9 ms·
American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
- dotcoma 5mo agohttps://archive.is/q1GxG https://archive.is/q1GxG
- Teknomadix 5mo agoIsn't there a better alternative to this archive site?
- dotcoma 5mo agoIt does the job for me, but please do tell me if you find a better alternative.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5mo agoWhat's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?
- beej71 5mo agohttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5mo agoHrrm :-(
- totetsu 5mo agodidnt the archive owner only start doing this after Patokallio revealed his identity for no good reason. Given the legal liability involved in maintaining that service, there is a threat to what Patokallio is doing so it doesn't seem entirely unsympathetic to do something in retaliation..
- archagon 5mo agoSeems like a mistake to rely on an archiving site that runs malware and changes the text of archived pages. However, there’s also not really anything better out there. The owner being some wily/sketchy Russian is even an advantage in some respects, since they can’t be pressured by copyright law or foreign politics.
- caymanjim 5mo agoWell, for one, it wants me to scan a QR code as a captcha.
- themafia 5mo agoI've never once had that happen. It's always straight to the unrolled article.
- dredmorbius 5mo agoSee: <https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requires-approved-phone/ https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requi...> Or my earlier reply to this subthread.
- kxrm 5mo agoI chose the audio option to get around this.
- jghefner 5mo agoMe too, and ain't no way I'm doing that. That's blocklist behavior.
- dredmorbius 5mo agoThat is an issue you can pin on Google: <https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-goog...> (8 May 2026). HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119> Though yes, Archive.is have continued using reCaptcha despite this recent change.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ProAm 5mo agoWhy does everyone on HN complain and post about anything and everything except the content of the link.
- datadrivenangel 5mo agoIs there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?
- denkmoon 5mo agoIt would require participation by all strata of society. So no.
- VonGuard 5mo agoLegislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum. Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
- saratogacx 5mo agoCostco's code of ethics makes this really simple, it is too bad it, or a variation thereof, isn't more commonly observed. In order of overriding priority 1. Obey the Law 2. Support our members 3. Support our employees 4. Support our suppliers 5. If we do the above, we'll reward shareholders
- strenholme 5mo agoThe Southwest thing is confirmed: https://archive.ph/20250311162848/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/southwest-airlines-bag-fees-to-basic-economy-what-to-know.html https://archive.ph/20250311162848/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/... “Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”
- HDThoreaun 5mo agoElliot showed up because southwests entire computer system imploded over the holidays which cost them massive amounts of money and reputation. Changes were absolutely needed at southwest.
- sghiassy 5mo agoWe came back from the gilded age. So there’s hope right?
- spicyusername 5mo agoPretty much, yea
- nozzlegear 5mo agoSounds like we need a modern day Teddy Roosevelt?
- anon291 5mo agoGilded age is one of the GOATed times in America though.
- pen1slicker 5mo ago[dead]
- coolhacker 5mo ago[dead]
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoI'd rather not go through a Great Depression, thank you very much. Maybe everyone should re-read The Grapes of Wrath.
- tim333 5mo agoThe Great Depression was a bit of a monetary screw up which we've probably figured out how not to do again.
- dionian 5mo ago"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.
- cm2012 5mo agoYeah, this article does not seem evidence backed to me. There is a ton of optimism now.
- Obscurity4340 5mo agoIsnt Economist , like, a super prestigious publication? Why would they let something flimsy seep thru?
- janderson215 5mo agoI know someone who has called it “The Ecommunist” for 20 years, so not everybody has the opinion that is is prestigious, but some see it as elitist.
- VonGuard 5mo agoCalling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos: The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!" The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
- Obscurity4340 5mo agoThis was and is my understanding
- matrix87 5mo agoZerohedge is probably more reliable at this point
- Stitch4223 5mo ago> Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789. 1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
- BurningFrog 5mo agoThe French Revolution was an orgy in mass murder that led to the slaughter of millions in the Napoleon wars. It really need to be romantizied much less!
- IndeanCondor 5mo agoIt was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France. Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history. In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors? Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
- sarchertech 5mo ago> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution “Fundamentally inherent from” is such a broad statement that it’s difficult to argue with, but the US constitution predates the French Revolution. > so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
- randycupertino 5mo agoI would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.
- WalterBright 5mo ago[flagged]
- ares623 5mo ago"create"
- WalterBright 5mo ago???
- _carbyau_ 5mo agoMe giving you a dollar doesn't create. The rich extracting wealth from the poor doesn't create. Investors buying existing housing stock doesn't create. Mine it. Make it. Improve it. Brings wealth into existence. Note that financially large businesses/individuals are a mix of wealth creation and transference. That one word comment implies a lot of the wealthiest people have not created much wealth in comparison with how much they managed to transfer.
- WalterBright 5mo agoBut you aren't going to give me a dollar. The rich will sell you things they created, but it is illegal for them to extract it from you. Buying existing houses means the seller realizes the wealth he created. Transference is called "stealing" and is illegal (unless the government does it).
- SilentM68 5mo ago[dead]
- matrix87 5mo agoI'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years. The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction. I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire. At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people. Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoWe've (tech workers) been in the labor aristocracy for the last 15 years ignoring the plights of the rest of labor. We kind of have it coming.
- intended 5mo agoK-shaped economy, Asset bubble, and AI spending. The retail / average consumer in America is seeing a very different world than the rich and ultra rich.
- ryandrake 5mo agoYes. When people say "The economy" is improving, they are only talking about the stock market, which primarily effects rich investors and old people's retirement.
- krackers 5mo ago>It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up Because people believe it will go up, it's a prediction market for attention. The stock market seems to have decoupled from underlying "real value" of a company and is closer to cryptocoins now. Of course the flipside is that you also have the same volatility of cryptocoins.
- aeternum 5mo agoI thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars? Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
- Barrin92 5mo ago> Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable. There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican. Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.
- aeternum 5mo ago>whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy I'm not sure about that, I think it would make me favor investments in science and technology, or if college age I would likely choose engineering over say art. The "Sputnik Shock" did have a cultural effect not to mention more direct methods like the National Defense Education Act.
- wesselbindt 5mo agoAmerica won the space race? The only milestone where the US got there first was having boots on the moon. Every other milestone (first artificial satellite, first organism in space, first man in space, first woman, first spacewalk, first craft on the moon) was achieved by the soviets first. Taking the one arbitrary milestone where the US did come in first and declare it the finish line feels weird as heck.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo agoAuthor appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
- saltyoldman 5mo agoNo reason to black pill. Tons of opportunities - be creative.
- seydor 5mo agoIs it true that Thiel moved to Argentina
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoWith investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom. The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest. With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
- anon291 5mo agoAmerica is a communist nation since the majority of the populace holds the majority of the productive capacity in joint ownership
- thyrsus 5mo agoThat claim needs explanation. My understanding is that substantially less than 20% hold the controlling ownership of U.S. productive capacity.
- anon291 5mo agoThe majority of Americans own stock and most of that is investments in the S and P 500. This is probably the closest any nation has gotten to mass public ownership of the means of production. Certainly more so than explicitly communist nations in which supposed shareholders (i.e. the citizens) have no right at all to influence company decisions. In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.
- pixelatedindex 5mo agoSeems more like an aristocracy where the productive capacity is owned by the billionaire class
- anon291 5mo agoNo ones labor is worthless. Guys this is so retarded but I understand why tech people find this difficult. Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people. An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary. Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possible there. America is friggin awesome.
- achierius 5mo agoWhy are there homeless people then? Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
- anon291 5mo agoThere are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless. The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India. The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival. > That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.
- Frieren 5mo agoFascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic. > A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one. The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good. > “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.” Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit. > If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive? Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo ago[flagged]
- ted_bunny 5mo agoIt's not an insect to be squashed once, it's a social retrovirus. There is no un-herpe-ing this one. It will require vigilance even after it's done.
- BloondAndDoom 5mo ago> Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic. Wish this was true, but clearly not. Unless you define existential as “inconvenience”
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoThese rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.
- ted_bunny 5mo agoHave you not noticed they are on the offense? It's the poor who need to study Mao.
- jocelyner 5mo ago[dead]
- tim333 5mo agoIt's a rather negative take on things. Take Musk for instance: >Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra He's actually been going on about "A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-all-is-free-thats-elon-musks-theory-of-sustainable-abundance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al... Also booming stock markets, solar output, AI development and the like could be ok maybe?
- giardini 5mo agopaywall
- giardini 5mo ago"The Economist" is falling into the rut that the remainder of British publishing has been bogged down in for a decade: increasingly liberal headlines generated via social-media topic measures to gain increased eyeballs (enough to survive). Increasingly, British news sources are drifting leftward, primarily b/c right-wing sources are increasingly rare and, let's be honest, dull. Maybe with a little bit of say, "DEI", in the topic we can raise some eyeballs, is a typical move. But that's a dead end. The real news is that good article headlines are hard to find and good composition is hard to write. No easy way to do that other than to find better writers.
- queenkjuul 5mo agoIt's fascinating there are people that believe things like this
- giardini 5mo agoNot nearly as fascinating [that] people believe.