Well, to be accurate, Baby Boomers were too young to give themselves colleges that were tuition free. Almost tuition free, actually. I paid more for the dorm and my textbooks than I did for tuition (well, my father funded it, but I wrote checks every semester). But my parents’ generation gave us that. We also let them tear it down, pretty much for the reasons AOC states. It’s the same reason Boomers and the children of Boomers are trying to give public money to private schools. Which is not really working out. The ordinary people who thought they’d win, at least here in Texas, are finding out tuition is only part of the cost of private school. Those vouchers are going to the people who don’t need them. It’s an issue in the governor’s race; and Abbott is not winning. Thinking is hard! Most people can’t be bothered to really do it. Which, no disrespect to AOC, is why we think AI is cognitive. Oh, she’s right about why we are told AI is inevitable (by the people trying to sell it to us), and that AI actually a form of intelligence (will someone please tell me, concretely, what that is?). I even agree that AI (not Trump’s fantasy factories, which are NOT bringing manufacturing back to America, where the costs would be so high no one would buy what the factories made. We like cheap labor. It means cheap stuff. Ask Walmart.) is the bubble supporting the financial bubble of the economy. But mortgages did that once (see, e.g., “The Big Short,” and we survived only because Herbert Hoover was proved decisively wrong, and Keynes decisively right). It’s gonna happen again, with AI. We’re stupid like that. But not stupid enough to accept the need for a data center in every pot. Or backyard. So “pop” go the weasels.
Let’s let go, this time. I don’t think they’re going to take our housing market with them. Just their power, which we’re taking back from them, anyway.
AOC: What the elite want—and they’re already planning for it—is to hoard all of the resources for themselves as the world gets more and more physically unstable.
And in an environment of AI, they want to wipe out all of our livelihoods. They want to make sure none of us have jobs, and they want to keep all the spoils of those riches while consuming and burning energy at a pace that is completely unsustainable.
The whole concept is unsustainable. The story is that Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford his cars. Nobody would believe that story about Elmo. The rich ride on our backs. Every once in a while it’s a good idea to shake them off. They need us far more than we need them. In the end, this is Omelas. We all depend on the misery of at least one other person, somewhere in the world, to keep our society going. Except, unlike Omelas, we don’t even acknowledge that. Until we do, we’re going to just keep going around and around in this circle.
But that doesn’t mean we have to. Thinking is hard, but we can reasonably reason our way out of this.
