No, but like… dude, you could flip half of those supposed traits between categories and it would read exactly the same. That’s why I called it astrology.

Perhaps you just did a bad job of presenting the book’s ideas, but I’ve just read through a summary of it and it didn’t exactly make me reconsider my knee jerk reaction.

This is your brain on idealism, just pure vibes. Political astrology.

I think a factor is just S Korea’s working class being squeezed that much harder than many other places. They’re calling it the “gender war” but it’s all just people being forced to live in unbearable conditions while getting more and more isolated from each other.

So most billionaires have most of their wealth in stuff like stocks. They can theoretically sell the stocks to turn them into money, and then buy things, but they have so much stock and the things they want to buy are worth so much money that it’s easier and cheaper just to get a loan and spend that instead.

The thing is, Trump has been abusing creditors for his entire long life. Most banks like most billionaires because they make their payments on time, but Trump has not paid many, many people in his life, so much so that most major banks no longer do business with him, and haven’t since the 80s.

This is when Trump got involved with the Russian mob. They were willing to extend credit to him when no one else was, hypothetically because he was part of their money laundering operation. Regardless, Trump’s access to liquid wealth contracted over this period, and by the 2010s people were speculating that he wasn’t even a billionaire anymore.

So his revenue stream changed. He went from directly profiting from real estate and investments to, after many high profile failures, licensing his brand and selling himself. He had always been a bit of a celebrity, but this is when he started making money like one.

From there, shilling out ugly sneakers, overpriced trading cards/NFTs, and other crap basically became inevitable. His recent legal costs have only accelerated the process because he needs money now.

Pretty much everyone post-Stalin fumbled the bag. The fact that the USSR lasted as long as it did once the leadership was essentially asleep at the wheel is a testament to how robust its foundations were.

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