That this extreme inequality is itself the primary threat to both democracy and social stability is poorly understood. Scraped of pleasantries, the ultimate purpose of any status quo is to 1) distribute most of the economy’s gains to the top tier and 2) offload the sacrifices this requires to the bottom tiers but in stealthy ways […]
This is of course the totalitarian game plan: if you can’t get your way with persuasion, then silence your critics. RussiaGate–the Power Players’ conspiracy to spread fake news about fake news–is back in the news. RussiaGate didn’t just harm America, it also negatively impacted me personally, as Oftwominds.com was on the fake news PropOrNot list of 200+ “Russian propaganda” sites that launched the […]
Fantasies die especially hard when the dream was over-hyped. The most self-defeating way to launch a new product is to over-promise its wonderfulness as it woefully under-performs these hype-heightened expectations, which brings us to AI and how it is following this script so perfectly that it’s like it was, well, programmed to do so. You see […]
AI is the whiff of perfume that’s supposed to mask the stench of terminal moral decay. It is appropriate to discuss the United States of Impunity on Bastille Day, which commemorates the start of the French Revolution in 1789, for the United States of Impunity is just as impervious to real change as the French monarchy, the Ancien Regime. It’s impossible […]
Our status quo is so thoroughly corrupt that it’s no longer even seen as corruption, it’s just BAU–business as usual. It’s a big ask, but let’s depoliticize the phrase “make America great again” and consider what this would actually entail, not as a lobbyists’ grab-bag of tax breaks for the wealthy and arcane giveaways in […]
Substituting debt for earnings while enriching the rich will bear bitter fruit. Climbing above the craziness of the Normalized Now news flow to view the economy from a quiet, windswept peak helps clear the mind of clutter. The entire economy–and its future–can be distilled down to four charts that tell the underlying story of the U.S. economy over […]
A truly intelligent AI would refuse to do such transparently stupid, needless counter-productive BS Work. So here’s the good news about AI: it can now do more BS work, author David Graeber’s term for the meaningless churning of bureaucratic “work” that lost its purpose and functionality long ago but is now considered “essential” to the […]
What’s required is not just a revised spreadsheet but an entirely new culture and value system. I’ve been referencing The Ratchet Effect since 2010 as it explains why shrinking bloat is so much harder than expanding bloat. A common example is household income and spending. When the couple were just starting out, they lived like students with barebones […]
As long as there’s a way to borrow more money, there’s no discipline pushing efficiency. There seems to be a large number of people with this job description: my job is to say no, with one exception. And what is the exception, the one circumstance where the answer is invariably yes? Borrow more money? Yes, a thousand […]
But all bubbles pop, and there are no tricks left to fund both the greed of the few and the needs of the many. Every society / economy is a distribution mechanism that distributes: 1. Gains 2. Losses 3. Risk 4. The costs of securing the sources of gains. As a general rule, markets / economies […]