Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith
Is DeepSeek a Sputnik Moment?
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
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?
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?
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
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?
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
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?
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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So the Economy Now Depends on Stocks Which Depend on Front-Running the Fed–And This Is Fine?
Is an economy based on the wealth effect generated by front-running the front-runners really that stable?
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What If All the Conventional Models Fail to Predict What Happens Next?
The 'novel, apocalyptic situation which has now arisen' goes largely unrecognized. A truly staggering quantity of content is aimed at predicting what happens next, a.k.a. the future, and justifies their prediction by referencing models that are presented as rock-solid predictive tools.
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"Why Are You So Negative?" Good Question. Here’s the Answer: Real Life
I think it's more productive to go with Plan B: set aside our emotions and reluctance and start doing the hard work of dealing with polycrisis.
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If AI Is So Great, Prove It: Eliminate All Surveillance, Spam and Robocalling
AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy. Judging by the near-infinite hype spewed about AI, its power is practically limitless: it's going to do all our work better and cheaper than we can do, replacing us at work, to name one example making the rounds.
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Financial Forecast 2025-2032: Please Don’t Be Naive
Rather than attempt to evade Caesar's reach, a better strategy might be to 'go gray': blend in, appear average. Let's start by stipulating that I don't "like" this forecast. I'm not "talking my book" (for example, promoting nuclear power because I own shares in a uranium mine) or issuing this forecast because I favor it.
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Global Recession’s Winners and Losers
The few winners of global recession will use the decline as a means to break the chokehold of unproductive BAU elites.
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Rates, Risk and Debt: The Unavoidable Reckoning Ahead
Policy errors have consequences, and we're only in the first inning of those consequences.
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How the Economy Changed: There’s No Bargains Left Anywhere
What changed in the economy is now nobody can afford to get by on working-class wages because there's no longer any bargains.
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Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work
One wonders what we're paying for via taxes, products and services, when we end up having to do so much of the work ourselves for nothing.
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Irony Alert: "Outlawing" Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable
Those who came of age after 1982 have never experienced a real recession, and so they're unprepared for anything other than guarantees of rescue and permanent expansion.
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What the Fed Accomplished: Distorted the Economy, Enriched the Rich and Crushed the Middle Class
The mainstream holds the Fed is busy planning a return to the glory days of zero interest rates, but ZIRP is on the downside of the S-Curve; it's done, gone, history.
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