If we're casting aspersions, I guess based on my personal experiences of people in poverty, lower, middle and upper classes, then

> most people into assholes

might just be a you problem. Get out and meet more people, and if you're still surrounded by assholes, then the real asshole is probably you.

People are people everywhere. Money really doesn't change that as much as you're implying.

Power, including financial power, reveals who people really are without constraints. President Johnson has to be my favorite example of this, he spent a political career kowtowing to racists, enforcing racism where he needed to in order to acquire power, and then when full power was finally thrust on him by JFK's assassination, he flips and pushes through key legislation from the Civil Rights Movement.

I certainly didn't put forward an idea that having money makes people less of an asshole. Somebody who gives it away in a non-assholish way certainly makes them less of an asshole.

Or is your contention that anybody with money is an asshole, without exception?

This version is more effective in expressing your sentiment, FWIW.

I don't think it's a different version of that at all? Presumably what he has in mind is the Internet transition. Nobody got "left behind" from the Internet, even cranky 80 year olds are often pretty familiar these days, but people like Reid Hoffman achieved "fulfilling lives and jobs" by recognizing early that it was going to be a big deal.

> No it is not. People retire, because they dont have strength to work anymore.

That's part of the problem, we shifted from an agrarian to industrial and now service economy. Unlike the first two, in a service economy you can work until old age finally takes you.

We have a duty to take it from them because their incompetence is beyond dispute at this point.

The gerontocrats running the US government are a complete disaster and need to be replaced as rapidly as possible.

Hmm. Mainly that access to much larger quantities of energy than before in the form of oil/coal/gas enabled the creation of a much more complex system than before, with a higher metabolic need.

Ongoing servicing of that metabolic need requires continuous access to the same or greater amount of energy year after year. The world burns through its annual resource budget in July this year.

As we continue to extract more and more, the energy return on energy invested goes down, so net energy availability drops, making it harder and more expensive to continue the current basal metabolic rate, let alone fueling continuous growth. Because so much is built atop the energy mechanism, instability happens when it's threatened or changed.x

So maybe a better turn of phrase would have been that it's the first time we've harnessed so much energy at once and effectively put a lot of energy slaves to use per each person. Like starting to use fossil fuel to create fertilizer that enables more people to survive famines, you create a scenario where you need ongoing access to the same or greater amount of energy just to keep up. Not saying it was the wrong choice, just that we tend to fix issues by making more complex solutions that introduce future resource need.