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Marx & Weber on Class and Power · Acedra
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Marx & Weber on Class and Power
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0:00
And then I know just an enormous source of not only economic power, but also political power. So Marx argues that whoever gains control of the means of production gains an incredible national economic and political power. For Marx there are primarily two classes, the capitalists and the proletariats. He does acknowledge actually seven, but he argues that all of them will divide into two primary classes. The capitalists own the mode of production.
0:40
So therefore it is the capitalist class that benefits. The mode of production structures all other aspects of society. Right? So Marx argues that the capitalist class restructures society so that it benefits. The capitalist class restructures society so that it's a privileged position will be perpetuated. So Marx argued that the capitalist class would create laws that benefit its position. We saw this
1:17
in our chapter on deviance. Marx argued that the state is nothing more than a formal organization that the capitalists are economic elites adopt for the guarantee of their privileged position. So the state is nothing but a mechanism of the capitalist class. The state perpetuates inequality. The state perpetuates the economic elite. He argues that ideology will serve to benefit the social classes. Marx argues that the reason why, the the proletariats,
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the working class does not revolt is because the working class suffers from false consciousness. False consciousness. False consciousness refers to the fact that a worker does not have an awareness of where his or her best interest lies. False consciousness, the lack of awareness of one's best interest. False consciousness prevents workers from identifying with other workers. They do not see where their true
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interests lie in uniting with other workers whether they whether they be black, white, purple. To unite with individuals who are in the same predicament, who do not own the mode of production. Too often Marx argues that workers suffer from false consciousness and therefore do not unite, do not realize where their true interest lie. They lack true, what he calls class consciousness.
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Workers, actually in America, it's been historically true that workers can have a very low sense of class consciousness. Class consciousness workers recognize their common interests, workers recognize their common opponents being the capitalists. And workers join together to change the system to revolt against their exploitation. So, Marx argued that essentially has the understanding of stratification is in terms of, assessing who owns the mode of production.
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In some ways, Marx's model is one dimensional. He looks at and wants to assess the the the people who own the mode of production and those who do not. Contrary to Marx, Weber's model is multidimensional.
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You call it the three piece. But you should not think since Weber is is multidimensional therefore Marx is is is is unsophisticated. Marx is actually very sophisticated. I've just eliminated the sophistication. Okay. Weber looks at three dimensions of power. For Weber, the key is property, prestige, and we're going to say power. The vaguer wants to assess, these three dimensions of power but it's pro stratification. When it comes down to the key for Weber and
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understanding stratification and understanding one's social class has to do with property. Property here Weber means do you own the means of production or don't you? He just doesn't use Marx's language. Property for Weber is do you own the means of production or don't you? Are you positively privileged, she says, or are you negatively privileged? Or are you in between? You're both positively and negatively privileged. They don't need to be in there. They were also
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says that we can't eliminate prestige from our dimension of stratification. Prestige here means status. So, when we're looking at a person's social class we want to assess most definitely wealth. Right? We want to assess the the fact does a person own the means of production? Does a person have wealth? But we also want to take into account prestige. Right? So, a truck driver is making more money
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than a school principal But a school principal has more status and this and has more power. Power here is authority. Power essentially has to do with the ability to make others do what you wish. To have others comply with your wishes. So, Weber argues if you want to understand social class, we have to take into account these multiple, these three dimensions to understand one social class. So, truck driver may make more money than a school principal but
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a school principal has more power and more status than a truck driver. So, Weber argues that this is how we should understand stratification. This is what American sociologists have adapted and it's referred to now as one socio economic status. Right? And that's essentially getting at where you rank in terms of wealth, power, and prestige. Well, there's an interesting note. There's a very big difference between wealth and income. Income is wages.
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Right? It's it's your income. Income is wages, is salary. Right? Wealth on the other hand has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with, wages. Wealth has to do with bonds, property, stocks. Big difference between wealth and income. Which would you rather have? Well, it's wealth. I hear you. Far. Wealth. Now in The United States I think it's impossible. Both income and wealth are incredibly disproportionate. They're skewed, in very unfavorable ways.
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In The United States, Seventy Five Percent of all 75% of all wealth in The United States is controlled by 1% of the population. Yeah. Yeah. Can be.
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75% of the wealthy United States is owned by 1% of the population. This of course is our number of class. 75% of all wealth, so all bonds, stocks, land options are owned by 1% of the population. 200,000 people own 75 of the wealth in The United States. These folks also have most of the income. The income I think breaks down though to something like 47%. So not quite all, but then you like income is like this in The United
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States. Actually, it comes down much further with the bulk being down here. So this is like 50,000 and below. Looks like your head? Wicked mountain, you know. And then all numbers come in here with very few people at a hundred thousand and then, and then, of course, you know, the 16,000,000 figures that we get our CEOs at annually. Okay. So income isn't as disproportionate as well, but still it is greatly skewed toward the upper class being more privileged. So the
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upper class members have 75% of the wealth. Most of this money is inherited I think I'd have it. How about questions? Yeah. Robertson's terrific. Okay. You don't need to know Lenski's theory for the exam. Why don't we do that? You do not need to know Lenski's for the exam, which does the synthesis. So, I'm looking down, like, on the first page of your outline here with task, class, class, class, and size. Review Marks and Baber. Look at functionalist.
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I'm looking at your oh, not alright. You wanna do it. Strap and take out the review sheet. We'll add this fact on it. Stratification sheet. Okay. Know the degrees of stratification. You might want to, as I said, include on the top there what is social inequality. So add on the top of stratification social inequality. And we do discuss degree of mobility. We know that there's a distinction between horizontal and vertical. Okay. So we will
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know split we don't have to know slave. Caste, class, feudal, and know the ideological systems that support these. So Hinduism, the divine rights of kings, and the law of academic. Okay. Okay. Is this Soviet Union classless or non classless? Review that. Skip or skip down to, class versus race and gender. Just cross it out. We have down already myths and realities of welfare. Add hurricanes, the functions of poverty. Yeah. Also, we add Lewis, Culture of Poverty, and Moynihan.
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Black female headed families as the cause of poverty. And both the latter being example of claiming the victim. Okay. For poor, for the lower classes make sure you know the categories of people. Who most likely be for? Cross out meals with power lead and add labor. Why without labor? Okay. This one. Oh. Oh, social mobility in your book, you don't have to worry about intergenerational or intragenerational or exchange mobility or structural mobility.
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Just know vertical and horizontal. With regard to marks, make sure you know,
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class consciousness or false consciousness? You can look at control of resources. Essentially, here what we have is just know that for Marx, the upper class, the capitalist, bourgeoisie control the key resources in America and able to perpetuate their their positions. So this section is called control of resources, which is followed by a section on ideology, consciousness, and functionalism. Okay. For functionalist, cross out Parsons, highlight
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Davis and Moore. Again, you don't have to know the synthesis. Do you know what it is more?
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You do that. Power. And then go through the go
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through the description of classes. I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of folks. So essentially, you can cut and paste, but then make sure you read from two seventy.
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I didn't describe the upper class, the middle class. Oh, okay. Upper middle of the working class. There's going to be more questions on the exam and the theories of poverty. Some of which aren't in your book. Okay? Most everything will be in the book. Okay? You can skip though the synthesis set the synthesis section and, the other things that I mentioned Okay. So the exam is in one week. Same exact exam. These are the three review sheets. Again, I'm going to emphasize what
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we went over in class versus what's in the book. But to follow the book, just,
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I'll draw my exam questions directly from Robertson. Force stratification. The other chapter requires are deviance and socialization.
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K. Anything looks, strange or questionable on socialization?
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We then go into studies. Again, socialization. Okay. So we talked about defects in socialization. Probably started sociobiology. So so biology combines sociology and biology. M the body is lying. The person is mentally ill. The person is disturbed disturbed in some way. So, essentially, the official agents of social control would be the people who police would be our doctors or psychiatrists and so forth. And today, a number of deviant behavior falls under the medical model.
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Obesity, alcoholism, gambling, and so forth all come under the dictates now of medical model. They're defined as a disease to be treated and a bit and and and, assisted by professions in the medical field. So essentially, it's it's it's an updated version of the pathological model, which argued that it is the person was born defective. Now we just say they had a disease. Okay. No. Learning would be cellular rent. So, Merton's a functionalist, who argue that the reason why
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we have deviance is because of our social structure. And, you know, social structure blocks certain people from achieving dreams of prosperity. And due to this block, it generates feelings of of enemy. And so some individuals can't be, and this results in deviance. So invert deviance is a direct result of social structure. Learning is really more the symbolic interactionist. Symbolic interactionist can either be labeling or or
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the learning perspective. And it really just is saying that it's it's behavior that's all for learning. So Sutherland is the one who gave us the first theory on it. So it sometimes goes under the cultural transmission theory. It's it's transmitted through cultural patterns. And Sutherland argues that it's it's by associating with individuals who don't adhere to the typical norms and values. Differential. Right?
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So different being deviant associates Right. And is that same problem applied to the label labeling, Doctor. Balscharts? No. Labeling doesn't engage in in in how it it occurs. Labeling the key of deviance is the label. Right? Society's reaction, right? Society's and remergent, Becker's book The Outsiders, right? We label certain people deviance, place them outside the social so for the labeling theorists, it's the label that matters.
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Society's reaction to some violation, society's reaction to behavior, they label it deviant. Anyone well, not anyone. Then they also label certain people as outsiders, label them deviant. It doesn't matter how the behavior occurs. It doesn't matter if the behavior occurs. The matter is who the label. Problem there is that we, one, have an innocent victim. Two, we can have a secret deviant. And three, many argue that the two might go in focus. Okay.
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So How behavior gets labeled as being deviant and how person becomes labeled as deviant? How behavior gets labeled deviant and how a person becomes labeled. So they look at how deviance is created and how deviants are created. One being the behavior, one being the actor. I don't know. I'm sure it could taste. Jordan, what was your question? With Goldberg and the Tiger in the Fox, do I see No. They're just examples of social values. And for them,
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I mean, really, it was just to give examples of sort of the outrageous, logic they were in. But it's important there to know the critique of that. Boy,
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for sure. I'm sure of that. Yeah.
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You need to, you know, figure out where the id, the ego, the superego line is. So the id for void is the it. It is the sort of primary behavior. The id is, moves into our unconscious. We never get rid of it. I'm reading the book, civilization and discontent. For Freud, the id is the source of or operates based on the pleasure principle. For, for Freud, the id is a primary structure of personality. Right? Then
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when the individual starts to realize it's not the only thing that matters, Freud says that the ego starts to develop. Ego, I in Latin, the I starts to sort of mediate. It wants to gratify the id. It's saying, please me, please me. The ego wants to, but it it wants to do so in accordance to, to societal norms. So it wants to direct the id's objects, sort of an appropriate time and so forth. So the id is is the
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the the it is the source of of like, your ego is the seat of personality. It balances the id with the superego. The superego sort of encompasses society's norms and values. So it's it's just it's your conscience. Society's conscience that you've internalized. A superego aims to control the id. The ego essentially seeks to mediate the id and the superego He wants to keep everybody happy. And
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the imagery would be, you know, the devil being the id, head being the person, the angel being the superego is what's to do. Ericsson's got his book. Ericsson deals with eight stages of development. The key for Ericsson is identity crisis, right, that he's really talking about identity. He argues that in eight key stages in life cycle, we develop throughout the life cycle. We have these identity crisis at particular points in the life cycle.
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He argues that once we have a crisis, we resolve this crisis and how we resolve it is going to affect our personality. So the first stage is trust versus mistrust. And how we are treated as infants is going to be how we treat the world. Are we gonna trust it or we're gonna mistrust it? But again, the key here is this identity crisis. It deals with, the entire life cycle. He argues also that we can go back and resolve. Nothing's
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permanent in terms of personality structure that we can go back and resolve conflicts.
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Those are the important things that Erickson points out. You don't need to know each of the eight life cycles. Just the overview of what's important. Crisis is dealing with identity. It's continuous and nothing is resolved forever. This is crime crime index. Pardon? Crime index. Okay. That's the type of cons that are listed in the, FBI's annual report. I mean, they they're concerned with, eight types of crime. And they're essentially can
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be divided into crimes against people or crimes against, property. And there are four of each crimes there. There's crimes against people, rape, murder, assault, and and robbery. And then crime scene's property would be burglary, theft. Burglary, arson, auto theft, And Distruction. Burglary theft. Lot of burglary, auto theft, arson, and one of the crime against others. Other questions? Is Sykes and Motts' techniques of net neutralization in the book?
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Yeah. And I would know them too. Do
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some? Yeah. Those are verbal strategies that individuals use to,
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sort of minimize the negative stigma attached to deviated behavior. So it's verbal strategies that individuals use to maintain positive self images, and to continue to engage in behavior. So it's used for correction, not not, prevention of it? For perpetuation of it. It's by criminals and deviants who are essentially saying, nobody was hurt. So who cares if I, you know, do this? You know, they're you deny the victim, you deny injury, you deny response you deny,
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you condemn authority, you know, sort of five things that you can do. Well, the crooks the the police are crooked anyway, so why not? Or you say, well, I didn't do it for myself. I, you know, I did it for my country. You appeal to higher loyalty. So you can stop you continue to sort of, you know, subvert funds from the government into, you know, drugs to buy guns and so forth because you're not doing it for yourself. You're doing
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it for your country. So it's like an excuse, not actually a correction of it. No. I mean, yeah, it's it's it's, absolutely, it's it's an excuse to continue the deviant behavior, but to reconcile that deviant stigma with a positive self image. So you don't think of yourself as being a crook or a nasty person or an awful person. And if you continue doing deviance. What? The best techniques of neutralization under social structure. Under social structure?
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Yeah. Right. So because Sykes and Moss is studying with Sutherland. Right? Sutherland arguing that deviance has learned, that it's learned through associating with other deviance. It's learned through, it depends on consistency, duration, and frequency of hanging out with deviants. And you learn the techniques, you learn the skills, you learn the motivations. And they agree with Sykes, They agree with Sutherland but Sykes and Masa were his students and they say,
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well, you not only learn the skills, the techniques, the values, but you also learn verbal strategies that help you continue engaging in your So you can maintain a positive self image and engage deviance by denying the victim, by engaging in these verbal strategies. And they after interviewing thousands of inmates found that they were five. Other questions?
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Now Now in our categories of personalities, there are ways to adapt to what Merton calls anomie. Anomie for Merton is generated from the social structure. Social structure creates is looked at in terms of institutional means and cultural goals. We argue that the institution of goals
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are blocked. Some people do not have access to legally, legitimately obtaining cultural goals. They still want the goals but they don't have the means. This generates feelings of anomie. One way of adapting to these feelings of anomie is a reality. Another way is a conformist, another way and so forth. They're not personality structures. There's there are there are ways he argues one adapts to feelings of anomie that are generated from the social structure. So, what would you
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want to outline, outline the strain to your one face of the conforming Right. Right. But there are certain strains as it sometimes fall that are generated because of blocked, access to the. No. No. That's an innovator. Okay. But but he doesn't make sense because he's a conformist. See, he he he it was a critique of his his his existence. It was a critique of Mervyn because he is a conformist how Mervyn argues. Right? He
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has the institutional means. Right? He comes from a very wealthy family. He's at a very private school. He has money in his pocket and so forth and he obviously wants to get a head length in college and so forth and studying. But he's also dealing drugs on the side. Why? Right? So he fits into the conformist schematic that Merton draws yet he's a deviant. So how does this how is this explained? So he isn't it's part of the critique of Merton's theory. But
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she didn't explain why, you know, the components taking part in this Right. He doesn't explain why someone like that would engage in deviance. According to Merton, this person should go through legitimate channels and not engage in deviance. One engages in deviance when the legitimate channels are locked. Okay. And since he uses in deviance, is it the major loss? Don't confuse the issue. It's just pointing out that his his model is inadequate. It doesn't fit. It just doesn't fit.
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It explains certain types of time, but it's an inadequate model to explain deviance. You're just gonna confuse yourself to try to fit for our son into it because he's both. Mervyn doesn't explain why conformist. Mervyn essentially doesn't explain why someone who's has a golden road paved would screw up and engage in demons. But there are explanations for that. It's just, like, you know, peers that they
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hung around with and stuff like that that would explain. But not everyone is murdered. And maybe we can say Sutherland could explain it real easy. Right. Because I was gonna ask you that when you're hope you're when you're going over the, the stratification because there are some people I know of and fell born into very wealthy families, and they turned out to be, like, drug addicts and construction workers, and they dressed like burnouts, so called. And and but in their
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family are, like, what normal people would call, like, rich snobs. And they've they've actually practically disowned their children that ended up like this because they are labeled deviant. Well, and also embarrassed animals. Exactly. And they've gone as far as evicting them from houses or telling them to get out. Well, having a drug addict living in home is rugged. Well, not necessarily a drug addict is one example.
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Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you got kids, a construction worker, and you're you're a, retired executive who's, looked up to by the community. And you're you're a member of all these clubs and things like that, and your child's a construction worker that wears, like, cutoff flannel shirts and beat up jeans and hangs out in bars and stuff like that. They label them deviant and kick them out. Oh, they're considered they're labeled deviant. Exactly. Yeah. Wouldn't fit with. Right.
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I thought we were talking about something. It's late. They'd be labeling. The label matters. Self fulfilling prophecy. They don't forget the self fulfilling prophecy, Mertens idea, that sort of, we we tend to predict things to become to come true, they come true, or people expect you to behave a certain way, you tend to behave that way. And we highlighted the self fulfilling prophecy to the agents of socialization in terms of sex roles. So don't forget that. It's a really
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important section. Going back to this, multidimensional three piece by Weber. You're saying, supposing somebody's a, like, say, person, like, my situation. I'm gonna be a computer programmer. Mhmm. And I and I wanted to go into a very large corporation
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or into a co enter a company that solely does computer graphics programming for large corporations. Although I could be making 10 times an executive's, salary, I still wouldn't have the status of that executive because I'm working for them in effect. Well, and he'd be what what Mills would call white collar worker. Right. I could be more intelligent than that person, yet the way society looks at the way you work for somebody,
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you would have lower status. Than your boss, but most corporate presidents have college degrees. And, actually, in The United States, a significant number of over half of corporate presidents have gone to the Ivy League schools as well. But Well, it depends on the corporation. I mean, you can go to a corporation such as Lee or Saylor and find you know, the executives aren't too intelligent. But Mhmm. Yeah. Actually, degree doesn't really make any difference.
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It'd be 12. You only have $70,000,000. You can go with anything. Right? Vice president. Yeah. But then again, you could also look at this corporation. Could you imagine if they blew up Ellis Island? We'd be stuck with Oh, that'd be hard. But yeah. But you'd still you'd lack prestige and you would lack, power. And you lack property in the dimension that that they were defined in because you wouldn't own the corporation. Right. But you'd
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still be making, you know, decent salary. And depending on where you work, like if you were
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