I totally understand where you are coming from, I love the woods and I love the beach so I love living here. But I really never go to the beach much unfortunately, My friends and family all moved out to the pacific northwest. A few went to Nevada. I scaled back my desk job to 2 days a week and have been starting to work the dirt again. I have a few dozen avocado trees in disrepair and a handful of cherimoya trees that need some love. The pomegranates are like weeds they always grow back strong all on their own but the papaya trees need a lot more tlc. They had been giving good fruit for decades but now are halfway dead. I need to prune them up and get them going again. We do have thousands of black walnut trees everywhere and cactus pears for treats on the hike. And scattered mandarins or random apricot or figs in the more wildwoods. There are many places like this in SoCal where you can get away with a ridiculous low cost of living. Specially if your don't mind living over an hour away of DTLA. And the only problem with taxes is that they are for people who don't want to share. Every system has some communism in it in a way. They just have a different way of doing it. Some for the worse of course. In CA if you don't share they take it from you in taxes. So you share instead. How do you share? You start a business or you donate your money to a good cause. Specially one you are passionate about. Where the investment is worth putting your surplus money into. And you only get taxed on your surplus. Any money that falls into your surplus should be considered house money. House money used to acquire things that can't be purchased with cash money. Like peace of mind or defense of self. It was either gardening again or join a gym. Its always nice to know your grower. Specially when your grower is you
if you really think this state only takes your surplus i don't know what to say in the real business world its a blood bath and they take everything they can before you even get a chance to make money as a general i watched every good developer head out years ago it was always the same response "how can i risk everything i ever worked for on a chance to make money?" a lot of those guys ended up living in the last house they built and moved first chance they got this state thinks that if you can't make it you don't know what you're doing and someone else will take your place starting to run out of those people and the quality of people coming to take their place is very low call someplace paradise kiss it goodbye some Cali band once said
surplus is relative to the person it depends on what you do with the money past your overhead what you actually need to live most of that can be written off and in terms of making money it has to be moneyball low risk-medium reward type of stuff like how a person who loves baseball opens a small pizza shop so he can sponsor a little league team
There is the rub. Ambition is good so it can get you the money you need to do what you want to do. But once you have the money you need you will most likely be brainwashed by then into being an old man. An old man forgets why he wanted to make money and money and what it can buy becomes the end goal. It is hard to make money and get away clean afterwards. It is too tempting to want to make a little more and a little more. But its a losing battle. Every little more you make every little more they take. At some point you realize that you are cattle and there is no use at kicking up at the pricks cracking the whip because no matter what you think they wont stop cracking until you stop acting like a broke ass nigger.
i'll just say it like this since we don't need to move the conversation to politics but the way its set up they KNOW exactly how much they can bleed out of every type of business to the dime and keep the slaves working not totally different than what you're saying but all the same unless you've actually run a business, paid the taxes and employed and paid a staff you have no idea god forbid you should actually try to own the land you do business on Capn and I disagree vehemently on a lot of stuff but he's worked it from both sides so in that sense we know each other i'm not saying i'm better than anyone else but if you haven't been there you don't know everyone slaps your ass and calls you playa until things get sideways and then its you and you alone ambition doesn't need to be ugly but unless you're in it to make money what's the point? what most people don't realize is how quick a successful business comes up on the radar in this state my Thai massage place was nice until they figured out they could extract more w permits and new licenses and laws the weed business here is over and i don't thing the guys going legal have any idea how badly the FTB is going to eviscerate them to say we live in a state hostile to business is a huge understatement
Of course its set up that way. That is the grand bargain. And they know that a lot of people will try and fight that fact and just bleed and bleed more money. Resistance is futile though. Surrender but dont give yourself away. You should not own the land you do business with IMO. Too much risk. It is more cost effective to lease and pay permits than to own and pay more taxes. And way more flexible. Whats the point? The playa thing should have gotten old and shoulda been a warning. We all end up alone in the end and we shoulda known that from the start. If your end goal is making money... then money is the motivating factor in how you judge then the force of the state will fall upon you hard. Just like you said. A business that starts to make money will show up on their radar as a new mine to tap. So a good idea is to not make money. At least not a lot of money. And by money I mean profits. So if the profits are low then the surplus will of course be low or even zero. If a person lives around vampires he should probably wear a turtleneck when he goes outside to mow the lawn or get his paper. Lets say instead he takes all the profits and shifts them to a non profit like Gates and the like do. No profit means no surplus. That non profit can then fund a travelling basketball team that helps inner city kids stay off drugs and gangs or some bullshit. And you hire one of your friends to coach the team and another to tutor them while you take on an agent type role getting kids that might not make it into the NBA into other lesser professional leagues in the US and around the world. Maybe you just always wanted to be in the basketball business but its not a big money maker so you sold thai rubdowns because they stack stacks a lot faster? The roman soldier would sit and tell his slave a story about how once his career in the military was over and he was free of his duty in his late 40's he would sell all he had and spend his savings to finally give his life a true start and do something he really wanted to do while living off the power and prestige not of what he earned but what he paid. There is no difference between the slave and the soldier if the soldier keeps taking on tour after tour in his 50's for a few dollars more. Here it is not about the earning, it is about the paying. How much you pay means how much you have contributed to our society. Greed is not good but consumerism is pretty radical. You have to break a few glasses if you want some good old world fortune. And you have to pour some out for the homies if you want to be blessed. Either way you have to destroy something precious to you that costs you cash money in order to win what it is you truly want and maybe don't even know you want. You have to have money to burn before you want to have money to burn and you can burn it. Maybe you want to create an amusement park for gladiatorial combat? Or maybe you always wanted a bar to watch Dodgers games at with good BBQ. Things that might not make money, might just barely break even... but things that you can now afford to do. Better yet... with the people you wish to do them with. You get to choose. And when we get the choose from so much in this great capitalist system with every single channel to watch we unfortunately get tunnel vision and settle on the same channel we always watch. The ruble channel. Where the means to the end becomes the end itself.
Incredible as it may be, John Walker Lindh ( Black), is scheduled to be set free from prison in May...remember this fuck? The American Taliban fighter captured years ago? He is still radicalized, and still calls for global jihad, writes about his unchanged beliefs every day. I was tending bar in a country club then, and his stepfather's name, or his adopted name, whatever, was Black. Johnny Walker Black. When one of the better members came in, he used to say, " Phil...I'll have a traitor on the rocks". I knew exactly what he meant. We'll see Johnny again, I'd bet a dollar to a donut.
Ireland has granted Johnny Walker a passport, btw. Does the whole world sleep whilst something wicked this way comes...?
I get it...but it could signify death for the poor bastard in the field who catches a couple of rounds from his AK 47 Or worse, down at the mall. Our legal system deals with traitorous murderers in this way? Have we no better way of justice to administer for the likes of him?
and its actually far more complicated than what you outline... not that anyone who isn't a business owner would grasp all the little niggling petty obstacles in place for no reason but to thwart you it seems not sure that would be different elsewhere but my renegade righty bros tell me TX is a fine place in some respects not so much in others
So Thanks for actually saying that It makes it a bit easier the next time one of us lays into the others buhliefs Take care buddy
More flexible.. yes More cost effective.. not at all. Vertical integration is the still single most cost effective.. if you can handle the heat
You write good rants @rube even if they are rife with jingoistic jargon and including complete circular logic and fuzzy rationales they're still good rants because you've tried to make holistic logic out of disparate greed, sloth and corporate avarice We differ in my view by seeing that nearly all small biz is goodness, you can't treat your customers poorly or they go away in contrast once a company grows so large as to become a corporation they make choices dictated by heartless CFO bean counters who care for nothing but profits at the expense of customers, employees, the environment, the world Telecoms and mega rich FAANG types (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix & Google) pillage humanity without a care of others which is the exact opposite of what @LAdiablo and I have tried to provide as small employers. Thus I speculated on the Politics thread that this evil doesn't happen until ... what? $500M in revenue? In all cases it appears by the time $1B in revenue is hit. Little entrepreneurs are what makes America great. Greedy rich corporate fkucks not paying a dime in taxes ... ever... is what will kill it. I can tell that the years of Catholicism have rubbed off on you Rube and even with your heart in a good place let me share that shit doesn't come off with soap
i'd just add that you also can't treat your employees poorly or they go away as well and that is goodness some of the most gratifying moments of my life were watching people grow, start families, buy homes and cars and enjoy their lives we celebrated those things and i still maintain contact w a few of them i had special bonds with there are some examples of that still around but not many since this state has suffocated the evil business owners my life as a contractor was coming to an end when i started hearing some of my suppliers say they weren't going to sell here anymore how disruptive to normal business flow must this state be that you would chose not to sell here? there is literally zero mom and pop businesses here anymore unless like we talked about the owner is in the kitchen and even then you have to work for free just to get a chance to maybe make 3% after everything and thats not how its supposed to be they are applying the harshest of punishments and taxations to the guys that can least afford it but hey we didn't build that right? when i hear politicians suggesting 70% tax rates for those who make over $10 mil i choke because i know they won't mean net worth and probably will look at lifetime earnings since the people who actually possess that net have better lawyers not everyone has the ability to employ others and there should be incentive not penalties to imagine business we're heading backwards at the speed of light
