And it's going to result in permanent unemployment. It's debatable how much but we're not ever going to see full employment ever again. Not with this much automation.

To be thoroughly honest we are cooking the books using sub minimum wage gig work to pretend that we aren't already well below full employment. I don't know South Korea's numbers but here in America there is only one good job for every five americans. A good job here being defined as paying enough that you can afford a modest house, reliable transportation, healthcare and to save for retirement when you're too old to physically work anymore. No extravagant luxuries per se. But what people used to call a working class living. Basically 50 years and you get to die in peace.

That kind of living is only available to one in five Americans.

We're going to have to do something and I suspect that something is going to be world War 3. It's not a coincidence that world War II kicked off when unemployment hit 25%..

I have seen multiple people who got forced to come back into the office complaining about coworkers that work from home or get to go home and finish their day out. Instead of those people demanding work from home for themselves they demand the people around them also are forced to come into the office. Even though the extra traffic on the streets makes their commute worse and means that they don't get the nicest parking spots.

But if it's one thing I've seen over and over and over again it's that for the sake of feeling like it's all fair people cheerfully stab themselves in the back. The animalistic urge for fairness is easily exploitable. Gets us all into a nice little crabs in a bucket situation.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is getting ready to do a massive stock scam worth almost 2 trillion dollars and it's going to get dumped in all our retirement plans at some point.

Did not know they had a mic jack. That's a nice addition.

If you're not watching his channel you probably should be.

So the CEO of GameStop gets a huge payout if he can make the company worth $100 billion dollars on paper. The debt is completely irrelevant it just has to be a market cap of $100 billion dollars.

Being the oh so clever boy he is he decided to try and achieve that by using a leveraged buyout to purchase a much larger company and call it GameStop so that on paper he would go from a 11 billion dollar company to a 66 billion dollar company. Basically getting him halfway to his goal and then all he has to do is find a couple more oversized companies to buy with their own debt and blam he gets a multi-billion dollar payout.

Of course all the companies involved here would collapse under the debt load and all the employees would lose their jobs and the community loses the services from those companies but that's a you problem not a him problem.

We put grifters, crooks and pirates in charge of basically everything. And every time anyone suggests taking away their power everyone screams socialism and government bad and blah blah blah until we all have to go back to our jobs.

You can't give this much power to this few people and have a functioning system or society but about 45% of the world wants it this way and then about 6% don't get to say in anything because of voter suppression and the remaining 49% don't matter because of winner take off first past the post voting.

It's a little better if you are in a parliamentary system but most of them at the end of the day have some form of winner take all voting which is prone to the same problems. And the few small countries that don't have that are prone to systemic attacks from the billionaires in the larger countries that do have exploitable voting systems.

I honestly don't know solution to any of this. I really do think we're going to collapse the economy and eventually hand the nuclear launch codes to a bunch of religious lunatics and then it's going to be game over for all of us. It's possible a few billionaires will survive an island bunkers but it's also possible that their air filtration systems won't work and they will die down there. I won't be around to find out though. I'm not smart enough to be one of the handful of engineers they keep around and I'm not sexy enough to be one of their sex slaves and I'm not violent enough to be one of the thugs to keep the other two groups in line for the billionaires. So there really isn't a place for me in the society that they want to create.

And again I don't see how we stop it because well, people are just so fucking stupid...

This is dumping it on the next administration. If that happens to be a trump administration that's fine because Trump can get more bribes. It's not going to be a Vance administration since well, there is no way in hell anyone but Trump is going to get a republican elected in 2028. Nobody else has his cult of personality that can give people to forget that they can't afford to drive to work this week...

There is a shitload of extraordinarily nasty things in the big beautiful bill that are going to hit like a truck after the midterms. Hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts to Medicare and medicaid. I want to be clear that's both Medicare and Medicaid. The Medicare cuts are trickier and nastier because they need to be round about so that people can pretend they aren't happening but they are still there. And the Medicaid cuts are going to basically devastate rural hospitals. There's a slew of other cuts and problems that were done to make room for billionaire tax cuts.

All of this is scheduled to hit after the midterms because that way you've already voted Republican by then like the sucker you are.

There's an old saying, what the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public. Low information voters who have no idea they are about to lose their health care or that their grandparents or parents are about to lose Health Care are in for a world of hurt but right now they're cheerfully humming along telling pollsters that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing.

Oh and Donald Trump and Republican party are once again mobilizing poll watchers and voter suppressors in Mass. There is a little article about it over on MSNBC but they're not exactly spending a lot of time talking about it. For some reason the Democrats can't seem to understand that voter suppression at the county level is a huge problem... Meanwhile the Republican party can easily use it to stop 5 to 7% of Democrats from voting. And that's before the racist gerrymandering that just got legalized

For every Republican yucking it up because this sounds great remember the less Democrat voting power there is the less they need you to vote for them. As always it's a big club and you ain't in it.

Especially when people look at everything from socioeconomic level.

Definitely will have more spare money.

But do you believe that the wealthy are indolent or something? Many of my peers are in the millionaire class, and they work hard and long. And more than a few are highly stressed.

It is fortunate that there are many other forms of art, some that require little more than a sketchpad and pencils. I know what you are talking about a little, as my parents would not get me an instrument when I wanted to join the school band. So I got a part time job after school, saved my money, bought a Fender Bass and amp, and was making around 100 dollars a week in 1970. Not too bad for a 10th grader.

Art is creating things, not spending money. You can pick an art form that requires money, but it is not mandatory. You can even just buy a knife and carve found wood.

You're talking to a guy who regularly worked 60 hours a week, and more than a few occasions 100 hours.

Oh man! My art is my de-stressing. Wonder what the difference is? How does someone de-stress when they cannot even make sketches, maybe sing, or do anything?

Slashdot has a lot of tech people in here. I wonder if they actually understand art?

FTS :

37% of classical music listeners in the UK are aged 16-34, debunking the "graying audience" myth

I'm not certain how that jibes with the common meme that Boomers sucked up all the money, and GenZ people are poor.

One-third of classical music fans live in households earning over $100,000 annually

Which is another way of saying two-thirds are living in households making under $100,000 annually

From the other report, I was gobsmacked when they wrote:

Proportionately fewer baby boomers have advanced into top professional and high-salaried positions, despite their advanced degrees.

Wait... what? the boomers, who are claimed to hoard all their money to themselves, won't retire because they refuse to give up their big money, and aer generally the cause of every problem on earth is that? I've been told by millennial and Genders that they can hardly wait for us to die so they stand a chance of fixing everything. I mean, we are hated. That's a shock.

What I am seeing, from the scope of those two reports/studies is that there are wide demographics interested in the Arts, and I have no doubt that interest in the arts is an enhancement to life. I do not see that the poor are excluded. I do not see that the poor have zero time to appreciate art. But that's just me.

Thanks - reading them now.

You are invoking a meme. I do have an art minor, so I've seen a lot of artists and people who are interested in art. There are many artists who remain poor to work their craft. They are not stressed about that - it is their choice.

There are wealthy people who are not interested in Art. As well, more than a few who are both artists and wealthy

But can you address how a poor person is kept from accessing art on the internet? Even places like Facebook have a lot of art on them. Not many people are bereft of a smartphone or computer.

I've been very poor, yet always been interested in art. I work many hours a week now (although slowed a bit since retirement) , more hours than when I was poor. I have money. I really think a person is interested in art or they are not. Making it into a class warfare issue is specious as far as I'm concerned.

But this is Slashdot, where virtue is inversely proportional to wealth. 8^)

Oh - averages, Can you give me those statistics? I get a lot of Artists exposing inequalities between rich and poor from searches. So perhaps rather than talk about statistical averages, and making it a wealthy versus poor battle - and let us face it, all of that reads a whole lot like good old class warfare - we might look into the differences between those people of modest means who are interested in art, and those of modest means who have no interest in art.

In addition, perhaps looking into the differences between wealthy people who are interested in art, and those who are not could be interesting. Because there are wealthy people who aren't interested.

Because if we just make this another have versus have not thing, it will deteriorate quickly.

You'd have to get a load of Bull manure for the last one.

You have an interesting outlook. People with money and apparently a lot of free time, are living in a utopia of stress free living.

Perhaps your outlook and narrative shows where your priorities are. As I noted before to others, are you prevented from accessing the wealth of art on the Internet?

In reality, it isn't that there are reasons to find people with incredible amounts of money to be problematic.

But it also becomes problematic when it becomes an obsession, when all you see is reasons to spread your hate and turn every topic into class warfare.

While it makes for narrative validation to yet again turn people with money into your mortal enemy, do you have a computer? Do you have a cell phone?

Tell me comrade, are you blocked from accessing art sites on them?

Comrade, do not make the mistake of thinking that you need huge amounts of spare time and wealth to appreciate art. You can do it on your digital devices instead of watching reality TV. And museums are all over the place. What is more, you can even make your own art.

But it is easier to look at everything as your class warfare outlook - Maybe class warfare is your art form.

As a person of the class that you hate, I make the time to engage with the arts. And I did it when I was poor too.

Not everything is about your class warfare, comrade.

This has my rapt attention! My hearing loss is accompanied by that nasty cocktail party effect. Along with tinnitus. My noggin processes all sounds equally, so the background noise is given the same importance as whoever I'm talking to. And that doesn't work.

Hearing aids can help a little, but after about 15 minutes, I'm exhausted. If this works, I'll sign right up.

Something similar happened with the Marcellus shale natgas drilling in my area. The gas companies improved the back roads they drove on, and in one case, repaved a whole length of highway after their very heavy equipment made a mess of it. The highway wasn't constructed for it (it was a road through an area where big trucks never went unless they took a wrong turn. The new length of highway is now sturdy, and very nice.

I actually had to be escorted through the area right after they wrecked the road. It was interesting to say the least. But as noted, they've owned their damage, and actually improved things.