Have You Wet Yourself?

I hope Elon Musk is not right:

That is going to suck, isn't it??

Seriously.
I will need to work hard again???

Say it isn't so!

What I like about Elon Musk is that while he is calculating in his delivery, he doesn't seem to care what the outcome is. I guess that is the benefit of being the world's richest person. It is also consistent with what I have heard is his position, that we may indeed be living in a simulation.

Forget all the technical side of the simulation theory and instead focus on the behavioral. If you act as if this is all just a game, then outcome of action and all the accoutrements like money, status, reputation and death, are non-events - they are just markers of progress, scores and levels along the code of the matrix. But, there is no respawns available -

well, maybe there is digital reincarnation.

But, Musk is wrong about one thing at least - it hasn't been raining money on fools, it has been trickling onto fools - but absolutely bucketing down on those who control the flow. While the world's poorest have gone significantly poorer and the middle class has been held steady, the richest have been raking it in hand over hand. They no longer have deep pockets, they have dump trucks for pockets.

But, rather than keep that cash, they know that it just isn't worth the paper it is printed on and have been steadily converting it into ownership. However, because of all the prices going up because of their money printing activity, they need it to go back down again so they can buy the low. And, the people they are buying the dip from, are going to be the people they extracted the wealth from earlier, by printing money and creating future debt obligation for tax payers, which they are not.

Want to hear something interesting though?

From the US in 2019:

• In 2019, taxpayers filed 148.3 million tax returns, reported earning nearly $11.9 trillion in adjusted gross income, and paid $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes

• The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.

• The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.2 percent)

It isn't that the individuals like Musk don't pay enough, it is that they are able to pay so much, because with this small fragment of society, they are dictating the economic course of the government, so influencing their own conditions. Poor distribution does matter in a society with centralized governments, because it becomes self-fulfilling to centralize further.

Their incentive isn't to make our lives better, it is to stay in control of the government, with both sides in the US are the same. They distribute the bare minimum to appease the people so they don't revolt and tailor conditions to maintain and extend control in the upper reaches of the economy. And, because every nation has essentially developed a captured population, there is very little anyone can do.

They have run their simulations for years - and they are winning.

But, simulation or not, the future is never set in stone and we can "unplug" at anytime, if we choose. We don't actually have to play the game as designed and we can create our own or, hack theirs. I think we are in the hack phase at the moment, looking for exploits in the coding, but in so doing, we are starting to discover that we can code too.

Tax may be theft, but I think that the biggest heist is in the conditioning of the belief that we can do nothing about the economy, that we are powerless. At the "money" level, we are, but the only reason that any of the economy can function, the only way for billionaires to be made, is through that 90 percent that can't manage themselves for shit. It is our disorganization and unwillingness to collaborate that holds us back, not the governments - because they are just doing what they are coded to do and, we should know how to play the game by now.

But, we don't, so here we are, heading into another recession, hoping that someone will come along and save us from the misery of not being able to cover our living expenses, falling further into debt and having to work until the day we die, at a job that will kill us.

It might be raining money for some, but for most of us - the outlook is very, very dry.