The decay of American politics
One of the most disappointing features of the 21st Century for me, is the decay in the quality of American politics. Both the politicians themselves and the media coverage of politics has descended to Third World levels. Compare the two currently likely candidates for President in the general election with John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon:
Compare also the anti-vaccine nonsense of a current Kennedy candidate with this statement by his uncle:
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-036-047
Compare the quality of political analysis of the "pundits" with the intelligence of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal:
The intellectual capacity of the people who lead us matters, greatly. Pretending it doesn't won't make the problem go away.
Our distorted economy
The vast majority of office jobs in the US are phony, make work jobs. If you look at the tasks that people actually do, almost of them could have been automated out of existence back in the 1980s with the computers available back then. AI was not needed. At some point, the government, both federal and local, decided to sacrifice the obvious gains in productivity that could have been obtained by appropriate use of technology for the sake of apparent full employment. They did this by providing powerful financial incentives to companies to employ as many people as possible, regardless of whether this made any sense from an economic perspective. To meet government quotas, companies then created make-work jobs that involve useless box checking and paid workers as little as possible to maximize government funding and minimize the expense of paying the drone-"workers". Instead of automating factories and dealing with predictable complaints by Unions, companies simply closed their factories, unbolted the machines and sent them to China where there were no Unions and no enforcement of environmental regulations. Upper management skimmed the cream from these schemes, hence the widely reported income inequality. This isn't a result of market forces. This is the result of backroom deals between elite executives and politicians, of both parties. We are now in a situation where we don't have enough people to do the jobs that need to be done (trucking, construction, law enforcement, health care, etc.) while millions sit in cubicles doing useless tasks and breathing in brain-destroying virus. I don't know if there is any politician with the brains and the guts to tell the American people the truth and end the charade.
Who will win WW III?
The answer is simple: whoever has the most smart, well-educated people producing the most advanced technology. You think the US can avoid this war because others fear us? They don't. I have heard this from the horse's mouth. You think we will automatically win because we are the good guys? You haven't read much history if you think this. The strong win, the weak go the wall. It doesn't matter who is the good guy or the bad guy. The winner will write history and the loser will decay into mulch. The anti-intellectualism prevalent in the US today is poison that will destroy us if we don't wake up. We need Science. We need Engineering. And we need them now.
弱肉強食
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