Although an interesting though I've had is that in the future people might get sent to jail on purpose for a non-violent offense because they'll essentially educate you while providing free room and board. There was a 60 minutes episode on an inmate who essentially was able to educate himself enough about the law to help appeal other convicts sentences and he became a lawyer when he got out.
I joke about this. 3 years ago I was giving conference talks, now I am seemingly chronically unemployed and homeless in Silicon Valley, working odd jobs (eg. Christmas tree lot, trench digging). Jail sounds nice.
Their seems to be a concerted effort to propagandize the population into believing that lowered living standards is a GOOD thing
Not being able to get a full time job with benefits isn't bad, it's the Gig Economy!
Not being able to afford a house or car isn't bad, it's the future!
Not being able to afford to have kids isn't bad, it's more freedom to do what you want!
Not being able to afford to retire isn't bad, it's empowering!
All the while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Globalism is neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a global equilibrium for wages.
Riots like the Yellow Vests in France are going to become common if nothing changes, people aren't going to just sit back for much longer
It seems like a middle-class existence should still be quite trivial to provide for most Americans.
We can afford universal healthcare, but we can't afford a system of for-profit insurers, unconstrained pricing, non-negotiated drug pricing, emergency room doctors being "contractors" to some shady out of state/out of network racket etc.
We can easily afford to send a large majority of our "top" students to colleges for free, but we insist that everyone needs to go to college, no matter the academic ability. We also allow universities to use this "free money" to create degree programs with no job prospects in order to grow universities for no other reason than to make more money, at the expense of the younger generations. There is a shortage of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen due to this, and of course the "solution" is yet another cry for more immigration.
We already have a large amount of struggling poor Americans we don't take care of, but we insist on programs that do nothing except subsidize very specific connected and powerful lobbies (tech, farming, etc.) Both republicans and democrats support this. Republicans have always supported the black hole of funding that is the farm lobby, and Democrats have recently given up the blue-collar unions to focus on immigration. I'm unclear why, but this campaign has been extraordinarily successful.
At the end of the day, all of the above causes the market to go up, until it doeesn't anymore. Any change in policy would most likely crush the market in the short-term but would potentially be a start at trying to fix endemic issues.
I guess we can't have the market go down though. That'd make the boomers mad.
Those are all bad, however, if you turn them around to read "being able to not ...", they become good things. Being able to not retire or being able to not have kids are good things.
Yes, remember back when we were forced by penalty of jail to get a well-paying fulltime job and raise a family? I'm so glad those dark times are over! /s
But the difference here is there's not choice. There's plenty of people who want kids or want to retire, but can't because the job market is garbage due to artificially increased labor supply and thus they are forced to live hand to mouth
We need to switch from bond-backed money to UBI-backed money or cryptocurrency (or both). Hereby I explain how UBI-backed money would work:
How money flows
- UBI is no-strings attached and provided from both fresh* and recycled money
- Taxes continue as usual
- Monetary supply is controlled by amount of government wages and UBI. Demand is controlled by amount of taxes.
Assumptions
- Everyone except civil servants get equal amount of BI
- civil servants get a wage which is greater than or equal to BI instead
* as in, UBI itself is an instrument to print money, this also applies to civil servant wages
No interest needed in this scheme. Just three variables: number of citizens, amount of UBI and civil servant wages, amount of taxes. UBI is provided from both fresh and recycled money, if we otherwise provided it only from fresh money, inflation would arise. Or the opposite, only recycled money would still require bond-backed money as civil servant wages are not enough of monetary supply for all the citizens.
If anything, I see companies bemoaning the absence of sufficient labor.
The only place I see too many people for too few jobs is in low-skilled manual labor and service. The ratio of people to jobs falls in these areas as a consequence of technological advancements. Not to say that isn't a problem, but it's hardly a nefarious conspiracy.
Offshoring with free trade means the whole global population is effectively in competition for jobs. Pay and benefits is reduced to the country willing to provide the cheapest labor with least protections and benefits.
Perhaps they are trying to sway public mentality to be more accepting of a more modest lifestyle, but...
Most of what is viewed as "The American Dream" was indeed an unsustainable and overinflated dream, built on debt and fraud.
But yeah, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. (At least, relative to each other.) That's kind of the point of technology. But all the while, the baseline the poor live at does rise quite a bit above what had come before.
Our parents and grandparents may have been able to buy a house, but it was half the size (or less) of what most people would consider to be a resonably sized house today. And their houses weren't packed with appliances and gizmos for every need.
They may have been able to buy a car, but it would have lacked so many features and required so much maintenance, for a company to produce such a car today would be considered negligent to the point of being worthless.
They may have had pensions, but those pensions were built on debt and lies, and today we're seeing the pensions have very little to actually back them up. (In other words, they really didn't really have legit pensions.)
They may have been able to afford kids, but they didn't spend hardly anything on them compared to what people today seem to think they "have to" spend on their kids.
They may have been able to retire, but part of that was larger communities and several generations living very near each other or even in the same house. There was no expensive health care because the healthcare industry had very little to offer anyone. There was no huge retirement community expenses because granny lived with the family and everyone chipped in to take care of her.
They may have been able to get a job, but only half the population was able to get a job. And no, most of the jobs didn't have benefits.
Overall, my point is many people have an overblown perspective of how good the past is or what normal is supposed to be. Today's standards of living may be seing stagnation - or even a bit of a backslide - but I don't think it's all that worrisome or oppressive in the grand scheme of things. Rather, our expectations what standards of living "should" be are a bit unrealistic.
You may see this and claim that I've drunked thE Kool-Aid or something and been brainwashed by this article and simialr media. I would counter that I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life.
I think you do yourself a tremendous disservice by ignoring the actual numbers associated with the generational wealth disparity on display here.
We aren't talking a small backslide. Who gives a fuck if your fridge can make ice if you can't afford to buy a place to keep your fridge.
>I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life.
No, the middle class most assuredly did have that kind of life. That's what made them middle class.
> Globalism is neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a global equilibrium for wages.
And why, pray tell, do you have a right to a high-paying-with-benefits job? Certainly, it was more likely for your parents to get such a job. Certainly, the pay and benefits were well fought for. Certainly it's better to have such a job than to have a job with less pay and benefits. But why do you feel like you have been wronged when such jobs are lost? Why do people deserve such jobs?
I think that if you delve into this line of thought, you end up either with the labor theory of value (we deserve it because we worked hard for it), or nativism (we deserve it because we were here first). The first is economically indefensible, and the second is morally indefensible.
Yes, you may (in theory) tax the rich to prop up your economically unsustainable lifestyle. Go empty the bank accounts of people like Hollywood A-listers and Wall Street financial executives and put the money into getting another couple weeks of vacation, a $10/hour raise, guaranteed six months of paternity and maternity leave, free healthcare, free daycare, and a fat pension besides. But if we're going to empty their bank accounts, then why do you deserve the cash?
Why don't college students deserve the cash? We could pay off all that student debt and bankroll free higher education for the future. Don't kids deserve to enter a bright future, unsaddled by debt? Or what about infrastructure projects? Don't we all deserve not to sit in traffic jams? Don't we all deserve Gigabit fiber Internet access to the home, bridges that won't collapse, smart energy grids that pay us for the excess energy from our houses' solar panels and batteries? Don't we deserve that?
Around the world, do you know who thinks that they deserve being well-off? Saudi princes think that they deserve their oil wealth. Russian oligarchs think that they deserve their gas wealth. Chinese politicians think that they deserve the wealth the Party has given to them. Why are you different? Why do you deserve more - because you ask for less?
The universe is a pretty unforgiving place. You only deserve what you can persuade people to give you, and most of the time you can only sustainably do that if you can make an honest, rational argument for why it should be given to you and not to somebody else. If you try to make economic arguments with emotional appeals, you may win some of the time, but the arc of the universe is going to bend towards undercutting you.
Nobody deserves to grow old in the same place they were born. Nobody deserves to have a guaranteed lifetime job with the same employer for forty years straight. And so nobody deserves to be able to say, "I have a right to stay here instead of moving far away for work."
> ..you end up either with the labor theory of value (we deserve it because we worked hard for it), or nativism (we deserve it because we were here first). The first is economically indefensible, and the second is morally indefensible.
So a country looking to the well-being of its own people first, and only second to the well-being of others, is morally indefensible? Should governments be reduced to nothing more than the facilitators of the Free Market? And if anyone votes for a different kind of government, well, they voted wrong?
> Should governments be reduced to nothing more than the facilitators of the Free Market? And if anyone votes for a different kind of government, well, they voted wrong?
Governments should facilitate competition in markets, not free markets. "Free" markets are economic anarchy; like political anarchy, power is inevitably seized and exploited by strongmen. Competitive markets have high entrepreneurship, low barriers to entry, easy access to credit for new businesses, and increasingly stringent requirements for companies as they grow larger and larger.
And yes, competitive markets welcome foreign imports, which reduce the price of inputs and therefore make it easier to start new businesses. Yes, competitive markets welcome immigration, since so many immigrants become entrepreneurs and so many others fill key roles in companies which would not exist without them and provide plenty of jobs for native-born citizens.
If somebody votes for a different kind of government, then they either voted short-sightedly ("he's going to save jobs! ... but not in my town. And the jobs he did save, moved away a couple years later...") or they voted ignorantly ("They promised me the sun and the moon for free! Why didn't anybody do that before?"). Political budgeting is like NIMBYism, everyone wants to expand infrastructure/education/social-welfare/environmental spending, but nobody wants to cut the programs they personally benefit from to help pay for it.
> So a country looking to the well-being of its own people first, and only second to the well-being of others, is morally indefensible?
In the context of an argument arguing that there aren't enough jobs to go around because immigration is too high, your notion of a government's "own people" is nativist, because actually legal immigrants are also the government's "own people". Certainly this is the case for legal immigrant citizens. Legal immigrant non-citizens may not be full participants in a country's democracy, their right to live and work in the country may be revocable, and the government may not answer to legal immigrant non-citizens in a democratic sense, but they are otherwise full participants in society - they use the same infrastructure, buy the same goods and services, and can be communal forces for good or bad, just like anybody else in society. So yes, they are the government's "own people", and when the government acts on a societal-wide scale (taxes, infrastructure spending, etc.), it does so in a way which affects all of us.
Illegal/undocumented immigration is a black hole of a topic that more often than not devolves more into a discussion about the rule of law vs. realpolitik than it does about whether immigration quotas are good or bad. In any case, the government's de facto inability to enforce immigration quotas has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether immigration affects the ability of legal residents and citizens to find high-paying work, since virtually no illegal/undocumented immigrants can find high-paying work.
You're arguing about who counts as a country's "own people", and in the sibling comment, whether limiting immigration is in the interest of those people.
In my comment, I raised neither point.
You are not addressing whether a country prioritizing it's own people is morally defensible - the core point of my comment.
My question isn't how frequently will we see more Yellow Vestian movements in the future, but what will it take, and how long will it take before leaders die over this?
This is kind of tangential but, I don't really understand the "death of the middle class" meme/claim. In what sense is the middle class not growing, decade over decade?
Literally why I don’t have kids. I could afford them (with some sacrifices to my quality of life, of course), but I can’t stomach the ethical consequences of bringing a kid into what I think is a dying world.
I’ve often thought that this is like someone living at the fall of the Roman Empire deciding not to have kids because the world was falling apart.
It wasn’t pleasant by any means for a lot of people and the population in Rome declined drastically, but if everyone decided to pack it in when the world felt like it was falling apart, Europe would never have become what it is (which I like to think would be a great loss).
There’s a big gap between “the empire I’ve known forever is going away” and “this world might not be habitable in a century”. You’re being incredibly disingenuous to draw a comparison between the two.
This type of fear-mongering hyperbole does true harm in the fight to combat climate change. The world will not become uninhabitable. It will change in dramatic, unexpected ways, but it's not like it will become radioactive rubble. Feeding FUD about it just enables the deniers.
I don’t think there was as much of a difference to the person living in Rome at that time, what with disease and starvation and lack of geographic mobility and hostile invaders.
And I might be wrong, but the worst predictions I’ve seen seem to be things that would lower the population of the world by billions, but wouldn’t make it utterly uninhabitable for those who remain (other than something like all out nuclear war).
I don’t think the comparison is disingenuous at all.
I think that if sea level rises and forests turn to deserts and oceans acidify and the population of the world declines by 90%, we’ll hope that the people who are left still try to thrive. And hopefully do better the next time around.
Are you sure from the viewpoint of a prosperous citizen of the empire that there was actually a big gap between these two comparisons? My readings have always suggested the two viewpoints would be thought synonymous.
the big gap you claimed was between “the empire I’ve known forever is going away” and “this world might not be habitable in a century”. My statement was meant to indicate that I am not sure that a citizen of Rome would have the same understanding of those two concepts that an American today might have, although there might be other correspondences between the two, the understanding of a world outside their empire being meaningful enough that its destruction would be significantly worse than the destruction of Rome.
The same concerns could motivate the opposite view. Doesn't ethical responsibility compel those with the most educational resources to raise as many creative and productive members of society as they can?
Fears of Malthusian overpopulation were quelled by a series of agricultural revolutions. Fears of peak oil turned out to be based on outmoded projections and technologies. Fears of worsening global war and nuclear apocalypse did not take into account massive increases in prosperity and political changes.
In every case human ingenuity has surmounted existential threats. The world is not going to die, it is going through change within the bounds of many climate shifts that came before (albeit more rapidly). We need more minds working on problems, not less.
Every generation has predicted it will be the last. They’ve all been wrong, so far. One will be right.
What terrifies me is that for the first time in human history, inaction will kill us all. Previous credible apocalyptic scenarios either were local (e.g. deforesting Easter island killed the islanders, but not anyone else), or required active action by people to bring about Armageddon. Now continuing the current course unchanged will absolutely bring an end to most civilizations by the century end, and end humanity completely by 2300 or so. This is new, and something we are really not prepared to deal with.
Only the dollar amount, the number of kids and wives is confirmed by a German newspaper
Snopes does that pretty frequently, adjust what about the story they are "fact-checking" and then rate only that aspect to try and discredit the entire story
Read more carefully, language can be twisted quite easily
In every society, birth rates drop precipitously as soon as 1) modern medicine reduces infant mortality and 2) women get a better education. Both of these things are already happening in many parts of Africa, and the trend will hopefully accelerate greatly over the next couple of decades. Those 20 Syrian kids will be lucky to want 2 kids each by the time they've grown up, having been exposed to European culture and technology.
I don't trust any prediction about what Africa will look like by the end of this century. Every prediction I've seen is little more than a projection of past trends into the far future, but far too much change is going on across the continent right now to make such projections even remotely realistic.
yeah, if bulls had been correct and there was a paradigm shift and Bitcoin soared to 100k this guy would have simply kept quiet about his prediction.
If he was truly confident in it he would have taken out a loan and put it on a binary option for bitcoin to be below X price 1 year later, or as you said gotten a broker account and shorted with 100x margin
And then the whole million muslim concentration camp. Chinese are pretty big on xenophobia. It's basically how the communist party is able to hold every thing together, the century of humiliation and us against the world mentality
Considering the US is, you know, the US and a majority white country, it's not weird at all.
Indians and chinese make up something like 5% of the US population so for them to take up 90% of a select group can really only be caused by favoritism. Unless you want to open up the can of worms that certain races are just so far genetically superior in terms of intelligence that they are 20x more represented
Do you think it's normal for tech companies located in India and China to have parts of their company that are 90% white?
we used to invest $3 into infrastructure and science for every $1 in entitlements spending. Now we spend $5 in entitlements for every $1 in infrastructure/science
And people wonder why the US is falling apart and technological advances have slowed down.
We're living hand to mouth instead of investing in the future. The sad thing is that many of our problems could be solved permanently via technology rather than government.
Instead of creating the automobile people are trying to make horses faster
It feels like we slowed down in the important areas. Software? Web Apps? We're doing great. Anything space related? Eh. In theory we get to claim SpaceX so I guess that counts but most people couldnt tell you what NASA's been up to recently...
I wouldn't say "vague". He cited the differential in dollar amounts and drew a conclusion from the data presented. That sounds specific to me. I think you may have overreacted to his point. You should have debated the merits and demerits of welfare spending versus R&D investment. Instead you accused him of something he never advocated for.
Everyone trashed Trump for the solar tariffs but I liked it for this reason. Sure, temporarily they get more expensive but what happens in 20+ years when the world is reliant on solar power and China has a complete monopoly because they played the long game and subsidized it until all competitors died out?
China is playing the long game, the west plays quarter to quarter because of the stock market
Not an expert, so please forgive overgeneralization.
The USA (and the West) has played the long game. Very successfully. We somehow avoided WWIII.
Nixon thru Obama, the USA engaged with China with the goal of normalization (with the West). This has been standard procedure. For whatever reason, this strategy hasn't worked. (Yet?) Further, some have concluded China is becoming less likely to normalize.
Every successfully developing country has bootstrapped itself thru some measure of theft, cheating, protectionism. Recognizing the power imbalance, some proponents of active engagement in the West have let it slide, for a period.
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I am unhappy with the stalled relationship between USA and China. While I do not support Trump's actions (tempting a trade war, weird rhetoric), I understand the impulse to do something. In truth, I do not know if there is any satisfactory path forward.
I grew up during the anti-Japanese hysteria of the Reagan years. I hated it then. I hate such rhetoric now.
Happily, it passed. I'd like cooler heads to prevail again. We'll see.
What you call normalization is submission to US values and power. No nation wants to do that. The difference is that China is powerful enough to go their own way.
As long as you call it normalization you will remain unhappy.
In what free market does a government subsidize a company and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
China never cared about free trade, they use it like a weapon to beat idealists like yourself over the head
What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market and those "cheap" solar panels get tripled in price because there is no competition left and the rest of the world can only grit their teeth?
> In what free market does a government subsidize a company
The idea that the Chinese government subsidizes every Chinese company is nonsense. This is just something that Americans need to believe because they don't want to admit how extraordinarily inefficient their domestic industries were before 2000.
> and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
This is hilarious. Nobody forces foreign companies to give away their IP. These companies, which are supposedly the best in the world, analyze the trade and make it voluntarily or walk away. It's called the free market. Remember that?
> What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market
The irony here is that all the tariffs do is put America further and further behind. The tariffs don't help America at all eg [1]. This should be obvious to anybody who understands how solar works and knows that the real money is not in panel printing.
What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market and those "cheap" solar panels get tripled in price because there is no competition left and the rest of the world can only grit their teeth?
Everyone warns of this scenario, but it never seems to happen in real life. Sure, the old, inefficient producers disappear as foretold, but the goods in question just keep getting cheaper and more plentiful. Can you think of any historical counterexamples?
what we should do then is to support local manufacturing by purchasing massive amount of solar panels, building battery based grid storage, switching transportation to electric on massive scale.
slapping tariffs on foreign products ensures that our manufacturing becomes even more backward, while the rest of the world takes off.
if we want to avoid monopoly - build own capacity, competitively.
I think it applies equally to furniture or solar. If you want quality local manufacturing, it is better to let it compete on the global market. Help by placing orders, may be, but let it compete.
Otherwise we'll only prolong inevitable decline.
Example: go to Japan and check in into a modern hotel. Then look at the hardware - door latches, bed, toilet... Then compare the quality of these products against their American counterparts. An isolated example, may be, but the outcome is higher quality at lower prices.
If there is only one manufacturer of solar panels in China, but that is not the case.
If the Chinese don't produce solar panels, the price would have been tenfold instead of tripled. With the Chinese in the game, tripling may not even happen, because the Chinese will compete with themselves.
As only big companies can underwrite development and then support ongoing/backlog compatibility quirks-mode work for a new engine, you are effectively saying "no" to other, higher-order values offered by new browsers than the engine.
Yes, I include Mozilla in "big companies" (2017 big revenue, which won't recur from what I can tell; big pay to chair too). Nevertheless, Mozilla has mismanaged Servo into an AR/XR only position where it won't go big, and Mozilla (for same reasons as MS) faces pressure to bail on Gecko.
Blaming little browsers for using chromium/Blink is blaming them for surviving.
Successful genes (e.g. for adaptive auto-immunity) tend to sweep. Think of WebKit and now (on desktop) chromium/Blink as such alleles. We may not like it but it happens whatever we may wish. I've chosen to fight for user rights at a higher domain of discourse: private ads, anonymous donations, ad and tracking protection by default. The time for a more radical new engine will come; it isn't now.
Inclined to agree. I see the fact that Microsoft is abandoning Edge in favour of a Chromium-based browser as a fundamentally bad thing for the web due to the loss of competition amongst browser engines (me of 10 - 15 years ago would probably be appalled by this sentiment, but times change).
Brave, as yet another Chromium based-browser doesn't feel like it's helping. That, and the name "Brave" absolutely grates on me. It's a web browser: what exactly is brave about it? Too pretentious for my taste.
The name is not about the company, rather the user who takes control of their own Web economics. This requires facing down some anti-ad/tracker-blocking, and supporting favorite sites and creators (easily done from grants, no need to pay; but still requires courage compared to false security of taking ads and tracking).
I always thought "Opera" was pretentious, personally! But I'm friends with long-time CTO, who does go to Bayreuth every year for Wagner, so I mean this is best possible way ;-).
The big thing nobody talks about with Bolsonaro though is the geopolitical implications with China. US and Brazil could starve China into compliance as they produce around 80% of the worlds soy and corn. Nobody is talking about that aspect,the fact that brazil has non-socialist anti-China leader for the first time in decades, although Trump must be aware because he sent Bolton down to Brazil and invited Bolsonaro to the white house
It applies beyond China as well. They could just become OPEC for food and both countries would benefit from being able to jack up prices on crops and livestock.
Well, Brazil had to sell those soybeans somewhere. Their economy is half bankrupt already anyway. If not China, where are going to send all the natural resources to, with its current price? Presumably not US, who is also desperate trying to sell its own gases/agricultural products to the world. They are competitors, not friends.
In worst case, China can just reduce the consumption of livestock, after all that is what soybeans had been used for, while finding replacements somewhere else. As long as they have enough rice, China will be fine.
China is fishing in all the planet and can exert a lot of influence over many countries in Africa. Chinese investors had spent more than $23 billion in Brazil in the last three years investing in energy and entering in the development of infrastructures. Would not be a wise move for the brazilian government.
Bolsonaro's big quote is that "China isn't investing in Brazil, it's buying brazil". If Trump offers Bolsonaro a good trade deal I wouldn't be surprised to see him take it to get away from China's influence
Here's a snippet about Africa, I'm sure South America is much more important for the US.
“We will make certain that ALL aid to the region - whether for security, humanitarian, or development needs - advances U.S. interests,” he said, adding that Washington will also re-evaluate its support for U.N. peacekeeping missions.
trade, IP, muslim concentration camps, illegal island creation in south China sea, the list goes on.
Xi's power grab is only accepted because life is pretty good right now in China. He won't be able to maintain power over a billion hungry, angry chinese
With how much money China has dumped into Africa and Nigeria it seems awfully suspicious that this would happen. From my understanding not only would the Nigerian ISP need to make a mistake, but the China and Russian ISPs would also have had to overlook the same mistake.
Although an interesting though I've had is that in the future people might get sent to jail on purpose for a non-violent offense because they'll essentially educate you while providing free room and board. There was a 60 minutes episode on an inmate who essentially was able to educate himself enough about the law to help appeal other convicts sentences and he became a lawyer when he got out.
I know if I was homeless I would consider it