Russell Brand — helping to wake people up. Who would have thought?
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Russell Brand is a very smart and very articulate guy with a good sense of humor. I could do without the farting bird though.
The downside to Russell is that he thinks that the corrupt criminal psychopaths are the result of the economic system of capitalism. And that it is all about money by greedy capitalists.
I believe he is wrong about that.
I believe that human beings evolved in small or medium size tribes. So we are optimized to be living in a community where everybody knows each other and there is one chief who has to deal with all the disputes and makes the rules.
Scaling this system up to a country of 378 Million people is definitely a challenge, but I think our Constitutional Republic did it the best.
Capitalism works best I think up to a certain size of company, but breaks down when companies get too big. This leads to CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars for doing just typical stuff like talking on the phone and sending emails. CEOs are paid crazy amounts because if one CEO is 1% better than another, that could mean $100 million more in profits when the company is huge.
Globalism is the real disaster. Example:
Swedish Car Maker Volvo sold 148,916 cars in China in 2020
Volvo sold 52,691 cars in Sweden in 2020
So is it a Swedish car company? If the Chinese Government wanted them to do something decidedly un-Swedish would they comply? Because the CCP could shut off all Chinese sales with one phone call. They wouldn't care what the Chinese people thought about that.
No. Volvo is owned by Geely since 2010, a Chinese company.
Yes, I guess I actually knew that but was making a point about the Globalist Capitalist system. If you want American companies to act like American companies, then they cannot go global. If you have some or all of your product manufactured in China, and you sell to the gigantic Chinese market, then the Chinese Communist Party will have you by the balls.
Is GM an American car company? How many cars do they sell in China?
Is Nike an American company? Where are their factories? What percentage of their sales is in China vs. the USA?
Yup. Capitalism busts when greed and power lust are not controlled. Really, there are good points to every system, our social security is one example, if managed correctly it is good and helps at end of life but it is not managed correctly. Our corporations are not managed correctly either. Capitalism is not working just like socialism and communism, we just controlled the beast a little longer. I think the long buried 13th amendment would have helped, but that's the rub, laws are not enforced. I always thought that the Ben and Jerry's rule was a great start. All positions were bound together from the CEO down so that if one got a raise or financial bonus, all got one as well and there were set ratios to tie wages together. If the board wanted a cush raise, the whole company needed to be incuded. That went out the window when they were bougut out. I think another interesting idea is capping board payroll and compensation and putting the excess back into the company, or wages, or used as tax somehow, anything to strip the potential for powermad megalomaniacs to drag us to where we are now. There has to be limits in order to grow, take cancer as an example, unbridled cell growth overcomes all else until it kills you. I would say that globalism is the end result of unregulated capitalism and it leads to communism just the same as communism is the best control mechanism on a society wide basis. It seems capitalism is just the long road there. Wall of text, yeah I'll shut up now.
To clarify my remarks about capitalism. The issue with paying CEOs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is that frequently CEOs get paid that much for doing a shitty job and making decisions that cost the company dearly. For example Kodak. We watched that company commit suicide in front of our eyes, and everybody could see that they were destroying the company on purpose. And the CEO took home amazingly huge piles of cash for doing it.
The system just doesn't work properly when the companies get too big. It is a problem of scale.
You can't scale a mouse up by multiplying the size of every bone and physical feature by 100. The bones would snap and the creature would be nonviable.
Didn't Kodak invent digital image capture and refuse to go the creative destruction route and kill off film? OTOH, KODK has traded at ~$4/share for the last few months. Perhaps look at it through the GME lens?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK?p=KODK&.tsrc=fin-srch
Yes.
I know the guys that worked on the first digital camera and have held some of the prototypes.
Yes I'm an old guy.
Management was horrified by the idea of a digital camera and killed it and let competitors ruin their film business.
"I believe that human beings evolved in small or medium size tribes. So we are optimized to be living in a community where everybody knows each other and there is one chief who has to deal with all the disputes and makes the rules.
Scaling this system up to a country of 378 Million people is definitely a challenge, but I think our Constitutional Republic did it the best."
Nice observation. This is evident by state's rights (50 tribes settling disputes with their own rules...if properly implemented).
Have States have much of the power has served us well in this crisis.
We can compare how New York has handled it verses Florida and compare.
For example I don't recall Florida forcing nursing homes to take in sick covid-19 patients.
We can see how well draconian lockdowns/mask/holiday restrictions do against states that did pretty much nothing.
Smart reasoned comment.