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.

Isn't the premise of a dollar store (or pound store) that everything is a single price...

Otherwise it's just a cut price store and frankly, the Germans have shown us with their cut price supermarkets that they key to running a successful one is hyper organisation. Everything runs like clockwork, no confusion, Everything goes into it's assigned slot. Money is saved by reducing overall work (I.E. the staff just put boxes on the shelves and let customer take the products out themselves), reducing costs and creating consistency (I.E. if national regs state the fridge must be x Degrees C, the fridges are exactly X degrees C) then passing the savings onto the customer. There's a reason Aldi and Lidl are growing so fast in so many countries.

Running a disorganised cut price shop seems counter-intuitive as you'll just drive customers away.

Awww didums... did I point out an unfortunate fact you can't refute... or even refuse (for the uninitiated, refuting requires proof, you can refuse without proof, also repudiate)

India, in my experience, is a society where the word "no" is the dirtiest word imaginable. It's unconscionable that anyone might say no to anything. Doubly so to their boss.

So every answer is a yes, doesn't matter if it's "yes I can" or "yes I cant" which leads to situations where anything deliverable is impossible to... well.. deliver. Any corner that can be cut gets cut, cut again and someone gets out an angle grinder to see how much can be shaved off after that. After things aren't delivered the finger pointing game begins with everyone shrugging and saying "it's not me". Meetings are convened with as many people as can be drawn into them as possible in order to dilute the chances that an individual can be held accountable and to reduce the chances that an individual might get an action item at the end of it. The meeting usually ends with the scheduling of another meeting with even more people in it. Of course, no-one can even consider saying "no" to any of this.

No is the "rudest" thing you can say to an Indian.

So is it any surprise that India's aviation sector is in shambles, thousands of flights cancelled because they can't meet schedules because ultimately, they just cant say "no, this is not possible, we can't meet that demand/schedule/deadline". So they're blaming safety regs, hey it's not so bad when you live in a society where life is cheap and almost everyone believes in reincarnation, plus all the airliners are foreign built so they can cop the blame for any problems.

India's aviation sector isn't the only one suffering from the yes problem.... it's just the most obvious because safe aviation is notoriously cautious and conservative, hence you have to say "no" a lot.