I loved how powerful the last line is and I hope it helps drive home the message for more people. I'm in my early 20's right now and I find not nearly enough of my peers show major concern for the...
If they do, future historians of American collapse will find something truly exceptional: capitalism without competence and feudalism without nobility.
I loved how powerful the last line is and I hope it helps drive home the message for more people. I'm in my early 20's right now and I find not nearly enough of my peers show major concern for the decay of our socioeconomic landscape
To be fair, most people don't really get all that interested into economics and politics until they're in their 30s and beyond. You can see a reflection of that in voter turn out by age bracket....
I find not nearly enough of my peers show major concern for the decay of our socioeconomic landscape
To be fair, most people don't really get all that interested into economics and politics until they're in their 30s and beyond. You can see a reflection of that in voter turn out by age bracket. It's also really important to remember that a great many Americans are so busy working that they do not have ample spare mental "bandwidth" to think/worry about it. When I worked rotating twelves in manufacturing, I barely had enough bandwidth to decide between wheat or white bread, much less the broader situation in the economy. This is not a blanket excuse, but it's worth remembering just how hard most if us have to hustle just have a roof over our heads.
Which segues back to just how f'd up our economy is. It absolutely should not take multiple jobs just to barely hang above homelessness. There should not be homeless camps on every corner in the shadows of gleaming skyscrapers.
The current situation is absolutely not sustainable. I can't predict what will happen, though, as our past examples came about before our silicon age:
1) We can't rely on people rising up. When we did that 100 years ago for the right to unionize, the gov't and businesses were happy to kill and maim. Not to mention that many of us have precarious employment and missing just 1 shift might mean termination or missing rent. Those folks aren't going to go protest, even if they wanted to. 2) We can't rely on an FDR/LBJ style society-first legislative agenda. One party is busy on the defense and isn't as progressive as we need; the other party is literally compromised and trying to undermine the system for their billionaire masters. 3) We can't rely our numbers and general strikes for much longer. With the ever-increasing pace of automation, the capitalists won't need us for much longer. AI is already getting better at cancer detection than experienced radiologists, cashiers are replaced by the self-scan, even fast food workers are at risk from automated ordering kiosks.
I have no idea where this road will take us, except that it'll get a lot worse for the 99% before it gets better.
Pretty good write up. This guy really seems to have his finger on the pulse. The bit about tech pay was not strong though. Bring up the median income of IT workers is misleading. Firstly, follow...
Pretty good write up. This guy really seems to have his finger on the pulse.
The bit about tech pay was not strong though. Bring up the median income of IT workers is misleading. Firstly, follow the reference and you see the $81,000 number refers only to salary! So it completely ignores 30-70% of the compensation for top software engineers.
Secondly I think it has to be acknowledged that it is possible in tech to make $500k a year before you’re 30 with only an undergraduate degree. That’s fucking crazy money.
The USA is “fertile ground” for tech professionals right now, but if you include all the people in “IT professional” category that aren’t actually engineers then yeah it looks underwhelming.
I loved how powerful the last line is and I hope it helps drive home the message for more people. I'm in my early 20's right now and I find not nearly enough of my peers show major concern for the decay of our socioeconomic landscape
To be fair, most people don't really get all that interested into economics and politics until they're in their 30s and beyond. You can see a reflection of that in voter turn out by age bracket. It's also really important to remember that a great many Americans are so busy working that they do not have ample spare mental "bandwidth" to think/worry about it. When I worked rotating twelves in manufacturing, I barely had enough bandwidth to decide between wheat or white bread, much less the broader situation in the economy. This is not a blanket excuse, but it's worth remembering just how hard most if us have to hustle just have a roof over our heads.
Which segues back to just how f'd up our economy is. It absolutely should not take multiple jobs just to barely hang above homelessness. There should not be homeless camps on every corner in the shadows of gleaming skyscrapers.
The current situation is absolutely not sustainable. I can't predict what will happen, though, as our past examples came about before our silicon age:
1) We can't rely on people rising up. When we did that 100 years ago for the right to unionize, the gov't and businesses were happy to kill and maim. Not to mention that many of us have precarious employment and missing just 1 shift might mean termination or missing rent. Those folks aren't going to go protest, even if they wanted to.
2) We can't rely on an FDR/LBJ style society-first legislative agenda. One party is busy on the defense and isn't as progressive as we need; the other party is literally compromised and trying to undermine the system for their billionaire masters.
3) We can't rely our numbers and general strikes for much longer. With the ever-increasing pace of automation, the capitalists won't need us for much longer. AI is already getting better at cancer detection than experienced radiologists, cashiers are replaced by the self-scan, even fast food workers are at risk from automated ordering kiosks.
I have no idea where this road will take us, except that it'll get a lot worse for the 99% before it gets better.
Pretty good write up. This guy really seems to have his finger on the pulse.
The bit about tech pay was not strong though. Bring up the median income of IT workers is misleading. Firstly, follow the reference and you see the $81,000 number refers only to salary! So it completely ignores 30-70% of the compensation for top software engineers.
Secondly I think it has to be acknowledged that it is possible in tech to make $500k a year before you’re 30 with only an undergraduate degree. That’s fucking crazy money.
The USA is “fertile ground” for tech professionals right now, but if you include all the people in “IT professional” category that aren’t actually engineers then yeah it looks underwhelming.