She is an associate professor at St Olaf's College.

Her St. Olaf Webpage

St Olaf's is in cow country about forty miles south of where I grew up.  Northfield is a cow town with two colleges.  I have never been there.  It was directly across the Minneapolis St/Paul megalopolis.  There was nothing I could get there that I could not find closer.

Competition among elites is a fancy way of saying what is going to happen when there is not enough shit to go around.

QuoteThis is a book review of end times by Peter Turchin and the the title is a little bit misleading it's a little bit dead-baby but end times doesn't mean the world's about to end it means uh some ways the opposite.

^== (in your dreams)

Her Critique is interesting but as far as I know trucks are still unloading boxes of stuff at the Faribault, MN Wallmart.  Thus she can continue to delude herself that elites play important social roles.

As things go foobar that will be a hard argument to make.



Most elites are no more than consumers with power.  Like most of us they don't actually do anything.

Quote from: K-Dog on Aug 05, 2023, 10:54 AMMost elites are no more than consumers with power.  Like most of us they don't actually do anything.

Going back a century, Elite education was available only to a few, with few universities.  You had your Pvy league schools, some 2nd tier schools like Duke and a some big state schools and ones run by the Catholic Church.  Fast forward 50 years to 1970. every state had a university and small for profit colleges were popping up like mushrooms.  There were periodic production overuns of elite jobs like aerospaace engineers, and NASA rocket scientists were working as janitors.  As long as the economy kept growing though and the unis didn't graduate too many people with sheepskins qualifyimg them for jobs with the big paycheck, it chugged along.  By the 1990s though there were so many lawyers they were working as sales associates at JC Penney trying to pay off student loans in the 6 figures.

AI now threatens even the creative world as well, being capable of writing novels or screenplays for the formula superhero or spy movies.  A list actors can be replaced by CGI characters.  The stock market is run by trading algos written by theoretical physicists 20 years ago but today write themselves.

So there is little left to do except some manual labor and service economy jobs, like wiping the ass of old people and cripples.  Robot factories can provide endless toys, but they don't produce jobs.

The problem of how to distribut wealth in a world where most work has become obsolete has not been solved.

RE

QuoteAI now threatens even the creative world as well.

True, but there are also creative opportunities.  I confess I have spent a lot of time with chatGPT.  It is helpful in many ways.  It is also like dealing with Rainman.


What life with AI is really like.  I have told chatGPT to fuck itself more than once.  This is not stoic.



Being angry is not something I want to cultivate in my new badass self.