Ground up plastic FTW: miralax

Once I got a quote from one of the doorstep fliers. The guy defrauded me between 54% and 30% of the original contract price because he waited until he got half up front before saying he would do a job with crappy materials that would only last a year or so unless i paid 54% more. I should have cancelled the check and said get off my property.

its common practice for insurance to have a “total coverage” contract with a provider, so they say 876 is coming out of next month’s insurance check to you, and the difference is between you and these clients… or you can eat it.

No cash ever flows back to the insurance company from a provider.

According to US case law. The power to tax is the power to destroy, so the state government cannot tax federal government.

There are several arguments for taxing church and I can’t help but think that soon we will be just having a closer relationship between church and state if the pastors start pandering for the current government.

Lead culinary water pipes (or lead soldier) is a problem, but lead shower pans (that affect the sewer water) are the preference in many USA cities.

Well, I didn’t post my sources and you didn’t post sources. I think I am right but I don’t want to spend the time looking it up when I am straight up told that I’m lying. I’ll address your four points off the top of my head though.

1. life expectancy has changed drastically for different populations and subcultures in the usa. Tweakers have a much lower life expectancy. White collar work has a much higher life expectancy. Blue collar… I bet you are right that it is about the same. I read that the current average is 74 (so 10 years longer than when retirement became codified into law) However shortly after the industrial revolution was the information revolution, so most of the gdp of the usa and other western countries is produced by these long lived white collar workers.
2. yup I agree. Blue collar life expectancy is about the same as when retirement was first codified into law
3. money turns to worthless over time unless it is invested and earning interest. A government is in the business of “Accountability to taxpayers on a election Cycle period”. Therefore, the government is highly incentivised to kill the golden goose and spend the money and claim that they invested it wisely into roads and stuff. If I recall correctly, that is exactly what happened to the social security program, and we are now paying out as fast as it comes in. Regarding “not tied to the Wallstreet casino” as what makes an investment more financially sound, I don’t follow the logic. There is some well established ways to make money on wall street:

buy and hold a low cost index of funds that diversified risk away from a single company. Have a mix of equity vs fixed income based on how soon you intend to start needing to rely on fixed income. Put your money in this exact index fund and don’t worry about market ups and downs.

If you follow that investing instruction, you beat the social security administration every time in the last 30 years if you paid in the whole time you worked for 45 years.

4. Taxing the wealthy is hard. There is a general rule of thumb in politics which is “those who have power don’t let it go easily”, and if those with power caused a politician to be favored, it is generally due to the bet that the politician will pay it back with a favor later. As far as I know, when you tax the wealthy, the wealthy are able to organize some governmental upsets/coops. The American revolution was headed by the “wealthy” of the American colonies. As far as I know, wealth also exits easily if a governmental administration is a hostile/unstable environment. All these things come together to make taxing wealthy people hard. In practice, the wealthy generally have a “high marginal tax rate” (tax rate on paper) but after all the loopholes from politician friends there is a “low effective tax rate” (tax rate actually paid).

Talking about raising the contribution limit is a moot point as government will be “accountable in this election cycle” by spending immediately based on my argument above.

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Did I say anything factually False? I hope to see any nuances that I missed.

I said it to mean agricultural work as in farm work.

-Agricultural revolution brown collar

-Industrial revolution blue collar

-Information revolution white collar

Having retirement shares as the same shares as the company that one is working at seems to be a huge concentration of risk. If you go out of business, then people lose both current active income and future passive income. I hope that your staff diversify away that risk.

The concept of retirement for working class people is new (aristocrats retired all throughout time)

• invented in Germany by a priest in 1600s but died out
• independently invented in America when a soldier in the military (late 1700s) had both his arms blown off and a law was passed for him to collect an amount for his (and family’s) maintenance from the neighbors.

Before invention of retirement, the working class had the mentality that you work until you are dead with 99% of the working class in brown collar work. During the industrial revolution where most people transitioned from brown collar to blue collar work, retirement became much more common with social mobility.

During the great depression, USA legislators picked a number “65” to be the “age of retirement” with the reasoning that it would get more young people back to work. The average age of mortality at that time was ~67 years old. They did not index that age with the average age of mortality, so as life expectancy increased, there is now a period in people’s life to be “retired”.

Problems with how this developed:

• social security in the USA is not able to keep paying out at this rate, the age of retirement should be more closely aligned with an “indexed” age whether that is the current average age of mental incompetence or an actuarially determined “you did your time, so you can now get out and your contributions should fund the government support of you”. The political cycle will probably destroy any hard to understand actuarial index, so that leaves us with the first option.
• retired people are a political force (high voter turnout). It is easy to vote to get a raise and ignore issues that would bring actual long term growth when you have a short term mentality. I think that accepting 100% of the cost of your maintenance from the government may be the price of your vote (you cannot vote if you are retired). I am sure that this is another unpopular opinion.

With that perspective, I don’t know if corporations are entitled here, or the people are just doing what their ancestors did for 1,000s of years and are owning it in a positive way.

I cant wait for all circular saw blades to be diamond.

don’t forget the creativity like “deleted from the census” or “bought the farm” or “bit the dust”, etc. There is a poetry to avoiding a filter.

in number 3, did you mean “herbicides”

The thing is, I understand that some farmers were doing that, but some others were simply trying to grow soybeans, and they didn’t use herbicides, but Monsanto successfully sued them into never saving “soybean” seed ever again.

have you heard of the “wisdom of crowds”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Different take: seed genome is like a MP3. Piracy (illegal copying) is enforced based on IP. Seeds doing it “naturally on a farm” just means that you have grounds to sue the farmer for not stopping illegal copying.

Step 1: protect the IP protected seed genomes

Step 2: sue the crap out of people growing those types of plants who arent paying you. Edit: these are all soy beans including “public seed”

Step 3: increase the price now that you have a monopoly on that kind of seeds

Source: Monsanto and soy beans

Regarding “retaining control” there are a number of stakeholders that almost never “retain control”.

• customers have no direct control over your strategic direction, but they have indirect vote with dollars. Companies will often hire a “FP&A analyst” to try to guess the trends and the ways that a customer will need to be, but often you need straight up contact with customers (interview a random 25 customers each quarter about questions key to your competencies and areas of frustration before the FP&A guy starts crunching numbers and saying that “this is where the market is” in a garbage in and garbage out manner)
• employees (not management) have no direct control over your strategic direction, but they have an indirect effect on productivity and profits. In my opinion, there should be a benefit like “donation to a office worker union” that represents employees but does not actually make them salt/unionize in your office unless you start the path of enshittification.
• regulators have no direct control over your strategic direction, but they can dry up your supply or your demand with hurdles to jump over. Spending a little bit of money to have a seat at the table in regulations that are directly applicable to your business is an important civic duty of businesses. If you have legal counsel on a retainer, then they should be able to give you a summary of laws and regs that are being considered so you can make your voice heard.
• vendors have no direct control over your strategic direction, but they can produce synergies or referrals if you treat them right. Keeping a pulse on your vendors and being willing to take an insurance policy out incase a crucial vendor will cause you to lose revenue if they fail is a good business.
• Hedge against stupid risk - try to match your variable revenues to variable expenses. Also try to match your fixed revenues to fixed expenses. Example: if you have a lease on a building that costs a fixed amount no matter what monthly, then try to have that office serve recurring contract customers at least equal to the cost of rent. You can then spend the rest of capacity on Variable revenue that correlates closer to the variable expenses like salaries of salespeople.