Dispatches from the Middle Circle

Like, I saw a thing today about how "real" jobs don't pay shit and "fake" jobs make six figures many times over, and someone pointed out it's because of the customers. If your customers are poor, you don't make any money. If your customers are rich, they pay you a shitload of money. If you are employed as a finance person, you are creating more money for the people who already have all the money, and so there's just far more to go around than if you're a teacher at the mercy of the standard of living of the immediate area.

People have pointed out increasingly in the last five years or so that "the economy" has nothing to do with the vast majority of people and is really just where the top 1% or whatever sub-fraction of that watch their piles of money grow, and I've been thinking also about how SpaceX got to invent new rules on most of the indexes in order to help boost Elon into trillionaire status, something he can do because he already has all the money and can get his peons to do whatever he wants and there is no meaningful accountability. All that risk absorbed by the rest of us, so we could make him a trillionaire, a thing that benefits him alone.

So we've kind of re-invented feudalism is what I'm getting at, with a tiny fraction of unreachably unfathomably wealthy people doing whatever they want while the rest of us just try to survive and avoid their wrath, while they squeeze us for what little money we have, except instead of rich people going to war with each other and conscripting us all to kill each other in order to grow their tax base, they just fuck around with our retirement accounts and slowly starve us out of house and home

the Arbytes