Asocial

Thought maybe I invented a new word, but no, asocial is in the dictionary. Don't think I've ever heard it used, what I do hear is introvert. I take introvert to mean inwardly focused, and most non-asocial people take that to mean the opposite of extrovert, which is what they are. But I expect that social people, by and large, cannot imagine that a person would be interested in anything besides other people, and since most people, well, at least all the people they know, are sociable, it follows that asocial people are in the minority and might be actual freaks. Weirdos, malcontents, and probably troublemakers to boot.

There is a cult of Do-It-Yourselfers, people who pride themselves on being able to cope with most any kind of mechanical problem that dares to make its presence known. But capitalism has so perfected the creation of mechanical do-dads, you can now live your life without knowing anything about how things work. Of course it's always been possible to do that, you just needed a lot more money. Now you can do it for a relative pittance, well, if you live in an apartment in the big city. 'Course that compartment is going to cost a pretty penny, but with all the money you save on things like repairs and entertainment, it's still very possible for many people. And by saving money on entertainment, I mean digital entertainment is dirt cheap. Any kind of real life entertainment like driving a car, going to concerts, flying to Europe, or even just hiking in the woods, is going to take real money, so you can judge yourself on the social pecking order by how much you can afford to blow on entertainment. Not how much you spend, but how much you can afford, because it is very easy to spend more than you can afford. Don't do that. That is the road to ruination.

Being able to fix broken mechanical do-dads is all very well, but you are never going to get very far doing everything yourself. All our great mechanical contraptions (trains, cars, airplanes) were produced by large groups of people working together. Near as I can tell, the mechanically inept greatly outnumber the mechanically adept, so when you have a large number of people gathered together, most of those people are going to be incompetent, so the task of the leader is to design a multitude of simple jobs that these friendly nitwits can do. Maybe nitwits isn't a very nice label to apply to these people, but most everyone is a nitwit about something. Those who are mechanically adept are sometimes socially inept, and when they commit a faux pas than any right brained (left brained? I can never remember. I mean what possible use is that kind of information?) individual could see was the wrong thing to do, they are also likely to be called nitwits.

There are two ways to make money. You can sell a product or service and if you are successful you could make a large amount of money. The other way is to squeeze the peasants. That doesn't actually work so well, you can't get blood from a turnip, so what you do is you squeeze everyone, so you can say it is 'fair', but you're actually getting most of the money from the big capitalists. Now you've got this big stream of money coming, and make no mistake, it's big, it's like a firehose of money, what are you going to do with it? Well, a big chunk is going to old folks (like me) for Social Security and Medicare and that's pretty much fixed, The rest of it is up for grabs, and that's what Congress is all about. With so much money going through the government, it isn't very difficult to divert a garden hose size stream to any kind of pet project.

So Mamdani won the election for Mayor of New York City. All the press I''ve seen is predicting gloom and doom for New York. I don't think it's going to make any difference. Of course, I'm three thousand miles away, I probably wouldn't notice if New York fell into the sea. In any case, New York is too established. If the bureaucracy is not totally integrated (communication and business wise), the underground good-ol-boy / girl network surely is. 

So what we have here is a guy who is a social butterfly has talked his way into the top position of the New York City Government Mafia. I don't know what he is going to do, but whatever it is, it going entail more of the tax stream going into his, and his cronies pockets. I mean, that's the whole point. Now if you can dress is up and sell it to the peasants, and you can see he knows how to do that, you're golden.

The big shots who are making bundles in the financial markets don't care. So what if your taxes go up by a zillion when you've just make ten zillion? Yes, the streets are littered with little people, but you never go out, all your financial work is done on line.