A feature of this age that has slowly evolved to be the centerpiece of our society is the fact that nothing is on the level. The central issue with the last election, for example, is the degree of shenanigans. Few people care about the platforms or people, outside of a few absurd examples. What matters to everyone are the many questions about the integrity of the process. Ours is an age where nothing is on the level and everyone is assumed to be up to something underhanded.
America is a marketplace society and the marketplace has always been the natural hunting ground for people who like to take advantage of their fellow man. This was something the ancient Persians observed about the Athenians. The agora, as far as the Persians could tell, was where Greeks tried to take advantage of their fellow Greeks through deception. Greek democracy was the marketplace applied to the arena of politics, which meant politics was based on deception.
The thing is, America has always been a marketplace society, but everyone assumed that we enjoyed a minimum amount of corruption. Businesses would cheat, but the marketplace would eventually expose them and they would suffer. It has always been assumed that the power of the marketplace, the invisible hand, eventually rewards the good and punishes the bad. The same has been assumed about politics. The best rise to the top while the fakers are eventually exposed.
Present day people would probably be embarrassed to hear themselves thirty years ago talking about politics or the economy. Regardless of your road to wherever you are now, the old you was a naïve and silly version of the present you, because present you is wise to the shenanigans. Ours is a world where no one is an idealist who trusts the system or imagines a better world. Everyone is a cynic now. The reason is the world is now run by hustlers always looking for a sucker.
Take pets as an example. Put the phrase “pet scam” into a search engine and you will find pages of various hustles in the pet business. This page offers a searchable database of pet scams. There is a whole industry around robbing people who simply want to bring a little joy into their home. Think about the sort of person who comes up with a way to rob people looking for a puppy for their kid. More important, think about the society that tolerates this.
Of course, puppy scams are just a version of the much larger scams that dominate the modern American economy. The news brings word that another cryptocurrency exchange is collapsing. Like all the others, this one was not a genuine business, but an elaborate way to rob investors. No one thinks much about these things because they have become so common. Finance is just a lightly regulated casino where insiders find new ways to take advantage of the marks.
It is tempting say that the stock market has always been a casino, but keep in mind that everyone’s retirement and lifestyle now depends on equities. The con men and hustlers who define the global economy are now relied upon to keep the system running so you can live a decent life. We have literally based the welfare of our societies on the good decisions of people who are incapable of telling the truth. The heart of our system is an economy based on deception.
There was a time when the government made some effort to tamp down the shenanigans, but that no longer happens. Everyone now accepts that their mobile device will be hit with scam phone calls and scam texts every day. The carriers should be able to block this stuff, but they have no reason to. It is not as if the government that supposedly regulates them is going to hassle them for it. The government is too busy producing disinformation to go after scammers.
That is the thing about this age that is different from the past. Scammers have always been with us, but these days we just accept it. Within living memory, we expected the government to make their best efforts to go after fraudsters. We used to have higher expectations of our politicians than we now have for our doctor. Like everything else, the people providing the most intimate services are assumed to be part of some hustle to separate us from our hard earned money.
The question that naturally arises is can a society exist where no one trusts anything or anyone in the society? Can you have a purely transactional society where everyone is trying to get over on everyone else? Right now, things are relatively calm, but that is mostly because most people have not embraced the new normal. There are still plenty of trusting souls to keep the old hardware of society running, despite the proliferation of people looking for ways to rob these people.
Western societies have always been moral societies. Your status is determined by your perceived morality. It is why we have always assumed that rich people must be smart and contribute something valuable to society. The proof of this is that they have been rewarded with wealth and power. What happens when the number of trusting souls declines below some level where trust and honesty are seen as vices? Can we have a society where deception is the coin of the realm?
In his book, The Jewish Century, Yuri Slezkine divided the world into two types of people, Mercurians and Apollonians. The former provides services to lubricate commerce, finance and politics. The latter are tied to their native lands, producing the goods required of society. America in the 20th century, according to Slezkine, was transformed by the Mercurians to reflect their interests. America had become a middleman society.
If the sum of your intercourse with other people is bounded by the momentary transaction, there is no profit in consideration. Why would parties to the transaction care about the interests of the other parties, when they will no longer have a reason to interact with them once the transaction is completed? Altruism and empathy quickly become liabilities to be exploited by the clever. All the rewards point toward profiting in the moment and moving on to the next deal.
What we are experiencing is the inversion of individualism. In a moral society, judging the individual on their actions results in a competition among members to uphold the shared morality of society. In a middleman society, where no one cares to judge anyone, the result is a Hobbesian competition of all against all. Ripping off moms with fraudulent puppy ads on Facebook comes with no reputational penalty. Worst case, you pay a fine and start the scam all over again.
Ten thousand years of evolution are not overcome in a few generations, so this current crisis is most likely the conflict between the system and our nature. The reason half of our young people have mental health problems is that they have been born into unnatural societies. This is not normal. Women are taking antidepressants because they did not evolve to live in a no-trust society. Male suicide rates are at record highs for the same reason. Our society is hostile to our existence.
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This post hit home. My mother-in-law, suffering from dementia, was scammed out of most of her life savings – something like 150K sent off in a “lottery scam.” As a result she will probably have to be in the lowest level Medicare-accepting facility for the rest of her life. As we pursued the issue, we have found NO entity working to stop or catch the scammers – who were apparently foreign nationals. Scams are usually interstate affairs, so U.S. government would have to be involved, but all there is is an electronic form to report the incident, and no follow-up… Read more »
They aren’t accepting it, they are growing it purposely. They go after and shut down the small potatoes so the big ones can keep scamming and growing and the government can take their partnership cut. Bernie Madoff was no mistake of the DOJ. The government didn’t shut down the mob, they did a reverse triangular merger with them.
Working in construction, I often call it “the most corrupt business”. You know, the white guy hiring 5 illegals to do the work. Promises made and not kept. I always tell folks…”everything important is UNDER whatever finish you’re getting, so be sure you can trust THE MAN to do the right thing, as the PERON DOING THE WORK has the final say, not the owner or salesman that comes and sells you the job…Anything he or she says is all HEARSAY as they have no idea what will actually happen” Guess what, nobody cares! It’s always the lowest price, who… Read more »
Blame fiat money. When money is more scarce and there are less turns of a dollar, people save, take care of, and generally take responsibility more. When money becomes like a meth hit you become like Lüscher’s mice, having a lever that they can press any time they want that activates their dopamine neurons. After two hours if they didn’t take them out of the cage, they wouldn’t eat, they wouldn’t drink, and just stimulate themselves to death.
The stock market is a redistributing mechanism, where a small number of knowledgeable investors/insiders keeps taking money from the middle class people. Paradoxically, this makes the ppl (the labour force) more productive, as they are unable to retire early. The reasons are behavioural and psychological, based on hardwired traits. In our evolutionary past, it was beneficial to “follow the herd” ie leveraging the aggregate knowledge of your clan, whereas a contrarian, who decided to eat those strange forbidden berries, didn’t pass his genes. In investing, it’s the opposite. The likelihood of any trend to continue is in inverse proportion to… Read more »
Welcome to jeworld, White people. We are all going to understand, soon, why the Germans snapped. You’re in the endgame of a plan over 100 years old…the protocols, the talmud, read em and weep.
Jeworld. They have a rollercoaster, right?
The Holocoaster, aye. Rode it once years back only to hear rusty parts and screeching. Can’t recommend.
Jeworld? Do they have merchandise? Are they family friendly?
It’s Weimar… updated to 2022 and a much larger country.
This blog would be the last place where I would expect to see people surprised by that, by the way.
The last paragraph is outstanding and I wholeheartedly agree. I have shared it with my family. Having said that, I wanted to give a more nuanced perspective. In anthropology, societies are classified between high-trust societies and low-trust societies. I happen to be from a high-trust society in Europe and have lived in a low-trust society in Latin America for more than two decades. I have read about the topic and explained the topic to my students. From the beginning, human society is composed by two trust levels. There is a high-trust environment in the tribe, clan, extended family and friends.… Read more »
This was very well explained. Thank you.
Beautiful, thoughtful comment. To echo Horace, your explanation of a high trust inner circle amid a low trust outer circle was explained well and rings absolutely true. Just to stomp on a point you brushed on, the United States and Western Europe simply are low trust without much inner circle at all any longer. The atomization is proving deadly. I do take heart with the self-sorting underway in the US, and it appears to be accelerating. That may make for an environment in some places (quite a few still exist, to be clear) for a high trust outer circle, just… Read more »
Don’t try this in any other country in the world.
Try England.
Switzerland
probably Germany.
Ah! Zman, I see you’re noticing the FTX crypto crash.
Weird, innit, that Sam Bankman-Freid, son of a Democrat PAC activist, became a quick billionaire just in time for the Blue Tsunami? And then all that money vaporized the day after the election.
Plus, he’s on the run! Whereabouts unknown…maybe he went to a country with no extradition?
Great article.
I think some acknowledgement of the psychopathy problem in society would go a long way, or what Andrew Lobaczewski termed Macro-Social evil. We’re being overwhelmed because society is run by and for psychopaths. There’s a Luciferian dimension to all this, especially in pop music (I tell people the Vigilant Citizen website is a good place to start) which Isaiah 5:20 encapsulates: INVERSION. The worst inversion of all is the feminisation of society. Lilith’s children. All planned.
I’m naive, I like the marketplace, I’ve faith in Smith’s invisible hand, I’ve great respect for the Yankee Trader.
However …
[…] ZMan is not happy. […]
Classic example of the Bullshit. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lied.
“Warning: None of the “Jobs” Created Last Month Were Real”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-11-07/warning-none-jobs-created-last-month-were-real
I read the ZH article you linked to. After reading it I’m asking myself, “How can we know the reality of ANYTHING if this is how ‘statistics’ are used?”
Nothing means nothing, anymore. So depressing.
Just as Randy Savage once said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4lK41SX-Q
When I was bankstering I had an early (80’s) eye opener when I’d talk to people about the GDP numbers. It was the Gell-Man effect before Crichton. Everybody would talk about the top line number and accept it, they’d quibble about the number for their piece of the economy. The Commercial bankers would whine about having to increase loan loss reserves because small business’ were defaulting, the Real Estate guy’s would whine about their buyer’s not being able to get mortgages. Exporters would cry about the strong dollar meant that German competitors were eating their lunch etc etc but they… Read more »
All this talk of the “good vs evil” in mankind reminds of the classic original Star Trek episode of Season 1 “ The Enemy Within” whereby Kirk, due to a transporter malfunction, is split into two people – one who is viciously aggressive and the other who is passively indecisive. Both are slowly dying as it is determined by Spock and McCoy that each will die without the other. I guess the lesson was that Good and Evil must learn to coexist. They cannot exist alone, for if they do they will surely extinguish themselves and their society. I also… Read more »
Lovecraft is will known in our circles so when I think of the society you mention I must think of this description: “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.” It’s worse than some… Read more »
Vivid and terrifying quote from “Call of Cthulu!”
Two interesting notes: the reference to Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” and a use of the word “holocaust” before it was defined as a specific (alleged) historical event.
it used to mean a religious sacrificial offering by fire.
Perhaps it still does, and perhaps every abortion is considered a sacrifice by those who champion it. Years ago i would have considered the thought i just proposed crazy. Not so much these days. What did the carthoginians sacrifice to moloch?
What they were accused of sacrificing, by a delegate of (((diplo-mats.)))
Same with the poor tribe in the ravine of Gehenna.
Always, always accuse others of what you yourself do.
The trait enshrined by a certain faction.
Perhaps, just perhaps, some may guess why I’m a raving fanatic.
Note that I see the entire Book as a response, a chronicle of an internal civil war.
The normies were trying to deal with something that had arisen in their own society, a faction they could scarce comprehend.
Sure, I think that is part of it. As the sacrifice was nearly always a young unsullied animal. The second part is the millions of dead babies are used to provide a lot of anti-ageing treatment for those aged abominations connected into this supply chain. The numbers of these people I think initiated into the club is growing as it consumes the upper reaches of the west. As Z points out its all old bastards hanging onto power all over. I strongly think the child murder pipeline is to provide stem cell and similar treatments for the aged in the… Read more »
Trumpton, go to a search engine, and search on “young blood jesse karmazin”
I don’t know what happens at the search engine if you include the three parentheses.
((()))
I’m just going to have to say it: the Zman is the finest philosopher of our age.
An additional component of the unnatural environment people live in now is nutrition. We evolved to consume a diet of mostly ruminant animals with the addition of occasional nuts, berries, seeds, and tubers when hunting was less successful. More generally, we evolved to survive a continuous struggle with caloric scarcity. In the modern age, much of our food has become a Frankstein facsimile of what our minds and bodies require for optimal health. Inflammatory industrial seed oils, sugar, and processed grains are ubiquitous, cheap, and nearly impossible to avoid. Veganism and vegetarianism, which are deficient in a long list of… Read more »
Odd that life expectancies aren’t plunging.
One needs to look at life expectancies outside of disease and war. Lots of ways to describe. If childhood mortality is in the low single digits, whereas before in the high double digits, you get some wild increases. I’m not convinced men have really extended their natural life spans but rather eliminated much of the stuff that shortened it generations ago.
Lack of plunging may have some relationship to alleviating problems stemming from modern disease and a somewhat more peaceful populace, and yes that has occurred although we think that our time is the most violent, it isn’t
The human body can take much abuse and healthcare systems can keep people alive that might be better off passing on. Living to 90 might not necessarily be so grand in those cases.
“…this current crisis is most likely the conflict between the system and our nature.” “Our society is hostile to our existence.” It’s interesting that white, especially Christian, men are the target, because we’re rightly perceived as the builders and owners of our societies, and everybody seems to know this except the builder-owners. Basing the nation on citizenship instead of ethnicity made society a legal creature, which opened it up to debate and outright deception. You have to wonder why it seems like white men are the only people to have gone all-in on it. It’s really stupid, frankly, and I… Read more »
It’s a pity Heartiste (pbuh) didn’t write a book.
The west is in a civilizational $#@! test and we are failing.
You saw BAP on AA yesterday say this right?
I sometimes miss young idealistic me. Sure I did and believed dumb things – enlisted in the Marines to fight evil commies. But life seemed a lot more enjoyable back in the 80s.
“I understand honey. I used to believe in things when I was a kid.”
– Homer Simpson
“You know Marge, that Bart of ours is a little miracle. His winning smile, his button nose, his fat little stomach, his face alight with wholesome mischief. He reminds me of me, before the weight of the world crushed my spirit.”
-Homer Simpsons
Well, given that the West was a much better place 40 years ago, that’s not unexpected.
Happy 247th
Semper Fidelis
A tour-de-force article, Z-Man. It’s a sick, godless, free-for-all out there, on every front. No trust, no morality. Nothing personal, it just business capiche? What Christianity has right is that people are no damn good. Every inclination is evil and that of Cain; why not kill my brother and take his money and wives if I can get away with it? Why the hell not? Man being evil is the CORRECT basis from which to form a society. You come from this framework and then ask, “what will make men work together? Trust each other, cooperate, and even possibly care… Read more »
I’ve thought too much about human nature, because I’m not comfortable with the idea that it’s evil, even though it’s a decent place to start, like you say.
Also like you say, it can be redeemed through discipline and self-control, but then you have to ask yourself where they come from. Are we capable of that which isn’t in our nature?
That leads me in circles, so I cop out and accept the Christian notion that man and the world are fallen, but the soul can be saved 😆 Or maybe it’s not a cop-out because it takes faith, idk.
I can’t allow you take refuge in universality. Sure, “people are no damn good” but that no-damn-goodness is not equally distributed throughout the peoples of the world.
Stop being blinded by Christian universality. I’m not saying don’t be a Christian, I’m saying stop blinding yourself with it.
“but that no-damn-goodness is not equally distributed throughout the peoples of the world.”
Didn’t say it was.
LineInTheSand: “Stop being blinded by Christian universality.”
From the point of view of recorded Christian dialogue [not doctrine, but ackshual DIALOGUE], universality is a strongly anti-Christian concept.
Matthew 10:34-10:36
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”
The problem then becomes if some humans are intrinsically evil then they are no longer responsible and it becomes unfair to punish them. Every criminal has a story about how he wasn’t brought up right so he’s the real victim here, the illusion of choice is necessary for us to be justified in shoving sharp objects into their brainstems.
Not true. If they are evil by choice, they need to be punished. If they are evil by birth, they need to be eliminated from the gene pool. Either justifies the pointy stick. I guess the only question would be the level of suffering a/w it. Evil by choice might justify some level of pain/torture to deter others and to balance the scales of justice. Evil by nature could be swift, like putting down a rabid dog.
I agree with Z completely on this one, and would just add a couple of points. First, the fact that we cannot trust anything, and in particular the institutions charged with disseminating information and knowledge, means that reality is effectively up for grabs. We simply cannot be certain of what is happening in the world and what has recently happened because the people tasked with providing a rough picture of reality have subordinated truth to their malignant ideology. We are, therefore, epistemologically unmoored. Second, the increasing application of social science and digital technology to all phases of human activity means… Read more »
Take the jab and get boosted. It’s safe and effective.
This post today taught me something new. I did not realize that Facebook is used to operate these scams. I don’t know how big of a problem it is. It really underscores how rotten the entire society is. That people are scammed like this, yet the massive media coverage of non problems like, “misinformation”, and “white supremacy”, and “protecting against hurt feelings”, on Social Media are the most high profile aspects of media coverage and Senate hearings is a scandal beyond outrage. I had read the post only up to the paragraph before the, “Jewish Century”, referencing paragraph before I… Read more »
You have to give the criminals in Arizona their due. They do not care that the election rigging is obvious to everyone. “We need time to substitute our ballots for theirs and if you don’t like it too bad!!” Florida and Texas with much larger populations counted their ballots quickly. Florida having just been hit with a massive hurricane. The hilarious part will be the election audits that will inevitably come. The auditors will count all the votes again and declare the election valid. They will never verify if the votes they got were legal or even if the people… Read more »
Also, what is the excuse in Nevada? They seem to be just as terrible at processing the results and don’t get the same amount of attention as Arizona. These are third world standards.
Yes. You are right. I forgot about Nevada.
AZ problem is 1) Incompetence, 2) Mail-in balloting. Ironically, the 2020 debacle caused a great number of Mail-ins to be handed in on day of voting, rather than, well—mailed-in. Such was the thinking of Rep’s that their Mail-ins would not be counted. Whereas, the Mail-in problem is not so much “discarding ballots”, but “adding invalid ballots”. The Legislature tried to head this off with a law that you could either turn it in on Election Day—or, bring the mail-in ballot to the voting center and have it “spoiled” and then vote directly as do other citizens. Most voting centers were… Read more »
Mercurians?
The Mercurians did it!!!
LMAO 🤣
Fellow Apollions ! We must check our Appalachian privilege.
[…] Scamdemic […]
One “optimistic” note on the election and corruption is the massive amounts of firings of the laptop class. Meta is laying off over 10,000 workers. Musk has already laid off plenty. And Biden is gunning for Musk, per his press conference. There is a lot of pressure from the activists to seize Musk’s companies. But can SpaceX launch all those satellites without Musk? Probably not. So the Tech Barons like Musk, Zuckerberg etc. have lost billions in paper losses, but still losses. They are not happy. A society along the lines of the WEF eating bugs and shivering in the… Read more »
The WEF appear to be too dumb to recognize that they only exist at the top of the cultural and economic pyramid as a product of the societal layers beneath them.
Their project to demolish and rebuild all of the pyramid layers beneath them is not going to deliver them into their delusional utopia they believe is their divine right.
The utter failure of Meta is one of the signs of how their project is going awry.
You could write endless pieces on that particular blindness. The people stood in a room spouting about ending oil for cars when the room they stand in, the clothes they wear, the food they just ate, the transport they used to get there, the energy and materials used for the metal and plastics that surround them in every wall, floor, device, piece of furniture, the road outside, water pumped into their home, the sewage processing, the supermarket et, etc, et is intricately linked into the substance and its relatives. The single order thinking of even those that don’t appear to… Read more »
What they value isn’t their rule, which is already more secure than any earlier rulers’, but our destruction. If they don’t slaughter many, many, many more millions of people than every ruler who came before them (combined), they lose.
Hemid-
Perhaps the stars are nearly right and these good folks are merely here to pave the way for the return of the Great Old Ones…
It is definitely odd how he is playing this election as a victory and personal vindication for him—I’m not saying he’s totally off-base; it is definitely a “feather in the cap” by strictly court-intrigue terms. But no reasonable non-swamp non-nitwit could construe it as the people’s mandate for moar Brandon Imperium. The old chuckling coot may now consider his belched-out student-loans decree to have been the best calculated political theater since Medici days. It reveals how he and his circle are wholesale narrative worshipers and sincerely believed the same thing would happen that everyone on the Gateway-Grift right was predicting… Read more »
Yes. I think they believe they have created incredible and enduring wealth. There is a lot of self flattery I suspect. The economic downturn is just now starting. The tech industry lead the way into The Cult of Woke because those who came after 2005 thought they were invincible. A never ending stream of IPOs, positive earnings reports, terrible losses spun as great news, endless new companies, endless jobs and raises forever. All powered by effectively negative interest rates. That is coming to an end. Now reality is going to dawn. A walk in the shoes of the deplorables awaits… Read more »
Maybe 10-15 years ago, I read about a massive scam in India around food programs for the poor. As anyone reading this knows, poverty in India is on a different level to anything we see in the West. The scale of corruption was absolutely staggering, on every single level of the bureaucracy, people were stealing from this program, literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry children, to the point where nothing was left. I read about this back in the day and thought, “what kind of evil has to exist in this country, where young children starve to… Read more »
This was the best essay I’ve ever read from Z. It’s clearly a topic which he cares about deeply – many of his essays don’t seem to be rote so much as written out of a sense of psychological exhaustion bordering on insouciance – but this subject is obviously eating away at him. And, quite frankly, it’s the most important subject of all… =============== Matthew 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. Mark 3:28 – 3:30 Verily… Read more »
A very, very drawn out way of saying, “Dem Joos was bad ta me!” Are the “tiny hats” in the room with you now, Heinrich?
Mycale: “We see it with the first wave of immigration to the US in the late 1800s, where you saw the tribe come from the Russian Empire and build out the mob (yes, the mob was not Italian to start, despite what the media tells you).” Many serious historians of the 20th Century are convinced that Meyer Lansky was both the wealthiest and & most powerful man of the era. There’s no doubt in my mind but that the Sanhedrin tasked Meyer Lansky with the executions of everyone from Huey Long to James Forrestal to Joseph McCarthy to JFK &… Read more »
What about JFK? You forgot JFK. And what about my aunt’s favorite cat who was run over last week? That was probably THEM too.
The Baltic nexus (I believe England traded with the Baltic)
Back in September the DOJ indicted a bunch of Somalis in MN for fraud: “This was a brazen scheme of staggering proportions,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew M. Luger for the District of Minnesota. “These defendants exploited a program designed to provide nutritious food to needy children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, they prioritized their own greed, stealing more than a quarter of a billion dollars in federal funds to purchase luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort property abroad. . .” https://tinyurl.com/bdzzan8m It would be interesting to know what % of felony fraud is committed by people from a “migrant… Read more »
“They simply have a blind spot for this level of dysfunction, corruption, and lack of shame. ” This, multiplied by 1000. When my family and friends in Europe deal with immigrants coming from the developing countries I live, I feel huge amounts of cringe. How can they be so blind? Don’t they see that they are giving signals to be scammed? Let me tell a personal story. When I went to Europe for the holidays, I saw that the Central American maid caring for my old mother was having lunch with all the family and treated like another member of… Read more »
Z Man quotes a certain book that explains much of the changes that we have seen in our lives. Our rulers have made our nation more comfortable to them. This includes not only the scam society but the promotion of sexual deviancy and the destruction of masculinity.
Am I saying that this group is responsible for all of our problems? Of course not. But if you did an analysis of the sources of our problems and the amount contributed by each source then they would be the greatest per capita contributors.
Speaking of scams and marketplaces, does anyone else feel like today’s soft CPI print was intended to skyrocket the markets and distract the herd from noticing election shenanigans and asking too many uncomfortable questions about them?
It will come and go in waves, so no worries as the wave machine is just getting started.
Years ago (93-94 I think) had a ringside seat for the first big derivatives fiasco that involved the now merged away Bankers Trust. Not only was the bank ripping off customers with complex instruments with no pricing transparency or often willingness to provide a market mark to the customer when asked (per the contracts). But we also ended up with the itape transcripts of internal traders laying portions of these bets off to other trading desks internally (and lying about the terms of the contracts) All that matter for compensation was the individual trading blotter of each desk. Not the… Read more »
I had to stop purchasing electronic components for my projects off of eBay because I kept running into fake and counterfeit chips. Bought some chips to drive some common-anode 7-segment displays only to find they were totally out of spec. They work fine with common-cathode displays though so was able to still use them. I went back to the seller page only to see that the listing had vanished. I see these chips still being sold by various random vendors with the same description. The reviews are all fake and the “merchants” all appear to have good reviews. Sure is… Read more »
“The thing is, America has always been a marketplace society, but everyone assumed that we enjoyed a minimum amount of corruption.” The corruption is everywhere today. Just a couple of days ago, it was revealed the California Bar systematically covered up and hid from public view the thievery and maleficence of an ambulance chaser called Tom Girardi. There have been over 200 complaints across a 40 year period against this guy, most of these complaints were criminal in nature where he was stealing his clients’ money. All of these complaints should have ended up on his publicly accessible disciplinary record.… Read more »
I see the corruption in government contracting all the time. The government puts out a bid for a project and some low bidder wins it. Then they do substandard work and try and scam out a change order to fix it. I’ve seen so many electrical code violations on one project that at this point it’s probably going to go to court, and even if the contractor loses I guarantee you they will still bid on gov projects and get the contract. This is critical infrastructure too. Not some piddly bs that can be messed up and not be a… Read more »
The California Bar is a complete joke, not to mention (unsurprisingly) conquered institution . The Girardi case is insane, the perfect example of how most administrative agencies operate anymore.
Don’t worry though, they’re doing all they can to lower admissions standards even further, despite the fact tons of practicing attorneys are already unqualified under the prior admissions standards. No doubt to accommodate all those MS-13 members who are coming here to open up estate planning practices.
This is one of those things I have a hard time making the case for because cars are a source of freedom that we otherwise wouldn’t have. Nonetheless, do you feel like cars aren’t fun to drive unless you’re driving as fast as you want out in the country? The constant stop start of being in traffic is mentally draining to an autiste like myself.
Cars also take up a lot of space in places like downtowns or even residential areas where you have cars parked in the street.
Is there a solution? I don’t know. But worth discussing.
You’ll take the steering wheel (Charlton Heston voice) from my cold dead hands.
We could always do our best version of Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, SAGEB. (-;
100% on Rotten Tomatoes!
Ahhhh, Ostei. Always wonderful to see friends from the good old days at Taki.
SAGEB (haven’t seen that in a while).
Kudos on the steering wheel / cold dead hands comment.
Hi, Doc. Thanks for the thumbs up. If this isn’t old home week . . .
I exclusively drove manual transmissions until a year ago (needed a new truck and there was no option for manual). I completely agree: driving is not fun in a city. I also ride a motorcycle, and I would simply expand on your one point (as fast as you want). I often don’t drive fast at all, in fact, many times cruising the empty roads where I live (Midwest), I go slower than the speed limit. However, sometimes I drop it down and go faster. The point is I go as fast as I want, and when you have a nice… Read more »
We are a dying breed. I’ve read that something like only 1% of young people can drive a manual and only marginally better for all people.
You have to drive a stick to understand how much closer you feel to the machine, especially on windy roads. Though, to be fair, it’s not 1955 when a stick provided better mileage and was faster. No human, no matter how good at driving a stick can keep up with a modern automatic, or frankly, even a torqueflite.
Up until they started doing goofy numbers of planetary sets (8 speeds and up) in autos, manuals still got/get better mileage. (Also why new microsuvs weigh as much as my silverado). Thats after 2012 or so. But the problem is longevity. New clutch and tob on a ZF 5 speed is $250. And you need a new clutch every 200k, autotrans usually needs rebuild every 100k. Rebuild on a 4 speed 4L6x or 8x is $300, 600 in parts, tops. Maybe $1k if you get a new torque converter. Rebuild on an 8 speed is “parts not available, buy a… Read more »
Rebuild on an 8 speed is “parts not available, buy a new $10,000 unit.” Now add to that the fact that many transmissions now are coming sealed, allegedly with “life of the car” transmission fluid. Or these 10k mile oil change interval engines. They last the “life of the car” if by “life of the car” you mean the warranty period. Same with the 10k mile oil changes. All the damage is going to show its ugly face after the warranty has expired. This is just one of the many ways everything is corrupt today. They simply lie in order… Read more »
I too love a manual transmission. Even in traffic, I’m still cool like Steve McQueen in Bullit. Just something cool about shifting.
You also save weight there, no heavy auto transmission, pump, fluid. Its a simpler system which is why in high priced Europe most cars are still manual.
I too am cool like McQueen in my manual Mazda. Also the best anti-theft device available.
Honda Prelude here – equipped with millenial anti-theft device.
Had manuals for years until met my wife, who no matter how hard I tried could not master one. But used to say (have experiencing it) that driving a manual from the Belt Parkway to Exit 13 in July in stop and go traffic without A/C and back…forever was the definition of Purgatory.
The Belt Parkway?
“Purgatory” is too kind a term…
MUCH too kind!
Cars are one of those things where you have to be careful of what you wish for. Everything is a parking lot now. Developers build long lines of garage houses. Charming. There are miles of strip malls. Then we got the combo of big box retailers so that most of the land slowly got dedicated to parking lots. Is anything uglier (this side of Hilary Clinton, anyway)?
Cars are ugly, noisy, and dangerous, no doubt about it. A sane society would have FAAARRR less of them. There would be reliable, safe, and clean public transport and people would live close to where they work.
But there are many well-known reasons why we can’t have nice things…
***and take up TOO MUCH SPACE!
There’s a reason the Amish never allowed motorized vehicles into their society. It’s so lovely trying to have a conservation with your neighbor or teach your kid to ride a bike while some loud vehicles roar by.
A few days ago I shared the hardly original observation that Jews tend to bring everything crashing down upon themselves and often everyone else, once they have reached their peak influence in a nation. Perhaps because their own culture, not unlike those of other rootless peoples (e.g. Roma/Gypsies, Travellers, etc.) was optimized to be Mercurian, to use Slezkine’s term. From a biology analogy, these types of cultures evolve to be symbiotic. But symbiosis (or parasitism, for you cynics out there) only works as long as the partner organism (or host) remains healthy. What happens if the partner population declines or… Read more »
“The thing is, America has always been a marketplace society, but everyone assumed that we enjoyed a minimum amount of corruption.” ————————————————————————- The assumption is correct, and has been since the dawn of time, for all nations and empires. All empires rise and fall; all fiat currencies eventually failed. If your marketplace becomes a corrupt casino, I will take my money and find an honest marketplace elsewhere to deal in so that I can deal with other professionals, builders, and working men where I can invest and see a return. This is what Torba at Blab envisions with his “parallel… Read more »
“I will take my money and find an honest marketplace elsewhere to deal in so that I can deal with other professionals, builders, and working men where I can invest and see a return.”
You must have upstream from your ‘honest marketplace’ *HONEST MEN*. Which requires God, full stop. Europe only arrived where it did thanks to 1500 years of steady Christian advancement in morals. Which the marketplace has slowly eaten up.
*HONEST MEN*. Which requires God, full stop.
It requires white men.
Scandinavia is arguably the least religious region on the planet and trust boxes are (still) a thing – unmanned stalls that sell garden produce, where you drop cash in a tin can.
For Now. Took 500+ years to kill Christian Ethics in much of the west, and some places are holding on longer than others.
Christian ethics is European ethics. Back when Christianity was a Middle Eastern religion, Christian ethics was Middle Eastern ethics and in Africa, Christians still sacrifice babies and practice cannibalism.
America is the most religious country in the Western world. If your thesis were true, it would be the most trustful society too.
If Christianity was the only thing that mattered, South Africa would be one of the top nations. Pretty sure they are like 99% Evangelical, and have very high weekly church attendance.
Why is it not? Ditto for Brazil, or Mexico.
Trust is a double-edged sword, of course. While your Denmark is very based on immigration, the rest of Scandinavia as far as I can tell is not unless that has shifted recently. The high trust factor causes people to view the hordes naively. This happens in areas of the United States settled by Scandis, too. Minnesota is a prime example. The same applies to Anglos, Celts, and Germans although not to as great of an extent, so those peoples will be the first to revolt (again, I note Denmark is an exception; any explanation as to why?). Of course, as… Read more »
Trust is a double-edged sword, of course. The high trust factor causes people to view the hordes naively. True. I note Denmark is an exception; any explanation as to why? This has been the subject of innumerable Danish and Swedish think-pieces and books. Nobody seems to know for sure, but I’d guess muh culture. Swedes are incorrigibly polite and nonconfrontational. Danes are congenitally rude and disrespectful (we call it “honest and straightforward”) and if you claim offense at being ridiculed, people just laugh harder. Not a good climate for political correctness. Danes like to think that the boy in The… Read more »
Thanks, Felix, tough read but the point got across.
I have two IRL friends from Denmark and they use “Islamification” interchangeably with “migration” at times. I don’t know how common that is, but the point is they are not the least bit shy about noticing. Civilian family, Cloud-adjacent, in Germany never would do the same.
Islamification is a perfectly non-offensive term in Danish, just a descriptor for a growing Moslems diaspora. It’s so baked into the discourse that even journalists regularly slip up and use the dichotomy Danes/Moslems about indigenous Danes/colored people. Even people who love immigration understand they are not us and rarely pretend otherwise. A few years back, Moslems areas were called “ghettos” by government ministers and some journalists took issue with that. They tried to enforce some newspeak term but at the end of the day it was decided that “ghetto” was perfectly fine because that’s what it was, so an official… Read more »
They still have those in the mountain west, too. Eggs, honey, etc. Vestiges last well past when the core dies.
Yes and no, BT. Yes, you need honest men, and that almost precludes anyone outside of real, honest christian faith. But business didn’t steal our morals and ethics. We threw them away. We’re doing it as we speak. Our rulers should be firing gas and rubber bullets at angry swarms of patriots that want the election frauds addressed. Yet here we sit, b****ing and griping on the computer. We shrug when trannies and pedos move into our childrens’ schools. We open the doors of our churches to queers and feminists. We let the jews whip the negroes into race hating… Read more »
No, Badthinker, I will not worship Abraham’s God, Adam’s God. Ye have been deceived.
What is it that the Whites hear? The answer to that question is the answer to another: who made God?
God’s Maker.
That is what the Whites hear.
The high registers of Creation.
What the rest can only hear, dimly, through the dull roar of the yhwh within the walls, is the Power above all gods.
Adam’s God, and Adam’s story, concerns only Adam’s people.
It is not ours, and I will never bow to it.
Maybe I’m a psychopath. But I personally don’t mind low trust societies. Even from a young age I was always scheming, cheating at cards and board games, etc. and I enjoyed it and am still good at it. You just have to know that some people are bad people, and be on alert. I do appreciate the honesty and good nature of average White people. It’s good to adjust based on who are you dealing with – nice White person, you can trust a bit more. Alien – the business hat goes on. I feel bad for some of the… Read more »
“Women are taking antidepressants because they did not evolve to live in a no-trust society.” Women are also unhinged because they did not evolve to spend 8-10 hours a day in the workplace, which is by its very nature features competitive striving and head-butting well-suited only to men. But with Big Harpy dominating the cultural landscape, most women dare not admit out loud that they want to be at home, let alone act on it. And then you have the bankers having devalued the dollar since the 1960s to where it takes two incomes for many couples to have a… Read more »
You’re hinting at an issue that dissidents ought to talk about more: the modern problem of men and women spending too much damn time together. Men should be palling around exclusively with men more often and women should get more gal time. A guy doesn’t have to be a homosexual or a “misogynist” (what a tiresome term!) to point that out. Too much time with the opposite sex kills the mystery of the sexes. Plus, excessive familiarity breeds contempt — or unhealthy suspicion and tension, at least. Women in the workplace was a bad idea not solely because the ladies… Read more »
That is a good working theory on the face of it. I love women, but lord… I need my space. I need to be in a place where I can get things done. Where somebody can fart or tell a rude joke without creating a hissy fit. Outside certain settings, I find even good women boring and tiresome. So it must go with them as they regard their men. We need our spaces and time away so that our time together is well spent.
Exactly! Constantly shoving men and women together is yet another toxic byproduct of the delusion known as EQUALITY. Whole races and ethnic groups are not equal to one another. Men and women are not equal to one another. Hell, no two individuals are equal to one another. The differences between people need to be acknowledged and accommodated to whatever degree is possible. However, due to this massive falsehood called EQUALITY, we must persist in denial of those differences, forcing everybody together often against their natural preferences, thereby fomenting much unneeded frustration and conflict.
But isn’t diversity our strength?
China is a global manufacturing juggernaut because they have millions of Mexicans, Indians, Guatemalans and (of course) Africans.
Australia had an org called Men’s Shed or something, basically workshops where men could hang out, hit things with hammers, run with scissors and tell filthy jokes.
Guess what happens next?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJRnZ6KBNEo
Yep, they “caught” the disease of equity and inclusion.
Yep. the beta males and mama’s boy gammas invited them in.
Feminism has actually made women useless. They’re just second rate men who are less mentally stable and physically weaker. If homosexual relations are normal and okay, women are further made redundant. It’s much simpler for a man to stick it up the poop chute of another man to get off rather than go through the dating and commitment process. I’m not sold on these single, perma-bachelors either (no offense Z man). Men are more independent, but on a societal level, I think men need women just as much as women need men. And, we need babies. Women are wonderful, and… Read more »
Are you a closet Frank Zappa fan? You use a phrase that recalls the X-rated lyrics in one of his (in)famous songs (“Broken Hearts are for Assholes”). He graphically recounts the diverse, er options at a gay bar. But he doesn’t leave the ladies high and dry, indeed he points out that they too can serve as a surrogate surrogate as it were. 😀
Thanks for your replies. I knew the world was going to hell when they let women in Augusta. Women clamor to be where men are, but at the same time faithfully remain spear carriers for Big Harpy, whining and moaning about men. Typical incongruity. Are men lining up to be where women congregate? No, in their evolutionary and biologically-based wisdom. And all this parallels the world beating a path to the USA, legally and otherwise, They want to be where the creative, dynamic economy is, but they have no regard for the men who are the engine of that rocket… Read more »
Whether men need women or not, I’m not sure single men these days are an anomaly as compared say to the 1800’s rates. Same with single women. But I don’t have references on hand.
The issue really started when housework stopped taking the majority of the day, and it paradoxically made many housewives more anxious and neurotic because of all the free time instead of working simply to survive. Back then the children would go to school for the day and the menial house chores would only take an hour or two. I know a few women who only were able to have two kids who are simply bursting with the need to do something and volunteer for everything under the sun. The new arrangement of working is a sort of out of the… Read more »
This is very much under-rated.
Many novels of Victorian and pre-WW2 detail how the society ladies were constantly involved in charity, or “do good works” interfering busy bodies. Indeed they are a stereotype.
This as you point out was because they had servants and nannies they had so much free time.
The modern life has given every woman the same free time and now we are overwhelmed with the same busy body driver but for all women, not jut a small fraction..
And don’t forget the move in the developing Western world from subsistence farming to urban life. You live on a farm, you have plenty of work from sun up to sun down.
“Think about the sort of person who comes up with a way to rob people looking for a puppy for their kid.” As confirmation of my twisted sense of humor, that line made me laugh. Viewed from a certain angle, the depravity of the human animal can be fairly amusing to those of us who enjoy a little gallows humor. It helps that I have never been the target of a “pet scam.” Zman justifiably ends today’s essay on a rather dark note. The truth about our culture keeps getting more painful. Trying to deny that truth won’t make our… Read more »
Z Man – “Ten thousand years of evolution are not overcome in a few generations…” “…The reason half of our young people have mental health problems is that they have been born into unnatural societies. This is not normal. Women are taking antidepressants because they did not evolve to live in a no-trust society. Male suicide rates are at record highs for the same reason. Our society is hostile to our existence.” Me – This sort of Darwinian lens through which you view things always puzzles me. I mean I agree with much of what you say about society, but… Read more »
David, you make a succinct observation: “It’s sort of a weird position wherein you say things aren’t as they should be, yet nothing really has any solid foundation, or meaning for that matter. ” This is a (unpopular) point that I often repeat: the Platonic divide between his so-called “real” (the internal, mental world) and his “apparent” (what most of us call the empirical, outside world we perceive via our sense.) The first is the realm of the shoulds, the oughts, morals, customs, norms, rules and laws. Few rules govern what the imagination can dream up. Alas, the “apparent” or… Read more »
For a good primer on the hustlers and con men, Hilaire Belloc in The Mercy of Allah explains their mindset. It might be even more black-pilling than this post.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-mercy-of-allah
Obiwan’s description seems apt about most of the world now :
” you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Most ruling areas of the country but now …you pick em.
It has been said many times for forever that the line between a moral civilization and the uglier sinful side of humanity is very thin and precarious. Tis true, tis true.
I would cite Andrew Jackson: “You are a den of vipers and thieves,” appropriately directed towards the financial world.
“Regardless of your road to wherever you are now, the old you was a naïve and silly version of the present you, because present you is wise to the shenanigans. Ours is a world where no one is an idealist who trusts the system or imagines a better world. Everyone is a cynic now. The reason is the world is now run by hustlers always looking for a sucker.” I think that about a decade back, Morris Berman came out with a book titled. “Why America Failed.” His main contention — if memory serves — is that the USA has… Read more »
It is the brothel on the edge of town phenomenon. In most times, people would look the other way, as long as it remained quiet and no one had a reason to talk about it. Today, the whore house is in the middle of town, right next to the casino, the weed dispensary, the strip joint and the bank. Until fairly recent, America was a moralistic society that tolerated vice at the fringes. I pointed out the other night that Gary Hart was run out of politics for womanizing. Four years later Bill Clinton was president. Over the last thirty… Read more »
The red light district has surely expanded.
I thought the same, David. The Morality District is on the edge of town now.
The brothel made enough money to buy up downtown.
Sane governments know that every now and then the brothel has to be raided to keep them on the edge of town.
“The red light district has surely expanded.”
I believe it’s now called “Tinder” and it’s been put online for your convenience.
The only revision I’d make is this: The bank is the business least likely to be present. Without exception, all those tawdry businesses you mention will have one or more ATMs that, for an exorbitant transaction fee, will allow the mark to get his hands on some cash. Over the past few decades many if not most neighborhood bank branches folded due to mergers and consolidations. Here in Florida, one literally was repurposed as a (medical) pot dispensary. In my former area of NoVA, some S&Ls were converted into mini McDonald’s.
It seems paradoxical that the more formalized and sizeable the police becomes as an institution, the more crime society has been subjected to.
It appears that the police’s role has been to increase the supply of criminals and restrictions on punishment.
More and more laws/regulations to hold back the obvious signs of moral decay equals more and more police. The tried and true “crimes” however, I agree are increasing. Hard to tell if the flood can be halted there are so many factors involved. Here the Hispanic population grows and grows and with it, their particular cultural penchants, for example driving while intoxicated. Every so often we get the MADD people in town to urge the passing more restrictive laws to reduce alcohol levels for presumptive impairment (now at .08). However, the *majority* of drivers caught here have an average of… Read more »
Perhaps it is more police leads to more criminals as they are the mechanism to prevent society oriented punishment.
The larger the police force the more lenient the punishment and the more crime it engenders.
They create their own need, by preventing summary retribution within communities, eventually as we see now being the main force which protects criminals from the public, rather than the other way around.
Brings to mind Major Rudy’s broken windows philosophy of crime. You let smaller crimes go, respect for the law evaporates, shop lifting under $500 is the de facto new law. If you’re a POC, no law applies. Laws are for chumps. White chumps.
Or not so slowly…
I agree to an extent… yet, do most adults, even decent types, actually practice decency? Do they strive to set an example as adults for the youth? Do they watch their speech? Do they exercise manners? Do they write thank-you cards? Do they shun wickedness? Do they drink, at most, moderately? Do they completely avoid programming that is immoral? Do they dress respectfully in public? Do they take steps to ensure that morality is publicly practiced? Now, I sure as hell don’t. But that is my point: the definition of morality has so shifted and decreased that what is a… Read more »
The new Congressional map is very, very encouraging… if you squint and pretend it was made by Avalon Hill.
Stories about puppy scams and the carefree way the perpetrators just dance away to start up again elsewhere makes me appreciate the draconian penalties Islam has for thievery. Rip off an old lady? Hand cut off. We used to bemoan such barbarism, but now I see the value of it. The Christianists will cry that such irrevocable punishment takes no account of repentance. True, but our present system takes no account of non-repentance. In a Muslim society, when you see a man with one hand you immediately think “Thief,” and everyone is on guard so he can’t repeat his predation.… Read more »
When we were in the market for a goat there were similar scams, on Facebook, for goats.
I’m not on there but my wife relates wild tales of scam posting on FB and it’s…wearying. I know if I wrote something on there favorable about mustache man that my account would be insta-suspended and the post black holed, but East Indians running animal procurement scams (among many others)? Meh, they cant be bothered.
The problem with cutting a hand off is that it impairs the person’s ability to work. The more humane solution would be to cut off the ears or nose, or just burn part of their face to produce some sort of gruesome scarring.
Branding and whipping seem to have been universally effective in prior times for offenses not warranting death. Public shaming for the female hedonic offenses is the only workable solution, as women feel shame (public) but not guilt (internal). The brinks, stocks, and dunking chair were proportional and necessary. Some say the quickness of application and breadth of offenses for which the death penalty was imposed in NW Europe is the reason we had law-abiding, moral, high-trust societies. People are as their nature dictates, so you have to get rid of those of a foul nature; one does not let the… Read more »
Christian society in Europe for hundreds of years meted out very harsh punishment to lawbreakers. I am pretty sure that at least some regions cut off body parts for thieving. One theory as to why Europe turned out so peaceful was because Europe spent generations executing criminals. The movement to show mercy to criminals and focus on giving them a “second chance” is very new, gaining steam in the early 1800s. Of course it was predicated on giving that second chance to European men who grew up with the same cultural norms and religion as the ones who were running… Read more »
I’m a firm believer in redemption through penance. Hell, that’s why we created “penitentiaries”—places where criminals could be confined and allowed to rethink their criminal ways and ask God for forgiveness. I’m so much of a believer in this concept that I think more criminals should be offered such facilities and allowed to stay and contemplate their “sinful nature” for even *longer* periods of time—even if for their entire life. What is such time spent when one’s eternal soul is at stake? My only exception is for murder. In that case, no criminal should be allowed to live for longer… Read more »
Why should society pay for criminal repentance?
I thought that’s what hell was for.
So I gather the hunt for a new cat has hit a few snags! Might be a good time to look around for a friendly stray. But try not to steal someones indoor outdoor cat
Thanks to mass immigration, the early settlers who came from west of the Hajnal Line, where high trust, high altruism, civic-mindedness and individualism dominate, are being swamped by east-of-the-Hajnal Line people, and everywhere around the world, where they’re clannish, collectivist and low trust and consider things like stealing elections normal.
For anyone not familiar with the Hajnal Line, hbd chick has written about it. https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/
All true, but what is the remedy? Can we now agree that voting harder is stupid on steroids? It’s just the lazy man’s pretense of “doing something” without having to get the fat ass up off the couch. And already, fanatics like Bongino are making excuses for 2022 and extending the carrot for 2024. How much longer can this insanity persist? Until the collapse and a majority of the dirt people have gone 3 days without a meal. Only then can sanity return. Hardship makes hard men. I just returned from a visit to the big city and was appalled… Read more »
That reminds me I need to get a bigger tent
Whitney: https://www.walltentshop.com/
US made, vet owned, excellent reviews – but $$$
If anyone has lived abroad, particularly Asia (including Russia and the ex-Soviet states) they would recognize the low-trust scam-heavy society we are turning into. When I was in China, hucksters wrote their mobile phone numbers on the pavement outside bus stops. They were peddling various services including organ sales. Not church organs mind you. And many other things. It was gross and clearly un-legal, but the working people just ignored it. Most Chinese accepted that anyone selling you anything was trying to cheat you. One of the first words I learned in Chinese was “cheat” or “rip off”. In eastern… Read more »
I’m losing confidence in large companies. Car dealers are among the worst. Buying anything over $100 becomes a gamble. You need to be shrewd when dealing with anyone. A coffee is one thing, a cell phone plan is rife with scam. Heck, even shopping for Christmas presents now, I am bombarded with midges to purchase $9.99 insurance for kids toys. Wtf
Ukraine is everywhere.
“ Most Chinese accepted that anyone selling you anything was trying to cheat you.‘ Son has been involved in business there. Yep, you are right on—except son would not call it cheating. If everyone cheats, then nobody cheats. I know, strange clever use of words. Basically, it’s a mind set. The person you are negotiating with tries everything and anything to gain the advantage in the transaction. The assumption is that you should know this, prepare for this, and avoid this. If you don’t, then you deserve what you get. Of course, son is involved with a large international company… Read more »
A while back I watched a video that was taken on a train in Japan. Some kid was eating pistachios and dropping the shells on the floor. An oldish man approached him and said something, and the kid responded in the negative. The old man then proceeded to whip the kid’s ass. High trust homogenous society vs low trust diverse society in one short video.
Ancient wisdom. Dysfunctional people respond to tangible consequences. Better to nip this petty offense in the bud now than have this kid grow up to become a serious thief and get shot in a failed robbery. All street cops know this, but now their hands are tied by the cancer cells running our cities. As such, the remedy should be focused on the root problem.
There was a video a few years ago of an Italian bus driver having to tell a vibrant passenger that he couldn’t get on the bus because he didn’t have the correct fare or something. The diverse enrichment figured he’d correct the driver’s disrespect by bestowing a girlish slap upon him, whereupon the driver got out of his seat and proceeded to batter the living daylights out of the little shithead. He finally let him off the bus to go staggering away down the sidewalk, to the applause of everyone on the bus.
Do that in the US and your ass is in jail and you’re unemployable. That’s the problem. Society lacks the trust to self regulate. We just throw away people who don’t defer decision making to the state.
Say a prayer for Derek Chauvin.
Upvote only bc you used “nip in the bud” for japs.
Yeah, unless that vid was from rural part of the country, you can’t do that these days in Japan. That said, I did drop a 500円 coin on the train in Osaka last month and a young guy chased it down and gave it back to me. Warmed my heart a tad since Corona has made people rather socially cold towards each other; it seems anyone not wearing a mask gets looked at like a dude running around without pants.
Such behavior is not dead here. It happens to me occasionally with cash transactions. As I get older, I sometimes give two bills when I think I’ve selected one, e.g., two twenties for a $19 transaction. I’ve gotten such corrections from both older and younger min wages types. There are other examples as well, but I won’t bore you with them. I am grateful mostly for the bit of redemption of faith in my fellow man—I don’t need the money (I’m probably losing it elsewhere anyway). My response in those situations has been to return the kindness. I have usually… Read more »
Link that emmer-effer.
The high trust still exists with the average joe. I’ve gone through a multitude of Craigslist transactions and have only once or twice come across a character who tried to deceive me. This has been pretty universal among rich and poor people I’ve made transactions with. With the current climate, one would assume there would be near constant muggings, thievery, murder, etc. with such an unregulated space, but people more or less are friendly and just want to sell their old stuff. Most of the robbers in our current society wear suits to the office and decide to shrink their… Read more »
Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Verbo…all companies I despise are nevertheless only functional due to hight trust.
Get into a car with a total stranger who’s not subject to DOT drug screening? Rent a private house 2000 miles away in an unknown neighborhood where literally hundreds of strangers can have copies of the keys?
Here we are. For now.
I know people that work for Lyft. It is the most dehumanizing job. It’s like they actively conspire against you and the more money you make they change the algorithm to make it harder for you to make money and then any complaint from a customer and your accounts deactivated, you get no say. It might be temporary but they can also do it permanently and you never have recourse to speak to a living person. I’m shocked at how awful it is.
This is a case of (as Z puts it) the hucksters monetizing that which shouldn’t monetized. In this case Lyft et, al are withdrawing what remaining social trust there is with their legally dubious rental operation and then turning it in to money.
You bring up a point that I’ve wondered about for years. The retirement of the middle and upper-middle class is now reliant on the stock and bond markets. And not just the stock market as a whole, but the stocks and bonds in index funds, primarily the S&P and Barclays bond index. (Index funds dominate 401k choices and, increasingly, non-401k portfolios.) The markets have gone from a mechanism to allocate capital to a retirement pension fund. Index funds don’t allocate money based on fundamentals but on capitalization. As the number of active managers shrinks, the allocation mechanism gets weaker and… Read more »
A few years ago I did some work for a huge investment bank. The head of fixed income rocked up and gave a speech on how they were changing focus as the pension funds and retail had finally managed to work out how to fairly value that particular type of fixed income instruments they had bought and that meant they just could not make the margins they had been for the last 10 years, as the prices were now transparent and that reduced the spreads. Entire departments were set up to exploit the fact that the clients were unable to… Read more »
Passive investing is good in some ways, as your example shows. It’s transparent and brings down fees while making it much harder for Wall Street to screw over retail investors. We now have transparent quant funds for managed futures and all kinds of esoteric strategies that we’re just algorithms in the first place. That’s good. But there’s a danger to the rise of index funds, especially in the stock market. Index funds are mindless. They rely on active managers to set the right price, but index funds are putting the active managers out of business. The value premium is still… Read more »
Indeed.
If index funds start to have outflows at scale they will wreck all the markets, irrespective as to its underlying value.
It will cascade as the indexes all use each other as benchmark signalling, the auto trades will stop out millions of positions and the 401s will mostly vanish.
I am not even sure if the circuit breakers would deal very well with huge selling at a fund level.
The funds always have an out. One trick is called “redemption in kind.” Hypothetically, let’s say the market’s in a panic. Big investor A, perhaps a state pension fund, decides to redeem its shares at the current net asset value. Rather than crediting them a dollar sum, they get a pile of unsaleable stocks instead.
It not the funds themselves that suffer, its the volatility stuff like second order selling during massive redemption into an illiquid market would have given the huge concentrations in the same stock list, the outsize positions and the need for balancing of other positions which would get dragged down, even when they are outside the initial panic. You would end up with pension funds doing OTC bulk trades of listed names just to liquidate the redemptions, making price discovery completely useless. Look at how fucked the russian stuff got during sanction starting when the ETFs tried to exit, and they… Read more »
The scary part is that you might not need outflows at large scale. As the % of flow represented by active managers falls, the size of the outflow (or even slowing inflow) from 401ks that could impact the market gets smaller and smaller.
But this machine has to stop at some point. The ride up of passive investing has been great for investors, but it’s reaching a point where valuations are very high which has to impact returns or where the slightest reduction in inflows blows up the market.
There is always an insider’s advantage, but a principle of the market economy is that real value is discoverable if you look for it. The state steps into make sure this is the case. That is the theory, but legalizing insider trading for politicians flipped this on its head. The markets are so mobbed up now even the central banks struggle to know what is really happening.
Or even worse was when fed officials were using inside information to trade. These guys literally have their hands on the levers.
Ironically (or not), after they were forced to get out the market, they cranked up interest rates and crushed the market.
Similar to trumpton, I worked for a tech company in SV. Like all tech companies there was some over-arching ethnicity (French; American; British …) in the team because of recruiting opportunities for classmates in the same University. In any case, this company was founded by Israelis. The CEO was a Harvard guy so he would bring in Harvard men in other businesses to present on an interesting topic. (My favorite was the found of Veritas. What a smart guy and a throwback to when SV founders were real entrepreneurs building real technology). On day he brought in one of the… Read more »
Yeah, I’m not crying for active managers, most of whom are evil dicks. But the markets becoming the primary retirement vehicle for the middle and upper middle class and where the vast majority of money in the markets will at some point be in index funds creates a situation where markets are no longer performing their needed function, which is to allocate capital based on business success.
You’ll get a utility that’s protected by the govt, meaning that you’ll have a much less effective economy.
Given Blackrock and co own about 50% of the ETF fund market it sees that people are paying their pensions into huge funds used by the ESG crowd to then destroy the same people providing the money.
You are funding your own oppression and most people don’t even realize it.
True, but the ESG movement is already showing cracks. Part of the reason that we’re staring down the barrel of a very low supply of oil is ESG make investment in the sector damn near impossible. (It’s also true that the sector had been a disaster for a decade.)
My point is that once the markets become a quasi govt-regulated entity, you’ll get even slower economic growth.
Yeah CoaSC. It sounds like you have a strong handle on this topic. Using interest rates as a tool for monetary policy created this mess. Driving down yield forced people out on the risk curve. Of course, monetary policy became a means to defer the day of reckoning. Making everyone yield starved unless they took more risk created the biggest ponzi scheme in world history. It is the systemic lie and grift that undergirds the various lies and grifts that it gave birth to – the ones ZMan discusses today. Our, “leaders”, moral bankruptcy of fearing and avoiding a real… Read more »
I have been through something like this with grant writing in my department. The actual aspect of research to be conducted was back seat to writing what the group thought most appealing to the Fed’s. And it worked.
I wonder if Gen X will be the last generation to expect 401k returns. I don’t hear many people under 50…especially right-wingers…trusting the market. Most younger right-wingers are preoccupied with tangible stuff like ammo, nutrients, and metals. Younger left-wingers are just hoping they can live comfortably in old age, even in a pod.
“Younger left-wingers are just hoping they can live comfortably in old age, even in a pod.”
..and voting for anything with a whiff of universal basic income.
Yesterday I called the bank that handles my company’s 401K and told them to stop taking deductions. The economy isn’t going to last long enough for me/us to retire.
At this point, having a 401K is like putting money into a piggy bank that you can’t open.
Even 30 years ago it looked pretty obvious that a big giant pile of money locked up to prevent access was a massive target for plundering and forced restrictions through legal changes.
Now even more so.
Yes. I try and keep equal parts in 401K and equal parts in a regular account. It has been obvious to me for years that someday, they will tax the withdrawal of 401K/IRA funds at some unGodly rate to make up for the, “tax-free” contributions. What was that thing in The Matrix? They control the key makers. They control all of the on and off ramps. They even invent new supposed off ramps that are really just a way to herd financial illiterates or libertarian dreamers into scams. I think crypto is one of them. When housewives and pot salesmen… Read more »
“Younger left-wingers are just hoping they can live comfortably in old age, even in a pod.”
Ha! Ha! I think most younger left wingers think that everything will always just arrive in sufficient quantity. That is why the only concern is with trans and POC, “rights.”
Too Much Leisure Time.
Acc to the Federal Reserve Tool https://tinyurl.com/yc3db6u2
Share of equities owned by household wealth:
Top 1%: 53.6% of stocks
Next 9%: 35.1%
Next 40%: 10.6%
Bottom 50%: 0.6%
You can also break it down by income, race, etc. It’s an interesting tool to play with.
Probably expected. 80% of the national wealth—stocks, cash, real estate is in the top 20%. Even more lopsided as you break the top 10% and then the top 1%. Dirt people squabble over the remaining 20%, which basically pays for their basics with little to spare.
So who has spare cash if you’re in the bottom 80%?
I fully expect to have any and all retirement accounts either worthless due to inflation/market losses or nationalized. If there is anything worth taking, it gets taken in every government caused economic collapse, e.g. Argentina in 2001.
I think they’ve also become and an inflation release valve. That money in the 401k isn’t yours. Who has to pay a fee when borrowing their own money? Who can’t access something until they turn a certain age? If you don’t control it, it ain’t yours.
The vast majority of scams calls and e-mails coming from India come from call centers in Mumbai. We know where they operate, and we know the major players and organizational charts in the market. When we whine loud enough, the Indian government will slap them on the wrist and force them to shut down an office, only to reopen somewhere else in the city. There are a few great YouTuber hackers that are fun watches that are able to hack into their systems while on the call with them, and it’s rather amusing. I’ve said often, why doesn’t our government… Read more »
> Send an effing drone strike to a few of these buildings to really send a message.
Forcing India to close these things down would be a proper use of economic sanctions, but our government uses them to punish countries that are mean to gay people.
True. Your answer is certainly more politically viable and realistic. However, Ideally these “people” would face justice. Think of it this way: if we lived in a normal community and a group of bandits was going around and robbing the elderly in their homes, what would we do? The gallows would be the best response.
My Globobank hires them to replace my American back-office guys, so there are at least a couple hundred just taking American jobs, not scamming old people.
Although, I’m told we don’t pay them much, so maybe they work a second job stealing from old people on nights and weekends.
The problem is allowing ourselves to become entwined with non-Europeans to begin with. There are certain races and societies that are genetically incapable of the intelligence and morality function in a high-trust society. I was explaining this to my 15 year old son this morning – that America is heading down the same path as Rhodesia or South Africa and that the natives in Africa squandered their colonial inheritance much like blacks in America today are squandering theirs. I suggested that saying so in racialist terms probably “hurt his sensitive ears.” He was quiet for a few seconds and then… Read more »
The Greatest Generation and their gadding about on their infernal cruises to exotic tourist traps played a big part in the big welcome to the Third World. “We had such an interesting time with our tour guide, Bohai, and learned so much about his culture. He was so friendly. We told him he should come to America.”
The men won World War II, and then let their wives drag them all over the world on a suicide mission.
Under these principles, you’d need to obliterate whole sectors in Israeli cities, as these are where the most vexatious predators of this type are located. And that will never happen.
Since that entity has made extradition for financial crimes against our peoples basically a non-starter, just as has criticism of tribal behaviors become, that entity has become a modern day Khazaria, a free-standing, largely impregnable strong point for serving the institution of latter-day financial slave raiding, just as the original Khazaria was to actual meat space slavery.
I just looked up Khazaria. Wiki used CE instead of AD.
I love how Current Era has no begging. It just a place out of time. That is to Zman’s main point today.
A drifting grift with no beginning and no end is where we are in space and time. We need to help our youth.
Oddly enough, I’ve seen numbers, from several years ago, that Utah is the Mumbai of our continent. The reason given was that the Morman state has always had an attitude that crimes against non-Mormans aren’t really crimes. If you scam a member though, you get the book thrown at you.
Reformed libertarian: As Zman notes, the liars and cheaters always go after the easy mark, the overly-trusting naif. In AINO the foolishly trusting are overwhelmingly older Whites (which raises the question as to whence comes the myth of elderly wisdom, but that’s an entirely different matter). Historical and sociological research has made the solid argument that England became a safer and more honest society over the centuries because it generally had a zero-tolerance policy for crime. Instead of the modern piety that it is better that all the guilty go free rather than one innocent suffer, they operated on the… Read more »
Your comments are great. I’m sorry to hear that you have to deal with the Asian hordes in Dallas or wherever you are, but you’re one of the few that seems to understand how they operate, and interact with them on a regular basis. Yes, they are far more sinister than Hispanics or Blacks, which seem to be the groups most Americans focus on.
B125: Many thanks and mutual respect re comments. I’m so sorry that Canada has been inundated with subcontinentals. I first dealt with them as a visa officer in the Caribbean (they went visa shopping from island to island, called constantly on each others’ behalf, etc.) and then when we were posted to Singapore (where I actually felt a bit of sympathy for them because they were very obviously the low man on the totem pole and generally held in open contempt by the Han). For the past 28 years here in a DFW suburb I’ve been forced to live amongst… Read more »
The Greatest Generation and their gadding about on their infernal cruises to exotic tourist traps played a big part in the big welcome to the Third World. “We had such an interesting time with our tour guide, Bohai, and learned so much about his culture. He was so friendly. We told him he should come to America.”
They won World War II, and then let their wives drag them all over the world on a suicide mission.
I was once on a flight to DFW and got chatting w/ the person in the next seat. You know what her job was? She coached the children of H-1Bs for Spelling Bee competitions! Apparently Spelling Bees are a massive deal to the Subcontinentals and they move there specifically for that.
Strange new respect for 3g4me.
Do you have a similarly fiery wrath-of-Gawd speech prepared for at-risk teenaged White girls who are toying with the idea of Mudsharkery?
‘Cause Lawd knows, our young fertile White wombs need to hear it.
In many places in Europe you already would be in jail for speaking your frustration.
In many places in the US you would already have your head jumped on for speaking your frustration.
I despise these grifters of the elderly myself. However, I think blaming the elderly is a bridge too far. After hearing any number of these fraud stories, I’ve come to the thought that such is not always a function of greed or stupidity, but of old age and cognitive impairment—often complicated by loneliness, especially with women. One instance I know of personally a not so very elderly man was scammed for several thousand dollars, which stopped due to an alert bank calling his wife. Everyone was surprised, since he appeared quite normal and was in his working years in a… Read more »
Compsci: Hubby and I are in total agreement that we want to distribute whatever assets we may have to our sons while they are relatively young and need it, and while we are of sound mind and body – either directly or via living trust. When either mind or body go (i.e. I exhibit signs of dementia and/or cannot wipe my own backside) husband and I are also agreed that it’s time to move on from this earthly plane. No desire to burden our children with years of care nor experience the simulacrum of such by sub-saharan ‘health workers.’
The police in India are extremely corrupt, and if you are rich you are pretty much above the law (as long as you don’t cross someone richer and more powerful than yourself). In addition, many big US companies — especially financial institutions — have IT centers in India, so the Indian government has a built-in American lobby that isn’t going to be enthusiastic about rocking the boat with aggressive sanctions. Even if you could cut off all calls from India the scammers could probably just route their calls through other countries. I don’t think it’s an easy problem to solve.