The majority of households in the US have no savings of any kind and rural suicide rates have jumped by nearly 50% in the last 25 years. Y'all have just about backed everyone into a corner already.

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madaxe_again 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And that’s just the U.S. - inequality there is comparatively low compared to an awful lot of the world. Brazil, for instance, is just nuts, and resultantly spends a lot of its time teetering around a political sinkhole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Unfortunately, it’s been the outcome of every system we’ve yet tried - wealth always accumulates. It has, so far, only been redistributed through violence - either direct action by the proletariat, or their mass slaughter in war, allowing redistribution amidst the survivors.

I’d love to imagine that this time we can find a different path, but ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck.

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forgetfreeman 2 days ago | parent [-]

"ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck"

Our species has been on the planet for what, roughly 300,000 years? 290,000 of which was spent mostly on chasing our food. By comparison our modern fumble-fucking around with political systems designed by and for a notional elite class is a blink of the eye. We've beaten worse odds.

	▲	madaxe_again 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That period was just the same shit on a smaller scale. The story is told by our genomes and by those of pathogens and parasites - again and again breeding concentrated and bottlenecked, suggesting power accumulation, and again and again entire germlines went extinct, as the old guard were violently usurped - and we’ve plenty of archaeology that shows wholesale slaughter of entire populations. And… chimps follow the same patterns - accumulation of breeding rights to a select germline, followed by violent revolution, infanticide, all of it. We are cut from the same stuff.

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crostlybostly 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How much of this is a cultural problem with Americans though?

Immigrant families save a higher percentage than Americans even when they make less money. Americans notoriously overconsume and are not big on saving.

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forgetfreeman 2 days ago | parent [-]

That there are cultural issues around consumption is absolutely not in question. That said I watched one of my great uncles raise three kids and put every one of them through college cultivating ~400 acres with equipment he owned outright and could readily maintain and repair himself when issues arose. Fast forward 40 years and "small" farmers are forced to take on and then service literally millions in debt just to break even (if they're lucky and the weather holds). So while I agree wholeheartedly that the modern cultural acceptance of living well beyond one's means is deeply problematic I'd prioritize breaking big industry's chokehold on all the things before telling folks they should tighten their belt.

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crostlybostly a day ago | parent [-]

Agreed it’s a multitude of issues.

I just think if people want results they should focus on the factors they can control. Changing government policy and industry policy is a slow process and can take decades for results and often has unintended consequences.

Reducing consumption helps immediately.

	▲	forgetfreeman 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Reducing consumption is a luxury of the middle class. The working poor don't really have any corners available to cut.

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jart 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's all the proof you need they'll try to draft them into a kinetic ground war with Iran. It's better to burn out than to fade away.

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Legalize debt for all and all are in debt. Strange and surprising.