Investors do provide an important role that earns money by taking on risk and enabling activity that otherwise couldn’t occur. The concept of an economy that constantly grows is, through investment and work, value greater than the sum of the parts put in can be generated.

If Bob pays Frank to build a house and buys all the supplies, Frank does the construction, and Laura buys it then Bob and Frank are left with more money than they started with and Laura is left with an asset worth to her what she paid for it. She can take loans out against the house or sell it some day, and as long as she gets at least what she paid everyone has gained from the situation.

If Bob and Frank can’t sell the house though or the price of houses drops while it’s being built Frank still gets his salary, Laura’s life is unchanged or she got a good deal, but Bob just lost everything he put in.

The problem is our society is wildly imbalanced towards Bob, so Frank is going to earn pennies for actually doing the work to build a house and Bob is going to rake in most of the profits.

That’s how an economy can be doing well (generating lots of value) but for regular humans almost none of the value gets passed to us and instead gets concentrated in the hands of Bobs and Lauras who contribute money instead of labor.

Ensuring us Franks have enough money to spend is critical because, as you mentioned, by far more of my money by percentage is recirculating into the economy than a billionaire who spends tiny percentages of their net worth. Someone living paycheck to paycheck is by definition recirculating their entire earnings back into the economy every month.

I’d bet when you spend 2.2 billion dollars building something useless you’d be willing to shell out min wage for a few armed guards. Also there’s no way they’re not doing the facial recognition bullshit Madison Square Garden has been going for

The United States is one of the best examples of a democratic republic, it is absolutely both a democracy and a republic.

Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law observes that the United States exemplifies the varied nature of a constitutional republic—a country where some decisions (often local) are made by direct democratic processes, while others (often federal) are made by democratically elected representatives

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic

The lack of high school civics education in this country has done untold damage

I think it’s a valid concern in that we need real laws around data and what you’re allowed to do with it or China/ whoever can just buy the data from an american company without needing to do anything themselves. Similarly forcing a sale of TikTok is meaningless if China can buy data from them or compromise their security ala solar winds. There’s a reason Saudi Arabia is so deeply invested in Uber, Reddit, lucid, etc.

And we didn’t abolish slavery for 89 years after declaring independence. We can absolutely agree change is usually painfully, unnecessarily, terribly slow but it does happen, requiring time, work, and sacrifice

our lives are worse than four, eight, twelve, sixteen, or however many four years you want to go back our lives get worse every election no matter who wins

Is what I was replying to and it’s objectively false.

An important caveat is that positive societal change is absolutely not inevitable, generations have fought to improve the injustices of their times and we must carry on their legacy lest we allow their sacrifices to be in vain

I bet they looked a lot more like the constellations before light pollution and fossil fuels became widespread

Tell that to my friends who’s parents weren’t allowed to get married until our lifetimes or who’s great grandparents were classified as 3/5ths of a person

Slava

Vote

I mean it explicitly says it’s not Gen Z’s fault they don’t have the requisite training. They want to learn more than the rest of the population, there just aren’t good opportunities to learn the relatively niche skills.

I totally agree the article should have been written way better, and I question why it focuses on just gen z when a lack of sustainable talent seems like a multigenerational problem, but improving training being most critical for gen Z as they will be taking over more and more of the workforce in the oncoming years (critically during the window of opportunity to reverse more of the effects of climate change) makes sense to me

I was wondering about this situation, thanks for posting an update. I think the podcast did a great job of explaining the complexity of the issue while making sure to leave passing judgement or picking a side to the tribal leaders and stewards of the language

I’m not shocked by the willingness of the right to throw a suffering former addict under the bus, they’ve shown who they are, but I am a bit surprised by the number of liberals and leftists who seem to agree or not to care