{"id":2291,"date":"2022-12-29T17:18:50","date_gmt":"2022-12-29T17:18:50","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2022-12-30T07:41:47","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T07:41:47","slug":"the-scaffold-that-got-us-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/2022\/12\/29\/the-scaffold-that-got-us-here\/","title":{"rendered":"The scaffold that got us here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m a dyed in the wool lefty. I always have been, I always will be. It seems so absolutely natural to me that people who are in the lucky position (and that’s all of us<\/strong>, more below) of having more should help those who don’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I’m faced with the rabid hell-scape of the sort of capitalism we’re now seeing in the current Tory party I tend to respond in exactly the same way normal people do when faced with a terrible racist: I struggle to engage on any level with their argument. It just seems so blindingly obvious to me – and totally backed by All The Evidence – that “trickle down” or austerity policies don’t work, have continued to fail to work and show no sign of working in the future. The very richest just go on getting richer and fuck the poor; who cares about those guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what I really don’t understand – who needs<\/strong> that sort of wealth? Like – I’m insanely wealthy compared to the vast majority of the world and pretty well off compared to a large chunk of the UK. We do ok and we’re very happy with what we’ve got. But we’re not millionaire<\/strong> wealthy or even hundreds of thousands of pounds<\/strong> wealthy, not even vaguely, remotely close. And yet some people who are millionaires continue to climb on up, some of them gaining wealth in the 10’s, 100’s or 1000’s of millions of pounds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see literally no reason<\/strong> for this. I suspect it just becomes a game. I’ve just completed Limitless Fortune<\/a><\/em> on my phone (a sort of simple intergalactic trading game and the closest thing I could find to Elite<\/em>) and it reached a point when playing that it became pretty much impossible to lose money. It’s probably like this when you’re insanely wealthy – you tick up a tenth of a percentage point on some investment somewhere and earn \u00a330k without even breaking stride, and then through the miracle of growth and compound interest, it’s \u00a3300k the next time, \u00a31m the time after that. Money probably ceases to become anything other than an abstract plaything. If you’ve got it, earn more of it, why the hell not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s talk about luck<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Any sort of life is predominantly about luck. This sort of sentence echoes long and fairly deep philosophical conversations about whether Free Will exists (my humble opinion: it doesn’t, in the face of the fairly irrefutable evidence I’m about to sketch out below); but even if we don’t go down that rabbit hole now, I think we can universally accept a few things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n