Society's Ills - A study in the perceived inequalities between the "haves" and the "have nots" - The Bear and Badger

hunk

One of the main policies driving western inequality, fuelling the 1%.

acemuzzy

Interesting. I do not understand these buyback things. But they sound evil, obviously.

acemuzzy

Ah ok it's rebuying from the open market. I still don't quite get it tho...

If a company is worth $1bn and has 1m shares, and you do a 10% buy-back, don't you need to spend $100m, and hence the company is only worth $900m cos it has less cash, so the value per share is exactly the same? Though I guess it's kinda different if you're looking at EPS and ignoring the balance sheet. Fuckin economics sucks.

hunk

It's stock market magic (suppy and demand). You buy your stock back en masse dirt cheap (eg during a crash/recession) and suddenly the price goes up and the stock is worth more. What was once worth pennies in a recession suddenly quadruples in value. It's like a tree growing money if you 'gamble' correctly. During a crash this mechanic can be used as damage control but when times are good you can seriously jack up the value of your shares.

To be able to do this you obviously need access to a lot of capital. Only the 1% has that ability so this means over time the rich get richer thus structural inequality keeps on growing. And with a govenment that is complicit (conservatives, the right) with the scheme, above outcome is inevitable.

acemuzzy

Surely it's the company that needs the funds, not the 1% (which is people)? Still feels like people putting value on the shares are doing their maths wrong, but that's Wall Street for ya

cockbeard

Tax wealth harder than income, also huge corporation tax (any company with 120+ employees), then disallow dividend payouts for publicly traded companies that received government help/subsidies

It really is that simple

hunk

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future

Remember how I always go on about society repeating its mistakes and everyone's walking blind in circles? That's because everything in history is cyclical. Baby booms, prosperity, decline, strife, revolution. Record history, build a database, let AI have a go at your datasets to make sense of it all and hope you can identify relevant factors to break the cycle of violent revolution.

Very clever, very necessary.

Minnesänger

Look, if we didn’t want history to be cyclical then we shouldn’t have made clocks round.

#200IQ #thoughtleader

SpaceGazelle

I'm a bit torn over Hong Kong. There's such a massive social divide and there's been open resentment between the locals and the rich for years. It's apartheid in all but name and when I went over to see my brother I was genuinely shocked at the physical and emotional separation of the two groups.

To say they're annoyed by the rich kids protesting is understating it a tad, although I suspect they're largely keeping quiet in the hope they all get shot.

Minnesänger

Hong Kong is really, really, really fucking complex. I’ve no issue with people who know the area and know the history and know the current issues supporting the protests. But anyone who is China = bad, Hong Kong = good, is a racist. And yes, I mean that, a straight up racist. If shows someone is happy to shit on China based on little knowledge or little understanding of what the underlying issues actually are, they don’t know what is actually happening in Hong Kong and they are happy to use the strife and suffering of others to further their own agendas.

It’s brutal and I’m still trying to work my way through it. And while some people here might think I’m biased and too pro-China...my wife refuses to talk about Hong Kong anymore with me because I’m too anti-China...so yeah.

Minnesänger

You can tell someone is racist when they pronounce Xi Jinping and any other X word in Chinese as Zhee or Gee - it highlights that they only get their info from other English language sources and don’t make any effort to even learn the fucking basics that people learn in month one dual lingo studies.

Minnesänger

And if anyone thinks I’m fence sitting, Blizzard fucking suck.

acemuzzy

Yes we should all spend one month on all the languages

Tempy

I'm on a few leftist Warhammer places (read: zoomer havens) where they actively support China in a very "Tankie" way and they are anti-Hong Kong due to... imperialist reasons? It's wild, these yank kids sat spouting off about politics they are determined they understand.

Minnesänger

acemuzzy wrote:

Yes we should all spend one month on all the languages

It’d take an hour at most (like, literally day one of my studies). The fact that everyone mispronounces the word in the same way tells me this is a pronunciation that comes from other people copying other people’s videos in the same subjects (namely English language press copying English language press) while trying to present themselves as having their own thoughts on the subject.

Go down to fucking China town and ask someone.

Minnesänger

If English language press routinely mispronounced the name of an EU leader you wouldn’t be annoyed? Especially if they all made an identical mistake implying they were just watching someone else’s vids?

g.man

I presume that Xi should actually be pronounced eleven?

Minnesänger

She, with long “e”.

Yossarian

We all pronounce words from different languages differently to how a native speaker would, not just all English speakers, everyone in the world. There’s probably not a single person in the country who doesn’t know that in French, you don’t pronounce the S in Paris, that doesn’t mean that if you do pronounce it in a conversation with an English speaker you’re racist, or even wrong, that’s the English pronunciation of the word.

hunk

Aye, HK is complex with a weird colonial history; opium wars and all
HK people are anxious of China because they fear mainland rule. I hope China does not overreact and comes to the realisation they should ease the populace's fears. Diplomacy is of the utmost importance.

Paul the sparky

Some of the craziest shit I've read on here. Great work Xinty.

Minnesänger

It’s the wrong pronunciation and if it’s consistent it shows you’re only learning from the same people who make the same mispronunciation.

This is not an instance of a language not containing a certain phonetic (for example, I can 100% understand native English learners struggling with 粗 which is kind of like tsu but not quite...it’s not a natural sound in English) but this is not that case.

It’s almost as if the staff of these newspapers is homogeneous, filled with the same middle class people who look down on others.

It’s a mistake I’ve seen a million times. It shows no one does basic fact checking. It’s lazy and racist.

Minnesänger

Paul the sparky wrote:

Some of the craziest shit I've read on here. Great work Xinty.

I felt the same about you earlier when you decided you might collectively punish service staff because you disagreed with Tempy’s tone.

Minnesänger

And if anyone here mispronounces Xi I’m not calling them racist. But if you’re part of a news organisation that writes or speaks that name dozens of times a day and still can’t find 20 minutes to check it...

Paul the sparky

I wasn't even serious there, that much was pretty obvious, but crack on anyway.

Minnesänger

Paul the sparky wrote:

I wasn't even serious there, that much was pretty obvious, but crack on anyway.

Coolio. Then I’ll retract the statement. I’ll leave the original up so people don’t get confused when reading it back. But if it was unintentional and not intended as a serious statement then I withdraw any anger towards it.

acemuzzy

Minnesänger wrote:

You can tell someone is racist when they pronounce Xi Jinping and any other X word in Chinese as Zhee or Gee

Minnesänger wrote:

And if anyone here mispronounces Xi I’m not calling them racist.

I'm so confused rn. But maybe I pronounce it right anyway :partyhat:

Minnesänger

Yes, I’ll throw my hands up on bad language there. I meant reporters.

Any issues beyond that?

Lord_Griff

Minnesänger wrote:

And if anyone here mispronounces Xi I’m not calling them racist. But if you’re part of a news organisation that writes or speaks that name dozens of times a day and still can’t find 20 minutes to check it...

I am anti cultural appropriation... Bonnet de douche Cinty.

acemuzzy

Minnesänger wrote:

Any issues beyond that?

Not for now :-D

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