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Hello. Attack! > Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.

Hello. Attack! > Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased. That sounds great except that it is not. Zero growth or slight increases are not good enough. Not when real inflation including education, health and property (i.e. things people must do) is growing faster than real incomes. Our grandparents wage grew in real terms by 10x. Is that going to happen for their grandchildren? If not, why not? Outside of the SV, I see diminished expectations everywhere. > Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming apart. This is much more plausible than you appear to think. Tens of millions of workers are just dropping out of the workforce because they don't see the point in competing anymore and welfare + modest income produces a 'good enough state'. This isn't true of those making > 75k per year but below that it's endemic. It's not just about money, it's about purpose. You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens. On the point that 'revolutions' tend to be a worse cure than the disease I tend to agree but it depends on how long the stagnation goes on for.

blahi 10y ago
>You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens. So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile. Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is justice. Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who did.
- internaut 10y ago
  > So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? I don't know the answer to that but I was hoping that The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (a kind of AI from a book called The Diamond Age that educated in such a way to enable social mobility) would solve the problem by giving some structure, showcase available possibilities and opportunities in a way specific to a person's current context and where they wanted to go etc. > You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. Yes I know that very well. Murdering your enemies in a fit of righteous rage coupled with self preservation is the most fun a human can have. People will deny this of course, but the evidence is everywhere. It's in our entertainment and our history. I have two concerns. One is that simply killing people rarely provides long term solutions to systemic inefficiencies or bottlenecks. I think this is the true reason why violence has gradually declined over the centuries. This is true whether it's proles killing elites or elites killing proles. My second concern is that just as Rome developed Bread and Circuses to distract the citizenry from system reform, we could neuter our population's drive to progress. All the time and energy spent fighting internal battles could make our system vulnerable to outside threats. This won't be politically correct but I don't give a shit. To a first approximation our young men are the source of all innovation and invention in society, as well as being the most volatile element within it. Currently they are: - Busy masturbating and playing vidya. [60%] [proles] - Working frenetically to compete. [30%] [middle] - Wasting their time with intellectual wankery [10%] [elite] This doesn't bode well for encountering future trouble. I would encourage a period of military training like the Israelis to encourage group solidarity for that reason. Our biggest strength as a species is our creativity, imagination. The ability to change a niche. To enlarge it, to scale back, to change to a completely different niche. It's what makes us truly dangerous and inventive. Right now we're burning a lot of CPU cycles in the three categories I mentioned but we're not actually getting to any destination that is better. This is stagnation. Our economy is on a treadmill going nowhere and we're gradually getting older. If we don't manage to snap out of this funk and open up new niches we'll crash and burn in the end.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? No, you're supposed to acknowledge that "purpose in life" is far more immaterial and nebulous than our ingrained concepts of professionalism and our ingrained cultural work-ethic usually admit, and that if the economy doesn't demand someone's labor, it doesn't affect their innate value as a human being integrated into the same broad moral ecosystem as all other human beings. Sure, those people could be engineering vastly improved medicines or train systems. They could be painting houses or planting gardens. They could even be taking care of children. But society has decided, of its own free will and through its own mechanisms, not to allocate living wages to doing those things. Complaining that broke and unemployed people don't form (uncapitalized) work teams to perform pro-bono labor on behalf of Society and the Nation and Humanity simply isn't fair game, even if the things you'd like them to work on seem necessary or beneficial to you. If you think the Greater Glory of Something is so important, pay for it.

blahi 10y ago

>You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens. So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile. Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is justice. Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who did.

internaut 10y ago
> So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? I don't know the answer to that but I was hoping that The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (a kind of AI from a book called The Diamond Age that educated in such a way to enable social mobility) would solve the problem by giving some structure, showcase available possibilities and opportunities in a way specific to a person's current context and where they wanted to go etc. > You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. Yes I know that very well. Murdering your enemies in a fit of righteous rage coupled with self preservation is the most fun a human can have. People will deny this of course, but the evidence is everywhere. It's in our entertainment and our history. I have two concerns. One is that simply killing people rarely provides long term solutions to systemic inefficiencies or bottlenecks. I think this is the true reason why violence has gradually declined over the centuries. This is true whether it's proles killing elites or elites killing proles. My second concern is that just as Rome developed Bread and Circuses to distract the citizenry from system reform, we could neuter our population's drive to progress. All the time and energy spent fighting internal battles could make our system vulnerable to outside threats. This won't be politically correct but I don't give a shit. To a first approximation our young men are the source of all innovation and invention in society, as well as being the most volatile element within it. Currently they are: - Busy masturbating and playing vidya. [60%] [proles] - Working frenetically to compete. [30%] [middle] - Wasting their time with intellectual wankery [10%] [elite] This doesn't bode well for encountering future trouble. I would encourage a period of military training like the Israelis to encourage group solidarity for that reason. Our biggest strength as a species is our creativity, imagination. The ability to change a niche. To enlarge it, to scale back, to change to a completely different niche. It's what makes us truly dangerous and inventive. Right now we're burning a lot of CPU cycles in the three categories I mentioned but we're not actually getting to any destination that is better. This is stagnation. Our economy is on a treadmill going nowhere and we're gradually getting older. If we don't manage to snap out of this funk and open up new niches we'll crash and burn in the end.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? No, you're supposed to acknowledge that "purpose in life" is far more immaterial and nebulous than our ingrained concepts of professionalism and our ingrained cultural work-ethic usually admit, and that if the economy doesn't demand someone's labor, it doesn't affect their innate value as a human being integrated into the same broad moral ecosystem as all other human beings. Sure, those people could be engineering vastly improved medicines or train systems. They could be painting houses or planting gardens. They could even be taking care of children. But society has decided, of its own free will and through its own mechanisms, not to allocate living wages to doing those things. Complaining that broke and unemployed people don't form (uncapitalized) work teams to perform pro-bono labor on behalf of Society and the Nation and Humanity simply isn't fair game, even if the things you'd like them to work on seem necessary or beneficial to you. If you think the Greater Glory of Something is so important, pay for it.