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Studies back it: When blue-collar work vanishes, men become less marriageable, fertility tanks. Helen Andrews: Replacing manufacturing jobs with home health aides isn't progress—it's a dying economy. Bradley Devlin: "Literally a sign of a country that's dying." Pink-collar rise → men lose stable jobs → marriage crisis (China shock...

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Camus

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146,172 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Helen Andrews made a point that feels increasingly hard to ignore. The shift from blue-collar to pink-collar jobs hasn’t just changed the economy; it’s quietly fueling a marriage crisis. Studies on areas hit hard by the China shock showed the sharpest drops in marriage rates happened where men lost stable work. When men aren’t economically flourishing, family formation stalls. You can’t simply swap who brings home the paycheck and expect the same results. She argues we need more real manufacturing jobs — not just for economic security against China, but because strong male employment is a key driver of the next generation. This one made me pause. We’ve celebrated the “feminization” of the workforce as progress for decades, but if it’s contributing to fewer marriages and fewer kids, maybe we’re missing something important. Economies aren’t just about GDP. They’re about people building lives, families, and futures. When the job market stops supporting that for half the population, the downstream effects are massive. Do you think bringing back more stable manufacturing jobs could help fix the marriage and birth rate decline, or is that too simplistic?
1:22

Helen Andrews made a point that feels increasingly hard to ignore. The shift from blue-collar to pink-collar jobs hasn’t just changed the economy; it’s quietly fueling a marriage crisis. Studies on areas hit hard by the China shock showed the sharpest drops in marriage rates happened where men lost stable work. When men aren’t economically flourishing, family formation stalls. You can’t simply swap who brings home the paycheck and expect the same results. She argues we need more real manufacturing jobs — not just for economic security against China, but because strong male employment is a key driver of the next generation. This one made me pause. We’ve celebrated the “feminization” of the workforce as progress for decades, but if it’s contributing to fewer marriages and fewer kids, maybe we’re missing something important. Economies aren’t just about GDP. They’re about people building lives, families, and futures. When the job market stops supporting that for half the population, the downstream effects are massive. Do you think bringing back more stable manufacturing jobs could help fix the marriage and birth rate decline, or is that too simplistic?

Camus

165,352 views • 1 month ago

“Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner.” A wife saying this to her husband is a reminder to men to treat marriage as one of your least, and highest-risk, investments. An investment which, if it collapses, leaves you unshaken; and if it does not collapse, remains sustainable. And therefore, prioritize investments in self-sufficiency. Amass enough value and resources that only a portion of it when committed to marriage, suffices - while the remainder, if the marriage fails, insulates you from ruin. Most marriages fail partly because men are too little sufficient for the amount of stake they make. Men risk failing. And When men fail, marriages fail. And when marriage fails, the man fails the woman. Because a woman, I Will tell you, is often with the man because of the marriage, not in the marriage because of the man. For women, marriage is often the goal, not the man. The man is a means. And when marriage fails, that means has, in her eyes, proven useless. She rages. And with that, the man’s peace is alienated. You must not fail. Because your failure can become the marriage’s failure. For in your incapacity, the security marriage guaranteed your wife is threatened. And women’s attraction plummets where security diminishes. Then it matters less how much you have sacrificed, how much security you once guaranteed, your dreams, or even your potential to recover. What matters is the impending doom your failure appears to announce - the threat to her security. And with that, her survival. And as a naturally and spiritually dependent species, which woman is, you, the man, lose utility when you are no longer dependable. And consequently, lose respect, grace and companion. The whole point I am belabouring is this: Men, do not delude yourselves with the “for better or worse” myth and invest excessively in marriage. Invest in it with only a minimal percentage of your value, as you would any other high-risk investment. Be so self-sufficient before marriage that you can run your home on a harmless and mildly percentage of your finances. Marry a woman who poses less threat to your finances, peace, and emotional stability. Make marriage one of the smallest running investments in your portfolio. Because when you invest too much of yourself in marriage, you relinquish more profitable parts of your existence for something as low-profit and uncertain as marriage. Again and for the last time, Invest little enough in marriage that its collapse cannot collapse you. For a man who places too much of himself in marriage does builds a vulnerability not a union.
0:42

“Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner.” A wife saying this to her husband is a reminder to men to treat marriage as one of your least, and highest-risk, investments. An investment which, if it collapses, leaves you unshaken; and if it does not collapse, remains sustainable. And therefore, prioritize investments in self-sufficiency. Amass enough value and resources that only a portion of it when committed to marriage, suffices - while the remainder, if the marriage fails, insulates you from ruin. Most marriages fail partly because men are too little sufficient for the amount of stake they make. Men risk failing. And When men fail, marriages fail. And when marriage fails, the man fails the woman. Because a woman, I Will tell you, is often with the man because of the marriage, not in the marriage because of the man. For women, marriage is often the goal, not the man. The man is a means. And when marriage fails, that means has, in her eyes, proven useless. She rages. And with that, the man’s peace is alienated. You must not fail. Because your failure can become the marriage’s failure. For in your incapacity, the security marriage guaranteed your wife is threatened. And women’s attraction plummets where security diminishes. Then it matters less how much you have sacrificed, how much security you once guaranteed, your dreams, or even your potential to recover. What matters is the impending doom your failure appears to announce - the threat to her security. And with that, her survival. And as a naturally and spiritually dependent species, which woman is, you, the man, lose utility when you are no longer dependable. And consequently, lose respect, grace and companion. The whole point I am belabouring is this: Men, do not delude yourselves with the “for better or worse” myth and invest excessively in marriage. Invest in it with only a minimal percentage of your value, as you would any other high-risk investment. Be so self-sufficient before marriage that you can run your home on a harmless and mildly percentage of your finances. Marry a woman who poses less threat to your finances, peace, and emotional stability. Make marriage one of the smallest running investments in your portfolio. Because when you invest too much of yourself in marriage, you relinquish more profitable parts of your existence for something as low-profit and uncertain as marriage. Again and for the last time, Invest little enough in marriage that its collapse cannot collapse you. For a man who places too much of himself in marriage does builds a vulnerability not a union.

Mr Sergio

13,014 views • 2 months ago

More than 900 Albertans will lose their jobs, and Alberta’s Premier is simply “disappointed” with thoughts and prayers for good severance packages? Premier, that’s 900 families impacted once these workers receive the pink slip. Alberta has one of the worst unemployment rates in the country. How are the 900 Albertans going to find new jobs? Your UCP government chased away $33 billion dollars of investments in 118 renewables projects that would have brought 24,000 jobs. It then continued with an unfathomable witch hunt on the renewables projects that practically stopped the growth of new jobs in that sector over the last two years. What’s the plan here, Premier? This Imperial layoff is not the exception; it is an increasing pattern. There are more mergers and consolidations in the oil sands sector, and the 2020 merger of Husky and Cenovus was a prime example that resulted in the loss of 2150 office jobs. In 2023, Suncor also cut ~1500 jobs in Alberta, citing the need for better financial performance and more efficiency. Imperial’s own press release says: “Leverages technology and global capability centres to deliver increased value” with “Expected annual expense savings of $150 million.” The UCP government has failed to act and prepare for the reality that is upon us. The sector is becoming highly automated and more efficient with the implementation of technology, which means less jobs available for Albertans. The question is, what is this government going to do right now to support the 900 Albertans losing their jobs? What’s the government’s plan to prepare and re-orient this highly skilled labour force for the future? And most importantly, how is the Premier caught off guard in this way? And will the Premier shut down the separation nonsense to bring back investor certainty in our province? Albertans deserve an actual plan for Alberta’s economy #ableg
2:23

More than 900 Albertans will lose their jobs, and Alberta’s Premier is simply “disappointed” with thoughts and prayers for good severance packages? Premier, that’s 900 families impacted once these workers receive the pink slip. Alberta has one of the worst unemployment rates in the country. How are the 900 Albertans going to find new jobs? Your UCP government chased away $33 billion dollars of investments in 118 renewables projects that would have brought 24,000 jobs. It then continued with an unfathomable witch hunt on the renewables projects that practically stopped the growth of new jobs in that sector over the last two years. What’s the plan here, Premier? This Imperial layoff is not the exception; it is an increasing pattern. There are more mergers and consolidations in the oil sands sector, and the 2020 merger of Husky and Cenovus was a prime example that resulted in the loss of 2150 office jobs. In 2023, Suncor also cut ~1500 jobs in Alberta, citing the need for better financial performance and more efficiency. Imperial’s own press release says: “Leverages technology and global capability centres to deliver increased value” with “Expected annual expense savings of $150 million.” The UCP government has failed to act and prepare for the reality that is upon us. The sector is becoming highly automated and more efficient with the implementation of technology, which means less jobs available for Albertans. The question is, what is this government going to do right now to support the 900 Albertans losing their jobs? What’s the government’s plan to prepare and re-orient this highly skilled labour force for the future? And most importantly, how is the Premier caught off guard in this way? And will the Premier shut down the separation nonsense to bring back investor certainty in our province? Albertans deserve an actual plan for Alberta’s economy #ableg

Nagwan Al-Guneid

35,651 views • 9 months ago

Alex Karp at Davos cuts through the AI jobs debate with something most people aren't prepared to hear. "One of the unfortunate things of the narrative in the west is it will destroy humanity's jobs — like you went to an elite school and you studied philosophy. Use myself as an example. That one is going to be hard to market." Karp points to workers building batteries in America, doing the same jobs as Japanese engineers, who went to high school rather than university. In his view, those are the people the AI economy will increasingly reward. "Those jobs are going to become more valuable. There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training." When pushed on whether this means fewer white collar jobs, he said yes. But his real point runs deeper than that. He brings up a former police officer who attended a junior college and now manages complex targeting operations for the U.S. Army at a global level. "That person actually is irreplaceable. And I think in the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person's talents are." The old credentialing system was built to filter for degrees, not capability. AI is now exposing that gap. The people who will thrive are those who can be quickly upskilled, apply practical judgment, and work effectively alongside advanced systems. A philosophy graduate from a top university may still struggle to land their first role, while a vocational technician who adapts and grows with the technology becomes the person no company wants to lose. AI is accelerating that shift, and a university degree is no longer the deciding factor in who the economy values.
2:28

Alex Karp at Davos cuts through the AI jobs debate with something most people aren't prepared to hear. "One of the unfortunate things of the narrative in the west is it will destroy humanity's jobs — like you went to an elite school and you studied philosophy. Use myself as an example. That one is going to be hard to market." Karp points to workers building batteries in America, doing the same jobs as Japanese engineers, who went to high school rather than university. In his view, those are the people the AI economy will increasingly reward. "Those jobs are going to become more valuable. There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training." When pushed on whether this means fewer white collar jobs, he said yes. But his real point runs deeper than that. He brings up a former police officer who attended a junior college and now manages complex targeting operations for the U.S. Army at a global level. "That person actually is irreplaceable. And I think in the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person's talents are." The old credentialing system was built to filter for degrees, not capability. AI is now exposing that gap. The people who will thrive are those who can be quickly upskilled, apply practical judgment, and work effectively alongside advanced systems. A philosophy graduate from a top university may still struggle to land their first role, while a vocational technician who adapts and grows with the technology becomes the person no company wants to lose. AI is accelerating that shift, and a university degree is no longer the deciding factor in who the economy values.

Big Brain AI

38,795 views • 3 months ago

“Fairness” = give the bureaucracy more money? Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is raising the tax on capital investments to the highest level in the G7. This video reveals a sad, dystopian view of Canadians. She uses the resentful ‘class war’ language of the 1970s, where Canada will be filled with a sad majority feeling ‘wrath’ unless you accept her new tax. Who writes these speeches? Have they travelled? Famously egalitarian nations Belgium and Switzerland and Singapore have zero cap gains taxes. Do they hate fairness? Seriously, this is her proposal: Take $18 billion in risk capital proceeds away from Canada’s small but critical investor class with a globally uncompetitive tax rate. Then give that money - along with another $40 billion in debt - to a federal bureaucracy that currently does not show up for work in person more than twice a week. They will invest it instead. The nation will heal. Thats not fairness. It’s losing. Again. On an international scale. Here’s why this tax will add to her economic losing streak: 1. It kills economic growth. Taxing capital investment discourages the cash that backs the entrepreneurial ideas that turn into the jobs and companies that grow the economy and improve productivity and living standards. Every other large advanced economy will have a lower cap gains tax than Canada. Are they less ‘fair’ than Minister Freeland? Or do they have an economic strategy of shared prosperity that allows for individual success without the sad language of class resentment and envy? Every company whose services we love today - no matter how large - started with an entrepreneur - and some investors crazy enough to fund them with risk capital. Most nations do whatever they can to attract entrepreneurs and investors because they bring growth and economic vitality and jobs. This Minister is taxing them away in the name of fairness. But federal fiscal incoherence is costing Canadians $54 billion interest losses degrading public services and the worst declining GDP performance in the G7 2019-2024 and the worst GDP per capita of all 40 advanced nations in the OECD modelled out to 2030. Fairness for Canadians starts with federal fiscal competence. 2. It kills jobs (the real ones): The private sector creates jobs when good ideas or expansion is funded by risk capital - that is why positive jobs reports are usually signals of economic growth. But Canada’s jobs reports aren’t signals of economic growth anymore because they feature a failing economy where most of the jobs being reported are actually government roles bought with debt. This kills economic productivity. When governments use debt to buy jobs it turns a single debt-funded position into a permanent unfunded annual govt operating cost. Every one of these jobs costs more in tax, debt and interest than it can ever contribute back. Taxing the risk capital that creates real jobs while borrowing money to buy public sector jobs with debt - the current modus operandi of this government and its “jobs” announcements - kills GDP productivity. 3. It takes Canada backwards Canada’s private sector is the only mechanism to fund Canadian prosperity. Risk capital funds the companies and jobs that are the engine that pays for everything - including all government employees and services - and all debt and interest. A previous Liberal government knew this. They dropped this tax back in 2000 to help Canada compete with the rest of the world, who in turn compete hard for the mobile investment capital of the smartest and most successful investors because it has such a positive impact on economic growth. For everyone. Economic prosperity is the best form of fairness. Going backwards to economic policies from the last century, wrapped in the dystopian language of big government ‘fairness’ isn’t helping anyone. Cut taxes, spending and the bloated state. Fairness = fiscal competence.
3:49

“Fairness” = give the bureaucracy more money? Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is raising the tax on capital investments to the highest level in the G7. This video reveals a sad, dystopian view of Canadians. She uses the resentful ‘class war’ language of the 1970s, where Canada will be filled with a sad majority feeling ‘wrath’ unless you accept her new tax. Who writes these speeches? Have they travelled? Famously egalitarian nations Belgium and Switzerland and Singapore have zero cap gains taxes. Do they hate fairness? Seriously, this is her proposal: Take $18 billion in risk capital proceeds away from Canada’s small but critical investor class with a globally uncompetitive tax rate. Then give that money - along with another $40 billion in debt - to a federal bureaucracy that currently does not show up for work in person more than twice a week. They will invest it instead. The nation will heal. Thats not fairness. It’s losing. Again. On an international scale. Here’s why this tax will add to her economic losing streak: 1. It kills economic growth. Taxing capital investment discourages the cash that backs the entrepreneurial ideas that turn into the jobs and companies that grow the economy and improve productivity and living standards. Every other large advanced economy will have a lower cap gains tax than Canada. Are they less ‘fair’ than Minister Freeland? Or do they have an economic strategy of shared prosperity that allows for individual success without the sad language of class resentment and envy? Every company whose services we love today - no matter how large - started with an entrepreneur - and some investors crazy enough to fund them with risk capital. Most nations do whatever they can to attract entrepreneurs and investors because they bring growth and economic vitality and jobs. This Minister is taxing them away in the name of fairness. But federal fiscal incoherence is costing Canadians $54 billion interest losses degrading public services and the worst declining GDP performance in the G7 2019-2024 and the worst GDP per capita of all 40 advanced nations in the OECD modelled out to 2030. Fairness for Canadians starts with federal fiscal competence. 2. It kills jobs (the real ones): The private sector creates jobs when good ideas or expansion is funded by risk capital - that is why positive jobs reports are usually signals of economic growth. But Canada’s jobs reports aren’t signals of economic growth anymore because they feature a failing economy where most of the jobs being reported are actually government roles bought with debt. This kills economic productivity. When governments use debt to buy jobs it turns a single debt-funded position into a permanent unfunded annual govt operating cost. Every one of these jobs costs more in tax, debt and interest than it can ever contribute back. Taxing the risk capital that creates real jobs while borrowing money to buy public sector jobs with debt - the current modus operandi of this government and its “jobs” announcements - kills GDP productivity. 3. It takes Canada backwards Canada’s private sector is the only mechanism to fund Canadian prosperity. Risk capital funds the companies and jobs that are the engine that pays for everything - including all government employees and services - and all debt and interest. A previous Liberal government knew this. They dropped this tax back in 2000 to help Canada compete with the rest of the world, who in turn compete hard for the mobile investment capital of the smartest and most successful investors because it has such a positive impact on economic growth. For everyone. Economic prosperity is the best form of fairness. Going backwards to economic policies from the last century, wrapped in the dystopian language of big government ‘fairness’ isn’t helping anyone. Cut taxes, spending and the bloated state. Fairness = fiscal competence.

David Knight Legg

266,285 views • 2 years ago

This is absolutely fascinating: Jason Furman, one of the foremost economists in the U.S. and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains why the so-called "China shock" is a myth. According to him, "85 to 95% of Americans benefited" from trade with China, and "China has been part of helping [the US economy] work, not hurting it work." In other words, the narrative that China "stole" American jobs and wages is the exact opposite of reality. Furman's logic is pretty ironclad: 1) He points out, which is factual, that "the slowdown of wage growth and the rise of inequality began in the 1970s, when there basically was no trade with China." It then accelerated in the 1980s-90s when China trade was small, and **slowed down** after 2000. And "since about 2013," when trade with China was at its highest, "we've had pretty fast real wage growth," with "the fastest real wage growth for moderate income households." In other words, the timing doesn't fit: if China was the cause, the problem should have gotten worse as trade with China increased. Instead, it got better. 2) A common narrative one hears about China is "who cares about affordable goods, we need well-paying jobs." But Furman points out it's actually one and the same thing: "the way we measure jobs is how much your wages can buy. If you improve purchasing power, you are making every single job in the economy better." In very concrete terms, if salaries stay flat but Chinese imports make goods 10% cheaper, your purchasing power just went up 10%, as if you got a 10% wage hike. This makes every single job in the economy better. In effect "jobs vs. cheap goods" is a false dichotomy: cheap goods ARE better jobs. 3) Furman also points out, rightly, that the majority of what U.S. imports from China isn't consumer goods: "more than half of what we import is actually inputs into the manufacturing process itself." In other words, Chinese imports make U.S. manufacturing MORE competitive as it decreases their input costs. If you were to cut all Chinese imports, you'd cripple U.S. manufacturing as it would no longer be able to compete on price with anyone. And, as per point 2 above, you'd also destroy Americans' purchasing power, making every single U.S. worker worse off. 4) Last but not least, Furman says that the "China shock" literature is fundamentally flawed, as it "doesn't answer the most important question, which is what the net effect was." It "doesn't consider other causes for the job losses, doesn't look at all the places that gained jobs and wages, and doesn't integrate the consumer side." All in all, he believes that if one were to actually calculate the net effect of trade with China on the U.S. economy, it'd show that "85 to 95% of Americans benefited." And even for the 5-15% who lost out, Furman says these people were failed by "our labor policies, our social safety net" - not by China. What Furman is saying is more relevant than ever because, both in the U.S. and in Europe, this notion that China is somehow "stealing" Western jobs and prosperity has become the unquestioned premise of so many of today's policies. Nobody even debates it anymore, it's almost universally assumed correct. In my own country France, Macron keeps repeating it all the time, leading the charge in Europe to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, warning that China is "killing its own customers" and that it's a question of life or death for European industry ( He literally called last week for the EU to build its own version of America's Section 301 - the same protectionist tool Trump uses ( BUT, if Furman is right, and the data strongly suggests he is, France and Europe are about to inflict economic self-harm in the name of a problem that doesn't exist. Much more affordable cars, for instance, would literally give every single European a big wage hike. It's Furman's argument on "85 to 95% benefiting" vs 5% to 15% losing out: the vast majority of Europeans would see their money go further, while a small number of jobs in legacy automakers would be disrupted. Instead of helping those workers transition, Europe wants to prevent making everyone better off. Anyhow, please do watch the whole podcast, which has many other fascinating insights because Furman also debates with Justin Yifu Lin, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and State Council Counsellor of China. They're both interviewed by my friend Hansong Li - also a professor and an immensely smart man - in his excellent new podcast "worldviews" (imho one of the best new podcasts our there). The video is here:
3:29

This is absolutely fascinating: Jason Furman, one of the foremost economists in the U.S. and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains why the so-called "China shock" is a myth. According to him, "85 to 95% of Americans benefited" from trade with China, and "China has been part of helping [the US economy] work, not hurting it work." In other words, the narrative that China "stole" American jobs and wages is the exact opposite of reality. Furman's logic is pretty ironclad: 1) He points out, which is factual, that "the slowdown of wage growth and the rise of inequality began in the 1970s, when there basically was no trade with China." It then accelerated in the 1980s-90s when China trade was small, and **slowed down** after 2000. And "since about 2013," when trade with China was at its highest, "we've had pretty fast real wage growth," with "the fastest real wage growth for moderate income households." In other words, the timing doesn't fit: if China was the cause, the problem should have gotten worse as trade with China increased. Instead, it got better. 2) A common narrative one hears about China is "who cares about affordable goods, we need well-paying jobs." But Furman points out it's actually one and the same thing: "the way we measure jobs is how much your wages can buy. If you improve purchasing power, you are making every single job in the economy better." In very concrete terms, if salaries stay flat but Chinese imports make goods 10% cheaper, your purchasing power just went up 10%, as if you got a 10% wage hike. This makes every single job in the economy better. In effect "jobs vs. cheap goods" is a false dichotomy: cheap goods ARE better jobs. 3) Furman also points out, rightly, that the majority of what U.S. imports from China isn't consumer goods: "more than half of what we import is actually inputs into the manufacturing process itself." In other words, Chinese imports make U.S. manufacturing MORE competitive as it decreases their input costs. If you were to cut all Chinese imports, you'd cripple U.S. manufacturing as it would no longer be able to compete on price with anyone. And, as per point 2 above, you'd also destroy Americans' purchasing power, making every single U.S. worker worse off. 4) Last but not least, Furman says that the "China shock" literature is fundamentally flawed, as it "doesn't answer the most important question, which is what the net effect was." It "doesn't consider other causes for the job losses, doesn't look at all the places that gained jobs and wages, and doesn't integrate the consumer side." All in all, he believes that if one were to actually calculate the net effect of trade with China on the U.S. economy, it'd show that "85 to 95% of Americans benefited." And even for the 5-15% who lost out, Furman says these people were failed by "our labor policies, our social safety net" - not by China. What Furman is saying is more relevant than ever because, both in the U.S. and in Europe, this notion that China is somehow "stealing" Western jobs and prosperity has become the unquestioned premise of so many of today's policies. Nobody even debates it anymore, it's almost universally assumed correct. In my own country France, Macron keeps repeating it all the time, leading the charge in Europe to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, warning that China is "killing its own customers" and that it's a question of life or death for European industry ( He literally called last week for the EU to build its own version of America's Section 301 - the same protectionist tool Trump uses ( BUT, if Furman is right, and the data strongly suggests he is, France and Europe are about to inflict economic self-harm in the name of a problem that doesn't exist. Much more affordable cars, for instance, would literally give every single European a big wage hike. It's Furman's argument on "85 to 95% benefiting" vs 5% to 15% losing out: the vast majority of Europeans would see their money go further, while a small number of jobs in legacy automakers would be disrupted. Instead of helping those workers transition, Europe wants to prevent making everyone better off. Anyhow, please do watch the whole podcast, which has many other fascinating insights because Furman also debates with Justin Yifu Lin, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and State Council Counsellor of China. They're both interviewed by my friend Hansong Li - also a professor and an immensely smart man - in his excellent new podcast "worldviews" (imho one of the best new podcasts our there). The video is here:

Arnaud Bertrand

160,585 views • 1 month ago

Why are so many young people single these days? Pooja Arora (Pooja Arora): So my last question: I wanted to talk about why people are single nowadays. I would have asked about human nature, but that’s for another day. I sent you an article—how do you think common knowledge fits into that area? Why do you think so many youngsters are single? Me: Yes, it’s a good question. I’m not sure that common knowledge is an important part of the answer, but some of it is that women no longer depend on the economic contributions of men for their livelihood, as was true, say, in my mother’s era, when women were not professionally trained. To pay the rent, they had to be married. Now, not only are women better educated, but the economy has shifted to favor the kinds of skills that women, as opposed to men, have. And just as women have been rising, men have been sinking because of the decline in blue-collar work. There have also been cultural trends that favor women’s temperaments. Men have been distracted by internet gaming, gambling, and pornography and are less desirable as marriage partners. Women with more economic power are more likely to raise their standards for what they want in a man. In my parents’ generation, it was not uncommon for a woman to marry a man with much less education and, sometimes, less intelligence. This was not unusual among my parents’ friends. The men often had a high school degree and then went immediately into a small business—sometimes a family business, sometimes one he started himself. The criterion was: does he make a living? No one cared about education. That has changed, with the result that there are fewer men who satisfy the criteria women now have. This was mentioned in the article you shared with me. Also, with more sexual freedom, people don’t have to get married simply to have sex, which was again true in my parents’ generation. There’s a process that has been in place since the baby boomers and has accelerated among millennials and Generation Z. For other reasons, I think a generation of men may also be incapable of socially skilled interaction, partly because they’ve grown up with screens instead of face-to-face contact. There is some fear that a sexual encounter could result in an accusation of rape or sexual harassment. There is so much pornography that, for an increasing number of men, it serves as an outlet for what in the past would have required actual human contact. There are many factors. The article from The Economist lists them, I think, quite skillfully. It’s not clear how to reverse the trend. Increasing the economic prospects of men and creating an educational system that is less feminized and more encouraging of male achievement might help. Another could be changing norms—and here common knowledge comes in. Among women, is it a sign of low status to be with a man who has less education than you? Men, from time immemorial, have been happy to marry women with less education than themselves. Women don't. That immediately reduces the marriage pool. Maybe that’s a norm that could change. Go back to the norm in my parents’ generation? Pooja Arora: No, let’s not do that. Me: Okay, let's not do that. Pooja Arora: We’re happy to marry men who are not as educated as us. It’s fine. They just have to be nice and kind at this point in time. Me: Well, yes—exactly. Nice and kind.
4:30

Why are so many young people single these days? Pooja Arora (Pooja Arora): So my last question: I wanted to talk about why people are single nowadays. I would have asked about human nature, but that’s for another day. I sent you an article—how do you think common knowledge fits into that area? Why do you think so many youngsters are single? Me: Yes, it’s a good question. I’m not sure that common knowledge is an important part of the answer, but some of it is that women no longer depend on the economic contributions of men for their livelihood, as was true, say, in my mother’s era, when women were not professionally trained. To pay the rent, they had to be married. Now, not only are women better educated, but the economy has shifted to favor the kinds of skills that women, as opposed to men, have. And just as women have been rising, men have been sinking because of the decline in blue-collar work. There have also been cultural trends that favor women’s temperaments. Men have been distracted by internet gaming, gambling, and pornography and are less desirable as marriage partners. Women with more economic power are more likely to raise their standards for what they want in a man. In my parents’ generation, it was not uncommon for a woman to marry a man with much less education and, sometimes, less intelligence. This was not unusual among my parents’ friends. The men often had a high school degree and then went immediately into a small business—sometimes a family business, sometimes one he started himself. The criterion was: does he make a living? No one cared about education. That has changed, with the result that there are fewer men who satisfy the criteria women now have. This was mentioned in the article you shared with me. Also, with more sexual freedom, people don’t have to get married simply to have sex, which was again true in my parents’ generation. There’s a process that has been in place since the baby boomers and has accelerated among millennials and Generation Z. For other reasons, I think a generation of men may also be incapable of socially skilled interaction, partly because they’ve grown up with screens instead of face-to-face contact. There is some fear that a sexual encounter could result in an accusation of rape or sexual harassment. There is so much pornography that, for an increasing number of men, it serves as an outlet for what in the past would have required actual human contact. There are many factors. The article from The Economist lists them, I think, quite skillfully. It’s not clear how to reverse the trend. Increasing the economic prospects of men and creating an educational system that is less feminized and more encouraging of male achievement might help. Another could be changing norms—and here common knowledge comes in. Among women, is it a sign of low status to be with a man who has less education than you? Men, from time immemorial, have been happy to marry women with less education than themselves. Women don't. That immediately reduces the marriage pool. Maybe that’s a norm that could change. Go back to the norm in my parents’ generation? Pooja Arora: No, let’s not do that. Me: Okay, let's not do that. Pooja Arora: We’re happy to marry men who are not as educated as us. It’s fine. They just have to be nice and kind at this point in time. Me: Well, yes—exactly. Nice and kind.

Steven Pinker

89,071 views • 5 months ago

Imagine leaving behind a legacy like this? 🔥🔥🔥 The West is facing a demographic crisis that almost nobody wants to talk about. For a society to simply replace itself from one generation to the next, women need to average about 2.1 children over their lifetimes. Today, nearly every developed Western nation is well below that number. The United States has fallen to around 1.6 births per woman. Countries like Italy, Spain, South Korea, and Japan are even lower. Some are now seeing more diapers sold for adults than babies. This is INSANE. This isn't just a statistic. It changes everything. Fewer children today means fewer workers tomorrow. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer soldiers. Fewer teachers. Fewer parents. An aging population places enormous strain on healthcare systems, retirement programs, and the economy as fewer workers support more retirees. Entire towns shrink. Schools close. Communities lose the vibrancy that young families naturally bring. But I think we've missed something even bigger than the economics. For decades we've been told that the highest purpose in life is maximizing personal freedom. Travel more. Buy more. Delay marriage. Delay children. Focus on yourself. Build your career first. Maybe have one child someday if the timing feels right. Yet many people who followed that script eventually discovered that comfort and fulfillment are not the same thing. They are depressed now. They have no purpose. Children cost money. They interrupt your schedule. They test your patience. They force you to become less selfish. That is precisely why they are one of life's greatest blessings. A large family teaches sacrifice, responsibility, generosity, and unconditional love in ways almost nothing else can. Parents begin thinking in decades instead of weekends. They stop asking, "What do I want?" and start asking, "What kind of world am I leaving my children?" Legacy is one of the most underrated ideas in modern culture. Your career will eventually belong to someone else. Your house will one day have another owner. Most of the things you buy will end up in a landfill. But the values you pass to your children, and the children they raise after them, can outlive you for generations. A civilization isn't preserved by speeches or hashtags. It's preserved when mothers and fathers raise children who love God, honor their families, work hard, tell the truth, improve their community, Obey Christ, and pass those same virtues to the next generation. If the West wants a future, it has to believe that the future is worth having. And that future begins with families willing to build one generation at a time.
0:27

Imagine leaving behind a legacy like this? 🔥🔥🔥 The West is facing a demographic crisis that almost nobody wants to talk about. For a society to simply replace itself from one generation to the next, women need to average about 2.1 children over their lifetimes. Today, nearly every developed Western nation is well below that number. The United States has fallen to around 1.6 births per woman. Countries like Italy, Spain, South Korea, and Japan are even lower. Some are now seeing more diapers sold for adults than babies. This is INSANE. This isn't just a statistic. It changes everything. Fewer children today means fewer workers tomorrow. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer soldiers. Fewer teachers. Fewer parents. An aging population places enormous strain on healthcare systems, retirement programs, and the economy as fewer workers support more retirees. Entire towns shrink. Schools close. Communities lose the vibrancy that young families naturally bring. But I think we've missed something even bigger than the economics. For decades we've been told that the highest purpose in life is maximizing personal freedom. Travel more. Buy more. Delay marriage. Delay children. Focus on yourself. Build your career first. Maybe have one child someday if the timing feels right. Yet many people who followed that script eventually discovered that comfort and fulfillment are not the same thing. They are depressed now. They have no purpose. Children cost money. They interrupt your schedule. They test your patience. They force you to become less selfish. That is precisely why they are one of life's greatest blessings. A large family teaches sacrifice, responsibility, generosity, and unconditional love in ways almost nothing else can. Parents begin thinking in decades instead of weekends. They stop asking, "What do I want?" and start asking, "What kind of world am I leaving my children?" Legacy is one of the most underrated ideas in modern culture. Your career will eventually belong to someone else. Your house will one day have another owner. Most of the things you buy will end up in a landfill. But the values you pass to your children, and the children they raise after them, can outlive you for generations. A civilization isn't preserved by speeches or hashtags. It's preserved when mothers and fathers raise children who love God, honor their families, work hard, tell the truth, improve their community, Obey Christ, and pass those same virtues to the next generation. If the West wants a future, it has to believe that the future is worth having. And that future begins with families willing to build one generation at a time.

Declaration of Memes

40,322 views • 17 days ago

Dario Amodei just warned about the next economic crisis on live television. The timeline is 1 to 5 years. Amodei: “We may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands as the pipeline for this early-stage white-collar work starts to contract and dry up.” Not factory workers. Not truck drivers. Lawyers. Consultants. Finance professionals. The entry-level jobs that millions of college graduates have used as the first rung of the middle class for decades. Amodei: “AI is at the level of a smart college student and reaching beyond that.” The skills those entry-level jobs require are exactly what AI does best. Summarizing documents. Building financial models. Drafting reports. Synthesizing research. The pipeline doesn’t just shrink. It dries up. And if the entry-level pipeline disappears, there is no path to senior leadership for the next generation. The ladder doesn’t get harder to climb. It gets removed. But here is what makes this different from every other automation warning. Amodei: “We can’t stop the AI bus. Even if all six companies stopped, then China would beat us. I think that’s a big and important threat.” This isn’t a choice between disruption and stability. It’s a choice between disrupting the economy ourselves or ceding that disruption to a geopolitical adversary who will do it without any of the safeguards. There is no pause button. There is no responsible opt-out. So Amodei said something no tech CEO has ever said publicly before. Amodei: “We may want government to find a way to level the economic playing field. Taxing AI companies like us.” The man building the technology that will eliminate millions of jobs is asking the government to tax him for doing it. That isn’t cognitive dissonance. That’s the clearest possible signal that the people building it understand what’s actually coming. The abundance is coming. The disruption arrives first. And the architects of that disruption are already asking who pays for the wreckage.
4:27

Dario Amodei just warned about the next economic crisis on live television. The timeline is 1 to 5 years. Amodei: “We may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands as the pipeline for this early-stage white-collar work starts to contract and dry up.” Not factory workers. Not truck drivers. Lawyers. Consultants. Finance professionals. The entry-level jobs that millions of college graduates have used as the first rung of the middle class for decades. Amodei: “AI is at the level of a smart college student and reaching beyond that.” The skills those entry-level jobs require are exactly what AI does best. Summarizing documents. Building financial models. Drafting reports. Synthesizing research. The pipeline doesn’t just shrink. It dries up. And if the entry-level pipeline disappears, there is no path to senior leadership for the next generation. The ladder doesn’t get harder to climb. It gets removed. But here is what makes this different from every other automation warning. Amodei: “We can’t stop the AI bus. Even if all six companies stopped, then China would beat us. I think that’s a big and important threat.” This isn’t a choice between disruption and stability. It’s a choice between disrupting the economy ourselves or ceding that disruption to a geopolitical adversary who will do it without any of the safeguards. There is no pause button. There is no responsible opt-out. So Amodei said something no tech CEO has ever said publicly before. Amodei: “We may want government to find a way to level the economic playing field. Taxing AI companies like us.” The man building the technology that will eliminate millions of jobs is asking the government to tax him for doing it. That isn’t cognitive dissonance. That’s the clearest possible signal that the people building it understand what’s actually coming. The abundance is coming. The disruption arrives first. And the architects of that disruption are already asking who pays for the wreckage.

Dustin

105,246 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk just said on camera that America CANNOT beat China with humans alone. His exact words: "We definitely can't win on the human front." This is the richest man on the planet. Advisor to the president. And he's saying the US is cooked without robots. Here's why he's probably right: China is about to hit 3x the total US electricity output. Elon says electricity is a direct proxy for industrial capacity. Three times the electricity means roughly three times the manufacturing power. They have 4x the population. And Elon said something that'll piss a lot of people off: "The average work ethic in China is higher than in the US." America's birth rate has been below replacement since 1971. More people retiring every year. Fewer entering the workforce. No amount of policy, tariffs, or reshoring fixes that math. His solution: Optimus. He literally called it "the infinite money glitch." Because you can use robots to build more robots. Here's what makes this different from every other robotics play: 3 things are hard about humanoid robots. 1. Real-world AI 2. The hand 3. Scale manufacturing And the hand is harder than EVERYTHING else combined. Tesla had to custom design every single actuator, motor, gear, sensor, and control system from physics first principles. There is no supply chain. Nothing comes from a catalog. Not a single component. But they've solved it. Optimus has full human-hand dexterity with all degrees of freedom. No other company has demonstrated this. Not even in demos. Then you layer on what Elon described as a "recursive multiplicative exponential": Exponential growth in digital intelligence. Multiplied by exponential growth in chip capability. Multiplied by exponential growth in electromechanical dexterity. And then the robots start building robots. He's targeting 1 million Optimus units per year at Gen 3. Ten million at Gen 4. The first use case? Any operation that runs 24/7. Factories, warehouses, refineries, every continuous operation on the planet. Robots don't sleep, don't overheat, don't quit. And here's the part that should terrify every other country: America can't build enough ore refineries because Americans don't want refining jobs. China does 2x more ore refining than the rest of the world COMBINED. They dominate rare earths. The US literally mines rare earth ore, puts it on a train, ships it to CHINA for refining, then ships the finished product back. Optimus wants to fix that. Not by convincing Americans to take refining jobs but by making humans optional in the process entirely. And Elon also said something else that went completely under the radar: "Pure AI, pure robotics corporations will FAR outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop." He compared it to spreadsheets replacing human computers. Entire skyscrapers used to be filled with humans doing calculations. A laptop replaced all of them. Now imagine replacing some cells in your spreadsheet with humans again. It would be WORSE. That's his prediction for the future of corporations. Mixed human-AI companies lose to pure AI-robotics companies. Not by a little. By orders of magnitude. The race isn't AI models anymore. It's not chatbots or benchmarks or who scores higher on some test. The race is physical. Whoever builds the robot army first wins the entire global economy. China has the workers. The factories. The electricity. The refining. The supply chains. America has one card left to play... And it's a 5'11" humanoid robot that Elon calls the infinite money glitch. This is either the move that saves American manufacturing. Or the most disastrous science project in history.
2:19

Elon Musk just said on camera that America CANNOT beat China with humans alone. His exact words: "We definitely can't win on the human front." This is the richest man on the planet. Advisor to the president. And he's saying the US is cooked without robots. Here's why he's probably right: China is about to hit 3x the total US electricity output. Elon says electricity is a direct proxy for industrial capacity. Three times the electricity means roughly three times the manufacturing power. They have 4x the population. And Elon said something that'll piss a lot of people off: "The average work ethic in China is higher than in the US." America's birth rate has been below replacement since 1971. More people retiring every year. Fewer entering the workforce. No amount of policy, tariffs, or reshoring fixes that math. His solution: Optimus. He literally called it "the infinite money glitch." Because you can use robots to build more robots. Here's what makes this different from every other robotics play: 3 things are hard about humanoid robots. 1. Real-world AI 2. The hand 3. Scale manufacturing And the hand is harder than EVERYTHING else combined. Tesla had to custom design every single actuator, motor, gear, sensor, and control system from physics first principles. There is no supply chain. Nothing comes from a catalog. Not a single component. But they've solved it. Optimus has full human-hand dexterity with all degrees of freedom. No other company has demonstrated this. Not even in demos. Then you layer on what Elon described as a "recursive multiplicative exponential": Exponential growth in digital intelligence. Multiplied by exponential growth in chip capability. Multiplied by exponential growth in electromechanical dexterity. And then the robots start building robots. He's targeting 1 million Optimus units per year at Gen 3. Ten million at Gen 4. The first use case? Any operation that runs 24/7. Factories, warehouses, refineries, every continuous operation on the planet. Robots don't sleep, don't overheat, don't quit. And here's the part that should terrify every other country: America can't build enough ore refineries because Americans don't want refining jobs. China does 2x more ore refining than the rest of the world COMBINED. They dominate rare earths. The US literally mines rare earth ore, puts it on a train, ships it to CHINA for refining, then ships the finished product back. Optimus wants to fix that. Not by convincing Americans to take refining jobs but by making humans optional in the process entirely. And Elon also said something else that went completely under the radar: "Pure AI, pure robotics corporations will FAR outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop." He compared it to spreadsheets replacing human computers. Entire skyscrapers used to be filled with humans doing calculations. A laptop replaced all of them. Now imagine replacing some cells in your spreadsheet with humans again. It would be WORSE. That's his prediction for the future of corporations. Mixed human-AI companies lose to pure AI-robotics companies. Not by a little. By orders of magnitude. The race isn't AI models anymore. It's not chatbots or benchmarks or who scores higher on some test. The race is physical. Whoever builds the robot army first wins the entire global economy. China has the workers. The factories. The electricity. The refining. The supply chains. America has one card left to play... And it's a 5'11" humanoid robot that Elon calls the infinite money glitch. This is either the move that saves American manufacturing. Or the most disastrous science project in history.

Ricardo

49,820 views • 5 months ago

Barry Sternlicht recently went on an EPIC rant about the Fed, predicting when they'll lower rates and the challenges the US is facing "Inflation will fall below 2% as soon as the rent component catches up to the data. The question is, when will the Fed lower rates? But here's where it gets really tricky... The economy is too strong. It's too strong because of public spending. It's not too strong because of private spending. Private spending is rolling over.... Everyone's laying workers off. But the federal government's hiring them.... They're spending enough money to keep these guys employed. So the Fed keeps using this really blunt, horrible instrument 5.5% interest rates with two huge victims, because we have a $34 trillion deficit, and the debt is going to roll over. A third of our debt rolls over this year. He can pay 5.3% on it, or he can pay 3% if he lowers rates. That's $200 billion. That's a quarter of the defense budget, which is the largest component of our budget. So he has a choice. Pay $300 billion on $13 trillion, or pay $500 billion on $13 trillion. It's up to you, right? So it's 3% or 5%. So that's one problem. Second problem is the regional banks. He's blown a hole through their balance sheets. There's $1.9 trillion of real estate loans in the regional banks... there's only $800 billion in the money center banks, and he blew their banks to garbage. These banks are out of business. They can't make money offering us 5.5% CD rates. So he's gonna have the next crisis if he doesn't lower rates. It's a serious mess in the capital markets and real estate and fixed income... anything that was yield related. Will he keep rates here? Yes, unfortunately. Why? He's up for, he's leaving in January. Powell's out. He's not going to be the guy who let inflation come back... I don't think we'll get the March cut. I think the data, as soon as inflation falls below 2%, there'll be a lot of pressure on him. That might be May. So I think June, you'll see cuts. It'll become very obvious that the private sector is struggling as the consumer runs out of money... And why has this economy kept going? Not only his spending, people have jobs. And b/c they have jobs and employment rates are good, so they're spending. But they're spending money they don't have. It's not in their savings account. It's all gone. And now they're on the credit cards. [And now] Americans are willing to live on Affirm. Now we have new ways to spend money we don't have."
5:37

Barry Sternlicht recently went on an EPIC rant about the Fed, predicting when they'll lower rates and the challenges the US is facing "Inflation will fall below 2% as soon as the rent component catches up to the data. The question is, when will the Fed lower rates? But here's where it gets really tricky... The economy is too strong. It's too strong because of public spending. It's not too strong because of private spending. Private spending is rolling over.... Everyone's laying workers off. But the federal government's hiring them.... They're spending enough money to keep these guys employed. So the Fed keeps using this really blunt, horrible instrument 5.5% interest rates with two huge victims, because we have a $34 trillion deficit, and the debt is going to roll over. A third of our debt rolls over this year. He can pay 5.3% on it, or he can pay 3% if he lowers rates. That's $200 billion. That's a quarter of the defense budget, which is the largest component of our budget. So he has a choice. Pay $300 billion on $13 trillion, or pay $500 billion on $13 trillion. It's up to you, right? So it's 3% or 5%. So that's one problem. Second problem is the regional banks. He's blown a hole through their balance sheets. There's $1.9 trillion of real estate loans in the regional banks... there's only $800 billion in the money center banks, and he blew their banks to garbage. These banks are out of business. They can't make money offering us 5.5% CD rates. So he's gonna have the next crisis if he doesn't lower rates. It's a serious mess in the capital markets and real estate and fixed income... anything that was yield related. Will he keep rates here? Yes, unfortunately. Why? He's up for, he's leaving in January. Powell's out. He's not going to be the guy who let inflation come back... I don't think we'll get the March cut. I think the data, as soon as inflation falls below 2%, there'll be a lot of pressure on him. That might be May. So I think June, you'll see cuts. It'll become very obvious that the private sector is struggling as the consumer runs out of money... And why has this economy kept going? Not only his spending, people have jobs. And b/c they have jobs and employment rates are good, so they're spending. But they're spending money they don't have. It's not in their savings account. It's all gone. And now they're on the credit cards. [And now] Americans are willing to live on Affirm. Now we have new ways to spend money we don't have."

Triple Net Investor

334,267 views • 2 years ago

Elon Musk says working will be "optional" soon. Robots and AI will eliminate non-physical jobs, creating a "Universal High-Income" where everyone gets what they want. But a Yale paper shows the economics behind his prediction are far more brutal than he suggests. I'm talking about the paper titled "We Won't Be Missed." It concludes: "Half the workforce could stop working tomorrow and GDP wouldn't budge." i.e. humans become economically meaningless. The paper splits all work into two categories: 1) Bottleneck work This work is essential for growth. Energy production, logistics, scientific discovery, and infrastructure. The economy cannot grow unless this work scales. 2) Accessory work It's non-essential. Arts, hospitality, therapy, and fine dining. It's nice to have, but not required for growth. AGI systematically takes over everything that's mission-critical. Some accessory work stays human, not because AGI can't do it, but because we have surplus workers and it's not worth the compute. In other words, your future salary will be based on the computational cost of replicating your work. As compute gets exponentially cheaper, your wage ceiling plummets. The economy grows, productivity increases, but your value is tied to declining tech costs. Yale's paper concluded: Labor's share of GDP converges to zero. All income flows to owners of computational resources. The transition speed determines how painful this gets. If technology develops faster than computing scales, we get jagged disruption, with some workers receiving huge premiums before crashing. If compute scales faster, we get gradual, predictable decline in wages. In my opinion, there is a paradox that Musk missed here. Work being "optional" is an illusion. Humans need work, maybe not for survival, but for purpose. The existential question is: Would people still choose to work when it's economically meaningless... and when your contribution doesn't matter for progress or prosperity?
2:12

Elon Musk says working will be "optional" soon. Robots and AI will eliminate non-physical jobs, creating a "Universal High-Income" where everyone gets what they want. But a Yale paper shows the economics behind his prediction are far more brutal than he suggests. I'm talking about the paper titled "We Won't Be Missed." It concludes: "Half the workforce could stop working tomorrow and GDP wouldn't budge." i.e. humans become economically meaningless. The paper splits all work into two categories: 1) Bottleneck work This work is essential for growth. Energy production, logistics, scientific discovery, and infrastructure. The economy cannot grow unless this work scales. 2) Accessory work It's non-essential. Arts, hospitality, therapy, and fine dining. It's nice to have, but not required for growth. AGI systematically takes over everything that's mission-critical. Some accessory work stays human, not because AGI can't do it, but because we have surplus workers and it's not worth the compute. In other words, your future salary will be based on the computational cost of replicating your work. As compute gets exponentially cheaper, your wage ceiling plummets. The economy grows, productivity increases, but your value is tied to declining tech costs. Yale's paper concluded: Labor's share of GDP converges to zero. All income flows to owners of computational resources. The transition speed determines how painful this gets. If technology develops faster than computing scales, we get jagged disruption, with some workers receiving huge premiums before crashing. If compute scales faster, we get gradual, predictable decline in wages. In my opinion, there is a paradox that Musk missed here. Work being "optional" is an illusion. Humans need work, maybe not for survival, but for purpose. The existential question is: Would people still choose to work when it's economically meaningless... and when your contribution doesn't matter for progress or prosperity?

Ruben Hassid

44,173 views • 8 months ago

One line in yesterday’s speech by Modi ji resonated a lot “Jaane anjaane main dusron par bahut nirbhar ho gaye” In spirit he has nailed it. Only and only manufacturing & indigenous jobs ecosystem can push India towards a middle income nation status. Slave services model has failed spectacularly. In the recent fiascos including the latest H1b $100k drama - two delusions Indians seem to hold are 1) US tech will collapse without Indians FALSE - in the short term they’ll see higher costs & some corporate pain but it won’t make a dent. Most H1b is IT grunt work (not thought leader innovation) and they will find ample Americans to do it. Most Indians came as immigrants post 1990s much much after US was already a highly developed super power. Indians benefited from dollar labor arbitrage & in return contributed taxes & stayed crime free. But to claim that Indians had any hand in “building America” is a very laughable delusion. 2) India will be vishwaguru if all NRIs are shipped back & brain drain is reversed FALSE - Human Capital is an asset only if there is a job creation merit based ecosystem else it’s a big liability. Humans consume resources when they are not productive. The Indian human capital who are in the US were in India to begin with. Why did India not become a Vishwaguru when they were there? Why did they have to leave India & to the US? Because India does not have enough indigenous jobs. A very high percentage of high paying jobs in urban India have extreme dependency on low cost services to non Indians. India does not have respect for merit or entrepreneurial spirit that can create those indigenous jobs. So it basically ships its human capital liability worldwide. BAD & RISKY strategy. If a million NRIs are shipped back home today it will be not just a humanitarian disaster but an economic crisis for India as there is no ecosystem to accommodate that much excess human capital. And this will happen. Somehow the policy of $100k per visa was reversed. Maybe some urgent backchannel negotiations. But please be assured that within a year it’ll come back. The H1b, L1, OPT gravy train is over. Which is why Modi ji had that urgent nation address. Which is why the urgent almost emergency level push for manufacturing is happening. Which is why the talk of having big four, big tech and all apps made in India (Just like China) has taken an urgent tone now. It’s not a luxury anymore. It’s a necessity without which anyone can threaten a thermonuclear attack on Indian economy and there won’t be much leverage to negotiate. We’ll soon realize that bragging that “we are the highest earning model minority” in an alien land where you have ZERO sociopolitical or demographic leverage is pointless. That “highest earning” community is basically a hostage and can be kicked around at will. The real swag is when you’re able to say that your own national per capita is “highest growing”. Not being some “high earning model minority” in ransom places. And to achieve that the only and only way is to have an independent ecosystem of creating well paying indigenous jobs.
0:58

One line in yesterday’s speech by Modi ji resonated a lot “Jaane anjaane main dusron par bahut nirbhar ho gaye” In spirit he has nailed it. Only and only manufacturing & indigenous jobs ecosystem can push India towards a middle income nation status. Slave services model has failed spectacularly. In the recent fiascos including the latest H1b $100k drama - two delusions Indians seem to hold are 1) US tech will collapse without Indians FALSE - in the short term they’ll see higher costs & some corporate pain but it won’t make a dent. Most H1b is IT grunt work (not thought leader innovation) and they will find ample Americans to do it. Most Indians came as immigrants post 1990s much much after US was already a highly developed super power. Indians benefited from dollar labor arbitrage & in return contributed taxes & stayed crime free. But to claim that Indians had any hand in “building America” is a very laughable delusion. 2) India will be vishwaguru if all NRIs are shipped back & brain drain is reversed FALSE - Human Capital is an asset only if there is a job creation merit based ecosystem else it’s a big liability. Humans consume resources when they are not productive. The Indian human capital who are in the US were in India to begin with. Why did India not become a Vishwaguru when they were there? Why did they have to leave India & to the US? Because India does not have enough indigenous jobs. A very high percentage of high paying jobs in urban India have extreme dependency on low cost services to non Indians. India does not have respect for merit or entrepreneurial spirit that can create those indigenous jobs. So it basically ships its human capital liability worldwide. BAD & RISKY strategy. If a million NRIs are shipped back home today it will be not just a humanitarian disaster but an economic crisis for India as there is no ecosystem to accommodate that much excess human capital. And this will happen. Somehow the policy of $100k per visa was reversed. Maybe some urgent backchannel negotiations. But please be assured that within a year it’ll come back. The H1b, L1, OPT gravy train is over. Which is why Modi ji had that urgent nation address. Which is why the urgent almost emergency level push for manufacturing is happening. Which is why the talk of having big four, big tech and all apps made in India (Just like China) has taken an urgent tone now. It’s not a luxury anymore. It’s a necessity without which anyone can threaten a thermonuclear attack on Indian economy and there won’t be much leverage to negotiate. We’ll soon realize that bragging that “we are the highest earning model minority” in an alien land where you have ZERO sociopolitical or demographic leverage is pointless. That “highest earning” community is basically a hostage and can be kicked around at will. The real swag is when you’re able to say that your own national per capita is “highest growing”. Not being some “high earning model minority” in ransom places. And to achieve that the only and only way is to have an independent ecosystem of creating well paying indigenous jobs.

Itihasika

52,765 views • 9 months ago

Elon Musk just named the single variable that will decide the next hundred years. It is not compute. It is not capital. It is not the chip. Musk: “Nothing will make you happier than having kids. We’ve evolved to have that, as all creatures have.” The consensus says this century belongs to whoever stacks the most GPUs. Musk is pointing at something the spreadsheets will never quantify. Look at the West. Birth rates are in freefall. Below replacement. Below recovery. Not because people stopped wanting families. Because the modern economy turned families into a math problem no one could solve. Rent took two incomes. Careers swallowed your twenties and thirties whole. Biology became a scheduling conflict you kept postponing until the window closed. A whole generation traded the continuation of their bloodline for the privilege of staying solvent. AI is about to shatter that equation permanently. When machines do the labor, your time stops being currency. The grind that ate your life ends. The moment it does, a question arrives that no algorithm can answer. If you no longer need to work to survive, what exactly is the point of you? Musk handed you the answer before the question landed. When survival is automated, you finally get the runway to do what four billion years of evolution actually built you for. Now zoom out. America is locked in an existential technology race with China over the future of intelligence itself. But China is staring down something no supercomputer can fix. The most catastrophic demographic collapse any modern nation has ever seen. A workforce aging off a cliff with no generation underneath to catch it. You do not win a long war against a country that runs out of people. The real American moat was never the chip. It was the cradle. We are racing to build superintelligence that secures the future. But a country without heirs is just a building with the lights still on. Spend the AI dividend on digital sedation and civilization dies quietly on schedule. Spend it on being human again and the West becomes physically impossible to replace. The machines will run the grid. They will route the supply chains. They will win the arms race. They will never love you back. We spent a century outsourcing our humanity to the economy. Artificial intelligence is about to buy it back. The nation that owns the future will not be the one that builds the most powerful intelligence in history. It will be the one that builds it and then walks away from the screen to go hold its children.
0:21

Elon Musk just named the single variable that will decide the next hundred years. It is not compute. It is not capital. It is not the chip. Musk: “Nothing will make you happier than having kids. We’ve evolved to have that, as all creatures have.” The consensus says this century belongs to whoever stacks the most GPUs. Musk is pointing at something the spreadsheets will never quantify. Look at the West. Birth rates are in freefall. Below replacement. Below recovery. Not because people stopped wanting families. Because the modern economy turned families into a math problem no one could solve. Rent took two incomes. Careers swallowed your twenties and thirties whole. Biology became a scheduling conflict you kept postponing until the window closed. A whole generation traded the continuation of their bloodline for the privilege of staying solvent. AI is about to shatter that equation permanently. When machines do the labor, your time stops being currency. The grind that ate your life ends. The moment it does, a question arrives that no algorithm can answer. If you no longer need to work to survive, what exactly is the point of you? Musk handed you the answer before the question landed. When survival is automated, you finally get the runway to do what four billion years of evolution actually built you for. Now zoom out. America is locked in an existential technology race with China over the future of intelligence itself. But China is staring down something no supercomputer can fix. The most catastrophic demographic collapse any modern nation has ever seen. A workforce aging off a cliff with no generation underneath to catch it. You do not win a long war against a country that runs out of people. The real American moat was never the chip. It was the cradle. We are racing to build superintelligence that secures the future. But a country without heirs is just a building with the lights still on. Spend the AI dividend on digital sedation and civilization dies quietly on schedule. Spend it on being human again and the West becomes physically impossible to replace. The machines will run the grid. They will route the supply chains. They will win the arms race. They will never love you back. We spent a century outsourcing our humanity to the economy. Artificial intelligence is about to buy it back. The nation that owns the future will not be the one that builds the most powerful intelligence in history. It will be the one that builds it and then walks away from the screen to go hold its children.

Dustin

171,717 views • 2 months ago

BREAKING🚨: ROBERT FICO WARNS THE EU IN CYPRUS — “CHEAPER ELECTRICITY FOR INDUSTRY NOW OR OUR FACTORIES WILL DIE, JOBS WILL DISAPPEAR AND OUR PEOPLE WILL FREEZE!” 🇸🇰🔥🇪🇺⚡️ At the EU leaders’ summit in Cyprus, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico attacked Brussels head-on. He demanded immediate cheaper electricity for factories and radical changes to the crazy subsidy system that is destroying Europe’s ability to compete. Fico has said this many times before: the current EU rules make energy so expensive that normal businesses cannot survive. What will actually happen because of these insane high electricity prices? Here is the simple truth that even a child can understand: •Factories close or move away. When electricity costs 3–5 times more than it should, companies cannot afford to keep machines running. They shut down or leave for countries with cheap energy. Thousands of jobs disappear overnight. •Normal families pay the price. Your monthly electricity bill becomes huge. In winter people cannot heat their homes properly — old people and children get sick or even die from the cold. Food in shops becomes more expensive because farmers and shops pay huge bills too. •Young people leave the country. When there are no good jobs at home, sons and daughters move to richer countries for work. Villages and towns empty out. Birth rates collapse because young couples cannot afford to start families. This is demographic suicide — the nation slowly disappears. •The whole economy gets weaker. Less factories means less taxes for the government. That means less money for hospitals, schools, pensions and roads. The country becomes poorer and more dependent on foreign powers. •Eastern Europe suffers the most. We in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania never had huge wealth like the West. High energy prices hit us harder and faster. We become colonies that buy expensive energy while the West lectures us about “saving the planet.”
2:14

BREAKING🚨: ROBERT FICO WARNS THE EU IN CYPRUS — “CHEAPER ELECTRICITY FOR INDUSTRY NOW OR OUR FACTORIES WILL DIE, JOBS WILL DISAPPEAR AND OUR PEOPLE WILL FREEZE!” 🇸🇰🔥🇪🇺⚡️ At the EU leaders’ summit in Cyprus, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico attacked Brussels head-on. He demanded immediate cheaper electricity for factories and radical changes to the crazy subsidy system that is destroying Europe’s ability to compete. Fico has said this many times before: the current EU rules make energy so expensive that normal businesses cannot survive. What will actually happen because of these insane high electricity prices? Here is the simple truth that even a child can understand: •Factories close or move away. When electricity costs 3–5 times more than it should, companies cannot afford to keep machines running. They shut down or leave for countries with cheap energy. Thousands of jobs disappear overnight. •Normal families pay the price. Your monthly electricity bill becomes huge. In winter people cannot heat their homes properly — old people and children get sick or even die from the cold. Food in shops becomes more expensive because farmers and shops pay huge bills too. •Young people leave the country. When there are no good jobs at home, sons and daughters move to richer countries for work. Villages and towns empty out. Birth rates collapse because young couples cannot afford to start families. This is demographic suicide — the nation slowly disappears. •The whole economy gets weaker. Less factories means less taxes for the government. That means less money for hospitals, schools, pensions and roads. The country becomes poorer and more dependent on foreign powers. •Eastern Europe suffers the most. We in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania never had huge wealth like the West. High energy prices hit us harder and faster. We become colonies that buy expensive energy while the West lectures us about “saving the planet.”

Slavic Networks

37,890 views • 2 months ago

.Donald J. Trump Mr. Trump, I'm about to dismantle every single one of your falsehoods from the first 2024 debate with .President Donald J. Trump in this thread 🧵. This may take a while due to the volume of lies, but rest assured, I won’t stop until every lie is exposed for all to see. First, when the current administration took office in 2021, the pandemic was in shambles under your watch, with thousands of Americans dying daily. Your neglect and lack of coherent strategy created an immense challenge to address. The so-called 'great economy' you boast about was merely riding on Obama's success, which you then tanked when a real crisis hit. Unemployment soared, millions of jobs disappeared, and the national debt ballooned like never before under your administration. Your pandemic response was a catastrophic failure: from underplaying the virus, hosting super-spreader rallies, to botching the rollout of essential supplies. Your claim of "no wars" is misleading. We remained entangled in ongoing conflicts, and you significantly ramped up drone strikes in some regions. The U.S. was still involved in ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Regarding the stock market recovery, you conveniently ignore the massive role played by Federal Reserve policies and Congressional stimulus and ridding Obama's recovery. It wasn't solely your administration's doing. Your nonsense about job creation under Biden is flat-out wrong. Millions of new jobs have been added across various sectors, not for undocumented immigrants or COVID recoveries. Lastly, your claim that inflation is "killing our country" is an exaggeration. Inflation has moderated significantly from its peak, and the economy has shown remarkable resilience. The U.S. had the fastest recovery thanks to President Biden's efforts to clean up your mess. The American people deserve a factual, balanced assessment, not overblown nonsense and misleading claims. To be continued...🧵 #DebatePresidencial2024 #DebateNight
0:58

.Donald J. Trump Mr. Trump, I'm about to dismantle every single one of your falsehoods from the first 2024 debate with .President Donald J. Trump in this thread 🧵. This may take a while due to the volume of lies, but rest assured, I won’t stop until every lie is exposed for all to see. First, when the current administration took office in 2021, the pandemic was in shambles under your watch, with thousands of Americans dying daily. Your neglect and lack of coherent strategy created an immense challenge to address. The so-called 'great economy' you boast about was merely riding on Obama's success, which you then tanked when a real crisis hit. Unemployment soared, millions of jobs disappeared, and the national debt ballooned like never before under your administration. Your pandemic response was a catastrophic failure: from underplaying the virus, hosting super-spreader rallies, to botching the rollout of essential supplies. Your claim of "no wars" is misleading. We remained entangled in ongoing conflicts, and you significantly ramped up drone strikes in some regions. The U.S. was still involved in ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Regarding the stock market recovery, you conveniently ignore the massive role played by Federal Reserve policies and Congressional stimulus and ridding Obama's recovery. It wasn't solely your administration's doing. Your nonsense about job creation under Biden is flat-out wrong. Millions of new jobs have been added across various sectors, not for undocumented immigrants or COVID recoveries. Lastly, your claim that inflation is "killing our country" is an exaggeration. Inflation has moderated significantly from its peak, and the economy has shown remarkable resilience. The U.S. had the fastest recovery thanks to President Biden's efforts to clean up your mess. The American people deserve a factual, balanced assessment, not overblown nonsense and misleading claims. To be continued...🧵 #DebatePresidencial2024 #DebateNight

Human☮🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🌊

209,510 views • 2 years ago

Over the last decade, a consensus has grown on the Left and Right that the US needs to be more self-sufficient when it comes to manufacturing. During Covid, we discovered we didn’t make much of the equipment we needed to deal with a pandemic and were thus dependent on other nations, and so Congress passed and Trump signed the CARES Act in part to spend money to support domestic manufacturing of medical supplies. In 2022, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. out of the recognition that we had become dangerously dependent on foreign nations for microchips, which have become general-purpose technologies, necessary for national security, and upon which the AI revolution will be built. Where America had a $38 billion trade surplus in 1991 on advanced technology manufacturing, today it has a $299 billion deficit. Liberals and conservatives, Leftists and Rightists, have long shared a broad agreement that manufacturing and its knock-on industries are an essential source of employment for non-college-educated working-class people, and that the loss of manufacturing contributed to social fragmentation, family breakdown, and the drug addiction and death crisis. In a 2024 survey, Americans agreed ten to one that “we need a stronger manufacturing sector; 47% said America suffered from globalization, while 33% said it benefited. It is partly for that reason that Joe Biden, in perhaps the most bipartisan and non-ideological decision of his presidency, kept in place the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his first term as president. And yet both liberals and many conservatives are reacting with outrage as President Donald Trump puts in place precisely the trade tariffs needed to reduce our dangerous dependency on other nations and increase our manufacturing of the goods we need for national security, economic security, and societal wellbeing. The China tariffs, the CARES Act, and the CHIPS Act did not result in the return of much manufacturing, much less the rebalancing of trade. Total manufacturing jobsare 12.8 million in December 2019 and are 12.8 million today. The US still depends on China and other nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients, personal protective equipment, microchips, and critical minerals. Suffice to say, we are a very long way from a manufacturing renaissance sufficiently robust to revitalize the communities that have lost good, high-wage jobs to China and other competitors and even rivals internationally. The reason is clear. The average tariff level globally is 6.7% compared to America’s 2.7%. And simply subsidizing industries may not be enough for two major semiconductor manufacturers, Intel and TSMC, to produce domestically without tariffs. US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)📷 Anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say Trump’s actions will destroy people’s retirement savings by crashing the stock market, and will undermine the comparative advantage of other nations producing products we shouldn’t. And, they say, our goal should not be to return manufacturing to the United States, except for a few exceptions, which Congress has already made. For centuries, economists have argued that some nations, such as poorer ones, are more suited to produce many products than richer ones. Americans making t-shirts at $20 per hour are less efficient than the Vietnamese making them for $3 per hour. And the US should not be trying to replace perfectly reasonable products to import, like aluminum from Canada, which we have no reason to ever go to war with, and which has access to cheap hydroelectricity to make it. Over half of American families have money in the stock market, and they will all suffer, anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say. The economic system we have had since World War II has worked to maximize win-win relationships that result in poorer nations climbing the development ladder with manufacturing and wealthier nations like the US focused on services. But it’s unwise to evaluate policies based on the short-term impact of the stock market. Anti-tariff voices grossly overstate the comparative advantage when it comes to manufacturing, and the postwar system, economically and militarily, is no longer in the interests of non-college-educated Americans, who are both more vulnerable and more numerous than the college-educated elite. There is no need to bring back a significant amount of low-skill and nonstrategic manufacturing like T-shirts, and Trump has not advocated that. America may need to bring back some low-skill jobs, such as manufacturing protective gear. But our priority should rightly be high-skill manufacturing, and CARES, CHIPS, and the Trump-Biden China were, obviously, not enough. It may be fine to rely on Canada for aluminum. But the tariffs against it and Mexico, as well as Trump’s stated desire to make it the 51st state, should be viewed as the president negotiating in preparation for upcoming trade talks between the three countries. While offshoring manufacturing policies benefited multinational corporations, bankers, and consumers, they often devastated communities built on manufacturing, mining, and manual labor. US companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs, fewer regulations, and subsidized exports. Economists calculate that just the so-called “China Shock,” that country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, alone cost the U.S. 2.4 million jobs and had ripple effects across entire communities. The average manufacturing wage is $103,000 per year compared to $37,000 per year for the average service sector wage. And where a service sector job supports 2 to 3 jobs, a manufacturing job supports nine jobs. Continuing with a system that is fundamentally advantageous to a minority of the country and disadvantageous to a majority is not sustainable and unwise to prop up. Trump’s trade actions are part of a broader return to nationalism underway globally, and they can’t be understood on economic grounds alone. Regarding priorities, we should put the two-thirds of the country that is non-college educated working-class ahead of the 50% of the country who own stocks, for moral and democratic reasons. America is deeply divided. While there are many proximate reasons for this, including geographic sorting, cable TV, and social media, the underlying reasons are economic. The gulf between the educated elites and the non-educated working class has grown dangerously large. Many critics of the tariffs are well-intentioned. They are right to worry that they could come with significant economic costs and disruption. The concern of many of them is genuinely for the working class and poor, who higher prices for imported goods would most harm. However, many American elites today identify more with their global counterparts than their fellow Americans. And that’s a huge problem. In his study of 21 civilizations, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee found that civilizations collapse not simply from external invasion but from internal decay, precisely when their elites stop identifying with the people. “Civilizations die from suicide,” he famously wrote, “not murder.” Civilizations all depend on their elites, Toynbee noted, or the people he called the “creative minority.” But rising success creates decadence, complacency, and eventually contempt toward their people, and they start to identify with elites in other nations. This is all a natural outgrowth of trade, cosmopolitanism, and snobbery. It starts to view the ordinary people as “deplorables.” At this point, the elite lose their creativity and become simply the “dominant minority,” one that rules no longer by example but rather by manipulation or force. Toynbee could be describing America in the 21st Century. College-educated elites look down on the American working class and identify with other professional and managerial elites in Europe and other nations. They sympathize less with the low-skilled American citizen born here and more with the low-skilled foreign migrant here illegally. Such elites are more concerned with tariffs' impact on their stock portfolio and the cost of their gadgets than they are with the downward pressure illegal migrants put on wages or with how nations manipulate their currency to retain manufacturing. Toynbee said that, at this stage of development, a nation’s elites become “parasites or renegades,” alienated and contemptuous toward the culture that produced them. Civilizations at this late stage are morally hollow and thus fragile and prone to abuses of power, like censorship, lawfare, and the weaponization of government agencies. And these civilizations disparage their traditions in ways that the American elites have disparaged America’s founding and its history as essentially evil, due to the unavoidable tragedy of indigenous genocide and slavery, even though a civil war that killed over 600,000 people was fought to end it. But Toynbee didn’t believe that civilizational collapse was inevitable; some societies can snap back.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!
9:16

Over the last decade, a consensus has grown on the Left and Right that the US needs to be more self-sufficient when it comes to manufacturing. During Covid, we discovered we didn’t make much of the equipment we needed to deal with a pandemic and were thus dependent on other nations, and so Congress passed and Trump signed the CARES Act in part to spend money to support domestic manufacturing of medical supplies. In 2022, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. out of the recognition that we had become dangerously dependent on foreign nations for microchips, which have become general-purpose technologies, necessary for national security, and upon which the AI revolution will be built. Where America had a $38 billion trade surplus in 1991 on advanced technology manufacturing, today it has a $299 billion deficit. Liberals and conservatives, Leftists and Rightists, have long shared a broad agreement that manufacturing and its knock-on industries are an essential source of employment for non-college-educated working-class people, and that the loss of manufacturing contributed to social fragmentation, family breakdown, and the drug addiction and death crisis. In a 2024 survey, Americans agreed ten to one that “we need a stronger manufacturing sector; 47% said America suffered from globalization, while 33% said it benefited. It is partly for that reason that Joe Biden, in perhaps the most bipartisan and non-ideological decision of his presidency, kept in place the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his first term as president. And yet both liberals and many conservatives are reacting with outrage as President Donald Trump puts in place precisely the trade tariffs needed to reduce our dangerous dependency on other nations and increase our manufacturing of the goods we need for national security, economic security, and societal wellbeing. The China tariffs, the CARES Act, and the CHIPS Act did not result in the return of much manufacturing, much less the rebalancing of trade. Total manufacturing jobsare 12.8 million in December 2019 and are 12.8 million today. The US still depends on China and other nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients, personal protective equipment, microchips, and critical minerals. Suffice to say, we are a very long way from a manufacturing renaissance sufficiently robust to revitalize the communities that have lost good, high-wage jobs to China and other competitors and even rivals internationally. The reason is clear. The average tariff level globally is 6.7% compared to America’s 2.7%. And simply subsidizing industries may not be enough for two major semiconductor manufacturers, Intel and TSMC, to produce domestically without tariffs. US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)📷 Anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say Trump’s actions will destroy people’s retirement savings by crashing the stock market, and will undermine the comparative advantage of other nations producing products we shouldn’t. And, they say, our goal should not be to return manufacturing to the United States, except for a few exceptions, which Congress has already made. For centuries, economists have argued that some nations, such as poorer ones, are more suited to produce many products than richer ones. Americans making t-shirts at $20 per hour are less efficient than the Vietnamese making them for $3 per hour. And the US should not be trying to replace perfectly reasonable products to import, like aluminum from Canada, which we have no reason to ever go to war with, and which has access to cheap hydroelectricity to make it. Over half of American families have money in the stock market, and they will all suffer, anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say. The economic system we have had since World War II has worked to maximize win-win relationships that result in poorer nations climbing the development ladder with manufacturing and wealthier nations like the US focused on services. But it’s unwise to evaluate policies based on the short-term impact of the stock market. Anti-tariff voices grossly overstate the comparative advantage when it comes to manufacturing, and the postwar system, economically and militarily, is no longer in the interests of non-college-educated Americans, who are both more vulnerable and more numerous than the college-educated elite. There is no need to bring back a significant amount of low-skill and nonstrategic manufacturing like T-shirts, and Trump has not advocated that. America may need to bring back some low-skill jobs, such as manufacturing protective gear. But our priority should rightly be high-skill manufacturing, and CARES, CHIPS, and the Trump-Biden China were, obviously, not enough. It may be fine to rely on Canada for aluminum. But the tariffs against it and Mexico, as well as Trump’s stated desire to make it the 51st state, should be viewed as the president negotiating in preparation for upcoming trade talks between the three countries. While offshoring manufacturing policies benefited multinational corporations, bankers, and consumers, they often devastated communities built on manufacturing, mining, and manual labor. US companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs, fewer regulations, and subsidized exports. Economists calculate that just the so-called “China Shock,” that country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, alone cost the U.S. 2.4 million jobs and had ripple effects across entire communities. The average manufacturing wage is $103,000 per year compared to $37,000 per year for the average service sector wage. And where a service sector job supports 2 to 3 jobs, a manufacturing job supports nine jobs. Continuing with a system that is fundamentally advantageous to a minority of the country and disadvantageous to a majority is not sustainable and unwise to prop up. Trump’s trade actions are part of a broader return to nationalism underway globally, and they can’t be understood on economic grounds alone. Regarding priorities, we should put the two-thirds of the country that is non-college educated working-class ahead of the 50% of the country who own stocks, for moral and democratic reasons. America is deeply divided. While there are many proximate reasons for this, including geographic sorting, cable TV, and social media, the underlying reasons are economic. The gulf between the educated elites and the non-educated working class has grown dangerously large. Many critics of the tariffs are well-intentioned. They are right to worry that they could come with significant economic costs and disruption. The concern of many of them is genuinely for the working class and poor, who higher prices for imported goods would most harm. However, many American elites today identify more with their global counterparts than their fellow Americans. And that’s a huge problem. In his study of 21 civilizations, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee found that civilizations collapse not simply from external invasion but from internal decay, precisely when their elites stop identifying with the people. “Civilizations die from suicide,” he famously wrote, “not murder.” Civilizations all depend on their elites, Toynbee noted, or the people he called the “creative minority.” But rising success creates decadence, complacency, and eventually contempt toward their people, and they start to identify with elites in other nations. This is all a natural outgrowth of trade, cosmopolitanism, and snobbery. It starts to view the ordinary people as “deplorables.” At this point, the elite lose their creativity and become simply the “dominant minority,” one that rules no longer by example but rather by manipulation or force. Toynbee could be describing America in the 21st Century. College-educated elites look down on the American working class and identify with other professional and managerial elites in Europe and other nations. They sympathize less with the low-skilled American citizen born here and more with the low-skilled foreign migrant here illegally. Such elites are more concerned with tariffs' impact on their stock portfolio and the cost of their gadgets than they are with the downward pressure illegal migrants put on wages or with how nations manipulate their currency to retain manufacturing. Toynbee said that, at this stage of development, a nation’s elites become “parasites or renegades,” alienated and contemptuous toward the culture that produced them. Civilizations at this late stage are morally hollow and thus fragile and prone to abuses of power, like censorship, lawfare, and the weaponization of government agencies. And these civilizations disparage their traditions in ways that the American elites have disparaged America’s founding and its history as essentially evil, due to the unavoidable tragedy of indigenous genocide and slavery, even though a civil war that killed over 600,000 people was fought to end it. But Toynbee didn’t believe that civilizational collapse was inevitable; some societies can snap back.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!

Michael Shellenberger

56,885 views • 1 year ago

Really think about this “Crazy how the government has been shut down for over two weeks and — nobody even freaking noticed. Think about that for a second. Entire departments with thousands of government workers sitting at home and not a damn thing changed in your life. Roads didn't disappear, the lights didn't go out, country didn't collapse. So maybe the real question is, were they ever really essential anyway? We've been told for decades that the government keeps the country running, that without it, Society would crumble. Right? But if you can shut the whole thing down and nothing changes, it's a pretty clear indication that the system isn't what's holding everything together. We are. Because while corrupt politicians are busy f*cking off and blowing taxpayer dollars on lavish parties in far off lands — It's us, the producers, the builders, the small business owners, the blue collar men and women showing up every damn day who actually keep this country running. And what do we get in return? Higher taxes, higher prices, and less freedom. They print fake money, they throw it at failed programs, and they still tell you to do your part. Meanwhile, your dollar buys less and your work gets taxed more. And the people making the rules never feel a single ounce of the pain that they caused. $37 trillion in debt, and these clowns still act like the solution is to spend more. More agencies, more staff, more handouts, more bullshit titles that don't contribute a shred of value to the American people. That is not how this country's government was intended to run. It's a bloated system feeding itself while pretending to serve you. The truth is, if an entire department can shut down for weeks and nobody notices, that means that the system is irrelevant. It's dead weight, and the American people are doing just fine without them because we're the ones who are keeping this great American nation alive, not the suits in DC”
2:25

Really think about this “Crazy how the government has been shut down for over two weeks and — nobody even freaking noticed. Think about that for a second. Entire departments with thousands of government workers sitting at home and not a damn thing changed in your life. Roads didn't disappear, the lights didn't go out, country didn't collapse. So maybe the real question is, were they ever really essential anyway? We've been told for decades that the government keeps the country running, that without it, Society would crumble. Right? But if you can shut the whole thing down and nothing changes, it's a pretty clear indication that the system isn't what's holding everything together. We are. Because while corrupt politicians are busy f*cking off and blowing taxpayer dollars on lavish parties in far off lands — It's us, the producers, the builders, the small business owners, the blue collar men and women showing up every damn day who actually keep this country running. And what do we get in return? Higher taxes, higher prices, and less freedom. They print fake money, they throw it at failed programs, and they still tell you to do your part. Meanwhile, your dollar buys less and your work gets taxed more. And the people making the rules never feel a single ounce of the pain that they caused. $37 trillion in debt, and these clowns still act like the solution is to spend more. More agencies, more staff, more handouts, more bullshit titles that don't contribute a shred of value to the American people. That is not how this country's government was intended to run. It's a bloated system feeding itself while pretending to serve you. The truth is, if an entire department can shut down for weeks and nobody notices, that means that the system is irrelevant. It's dead weight, and the American people are doing just fine without them because we're the ones who are keeping this great American nation alive, not the suits in DC”

Wall Street Apes

609,801 views • 8 months ago