"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
Sagan was prophetic in a much more realistic way, I think. Herbert is fundamentally constrained by the rule of cool. Actual failure modes of the human firmware are rarely cool. We're generally just not very clever at a species level.
My personal view is that biological intelligence is fundamentally an unstable state. We should enjoy every moment of it, like you enjoy the brief flowering of a desert cactus. It's basically the same thing.
- "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS.
- "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter everyday on how atrophied manufacturing has become in the US: [I Tried to Make Something in America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY)
- "Technological power in the hands of very few": AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
- "People have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [...] unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true": Fun house mirror of Twitter/X. Attention economy. Algorithm that maximizes engagement. AI Slop. Deepfakes. War in Iran.
Because all this is mere extrapolation of trends seen in the 90s and before. Sagan was no psychic (or alone in predicting these things), he just knew where to look.
Moving is no fun at all (and also costs money! deposits, movers and the rest of it), but the only thing worse is staying in one place. I just can't do it.
I mean, of course I tell myself this is the last time we're ever moving, and that this is the forever spot. However, experience suggests this is never, ever the case, and there's no actual precedent for that.
So your friend had a large taxable event occur, ignored any advice that such tax event would persist over the tax year, and failed to act at any time to address his tax shortfall. Sounds like he had a shit tax/financial advisor. And to consume all of his net worth etc, the number of options that vested must have been quite large.
Not going to be sympathetic to someone YOLO'ing their compensation/taxes.
This is what parrots continuously say while ignoring that the original problem was that in the existing system they not only don't pay taxes on the money they don't spend, they don't even pay taxes on the money they do spend, because they can borrow what they want to spend instead of using taxable income and then defer capital gains or keep assets in shell corporations.
Getting from that to where they at least pay the same taxes as anyone else on the money they actually spend would be a marked improvement.
We already know how to solve that one though. You now have corporations and billionaires actually paying the consumption tax along with everyone else, so you take that money and use it for a UBI, which causes the effective rates on lower income people to be much lower or even negative even though everyone is still paying a uniform marginal rate.
Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money. In most studies, retirees receive less in benefits than if they had been able to invest their Social Security contributions. But that's fine, SS really has two main goals: a forced savings towards retirement, and as a social safety net for those who would otherwise be impoverished in old age.
> Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?
I'd just tax it at 100% unless they declare bankruptcy. The US national debt skyrocketed during their lifetimes. Mathematically speaking, they did not pay enough in tax to support the spending that their duly-elected officials enacted. They also didn't, mathematically speaking, have enough children to make up the difference in future taxpayers, either. The American birth rate never recovered after 1970. Someone's got to pay off those bills, and if the numbers comparing the Boomers to Millennials at the same age say anything, they say "the Millennials will not have the money to pay off their parents' government debt."
Is that harsh? I don't know. I do know that your children's generation is supposed to have it better than you, and by pretty much every objective measure, the Boomers did not do that for their children, at least not economically. So it's time for them to put up.
> If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
Why should they be receiving Social Security at all? Same with Medicare. This is the demographic that has more collected wealth than any other age cohort. If they do, in fact, need government help, they can prove their need, like you have to with unemployment insurance or Medicaid.
> The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money.
Then those who don't really need it won't miss it. Those who do will have a more sustainable program to support them.
"institutions" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This often means bloated bureaucracy. I'm not against big government in any way or form, but inefficient, bloated bureaucracy with a bunch of mandarins doing the real governing since all the office holders get rotated out after their term limits hit, doesn't seem like a good solution.
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