That only works if the stock keeps going up. Musk is so incredibly powerful and wealthy now he can get away with crashing the stock as long as he doesn't screw over his fellow 0.1%ers.

but if you try that as a regular CEO you still get your ass handed to you when the stock eventually comes back to Earth.

Because of course it did. You don't automate dirt cheap labor first you go after the more expensive stuff first.

Ignoring the fact that our unemployment statistics are just flat out lies and that industries will always tell you that they have quote unquote negative unemployment in order to bring in more h1bs the fact of the matter is the automation initially was targeted towards factory workers because they were unionized and so they could demand better wages. Factory workers were prone to unionization because you would have a shitload of the same kind of worker all in one place so it was easy to organize them.

Even Trump's own commerce Secretary admitted on Fox news that even if the factories ever came back to America the jobs wouldn't because they would be automated.

So what we have is a ton of Mcjobs replacing what used to be good paying factory work. And now even those Mcjobs are at risk because they require a viable service sector economy and you can't have that if you gut what's left of the middle class. You need somebody to be able to buy services in order for there to be a service economy

This is why we can't all be plumbers. Because as the white collar workers get replaced by machines they're going to stop hiring plumbers because they can't afford too or because they don't actually own houses they rent.

Our economy requires everything to be firing on all cylinders and a system where money circulates. We're breaking down that circulation and we've got a knock in the engine.

70% of middle class jobs since the 1980s were taken by automation.

It happened, but like most Americans because it didn't happen to you personally it's not real. It doesn't exist.

Americans can't comprehend a phenomenon that they do not personally experience. It's why there are so many mass shooting survivors that come out in favor of gun control

At least not like that. I don't understand why Americans like to pretend they don't have a ruling class but I know we really really like to pretend. Personally I stopped playing pretend around the age of 9 or 10ish.

They're looking to automate everything they possibly can. Lots and lots of stuff that could have been automated years ago but wasn't is now going to get automated.

Remember CEOs can't just make statements like this, at least not unless they are Elon Musk. These kind of statements come with fiduciary responsibility. The affect the stock price because investors are expecting bigger returns because of fewer employees.

That means that the CEOs believe this. And that means they're going to do large scale layoffs whether the technology works or not.

If it works then great for them right? If it doesn't work great for them because the people they don't fire will be forced to work double time to make up for all the people who got fired.

You allowed a civilization to form where the ruling class wins no matter what. There are consequences for doing that. You had your reasons for doing it and now you've got the consequences.

Vitamin a? Like a as in aids? See the problem? It's just basic scienk.

This is why RFK Jr is in charge of Health and human services and you're not. Well that's and you didn't run a presidential campaign off of your family's good name and then use it to score a sweet cabinet position by selling the endorsement out.

It's nice not having to worry about the crisis going on because you know you're going to be dead before the worst of it hits, isn't it?

Thing is human beings have a bad habit of living longer than they intended to. I don't drink and smoke and that's usually what kills people in my family so God only knows how long I'll live.

Meanwhile we have fucked up the water cycle. Go look it up. Basically we are in perpetual drought because the increased temperature messes with the water cycle preventing rain from being cycled around to places we humans can actually use it.

One of the major reasons beef has gotten so expensive is that Texas had to slaughter vast amounts of cows because of a lack of water to maintain them.

That's going to get worse and it's going to spread. People who are on the edge of food security are going to go over the edge and start to starve. They will start wars. Big ones. Worldwide ones.

Remember folks if you look at both world wars there's a couple of things leading up to them that are pretty obvious. First a long period of drought and increased food prices and second we had just come off to industrial revolutions and had a fuck ton of technological unemployment going on because we hadn't caught up technology-wise to create new jobs to replace the old ones.

The only difference is this time world war 3 is going to be nuclear. When those firecrackers go off, and they will, it's going to fuck shit up like you wouldn't believe. It's very likely we are about to Fermi paradox ourselves

You're thinking like someone with way too much education. If you got some booze in your fridge take a few swigs and get back to me after your IQ drops.

To the kind of person in the 46 to 47% who currently support Donald Trump in spite of everything you can't cure something that you aren't suffering from. Everything has to be dramatic to those people. So you have to have somebody who very very very very obviously has AIDS and is dying from it and then gets better like magic. That's curing.

Those people neither understand nor appreciate preventative medicine that's why we're in this mess in the first place. Chesterson's fence basically on a civilization wide scale

And I've been told that if you leave the default feed that's curated for you, typically because it's crashed which it seems to do a lot, then when forced into the main Twitter verse it's basically neo-Nazi central. The best example of a Nazi bar phenomenon. Only instead of inviting one Nazi in the whole nine yards got given the red carpet treatment by the new owners.

On the other hand if you just stay in your curated feed it's not impossible to keep most of the Nazi shit out of your feed. It'll still creep in periodically but it will have sufficient dog whistles that unless you are terminally online like I am you're not going to realize it's Nazis.

And that's one hell of a slogan. Twitter: you probably won't notice the Nazis.

As bad as that slogan is I've been it's still better than whatever Accenture is going to come up with for Intel.

You're thinking is too linear and simplistic.

When the government borrows money the vast majority of it, 85%, it owes to itself. i.e. its own citizens. That's not debt that's money supply. As long as your economy is growing and more goods and services are being produced and there is enough to meet demand it's fine.

All of those are under normal circumstances true with the exception of the pandemic caused by that idiot Trump (remember kids Obama had a similar pandemic and he kept it in China). We do have a bit of a housing shortage because the government subsidies we were pumping into the back end to prevent that got taken away post 2008 so we never put them back because of course we didn't.

Now we do owe $7 trillion overseas. And just based on your comment you don't know what a fucking Petro dollar is.

America uses our national debt to artificially inflate the value of the US dollar. That's the Velvet glove. Behind that is the iron fist of the US military specifically our air force and all those bombs. Like the old emo Philips joke the Chinese come and ask what we spent the money on and we say, all these bombs...

The elevated and inflated value of the US dollar means that we get trillions of dollars worth of imports for a fraction of their real world value. It's basically imperial tribute but we don't like to talk about it.

There is one problem and as usual it is caused by that fat orange turd.

During the covid crash he gave something like 15 trillion dollars to the top 1% on top of an additional $5 trillion in tax cuts. Now he wants to do another 7 trillion. That's on top of the 50 trillion or so we have moved from the working class to the top 1%, since 1970.

We are basically in the same place we were right before the Great depression.

Climate change means that we have food shortages developing and while there is enough food there isn't so much of it that it's cheap and affordable and doesn't impact the economy. We could fix that but we won't.

So there's your dust bowl. Now we have an idiot doing a massive tariff war so he can avoid raising taxes on the wealthy while he slashes taxes on them and slashes regulations. And finally he's gearing up for a large-scale war.

None of this is something you are going to get from our current corporate media because the way the Republican party wins elections is using overwhelming propaganda to get to about 47% and then using voter suppression with just a hint of outright cheating to get over the finish line. And because we are a winner-take-all voting system that means they get everything.

They are coming for your house. Elon Musk and Peter thiel are vying to see who will be the first trillionaire. It's not about how much wealth they have it's the number in the system. And one great way to get to that is by consuming your wealth. Which is your house.

And unlike 2008 because we haven't been funding the subsidies to keep things affordable you won't be able to just go to an apartment. You will be homeless.

I wonder when they finally do take your house in the next few years if you will be posting this kind of bullshit from your car. Assuming they didn't repossess it...

It doesn't have to use it up. I already mentioned recycling. Also the water needs to be extremely clean to be used in a Data center and when it exits that data center it is not clean anymore. It isn't practical to make it potable again.

In practice that just means you have less water.

I don't know if you've been following the news but Arizona already doesn't have enough water for lawns. They aren't far off from rationing showers.

There is no way this is making through the complete lunatics in charge of our healthcare system right now. Robert "don't ask me for medical advice" Kennedy Jr fired the entire board in charge of vaccines and replace them with complete anti-science lunatics.

By the beginning of Trump's third term you will have to travel to Europe or Mexico or Canada to get a vaccination.

Trump is getting ready to collapse the economy and everybody knows it. The bond market is going to take a huge shock when Trump Rams through those 7 trillion dollars in tax cuts coupled with $800 billion dollars in Medicaid cuts.

Remember that's $800 billion it's going to exit the economy. Also half of all rural hospitals will be closing.

There's a reason why the big beautiful bill doesn't really go into effect until after the midterm elections.

When all that hits every major corporation is going to want to have a huge stockpile of cash they can use for BuyBacks so they can pump their stock during the market crash and make themselves look better than everybody else.

This is how stock BuyBacks create layoffs. If you have ever faced a layoff there's a good chance it was so that your company could do stock BuyBacks. And it's why they were illegal for so long. Remember the thank Reagan when you lose your job cuz he's the one that legalized them.

They're cheap and while Intel is facing real competition marketing isn't where they make their sales they make their sales with nasty little backroom deals that should probably be investigated as the antitrust violations that they are.

I will say that every single local business around me has stopped using regular people in their ads and just uses AI now. As a tech nerd it's a huge turn off because I associate AI with scams but I'm not sure regular people are that plugged in or that the critical thinking skills are such that they can see a scam and recognize it as such and then start drawing the association between AI ads and scams...

It uses about a bottle of water. I don't know how true that is but you can bet it uses a hell of a lot of water. Yes of course it's not necessary for it to use and dispose of water but it is much cheaper than having the more expensive recirculating systems. And AI is already on money loser so you can bet your ass that's one cost they will be happy to externalize.

So sure let's find a desert where water is scarce and build giant data centers for replacing white collar workers.

It really pisses me off the water and electricity I need to live are going to be taken away from me so that I can also lose my job. And the bastards are going to get away with it too because we are stupid and we're going to let them do it.