politics

Man... that's one of the things that seems like a conspiracy theory to a great many people, but just actually is true.

Dude literally got caught doing massive amounts of money laundering for literal Nazis during WW2 and by all rights should have been convicted of treason.

Its like how most people don't know that IBM machines enabled the Germans to tabulate and keep track of the holocaust, that their machines spit out the UIDs that were tattooed onto the victims at the death camps....

... I think that 'War is a Racket' by Smedley Butler really needs to be added to the basic K-12 curriculum alongside 1984 and Brave New World...

But oh oops, the Republicans already destroyed our education systems, nevermind.

... The answer is infinity.

Capitalism requires constant growth, constant extraction, constant return in investment, constant tendency toward monopolies and wealth disparity until you end up with a neo feudalistic caste society.

You can either attempt to restrain and regulate the system, which we are currently doing a rather poor job of, overthrow the system, which is nigh impossible given the precarity of the average prole, or you can just watch as we head closer and closer to... some kind of hybrid of the handmaids tale and elysium.

... Or, maybe, escape to a slightly less insane foreign country, but you're gonna need a lot of money or a very lucrative skill set as an employee to do that as anything other than an illegal immigrant.

LOL. Task failed successfully!

I just re-linked the GIF to go through my image proxy (originally linked directly from yarn.io which usually works fine. Usually.). Did that help?

It's also weird that it's not showing the alt text. Figured that'd have at least come through.

Not so fun fact: The absolute richest dragons in all of fantasy, excluding Smaug, only have a net worth of several hundred million dollars. A Red Elder Wyrm will have, on average, around 2.5-3 million gold pieces of wealth, with an absolute maximum of 5 million gold pieces. That means that the absolute greediest, and richest type of dragon, by far, only has between 100,000 to 500,000 oz worth of gold.

Smaug being the absolute outlier because he had somewhere between 5 to 10 billion dollars worth of gold.

Now if you are wondering why I'm making a big deal about this, it is because 500,000 oz of gold is only worth about 1.1 billion US dollars. But that is the absolute outlier of the greediest type of dragon that there is. Still only looking at Chaotic Evil Red Elder Wyrms, the average would only be about 3.5 million gold pieces, or a mere 350,000 oz of gold. That's only about $850,000,000 and that is just the most average of the absolute greediest manefestations of greed that our limited minds could imagine. Most dragons would be absolutely fine with between $1,000,000 to $10,000,000. The literal manefestations of greed don't need more than $10,000,000 according to every treasure table.

Those people that have more than 100 million dollars have already passed the greed alignment chart into Chaotic Evil. They are damn near caricatures of dragons at this point.

There is a big accounting difference in use the term "wealth" and "income", especially when the wealthy take out a loan from stock holdings and not pay income tax.

Eh.. no? Most free press is privately owned. Just not by billionaires who influence the content.