General Discussion

A pure free market, combined with intelligent automation, will first reach a stage where fewer and fewer people are actually employed full time by companies and instead become independent consultants, then, will reach a stage where the consultants will no longer be called upon as corporations either become fully automated tools of the wealthy or cease to exist because no one is capable of buying their unnecessary products. AI doesn't really need to be all that powerful to do it - a great deal of existing "work" is already bullshit jobs.

My worry through much of this year was that the economy would improve enough to push Biden (then Harris) over the finish line before the economy went sideways. I'm in tech, haven't had a full time job in two years, primarily because the companies I've worked with have lost their funding as investors tried to claw back investments or were shafted by THEIR clients. Too many people with just enough wealth to leverage themselves out to 15-20x their actual net worth that could afford to do so when interest rates were essentially zero, but couldn't when interest rates began climbing to handle inflation. Right now the Ponzi game in tech (especially AI) is still holding, but you can tell that it's unravelling. The ONLY comfort to this is that it's going to land on Trump's watch, and that comfort is pretty cold.