if you havent seen #governmentshutdownpickuplines then you’re seriously missing out
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My god I wish more people understood this.
See also "why don't billionaires end world hunger" or any aphorism in that style. They don't want to, but even if they wanted to, they couldn't, because their actual "money" doesn't exist. It's just capitalist masturbation, stocks and financial tools that don't actually represent real production or value to society but rather what creates capital. It's not just "a bunch of greedy people who don't want to spend money", it's the system of capital accumulation itself. Even if some of those billionaires had a change of heart and decided to reestructure their company to help people, they would get quickly fired or their company would get picked apart by others.
(and also the fact that leaving things such as food production in the hands of billionaires is the worst idea you can have)
The only thing that is real are the means of production and the workers who actually create everything we use to live.
There is surely lot of better theory explaining this and I encourage people to seek it out and read it, but this is something that is worth remembering.
An argument I've had with several of my friends, and always failed to convince them, is that stocks are a bigger-fool commodity.
(A bigger-fool commodity is one that has no inherent worth, so you'd have to be a fool to pay money for it. If you have paid money for it, the only thing you can do is try to find a bigger fool to buy it from you at a higher price.)
Let's consider Apple just as an example. At the time I'm writing this, there are about 14.84 billion shares of Apple outstanding, each share is trading at about $238.15, for a total market capitalization (a.k.a. market cap, the total value of all outstanding shares) of approximately $3.53 trillion dollars.
So what does a share of Apple actually get you?
Stocks have value in three ways:
- They (may) pay dividends. Periodically a company may decide to pay out a certain amount of money to each share of stock. In the case of Apple, that amount is currently around 25 cents, and they have been doing it three to four times a year. So your share of Apple will gain you about one dollar a year of passive income. If you bought a share today, you'd have to keep it for over two hundred years (assuming Apple continues to exist and pay dividends at the current rate) to make back your purchase price.
- You can vote at shareholder meetings. This is worthless unless you hold a significant percentage of the total shares, such that your vote actually means something. In the case of Apple, you'd have to own literally millions of shares to even be noticed.
- You can sell it to a bigger fool.
For the average small investor (i.e., basically everyone who isn't a billionaire or a major investment fund) the first two points are worthless, at least compared to the stock price. The only useful thing you can do with a share of stock is sell it to someone else, hopefully for more than you paid for it.
(Well, there are maneuvers like shorting, where you make a bet that the stock price will fall; but those are mostly the domain of those billionaires and major investment funds.)
The price of a stock is based entirely on what you think someone else will pay for it in the future, and what that hypothetical person will pay is based on what they think someone else will pay for it, which in turn etc. etc. it's all circular.
"But you own part of the company!" people always say to me. "That's where the value comes from." OK, fine. One share of Apple means I own one fifteen-billionth of the company. What, concretely, does that actually mean? Can I walk into an Apple building and just scoop up some coffee creamers and walk out, because I "own" them? No, I'll be tackled by security and thrown out. All that share means is that I own a notional object that has no intrinsic value.
It's all a house of cards, a bunch of people playing pretend, but those people can cash out for actual money dollars and buy things with them. Where does that money come from? Nowhere, basically. If Tim Cook tells a journalist that he's feeling good that day, Apple stock goes up and suddenly a trillion pretend dollars have appeared out of nowhere. If he says he's feeling sad, Apple stock goes down and a trillion pretend dollars go away. But in the meantime someone dumped their shares and got enough real dollars to buy a real yacht.
[Transcript:
The problem with forcibly seizing the assets of say, Jeff Bezos is that his net worth of $326 billion does not mean he has that in cash. That's the worth of everything he owns, including stock in his own company.
And the problem with seizing that is that it isn't real. It's based on confidence and what people might conceivably pay for it. And if you just seize it, that confidence tanks. And then that wealth evaporates.
The problem with capitalism isn't that there's a bunch of old dudes sitting on hoards of cash. It's that they've collectively created a system by which they have ludicrous social and economic power based on the promise of hoards of cash. That don't exist. They have created a social stratum in which debt is money.
That's why the exhortation is to seize the means of production, not go grab all the money. Because the money isn't real, and the need to go out and get it is blinding people to the fact that it doesn't need to exist.
./end.]
making good posts used to be a thing insane people did. and now it is the only possible way to advance in a career in hundreds of professional industries
if youre a hairstylist you gotta advertise it on instagram. tattooist. instagram. writer. performer. visual artist. therapist. all on instagram. lots of bars make their bartenders advertise their shifts on story posts to try and lure customers in, these days. every fucking job you can possibly do, you have to be a personal social media manager for, and be as active in the world of digital representation and engaged in the discourse as only the most suicidal graduate students of 2012 were
Still thinking about this post. The more online we are expected to be, the more offline I am.
The fact that artists of all mediums (visual artists, writers, dancers, etc.) are unofficially required to promote online makes want to tear my hair out.
Anonymous asked:
"sometimes you absolutely ARE required to do things in life for the good of other people, even if you hate it" loud incorrect buzzer noise
iwilleatyourenglish answered:
pure individualism is a disease that kills communities, isolates individuals, and leads to things like the anti-vax movement.
you are not so important that you aren’t bound by social responsibility and decency.
others are not so insignificant that they don’t deserve help and sacrifice.
ITC Benguiat (pronounced "ben-gat") was created in 1977 by Ed Benguiat, presumably while chainsmoking.
Reddit user ChunkArcade said of Benguiat:
I had Ed Benguiat as a teacher in college. Absolute legend. He used to smoke in class (looonggg past when smoking indoors was illegal in NY), tell us stories for 75% of the class, then randomly drop gems of typographic genius that I still use on a daily basis at work. Such a good soul and a fucking REBEL.
Originally the letters were intended to form part of a logo for a friend's business, but when the logo was rejected, Benguiat decided to continue working on it and turned it into a font. It was one of approximately ten billion fonts Benguiat designed.
ITC Benguiat is often described as an "Art Nouveau" font, but Benguiat denied this:
When I designed this font I was not thinking “Art Nouveau” style. My thought was just to create a beautiful font that would fit the need for a highly readable serifed font.
The font includes a number of ligatures, like AR, LA, SS, and TT, which are rarely used in practice.
One of the many places ITC Benguiat ended up being used was on book covers in the late 70s and 80s:
A well-known recent use of ITC Benguiat is in the Stranger Things logo, which is widely claimed to be based on the covers of Stephen King novels.
But... I can't actually find any Stephen King novels with ITC Benguiat on the cover? Classic Stephen King novels actually used a modified version of Pacella Latina for his name and the title, and Korinna for smaller text. (Image below from avperth on Flickr.)
Korinna and ITC Benguiat do look kind of similar, but Korinna was never used for titles. The only real similarity between Stranger Things and (some of) these covers is the way that the first and last letters of "StepheN" and "StrangeR" are bigger than the others.
I mean look at this shit:
Are people blind? That's not the same font! Look at the E, look at the G! Look how thin the verticals of the N are! Just because they're both red doesn't mean they're the same font.
"It graced the cover of countless Stephen King novels", but they couldn't find a single example because none of these covers actually used ITC Benguiat (nor do they all use the same fonts as each other). They are right about Choose Your Own Adventure books using it, though:
Fonts In Use has more examples of ITC Benguiat, as well as higher standards than slop factories like Screen Rant and Collider.
are you guys hearing about this dude working to developing a vaccine for cats that he's hoping would like. theoretically double their lifespans?
turns out i wasn't making that up, his name is Dr. Toru Miyazaki! he also wrote a book called "The Day Cats Live To Be Thirty", so cats are kind of his thing.
apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.
[girl who would like to take a break from being a person voice] yeah no I'm just a little tired today
more-eels-please asked:
I have parodied
the poems
that were in
the askbox
phaeton-flier answered:
And which
you were probably
saving
For better hours
Forgive me
It was easy to finish
The last stanza
Alone
The more empathetic and kind men I meet, actually, the MORE I hate bad men. It’s like I’ve seen it proven you don’t have to act this way — I know for a fact that it’s not coded into your biology to disrespect women or be aggressive or be emotionally stunted — you’re literally just a shithead.
Every good dad I meet is just another enormous fuck you to bad, absent, and apathetic dads.
Yes yes yes!! This is a great way to reframe (part of) the harm done by “all men are trash” radfem ideology. Low standards just excuse shitty behavior. You can set high standards, and have those standards met, and hold to account the men who don’t meet those standards.
Follow the laws. I thought no one is above the law? Including law enforcement.
Todd Blanche is an unqualified personal lawyer for Trump who got the "didn't earn it" treatment.
The states' rights dickbags and 2A turds sure are silent.