the billionaires now want to control the government, too? I can.

God help us non-billionaires, even the Trump voters.

Random Stuff

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The numbers have changed but not the result. Trump is now a million or so 2024 votes over his 2020 totals, and Harris is still over 10 million short of Biden’s record haul in 2020. With still, about 30 million registered who did not vote.

A billion is 1,000 millions. Can you imagine having one million dollars? It’s a lot of dollars. Now imagine having 1,000 times 1,000,000 dollars. From Forbes “Real time Billionaires List”, I learned there were 13 billionaires in the United States in 1980. In 1990, we had 66. In 2000, Forbes counted 298. In 2010, 404. In 2020 614, and in 2024, as of September 30, 2024 there were an astounding 801 billionaires in the United States of America. (I did not get into details of how they were measured or recorded, just assumed they were measured and recorded the same way each year, and adjusted for inflation over the last 44 years.) You can digest this fact anyway you want. But I know very few millionaires.

The Daily Show is doing its best to capitalize on the opportunities offered by the Trump victory. It is a comedy show, after all, so Jon Stewart put up the electoral map of Reagan’s 1984 victory. The entire United States was red with Republican victories, except for Minnesota. With population increases, it’s inefficient to compare POPULAR vote totals, but Reagan won the Electoral College in 1984, 525 to 13. The biggest win in recent history. Walter Mondale was the Democratic nominee who lost but he had Geraldine Ferraro, a woman, as his running mate. Reagan won and was a good president but I am personally going to suggest his huge margin of victory had a little to do with misogyny.

Will a woman ever become president? No. An Artificially Intelligent (AI) candidate will probably win before a woman does. The modern American Male is not secure enough in his masculinity to let a woman lead this country.

I try to watch a little of Fox news to keep abreast of their latest grievance campaign. Fox is the snarkiest, least inhibited of all the Fake Lame Stream Legacy Media sites and watching them work so hard at being offended is often comical. It’s going to be fun to see how they navigate a Trump presidency…again. Fox wasn’t ready for the first four years, but they’ll be all wound up, this time. It will make for good viewing.

Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist who supported Trump, says the tech sector will “do more in four years than we’ve done in the last 40 years” and American should “buckle up. It’s going to pretty exciting to see.” Note my prediction of an AI candidate in a preceding paragraph. I do know a well-educated, intelligent, adaptive citizenry should be able to handle all that change, right?