Economy The Capitalism Crumble

[HOLA]

Who would have thought that the pursuit of infinite growth would eventually lead to things crumbling down...

 

[LeonardoBjj]

The first time I noticed this trend was before Vegas really started to sell its soul. It was in Key West. When I was a kid going to The Keys in Florida was a big deal if you liked the ocean. My wife and I went a long time ago while visiting my Mother and it was INCREDIBLY tourist-trappy. Everything was magnificently overpriced, and lower in quality. She was pretty underwhelmed with that aspect of the Atlantic Ocean as a California Native lol. We got a nice room literally 50ft from the beach and just hanging out at the room was more fun because there wasnt a ton of pressure to buy sh*t or pay for overpriced experiences.

Vegas turned around and did the exact same thing. It's no longer a place where anyone is made to feel like Royalty. It's a place where only actual Royalty are welcome.

- Thats Florianópolis to you. I can buy a prety good sizxed and taste pastel for 4,50:

Now you walk a couple of meters and go to the public market here:

A pastel of inferior quality costs the double or more. The same with fishs, crabs, oysters. You go at a restaurant outside and is far cheaper.

 

[aerius]

I think we are going to have to start importing talent again for sure if we want the system to get better. However, I would also argue that America needs to actually get serious about developing home grown talent at all ages. If top talent is going elsewhere then you have to learn how to build internally. I think one way to do this is there has to be a force towards businesses paying market price for labor.

Say a business wants to hire someone. Two conditions must be met before you can hire anyone overseas by Visa or offshore. One, you have to prove that you could not find anyone who can fill that position. Two, you have to pay American market prices no matter if you the person is here or overseas.

Get rid of H1b visas entirely and have O1 visas only, that way the visas are no longer tied to the employer and they can't play their abusive games anymore. Most of the problems will fix themselves when the employers can no long abuse & underpay their foreign workers by threatening to fire them & getting their visas pulled. Since O1 visas aren't tied to the sponsoring employer, the worker can quit and go work somewhere else at any time during his 3 year term (plus extensions, if any), which is why they generally get treated a lot better than H1b's. Also why there's a lot less of them, companies hire them only when they really need to.

 

[Sinister]

They have a pretty good model with Cuba. During prohibition the casinos and clubs were really only the destination of the wealthy. By the 1950's it was much more accessible to the middle class, and the casinos and clubs were awash with cash. The Cuban Revolution helped paved the way to make Las Vegas more popular. Before the revolution, Cuba was seen as a better and more uninhibited destination.

You know what's funny about this is that the Mob ran Cuba, then moved here. And there are a few old timers here who LOVED Vegas when the Mob ran it. As weird as it might be the going notion is that the service was better. The gangster Casino managers knew how to treat people. Now I used to think this was just something said in movies but there are a few mob establishments still holding on and my wife encountered one as a Health Inspector. She said it was one of the most pleasant experiences she's had. The Manager always met her at the entrance WITH the Head of Custodial. She said the guy always remembered not only her name, but my name and asked her how I was doing (I forget why but she had told him a bit about me). And whenever she pointed out an issue he had it handled on the spot or had it taken down.

She said the corporations suck to deal with. It's difficult to find a manager, that manager can never find the head of custodial, and they always either are hardly paying attention or pass off responsibility to someone else. She says she thinks it's mostly because they're overworked, but some are also just jerks.

That being said, Cuba was also racially segregated and there was a lot of organized crime there then. Drunken Americans r*ping local women while incompetent police doing nothing about it. I can understand why the Revolutionaries took exception to being the playground of American criminals

 

[Scerpi]

This has been on my mind for a long time. As indoctrinees into the religion of capitalism we are always assured this is THE most efficient and most prosperous economic model. When I was a kid and the US still had some pride in our manufacturing, we were even assured that the great American Corporation was the Savior of our well-being, so much so that a President based his entire economic policy on giving them tax breaks, massive subsidies, the ability to pursue cheap labor overseas, we were told to just give these people all our money and they would be generous enough to trickle-down enough of it to make us whole (but not TOO whole, we dont want to spoil ourselves).

I moved to Vegas about a year after joining this forum. In pursuing my career I ended up in a lot of places that were inaccessible to the version of myself that was in Florida. One of my favorite early experiences was being backstage with my stablemate and former 130lb Title Holder Sharif Bogere as he fought on an ESPN card. The event was poppin', we got comped at the buffet, staff was great. This was held at the Buffalo Bill's Star Arena in Primm, Nevada:



This is Primm now:



Since moving here Ive always heard that Vegas is a good barometer for what's going on in ths Country economically over all, because we depend largely on people.having disposable income. We depend on consumer confidence. When I got here cost of living was low and pay was high, because the Casinos catered to locals and middle-class families. Deals were a-plenty. Locals got half off show prices, and NEVER charged for parking. Now it seems cost of living is higher and pay has stagnated, so what's going on with the corporations, with the Casinos who can essentially do whatever they want here?



Like every great American corporation, combinations of greed, stupidity, and stubbornness are contributing to their downfalls on real time. They aimed at the rich, neglected the people who built the town and kept it alive through multiple economic crashes, and are now suffering the consequences. Not to mention a Government not-so-friendly to international business (I'm experiencing this in my own industry, many international fighters are going to train in Mexico as opposed to coming here) because its both easier AND cheaper.

Here it's going like this:

- rooms are more expensive AND smaller
- service is colder
- food and drinks are triple-priced
- little to no comps
- payouts are less frequent
- layoffs are high, and nonsensical layoffs like long-term executive chefs
- one of the highest unemployment rates in the US
- homelessness increasing
- grosheries (as per JD Vance) high
- gas trended up recently

All that said yes we are more fortunate than say, a different Country currently under economic embargo. However give the amount of economic decimation that is now more highly visible because of YouTube, there is no denying that there is something inherently wrong with capitalism. And its not "crony capitalism"...if you didnt account for cronyism in a system where money has always influenced elections then guy failed to understand capitalism from the beginning.



You wanna live here?

lol... Seems like it's working to me

Vegas got too expensive. People stopped showing up

Guess what happens next

Neato... Now do your favorite Socialist countries and see how well they fared in the long run. Starting with the former Soviet Union

 

[Sinister]

lol... Seems like it's working to me

Vegas got too expensive. People stopped showing up

Guess what happens next

Neato... Now do your favorite Socialist countries and see how well they fared in the long run. Starting with the former Soviet Union

"Vegas magically got too expensive...but soshulizm!!"

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Agreed. Perhaps also taking away tax exemption from organizations designated as religion-based non profits who are clearly profiting in the millions.

- Funy you mentioning that. Chruchs help a lot of people, the small ones. The bigger ones are just piramid schemes. Pastors getting milionaire, without providing anything to the comunities. They're a pretty big business here, people that didnt amount to nothing, didnt study or learned a work, go to them and become Pastors, so they start floating money, i personally know 3 like that, one killed a kid when he was also a teen, the other was married to a 15 year old girl that used to go to school with me, he was already in his middle 20's.

 

[Rygu]

There's a difference between Capitalism and crony Capitalism.

Capitalism is fantastic and is responsible for the current global standard of living being the highest it has been in human history.

Crony Capitalism on the other hand puts massive wealth into the hands of few with the help of paid off members of government at all levels.

They are not the same.

Don't complain about the wealthy not paying the amount of tax you think they should pay, complain about how your tax dollars are currently being spent.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

The unspoken assumption in capitalism is that the rich people who own & run all those corporations are wealthy & powerful because they're smarter, harder working, and "better" than the rest of us, which is why they're often referred to as "elites". It's therefore assumed that they understand what's happening in the world and can plan for various contingencies to keep the money rolling in.

Unfortunately that assumption is pure bullshit, the vast majority of them are no better than some trashy redneck who won the lottery jackpot and their financial & operations planning (or lack thereof) reflects this. Once they get to play with some real money they get intoxicated by the power and start drinking their own kool-aid, the results are predictable; prices go up a ton, quality goes down, customer pool dries up because normal people can't justify it anymore.

The way I see the it the US corporate class was raised on 80s "greed & money is good" propaganda and they all run their companies accordingly. If profit is maximized then everything is automatically better because that's what capitalist economic theory states, and anyone who disagrees gets labelled as a communist. All they know is how to run scams and turn short term profits.

It's therefore assumed that they understand what's happening in the world and can plan for various contingencies to keep the money rolling in.

- Thats true, ounce they start wescalating, they will have a team to manage the business, a acountant, layer, business administrator. My brother boss is a imbecile, he is getting kicked out of his work late this year, for the better of that place.

 

[aerius]

There's a difference between Capitalism and crony Capitalism.

Capitalism is fantastic and is responsible for the current global standard of living being the highest it has been in human history.

Crony Capitalism on the other hand puts massive wealth into the hands of few with the help of paid off members of government at all levels.

They are not the same.

Capitalism always evolves towards crony capitalism & kleptocracy.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Besides these issues anyone else seriously concerned about other countries grabbing all of our top talent? This shutdown has caused many experts to get fired or leave their positions. We’re fucked from every angle. If there is indeed a new administration we need more than economic reform. There’s going to be a lot of people that need to be jailed. Russel Vought was voted in after it was known he wanted to retire all government employees by “traumatizing” them. It’s unbelievable how weak our guardrails are. I guess my point is I feel sorry for the people that are tasked with cleaning this all up.

- US did that before. It's just the nature of the beast.

 

[HOLA]

You know what's funny about this is that the Mob ran Cuba, then moved here. And there are a few old timers here who LOVED Vegas when the Mob ran it. As weird as it might be the going notion is that the service was better. The gangster Casino managers knew how to treat people. Now I used to think this was just something said in movies but there are a few mob establishments still holding on and my wife encountered one as a Health Inspector. She said it was one of the most pleasant experiences she's had. The Manager always met her at the entrance WITH the Head of Custodial. She said the guy always remembered not only her name, but my name and asked her how I was doing (I forget why but she had told him a bit about me). And whenever she pointed out an issue he had it handled on the spot or had it taken down.

That's definitely believable. Lots of the old timers - the Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky era - could be pretty cordial, in their own way, so long as you didn't get in their way somehow.

She said the corporations suck to deal with. It's difficult to find a manager, that manager can never find the head of custodial, and they always either are hardly paying attention or pass off responsibility to someone else. She says she thinks it's mostly because they're overworked, but some are also just jerks.

That being said, Cuba was also racially segregated and there was a lot of organized crime there then. Drunken Americans r*ping local women while incompetent police doing nothing about it. I can understand why the Revolutionaries took exception to being the playground of American criminals

One of the first things Castro did, after Batista fled, was close down the casinos (and the golf courses). You also had mobs of people tear them apart, because they saw them as a symbol of corrupt foreign influences; on the other hand, enough Cubans protested (thousands were immediately put out of work when they closed) that Castro actually temporarily reopened them for a few months.

Cuba was far from egalitarian when it came to race, but they seemed quite a bit ahead of where The United States was at the time, at least. Although that was a pretty low hurdle to cross. IIRC Fulgencio Batista himself was mixed race.

Cuban history is pretty damn interesting.

Havana Nocturne by TJ English is a good book about the Cuban casinos and the mob that controlled them.

 

[Siver!]

Worth noting that the projected drop in US tourism on the whole has materialised.

This self inflicted gunshot wound to the fiscal foot won't help, either.

 

[sickc0d3r]

Capitalism always evolves towards crony capitalism & kleptocracy.

That's only because people are bad, the economic system is just a means that can be exploited. This is why democracy is so cool, we can decide not to let our weakest be taken advantage of by the most powerful. Of course, that only works as long as the people believe in the benefits of true democracy. Hence assholes like Trump doing whatever they can to convince people otherwise.

 

[Rob Battisti]

Everyone likes the shit on Bitcoin for its energy consumption.

Take a look at data centers and AI and get back to me.

 

[aerius]

That's only because people are bad, the economic system is just a means that can be exploited. This is why democracy is so cool, we can decide not to let our weakest be taken advantage of by the most powerful. Of course, that only works as long as the people believe in the benefits of true democracy. Hence assholes like Trump doing whatever they can to convince people otherwise.

People don't need to be bad for the system to fail, a bit of apathy & laziness is all that's needed to wreck a democracy. Hell, even good intentions will do it when they fail to take higher order effects into account during the planning phase. I honestly think the people of most nations are too fucking dumb & shortsighted for a democracy to function for long before it effectively becomes a plutocracy or kleptocracy. We're gonna need serious societal & education reforms before we can run a real democracy for the people which doesn't turn into a kakistocracy within a couple generations.

 

[Starck]

Finally went to Vegas early this year - everything was incredibly expensive except for Asian buffets 15-20 minutes drive away from the strip.

 

[AmonTobin]

There's a difference between Capitalism and crony Capitalism.

Capitalism is fantastic and is responsible for the current global standard of living being the highest it has been in human history.

Crony Capitalism on the other hand puts massive wealth into the hands of few with the help of paid off members of government at all levels.

They are not the same.

Don't complain about the wealthy not paying the amount of tax you think they should pay, complain about how your tax dollars are currently being spent.

People absolutely should complain about the wealthy not paying their share of taxes; and I will complain about it until the day I die.

 

[Sinister]

There's a difference between Capitalism and crony Capitalism.

Capitalism is fantastic and is responsible for the current global standard of living being the highest it has been in human history.

Crony Capitalism on the other hand puts massive wealth into the hands of few with the help of paid off members of government at all levels.

They are not the same.

Don't complain about the wealthy not paying the amount of tax you think they should pay, complain about how your tax dollars are currently being spent.

You're demonstrating the exact type of hierarchical thinking that, to me, always pushes capitalism TOWARDS "crony capitalism." My tax dollars are spent mostly on massive corporate subsidies. And who do I have to thank for that? The politicians. And why do I have the politicians to thank for that? Because they act on behalf of the donor class, who are the capitalists.

Pissing on my head, telling me it IS raining, but I gotta buy an umbrella from you for $45

 

[Fedor>Cain]

Finally went to Vegas early this year - everything was incredibly expensive except for Asian buffets 15-20 minutes drive away from the strip.

Hopefully you went with your lawyer and a suitcase full of drugs