It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
> 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 a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
That is a bit of revisionist history: conspiracy theories gripped the revolution, and a lot of them thought Marie-Antoinette was already organising an Austrian invasion of France (since she is Austrian), so rather than wait for the supposed inevitable to happen, France attacked first. And that's what made the coalitions form. Not that they liked the idea of a Republican France, but before France attacked, they were unlikely to do anything about it.
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?
I could only relate to this stuff in my 20s but now I just don't care. Maybe it's cause I went from < 200k net worth to over 1M in that time. I've seen the country I was born in collapse in my lifetime. I saw my grandparents give their entire life to that country only to be left destitute. I saw my parents come to America with literally $0 and after thirty years I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
> I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
If it was that easy, every office cleaner or bank clerk would be a millionaire.
> living in literally the best time ever to be a human being
Sure, but we're also watching the rise of a new oligarchy, and their latest innovation appears poised to put a lot of people out of work, making their lives materially worse.
It literally is. People just have no discipline or skills with money. Go on the fire subreddit. 25k saved per year is a million after twenty years with a modest very conservative amount. And if you can double that with a spouse you're looking at a million in only ten years. People who stretch that to 20-25 years end up with 3-5 million.
So you're still looking at 43% of every pay packet. And 50% of full-time workers will be paid less than that.
This is beyond discipline and much more than simply getting up and working hard, and more like living in self-imposed poverty, putting on hold anything resembling building a life, buying a house etc.
The fact is putting away $25k a year is the reserve of the privileged, not something achievable just by getting up and working hard for most people.
The average household income in the US is $83,730 and the median is $121,000.
It's also irrelevant. The average is weighed down by students and retirees. If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
But thank you for the comment. It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
And beyond that... yes? These figures are for all households, not necessarily households with people in full time work, which is a pre-requisite to looking at your claims properly. As such your household income figures don't give us a good picture to evaluate them.
The figures I quoted were for people in full time work, much more relevant to your statement, and no, they aren't weighed down by anything.
> If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
Why would I do that? Your claim was that people could become millionaires over the course of 20 years by saving $25k per annum. The median person in full time work would have a very hard time doing that as shown by the figures I gave you. And they are better off than fully half of other full time workers. Unless you have some compelling (sourced) figures about lifetime earnings that negate this, it doesn't really help us.
> It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
Wow, OK.
Well firstly I'm not American, I'm British, soon to be Australian and might eventually become Irish (by descent) as well. No US in the picture though. Never had a state handout in my life, and my net worth is already well over your target threshold.
What I have (that you seem to be missing) is empathy for people who don't have it so good and a basic understanding of figures.
Yea I had a feeling. I'd caution you not to buy into the Internet doom and gloom. Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine. Because the people that tend to live on less also live in the parts of the country where you can still buy a house for 100k.
- I introduced to the thread first
- You quoted incorrectly
- Doesn’t contradict the other sources given
- Doesn’t support your arguments
You think I’m ignoring that primary source? That would be quite a feat given I linked it first.
Please do explain further, preferably with reference to the comments above that show the figures you quoted aren’t a good match to illuminating the claims you made.
How does that source support the notion that median-and-lower earning people can realistically save $25k per annum, per person, or trivially become millionaires with a bit of discipline?
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.
The number I am finding for the median household expenses for America is $67,000 annually. That's just essentials, housing, food, transportation, insurance, healthcare
So if your median household makes 84k, and your median household spends 67k on necessities, where is the money coming from for saving 5%? The difference is only 17k
It doesn't take much to eat up 17k. A car repair, house repair, or hospital stay (in America at least) will easily reduce that to zero or negatives
So I dunno man. It doesn't seem that simple.
Edit: and keep in mind that median does mean that a pretty large proportion of people make less than that number too. Sometimes significantly less
Presumably the 67k spend contains the car repair, house repair, hospital stay part you mentioned. Everything you're saying is accounted for. Your argument is basically anti social security. I'm saying make your own social security fund and you keep going "and what about" as if that's an argument. These externalities are literally what the fund is for. And frankly you should have an HSA for medical expenses because it lets you spend pre-tax money on that stuff.
When you do non Roth it's pre-tax cash so it's much easier to run up your net worth because it's based on money that you haven't paid taxes on yet.
$5583 a month is essentials? This is more than what I spend on my mortgage..... and all my bills.... and all my food.... and I live in SoCal.
This conversation is dumb. Put money into an IRA. You lower your taxable income. It's not that hard. You grow your net worth on your untaxed monies and then later when shit hits the fan you can extract it at a lower tax bracket. And you get to gain market gains on cash that would otherwise be spent on taxes. It's how people who are good with money make an extra 10-15k per year while you're being all like "woe is me. i can't afford anything".
This is how you can cover that $10-15k you mention when it does happen. You're welcome.
I really don't know what gave you the impression I needed your financial advice in the first place
Do you think just because I'm concerned about people who are less well off that I must be one? Do you think the only reason I could or should care about poor people is if I were poor myself?
If so, then I truly hope you become a better person in the future
My financial situation is fine though, thanks for the concern. My financial advisor has me all taken care of
LOL, what are you going to do? Sit at the end of Northrop field and fly a swarm of drones into the engines of a G6 traveling down the runway at over 100MPH? No way a handful of drones are going to get sucked into a jet engine at that speed. Or do you mean engage a PJ in a dogfight at 40000 feet? I suspect if drones could down a jet, we would have heard about it coming out of Ukraine by now.
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.
The original comment was made in relation to guillotines, popping unoccupied jets on the ground isn't what the commenter I was replying to was referring to. Taking down an occupied jet without using a sidewinder missile is a different capability.
New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
Your theory is that the billionaires will escape popular uprising by forcing their way into a sovereign nation, and that that nation won't rise up against them? Why wouldn't we?
> ... federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
> This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs.
To be fair though in the times of French Revolution the surveillance capability was really basic compared to today, the tech capability to organize protests was lower too. Which one prevails? We know that in PRC and maybe Russia it's surveillance, but what about US?
It's laundered through data brokers and 3rd parties, but with ICE subpoenaing reddit et Al for people that shit post about ICE online, do you really think we're that far off? Especially if the person shit posting is in the US on a visa?
I know what you mean, just saying relative to French revolution, they not only had no such surveillance tech but also no such tech for organizing protests and stuff. Which one tops which in US?
PL> "I'm going to build a guillotine; be my lawyer and give me advice as if it's going to be built."
>>"... don't make it entirely functional."
PL> "It's going to be built functional."
>>"... hmm ... use a bicycle cable lock to add a safety to it – lock&key. But remember that my original advice was not to build it in the first place."
Inequality and other such issues are universal, the French Revolution was not. What was unique about the French Revolution is not even that the government bankrupted themselves fighting wars and then tried to refill their coffers by sharply increasing taxes in a fashion that disproportionately affected the lower classes, but that this was all paired alongside widespread crop failures that sent the cost of food skyrocketing driven widespread food scarcity.
The average person couldn't care less, at least in terms of action, how much money somebody else has. If people have food in their belly and a roof over their heads, you're only going to draw out radicals. And in modern sharply divided societies those radicals will be framed (probably accurately) as being disproportionately made up of one side, and the other side will oppose them all their might and widespread public support behind such opposition.
So there will never be a popular revolution in a place like the US in its current divided state. The most probable scenario by an overwhelmingly wide margin is 'nothing', but the only other possibility would be a civil war. And I do think that's possible, but the chances are extremely remote. It would require something very extreme like one side trying to ban the other side from political office. We've probably been closer than some might expect, but we're now probably much further, rather than closer, to those times and outcomes.
That’s incorrect, in fact, fairness and equality is one of the few universal social contracts that are valued in every culture on earth (though lived/implemented differently).
And I would argue that’s one of the key differences that separates humans from animals. Humans have an intrinsic desire for things to be fair.
Oh, the good old reflex that is activated in panic situations but never realised. Then the revolution was from capitalists against kings. Now the former are already in power with their servants (CEOs) and there is no alternative. So no change, no revolution.
What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?
didnt the archive owner only start doing this after Patokallio revealed his identity for no good reason. Given the legal liability involved in maintaining that service, there is a threat to what Patokallio is doing so it doesn't seem entirely unsympathetic to do something in retaliation..
Seems like a mistake to rely on an archiving site that runs malware and changes the text of archived pages.
However, there’s also not really anything better out there. The owner being some wily/sketchy Russian is even an advantage in some respects, since they can’t be pressured by copyright law or foreign politics.
Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
“Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”
Elliot showed up because southwests entire computer system imploded over the holidays which cost them massive amounts of money and reputation. Changes were absolutely needed at southwest.
The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.
Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.
The current proposal on the table is to have the rich pay a lot more taxes. They scoff at the idea, so probably we will end up doing something less graceful.
With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom.
The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.
With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.
That’s not for lack of engineering talent! We just don’t like paying for boring things like… bridges that haven’t collapsed yet. “Call us when it does crumble. We’ve got a border wall to build or gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners to pay for.”
Sure, untreated mental illness is a tragedy, and humanity sucks balls at biology, so hard it's as if we wished to be made of silicon. How does this make for a trend or justify the idea that the WEIRD's least-harm decisions explain broader resources allocation in real monetary terms. We're talking about the price of how much concrete pouring in the sad story you linked?
(WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic, indeed a dying breed)
What a cheap shot. “gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners” - cos there are soooo many of those happening we can’t fix a single bridge.
How about another explanation. Your government is totally opposed to helping citizens for “free” (let’s ignore that most government revenue comes from good ol’ taxpayers) when the alternative is to farm out the provision of expensive services to lobbying corporates.
They’re more than happy to punish people however. For free _and_ for corporate profit.
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
Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is:
1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.
Easy money and cheap (foreign) labor are one and the same. Political parties that are not accountable for this are the upstream problem. In other words, it’s a failure of what we think of as our “democracy.” The will of the people doesn’t mean much when you can just swap out “the people” to get what you will.
The new mortgage backed securities are the instruments trading the debt used to build AI data centers (the AAA rated debt that is anything but). The music will stop when there’s a blip in liquidity. Everyone will rush for a chair and there won’t be enough for everyone.
I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it.
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, heriot, merchet.
Serfs were legally bound to the land.
The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated.
If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.
>"If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance)"
It creates a country nobody is willing to fight for. Beyond certain levels of inequality, you get systemic dysfunction.
Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.
> Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.
Concur that poverty should be eradicated and that overt time the minimum bar for what qualifies what each human deserves/needs rises. However, that's orthogonal to wealth inequality.
It is not impossible to have huge wealth spectrum and no poverty. Conversely, it is not uncommon throughout the ages for societies to have little wealth inequality but extreme poverty.
>Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?
There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's expectation of what a fair distribution would be, accounting for different levels of ability and luck. Aside from this cognitive dissonance, there are also pragmatic limits on how big a disparity can be while still having a functional democracy. It's clear that truly enormous disparities in wealth, made even worse by a lack of regulation in political donation, lead to major distortions in the principle of "one person, one vote" which is a cornerstone of democracy.
>Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
No, because people have different levels of ability and experience different amounts of luck. Inequality is inevitable, and the vast majority of people understand and accept that. But they also expect that the system should at least roughly resemble a meritocracy, and that is impossible to maintain in an unregulated capital system because of the feedback loop between capital and income. Most professional sports leagues recognize this problem: once a franchise starts winning, they make more money, which allows them to buy better players, which leads to more wins, etc, until you have a league where a handful of teams can win the championship and the others are perennial also-rans. So they cap the amount of money that can be used for salaries. They are free, of course, to make as much money as they can, they just can't plow it all back into player salaries. Capital is regulated to preserve the fairness of the system. That doesn't mean the teams are all equal, there are still franchises that perform better over time than others. But it's more clearly tied to intrinsic merit like coaching systems and player development, not just going out and buying proven superstars.
Similarly, a person of average skill can get lucky and make a large amount of money. Having that capital in turn makes it easier to make more money. Over time, and across many such situations, capital starts outrunning merit as a predictor of someone's future income, which is socially demoralizing. That's where the US is today: a pervasive feeling that the system is rigged. To a great extent, this widespread perception contributes to the current political climate in the US.
JFYI, consumer debt to GDP ratio is at the lowest level in a generation. There's really nothing at all concerning about household debt load and of all principal types of loans there is only one that is problematic: student loans. But it's just one out of many. Every other kind of debt is at historically low levels.
Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.
> A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.
> “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”
Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.
> If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
"The Economist" is falling into the rut that the remainder of British publishing has been bogged down in for a decade: increasingly liberal headlines generated via social-media topic measures to gain increased eyeballs (enough to survive).
Increasingly, British news sources are drifting leftward, primarily b/c right-wing sources are increasingly rare and, let's be honest, dull. Maybe with a little bit of say, "DEI", in the topic we can raise some eyeballs, is a typical move.
But that's a dead end. The real news is that good article headlines are hard to find and good composition is hard to write. No easy way to do that other than to find better writers.
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.
There are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless.
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.
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
Yes. When people say "The economy" is improving, they are only talking about the stock market, which primarily effects rich investors and old people's retirement.
>It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up
Because people believe it will go up, it's a prediction market for attention. The stock market seems to have decoupled from underlying "real value" of a company and is closer to cryptocoins now. Of course the flipside is that you also have the same volatility of cryptocoins.
On some level it is probably due to flows. As long as money keeps flowing in and things don't get revaluated things look great. More money in line goes up. Money can come from both investing and corporate revenue.
Once things are valuated again to lower point it might all cascade and crash.
The majority of Americans own stock and most of that is investments in the S and P 500. This is probably the closest any nation has gotten to mass public ownership of the means of production. Certainly more so than explicitly communist nations in which supposed shareholders (i.e. the citizens) have no right at all to influence company decisions.
In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.
I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?
Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?
Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
> Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks?
the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.
There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican.
Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.
>whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy
I'm not sure about that, I think it would make me favor investments in science and technology, or if college age I would likely choose engineering over say art. The "Sputnik Shock" did have a cultural effect not to mention more direct methods like the National Defense Education Act.
America won the space race? The only milestone where the US got there first was having boots on the moon. Every other milestone (first artificial satellite, first organism in space, first man in space, first woman, first spacewalk, first craft on the moon) was achieved by the soviets first. Taking the one arbitrary milestone where the US did come in first and declare it the finish line feels weird as heck.
Well, because obviously the finish line of the space race was the Moon.
Had the Soviets declared the line on the "first woman in space", now we probably would use Soviet GPS, we would use Soviet maps of planet surfaces, we would have Soviet Mars rovers, Soviet Voyager... You get the idea.
> Well, because obviously the finish line of the space race was the Moon.
So, this choice is not super obvious to me. If it was called the moon race or whatever, I'd get it. But in this case it just feels like making up rules after the fact to make sure you "win".
EDIT: I just realized you might be saying this sarcastically. I'm really bad at picking up on that sort of stuff, and apologize if that's the case.
My point is that the "space race" didn't really have a finish line, and despite early Soviet successes, the Americans ultimately took the lead. Because they sustained that momentum continuing to explore deep space, putting people on the Moon, and achieving all kinds of successes while the Soviets stalled and scrapped their programs, it's commonly understood (in the West, anyway, as Moon landing denialism is surprisingly rampant elsewhere) that the Americans won the race.
No need to apologize. In any case, I should apologize for hiding my point behind sarcasm.
It is sore loser behaviour. Combined with typical fascist totalitarian terrorist state mind washing of the population it does stick. Repeat lies enough time and people actually start believing them instead of the naked truth.
Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.
> Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789.
1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Oh it’s definitely starting to feel like 1789 vibes. The oligarchs have taken too much, too fast.
The French Revolution was an orgy in mass murder that led to the slaughter of millions in the Napoleon wars.
It really need to be romantizied much less!
It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
> 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 a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
He said inherit, not inherent
It was a typo.
That is a bit of revisionist history: conspiracy theories gripped the revolution, and a lot of them thought Marie-Antoinette was already organising an Austrian invasion of France (since she is Austrian), so rather than wait for the supposed inevitable to happen, France attacked first. And that's what made the coalitions form. Not that they liked the idea of a Republican France, but before France attacked, they were unlikely to do anything about it.
The Robespierre regime chopped off ~40,000 heads during the 10 months "Reign of Terror" 1793-1794.
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?
I could only relate to this stuff in my 20s but now I just don't care. Maybe it's cause I went from < 200k net worth to over 1M in that time. I've seen the country I was born in collapse in my lifetime. I saw my grandparents give their entire life to that country only to be left destitute. I saw my parents come to America with literally $0 and after thirty years I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
> I watched them become millionares by simply getting up and working hard.
If it was that easy, every office cleaner or bank clerk would be a millionaire.
> living in literally the best time ever to be a human being
Sure, but we're also watching the rise of a new oligarchy, and their latest innovation appears poised to put a lot of people out of work, making their lives materially worse.
It literally is. People just have no discipline or skills with money. Go on the fire subreddit. 25k saved per year is a million after twenty years with a modest very conservative amount. And if you can double that with a spouse you're looking at a million in only ten years. People who stretch that to 20-25 years end up with 3-5 million.
Median net wage in 2023 the US is $43,222 as per https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html
You're talking about median earners putting away more than half of their pay.
If we look at full time workers that may go up to about $1200 per week or (after federal income tax) about $57k per year - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
So you're still looking at 43% of every pay packet. And 50% of full-time workers will be paid less than that.
This is beyond discipline and much more than simply getting up and working hard, and more like living in self-imposed poverty, putting on hold anything resembling building a life, buying a house etc.
The fact is putting away $25k a year is the reserve of the privileged, not something achievable just by getting up and working hard for most people.
The average household income in the US is $83,730 and the median is $121,000.
It's also irrelevant. The average is weighed down by students and retirees. If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
But thank you for the comment. It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
> The average household income in the US is $83,730 and the median is $121,000.
> The average is weighed down by students and retirees.
What's your source? For a start these appear to be the wrong way round - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
And beyond that... yes? These figures are for all households, not necessarily households with people in full time work, which is a pre-requisite to looking at your claims properly. As such your household income figures don't give us a good picture to evaluate them.
The figures I quoted were for people in full time work, much more relevant to your statement, and no, they aren't weighed down by anything.
> If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
Why would I do that? Your claim was that people could become millionaires over the course of 20 years by saving $25k per annum. The median person in full time work would have a very hard time doing that as shown by the figures I gave you. And they are better off than fully half of other full time workers. Unless you have some compelling (sourced) figures about lifetime earnings that negate this, it doesn't really help us.
> It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
Wow, OK.
Well firstly I'm not American, I'm British, soon to be Australian and might eventually become Irish (by descent) as well. No US in the picture though. Never had a state handout in my life, and my net worth is already well over your target threshold.
What I have (that you seem to be missing) is empathy for people who don't have it so good and a basic understanding of figures.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
> I'm not American
Yea I had a feeling. I'd caution you not to buy into the Internet doom and gloom. Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine. Because the people that tend to live on less also live in the parts of the country where you can still buy a house for 100k.
Yes, so that link is the same one I gave you, and confirms you have your average and your median the wrong way around.
> Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine
Soooo .... walking back all those claims about everyday folks being able to become millionaires just by showing up to work?
Didn't know walking back on basic math was a thing but here we are.
Please stop wasting eveyones time if you're gonna ignore a primary source after you asked for it.
The primary source which
You think I’m ignoring that primary source? That would be quite a feat given I linked it first.
Please do explain further, preferably with reference to the comments above that show the figures you quoted aren’t a good match to illuminating the claims you made.
How does that source support the notion that median-and-lower earning people can realistically save $25k per annum, per person, or trivially become millionaires with a bit of discipline?
> 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.
Disclaimer: Past performance is not indicative of future results
The number I am finding for the median household expenses for America is $67,000 annually. That's just essentials, housing, food, transportation, insurance, healthcare
So if your median household makes 84k, and your median household spends 67k on necessities, where is the money coming from for saving 5%? The difference is only 17k
It doesn't take much to eat up 17k. A car repair, house repair, or hospital stay (in America at least) will easily reduce that to zero or negatives
So I dunno man. It doesn't seem that simple.
Edit: and keep in mind that median does mean that a pretty large proportion of people make less than that number too. Sometimes significantly less
Presumably the 67k spend contains the car repair, house repair, hospital stay part you mentioned. Everything you're saying is accounted for. Your argument is basically anti social security. I'm saying make your own social security fund and you keep going "and what about" as if that's an argument. These externalities are literally what the fund is for. And frankly you should have an HSA for medical expenses because it lets you spend pre-tax money on that stuff.
When you do non Roth it's pre-tax cash so it's much easier to run up your net worth because it's based on money that you haven't paid taxes on yet.
> Presumably the 67k spend contains the car repair, house repair, hospital stay part you mentioned. Everything you're saying is accounted for
It explicitly is not. The number I am quoting is for essentials, it does not factor in emergencies
> I'm saying make your own social security fund
I'm saying many people can't realistically afford to, so expecting it is absolutely ridiculous
$5583 a month is essentials? This is more than what I spend on my mortgage..... and all my bills.... and all my food.... and I live in SoCal.
This conversation is dumb. Put money into an IRA. You lower your taxable income. It's not that hard. You grow your net worth on your untaxed monies and then later when shit hits the fan you can extract it at a lower tax bracket. And you get to gain market gains on cash that would otherwise be spent on taxes. It's how people who are good with money make an extra 10-15k per year while you're being all like "woe is me. i can't afford anything".
This is how you can cover that $10-15k you mention when it does happen. You're welcome.
> $5583 a month is essentials? This is more than what I spend on my mortgage..... and all my bills.... and all my food.... and I live in SoCal
Is there anything that other households might spend money on that you don't?
Say for instance childcare, or having a second vehicle for a spouse, groceries for a family with children
Your post is pretty light on details about your actual household situation
Personally I don't think $5583 for a family of four (for instance) sounds that outrageous
What I'm supposed to write a book to account for every random bullshit scenario to assuage your adhd overthinking?
This shit is exhausting. If you don't want good financial advice move on. I'm not replying to you anymore.
I really don't know what gave you the impression I needed your financial advice in the first place
Do you think just because I'm concerned about people who are less well off that I must be one? Do you think the only reason I could or should care about poor people is if I were poor myself?
If so, then I truly hope you become a better person in the future
My financial situation is fine though, thanks for the concern. My financial advisor has me all taken care of
Or take some data centers offline.
LOL, what are you going to do? Sit at the end of Northrop field and fly a swarm of drones into the engines of a G6 traveling down the runway at over 100MPH? No way a handful of drones are going to get sucked into a jet engine at that speed. Or do you mean engage a PJ in a dogfight at 40000 feet? I suspect if drones could down a jet, we would have heard about it coming out of Ukraine by now.
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.
A quick google shows news articles and even videos of Ukrainian drones destroying Russian planes.
The original comment was made in relation to guillotines, popping unoccupied jets on the ground isn't what the commenter I was replying to was referring to. Taking down an occupied jet without using a sidewinder missile is a different capability.
New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
You know New Zealand has borders right? And guillotines (or the makings thereof).
Hey, don't leave out the New Zealand Navy having an entire two frigates and an oiler.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xUYbI64QHI
Your theory is that the billionaires will escape popular uprising by forcing their way into a sovereign nation, and that that nation won't rise up against them? Why wouldn't we?
> Your theory is that ..
That'd be _your_ strawman that _you_ typed.
In the factual world, how many non NZ born billionaires already have residences in New Zealand?
What exactly are you arguing?
We just need to make enough crowdsourced guillotines as if to make global escape impossible.
My workingclass neighborhood is already getting pretty hungry.
It's kind of true:
> ... federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
> This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs.
https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
To be fair though in the times of French Revolution the surveillance capability was really basic compared to today, the tech capability to organize protests was lower too. Which one prevails? We know that in PRC and maybe Russia it's surveillance, but what about US?
It's laundered through data brokers and 3rd parties, but with ICE subpoenaing reddit et Al for people that shit post about ICE online, do you really think we're that far off? Especially if the person shit posting is in the US on a visa?
I know what you mean, just saying relative to French revolution, they not only had no such surveillance tech but also no such tech for organizing protests and stuff. Which one tops which in US?
My attorney's advice to me was:
>>"PL, don't build a guillotine"
PL> "I'm going to build a guillotine; be my lawyer and give me advice as if it's going to be built."
>>"... don't make it entirely functional."
PL> "It's going to be built functional."
>>"... hmm ... use a bicycle cable lock to add a safety to it – lock&key. But remember that my original advice was not to build it in the first place."
----
Exhibit Z
Inequality and other such issues are universal, the French Revolution was not. What was unique about the French Revolution is not even that the government bankrupted themselves fighting wars and then tried to refill their coffers by sharply increasing taxes in a fashion that disproportionately affected the lower classes, but that this was all paired alongside widespread crop failures that sent the cost of food skyrocketing driven widespread food scarcity.
The average person couldn't care less, at least in terms of action, how much money somebody else has. If people have food in their belly and a roof over their heads, you're only going to draw out radicals. And in modern sharply divided societies those radicals will be framed (probably accurately) as being disproportionately made up of one side, and the other side will oppose them all their might and widespread public support behind such opposition.
So there will never be a popular revolution in a place like the US in its current divided state. The most probable scenario by an overwhelmingly wide margin is 'nothing', but the only other possibility would be a civil war. And I do think that's possible, but the chances are extremely remote. It would require something very extreme like one side trying to ban the other side from political office. We've probably been closer than some might expect, but we're now probably much further, rather than closer, to those times and outcomes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_Revolution...
That’s incorrect, in fact, fairness and equality is one of the few universal social contracts that are valued in every culture on earth (though lived/implemented differently).
And I would argue that’s one of the key differences that separates humans from animals. Humans have an intrinsic desire for things to be fair.
Unfortunately, what we have and what we want are not the same thing even if near universally true. E.g. - nobody happens to be a huge fan of murder.
Oh, the good old reflex that is activated in panic situations but never realised. Then the revolution was from capitalists against kings. Now the former are already in power with their servants (CEOs) and there is no alternative. So no change, no revolution.
https://archive.is/q1GxG
Isn't there a better alternative to this archive site?
It does the job for me, but please do tell me if you find a better alternative.
What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
Hrrm :-(
didnt the archive owner only start doing this after Patokallio revealed his identity for no good reason. Given the legal liability involved in maintaining that service, there is a threat to what Patokallio is doing so it doesn't seem entirely unsympathetic to do something in retaliation..
Seems like a mistake to rely on an archiving site that runs malware and changes the text of archived pages.
However, there’s also not really anything better out there. The owner being some wily/sketchy Russian is even an advantage in some respects, since they can’t be pressured by copyright law or foreign politics.
Well, for one, it wants me to scan a QR code as a captcha.
I've never once had that happen. It's always straight to the unrolled article.
See: <https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi...>
Or my earlier reply to this subthread.
I chose the audio option to get around this.
Me too, and ain't no way I'm doing that. That's blocklist behavior.
That is an issue you can pin on Google:
<https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-goog...> (8 May 2026).
HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119>
Though yes, Archive.is have continued using reCaptcha despite this recent change.
Why does everyone on HN complain and post about anything and everything except the content of the link.
Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
It would require participation by all strata of society. So no.
Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
Costco's code of ethics makes this really simple, it is too bad it, or a variation thereof, isn't more commonly observed.
In order of overriding priority
1. Obey the Law 2. Support our members 3. Support our employees 4. Support our suppliers 5. If we do the above, we'll reward shareholders
The Southwest thing is confirmed: https://archive.ph/20250311162848/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/...
“Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”
Elliot showed up because southwests entire computer system imploded over the holidays which cost them massive amounts of money and reputation. Changes were absolutely needed at southwest.
The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.
There's no requirement that this be a 100% ownership arrangement, but there are a surprising number of companies in the US where that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...
Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.
Fnord!
The current proposal on the table is to have the rich pay a lot more taxes. They scoff at the idea, so probably we will end up doing something less graceful.
With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom.
The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.
With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
These rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.
Have you not noticed they are on the offense? It's the poor who need to study Mao.
Is it true that Thiel moved to Argentina
Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.
You just named symptoms not cause.
1. People vote for old idiots .
2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that .
3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know
> 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
Yea that's why the only three orbital grade reusable boosters are American. Lmao.
But our bridges and infrastructure are crumbling
Those are issues of priority and revenue generation, not capability.
Soon we won't have the capabilities. See the nuclear industry and how we don't have the people and training to do the work anymore.
There are 342 million people here. We'll be fine.
That’s not for lack of engineering talent! We just don’t like paying for boring things like… bridges that haven’t collapsed yet. “Call us when it does crumble. We’ve got a border wall to build or gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners to pay for.”
reference needed
https://www.yahoo.com/news/taxpayers-fund-trans-surgery-inma...
Hope this helps.
Sure, untreated mental illness is a tragedy, and humanity sucks balls at biology, so hard it's as if we wished to be made of silicon. How does this make for a trend or justify the idea that the WEIRD's least-harm decisions explain broader resources allocation in real monetary terms. We're talking about the price of how much concrete pouring in the sad story you linked? (WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic, indeed a dying breed)
What a cheap shot. “gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners” - cos there are soooo many of those happening we can’t fix a single bridge.
How about another explanation. Your government is totally opposed to helping citizens for “free” (let’s ignore that most government revenue comes from good ol’ taxpayers) when the alternative is to farm out the provision of expensive services to lobbying corporates.
They’re more than happy to punish people however. For free _and_ for corporate profit.
Both parties spend money on ridiculous things that are obviously wastes of money. Are any lies detected?
that looks like reinvesting profits from innovation in hopes of more innovation
> 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
All these people working in NASA must have had terrible childhood.
We can selectively breed astronauts by beating them from early childhood.
People don’t realize how stupid this quote is.
The Russians must be having a grand old time according to this theory.
yeah all those Good Times created by Hard Men like Mussolini and Stalin
or does this quote refer to Hard Men as in the men who rioted and fought and died for 8 hour work days and basic social services?
The latter
Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is:
1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.
Hey, I like easy money.
Easy money and cheap (foreign) labor are one and the same. Political parties that are not accountable for this are the upstream problem. In other words, it’s a failure of what we think of as our “democracy.” The will of the people doesn’t mean much when you can just swap out “the people” to get what you will.
The new mortgage backed securities are the instruments trading the debt used to build AI data centers (the AAA rated debt that is anything but). The music will stop when there’s a blip in liquidity. Everyone will rush for a chair and there won’t be enough for everyone.
I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it.
Or maybe nothing is going on. What do I know?
> wealth inequality
Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?
Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
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, heriot, merchet.
Serfs were legally bound to the land.
The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated.
If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.
>"If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance)"
Yeah, right. Soviet level propaganda
If you can explain the mechanic, I’m all ears and open to change my point of view.
> Soviet level propaganda
I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.
> I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.
Actually, they're pretty much the same.
they “extract” wealth on the back of shared investments like infrastructure and now our data/IP with AI
it’s not the same as your examples but i’m not sure that it needs to be exactly the same
Yes, this is easy to explain.
It creates a country nobody is willing to fight for. Beyond certain levels of inequality, you get systemic dysfunction.
Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.
> Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.
Concur that poverty should be eradicated and that overt time the minimum bar for what qualifies what each human deserves/needs rises. However, that's orthogonal to wealth inequality.
It is not impossible to have huge wealth spectrum and no poverty. Conversely, it is not uncommon throughout the ages for societies to have little wealth inequality but extreme poverty.
>Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?
There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's expectation of what a fair distribution would be, accounting for different levels of ability and luck. Aside from this cognitive dissonance, there are also pragmatic limits on how big a disparity can be while still having a functional democracy. It's clear that truly enormous disparities in wealth, made even worse by a lack of regulation in political donation, lead to major distortions in the principle of "one person, one vote" which is a cornerstone of democracy.
>Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
No, because people have different levels of ability and experience different amounts of luck. Inequality is inevitable, and the vast majority of people understand and accept that. But they also expect that the system should at least roughly resemble a meritocracy, and that is impossible to maintain in an unregulated capital system because of the feedback loop between capital and income. Most professional sports leagues recognize this problem: once a franchise starts winning, they make more money, which allows them to buy better players, which leads to more wins, etc, until you have a league where a handful of teams can win the championship and the others are perennial also-rans. So they cap the amount of money that can be used for salaries. They are free, of course, to make as much money as they can, they just can't plow it all back into player salaries. Capital is regulated to preserve the fairness of the system. That doesn't mean the teams are all equal, there are still franchises that perform better over time than others. But it's more clearly tied to intrinsic merit like coaching systems and player development, not just going out and buying proven superstars.
Similarly, a person of average skill can get lucky and make a large amount of money. Having that capital in turn makes it easier to make more money. Over time, and across many such situations, capital starts outrunning merit as a predictor of someone's future income, which is socially demoralizing. That's where the US is today: a pervasive feeling that the system is rigged. To a great extent, this widespread perception contributes to the current political climate in the US.
JFYI, consumer debt to GDP ratio is at the lowest level in a generation. There's really nothing at all concerning about household debt load and of all principal types of loans there is only one that is problematic: student loans. But it's just one out of many. Every other kind of debt is at historically low levels.
Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.
> A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.
> “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”
Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.
> If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
> Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.
Wish this was true, but clearly not. Unless you define existential as “inconvenience”
"The Economist" is falling into the rut that the remainder of British publishing has been bogged down in for a decade: increasingly liberal headlines generated via social-media topic measures to gain increased eyeballs (enough to survive).
Increasingly, British news sources are drifting leftward, primarily b/c right-wing sources are increasingly rare and, let's be honest, dull. Maybe with a little bit of say, "DEI", in the topic we can raise some eyeballs, is a typical move.
But that's a dead end. The real news is that good article headlines are hard to find and good composition is hard to write. No easy way to do that other than to find better writers.
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 possible there. America is friggin awesome.
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.
There are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless.
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.
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
We've (tech workers) been in the labor aristocracy for the last 15 years ignoring the plights of the rest of labor. We kind of have it coming.
K-shaped economy, Asset bubble, and AI spending.
The retail / average consumer in America is seeing a very different world than the rich and ultra rich.
Yes. When people say "The economy" is improving, they are only talking about the stock market, which primarily effects rich investors and old people's retirement.
>It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up
Because people believe it will go up, it's a prediction market for attention. The stock market seems to have decoupled from underlying "real value" of a company and is closer to cryptocoins now. Of course the flipside is that you also have the same volatility of cryptocoins.
Just wait until TPTB crash the dollar on purpose to try to make their crypto stronger.
On some level it is probably due to flows. As long as money keeps flowing in and things don't get revaluated things look great. More money in line goes up. Money can come from both investing and corporate revenue.
Once things are valuated again to lower point it might all cascade and crash.
It's a bubble. When the music stops, everyone will be crying.
We came back from the gilded age. So there’s hope right?
Pretty much, yea
Sounds like we need a modern day Teddy Roosevelt?
Gilded age is one of the GOATed times in America though.
I'd rather not go through a Great Depression, thank you very much. Maybe everyone should re-read The Grapes of Wrath.
The Great Depression was a bit of a monetary screw up which we've probably figured out how not to do again.
It's a rather negative take on things. Take Musk for instance:
>Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra
He's actually been going on about "A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al...
Also booming stock markets, solar output, AI development and the like could be ok maybe?
America is a communist nation since the majority of the populace holds the majority of the productive capacity in joint ownership
That claim needs explanation. My understanding is that substantially less than 20% hold the controlling ownership of U.S. productive capacity.
The majority of Americans own stock and most of that is investments in the S and P 500. This is probably the closest any nation has gotten to mass public ownership of the means of production. Certainly more so than explicitly communist nations in which supposed shareholders (i.e. the citizens) have no right at all to influence company decisions.
In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.
Seems more like an aristocracy where the productive capacity is owned by the billionaire class
I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?
Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?
Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
> Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks?
the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.
There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican.
Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.
>whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy
I'm not sure about that, I think it would make me favor investments in science and technology, or if college age I would likely choose engineering over say art. The "Sputnik Shock" did have a cultural effect not to mention more direct methods like the National Defense Education Act.
America won the space race? The only milestone where the US got there first was having boots on the moon. Every other milestone (first artificial satellite, first organism in space, first man in space, first woman, first spacewalk, first craft on the moon) was achieved by the soviets first. Taking the one arbitrary milestone where the US did come in first and declare it the finish line feels weird as heck.
Well, because obviously the finish line of the space race was the Moon.
Had the Soviets declared the line on the "first woman in space", now we probably would use Soviet GPS, we would use Soviet maps of planet surfaces, we would have Soviet Mars rovers, Soviet Voyager... You get the idea.
> Well, because obviously the finish line of the space race was the Moon.
So, this choice is not super obvious to me. If it was called the moon race or whatever, I'd get it. But in this case it just feels like making up rules after the fact to make sure you "win".
EDIT: I just realized you might be saying this sarcastically. I'm really bad at picking up on that sort of stuff, and apologize if that's the case.
it got silly when you wrote "first woman"
Why?
My point is that the "space race" didn't really have a finish line, and despite early Soviet successes, the Americans ultimately took the lead. Because they sustained that momentum continuing to explore deep space, putting people on the Moon, and achieving all kinds of successes while the Soviets stalled and scrapped their programs, it's commonly understood (in the West, anyway, as Moon landing denialism is surprisingly rampant elsewhere) that the Americans won the race.
No need to apologize. In any case, I should apologize for hiding my point behind sarcasm.
/s
It is sore loser behaviour. Combined with typical fascist totalitarian terrorist state mind washing of the population it does stick. Repeat lies enough time and people actually start believing them instead of the naked truth.
Schumpeter is one of their columns; this is an editorial piece, not one of their news articles.
The regular stuff is still well written, IMO.
paywall
No reason to black pill. Tons of opportunities - be creative.
"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.
Yeah, this article does not seem evidence backed to me. There is a ton of optimism now.
Isnt Economist , like, a super prestigious publication? Why would they let something flimsy seep thru?
I know someone who has called it “The Ecommunist” for 20 years, so not everybody has the opinion that is is prestigious, but some see it as elitist.
Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
This was and is my understanding
Zerohedge is probably more reliable at this point
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.
You can be in a fatalistic mood and buy.
No, you cannot say the mood is fatalistic when purchase interest in stocks is at an all time high
Is the concept of local maximum tripping you up?