Stagflation is the polite word. The reality? Much darker. We may be entering the early stages of an inflationary depression.
— Marcelo Cardenal⚡ (@MarcelCardenal) August 23, 2025
Yes, we are. It’s here and it’s going to get so much worse.
Just takes a while to fully actualize in an economy as large and varied as the US’s.
Here’s a stat nobody wants to say out loud…
If you’re laid off after 50, there’s a 1 in 4 chance you will never work again.
Not retire.
Not take a break.
Never. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Y7WhHZHQlY— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) August 24, 2025
That’s pretty brutal, but about what I expected.
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being
— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) August 22, 2025
Cohesive, coherent nations are probably the only structure we can support with current minds and sociocultural development that can provide something like general welfare benefits to the downtrodden.
Anything else is leftist fantasyland crap. They destroy themselves with worship of third-world immigration and clownish allegiance to Hamas and the like.
I think this gloss is basically correct. It will not get better from here; tech is gonna be devalued and destroyed. It’s already occurring.
Agreed, Baumol’s is not an adequate explanation; it only accounts for about 20% at most of this massive change. Not nearly enough, in other words.
Essentially, we just don’t want to offer the services and benefits we could vastly more easily provide now. Like most things in this world, it’s a choice. And we choose not to do so. For no good reason, either. Nearly all of what we once were able to do as a civilization we could do now and it would benefit everyone. But in the descent into zero sum thinking that has occurred for an enormous variety of reasons, people are convinced it’s more worthwhile to hurt their neighbor rather than to help them.
This, they incorrectly believe, will raise them up. The reality is that it drags them both down. As we’ll see soon enough.
Why Peak China may finally have arrived.
Agreed. Both China and America are on the decline. The world will be very different in a few decades in ways we cannot yet imagine.
FYI an uncertain economy is even worse for investment and future growth than a merely bad economy.
A bad economy is predictable. Uncertainty, however, is economic death. And Trump is overloading us with uncertainty. In fact, providing nothing but. This will result in very bad things. Already is, really, but unless an actual nuclear attack or tsunami hits economic headwinds generally take 6-9 months to have much noticeable effect.
We’re in the winds now. Storm is coming; depression is on the way. Just give it time.
Contra the Boomers’ bullshit beliefs, housing even by the fairest of measures is much, much more expensive than it used to be. Also, that does not include taxes, insurance and maintenance, all of which I believe have in most places exceeded wage growth and general inflation.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens to the economy when the inevitable AI crash occurs. The economy is already exceedingly weak and teetering on the edge of or already in recession.
The AI bubble bursting will probably usher in the depression that’s on the way.
Does the majority of people believe piracy is morally okay?
Piracy is not only morally okay, it is a moral obligation. It is the only way to preserve or own anything these days. If you aren’t pirating it, someone at any time could alter the media without your knowledge or remove access to it altogether. And you’d have no recourse.
And yes, it does happen.
Piracy is the only moral and correct action in the current corporate climate and cultural environment. Anything else is unethical and against human flourishing.
New tariffs snap into effect, raising import taxes to highest level since Great Depression.
The good news is, we’re getting another one of those too! Great Depressions, that is.
A depression is still on the way.
Inevitable now, and has been for months. Really, since the election. Get ready.
Europe has even more potentially society-ending challenges ahead than the United States, despite the creeping anti-science authoritarianism here at home. Among them:
1) Demographic crisis. Shared with the rest of the world, of course. And no, immigration won’t solve it. Their more-generous social safety net is going to need some re-vamping that will cause massive social unrest.
2) Islamization. Once a society becomes ~10% Muslim, it’s enough to throw it into chaos and often dissolve the existing culture. Many EU countries are getting close to this threshold or have exceeded it. And no matter what idiot feminists think, this will be very, very bad for women there.
3) Russia. It’ll be invading soon. Europe is not even close to any kind of ready.
4) Immigration of unattached economic anti-western migrant men. Even apart from Islamization, this is a huge issue and will be getting much worse.
5) AMOC collapse. This will make a lot of Europe a whole lot colder on average while having minimal effect on the US.
The US and China are best-positioned to endure and even prosper here. That is, assuming we in the US don’t strangle ourselves to death, which we are merrily on the way to doing by killing science, research and clean energy.
But Europe is pretty much fucked no matter what.
Correct. That is how it was for thousands of years and there is never any going back. All fantasy.
Climate change is real. Of course.
As with all the other problems we’ve faced as a species, it’s just something we need to deal with. We’ll have to use tech to manage and ameliorate it; it is not something we need to dismantle our entire civilization to atone for.
Doofus degrowther nonsense is gonna get us all killed.