Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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AI for Dummies: AI Turns Us Into Dummies

2025-07-30

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2025-07-30

Given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we're de-learning how to innovate. EDITOR's NOTE: I just got called out by a programmer who uses AI who was furious and wrote "students cheat, always have, tell us something we don't already know". I responded: "did you read the MIT paper or the other link?" Of course he didn't: TL/DR, which proves my point. Even the programmer...

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Hollowed Out

2025-06-26

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2025-06-26

The status quo has pushed everything to an extreme of hollowed-out instability to maintain a superficial appearance of normalcy and stability. But it's all fake. The phrase that best describes the present era is hollowed out. By hollowed out I mean the exterior facade still looks pretty much the same as it did in the past, but the internal structure has corroded / eroded to the point that little remains of what provided strength and...

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Meta-Thoughts on the War

2025-06-23

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2025-06-23

Decades of 'The Fog Machine of War' have jaded the public's appetite for 'Narrative Control'. The Fog of War is perhaps better described as The Fog Machine of War, for everything presented to the public is some version of Narrative Control, the purpose of which is to establish a context and story that's beneficial to whomever is presenting "facts," "news," "information" and "commentary."

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Living on Meds, Vitamin C and Ibogaine: American Precarity

2025-05-14

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2025-05-14

Favoring capital over wage earners is the long-established policy of both political parties. Cribbing a line from a Grateful Dead song ("ain't it a shame") seems appropriate when discussing the prospects of America's burgeoning Precariat Class who are increasingly depending on tips, side hustles, credit cards and buy now, pay later schemes to survive in a stupidly high-cost economy where all the media-hyped "GDP growth" benefits the few at the...

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The One Real Economic Indicator: "Upgrade to Premium"

2025-05-12

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2025-05-12

If you want to escape immiseration, that option is available--upgrade to Premium. I propose we set aside the conventional economic measures (GDP, unemployment, corporate profits, etc.) in favor of a more real-world metric: how many times we're hectored to "upgrade to Premium" to regain services that were once part of what we already paid for.

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Tariffs Are Not Enough

2025-05-08

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2025-05-08

The tariff sledgehammer has a role, but it's a limited one. There's an inherent tension in State-Corporate Capitalism. Proponents of the free market hold that any state Industrial Policy will fail because the State cannot pick the winners and losers as effectively as The Market.

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The Terminal Rot in Corporate America

2025-05-05

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2025-05-05

Corporate America took advantage of the Covid shortages and fiscal largesse to profiteer on a scale criminals could only dream of.

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The Wile E. Coyote Recession

2025-04-24

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2025-04-24

So where are corporate profits going to come from as globalization, price-gouging, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation and immiseration run out of rope?

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What’s "Normal" in a Hyper-Normalized World?

2025-04-21

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2025-04-21

Now that the entire economy depends on these hyper-normalized speculative bubbles for its "growth" and "wealth," there is a profound fear of a future based not on artifice but on the real world.

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This Nails It: The Doom Loop of Housing Construction Quality

2025-04-16

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2025-04-16

Add in the doom loop of an unprecedented credit-asset bubble and housing as a sector is in trouble.

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Three Ways to Restore Housing Affordability

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both.

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The Tax Benefits of Self-Employment

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

Lowering one's tax burden is not the reason to pursue self-employment, but it is something worth understanding if you're exploring self-employment.

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Is DeepSeek a Sputnik Moment?

2025-01-27

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2025-01-27

I'm not sure that "software will eat the world," but it could consume the stock market bubble in a single gulp.

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"Too Big to Care" and the Illusion of Choice

2024-12-30

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2024-12-30

In a functional economy with real competition and transparency, every one of these cartel-corporations would be driven out of business by their 'too big to care' incompetence.

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How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality?

2024-11-20

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2024-11-20

Every product now has an "extended warranty" admission of the collapse of quality and durability. There's a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what's broken, and so here's my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted?

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Is Social Media Actually "Media," Or Is It Something Else?

2024-10-30

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2024-10-30

By placing search/social media in the bucket of newspapers, radio and TV networks, perhaps we've obscured their true nature as "Digital Marketing Mechanisms."

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Welcome to the Circular Firing Squad

2024-10-29

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2024-10-29

If you find my scribblings upsetting, there's an easy solution: stop reading it. We'll both benefit. I'm never more than one inch away from converting my site from essays to photos of kittens and puppies as the only means to gain respite from being hammered for my many failings as a human being.

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Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy?

2024-10-14

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2024-10-14

Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

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Why Political "Solutions" Don’t Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse

2024-10-02

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2024-10-02

The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment. A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.

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How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now?

2024-09-27

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2024-09-27

If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it straightforward for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" to climb the ladder to middle class security.

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