IQ facts:
Race and intelligence: get the facts. pic.twitter.com/bhOMrECZg6
— Librarian of Hate (@LibrarianofHate) November 4, 2015
High-IQ wins again as Facebook’s valuation crosses $300 billion. But I thought Facebook was supposed to be a bubble and a fad, said the left in 2012.
Facebook market cap is just over $300B.
— Chris Dixon (@cdixon) November 4, 2015
Over on XenoSystems, a commenter writes:
What concerns me is that post-industrial capitalism seems frustratingly demotic. Even with a fully realized patchwork, if the majority of wealth is held by a minority that favors socialism (or mercantalism, etc.) what prevents them from crushing markets elsewhere. Our major publicly traded companies are prioritizing social justice over profit, and are going to melt whole sectors of the economy as they implode. A majority that values piety over profit and controls the vast majority of the wealth can distort/destroy any market. Heck, look how much damage Soros has done…
Normally I would just reply to the original comment, but this is amusing enough to warrant its inclusion into a blog post.
I guess it depends how you define ‘social justice’. True…too fend off the social justice lawyers, most companies have an employee conduct code that rivals that of Hammurabi, and violators are dismissed with prejudice. But that doesn’t stop the left from complaining about: low wages, outsourcing, profits being too high, taxes…you name it.
Starbucks: wages, fair trade
Facebook: privacy concerns, taxes
Amazon: taxes (dodging state taxes, especially), employee working conditions at warehouses
Apple: wages, taxes (avoiding cash repatriation), working conditions in China, outsourcing
Walmart: wages, displacing ‘mom and pop’ stores
Google: taxes, privacy concerns
Uber: busting cab cartel, not paying drivers enough
Snapchat: fostering narcissistic behavior, valuation is too high according to the left, privacy concerns
Behind any successful company are liberals who have some reason to complain.
There is also a tendency among some to throw words like ‘socialism’ around flippantly. Also ‘socialism’ and ‘multinationalism’ are not interchangeable. While multinational companies do get government contracts, so do many smaller companies, and this in and of itself is not socialism. Socialism means the government has complete control and ownership, which includes ownership of profits, dividends, and equity. That also means socialism is NOT the same as a grant or a loan. The government helping to fund companies like Tesla is not socialism unless they own Tesla, which they obviously don’t. Musk is worth billions, which is his to keep. When the US government took a 75% stake in AIG in 2008, I guess that could technically be called socialism since the government and, to some degree, the tax payers ‘own’ AIG; the common shareholders lost almost everything, but the stock was already close to worthless by then. Same for Freddie Mac and Fannie May, which too were bailed-out, but by then the stock was close to worthless. The US government gets all of Fannie’s and Freddie’s profits, which is why activist shareholders are trying to ‘liberate’ Freddie and Fannie, and I support their efforts being that I am also long some Freddie and Fannie stock in the hope the conservatorship will be relinquished. That is socialism, but this is extremely rare, and maybe only a dozen companies out of tens of thousands were bailed out in such a manner in 2008 and would meet the definition of ‘socialism’. The vast majority of companies on the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones would not qualify as ‘socialist’ ownership. Just tired of all this whining about the slippery slope to socialism when there is very little actual socialism.
This story has been covered to death in the past 24 hours, but It sucks to be a middle-aged white person
My guess the root cause is fulfillment, emptiness. In the past, God filled that role, but the developed world is becoming more secular. Society demands a lot from white men – money and social status – things that are harder to obtain than just being a decent, moral person. Church is easy. You go every week and God gives you salvation, but attendance is falling, people realizing what atheists have suspected all along: it doesn’t work. This is not a knock on religion, but science is supplanting religion. No, salvation cannot be attained by believing in a deity. You have to make a lot of money and be well-known.
And it looks like Roisey has a new Twitter account after the SWJs banned his old one https://twitter.com/ChateauEmissary