Social media is not the place to release this type of inflammatory language. This idiot is going to put us in a major conflict. Anything to distract from Epstein. Billionaire narcissists need to be as far away from the levers of power as possible.

Agree to disagree then. Even your answers show economies leave people behind in favor of profits which are entirely made up structures. I believe the benefit of people and society should supersede the power of individuals and capitalism will always give too much power to minority interest. Rich people show time and again they don’t care what happens to the rest of us if it means they thrive. Capitalism rewards our worst instincts of greed and ruthless competition. You can’t expect a system that exalts the most ruthless actors to take care of those who don’t have the same advantages. Socialism and collective action has always been the main source of gains for the majority in capitalist systems. You just have to look at the early labor movements of the early industrial age to show how ruthless the owner class is towards it’s workers when worker well being goes against their profit lust.

AI will replace a lot of jobs and with the active weakening of social safety nets it will cause people to suffer unless something like UBI is implemented. The rich are working against any social safety nets and are making advances in weakening those programs. They are also hurting public education, public information systems, grant programs, and anything not geared toward private profit. The protectionism you mention is also causing a brain drain and labor shortage in the US through mass deportation efforts.

Robots are being used for war more and more - there are major advancement in this field right now. Right now one of the biggest things holding back crack downs on protests is that soldiers are people who can disobey orders and most don’t want to hurt their neighbors. If robots, which will be controlled by rich defense contractors as things stand, advance to a stage where they can be fully implemented in the field without need of operators - what is to stop them from being used on the population if protests occur contrary to wishes of the powerful. That’s why I am worried about robot advancement with a society where power dynamics are so skewed away from the majority.

The rich being in charge of allocation of resources through investment has only helped society in the ways they could also make it enriched themselves. Using the whims of narcissists to guide the allocation of resources in society has slowed advancement, not fueled it. It has slowed the addressing of the climate crisis - which fuel companies originally tried to hide, then created campaigns to misinform, and now outright bought politicians to slow the needed transitions. Private companies slowed advancement of the technology through proprietary focus over open source collaboration. Computer technology and the internet was built on public money and the wealthy did more to gate keep it for profit than they did to advance it. They’ve worked to hoard information in paid silos instead of widely distributing it in the interest of profit over advancement. Just because advancement happened, doesn’t attribute it to the rich. They only found ways to bend it to a capitalist system for profit. Open source projects prove the advances would have happened either way. I whole heartedly agree UBI is the way to go to keep us focused on advancement over this rat race capitalism that is mostly extractive from labor.

I’m not saying you are wrong entirely, things have improved in a lot of ways, but the power through wealth and technology the rich have been able to attain in the last 50 years is like nothing humanity has dealt with before. Mass surveillance alone makes resistance more dangerous for those who participate. Technology in the wrong hands has been used to manipulate markets, manipulate elections, manipulate society, and move society away from democratic rule. I’m not saying society hasn’t faced other technological challenges in the past, but you are clearly a smart person, you have to see that the scale and connectedness of today’s tech is a greater challenge than early industrialization or cotton gins. It allows for greater concentration of power with greater control of that power. Capitalism is just a bad system because it gives too much control to a minority of individuals over society. It needs to be in the hands of democratic choice, not the whims of individual self interest.

It’s also easy to become complacent looking at small increments of gain while the wealthy consolidate power over international governments. The Trump administrations alone is a drastic ramping up of corruption and infliction of pain for regular people. The “big beautiful bill” is going to hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways. Many western nations like the UK and Australia are following suit on some levels. The rich have gained astronomically more wealth and power than the majority at levels higher than the gilded age. With AI and robots making such advances and that technology being firmly in their control, it’s more important than ever for people to stand in solidarity and push harder for a more equitable society. There’s a reason social media has been so weaponized with propaganda to divide us. Things are at a huge inflection point in history. The next couple decades are going to be very challenging for the majority of people.

It takes a simple google search to show how bad those statistics are being collected today in the US. Both Trump administrations actively attacked funding and reporting of these statistics which hastened their existing decay. The powerful have a lot to gain from stats coming off sunnier than reality. Plus it doesn’t account for cost of living expenses or how income is distributed very well at all. It’s a blunt instrument that does little to show how the bottom half of American wage workers are actually struggling. I’m glad you seem to be doing well enough to defend this system, but most of the people I know are barely getting by and have nothing for retirement. If you look at generational wealth, the majority of younger Americans have far less wealth than our parents or grandparents did at our age. Fewer own houses or have the stability of a large savings account for emergencies. The costs of essentials like food, housing/rent, insurance (health/property,etc), and just about everything has gone up at a much higher clip than wages. The trends are going downward and it is a direct result of billionaires influence through “charitable foundation” spending and dark money. Read the book “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer and “The Network State” and other plans by the ultra rich to take more money and power from the majority and government assistance. Any gains regular people have made have come from collective action and technology inevitably creating some surplus, not trickle down from the rich. With climate change causing further disasters as insurance companies raise rates and deny coverage - it will only exasperate the issues. Not to mention the inevitable climate refugees that will be created. Trends may have improved at a macro level from industrialization over the last half a millennia, but the last 50 years have not been kind to poorer Americans.

The rich are constantly clawing more of that comfort away from the “more fortunate” middle class you speak of as well as the poor just to add to a score card. Every step of improvement is against their lust for all to be their slaves in one way or another. The more complacent and content people are with their gains, the more the powerful will take. The doomers as you call them understand that all gains are tenuous. The rich are parasites.

No one should have this privilege to begin with. Society should work to create a livable experience for everyone instead of constantly making comfort and stability an exclusive club.

Capitalism rewards the worst most selfish hoarders of wealth. How can we build a system like this and expect this type of altruism? Makes no sense. The system was always broken.

It helps with the dialogue, but I also like it because I feel like it keeps my mind more active and involved in the story. It’s more like reading a book and watching a movie.