Capitalism & all its perks
So, we were communists in 1950?
Or, is what we're talking about creeping
socialism for the rich? Remember
too big rich to fail? How are bailouts capitalism? What we saw was insiders creating a bubble, profiting from it due to insider knowledge, and making bad investments because they knew they'd be bailed out.
What we're seeing is a return to the robber baron years. The USA used to have strikes because children complained that they should have a 55 hour workweek, no longer.
On July 7, 1903,
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones began the
March of the Mill Children from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week.
During this march, Jones delivered her famed “The Wail of the Children” speech.
Roosevelt refused to see them.
Mary Harris Jones said:
I asked the newspaper men why they didn’t publish the facts about child labor in Pennsylvania. They said they couldn’t because the mill owners had stock in the papers. “Well, I’ve got stock in these little children,” said I, “and I’ll arrange a little publicity.”
further deregulation (which even non-corrupt politicians seem to eat up).
What non-corrupt politicians? As soon as a person is elected to a major higher office that person is automatically going to fail to represent all of his/her constituents. It's not possible to do so. It may sound like I'm splitting hairs here but there is an unresolvable conflict between society and the individual that exists in politician vs. constituent. Someone who tries to represent everyone simultaneously could be seen as having no principles, no inherent beliefs. What then, is the point of having such a person around — to read polls? So, to get elected, politicians lie, including "white lies" — nebulous promises and rhetoric designed to sound like it means representing the will of all of the constituents. Honesty doesn't sell in politics, especially not as one rises in the hierarchy. If Mr. Smith had gone to Washington he would have felt fortunate to have found a job as a clerk. Cliques are how politics works, too. Monied cliques and their pressure front groups (which includes, among other things, the big press and organized religion).
The future is looking ever brighter. In the short term there'll be a worse financial crash than ten years ago, and in the long term our living areas will flood, our food supply will shrink dramatically due to insect death, erosion/soil degradation and climate change, and all the while people keep voting for politicians in the pocket of the looter class who seem to think they'll ride it all out on their megayachts.
Voting is more of a theatrical exercise than not. The people one votes for are those chosen by the rich, plus the voting systems are absurdly on the network and have no serious security — making it really easy to substitute whatever outcome those in power desire. Even "populists" who "fight for the average family" like Elizabeth Warren come from places like Harvard (as opposed to a certain conman who was a multimillionaire by the age of two). The Ivy League perpetuates the status quo. Chomsky said it's the handmaiden of power. And that's best-case for average people (someone who is, at least, educated and, at least, gives lip service to working people without it being completely fraudulent) and thus labeled "radical far left" commie socialism — "unelectable". When the populace is comprised of so many stupid people you get a stupid system. And, of course, knowledge is power so it's in the interest of the ruling class to keep knowledge under their control.
Technology is going to entrench and expand stratification (the concentration of wealth in few hands), as AI will make it increasingly easy to control the narrative, in terms of Internet information veracity (and general informational veracity, as always). It will be trivial for AI to pump out billions of webpages with false information, forcing ordinary people to rely more and more on a small select group of megacorps and their governments to give them the promise of factual information. Video and images will be able to be doctored more easily and, again, we will have to rely on certain powerful entities for "proof" about what is and isn't real. AI is going to outpace the ability of humans to keep up, just as corporations, which the Supreme Court corruptly said are people, have so many advantages over people. Give the corporations AI and their power over individuals grows exponentially.
As far as food supply goes, it will take a while for "first world" countries to feel the pinch, since something like 25% of all food is thrown away, uneaten, globally. Maybe it's 50%. Whatever the number is, it's really high. Food quality, though, will decline, with things like arsenic and heavy metals contaminating things due to contaminated soil from farming and industry. Prices will rise as the food supply deals with things like global warming and people become more aware of things like intentional arsenic pollution in poultry (to kill parasites from overcrowded filthy conditions) and thus pay the premium for organic. Food waste isn't just a "bad Americans" issue. I've seen so many Chinese college students (some driving Mazeratis) leave 1/3 of their dinners uneaten, sometimes even 1/2, at not-inexpensive Chinese restaurants, that I doubt it's all anecdotal. But, I wouldn't doubt it for a minute that the US leads in per-capita food waste.
As for the NAND thing, Anandtech ran an article recently that said all of the major NAND players (Samsung excepted) have cut production. (As for Samsung, I think whether or not it planned to cut or has cut was unclear.) It seems awfully convenient (i.e. collusion) for them to have cut production simultaneously. However, how does one prove the difference between smart business and price fixing? Why does it matter, actually, if the outcome is identical? This seems to be an example of intent having little relevance in criminal justice.
