Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

Humans need a constant supply of resources and shelter to survive. There is no "system" which avoids this inconvenient fact. In the absence of any "system" at all, you would still need to constantly work for survival - and in fact you'd just die as soon as you were no longer able to do so due to illness or injury much less old age.

In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement" in the first place.

We all wish that we could spend our best years doing whatever we want. That doesn't mathematically work out, though. European social safety nets are pretty damn generous all things considered. Plenty of vacation days, especially compared to the US. It's not like it's impossible to use those well during your "best years".

> No, it is a resource allocation problem.

There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.

> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year

That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".

> This isn't a zero sum game

It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)

> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor

You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem

It's a tough reality to face. Problems are piling up for the west that aren't easily solved, and not just with social benefits. Something as mundane as aging sewage systems is starting to become a real problem in many countries.

Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.

In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.

For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.

I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.

The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.

None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.

It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...

[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...