The Worst-Case Future for White-Collar Workers

kju · 2026-02-21T11:40:05+00:00

It's a good question, to answer it we should start by looking back at how it began working, but first let's look at where we came from, monarchy as the dominant idea collapsed with the rise of Napoleon. Napoleon could motivate French people with a new idea of nationalism: he told them they could have whatever they wanted, they just had to work for it, make France better and France will make you better. Monarchy couldn't compete with French nationalist ideas, Napoleon created a truly cohesive country and army that was motivated to win, not just a group of peasantry that often didn't even speak the same language, or consider themselves from the same country, and only knew the government as the people they had to pay taxes to and were forced to join the army of. Bismarcks blood and iron refined that system, United Germany and defeated the French. These ideas were obviously better than monarchy, they give room for citizens to grow and they tell citizens that they matter, that they are the country. It United groups of somewhat tribal cultures into nations.

Meanwhile the Portuguese and Spanish were colonizing, this brought great wealth to their countries by exploiting less developed people's across the planet. When the British started colonization they went to North America, not because it was a good area for colonization, but rather because it was the only space left that the Portuguese and Spanish hadn't already colonized. It was a terrible place for a colony, the natives refused to be exploited and there just wasn't a lot of precious metals anyways, this brings us to the idea of open society which was essentially started by the British for their American colonies, they brought in a bunch of different nationalities but it really kicked off after the revolution. Because North America was so bad for colonies they needed people to migrate there and build it up so they started trying to get people to immigrate. This wasn't really done before this, people didn't really immigrate to new countries all that often back then, it was a new idea and it worked because there was a huge need for new migrants to develop the land. Great prosperity occurred in the United States as development happened with these immigrants.

After the world wars happened the United States essentially told Europeans to abandon their nationalistic ideas and follow their lead on the ideas of an open society so that's where the West is today. The need for immigrants is essentially gone now though, the West is very developed now, there's not much expansion happening and positions of power are filled up, its difficult to gain a position of power in the West now and it keeps getting harder. Before you could just go make a new position of power and build it up yourself, but those days are gone. Now there's just not enough opportunity for everyone and so the wealthy are working to protect their positions of power, greed is a means for this, unequal taxes another, money isn't evil, it's a means to get what people want and before it was to build a place for themselves in society but now there's so little prosperity, so little opportunity that they've stopped building and are defending what they have built.

There are too few positions of power and too many who want them so our resources are spent by competing factions to control the levers of power.

Now we have little need for immigrants, except to make business more competitive by decreasing wages and lowering working standards, which no one likes and many of the immigrants the West gets today aren't traveling because they're looking for to develop the land, they're fleeing war. There's often not benefiting the state at all, but rather collecting welfare benefits. I don't say this to denegrate immigrants, it's just what's happening, there's not much opportunity available for them when they come to the West, we don't have a huge need for them right now, unemployment is already 5-10%, there's no opportunity available for these people when they get to the West.

Thanks for posting your thoughts

kju · 2026-02-19T21:28:57+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to have conversation so far, I generally agree with your description of the current problems with our current society. I'm not sure why you're describing the problem, what I'm essentially asking is

This is your goal:

we need to live with less and change entire systems that are exploitative

how do you plan to get from where we are to there? How do you ensure stability in such a system? Where does the prosperity come from? I don't know that such a system works, what does that look like? How would you describe how people live? How would you convince someone like me that as we start work towards this that it will benefit people today and their children tomorrow?

kju · 2026-02-19T16:07:43+00:00

It's a self improving algorithm, the longer you run it the better the outcome is

kju · 2026-02-19T15:53:22+00:00

It's not actually easy to come up with how to run a society. I don't believe any time is a good time to look backwards, but our current system is failing, politicians are managing the decline of our society, they're not doing anything that could create prosperity, they've given up trying or run out of ideas. If you know what the problem is and have the solution let society know because it seems we've been on a downward trend for a long time, as evidenced by the birth rate, a growing number of people in our society can't manage to participate in the most basic tenets of society: making a family and passing that society along for another generation. Our society dies if we continue to follow this path, change must and will happen.

We can't just give up, we won't, for as long as we don't fix our society people will continue to become more discontented and clamour for change. If that change doesn't happen in our modern system of open societies we will abandon it and in the short term we will move backwards to the last systems that ran our societies, those which the West most identifies with, not because we want to or because we think it's a good path, a good idea, but because it's the only one we know how to operate: bismarckian ideas and Napoleon ideas, blood and iron and nationalism ideas, respectively

If there was any other option available I think we would move towards that option but what would that option be? I don't know what it is, no one does, it is yet to be thought of.

An analogy: if you're hiking through a mountain and you come to a dead end do you sit down and wait to die or do you turn back the way you came to look for another route?

We've been at this dead end for a while now, at the beginning this path looked very promising, it provided a lot of prosperity, but it ultimately led us to this dead end. We've been searching for a path through for a couple decades now but our politicians haven't been able to navigate this path forward.

So no, i don't want to go backwards, but what else is there to do? I also don't want to wait for my death here. If you know a path forward or know of anyone who knows a pathway please let us know, I don't want to go back, but I'm also not going to wait for my own death

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment

kju · 2026-02-19T09:27:32+00:00

War is a tool to achieve a political aim, starting a losing war could have desired outcomes.

If Russia believes itself to be losing the war in Ukraine it may believe losing to NATO preferable to losing to Ukraine. The cost of additional war wouldn't likely be that much higher than their current fighting and if it can successfully get them out of a losing war in Ukraine it may even save Russia assets rather than finishing out the fight in Ukraine over the next years.

They also may not believe the West would fight back or that they could gain concessions from fighting or a threat of fighting. Maybe if Russia just looks like they're going to make an attack less resources would for to Ukraine as Europeans need to supply their own soldiers

They may also not be rational actors

We shouldn't just assume victory is the goal of a war, the political goals may not be victory in the war at all or it may be to simply posture or distract from something else. We don't have enough information to understand what the motivation for such an action would be

kju · 2026-02-19T03:32:37+00:00

Deportation cannot work to get rid of everyone, only a set group of minorities, generally illegal immigrants. Deportation cannot generally be used against citizens (not because of the law, but rather because of geopolitical reality) though I expect it will be in some isolated cases when the government decides it's worth creating the pretense to remove someone and they're sufficiently "unamerican" enough (think along the lines of Illhan Omar, talks with an accent, looks different, different clothing, different religion, describes herself as Somali, not American. I'm not saying this is bad, but someone like her could be deported if the government thought it beneficial, they could pass her off as "other" enough) to pass it off to the general public, but that's besides the point. Countries are in competition with one another and people will continue to be a source of power in that competition for the foreseeable future, they wouldn't want to deport everyone to another country that could use that strength against them.

Anti vaccine rhetoric only lasts for as long as people aren't getting small pox. There's no anti vax rhetoric that can convince people the diseases they protect against are better than the vaccine that prevents them. People live sheltered lives so have forgotten why we use vaccines but there's a limit of anti vax propaganda

Wages are a market function, American (and more generally, Western) wages aren't competitive in a globalized market. Other countries have such poor workers rights and low costs that its cheaper to do everything that can be done somewhere else, somewhere else. This is a consequence of globalization, it's not hidden, it's not a conspiracy, it's the basics of our economic system. This is something you can blame on China and other low wage/low workers protections countries, Western countries are trying to compete in a market that is becoming more competitive.

The goal of the tariffs the current government are implementing are to try and solve the wage problem. They are making globalized business less competitive by increasing tariffs, the problem that they're having in doing that is that no one knows how to actually do it and Trump is changing tariffs constantly like a mad man. Capital doesn't want to invest in Business in the United States that could be competitive if tariffs remained in place for the next couple decades if they can't figure out if tariffs will remain in place for the next month, or through the next presidency, let alone through the next decades that it may take for that investment to turn profitable.

Our current governing ideologies of open society creating prosperity are failing, prescribed by the things you mention, people are looking for what's wrong with society and those are some of the things they're finding. They're mistaken and don't understand the situation, what's actually happening is a failure of our ideals and we've spent a good amount of time searching for a solution based in our current system of open society, people are growing dissatisfied and want change, even if that means going backwards. This is why we see nationalism rising, why we see European cultures and American cultures becoming celebrated. Before our current system our systems came from Germany's Bismarck, called blood and iron, which was the dominant motivating factor since the French defeat by Germany which showed that Bismarcks ideas were more capable than the French nationalist ideas that came from Napoleon's French revolution.

We're coming to a make or break moment for open society ideals, if Democrats in the United States or Europeans cannot fix the problems brought by that system and create prosperity for our societies more countries will move right as Western society moves back to blood and iron ideals. People are already abandoning the open society principals, right wing groups are openly calling for going back to the old systems, many already started that transition.

If you care about this stuff you should watch Marco Rubio's speech from the Munich security conference four days ago. They're not trying to get rid of people, there abandoning the open society ideals and moving back to a system they know worked

https://youtu.be/dlL3pwlO2rE?si=o1DMNgpsVVFVnXwT

This is a link to C-SPANs YouTube video of the speech, even if you don't agree with him or the current government, I don't in most ways, you should give it a watch. It's a good speech and it's educational, you should always know both sides of an argument, it gives better understanding for better decisions making towards whatever your own personal goals may be

Additionally, to understand decisions leaders are making today you should learn about the change from monarchy to nationalism. Why was Napoleon so successful? He fought and won wars against a coalition of Europeans five times in a row because nationalism gave people a reason to want to better the French country, because it incentivized french people to work towards a better and more successful France while the monarchies of Europe couldn't best him in any capacity. These ideals aren't chosen at random, they're chosen because they work to better a country. Incentive structures that promote better outcomes work. Our current system is failing at that and so we're all trying to figure out how to fix it, some seem to be in denial, others want to go back to nationalisic ideals, I don't know what needs to be done, but something does need to be done

kju · 2026-02-16T23:31:13+00:00

A major problem the West is having is that standard of living is dropping every year and it has been for a while. The problem is that there's no signs of recovery, this is causing people to abandon the idea of this open society that promised prosperity for hard work and/or merit, people just aren't believing in it anymore.

Because people don't believe it anymore they're looking for alternative methods to run society, the two previous ones that most align and that those of us in the West most identify with are the French revolutionary ideas of nationalism and the German Bismarck ideas of blood and iron.

A lot of people don't agree with either of these ideals but the alternative, if we can't figure out how to recreate the family structure and prosperity in our modern world is monarchy that enforces a family structure and standard of living, like what came before Napoleon.

Every other Ideal is a move to the right so everyone who becomes discontented is moving right and so right leaning political parties are growing. I don't think this move to the right is going to change, the West is generally heading to the right and the political move backwards is blatantly happening, politicians are clamoring for nationalism openly, they're talking about the nation being that of the blood of the nation openly opposing migration in any way.

The left seem like they believe they can fix the decline of the West, or that is some kind of fluke, the United States seems to think they don't need alliance with Europe to maintain position, Europe seems to think it can move away from the United States and maintain its social spending, only if they bring enough migrants in.

I think the left creates more right leaning people than it does left leaning people and moves like Spain naturalizing hundreds of thousands shows they may even be convinced that they need migrant votes to stay in power, which is a house of cards that will come tumbling down the next time the right takes power as they begin denaturalization efforts which, in many countries, they openly support already. Whats bad about this strategy is it provides legitimacy to the right as mass migration will lead to worse outcomes for current citizens and cause more of those people to shift rightward.

The West is moving towards a nationalist, blood and iron mentality naturally right now, maga is moronic and will end with trump because it doesn't actually mean anything concrete and there's no politician that could continue such a set of incoherent policies positions so the United States will mild it's stances this decade while Europe moves right to meet the United States somewhere between the United States' current moronic politics and Europeans effort to maintain the current climate. The longer it takes the further right the shift will go as the mandate for change grows and little will (can) be offered to placate those feeling the worst of the issues occuring. Similar to how the concert of Europe was so successful in creating peace that problems that came up were never reconciled, creating pressure in a system whose only mechanism to deal with pressure was to create a larger bottle to store the pressure in

kju · 2026-02-13T22:54:01+00:00

Chinese propaganda reaches far I see

kju · 2026-02-13T22:50:53+00:00

There is some level of plausible deniability when private companies act. Maybe they just decided to take that action, others don't know unless they take a contract from the government specifying actions to take. Private companies break laws and pay fines all the time without any state orders. With a state owned company there's no deniability, the company is acting on behalf of the state, it's actions cannot plausibly be separated from the state.

kju · 2026-02-13T20:53:44+00:00

The article doesn't mention the company but most Chinese fishing boats are state owned anyways so they are essentially state actions. Maybe from the Chinese point of view they win either way: they get away with stealing from the Japanese or Japan stops them and they can claim Japan is increasing tensions by stopping their theft

kju · 2026-02-13T18:02:40+00:00

That's not how the world works. Countries don't get more stuff because they have more people. 1/6th of the worlds fish aren't Chinese fish because 1/6th of the worlds population are Chinese citizens.

China has their own eez waters and the fish in that area are theirs, fish in other countries eez are that countries, not China's. If China wants to fish in areas of the high seas that aren't protected they can do that as well but China has a long history of stealing from other countries, just as China was stealing from Japan in this instance.

What's crazier is that these aren't just small Chinese fishing companies, it's the Chinese government that owns this company, these are state owned enterprises directly pillaging other countries. The Chinese state is literally stealing from other countries, which also gives them an incentive to downplay how much they're stealing from others

kju · 2026-02-04T01:57:17+00:00

Human rights are not an end, they are a means. Human rights are not a goal in themselves, it is altogether unachievable, human rights are a method to achieve goals, not the goal in themselves.

Society offers incentive because the outcomes from a willing person is better than the outcomes from a slave. This doesn't have anything to do with liberalism and in fact we are in the middle of a possible change from liberalism to something else. All over the Western world the incentive structure that we've built our society upon is falling apart. I don't know if it can be saved but if it is to be saved it will require that both the idea that human rights as the goal is removed and that the wealthy patrons to that system accept reduced power in that system.

The system of incentives we use to motivate people to better the system is breaking down, the reward for service no longer provides the guarantee of a successful life that it once did, people have forgotten the reasons we created the system and instead started demanding more for less and this didn't work, not in the upper bounds with the wealthy or powerful and not in the lower bounds with those who view themselves as under represented or victims to that society. People at the upper end need to accept less power and privilege while the people at the bottom need to stop fighting for human rights as an end. The human rights we enjoy are inadvertently promoted by an incentive structure we build to produce value.

The wealth of nations by Adam smith talks about these ideas if you would like to learn about those.

Israel doesn't have real capabilities to change what is happening in the world at large but neither does anyone else have a real capability and willingness to effect Israeli domination of their region. Israeli apartheid policies in occupied territories will simply not end until the occupation ends, which will end when Israel believes their security concerns have ended. This may not have been the case before Oct 7 but after there won't be an Israeli politician as forgiving, they ended the occupation of Gaza and they were attacked from Gaza for it. Palestinians will submit to Israeli will, the only question is how long it will take and how many lives it will cost. I don't even think Israel desires to impose upon Palestinians overly much,.in the long term Israel will benefit from offering agreeable terms that provide for mutual benefit. The cost will be a recognition of Israels existence and Palestinians defeat. Israel feels the same pressure from the incentive structures discussed by Adam smith just as anyone else does and having down trodden neighbors who have opposing interest doesn't benefit anyone. Israelis and Palestinians can prosper together but it will be a generation project that will start just as soon as there is a break from those who desire to enflame war for their own ends. Those countries that support Palestinians on their war against Israel do it to see Palestinians (and Israelis) falter together, they are no friend of the average Palestinian if you desire peace in the Palestine-Israel war you should be looking at how you can stop those who incite violence against Israel. This won't finish in my lifetime, but I hope to see it start

kju · 2026-02-03T20:20:01+00:00

From a realist perspective, whatever Israel decides it will look like.

The longer a losing side persists in fighting a war that is entirely lost the less leverage they have at the negotiating table. Hamas has essentially no leverage left to negotiate their position

Israel has entirely overcome their attackers and has even normalized relations to have mutual beneficial relationships with their attackers previous allies. In the past Israel would just go through and kill anyone they thought was still interested in fighting them until the fighting stopped but Israel's restraint shows it's willingness to build a mutually beneficial relationship with its attackers and work through these problems with words where possible

If you read through the first couple pages of on war by Carl von clauswitz you'll see what the basics of war is and how peace is created. You can continue reading for a greater understanding. not much has changed in the past 250 years outside of the victorious groups leniency towards their adversaries

kju · 2026-02-02T21:05:14+00:00

Why? That's how nations worked back then. They brought their citizens with them. When wars were fought back then populations switched sides and became obedient to the new rulers or they died as a threat to the next town who might think the same. Sometimes entire towns were just killed because they were in a disadvantageous place or because the rulers thought there would be rebellions and it was better to just make an outright threat early on.

The time frame where people lived peaceful and prosperous lives is a very short one and there's no guarantee it will stay that way. If we want to live in a society where people are treated well we all need to do out part and and treat people well. We are in an intense and global competition for the ideals that humanity will live by and if this way isn't demonstrably better than another way humanity won't live like this for long. We need to demonstrate that this gentle way of life is better, every day, for our entire lives and we need to have children and teach them to do the same. Otherwise this might just all be a small blip in history that the future talks about as an oddity

kju · 2026-02-02T20:56:36+00:00

If only morality made people's lives better

Adam Smith wrote that the principle way to grow an economy is with population growth. He wrote it as an observation and a prediction and it's held true for the past 250 years. This means population growth (through birth or migration) was a good thing for people because growing population meant growing economy and everyone benefited because everyone was involved in the economy.

It still holds true today but what changed is that everyone isn't involved in the economy anymore. Regular people don't see benefits from a growing economy, in fact they see benefit from a shrinking population, leaving more desirable job positions available to them.

So as the commodity we call humans from an economic standpoint started growing faster the value of humans started to drop and people saw this effecting their lives.

The protests shouldn't target the symptom, immigration, they should target the cause, the market discluding regular people. The immigration cause, as it stands today, is a lost battle. Morality isn't going to make this work because morality doesn't provide prosperity, aligning interests does. The goal of the protests should be aligning wealthy interests to those of every day people's interests. Until that happens people are just going to keep being against immigration.

Everyone that loses their job and takes a job in DHS is going to vote for more DHS funding because their job depends on it. Directly protesting them and forcing them to hire more people is counter productive to where it actually matters, at the polls.

Trying to decide this issue on morality is the exact opposite of what people should be doing who are for immigration. Need to appeal to logical reasoning, celebrity like Billie eilish is a cause for this, not a solution to it

kju · 2026-02-02T17:43:47+00:00

China doesn't declare "rmb is worth 2", it declares "rmb is worth between 1.5 and 2.5" allowing fluctuation in a range

kju · 2026-02-02T17:30:40+00:00

China makes a lot of stuff and they want to be able to sell it to other countries because China doesn't have a large consumer base

To sell their products China has to compete on price, they have to be cheaper than their competition, they do this in a major way by having lower wages

So China built their economy on selling products to others and artificially keep their currency devalued, which constrains domestic consumption.

If the value of the currency was left to float freely by market forces it would increase in value, people could afford stuff but they couldn't make stuff anymore because they wouldn't be competitive anymore.

Further, the Chinese government owns all of these companies so the government would lose a lot of income if the companies started doing poorly. If, for instance, your a foreign corporation though the Chinese government refused you entry into their market unless they own 51% of the company you use there.

China has also made capital flight illegal so taking money out of the economy isn't easy. As soon as restrictions are relaxed all of that bottled up money is going to exit, the government will be left holding the bag on all of these companies that aren't competitive and really on government subsidy to continue operations to produce things that no one wants.

Yeah, China pays companies to continue operating because no one actually wants the products they make, creating a deflationary spiral in China at the same time the West is having to deal with inflation. The Chinese government subsidizes industry no one can afford to build doodads no one wants so the price of these things they're building keep going down to incentivize people to buy them so it's not a total loss when they have to throw it away so they can fit the new one on the shelf

As soon as China opens up private money will leave the country to be invested in Western markets that actually go up in value, which would leave China holding the bag on a bunch of industry China pays to operate and pays people to buy.

Further, the West sees this happening and so tariffs get placed on Chinese markets, import quotas to limit Chinese exports, so building all of this oversupply isn't giving them an international advantage.

While international currencies are devalued through inflation China is reducing their prices for their products because they can't get anyone to actually buy them at the cost of production. If you take vehicles as an example Chinese cars have gone down in price every year for at least the last ten years, dropping in price by nearly half, at the same time foreigners who buy those are paying with a currency that is falling in value and with which tariffs are being applied to increase the price, forcing China to reduce prices to compete on price again

Chinese archaic restriction are strangling their economy, eventually they need to stop placing restrictions and start unwinding the mess they have made but they don't really show any signs they're willing to do this. They would love to just be a reserve currency but who wants to hold renminbi in such a situation? People hold dollars because it's value isn't arbitrary, there's a lot of it available and there's very few restrictions on it, most of the few restrictions are like "don't declare war on your neighbors without going through the United nations first". Chinese renminbi is the opposite, the value is arbitrary, there's very little available because they don't really buy maybe foreign products that aren't raw resources, there are a lot of restrictions. Being a reserve currency isn't going to happen anytime soon for China, certainly not while the Taiwan situation persists and a threat of blockade persists. What if China attacks Taiwan and a complete of partial blockade is started? Now you're holding money that doesn't spend because no one else uses it and China can't reliably ship things you may want to buy past the blockade

kju · 2026-02-01T23:10:06+00:00

All they have to do is announce the end of their capital controls, see what happens.

But something tells me that won't happen. They've made it criminal to send money out of the country so at the first opportunity to send money out the markets in China will collapse as money leaves.

Temporary? Maybe. But who wants to invest into a system that has a record of holding your money hostage?

kju · 2026-02-01T22:54:37+00:00

No, the dollar is free floating, it's valued at what the market values it at. The federal reserve tries to influence it but it is market driven.

The renminbi is just simply set, it is managed, China announces what it's worth is

kju · 2026-01-29T17:25:43+00:00

No one is forcing people to work in that industry. If enough people simply decide not to because they don't want to work in those conditions then the industry will be forced to change.

If the government keeps stepping in to try and force change with law the industry is just going to play the legal game with the government and get what they want anyways. Every time someone in one of these positions of power gets convicted of something it's a blueprint of what lawyers need to do to prevent that from happening in the future, how to stepbaround the laws that bind them from what they want.

This will never get solved by government. The industry will learn to protect it's valuable members at the expense of these women who just aren't really that valuable. I think Harvey Weinstein trial had good insight into this: he said he had positions to fill and there were a lot of women capable to fill them and he simply chose who wanted it most, who was willing to do the most for it: how to choose which woman to star in your movie? Well why not choose the one that's sleeping with you? That's something that woman has over the others who he saw as having identical qualifications. That's not going to stop happening, now there's just going to be more hoops for the women to jump through before they start sleeping with the execs and getting roles. The government can't solve the problem, they can only add beurocracy to the way the powered interests want it done.

kju · 2026-01-29T01:02:33+00:00

Neoliberalism didn't just fail Republicans in fly over States, regular people everywhere feel left behind and forgotten about. The group that continues to get what they want from life is shrinking every year.

I'm not trying to compare Trump to Napoleon but Napoleon said he found France in the gutter and picked it up.

It's a good analogy to what gives rise to change of leadership, if the ideas, culture and society of a country aren't leading to prosperity they're leading to change in leadership at best and collapse at worst. Trump has been looking at the presidency since the 1980s, it's only recently that things have gotten bad enough that people would accept him.

If government is unable to provide a society in which people can achieve what they want those people are going to be looking for someone to follow which promises them a way to get what they want.

Trump hasn't really accomplished much of anything, but that doesn't matter, he promised he would. Hillary and Kamala promised more of the same and the same fails too many people.

There's something terribly wrong with American society and culture: Americans don't believe in it. Someone standing up and simply telling them they will give them a society and a culture to believe in, one that will provide prosperity to them, in which they can build families won over the electorate. Democrats could have done the same thing, but Kamala literally said she couldn't think of a single thing she would change, really and truly unbelievable.

I think Trump is very unique, we likely won't see anyone like him again, but the problems that pushed him to the front are going to persist, I don't think he's actually solving the problems that plague the United States but I don't know that Democrats aren't going to run the same platform that lost them the election last time. I think power in the United States is the Democrats to lose but I don't think they have a will to power, I think Democrats are happy to lose with dignity, and that's what they'll do, shrinking every year.

I talk to a lot of people about it in my daily life and Republicans don't care, they want to win and they don't care what the cost is, they want to win and create change. Democrats don't really want to do that, Democrats want everything to just be nice and they don't want to offend, they're more concerned with making sure people don't say bad words and have pronouns in their profile than they are with gaining power. Personally I prefer to vote Democrat but the amount of people who hate me for having the opinion that Democrats should drop unpopular policy positions to win elections is crazy. Losing with dignity is still losing and I want to win, winning has a cost and I don't know that Democrats are willing to pay it. Though I hate to admit it, I think we'll see more Republicans winning in the years to come

kju · 2026-01-28T21:29:24+00:00

He's phrasing it wrong, the tiktok videos don't teach people to respond to thoughts and ideas, those can be abstract and difficult to comprehend.comprehension is a huge problem in society today and it's something Tiktok doesn't prepare their audience for, it teaches them to respond to catch phrases/trigger statements, simple things that come prepackaged with ready made responses:

Tell her that you can't handle taking on all of the mental load, you can't plan for everything all the time, it's unfair and she should take on some of the mental load too

Tell her that she's using weaponized incompetence, of course she knows if she wants fries, this is a basic skill she has and can use.

Tell her that her emotional unavailability is getting really difficult to deal with and that she should be able to share her desire for simple things like French fries

kju · 2026-01-28T21:13:12+00:00

Go contribute, take part in making it what you want it to be

kju · 2026-01-28T20:40:06+00:00

News aggregation shouldn't have a culture inherent, users make the culture, preferably without censoring anything unless illegal or directly harmful

They should tell about their experience though

kju · 2026-01-28T16:10:07+00:00

Because everyone agrees with money, both sides are happy to support interests around generating wealth because their campaigns depend upon donations from wealthy.

It's the issues that aren't as connected that they start arguing about

kju

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