Capitalism Should Serve Humanity, Not Vice-Versa

We created corporations to serve humanity, not vice-versa.

First of all, a note.  Some of you have e-mailed me wondering whether I am still alive.  Well, I am, just hiding somewhere in the Poconos, kayaking and watching the world slowly lose its mind.  I have been relaxing.  Or maybe, finally, I have run out of things to say.

All I can say is, the next five months will get very, very ugly.  If Trump loses the election, expect a repeat of January 6th, along with some random yahoos shooting their neighbors while crying "Civil War!" (over nothing).  Eventually it will all settle down, I think, but I hope to be out of the country when that happens.

But getting back to topic.

I read a lot online from younger people (or perhaps merely Russian trolls) that we are in "late stage capitalism" and that capitalism is dead or at least bad or evil.  This is an interesting argument, but a lot of it falls along the lines of, "My parents, after working 30 years, have a nice house, cars, and a retirement plan.  I'm 25 and have nothing!  That's not fair!"

As I noted before, until I was about 30, my net worth was negative.  Within a decade, I became a millionaire.  And yes, I had to pay back about $38,000 in student loans, which would be the equivalent of $80,000 today.

But I get where they are coming from.  They were raised in the suburbs, had a gaming computer and a cool car in high school.  They partied in college and lived in "luxury student housing" (something that did not exist during my 14-year tenure in college) and put it all on student loans.  Now they graduate and are released from their comfortable bubble and realize, for the first time, that life is a struggle for most of us - and that sucks.  But if you apply yourself, in a scant decade or two, you could be fairly well off.

But you do have to apply yourself.

However, there is another angle to this other than spoiled middle-class kids realizing for the first time what the real world is all about.  We do have a marked increase in wealth disparity, with wages for average workers being stagnant while the number of Billionaires (which is an obscene amount of money) increases.

In a way, this is nothing new - we've gone through these cycles in the past where a few people managed to accumulate huge amounts of wealth to the point they could control the economy and the government.  The "Trusts" of the turn of the Century could make or break Presidents and crash the economy at will.   The Great Depression of the 1930s saw this whole model break down.  When a few people have all the cash, well, no one can buy anything and the whole economy goes to pot.

So our Democratic government institutes reforms - creating the income tax, for example, or the gifts and estates tax (which rich Republicans want abolished, of course, calling it a "death tax") which put an end to, or at least attenuated, dynastic wealth.  The landscape of America is littered with the remnants of white elephant mansions and estates that heirs could no longer keep, much as the "great homes" of Great Britain are either now bed-and-breakfasts or owned by the National Trust or some such.

Mark's Father bought such a mansion, in tony Westchester County after the war, for very little money.  He turned the estate into a retirement home and ran it for a couple of decades before selling out when the government got antsy about fire hazards and wanted him to install a sprinkler system in that old wooden firetrap.  Today, the estate is home to some rich whiz-kid Wall Street type - the circle of life being completed.

Kennedy lowered marginal tax rates from an astounding 70% in the 1950's and the GOP has successfully hammered the Estate tax - to the point where once again, it is possible to acquire dynastic wealth.  And people have.  And you know their names - the "tech bros" who were once hailed as geniuses but today, we are realizing that they were just people in the right place at the right time who got incredibly lucky.   Bill Gates, for example, wasn't some computer visionary, just a guy sitting in the right chair when IBM made the blunder of the Century and poured a billion dollars into his lap.  IBM no longer makes computers as a result.  Gary Kildall faded into history as a result as well - he could have been Microsoft, but for one bad decision.

Musk, Bezos, Zuck - the story is the same.  Out there somewhere is a guy who had a similar idea or, in fact, the same idea or in fact, came up with the idea, only to have it taken away.  We laud the winners as visionaries, but Musk didn't invent the electric car, Zuck didn't invent social networking, and Bezos didn't invent selling cheap shit from China online.  Rather, they floated to the top of this septic tank we call capitalism, and some folks, down in the muck, look up to them or even worship them, convinced that if they are beholden enough to the wealthy, they too will someday be Billionaires.  It all will trickle down, somehow!

Or, as one wag put, it, your average Trump supporter wants tax cuts for the rich, even though they are poor, or as they like to view it, temporarily disadvantaged billionaires.  During the last recession of 2008 (when I started this blog) another wag coined the phrase, "There are idiots, look around you!"  And today, it seems like the number of idiots is expanding exponentially.  I mean, who else would buy a "Cyber truck"?  Even the name is embarrassing - something a Junior High student would think is cool as they scribbled it in their notebook.  That and "Giga" - tech terms that the users don't even understand but like to use to sound "with it."  It is Goddamn embarrassing is what it is.

But what about the coming recession?  Oh yea, that - the one that is being engineered by the Billionaires to turn the election.  After Covid, people were finding they could work from home or "name their salary" and we can't have that, now, can we?   So one tech company after another announces layoffs to put the fear of God once again into employees.  No collusion here, my friend!

At the same time, they put up listings for "ghost jobs" - which may account for as much as half the listings online.  An unemployed coder sends out hundreds of resumes and wonders why no one responds.  When he finally gets a low-ball offer, he swallows his bile and takes it.  Neat trick, eh?  Get people to think they are "lucky" to have a job and you can control them for life.

This all dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when unemployment peaked at over 10% (during the early years of the Reagan era).  It was "Morning in America" and we all got back to work - at lower wages, of course, thanks to union busting and two-tier contracts.  I was a Teamster at the time, making $8 an hour and thinking I was lucky to get that.  Meanwhile, the old timers, doing the same job (but working less hard) were making $16.  And over at Fed Ex, if you were willing to go into debt to buy your own truck, you could be a captive "contractor" and "independent" businessman with only one customer, of course.  You can see how the road map was laid out even back then.

It took 40 years - forty years of political parties catering to job paranoia and touting themselves as "job creators" - to get where we are today, where we have been conditioned to beg for crumbs at the tables of Billionaires - the lucky ones getting to work like dogs for a pittance.  Or so it seems to many people, anyway.

So maybe the pendulum swings the other way - and people will turn away from the lies and empty promises of the rich.  Maybe, finally, people will realize that cutting taxes for the very wealthy just benefits the very wealthy - and that accumulating such wealth stagnates the economy.  Maybe they will realize that promises to "protect social security" made by the very people promising to abolish it are actual lies.  Maybe, but I doubt it.

Of course, this does not mean a Harris Presidency would usher in an era of Shangra-La.  Stronger unions and higher wages will mean higher prices for domestically produced goods.  Higher taxes will mean a lower standard of living for the wealthy.  But then again, it won't quite be the end of the world or the "End of America" as panicky Fox News hosts posit.  The pendulum does swing both ways.

I suspect that, by November of this year, the manufactured recession will kick in, and if Harris wins, she will, like Obama before her, be handed the smoldering ruins of an economy, beaten and bloodied by Wall Street stock manipulators.  And like Obama before her, she will have to slowly bring the economy back, one painful step at a time.  And meanwhile, Republicans will sit on the sidelines and complain about the "Harris economy" that is so awful, even as it shows slow but traditional levels of growth, consistently, for eight years, much as it did during Obama's tenure.

But that is mere speculation at this point.  Between now and January, things are going to get very ugly.  And if Trump wins, well, keep in mind that means there is a very good chance that "JD" Vance will be President, as Trump is quite old and in very bad health, both physically and mentally.

The world has lost its mind, it seems.

Why The Walmart App Sucks - It's Supposed To! (Why All Apps Suck!)

The smartphone and its apps were supposed to make our lives easier, but they make them harder.  This is by design and part of the "Dead Internet."

When Walmart introduced its "app" it was pretty cool.  You could create a shopping list, go to the store, and use the store map feature to find the products you wanted in the store.  The app would also tell you whether the item was in stock and how many were left in inventory.  This was the same data Walmart "associates" had access to, with their little scanner devices that they are constantly leaving in the restroom or on a random shelf somewhere.

It was great.  You could go to Walmart, buy what you wanted very quickly, and leave.  And we can't have that, can we?

So, over time, the "app" morphed into one big online ad.  The "shop in store" feature became harder and harder to find until you could not find it at all.  Or if you did get to that part of the "app" it would constantly go back to online ordering, or ship-to-store, or store pickup.  For some reason, Walmart would rather we order through our phones and then sit in our cars like friggin' Marie Antoinette, while servants load our groceries in the back.  This is saving Walmart money?

No, it isn't.  But it is making them money.  You see, Walmart doesn't make money from me - I am a loss-leader half the time, buying store-brand "woven wheat" crackers for $1.99 a box instead of Nabisco-branded Triscuits (the electric biscuit) for $4.99 a box.  They want shoppers to shop - to wander around the aisles and snatch at whatever colorful and fun thing seems appealing.  They really hope you shop with hungry and fussy children or that you have low blood sugar yourself.

Lately, the gag is to get you to join "Walmart Plus" - a membership club like Sam's club or Amazon Prime.  And the "App" prompts you to do this and it is very easy to hit "accept" by accident and find your credit card charged for the membership.  And just when you think it is safe, the pop-up asking you to join shows up again.  For this reason, I uninstalled the Walmart app from my phone.  It no longer is of any use to me, as I am not interested in "shopping" on my phone or having people stuff groceries in the back of my car.  And of course, I am in the minority on this - at least for the time being.

The same could be said to be true for most "apps" - they are worthless from the consumer point of view, but valuable to the app owner.  Every website wants you to install their "app" so they can track your movements online, tell advertisers what you looked at, and so forth and so on.  Oh, and of course, the "app" is a neat work-around over ad-blockers, which work only with browsers.

All of this is part-and-parcel of what some are calling the "Dead Internet" - the slow decline in quality of online content while at the same time it is smothered in ads and crass commercialism.  It sounds alarmist at first, until you realize there is much precedent.  The original dial-up Internet with is "usegroup" discussion groups (in ASCII text) was an online free-for-all.  That is, until the SPAMMERs took over.  One day you are having a nice discussion on alt-fans-startreck and the next day, there are literally thousands of ads about "Russian women want to meet YOU!" or "Win big at the online casino!" or other obvious scambait.  This effectively shut down these discussion groups, which transitioned to website-based discussion groups, sponsored by advertisers.

The same happened to television.  You watch old shows from the 1950s and 1960s and the show time of a 30-minute sitcom was at least 22 minutes.  By the 1980s, these reruns were edited and chopped and sped up so the ratio of ads to content was 1:1.  15 minutes of ads for every 15 minutes of show.  It sucked and people stopped watching - particularly when streaming became a thing.  But you already know what happened to (and is happening) to streaming.  Once again, they boil us like frogs.

I suppose you could say this in inevitable - part and parcel of human nature.  We endure frog-boiling because of the way our brains are wired.  "It's not so bad once you're up!  Look at the view!" as one of the Monty Python gang once quipped while being crucified in Life of Brian.  Eventually, human beings enshitify everything they touch.

Some argue that government intervention is the answer.  Public Broadcasting!  The BBC!  CBC!  Neutral parties who have no need for commercialization.  But of course, the powers that run commercial media will have none of that. PBS now has "sponsorship" advertisements, and even though their share of the Federal budget is infinitesimal, the GOP regularly rails against it and calls for defunding it - not to save money, but to squelch its influence on media in America.  And yes, the same conservative voices have called for the defunding of the BBC in the UK and CBC in Canada - again, not to save money, but to bolster their own, private networks.

Market mavens would argue that from the Economist's point of view, the fact that people tolerate this dreck is proof the system works.  After all, Walmart would go out of business if people stopped shopping there.  Lame-ass "news" sites would fold if people stopped clicking on them.  And to some extent, this is true - but belied by the legions of people who complain about how crappy Twitter has become - while Tweeting their grievances  on that very site.  It is akin to young people bitching about Ticketmaster charging them a $50 access fee to buy tickets to Battle of the Rap Bands. They still buy the tickets and go. It is only when they can't sell out the arena that stars will pull back on pricing, or cancel a show claiming a terror threat or sore throat.

With Walmart, the problem is acute.  There is no "better, lower-priced" alternative that is available in all 50 States.  I know some people who refuse to shop at Walmart for political reasons, but shop at Publix instead, whose major shareholder was behind the January 6 insurrection or some such.  Same shit, different day, but with higher prices.  I have another friend who refuses to camp at an Army Corps park because they "don't believe in dams" which I cannot parse.  Are they saying if they don't see them they won't exist?  Or by paying $11 a night to stay there, they somehow are enabling the dam to exist - a dam built in 1939?  I just don't "get" people sometimes.

Of course the biggest example of "Dead Internet" is how Google went, overnight, from the world's greatest search engine and database, to a shitty, AI-drive ad platform.  No matter what I am searching for, Google assumes I want to buy something.  But maybe this is just an indicia of an overall trend. Today we are all selling ourselves, as "influencers" or OnlyFans stars.  Everyone has a side-gig or "hustle' it seems, and it seems so terribly boring and stupid, to me at least.

But I "get" enshittification.  It is the tendency of humanity to drag everything to the lowest possible level.  Maybe it is a law of nature, like Boyle's law about gas expanding to fill a vessel, or how water seeks its lowest level.  Maybe this is inevitable - unless we unplug entirely.

A Condo Tale

The following story is true.  The names have been changed to protect the obscenely guilty.  If you find a parallel to some political figure or party, that's because a condo association is a government in miniature - with all the baggage that goes with it.

Once upon a time, there was an apartment complex.  It was a nice apartment complex, but the owners were getting older and wanted to sell out.  So they sold to a developer who decided to sell off bits of the complex as "condos" as part of a condominium project.  The idea was, that each apartment dweller would own their own condo, and thus save money by not paying a landlord - and share in the increased equity of the property.

Of course, to pay for maintenance and upkeep, they would have to assign a "condo fee" - a form of taxation, basically - on each condo owner, based on the size of their condo unit.  This fee paid for lawn mowing and cleaning and basic repairs, with a surplus accumulating to cover long-term repairs, such as roofing, windows, piping, and other infrastructure.

It went well at first.  The units sold quickly at reasonable prices and the condo fee was low - kept low by the developer who wanted to make the units more attractive to buyers.  Once the developer sold out, the residents elected their own condo board and then the real fun began.

Some members ran for the board based on "social issues" - whether a resident could put a door mat in front of their outside door, or whether an owner could put Halloween decorations in their window, or what breeds of dogs could be kept in the units, or whether owners could fly an American flag from their balcony or whatever.  For many resident owners, these seemed like the burning issues of the day.

Some board members, however, took the job a little more seriously and realized the developer didn't leave them with  much money in the reserve fund.  There was no money to pay for "rainy day" repairs or even expected repairs - such as new roofs which would be needed within a decade or so.  They argued the board should increase the condo fee to cover these expenses, but as you might imagine, the condo owners shouted this down.  "Lower my taxes condo fee!" they said.  So the board did - creating even more of a deficit for the association to dig itself out of.

One of the board members had a swell idea.  They were paying a "management company" to manage the property and that cost a lot of money.  They could save money by switching to a new management company, one conveniently owned by and founded by, the said same board member (and condo President), explicitly for this purpose.  Some argued this was a conflict of interest - and it was, a blatant one.

A year or two later, the vaunted "savings" failed to materialize and the board had to vote for an increase in the condo fee.  The board member who owned the management company offered one excuse after another as to why costs suddenly skyrocketed.  But by then, he had stuffed the board with cronies of his, who all voted for the increases, over the objections of the condo owners.

And yes, bizarre as this may seem, this actually happened.

But how?  Well, most condo owners were busy with their jobs and careers.  Condo meetings were long and boring, except for the regular occurrences of shouting matches over "social issues" such as door mats.  One condo owner put six doormats stacked atop one another, in front of his door to protest.  That'll show them!  Most condo owners wanted nothing to do with the board.  "Politics, ugh!" they said, as they sighed and paid their condo fee.

The association still had a reserve fund, of course, but it wasn't enough to cover anticipated expenses in the future.  One board member came up with a clever idea.  Why not tap into the reserve fund to cover standard operating expenses?  That way, they could lower the condo fee while still paying the Board President's "management company."  Lower condo fees meant higher resale prices on the units, as they were more attractive and affordable to buyers.  The fellow who proposed this idea owned no fewer than 15 units, which he put on the market the day the condo fee was lowered.

Sales boomed and prices skyrocketed.  The overall real estate market was in a bubble at the time, but cutting the condo fee meant that buyers could afford to pay more per month in mortgage costs, based on their fixed monthly income.  Prices nearly doubled overnight and within two years, doubled again.

A developer approached the board with a generous offer to buy the entire development and tear it down and rebuild as medium-rise condos.  The board turned the offer down, summarily.  The President of the association - whose company was managing the property - passed a resolution that no offer would be considered by the board unless it was twice the offer made by the developer.  This essentially shut down any further offers.

Of course, the reserve fund was depleted within two years and the condo fees had to be raised again - by a new, and rapidly unpopular board.  The new board, faced with hard choices, raised the condo fee, put off needed maintenance on basic infrastructure, and fired the "management company" owned by the now-former President of the association.  The ex-President of the association went on social media to complain that the new board was corrupt and inept and that things were so much better when he was running things and his management company (not defunct, as it had only one client) was in charge.

The board tried to refill the reserve fund, but without raising fees dramatically, it was like filling a swimming pool with an eyedropper.  It took only a few years to deplete the fund, it would take a decade or more to refill it.  So the board did what it could do, crossed their fingers, and kicked the can down the road a bit further.

Then tragedy struck.  Aging concrete and exposed rebar started to crumble, causing the foundation on one building to settle and a wall to crack and partially collapse.  The buildings were beyond their anticipated design life at this point.  Emergency meetings were held.  Residents of the affected buildings had to be relocated to hotel rooms.  Engineering studies were performed and the ugly truth came out - the entire complex was built on reclaimed land and was settling slowly.  Expensive "reparging" of the foundations would be necessary to keep the place from collapsing over time.  If the reserve fund had been properly maintained and added to, the Board could have paid for this with no increase in the condo fee.

So a special assessment was ordered - varying from $10,000 to $40,000 per unit owner.  There was outrage, of course.  One owner asked why the government couldn't pay for this.  Another suggested the Board borrow the money, but banks were not too willing to lend to a sketchy and indecisive condo board.  The special assessment was passed - after much hue and cry and hair-pulling.  And a new board was elected, mostly because the old board was tired of the abuse and even death threats they received from other unit owners.

Of course, with the special assessments, prices plummeted, which made it even harder for some unit owners to refinance and take cash-out to pay the assessments.  More assessments followed down the road, as more and more "deferred maintenance" reared its ugly head.  Many started to wonder why the board turned down the redevelopment offer when they had the chance.  Too little, too late, the condo owners started to think about selling out - but there were no buyers!

* * *

Like I said, the story is true, but I changed some minor details to protect the guilty.  This shit actually happened more than once.  Like any government, the condo association gets distracted with "social issues" which the voters (condo owners) think are paramount, even as long-term liabilities (Social Security, Medicare, Roofing Fund) are gutted or under-funded.  Board members - or Congressmen or even Presidents or Supreme Court Justices - engage in self-dealing to enrich themselves by pitiful amounts, at great expense to the taxpayer or condo owner.  Same shit, different day.

We've owned three condos and seen some of these sort of things going on.  A common thread is that the owners want low fees at the expense of long-term security.  Investors who want to "flip" a condo know this is bad for long-term owners.  Long-term owners just don't realize how expensive deferred maintenance can be - or how deadly.

In Florida, there are laws in place that mandate how much of a reserve a condominium must have to cover long-term expenses.  When we lived there, the law was in place but there was little in the way of an enforcement mechanism.  In January 2025, there will be an enforcement mechanism in place, apparently, and condo associations are scrambling to fund reserves as well as pay skyrocketing insurance costs.  Many condo owners are discovering that, even with a "paid-for" condo, they can't afford to live there.  Many units are on the market and retirees are starting to leave Florida.

My experiences with condos was illuminating.  It illustrated to me how human nature is an inexorable force that tends to screw up even a wet dream.  This is why we can't have nice things.  People, in the aggregate, are assholes - narcissistic, greedy, selfish, and foolish.  Not "others" mind you, but you and me.  We all want lower taxes and special insider deals - it is a survival instinct.  Let the other guy pay - particularly if the "other guy" is either yet unborn or too young to vote.

There is hope, however.  People do, on occasion, figure things out and vote for responsible people to do responsible things.  Problem is, we have very short memories.  Obama spends nearly a decade slowly digging us out of a hole that Bush dug.  But after a few years, people say, "Gee, remember the good old days when your house doubled in value in the space of a few years?  Let's go back to that!"  And they conveniently forget the last days of the Bush administration, when it all went so horribly wrong.  Or if they do remember it, the claim it was on Obama's watch and all his fault.

Sadly, our four-year election cycle works this way.  You can get elected to office and burn the White House down - handing the keys to the smoldering wrecking to your successor.  "Things were so much better when I was President!" you can say - neglecting to mention how you soaked the place in gasoline and lit the match as you left.  "Look at the new guy!  Presiding over a burned-down house!"  And after he spends years painstakingly putting it back together, one board and nail at a time, you can take credit for that as well.

And that's politics in America, 2024, whether at your Condo Association, School Board, Town Hall, County Government, State House, Congress, or the White House.

Me?  I'm voting for the guy who is outlawing door mats.  That's the burning issue of the day!