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30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

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Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#41

Post by Barrin92 »

treis wrote: post #12

It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative. I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there…

>My TV is the tits

having 50 different flavours of ice cream and a big TV available is a fifteen year olds idea of paradise, but what people actually care about is infrastructure, public health, safety, childcare and progress in the material world.

The US has the problem that the commons and the physical world have been run into the ground, the country has effectively become the Wall-E future.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#42

Post by skybrian »

SimianSci wrote: post #26
delichon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.

We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before. In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one. How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?

At least in the US, it wasn't better in the past. Railroads were often private monopolies on certain routes. The Interstate highway system is much more open in comparison (lots of competition in trucking), and so is the Internet.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#43

Post by esrauch »

qaq wrote: post #36
conception wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.dcfpi.org/all/how-wealthy-households-use-a-buy-b... Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!

Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.

I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.

It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things

It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#44

Post by blindriver »

You can summarize it like this:

People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.

People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.

The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.

The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.

And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#45

Post by christophilus »

Retric wrote: post #20
chasd00 wrote: post #8

This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.

US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America. https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.

Depends on your definition of large and of prosperous.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#46

Post by MangoToupe »

accrual wrote: post #37
joe_the_user wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile. Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhou…

> illustration of how self-insulating people are I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.

This is leaking out of the us, too. The cultural gap between people who have money, access to the internet, and who can speak english, and those people living within a mile away who have none of these things, has never been wider.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#47

Post by b59831 »

jerlam wrote: post #38
kjkjadksj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actual…

The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.

[dead]

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#48

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

starik36 wrote: post #31

The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one. I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer.…

We were on the right side of the debt cycle, that's all there is.

If the rate of TOTAL debt was accumulating at the same rate now as it was then, there would be jobs aplenty.

Debts are still rising, but at slower rates.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#49

Post by cyberax »

Well, your resident anti-urbanist is here.

Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.

So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".

Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.

But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#50

Post by SimianSci »

starik36 wrote: post #31

The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one. I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer.…

I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons.

I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me.

I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.

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