In many countries, yes. People in India and China for instance are on average more likely to not be in severe poverty and subsistence vs 40 years ago, though western-style modernization has caused it's own problems. However most people are less well off in the US than we were in the 50s-90s. Reagan economics seems to have been 'wait, why are we letting the middle class exist? We could just keep all their money'. Seriously though i was completely fucked over by what I mentioned and it's only based on luck that I'm not homeless.
Main reason I never had kids was I was screwed over by just about everything financially. Student loans, housing/“financial crisis”, medical system, deck stacked against self-employment, predatory credit cards. Great job, USA. Then the same cunts who did that bemoan low birth rates and cry about immigrants.
I thought of that but considered maybe they just want people to die, anyway. Agreed, I don't get the impression this guy is super good at societal engineering or economics, other than as such might benefit people like him in the short term.
More people are supposed to not have jobs, but at the same time, not be collecting unemployment or public assistance. So basically… go panhandle, live in a tent city, go to prison, or I guess just die is their suggestion.
It is low now, but also (in the US) the last few administrations played games with how they defined it, mainly by excluding people who had basically given up on finding employment.
The way the republicans devoted the entire 90s to trying to crucify Clinton was notable. Then insane BS like Rush Limbaugh and the various angry sneerers on Fox. But also, Reagan…. and then back to Watergate, and JFK, and so on. So it’s been nutty for a while.
The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”. However, that is incidental to users and not even necessarily known to them. Therefore it’s a flawed view to say users are trying to be a “free rider”. All the users know at that point is they are receiving a good deal.
I, a user on BlueSky or Threads or Facebook or Mastodon or whatever, have paid exactly zero of any currency to access it. Here, the user is almost definitionally a free-rider.
The platform may be paying to grow their business and advertise, essentially, or they may be using the customer as a source of data and audience as required to sell ads. So it’s quite wrong to look at it as if the user is acting entitled or taking advantage of someone.
If that right is restricted or they are expected to trade something for that right – even something ultimately immaterial and intangible, like seeing ads – they cry “enshittification” and push blame for this state of affairs onto the platform, then try and leave it for another platform that is willing to indulge free-riders… until their costs, too, become unsustainable.
This is all really so wrong as to be painful to read. As if Facebook doesn’t make money from people using their service?
