Ben Uticone

If we're arguing over a tweet and now you're reading my bio so you can find something to attack me over, walk away. You've already lost. You just don't know it.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

I'm proud to say I needed no help or privilege to get where I am.

I achieved forgettable mediocrity all on my own.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@bestofStarTrek Spock's death is too easy. Gonna go with this:

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@aestheticsguyy

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@Itz_zayyad1 It's established in the books that when a Targaryen marries outside the family their kids are as likely as not to take after the non-Targaryen parent.

Baelor Breakspear, for instance, was said to have inherited his mother's Dornish looks.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@uscfan981 I think both together are more significant than either alone. These signal the beginning of the Attitude Era and Monday Night Wars, the single greatest age in the history of pro wrestling.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@ANG3LA_x_ Xenogears
Final Fantasy VI
Skyrim
Stardew Valley
Civilization V
Mass Effect 2
Shadow of the Colossus
Subnautica
Batman Arkham Asylum
Tropico 4

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

Nice zinger, Nick.

Now compare Texas to New Jersey on:

-Literacy
-Teen Pregnancy
-Food Insecurity
-Violent Crime
-Life Expectancy
-Infant Mortality
-Child Poverty

[Nick Sortor @nicksortor]

Shoutout to Texas and @GregAbbott_TX for allowing me to pump my own gas for $3.17/gal without the threat of LITERAL ARREST like New Jersey at $4.68/gal!

Red states just work better.

Liberals will learn eventually.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@bestofStarTrek Absolutely. Underestimated character. The Disaster episode showed how she could rise to the occasion when needed.

Also, a genuinely lovely person in real life. Met her at an event some years ago. A real sweetheart.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@TheCinesthetic I love how he caught the whole bullet in his mouth, shell casing and all. In any other movie it would be a stupid mistake but in UHF it just makes the gag funnier.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@james_xond I have barrister shelves that were originally a wedding gift to my parents over 50 years ago.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@90sWWE Ether of the Razor Ramon vs Shawn Michaels ladder IC title matches.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@Tsar_Martyr Is rage-bait the most transparent ploy for online engagement?

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

We are so, irreparably fucked. And not even because this is a tough problem. It isn't. We're fucked because no matter how big a problem is and no matter how easy it is to fix, we're forbidden from considering any solution that inconveniences the top 1% in any way.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Social Security’s trust fund is now due to run low on money beginning in 2032.

The government acknowledged that the Trump administration’s immigration policies and tax cuts are expected to contribute to the insolvency. https://t.co/FpQywAm1Hv

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@bestofStarTrek Absolutely love him, and the rest of the cast.

And speaking as the son of a career public school educator, I will be forever grateful for all he has done for literacy in this country. Thank you, @levarburton.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@IconicChriss You could make a compelling argument for it. His in-ring work was excellent, he was dynamite on the mic, and he was more over and drew more money than anyone else in the history of the business.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@SteveLovesAmmo "Burning down cities"

This is why it's so hard to have an intelligent conversation; this hyperbole.

Yes, there was some rioting, some vandalism, even a little arson, and there's no excusing that.

But words have meaning. If you want to see a city burned down, think Hiroshima.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@TheCinesthetic The show lacked a proper dénouement, and that was the point. The overall message of the series was the self-defeating futility of the war on drugs. But because our political system runs on money and there's money to be made on an endless war, we keep fighting it.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

In 1879, JP Morgan paid a man to invent the lie that is the foundation of modern economics.

A billionaire who helped start Amazon just exposed the whole thing on Diary of a CEO, and once you hear it you will never look at paychecks the same way again:

146 years ago, a guy named Henry George wrote a book called Progress and Poverty.

It was the first mainstream book about the rich systematically stealing from the poor, and It literally became the bestselling book in the history of the United States at the time.

The working class was reading it everywhere, and the people at the top of the economy completely lost their minds.

So JP Morgan personally brought a man named John Bates Clark to Columbia University, which was essentially the intellectual headquarters of Wall Street, and told him to fix the problem.

Clark wrote a book called The Distribution of Wealth. In it, he invented something called the "theory of marginal productivity," which claims that because markets are perfectly efficient, the amount of money you earn reflects EXACTLY the value you contribute to the economy.

If you make $15,000 a year, that's because you're providing $15,000 of value. If a hedge fund manager makes $500 million a year moving money around, that's an accurate reflection of the value he creates in the world.

And Clark literally said the quiet part out loud IN HIS OWN BOOK.

He wrote that they had to prove to working people that no matter how much they make, whether it's a little or a lot, it accurately reflects their value, because if workers ever concluded that their labor was worth more than they were being paid, they would revolt and destroy the entire system.

That was the whole point. The theory was built to prevent a revolution.

And it worked so well that it got absorbed into mainstream economics and is STILL taught as a foundational principle to this day.

Every time a CEO tells you "the market decides your salary," they're repeating a framework that was literally commissioned by JP Morgan in the 1800s to convince you not to ask for more.

Nick Hanauer, the billionaire who told this story, also shared the numbers that prove why it matters right now:

The median full-time worker in America earns about $60,000 a year. If that same worker had maintained the same share of GDP they held in 1975, they wouldn't be making $60,000. They'd be making $120,000. That gap goes all the way up to the 90th percentile. If you earn $180,000 today, you'd be earning $250,000 under the old distribution.

The ONLY people who benefited from 50 years of economic growth were the top 10%, and the vast majority of that went to the top 1%. That is trillions of dollars every single year that used to be wages for ordinary working people and now sits in the accounts of the wealthiest people on the planet.

This happened because of policy. Tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for everyone else, all justified by an economic theory that was invented specifically to make you believe you deserve exactly what you're getting.

And the craziest part is that GDP growth rates in America were 4 to 4.5% for decades when workers were included in prosperity. As soon as the neoliberals took over in the mid-1970s and implemented these policies, GDP growth fell to 3% and eventually to 2%.

Including people in the economy doesn't slow growth down. It's literally the thing that CREATES growth. And the theory that convinced the world otherwise was a hit job paid for by one of the richest men in history to keep workers quiet.

What do you think?

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@TheCinesthetic When Christopher Reeve was hired for Superman he was quite skinny. He had to bulk up and worked with an actor who was also a bodybuilder to train. That actor was David Prowse, the man in the Darth Vader suit in the original Star Wars trilogy. Superman was trained by Darth Vader.

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

Gunning a man down in the street and lighting a warehouse on fire are both wrong.

BUT

The 1% threw the social contract into an incinerator a long time ago. Blowback was inevitable. You can push people, any people, only so far before they push back.
https://t.co/ySaIzpeK8g

[Ben Uticone @BenUticone]

@otokyo Mr. Bigger
Fat Lizzie
Bus Halen
Green Week