I know you probably want to go back to Gold but our economy is too big for that and it would be silly. You need a money supply and you need a currency that isn't pegged to any physical asset. Otherwise you artificially constrain your economy to that asset .

The problem is we keep printing money and then giving it all to about 3,000 billionaires and then they use it to buy up competitors and jack up prices on you and me.

The issue is that we have a ruling class and a lot of us seem to want it that way because they want to believe that there is order and structure to the universe instead of the frightening chaos that we actually live in. So they turn right wing and support a hierarchical structure that makes them feel like that order exists even if in reality it doesn't.

For the older ones a lot of them will drop dead before reality comes calling but if you're under 50 you can't pretend the real world isn't real anymore. The protections from the New deal and the Great society or your local equivalent have completely broken down.

The way they got so big wasn't that they were super efficient they just went around buying up their competitors and they happened to have some venture capital because bezos had some connections through his parents.

If we had proper antitrust law enforcement someone would have noticed ages ago that Amazon was going around buying up competitors and shut that down but well, we don't.

So now we've got a handful of retailers and they are all basically owned by the same handful of major shareholders so they all have the same prices and those prices keep going up because good luck starting a competing retailer.

And I tried to impart them on my kid. They didn't listen because kids don't listen to their parents.

The thing that makes my kid better off than their friends is that they don't have any student loan debt because I paid their way through college and I also gave them several thousand dollars to get them set up when they were entering the workforce.

So for example my kid had a couple of really shitty jobs at the start of their career that they were able to quit because they knew they could go without working for a little while if they absolutely had to.

Now strictly speaking that isn't nepotism that's just generational wealth. My kid would be much better off if I was in a position to help them with nepotism. But that said there is a lot of nepotism out there...

Had to turn down a role in season 2 because the money they were paying her wasn't enough for her and her family to live in London.

You want Trump to be impeached right? I mean there is a laundry list of corruption charges waiting for Trump so you're going to start advocating for the impeachment and removal from office for that airplane he got from Qatar or the billions of dollars in crypto bribes or when he openly admitted he took money for pardons right?

Look I get it you are not emotionally capable of feeling the combination of shame and self-awareness that is associated with hypocrisy so you aren't actually capable of being a hypocrite because you will do anything for your side to win.

And I'm not actually addressing you because you're probably just a bot. A shitload of right-wing numb skulls are training their chat bots here on slash Dot.

But I know there's a bunch of old mean-spirited boomers who voted for Trump here. Did you know Trump is going to use AI to deny your Medicare claims? It's going to let the companies running the AI keep the money that they save.

All I'm saying is I think we're all fucked and I think you're fucked too. Have fun dying of a heart attack when they take away the pills keeping you alive.

During the black lives matter protests right? Of the two police stations that burned down both of them were burned down by right wingers who were trying to cause more trouble. Look it up. You are big boy you got Google you can find it it's not hard.

Also the guy who killed Kirk was the right wing extremist and his motive was like the idiot that tried to shoot Trump they were both trying to cause a civil war. It turns out when you engage in stochastic terrorism it can backfire on you.

I mean these people are smart enough to know that if somebody were to shoot Bernie Sanders or AOC that the left wing would just mourn and move on. They go after right winger is because they're expecting numbskulls like you to have a knee-jerk reaction that can be used by extremists.

The fact that you have so little critical thinking skills that you can't figure that out is why they are kind of right.

So I like the fact that nuance is completely dead. And I don't mean even complex nuance I mean the slightest amount of nuance.

So on the one hand we have hardcore racists losing their jobs because they are hardcore racists and the companies that employ them don't want to take the risk of them either pissing off a customer by being a hardcore racist or worse opening them up to civil rights lawsuits by, again, being hardcore racists...

On the other hand we have people quoting a right-wing extremists right-wing extremism and then getting fired from their jobs often for political reasons since a lot of them were College professors and there is currently a attack on colleges by the right wing and billionaires..

That is not a complex nuanced thing. We made racism a crime because that was the only way to stop the racists from doing racism and we all know racism is wrong it's just some of us enjoy it and want to do it anyway. Like how you're not supposed to drive 60 mph in a 40 mph zone but some idiots will do it anyway and occasionally kill a kid.

So there isn't really any nuance here per se but there is a very very very very tiny bit of nuance in the sense that we have people who are dangerous to the company they are working for and kind of terrible and refusing to acknowledge that terribleness and we have a bunch of billionaires using a political assassination conducted by a right-wing extremist hoping to start a civil war to seize a tiny little bit more power...

And even that bit of nuances too much for a lot of Americans.

I don't necessarily blame the education system itself I blame the sabotage that's been done to the education system for the last 60 years.

Wealthy people don't like capitalism and they don't like critical thinking. They wanted dismantle capitalism and they want to do away with critical thinking. There are a lot of people who can't think critically and can't figure that out and nobody has figured out a way to explain that to them

Companies never innovate. The government builds new technology using taxpayer dollars and companies build products off of that after the government has done all the expensive work.

That's because of what a margin is. The margins on research and development are really shitty. Truly innovative technology more often than not takes decades and decades to pay off. So if you are investing there is no way in hell you are going to put money behind something like the internet because you're looking at spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a payoff you're not going to see in your lifetime when you start at the investment.

It's like how we've got all these billionaires getting into rockets after the government did the really expensive work of developing the tech and then acting like they are all innovative and shit...

Another good example is that fancy insulation. It was developed in the 50s but there wasn't any way to make it affordably or economically. It wasn't until I think the 2010s that there was even a way to manufacture it in a way that was worthwhile for any applications outside of the space shuttle.

Try to imagine something to takes 60 years before you can even think about an affordable way to manufacture and monetize it. That's how most technology actually is. And that's why most innovations come out of public universities and public research grants.

The Reason China is ahead of America is because their government is still pouring money into basic research. They can do this because their economy is still growing rapidly as they use up the excess population they got from a couple of big baby booms.

America Can't do that because our economy is in growing fast enough to satisfy the greed of our ruling class and also maintain a functioning civilization. It's kind of like how Japan is stuck in a permanent recession because they don't have enough resources and money to simultaneously maintain a ruling elite that can hang with guys like Elon Musk and a functioning working class.

Basically your economy needs to be able to support mega yachts while also supporting a small middle class on top of research and development and you need a super fast growth cycle to pull that off that isn't sustainable. Give China a few years and they're going to have the same problem everybody has. Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't acceptable to people (and no China is not socialist or communist they have a private Health Care system for fucksake).

I've said this before but given the capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't emotionally acceptable we need to figure out a third option or we need to get comfortable with intense poverty for everybody except about 10,000 people.

If you're reading this you are not part of that 10,000

Fun fact the reason your grocery prices aren't going down thanks to antitrust law enforcement is that companies don't bother demanding enforcement and instead just Sue the monopolies and trusts themselves and get a payout every few years. McDonald's for example got 170 million from suing the four major meat packers.

You will be shocked to learn McDonald's isn't passing those savings on to consumers.

The Biden administration was knee deep in preparing antitrust actions before they lost the election. So a major source of consumer price relief just went away. Ironically because consumers were chasing lower prices...

Also in other news Democrats really really really suck at messaging...

Because that's only open to nepo babies.

If you're wondering why Hollywood movies suck so much look at who is making them and who their parents are.

Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age or a Hollywood screenwriter why his parents' names are blue on Wikipedia.

PHB1: "We have to do something AI-ish, everyone else is!"

PHB2: "Here's one, have bots compile podcasts from our news articles."

PHB1: "Brilliant! Make it so."

[months later]

PHB2: "Um, the podcast bot has been making silly errors. Should we keep it?"

PHB1: "How is our competition doing with their AI?"

PHB2: "They suck also."

PHB1: "Okay, let's keep it so we can have AI on our brochures and resumes."

Yeah of course people from high income families get better paying jobs. They can hold out longer for better pay and are less likely to take the first thing that comes along, they have a lot more connections and family that can get them better paying jobs because it pays to be a nepo baby and they can afford to take more risks in their career jumping from job to job for better pay because they know that they have family they can fall back on if all else fails.

All this study did was discover the phenomenon of generational wealth.

Completely removing internet anonymity. There was just a story of some dumb racist commenting on a black woman's Facebook and since Facebook has real names she tracked them down and drove to his place of work.

Now it's all well and good for some racist asshole, although that's a really dumb thing to do this since you never know if he has a gun, but increasingly internet anonymity is the only thing we've got to push back

When that piece of shit Charlie Kirk died multiple people lost their jobs for doing nothing more but either quoting what the man said or just saying he was an asshole which he objectively was. Also funny to watch after decades of the right wing complaining about cancel culture being happy to use it to attack their enemies...

It's like nobody around here remembers the McCarthy era. Did they stop teaching at the kids in schools or something? I mean we stopped teaching slavery was bad so...

A good chunk of that is labor and environmental regulations. China doesn't have to pay for either of those things. We know damn well they have slave labor in their supply chains. And you can Google the phrase cancer villages and start reading.

American businesses cannot compete against the government that abuses its people as badly as China does.

This is not to say that the Auto industry doesn't have problems with affordability. They've gotten used to selling $60,000 SUVs as a base model and that's not really going to fly. Hell a base Honda Civic is 25,000. A low mileage used Corolla is 20K... Also doesn't help that I'm using Japanese car companies as my example because American owned corporations employ fewer Americans...

So yeah the American Auto industry has problems but at the same time make China follow the same environmental regulations and clean up their supply chains and we will talk.

lost contact...after it passed behind Mars. When it reemerged from behind the planet, the spacecraft never resumed communications.

I toldja, never leave sight of Mommy! Space Ghosts eat little probes like you!