The speed, the scale and the class of people impacted are all novel.
AI will likely cause massive displacement in the span of a few years which prior advancements had spread out over decades. In 1850 the US was 30% urban, in 1950 it was 64% and today it's 82%. Spreading the change out over 150 years doesn't yield the same sort of shock to the system that rapid changes do, and correspondingly doesn't result in the same sort of political force to change society.
It might be better to look not at "new technologies" but instead what happens after "sudden mass unemployment" like the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, which in turn led to unprecedented new policies like the New Deal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal).
Also relevant - the people about to be unemployed aren't the already disenfranchised lower classes. I won't be surprised if there's more sympathy from the people in power when the unemployed are their friends, family and former classmates.
Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
Ya, the word "transplants" here seems to mean something very different than you're interpreting it as.
This isn't a hospital procedure like an organ transplant. It's material placed into the recipients colon through an enema, nasogastric tube or possibly even just taking some pills.
So it might range from done at home to done during a 30 minute visit to a clinic.
Cycling has a pretty rich history of people injecting themselves with things they bought on the internet- EPO, testosterone, etc.
The bodybuilding subculture has been injecting testosterone, about 50 different testosterone-like drugs (Tren, Clen, Deca, etc) for the past 50 years, HGH for the past 30 years and IGF for the past 15 years.
The psychonaut subculture has been buying research chemical derivatives of serotonin and dopamine for decades for their psychedelic effects, and the nootropic community doing similar things for compounds that increased attention, memory or mood.
In prior decades, the transgender community often relied on buying & injecting drugs on the internet for gender affirming care they were unable to get from their healthcare systems.
There are risks, but also, if tens, hundreds or thousands of other customers have purchased and used something from the vendor, that's probably as reliable of a signal as most regulatory regimes are.
The payments are going to a government. They're not using bitcoin to hide the payments, they're using it because receiving USD or Euros or whatever would mean that a hostile government could seize the funds from the bank.
The tracking is unique though. I don't know who had the $20 in my wallet before me or what series of payments it was a part of, but crypto has the curious property that over time, essentially all crypto money will have at some point passed through wallets associated with controversial entities or transactions.
I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.
Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.
I don't think the "broken windows" metaphor is very accurate for healthcare. A lot of healthcare spending is along a gradient of elective vs necessary and some continuum of quality of life improvements.
For instance, I could live with allergies, and all my ancestors just had to, but I have the option to spend money on allergy testing services, medicines, treatments, etc. People spend money on in-home professional care to get better treatment than going alone or relying on family, or spend money on care facilities as appropriate for their circumstances.
We have medicines for depression, anxiety, restless leg syndrome, ADHD, birth control, acne, weight loss, low testosterone, ED, poor sleep, eczema, psoriasis and a million other issues which people in the past, or people in developing countries today, simply had to live with that we have the privilege of having access to treatments for to improve our quality of life.
I know people who are affluent and outwardly "healthy" who spend thousands of dollars per year in the "healthcare" category that's entirely discretionary, but lets them keep looking young and playing tennis at 70 years old, or helps them juggle work, family and fitness at 40.
I consider it a small green flag, if the award is from somewhere semi-reputable.
I've worked at places where employee surveys were done by the 3rd party to decide on winners. Companies that know they mistreat their employees won't bother and some companies will have management surprised when they find out how poorly their employees rated them on those surveys.
I don't think of it as really being a big positive, but it at least weeds out many of the worst.
Seems like the main reason it's gone up all these years is "Early adopters successfully evangelized to get more mainstream bigger-fools to buy from them at elevated prices".
At this point, Bitcoin is fully mainstream and the biggest fools have bought in. People hoped that the Trump election would mean a new giant pot of dumb money (government/tax dollars) would buy bitcoin, but now that they've realized Trump will just issue his own crypto memecoins that bet is unwinding.
I don't see where the buying is going to come from in the future. Every cab driver and retiree and stay-at-home-mom already knows about bitcoin. Maybe Tether prints another imaginary 10 billion dollars to buy bitcoin and prop up the price though, so it could still maintain for a while.
And yet, millions of people work 40 hour weeks and take a couple vacations per year while working in razor-thin margin industries like grocery stores and low margin restaurants, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, retail, trucking and services ranging from hair stylists to accounting.
Sane working hours and vacation time should be taken as a given in the modern economy. Unusually long work hours should be reserved for unusually highly paid professions like investment banking and surgeons.
Regulations will just make it easier for the powerful incumbents to control what content the platforms are allowed to host.
Deregulation is the solution here- get rid of DMCA and all the other laws that are used to bankrupt any competitor to YouTube, so that instead of a single video hosting site, we have tens, hundreds or thousands.
The dream of the early web was that everything would be resistant to censorship and centralized control because it was a true network of many independent hosts, globally distributed, independent from the whims of any government. Then we let a few billionaire copyright holders and authoritarians who want to control what is published and seen gradually strangle the open web and replace it with a handful of corporate sites that can be controlled.
So the government can neutralize every journalist, political opponent, whistleblower or whoever by whatever means are most effective in their particular jurisdiction (China- disappear, Russia- jail, US- arrests, lawsuits, firing).
We need better tools for filtering out the bad actors, not just throwing the baby out with the bath water and accepting totalitarian control from a handful of dictators and wannabe-dictators.
I smirked at the parent comment, and it didn't even slightly occur to me that someone might interpret its intent as serious and literal until I saw your comment.
Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.
They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
A minor improvement to your argument here- artificial dyes are legitimately harmful in many cases. There are good reasons why the EU had already banned multiple chemicals that were still allowed in the US, and it's a good thing to update the American standards to the EU ones (which are generally more focused on human health as opposed to corporate profits).
The focus and prioritization is definitely out of line though, and it's particularly absurd in the face of the rolling back of pollution protections and removing access to healthcare.
Basically, it's focusing on a minor problem rather than the major ones. (But the minor problem is a legitimate one, and we should be solving all of them).
$260k is absolutely middle class, nowhere near "upper class", by any reasonable consideration of lifestyle, freedom, power or day to day experience.
The median home price in SF is $1.3. Using the calculator at zillow (https://www.zillow.com/homeloans/buyability/) with an income of $260k, looking to buy a $1.3MM house, you'd need a down payment of over $300k.
So suppose you get your $260k payout and want to live in SF... you have to rent for what... 5 or 10 years to save up the $300k down payment (while living modestly to save tens of thousands per year). Then finally you can buy your average home, watch half your income disappear to taxes and another third to mortgage, and then you'll still have enough to live a comfortable, middle-class life.
You're not buying yachts, getting meetings with senators or buying your kids into elite schools. You're not flying private, hiring personal assistants or buying a vacation home in Aspen. You're not making dozens of angel investments or being courted as a limited partner by VCs or PE funds.
"Upper class" probably starts at around $10-15 million in liquid assets, to be able to really have the freedom, flexibility and power to live a life that's distinct from middle class existence. If you can't give your son a "small loan of $1 million" to start his business (and be able to shrug off a complete loss as a learning experience) then you're not upper class.
It's wild that 99% of the "point" of crypto and a Bahamas-based exchange was to avoid all the laws around securities trading, banking, money transferring (anti-money laundering, taxes, etc), etc and yet when things go south, people still expect the government to come in and enforce a tiny subset of the financial laws they've otherwise been operating outside of.
This is a weird form of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" but with the benefactors being the people intentionally avoiding all the financial laws.
Getting laid off doesn't end health insurance, it's ironically bad journalism that they included that misleading question, from an apparently uninformed person.
The typical flow would be: current insurance continues unaltered for the rest of the month. Following month you're automatically covered under same policy through COBRA provisions even if you take no action. (Obviously some employers would include multiple months of employer-paid coverage, but this example is a worst-case scenario if they don't give any additional coverage in severance).
Somewhere in the 60 days following getting laid off, you need to decide between A) sign up to continue your existing insurance plan through COBRA B) sign up for a new insurance plan through healthcare.gov (subsidized if low income) or C) sign up on your spouse's plan if applicable.
It's a hassle, but you have a couple months to figure out what's best for you, and you can continue any ongoing things without interruption.
The speed, the scale and the class of people impacted are all novel.
AI will likely cause massive displacement in the span of a few years which prior advancements had spread out over decades. In 1850 the US was 30% urban, in 1950 it was 64% and today it's 82%. Spreading the change out over 150 years doesn't yield the same sort of shock to the system that rapid changes do, and correspondingly doesn't result in the same sort of political force to change society.
It might be better to look not at "new technologies" but instead what happens after "sudden mass unemployment" like the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, which in turn led to unprecedented new policies like the New Deal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal).
Also relevant - the people about to be unemployed aren't the already disenfranchised lower classes. I won't be surprised if there's more sympathy from the people in power when the unemployed are their friends, family and former classmates.