It’s certainly a skill I feel I’m needing more lately, and trying to cultivate more. But I also have a feeling that people shouldn’t need to do this to survive. If elites are building a world where this is necessary to survive (e.g. where older people must stay on top of all the new scams appearing every year, or lose all their money if they slip up once), then maybe fuck those elites. Let’s choose different ones: those that understand that humans need a habitat fit for humans.
How do you envision that happening, concretely? It seems to me that elites are elite because they are simply the best at doing whatever it takes to maintain their power, and any replacement elite would have to do similar things or itself be replaced. If it were possible for the majority to govern society for their own benefit from the bottom up, we’d be living in a communist utopia already.
I think that the politicians are doing their best to prop up home prices and keep the pensions alive and make everything stay normal etc. Banks try to stop you from withdrawing a lot of money at once. The only problem is that we got used to growth and innovation and freedom and peace and comfort and security as the norm. It is deep in the culture… Scammers and wars usually come from across national borders; what you are asking for is not a simple easy clear thing; I don’t blame you for wishing.
Propping up home prices causes a lot of harm though. If we think of housing as a consumer good, then it’s obviously better if it’s cheap, same as any other good. And if we say housing is an investment, then it’s better if investment money flows to its actual most productive use, not something that’s artificially propped up.
It’s certainly a skill I feel I’m needing more lately, and trying to cultivate more. But I also have a feeling that people shouldn’t need to do this to survive. If elites are building a world where this is necessary to survive (e.g. where older people must stay on top of all the new scams appearing every year, or lose all their money if they slip up once), then maybe fuck those elites. Let’s choose different ones: those that understand that humans need a habitat fit for humans.
How do you envision that happening, concretely? It seems to me that elites are elite because they are simply the best at doing whatever it takes to maintain their power, and any replacement elite would have to do similar things or itself be replaced. If it were possible for the majority to govern society for their own benefit from the bottom up, we’d be living in a communist utopia already.
I think that the politicians are doing their best to prop up home prices and keep the pensions alive and make everything stay normal etc. Banks try to stop you from withdrawing a lot of money at once. The only problem is that we got used to growth and innovation and freedom and peace and comfort and security as the norm. It is deep in the culture… Scammers and wars usually come from across national borders; what you are asking for is not a simple easy clear thing; I don’t blame you for wishing.
Propping up home prices causes a lot of harm though. If we think of housing as a consumer good, then it’s obviously better if it’s cheap, same as any other good. And if we say housing is an investment, then it’s better if investment money flows to its actual most productive use, not something that’s artificially propped up.