tags: #publish links: [[My Writing]] created: 2021-11-01 Mon --- # You have two cows ## Classics These first few are from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows : ### Socialism You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbour. ### Communism You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then gives you some milk. ### Fascism You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then sells you some milk. ### Capitalism You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. ### Nazism You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you. --- ## My own The rest are my own writing (or perhaps some of them remembered from years ago): ### Regulated capitalism You have two cows. The government regulator passes rules making it uneconomic to sell your milk. A company run by the former head of the regulator acquires your farm to add to its conglomerate. Mysteriously they don't seem to get many compliance inspections. ### Bureaucratic democracy You have two cows. Even though you acquired a farm which was already in operation, by the time you get the final form stamped to obtain your own milk production license, your cows are too old to produce much milk and you have given up your dream of dairy farming. ### Financial engineering You have two cows. You sell the cows to a company you own, extending it a small loan to leverage for a larger line of credit to finance the purchase. The line of credit, now backed by the asset of a two-cow herd with generously-estimated milk production, allows the purchase of 20 more cows. You raise a bond against next year's projected herd size of 50 cows, split it into senior- and junior-claim tranches, then sell pools of collateralised derivatives on these. Three layers deep, the high risk/reward junior claims are trading at around 8 cows each. You also borrow against the potential invoices to the likely future customers for your milk production from the 400 on-paper cows, then leverage that cash to purchase a controlling interest in the farm next door to provide space for your herd. A small change in the price of milk causes Company C to default on its bond payments leading the bank to call in its line of credit, but it doesn't matter because after the bankruptcy process the cows (if any) belong to the trust you set up to purchase the low-risk bond claims using the real cashflow from the 20 cows' milk production. You sell the remaining cows to reduce operational costs, while planning the ownership structure for your new saffron farm next door. ### Crypto-finance You have two cows. After investing a couple of hours in coding a trivial fork of one of the 1200 existing memecoin derivatives, half a day choosing a name and making a cow-based logo, and a few minutes finding a first-year student to set up some miners in AWS in exchange for a wallet with a few coins, you hire a troll farm for $500 to spruik on Twitter and Reddit, bribe a Russian crypto exchange to list your coin, then launch an ICO using a sketchy legal template you bought for $300. It is a total flop attracting no headlines whatsoever, is subscribed to mostly by a couple of redditors as an in-joke not in your favour, and the 200 million initial coin offering completes at $0.00000001337 each, giving your essentially unsellable 60m remaining coins a total value of $0.8022. Disheartened, you milk the cows, then rename your coin to DEADBEEF. You transfer your remaining coins into a wallet for which you then delete the access credentials, and create NFTs each representing a frame of a short, sad but slightly comic video of you doing this. The NFTs sell better, but for trivial amounts. The next morning, you wake up hungover to discover Elon Musk has purchased 133.7m of the 140m outstanding coins for exactly $420 in total, tweeted some kind of joke about doge cash cows, then immediately sold them into the Reddit diamond-hands rocket storm for a profit of around $665m. Reddit is momentarily excited but quickly moves on; Matt Levine finds the whole thing extremely funny; SpaceX publishes an irritated but ineffectual press release trying to get everyone to focus on rockets instead of cows. The SEC fines Elon another token $20m, fines you 50x the original cost of your cows, and bans you indefinitely from involvement in any finance-related business. The NFTs, which you sold already, are now trading around $6,000 for each of the 4,500 frames. Enraged, you delete your Reddit account but manage to scrape together a subsistence career from farming YouTube videos about the financial mainstream silencing your voice of innovation. The cows chew sympathetically. ### Kurt Vonnegut You have two cows. So it goes. ### Populism You have two cows, even though you have no real connection to dairy farming. Your new "Milking It" reality show is an overnight success thanks to some clever marketing, and soon your financial engineering no longer needs to have any connection with actual value in order to sell stock. Competing political candidates don't really seem to understand what you are doing, as they are still trying to debate you on issues like agricultural water consumption, farm runoff pollution, biodiversity and greenhouse gases. After a couple of years you are able to move beyond the rather narrow-appeal farming-based aspects of your image as your support base grows, leading to a successful run for state leader, with the press actively helping your exposure by continuously pointing out that your campaign pushes multiple fundamentally-conflicting ideologies at the same time (your voters don't care). You are now able to alter trade and environmental laws to the advantage of the massive dairy farms of the billionaire who financed the early stages of your campaign. Your cows, if they were even yours in the first place, are long forgotten. ### Dot-com boom You have Tucows. It was such a good boom that you are able to continue operating your downloads site for 28 years before it finally succumbs to corporate reality now that no-one knows what shareware is anymore. ### Neo-liberalism