Thursday, December 2, 2021

America undone

Dystopia won’t be a destroyed city, or even a gritty one. It will be white, bright, and clean, just like your thoughts are mandated to be.

No one wants to work and you can’t blame them. The culture of easy money from the finance industry, tech, and celebrities has trickled down. The hard work ethos has some truth but more often than not it’s a tool to exploit people, and to divide those with no income and those with just slightly more. You can make 200k and you’re still closer to a McDonald’s worker and a serf compared to people with real money, the kind that comes from passive income investment properties and stocks. You don’t even need a good business or business model, by the time a company’s failing you could have already sold it in a public offering. And I know this sounds like ramblings in a goth’s scrapbook but I’m goth and this is correct. 

There’s inflation that’s knocked 96% of the dollar’s value in 100 years. The Fed admitted this week maybe it isn’t transitory. So it’ll get worse. It’s always been a way for governments to steal people’s labor by spending that money before it affects the average person. To be fair socialist countries seem to work the same, if not worse, because a power consolidation always forms and uniform pay doesn’t always incentivize innovation or harder work (an oversimplification). But even still, the median American pay is about $35,000. If Elon Musk for example was operating at 100x the mental and man-power of the average person by median wage this would be 3.5 million a year. Of course people are confused by his net worth not realizing it’s tied to liquid assets, people placing bets on Tesla as a future energy company, and pricing in absurd future earnings potential. If he sold and gave all his money away it would decrease in value during the sell off, not to mention due to its connection with indexes potentially trigger a collapse in the stock market. The fact an innocuous tweet can cost a company 100 billion dollars should indicate the market operates on hopes and dreams more so than any connection to reality. And that’s just one person.

As much as you can shit on Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg, at least they’re to some degree providing a service. If they paid their fair share the government would still be trillions in debt, because governments like seemingly any organization with big administrative teams get bloated and expensive when the people at the top are basically deciding their own salaries, hiring an assistant for their secretary’s dog-walker, and entertaining conflicts of interest to make more money through favors, stock market manipulation and insider trading. Really, how did Nancy Pelosi make $100 million on $200,000 in salary. Banks and hedge funds are the same thing, making some of the largest amounts of money providing the least amount of service. And money is so powerful, humans don’t matter anymore. Super computers and algorithms in technology by companies like BlackRock exist to price in, calculate, and profit from catastrophic events that haven’t happened yet. They have 9 trillion in assets. I believe this AI is in charge of society (see Hypernormalization documentary) along with banks, money picks presidents, with leaders being mostly performative and symbolic at this point.

Winner takes all capitalism is a nightmare. China is our competitor because they have cheap labor and complete control of their country, plus they steal all our intellectual property at will and modify it with their spyware. This gives them a huge advantage because they get all the data that would be highly illegal here to make their decisions, and means they will be ahead of the United States in terms of data and information, and through this erosion of privacy better able to implement dangerous, power-consolidating technology like social credit scores (see Whitney Webb’s work). What happens if China has more cheap labor and less regulation to throw into innovation during the AI arms race. People want limitless clean energy but what happen when a country with a cheap factory force creates endless, deadly solar-powered drones that blot out our skies. Technologies are dangerous without some universal moral backbone which our world is far from.

So to go back to something basic, I don’t know what the perfect answer is. But the fact we can’t figure out something as important as healthcare. And this shows itself because even during the pandemic many prominent health officials and organizations both lied to people and seemed to have no idea what to do during a pandemic. What were the people at the CDC doing for the last few decades if the emergency response was handled so poorly. Nothing was done to calm or universally inform the public. Key positions and recommendations were changed to and from several times, despite precedents for pandemics existing in Asia. The Trump press hearings were a shit show. Without a fix to this you’re going to have more societal derangement, the lack of fairness that drives people even further to mental illness, more Mathboi Flies driving into people and children.

And largely this is an effect of greed, a pathological desire for more. Like in this probably fake anecdote, JP Morgan in response to Tesla’s free energy device says, “If it’s free, where do we put the meter?” I don’t know but if we had more energy we would have progressed more quickly and JP Morgan maybe wouldn’t be dead or would have at least got to use the internet. Instead people go for the satisfying short-term, and would prefer the illusion of power over something or someone to inhabiting a better world where they are not the star player.

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