> but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them.
In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.
> The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.
And herein lies the real, consitent, and real anxiety among the youth - leading to lower birth rates. I myself feel the same.
And then I look at the elected corrupt pedophiles, and there is just no hope.
What strikes me most with this quote is that (consistent) labour is very much a defining, if not the defining parameter in all our cultures and the author highlights this later on with data from China etc. I feel we might have a problem with the emphasis on that value in the future. If we think automation through to it's extreme and accept a growing world population and worsening climate effects, we've got to shift cultural values accordingly or face severe societal upheavals. I don't have a point here, just gave me stuff to think about.
Hmm, I'm not sure about the link to lower birth rates. Birth rates have been falling in e.g. Western and Northern Europe for a long time, despite strong social safety nets.
While I think the link between birth rates declining and automation does make sense, it will take quite sometime for this to verifiable as this is a somewhat recent anxiety. The reason for the trend that we have seem over the last decades seem to mostly stem from lower childhood mortality rates, women having access to the job market, and perhaps to a lesser extent climate anxiety.
> By 2026, Nvidia was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about AI. One reason they were excited was Nvidia's revenue growth. So they invested in new AI startups and cloud hyperscalers. The startups and hyperscalers then used the money to buy Nvidia chips. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Nvidia, and further convinced investors AI was worth investing in.
Fixed this for anyone still not processing the bubble.
While I don't 100% agree with his policies, I cannot be more excited for someone completely opposite of the corrupt establishment Republicans and Democrats.
I was sold when he was willing to back down on some of his own views publicly, admitting publicly that he was wrong on some things. That kind of admission and honesty is so refreshing.
Complete opposite of Trump, MAGA, and constant lies. Kudos NYC! Time for a new era.
Also, he deserves credit for not backing down. A major push calling you a pro-9/11 jihadist? Release an ad speaking Arabic two days before the election.
> For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.
This problem is unrelated to datacenters. The datacenter boom has created demand in markets outside New England, which is seeping into New England. It only got compounded by lack of natural gas.
> At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
Mass save is actually a great program. Mass houses are old, creaky, and lacking insulation. Mass save let these things be upgraded at a lower price burden to the masses. If you are talking about heat pumps, heat pumps can have backup furnaces - you could use natural gas if you wanted. The idea behind a heat pump was to have it work with solar, wind, and other low cost energy sources.
Then trump came in and shot all these other sources at gunpoint. And you are seeing it in your bills.
Libertarians and Conservatives can all wish for a smaller government and slash things apart in America - it's not going to change the fact that America is a corrupt socialist country which runs semis, bails out billionaires, subsidizes farmers, and uses taxpayer money to enrich business owners.
The only difference between American socialism and Argentinian socialism was that Argentinian socialism pretended to help the poor but America doesn't even pretend to help the poor.
Snap, Chip, ssi, ssdi, medicaid, medicare (since recipients don't pay their way), ACA subsidies, progressive income tax (half of us pay no federal tax at all), 1-12 schooling/daycare (often with free lunch, sometimes also free breakfast)
Big brothers/sisters, salvation army, habitat for humanity, red cross, food banks too numerous to list, Shriners hospitals
Oh, forgot about the billions Los Angeles has spent on homeless housing
A Socialist would argue the private money spent use to the private charities you just listed should have gone to the government through taxation originally, and that the government should provide services and a safety net for all instead.
> Snap, Chip, ssi, ssdi, medicaid, medicare (since recipients don't pay their way), ACA subsidies, progressive income tax (half of us pay no federal tax at all), 1-12 schooling/daycare (often with free lunch, sometimes also free breakfast)
Literally the things held hostage for politics right now? How can you claim America helps the poor when we are literally living a government shutdown where poor are held hostage?
> Big brothers/sisters, salvation army, habitat for humanity, red cross, food banks too numerous to list, Shriners hospitals
These are not government. This is about people helping people. Some American people are helpful to each other. But the societal unit of government isn't - aka - there are people who don't want to help others at all.
> America at least "pretends"
American people try really hard - especially in blue states. But American government system holds people hostage. The work requirements, the constant paperwork, the sudden ineligibility - this is all uniquely American - designed to not disburse the benefits that people may be entitled to. America has the pretence of programs but if they truly wanted to help the poor, they'd make the programs truly usable - not hostage to political processes and eligibility corner cases.
Every country is more than its government. The original assertion was that America doesn't pretend to care about the poor.
Apparently, the assertion should have been "America doesn't care about the poor as much as I feel they should and no evidence you bring contrariwise will change my mind".
It reminds me of the houses in the gated communities with "no borders" signs in the manicured lawns.
How do you define socialism? I don't believe that we the people or the state collectively own the means of production in any major industry. Private ownership by capitalists is still the dominant economic system in the US.
The US literally purchased shares of Intel - thus owning means of production.
The US also bails out a group of people all the time. The group is called the rich.
Furthermore, it subsidizes select groups like big ag.
Except these, the US is predominantly capitalistic but so was Argentina. Their populace was fed up with the pretense of helping the poor while bailing out oligarchs. America doesn't seem to pretend to help the poor. Poors are undesirables.
Owning part of one company in one sector is not socialism unless you think nearly every country in the world since the invention of the limited company is socialist?
“Bailing out the rich” isn’t socialist is it? What do you think “socialist” means?
I don’t think you understand why the word “socialist” scares so many people. It’s not a word you can just slap on anything to make it “bad”, many people are actually scared about the underlying ideas not the word.
Some Americans seem to just think socialism=bad “because the CIA and the NYT does propaganda”. You may think America is bad and I may agree with you, that doesn’t make it socialist.
In the GDR you couldn’t start a private enterprise without a license. Any enterprise doing anything.
In socialist Burma, there were no privately-owned factories _at all_.
In Czechoslovakia the constitution banned a private company from employing anyone other than the owner of the company.
In Soviet Russia you needed a permit to move city. If you were a farmer you were unlikely to get that permit. You work for the collective farm, the government set the price they would pay you for your produce, and you couldn’t move city to a new job.
I hope these examples show why “the us government is socialist partly because it owns shares in Intel and partly because it’s a lender-of-last-resort for rich people” sounds fatuous.
I'll tell you why you are wrong - you are wrong because you think that real socialism is only one that maps exactly to a prior example. You think it can't be real socialism if there is even one edge case that differs from a pre-existing example.
Your argument is a variant of the straw man fallacy. Look it up.
I think myself and the other poster are mainly taking issue in your use of a specific term "socialism." I think you could argue that if the US owned 51% stake in Intel, you could argue that would be socialism. I've heard the term "socialize" applied in similar conversations such as "privatize the profits, socialize the losses," which I believe is a more accurate rephrasing of your original point.
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