And they keep demanding better working conditions. And yeah we can use the police to beat the hell out of them when they do but then every now and then somebody films the police when they do.

So the real problem with Farm labor is going to be that nobody is going to want to pay people enough to have people who want to live on a farm if you're not picking up refugees from war-torn countries. And a lot of people don't want those refugees anymore for a variety of reasons.

Otherwise you've got to pay people a premium because they are living out in the middle of nowhere and it's backbreaking work.

And then there's all those little social issues nobody wants to deal with like I mentioned above with the unionization and needing to treat people decently.

Now given that a modern civilization needs about 2% of its workforce farming there's no particular reason we couldn't do all that but if you're a billionaire you just don't want to. Frankly at this point the billionaires have had enough of employees and consumers and capitalism in general. They have never been big fans of capitalism preferring monopolies and oligarchy to competition and free markets.

So it's no surprise that there's a automation push here too.

Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000

Is socialism? Almost the entire world is against them except Russia that uses them occasionally as a thorn in the side of the United States.

America's gearing up for war with them. Prior to that we had cut them out of the rest of the world and all of the global markets.

So I don't think Venezuela which is under active attack by every capitalist nation in the world is a fair representative of alternatives to capitalism.

I do think we live in the real world though and we can't pretend that socialism works even if the only reason it doesn't work is that billionaires, who are themselves vehemently opposed to capitalism, will sabotage it making it impossible to properly implement.

The important thing to remember is billionaires do not support capitalism either. So capitalism is going to get sabotaged by billionaires too and therefore capitalism is not an alternative to billionaires.

We are going to have to figure out a third way. Because both capitalism and socialism have failed us.

There is no fix besides austerity and suffering.

That's because rich people don't want to have to spend the money to solve problems that are mostly your problem and not theirs.

You need to get out of the habit, a habit let's remember you were conditioned into by the wealthy, of assuming that nothing can ever get better and that good things aren't possible anymore.

That habit is an extreme and toxic form of conservativism.

Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

You don't get coursework for a doctoral. That's not how that works. You write a research paper and have peers review it.

What the hell is writing this crap? It's not somebody going through a doctoral program in teaching that's for sure...

we just used to subsidize it more. When we were kids the government paid 70% of tuition, most of it was money given directly to the colleges who passed that money on to you and me via lower cost tuition.

In the early 2000s Bush Jr and the Republican party slashed those subsidies, which is why the cost shot up. It's got nothing to do with administrative costs or fancy dorms (the dorms literally are paid for by rent paid by students, I know, I put my kid in one of the prison style dorms in college because the nice ones were too pricey).

As usual we're all being lied to.

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These are canaries in the coal mine for the collapsing economy. There's a ton of money in Wall Street chasing meme stocks and trying to extract value without offering it. But they can only survive while the economy at large does and can absorb their losses.

When the broader economy collapses various ponzi schemes go with it. Usually we prosecute the crooks and clean things up a bit, but I don't think anyone is expecting that this cycle.

A six-figure income today is enough to rent a decent apartment and maintain a okayish car.

I can tell you're an old man because you say six figure income when six figures isn't a lot of money.

I saw a joke that has really stuck with me, it's a wonderful Life is a timeless movie because it has the the line "do you know how long it takes a man to save $5,000"

Basically we have been screwing over the kids and they're feeling it. Pretty soon they're going to take away old people healthcare and social security. If only out of spite

Yeah you can read the studies but basically jobs that don't involve a college degree require that you build up over time to a higher income and when you lose those jobs you're starting over because without that degree employers do not value your experience.

Furthermore college educated employees tend to be more productive because they are not doing the work of one person but instead building out systems that due to work of multiple people. In the cases where they are doing individual work it's typically very high skilled specialized work which limits the number of people who can do it and competitive forces kick in keeping their wages high and keeping them employed longer.

Basically think of it like this. In the old days you didn't need any school you just worked the fields. Then we started to automate farming and improve that so we started to have to educate people up to about third or fourth grades so they can work factories which were much more efficient and productive. Then we started to automate those jobs so we started to require high School level education in order to maintain the kind of productivity we demand from workers. Now we've automated most of the jobs involving a high school education so that if you want to earn a living you need a college education.

Basically we demand increased productivity from workers every year and the only way to get that is with more education for more advanced workers.

The monarchy was restored and the only reason it eventually fell is that the merchant class overtook monarchies as the ruling elite.

We basically traded one set of Masters for another.

Violent revolutions don't really work because people who are good at violence don't usually give up power and will set themselves up with power following the violence.

I'm not sure what the solution is but it's not going to be a revolution. I don't think we actually have a solution and I think we are eventually going to trigger world war III and hand the launch codes to religious lunatics but assuming we don't do that it's going to be slow steady progress through education.

Studies still clearly show that you will earn more money and have a more stable career regardless of the major you pick.

Everything is going to shit so there are no guarantees like there was for the boomers. Nobody is going to build you a house with government money like they did for the boomers.

But if we are talking about probabilities you should still go to school.

A whole bunch of very rich assholes want you to think that you don't have any use for an education because they are tired of paying for it and because they don't want you to learn critical thinking skills. That's why you get at least two stories a week attacking education in your feed.

Keep in mind those wealthy elites think you're too stupid to figure that out. It's up to you whether you want to prove them right or not.

I don't do anything that sophisticated and I have to admit even I noticed the performance difference between OpenOffice calc and Excel...

I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation but we don't enforce those laws so that's kind of a moot point.

I cannot imagine what it would be like using OpenOffice for one of those really really huge spreadsheets that are basically poorly implemented databases. And I know we all just want to say don't do that but it fills a need that a lot of businesses have.