Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 5 of 31

Revisiting The Ivy League “Super Conformer” Thesis

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On December 16, 2025

22 Comments

Back in 2021 I wrote

What the Ivies have tended towards for generations now are “super conformers” — straight As and spent all their time in adult run extra-curriculars. People who spent all their time doing what authority wants. But in the past, they did seek out a few of the very smartest, too.

But, with the triumphal fall of the USSR and the “End of History” the Ivies decided that the system no longer needed smart people and stopped looking for them, they wanted nothing but super-conformers. But every system needs some smart people who aren’t entirely conformist.

This was anecdotal but fit everything I was seeing. Now here’s another data point:

This tracks my interactions with Ivy League grads exactly. Some of the older ones are brilliant, but anyone younger than their later 40s is a drone. Perhaps an intelligent drone, but a drone nonetheless.

People who are super conformers can’t actually be good analysts or creatives, because they can’t think original thoughts or challenge consensus views. And if you can’t do that, you can’t do paradigm changing real things or say “uh, boss, what we’re doing won’t work.”

American elites didn’t want any non-conformists any more. They wanted smart yes-men. So they lost Russia and sold their military, technological and industrial lead to China. They got filthy rich in exchange, in dollars that in 20 years won’t buy anything that matters internationally, leaving them as the equivalent of rich Indians in 1990. Yeah, you have servants and gold toilets and a mansion, but you run a country that doesn’t actually matter, and outside your gilded circle your society is a garbage dump. (If you visited India in those years you know that’s barely a metaphor. It’s just a description.)

What I have seen over and over again thru my adult life is that being right against the consensus is a career killer. (It sure did nothing for my career, but I’ve seen it in plenty of cases so this isn’t just “Ian is a bitter failure!” Heh.) I remember a study looking at media pundits who got the Iraq war right: people in the system already—fired, laid off or never promoted again. Pundits who got it wrong, but with the consensus? Their careers did well, thanks.

Incentives like this are picked up on quickly. You want everyone to be wrong with the elite consensus? You’ll get it! (See Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the centrist pundit versions.)

And this is just as true in most corporations. Look at all the morons jumping on the AI train. Spending trillions rather than just waiting and buying the tech once it’s clear which models work (and probably just using a Chinese open source model.)

Now, of course, this “be wrong with the crowd” incentive has always been most of the case in the sense that being wrong against the crowd would get you fired, and being wrong with the crowd wouldn’t usually hurt your career. But there was a time when the mavericks who were right against the crowd were rewarded and glorified, and that mattered.

Post collapse of the USSR and during the “End of History” era (Fukuyama is the poster boy for “got everything wrong but said what elites wanted to hear so was rewarded far beyond his merits”) elites didn’t want to hear anything but how everything they produced, including their shit, smelled like roses. There was no competition, so they didn’t have to be competent or care about results.

Or so they thought. Turns out that Russia wasn’t down permanently, just for a generation or two, and that China was real competition, but being smart they followed Deng’s prescription “Hide your strength, bide your time” and sucked up to American elites, whispering “send us your industry and we’ll make you rich and you won’t have to put up with uppity American workers and unions!”

American elites got what they wanted. The pure peace of being able to smash anyone who contradicted them, the joy of forcing workers to work for less and less and shut the fuck up about wanting to share in profits, vast wealth, plus two generations of courtiers who were entirely yes men, telling them how wonderful they were. “Oh no my lord, your shit smells like lilacs! Yes my lord, I’d love to lick it up, it tastes like bacon!”

China got what it wanted: the tech and industrial lead and the end of American hegemony.

No leader worth his salt doesn’t have a few people around him saying “you know, Jack, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

It’s been a long time since America had any leaders worth their salt.

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Higher US Profits Are WHY The US Can’t Compete (American won’t re-industrialize)

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On December 15, 2025

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A couple weeks ago we discussed why money still flows into America: returns are higher.

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind.

This is a good thing (sort of) if you’re rich and own a lot of assets in the US. It is a bad thing if you don’t, and you’re American. (Europe is similar, but in some ways better for ordinary people.)

American companies just aren’t competitive, because they are always seeking higher profits, which means higher prices, and they actively work to make sure there is no real competition inside the US. Everyone wants to be a monopoly or part of an oligopoly. They want a “moat”, something that means other companies can’t compete with them and government refuses to regulate price gouging.

That produces higher returns, but if you’re going up against a country which has actual competitive markets you’re screwed because they have lower prices and always will. This is the argument for tariffs, to keep American companies competitive in America against cheaper foreign goods. To re-industrialize it would have to be profitable, and it isn’t. The US market is increasingly only America and whatever allies can be convinced to tariff China (which many do, but will they continue to do so?)

Plus, even then, American companies won’t invest unless they can make profits higher than what Chinese companies would accept.

American companies are all financialized. They’re looking for unfair profits, they’re not actually competitive and worse, they don’t want to compete.

OTOH, a lot of Chinese companies are sharks. They compete savagely and they are willing to cut profits razor thin to gain market share.

Additionally the Chinese just move faster, and they have 90% of their own stack in China, while the US has less than 50%. America, ironically, needs China’s help if it wants to rapidly re-industrialize, it needs aggressive anti-trust enforcement, and it needs to change various laws to make financialization far more difficult.

Start with just outlawing PE. Get rid of stock buybacks. Stop pumping the stock market. Ruthlessly go after everyone deliberately raising real-estate, rent, food and other prices.

Slash, in general, all excess profits (like healthcare). Crash the cost structure. Free up consumer demand.

Everything’s being spent on AI, which is increasing energy costs for every other business in the country, and draining investment from anything actually productive. and the US cannot win the AI race, it’s impossible. At best it can get a draw and I doubt it’ll even get that. Chinese AI is open source and uses far less energy, plus the Chinese are building new energy like crazy.

To re-industrialize and compete with China is impossible for the time being. Not in theory, it’s possible theoretically, but it is impossible in practice.

Why? Because NO ONE in power or who can get into power wants to give up their outsized unfair financialized profits.

This is why it’s all Kabuki bullshit. China will keep pulling away. The US cannot compete, because the US refuses to compete. Its only effective policy is to loot its vassals, but that won’t save it.

To a large degree this is why I don’t bother with wonky analysis any more, except occasionally to show it’s pointless. The game is over. The US lost its last chance in 2009, everything since then has just been playing out a game the US cannot win because its elites will never allow the policies necessary to win.

The only way out is thru. The US economy will have to essentially collapse, this type of elite will have to be driven entirely out of power and replaced by industrial elites. Only IF and THEN will it be possible to re-industrialize. That is, best case, a decade in the future, and will start from an even worse position than now.

By then we’ll have even worse climate change and cascading environmental problems.

The next 40 years are going to be UGLY for most of the West.

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The Loss Of American Dollar Privilege Is The Second Most Important Factor In US Decline

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On December 9, 2025

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Dollar privilege: everyone using the dollar for trade, and the US controlling the system that moves currency around the world is important. When it goes away, and it will in the next five years, I’d guess, the US will take a huge hit to its ability to command the world’s resources and will lose most of its ability to sanction anyone outside the US vassaldom area. (And the vassals will find it easier to leave if they choose.)

But to see the loss of dollar privilege as primary is a huge mistake. It’s downstream from the only thing that really matters: actual national capacity.

Industrial output, tech, secure resource availability (people, food, energy, rare earths, oil, uranium, etc.)

Fundamentally everything flows from having the most industry and the tech lead, combined with enough resources to make use of that industry and tech lead. Dollar privilege happened because after WWII the US controlled over 50% of the world’s manufacturing ability and was the most powerful non-Soviet state in the world. As such, in a cold war situation, it took charge and created a “free” world in the image it wanted. That certainly included controlling money and money flows, and if you wanted or needed anything you either had to get it from the US and over time its allies (Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) or from the USSR. When the USSR went away, the US was able to go hog-wild with sanctions, because there was not alternative to using their system and buying from them and their allies.

Now there is. Almost everything you want you can get from China, Russia or some nation outside the “West”. There are exceptions, but they are small in number and that number is decreasing every year. It won’t be long before China delivers satellites to orbit cheaper than the US and had domestic jets that don’t have to buy jet engines (one of those last things) from the West. And hey, virtually everything the Chinese sell is cheaper than if you buy it from the West.

But this is not just about civilian stuff. The fact is that China’s military tech is now more advanced than America’s in most areas. Better missiles. Better drones. Better jets. On top of that they have far more capacity to build ships and drones and missiles and weapons and ammunition than does the West.

Industry/tech (and the resources to use them)=military power. America had a tiny army before WWII, but was able to ramp up seemingly overnight because it had more industry than anyone else. There is zero possibility of America winning a conventional war against China. Zero. Cannot happen. The last chance of doing it was a “resource choke” but that can’t be done now because Russia isn’t going to cooperate. It required Russia as an ally.

To return to our initial point, dollar privilege is a lagging indicator. You get currency domination after you’ve already won, and you lose it after you’ve lost. Once you are no longer the world’s leading industrial and technological state you will lose it, the only question is when. America could have kept it for quite a long time if America’s leaders hadn’t abused it with constant sanctions because while currency privilege has advantages it’s also damaging to the actual productive economy of whoever has it and China is going to great lengths to avoid this.

But as it stands everyone with sense wants out, so the US will lose dollar privilege soon thru most of the world, without, if China can manage it, China creating Yuan privilege.  America may retain it in relation to the usual vassals: the anglosphere, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Europe, but once the alternative exists (and the Chinese and Russians have and are building those alternatives) and has reached critical mass, one by one even the vassals will move to using other systems in addition to SWIFT and will make themselves largely sanctions proof.

This is another “last days of the American Empire” thing, and thank God. Dollar privilege has been used, literally, to kill many millions of people thru the world, and to impoverish hundreds of millions. It will be a great day for every non-American when it ends.

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American Will Try To Maintain The Monroe Doctrine. Can It?

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On December 8, 2025

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The Chief of Staff hints as much:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs hints at military combat deployment “in our own neighborhood.” GEN. DAN CAINE: “ We haven’t had a lot of American combat power in our own neighborhood; I suspect that’s probably gonna change. We’ll see what we’re ordered to do.”

Venezuela is the current target, but there have been rumblings about Colombia, and you just know every slavering knuckle dragging neocon wants another crack at Cuba.

China gets a lot of resources from Latin America, and they want more. America regards Latin America as its backyard, the place where it has a right to overthrow governments at its whim, and where no other great power is allowed.

Obviously most South American countries not currently run by US aligned regimes aren’t too thrilled with the danger America constantly represents if they do anything the US doesn’t like. So they’ve been increasing their ties to China.

America is weakening. It’s falling behind China militarily, economically and technologically, and it will continue to do so. What it does still have, however, is far more military projection ability than China, and Latin America is nearby.

The US can’t offer Latin American nations as good an economic deal as China: America doesn’t need as much resources, its goods are more expensive, it charges more for loans and it no longer build bridges, ports, hospitals, railroads and so on.

Any sane Latin American country is going to want to move under China’s economic sphere, and most of them have. Even Argentina, an American lackey. (Milei talked big about cutting trade with China till he got in power, then he backed down fast.)

Worse, China has cheap effective drones and far better missiles than America, including anti-ship missiles. Plus air defense systems.

So the window for using military force to get friendly governments in charge of Latin American countries is closing. The longer the US waits, the harder it will be and before long it’ll be impossible. Bring those aircraft carriers close enough to be useful, start a war, and you’ll eventually lose one once China has finished arming its allies. (Plus Russia will happily sell as well, especially once the Ukraine war is over. Revenge is a dish best served cold and with a side of missile.)

This, it should be clear, is a desperation move. It is an attempt by a great power in serious decline to hold on to some remnants of its empire. It is part of a general move to try and tax vassals at a ferocious rate (that’s what the 5% of GDP on military goods is, a tax. Buy American weapons!) At the same time the US is trying to remove industry from its vassals and re-shore it. These efforts will succeed for a while and fail in the longer run, but they’re what the US has, since it can’t actually generate real growth (not fake GDP growth, but the real thing) itself any more.

In the medium run, the US will not be able to keep the Monroe doctrine running. The military advantage has just moved too much to new weapons which are cheap and effective at damaging the US military projection stack. If the US couldn’t even keep the sea lanes open against the Ansar Allah (the Houthis), when real countries, even developing ones, get their hands on enough Chinese and Russian missiles, drones and air defense, it’s all over.

Then, slowly, the Chinese will overthrow most of the puppet states, because they just have more resources and offer a better deal and will be seen as friendly. Countries near China may be scared of it, countries in Latin America know they’re far enough away that what it offers is a far better deal with far fewer chains than the US can, or ever did. (The same is true of Africa.)

This all falls under “Empires do not go quiet to that long night”. It could be very bloody. But the end is not in question. I doubt they’ll even hold on to Mexico. The way they’re going, America might eventually even lose control of Canada. Incompetence, greed and denial are powerful drugs, and America is high on all of them.

The long night approaches for the American Empire. Other than Europe and Japan’s comprador leaders, few will miss it.

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The Financialization Hoover Effect & The End Of The American Dream

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On December 1, 2025

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The great problem with financialization is that produces higher returns than productive investments do. If you want to industrialize or stay industrialized, you will have lower profits than a financialized economy does. This leads to situations like the below:

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind. It has the largest drone market, the most robots, etc, etc… It is the world’s strongest economy.

But China is a competitive market, and in competitive markets, profits are low, because the second they start to rise, someone new jumps in. That’s how capitalism, in theory, is supposed to work. The problem is that it only works that way with aggressive government regulation and enforcement. The CPC, being Socialist, doesn’t “believe” in markets. It uses them as a tool, without an ideological commitment. There’s no nonsense about markets being self-correcting, about rich people being good, about trickle down, etc, etc… If a market isn’t working to improve mass welfare, the state intervenes, and it will let, and sometimes force, “too big to fail” companies die.

This is, ironically, “real” capitalism, something the West no longer practices.

So America in specific, and the West in general has spent about 45 years now hollowing out its real economy. In exchange a great deal of money has been created, and if you as an investor want money, then you invested in the West.

This is coming to an end. It is in its last five or so years. It relies in the destruction of the real economy by jacking up prices, loading up debt and liquidating industries, often, ironically, to send to China. Once the real economy is gone, there will not be enough financialization opportunities to allow vast inflows of foreign money. This is especially true because, increasingly, US consumers are tapped out. The decision to end large classes of Obamacare subsidies is just a nail in this coffin.

Right now the US economy is bifurcated. Most people are under huge financial stress, but about 20% of the population is doing well and spending more. They are attached to a financialization spigot of some sort. This will end, or rather contract to about 5% of the population over the next decade. As financialization opportunities go away, the number of people benefiting from remaining financialization will of necessity contract. This contraction has been going on for decades. At one point a majority of people benefited, but as time went by more and more had to be sacrificed and the losers soon outnumbered the winners. The 2008 crash was when this became impossible to deny without straight up lying.

What will be left is a sclerotic economy, with a lot of rich people (relatively, in absolute numbers, not so many), a lot of poor people and a small real middle class. (And to be in that middle class you will need to earn low six figures minimum, because financialization makes everything expensive. You’re better off living in China with half the salary of an America. Maybe a third.)

It’s weird being, well, me. Because this is the endgame. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and now I’m seeing my Cassandric prophecies all coming true. None of this was, in one sense, necessary: up till about 2010, it could have been reversed, in theory, by correct policy. In another sense it was inevitable, because the people who make all the decisions were all in, and benefiting immensely, and were unable or unwilling to understand or care about long term consequences. For many of them that made cold hard sense. They were engaged in a “death bet”, they bet they’d be dead before the game ended. Others are just fine being the richest or most powerful people in a shitty country. They don’t, yet, understand what they’ll lose when China is recognized by everyone as the most important and powerful country in the world, or what the decay of American military ability (entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead) will mean to them.

This the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was when Obama and Bernanke decided to bail everyone rich out during the financial crisis, and pass the cost to ordinary people, including by stealing their houses.

This is also epochal. For the first time in centuries, the West will no longer be the most powerful or the most technologically advanced region.

The consequences, for everyone in the world, will be vast.

 

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By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

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The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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The Promise Of Automation and Abundance

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On November 19, 2025

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For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty hour work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.

It never happened.

Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.

Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.

If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care. Indeed, without CEOs most companies would run better than they do, and you’d be in a lot less danger of losing your job.

We could easily work 20 hour weeks already, if that was a priority.

But the structure of capitalism makes this impossible. We create goods which are designed to wear out quickly and be replaced. “Planned Obsolesence.” We need people to have jobs to get money to buy these shoddy goods. We buy fast food crap because we’re too busy, rather than cooking good food, and most people spend their lives doing work they’d never do if they didn’t need money to survive.

So we find more bullshit jobs, and more harmful jobs for people, and the machine churns on, destroying the environment, making people sick and unhappy and forcing us into wage slavery. Most people spend most of their waking hours doing what they’re told. Or else. Then when you’re old, you might be allowed to retire, and enjoy your declining health. Might.

We have more houses than we need, far more than the number of homeless. America throws out one-third of its food, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough, literally more than enough food for everyone in the world to have a full and healthy diet.

KT Chong recently wrote an article about humanoid robots, in which he hopes that the Chinese will use them to allow lives of leisure, to institute a good guaranteed income. 

Perhaps they will, I hope so. To do so, however, they will have to move away from capitalism towards true communism, where everyone shares in the benefits of automation, and not just a few.

There is no reason why this isn’t possible. It could have been done any time in the last century or so, had we wished to.

Remember this: you work like a dog, obey some manager’s orders and don’t do what you really want to do because our system, and our leaders require it when it isn’t actually necessary.

Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.

May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.

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Trump Has Achieved Biden Levels of Delusion and Denial

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On November 11, 2025

14 Comments

I mean…

Not to mention firing BLS workers because he didn’t like the stats, which even Biden didn’t do. Given how dubious most BLS stats relating to inflation are already, that’s some impressive cope.

The fact is that prices keep going up, and if you aren’t in the golden AI Ponzi Scheme, the economy sucks.

Rosenberg Research did some analysis:

If they aren’t in expansion, they’re in contraction. This is also known as a recession, even if they didn’t shade it.

Some further supporting data:

 

Sure doesn’t look like those tariffs are causing manufacturing to flood back into the US, does it? Data centers and power station building are both AI-related, and as for hospitals, they are part of a protected oligopoly, or, they were until the ACA subsidies were cut. That’s not likely to be good for the health “industry,” which would be wonderful — except that people will die and suffer as a result. “Get rid of part of the shitty way we provide health care now without replacing it with something else.”

Anyway, unless you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly, and have some control, or you’re connected to the AI spigot, the economy is ass. And remember, major tech companies are engaging in mass layoffs, so just working for tech companies won’t protect you; the reverse is true. Unless you’re actively working on AI, you’re first to the gallows, as their workers are where they’re starting with the replacements.

For decades, I warned coders (“engineers”) that their days of being King Shit of Turd Island, pretending their skills were super-special, would eventually come to an end. The moment senior management could figure out how to replace them, they would. Unless you’re truly at the very top of your field, you’re always replaceable — mediocre isn’t as good as average, but it’s usually a LOT cheaper.

Anyway, the end days are nigh. There isn’t much left of the middle class in America, with little left for the rich to steal. The US either changes its politics radically (and Trump has always been a billionaire whose policies are good for billionaires) or the US continues its descent to becoming an unutterable shithole for about 80 percent of its population.

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