Thursday 19 January 2017

HOW TO FOOL YOURSELF INTO WEALTH.

Far as I know, you can't adjectivise a verb; a verb needs an adverb - it should be Think: different or Think differently.
Think different is shit.

I go to sleep at night - when I go to sleep at all - worrying about a  chap in  a TeeVee commercial.  He's not very bright and he has a demanding daughter, you know the type,  the country's plagued with the little bastards, gotta have a gap year,  le grand tour de nos jours, before she goes to Uni. 

 If I was Seckaterry of State for Education I would ban this practice; if you need a year's holiday after meaningless A levels and before you start a degree then you're not up to it, most of them aren't up to it, anyway, after Blair's Uni Revolution, few graduates can frame a sentence;  I'd say to GapYearBrats,  you've got a place, take it up and work like Hell or fuck off and get a proper job,  even if you're taking out a loan it costs taxpayer money to maintain higher education, if you'd rather be on holiday then fuck off, learn a trade and do something useful, you can't just interrupt the study mechanism, go fucking and drinking around the world and  then carry-on studying as though nothing had happened, besides, your life is a fucking holiday, you don't need another one, you cheeky fucking bastard.

 It is no wonder that employers are all a-whine about graduates hardly being able to spell their own increasingly preposterous names, now that they, by virtue of their undergraduacy consider themselves entitlementistas
But I suppose the gap-year brat is just an extension of Thatcher's property-owning democracy bollocks, in which people shackle themselves to a tiny, rudely built and unimaginably over-valued house, one they can only afford by both of them working their arses off, and then when it's paid for, selling it to pay for social care - to be bullied and abused, pinched and prodded, wrongly medicated and left in piss-soaked bedding by very welcome, culturally enhancing and totally necessary Polish immigrants, without whom we simply cannot do, the fucking horrible bastards, smirking that they've come here to make better life, no; and so everybody bend over or get out of their way. Why don't they stay and make better life in fucking Poland, eh? Why not make Poland better place. Making better place was what Britons did, after the Hitler war, fought on behalf of Poles and French and Dutch and countless others, all now berating Brits for their temerity in wanting to leave Greater Germany. 
Scottish catering is full of them, Poles, and everywhere you go in hotels and restaurants there're little saucers with pound coins in them, so's we can help these horrible fuckers make better life by giving them free money, as well as free health care and education. Oh, but mr ishmael, they work so hard. No, they fucking don't, they just say they do; they can't even speak English most of them, and they make that your fault, you should learn Polish to help Magda make better life. I knew a Magda, in social care, she was a liar, a cheat, an incompetent,  a right monster, hostile, belligerent; a bully, untrainable, every constructive suggestion eschewed as being inspired only by racism - is because I am Pole, that you criticise.

For now, anyway, those like my man in the Apple advert, well,  their half-wit spawn need supporting through their three- or four-year course because, quite rightly, no grants are available for hairdressing and leisure studies, and, in the case of this poor sap, they need supporting on a one-year world  holiday, too. And then  the kids - DoAnyfin'4'Em,Me - need help with the starter-home down-payment, y'know to help them get their foot on the housing gallows. And to drive-up the prices for everyone else.

What Dad does, anyway, is allow himself to be dragged into an Apple store to get his kid some gap-year tech, a sales assistant talks to him for all of about two and a half seconds and he purchases an Apple I-pad Pro, so's his horrid little monster can send all her so-called friends movies of herself, dossing all over the world, and do whatever the fuck else it is you can do with an i-Pad.  It's over nine-hundred quid, this piece of junk, and he just says Oh Yeah, Will This DoYa Love?


We own our house, we own our cars, everything which we own we really own; we have no dependent children and an above-average income but it'd be a long cold day in Hell before I paid a grand for a tablet, even for myself. 
 I already have an i-Pad, one with no apps, and I am continuously receiving billing enquiries, threats to cut me off because I don't use the AppStore.  I really do believe that Apple and Facebook and Twitter are an insidious consumer tyranny, le totalitairianisme consumeriste nouvelle.  That the TeeVee is used to define good parenting as the gifting to non-productive children  of Apple's current model is not only wicked in itself but is a slap in the face - another one - for the majority of parents, who are unable to  spend so extravagantly.
According to HMRC the average UK salary is £28K on which tax of £6K is paid. The average house costs notionally £288K but over a 30-year mortgage will actually cost £630 K, so, assuming  that inflation rises at the same rate as the house repayments, and that the resale value of the house, once paid for, reaches more than the £630K it actually cost - this is the hope upon which house ownership is now built, that howevermuch it cost a house can be sold for more -  we can assume that AppleDad's residential care costs adjusted for that inflation will be about £3k a week, and if he and Mrs AppleMum both need care then the proceeds of their house sale will cover barely two years' residential care, unless, of course, they transfer ownership of the gaff to Little Poppet, which, if they do, should see them jailed, in my IMHO. 

Assuming  longevity for all, apart from Gnasher's Glaswegians, the very best use of one's earnings would be to rent as cheaply as possible and spend any spare money on having nice cars and other sorts of fun because by stepping on the housing gallows you are only saving money with which to pay for dubious care and regular bullyings and mistreatments by people being paid the minimum wage in care homes, whilst obsessing about making better life - the kind run by Mad Mick Fallon, before he became War Minister.  This, of course, is why there are no council homes to speak of and why the property-owning democracy is a myth created to serve private enterprise and discourage workers  from quite rightly going on strike.  The stake of the stakeholder in the property market is actually one to which he is tied.

As well as the abolition of decent, affordable council housing, Junky George Osborne and  That Albino Cunt Johnson made London a money laundry for International Crime; gangsters park their money in over-priced housing stock, forcing unaffordable price rises in  homes formerly occupied by ordinary workers.  This unwelcome trend is now spreading to provincial cities and towns, with the blessings of national government, local mayors and councils, all of whom will be on the take, as usual. 
All our democratic masters are happy, as long as the myth of AppleMan is meat and drink to those poor but Aspiring. 

  Aspirational, it was one of Cameron's favourite words, him, the one with the family money, or some of it, in an offshore tax haven, he loved to describe the voters as Aspirational, meaning poor and stupid, believing  that they, too, can be filthy rich, even though the number of rich people has to be strictly limited, otherwise what's the point of it,  there have to be far more poor people than rich people, otherwise the rich people cease being special and become almost like poor people, only with money, and what would be the point of that? If everyone had lots of money then what would be the point of Lewis Hamilton, people'd thnk he was a fucking lunatic, he's got loads of money and here he is, risking his life, driving like a nutcase, he could be roasted alive, what's the point of that? And if pretty young women were rich then why would they want to snuggle-up to a suicidal lunatic with a bizarrely  stupid beard, whose greatest thrill is squirting champagne over other suicidal lunatics, only not as suicidal as him, because he's the world's champion suicidal lunatic. And as for Mutant Murray, well, if everyone had money then nobody'd go and watch him, punching himself, having Turette's Syndrome and smashing his racket to pieces, climbing into the crowd and snogging his own mother. And if everyone had money then everytime Prince Brian opened his gob he'd get a fist in it or a boot. Keeps things in proper order, it does, most of us being skint, and only a few of us being minted.

 But Cameron's approval of aspirational  voters is  nothing to do with equality because  an aspiration, by definition, is something in the future, you're never actually going to be rich, you just dream about it, like winning the Lottery.  Aspirationalism  is Cameron's form of the American Dream, in which the citizen is permitted, encouraged, to dream, whilst his masters shit in his face and use his tongue for toilet paper. In that We Shall Overcome nonsense, it is the Shall, that counts, We Shall Overcome, one day, overcoming is an aspiration not a certainty;  aspirationalism is a form of SOMA, whose active properties take away brutal, impoverished reality, for a time, and substitute a waking dream.

If properly aspirational all you gotta do is not rock the boat, live in a house you don't own, even though you pay for it two or three times over;  drive a car you don't own and borrow the petrol money at 28% per annum, if you're lucky; accept that your bosses, who don't actually do anything other than fuck things up, require substantial payrises and that you,  actually, because of things you don't understand, must work for less and less each year;  that way you can be properly aspirational, aspiring to get into even more debt so that you are  able to raise useless, ineducable children and buy them expensive and unnecessary love tokens, on borrowed money,  just like my man in the Apple ad.  And better still,  Apple, like all successful initiatives,  is, as a matter of principle fully committed to not paying any UK tax on its sales of the Apple Dream. What could be better than borrowing money in order to support an industry which doesn't help pay for schools and hospitals?

You only have to Google "Average Incomes" to discover armies of Mrs Askey's, what is it, JAMs, those JustAboutManaging. 
 These aren't the couples doing half a dozen disgraceful zero-hours minimum wage jobs in which we, the taxpayers, support the robbing-bastard employers with tax credits, so's they don't have to waste money on proper wages;  these JAMs are married couples, both with expensive-sounding job titles - systems analysts and senior sales executives - earning between them about £50K and once they've paid mortgage, child care, grocery, credit card and car costs they haven't got a pot to piss in, never mind a grand to spend on a kid's tablet.  Neither the abused zero-hours workers or the twin careerists can afford such a thing, although the Apple advert would  make you think it was just perfectly natural, a casual purchase.

From 2001-2016 average wages have risen by less than 3% whilst the costs of housing, food, fuel and energy have rocketed. During that same period MPs have weathered the exposure of their expenses crime spree and still managed to increase the own wages by 30%.  
MPs still manage the impudence of second and third jobs, Michael Spit, MP, this week, working-away for Mr Murdoch, interviewing Donald Trump, and writing for the Times regularly;

The MP for Surrey Heath 
attends to his constituents' interests.

 his must be a blessed constituency, enabling him to let it care for itself, while he earns a crust, an activity made cruelly necessary, by him only being on £80k, plus food, clothing, IT, postage, travel, housing, bungs, bribes and freebies, the cheeky cunt.

 Despite massive and unprecedented rises in the costs of  living, despite static or falling incomes, zero return on savings  and soaring personal debt we allow ourselves to be persuaded that inflation is running at between one and two per cent when effectively it is ten or twenty times that; just as we allow Apple to persuade us that their devices, produced by slave labour in China, are simply essential to the proper development of our precious consumer children.

The reality - rather than the aspiration - is that a proper society would hound the Apple trash-people into the Thames and burn their bright, shiny shops to the ground. As it is, the Apple adverts will continue to taunt those outside the charmed circle of discretionary, disposable income, whilst its owners will continue to brazenly evade lawful taxation to which the rest of us are compelled by fear of imprisonment.  


Stop me if I've mentioned this before but Apple founder and whiz-kid,  Steve Jobs, was a pathetic Bob Dylan freak,


  he could  never get near Bob but when a chance came up to date his fellow-Californian, Joan Baez - 


Dylan's cruelly humiliated former lover -  
Stevie jumped at the chance. 
Weird, really, but then he was.


One day billionaire Stevie said,
 Hey, babe, I saw this really cool little French dress,  in a couturier's over in Santa Barbara, wanna take a ride over and have a look? Baez says that she thought what any woman would think in that situation but when she did him a twirl in his recommended garment he said, Yeah, I was right, it does suit you, Joanie,  you really should buy it.
Now, that's what you call Thinking Different.

9 comments:

Dick the Prick said...

I would have loved to read all of that but I didn't. Sir, Northern Ireland is more important than Brexit. James Brokenshire is the minister's name. He got bored.

callmeishmael said...

Possibly, mr dick, but short of war on the Falls and the Shankill, nobody here gives a fuck, do they, about Kneecaps and Arlene? Nor about Blair, Clinton and the Peace Praw-cess and Peace4Pardons. The best news is that Marty looks ill.

Mike said...

Mr I: a succinct summary of the modern day equivalent of the feudal system we all live in. I thought I had escaped here, Down Under, but its a diluted version of what you describe, up there. I'm independent, financially and in all other matters, but I feel the system closing in on me. Although some would consider Sydney to be paradise, my older daughter has said 'fuck it' and gone to live in Bali. For younger people the cost of living here is beyond them and it becomes slavery. I've advised my younger daughter, after she finishes uni, to enjoy life rather than join the other lemmings on the daily commute to the city, and wait for me to die and inherit the pile.

Marx was correct when he said capitalism would be its own downfall. Debt is a pernicious bond most onerous.

Doug Shoulders said...

I wouldn’t touch any ithing. Give me a keyboard and desktop computer any day. My phone is 9 quid out of tesco’s about 10 years ago.. 15 quid top-up just before Christmas and still have 12 quid in the thing. So that’s 3 quid a month and oly on a busy month.
I have an old ipod which won’t connect to youtube anymore and I suspect it’s to make me buy a new one.
Everything’s about getting more new stuff isn’t it? Used to repair stuff…washing machines and the like.. make them go on for years. My brothers and me self-taught repairmen cars, music stuff …domestic appliances. Some folks never learn that.
Guy came round to fix the dishwasher the other day. New main pump needed…250 quid. Fuck that..60 quid pump from espares and I’ll fix it myself.
Lost all that kind of stuff when I was raising a family and the ex would just buy a new appliance when the old one burst a component.. It’s all come back now….lovin it.
The more stupid and inadequate we get to be, the more govment can control and abuse.

mongoose said...

Debt is selling the future, isn't it? It used to be that debt was that sofa and the tallyman would come on a Friday for his sixpence. Now it's an electronic scorecard that you cannot see or control because it is plugged into the game. Your sixpences are aggregated, securitised, sold on, and hedged. The risk is distilled ever more keenly while the profit is siphoned away. Didn't we play this game to its logical hiccough of a conclusion almost a decade ago?

The problem with capitalism BTW is not the capitalist and the capital - the farm, the farmer, the tractor, and the seed - but the fucking crows.

walter said...

Ive got an ipod {the one with the stainless back}Ive got a ten year old Macpro works a treat after a £100 hardware upgrade its astonishing quality, How many old windows computers work after ten years, Ive also spent£1800 on parts that my son turned into an extremely fast computer, Ive just come back from a walk in a beauty spot whilst walking i was listening to Mozart piano concertos, bluetoothed to my headphones from my samsung smartphone at the same time i was communicating with my son on whatts app and
at the the same time i sent him a very good photo of the lake with the phone, the phone is 5 years old and works perfectly technology whats not to like!

callmeishmael said...

Ecpverything is not to like. The digitised reproduction of everything, mr walter, diminshes everything but what you lose most in your digi-stroll is yourself, your own silence, your own imagination, this enslavement is destructive kf creativity, and the poor children, given programmed trickery in order to supplant there own daydreans. There is very little about expensive information-handling technology which is not corrosive of those instincts and thought processes which brought us here. Often, at the airport, I am the only one, among hundreds, not peering at a tiny screen, thumbing and swiping like a chimp, not braying self-importantly into an already obsolete telephone. I am often the only person in the airport lounge who is really in the airport lounge, lounging and imagining, all the others are having their imaginations managed for them, eternally connected to the Great InfoShit In The Sky, like obedient Aztec primitives.

Mental arithmetic, estimating? No, I don't need them, I got an app. Grammar, comprehension, vocabulary? Nah, just run everyfin froo Spellcheck. That's what's not to like, mr walter, amongst much else, voluntary idiocy. Sense of direction, map reading? Nah, gottanapp wot does that for ya. An I gorra SatNav, too. Does all yer finkin for ya, this stuff, duneed to bovvah wif finkin'. Wossapoint? That's your brave new bluetooth world, mr walter, a race of obedient idiots with highly developed thumbing skills, good for fuck all.

I live in those Orkney sea and skyscapes which Neil Oliver and his chums rave about and let me tell you, they cannot be accurately photographed but only seen and breathed and lived-in; a bit, I suspect, like your lake; how have sensible people been so hoodwinked into believing that they can point and shoot and thus replicate nature's majesty, it is such a fucking impertinence, such stupidity, such arrogance. You sent your son some pixcels, which he can display on any number of devices, enlarging and enhancing them, but it's all just electrinic voodoo, and a practice which restricts and diminshes and ultimately destroys all the other senses, it reduces everything to a Polaroid Camera moment. He, you and the world would be better if you wrote him a letter, describing the lake and encouraging him to imagine, to think differently, y'know, as I do, here, to you.

walter said...

Thanks for your reply,I listen to mozart because it does not impair my thought processes,Folk music would with all the singing, I would like to stop thinking for a while..I was using the phone to communicate about a linux distibution i was a about to try..the photo was too prove what a lovely day it was! There arent many sounds of nature around the lake only dogs barking! Im crap at the punctuation and vocabulary, because ive never written anything other than a birthday card for over fifty years
Ive two awards on my writing desk for innovation earned in my last two years at work
The last one is named after me and will be awarded annually..Mozart doesnt interfere with my mind it makes me feel wonderful and a bit of beethoven too, your like all celts mr ish passionate are about language and feelings, In my old age i dont care much about what people do aslong as they dont interfere with me, what pisses me off is idiots with unsuitable breeds of dog barely under control!

call me ishmael said...

Thank you, mr walter. I used to describe much of Mozart and suchlike as walking about music, for it was often mere backdrop to the dounbgs of the the Great, there is nothing wrong with walking to Mozart. It is against the complete atomising of such experience that we should guard, each living in his own digitised sensory universe, his knowledge of art playlisted, his culture on speed dial.