Category Archives: economy and money

What people value

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I was thinking about the difference between the things people say and what they actually do. For instance, they will say they are for equality, compassion, freedom of choice and so on, and in reality they just want to be seen supporting the popular things in order to virtue signal in society. So, what they actually want is not to be socially ostracised and isolated, they want to be popular and they want to have as much power and influence as possible.

Also, they say that money doesn’t matter, that love is everything, but on a practical level they will despise people who don’t have money, they will envy those who do, they will buy all sorts of trinkets in order to augment their social status, and so on. Hypocrisy is a significant factor, and so I can’t really take people’s word for it. Instead, I’ll use a different approach – see what people actually do on an empirical level. People will say that money doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t value people according to how much money they have, but the problem is that money is invented exactly as a measure of value. What else would I use? Saying money doesn’t matter in assessing how much people value someone is like saying I shouldn’t use a meter to see how big a house is. I’m definitely going to experiment by taking a look at where the money goes and assess people’s priorities in life based on whom they made rich.

Here’s a list of top ten companies by revenue:

So, it’s retail and online stores, energy and fancy computerised gadgets.

Let’s see who the wealthiest individuals are:

How did those people make all that money? There’s an empire of luxury goods, there’s one guy that sells fantasies about clean cars and going to Mars, one has a big online store and sells server space, several got rich on computer software, some successfully invested money, and one can imagine all those oil companies from the previous list made some people very rich, but curiously they are not on this list, probably because they are too wealthy and want to stay behind the curtains. There’s also that idea that religions are super wealthy, so I looked into that, too:

Surprisingly, whole religions representing beliefs of vast numbers of people and having all kinds of clergy to support pale in comparison with the wealth of individual billionaires, which brings us to the obvious conclusion that luxury goods for wealth-posturing are a greater priority for people than religion, statistically speaking, and judging by where they put their money.

I am trying to exclude anomalies such as the insurance industry and American health “care” from analysis because they don’t tell me much, other than the fact that America is based mostly on fraud of some kind, and most of that milks people for money; the fact that the insurance companies are getting rich means they are finding ways to eschew payouts, which means fraud. There are also huge conglomerates that own all kinds of real estate, that are conspicuously absent from those lists, and pharmaceutical companies that are incredibly wealthy, and also hidden from sight for some reason.

However, let’s say that people put most of their money in housing, which makes the banks, insurance and real estate companies rich. They buy cars and consume lots of petroleum products. They consume food and hygienic products. They buy smartphones and computers, and consume telecommunication services. Also, and quite disproportionally, they buy luxury goods in order to show off, and the interesting thing is that they all do it, and especially the lower and middle class, because the companies that service only the rich people aren’t featured on those global wealth lists – you need to cater to the average in order to be there. You see, everybody owns smartphones, everybody consumes energy, pays for housing and transportation, and buys food and hygienic products. Also, obviously, everybody buys LVMH products. They are advertised as “rich people things”, but obviously average people are the main buyers of “rich people things”. It also seems that Rolex products are mostly bought by the middle class, as it’s an aspirational thing.

Religion does feature in all this, but when you understand how many members they supposedly have, how much actual money they work with, and how much it must cost them to pay for the clergy and the expenses, they simply can’t compare with the incredible wealth of the people and companies that sell them ordinary worldly goods. The Mormons seem to be an exception, but other churches simply pale in comparison with individual billionaires, let alone the huge multinational corporations.

Many things are hard to see from those lists, but one can guess – for instance, gambling, gaming, entertainment, alcohol and drugs are huge business, that possibly outweigh most of what I already mentioned. Education must also feature somewhere, but it’s usually categorised as student loans, which enriches primarily the banking sector.

So, if we summarise, people pay for housing, cars, fuel, food, hygienic products, electricity, telecommunications, technological gadgets, medical costs, education, luxury goods, religion, vice and addictions. They will go to great lengths to present themselves as members of a higher social class, to the point where they will debt-finance luxury purchases, such as cars, trinkets and bling, and I should also probably include travel to fancy destinations and housing that’s too expensive for what they can actually afford. In addition to that, they will go to social media and show all of that off, and waste time trying convince others that they are happy.

In addition to that, 56% of Americans can’t cover a $1,000 emergency expense with savings. Some polls report even worse findings, such as the SecureSave, whose study found that a 67% of Americans don’t have enough money saved to cover an unexpected $400 expense. The implication is that even those families that are seemingly well off, judging by the size of their house and the cars they own, are running a very tight budget – their house is financed by a mortgage loan, their cars are either leased or financed, and they buy everything on credit cards, and juggling with monthly payments. If anything goes even a bit wrong, they are too stretched financially to be able to respond. They all look wealthy and prosperous, but the only ones who are actually wealthy in this pictures are the banks giving them loans, and the companies selling them stuff they can’t really afford.

The conclusion is that social posturing is so important to humans, that they will almost invariably choose to overextend themselves financially and put themselves in a position of stress, suffering and high financial risk just to keep up with the neighbours and show off a false facade of success, and this seems to apply more to the low and middle income brackets; the truly wealthy people seem to care less about showing off their money, and statistics show that the most common brands of automobile driven by American millionaires are Toyota, Ford and Honda.

Also, one in six Americans is on antidepressants. Millions are consuming opioids. When we add cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and other addictive substances, it is apparent that almost everybody in the West is addicted to something nasty, and it’s not because they are living happy, healthy and balanced lives. Oh, and I forgot the epidemics of obesity, violence and suicide.

However, when you ask those people what they think the world’s biggest problems are, they will invariably speak about climate change.

 

Welcome to the real world

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I see a pattern in lots of seemingly independent sources in the West.

People increasingly perceive that things are not working out for them. The people who work hard doing an honest job can’t even make ends meet, let alone buy a home or feel good about finances. The people who went to college like they were told end up with debt and are either unemployable or end up working low-paying jobs that are significantly beneath what they expected to be working with their degree. People increasingly understand that they can’t retire because their retirement fund is basically guaranteeing them poverty if they do. Women who believed in feminism find out that they are undesirable and ruined after their youth has been consumed whoring around and chasing irrelevant “careers”. Men are asking themselves why the hell are we doing all this for? People who have been getting in debt and spending the money they don’t have in order to keep pretences that they are doing well, like they were told good consumers should do in order to drive the machine of capitalism, find out that they are financially distressed and without hope on the horizon. People increasingly invest in high-risk schemes trying to multiply their insufficient funds because they are desperate.

The emotional undercurrent of this is “that’s not what I signed up for”; basically, the deal was that they get to be rich and powerful, above all those “third world” people. The deal was that they get to ironically complain about having “first world problems” because all the money they have is so hard to keep track of, or parking for all their cars being expensive in that high-rent neighbourhood they live in. We, who live in countries that are not America and not “the West” get to be poor and we are supposed to try hard to get a visa to get to America and try to join their privileged club. They get to earn more than our doctors and lawyers by just pumping gas and working at the cash register in America. They get to have the greatest ego trip and they get to feel successful, powerful and in a position to teach the rest of the world how to exist properly. They weren’t supposed to have a favela of homeless people in their rich California, with human excrement mixed with drug needles on the sidewalks; they weren’t supposed to have fucked up lives with nothing to show for and no hopes outsides of drugs, alcohol and suicide. Sacrifice, failure and suffering was for other people. This is not what they signed up for. Buddha taught that suffering is inherent in this place because he was a loser living in a third world shithole; he should have been born in America, then he would have said otherwise.

The thing is, you can make almost everything seem like a good idea for a short period of time. All kinds of questionable financial schemes, for instance having money that’s based on debt and not gold, look like a great idea, until the bill arrives. People knew the current economic model was unsustainable in the long run when it was originally introduced, and Keynes himself answered “in the long run, we’re all dead”.

Yes, in the long run you’re all dead. You spent ten trillion times more than you’re collectively worth, and now you’re going to die on a pile of manure. The Western civilisation introduced several dangerous experiments – atheism, egalitarianism, republic, democracy, communism, feminism, fiat money and so on, and some ended in disaster sooner than others, but apparently it took time for the entire thing to unravel, and now the bill is due. Truly, how much of this progressivism had produced true and legitimate progress, something worth keeping and building on? Most of it all was some ego-trip or another, for the sake of hunting for mirages in the world and calling it emancipation. This might not be what they signed up for, but what they signed up for will have destitution, ruin, hopelessness and humiliation as the ultimate result.

Limiting ideas

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When we’re talking about tools, there’s another thing that usually crops up – you see, people who are used to thinking in terms of getting the maximum performance for the money have problems understanding the position of people who don’t have their monetary constraints, and who think in terms of getting the best thing for their needs regardless of cost. The usual comment is “more money than brains” or something along those lines.

It’s a tricky thing, because I understand both positions, and neither is without merit. Truly, there are people who routinely overspend on things and indulge in never-ending excesses, and none of it makes much sense. On the other hand, there are people who don’t understand that, if you can afford it, sometimes it makes much sense to spend more on equipment, especially if it’s the stuff you use every day, lasts many years, and you can obtain advantages that would otherwise not be available. You see, I’ve seen situations where other kids made fun of my son because he used a Macbook – the standard arguments were that it’s a computer for stupid people with money, and imagine what kind of a gaming machine you can get for that money, and so on. The next scene was kids with a Windows laptop waiting for the Windows update to finish and they need the machine for the presentation or they fail; you can imagine the panic and frustration. Oops, so it’s not actually for stupid people only, but also for people who absolutely need it to work in a mission-critical environment. Also, they laughed at him for having an iPhone because the battery is so much smaller than in their Android phones, but curiously they all seemed to constantly run out of battery before him.

Apparently, the danger in getting by with limited resources is when you start thinking in terms where everything better and more expensive than what you have is useless and those who can afford it are idiots for buying overpriced crap. Don’t go there, because it actually limits you, and you might actually impose artificial financial limits on yourself and not allow yourself to make money because money is for stupid losers. Instead, get by with what you can afford, but allow yourself to expand into something better when you can, because frequently the people who buy the stuff you can’t afford are very smart people who just happen to have money. The actually stupid stuff starts when people from low or middle income brackets think they’ll become rich if they overspend on rich people things, such as expensive clothes and trinkets. That’s the way to remain perpetually poor. However, buying high quality tools if you can afford them is always a good idea, and is almost always going to pay off in the long run. If it is more reliable, faster, quieter, less quirky, integrates better between many devices, puts less strain on your body while you work with it, and just gets out of the way and allows you to do your thing, it’s probably worth it. If it creates additional problems for you, you might want to migrate away. Also, I’m almost always against taking loans and for buying everything with cash, but tools you use to do work and make money might be an exception I’m willing to make. Tools are productivity multipliers, if it’s something you actually need and are more productive with, and not only the new shiny gadgety thingy you desire. Tools are also idiosyncratic, so don’t make fun of someone who bought an expensive guitar that just “feels right” for him, even if it feels psychological. The feeling you have when using something that’s “right” might put your psyche in the “right” place and allow you to really spread your wings. However, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you will obtain skill by buying stuff. You won’t. If you can’t code on a cheap computer, you won’t do any better on the most expensive one. If you can’t make nice pictures using a smartphone, buying the most sophisticated medium format system won’t make any difference.

So, basically, don’t get into a place where you think all beautiful women and rich people must be stupid or morally corrupt. It’s a really shitty coping mechanism that is closely related to envy, and is of no use to anyone. Rather, be free to acknowledge what is worthy, and to aspire to better and greater things. Sure, some assholes are rich, but God is also rich (if owning the entire reality counts). Some stupid whores are beautiful, but female angels and Gods are also beautiful. Don’t spit in the direction where you want to be heading.

Democratic technology

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I have a weak spot for “democratic technology” – meaning that you can be a kid with very little or no money, and still be able to buy it and use it to learn and start getting your initial experience making money. As a teenager, I had posters on my bedroom wall with HP Integral PC, Compaq Portable 386, IBM PS/2 and a HP 28c calculator, when other boys had posters of cars, girls and football stars; you can see where my priorities were. 🙂

I still have a weak spot for good quality pencils, calculators and computers, into which I projected almost magical qualities of compensating for my limitations. The irony is, I ended up in a place where I do almost all the heavy lifting in my head, and use computers as glorified typewriters, but I digress. 🙂

So, what’s the “democratic technology”? It’s basically the stuff you can actually buy and do all the work you would otherwise do on the hardware you dream of, but can’t afford.

Today, democratic technology is a cheap Xiaomi smartphone, a desktop computer you built from cheapest new or used components, running unlicensed Windows or Linux, or a laptop along similar lines, all bought with pocket money, allowing you to access stuff on the Internet that allows you to learn. Interesting, it’s very rarely the stuff that’s designed and marketed as “democratic”, such as a Raspberry pi. I would actually not recommend that as a computer for kids, because it’s seriously underpowered and not inexpensive enough to be worth the effort. You can actually get a used i5 laptop for the order of magnitude of 100 EUR, which would be greatly preferred. This would be something along the lines of a ThinkPad X240 i5-4300u, which would run either Linux or Windows, and you can install an SSD and add more RAM if required. Such a machine could be used to surf the web, learn Python, PHP or C, and basically get you started in a position where you are very low on money, and very high on motivation. Interestingly, laptops seem to be a cheaper solution than desktops, when you add everything up.

Similar examples can be found in other areas as well; photography, for instance. You can buy a ten year old digital SLR with a lens or two, get cheap macro extension tubes from Ebay, use some free raw converter such as RawTherapee, and that will get you started. Heck, you can use a smartphone to learn composition if you can’t afford a proper camera, but I’ve seen things such as a Canon 30d with a kit lens for the order of magnitude of 50 EUR, and that would be a very good way to get you started. What can you do with a 8MP camera and a kit lens? If you can add a cheap tripod, you can do this:

With only a smartphone, you can do this:

Sure, I wouldn’t attempt large magnifications from phone images, but we’re talking about learning here; in that phase, you could take excellent equipment and produce shit, because you don’t yet know how to pick light, don’t understand dynamic range, don’t know how to compose, or even how to hold the camera still. A phone will do for composition, colour and dynamic range; an old dSLR with a tripod will allow you to learn everything else.

It’s not my field of expertise, but with a piece of paper and colour pencils you can learn how to draw, and then use a cheap flatbed scanner to digitise your drawings and use them as illustrations on websites you design, to give your work a unique look. Or you can learn how to draw in some digital tool, such as Inkscape.

Sure, you need to compensate for technical disadvantages with skill and talent, but the “democratic” part of my point is that you don’t “pay to win”; people usually get the fancy gear only after they got rich using the basic stuff everybody has, or can get. If you have something meaningful to say, you don’t need a Macbook Air to write it down; any computer will do. Heck, a smartphone with a bluetooth keyboard will allow you to write books and articles if you don’t have anything else, although I wouldn’t recommend it if you have options. However, after you had been doing that for long enough, you’ll probably start healing your frustrations caused by inadequate gear the way I’m doing. 🙂 Sure, I could do it on a 386. Been there, done that, didn’t really get a t-shirt, but I did get trauma induced by having to delete the unnecessary multimedia files such as moricons.dll and *.wav from a Win3.11 installation in order to be able to fit my code builds on a 85MB HDD, and edit rich text files of the Ventura Publisher in a DOS text editor because the machine simply didn’t have enough RAM or CPU to edit the tables in the GEM GUI. Sure, it can be done, and you can get started and dig yourself out of the pit with very few resources, compensating for the drawbacks of your tools with some ingenuity. However, fuck me if I’ll do it anymore, now that I have the money. 🙂

Some musings about money

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I’ve been thinking about something for quite a while now.

When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some reason found it impressive how I seemed to not care about it at all – I would wear torn clothes, buy a used computer somewhere and work with it, drive a shitbox, and seem not to perceive the entire material sphere, instead focusing on spiritual realities and energy work.

What troubles me there is that they thought this was a good thing, that it’s fine for “spiritual people” to be poor, that it’s somehow a positive status symbol of spirituality or whatever. It’s not. They saw that I don’t care about matter but they were wrong – I didn’t care about it while I was working with them, because they were the priority. The entirety of my focus was placed on trying to get them to overcome their limitations and get the taste of transcendence, so to speak. However, when I was alone I had rent and bills to pay, groceries to buy, car to service and fuel, and not enough money to cover almost any of it. I didn’t wear ragged clothes because I didn’t care about my appearance; I wore them because I had no money, and I truly didn’t care about my appearance when I was doing more important things, so they kind of made a flawed conclusion that this is how things are supposed to be, and anything else represents a spiritual downfall.

Of course I cared about money – I had constant problems caused by the lack of money, that I could never truly solve. However, the fact was that people I worked with tended not to have money, and the people with money tended not to care about me, and my priority was to focus on people most receptive to what I wanted to teach, not teaching people who could be of most material use to me. Sure, I made some compromises, namely continuing to work with some people whom I would otherwise have sent away sooner due to them showing no perspective, due to them “bankrolling” my work with talented but broke people, and in only one instance this turned out to be a bad idea because the person in question turned out to be coercing and manipulating others with money and created a really toxic atmosphere that made everybody’s lives more unpleasant and difficult. The concept itself isn’t bad – you see, anything else makes an implicit assumption that the teacher himself should bankroll the entire operation so that he would be independent of any kind of financial pressure or free from financial concerns that could otherwise bias his selection of students and general approach, or that money is such a bad thing that you should never give it to good people who are doing useful things, especially if you’re not the only one incurring benefit. The concept that people with money should support things that are of spiritual use not only to them, but to other people who might be better positioned to benefit from it than themselves is perfectly rational. Furthermore, people who support good and useful things with money incur a karmic benefit.

But to return to my situation – I had very serious and persistent financial problems, but I did not allow this to influence my choices and work to any great extent. I never rejected a poor but qualified student, or spent less time with them than was needed to produce optimal outcomes. It’s just that I allowed some more affluent, but unqualified people to hang around, thinking no harm can come from it, and they might pick up useful things in the process and acquire spiritual benefits. You see, it wasn’t that I really had that many options. I could have abandoned the whole thing, returned to software engineering, made a career in that and have no problems with money, however I felt this would have been a waste of life, because I felt I had to contribute to the world in the most meaningful way I am capable of, not merely in the way that people would pay the most money for. The result was that I was poor for decades, but, in hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could and followed the line of righteousness that made me essentially immune to all kinds of karmic attachments and backlash that normally destroys spiritual people.

So, no, I wasn’t poor because that’s a good thing. I was poor because people with money didn’t give a fuck about what I did, and even some people I did work with thought poverty suited me just fine. Of course I could have used a car with air conditioning back then, and a computer that is actually capable of editing a book cover 600 DPI TIFF, and has a screen bigger than 15”. The thing is, good things tend to be owned by people who have the money to buy them, not the people who need them the most. However, that’s not the part that irritates me. What I found really, truly humiliating is the attitude of some of my then-students, who sincerely thought that good things were too good for me, and shitty things are just right, and liked the feeling of being financially above me. Of course I could se that in their minds, it was more than obvious, and this truly pissed me off, because it reeked of contempt and disrespect.

Another thing that pissed me off were the people who arrogantly criticised me as being materialistically disposed and trying to personally benefit from others by charging money for my books. Putting those books on the market was hugely expensive for both me and my students, in both money and labour. It was a significant sacrifice to make those books available to a wider audience, and it came with a spiritual blessing that was to awaken the presence of God in people, that would grow and overcome everything else if they chose to allow it. What I expected in return was that they buy the books, so that the financial load on my students would be reduced, and, possibly, that I could pay the bills without being a burden on them at all; it looked like a karmically beneficial thing, a way to spread both the benefit and the load. What I got instead was an opportunity for all kinds of worthless assholes to denigrate and humiliate both me and my work, and this made me very angry, especially since some people made it a point of pride for themselves to offend me for making the effort. It made me so angry I withdrew the books from the market and physically destroyed all the available copies, and I also withdrew the blessing. No, the books are not available for free in the digital form now because I’m more spiritual now or anything. They are free because of my contempt. You see, I earned substantial amounts of money in the payment industry, by charging a percentage for a service of navigating through the maze necessary for supposedly high-risk businesses to get a merchant account in order to sell their goods and services online. It was frequently some highly questionable stuff, such as the online dating sites, but I always had a feeling of a clean and transparent business transaction. I was never insulted or humiliated for any of it – quite the opposite, I was the respectable businessman and a gentleman who provides a valuable service to others. The only time I was exposed to deliberate ridicule and humiliation and treated as if I’m defrauding the naive and doing it all for money, and called a worthless and stupid poor person who wants to get rich by scamming others, was when I made the choice to endure financial hardship in order to provide the greatest benefit to others that I was capable of. This truly traumatised and offended me, and I feel that this is a mere shadow of God’s cold rage directed at those who offended me then, because what I did was expose the presence of God in this world and make it available, and all the contempt was in fact directed at and felt by God, and God didn’t like it one bit, let me tell you that. All the contempt, ridicule and abuse hurled at me went straight to God. All the thoughts of how shitty stuff is good enough and just right for me went straight to God, and let me tell you something: I am very glad God isn’t that angry at me.

So, at this point I live in a place that’s too good for what those people would wish for me. I drive a car that’s much better than they would let me have, I wear a watch that’s much more expensive than they would approve for me, and write this on a computer they would deem much too powerful and good for what I need. Fortunately, nobody really gives a fuck about their opinion any more.

There’s another implicit premise the worthless people assume – that if a man of God works for God, he should be paid by God, not by them. No, that’s not how things work. A man of God is the presence of God in this world, and God doesn’t actually like you or think you’re worthy, because He knows what you are, and you need to pass His tests, because that’s how things work – you don’t test God, or place demands God should meet, because you’re not the ones in charge and nobody asks you how things should be done. No, God tests you, to see if you show promise. God tests you by taking something that is a known absolute quality, such as His own tulku. A test for you is for this person to be presented before you, and you have to decide what it is, and how you will treat it. Basically, it’s like having two places presented to you, and you need to decide which is heaven, and which is hell, and then of course you go to heaven of your choice. God tests you by showing up among you every now and then, and you have to decide what that is, and how much it is worth to you. And then you go to a heaven that’s created for you by your choices.