I don't understand, what stops you from doing that today?
make your own company and do something about it then. or STFU.
my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money.
then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying.
how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.
additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is done about politics. did you vote? neat, that’s the system we have. want to do something about it? make some money. that’s the system we have.
these people complaining about things instead of doing something will die complaining.
coming from a liberal that is more in the center and annoyed with my overally liberal parents.
Maybe your lord is a great guy and he does everything right but tomorrow his son comes into power and he could whip you. That’s what a good company is like. My new manager is an asshole who ruined my great job.
but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become a feudal leader ourself.
America baby!
Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of us don’t.
anyone interested in some cold blooded american history from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.
Working on it
I love history. It’s a great cope to see how people can live fulfilling lives under completely different conditions from the standard 2025 life path. Maybe I will check it out :)
Or you could raise the capital by pitching investors that have money because you actually have a good idea.
or you don’t have a good idea. you don’t have any money. and you want to complain.
what are you asking for? that your parents were more rich? that everyone has the exact same amount of money?
what are you striving for in this comment? are you pointing out that life is unfair? i do agree with that.
But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems is not only inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the crisis that brought us to this point.
"I don't want all the land to be held by neofeudal corporations that exercise control over every aspect of our lives" cannot be solved by "so become a neofeudal overlord yourself!" Not only is it effectively impossible to achieve, at the very best it only solves the problem for you.
I don't want to just have a better life for myself. I want a better life for everyone.
if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one.
my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about.
do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?
it has been fought for and died over for thousands of years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we believe in.
now we can just make money and use that to effect change. pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.
in addition, what’s wrong with solving the problem for me first? then taking care of others? that’s exactly the right approach.
others can then follow the same approach. now we have a lot of feudal overlords.
diversified micro feudalism is the term that this conversation has spurred. i like it!
A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.
gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well.
we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.
editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit.
yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding together with individuals of power to produce combined power. you say it’s impossible and then say exactly how we’re going to do it. :)
i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable conversation for me.
At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."
But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you suggest is, for any given individual, effectively impossible. The only way to achieve it would be to band together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality with much more success.
Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all comforting.
Source: I have worked on both robots and small farms.
And even the people who recognize that this ideal is utterly impractical can still be strongly influenced by it, such that when a set of technological advances promises the prospect of actually being able to realize it, they jump toward it with stars in their eyes.
Unfortunately, it's not just impractical because of the lack of technology to support it (other obvious problems include the degree to which humans need social interaction to be healthy, the limited amount of land available, the number of things taken for granted in modern life that cannot be either grown or crafted alone, even with robotic help...). It's a fantasy, and always has been.
Militaries being used by Governments to protect the interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright laws and DRM protections.
Centralization of systems and dependency of products on remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers, social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private hosting.
They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send the police to protect their property, leverage the military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring remote dependencies for operation.
That's how they stop you.
But I hear what you're saying. More "humane" progress would certainly be very welcome. In fact if neo-feudalism wins, most of us will have to "live off the land", whether we want to or not.
And those are only two of the jobs for maintaining households. If those two things aren't automated, we're not having these 'robo households' - period. Instead I think the future holds mostly the present - glorified clappers [1] and ad-tech masquerading as some sort of something that mostly does a mediocre to awful job of whatever it's supposed to be, Alexa.
AI-assisted plumbers will follow this archetype.
That Audel's, my wife got me for Christmas a few years back at Lee Valley Tools, I think. Was about 1/3 of what the listed price is here.
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&kn=how%...
[2] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ds=20&kn=read...
[3] https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/audels-carpenters...
Why do you hate freedom?
Wait brb, the ceiling fan I wrote in Lisp is spraying yogurt again
I can see a drain plumbing system that maps out a new construction home and some sort of automated robot that builds out large sections of pipe. It wouldn't completely eliminate the plumber. But it'd change it from something like measuring, cutting, and gluing 100 times to walking around with a camera for 5 minutes and then gluing 10 things together.
I expect new “robo friendly” roads will be the first example but of course homes could do the same.
Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it. We will never get rid of context sensitive plumbing and electrical work but it just won’t really matter
What does this mean? The world didn't start Catholic and gradually reduce its Catholicism over time. There are apparently about 1.4bn Catholics out there[0].
Maybe AI will be just as productive.
Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.
I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of those videos, they are just entertainment.
That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner.
The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?
Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.
Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.
That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65% and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via loans and scholarships.
Only around 40% of people in the US have a college education. But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
Then cultural, as we see now, there is very much an anti-intellectual anti college bias by a major user of people in the country.
Many people don't want to be itinerant, they want a settled home to make their own and enjoy for a long time if not life. 'Forever home' is a phrase and a positive one because that is a goal people have.
I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that. Move to where the jobs are. I moved from my hometown in south GA the week I graduated from college because there were no jobs.
Maybe rural America should stop voting for politicians who are opposed to affordable college education (or trade school) and student loan forgiveness.
> I want a million dollars a year income. No one owes me that.
Why is this always where this type of conversation goes? No one has spoken about any entitlement here, but frankly, while you aren't owed a million dollars a year, I'd say you're owed something. Assuming you're working full time, I'd say you're owed at least a living wage.
But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
We are under no obligation as a country to make sure that people who want to live the rest of there life in the MiddleOfNowhere Oklahoma can stay there for the rest of their life who don’t want to move. Besides again, these people overwhelmingly voted for politicians who don’t want to help them.
They are also cheering for the dismantling of the Education department, defunding colleges, cutting Medicaid, inflationary tariff policies, etc.
Do you seriously want to turn this discussion into lower-class rental / apartment discussion? Okay, fine. Lets go there.
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea...
Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025 is $1397/month.
For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has gotten worse. It doesn't matter where you plan to pivot this discussion, its all bad numbers for your discussion point.
But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and people who are trying to get rid of services they need the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting for and cheering right now.
They are actively opposed to programs that would make education more affordable and cheering cutting the department of education, the post office, internet for rural America etc.
Which is all I wanted to say in the root post. I'm not gonna get gish galloped off topic any further.
So they must be okay with it.
But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick with the truth of the matter before we get into the politics.
As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.
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I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what the problems are in America. And then once we all agree on that, then we can work on them.
Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%) of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter, which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226 (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the latter. However the population of the United States is 340.1 million of which 244.6 million are voting eligible. Some quick back-of-napkin math then will tell you that while Trump took both the popular and electoral votes enough to win, that victory represents at best the will of approximately 31% of the eligible voters. And, that's strictly the popular vote, which doesn't actually win the election. Democrats struggle in every election because of decades of meddling on the part of Republicans with regard to how electoral votes are awarded and calculated, gerrymandering in every state, anti-voter, anti-minority policies that disenfranchise people on an industrial scale from the right to vote they're entitled, etc. etc. etc.
And you can say "well the Democrats should be working harder to undo it!" and I totally agree, but between the raw numbers on the ground, the well-documented Southern Strategy that has turned formerly pro-labor and progressive swathes of America into hard right strongholds via churches, and the various culture wars that have utterly melted American's brains to a great degree spearheaded by rest-in-piss Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the reactionary media sphere he helped weld into being, it is not remotely a fair statement to say that "over half of America voted for this knowing what would happen." Some did, for sure. Not half, not even fucking close.
dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.
to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high road? when our citizens’ voting rights have been marginalized?
or are you just turned off by the word gangster?
anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti—american thing. which it is.
make it the center of everything. there should be zero other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for all our people has been corrected.
i would call out every single politician that was responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and over again until they were harassed into a retirement recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.
focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate their whole memory from America.
Cosigned all above.
> But everyone should be able to own a home? No.
I think insofar as property is treated as an investment vehicle, everyone should be able to own something. Like, the difference between a mortgage and a rental contract in terms of personal economics couldn't be further from one another. One creates wealth, one transfers wealth and concentrates it.
"Can you afford to buy a home" as an economic metric doesn't mean necessarily that you should buy a home and you are a poor if you haven't or simply choose not to. That's fine. However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment to make that requires access to okay credit, and that once done, benefits the homeowner financially decades into the future. When I got a mortgage, an insured one with no money down even, my credit immediately went down to account for having a loan, but then right afterwards jumped almost 20% in a 3 month period, even though I did nothing differently apart from paying into a mortgage instead of paying rent.
Alternatively, reform the housing market so it functions as... well, a market. A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange. One could argue that if nothing has appreciably changed in your neighborhood since you bought your house, it should sell for ballpark about the same price as what you paid for it, unless you did some substantial renovations or something. And even then... if you're just making it more suited to your tastes, probably not?
In other words make houses... well, houses. Not investment vehicles.
> People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the poorest states repeatedly vote for politicians that want to cut government services and cut the safety nets. Right now they are cheering DOGE. Why should I feel sorry for rural America? They are getting exactly what they voted for.
Well, a lot of them are poorly educated for starters, and insanely propagandized. They've been the singular target for Republican messaging for decades now, and as you state, they've voted for those people too who have in turn damaged their schools and pillaged their industries. And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
And yes it's tremendously frustrating to talk to these people since they're seemingly ready to blame anything and everyone who isn't them, their ideology, and their own choices for the fact that their home is dying, but it's still their home, and it's still dying. And like, even if their children all do what you're telling them to do, that means millions upon millions of people about to immigrate to cities from these rural areas. So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment
And then later you said
> A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange.
So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to Zillow it’s now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
> And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
So you support Trump’s inflationary policies about tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort to bring jobs back to the US (which won’t happen).
The world where every other country was demolished by wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how “rich” they are compared to the average American and aren’t willing to give up enough of their income for “equality”.
> So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians who hate the same people they hate - non Christians (except for Jews for some reason), minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc. They aren’t voting against their own interest because they are “uneducated”.
They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and minority/majority and are doing everything they can to fight the inevitable.
They themselves would rather not have universal healthcare because it might help the “illegals”.
Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people have equal rights and Jesus won’t have any place to come back to if Israel isn’t protected. I’m not exaggerating at all to make a point.
Then you have people with money who like the status quo and don’t care about inequality.
> But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.
No one said starving. I'm saying that the average person is in worse straights than the average person from the 1980s.
If your message is 'Maybe not everyone needs a house' then it kinda sounds like you agree with me?
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1991/demo/sb91-0...
In fact home ownership rate has consistently been in the mid 60s since 1960
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-ownership-ra...
In which way is the average person worse? Worse health? Worse life expectancy? More homeless people?
People who own a home in 2025 have to pay $350,000ish on a wage of only $66k.
Home prices have gone up dramatically more than wages.
> In which way is the average person worse?
The amount of debt needed to own a home. Which is related to income vs cost-of-home. This ignores the fact that to reach $66k+/year salaries to begin with, you needed tens-of-thousands in student loan debt as well (which the average person in 1980 didn't need).
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1. Costs of education have gone up. It costs more money to be able to get a comfortable salary to begin with in today's world.
2. Younger folk are entering a very high-priced housing market, despite being already saddled with student loan debt (and thus starting off with no savings).
3. The bulk of "starting a new life" costs are car, house, and education. While yes computers and food have gotten cheaper, I would argue that car/house/education costs are the primary gatekeeper into income and/or class mobility.
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For the 40%ish who cannot afford a house, it gets even worse. Rental prices in 1980 were $243/month. Do you want me to run the numbers on how screwed they've gotten? Or do you have the gist yet?
Also remember: 1980 was a recession year with high unemployment and incredible inflation. We're comparing ourselves to the WORST time of stagflation and some of the worst geopolitical crisis of that era.
Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is the same, people aren’t going homeless and people’s needs are being met. How is that? If people are worse off meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?
Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room.
The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because the vast majority of people could get by on free and public high school education btw. Especially if we assume that we're talking about the median income household.
To achieve this equivalent to 1980s lifestyle, we're talking what? $200k extra debt burdens on every average / median person? $40k in student debt and $150k++ in extra housing debt? Plus 4 years lost in education (as 1980s folk could work those 4 years instead). How is this a better or even equivalent life?
all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges got lots o’ money from donors to prolong their livelihoods.
> Home Ownership Rate refers to the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner
So this rate is not that of people that own a home, but homes that are owned by someone that resides there.
Consider people in shared housing, young adults staying with parents, etc.
Male crime rates correlate with economic opportunity too, so even if you don't care about the 1930s and the economic reset of WW2 and its rebuilding (and WW1, but to a lesser extent), you should care about the possibility of crimes rates continuing to regress. Serious crimes don't get solved at a much higher rate than in the past, even if they have decreased since the 90s.
Home ownership is a lagging indicator and doesn't show the whole picture: If people used to buy a home at 25 and move into it, but today they wait and live in their parents house until 30 before moving into a home, the stats might appear the same. The quality of life won't be. Home ownership rate needs context too, in some countries rent is low and house prices are high(er than the US), where many people rent through retirement, and where the implication of rising house prices is not as bad unless rent also raises.
As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control? Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don’t. America is getting exactly what they voted for - especially in the poorest, least educated states that vote Republican.
This is a sign of low class status and lack of success. Rich people change the world to fit their needs. Poor people change themselves to fit the world. Leaving your entire family and social network behind for work is extremely middle class behaviour
That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950 - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were normal.
Students expect a lot more services from universities today. They expect regular formative assessments. They expect various support services. They expect warm, air conditioned buildings without draughts. They expect healthcare, mental health support, disability services, and expensive facilities for everything: projectors and screens and computers and everything.
Could that also be part of the drive of cost? The services definitely are, theyre a big driver of the increase in admin staff at universities.
The cost of education is pretty irrelevant anyway because nobody actually pays it. You get a loan. That is paid by someone else: you, later. But young men and women heading off to university don't have a moment where they have to give up the opportunity to go because they don't have the money.
The house is due to population increasing far faster than new houses being built. That's a function of policy, not of rich people existing.
Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn’t exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity, internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation & infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that improve QoL.
And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity and late stage capitalism.
The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is available, if too expensive.
Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual technology. There is still very cool research going on in other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing & social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and hard to get excited about.
At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For example, the tech behind modern AI models has already produced breakthrough research in the field of protein folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.
All that to say… let’s stop being so closed-minded about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But technology is way more than that. It includes robotics advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without modern technology), more clever & efficient construction techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We can be excited for that and also not care about the next knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.
I didn't say they were. I said they had better jobs to go to than working in the fields. I'm not saying their lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.
The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our billionaires. They should take pride in building a better tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now is the exact opposite of that.
Douglas Adams described it well:
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure.
We are going in the former direction right now.
(Also, it is not clear to me how any of this is relevant to "The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive".)
I think it's damaging to clear thinking by muddying the waters.
I give you an example of returning the favor to you:
"Causual relationships can be hard to discern. Some say when people spout a spurious claim without evidence nor citations that falls in line with the entrenched structural power interests it simply shuts down critical thinking and causes people to not advocate for themselves and their own self interests which lets deep systemic issues fester and rot and leading to mass violence."
https://a.co/d/9rTmcYe https://a.co/d/5aIpwPC https://a.co/d/0ujVgWg https://a.co/d/0g5HHDh
My point is not that the person I was replying to is definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that the effects of FDR's policies are uncertain enough that the fact that FDR imposed them in the 1930s cannot credibly used to lend strong support to any argument for any economic policy to be imposed today. The post-WWII economic boom for example happened after most of FDR's policies had been repealed.
FDR committed the grave sin of making a lot of rich people slightly less rich, in the short term. Deregulation is the answer to everything, including the problems caused directly by lack of regulation and governance. Hilarious.
Society has to change before humanity has any further technological progress that will benefit everyone. We're simply in the "how to min max wealth growth" stage.
If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and have to take them into a service center to get them serviced and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier will only work with genuine Monsanto(TM) seedPods(R)
The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal collapse from the political movement to destroy America, but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots for neighbors in trade.
Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do you even need to live off the land? As in, why turn soil just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much more controlled fashion.
They don't. You live better than Henry VIII in almost all ways (other than you can't establish a new state religion). You have access to painkillers, dentistry, sight correction, and information on a daily basis, along with more chicken than he did. The fact that that's true for hundreds of millions of people is incredible.
I am not sure where this is going but there will be some large changes to society needed if technology keeps progressing at current speed.