this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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No one should have this privilege to begin with. Society should work to create a livable experience for everyone instead of constantly making comfort and stability an exclusive club.
For much of history, comfort and stability wasn't available to anyone, at least a large portion of society today in developed counties could claim that (anything lower middle class and up).
Things could certainly be better, I'm just pointing out that things are a lot better than many doomers claim. This lady is certainly super entitled, but the fact that the average person can afford to fly across the world is pretty awesome.
The rich are constantly clawing more of that comfort away from the “more fortunate” middle class you speak of as well as the poor just to add to a score card. Every step of improvement is against their lust for all to be their slaves in one way or another. The more complacent and content people are with their gains, the more the powerful will take. The doomers as you call them understand that all gains are tenuous. The rich are parasites.
That doesn't match the stats I see, which is a pretty constantly increasing standard of living for the average person. Real median household income in the US had been consistently rising (here's a bit longer term data). If the rich really are taking from everyone, surely we'd see those numbers go down, no?
Yeah, it's not great that some people are obscenely wealthy, but that doesn't mean the rest of us are getting poorer, we're also getting richer, just more slowly than the very rich.
Wage stagnation is completely fucked, though, and housing and rent prices are shooting up at absurd rates all over the place. Every year comes a shitty raise that can’t keep up and companies pat themselves on the back for being so generous while their employees are effectively poorer than they were the year previous.
None of that talks about the fact that we can take care of everyone but the rich are hell-bent on taking as much as they can regardless of what it does to others. The true reason the US is the worst country on earth, in my opinion, is because there’s no reason why they need to be such a flaming dumpster fire full of dogshit but they are anyway just so a handful of the worst people in history can make little bit more money.
They're actually stabilizing and coming down a little in some areas, so I think we're likely to see a bit of a correction now that construction seems to be catching up with demand.
But housing is also a major factor in inflation, which is why I linked inflation-adjusted figures. That data shows that wages are rising slowly relative to the prices of things. Some things will increase in price faster than others, so housing has been outpacing other things people spend money on. All that comes out in the wash in the averages.
Right, and I agree with you.
My point is that despite all that, the average person is better off each year than they were the previous. There are obviously ups and downs, and each person is affected differently, but the median person generally does better each year. It's easy to lose sight of that when we see prices going up w/ inflation, but it tends to work out.
It's also easy to become complacent looking at small increments of gain while the wealthy consolidate power over international governments. The Trump administrations alone is a drastic ramping up of corruption and infliction of pain for regular people. The "big beautiful bill" is going to hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways. Many western nations like the UK and Australia are following suit on some levels. The rich have gained astronomically more wealth and power than the majority at levels higher than the gilded age. With AI and robots making such advances and that technology being firmly in their control, it's more important than ever for people to stand in solidarity and push harder for a more equitable society. There's a reason social media has been so weaponized with propaganda to divide us. Things are at a huge inflection point in history. The next couple decades are going to be very challenging for the majority of people.
Agreed, and if opinion polls are to be believed, people are noticing.
I obviously haven't read through the whole thing, but it's honestly a lot more tame than I expected. It's still horrible, but I'm much more worried about what Trump is doing outside of legislation, like messing with tariffs and deporting people.
I don't see what AI and robots have to with anything. Are you worried they're going to take everyone's jobs?
This sounds like the same FUD every time there's a big tech change. People were worried the cotton gin would, automobile, and computers would kill jobs, yet here we are with relatively stable employment figures. Yes, it'll cause change, but at the end of the day, businesses need consumers, so it's in their interest to keep money circulating.
I agree we need to make changes, but that's completely separate from recent innovations. I think we need something like UBI (my preference is to replace Social Security with a negative income tax), not because I'm worried about mass unemployment, but so we can increase innovation. Many people don't pursue their ideas because they're worried about putting food on the table.
Things are always at an inflection point. I'm more worried about the protectionist BS countries are doing today than anything involving AI.
AI will replace a lot of jobs and with the active weakening of social safety nets it will cause people to suffer unless something like UBI is implemented. The rich are working against any social safety nets and are making advances in weakening those programs. They are also hurting public education, public information systems, grant programs, and anything not geared toward private profit. The protectionism you mention is also causing a brain drain and labor shortage in the US through mass deportation efforts.
Robots are being used for war more and more - there are major advancement in this field right now. Right now one of the biggest things holding back crack downs on protests is that soldiers are people who can disobey orders and most don't want to hurt their neighbors. If robots, which will be controlled by rich defense contractors as things stand, advance to a stage where they can be fully implemented in the field without need of operators - what is to stop them from being used on the population if protests occur contrary to wishes of the powerful. That's why I am worried about robot advancement with a society where power dynamics are so skewed away from the majority.
The rich being in charge of allocation of resources through investment has only helped society in the ways they could also make it enriched themselves. Using the whims of narcissists to guide the allocation of resources in society has slowed advancement, not fueled it. It has slowed the addressing of the climate crisis - which fuel companies originally tried to hide, then created campaigns to misinform, and now outright bought politicians to slow the needed transitions. Private companies slowed advancement of the technology through proprietary focus over open source collaboration. Computer technology and the internet was built on public money and the wealthy did more to gate keep it for profit than they did to advance it. They've worked to hoard information in paid silos instead of widely distributing it in the interest of profit over advancement. Just because advancement happened, doesn't attribute it to the rich. They only found ways to bend it to a capitalist system for profit. Open source projects prove the advances would have happened either way. I whole heartedly agree UBI is the way to go to keep us focused on advancement over this rat race capitalism that is mostly extractive from labor.
I'm not saying you are wrong entirely, things have improved in a lot of ways, but the power through wealth and technology the rich have been able to attain in the last 50 years is like nothing humanity has dealt with before. Mass surveillance alone makes resistance more dangerous for those who participate. Technology in the wrong hands has been used to manipulate markets, manipulate elections, manipulate society, and move society away from democratic rule. I'm not saying society hasn't faced other technological challenges in the past, but you are clearly a smart person, you have to see that the scale and connectedness of today's tech is a greater challenge than early industrialization or cotton gins. It allows for greater concentration of power with greater control of that power. Capitalism is just a bad system because it gives too much control to a minority of individuals over society. It needs to be in the hands of democratic choice, not the whims of individual self interest.
It'll also create jobs. That's what new technologies do. We've been using robots in the auto manufacturing industry, which replaced lower skill (and lower paid) jobs with higher skill (and higher paid) jobs.
If we ever get to the point where AI is more than a meme, in software development this means we'd end up with more architects and fewer "code monkeys," so instead of working with syntax, they'd work with systems diagrams, and software engineering might look more like how CPU design works today (nobody works with individual gates anymore).
Like other times in history, the transition may be painful. Those who adapt will thrive, and those who don't will chase fewer and fewer jobs.
I assume you're talking about the current administration in the US here. I think most of this is temporary since it's largely being done via EO instead of legislation. Some of it I agree with, most of it I don't.
Yeah, it makes war into even more of an economic battle than it was previously. I'm on the fence on the one, on the one hand, it should mean less death, but on the other hand, ruthless countries could use it to terrorize innocent people. But they do that regardless (see Russia in Ukraine and Israel in Gaza).
Presumably the rule of law.
Eh, the climate crisis is a lot more controversial. Even if we agree on what the solution is, the economic impact needs to be considered to not ruin economies during the transition. Also, the countries most interested in making changes are not the main contributors, so why ruin your economy if your competitor won't and will end up winning in trade due to less climate investment.
While I'm a huge proponent of FOSS, I don't think this is true. Most contributions to large FOSS projects are by full time employed devs, say people at RedHat, Google, etc.
Profit motive does a lot to focus development on things that sell. And companies like saving money, so a lot of propriety projects use FOSS components and even upstream changes to reduce their own workload.
FOSS projects are generally developed by a for profit company and released for the community to maintain. Look at projects like React, it started as an in-house tool and then generalized to something the community could use and maintain. Most of the more popular projects started that way.
I support something like UBI to encourage more entrepreneurialism from those who don't have the skills needed to secure investment. I'd like to lower the bar for people to pursue their passions so we get even more cool stuff.
Capitalism is at the heart though, and profit is usually a necessary ingredient to turn an idea into a product. Without that motivation, it'll remain a perennial personal project and likely go nowhere.
I don't think that's true. Look at Standard Oil and other mega companies of the past, and look at kings and emperors before that.
I think it's pretty much the same as always, just with bigger markets and more transparency.
I don't think that's true. Democracy sounds like a great idea until you take a closer look. At one extreme is Hitler, and then there are people like Trump that are somewhere on the bad part of that spectrum.
I think government works best when it's separate from the economy. You think things are bad now? Let people like Musk and Bezos run the government and we'll see what bad really looks like. Or even worse, give Trump complete control of the economy.
People will elect populists, and populists are the worst people to run an economy.
I think politicians should be as removed from the economy as possible. Limit what they can do and you'll limit the effectiveness of lobbying efforts. Things like antitrust shouldn't be defined by legislatures, but by juries setting precedent. Have the legislature lay the ground rules and courts flesh out minutia. Instead of that, we currently have executives setting policy, and that's worse than both.
Democracy works well on smaller scales, like in a company. For anything larger than that, we need representatives, and the larger scale that gets, the more likely they'll give in to corruption.
Agree to disagree then. Even your answers show economies leave people behind in favor of profits which are entirely made up structures. I believe the benefit of people and society should supersede the power of individuals and capitalism will always give too much power to minority interest. Rich people show time and again they don't care what happens to the rest of us if it means they thrive. Capitalism rewards our worst instincts of greed and ruthless competition. You can't expect a system that exalts the most ruthless actors to take care of those who don't have the same advantages. Socialism and collective action has always been the main source of gains for the majority in capitalist systems. You just have to look at the early labor movements of the early industrial age to show how ruthless the owner class is towards it's workers when worker well being goes against their profit lust.
I guess we're opposites then.
I believe in prioritizing personal liberty, which means encouraging our worst instinct of greed and channeling it for the betterment of society. I believe wealth redistribution needs to be a core part of that to help those who fall through the cracks and ensure everyone can live with dignity, but that inequality is essential to properly motivate people to be productive.
I believe in georgist and related tax policies, meaning:
Basically, you pay for the resources you exclude others from using, and you return the majority of it upon death. Society as a whole owns those resources, so this works as a form of rent paid to the people.
Government regulation should be minimal, and governments should only step in for things like anti-trust. Most "regulations" should be precedent established by the courts with a jury, whether through lawsuits against individuals within a corporation or the corporation as a whole (latter should be more rare).
I believe this system does a good job at correcting the negatives of capitalism while preserving its benefits.
It takes a simple google search to show how bad those statistics are being collected today in the US. Both Trump administrations actively attacked funding and reporting of these statistics which hastened their existing decay. The powerful have a lot to gain from stats coming off sunnier than reality. Plus it doesn't account for cost of living expenses or how income is distributed very well at all. It's a blunt instrument that does little to show how the bottom half of American wage workers are actually struggling. I'm glad you seem to be doing well enough to defend this system, but most of the people I know are barely getting by and have nothing for retirement. If you look at generational wealth, the majority of younger Americans have far less wealth than our parents or grandparents did at our age. Fewer own houses or have the stability of a large savings account for emergencies. The costs of essentials like food, housing/rent, insurance (health/property,etc), and just about everything has gone up at a much higher clip than wages. The trends are going downward and it is a direct result of billionaires influence through "charitable foundation" spending and dark money. Read the book "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer and "The Network State" and other plans by the ultra rich to take more money and power from the majority and government assistance. Any gains regular people have made have come from collective action and technology inevitably creating some surplus, not trickle down from the rich. With climate change causing further disasters as insurance companies raise rates and deny coverage - it will only exasperate the issues. Not to mention the inevitable climate refugees that will be created. Trends may have improved at a macro level from industrialization over the last half a millennia, but the last 50 years have not been kind to poorer Americans.
Most of that data was collected outside of Trump's terms, either under Biden or Obama, and the trend is consistent.
It uses "real" dollars, which accounts for inflation. So yes, it does.
Income distribution is irrelevant here, I'm looking at median incomes rising over time, relative to inflation. Musk or Bezos making billions doesn't skew these numbers since they're not mean numbers (average).
I could probably dig up some stats that break it down by income percentile, but I'm worried you'll just reject it because it doesn't fit your worldview. If you provide some evidence to back up your claims (not just income gap, that's well known, but that people are becoming worse off), I'll go dig through the data and see what I can find. But "things are actually getting better" don't make headlines, so there's a lot of rage bait to dig through.
Anecdotes aren't statistics.
If you go back 50 years, people still didn't save enough for retirement. Pensions largely filled in the gap there, but a lot of people still fell through the cracks. That's largely not an income problem and more a priorities problem. Show me someone who doesn't have enough for retirement and I can show you someone with a similar income who did. Even people with huge incomes often live paycheck to paycheck.
Obviously individual circumstances differ, but individual circumstances don't define trends.
Do you have sources to back any of this up?
That certainly happens, but stories like this are mostly rage bait.
Do you think companies suddenly got greedy recently? They've always been greedy, and have been screwing people over since time immemorial.
The reason things get more expensive isn't because some capitalist decided to suddenly become more greedy, it's because of supply and demand.
Things shot up in price during COVID for a number of reasons:
Yet people blame "those greedy capitalists" when really it's consumer behavior largely driving up prices.
When the cause of higher prices is resolved, prices tend to return to normal. For example:
I don't know what you mean by "trickle down from the rich," but things like technological change is funded by the rich. Reagan was certainly an idiot here, my point is merely that things get better partially because of investments by the rich. That generally doesn't mean you make more money, but that you get more for your money (e.g. everyone seems to have smartphones now vs almost nobody 20 years ago).
This doesn't seem related, not sure why you bring it up. If anything, it'll create jobs since we'll need people to build dikes, rebuild coastal homes, etc, at the cost of reduced GDP since it's not actually productive work.
Afaik, no time is kind to poorer people. But I firmly believe poorer people are better off today than they were 50 years ago.