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José Freitas's avatar

I was laughing and smiling a lot reading this piece, which I guess is both good - your writing has this slight sarcastic, funny, genuine kind of Hunter Thompson vibe, but also sad, because the situation is bad, and we're mostly in the shit.

My wishes to you and yours from Portugal, for a very Happy Christmas and holidays with friends and family!

Reckoning's avatar

I enjoyed this, thank you for your sensible takes.

For me 2025 was the year that I notice a significant decline in the quality of food, clothing and other products. It seems that they stopped the shrinkflation and just decided to start making shit. It’s like being in WWII England. (There’s an Orwell novel where he memorably describes how all the hero’s food is basically shit. Props to anyone who can name it.)

I would link this to the AI and immigration trends you covered. I think what happened is that the native born population got smaller and more expensive, so the elites turned to low quality third world immigration and figured consumers have no choice but to take it. Now the next dream is to eliminate workers entirely with AI. Hey, 80% correct is an A!

I think a lot of this is corporate leaders’ resentment of employees, especially the young. They simply do not want you to have a better life than them, or much of a life at all. The dream is to have a profit machine with zero employees at all.

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