Posts by Anony Mous

33

The problem with Capitalism!---Billionaires

by pistolpete in

as imperfect and flawed capitalism is, it has worked better than other forms of economic and political systems-so far.

it’s very simple in “theory.” capitalism is an economic and-or, political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

in other words, keep government out of it as much as possible.

Anony Mous

What I find frustrating is that some people think that us business owners have to be punished for doing a good job.

So what if I make twice as much as the average person? Is the average person doing worse now than they did 20 years ago? If not, what is the problem? The problem is jealousy, you're jealous that someone else has more, so instead of striving to work hard, you intend to steal it from them. Sure there is inequality, but compare the inequality you have with the inequality in Venezuela or Cuba or China, where some people are eating at banquets every day while others are forced eating the fucking bats that caused the coronavirus. What does Jeff Bezos have that you NEED? Jeff has a cell phone, we have government programs to give people those that can't afford them. Jeff has a house, we have government programs to give people those that can't afford them, Jeff has healthcare, we have government programs... Jeff has transportation, we have government programs... Hey, I see a pattern here. So do you need that Lamborghini? Do you need a diamond-studded iPhone?

Compare yourself in America to people in Europe. You complain about a healthcare system that has better outcomes across the board, that is cheaper across the board, sure you have to be responsible and pay for your insurance (or you don't if you make less than 150% of the poverty line), but how does that compare to paying 55% income taxes and 21% sales taxes and 200% fuel taxes? Do you want to get taken care of by a system that cuts off people above 65 because rationing, this is what is currently happening in Belgium, Italy, Spain, people above 65 do not get COVID treatment and most other care (cancer, palliative etc) likewise have limits if you're over a certain age across the EU

Even in the area of safety and environmentalism, the free market has done more to alleviate that than regulation. You can see that easily in nuclear regulation, nuclear is one of the safest and cleanest energy sources bar none, very few heavy metals, some concrete and water is all it needs, yet regulation makes it infeasible. Based on 1970s projections we should be completely carbon neutral today if we had nuclear energy proliferation. But because we're scared of just one accident that a corrupt socialist government caused by doing dangerous weapon testing, we think every reactor is about to explode in a mushroom cloud whereas to date, people and animals live in that area without a major impact. A working coal plant causes a lot more cancer than has an exploded nuclear plant over the last 50 years.

Having an excess of any sort of chemical, whether it's CO2 or chemicals in a barrel, is waste and waste means you have wasted energy and you have room to improve thus the market will guarantee you eliminate waste over time as your competitors, in order to cut costs, will eliminate waste and thus dirty factories will go out of business. Setting limits by government means that only dirty factories can afford to implement these things and small businesses can't even get off the ground to make those groundbreaking changes that transform the industry. We can see that with Tesla, it took an established billionaire to even break into the car industry due to oversight, taxes, unions etc.

33

The problem with Capitalism!---Billionaires

by pistolpete in

as imperfect and flawed capitalism is, it has worked better than other forms of economic and political systems-so far.

it’s very simple in “theory.” capitalism is an economic and-or, political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

in other words, keep government out of it as much as possible.

Anony Mous

You claim Bezos' net worth is undeserved.

His money employs 1M people directly and many more indirectly, the majority of those are well paid.

So let's say you take all his assets and equity and money and divide it up, even just amongst his employees, now you have a bunch of people with just under $190k in the bank, barely enough to buy a nice house, but in the process you made those people unemployed. Because his money is not in the bank, his money is tied up in Amazon and if Amazon needs to liquidate assets to pay off some socialist redistribution scheme, it ceases to exist.

Bezos is worth $185B, sure but he doesn't have $185B in the bank, he maybe has $100M in 'cash'. Still nice, but nowhere near enough to simply take and redistribute. ~$62.06B of the value (according to Wikipedia) of Amazon is equity (a form of debt).

Okay you say, then let's raise taxes on Amazon so a part of that revenue goes back. How much you ask? 8%, that's a nice number, it's the sales tax for a lot of states. Okay, but you already collected the sales tax, so this is another tax on what they already paid taxes on. But sure, every $ they make, collect 8c. Amazon currently has a profit margin of just under 2%. That means they'd have to liquidate 6% of the company every year to pay these extra taxes or raise the prices which makes them less competitive and thus makes them go out of business faster.

Every company eventually goes out of business, taxes simply accelerate that process by siphoning off money. And for what really? Back in the day people made 25c/h in 1929 - or $3.84/h adjusted for inflation. People at the lowest ends of the income pool now make $15/h on average. They got 5x richer compared to 100 years ago, basically an American at minimum wage should have a living standard of the average middle-class American - AND THEY DO! What poor folk were able to afford cars and phones back in the day? How is giving more money going to help them in any way?

23

Australian jws/branch warned of possible loss of charity status.

by Holey_Cheeses*King_of_the juice. in

jw
friends

hello all interested persons,.

whilst driving to work this morning listening to the radio, my ears pricked when the presenter began talking about jws.

it was on a programme which airs between 8.00 and 8.30 entitled am, and broadcast on the abc national radio.

Anony Mous

@faded: it was what they did in Russia when they lost their status for much the same reasons.

59

What’s Your Prediction For The Future Of The Covid Virus?

by minimus in

jw
friends

will it ever end??

will a vaccine end this pandemic?

will it suddenly dissipate if joe biden becomes president?

Anony Mous

COVID will be used for the next few years to get government policy pushed through across the globe.

- They're already pushing random and pointless shutdowns of small businesses and churches through SCOTUS. - - They're also pushing more aid through the UN, primarily to China and Iran

- Joe Biden and the Harris administration has said the vaccine, developed in and paid for by the US, will be first distributed outside the US (which means China first, then Germany and then whatever other nations they have to pay off) and the first vaccines have already been shipped away from the US while others, having been paid for the US and created in the EU are suddenly seeing shipping delays, which means the vaccine will have to be deployed there so as not to lose the 'critical' doses. Yes, we can ship -80C samples for just about anything to the US through FedEx, but a few vaccines suddenly runs into issues.

- The vaccine, once deployed into the US, will be deployed first by the Harris administration, as they've made very clear to 'minority' areas first. This means, as we've seen time and again with masks and hospital supplies to NYC and school supplies everywhere and the Clinton's administration's emergency containers in minority cities across the nation, aid to Puerto Rico after disasters and aid to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, they all have the same story some local mayor will get very rich and years later they'll find many corrupt dealings, the distribution numbers will have been found to be cooked up and stockpiles of the product will be found in warehouses that went to waste.

- COVID will continue to be pushed as a reason to allow mail-in voting for everything. You think this election was bad? Don't expect any election to be fair, as soon as the numbers don't go their way, they'll find thousands of mail-in ballots harvested in favor of their candidate which is what we now are finding out happened in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Carson City. Vote harvesting and mail-in voting isn't illegal per se, it's just impossible to verify the results against voting rolls, so you'll be hard pressed to overturn the elections on legal grounds.

61

Is There (Was There Ever) an Anglo American Dual World Power?

by BluesBrother in

if you live in the u s a or the united kingdom, this is how the wt society views your government, your nation :-.

yes, as an ugly, evil terrifying beast !

this is based on the book of revelation chapter 13 , quoted as follows in the revelation climax book.

Anony Mous

Here are the largest trading partners with the US:

1) Mexico

2) China

3) Canada

Here are the largest political allies with the US, the UK isn't even in an extended list:

1) Israel

2) South Korea

3) Phillipines

Japan is above UK in both lists and this goes back decades. The notion of a duality UK/US world power is simply false, there is no evidence for it. Even at the time it was written, the largest world powers after the fall of the USSR - the UK, once again, wasn't even on the list.

USA
Germany
Japan
Russia
India
Saudi Arabia

10

The Security of Following Rules

by minimus in

jw
friends

i think many people feel secure with an abundance of rules.

they enjoy being told what to do, how to think.

it makes them feel safe.

Anony Mous

@Phizzy, sometimes you do need to be a dick. Freedom is an absolute, if you don't want someone to leverage their freedom to be a dick then you are talking about oppressing people that are dicks and you promote a committee of sorts to decide who fits in that category.

The Bill of Rights including the First, Second and other amendments are absolute. There is no room for interpretation in the text, anyone that cannot have a textualist/originalist view of those freedoms established are petty authoritarians.

15

The covid vaccine and microchip fears

by BourneIdentity in

why is there a group so fearful of being tracked?

if you carry around a cell phone, your every movement is being tracked, even if you disable it.

court proceedings have shown google and apple can hand all the data over of all your movement.

Anony Mous

Are there really people that think they are getting microchipped? I'm sure there are, but you won't hear about it on the Internet, because those people don't have Internet for the same fear that everything is bugged and chipped.

What you see is a lot of trolls on the Internet and the old media still doesn't know how to handle it. So they pick up a Qanon story or a flat earth story or a troll about vaccines and run with it as if there are really a large swathe of people that believe this crap. Then they go around asking dumb questions and get troll responses just to confirm their biases, and that's how you get "50% of US citizens believes in flat earth" - no you asked a dumb question and got a troll answer.

This is how the old media and their corporate arms gets Boaty McBoatface and Kellogg's Green Onion cereal and election polls that are off between 10% and 15% and they STILL don't UNDERSTAND the phenomenon and continue with their classic analysis that this is somehow REAL and somehow this is how the average American thinks.

Here is the reality: 22% of the US population has a Twitter account and 98% of them are not active on a regular basis. So if you poll Twitter about a thing, whether it's vaccines or elections or wokeness, you are more likely to get either the extremists or the trolls, you won't get Joe Sixpack who really couldn't give a shit whether you are a crossdresser on Twitter, whether you sexually identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter and whether that is woke, troll or someone who is actually delusional.

30

Height of mountains before and after the flood .

by smiddy3 in

it was stated many years ago in answer to how did the flood cover the top of all the mountains on earth in noah`s day.?.

mount everest ?.

and it was explained away by saying that the mountains before the flood were a lot smaller / lower than the mountains that exist today.. so there was no problem .. when the deluge began with so much volume of water now covering the earth ( water being heavy ) pushed down into the weakest parts of the earth and raised up in other parts of the earth to where we now have higher mountains than existed before the flood of noah`s day.. in other words mount everest didn`t exist at its present height before the flood and neither did any other high mountain that exists today ,the topography all changed with the noachian flood.

Anony Mous

Here is all the water on the globe, compared to the land.

Water COVERS 70% of the earth, and that's about its maximum, even if you turned every mountain upside down and dumped it in the Mariana's trench, and did the same to all the mountains the sea level would rise basically to cover most flatlands.

In comparison, an average mountain (eg. Mount Fuji) is ~24 cubic miles, there are about 1M mountains. 24M cubic miles. There are 332.5 cubic miles of water. So about 10% of the total volume of water, and that is ALL the water, in the earth, on the earth, over the earth. So if you brought it ALL up and made the atmosphere void of water, you may be able to cover most of the land, barely, so most people would get their feet wet.

To kind of demonstrate how small the mountains really are, if Earth were shrunk to bowling-ball width, the earth as is currently would feel like P1000 - Super fine - sandpaper!

12

Trade union membership

by Panka in

hi, i am currently supporting a jw colleague with some work problems and have advised them to join our trade union for official support.

am i right that jehovah 's witnesses can't vote or contribute to political funds, but they can join trade unions?

thanking anyone who can help me understand.

Anony Mous

Interesting, in Europe you are not allowed to join a trade union as a JW because they are overtly political (basically trade unions, as in the US, are just extensions of the most liberal political parties).

Just enter the topic on Watchtower Library and plenty of articles denigrate trade unions and 'experiences' and 'life stories' of people that parallel the act of joining a trade union with political activities.

I never had the issue coming in the US (why would anyone want to join a trade union in the US after all), but in Europe it is definitely frowned upon.

37

We in the UK are dealing with COVID all wrong

by LoveUniHateExams in

yeah, so boris johnson has plunged the whole of the uk back into a second lockdown.

kids are still going to school (thank goodness!

) but this second lockdown is ruining the economy and killing small businesses.. the first lockdown was forgivable because, at the time, nobody knew what we were dealing with.. but now, we know more and more about covid-19.. it is lethal to elderly people (the average age of deaths with covid in the uk is 82 years - the average age of deaths without covid in the uk is 81 years).. it is also lethal to obese people and people with diabetes.. i'd imagine hiv+ people are another vulnerable group.. but to everyone else, catching covid is fairly similar to catching the flu.

Anony Mous

So if it's Boris' fault, what about Belgium, is that also Boris' fault? How about Spain, Germany, Italy, all seeing second waves and overflowing hospitals? How come the US hasn't seen ANY hospitals overflow? How come Belgium has had to ration healthcare for literally months on end now. And it's not like healthcare rationing in Europe is uncommon, Italy has yearly rations before the pandemic even began.

There are certain things nobody can fix in 2 or 4 or even 10 years, the UK has had a poorly run health system for nearly a century. As does Europe in general, when you leave hospitals up to government spending, you leave it up to government budgets and associated budget cuts.

Free healthcare for everyone means no healthcare for anyone.

And yes, I've lived there, I am European, I grew up poor (true JW) in Europe so I've had to deal with government hospitals and rationed healthcare systems all my life.