Unions trample human rights and they don't increase wages long-term, rather they increase deadweight-loss and limit opportunities. I would not work for an employer with a mandatory union and I strongly recommend nobody work for one either.
“Unions trample human rights” is such an absurdist statement that I don’t even know how to respond. The vast majority of the countries at the top of an human rights index have strong union cultures, and the vast number of those at the bottom have no unions at all.
> Between 2008 and the early 2010s, Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
> Hanania was a contributor to Project 2025 regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. His advocacy against DEI has been influential among Republican and conservative policy-makers in the United States, and Vox called him "the man whose tweets helped kill DEI".
Interesting you mention human rights, the author seems to not care much about that issue.
Unions as you describe (mandatory membership for employment) is not the only way for unions to exist; in the Nordics unions are a core component of the labour market, and there are no jobs where union membership is required, it's all voluntary.
What exactly about unions, outside of the USA, in countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, that trample human rights?
I can agree on the healthcare thing, a few years ago I was working as an independent contractor and my health insurance premiums were almost $25k a year, for a plan with a $6.5k deductible. It’s bananas if you need to buy private health insurance.
The U.S. health system is incentivized in a way that's simply not sane.
With socialized medicine, the state has some very constructive incentives. People who get sick and stay sick don't produce as much taxable income, so keeping citizens healthy is good. It costs more to remedy conditions after they develop than it does to prevent them, so preventative care is offered and even pushed. The government is on the hook for unemployed and retired people, so it makes sense for healthcare to take a long-term approach.
In the U.S. system, insurance companies want to collect money and then not be responsible for you once you become too expensive. If you get sick and can't work, lose your company plan, or can no longer afford your personal plan, that's great! You're no longer their problem. Preventative care? Sounds like a short-term expense for no long-term payoff. So old that you're virtually guaranteed to need care? Good luck getting insured without paying a fortune out of pocket! The affordable care act was pretty insane in that it left insurance companies in the loop and simply shovelled money into a broken machine. It was better than nothing, but its design made it clear that U.S. insurance companies had accomplished complete regulatory capture.
The 1% in the U.S. might get better care than they would in a country with socialized medicine, but the average white collar worker does not, and there's also less security. If you lose your job because of AI or because some exec made bad decisions for your company and then get a serious condition at just the wrong moment, you're F'd. How can typical Americans have peace of mind?
Housing inflation cascades down into everything else too, since people require higher wages to afford housing... which drives up housing costs... which requires higher wages to afford housing...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.
It’s not like Americans were invaded and forced to accept this. They repeatedly voted for it. Obama tried to work on healthcare, then had the largest electoral losses since Eisenhower, all up and down the ballot. Instead they voted for the real estate billionaire. Trump has zero healthcare during a major pandemic - crickets. This country doesn’t want anything labeled “socialism”, and will hurt itself repeatedly to prove it.
This is true but it is not the whole story. Both establishment parties have presided over and encouraged the financialization of real estate. The ludicrous CEO-to-worker pay multiple wasn’t voted for by anyone.
Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization.
Another thing I’ve noticed is Americans are extremely non-self-aware about this topic. Go ask your favorite frontier LLM to tell you about notable moments in American history when they rejected socialism, explicitly or otherwise. Overall in history, and over just the last 30 years separately.
I worked as consultant at a major west coast-based health insurer in 1993. A family plan, that is, two adults plus any number of children, was $300/month; a figure that wasn't far off from the cost of a studio or 1 BR apartment at that time anywhere but the most expensive coastal cities.
Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.
So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.
Health insurance companies have profit margins of 2%, and owning their stock gives you a terrible return. They don’t do buybacks, because they have no money to buy back with, and a large portion of health insurers are non profits.
Because your 1993 health insurance was not insurance, it was a limited amount of healthcare paid with pre tax income.
There was no out of pocket maximum, you were denied for pre existing health conditions, and a surprise bill could show up anytime.
Now, you can buy health insurance even if you know your anemic kid will need $1.5M of treatment in the year, and it will only cost you ~$10k to ~$15k per year.
To be clear, today’s health insurance premiums are not premiums either, they are taxes, due to the legal ban on underwriting health risks and caps on premium price ratios between various ages.
In the US, it is explicitly wealth redistribution, from the young and healthy to the old and sick. It is still called an insurance premium because it is more politically palatable.
Because there is no guarantee that the donors now will receive the same benefits when they are older. It's almost the opposite, given demographic trends. For example, 20 to 30 years ago, getting consultation by a doctor was easier, but now you often have to get consultation from a physician assistant, if you're lucky, or more likely a nurse practitioner, who are far less qualified than doctors.
Also, ACA started in 2010, so all the people receiving the most healthcare now (age 50 to 65) had a good chunk of working years where they never paid into the system, but they received a lot of benefits. Also, there is no mandate to pay the premiums in the US, so many people don't pay into it at all, until they need the healthcare.
All fine. The only part that I have trouble with in your message is the 1.5M number. Why should something like anemia cost 1.5M a year of treament? And out of that 1.5M a year to the hospital, how much goes to:
a) administration
b) health care claims administration (a huge %age of the gap)
c) private equity profit numbers
Do we even know? Is it ruly worth 1.5M?
I ask because an MRI costs thousands in the U.S. And if I go oversees and pay out of pocket it costs something like $300 out of pocket - and I'm talking the U.K. here, not Turkey or Mexico. How do you explain that?
I don’t know what worth means, but the price is the price. I can see all the bills that the insurance company pays the hospital, and the hospital collects $80k per dose of medicines like
And $10k to $15k for other infusions (can happen two times per week).
The hospital is owned by the government.
In general, pharmaceutical companies have huge profit margins and profits, and doctors earn a decent amount of money in the US, especially specialists. Also, liability is huge in the healthcare space, with awards in the millions and tens of millions.
>How do you explain that?
Bottom line is a lot of people earn a lot less money in other countries.
I'm not sure where you live, but I'm a consultant and buy my own health insurance for a family of 4. I pay around $1200/month. This includes doctor visits and prescriptions.
My wife had both of our kids on this plan and my deductible was $3,000.
"So what happened Health Care"
Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
> Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
The pooling of risks is literally what makes it insurance. If any part of health insurance is arguably not actually insurance it's the annual preventative care that is certain to apply to you.
Yes, but classically insurance wouldn't allow a guaranteed bad bet in. Health care is way worse then the classic 80/20 (20% of the people generate 80% of the costs). Pruning even just a fraction of these ultra high cost humans massively reduces the cost for everyone else which is what insurance companies used to do before the government stepped in.
(I mean a lot of this discussion is fucked because healthcare is literally your life but the point still stands)
The 20% of the people are likely to include nearly 100% of the population over time.
With socialised health care you don't just avoid the corporate tax of insurer profiteering, you're saving money in return for access to care when you need it.
The startup I started working for has a fake health plan,(no network, prior authz and reimbursement issues for everything serious). So I just priced our family of 4 for rudimentary PPOs on the BCBS in our state. Our COBRA offer was 2400, ACA Individual market was 2200-3300, Small group plan thru my wifes LLC was 1700-3000. These plans mostly have 6-8k deductibles and out of max out of pocket $17k.
So I guess if you have a serious condition its post tax $40k/year until bankruptcy or death. How are you supposed to earn an extra 40k if youre not healthy enough to work. This is actually an insane system!
> Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
Your entire message is extremely localized to your state. In New York State, the state marketplace a, are only HMOs with limited networks, b, are expensive with high deductibles, c) don't have all that much coverage. In California, by contrast, the plans are a lot more extensive.
In many states, no one pays 1200 a month for a family. My COBRA would be 1200 a month, and if I went with a marketplace plan probably closer to 800. Me. Alone.
And yes, paying for risks that don't apply to you is how insurance has to work, or the insurance companies go bankrupt.
Does it make people feel better to write stuff like this? I feel like we all know this stuff this already.
Figure out how to make more money, or how to be happy with less, or go live somewhere else. Writing AI-assisted screeds on how broken the system is doesn’t bring us closer to a fixed system, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you live a happy life.
Without loudly complaining there is absolutely no change. Shutting up has never improved anything.
Why would the only solution be "figure out how to make more money"? There are many professions where it isn't even possible to figure that out, should all of them just shut up and move? It's great you were able to go live somewhere else, for some it would be devastating to lose their sense of belonging, other people have different priorities for what they consider a happy life.
Sorry but I think it's even less conducive to anything to tell people to shut up, it's an easy cop out, a way to invert the blame while being thoroughly unhelpful.
Are they? One person is saying that complaining won't help (since presumably "we all know this already"). The other person says complaining will help (i.e. let them speak).
I wasn't really telling them to shut up. I agree with most of their points, but there's a lot of hopelessness and defeat in the writing. I see some of my friends do this and it doesn't feel like purposeful, effective striving for a better world, but neurotic obsession over things that they are incredibly unlikely to affect.
I hope the complainers win, and I will join their fight in ways that make sense, but I'm also not going to spend my one short life doing the equivalent of being angry at the weather. I'm going to figure out how to live a life I can tolerate within the world as it exists.
Of course, I could be pattern-matching incorrectly. Perhaps writing this like this fills them with purpose and holy fire, and this is how they live their best life.
Get used to it, we have a lot more people that will be coming in and they all need to be taken care of. Unsustainable lifestyles are going to have to give way. We can’t all eat beef and have air conditioning and travel in retirement if we’re going to share this planet.
> This is not a spending problem. Families spend less on clothing, food, and appliances than a generation ago, adjusted for inflation. [19] The increase is entirely in fixed, non-discretionary costs: housing, healthcare, childcare, education.
I bet the explanation for this is that non-discretionary costs got higher, so people pulled back on discretionary spending. I do wonder if maybe people intentionally pulled back on discretionary spending despite small wage growth over time and capture was performed by housing, healthcare, and childcare. Or incentives by the government caused it. I have no clue.
"The people living inside these numbers describe them in nearly identical terms. “All my life, I thought that was the magical goal, ‘six figures,’” one writes. “During the pandemic, I finally achieved this magical goal… and I was wrong.” Sixty-two percent of American consumers live paycheck to paycheck; among those earning over $100,000, the figure is 48 percent."
My cousin makes around 60k/year. He had lower paying jobs before this. He now owns a home in a good area and doesn't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
He saved money for years, invested part of it, and was able to pay a large down payment on his house. His monthly expenses are low and he doesn't buy the latest or greatest.
Too many people spend money on booze, drugs, expensive hobbies, and traveling. They then wonder why they can't ever buy a house and have no money left over at the end of the month.
This is a variation on "Stop buying lattes and takeout and you too can become financially secure."
Run the numbers, and no, you really can't. Because if you have a health crisis you'll still be bankrupt.
You need an absolute minimum of $100k to protect yourself from health bankruptcy, and if you have a serious condition that's going to be too small by one or two orders of magnitude.
Another, less quantitative, way to think about it is that, for a brief blip in history, there existed a finer stratification of society. Where there once was the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and proletariat, that simple model became obviously insufficient. We created terms like middle class, an entirely new class of non-capital owning worker of petit-bourgeois level flows, then divided that into sub-strata: upper-middle, lower-middle, etc.
Now, we're experiencing a great re-flattening, a reverse-differentiation. As the middle class disappears, can resurrect the old economic gods, and with it, its demons?
Or, is it different this time? Does Marx suddenly become proletarian-prophet again, evangelizing a reframing of the proletariat relation with capital? I think we all sense that no, this time it's different. This time, capital doesn't need us, hence the popularity of terms like "permanent underclass".
The vibe-coder is the prolefication of the knowledge worker, the former purely-human mind, commoditized into a production-repitition. But, those are the lucky few. The rest become lumpenprole, economic invalids, non-essential and therefore irrelevant to global capital.
I do not know what comes after the recognition. The broader public directs its outrage at whatever the algorithm surfaces […] while the structural rearrangement of their economic lives proceeds without organized resistance.
I wish I knew the answer to this question: What shape would organized resistance have in this day and age, especially with the fragmentation of reality caused by social media?
Myself and almost everyone in my social circles under the age of 50 seem well-primed to participate in such organized resistance, were it to come to life.
I think we need to build open/cooperative products and services to replace anything that is run/owned by less-than-moral entities, while boycotting those entities as much as possible. We need better open, fair and secure methods/protocols/tools/platforms for cooperating/organizing as well.
Well, if you enjoy Trump era corruption, authoritarian strongman rule, and a great chasm between the haves and the have nots you can go to those countries as well. The options are open.
Isn’t it easier to wait for the minority opposition to age out versus moving? As long as young voters show up to vote, you just have to be on the ballot (as almost every election since the presidential election has shown). Perhaps you’re asking the wrong folks to move.
You can be on the plane tomorrow. If you're really committed to living under the beautiful Communist dream, it can be yours within 24 hours. Do you really think that it's going to just be Mamdani victory after Mamdani victory going forward and that in 10-20 years you'll be living in paradise?
And, btw, the youth are also time constrained. Sorry to burst your bubble.
You know, I thought, surely, by now, capitalists would be calling for reform to capitalism to prevent the weird ponzy scheme from shutting down, but it's the same clichés! Not even an interrogation of why people are souring to capitalism, just the same old tired response.
Make sure you do 5 prayers to Bezos and another 5 to Thiel on your capitalism rosary ($14.99/month subscription). If you've run out of prayers for the month, they actually have a sale for the 4th of July, $8.99 gives you 12 more prayers! Golly, I could use those two extra prayers to pray to Musk.
> Myself and almost everyone in my social circles under the age of 50 seem well-primed to participate in such organized resistance, were it to come to life.
You are assuming it hasn't. And besides, are you a revolution to come by way of your instagram/tik tok/Facebook feed? It won't. It's like a relationship, if everyone expects everyone else to make the first move, everyone loses.
Demoralization in e.g. Germany has reached insane levels.
This is a problem of the direction things are going. Things are getting worse and that is causing the demoralization, not the absolute level of "how good things still are".
> In 1980, 38 percent of private-sector workers had defined-benefit pension coverage. By 2023, that number had fallen to 11 percent. [15] Government workers, who have the political power to maintain the old arrangement, still have pensions at a rate of 75 percent. [15] The private sector abandoned the model because it could. I wish I’d known when I was young what I know now about government jobs.
I wish I'd had better tools for budgeting and retirement accounts.
This argument would have much more heft if it discussed 401k accounts and financial planning.
The argument has no heft at all, because it ignores the laws that require actually funding a defined benefit pension plan, such as ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006, which exempt taxpayer funded pension plans from any and all funding requirements.
The private sector abandoned the model because the promises only made sense with fantasy accounting, and once that was reigned in, they didn't have the power to tax future generations, so they naturally went away. Also, the government pays under market for labor, because the government employee unions prioritize not being able to be terminated today and deferred compensation over higher, market rate compensation today.
It's a moot point anyway, since nearly free target date mutual funds and index ETFs exist where you can get all the benefits of stock market gains without any of the agency risk and cost of pension fund managers and employees. They have been obviated.
Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the assertions by the author, that he has contributed in a "disciplined" way to his 401(k), and he’s 41, and he doesn’t think his savings will replace his income. The S&P 500’s total return over the past twenty years has been around 11%, annualized. That’s on track to millions, maybe even tens of millions for him by retirement age.
Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.
This article is the usual self victimisation rut but it comes with an interesting irony.
The article states the often quoted Wages vs Productivity gap. But wages didn't track productivity for the simple reason that the top 10% of people were paid much higher and consume disproportionately higher.
Who do you think the top 10% mostly comprises of? White collar people. So the article mourns for the same people who were responsible for and benefactors of the wage vs productivity pay gap LOL.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 24.3 ms ] thread[1] https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
Unions trample human rights and they don't increase wages long-term, rather they increase deadweight-loss and limit opportunities. I would not work for an employer with a mandatory union and I strongly recommend nobody work for one either.
> Hanania was a contributor to Project 2025 regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. His advocacy against DEI has been influential among Republican and conservative policy-makers in the United States, and Vox called him "the man whose tweets helped kill DEI".
Interesting you mention human rights, the author seems to not care much about that issue.
Unions as you describe (mandatory membership for employment) is not the only way for unions to exist; in the Nordics unions are a core component of the labour market, and there are no jobs where union membership is required, it's all voluntary.
What exactly about unions, outside of the USA, in countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, that trample human rights?
Like which one more frequently monitors your time in the bathroom?
With socialized medicine, the state has some very constructive incentives. People who get sick and stay sick don't produce as much taxable income, so keeping citizens healthy is good. It costs more to remedy conditions after they develop than it does to prevent them, so preventative care is offered and even pushed. The government is on the hook for unemployed and retired people, so it makes sense for healthcare to take a long-term approach.
In the U.S. system, insurance companies want to collect money and then not be responsible for you once you become too expensive. If you get sick and can't work, lose your company plan, or can no longer afford your personal plan, that's great! You're no longer their problem. Preventative care? Sounds like a short-term expense for no long-term payoff. So old that you're virtually guaranteed to need care? Good luck getting insured without paying a fortune out of pocket! The affordable care act was pretty insane in that it left insurance companies in the loop and simply shovelled money into a broken machine. It was better than nothing, but its design made it clear that U.S. insurance companies had accomplished complete regulatory capture.
The 1% in the U.S. might get better care than they would in a country with socialized medicine, but the average white collar worker does not, and there's also less security. If you lose your job because of AI or because some exec made bad decisions for your company and then get a serious condition at just the wrong moment, you're F'd. How can typical Americans have peace of mind?
In usa, almost all of healthcare spending is on chronic diseases of ppl who are on disablity and really old.
> Owning a home is the primary mechanism through which ordinary people build wealth.
That alone is a direct answer. Their wealth building is your failure. Their successful investments priced you out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
And of course the evergreen https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Basically real estate is the thirsty sponge that soaks up all the gains.
Another thing I’ve noticed is Americans are extremely non-self-aware about this topic. Go ask your favorite frontier LLM to tell you about notable moments in American history when they rejected socialism, explicitly or otherwise. Overall in history, and over just the last 30 years separately.
Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.
So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.
The number of paper pushers and executives is sustained by your premium.
There was no out of pocket maximum, you were denied for pre existing health conditions, and a surprise bill could show up anytime.
Now, you can buy health insurance even if you know your anemic kid will need $1.5M of treatment in the year, and it will only cost you ~$10k to ~$15k per year.
To be clear, today’s health insurance premiums are not premiums either, they are taxes, due to the legal ban on underwriting health risks and caps on premium price ratios between various ages.
How is it wealth redistribution when most people will start as recipients, then move to being the donors and will then become the recipients again?
Also, ACA started in 2010, so all the people receiving the most healthcare now (age 50 to 65) had a good chunk of working years where they never paid into the system, but they received a lot of benefits. Also, there is no mandate to pay the premiums in the US, so many people don't pay into it at all, until they need the healthcare.
a) administration b) health care claims administration (a huge %age of the gap) c) private equity profit numbers
Do we even know? Is it ruly worth 1.5M?
I ask because an MRI costs thousands in the U.S. And if I go oversees and pay out of pocket it costs something like $300 out of pocket - and I'm talking the U.K. here, not Turkey or Mexico. How do you explain that?
I don’t know what worth means, but the price is the price. I can see all the bills that the insurance company pays the hospital, and the hospital collects $80k per dose of medicines like
https://www.asparlas.com/
And $100k+ for
https://www.blincyto.com/
And $10k to $15k for other infusions (can happen two times per week).
The hospital is owned by the government.
In general, pharmaceutical companies have huge profit margins and profits, and doctors earn a decent amount of money in the US, especially specialists. Also, liability is huge in the healthcare space, with awards in the millions and tens of millions.
>How do you explain that?
Bottom line is a lot of people earn a lot less money in other countries.
My wife had both of our kids on this plan and my deductible was $3,000.
"So what happened Health Care"
Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
The pooling of risks is literally what makes it insurance. If any part of health insurance is arguably not actually insurance it's the annual preventative care that is certain to apply to you.
(I mean a lot of this discussion is fucked because healthcare is literally your life but the point still stands)
With socialised health care you don't just avoid the corporate tax of insurer profiteering, you're saving money in return for access to care when you need it.
Because - sooner or later - you will.
So I guess if you have a serious condition its post tax $40k/year until bankruptcy or death. How are you supposed to earn an extra 40k if youre not healthy enough to work. This is actually an insane system!
Your entire message is extremely localized to your state. In New York State, the state marketplace a, are only HMOs with limited networks, b, are expensive with high deductibles, c) don't have all that much coverage. In California, by contrast, the plans are a lot more extensive.
In many states, no one pays 1200 a month for a family. My COBRA would be 1200 a month, and if I went with a marketplace plan probably closer to 800. Me. Alone.
And yes, paying for risks that don't apply to you is how insurance has to work, or the insurance companies go bankrupt.
Figure out how to make more money, or how to be happy with less, or go live somewhere else. Writing AI-assisted screeds on how broken the system is doesn’t bring us closer to a fixed system, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you live a happy life.
Why would the only solution be "figure out how to make more money"? There are many professions where it isn't even possible to figure that out, should all of them just shut up and move? It's great you were able to go live somewhere else, for some it would be devastating to lose their sense of belonging, other people have different priorities for what they consider a happy life.
Sorry but I think it's even less conducive to anything to tell people to shut up, it's an easy cop out, a way to invert the blame while being thoroughly unhelpful.
I hope the complainers win, and I will join their fight in ways that make sense, but I'm also not going to spend my one short life doing the equivalent of being angry at the weather. I'm going to figure out how to live a life I can tolerate within the world as it exists.
Of course, I could be pattern-matching incorrectly. Perhaps writing this like this fills them with purpose and holy fire, and this is how they live their best life.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-sh...
I bet the explanation for this is that non-discretionary costs got higher, so people pulled back on discretionary spending. I do wonder if maybe people intentionally pulled back on discretionary spending despite small wage growth over time and capture was performed by housing, healthcare, and childcare. Or incentives by the government caused it. I have no clue.
My cousin makes around 60k/year. He had lower paying jobs before this. He now owns a home in a good area and doesn't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
He saved money for years, invested part of it, and was able to pay a large down payment on his house. His monthly expenses are low and he doesn't buy the latest or greatest.
Too many people spend money on booze, drugs, expensive hobbies, and traveling. They then wonder why they can't ever buy a house and have no money left over at the end of the month.
Run the numbers, and no, you really can't. Because if you have a health crisis you'll still be bankrupt.
You need an absolute minimum of $100k to protect yourself from health bankruptcy, and if you have a serious condition that's going to be too small by one or two orders of magnitude.
You're not going to get that from a $60k job.
Now, we're experiencing a great re-flattening, a reverse-differentiation. As the middle class disappears, can resurrect the old economic gods, and with it, its demons?
Or, is it different this time? Does Marx suddenly become proletarian-prophet again, evangelizing a reframing of the proletariat relation with capital? I think we all sense that no, this time it's different. This time, capital doesn't need us, hence the popularity of terms like "permanent underclass".
The vibe-coder is the prolefication of the knowledge worker, the former purely-human mind, commoditized into a production-repitition. But, those are the lucky few. The rest become lumpenprole, economic invalids, non-essential and therefore irrelevant to global capital.
I wish I knew the answer to this question: What shape would organized resistance have in this day and age, especially with the fragmentation of reality caused by social media?
Myself and almost everyone in my social circles under the age of 50 seem well-primed to participate in such organized resistance, were it to come to life.
https://www.fulu.org/
https://www.usworker.coop/directory/
https://atproto.com/
(Socialism support is ~62% of the under 30 cohort, and 2M voters 55+ age out every year, progress is a function of time and electorate turnover)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529387 (citations)
And, btw, the youth are also time constrained. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Make sure you do 5 prayers to Bezos and another 5 to Thiel on your capitalism rosary ($14.99/month subscription). If you've run out of prayers for the month, they actually have a sale for the 4th of July, $8.99 gives you 12 more prayers! Golly, I could use those two extra prayers to pray to Musk.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx (first graph)
Democrats saw a golden opportunity, took it, got punished very hard for 20 years.
Issues of culture are sticky. I think it could take many decades for Americans to unlearn their brand of toxic individualism. Maybe centuries.
You are assuming it hasn't. And besides, are you a revolution to come by way of your instagram/tik tok/Facebook feed? It won't. It's like a relationship, if everyone expects everyone else to make the first move, everyone loses.
Demoralization in e.g. Germany has reached insane levels.
This is a problem of the direction things are going. Things are getting worse and that is causing the demoralization, not the absolute level of "how good things still are".
I wish I'd had better tools for budgeting and retirement accounts.
This argument would have much more heft if it discussed 401k accounts and financial planning.
The private sector abandoned the model because the promises only made sense with fantasy accounting, and once that was reigned in, they didn't have the power to tax future generations, so they naturally went away. Also, the government pays under market for labor, because the government employee unions prioritize not being able to be terminated today and deferred compensation over higher, market rate compensation today.
It's a moot point anyway, since nearly free target date mutual funds and index ETFs exist where you can get all the benefits of stock market gains without any of the agency risk and cost of pension fund managers and employees. They have been obviated.
Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.
The article states the often quoted Wages vs Productivity gap. But wages didn't track productivity for the simple reason that the top 10% of people were paid much higher and consume disproportionately higher.
Who do you think the top 10% mostly comprises of? White collar people. So the article mourns for the same people who were responsible for and benefactors of the wage vs productivity pay gap LOL.
Hard to take this seriously.