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The Three Acronyms That Best Describe This Era: TINA, TANSTAAFL And FUGAZI
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
TINA and the complacent belief in free lunches strip the resiliency from a system and leave it vulnerable to collapse.
It's tough to select three acronyms that best capture the current perfection of central planning, central banking and centralized propaganda. FUBAR (f**ked up beyond all repair) is tough to beat, and for those with a taste for absurdist humor, ROTFLMAO is equally appropriate--especially when "official" economic data is issued by various Ministries of Truth.
After long deliberation, I'm going with TINA, TANSTAAFL and FUGAZI as best defining our era: there is no alternative, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and f**ked up, got ambushed, zipped in (to a body bag).
Let's start with TINA, there is no alternative, because this drives the other two. TINA is the favored phrase of those benefiting from the current arrangement; if they can sell everyone on the idea that this is the only possible arrangement, the tax-donkeys and debt-serfs (i.e. the bottom 90%) will passively accept their lot in life and those at the top of the heap will have a free pass to most of the wealth and power.
But TINA also expresses a systemic rigidity that suppresses the variability and volatility needed to maintain real stability and not just a phony extend-and-pretend pseudo-stability.
As Nassim Taleb has shown in his work on fragility and anti-fragility (as described in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder), there is no alternative is another way of guaranteeing rigidity, brittleness, fragility and vulnerability to collapse.
Here's one example of TINA--rising credit is the backbone of the status quo, and there is no alternative to ever-expanding levels of debt and ever-diminishing returns on all the newly acquired debt.
Which brings us to there ain't no such thing as a free lunch: if there is no alternative, i.e. there is no experimentation, dissent or innovation allowed, the system becomes increasingly fragile and implodes at the first crisis.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch expresses three core dynamics in economics: everything has an opportunity cost; externalities are eventually paid by someone, somewhere, and every "investment" that claims to generate something for nothing is a Ponzi scheme or other fraud.
The opportunity cost of any expense is what else could have been bought with the money. If a society builds a bridge to nowhere at great expense, the society gave up all the more productive uses of those funds. If a university pays an administrator $350,000 a year to be Executive Director of Institutional Advancement (or some equivalent paper-shuffling nonsense), the students forfeit $350,000 of additional classroom educators or a reduction in tuition.
When the money is being borrowed or extracted from student debt-serfs, it seems as if the money is free; the opportunity cost is not visible. But over time, malinvestment, waste and corruption bleed the system of capital and vitality. A society of bridges to nowhere and overpaid, counterproductive paper-shufflers is a society poised on the precipice of collapse.
Externalities are costs that are dumped by participants onto the system or others in the system. The classic example is industrial waste dumped into the air and rivers.
Externalities such as pollution are interesting examples of the Tragedy of the Commons(U.S. Healthcare and the Tragedy of the Commons) that I discussed last month.
When we dump waste in the air and rivers, at first it seems as if the dumping is "free"--we avoid the cost of dealing with the pollutants, and the river and air absorb the poisons with little impact on the system as a whole.
But then as everyone else also dumps waste in the air and water--and they must do so, if they want to compete with those who are "lowering production costs" by dumping their contaminants--the entire system is soon clogged with pollutants that negatively everyone who breathes, eats food grown on poisoned soils, etc.
Since the waste has reached truly epic levels, the cost of remediating the damage is now staggering: the sources of pollution must clean up their production discharges (a horrendously costly project on a national scale) and the damage already done must be cleaned up--another project that will cost a significant percentage of the nation's GDP.
If the nation pretends to clean up the waste with toothless regulations and PR pronouncements, all in the name of maintaining production and consumption, the waste will only get more costly to clean up later.
In the meantime, everyone breathing the air rediscovers TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The illnesses caused by rampant environmental damaged deduct millions of years of productive life from the citizenry and rapidly increase healthcare costs. Both divert capital from production and bleed disposable income from consumption.
Putting off the $10 trillion in environmental cleanup creates $10 trillion in reduced lifespans, lower productivity and soaring healthcare costs--and eventually the $10 trillion clean-up will have to paid for anyway, lest the nation become unlivable.
Every pension plan based on 7+% annual returns is effectively a promise to take $10,000 in contributions and magically turn it into $250,000 in benefits. Every pay-as-you-go healthcare system for the elderly (Medicare etc.) makes the same promise: everyone who paid in $10,000 in total lifetime Medicare taxes can extract $300,000 to $500,000 in benefits.
The same goes for stock markets that triple in six years and housing prices that double in a few short years: the gains, pensions and healthcare are mostly free lunches.
And that brings us to FUGAZI (f**ked up, got ambushed, zipped in). FUGAZI has two current meanings, both apocryphal: something that is fake and the combat-context phrase f**ked up, got ambushed, zipped in (to a body bag, i.e. killed in action). While this certainly sounds Vietnam-era, I worked with many Vietnam vets in the 70s and 80s, and I never heard any use the word fugazi, so it may be a backronym, i.e. a word that did not start as an acronym but acquired an acronym later.
The official narrative of "growth" based on official statistics is fugazi, i.e. fake. The stats are fake, the rah-rah propaganda is fake, the claim that subprime auto loans will all be paid in full is fake, the promise that a college education will deliver a secure, good-paying job is fake--the list is essentially endless.
That leaves investors and anyone else who believes the official narrative (or believes the Powers That Be can enforce the narrative even if it is fake) in danger of getting ambushed by an imploding, bidless market. The big screwup is believing you're safe because nothing untoward has ever happened on this path. (In other words, "buy the dip" has worked every time and is thus totally safe.)
The point here is that TINA and the complacent belief in free lunches strip the resiliency from a system and leave it vulnerable to collapse. So instead of hyper-vigilance and a keen intuition for something not feeling right, the believers in free lunches march complacently down the trail, are ambushed by "the impossible" and zipped up in body bags.
Put another way: it's fun to play at a rigged roulette wheel, but once you feel confident that you'll never lose or will recover your losses quickly, it's wise to cash in your chips and let others play the last few spins of the wheel.
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FUBAR
AU, BITCHEZ!
The acronymn he forgot to explain (the most important one) is WHEN?
Yeah, at 484 years, people thought Methuselah would croak any day, but he was only half-way to his demise.
ZIRP foreever and QE to infinity.
DOW 125000.
Who will stop them?
But that's the only way government "works".
Ever increasing laws.
Taxes and their waste.
Propaganda and disinformation.
EBT
Don't forget TPFB (tongue punch fart box).
No.
Too
Powerfully
Fucking
Big
And MUTANTS...the government is crawling with scumbag MUTANTS.
M.arxist
U.surper
T.yrannical
A.uthoritarian
N.efarious
T.reasonous
S.ociopaths
HEY COMMONERS! don't forget BOHICA!
Again and again and again! Jubilee is inevitable. Well, that or debt slavery for all.
Banksters will never allow jubilee.
.
.
.
.
Zionist
Occupation
Government
Don't forget SNAFU
shikata ga nai
Thatcher taught me everything I ever needed to know about TINA. There simply is no greater force in politics than painting oneself into a corner of their own making.
It's the equivalent of being forced to cry "Uncle!"
Congressional hearing 2017 quote; "we did everything we could to save the economy, but it just wasn't enough....we should have bought more bonds but _____ stopped us or we could have saved it"
Nope, it's gonna be "who coulda knowed?" And "nobody could have seen this coming!"
It is more likely to be "it's not my fault!".
It's all of our faults for being ignorant early on and not putting our feet down when that ignorance was lifted. It's late enough in the game, that barring iminent nuclear war, the best course of action is to let it crash, then be the assholes with all of the real, tangible good ideas.
Sitting in the waiting room.....
I WAIT, I WAIT, I WAIT, I WAIT...
You can summarize all three words in one: SNAFU.
FIZZ
Tango Uniform
Oh come on now... have some faith in the system. Everything is gonna be all right... you will see. Lol
FOLKS -
folks on list kill soon
MDK MDK MDK
Isn't that a double negative? So we're fine, right?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwNrpPgIEjQ
Don't fvck with Lefty from Mullberry Street.
That's not a body bag. No really, it's a sleeping bag.......
never mind ISIS will fix it
"Every pension plan based on 7+% annual returns is effectively a promise to take $10,000 in contributions and magically turn it into $250,000 in benefits. Every pay-as-you-go healthcare system for the elderly (Medicare etc.) makes the same promise: everyone who paid in $10,000 in total lifetime Medicare taxes can extract $300,000 to $500,000 in benefits."
This is where the wheels actually come off. Everything up to that point is wasted breath. "I was promised" is a hell of a drug.
buy bonds---the coupon plus the 'for sure' capital appreciation will get you your 7%
that 300,000 extracted, only gets you 50,000 worth of healthcare
Was thinking SNAFU myself...
The sheeple expect great heroes will be sent. It happens in their media fantasies. There is no good king/government/banker/destiny.
The sheeple crap all over the few people with the stones to sound warnings or tell the truth.
Screw 'em.
It takes them out of their little comfort zone and all sorts of mental blocks go up. They'll learn soon enough. Being hungry and homeless is said to be very uncomfortable.
Government, unresponsive to its citizens, can make any Draconian rule it chooses. So can Google, since it has become an inseparable part of government.
Where did we think it was leading with the worldwide spy network, Internet personal information, and unbelievable support from the U.S. Congress for the advancing power of Google and the Internet suppliers?
First, the people lost their representation when the Federal Reserve began buying Congressmen and presidents. Now, any social, civic or financial complaint the people have is meaningless to these elected representatives who landed their positions with the corrupt, one-party system financed by unlimited fiat (printed by decree) money.
And, now, Google pushes ahead with its plan to censor the Internet with its newest rules after already corrupting the search engines so significantly that any articles which realistically take on the Establishment are moved to the back of the line. Google a controversial subject and you will wade through pages of Establishment and Progressive opposition to your viewpoint and the truth.
This is what happens with monopoly, first a monopoly on the financial sector of the economy (international financiers who own the Fed); then, the monopoly spreads from industry to industry, eventually completely sewing up media. And the result, the complete abolition of free speech,
It was a key responsibility of government to protect the people from monopoly; it was the Congress that was charged with keeping the tyrants from controlling industry, the economy, the media, the government and life itself. It was the role of government to issue anti-trust laws that would restrain the development of monopoly within the American economy.
Congress is a cesspool of prostitutes that has eschewed its duty.
Google Moving to Shut Down Alternative Media by Ranking Sites on “Facts” Rather than Popularity: Wants To Cross Check Websites Against Debunking Sites Such As Snopes.com
By Steve Watson
Global Research, March 02, 2015
Infowars
Search Engine giant Google, the major driver of traffic to the majority of media portals is moving to change the way it ranks websites, declaring that it intends to use known partisan debunking outlets to determine the “truthfulness” of content.
Currently, Google rankings are determined by the number of incoming links to a web page, meaning that if a story becomes popular it can be driven to the top of search results, and by viewed by millions of people.
However, this is a little too democratic for the liking of some, who only like to get their “facts” from pre-approved sources.
The proposed solution, according to a Google funded research team is to compute a“Knowledge-Based Trust score” for every web page, based on Google’s own “Knowledge Vault”, an automated database that determines “facts the web unanimously agrees on,” according to the New Scientist.
“A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the research team.
In short, any web pages that provide information that contradicts or questions Google’s own established “truth”, will be bumped down the rankings.
In addition, some of those working on “truthfulness” ranking technology have expressed a desire to verify or rebut web pages by cross-referencing them to other sources, such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. These websites exist and profit directly from debunking anything and everything. What’s more, they have been previously exposed as highly partisan.
It is a move that will set alarm bells ringing for fans of alternative media websites, such as Infowars, which are regularly attacked by the professional debunking websites merely for questioning official narratives, and popularising underreported information.
Presumably, the meters of truthfulness and trustworthiness ultimately implemented by Google will stem from government accounts and its mouthpiece mainstream media reports. The rise of the alternative media has directly correlated with the routine exposure of misinformation, propaganda, and outright lies emanating from these institutions.
Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/google-moving-to-shut-down-alternative-media-by-ranking-sites-on-facts-rather-than-popularity
RIFS (Reality is for suckers)
Reality is for (the) sober.
Too Ignorant to kNow Anybetter....(TINA)
The original post needs some Fugazi!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMOAXm94VWo
Free housing, free cell phones, free health care, free Escalades [but only in purple], free community college, free...free...free...
It's only fair.
The purple thing must be location dependent. I see more white ones and black ones than anything else.
<- FRB + TBTF + TBTJ = FUBAR + Time = TEOTWAWKI or DOA
<- p.s. FU2 2 GOV+NGO trolls
wtf!? deleted duplicate.
wish there were a Delete option.
wtf!? deleted duplicate.
wtf!? deleted duplicate.
I used to pass by Club Fugazi every day, but I never went in. Too many tourists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Fugazi
love this article.
bring on the Backronyms!
Charles, TANSTAAFL is too long. LOTD* will do.
* Laws of Thermodynamics http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
Which are a subset of Laws of Physics, e.g. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html
IOW... LON (Laws of Nature) = 'GOD'. And LON/God won't be fooled indefinitely. The inevitable Payback is a Biatch.
All else is speculation, wishful thinking, indoctrination, BS, or downright deceit, scamming and lies. \If you don't believe me, then contact me for some invisible, undetectable and untestable products I'd like to sell you or to subscribe to./sarc
p.s. Now that Spock** is dead ("He's dead Jim, he's dead!"), I have to keep his rational spirit alive. It's... logical.
** Fri, 02/27/2015 - 16:31 | 5836839 new Kirk2NCC1701
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-27/here-what-americans-spent-their...
EABODO.
"Eat A Bag Of Dicks, Obama."
What a coicidence. Eabodo is in Nigeria.
http://wikimapia.org/21929414/Gwagwalada
"I am a patient boy..."
fugezi, fugazi it's a whazy, it's a whoozy it's a ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTHlXb0PXh4
FUGAZI is clearly a second-generation FUBAR.
btw a couple of big stocks have been jumping recently like frogs in a dynamite pond, MCD, IBM, GE, ... for no rational reason. thank you Janet.
Best band of all time.