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The billionaire, who chairs the world's largest asset manager, kicked off his 2024 letter to shareholders by telling his readers it is "time to rethink retirement" if they want to dodge America's looming "retirement crisis"

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[-] Elting@piefed.social 12 points 1 week ago

Most jobs are pointless ones, we can get by with far fewer laborers than we currently have. Implement a UBI and watch how many people quit and never work again.

[-] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

It’s much more dire than that.

30% aren’t participating in the workforce right now. That’s going to increase to over 40% in the next 5 years.

Half of all farmers are at retirement age today.

When people retire they become a burden to the people that are not retired. They don’t simply disappear.

Also, you can’t take a programmer and put them into farming.

These are just small focused examples. Things are going to get really bad. The only way to fix it is a time machine that distributes wealth and housing to genx when they were young.

Another problem that countries will have from a depleted workforce is a lack of military personnel. Countries will not be able to defend their borders. Geopolitical instability will only get worse over the next 15 years.

[-] Elting@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago

Farmers love complaining despite the fact that a farmers job is nothing like it was before mechanization. We can't continue farming like we do, it relies too heavily on the fossil fuel industry and ignores too much the environment it depends on. However, agricultural science is so far ahead of where it was 150 years ago that it is almost unbelievable. Very few people have to farm to support our needs (especially if we stopped consuming so much meat.) You will also never be able to convince a person like me that there not being enough laborers to send them to war is a real problem.

[-] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Most countries don’t have the resources in their borders to produce everything they need. They trade for it.

You can’t trade with countries that are unstable. You also can’t trade if the trade routes are under fire.

The best example of this today is Hormuz but it extends beyond that single resource. Think about how many countries contribute to make a cpu, and what would happen if that got disrupted. Suddenly all the mechanization advancements in farming become a little more expensive, along with everything else.

China is experiencing some of the worst labor shortages today, and Taiwan will be within the blast radius of geopolitical unrest. Every advanced cpu is assembled in Taiwan, and depends on resources sourced from nearly ever country.

[-] Elting@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Perhaps the paradigm of nation states isn’t suitable to our climate future.

[-] Smaile@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh and tach nomads that just wander wherever, not paying into the nation they reside in are? Someone has to pay and a social collapse would destroy that idea real quick.

[-] Elting@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

A strong local community can fill all the unmet needs we have been trying in vain to cram into the welfare systems of nation states.

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Indoor local farming is the future. Less water. Less blight. Less shipping. No reliance on the weather.

[-] Smaile@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well... That leads me to a dark line of thinking... Jobs that are actually worth something are constrained by resorces we have and could extract if we're going by a "what is nessisary" line of thinking and who can just be cut out of the economy, we can't magic them out of thin air, it's part of the reason why it's so popular, also UBI would never work without keeping it low and having it replace existing welfare structures and aggressive taxation of the 1% and 0.1% (something I am for but that's tough when your population is comprised of mostly economic laymen who Don't Wanna be tAXd. )

[-] Elting@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago

Besides capitalism being inherently inefficient, it incentivizes holders of capital to extract maximum monetary value from laborers. This means that, as capitalism progresses, more and more jobs exist for the sole purpose of enriching the owners of capital. If every job was a meaningful one, we could support everyone on the planet without everyone doing labor.

[-] Smaile@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh I won't argue that base capitalism isn't a big waste machine, Iv never believed it was the end all be all, but the system needs to feed itself to keep going. UBI could work is funds are redirected carefully and kept as a booster and not as a full replacement. my only issue is convincing people of what has to happen to get that done.

this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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