Routine Revelations

I was born in 1966 and thus part of Generation X. The primary norm that I was taught to be in good standing within the U.S. social order can be summed up in the phrase, “get a job!” It is that phrase, and all of the expectations around it, that I think is at the root of our problems in the United States today.

The obvious reason why society wants one to “get a job” is so that others in society do not have to provide for me. We not only glorify the self made man, we demand it! Another, unspoken reason why society demands I “get a job” is that having a job provides me the money to buy things that make others in society wealthy. Nearly all of the wealth in the United States is because someone else has spent, and thus given them, money. (Think about the real reason why Trump gave us those stimulus checks at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic.)

And of course, this also means that those who have a job are superior over those who do not have a job.

Today the United States government is “shut down” because no Democrat Senators will vote yes on the Continuing Resolution law that approves the money needed to keep the government running. Democrats are voting no on the CR because they want the government subsidies that lower the cost of health care people buy via the Affordable Care Act extended. The subsidies are expiring at the end of the year and if not extended the resulting monthly health care premiums people will have to pay in 2026 can be double what they paid this year.

Republicans who oppose the ACA generally do so because they do not want to help pay for healthcare for those people who do not “get a job.” Of course, they assume that anyone who has a job can pay for their own healthcare, which itself is not necessarily true. Many people who get healthcare via the ACA do have jobs. (As do many people who get food stamps.)

So, “get a job” dogma is at the root of our current government shutdown. I would also say that dogma is also the kindle for the wildfire set by Trump and his supporters.

The thinking that those who do not have a job are just lazy, that anyone who has a job has enough to money to live on, and that healthcare (and thus the right to live) is only a privilege for those who have a job is the root cause of the problems of our times. How can this be for a so called Christian nation? We might say Christ is King in the United States, forgetting how Jesus answered Pilate when he asked whether Jesus was king of the Jews. And if Christ is King then shouldn’t we be following his commandments?

If you think the problems we have are bad now, consider what is going to happen when “get a job” clashes with the elimination of jobs by Artificial Intelligence. Further consider that many of the jobs AI is going to eliminate are the very white collar jobs that so many are told are needed for them to be wealthy.

Jesus does have the answer, but many in the United States do not like it.

Earlier this week a chunk of the Internet went offline, which should be a surprise for those who know the history of the Internet.

During the COVID pandemic just a few years ago prices of nearly everything in the United States increased because most products that we depend upon are manufactured in countries outside the U.S. and the shipping of those products was disrupted.

Both of these events exposed how fragile normal functions have become, and they should be lessons learned about the risks of depending upon an external entity. I think those who have long been warning us about these risks have been drowned out by the strong emphasis on open source and Internet application development that demands the use of external libraries. The culture says that one should not re-create the wheel and instead use the code already written by others as building blocks for your own application, thereby speeding up development in a race to toward making money.

The 21st Century is being built on blind faith of dependencies, with seemingly little thought on their risks, which is why all of the AI hype I see sets off nothing but alarm bells in my head. I see companies betting their future of the AI developed by a handful of other companies. I see the U.S. stock market driven up by the inflated value of those handful of companies even though most of those companies have not made any money.

What happens when capitalists stop throwing money at these companies when they realize there is no return? We saw this in the dot.com boom, as fast as those companies ran up they went out of business. So, if you are CEO of a company and you are “all in” on AI as the future for the products or services your company produces, realize you are “all in” on a handful of companies that might be gone tomorrow and ask yourself to which direction you are leading your company towards.

While I thought that civil war could happen again in the United States, I never thought I would live to experience democracy die. I find the pictures of portions of the White House being demolished on the whim of a single person to be breathtaking. Unimaginable only a few years ago, now seemingly barely a blip on the news.

For years it became generally accepted to bitch about the U.S. government’s failures and inefficiencies. Government is too slow, they say, not knowing that was the very point. Dictatorships are more efficient but at the price of being enslaved to the whims of the dictator. Dictators being human are as prone to horrific acts in response to greed and anger as the human who decides to burst in to an elementary school and kill everyone inside. Worse still is the fact that the U.S. dictator has access to weapons of mass destruction far worse than AR-15s.