281–290 of 360 posts
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> People vote for old idiots . i think this is also a syndrome not a cause
Agree, coming from a 3rd country to US what I have personally perceived a lot is the generational loop at the later stage..."Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." — G. Michael Hopf
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> 25k saved per year is a million after twenty years with a modest very conservative amount. Close to 25% of people in America only make 25k a year. Forget saving that much You are wildly out of touch with the average person and their struggles to think that 25k saved per year is even remotely achievable for most people
I dunno why people keep bringing this up as some sort of gotcha. You don't save for retirement based on your average. You do it during your peak earning years. Which are far above average. And most households have more than one earner. So even a 5% savings based on a median 84k household yields over 750k in 20 years. Like it literally is that simple.
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> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution “Fundamentally inherent from” is such a broad statement that it’s difficult to argue with, but the US constitution predates the French Revolution. > so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of…
He said inherit, not inherent
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Like anything some is good too much is bad, a gradient work for a complex society, a brutal difference like kings and dark ages poor eventually bring collapse
Wealth inequality was not the defining aspect of the relationship between kings and peasants. It was also not the reason for the collapse. The defining quality was the mechanisms by which kings extracted wealth from peasants (indirectly, through layers) which doesn’t resemble what we have in western liberal democracies today. Things like tallage and arbitrary taxation, labor dues, mill/oven/wine press monopolies, her…
it’s not the same as your examples but i’m not sure that it needs to be exactly the same
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If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources…
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All those checks to business owners and farmers. Huge slush funds.
Californians used it to buy houses in smaller cities across the country.
Not doubled but a windfall of cash into accounts for the wealthy none the less.
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> American lost engineering culture everywhere except software microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?
Both companies created in the previous century and running on old fuel of past success
No ones labor is worthless. Guys this is so retarded but I understand why tech people find this difficult. Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people. An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary. Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possibl…
Why are there homeless people then? Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India.
The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival.
> That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard,
They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.
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The French Revolution is no longer possible. The surveillance state plus wealth mobility means the wealthy will be in New Zealand before anyone erects a guillotine, and the people that would foment a revolution are heavily surveilled and infiltrated.
Are you sure about that? Tech cuts both ways & asymmetric drone warfare has become cheaper than ever … how hard it is it to sink some yachts or down some jets?
The reason we don't do these things is because the jets would come crashing down onto someone's home or place of work. That UPS jet that crashed last year when the engine detached on takeoff killed a dozen on the ground. Nobody is going to drone attack a private jet because the innocent would get killed by the dozen.