Creating a 21st Century Feudal System and Finding New Information for Free BTC
Level 1 - NGMI
Welcome Avatar! If you’ve been paying attention online, the White House and other government organizations are slowly moving goal posts. In particular they are now changing the definition of a recession (Source).
“The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” - Emphasis BTB.
This is a clear positioning example. Attempting to change the “official” scorekeeper and get them to suggest we’re not in a recession. This is a psychology operation to try and tame the masses.
Part 1 - Creating the 21st Century Feudal System
Convince You That You Are Doing Better Than Most
While definitions continue to change, the other goal is to convince people that they are doing better. This is a heavily, heavily, heavily underestimated part of propaganda. If we look at things like job growth and income, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Job Growth: If you are living paycheck to paycheck and want to try and save some money for a rainy day, this means you could acquire a second job. Since the growth of jobs is tied to “employees” you could work two jobs and that would register as “growth”. If the typical person has to work 40 hours a week to survive and that goes up to 60-80 hours a week, that is not job growth in our opinion since it reduces your quality of life. Going from working 40 hours a week to 60 hours a week and affording the same stuff is pretty painful. If we can agree that 20% is the correct inflation number then it means 48 hour work weeks = 40 hour work weeks from about 18 months ago.
Income Comparison - Businesses “Fail”: This is another one that seems to fly under the radar. The claim for income by household is primarily tied to W-2s and we’re told that most businesses “fail” to make a profit. This is where it gets really messed up.
Take a basic LLC that owns some property. For anyone who has owned rentals before, you know that your accountant will encourage you to take as many legal deductions as possible. Since no one really audits them closely you can be cash flow positive and register “Zero income” for the year. Depreciation and some random “expenses” that drag your profits to zero. As long as you have receipts it is next to impossible to prove that the LLC is profitable. Read that closely. As long as you have proof you will be entirely fine.
Financial Data is Largely a Mess
As you move up the socio-economic ladder, you quickly realize that there is no way to calculate income brackets correctly: 1) have you ever paid cash for remodeling/construction work? Be honest, 2) do you think people are using illegal immigrants to do work under the table? 3) how do you track earnings of the massive illegal market - drugs etc. and 4) how many “restaurants” are really restaurants and are not money laundering locations? For the last one, we’d wager that you have at least seen 5-10 restaurants that are always empty but seem to be around for 10+ years despite having no foot traffic. Again. No one really knows.
Basic Premise: One of the major rules of running a business is you want to lower your tax burden as much as possible. This means you find as many line items as possible to add to the expense line. Therefore, since humans want to minimize taxes, you can bet everything you have the a HUGE number of private businesses have exaggerated expense lines. If you don’t have exaggerated expense lines, it means you’re too big to hide and likely move to a tax haven where it is legal to pay a low or near zero tax rate.
Create a False Sense of High Status
Now you’re probably wondering, why is the government reliant on W-2 items? Why don’t they try to figure out the real numbers and include small businesses etc. Well this is because they know that humans are status chasing monkeys and always “compare” themselves to one another. If you want proof of this just go on Instagram. There is an absolute obsession with proving “high status”. Be it cars, boats, homes, vacation destinations etc.
Since they know people are status monkeys, one way to make the masses feel better about themselves is by *lowering* all of the income bands as much as possible. This is why the masses believe “doctors and lawyers are rich” - they have a large W-2 (hint, unless they are partners/owners of their own biz they are rarely saving a ton).
Why Does This Work?
The Goal is to Make the Masses Content.
Please remember that before reading the step by step explainer. The goal is to keep the masses content so there is no civil war or unruly activity. We’re already at a point where crime is up significantly in major cities (NYC, SF, Miami, LA etc.). This is terrible for the ruling elite. The goal of the ruling elite is to placate people and make them feel better about their lives.
Make all bad news seem less bad - recession change in definition. Change in what is included in the CPI basket.
Make All Income Data Look Better: If $60,000 is the median or $80,000 it doesn’t matter. Just *delete* the part about how many hours were worked. If the median is $60K but the person works 10 hours more than 10 years ago. That is not a negative it is just “the median”
Encourage Employee Focus: By getting people to focus on income and W-2s, you avoid research into people earning from small businesses. This removes the higher earning people from the “income pool” and pushes the data downward making people feel better about their status in society
Don’t Dissect Companies: Many companies are set up as shells. Include all of these profit losing or break-even entities into the “business income” calculation to understate the success rate of individuals
Goal Achieved: At this point people compare themselves to other employees. No one wants to take the “risk” of starting a business and by cutting the data correctly most will believe they are doing “better than most”. This is a perfect cocktail to inspire mediocrity for the next 40 years.
Slave Class Achieved! At this point you are pretty much good to go. The only way to lose in this game is if the entire system collapses. This would be through an extreme event such as hyper-inflation or a sovereign debt crisis. Looking into the history books, you can really crank down the standard of living without people noticing. You can give them 50 year mortgages, 15 year car payments etc. This allows the typical person to bleed out over a long period of time. The debt cycle can last many years *if* the government can convince the masses that things are going well.
That of course is the Trillion Dollar Question. Will double digit inflation + loss of faith in politicians be enough to start another Civil Rise. Or is there enough meat on the bone to continue reducing the quality of life.
After all, we went from one working person = enough to support a family of four to…. two people working full time = might not support of a family unless you buy a pet dog/cat!
We get to sit back, watch and see!
Part 2 - Finding New Information
On a completely separate topic, we’re going to run a couple of competitions on twitter for BTC payouts. Instead of doing Memes we’re going to crowd source observations.
If they get up voted heavily, we’ll take the top four or so and run a poll on who found the most interesting observation. (Three winners since twitter limits to four for a poll, last place gets nothing!)
In a mini epiphany, we realized a large amount of value online is derived by someone making an observation that others have started to notice as well. For example, everyone knows the joke about “going outside costing $100” if you live in a major city.
We ran one of them last week and we’ll allow them to be included in the competition which we’ll run on Tuesday. Here are some interesting ones.
Balding and Dry Skin: “oil production higher DHT (linked to baldness and is what finasteride suppresses) apparently can cause you to produce extra sebum - the oil gunk on your skin that comes out of hair follicles” - (source)
Clean Skin and Psychopathy? “Everyone I know with perfectly clear skin acne-wise tends to be mentally unwell. Whether its ending up in the psych ward, being prescribed several medications, having severe "episodes", they all just tend to be borderline insane.” - Source
Nissan Terrible Drivers? “The worst drivers all prefer Nissan” Source
Annoyed By Eating Habits? “People who are annoyed by loud chewing noises = good with money” (Source) - Pretty sure this is well known so might have to be thrown out
Polarity of Honor Students: “honor roll bumper stickers = mom or dad is going to blow twice the legal limit.” (Source)
Internal Clock and Wealth: “The most successful people I know always know what time it is Watch or no watch, clock or no clock Their internal clock is basically infallible Probably why they waste none of it” (Source)
Rose Gold Red Flag? “Every woman I know who prefers rose gold jewelry to gold or silver is crazy” (Source)
Steel Watches? “The most reliable men wear steel wristwatches. The worst npcs wear apple watches “ (Source)
White Cars and Volkswagons? “Hot girls drive white cars” Source alternatively “women driving Volkswagen Jetta's are (or very often tend to be) quite good looking... I didn't believe it at the time until I tested this and saw only one counter example in a year.” Source
Quoting Experience = Unskilled? “The least productive employees are the most likely to quote their experience. "Trust me I've been doing this for 30 years." - So you've been incompetent for a long time?” (Source)
Sweet Caroline NPC Mating Call? “People who aren't totally disgusted by people singing "sweet Caroline" and even join in and do the "d' d' duh!" and (worse) the "so good, so good, so good" bits are the worst possible form of NPC normie and should be treated like the cattle they are.” (Source)
We’re sure there are a few more. We wrote one that fell flat as we noticed there are many disagreements. We’ll stick with “good sense of sound” = intelligent instead. IE. Someone who is bothered by noise easily is usually bright.
Addendum - Art Problem Solving? Many years ago, we wrote a post on how you can use Museums to solve your problems. You think about your problem before you enter the museum. After entering you stop, think about nothing and simply walk around slowly. After that just take a note of what art/images you are drawn to. Usually your answer is found there.
We’re writing this because apparently there is a book dedicated to this topic! We’ll be checking it out but can’t really give credit for this being an observation as we wrote about it years ago.
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce. We’re an advisor for Synapse Protocol and on the JPEG team
I think people really underestimate how much blood there is left to bleed in the degradation of people's quality of life.
In the 50's it was not uncommon for a family to not only own a home, 2+ cars, and several children. But many families had their own planes.
General Aviation in the US peaked in the 70;s. With a population of 200mil, there were 40 million Towered Operations in General Aviation (interaction with Aircraft Control Tower). By comparison, in 2010, with a population of 320 mil, there were only 25mil Towered Operations of general aviation.
Having a plane passed down to you in a will was a semi-common occurrence in the 60's, but today its nearly unheard of. No one even knows what we've lost. Similarly in a future where we own nothing, people will be happy because they won't even have a memory of what was lost. Our children (not ours, we'll be rich) might not even have the concept that a home should have a private yard.
Everything can be taken from the population without much of a fight being put up to stop it.
Re: eureka effect.
The important take away point is that insight can come at weird times, and more importantly, that we can forget it too. That is, do what successful people already know to do: always carry a small pocket notepad and a pen with you to write ideas down.
Those ideas will not always be ways to invent cold fusion, btw. Seriously, the best stuff you can do is simply write down items on your to-do list. Most people flounder because of lack of discipline, and that includes on getting basic (i.e. boring) shit done. Writing it down increases the chances that you will remember to do it, and actually to do it too.
Original post had it right: keep writing stuff near, whether taking a walk or in the shower. The brain needs to shut down a bit an unspool its engine, in order to open it up to new ideas, fresh thoughts, and creative solutions. Indeed, that may mean looking at art, or hitting the gym, or on a long run. Turning off allows the neural networks to turn on. Also, it takes time: it may not happen on that first run, but takes a while of casual thinking during downtime, as opposed to intense thinking during 'on' times. Anyone who has done this stuff knows.