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Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

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Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#121

Post by cmahler7 »

gramstrong wrote: post #100
cmahler7 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

majority of people simply won't be able to help with the complex problems that push human progress forward. What do you suggest we do with them?

Educate them with all of the free time created from automation, then put them back in to the work force.

you can educate people as much as you want, the majority aren't going to be able to become engineers and physicists.

Unless we can get to the point where we can manipulate genes to increase intelligence that's not a solution to the problem

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#122

Post by okreallywtf »

gramstrong wrote: post #100
cmahler7 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

majority of people simply won't be able to help with the complex problems that push human progress forward. What do you suggest we do with them?

Educate them with all of the free time created from automation, then put them back in to the work force.

Educate them with what money? That requires redistribution of wealth because these people will not leave the workforce with the means to retrain and reeducate themselves.

How many scientist and engineers can any future workforce support? There will be a limit to how many "production" jobs there can be. By this I mean manufacturing, farming, infrastructure etc. This still leaves many creative endevours that can be produced and consumed almost without limit - but this also assumes people have expendable income.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#123

Post by grzm »

_pmf_ wrote: post #93
cmahler7 wrote: post #35

We're at the point where the United State can either become utopia or dystopia. Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure, or continue as it has destroying the middle class and consolidating wealth for the elite. I used to be hardcore capitalism but if something isn't done to spread the wealth we are going to have our own French revolution with the plebes rising up ag…

> The anger that got trump elected is just the beginning if things don't change Try to get a single Democrat to acknowledge this. They are still belitteling and stigmatizing those who share these concerns (and riduculing them for their audacity of hoping that Trump will be able to change anything).

Increasing partisan rancor by generalizing across large groups of people does nothing but make the situation worse. Please don't do this. If this is something you care about, and it appears you do given you chose to comment on it, do what you can to improve the situation.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#124

Post by posguy »

nostrademons wrote: post #87
posguy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the power of capital over labor, whereby capital is extremely stratified in the hands of very few people, and they have shifted political power so as to avoid investment in the laborers (aka everyone below themselves) and ensure they do not become a threat. Additionally, they will usually influence monetary policy to ensure their status is never challenged, which is why rapidly rising housing prices aren't a majo…

Interestingly, capital holders are complaining all the time as well. There are very few places to put money now with a decent return. Savings accounts pay roughly 0%. Bonds are at inflation, or sometimes less. The S&P 500's P/E is at 25, which is historically very high, implies a rate of return of about 4%, and makes the risk of a correction significant. Real estate is inefficient; property prices are so high that th…

Savings accounts are basically a negative return due to inflation, even if your credit union will do 1.25%, inflation is still 1.6% to 1.7%.

We need to mobilize this capital back into the economy, rather than letting it languish in the financial markets, guarded jealously by a handful of people. The economic stimulus it would provide could easily help kickstart and sustain waves of growth and development, though we should not repeat the errors of the past (urban sprawl, heavy investment in infrastructure in dying suburbs).

The last two were borne of an era where sprawl was supposed to distribute the white populace so as to allow some to survive nukes, and it has run its course and proved to be unmaintainable (look at Livingston, TX).

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#125

Post by gramstrong »

Jtsummers wrote: post #115
gramstrong wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educate them with all of the free time created from automation, then put them back in to the work force.

That requires economical access to education opportunities, which is presently not the norm in the US.

Neither is unlimited leisure. I'm proposing the former in place of the latter.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#126

Post by sgift »

dorgo wrote: post #103
MichaelGG wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is it just the stigma that prevents people from getting 100K a year? I mean if it's as easy as it sounds in your comment, there should be loads of people signing up. And I'm guessing you don't end up with 80K+ in student loans?

As a programmer in Germany I don't even get half of that. Where can I sign?

Depending on the region and your experience you may consider asking for a raise or changing your job. You are probably (seriously) underpaid.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#127

Post by faet »

ams6110 wrote: post #18

“America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree, and I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist. Coming from a Princeton egghead that's not a surprising point of view. It seems very typical for those with education to look down upon the less-educated. The truth is, US high schools miserably fail the non-colleg…

He's not looking down upon them, he's stating that on average they'll be worse off. Your anecdote doesn't jive with the data.

In this day in age a college degree gives you a much higher chance of success/income. Median net worth is 8x higher for those with a college degree. And salary is almost 18k/year higher.

In the past the gap was much smaller. It's been growing and will likely continue to grow.

[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income...

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#128

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

cmahler7 wrote: post #35

We're at the point where the United State can either become utopia or dystopia. Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure, or continue as it has destroying the middle class and consolidating wealth for the elite. I used to be hardcore capitalism but if something isn't done to spread the wealth we are going to have our own French revolution with the plebes rising up ag…

It's difficult to imagine a violent uprising in a state with such militarized police and widespread, distributed armed forces presence as the US.

When even outside of times of unrest, encounters with the police result in getting fatally shot or seriously injured much more frequently than in comparably high-HDI states [1][2], it would take the cooperation of police and the military to allow unrest to take its course instead of being quickly crushed; this is culturally unlikely in the US which holds public order and the continuity of government in high esteem.

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-12/when-it-comes-police-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#129

Post by magic_beans »

cookiecaper wrote: post #53
irrational wrote: post #6

I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…

My grandfather was dyslexic and in his 92 years, he never could learn to read. He started his own garbage disposal business and became wealthy from it, eventually getting contracts with several significant municipalities in the Northwest before he sold it off. He surrounded himself with intelligent, well-educated people who would read the contracts to him and advise him (primarily his sons and wives, but also trusted…

Ah, that is the very definition of white privilege. This despairing young white America just doesn't realize they actually have it, unlike their truly hopeless minority counterparts.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#130

Post by cmahler7 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #65
cmahler7 wrote: post #35

We're at the point where the United State can either become utopia or dystopia. Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure, or continue as it has destroying the middle class and consolidating wealth for the elite. I used to be hardcore capitalism but if something isn't done to spread the wealth we are going to have our own French revolution with the plebes rising up ag…

lol, yeah like large corporations and investors (which includes many of us here) want to give away free cash or inflate wages without cause the answers to these problems are rarely simple

paying a fair tax rate would be a start

Do you really think Google should be paying 3% tax?

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