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"I will never own a home" is not the only reason. The whole financial system is "fuck you this and fuck you that, incl. when you least expect and depend the mos
"I will never own a home" is not the only reason. The whole financial system is "fuck you this and fuck you that, incl. when you least expect and depend the most, and we won't tell you why". Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again (by the way, even when they don't ban you, their verification and customer services are a disaster anyway). This bullshit has to stop. Every person on Earth (even those with questionable reputation or even convicted felons) should be able to wire/accept some reasonable amounts of money (I don't advocate letting terrorists make million-dollar deals) freely, no questions asked, like in cash. It's a basic thing in today world, like eating and shitting.
Maybe if we would question why we (don't) need money in the first place, and why people turn to terrorism, we wouldn't have problems in the first place.
Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
In the meantime, i agree it's a reasonable expectation that people can exchange money freely with the caveat that there should be taxes. As much as i hate taxes because they will fund police terrorizing my neighborhood, big corporations for their next nature-destroying megaproject, and cameras everywhere in the big cities, they are important as long as we live in a capitalist system to ensure we have basic public services.
A system like GNU/Taler is really interesting because it promises buyer's secrecy while retaining public accounting for receivers so that they can be subject to taxes. Cash is better of course as anonymity is guaranteed on both sides, and that's precisely why the chief scammers are pushing for the abolition of cash... so much of informal economy/solidarity would disappear overnight i'm having nightmares over it.
> Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
Are there sufficient people interested in cleaning toilets, dealing with the mentally ill/infirm, working in crawl spaces and attics, working on a farm an hour plus from everything?
For a good (for some definitions of good) extra paycheck, I guess many would do more work.
Want to buy a cool car? Do some cleaning on the side.
> Are there sufficient people interested in ... ?
There's people interested in caring for others and/or growing food on the countryside. Cleaning toilets is a task nobody does by pleasure but i don't see a reason there should be a specific class in society handling undesired tasks for the others.
Why can't we take turns doing what HAS TO be done? I've lived in communities for about two decades now and it's never ever crossed our mind we should designate someone to clean the toilets for others. I'm happy to do it every now and then if you're happy to do the same.
Love to see you being downvoted into invisibility for suggesting that Another World Is Possible. Our techbro overlords are aiming for Rentism, but they'll accept Exterminism if they can't get it.
> Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
It's a nice thought, but I don't think this is actually true. Osama bin Laden and a number of the 9/11 hijackers were actually well-educated, well-off engineers of various sorts, for example.
what if the terrorists broke up 1mil into 1000 $1000-transfers?
> Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again
In the past few weeks crypto has shut down energy infrastructure, meat processing, and a major ferry service.
It's also burning 1% of the world's electricity and rapidly growing.
By the way, perhaps cryptocurrencies may devaluate or even die out if a viable alternative letting everyone unconditionally and anonymously transfer and accept conventional amounts of money is introduced. Perhaps this may destroy the ransomware market which is about sending huge amounts of money in cryptocurrencies.
Why would someone that wants to exploit other people leave a place that lets them exploit others?
I’ll cut to the chase. My point is your concept of society does not work at scale. You will have people that want to use the system, you will need to use force and adjudicate in the system, and you will need something more than good vibes to serve as incentives.
Imo flip these "punishment" jobs into "reward" jobs. As it is, we give the jobs no one wants to people who don't have any other options - or are struggling to exercise their options. We use them as boogeyman for kids when we remind them how important school is.
If everyone is taken care of, these jobs should come with some extra benefits - both socially and financially. Remember all those bs commercials thanking essential workers toward the beginning of Covid? What if society really appreciated its essential workers and compensated them like it did?
Cleaning toilets is somewhat unpleasant, but there's immediate feedback on your performance (the before and after is clear), and people should appreciate the people that keep them clean. There should be an understood, and spoken, sense of "Thank you" for the people keeping them clean.
Perspective -> feeling - > actions. I don't think this is a particularly difficult issue to navigate, but it would require a shift in perspective.
> What if society really appreciated its essential workers and compensated them like it did?
The person I was responding to was arguing against compensation as a concept in general.
Very fair. I don't think you can remove compensation. But, I think the post still had some good thoughts and good aims. They need some tweaking. Your post highlighted an area that needs tweaking, and mine tried to build on both posts.
What if monetary or material compensation was replaced with simple respect and appreciation though? As it is, the people who do the dirty jobs of society are often treated like they themselves are filth.
Have you read Another Tomorrow by Yanis Varafoufakis?
As long as there is money and private property, i agree with your point. Jobs that nobody wants to do by pleasure should be the highest paid and most respected. However that's not how capitalism works (quite the opposite). Like another commentator pointed out, i'm opposed to financial compensation (and all forms of money) as an organizing principle of society. However as long as money hasn't been abolished your point makes perfect sense.
Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting. Because when the government continues to dismantle all forms of public services and keeps on overworking hospital workers (most of whom have months or even years of paid vacations they could never take because of understaffing) and destroying all their social benefits, it's hard not to take this as "fuck you".
> i'm opposed to financial compensation (and all forms of money) as an organizing principle of society.
What does this mean? It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other, least of all for mating purposes. Not using money will not change that, and another proxy will be used.
> Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting.
It was the same in the US. The thank you and hero nonsense was seen through by all, but I guess plausible deniability is worth it amongst the managing class.
> It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other
Not at all. Competition is not the norm in the natural world. There's the entire field of ethology to study if you'd like to know more.
If you need a quick intro, "Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin is really dated science-wise (it's almost 120 years old) but is still a pretty good read. If you're into TV stuff, i'd recommend Adam Curtis' series "The trap" and "The century of the self" which explore the topics of how competition and self-interest have increasingly been guiding principles of (at the time) western societies and how we've tried to apply such principles (eg. game theory) to other fields where they in fact do not apply.
1) The fundamental problem is that countries, especially the US, have basically made companies exempt from criminal proceedings. Any criminal activity conducted as part of the company rarely leads to prosecution of the people in the company, and companies themselves aren’t really ever prosecuted for criminal acts. So any penalty to HSBC wouldn’t be criminal but civil and financial.
2) The articles say that HSBC laundered billions. This likely means it was $3-4Bn at most, but let’s assume it was $19Bn (because if it was $20Bn they would have said tens of billions). These transactions were probably earning HSBC a few basis points. I can’t say for sure since I’m not aware of the market price of criminal transactions, but I suspect the premium was not much higher than a regular transaction for the simple reason that it would make the transaction appear obviously criminal. But let’s say it was 200bp (so 2%, and that’s likely an order of magnitude higher, but for arguments sake). Then HSBC probably made about $400mm - costs (remember, assuming a very high $19bn in transactions). So a $1.9Bn fine is extremely high, being 5x HSBC’s revenue from the transactions assuming very favorable numbers, and not considering the non monetary penalties, such as probation, etc.
3) Finally, if Apple is found guilty of illegally promoting a monopoly through their App Store policies, would a fine of $7Bn be considered laughable, considering it’s about 5 weeks of Apple’s income? And in Apple’s case, the company operates fairly cohesively, and the App Store almost exists for the sole purpose of encouraging hardware sales, so there’s actually an argument to be made to base the penalty on Apple’s total income as a company. OTOH, banks tend to have fairly independent divisions, because they are highly regulated, unlike the likes of Apple, and there are all sorts of restrictions preventing the divisions that are making the kind of transactions from even interacting with most of the rest of the company. Apple collaborated more with its competitors to illegally suppress employee pay than this division of HSBC likely collaborated with any other division in HSBC (and they likely had to actively evade scrutiny from the middle office).
I’m not trying to argue that the punishment was appropriate. However, what I am arguing is that if a non banking company was found to have done something similar, they would have faced punishments that were a much tinier fraction of what HSBC faced. And that’s even before we factor in the fact that banks are orders of magnitude more regulated than nearly any other industry, with them being required to set up entire departments that account for over 10-20% of their workforce purely to ensure they can meet government regulations. Something pretty much no other industry, especially the tech industry, has to do.
Any shortcomings in the punishment imposed on HSBC was a result of leeway’s given to companies in general.
Primates and other mammals do it. Birds do it. Unless all those David Attenborough narrated shows I’ve watched are wrong or misinterpreted by me, there seems to be extensive use of competition in many species.
Or one can look at data from myriad of dating apps and websites. I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
Do some reading on the question and make an opinion for yourself. There is some competition throughout nature but it's really far from an organizing principle as it has become with the capitalist system.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics
That sounds really close to the definition of a psychopath, and is definitely not how most people live their lives/relationships. Adam Curtis in "The trap" touches on this topic and how only psychopaths and economists used to behave like according to "measurable rational self-interest". With the commodification of everything (including oneself through social media) it's fair to bet more people behave like that nowadays than previously, but it's still really far from everyone.
Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
You sound like you're arguing from a point of insecurity or emotion rather than making a rational argument.
> Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
Why would you not believe that I have a long, committed, happy relationship today that I arrived at through consciously ranking and evaluating qualities of my current partner and other people that I met? Why is it so hard for you to accept that humans are inherently judging and comparing creatures? Why do you think that to just think about important life choices like a partner doesn't make you a "soulless suit-head"? If you want to live your life that way, go ahead.
The fact that you and even most people seem to let your subconscious steer you with important life decisions doesn't affect me. But I don't see why you have to indirectly call the other user names (psychopath, soulless suit-head) just because they do things differently than you. Are Indian and Chinese parents who perform arranged marriages also psychopaths or soulless suit-heads just because they choose matches for their children based on a variety of metrics? Does it make Chinese or Indian culture soulless or psychopathic since they've been doing this way before the "commodification of everything"?
> There is some competition throughout nature
Competition for mates literally forms and morphs most animal species.
I think this thread is a perfect demonstration of idealism vs realism. Some people are idealistic and believe what they wish were true, even with little to no supporting evidence and mountains of evidence to the contrary. Other people look at reality first and base their beliefs on that.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
I certainly do, and this is commonplace to the point of cliche. Think of Indian or Chinese arranged marriages where the parents openly and blatantly choose and approve of partners based on what you said: health, wealth, family, etc. It's a documented fact and I've seen it personally that some Chinese parents even disqualify women over 30 or so as partners for their children (to the point there's a word for it: "leftover women"). In the West some people are squeamish about consciously evaluating and ranking people, but everyone still does it, even if it's subconscious, unless you literally throw a dart at at list and pair with whoever you hit. We just talk about it indirectly: having a "type", being "compatible", having similar interests, getting along, having things in common, avoiding "red flags".
I at least certainly have based my relationship evaluations based on conscious ranking and metrics, and it's led to the incredibly happy, successful relationship I'm in now.
What ethology tells us is that, yes, but a little more.
Competition IS relevant, but it's in the context of other drives like group-oriented behavior, and it is cooperation that some people seem to have a hard time understanding. Cooperation and group behavior is every bit as powerful and rewarding as competition is, and every bit as natural.
I feel like we get into trouble when we try to isolate one side of things and dismiss the other. You're correct that western societies (probably not exclusively western societies) have erred, in leaning way over to the 'competition' side.
You could say law of the jungle except for jungles don't operate in this simplistic way. More like law of the capitalism, which tries to deify one behavior and demonize the other.
I'm not convinced Kropotkin is the final answer here, but he sure serves as a good window into the 'cooperate' side which is unreasonably suppressed in western society.