First off, the reason everything seems awful is because you're hunting engagement, and engagement is easy pickings when you're targeting fear and anger. You're

First off, the reason everything seems awful is because you're hunting engagement, and engagement is easy pickings when you're targeting fear and anger. You're literally asking for anger. People will give it to you in spades. Congrats, your audience is engaged. I hope the paycheck's decent. Taking the question seriously, however, the answer shit is screwed is the Financialization of Everything. The easing credit environment post-1972 - a weird collision of forces including the invention of EUROBOND, the OPEC thing (which sometimes gets labelled AUUUGHH THE PETRODOLLAR), a broadening (ha ha! I kill me) workforce, and Soviet Union extraction equipment aging out - has had a gigantic cornucopia of add-on effects, the reach of which is hard to make out because it's so vast. One of them is that the people who have money are increasingly separated from what that money does in the world. I don't really need to bring up 2008, when the private financialization mechanisms dried up and collapsed, but that's a pretty good example of how the endgame goes. More pertinent to this audience, you end up with VCs funding a new . . social hotel eco enterprise data engine . . whatever, without having absolutely any idea of what the business is going to be doing or any way that it has to make money, ever. The end game of this is someone like Sam Bank Fried or whatever his real name is. That guy. Perversely, at the other end of the spectrum, it makes debt-driven hard industries risk-averse to the point of absurdity. I'm going to point a finger at the 737 here. Logically, the answer to the A320 NEO was a next-gen platform that would basically shadow the 787. Unfortunately, when you're leveraged up to the eyeballs, that's a bigger risk than just BOLTING ON THE WHATEVER to your existing thing. Sure, it might crash and kill everyone, but you have this neat spreadsheet that shows how unlikely that is, and the loan comes through with the teaser rate. Watch that spreadsheet I just mentioned. That spreadsheet turns into one of the biggest administrative employment engines the world has ever seen - every five cent screw, every fifty dollar monitor, every five dollar cable has a multi-million dollar logistics backend to ensure that THIS IS THE LAST THING YOU'LL EVER NEED. Everything to lower the perceived risk threshold, again, so that heavy industry can keep piling on the bonds and worse. This principal extends its fingers into everything from airplanes to movie scripts. Ever wonder why there's a million movies about Spiderman? Less risky, easier loans. Then the debts go off into Financialization Land, packaged, and, hilariously, used as yet more evidence by the Spreadsheet Industries of how the Spreadsheet System is AWESOME. Digression. Speaking from aerospace, what I call the "spreadsheet industries" - Systems Engineering, Integrated Logistics, Model Based Engineering, Six Sigma, blah blah blabbity blah - have, with extremely rare exceptions, been a terrifying drag on our ability to build big things of any kind whatsoever. Meanwhile, the VC types drop ill-informed bombs of capital on stuff that takes their fancy. I guess one of the things I always wondered is where the hell software VC types get all their money, then I count the zeroes and realize that it's a zit on the broad fatty ass of any defense budget. Still . . Who is saving so much damn money? Wellllll . . this post is too damn long. 1980s, KGB and then the Oligarchs started doing . . stuff . . and then China started to do its "everyone saves most of their paycheck by law because no one has kids" thing. There's more, obviously, but the history books are going to mention how America's standard of living was basically from the sweat and blood of some poor frickin' Chinese guy gluing circuit boards with a chain on his leg.