The stagnation in culture and intellectualism has now become overwhelmingly stifling for anyone who can fog a fucking mirror. From the infotainment news outlets featuring over-confident bullshit artists blathering incessantly, to the infantile entertainment media already massively debased, yet always reaching to that next lower rung on the common denominator scale - there is nothing worth reading, nothing worth seeing, nothing worth contemplating. Until such time as the current ponzi economic model with its overriding mandate to assimilate, gets obliterated, we can assume that we will continue to be buried alive by junk culture and junk information...And as long as the "news media" is overrun with bloated man-boys spewing self-serving cynical denialism to an ever-eager audience, then the vector for this shit show will be hard down - straight into the ground, and then some...
The Self-Absorbed Sociopaths Have It All Under Control...
Sports and Entertainment 24x7
The Idiocracy's overwhelming obsession with avoiding reality ensured that sports and entertainment would become the only subjects on the agenda. The two areas of human interest that have the greatest content of fantasy and vicarious escapism. General human interest has now been narrowed down to two subject areas, exiling anyone who is not up-to-speed on the latest scores or the latest Kardashian outfit. Politics itself is merely another form of sport-like entertainment wherein each party takes sides in their fantasy football team and then roots for the total annihilation of the other side. No middle ground can be ceded. Winner take all. Entertainment of course has been dumbed down to the third grade level across the entire spectrum. Trying to find something worth watching on TV or the movies, is becoming a full time job. Like searching for a needle in a haystack. Staring at the wall would elicit more brain activity than watching the average cable TV channel.
Competition and Conformity v.s. Innovation and Differentiation
Success in the globalized Ponzi model demands the ultimate adherence to competition and conformity. Innovation and differentiation will only lead to variation, risk, and potential failure aka. abject poverty. Conformist-style competition on the other hand has led to total economic stagnation - the incremental improvement of existing products leading to absolutely no improvement in the human standard of living. The fiftieth flavour of toothpaste; Yogourt with M&Ms added; a new beer can with a wider mouth opening; a new diet soda with a different cancer-causing sweetener; four new cupholders in the same Minivan; six McNuggets instead of four; magically rebranding the internet as "the cloud"; 7 Minute Abs instead of 8 Minute Abs - you get the idea. The new business startup rate in the U.S. is now at a record low. The globalized ponzi model has turned everyone into risk averse conformists who are too afraid to innovate for fear of being left in the gutter. A system that encourages risk taking is one that eases the pain of failure by making it easy for people to recover from loss. Not one that locks people permanently out of the jobs market with no benefits and a joke safety net.
Tattoos, Piercing, and Amateur Porn - What Brand am I?
It's no wonder that young (and some old) people are finding ever-more extreme ways of differentiating themselves. The globalized ponzi scheme has corporatized everyone into oblivion. There is no way to stand out and otherwise have a unique identity. The idea of actually pursuing an occupation or life goal that is not preoccupied with making the maximum amount of money possible, is totally economically suicidal. It's becoming impossible for the majority of people to make ends meet as it is, imagine trying to add an element of satisfaction or fulfillment to the job - totally impossible. That fantasy exists for such a statistically small number of ultra-wealthy young people as to be totally meaningless to even contemplate.
The University System is a Total Fucking Failure
The University system was created hundreds of years ago and since then has become primarily a mechanism for stratifying society and secondarily a mechanism for conveying knowledge. I received a degree in business twenty-three years ago and the vast majority of what I learned was totally useless bullshit. I had studied my way to the top of my class, only to end up having to purge most of what I had learned upon graduating. Knowing too much theory in the real world, is a liability, not an asset. Meanwhile, for many people who have other abilities beyond being able to memorize large books, they have almost no on-ramp to the economy. The academic/theory based University system consumes the overwhelming amount of available resources, leaving almost nothing left over for the literally thousands of skills and trades that don't require someone to have taken Grade 12 Trigonometry which is yet another totally fucking useless class for 99% of the population. Again, the stratification. The Trigonometry isn't in the curriculum because it's useful in most professions, it's there to weed out people who are not academically inclined and therefore are not "suitable" to join the educated elite. The entire system was created by and for the self-nominated educated elite. Student loans of course are the next looming debt crisis. Young people, whose job prospects are still in a depression after four years, hid in the massively bloated and overpriced higher education system. My son's first semester at Emory cost more than my entire four year degree in Canada, circa 1990 (I know, I'm dumb as a fucking post, thanks for the reminder). The bill for this hide-and-wait-it-out strategy will inevitably come due years before any viable job opportunities make themselves available. A total catastrophe for young people. Washington's just passed plan is to link interest rates on student loans to the financial markets, which of course works fine now with 0% interest rates, but is a total disaster for the future when interest rates rise. Apparently the subsidized interest rates that had existed for decades were costing too much i.e. 1.3% of the defense budget. I went postal on this plan, back here. As long as University degrees are viewed as status symbols whereby Universities compete to provide ever-fancier facilities and sports venues, rather than focusing on real world education, then the out-of-control upward cost spiral will continue. Other countries subsidize their education systems to a far greater degree than the U.S. and yet don't have nearly the same out-of-control tuition/fee inflation:
The ROI for most college degrees is now deeply negative. The break-even point is measured in centuries. Alumni snobbery has turned the University experience into the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race. The "winners" receive a lifetime of debt slavery.
7 Minute Abs, 6 Minute Career
7 Minute Abs, 6 Minute Career
Discussing higher education and the best way to achieve skills and trades is totally pointless anyway, because the overriding goal of the globalized ponzi model is to commoditize every skillset and factor of production, to achieve ever-greater economies of scale, so that an ever-dwindling number of people can enjoy ever-more obscene levels of wealth. Having a skill these days is like playing musical chairs. Whose job will get outsourced next? The turnover rate in skilled jobs is so high as to make it impossible to guess what skills will be needed five years from now let alone twenty years. When I was in IT back in the booming Dot com days, "pundits" said that IT would be the fastest growing profession for the next twenty years. It turns out that twenty months is the new twenty years, because after the bust, IT jobs were being purged from every company.
Leverage - The First and Last Resort Of Idiots
And because the salesmen have taken over from the engineers, leaving virtually no real innovation in the corporate world these days, that leaves leverage as the only game in town for the soft-brained fratboys dominating the corporate country club. Operating and financial leverage are the ubiquitous business models in this era, and unfortunately leverage has a consistent track record for always ending extremely badly. Operating leverage of course means outsourcing and swapping out high wage workers for low wage workers, all while destroying the end customer base (aka. middle class) slowly but surely. Financial leverage of course pertains to the 0% interest rates on offer and the myriad ways that companies can boost shareholder returns via debt-funded dividends and stock buybacks. Financial leverage of course works great at boosting one year bonuses, but when the cost of capital inevitably rises, the strategy inevitably implodes. With each passing day, this current economic bubble grows larger and more lethal. However, the people at the top of this latent clusterfuck are all in, and will be the last to realize that it's already no longer working i.e. when the Dow goes tits up for the last time...
