For writers, it is a pleasure to read something that grasps and articulates ideas in your head far better than you could imagine. Firstly you are freed from being unable to express the thought with the clarity you hope. Secondly you are inspired and challenged to keep writing in search of effortless communication.
On Capitalism, by u/TheBirminghamBear
All of capitalism has panned out to be exploitation. The people with power don't produce; they organize . But they organize in a way that maximizes profits for owners, not actual value produced and not reward for the employees. So companies routinely engage in things like criminal behavior or negligence, if the calculated risk and penalty is less than the forecasted reward. Or they lay off huge amounts of staff merely for an uptick in share price; a few blips in the portfolio of someone who is rich enough to live a thousand lifetimes, while destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people.
Every employee should be a shareholder in the company they work at, their stake comparable to their time, productivity and rank at that company. Voting power and wealth should accumulate in addition to fair living wages. If your company does well, you do well.
Everything in America is tied to someone's employment, for most Americans. Your healthcare, your social status, your income. You depend on these places, and yet most have little to no control. Decisions can be made to benefit one individual that can leave an entire town devastated.
This should not be permissible. People should and can gain wealth commensurate with their abilities and genuine merit. But that's not what happens. Oftentimes the wealthy are just lucky; but the system perpetuates wealth. Get a little wealth, and its vastly easier to get more wealth than to start from no wealth and work your way up.
The truly sad thing that so many Americans don't realize is that billionaires can literally pay for entire gaslighting operations to excuse and justify and protect their interests without ever thinking about it.
Rupert Murdoch built Fox to gaslight people. That's what it is. It reports the news in a way favorable to his business interests. He doesn't give a shit about conservatism, they're just the ones who watch and the politicians who are most pliable to bribes.
The thing is Murdoch barely has to think about it. He calls up, says, "I want Trump to win, make it happen," and thousands of people will spend years of their life working for puny wages to make that happen, while he globe trots to exotic locations to do whatever he wants.
This is feudalism with better tech. The farm isn't a farm anymore, it's a business, but you still toil away in someone else's field to give the lion's share of food to some shriveled old fossil so he can live a life of extreme luxury.
You spend your entire childhood life being taught in a way to explicitly prepare you for college (not to genuinely impart true knowledge), and college trains you to do a job, say, marketing, and you get that job in marketing so you can make money for things you need to live, like food and a roof, and in return your labor is to market a product, let's say Cola, which kills people slowly through exploiting their addiction and survival centers in the brain and ramping up their blood sugar to give them chronic high blood glucose and eventually diabetes, so as you waste decades of your life figuring out ways to tell people to buy something addictive that kills them, your wages for getting them to buy poison are not even commensurate with the increase in stock prices for said poison. Then eventually you retire, without a pension, because companies don't do that anymore, and spend your handful of twilight years doing things you wish you could have done when you were much younger and much more fit.
That's an entire life for someone in America.
The entire time, birth till death, you are groomed and trained to accept working well below your worth to do something you don't want to do, that in all likelihood is bad for society and bad for your fellow man, just so that you can live.
This is how it happens. Our disgusting inequity has made the world into a place where billions of people play out the whims and wants of a very, very small number of people, and are increasingly brainwashed into thinking this is a desirable state of affairs.
That's what happens for the vast majority of salaried and hourly-wage workers. And your entire media construct in part helps normalize and placate you in that position. Because for a billionaire, spending $500 million to make something they want a reality is nothing; but that creates an entire ecosystem around simply executing that person's will - whether or not it has anything to do with the good of the country.
It is profoundly perverse, it is making us sick and miserable and now, thanks to climate change, literally perpetuating and hastening the end of the world.
All to make a few thousand billionaires satisfied.
"Calculators don't solve these problems, Niket!"
I was being scolded, again, for being on a calculator midway through the drudgery of an algebra class in 7th grade.
Unfortunately for the teacher, our calculators had become advanced enough to solve simple variable based functions. But that's not what I was doing. I had sorted out how to play video games on my Ti83 calculator and was particularly obsessed with Drugwars 2, a resource allocation game focusing on drug dealer arbitrage.
As a 12 year old does, naturally.
Two years later I would get my first job at McDonald's, learning about forecasting and inventory management through a magic chart that instructed the amount of fries to have ready on a 15 minute intervals. As a 14 year old "fry guy" at McDonalds, the chart's accuracy was nothing short of witchcraft. I would later credit that experience as the reason I studied a mix of mathematics and engineering somewhat ironically, but mostly truthfully.
Math, Statistics, and Operations for whatever reason always naturally made sense to me. And to this day I think McDonald's is one of the best to blend those elements together, and was nearly responsible for me becoming some sort of consultant.
My distaste for such pursuits had been started in parallel in my last semester where I was taking an Engineering Ethics class taught by an utterly disarming professor.
Americ was unlike anyone I had met at Berkeley. He was an accomplished engineer completely disillusioned by the companies he advanced, such as the Shell corporation in the 1970s. He admitted to a class of wide eyed 20 years olds that his experimentation with LSD, while working as an engineer, led him to realize he was using his skills for meaningless pursuits and trappings.
He was also accomplished in Philosophy, having a PhD to "fall back" upon as he spent the rest of his life pondering how to accept the elusive meaning of life instead of searching for its answer. He would often tell us to focus on the moment, recording each of his classes where he would no doubt listen to them and realize how little our contrived minds understood.
Despite his efficacy, he never judged us. In fact, he hoped for the best that we would use our intellectual power and optimism generously for others rather than ourselves. He was particularly accepting of the many characters and motivations in the class. For the ambitious types he would serenade the good life of being a well paid engineer and how little happiness it yielded.
For the less talented, he would oblige our commentary and occasional comedy. In some regards, he was the first teacher that gave me permission to be myself and encourage levity amongst the serious subjects in engineering. He questioned the assertion that being smarter or more ambitious than others made us more valuable. We all simply needed to figure out how we fit into the larger puzzle and enjoy the moment. For me, he would quip that a Jester has all of the wits of a great King, but none of his aspiration.
His class was a seminal moment for me in college and life. It was the type of experience one writes about and shares while receiving some sort of award. I wish I had shared his story and its impact on my life earlier on. While he would never seek such recognition, I do think he would want his philosophy to help those trying to find their place in the crevices of life.
The bluest of California skies dim without his glowing presence. I take solace in knowing that his thousands of pupils might fill his impossibly large void.
One hallmark of a great writer is their ability to write while completely uninspired. If pressed, I might contend anyone masterful at something can do it unprompted and in their least interested moment.
When Winston Churchill spoke of going through hell, it didn't occur to me that writing was the same thing. When you start, you simply must not stop — no matter how poor the initial effort. Something can always be improved. Multiplying nothing always yields zero.
One of my nemeses is boredom which I wished I had befriended during those horizonless high school summers. There are many things about me I tried to kill or escape rather than befriend. Boredom was a persistent acquaintance, reaching out to me for each of my intellectual pursuits. I can become obsessive about ideas, intensely studying a topic until I had mentally sorted it. Before mastering anything, though, I would unceremoniously eject — never quite reaching the finish line while arrogantly assuming I would (or sometimes had).
Boredom would meet me at the start of each journey, usually prompting it, and close to the end. Like a magnet without polarity I would reject it at both ends. Life is funny though. When I am encumbered with an idea I become its prisoner. Sometimes in society, like when manically focusing on building a startup, such a quality is deemed a virtue. Capitalism exploits people tortured by ideas and idealizes its captives.
I can think of nothing more haunting for an entrepreneur than being mildly successful and being instructed to reproduce their success. I would rather live in a dream of being good than put to test poor extrapolative luck in real life. I first dove into this idea when my Dad recommended a book called Fooled By Randomness. Somehow my years of statistics and mathematics studies unlocked when luck and randomness was presented in laymen, real world terms.
Writing is not a difficult thing to do. You have ideas and you write. Or you don't have ideas and you write. What prevents writing is being afraid. What generates that fear is ego wanting to live in a good dream; a place of nothing.
Bruised egos, then, are a key tangible assessment of improvement. While emotions and judgement can be tempered, sometimes even such calmness is a false security. Sometimes you have to bruise, batter, and break things to sort out if they were ever, in the first place, intact.
If you are living a life ass-backwards, consider it an opportunity to understand which way is forward.
Non-compliantly yours,
NND