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.
This is a great example of a very clever person using their sharpness to deceive. This piece is using a lot of econ (emphasis on the “con”) terms and pseudointellectualism to sneak in NIMBYism. Essentially, this entire argument is purpose-built to say: We shouldn’t build anything because landlords will inevitably charge the monopoly price no matter what.
I’m sure someone proposed building an apartment complex in his neighborhood. So now he’s upset because his house price might fall and writes this article “proving” it’s a bad idea.
Meanwhile, when Austin built more new apartments than anywhere else in the country, rents fell a large amount. Shocking.
All of this is a result of NIMBYs and the left utterly despising the Klein & Thompson Abundance book. It really gave them quite a scare and bedevils their dreams. Just the thought of someone slightly poorer than them living anywhere nearby keeps them up at night.
So they write clownish sophistry like the article to which I linked.
Economists attempt to deny this, work around it, lie about it and employ odd circumlocutions, but many of our problems — and even more of the problems young people have — stem from this simple truth: housing just costs much, much more than it used to.
Deny that and turn your whole profession into a sick joke. Which is what economists have done.
I think that's right.
Basically, I think decarbonization is often sold as "Let's build a future that's electric and clean, to keep the world from becoming a hellscape," and I think that message holds limited political appeal.
The message should be: We can build a future that's…
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 15, 2025
The liberal degrowth heavy breathing about all they will “have” to take away you from was always doomed to fail. To be fair, there are a lot of right-wing degrowthers now too. Evil no matter which side they are on.
AI isn’t coming for jobs.
It already came.
👇👇👇👇Microsoft – $500M saved, 9,000 cut
Amazon – Jassy: “AI = less jobs”
Meta – Restructuring tied to 'AI'
Google – Hundreds laid off for “efficiency”
IBM – 94% of HR replaced
Deloitte – Audit + tax? Now AI
UnitedHealth -…
— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) July 14, 2025
The economist and Reddit conventional wisdom is that AI is not replacing any jobs.
But of course it is. And will replace many more. If you listen to normies and econs, you’ll always be 2-20 years behind the times. Don’t do it.
This contradiction is impossible to ignore nearly 2 weeks since the Microsoft layoffs…
Let's recap:
– Cut ~18,000 workers
– Saved $500M by automating sales + support
– Spending $80B on AI
– Training 400,000 teachers to teach itAI literacy is good.
But the contradiction is…— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) July 15, 2025
The future for a lot of white collar workers is looking pretty grim.
My unpopular opinion: These days, all water shortages in the US are self-created.
With cheaper desalination and much, much cheaper solar options available (not to mention nuclear) we could desalinate water at the coasts and transport it via pipelines to anywhere needed — even Kansas.
As we scaled this up, the costs would fall enormously over time.
And contrary to what you might’ve read, transporting by pipeline is insanely cheap. Many of our problems have obvious and easy solutions. We just lack the will to implement them.
IBM laid off 8,000 HR employees!!
Not for budget.
Not for performance.They got replaced…by a chatbot.
That bot? It’s called AskHR, and it runs on IBM’s own AI engine: Watsonx Orchestrate.
– 94% of HR work, automated
– Pay, vacation, paperwork, even terminations
– $3.5B in…— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) July 9, 2025
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.
Except I can’t afford any because I’m jobless, homeless and living in a Frigidaire box. Glorious.