The majority of households in the US have no savings of any kind and rural suicide rates have jumped by nearly 50% in the last 25 years. Y'all have just about backed everyone into a corner already.
How much of this is a cultural problem with Americans though?
Immigrant families save a higher percentage than Americans even when they make less money. Americans notoriously overconsume and are not big on saving.
That there are cultural issues around consumption is absolutely not in question. That said I watched one of my great uncles raise three kids and put every one of them through college cultivating ~400 acres with equipment he owned outright and could readily maintain and repair himself when issues arose. Fast forward 40 years and "small" farmers are forced to take on and then service literally millions in debt just to break even (if they're lucky and the weather holds). So while I agree wholeheartedly that the modern cultural acceptance of living well beyond one's means is deeply problematic I'd prioritize breaking big industry's chokehold on all the things before telling folks they should tighten their belt.
I just think if people want results they should focus on the factors they can control. Changing government policy and industry policy is a slow process and can take decades for results and often has unintended consequences.
And that’s just the U.S. - inequality there is comparatively low compared to an awful lot of the world. Brazil, for instance, is just nuts, and resultantly spends a lot of its time teetering around a political sinkhole.
Unfortunately, it’s been the outcome of every system we’ve yet tried - wealth always accumulates. It has, so far, only been redistributed through violence - either direct action by the proletariat, or their mass slaughter in war, allowing redistribution amidst the survivors.
I’d love to imagine that this time we can find a different path, but ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck.
"ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck"
Our species has been on the planet for what, roughly 300,000 years? 290,000 of which was spent mostly on chasing our food. By comparison our modern fumble-fucking around with political systems designed by and for a notional elite class is a blink of the eye. We've beaten worse odds.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.
In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.
Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.
Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.
> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power
Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.
The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.
The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?
I fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?
If I was given a choice between robust journalism and whatever Craigslist is the choice seems rather plain. A dispassionate analysis of the majority of tech industry "improvements" reveals similar choices.
Attempting to lecture me on what journalism was is a misstep on your part. My first professional development gig was supporting software integrations between 33 local newsrooms, their printing floors, and their (at the time fledgling) online presence. In addition to my normal development work I was frequently called upon to work directly with editorial and newsroom staff on specialty projects and provide on-site support at industry events. As a result I spent a lot of time in the room where shit was going down.
While it's always been possible to find shills in the media landscape the overwhelming majority of the men and women I worked for were the kind of intense scary-obsessive anti-authoritarian types that literally skipped meals and sleep (sometimes days at a time) just for a chance at catching industry or government fucking around. And with literally hundreds of newsrooms scattered across the country staffed similarly journalism was a force to be reconned with. But hey, having to pay $5 to sell your couch to a stranger was kind of a drag so I guess this is better.
If you think that every comment on social media is an "attempt to lecture" you, a random nobody on the internet, who once basically worked as support staff to journalists, you have personal problems beyond my powers to fix...
There is the undocumented 3rd option of actually running for office oneself if you're (correctly) certain no quality candidate will be produced for the position.
The US appears to be ideologically committed shitting on their trade partners and ending the dollar's run as a reserve currency and you see this leading to improving it's geopolitical standing? Through what mechanism?
The GOP isn't "crypto-libertarian" by any stretch of the imagination. That's probably even more absurd than the people who suggest the GOP is "financially conservative".
They'll ride it forever. My dad still insists "Protecting the environment is conservative, look at the EPA made by Nixon" as if there hasn't been clear and deliberate anti-environmental policy since then.
After 30 years of empirical reality demonstrating that if you want a government that is responsible with money, you must vote democrat, Donald Trump was still voted in because "He's good for the economy"
Late response but I can't leave the assertion that voting Democrat results in fiscal responsibility unchallenged. Their experiment with neoliberal economics and aggressive disinterest in pursuing anti-trust and anti-monopolistic policy have bankrupted most of rural America. At this point if fiscal responsibility is a goal you'd pretty much have to vote 3rd party or independent (for as much good as that does anyone).
"The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable."
Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a tendency to produce as many or more problems than it solved, and on more than one occasion I've seen developers of this stripe lose commit access to FOSS projects as a result of the low quality of their contributions.
"nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful."
Compared to trying to get stuff accomplished in C Perl was an absolute dream to work with and many devs I knew gravitated to web development specifically for their love of the added flexibility and expressiveness that Perl gave them compared to other commonly used languages at the time. Fortunately for us all language design and tooling progressed.
Generalize much? How would you feel if code-as-craft people were called out to be anti-social nerds who spent times on umpteenth rewrite and refactor, didn't care what impact that had on the actual user they were building for?
I'd thank you for the laugh and assume you worked in project management, marketing, or some other low info industry segment. I've worked with hundreds of developers over my career and the only time I've brushed up against anyone who even approximates what you are describing would be in HN comment threads. The craft-oriented women and men I've had the pleasure of working with have without exception held user experience and the future sanity of other developers interacting with the code they wrote as core requirements, every project, every line of code. Getting it right the first time tends to cut down significantly on refactoring.
"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all."
That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.
It's never been tried before. Capital always required human labor, to be productive.
Capital has never closed in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing in on that ability now.
Oh, for sure, the capital "owners" get ganked either simultaneously with the rest of us, or shortly after.
But that's not a factor in their decisions; because if they didn't build it, China would; and there's obviously nothing we can do about that. (and to some degree, they're right; international treaties to limit the development of world-ending technology is something that requires minimally competent governments, with an interest in preserving the world, on the majority of the sides of the treaty).
Is that what you think is happening right now? This line of reasoning brings to mind the luxury bunkers in New Zealand that are so popular with a certain type of folks. I'm guessing the sales brochures on those things don't mention stuff like the outcome of an 80lb bag of cement poured into the ventilation or the fact that heavy machinery is ubiquitous and shockingly simple to operate. Thinking capital can decouple itself from the larger populace is comically flawed for similar reasons. See also: XKCD where the crypto guy gets worked over with a wrench for his password.
We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in the logistic curve where things slow down a lot.
I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid advances in task length, general capabilities, and research and development capabilities in AI, and generality, price, and autonomy in robotics.
How much headroom in these capabilities do you believe we have, before a data center can protect and maintain itself and an on-site power plant? Before robots can run a robot factory?
I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of automation. People are still confusing plausible text generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also: "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some awesome tools that sound like science fiction from decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle. In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or computational bandwidth necessary.
We're absolutely not there yet, algorithmically or with compute. Algorithms keep getting better, though, despite the bitter lesson; and data centers keep getting bigger.
If you showed a conversation between Terry Tao or Steve Yegge and their AI collaborators to someone from 2021, they would consider it beyond obvious that it's AGI. Today, we know they still have some shortcomings; but in another 5 years, what looks to us today like it's beyond obviously ASI may well be enough for catastrophic, irrecoverable outcomes.
The real transition would be from human-owned capital to self-owned capital. You are right that current capabilities and autonomy don't allow for that yet.
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