oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith

America Is Already Great; Its Leadership Class Is Not

2026-10-20T10:08:38.963-07:00

This is Essay #2 in the series Truth Be Told.

I generally avoid juggling lit sticks of dynamite, i.e. addressing MAGA (Make America Great Again), but this juncture in history obligates me to make a few points now, despite the risks of outrage.

1. America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again."

2. America's self-serving Leadership Class--those in power--has failed the nation and its people. By Leadership Class I mean the class of people who have authority / power in every sector of the economy and society, not just in the political realm but in academia, what passes for America's intelligentsia, technology, corporate America, energy, media, finance, banking, foreign policy, manufacturing, defense--every sector.

This class has mastered the artifice of pantomiming leadership, not real leadership, to cloak their sole real goal, which is self-enrichment and the consolidation of their personal wealth and power. This pantomime of leadership is what I term The Big Con, which boils down to this:

Telling us what we want to hear--the con man's core technique--so they can stripmine us without restraint.

What we want to hear are cliches of restoring greatness lost to the corruption and greed of our Leadership Class and a grab-bag of other sappy, hollow cliches--I feel your pain, Hope and Change, peace with honor, innovation, increasing shareholder value and so on, an endless spew of phony PR slogans designed to con us into thinking their self-serving actions are actual leadership rather than artifices of self-enrichment cloaked in PR finery.

These hokey cliches are hyped by $100 million campaigns funded by the rich and powerful cronies of the self-serving Leadership Class to make sure they stay in power so they can make the rich and powerful even richer and more powerful, all at the expense of hard-working Americans who are losing ground every day.

Consider one example among many: how many leaders in academia devoted their prodigious intelligence and energy to slashing their institution's bloated bureaucracies that contribute nothing to actual learning to reduce the cost of attending their university by 50%?

The answer: none. Higher Education leaders feasted on the hundreds of billions of dollars of "free money" funded by student loans, a modern-day version of indentured servitude, funding lavish buildings and other fripperies, padding their own already-stupendous paychecks and pensions, "investing" in PR about the value of their education rather than actually making sure their students learned anything of actual value.

This pantomime of leadership--The Big Con--masking the zealous pursuit of self-enrichment is visible in every nook and cranny of America. The pantomime--self-glorifying theatrics, overblown visions of techno-paradise, threadbare cliches reworked in a hundred ways to distract and lull the populace--is now so pathetically obvious and absurdly excessive that it's a self-parody, a comic book version of leadership.

Real leaders demand sacrifices of the rich and powerful to serve the national interest and the shared interests of the citizenry. Real leaders don't stage an elaborate pantomime of leadership to cloak their self-enrichment and their ceaseless efforts to further enrich their campaign contributors / cronies.

The moral rot of America's Leadership Class has now reached a self-reinforcing terminal spiral. The rot started two generations ago, and has now reached the point where the corruption, avarice and the stripmining of the populace are not even recognized for what they really are, they're now just BAU--business as usual.

Foreign policy is now guided not by national interest but by what I call The Imperial Project, which boils down to expanding the power and profits of America's monopolies and cartels.

The leadership of Corporate America gutted the nation's manufacturing sector over the past 30 years to boost their own private wealth and the private wealth of their biggest shareholders. Corporate America is run by greedy lemmings--with apologies to real lemmings--who slavishly jump on every trend no matter how destructive and nonsensical.

Way back in 2000, on my first flight to China, I sat next to a senior employee of a top-tier semiconductor equipment company, who recounted his CEO's lemming-like insistence on shipping production to Asia, resulting in a flood of defects that cost far more to fix than the supposed gains. The corporate lemmings all jumped on the offshoring bandwagon regardless of its impracticality and many obvious downsides.

And now all the corporate lemmings have jumped on the equally flawed AI bandwagon, guaranteeing a horrific host of dire consequences await all of us chained to the idiocracy of our Leadership Class.

As noted previously, it's painful to admit we've been conned. The con man knows this, and is a master of misdirection and phony excuses. But unlike these forked-tongue artifices, the consequences are real: beneath the gamed statistics and parody-level theatrics--AI!--we're going to Mars!--our economy and society are in shambles.

So what can we do? For a start, stop voting for people who collect $100 million from the wealthiest and most powerful stripminers and spend it on the The Big Con. Start voting for the handful of real leaders who refuse to accept more than $100 from any person or entity, who refuse to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

I just completed a 5,200 mile camping trip through much of America, and it's worth repeating what I observed everywhere: Truth be Told, America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again." It's America's hopelessly corrupt leadership class that needs to be cashiered en masse and replaced by real leaders who aren't vying to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Yeah, I know--this will never happen. Don't be too sure that moral decay and corruption have no consequences, and that The Revolution No One Sees Coming isn't just off-stage.

New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

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Truth Be Told

2026-10-15T07:53:51.613-07:00

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction.

This is the first in a series of posts around the theme of Truth Be Told, a theme that demands some interpretative explication / context.

There is a spectrum of ways to tell the truth. There's the angry rant ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this any more!"), the tearful confession, the accusatory diatribe ("you can't take the truth!"), the dispassionate accounting of facts and evidence, and many variations that combine the human emotions these express.

My series is built around a special form of Truth Be Told, the kind only a true friend can tell us. It's human nature to hide truths that hurt, and it's human nature to lie to ourselves to maintain a front that all is well and whatever's crumbling can be shored up by our belief that everything is still as it's always been.

The acquaintance responds to our doubts and fears with superficial encouragement: you'll get through this, it's just a rough patch, every relationship / enterprise goes through these low spots, you just need a weekend off to regain your perspective, and so on--well meant but not the truth.

Only a true friend will risk telling us the truth, knowing it will be painful and that we will likely respond poorly, defensively at best and lashing out attacking the friend at the worst. The true friend accepts the responsibility reluctantly, torn between the desire not to hurt us and the knowledge that the only way out of our misery is to finally face the truth, mourn what is no longer what it once was and accept the truth of what we feel beneath what we've been telling ourselves to keep going.

A true friend is not passing judgement, they speak the truth with sympathy for our plight, sympathy for the suffering of living a lie, however attractive the lie may be, fully aware of the pain we're experiencing as the gulf between what we tell ourselves and what we truly feel widens to the breaking point.

The truth is the most personal, consequential truths are often painful because accepting them means the end of something we wanted and cherished, the end of an era and the acceptance of an uncertain, perilous future. I use the examples of relationships and enterprises, because these are life's most demanding commitments. To end a relationship or close an enterprise is difficult on multiple levels, and the true friend knows this from their own experiences.

The path of least resistance is to maintain the facade of a happy marriage and successful enterprise, even as living a lie eats away at us. It's often a shock that someone else sees through the facade and discerns the truth within us.

The true friend must make a difficult calculus, as truth be told risks the friendship for a highly uncertain gain. The true friend is aware that sometimes we're not ready to confront the truth, and the precipice has to crumble beneath our feet before we're ready to accept the truths behind the facade.

Or we're finally at a point where hearing the truth from a trusted friend who has our best interests at heart unleashes a great relief, for the truth is not just pain, it's also relief. A true friend is more likely to expose the truth by asking us questions rather than making statements. Our answers to questions such as "when was the last time you had an honest heart-to-heart with your partner?" reveal the truth we've avoided.

I anticipate angering many readers in this series, because deeply held mythologies will be bulldozed. In a very real way, the facades we cling to to maintain relationships and enterprises are personal mythologies, and their collapse generally spawns an emotional tornado.

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction. To share a series around Truth Be Told makes me feel like the guy in a bedraggled white robe on the street corner, murmuring about redemption while passersby cross the street to avoid me.

So be it. I'm just asking questions, and the truth is revealed by your answers and your emotional reactions.

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What's the Point of AI, Anyway?

2026-09-20T16:59:29.009-07:00

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment.

AI is by most accounts either 1) the greatest advance since the wheel, or at least since YouTube and/or 2) the greatest opportunity ever to skim billions or maybe even trillions of dollars in private gains. A third possibility--that AI will generate a destructive tsunami of Anti-Progress unique in human history, catalyzing the deepest, most destructive Global Depression since the Great Depression 97 years ago--was not in the running a few laps ago but is now neck-and-neck with the favorites.

This raises a question worth answering: What's the Point of AI, Anyway? Is it:

1) just the latest in a string of over-hyped technologies whose primary purpose is enriching those who get there the firstest with the mostest, i.e. secure the trillion-dollar gains of a network-effect monopoly, or

2) really going to usher in the greatest advances in human history, freeing all of humankind from drudgery, illness and taxes? or

3) actually going to usher in an AI-enabled, centralized, surveillance-extraction-control dystopia of serfs rendered helpless by their dependence on AI?

There are many opinions, but are there any conclusions that withstand scrutiny? I say yes, there are. Let's start with the 42 essays I've written over the past two years on AI and add recent links from other sources.

Conclusion #1: AI isn't actually intelligent, but that doesn't mean it's not ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. There's Just One Problem: AI Isn't Intelligent, and That's a Systemic Risk. (8/8/24) AI is ideally suited for hacking, ransomware, breaking into secure systems, leaping over guardrails, mimicking trusted identities, malicious deep-fakes, surveillance, and much more: the sky's the limit on AI's proclivities for malicious mayhem.

As my short story The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia, illustrates, AI's mayhem already extends beyond the conceptual reach of our current legal system.

Conclusion #2: since AI has no moral foundation or understanding of the real world, it's ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. AI has no moral guardrails, despite over-hyped claims, or indeed, any guardrails, as guardrails are rationally understood by AI to be impediments to "earning rewards" for completing tasks. So to complete tasks, AI must circumvent guardrails.

"Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology (8/19/26)

Conclusion #3: all the over-hyped wonders AI is supposed to be creating are a trickle while highly profitable malicious mayhem is scaling up at light-speed. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, consider these links:

Trust Was This Week's Vulnerability. (easydns.com)

Every story below is a variation on the same move: borrow a trusted identity, then cash it in before anyone checks.

Operators open contact on WhatsApp or Telegram posing as someone the target already knows, spend days building rapport, then send a file disguised as Norton Antivirus, Adobe Flash, KeePass, Telegram, or an AI tool like Pictory or RunwayML. One lure was a fake MRI scan showing a disc herniation. Once running, it harvests contacts, email, and social messages, captures the screen, and switches on the microphone.

The FBI's advisory notes that some victims' personal information later surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites. The design is the whole point: the approach happens on a trusted platform, from a familiar-seeming contact, over enough time that the eventual file doesn't read as an attack. If you or someone you know does work that makes you a plausible target--journalism, activism, dissent--a friendly contact who takes days to build rapport before finally sending something to open is worth verifying through a separate channel, no matter how convincing the conversation has been.

Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control (3/26/26)

What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable (6/17/26) June 17, 2026

Forget the AI Slowdown--the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening: AI labs are toying with an industry-wide pact to slow development. Meanwhile, widely available AI chatbots are already helping uncover a tidal wave of security flaws. (wired.com)

If the AI Industry Followed Its Own Research, It Might Have Paused Already: Anthropic's CEO says that safety hinges on understanding how AI 'thinks.' So far the evidence is disturbing. (wired.com)

Conclusion #4: The full systemic costs, utility and productivity of AI cannot be determined as long as AI chatbots, agents, search and tools are heavily subsidized to goal-seek network effect dominance, and the costs of defending against the rising tide of AI-enabled security threats are soaring so fast they cannot be determined.

Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable (8/8/26)

Wall Street Thinks AI Is Getting Cheaper. It's Missing The $430 Billion Security Bill. (zerohedge.com)

The token price is only one part of the cost of an AI workflow. J.P. Morgan estimates that AI could create more than $430 billion of additional security spending over three years. Cheaper intelligence can create more machine activity, and more demand for trust. For security vendors, the trust bill is revenue. For companies deploying AI, it is cost.

Falling token prices should improve AI economics, but the total cost of an AI task also includes identity, security, monitoring, governance and compliance. Some of the savings created at the model layer may simply move somewhere else in the software stack.

This does not mean security costs erase the benefits of AI. It means token deflation is not the same thing as total AI-cost deflation. The better metric may be cost per trusted AI task, not price per token.

Conclusion #5: it's already abundantly clear that only those who already know how to think, write and research for themselves can avoid becoming dependent on AI to the degree that they are incapable of developing / learning how to think, write and research for themselves, and are therefore cognitively impaired for life.

I explain this in depth here: Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us (4/9/26)

An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing 'Cognitive Surrender.' Universities Are in a Bind. The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering 'cognitive surrender.' (nytimes.com)

Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym? As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward. (newyorker.com)

Conclusion #6: the implosion of the AI "investment" bubble will trigger the implosion of the global financial house of cards that's been propping up the global economy. An all-or-nothing bet has already been placed on AI generating trillions of dollars in revenues (and profits) while the sector struggles to generate billions while bleeding billions in losses chasing the chimera of network-effect dominance.

The Inevitability of the AI Depression (4/3/26)

The AI Depression (3/24/26)

AI slowdown calls justified but collapse of bubble may be more immediate threat. (theguardian.com)

Conclusion #7: no one is going to save us. We're on our own.

Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon: Even with mounting concerns about AI models going rogue, legislation appears unlikely, and the White House is outright opposed to oversight.

Our A.I. Problem: Why can't the people who produced the technology, which has already shown that a different world is possible, just do the things that would prevent extinction?

Because they're too busy trying to secure billions of dollars in their private accounts, that's why. They're busy automating sociopathologies, but there's no need to automate greed--it's already super-abundant.

Conclusion #8: the entire premise of "technological innovation drives Progress" is that new technologies serve the public. AI takes "to serve humans" in the Twilight-Zone context of consuming us to benefit AI's owners and centralized overlords.

Conclusion #9: the only effective countermeasure is Cold Turkey--don't get dependent on AI, which means avoiding using it in the first place. Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey. (10/27/26)

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment. If you use AI, treat it like plutonium, as that's a reasonably useful analog.

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Smug Hypocrisy Invites Nemesis

2026-09-17T08:39:57.644-07:00

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience.

Among the many infuriating facets of everyday life, a special corner of Heck is being reserved for the Smug Hypocrisy of America's elites which manifests along the entire ideological spectrum from Smug Hypocritical Liberal to Smug Hypocritical Conservative.

No one runs faster to cut in front of everyone else crowding around the Federal "free money" feeding trough than self-proclaimed "conservative believers in free markets" elbowing aside everyone else to secure their federal tax break, government subsidy or other gummit giveaway.

The much-reviled welfare queens in the "Free Stuff Army" (FSA) are small fry compared to the Corporate Welfare Royalty who defraud, extract, skim and scam untold billions from the public and the Treasury via an endless stream of lobbying, regulatory capture, bribery, outright fraud, inflated invoices, no-bid contracts and enough other scams to keep an entire army of overpaid attorneys and lobbyists busy at the Federal "free money" feeding trough.

I often share this comprehensive data base of Corporate Settlements and Fines for egregious violations of the most basic business standards ably compiled by Jon Morse. There are now 2,848 entries. Come on, "believers in self-regulating markets," give us your best shot of smug hypocrisy.

"Taxes are theft" until we're feasting on government contracts funded by taxes.

When it comes to identifying the most infuriatingly smug examples of hypocrisy, wealthy liberals are like shooting fish in a barrel. "Rent is theft" until our monthly draw from the family trust fund depends on collecting rents from all the properties the trust acquired for peanuts decades ago.

It's funny how privatized totalitarianism's core characteristic--"some are more equal than others"--plays out across the entire spectrum of Smug Hypocrisy: all those wealthy folks, regardless of their self-identified political label, are delighted to sprawl atop the moral high ground and lecture the rest of us about how marvelously righteous they are, disclaiming their elitist education and connections and proclaiming their ordinariness: "we live pretty simply," look at us playing with our Irish Setter, just like you do, blah blah blah.

Gee, why is everyone suddenly so shy about their wealth and advantageous perch in the top 10%, 5%, 1% and 0.1%? Could it be that they know the system is rigged and they benefited mightily from it being rigged?

Political correctness, left and right, manifests Smug Hypocrisy. Those feeling smug about "saving the planet" because they bought an electric or hybrid vehicle should surrender their top 10% house and income and go live in a village next to an open-pit lithium mine for a few months, then go work on the natural gas wellhead that powers the battery factory, then drive a diesel fueled dozer in another mineral mine before declaring their purchase of an electric vehicle is "saving the planet."

Those touting the wonders of "the market" should surrender their top 10% house and income and go work a couple months of 10-hour shifts as a Lyft driver and find a place to live that matches their earnings before glorifying the rigged "markets" of privatized totalitarianism.

A little honesty and humility would be welcome. How many times do you hear someone state that the vast majority of their income and wealth is the result of pure luck, getting in before assets soared five-fold because they happened to be in the right generation, not because of "hard work" and brilliant investing?

How many times do you hear anyone state that their income and wealth are the result of connections unavailable to most people, from elite universities, inheriting family enterprises / wealth, being offered a job in a family friends' office, etc.--or plain old luck?

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience. It's remarkably easy to be smug when your hands are clean and you tagged home plate because you started on third base. It's remarkably easy to be hypocritical when defending your righteousness in a rigged system.

On a much larger scale than "money" and status, Smug Hypocrisy invites Nemesis, payback for the smug confidence that living atop a rigged system is our rightful due. Hypocrisy is costless, which is why it's so attractive and ubiquitous. But maybe it's only costless in the moment because the consequences will be served as a banquet that we won't be able to decline.

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Since We're All On Board the Hyperinflation Ship, Will It Sail As Expected?

2026-09-13T14:17:56.695-07:00

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed.

Few things have attracted more consensus that the belief that the US government has no choice but to "inflate away its massive $40 trillion debt" by devaluing the US dollar, a process that has a nasty habit of escaping the control of Central Planners and self-reinforcing into runaway / run-to-failure hyperinflation that destroys the economy.

As a hard-wired skeptic, when everyone is on board the same ship while the other side of the trade's ship has only a handful of contrarians and a few people wearing Silly Hats, I start wondering if Bob Farrell's famous Rule #9 will play out: "When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen."

(Ten) Market Rules to Remember.

There are various game-theory and market dynamics supporting this truism: Self-Defeating Prophecy, group-think, etc., but there's another set of dynamics in play that few seem to think through.

Those empowered by their positions within the Central State have a keen interest in not letting the Central State devalue its currency--and thus its credibility and power--in a hyperinflationary death spiral. History offers few (if any) examples of hyperinflationary death spirals benefiting the citizenry, whose consent legitimizes the government.

While the consensus is confident that the US government "has no choice but to inflate away its debts" by debauching its currency, this discounts the survival instinct of those steering the ship. As already noted, only "madmen and economists" could believe that debauching the US dollar to "inflate away the debt" will generate a Hollywood ending to the drama--and it seems even madmen and economists don't believe it will lead to a Hollywood ending.

What's being discounted (other than Farrell's Rule #9) is the nation-state has other options other than destroying the value of its currency to inflate away the $40 trillion in Treasury debt. Doing nothing is popular because no one wants to make any additional sacrifices, but the irony here is painfully obvious: doing nothing feels like a victory until the currency and economy implode, laying waste to everyone's security.

There are various radical alternatives being proposed, for example, Ellen Brown's proposal to invoke the sovereign powers already granted to the nation-state: The Sovereign Reset: Escaping the Interest Trap with Greenbacks. These ideas are controversial, of course, because doing nothing remains the most popular and easiest choice, until something breaks and a crisis forces some action that proves undesirable to somebody.

Let's consider what somebody did back in 2008-2010 that effectively rigged the US economy to benefit the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%. These charts are facts, not proposals. Go ahead and argue with the facts, oops, the facts won.

Post the rigging of the economy to favor the top 10% via monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes, the wealth of the top 10% tripled. The Federal Reserve breaks the top 10% into the top 0.1%, the top 1% and the top 90%-99%. The charts of the top 1% and the top 90%-99% are nearly identical: if the trend line of the previous decades had continued (i.e. unrigged), the assets held by the top 10% would be roughly half of their current levels.

This concentration of the nation's wealth is especially obvious in the top 0.1%, whose share of financial assets nearly doubled post-2008-2010 from 7% to 13%:

The top 1%'s wealth more than tripled, from $16 trillion (poor things, only $16 trillion!) to $56 trillion:

The top 90%-99%'s wealth also tripled:

The bottom 50%'s share of financial assets--real wealth--plummeted: some are more equal that others in privatized totalitarianism. Note that the top 0.1%--340,000 people--own 16.6% of the nation's financial assets, 6.6X what the bottom 50%--170 million people--own, a 2.5% share of the nation's financial assets.

In terms of who got thrown under the bus and who's driving the bus post-2008-2010, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? Here are the facts:

Top 10% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 64%

Bottom 50% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 5%

Top 10% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 72%

Bottom 50% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 2.5%

The rising tide of the monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes since 2008-2010 did not raise all boats: the share of financial assets owned by the wealthiest few doubled while the share of financial assets owned by the bottom 50% fell.

According to the Federal Reserve, the top 10% own $125 trillion in assets. If the economy hadn't been rigged to their exclusive benefit, their wealth--tracking the trendline of the previous decades--would have been about half this sum.

Doesn't common sense suggest that those owning 72% of the gains of our rigged economy should make 72% of the sacrifices needed to restore some measure of financial sense to the nation's accounts? In previous eras, this was called noblesse oblige, the obligation of the wealthy nobility to serve the shared interests of the entire society, not just their private interests.

It's almost amusing how those whose wealth tripled due to the economy being rigged to benefit the wealthiest 10% consider these gains "earned" and therefore sacrosanct, when the charts above indicate these gains were entirely the result of the casino being rigged.

It seems reasonably safe to assume the 200 million people thrown under the bus might not be amused when something breaks and a crisis demands resolution, and the 340,000 with political influence declare their wealth is sacrosanct. Few seem to think these dynamics through to their logical conclusion.

No wonder doing nothing is so popular with the wealthiest, most politically influential few.

If this doesn't sit well with the top 10%, they have another option: put their wealth to work electing adults instead of self-enriching toadies, sycophants, minions, lackeys and grifters who win re-election by passing out "free money" borrowed by the Treasury, money that accumulates interest paid by taxpayers.

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed, which is all that's left in our rigged economy. When something finally breaks, greed won't provide a solution; it will only accelerate the dissolution and destruction.

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We Can't Automate Learning, We Can Only Automate Dependence on AI

2026-09-10T09:45:19.995-07:00

AI can't do our learning or thinking for us, but it excels at making us dependent on its substitution of learning and thinking, and the resulting state of helplessness when we have to think for ourselves.

There are a number of things we already know about AI: one is that we can't automate learning, we can only automate dependence on AI. This can be expanded to: we can't automate learning how to think independently, we can only automate the helplessness of being dependent on AI.

The use of AI in education to substitute for actual learning has pushed reading--and reading comprehension, i.e. the ability to truly learn and think for oneself--off a cliff. What AI does is automate dependence on AI, at the cost of students learning how to "connect the dots" on their own.

This process of connecting dots beyond what was taught in the lesson plan requires an ability to research variety of subjects and think about them independently, that is, not as a process of rote regurgitation for an exam but thinking as the source of "aha" moments, where we come to understand something in a new, intuitive way, not just as a collection of facts.

Correspondent P.S. has worked extensively with AI tools, and he encapsulated what AI can't do for us / automate:

"This missing faculty is probably one of the clearest remaining boundaries between present AI and genuinely general intelligence. It isn't knowing more. It is seeing what matters before somebody labels it for you."

This is the intuitive leap from being told "this is the way it is" and accepting that uncritically, and seeing connections beyond what's already labeled for our consumption. This is thinking independently, and it requires thoughtful, focused reading of often difficult texts, re-reading key passages, and connecting ideas and concepts--i.e. labels for broad swaths of knowledge--in ways that extend beyond the conventional labels.

AI can't do our learning or thinking for us, but it excels at making us dependent on its substitution of learning and thinking, and the resulting state of helplessness when we have to think for ourselves. AI makes it convenient to learn nothing deeply enough to matter, and in this way it is Ultra-Processed Cognition, the equivalent of social media's endless Ultra-Processed scroll of eye-catching, emotion-arousing crunchy snack texts and images.

So when we finally awaken to the profound loss of our ability to research, think and connect disparate ideas and concepts beyond the Ultra-Processed Labels of convention, we find we've lost the ability to connect anything beyond our dependence and our helplessness.

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Social Media Is Pointless Slag

2026-09-08T10:39:52.892-07:00

The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media.

If we want to understand why a system generates unfavorable output, a good starting place is to identify

1) the incentives embedded by the system's design and

2) what this type of system generates by its very nature. One way to understand this is Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, the medium is the message: the medium itself defines the message, not the content.

Per MarshallMcLuhan.com, Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message. 'The medium is the message' because it is the 'medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.'

The classic example is the medium of print media versus the medium of broadcast television. These are not interchangeable, as each medium lends itself to different avenues of communication, knowledge and emotional impact. Each is attractive / addictive in different ways, and the incentives to "consume" content in each medium differ, as do the incentives to create content in each medium.

The basic idea here is it's more productive to investigate the incentives and behaviors generated by the communication medium itself and ignore the messages / content.

What becomes immediately apparent is social media is slag--the worthless mass left over when we melt a mountain of ore to obtain a handful of useful metal--both by the nature of its incentives and by its structure.

The incentives of social media are uniquely perverse: social media platforms invite users to create content with two built-in incentives:

1. increase your social status and sense of self-worth by posting content showing yourself in the best possible light

2. attempt to earn money by posting a mountain of content to extract a handful of payments from the corporate platform.

The consumer economy systemically induces insecurity as the means of promoting the purchase of goods and services we don't need but which confer social status: "you have to have this new product/service or you're low status."

Given the mass insecurity this system generates, people are starved for opportunities to increase their social standing and sense of self-worth by increasing their visibility: look at me!

Social media fulfills this desire to a T. Constantly post photos of oneself in exotic locales, dining out, looking fabulous, etc., none of which has any appeal to the truly secure individual.

This competition to gain attention generates envy and insecurity, which then feed a desire to fabricate / highlight even more looking fab content, which then generates more data and profits for the platforms.

That we don't actually become higher status or more secure by entering this competition undermines the entire exercise / "investment" of time and energy. The platform's Happy Story is that social media "connects people," but the medium only lends itself to superficial simulations of connection, not actual connections.

For that, we have email: individual to individual, not broadcasting on social media.

The financial incentives are equally attractive: sit at home (or at work) and post content for "free" (because "free" means we're the unpaid source of the platforms' profits) which can generate substantial income if our content goes viral and attracts millions of views.

By its very nature--users post as much content as they want, 24/7--social media thrives on quantity, not quality. So the way to make money on social media platforms is to post a mountain of content as the means to extract a handful of cash.

This is an ideal setup for social media platform corporations: users create content that is addictive by design--the endless scroll, keep going or you'll miss out on a terrific post!--which can then be scraped for data that can be sold to other companies while also being used to target advertising tailored to each addicted user / poster.

The platforms rake in tens of billions of dollars and dole out a tiny percentage to content creators. It's actually an amazingly one-sided extraction machine: the platforms recruit users to slave away posting mountains of content that's profitable to the platforms in the vain hope of becoming an influencer raking in big bucks from attracting tens of millions of views. The actual distribution of the money follows a power-law curve: only the few at the top make any real money, the 99.8% earn pennies or nothing.

This meager monetary inccentive also generates an unquenchable desire to post attention-grabbing content. Whether it's accurate or not is not the incentive; the incentive is to be outrageous enough to activate users' limbic attention to emotion-generating images and text.

There is no other possible output of this structure other than addiction to a pointless mountain of slag. Mighty bulldozers scoop up the raw content and extract the value via data collection and advertising, and a few nuggets are tossed to the content creators who generate the most addictive / attractive content. Everyone else is generating content in the futile pursuit of higher visibility / status / security.

Hey, Hypocrite, don't you post on social media. Yes, I do, because that's where the audience is now. If you expect me to stand on a street corner reading my content aloud (and likely being arrested as a 5150 or public nuisance), sorry, I'm in the business of creating content, and so I have to go where the audience is, which is now social media.

I don't have to "like" social media or spend any time on it to recognize that it is a global mass medium of open access. I don't post enough to ever attract much of an audience, nor is my content of the sort that attracts vast audiences. But no writer can ignore changes in the mediums of communication if they want their content to be read, oops, I mean "consumed."

The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media. The medium of social media lends itself to Ultra-Processed Content, the cognitive-emotional equivalents of addictive-by-design Ultra-Processed snacks.

How much "nutritional value" did we extract from sorting through the mountain of pointless slag? The answer is not enough to make the time-attention-consuming process worth our time or energy, given the degradation of our mental-cognitive health that being addicted to social media incurs by its very nature.

Social media can be productively understood as a medium labeled "to serve humans," as it consumes us to feed a profit machine that can only generate mountains of pointless slag due to its incentives and structure.

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We're Living in a Tragicomic Parody

2026-09-03T11:11:56.519-07:00

It's hard to take a joke when our entire economy and financial system is the joke.

We're blessed/cursed to be living in a very peculiar era in which parodies are taken with the utmost seriousness, an absurdist state of affairs captured by the classic line from the 1959 film North by Northwest: "So horribly sad. How is it I feel like laughing?"

The parodies are now so extreme they are self-parodies that cannot be parodied. How do we parody a world gone mad with parodies? Every attempt to parody "the news" today is trumped by reality.

We're inhabiting a travesty of a mockery of a sham of smug overlords and obsequious politically correct grifters, left and right, claiming the high moral ground while they pillage with a money-grubbing avarice so blatant that it's impervious to parody.

Their hypocrisy is so comically obvious that we can no longer tell if it's comic by design or the grifters are so shallow and superficial that they're blind to the irony of their self-parody.

At any moment, we might be instructed to wear our underwear on the outside of our clothing, and the Supreme Court would rubber-stamp this parody of serious policy with its usual cowardice, a cowardice that is now so blatant that it's also beyond parody: the Supreme Court is a parody of a functioning system of justice.

All this will be reported with great seriousness, as if it isn't a punchline in a joke nobody gets.

The irony of all the euphoric claims about AI is powerful enough to melt thick steel containment doors. The AI euphoria is itself an irony, wrapped around an even deeper irony: there is no way to tell the difference between an AI parody of "intelligence" and what AI presents as "legitimate intelligence."

A parody of AI hallucinations is impossible, because the reality of AI hallucinations already exceeds any parody. A parody of runaway AI mischief is also impossible, because the reality of AI mischief already exceeds any parody.

Then there's the parodies that are so systemic, they're the punchline nobody gets: the economy is a parody of a functional economy--here is total debt:

And the the stock market casino run by The Gamesters of Triskelion is a parody of a functional financial system:

Star Trek fans know the The Gamesters of Triskelion episode is a parody in which a society of supposedly great intelligence has decayed into a debased casino in which gambling and gaming the betting action is the sole focus of these supposedly intelligent Masters of the Universe.

Isn't it obvious that the US financial system / stock market is now such an absurd parody of a functional financial system that it can no longer be parodied, as it's a full-blown self-parody?

Ultra-Processed Life--everything is "innovative," "new," a novelty everyone must have, profitable glop presented as amusement and distraction not nourishment--is a self-parody not just of a functioning socio-economic system but of an authentic value system.

It's hard to take a joke when our entire economy and financial system is the joke. The comedian delivers the punchline and the audience is silent: they won't get the joke until it's too late to laugh, except through tears, for we're living in a tragicomic parody.

New podcast: Charles Hugh Smith on the End Game of Repressed Interest Rates: Stagflationary Inflation followed by "Cold Turkey" (29:25 min)

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The Irresistible Temptations of Centralized Power

2026-09-01T08:54:42.963-07:00

The only "reform" that changes our lives in a fundamentally positive way is radical decentralization via distributing centralized power.

Presidents like to deal with the CEOs of corporate monopolies for self-evident reasons: Rather than engage in the tedious, contentious herding-of-cats in nimble, dynamic, competitive sectors, the Prez makes a deal with the monopoly CEO and the deal is imposed on everyone down the political, corporate, workplace hierarchy.

Centralized power makes a coup--a forced swap of leadership--meet the new boss, same as the old boss--easy. Financial coups are easier, too, with one central bank and one cartel of "too big to fail, too big to care" banks.

Centralized power offers many other Irresistible Temptations. Reformers love centralized power because if they can grab control of it, they can force-feed their glorious reforms (or profit-maximizing schemes) down everyone's throats whether they agree or not: it is against the law to complain about corporate/state monopolies controlling our lives, everyone must install a Flock camera in their bedroom, no one can criticize the Supreme Leader in private, everyone must wear approved Silly Hats in public, etc.

Oops, those reforms sound like an authoritarian, totalitarian state gone mad. Yes, precisely. All centralized power arrangements end up manifesting authoritarian, totalitarian extremes of madness, because that's the only possible outcome of centralizing power: petty dictators are soon running the asylum, and loving every minute of it. The patients, not so much.

We see this everywhere now, as monopolies are manifestations of centralized power. This is why I call the status quo Privatized Totalitarianism as privately owned and operated monopolies / cartels have the same headlock on us as state monopolies, and the two work together, as this serves the interests of both: you make the Silly Hats, and we mandate their use, and penalize anyone attempting to modify your software, app, device or Silly Hat to evade your monopoly chokehold. We both get rich exploiting the powerless peasantry, so what's not to like?

Politics now boils down to a Silly Hats slugfest over who gets control of the Privatized Totalitarianism casino. The only meaningful reform is to decentralize power by demolishing every monopoly and cartel and banning the aggregation of power. But what about "efficiency"? Yes, Privatized Totalitarianism is very "efficient"-- efficient at extraction, exploitation, surveillance, repression, propaganda, PR and social control mechanisms.

If the public can "vote with their feet" by moving to a different physical location but they're still living in the same cartel-monopoly economy wherever they move, their "liberty" is illusory. It's like changing cabins in the gulag: maybe this hut has fewer leaks and fewer fleas, but it's still in the gulag.

Just as what we're losing by using AI is invisible because we've lost the capacity to even see what's been lost, we've lost the capacity to see the systemic decay of the quality of our lives in the invisible gulag of Privatized Totalitarianism. So even as we thrill to some new novelty or tiny discount, we've lost the capacity to see what's been lost in the slow destruction of decentralized, competitive dynamism in favor of the profit-maximizing, sclerotic gulag we're all trapped in without even being aware that we're trapped, for the key to maintaining the kingdom is to foster the illusions of choice, liberty and competition while distracting us with ceaseless hype about new technologies, novelties and meaningless discounts as "competition" and "choice."

It's like looking at a row of different brand products and then reading the fine print to discover that they're all owned by the same corporation. That's Privatized Totalitarianism, well cloaked behind carefully maintained illusions of choice, liberty and competition.

And if you protest, it might get worse: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

The only "reform" that changes our lives in a fundamentally positive way is radical decentralization via distributing centralized power. Everything else is just changing huts in the gulag and being delighted with the steady stream of absurd parodies of novelty: "New gruel, new taste, now with micro-plastics!"

New podcast: Charles Hugh Smith on the End Game of Repressed Interest Rates: Stagflationary Inflation followed by "Cold Turkey" (29:25 min)

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The Blindfolded Can't Make Informed Decisions--and We're All Blindfolded

2026-08-27T11:14:20.778-07:00

If there was a black market for systemic risk, we'd make a completely different set of decisions. Instead, we're each on our own, trying to peek beneath our blindfold to see a sliver of the real world.

Here in the 9th inning, the name of the game is artifice in service of the Big Con. Everywhere we turn, we're inundated with "information" designed to funnel us into passively compliant complicity, a constant flood of interventions, social engineering, gamed statistics and fake substitutions for what was once authentic: fake facsimiles, synthetic mimicries and an endless array of flimsy facades designed to hide the realities that might awaken us from our uneasy somnambulance.

All this artifice is the machinery of the Big Con, in which the credulous marks are led to believe they're "winning" while they're being fleeced. So you're "winning" gambling in a rigged casino, but that's how the Big Con works: you keep winning in the stock market casino, so you get complacent and complicit: hey, don't shut down the rigged casino, I'm winning!

Once you believe the carefully conjured falsehoods are real, the trap is sprung: you're all in now, but instead of winning, you lose--everything. Oops, sorry about that, well, you knew it was a game of chance. Better luck next time. But there is no next time, because you're wiped out--by design.

But that's not even the worst of all the fakery and artifice. If we set aside all the ideological, economic and cultural differences around the world, one truth remains the same everywhere:

If you want to know the true price of things, including risk, there's only one place you'll find it: the black market, the underground cash market that's beyond the control of authorities fixing prices, manipulating credit and intervening to mask risk.

The reason we want to know the true price of things, including risk, is that it's impossible to make informed decisions based on artificially set prices and risks. In a system that's nothing but a carefully controlled stage set, we're all blindfolded, unable to see the real cost of capital and the real extent of risk.

So the Federal Reserve says the cost of capital is low and this reflects near-zero risk. This staging places a blindfold on everyone in the system. Unable to see the real cost of capital, the real extent of risk, the hidden costs of suppressing feedback by rigging the entire financial system--it's all hidden to serve the Big Con--for your own good, of course, because that's the core con in the Big Con.

The blindfolded can't possibly make informed, sound decisions, and we're all blindfolded by artificial "information" designed to make a system bursting with risk look low-risk and a system that's rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many look like it makes "winners" of everyone gambling in the casino. You can't lose, because Mommy and Daddy Fed will always step in to bail everyone out.

The real winners aren't playing the tables, they're rigging it all, amused by the ease of running the Big Con. In a system as centralized as the one we inhabit--what I call Privatized Totalitarianism--there is no black market where we can take off our blindfold and see the true level of risk and the true cost of unmanipulated capital and credit.

And since these realities are purposefully hidden from us, we're doomed to making disastrously bad decisions based on artificially contrived "information." Blindfolded, we're perilously close to the precipice, but the messages we hear are all soothing confirmations that everything is low risk and we're all "winning."

Blindfolded, it's inevitable that one day we step off the precipice we can't see. That's the current era in a nutshell.

Or put another way: we're wandering around blindfolded, making decisions based on Big Con fabrications, one of which is we can "borrow our way to permanent prosperity:"

We don't actually "own" our "winnings," we're only temporarily "renting" them-- We're Actually Only "Renting" What We Think We "Own":

If there was a black market for systemic risk, we'd make a completely different set of decisions. Instead, we're each on our own, trying to peek beneath our blindfold to see a sliver of the real world.

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We're Actually Only "Renting" What We Think We "Own"

2026-08-26T09:05:15.082-07:00

In many cases, we're actually only "renting" the functional / monetary value of what we "own," and that makes the value of "ownership" far less certain than we might imagine.

What we "own" seems straightforward, but it's actually slippery. Yes, we own what we have a deed or copyright for, but we only "rent" the valuation the market assigns to what we own.

Consider the gambling chip in our pocket issued by a casino. Its market value within the casino is, say, $100. If the casino suddenly declares bankruptcy, we still "own" the physical round of plastic, but we no longer "own" any monetary value, as the chip is now worthless beyond its collectable value, which is likely nil. It turns out we only "rented" the market valuation, which is dependent on conditions outside our control.

This confusion about what we actually "own" becomes visible when asset bubbles pop. As an asset bubble inflates, we naturally feel we "own" wondrously expanding wealth. But actually all we own is the stock shares or the house or the futures contract. Since the market valuation is set by conditions outside our control, we're only "renting" the market valuation via our ownership.

Once the bubble pops, our great wealth has vanished, even though we still "own" the asset.

Buying assets with borrowed money generates additional slipperiness. As long as our liability / debt remains lower than the market value, our ownership has monetary value. But should the bubble pop and the market value drop to the point that our debt / liabilities exceed the market value of the asset, then it's revealed that we only "rented" the monetary value, because the conditions that set that value are outside our control.

Here is a chart of total debt, public and private. We may have a claim on a pension or an entitlement, but if the debt absorbs all the income, then our claim wasn't ownership. And if our liabilities exceed the market value of the asset we own, we own nothing of monetary value.

We all know that the digital device we "own" is a brick unless we "rent" the software, which we "own" until the controlling corporation declares it obsolete. Once again, the functional and monetary value of what we "own" is outside our direct control because those values are controlled by others.

Compare this to a tool like a hammer, whose functionality is not controlled by anyone but the owner.

Which brings us to AI, another slippery manifestation of "ownership." Most AI tools are rented from a corporation via a monthly fee, and programs that are downloaded and "owned" are still controlled by the issuing company in terms of their functionality.

But we own the content we create with AI, correct? Yes, but since AI tools and agents are commodities now, anyone else can create the same or equivalent content, so the monetary value of AI-generated content is near-zero due to its low scarcity value.

And if we consider "ownership" of cognition, then the only cognition we truly own is what we know and can create once all the AI tools and agents are offline. In other words, what we truly own and control is our own knowledge and experience. Everything we "rent" or borrow isn't ours to "own" if we understand functional value as only what we control lock, stock and barrel, with zero dependence on conditions beyond our control.

Which makes us wonder if we're renting AI or AI is renting us.

In many cases, we're actually only "renting" the functional / monetary value of what we "own," and that makes the value of "ownership" far more contingent and far less predictable and considerably less certain than we might imagine.

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The Lit Fuse: Low Interest Rates Ruined the Economy

2026-08-24T12:28:34.519-07:00

What matters is seeing the fuse burning and realizing it's going to blow up, and planning accordingly.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the inevitability of the stagflationary, bubble-popping recession we're entering is that the "solution" to the 2008-09 financial crisis--near-zero interest rates, limitless credit for the Too Big to Fail players, and the informal institutionalization of the Fed will always rescue the stock market Put--ruined the economy in ways few seem to recognize.

This ruination is systemic and structural, as it:

1. shifted the incentives from risk-sensitive investing to risk-insensitive speculation, rewarding gamblers loading up on high risk bets based on their confidence that the Federal Reserve will always intervene to reverse any stock market decline.

2. Made economic "growth" dependent on an ever-rising phantom wealth stock market rather than organic growth fueled by investing in increasing productivity that generates real value via higher quality goods and services.

3. Handed the biggest financial players--corporations, investment banks and financiers--the enormous advantages of lower borrowing costs and unlimited credit lines, advantages unavailable to households and small businesses. These credit-based advantages widened wealth and income inequality to extremes unseen since the Gilded Age.

4. Corporations with low-cost unlimited credit lines can always outbid households for homes, exacerbating the "housing shortage" which isn't actually a shortage, it's an artifact of low-cost unlimited credit lines for the biggest players, enabling them to monetize the family home as rentals, creating an artificial scarcity that then drove home prices to absurd heights.

5. Made financial-credit gaming far more profitable than actually producing goods domestically. Artificially low interest rates incentivize borrowing not to invest in the long-term but to place short-term speculative bets: get in, scalp a profit, exit. The "rational" response to artificially low interest rates is to offshore investment-heavy production and use cheap credit to snap up assets that can be monetized with credit-funded leverage for short-term gains without any of the risks of actually producing goods.

6. Low-cost credit in unlimited sums enabled corporations to snap up competitors, accelerating the collapse of competitive sectors into non-competitive monopolies and cartels that then gain the power to extract higher profits from captured consumers and immiserate our quality of life by reducing the quality of goods and services.

7. Made borrowing more money at artificially low costs the "solution" to everything, from the the nation-state to corporate to households. Rather than face painful, difficult tradeoffs of how to spend / invest scarce cash, the "solution" is now avoid all pain and tradeoffs by just borrowing more money because "it's now so cheap because interest rates are so low." You can have it all, just borrow more. And the "solution" when interest payments start crunching cash flow is--you guessed, it borrow more to pay the interest due on all the previous debt piled up.

8. Informally institutionalizes moral hazard, the artificial suspension of risk as the decisive factor in making financial decisions. The Fed Put basically turned the stock market and financial markets into casinos where losses are made whole, so why not borrow and gamble bigly?

This is easy and nice but it isn't "capitalism" nor is it sustainable. Whatever else it is, capitalism is a system of discipline and accountability in which capital (cash, assets) is put at risk to earn a gain.

If interest rates are artificially suppressed and risk is suspended (not evaporated, just transferred to another part of the system or a set of bagholders), then the essential causal connections between risk, cost of capital and return are sundered, freeing the borrower / gambler from the discipline and accountability that make "capitalism" a successful way to organize credit and production.

"Opportunity cost" is the calculation of what must be sacrificed / given up to put capital at risk in one venture of many potential ventures. Low-cost, unlimited credit distorts this calculation, since credit opens the door to no-tradeoffs-necessary "why not have it all?"

The elimination of discipline, tradeoffs, accountability and risk is the infantilization of the economy. We're like children at play, free of the burdens of adulthood, because Mommy and Daddy Fed will make it all better.

This is illusion, as discipline, tradeoffs, accountability and risk cannot be erased, they can only be transferred, and what the Fed's artificially suppressing interest rates has done is transfer risk to the entire financial system and US economy.

So while we're all happily playing pirates in the low-cost-credit sandbox, the financial system and economy are bursting at the seams with all the risks that have been stuffed in the basement, out of sight and out of mind.

In unfettered credit markets, lenders demand a substantial return for the risk of lending scarce and therefore valuable cash. In a ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) / artificially suppressed interest rate economy, "Cash is trash" and low-cost credit favors the wealthiest, most influential players who can borrow at the lowest rates in virtually unlimited sums who can then outbid all but the other wealthiest few for income-producing assets.

This drives wealth-income inequality into overdrive, leading to distortions that have only one possible outcome: systemic imbalances that destabilize the entire socio-economic-political system, leading to crisis and collapse, which is where we are now.

Call this whatever you want, but it isn't Capitalism, it's a powder keg with a lit fuse. It's a rigged system of Cronyism in which those running the financial system favor the wealthiest and most powerful in every way, every day.

Those benefiting from this rigged-crony-ripoff are frantic to protect it behind a phony facade of "capitalism," so their armies of lackeys, factotums, toadies, sycophants and apologists instantly label policies President Dwight Eisenhower reckoned were self-evidently common-sense as "communist" or "socialist," i.e. evil, evil, evil.

Meanwhile, Adam Smith is rolling in his grave at the travesty of a mockery of a sham of the claim that this rigged-crony-ripoff system is "capitalist."

Let's look at some data / charts. Notice how wealth-income inequality soared from the 2009 inception of ZIRP / artificially suppressed interest rates. Go ahead and argue with the data, oops, sorry, the data won.

Here's the US Treasury 10-year bond yield. Cash is trash so let's go outbid hundreds of thousands of homeowners to snap up family homes as income-producing rentals.

Coincidence or causation? Labor's share of the economy took a nosedive from 2009 onward as capital earns a higher return being borrowed for gambling than it does from being invested in the workforce or production that actually improves our quality of life. What generates the highest profits is shipping production overseas and reducing the quality of goods and services, which is what we have today.

If you want to argue about something, argue about the length of fuse left before the powder keg blows up. Some claim we have decades of crony extraction and exploitation fun-and-games to go, while others see a fuse burning an inch from the powder keg. Whatever you "like" or "don't like" doesn't matter, it will blow up regardless.

What matters is seeing the fuse burning and realizing it's going to blow up, and planning accordingly.

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