They aren’t even beginning a comeback until their Overton Window shifts closer to reality. Otherwise nobody isn’t going to recognize them as anything but descending uncontrollably into backwater hermit state as every nation scrambles to cut ties.

At most 30% of the voting age population understood the assignment trying to prevent all this. That’s certainly an indictment. The majority of the population has departed from reality. Perhaps many were never with it on account of being born too deep into the mythology of America.

The internet was supposed to expand peoples minds offering an antidote to such things as this. Instead it dug them deeper. It’s crazy. Sometimes I wonder what if all this is in no small part due simply to a consequence of reactionaries getting online and seeing too much of the world. Seeing 7 billion kinds of diversity of humanity around the world beaming through their smartphone caused their brains to short circuit. Deciding that being a paranoid hermit state is better than being a nation of the world.

Notice the “free market” vanishes when it’s a thing they don’t like. Suddenly we need strong authority to ensure it’s “fair”.

How do you know it will? Stagnation is a thing in the US stock market as much as ‘line go up’ is a thing.

If anything millennials have had it better than anyone else. If your brain hasn’t hemorrhaged from reading that sentence then consider that what you are saying is only being said because millennials have seen the one of most incredible bull runs ever.

If you’re 35 years old that means you started your big boy career job about 15 years ago. In other words your investment portfolio if you were one of the individuals smart enough to begin diligently investing from the start. Look at the SP500 15 years ago. It was the bottom of the recession. The SP500 has gone in a straight line up from about 700 to 6000. So only a modest what like 800% gain. Of course it’s easy to say ‘cheap stock’ every time a big drop happens.

Now look at the 15 year period after the Dotcom bust. Now try the 1970s through the better part of the 1980s. Long periods of stagnation. Sideways moving stock market.

People need to be ready to stomach effectively zero gains until age 50 as much as you can tell them the SP500 could hit 12000 in the same period. There’s no guarantees unless your frame of reference is only the past 15 years. Then of course it is easy to say line always go up.

You’re not crazy. We’ve been witnessing a collective psychological phenomena as you’ve described. I’m sure psychology field has enough papers to write for more than a lifetime. People a century from now will be dissecting this period of history.

Infinite scroll is suited for current events putting negative pressures against content creation. Content creation became an economy. Commoditization of content sucked the life out of it all.

Those who take issue with loss of profits without ads must take it up with big tech. They’ve have literal trillions of dollars from dominating the ad industry. They have your money. Nobody else.

Those were dictators too.

Fight fire with fire. Assume their gender. 🙂

They have old/orphaned dependencies on their machine. It’s hanging on a by thread. They have no idea the packages have disappeared years ago. The house of cards is a bit flip away from collapsing.

It’s the tech oligarchs. They’re doing their own gilded age. Their empires exist in the tech domain. Mostly IT services. They’re going after the whole pie. They want the entirety of American industry.

What they have in mind exactly is anyone’s guess. We’re not going back to the times of railroad or oil barons. We’re not necessarily going back steel and auto manufacturing. The future is in things like robotics, renewable energy, semiconductors, or whatever the future holds.

I think crashing the economy just to buy stock is old news too. The saying has become rather mindlessly echoed. They have relatively little to gain from this. The rich hold 90% of stocks. There’s little to extract from the remaining 10%. Plus I think people have believed too much in the idea that stocks are a shell game. It’s not as much as people think. The markets are still based on tangibles meaning actual industry. That is what the oligarchs are after. What’s better than owning stock in the industry is owning the industry itself. Complete total monopolies just like the gilded age and just like they’ve monopolized IT services sector.

The chronically online incels look for things to mass report. It’s part of their ongoing campaign to shove the Overton Window far right.

Reddits content moderation are cubicle farm employees that barely look at content; nevermind actual context or intent. They’re clearing tickets to make quota. Right wingers exploit this to control discourse.

You can try doing it yourself. Look for frivolous things to report as offensive. You can get quite a bit of things removed.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

He’s been around long enough such that young men have only ever known a world where Trump is the Republican nominee. Their world view is one where Trump is the normal.

Traditional conservative politicians are boring old men in suits. When they talk they put full grown adults to sleep. That was never appealing to young men barely able to sit still with raging hormones.

They fell in love with their own reflection. All they can hear is their own words ‘Freedom!’ echoing in their ears. It’s a modern day tale of Narcissus.

It’s not that arbitrary. Gen-X are the first generation of boomer children. Millennials are the second generation of boomer children who grew up with the internet. These are real events.

People find it easy to fit boomers into a tidy box. Ask the boomers born on the cusp of boomer and gen-x. It’s arbitrary bullshit too. It’s not like baby boomers all came from the boomer factory and then one day they decided, ‘that’s it the boomer factory’s closed’.

They want to virtue signal trivial social issues to avoid admitting they’re just plain conservative.

The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.

Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.

There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.

Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.

You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.

There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?

In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.

In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.

Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.

It’s not uniquely an American problem. The American symptoms are quite a sight to beheld though.

The gift code means a subscriber is sharing access to the content.

Though I don’t doubt the sites use this as a double purpose for tracking.

Americans are going to take this as a statement that Canada themselves are paying the tariffs.