Jag hade länge en föreställning om att Sverige var bra på tråkiga saker. När något behövde flyttas från en plats till en annan. Broar, vägar, teknik. Det praktiska, konkreta och rationella helt enkelt. Här funkar saker. Folk står i kö. Gör sin plikt. Någon korruption att tala om finns inte här, den bor i länderna man åker på solcharter till. Man kanske inte skrattar ihjäl sig alla gånger här i landet brunsås, men vi har billig el, tjänligt vatten i kranarna och varma element. I ett land där mörker och kyla härskar stora delar av året måste saker fungera.och att "Det kanske stämde någon gång, men det stämmer verkligen inte längre" så håller jag helt med dig. Men den tiden är borta och kommer inte tillbaka snart. Internet och tillgång till information har ändrat allt. Det som drängen var glad och nöjd med för 200 år sedan funkar inte längre.
It’s home to some one hundred forty thousand happy, active retired people, with more constantly arriving: this is the single fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, four gun ranges, two one-thousand-seat concert venues, and eight vast churches. It has more than fifty free golf courses, enough for you to play on a different range every week of the year. Ninety swimming pools, not counting the ones in people’s backyards. Twenty of them are Olympic-sized.https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/i...dow-on-the-sun
[...]
In the 1980s, when the pension funds first started taking over the economy, this led to some strange outcomes. Often, an industrial firm would be bought up by its own pension fund, who would then decide that the firm was hopelessly unprofitable, sell off all its assets, and fire all the workers. Today, things are calmer. The United States has quietly transitioned into a command economy. Between them, the three biggest asset management firms—Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street—own almost the entire corporate sector. (They also own an increasingly large chunk of the residential real estate market.) They are strangely unconcerned by the profitability of any individual firm they invest in, since they also own a significant slice of all its competitors. Instead, they’re content to gently guide the entire system of global capitalism towards a maximum general return on investment. In an era of stagnant growth, this requires total control: every industry integrated, every possible node accounted for. (During the COVID pandemic, for instance, BlackRock instructed the major pharmaceutical corporations to collaborate on vaccine research. The asset managers didn’t care whether Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson or Merck patented a vaccine first; they owned all three.) These firms manage investments for individual billionaires, sovereign wealth funds, and central banks. But most of all, they manage pensions.
[...]
The job of The Villages is to be that purpose. It is here to soak up as much of this extraordinary bounty as possible: to ensure that a significant slice of an entire planet’s worth of economic activity ends up in central Florida. They do this by selling the thing that all these people have been working for all their lives: perfect leisure before you die. Like the pyramids for the Egyptians, or the moai for Rapa Nui, The Villages is the final output of our society; the thing all our collective efforts have come together to produce. Our monument. It is a place of infinite, affordable delight. I have been there. It is the worst place I have ever been.
[...]
I met Jim and his wife at a bar on the main square called Amerikanos Grille. Communicating with Jim and his wife was a strange and difficult process. Jim was capable of talking, at length, but he couldn’t understand anything anyone else said. The sole exception was his wife of forty-three years, a tiny creature with a face so wrinkled it appeared to be folding in on itself, and a low, indecipherable grumble of a voice that sounded like it was filtered through the sticky residue of roughly half a million cigarettes, which it probably was. But Jim could understand her fine. This meant that every time I said something to Jim, he would briefly seem baffled to the point of anger, until his wife leaned in close and hacked up a repetition of what I’d just said. At this point Jim would nod, satisfied, and then he’d usually talk on an entirely unrelated subject for about five minutes, at which point I’d buy him another drink and the process would repeat itself.
Jim wanted me to know that he and his wife were not like the other Villagers. They were snowbirds: they spent their winters here in Florida, and in the summer they moved around, ceaselessly, from place to place. They drove their R.V. across Montana. They pottered around the woods of New England. “I’m like a gypsy, but with money,” Jim said. He paused. “Do you know what a gypsy is?” I said that I did. Jim looked suddenly terrified. “What did he say?” said Jim to his wife. Jim’s wife growled like a Long Island demon into Jim’s ear, and I could just make out the words. “He’s saying he knows what a gypsy is,” she said. “Ah,” said Jim. “That’s good.” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment. “But with money,” he added. “You’ve got to have the money.”
The United States has quietly transitioned into a command economy. Between them, the three biggest asset management firms—Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street—own almost the entire corporate sector. (They also own an increasingly large chunk of the residential real estate market.) They are strangely unconcerned by the profitability of any individual firm they invest in, since they also own a significant slice of all its competitors. Instead, they’re content to gently guide the entire system of global capitalism towards a maximum general return on investment. In an era of stagnant growth, this requires total control: every industry integrated, every possible node accounted for.Snacka om maktstrukturer. Hur stor andel Blackrock i genomsnitt äger i de bolag de investerat i är tydligen hemligt för allmänheten, men det är en tankeställare som sägs i citatet att "return of investment" inte ligger i de enskilda bolagen utan i den totala kontrollen som bolaget erhåller. Som Klaus Schwab, grundaren och verkställande ordföranden för World Economic Forum (WEF), sa i en Forbes artikel redan 2016 "You own nothing and you'll be happy", något som förstås inte inkluderar Schwab själv eller Larry Fink eller ... övriga eliten.
Apple (AAPL): 7.8%I mitt tidigare inlägg skrev jag att det är hemligt hur stor andel Blackrock i genomsnitt äger i de bolag de investerat i. Detta är kanske fel, det kanske inte alls är hemligt, men var svaret jag fick på frågan om uppgiften från samma AI som gav ovanstående siffror. Man kan inte fullt ut lita på dessa botar.
Microsoft (MSFT): 4.59%
Amazon (AMZN): 1.86%
Nvidia (NVDA): 1.51%
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A): 1.44%
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): 1.38%
Bank of America (BAC): 1.37%
Wells Fargo (WFC): 1.36%
UnitedHealth Group (UNH): 1.35%
JPMorgan Chase (JPM): 1.34%
Apple (AAPL): 7.8%I mitt tidigare inlägg skrev jag att det är hemligt hur stor andel Blackrock i genomsnitt äger i de bolag de investerat i. Detta är kanske fel, det kanske inte alls är hemligt, men var svaret jag fick på frågan om uppgiften från samma AI som gav ovanstående siffror. Man kan inte fullt ut lita på dessa botar.
Microsoft (MSFT): 4.59%
Amazon (AMZN): 1.86%
Nvidia (NVDA): 1.51%
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A): 1.44%
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): 1.38%
Bank of America (BAC): 1.37%
Wells Fargo (WFC): 1.36%
UnitedHealth Group (UNH): 1.35%
JPMorgan Chase (JPM): 1.34%
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