zazen

@Elliott Your responses makes sense as you shared Kinna and Graeber on the other thread and lean anarchist? You see the state as the only meaningful source of domination. But that lens creates blind spots - you treat private power as harmless individual action instead of something that can consolidate, organise with others and choose to impose violence on others living ''freely'' in a world of anarchy where no state exists to protect them. It’s ironic because both Kinna and Graeber critiqued corporate and financial power as forms of domination - not just the state. They included economic coercion and private capital as forms of violence. Yet you excuse oligarchs, minimize 2008 and shift all blame onto ‘individual consumer choice’' which is tone deaf just as Apparition Jack has called you above. You dick ride capitalists instead lol ''BaNkErS cOmItTeD nO HaRm BrO'' You’ve adopted anarchism’s suspicion of the state, but ignored its structural critique of private power. Graeber would’ve shredded the arguments you’ve been making.

@Apparition of Jack Elliot is unable to analyse at a systems level or entirely underestimates structural factors. His analysis hinges on the individual being the ultimate decider of his fate. The same blind spot shows up in conversation with yourself, Blueoak yesterday, and me in a previous conversation about the 2008 banking crisis where he didn't see how predatory and fraudelent banking practices harmed people - instead it was the consumers choice.

Symbiotic doesn’t mean equal - tapeworms are symbiotic yet parasitic. The main issue isn't that both can benefit but the asymetric gain and trajectory of private capital eroding the sovereignty of a state. You don't see issue with a state needing to depend on a oligarch who can exercise their private interest at the expense of the national interest? If it was such a ''win-win'' why did anti-trust laws come about? Because of public backlash and the fact that a state recognizes the structural vulnerability and lack of sovereignty it has in needing to depend on a private individual. You just read a headline about a titan like JP bailing out the government and get a MAGA hard on. Analyse things structurally and not just on the surface. The trajectory from 1895 to 2008 in fact shows a initial power imbalance that has since become institutionalized to the point it is too big to fail. Over time - has private capital become more powerful or less? Has the sovereignty of the state become sub-ordinate to capital or less? JP Morgan was in the same class of actors referred to as Robber Barons. Google Morganization: ''Morganization refers to the late 19th-century business strategy of J.P. Morgan, involving consolidating rival companies, forming powerful trusts/monopolies (like U.S. Steel, General Electric), stabilizing industries, and attracting European investment by creating massive, profitable entities, fundamentally shaping American finance and leading to modern antitrust laws and private equity. It was a period of intense industrial consolidation and monopolization, creating vast wealth but also public backlash against "robber barons". We've been over this in another thread where you couldn't see the harm bankers caused because of the 2008 crisis and instead blamed consumer choices lol. You said: ''What you're pointing at has been getting minimized even, not growing. Look back to Carnegie and JP Morgan for heavens sake, look up JP Morgan's bailout of the United States, (the bank bailed the country out).'' JP Morgan manages assets worth $4 trillion. That's equivalent to the GDP of the 4-5 biggest economies - Japan or India. It has more firepower than the UK. When your larger than the GDP of most countries you don't just manage assets in the market but can govern and dictate the nature of the market by your decisions - you dictate to ''sovereign states''. You become indispensable because of your size. If a state must guarantee your survival for stability - it introduces perverse incentives - the more recklessly you grow, the more certain the governments backstop becomes. Gains get privatized, costs get externalized and socialized. To understand better: If excess of capital isn't checked you get gremlins like Soros: See how he says he acts a-morally ie not immorally. The issue with perverse or misaligned incentives is that actors don't have to hate the world and act with ''intent to harm''. They simply act with indifference. That's the alignment issue with AI also - not that it could act with malice to harm humans but that its cold indifference to humans can cause harm because it simply seeks to achieve its objective regardless of the cost to humans. The same way corporations seek to achieve their objective - one of them being the legally mandated fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. From our other conversation ''Corporations have a fiduciary duty to serve private shareholder value - not people. People are served as as secondary order effect, but not as a primary motive. If a corporation can cut costs, hike prices and lobby for regulations that favor it at the expense of the consumer - they will. This is legally mandated - this is what I mean by the system being structurally rigged in favor of capital.'' Even if your a enlightened lovey dovey bhudda with good intentions as a CEO - you will be replaced by someone who will execute on that legal mandate. This is structural entrapment where capital and its accumulation is primary regardless of its costs.

What’s your point, elaborate?

Elaborate on the point your trying to make - is it that an oligarch richer than God had so much concentrated wealth and power that he could single handedly decide whether the US economy survived? Is that free market capitalism? The problem isn’t that JP Morgan once bailed out the state - its a problem if the state’s stability depends on JP Morgan type actors existing. That’s why the Federal Reserve was created after that crisis. From Wiki: “The panic was triggered by the failed attempt in October 1907 to corner the market on stock of the United Copper Company.” Ie Capital being naughty. ”Collapse of TC&I's stock price was averted by an emergency takeover by Morgan's U.S. Steel Corporation, a move approved by the trust-busting President Theodore Roosevelt. The following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, a leading Republican, established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.” So the excesses of capital accumulation created such instability, and then a God tier capitalist consolidates during that crisis and can then make certain demands for the price of rescue. And Roosevelt just said “fuck it, exempt JP from anti-trust laws cos we need him more than our laws” and let him gobble up competitors in a consolidation play. For your historical amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

Still haven’t seen OP rebuttal any arguments - just agreed with Leo saying the current system is the best so far. Despite my comment on the previous page going into how and why this particular kind of capitalism has in emerged in the West - including the reason for its sacredness as a value which has become synonymous with freedom. “Capitalism” isn’t the least bad system - it was and is the least bad system for a specific civilization (Westwern) escaping a specific problem (Medieval fuedalism). It’s a mistake to assume this as universal and have a binary view of governing systems that is blind to history. Other societies had capitalism in the sense they had commerce that allowed for private gain and accumulation but that the excesses of which were disciplined by a higher authority instead of making it the apex value ie Capital-ism - a mutant child of commerce. Westerncentric analysis thinks the West is the reference point of development with everyone else developing on and along their timeline - trailing behind them of course. Historical amnesia and Spiral dynamic supremacy. In 2008 capitalism privatized the gains and socialized the losses. When the system based upon the primacy of capital collpased it wasn’t the “free market” that saved the day but state power (banker bailouts) and ironically a so called communist state (China) that disciplines the excesses of capital instead of elevating it into God tier status - that stabilized the global financial system by buying US debt. Be prepared to have your theories and worldviews challenged in the coming decades as the global order shifts. Haters gonna hate, comrade Zazen be like:

If vibing is considered game then Craig Ferguson :

People need to realise this a larger war than Ukraine-Russia. The reason Tomahwaks can't be given and most likely won't be is because whilst Western involvement in this war is obvious (intelligence, ISR, Western arms and aims at the expense of Ukrainian blood etc) Tomahawks or any system that requires the very explicit involvement of the US to operate such systems (that can't simply be given to those without the operational ability) increases the tensions between rival powers who are avoiding direct conflict (a hot war vs a cold indirect one via proxy now). The stakes are simply too high unless you want to risk WW3 and gamble on that. This is where Ukraine finds itself in a bad position - because it's provided defensive means but never the offensive means that can perhaps tilt the balance in their favor - which may not happen even if they were provided. Those offesnive weapons simply risk a hot war between Russia and the West that is being avoided at all costs by the sane minded, or being flirted with by the insane Eurocons who dream of Balkanizing Russia and taking the fight to them - not knowing what that even means. This is why diplomacy is the only way and the cutting of losses to prevent further losses (to life or land). As we speak there are encirclement of the front line cities with Pokrovsk being a major logistical hub in the cross hairs. The linear thinking of - Russia only captures x km of land in x amount of time therefore it would take them 100s of years to capture all of Ukraine - is simply not smart. War isn't linear - if certain places fall they can have a domino effect more than others and leave wide open spaces to take land more easily than others. Attrition warfare is never linear. Ukraine's drone strategy is good in causing issues in Russia - but the other side of this is that facilities get repaired and back online within weeks at times, and Russia can adapt or move product to other regions to be refined etc. Things shouldn't be overstated. Even if we think the West can cause enough chaos in Russia as to have Putin overthrown - what does that achieve? Putin is actually seen as more of a moderate in Russia - do we really want someone like Medvedev to come into power? lol. Tell you the future before it happens cos I spy with my third eye. Apparently it was “once strategic” and is “no longer militarily important” lol Not what BBC was saying just last month: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jdv0623pno.amp ”If Pokrovsk falls, defending its satellite city of Myrnohrad becomes almost untenable and Russian troops would then be able to turn their focus to the battle for Kostyantynivka to the north-east and the rest of the so-called "fortress belt" cities of Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.” EU fully banning Russian energy. So how will Europe become competitive with higher energy prices? Some will do better than others and it will take time. UK just said their going to reform and embrace nuclear which is a start: https://nuclear.britishprogress.org/ UK luckily also has some of the best wind potential it can harness. Norway has unreal hydro etc but most countries don’t have blessed geographies and instead react to nuclear like their allergic. The only silver lining here is that Europe got a kick up the ass to take their energy, economic and military sovereignty seriously and need to start acting accordingly. But it will be a lost decade of growth due to higher energy cost and major investments needing to be made plus % of GDP going to military.

Larry Ellison: A AI expert: Most of these AI guys say similar things - there's a uncomfortably high chance of dystopia rather than abundance. But the AI race and game theory of it all pushes us forward regardless. Another common theme is that the AI leaders / companies underplay the risk (that they discuss in private) but overplay the benefits when public facing. It could be that our baseline rises but inequality skyrockets. We'r all rich with Ferrari's we 3D print - but not powerful like the elites who have Bugatti's instead lol. Essentially rich but powerless peasants.

Spot on here. This is the thing - we still view power dynamics as nation state vs nation station rather than as private capital that has outgrown the nation state itself and is in conflict with it, even as that nation state goes up against other nation states. Our analysis of geopolitics is outdated if we only look at national interest - because now there are private a-national, trans-national interests who use the nation state as a platform for their own interests. This is why many people feel dissonance, disillusionment and confusion and question ''why don't our elites or political class serve us any longer''. The fundamental thing is to have state capacity that checks this power and disciplines it. But the liberal reflex to this level of state capacity and intervention is seen as ''authoritarian overreach'' and fear of the slippery slope leading towards a tyrannical state. So we exist on the edges with our solutions (communism vs capitalism) rather than in a healthy middle. As I mentioned in my comment on the top of this page: the underlying social contract that justified capitalism has been broken. We have private empires being built on public scaffolding - with the public no longer sharing in those returns or riches. That's because we have a funnel vs a loop - to put it simply. A healthy functional system or a loop enforcing the social contract would be - the public creates the conditions for growth = private sector innovates and builds wealth = wealth circulates back into the public sphere through wages, taxes, and reinvestment. The funnel that has taken its place instead is - society funds the platform = private actors monetise it = capital exits the system = the commons decays = capital gains more leverage and consolidates its gains by influencing and gaming the system ie the state (lobbying, regulatory capture, revolving door etc). We seprated churhc from state but not capital from state. And the same way we have brain drain from developing countries, we have a similar sort of resource drain (wealth exiting or existing out of state reach) in developed countries that stalls societal level up lift. ''True Communism'' much like “True Capitalism” can never be implemented in their purest forms by a human nature that isn’t 100% pure. Communism demands we not be greedy for the sake of community (the commune) and assumes others will fend for us - capitalism demands we be greedy enough to fend for ourselves and that doing so will have a trickle down effect on those less able to compete with us. Communism throws a net on talent (suffocating innovation and growth), capitalism has no safety net for those with little to no talent. Communism assumes the wealth it built off of capitalist mechanisms can then be sustained without those mechanisms. Capitalism assumes the goodwill of the people and market incentives are enough to protect against the accumulation of power by capitalists that can then undermine the public commons. Communism overestimates human goodwill and virtue, capitalism underestimates human greed and corruption. Neither survive contact with reality and are retarded Frankenstein caricatures of human nature.

Lol so much binary thinking. The world isn’t as simple as capitalism vs communism. That was a peculiar reaction to Western feudalism that distorts human traits (individual gain vs communalism) and totalizes the system to bend to one principles over another without any nuance or complexity. Both are inhuman or end up inhumane. Non-Western civilizations had commerce, wealth accumulation, and contracts - but were disciplined by a higher authority when they grew too powerful. Capital itself was never the organising principle. The kind of capitalism that came out of the West was a much needed escape hatch from feudalism. But that creates and is potentially now creating a techno fuedal scenario where capital escapes the people - because when capital no longer needs labour (AI, automation) - how does labour (all of us peasants) obtain capital? Capital and property rights as its pre-requisite became sacred in the Western psyche because it literally was the escape hatch from a rigid feudalistic aristocracy that kneecapped upward mobility. This is why libertarianism, capitalism and communism emerged from the West in particular - but shouldn’t be universalised as if they are the global solution. A European family civil war became a global Cold War of retarded ideaologies that bring lopsided results. The West separated the state from church and monarchy but didn’t so cleanly from capital - and now capital cannibalises the system and commons. The reason it works better in Scandinavia is because instead of a loop where capital is taxed and re-invested into society - it’s funnelled out the system. Smaller, culturally cohesive societies keep the social contract intact - they see tax collection as an investment rather than taking something from “me” the “sovereign individual”. Also, the wealthy don’t pay tax in proportion to what they own or extract from society - they pay tax on the income they choose to declare. This isn’t malice but simply incentive - which is why the system itself needs a redesign - but that takes a cultural shift where capital isn’t the apex value. Check this:

Shabby roads and infrastructure: Their building cities just to show off and ''flex'' - not because they need to urbanize and lift 100's of millions out of poverty and rural living: China's political system: People used to also view Japanese products as mass market trash and ''unreliable''. That's how industrial economies develop - they master mass manufacturing and climb up the ladder to advanced manufacturing and quality. The value for money in China is strong too. Which is also what PPP compares better compared to just GDP - meaning, people in their local currency have decent purchasing power and therefore better living standards. For people coming in with stronger currencies its quite a place to enjoy: You can stay in 5 star hotels for £100 - £200 a night that would cost anywhere from £300 - £600 a night in the Western cities. Grand Hyatt, Sheraton etc. Even on their tropical island of Hainan with beaches. What happens when you focus on building and re-investing in the foundation of a society instead of financializing your economy for a parasitic financial elite that bid up and milk the populace through a rentier economy that jacks up the price of essentials rather than supply them at scale. Of course no place is perfect - but there are lessons to be taken.

Real “change” in the transformative sense happens to a society - rather than solely by a society. Incrementalism manages a system but transformation changes a system - and most people and systems resist any significant change until crisis point. Incrementalism (small steps) from the elites above preserves the system through policy tweaks, symbolic gestures, concession’s etc. Incrementalism from the society below prepares the ground for change but isn’t groundbreaking by itself ie galvanised energy into movements, shift in consciousness/culture etc. Both (elites and society) need crisis or enough pain to cross a threshold - where the old system’s operating logic needs to be abandoned for a new one. For society the status quo becomes intolerable to their material security and sense of dignity. For elites the status quo continuing risks revolt (heads rolling), mass non compliance or systemic failure. It’s more incentive driven then morally driven for the elites who risk loss of legitimacy and control - while society risks material well being and dignity. Transformation will come when the price of staying the same becomes higher than the price of changing. Surely AI will force its arrival.

Epstein was a node in a wider ecosystem largely revolving around financial crime : Criminal underworld - intelligence agencies - finance - and now tech. Shorter if ya’ll busy actualizing:

@Jodistrict Nice share. We’re gonna see so much cope in the next decades lol Tristan Harris who made Social Dilemma : We have to get our shit together to tackle the changes AI is going to bring. Perhaps that will bring the world together better than Covid did.

I share your optimism too. At the same time - the transition to get to the baseline where everyone is lifted up will be bumpy. Abundance still doesn’t solve for ego - and the resulting power dynamics that come with it. Even if survival pressures are solved - power dynamics and new hierarchies can be created. The infinite abundance in output also relies on the finite resources of input. Geopolitical tension and rivalry will be over that material base including choke points. At the national level states will have to have the capacity, coordination and cohesiveness to keep pace with the change. Job displacement will have to be plugged with some sort of UBI - but that requires taxing and containing the very companies that will wield immense influence and leverage. States that subordinate capital / private interests for national interests will fair better in this regard ie China, Singapore, Nordic and Gulf countries for example. US is notorious for functionally acting as a corptocracy where the state is a platform for private / capital interests that subvert national interests. Will the state discipline and step in before it’s too late, or will it take crisis to force them to do so? In the end - the incentives will force the elites to provide UBI to prevent revolt and because they still require consumers. It will be some form of circular economy - but it’s not certain what the UBI will look like - it could be conditional basic income where we’re surveilled, programmed and nudged to behave “well”. Also, if AGI then leads to Artificial Super intelligence - that’s something that could be completely out of our hands. It won’t be confined to whichever country reaches it first - because it could be far beyond our capacity to reign in. Check these out:

That's one city your talking about - Chongquing. If anything that shows the engineering capacity to build a city in a place nature wouldn't so easily allow. We marvel at road networks in Switzerland cutting through mountains but in China its ''urban planning sucks'' lol. It's incompatible for China to be the logistical manufacturing hub of the world and have universally poor roads of which those logistics depend on. Chinas consumed more concrete in a few years than the US used in the entire 20th century. The scale of build up is enormous - including the time-scale its all done within. Of course there's going to be viral failures and corruption here and there where standards are dropped or sub-standard materials are used. In the West not a whole lot is being built anywhere near this level. When new things finally get approved they act like its a big achievement - for example in the UK we just got the go ahead for another runway at Heathrow Airport that was deliberated over many years and will cost over £40 billion (will go over budget as always and not be on time) lol meanwhile: Also, what my above comment was talking about regarding containment of parasitic financial elites and steering private capital away from speculation and towards more productive domains. Here is what I mean:

- Leading the world doesn't mean leading in the way the West has and has felt entitled to (Western exceptionalism) with some missionary zeal. States can lead through industrial capacity, logistics, trade corridors, technological innovations etc. It doesn't mean imposing its moral framework onto others - which the West makes synonymous with ''leading''. China doesn't trade with African nations with strings attached for them to accept a neo-liberal framework - which is why they'd rather deal with China than the West in the first place. - On innovation. Every civilization builds upon others - civilization is cumulative. Japan copied from the West, Korea from Japan, US from UK for its early industrial base. UK and Europe colonially plundered the world and built on top adding their own ingenuity and genius. It's not just who copied who but who takes and builds further upon the shoulders of giants. - We need to look at trajectory and not just where things stand today. China has the largest science and tech talent pool in the world. The pipeline of STEM graduates is insane. They're filing a lot of patents and already leading in key areas: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker/ 'The Critical Technology Tracker is a large data-driven project that now covers 64 critical technologies spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. It provides a leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent and potential future science and technology capability.'' The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies. https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outperforming-the-united-states-in-critical-technologies/ BRICS+ isn't some coordinated mass uprising against the old imperial guard of the West. It's more pragmatically a coming together to equalise the global order in such a way as to not have 15% of the world population dictate to 85% of the world through the institutional leverage these colonial legacy powers have had and maintained till today. The ability to uni-laterally call the shots is what is fading. This doesn't meant the West is going to collapse or the US won't be a super power - it just won't be THE superpower. Some countries will fair better than others - Europe will stagnate most likely closer to how Japan has been the past decades, whilst US still has plenty of strong fundamentals. We're in a world of transition and it's also not guaranteed what way things will go. Things will be turbulent - especially with the advent of AI. There's actually not many countries who are equipped to handle that turbulence. If (perhaps when) AI causes mass job displacement at a rate that economies are unable to replace those jobs - it's the countries which have competence, cohesion (social/cultural unity) and containment ability (state capacity to contain the excesses of capital and private interest that serve themselves above the national interest) - that will cope better. Small Nordic countries, Gulf monarchies, Singapore, China come to mind immediately. The world looks to be on the precipice of transforming faster than most states can transform themselves to keep pace. The baseline of humanity may raise in the end with all these innovations, but there will be wide variation and friction on the way there. If a country and culture is allergic to the idea of state intervention (due to liberal freedoms, libertarian impulse) they will resist the much needed coordination and authority that only a state structure could provide to stabilize society among all the changes on the horizon. If the state is captured by private interests and capital elites (US for example) - will they wrestle with the state needing to reign them in and tax them enough to replace the lost incomes their tech companies will bring? There is going to need to be an inversion in that dynamic - state controlling capital rather than the other way round. But when a system has been captured already, it's much harder to reverse things until a breakdown of that system and a re-building with a proper hierarchy in place of what the state is for and its role - which is the service of the people and the containment of private interests (capital) when they grow unchecked. Right now, when China checks capital (notoriously Ali Baba) the West cries authoritarian. Liberalism's Achilles heel is that it’s scared of looking illiberal. And this is due to some juvenile notions of freedom of the individual - a flat binary 2D way of thinking about freedom without much context for a much wider framework of freedoms within which the individual is embedded. This will have to change and things will need to become much more holistic rather than crowning the individual and freedom as the apex values - no serious society can build cohesively and sustainably upon such values.

Many times I come across geopolitical videos that are so wide ranging - they don’t quite fit in any single thread. Here’s a thread to share such videos and discuss geopolitics in general. Don’t jump to conclude that sharing such videos means endorsing all the views in such videos, and ignore the clickbaity titles and thumbnails that are unfortunately common these days despite the content being worth listening to. Starting off with three all encompassing videos: - Jeffrey Sachs covering how the world got to where it is today (Uni-polar) - Scott Horton covering US foreign policy in detail (there’s a recent Lex Fridman podcast 10 hrs long but this is more condensed) - Matt Williams (Willy OAM) on global geopolitics and how all the players are positioning themselves. Quite a mind blowing listen. Doesn’t embed so here’s the URL: https://youtu.be/6OaP6Hi0OSk?si=tacdv0wa2gCzC3cc

Wanting affordable housing, healthcare or education isn't being a super-consumer. Going into debt to wear Loro Piana clothes with a Patek watch and eat at Nobu every weekend is a super consumer lol. People don't go to fancy colleges and in debt themselves to the degree they do because they want to simply party though. The path to higher living standards can and often does require going to good schools to gain access to credentialed professions that you can't do otherwise. Those cluster in more expensive cities - and those jobs and career paths require working and living in those same cities. The fact that those same people can't afford to or struggle to live in the same place they work is where the major disconnect is. Moving to a cheaper city can work on a individual level but it's not a mass scale solution to something which is structurally constrained. The fact they need to move shows the system isn't working. Re-locating moves the pressure to elsewhere which then causes prices to increase there. Those areas become mini-Austins or Denvers. The main issue is cheaper cities are disappearing faster than new ones can emerge. If you magically invented a machine to make houses super fast and cheap - would the government allow you to use it? Or would they regulate it away because the value of housing as collateral underpins the entire financial system and thus the empire? You wouldn't only meet demand but exceed it (flooding supply) thanks to your new genius invention - which would threaten the system itself. That's a good thought experiment. Individuals can re-locate, as many already do due to high prices and affordability. The issue is other places don't offer the same opportunities and the prices in those area's also increase as more people relocate. The issue just gets kicked down the road without being resolved structurally. This happens within cities also ie gentrification. Take your example of Albuquerque. ''According to HUD, no more than 30% of monthly household income should go to housing costs, including utilities and insurance, to be considered affordable. To afford the median sale price of $345,000, a household must have an annual income of $108,935. Currently only 12% of the state’s population can afford the median priced home, assuming an interest rate of 6.5%, and 5% downpayment. The state’s median household income increased 22.2% (from $48,059 to $62,125) from 2018 to 2023, while the median home price increased 72.5% (from $200,000 to $345,000). As home prices outpace wage growth, the ability to achieve homeownership becomes more difficult.'' Source https://housingnm.org/uploads/documents/2025_Housing_Needs_Assessment_Key_Facts-_final.pdf The price to income ratio is 5.5x which is much better than other cities but still worse than baby boomers had it or the healthy 2-3x ratio. 4x starts stretching, 5x is stressful, 6-8x becomes un-affordable, and over 8x income is crisis (when 2008 hit). ''Housing affordability remains a critical issue, with 74.9% of U.S. households unable to afford a median-priced new home in 2025, according to NAHB’s latest analysis. With a median price of $459,826 and a 30-year mortgage rate of 6.5%, this translates to around 100.6 million households priced out of the market, even before accounting for further increases in home prices or interest rates.'' https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics-plus/special-studies/2025/special-study-households-priced-out-of-the-housing-market-march-2025.pdf?rev=557833ecb28e410c983deb86813645a8 - You ended there with systemic intervention - so it is clearly systemic and not just cruelly cultural - although they feed into each other to varying degrees. You underestimate the structural causes and how it takes away the available choices ''free individuals'' have to choose from to better their lot. If people are drowning in water the systemic lens finds out why the water level is so high, the individualist lens says the people should just swim better so they don't drown. Both can be true - but as we know not everyone is of equal ability and we can't expect everyone to deal with unfavorable conditions well - it isn't a workable solution at scale. Which is why left leaning, socialist type policies exist (though they can't be so utopian either) and which is why the libertarian every man for himself capitalist worldview flops in reality because in reality a rising boat doesn't just lift the tide for all boats but drowns many. - Americans work more hours than almost any developed nation, have less vacation time than any developed nation, and run around doing multiple jobs and "side hustles" these days. Don't think their lazy in that sense. It's indicative of a broken system. You can't become a credentialed doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer etc at a library. - If they built so much in 2008 we'd have a surplus and prices would have remained low. But the issue isn't that things are built - its that demand was artificially pumped to outstrip supply ie more money chasing few goods = hike in prices. Fraudulent finance caused both high construction and the inevitable crisis - no supply can satisfy artificial demand. Real demand should be met with real supply to avoid that. - The inheritance math doesn't work because people have more than one child. So say your parents have a house but you are two children - now your not just one household but two households needing to share a single house. This also doesn't include the fact that people live longer, live alone, get divorced etc. The housing demand multiplies non-linearly rather than simply being added to. People also require moving to where the jobs are in a much more mobile world. Maybe population decline solves that, but not so easily as I'll explain with Japan: Watch the video. Tokyo built more homes (140k) than California (80K) whilst both have similar population size. Godzilla must be the demolition man. Demand for housing in Tokyo grew just as much as London and New York in the past 50 years. But they built to keep up with supply and don't rely on housing a collateral to uphold their entire system which is supported by industry, tech, exports etc instead. They didn't financialise housing which should remain shelter. They actually suffered a property bubble pop and then fixed the cause structurally. They overrode NIMBYism and zoning restrictions. Per capita - Tokyo builds 3x the US, 4-5x the UK, 7-10x more than Aussie or Canadian cities. https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/can-tokyo-show-us-how-to-solve-britains-housing-shortage/ About population decline solving the issue. Even if national population declines or stagnates, metro populations still grow because of urbanization, opportunity etc. Cities attract people and everything clusters there in the modern world. Even with the rise of remote work - people crave connection and proximity beside just opportunity. We do have digital nomad types making their own communities in Bali, Thailand, Mexico etc but again its not a scalable solution and that works for certain types. For most people they don't want to uproot themselves. Japan as a example - the population peaked in 2010 (128 mill), stagnated and has slightly decline now to 123 mill. But Tokyo's population increase from 37 mill in 2010 to 41 mill now. Like wise the GDP of Tokyo has increased also even if nationally it hasn't increased the same as the entire GDP of the US. Urbanisation cancels out population decline - and if the national economy struggles that only causes people to further need to go to where the jobs are ie cities. So unless the structural constraints aren't resolved - the affordability issue remains and will be crushing.

@Thought Art @Miguel1 My comment below resolves the apparent difference you guys have. Age is too arbitrary a line to draw on the complexity of reality.

Relevant for your guys discussion: If two high schoolers have consensual sex - one of them is a day over the age of 18 after their birthday, the other is just a day away from turning 18 themselves - is it immoral? It’s still illegal according to law - standardization creates such edge cases. The law is intended obviously to protect against much wider age gaps that create power asymmetries where exploitation happens. Yet, there can still be two legal adults with a wide power asymmetry (that oddly created the attraction in the first place). A 20 year old “legal adult” and a 40 year old “legal adult” ie Leo Di Caprio dating young women. Both are legal adults consenting - but the asymmetry is massive in who has the years of experience, status and power that comes with all that. It comes down to maturity - physical, emotional and psychological. Not just an arbitrary (yet protective) line drawn in the sand along just the simplest to measure metric ie age. When someone’s biologically mature - they should be mentally and emotionally mature for the responsibilities that come along with the act and its consequences. Legality doesn’t equal moral symmetry. And standardization draws a blunt line to protect society, but it flattens nuance at the same time. Where the guy in the above video is wrong though is that he says Aisha married that young because she was intellectually and emotionally mature for her age ie the exception - but that wasn't the case at the time of marriage. Who she married most likely aided in her becoming exceptional later. She became a prodigy because of the environment and role she grew into. Still - this wasn't a case of pedophilia either, because the Prophet didn't have a psychological fixation or pattern of predation upon the young and “pure”. Most of his wifeys were older, divorced or widowed. Aisha was the exception as daughter of one of his closest companions who entrusted him. It was a norm of the time the Prophet was acting within in pre-modern society. Power asymmetry is the thing modern ethics condemns - yet isn’t it power asymmetry that fuels the attraction in the first place? Models date Leo because of it - not despite it. The attraction of human nature is drawn to inequality - but our liberalised worldview of equality psychologically resists that fact. This is why Leo’s case makes many uncomfortable and is debated. To get around all this the loophole of consent is used to sanitize the inequality, not eliminate it. But then - consent requires maturity (capacity) as a pre-requisite. And maturity is difficult to quantify - so society defaults to “if they consent it’s fine - and we assume the capacity for consent is there once they cross the age of 16, 18 etc”. The line (standard) is needed for society to run at scale smoothly - but that line in turn influences society to think linearly and without nuance.

That graph is from chart 8 here: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/economic-bulletin/articles/2020/html/ecb.ebart202005_01~7749d3224d.en.html#toc10 Measuring the EU, not the US, but it's still applicable and true - just irrelevant to the point of affordability for essentials. It's measuring consumer goods or durable goods - one of the few categories that have fallen in price due to globalization and offshoring / cheap labor arbitrage. Electronics and gadgets getting cheaper (technological deflation) doesn't mean people aren't being squeezed in housing, healthcare or education - the biggest expenses and investments of peoples lives. Inflation increasing the price of apples or cherry pie isn't going to bankrupt or squeeze people the same way those big bills would - but even then, the fact that people are now financing groceries shows how much they are being squeezed. Depends what definition we want to use but if living standards simply means a increase in access to goods and services or increase in consumption then sure - they have increased, but like you said, at a cost. The question is does that cost eat away at peoples quality of life in the form of mental health, gig economy work to maintain a standard of living a regular job can't etc. This is why we have hustle culture as a phenomena - regular pay isn't enough - people feel the only way out is through extra hustles on the side, or asymetric gains made in a casino economy betting on crypto pump and dumps or bitcoin because the older wealth ladder has shrunk away. People are medicated to their eyeballs too. It's cool to have 100's of ice cream flavors and cheap TVs to brainrot in front of - but it's overshadowed by crushing debt and having to live in perpetual anxiety not knowing how to pay it off and questioning how you'll ever retire. The water quality improving doesn't mean people aren't drowning in water. Yeah I agree - the ROI isn't as strong anymore. But some professions are gate kept due to standardization and credentialism - and those providing those credentials have monopoly as the standard bearers so they can inflate the price and years of education to milk as much out of it. Credential cartelism lol. Also - skills aside (which lets say can be obtained elsewhere) there is a prestige effect and alumni network that you get from these places. They get your foot in the door - although they don't guarantee a strong outcome by themselves today. I went to private Business school - and the people you meet or become lifelong friends with can open doors and provide insight or other connections that would be hard to come by otherwise. Especially as everyone gets older and busier in their lives ie more closed off to giving their time away to new people. For example I have a friend who's in tech and venture capital - grew up in Atherton and has been around that whole scene. He was at the White House recently when Saudi's MBS met Trump as he's been raising capital from sovereign wealth funds in the gulf. Similar to credentialism for certain professions - even venture capital has barriers to entry to get into seed rounds or early stages of investment that are oversubscribed by the time people even hear about them. The internet democratizing education can lift the baseline up, but certain professions are gate kept and create a moat around access to the best opportunities that only widen inequalities. The top 10% live in a entirely different world than the majority. Speaking of tech and AI more generally - I do think they could help bring down costs in health care and education though. Imagine every child getting a personalized AI tutor tailored to them - and then mimicking the social aspects in some other ways that aren't as costly. Housing will be the toughest to handle. Tech deflation provided cheaper consumer goods that elevated peoples lifestyles the past decades. Essentials got monopolized and financialized - education, healthcare and housing. AI and tech breakthroughs will most probably bring down the cost of healthcare and education - not without a political fight from big pharma and academia - but when the costs go down so much it just won't be politically viable to demand extractive profits the way they do. As far as I understand it - housing is the key collateral that holds up the entire Western financial system. The US was on the gold standard before - that placed a hard limit on credit and the money supply (finances). Then the dollar moved off the gold standard and in came the petro dollar and fiat currency - which meant the US could run trade deficits and issue more debt without runaway inflation. Then housing was financialized into a new collateral base via mortgage-backed securities - which scaled the debt even further by turning suburban mortgages into global grade collateral. Real estate being the largest asset class in the world meant insane amounts of collateral to issue debt against. Housing turned from shelter into a asset class - ie got financialized. Each transition removed the old constraint and unlocked a larger credit system. That’s why the system grew so large - gold set limits, oil loosened limits, housing removed limits. As to why that's a issue that will get in the way of bringing housing costs down in the same way other technological breakthroughs might: basically - the value of housing can't deflate like the others because the system depends on their value remaining high - against which they are collateralised for debt. So housing is bidded up instead of built up - its engineered and maintained scarcity to keep the entire system afloat and far away from imploding. Beside that - zoning, NIMBYism and asset holders (boomers) and the real estate industry represent a important and powerful bloc of voters. It's a catch 22 of sorts for the West - particularly the US and UK who's backbone is reliant on housing asset values. And what's worse is that with AI coming to displace plenty of jobs (according to a lot of people apparently) - that threatens the entire system too. Because if incomes go down or away - that threatens house prices - which threatens the collateral upon which the entire system depends. This is why the bankers were bailed out in 2008 and protected instead of the citizens - to protect the system. This is why a UBI or emergency basic income is almost a structural necessity in order to keep the system alive.The hard thing to know is how much hardship will be allowed to occur until they step in to do so. Whats the precedent for that? 2008 showed us citizens got crumbs or nothing. This is the bind that financializing housing causes - or a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) based economy. The other catch 22 is that the West have no choice but to go all in on AI to maintain tech primacy against China (geopolitics) - but this causing labor displacement means citizens will need to be socialised into a techno-feudalistic welfare system to maintain the system itself - like discussed earlier = asset housing values must remain propped up, which requires incomes. But the problem with that is - the tax base from which that will be funded can only come from the same mega corps and techno-garcs that have influence over the state. And we expect the state to discipline them and close the loopholes from which they avoid tax. Which goes back to our discussion - capital influencing the state vs the other way round as in China - where capital is contained and directed to socialise its gains down to the people. To put it bluntly - do we think capital elites give a fuck .. and does the state capacity exist to exercise control over these parasites? Only incentives will shift them - and the sobering realization that they must work with the state in order to keep the entire platform and system upon which they depend afloat - by maintaining domestic order and preventing a revolution from burning their asses. I heard someone say - to beat China the West will need to become more like China - in a way that's true. American with Chinese characteristics. It seems like two paths the West has - Sinification or Japanifcaiton. Either become more like China and discipline capital (but this requires a cultural / political orientation the West lacks, including the social cohesion for it) or become a techno-fuedalist power that stagnates like Japan and rides off its past glory as a empire into the sunset, whilst hollowing out and cannablizing its own atomized, polarized citizens living within their virtual worlds that sedate them like dopamine junkies. Check out this video on Japan's housing being affordable compared to other developed countries (didn't financialize): And check out this great article: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Just not progressive cats Type sheeet

I get you and agree with your larger post - all this limitlessness is true at the level of essence. It's just that it doesn't translate to form, which is limited by definition. Essence being limitless doesn't mean the expression of that essence is limitless - essence is absent of limits but not form. A expression or manifestation of the limitless is limited, even if its source isn't. The absolute created the limit to begin with. The essence/form distinction honors both truths - that we are one (in essence), but many (in form/manifestation) - simply put, we are not the totality only a locality. We are parts (of a whole), but not apart (separate). And structurally, the part can't contain the whole - but only expresses the whole locally - just as the wave expresses the ocean.