I’m genuinely sad that I might miss out on a possible post-scarcity world by like 20-50 years
don’t be. like infrastructure week, post-scarcity world is always like 20 year away.
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We’re already in a post scarcity world most likely. We’re just too stupid to know it.
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with decent wealth redistribution or social net, sure. but environmentalists will argue we’ve just been depleting water and wildlife resources and about to hit a scarcity wall.
And I feel like those environmentalists aren’t being realistic about the lengths humans will go to preserve their standard of living. Every time there has been a big mass extinction event because some new form of life evolved that nothing else could really resist, and make no mistake that’s what we are, life has continued in some new form or fashion evolved to that new thing.
Now I want to be clear here I’m not advocating for this, and actually care quite a bit about the species using fewer resources, but I’m also realistic about what my fellow humans are like. They are not going to start sacrificing anything ever or they already would have. They will do what is obviously best for themselves. Given that the only way out is technological development, which means my argument is essentially ‘we have a problem created by technology and the only solution to it is even more technology’. Kind of hard to believe in, but the alternative is just that every form of life on planet earth is about to stamped into a form that serves us or perish.
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Based on what we know about humanity, a likely scenario is that a small group of powerful people will try to save themselves from excessive resources consumption by simply eradicating the rest of humanity. The people with armies are not going to just slowly walk into extinction so nameless faceless brown people elsewhere on Earth can access the middle class. We’re going to mow them down.
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You’re assuming those faceless brown people aren’t going to have drones of their own. That’s the thing, it’s already too late to prevent the so called ‘developing world’ from developing. They already did.
The most powerful weapons technology in the world isn’t the high level stuff the US uses. It’s cyberweapons, bombs, and plain old assault weapons. We’ve been a paper tiger that spends 50%+ of its enormous military budget on graft and waste for a long time now. Other than dropping bombs on people, which has very little ability to influence people to do what we want on the ground, our military isn’t good at much but giving bales of cash to corrupt warlords without the backing of the popular will.
Every single military technology the US government debuts immediately goes wide and at a price point a microscopic fraction of what we paid. You can buy a drone for 400 dollars, attach explosives to it, and pose a credible assassination threat to the leader of a large country with a large military budget.
We haven’t actually won a conflict since WW2.
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Also to massive corporations.
The military is basically the world’s most inefficient jobs program.
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Over and over again our military loses to people who are just massively more willing to die for their cause than we are. That’s because they have the popular will on their side. People are willing to sacrifice an incredible amount when they feel like their own present/future is at stake and Americans aren’t willing to pay those kinds of prices for the benefit of corporations like they were before there was no way for them to hear about it.
There is absolutely no chance the Confederates last as long as they did and get as many poor white kids killed as they did in 2021. There would be viral video of people getting limbs sawed off without anesthetic, small holders property getting taken to feed the army, and all kinds of other grimy shit that would make people seriously question whether or not the rich people being able to own labor that they then had to compete with was worth that much suffering.
That’s why the US doesn’t take much in the way of casualties. We can’t. If we had 10-15,000 soldiers die in a single day people would start asking questions about what we were paying for.
I remain convinced that if Donald wasn’t president there would have been federally invited news crews filming COVID wards to get people’s fear up. Instead there was every barrier you can imagine to people seeing what was actually going on. I think that the mainstream media sanitizes reality hard because the establishment learned with Vietnam that showing footage of what is actually happening is a great way to trigger mass public outcry.
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An America where SUBWAY doesn’t exist is my kind of America
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I’m actually conflicted here wrt Subway, on the one hand the sandwiches are terrible, well the bread is not even classed as bread anymore? Is it. 
But their coffee for £1.50 is great for the size and is always warm & unfortunately I cannot afford a £5 mocca, chocca, with caramel everyday. 
make your own chocca for pennies on the pound.
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Any idea what this means. I got a 3K advance last year but my address did not qualify for the top up to 10K this year.
In other news it’s been about a month since I applied for the loan increase. Silence so far.
Didn’t we already discuss this? The additional advances are targeted to low income recipients, determined by address.
Yes. I just saw this new announcement and was wondering if anything changed on that front.
Also, further evidence the government is monitoring UP: I get a call from SBA about my EIDL loan increase today. 
FWIW still haven’t seen my second or third stimulus check lol. I could at least claim the second on my taxes.
Application for EIDL increase has been in processing since January.
Things are okay, I’m just complaining.
The SBA hosted a press-only virtual conference this morning to discuss the state of EIDLs and other supplemental programs.
Not much new was shared besides this zinger:
As of the press call, only $550 million of the EIDL supplemental grant’s $5 billion funding has been used. Of the targeted EIDL grant’s $30 billion total available funds, only $1.5 billion has been given out, SBA officials said.
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Yea I’m not to surprised. I qualified for targeted advance. I met all criteria but was still denied. Pretty sure it’s because IRS still hasn’t gotten around to my 2019 taxes. No way to appeal and I just gave up on even trying.
We have provided the necessary info for our EIDL loan add-on. We shall see what happens next. We will just document all eigible expenses over ~3 years and hope that someday they decide on loan forgiveness. Otherwise it’s cheap money at less than 4% and keeps us out of harms way if there is another business disruption which I think is not likely but not too unlikely.