Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country

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This could be my tilt but, considering how I've had to struggle to get by - even graduating college highest honors, even having an IQ in the 120's range, it's not that I haven't tried - it's more like I've found out how active the 'devil take the hindmost' aspect of things is. We don't really care about cultivating talent in a lot of places, likely more often we see it as a threat to our own survival if we're in that person's path to rise and so we play knowledge-keepaway games in the workplace, especially if we have our own niche software for accounting or the like that the person's college education can't prepare them to know inside out.

I've really had to take a much more Hobbesian view of life, again (had this in my early 20's when I had something like a full social relapse of high school at a place I worked), and I have to circle back to the sense that humanity lives with an underlying primal hatred that it seems like a large part of the animal kingdom shares, ie. kill anything that looks like me, wants the same food, might want the same job or same kind of partner, and that primal hatred just gets masked in this non-stop game of never-serious joking, evasion, and refusal to deal with problems (the nod-nod wink-wink in that seems to be that a lot of the problems are benefiting certain people and if they are they need to stay).

This is where I do think our current intellectual elite got so infatuated with their credentials, started rubber-stamping themselves in the Ivy League schools, and in that sort of generic elite-making machine actual talent and natural ability got lost along the way and replaced by entitlement. This is one of those areas where I do believe that current social media, for all of it's known problems, also gives the freakish natural talents, ie. the Goethe's of our generation, the ability to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and actually be heard. I really hope something does come of that, ie. superior ideas on economics and incentives or tweaks/tuning to culture should have enough impetus that, if launched right, they'll infect our way of doing things for practical reasons and anyone whose benefiting from shortfalls in the way of these things would have a difficult time stopping a change if it's coming up from the bottom.

I think one thing is urgent - unless we want the next decade to be a decade of pogroms in the west we absolutely have to untether economic success and 'right to live'. That sort of ugly stick might have worked when there were gainful jobs available for everyone (ie. jobs that they could make ends meet on) but that's rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I get a bit horrified to when my parents or close family members, if I mention UBI go 'gasp!! But that's... socialism!'. I ask em what their answer is to the notion that if we hit high enough unemployment numbers, ie. above 20% somewhere or beyond, that we'll have the worst kind of political revolution - they won't follow that line of thought and instead just say 'work hard and outrun em!'. What grieves the heck out of me is they're really decent people otherwise but it's like the Stockholm syndrome on this one goes all the way to their core and back out. This whole thing is still running on a lot of self-delusion for a lot of people and if anything it's not getting knocked out of enough people fast enough.

Hopefully, Congress can push through budget cuts to bring it down.

First post here in four months (had an issue that gave me a meltdown here, so I put the site aside for a while). As usual, I agree with what you're saying (in it's entirety on this post, even your personal history sounded like mine). What a lot of people don't understand is that within 50 years there will be no such thing as 'human labor'. We're starting to see robotics really hammer the human workforce right now, but we're just at the very, very start. People don't understand that virtually no one is immune, even surgeons will eventually be replaced. You and I know because we're programmers, but the layman has no idea what's really coming down the pipeline (most have heard it they just don't believe it or want to believe it) and they're treating it as if our current economic system can handle the changes: it cannot. Once human labor has no value because a machine can do the job better and cheaper we'll need some other system to divide our resources among the population.

I have no idea how we're going to navigate that problem, it's one humanity has never faced. I see two nightmare scenarios unfolding though and they do scare the hell out of me: the first is the sci-fi corporate/ghetto dystopia where the people that are consolidating power now control the machines and force all the poor (previously middle class) into ghettos where they get tossed scraps of resources, and the only reason they're allowed to live is because the wealthy enjoy lobbing bricks on those less fortunate than themselves. I doubt this scenario will unfold, but you never know, there are some real sick people out there and they tend to congregate at the top. The second scenario that concerns me won't concern most people, but it should concern autistics: we keep our economic system unchanged and invent jobs that are machine unfriendly-- i.e. social jobs that are all about human interaction, such as sales, legal, etc.

This issue is something we need to be talking about right now, not in 10 years when all the major changes drop like a ton of bricks. As I said, we're already seeing problems and we're just at the very, very start, and as time goes on these changes will come quicker and quicker (human achievement has been on a logarithmic curve since civilization).

The assumption is as with previous technological shifts, while some people got screwed the economy handled it and most moved forward, it is always going to work out that way.

Yes, homelessness is on the rise.

"There was an increase of 15% from 2016 to 2017, while since 2010 rough sleeping estimates show an increase of 169%."
(data from homeless link)

This could be my tilt but, considering how I've had to struggle to get by - even graduating college highest honors, even having an IQ in the 120's range, it's not that I haven't tried - it's more like I've found out how active the 'devil take the hindmost' aspect of things is. We don't really care about cultivating talent in a lot of places, likely more often we see it as a threat to our own survival if we're in that person's path to rise and so we play knowledge-keepaway games in the workplace, especially if we have our own niche software for accounting or the like that the person's college education can't prepare them to know inside out.

I've really had to take a much more Hobbesian view of life, again (had this in my early 20's when I had something like a full social relapse of high school at a place I worked), and I have to circle back to the sense that humanity lives with an underlying primal hatred that it seems like a large part of the animal kingdom shares, ie. kill anything that looks like me, wants the same food, might want the same job or same kind of partner, and that primal hatred just gets masked in this non-stop game of never-serious joking, evasion, and refusal to deal with problems (the nod-nod wink-wink in that seems to be that a lot of the problems are benefiting certain people and if they are they need to stay).

This is where I do think our current intellectual elite got so infatuated with their credentials, started rubber-stamping themselves in the Ivy League schools, and in that sort of generic elite-making machine actual talent and natural ability got lost along the way and replaced by entitlement. This is one of those areas where I do believe that current social media, for all of it's known problems, also gives the freakish natural talents, ie. the Goethe's of our generation, the ability to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and actually be heard. I really hope something does come of that, ie. superior ideas on economics and incentives or tweaks/tuning to culture should have enough impetus that, if launched right, they'll infect our way of doing things for practical reasons and anyone whose benefiting from shortfalls in the way of these things would have a difficult time stopping a change if it's coming up from the bottom.

I think one thing is urgent - unless we want the next decade to be a decade of pogroms in the west we absolutely have to untether economic success and 'right to live'. That sort of ugly stick might have worked when there were gainful jobs available for everyone (ie. jobs that they could make ends meet on) but that's rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I get a bit horrified to when my parents or close family members, if I mention UBI go 'gasp!! But that's... socialism!'. I ask em what their answer is to the notion that if we hit high enough unemployment numbers, ie. above 20% somewhere or beyond, that we'll have the worst kind of political revolution - they won't follow that line of thought and instead just say 'work hard and outrun em!'. What grieves the heck out of me is they're really decent people otherwise but it's like the Stockholm syndrome on this one goes all the way to their core and back out. This whole thing is still running on a lot of self-delusion for a lot of people and if anything it's not getting knocked out of enough people fast enough.

They see us as rats , so.. when the biggest Rat just couldn't leave this world alone..

and the MAGAs are just fine with that.