>it really has struck me that a huge proportion of our economy is probably just money laudering.
Fake work and misappropriating funds are two different things. In the latter case, money gets laundered because it is dirty money.
In the case of trying to hide money that is effectively *looted from taxpayers* **(while telling them they aren’t paying enough and pointing at the empty coffers)** this isn’t part of ***our*** economy, it’s part of the economy in PRC or Iran or North Korea or motorizing the illegal immigrant caravans to jam them into our country faster than it can swallow.
>I used to look at the dumpy exteriors of these businesses and naively think “They should clean this place up and make it charming and attract more customers!”
Fake Work Type A – Scientology Type – a scam so big it becomes a religion. There is/was an abandoned CoS building in the city of Riverside CA not far from Gold Base, from which they brought “”petitions”” to the postsecondary-heavy town’s schools *(account full of borrowed money disappears and the contract’s remaining balance gets passed off to collection agencies)* before eventually being shut down. If the abandoned building still stands, there might be a pretty decent chance it’s getting taxpayer money somehow.
Fake Work Type B – The Department of Whatevermajig – a government so big it becomes a scamligion. There are people with seven figure hours logged in Bejeweled and then they drive their SUV home to a gated community. They will always tell you they have a degree but they will never tell you the subject. Identifies as a ‘proud public servant’ while viewing builders truckers farmers miners the same way Syme viewed the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fake Work Type C – Enshrined Obsolescence – back in my day I attached printing film to big sheets and used it to make the plates that go in the printers. The two-room camera took a picture of your graphic design that would come out of a laser printer, before those were there people did cutting and pasting with scissors and paste onto a board. I also studied Shockwave hoping to develop simple applets on the side and I used Photoshop 3.0 with layer effects – but you had to add new layers manually each time you wanted one. **If you see any of these things or similar-gen still in practice,** *you might be in a government building in USA or some propped-up-by-government company in Eurasia that is fossilizing right before people’s eyes.* (I’m a bureaucrat.) *(The older or poorer the technology gets* ***the more manhours it shreds.)***
>So I peeked into the “kitchen”. And to my surprise there was no kitchen–it was just an empty room. No fridge, no stove, no food.
>And there was no cute asian girl.
>She’d left.
This is where subsidies end up, and why they always need more of them. *”The work is not yet finished!”*
1 Comment
>it really has struck me that a huge proportion of our economy is probably just money laudering.
Fake work and misappropriating funds are two different things. In the latter case, money gets laundered because it is dirty money.
In the case of trying to hide money that is effectively *looted from taxpayers* **(while telling them they aren’t paying enough and pointing at the empty coffers)** this isn’t part of ***our*** economy, it’s part of the economy in PRC or Iran or North Korea or motorizing the illegal immigrant caravans to jam them into our country faster than it can swallow.
>I used to look at the dumpy exteriors of these businesses and naively think “They should clean this place up and make it charming and attract more customers!”
Fake Work Type A – Scientology Type – a scam so big it becomes a religion. There is/was an abandoned CoS building in the city of Riverside CA not far from Gold Base, from which they brought “”petitions”” to the postsecondary-heavy town’s schools *(account full of borrowed money disappears and the contract’s remaining balance gets passed off to collection agencies)* before eventually being shut down. If the abandoned building still stands, there might be a pretty decent chance it’s getting taxpayer money somehow.
Fake Work Type B – The Department of Whatevermajig – a government so big it becomes a scamligion. There are people with seven figure hours logged in Bejeweled and then they drive their SUV home to a gated community. They will always tell you they have a degree but they will never tell you the subject. Identifies as a ‘proud public servant’ while viewing builders truckers farmers miners the same way Syme viewed the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fake Work Type C – Enshrined Obsolescence – back in my day I attached printing film to big sheets and used it to make the plates that go in the printers. The two-room camera took a picture of your graphic design that would come out of a laser printer, before those were there people did cutting and pasting with scissors and paste onto a board. I also studied Shockwave hoping to develop simple applets on the side and I used Photoshop 3.0 with layer effects – but you had to add new layers manually each time you wanted one. **If you see any of these things or similar-gen still in practice,** *you might be in a government building in USA or some propped-up-by-government company in Eurasia that is fossilizing right before people’s eyes.* (I’m a bureaucrat.) *(The older or poorer the technology gets* ***the more manhours it shreds.)***
>So I peeked into the “kitchen”. And to my surprise there was no kitchen–it was just an empty room. No fridge, no stove, no food.
>And there was no cute asian girl.
>She’d left.
This is where subsidies end up, and why they always need more of them. *”The work is not yet finished!”*