This article first appeared in Alternet.
Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a single day than most Americans will earn in their entire lifetimes. That’s because hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain — and Dalio runs the largest hedge fund of all, Bridgewater Associates. Life’s good at the top of this food chain: in 2008, a bad year for most Americans, Dalio took home $780 million. That same $780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students (using author Les Leopold’s calculations). A lot of people might find this offensive and unjust, but not Dalio—he thinks this is all part of Nature’s Plan, and it just so happens that Nature favors the hedge fund managers:
“I believe that self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic [bold–Dalio’s]…That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”
So now we know why hedge fund managers are raking in record pay (last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned on average about $1 billion each), while hundreds of thousands of America’s teachers are getting fired all across the country: Nature hates teachers and other do-gooders. Sure, Dalio’s hedge fund is flush thanks in no small part to all the teachers retirement funds that Bridgewater managed to tap—without those teachers pooling their money together, he’d have a lot less to plunder, and society would never even know what a great person he is.
To which Dalio would answer, “Be a hyena. Attack the wildebeest.”
Did you write that down yet? Because that’s Cruel Reality According to Ray Dalio, a self-described “hyperrealist” and author of a bulky book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker. Dalio titled his collection of maxims—some 250 in all– “Principles” and he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. A weighty title like Principles might have you thinking he’s the Descartes of the new millennium. Except that his philosophy comes down to something like this: “I [am too rich to] think, therefore I am [a delusional asshole].” Or better yet, “If I’m so rich, then you ain’t smart.”
You can read Dalio’s Principles thanks to the folks at Dealbreaker who leaked it last week. Imagine some Ayn Rand geek a few decades later and a few billion dollars richer, and you get Dalio’s Principles, exemplified by his “Be a hyena” maxim:
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be “good” because it seems cruel, and the poor wildebeest suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently “cruel” behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom. Like death itself, it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self- interest and the interest of the greater system, including those of the wildebeest, because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement). In fact, if you changed anything about the way that dynamic works, the overall outcome would be worse.
That’s right, America’s largest hedge fund manager sees himself as a hyena, and the rest of us as his wildebeest. As awful as it reads, coming from the mouth of one of the oligarchy’s most powerful barons, it also reveals what an idiot Dalio is. Does he even know anything about the hyena he compares himself to—specifically the spotted hyena, since that’s the only hyena that regularly feasts on wildebeest? Can he handle the truth? Because he’s not going to like it—not unless a macho hedge fund manager like Dalio is into being dominated by bitches.
See, spotted hyenas are matriarchal. The females rule each clan, with male hyenas always expected to submit to even the lowest female in the pecking order. The females also sport enormous clitorises as large as the male hyenas’ penises. If there’s a domestic dispute in the hyena clan, the submissive female hyena’s clitoris grows an erection as a sign of her submission to the alpha-queen hyena (the male hyenas cower and scurry around with their tails between heir legs).
Here’s a description of the female hyena’s bizarre “pseudopenis”:
The labia are fused into what looks like a scrotum, complete with two pads of fatty tissue that resemble testes. In addition, the clitoris is elongated to the point that it is nearly the size of a male’s penis and is likewise fully erectile. Astonishingly, females mate and give birth through the long, narrow canal running down the center of this “pseudopenis.” During mating it retracts much like a shirt sleeve being pushed up, and during birth it stretches so much that it looks like a water balloon. “From a human perspective, the process can be thought of as giving birth through an unusually large penis,” says Frank.
Even Andrea Dworkin would cringe, but for Ray Dalio, this is the description of the ideal Bridgewater employee. Dalio is a major Republican donor—he gave $2 million to the Republican convention in 2008 where Sarah Palin made her debut—and he’s a self-described bow hunter who kills Cape Buffalo and wart hogs. Besides the fact that spotted hyenas live in warthog burrows and generally get along fine with them, Ray Dalio sees himself and his fellow hedge fund billionaires as the spotted hyenas of the human food chain –and he’s just as successful, by his own boasting: “Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest, successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of self-interest helps society, but it typically does.”
And yet, as Robin Meadows writes in the Smithsonian Zoogoer, hyenas are the only known species who get erections as “a submissive gesture” to the dominant female.
Who would have guessed Ray Dalio is so dickless, and proud of it?
Billionaire Ray Dalio schmoozing—just like a hyena!
But there’s more about the spotted hyena for the aspiring hedge fund maverick to admire: like the spotted hyena’s two pronounced anal glands that squirt out a white pasty substance which produces a “powerful soapy odor which even humans can detect”—that way, you and I can smell if we’ve crossed into a Bridgewater partner’s territory. And hyenas eat anything and everything. It’s true that they chase down wildebeests. But they’re just as happy to eat someone else’s wildebeest too—even if it’s been rotting for days in the Serengeti. Hyenas will follow vultures all the way to some other predator’s kill, then chase them away and devour it themselves. You’ve heard of Wall Street Vultures? Well, hyenas are the vultures of vultures. Nothing makes them sick. Nothing. Spotted hyenas eat every single fucking thing on a rotting corpse, and to prove their point, hyenas begin their meals asshole-first: by chewing through the carcass’s anus until reaching the entrails, then tearing into the belly and opening up the whole smorgasborg of guts and ribs and flesh—and finally chewing up and swallowing the rest: hooves, bones, skull, horns…everything is devoured. Almost everything is digested; there’s almost nothing left for a spotted hyena to shit, just a puff of “white powder with a few hairs.”
So to recap: if you want to be like billionaire Ray Dalio, you need to be a submissive vulture-chasing scavenger with no gag reflex whatsoever, willing to swallow anything at all, living with warthogs, scampering away from boner-wielding bitches, and occasionally shitting out plumes of chalk dust and the odd ass-hair. Which is a pretty good description of the Bridgewater Associates employee, as this ex-employee’s confession in Dealbreaker shows:
Most management meetings and department meetings are recorded, both the business and tech side, as are individual quarterly reviews or any meeting at managements discretion. Often if a manager or Ray thinks something is worth educational value they will email out a meeting recording company wide, these usually involve the individual getting shredded publicly for the greater good of the company. An example would be like when former COO Hope Woodhouse was shredded in front of the management committee and the sessions were sent out to the company to learn from (she was brought to the point of crying in the recording). Everyone is encouraged to given open and honest feedback so meetings often resort to public shaming and the demolition of people. 360s end up being everyone’s chance to totally dig on and destroy other individuals and say whatever things all year you’ve hated about people, 90% of feedback received in 360s is negative.
From the outside people think it’s a nice wholesome principled place that wants to cut through the corporate BS but it’s anything but. Ray’s hyper realism (in “Principles”) is insane. Once you read it you’ll get the idea–it’s all about adherence and indoctrination.
One of the secrets to Bridgewater’s success is that unlike most hedge funds, Dalio’s avoids wealthy clients in favor of public funds: teachers retirement funds, public and private pension funds, central banks, endowments and the like. In other words, this hyena avoids costly scavenging fights with other predators, in favor of easier kills—that is, us wildebeests. Sure, it may not seem fair that the billionaire’s hedge funds have been decimating pension funds over the past decade with unfulfilled promises of high returns, levying shocking fees and expenses, all tainted with accusations of bribery, kickbacks and corruption. But you have to look at it through Ray Dalio’s eyes, you’ll see that it’s all just cruel nature at work, and anyone who thinks differently is just a weakling, or worse, a wildebeest.
What makes this all so goddamn humiliating is how banal and comical this is. Ever since the early 1980s, metal heads and computer-science libertarians have been riffing on this same pimply-faced Social Darwinism—joined by the Ayn Rand Trekkies and all the other misfits. Who would have thought that the Revenge of the Nerds would look this absurd—and this awful? It’s such a cliché that it’s become the butt of sitcom jokes on NBC’s “The Office,” with its Ayn Rand libertarian dweeb Dwight Schrute. Even Dwight’s boss, played by Steve Carrell, gets in on the Social Darwinism act when he decides he’s Going Ray Dalio on a rival family-owned paper company. Here’s how Carrell describes the same philosophy that Dalio swears by:
“In nature, there is something called a food chain; it’s where the shark eats a little shark. And the little shark eats a littler shark. And so on and so on. Until you get down to the single cell shark. So now replace sharks with paper companies and that is all you need to know about business.”
But Dalio has no idea he’s just a parody of himself. And it does us no good at all that he’s a parody—because this parody of a fascist is still plundering America’s wealth. So when Dalio parrots the parody, it’s not all that funny, not to us anyway. He doesn’t even care about the billions he’s plundering—it just makes him feel strong, that’s all:
… people who have made a lot of money typically never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they typically engaged in the game or craft of what they were doing, got very good at it and society rewarded them because it valued what they were doing. In other words, I believe that the way “reality” generally works is that it is the pursuit of self-interest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that are required to produce what society wants, and society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why self-interest is a far more powerful force for good than mercy and charity, though mercy and charity are certainly natural and beneficial forces in some cases.
And to add to the insult, Dalio wants to lecture us as he’s chewing into our anuses. Because we’re crude slobs who make the billionaires sick. In December of 2007, a Dalio foundation ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal denouncing Christmas consumerism–for some reason, rich people, especially the sons and daughters of rich people, started Going Naomi Klein every Christmas, and Dalio wanted in on the act if that’s where the hyenas were heading. So his ad campaign, “Redefining Christmas,” sneered at the wildebeests: “No sooner does Thanksgiving end, than the loathsome shopping season begins–a monthlong compulsion to buy something, anything, for anyone.”
And that’s it. We’re ruled over by crazies who despise us and think of us as wildebeests and themselves as hyenas, and don’t even care that it’s a laughable analogy because they’re too fucking lazy and stupid and too busy devouring everything they can. And in case you thought things were about to change, and that financial reform was failing only because of the Republicans, I’ll leave you with this scene from a New Yorker article published last October, titled Inside The Crisis: Larry Summers and the White House Economic Team, recounting last spring’s “stress tests” on the bailed-out banks. Those tests, you’ll recall, were roundly criticized as a joke and a fraud, but Obama’s economic team wasn’t interested in our opinions. Guess who’s opinion they sought to please most of all:
The results of the stress tests showed that the banks were not in as dire shape as commonly believed. Most of the nineteen banks were able to raise money privately. “It worked,” the Treasury official said. “People had money to put into banks. The nationalization crowd would have had the government putting all that money in.” On the day the results of the stress tests were released, Geithner met with the President. He smiled and handed Obama the first page of a report from Bridgewater Associates, a private investment firm that had consistently taken a dim view of Treasury’s plans. The report was headlined “We Agree!”
There you have it–the entire goal of Obama’s economic team was to get a self-described hyena to take a break from his wildebeest feeding frenzy to give a big thumbs-up in approval and cackle, “We agree!”
Wildebeest hopes that by burying his head in the mud, the hyena will just go away.
This pretty much answers every question about why nothing has changed for the better in the wake of the financial crisis—it’s a matter of perspective. Everything’s better for the hyenas—that’s just the way Nature wanted it, and that’s the way it’ll be until we wake up. Remember, even wildebeests can kick a hyena to death. Their power is in numbers—and in the real Nature, wildebeests are winning, while hyenas are protected by conservation efforts. It’s only in the human world—our world– that the hyenas are winning.
This article first appeared in Alternet.
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
Click the cover & buy the book!
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62 Comments
Add your own1. The Ghost of Fenians Past | May 22nd, 2010 at 8:19 am
Excellent! Best article for ages. Looks like there’s life in the old Amesbeest yet.
2. tim | May 22nd, 2010 at 9:07 am
The article is long on image. Content could have been done in a paragraph. I would have loved to read the allegations about corruption and kickbacks, with names named, and nasty pics of the accused, and the hyena thing just woven in, and not used as the center of the article instead.
3. BlottoBonVismarck | May 22nd, 2010 at 9:24 am
HUNTING IN THE CANYONS OF WALL STREET?
It’s nice to believe in something.
Some people believe in .50 cal, a one mile standing start and firing from a reinforced bunker. – Afghan .50 cal – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZoYIoyjuM
Their targets? HYENAS.
Alternatively we could ask Micky and Mallory for help.
DALIO AS A REDNECK ABOUT TO BE ‘ROLLED’ BY MICKEY AND MALLORY
TIGER MEETS HYENA WITH UNFORTUNATE RESULTS FOR THE HYENA
Let’s hope that there is a Mallory out there with Dalio’s name on her list.
Natural Born Killers – Part 1 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIeDJm04dqQ#t=03m08s
May the best .50 cal win.
4. truth knowledge information | May 22nd, 2010 at 9:29 am
I wish I was Ray Dalio. All these creepy hyenas are fucking with my racial complex. It’s time to reconsider the good old fashioned Deliverance banjo song, it was more meaningful to me than you could ever know.
5. Doctor Doomlove | May 22nd, 2010 at 9:46 am
Nice work Ames. But looky here, I deal with hooved herbivores on a daily basis, unlike most of you city slickers, and this Dalio fellow has a valid point. These creatures are dumb, they follow the herd, and they exist to convert vegetation into meat for the carnivores like you and me. Do you think you’d have that overgrown cerebral cortex if you could stand around eating grass all day? Hell no! Predators are the smartest, most cunning animals on the planet because they have to be or they starve!
Now, civilized man has so successfully conquered the rest of the animal kingdom that he’s just about run out of acceptable outlets for the predatory instincts that got him this far. So what is he to do? Abandon predation and become Kumbaya singing vegan socialists? Never gonna happen! Reprogram himself genetically to be less aggressive? That’s a possibility, but it’s not here yet. So where does that leave us? It leaves us eating each other up, of course, via resource wars, holy wars, terrorism, politics, dirty tricks and yes, predatory capitalism. Dalio isn’t claiming to be a hero, just a realist who is honest about his own nature, which is more than I can say for 99.9% of the “liberals” of this world. If the human herding animals among us don’t like folks like Dalio, then by all means try to kick them to death. But if history tells us anything, it’s that humans don’t make good herding animals, and they always start preying on each other eventually. It’s just the nature of the beast, and Darwinism in action, any way you look at it!
6. tazio | May 22nd, 2010 at 12:00 pm
The inversion of the analogy’s funny and useful but it still leaves room for dumbasses like @5 to invoke poorly interpreted Nietzsche-based concepts of morality focused on survival of the fittest and blah blah blah. A more fitting comparison for this fat fuck would be a tapeworm.
7. auhsoJ | May 22nd, 2010 at 12:10 pm
It’s warming to know there are people out there verifying that I already thought about people.
8. Fujio | May 22nd, 2010 at 12:41 pm
In a just world Ames would be king.
Anyway, I looked it up and hyenas have no natural predators – not on the savannah, not on TV, not in the White House.
Are we left with Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us’?
9. Fissile | May 22nd, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Social Darwinists, like Ray Dalio, seem to think that destroying society’s basic institutions for fun and profit is part of nature’s grand plan, eh? When these social institutions are gone, along with the civilizing forces they provide, will Dalio still be singing the praises of Darwinism? I mean, after social Darwinism, comes real Darwinism. Real Darwinists will be guys like me, breaking into the gated compounds of guys like Dalio, applying a load of buckshot to the faces of the Wall Street hyenas, and making off with the hyena’s gold, daughters and trophy wife. But hey, that’s what Darwinism is all about, right?
10. coldequation | May 22nd, 2010 at 1:42 pm
That is a very odd analogy for him to make. I would think that the first choice for a predator analogy would be a lion, a tiger, a shark, or a wolf. Maybe a panther or a cougar. Hyenas would be way down there.
He wouldn’t happen to be an FTM?
11. aPeasant | May 22nd, 2010 at 2:00 pm
When I see the Ames’ prize for Journalists With Balls, I might believe it. I see no evidence human Wildebeests have a chance, but at least you gotta kick.
You’ve got some of my trickled-down drachmas.
12. jimix dot org | May 22nd, 2010 at 2:15 pm
ah, worthington’s law
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF8wLg5Asgo
13. robert chambers | May 22nd, 2010 at 2:53 pm
“That same $780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students”
I had to laugh… in the US public school system, just what would these 20,000 teachers be teaching 400,000 dysfunctional juvenile delinquents? I shudder to think. Do they still teach fist-fucking to 4th graders in Queens public schools?
However tacky or loutist the behavior of this Dalio character, the money is far better off (and far more socially useful) than in the hands of frauds at United Federation of Teachers and Board of Ed.
At least he is, in theory, spending on paintings, great restaurants, expensive cars, penthouses, taxis, car services, nannies, maids, theater tickets, donations to charities, und so weiter — which keeps thousands of genuinely productive people employed.
14. GDan | May 22nd, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Obama’s no socialist- he’s a conservationist trying to preserve hyenas.
15. populista | May 22nd, 2010 at 3:48 pm
How about a multi tiered capital gains tax with the top rate being 110 percent …acceleratd bottom to top. These are the least productive, since the winners
only make money from losers hence no net
gain for liquidity. I agree with all the satire but it doesn’t satisfy me as much as
if his kind were taxed out of existence and the “investing” in the market might be possible again w/o its manipulations.
16. Necronomic.JustIce | May 22nd, 2010 at 4:09 pm
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
[teh interwebz r sayin it waz Keynes said it, but wtf ever]
17. Pablito | May 22nd, 2010 at 5:33 pm
I love it when poor commies complain.
Gotta go guys, I’m going to spend $300 at a bar getting drunk and fuck a girl you could only fantasize about.
18. AynRandist Militant Ideologue | May 22nd, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Ray Dalio sounds like such a cool guy. If only we lowered his taxes so he could spend even more on maids, hookers, expensive cars, restaurants, jet travel, and all the other stuff he buys to keep people employed. Unlike the govt. sector, who get paid 2X private employees and get way more benefits. If a private employee gets fired he has to bust ass and find other occupations, unlike govt. workers whom only have to organize a strike, ask for more pay and benefits off of other people’s pay, and sit in their asses all day in some bureaucratic concrete office building. I wish I was a govt. worker where I dont have to worry about getting fired because all I have to do is strike and ask for more pay. Glory to Ray Dalio!
19. captain america | May 22nd, 2010 at 7:35 pm
pablo, i thought it’s generally established that ames also does his fair share of loveless rutting with attractive women.
20. vortexgods | May 23rd, 2010 at 12:09 am
Look, here’s the problem. Ray Dahlio or whatever the Hell his name is spouts off like this, and no one shoots him. So, he figures he’s right.
In the long run, guy with a vowel on the end of his name? I don’t fancy his chances when he inevitably crosses the old money.
A fool like this? Who thinks of the hyenas as the real predators? I mean, Hans Landa compared the German soldier to a hawk for a reason, while this guy, compares himself to vermin.
He can share a cell with Bernie Madoff, another guy I’m sure who thought he was smart.
21. General Foods | May 23rd, 2010 at 1:41 am
Read Ray Dalio’s Principles. You may find them instructive.
http://tinyurl.com/35796ll
Masha: Videodrome. What you see on that show, it’s for real. It’s not acting. It’s… snuff TV.
Max Renn: I don’t believe it.
Masha: So… don’t believe.
Max Renn: Why do it for real? It’s easier and safer to fake it.
Masha: Because it has something… that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy, and that is what makes it dangerous.
22. Saoirsí | May 23rd, 2010 at 3:04 am
“I’m going to spend $300 at a bar getting drunk and fuck a girl you could only fantasize about.”
Your Mom?
23. Plamen petkov | May 23rd, 2010 at 6:21 am
it’s becoming obvious how carefully Ames constructs his articles to get the maximum emotional knee jerk Pavlovian reaction/response out of his readers.
Problem is some of his readers can see that stratagem from a mile away and don’t fall into the trap.
Sorry but just cuz hyenas are matriarchal and sport clitorises the size of male penises doesnt disprove what Ray Dalio sez.
And yes that’s exactly what i was telling people a few hours ago (before reading this article) is how the rich probably see us as a herd of dumb sheep just waiting for them to be used and abused. SO I can see his point clearly.
Hopefully Dealbreaker’s got the full text of
Dalio’s Principles so I can read them up and learn something.
to Fissile:
you forget a few important details:
1. a sucker is born every minute. Dalio will ALWAYS got somebody to eat.
2 the police and military are on Dalio’s side and will shot your ass if you ever try your fantasy. Example: recent events in Thailand.
24. DarthFurious | May 23rd, 2010 at 8:08 am
@Saoirsi – that’s HILARIOUS.
25. Gustavo Arellano | May 23rd, 2010 at 9:03 am
FUCK THE HEDGE FUND FUCKERS.
26. RecoverylessRecovery | May 23rd, 2010 at 12:50 pm
R ecall
U seless
L egislators
E verywhere.
O verhaul
F inances.
L et
A mericans
W itness …
27. Fissile | May 23rd, 2010 at 4:08 pm
@Plamen petkov
“Tom Hagen: It would be like trying to kill the President; there’s no way we can get to him.
Michael Corleone: Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain – if history has taught us anything – it’s that you can kill ANYBODY.”
28. Where's Brecher | May 23rd, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Ok, enough with this class warfare shit. I demand to know what happened to Brecher! Bring back the War Nerd! We got people getting shot in Thailand, ships getting sunk off Korea, shit going down in Afghanistan and no Brecher here to write about it.
29. Leos Tomicek | May 23rd, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Instead of having wild fantasies about hyena and antelopes, Ray Dalio should pick up a book and read up on the causes of the French Revolution. 😉
30. Iok Sotot, Eater of Souls | May 23rd, 2010 at 9:46 pm
@9
“after social Darwinism, comes real Darwinism.”
Classic.
31. Finisterre | May 24th, 2010 at 3:22 am
“and making off with the hyena’s gold, daughters and trophy wife.”
“fuck a girl you could only fantasize about.”
“pablo, i thought it’s generally established that ames also does his fair share of loveless rutting with attractive women.”
Great to know that dudes on all sides of the ideological divide can agree on one thing – unconvincing, misogynist dick-swinging is how you prove your superiority over other armchair warriors.
32. Collectivist Leech | May 24th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Yet taxes on high income earners are bad because they dis-incentivize the glorious Producer class, John Galt, toilet paper lines, etc. Right? Or is it just immoral to make the hyenas stop hording most of the food and water?
33. robert chambers | May 24th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Dear #32 – because increase in federal tax rates, particularly targeting higher brackets, produces no additional revenue.
34. Dammerung | May 24th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
What startles me is he has NO IDEA how he got rich. He got rich by conning a bunch of grandmothers and public school teachers out of their retirement, telling them he’d give them a 500% return on it. Then he blew it all on hookers and blow and in the stock market casino.
But now the teachers and grandmothers are totally broke, where is he gonna get the capital to keep fueling his lifestyle? He’s DESTROYED capital, not created it.
35. FrankMcG | May 25th, 2010 at 12:02 am
Oh man, the Libertarian trolls just keep getting more intense! Are you slackers going to let Robert Chambers take the crown away from you?
36. robert chambers | May 25th, 2010 at 12:44 am
O wait, it’s not about generating additional revenue, it’s about creating the feeling of “fairness.” All very nice. But 70,000 pages of tax law ultimately means: no additional revenue is collected.
37. Collectivist Leech | May 25th, 2010 at 6:53 am
Thanks, 33. I’ll take your unsourced assertion as true in all cases. After all, you are some guy (or gal) on the internet. But seriously, true in all cases? Is there some threshold below which this is not true? Here I thought there was some optimum level beyond which diminishing returns occur. After all, even St. Ronnie had to raise taxes to increase revenue. And when Clinton did it, I seem to remember something being balanced. Spinning plates, perhaps. I guess those things never happened because they couldn’t have according to conservative economic theory.
38. FrankMcG | May 25th, 2010 at 8:45 am
When I see salaries like this I think about what Randians say whenever someone says how getting rid of the minimum wage would be a good thing because you could find people to work for fifty cents an hour efficiency blah blah blah.
Funny how they never bring this up for the people at the top. Is there seriously no one on Earth who could do this guy’s job for $100k (or even less!)?
39. Allen | May 25th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Human civilization and behavior is more complex by many orders of magnitude than what goes on in the natural world. The naturalistic, social Darwinist, analogy is simply lazy and puerile.
An animal is not capable of anything beyond its simple, evolutionarily defined, life plan. What animal could you call a criminal? Sure in our “market” economy we can become rich by producing things (more specifically having an idea and social capital in form of money that then allows you to use other people to execute that idea and provide you with most of the value from the exchange), but any person knows one can also succeed, and easier too, by just gaming the system and or being a total parasite.
And a successful parasite is still a parasite.
40. robert chambers | May 26th, 2010 at 12:53 am
ha, my “unsourced assertions”…. is this a ghey site now that war nerd is gone?
see: tax rate vs revenue
41. Zeta 1 | May 27th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Kill the fucker, someone. Just do it.
42. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
In reality, he is a tapeworm who thinks his host will never die.
43. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
“it’s becoming obvious how carefully Ames constructs his articles to get the maximum emotional knee jerk Pavlovian reaction/response out of his readers.”
Of course, that’s what rhetoric is all about, esp. advocacy journalism.
44. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
“Social Darwinists, like Ray Dalio, seem to think that destroying society’s basic institutions for fun and profit is part of nature’s grand plan, eh?”
Darwin himself thought that altruism was a survival trait.
45. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Pablito, when it comes to good food, good booze and good sex, you do not get what you pay for, but what you earn.
46. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
‘Ray Dahlio or whatever the Hell his name is spouts off like this, and no one shoots him. So, he figures he’s right”
If/when someone does mug him, he will whine about how unfair it all was, blah, blah, blah.
47. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
“If a private employee gets fired he has to bust ass and find other occupations, unlike govt. workers whom only have to organize a strike”
Private employees have been dumb enough to de-unionize. You will notice that the United Auto Workers take good care of each other.
48. Zhubajie | May 27th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Leos Tomicek | “Instead of having wild fantasies about hyena and antelopes, Ray Dalio should pick up a book and read up on the causes of the French Revolution.”
France has had 19 different political regimes since 1798. French unions have political clout because pols and Dalio types are afraid of ordinary Frenchmen. But Americans are extremely passive. Lots of not-very-well-off Americans stupidly ID with the Dalio types, thinking “I’ll be super-rich like him, so I will protect his privileges!” If rarely happens. Usually when such creatures spawn, they help each other out with guanxi. That was how Bush the Younger became Pres., in spite of his CV, a record of continual failure. Neither the Dems or the Reps are afraid of ordinary Americans.
If there is a Second Revolution in the US, it’ll probably be Religious Right types imposing their idea of Utopia on the rest of you, like Cromwell in England a couple centuries ago. You won’t like it.
Zhu Bajie, alive in the bitter sea.
49. robert chambers | May 29th, 2010 at 9:45 am
“Religious Right types imposing their idea of Utopia…” – by no means an ideal scenario, but isn’t it better than living in a degenerate liberal hellmouth, where accelerating deterioration is simply a way of life?
A certain amount of decadence is a good thing, it acts as a stimulant on healthier instincts for self-preservation, etc. — but it reaches a certain point (and we appear to be determined to find out what that point is…) whereby the monstrous american toilet… simply… flushes away, a la weimar?
I keep waiting for Russians to liberate us, but I dont think they are interested.
50. Jussi | May 29th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Mark, write that book about Russia that you promised. We are expecting it and I´d like to translate it into finnish jazik. You are better than this bullshit.
51. RecoverylessRecovery | May 29th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
“If there is a Second Revolution in the US, it’ll probably be Religious Right types imposing their idea of Utopia on the rest of you, like Cromwell in England a couple centuries ago. You won’t like it.”
Doesn’t matter. When it comes to Americans;
‘Theirs is NOT to reason why,
theirs is to take it up the ass..and die.’
52. Diego Montalbon | June 2nd, 2010 at 11:02 am
I am Dalio apologist , I simply want to believe I understand what Dalio is getting at. Seriously, he and I could have a beer together. Just because he’d run me over with his car sooner than drinking a beer with me doesn’t mean he and I don’t understand each other on some deep level. Yeah it is easy to suck up to Dalio because everyone does it, myself included. I don’t understand why Ames isn’t sucking up to him, I’ve never read a piece that I can cite which rips an asshole in Dahlio. But anyway, Ray, if you’re reading this, please recognize me. I will suck your dick for 10 bucks. Seriously. Oh, and like Ray, I don’t really care about this article, Rand and I have better things to do. Don’t we Ray? Ray? Are you here?
53. Diego Montalbon | June 2nd, 2010 at 12:14 pm
I am gutless and I wish Mark Ames would edit my stupid fucking comments. I’m just pathetic; for some reason Family Guy is something that means something to me, and I don’t know why except that this is what happens to my brain after sucking Koch all my life.
original post;
Forget it, everyone has better things to do than read me, what’s the point?
54. Zhu Bajie | June 8th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
” the monstrous american toilet… simply… flushes away, a la weimar?”
Hardly likely. More likely something like the warlord era in China.
55. Zhu Bajie | June 8th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
“He can share a cell with Bernie Madoff, another guy I’m sure who thought he was smart.”
Madoff is living on borrowed time, given that he cheated both the Russian Mafia AND various S. American drug cartels. News of his shanking will get a couple seconds on CNN or Fox in a year or two.
56. Zhu Bajie | June 8th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Re: hyenas, I’m told that one of the traditional punishments in old South Africa was to lock a man up in a hut with a hyena. The hyena won’t attack as long as the man is awake. But once he drops off…. Maybe an appropriate fate for Dalio the Hyena?
57. TotallyWired | June 9th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
“Top Billionaire Hedge Funder Sees Himself As a Hyena Devouring Wildebeests” ..the rest of the world sees him as a self-involved prat who needs a good hard kick in the cunt.
58. mounick | September 18th, 2010 at 5:39 am
this article first describes the nature of evolution and then goes on to criticise dalio who has proved himself yet the person who wrote this article is surely not a billionaire. OK dalio said that he sees himself as hyena but he never said that he sees us wildbeast what he meant was he looks to himself as an hyena and the opprtunities that arise in hedge fund industry as wildbeasts not people but oppurtunities
59. vortexgods | April 13th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
The rich have always, always hated Christmas. Because it’s fun and it’s cheap, a way the small people can enjoy themselves.
Remember Dicken’s wrote his Christmas Carol in a society much like ours, and he mentioned the real life people who didn’t like Christmas:
“Scrooge offends the Ghost of Christmas Present by suggesting that the Spirit’s name is linked to a recent attempt to close bakers’ shops on Sundays and Christmas Day. (Poor people like the Cratchits, who had no oven at home, took their Sunday and Christmas meals to the bakers’ to be roasted just as Dickens describes in the book, because the law forbade bread to be baked on that day. Closing the shops would deprive them of what might be their only hot meat meal of the week.) The Spirit angrily retorts:
“There are some upon this earth of yours…who lay claim to know us, and who do their deed of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and to all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.” (The Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol, Stave Three)
This is a reference to the repeated attempts during the 1830s of Sir Andrew Agnew, MP for Wigtownshire, to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in Parliament which would have closed the bakeries and restricted many other Sunday pleasures of the poorer classes. Dickens was violently opposed to Agnew’s plans and had attacked them in a pamphlet published under a pseudonym.”
60. Doubt That | May 11th, 2011 at 7:45 pm
I’ve read his “principles”. Dalio never compares himself to a Hyena. Your editorializing there is inaccurate. You take one analogy that he uses and blow it completely out of proportion.
You critize him as a hunter. Do you eat eggs, meat or fish?
On the one hand you quantify the amount of money he made and therefore his fund made as what could be paid to teachers and then critize his funds for managing the pension funds which invests the pensions of teachers. Based on the returns his funds have generated I’d say the teachers are doing well.
Your critiscm of him regarding Christmas is the most bizaar of all. He’s saying people should think of contributing to charities, rather than engaging in rampant consumerism. You’re attacking that?
61. hyena 2 | July 20th, 2011 at 5:07 pm
I always love these fat bankers thinking they are wild beasts. Capitalism ought to get rid of all regulation and let not only clever shits like Dalio, but guys who could punch Dalio’s lights out operate free of regulation. The laws against kidnapping, for example, have the same justifications as those that restrict hyeans like Dalio. Anyway, he’s going to be a tasty prize for some gang who specializes in squeezing ripe fruit
62. darthfader | July 21st, 2011 at 10:55 am
Of course he identifies with hyenas, and sees the victims of his actions as wildebeests. He’s a psychopath. Characteristic of his disorder is how he identifies with predators, and how he views other people as a separate and distinct species of prey. The proper place for him is in a maximum security asylum where he can’t harm others.
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