(continued from previous post on thread)

This topic is very apropos in the current market. We may be about to enter another recession, perhaps a depression. 401K's are down. So the claim that we could do better investing on our own is uncertain, but is again certainly going to test a lot of ordinary citizens, postponing their ability to retire.

And I emphasize that the choice f when to retire is not just a whim. Even ignoring age discrimination, age wears on a person, and some people do physical jobs (read: ACTUAL hard work, as opposed to metaphorically hard work done by rich executives) that leave them depleted. So delayed retirement is not just an inconvenience, it is in some cases torture and in some cases impossible.

But even as we are potentially entering a depression, the billionaires are salivating. They are looking forward to "buying low". They're treating this roller coaster as a buying opportunity. They plan to get rich on this depression. Even as others suffer and probably many die. They are gleeful.

This is the time when Social Security should be doubling down and assuring people it will increase benefits to cover rising costs (although it wouldn't be terrible if we just impeached the President who's causing those rising costs artificially with tariffs that really no sane business people think are a good idea). Because Social Security is again a contract with the population about what our priority is. And if we need more money, we should be bumping the tax on those gleeful about what a great buying opportunity this is.

They, the rich, would probably whine that this singles them out. That people are jealous. No one should stand for such rhetoric. The ones making the noise did not get their power by dealing honorably with us citizens. This is not jealousy speaking, it is a desire for justice. Be glad I'm not suggesting (as some are) that we just eat the rich and be done with it. Proper taxation of accumulated wealth (not just income) works for me.

No one needs that much money anyway. It's CLEAR from their observed behavior that one can only buy so many gold toilet seats before one starts to wonder what the point of excess riches is, and really it seems the only thing that one can find to spend such wealth on is buying governments. And then, apparently, running them badly and cruelly. No, I'm not going to feel sorry about suggesting taxation.

2/2 (probably the end)

#SocialSecurity #Privatization #USPolitics #Politics #SocialContract #justice #inequality #poverty #SafetyNets #tariffs #401K #RetirementSavings #retirement #AntiPoverty #dignity

@Snoro

We have two incompatible notions of the idea of "investing". One is to make money. The other is to put resource behind something we want to happen. If one blindly believes the capitalist premise that money is proportional to what people aspire to or are grateful for, it's easy to believe that the world wants the monetary outcomes these companies produce, and so must want the world these things collectively create.

It all goes wonky as a world view if one stops and realizes that what capitalism really brings us is a world where sociopathy--the single-minded pursuit of monetary profit at the expense of all other possible virtues--sells, and where efficient sociopaths therefore rise in the ranks, and so also a world where investing money has to choose between hitching one's wagon to that sociopathy and making a good monetary return or putting one's money into things that improve the world but may or may not make much profit doing it, or might even lose against the sociopaths but will at least be something to be proud of.

Easiest to see with kids. We invest in their future by educating them and spending time with them. Will that turn a profit? Who knows? But who cares? Most of us, hopefully, don't measure success of their kids by whether having them is net financially positive. But we do so for our other investments. Except for family, and people we care about, we call things good investments if and only if they turn a profit. Saving the world but incurring a net expenditure of money in the process is called a bad investment.

To pick something topical, Social Security and Medicare, among other social safety nets, are seen by some as frilly extras. The term entitlement has been carefully chosen and managed to corral us into thinking these a net drain on society. But their hope is to corner us into thinking we must invest in the sociopathy world if we want to live comfortably.

If instead these programs assured we would not fall to ruin, we could more comfortably choose to invest in the world as a whole, in the environment, in institutions we respect, not on the basis of who can outsell who by the most ruthless means, but by who joins us in a world vision.

Yes, safety nets are about individual human dignity, but that dignity in the aggregate is not mere charity. It moves the needle on who we can afford to be in life, on whether societally we can afford a world where people are kind or can afford to care about avoiding human extinction.

The sociopaths want us to think we can't afford to invest in, to spend money on, the safety and health and happiness of ourselves and the world, but only because if they can get us to believe that, most of the world's money, resource and hope will flow to the few of them and they'll be able to delude themselves into thinking that's because the world reveres them and wanted them to succeed in proportion to that windfall and at the expense of the rest of us.

But we CAN afford to invest in such goodness for ourselves and the world. More to the point, we cannot afford not to.

#capitalism #LateStageCapitalism #insurance #oil #FossilFuels #investment #politics #USPolitics #sociopaths #sociopathy #Medicare #SocialSecurity #SafetyNets #profit

@climatebrad

It feels to me like "build more housing" can't be the answer. You almost might as well say "make more land". It's not a durable solution. And it doesn't address the many other aspects of society that need to be addressed. Jobs food commerce in general, schools, the nature and flow of community itself.

A favorite quote comes to mind.

"Better implies different."
--Amar Bose, at an MIT Enterprise Forum event

(He was trying to explain to sales people at stores that would sell Bose speakers why they had to make changes in how they set them up. "Couldn't they just do what they'd always done?" The people would ask. They were used to that and did not want to change. He was trying to explain succinctly why you can't just radically improve something and leave it the same at the same time. So he, explained, that slogan had emerged.)

Surely higher population density at some point means using existing resources differently. I'm not pushing an agenda here, but I am observing that higher density feels less compatible within every person for themselves and traditional-ownership / rent-taking-for-profit model. Surely that brings a 2-tiered citizenship and breeds discontent/danger as inequality simmers.

In computer science, we talk about building systems that scale, planning for higher traffic. This could really be done in a system that did not plan for scale without the architecting the system entirely, and I've even seen some of pine that every factor of 10 in scale requires a redesign.

Sometimes the architectural plan is indeed to just add servers, but that has to be planned in, and there has to be a source of servers, and the system architecture has to be structured such that in the new model, all the necessary flows will happen correctly and resources won't be cut off from each other or too hard to access or too expensive.

"Build more housing." does not sound like the kind of answer I could give in a job interview and expect to be hired, with the hiring manager saying "this person has clearly demonstrated their understanding of operating at scale". The answer is not of a shape that seems right to me, nor does it offer sufficient detail.

A lot of capitalism seems to operate on a theory that you just twist some knobs and everything will just happen right without coordination. I think this is less and less true as either populations grow larger or resources grow smaller or resources become more stressed.

I did not write the accompanying article specifically to address this issue, and yet I feel like it says some important additional things I might say here if I were to ramble on. It is not a complete discussion of scale, but more discussion of why I don't think the traditional ways of thinking about just turning a few knobs is likely to keep working.

Losing Ground in the Environment
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html

It also just not addressed the issue of urgency, and the way in which urgency materially changes the set of usable solutions. I did try to address that issue here:

The Politics of Delay
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-politics-of-delay.html

#climate #ClimateMigration #SystemsThinking #scaling #ScalingSoftware #Community #Housing #LateStageCapitalism #capitalism #population #collapse #inequality #sustainability #SocialPolicy #SafetyNets