Surviving Tomorrow

I want to tell you a story about one of my DNA-confirmed relatives on my mother's side.Her rather breathy name was Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen. She was born an Austrian duchess, grew up in castles, hung out with Mozart when they were seven, was married off at age fourteen, and when her hubby became Louis the XVI four years later, the eighteen-year-old became Queen of France and Frenchified her name to Marie Antoinette.At first, the masses loved her. She was pretty and charming, and she knew how to make the public swoon. She spoke a few languages, played a few instruments, and was a capable politician. Talented lady.Aunt Marie, though, was a profligate spender. She was a fashion addict, a real estate hound, and an inveterate gambler. She never met a costly war she didn't love. Some of her custom-made hair poufs were three feet tall. In fact, I'm embarrassed to say she earned the nickname Madame Déficit after it was discovered that she had personally spent more than 7% of the nation's budget.Meanwhile, the slaving masses were starving to death. Bread was so scarce that it literally started a war called The Flour War in 1775. By then, the public had rightfully turned on Aunt Marie and the rest of the elites who passively extracted wealth from the working class while evading taxation to help pay to keep the country solvent. Even worse, Aunt Marie did her best to block all attempts at economic reform to tax the rich who had benefited most from civilization.Does this story sound familiar?Enter the meme queen bubble boy“We recommend investors not weight Tesla shares in their portfolio in equal proportion to the S&P because Tesla shares are in our view and by virtually every conventional metric not only overvalued, but dramatically so.” — JP MorganLike Aunt Marie, Elon Reeve Musk is not a man of humble origins.Raised in South Africa by a former model and a city councilor/property developer, Musk grew up in lavish luxury in one of the largest houses in Pretoria, enjoying yachts and ski trips and a first-class education at Wharton and Stanford. (But please note that their tax-evaded emerald mine profits probably weren't apartheid-connected; though he likely introduced convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, which is all sorts of creepy.)Elon Musk is quite rightfully a social media darling, even though he didn't actually start the company that made him famous. (He didn't start Paypal or SolarCity either.) Up until about two years ago, pretty much everyone had a favorable view of the former-Paypal-turned-electric-car-and-rocket guy.But just like Aunt Marie, things have taken a turn for the worst:The SEC sued him for lying about his publically-traded company.Musk has become a blatant market manipulator, whip-sawing the Bitcoin and Dogecoin markets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.As we've covered on Surviving Tomorrow before, Tesla is the most dangerous story stock in the world right now, and will likely lose its investors up to $1 trillion dollars in the next crash.In the meantime, Elon can see the writing on the wall and has begun cashing in his chips to the tune of $13 billion so far — but wisely, doing so loudly and publically so as not to spook investor-suckers.People are starting to realize that, though Elon is certainly a very smart and interesting fellow, he definitely has a con-man streak.Also, he's cost the hard-working masses a metric ton of money.Corporate socialismLike the French kings and queens who lived large off the backs of the struggling masses, Elon Musk has built his twelve-figure fortune off the largesse of taxpayer subsidies.Tesla has received more than a hundred handouts, grants, awards, and subsidies from the American people:We gave him a $465 million low-interest loan in 2010.We gave him a $440 million grant in 2014.We gave him a $2.6 billion contract in 2014.We gave him $1.3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies in 2014 that will allow him to avoid $300 million in payroll taxes through 2024.We gave him $497.5 million in direct grants and subsidies in 2015 (but the real number could be triple as much.)We gave him $517 million in free tax credits in 2015.We gave him $750 million toward an underperforming Buffalo plant in 2016.We gave him $15 million in Texas, and also shut down a public beach and changed the laws to give him legal protection against noise complaints.We gave him a $653 million contract in 2020.We gave him some of the $600 billion in payroll benefits during the 2020 pandemic while Musk tweeted against government aid for individuals.We saved SpaceX from bankruptcy in 2021 by giving him a $2.89 billion contract.So… yay, free market?This has to stop.But jobs!Oh please.If you add up all the money we've given Musk, we could've given all of Tesla's 70,000 employees a $144,000 loan to build their own startups. Think of all the lost opportunity cost of giving Musk over $10 billion. (We could've invested in Tesla stock and reaped a $120+ billion profit.) We could've built schools and hospitals. Imagine if we'd put that seed money in an endowment and educated thousands of kids through university instead.So let's just say what needs saying: Billionaires who oppose meaningful tax reform — especially Elon Musk — are traitors to the commons.Musk goes Marie AntoinetteNormally when someone's wealth balloons to $250,000,000,000 thanks to taxpayer subsidies and uneducated investors, they're expected to pay a proportionate amount of taxation to help fund the society that made them rich and provided them with paying customers, a healthy and educated workforce, military and policing to keep the peace, and a judiciary to protect property rights.But not Musk.He thinks he's paid his fair share, even though he's not even close to paying back what we've already given him in handouts, let alone covering our lost opportunity costs or making a proportionate contribution to the commons.After all, he reminds us, he might pay more in tax than anyone in American history. But who has profited more? And his premise itself is wrong: Thanks to a cadre of anti-commons accountants, there's no precedent that suggests this will ever actually happen — after all, he paid zero federal taxes in 2018 and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017.And yet TIME Magazine just named him Person of the Year.Just what every oversized ego needs.Thankfully, there's at least one politician who's willing to speak truth to power:His (sexist) response?Yes, you read that correctly.Imagine this level of callousness toward the working masses who create 100% of all societal wealth through their labor and their spending.Rather than being grateful that America let him into the land of opportunity in the first place, and paying what democracy decides is his fair share to pay, he's doing exactly what Aunt Marie did — trolling the commons, mocking democracy, and opposing real and meaningful moves towards a fairer society for all.Elites throughout history all sound the same.The people need breadThe Federal minimum wage hasn't gone up since 2009.Think about how much houses, cars, and food cost thirteen years ago.(If this isn't the #1 reason to boycott multinational corporations and fire all of their rented politicians who've voted against helping millions of working poor people, I don't know what is.)Real wages and purchasing power stalled in 1971.Shelter is unaffordable in every single state in the Union.The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer — they just don't know it yet, because inflation robs silently.And the reality is that democracy simply doesn't want rockets. Sure, it's fun to think about living on Mars, but in reality, we need to urgently invest society's wealth in ending hunger and poverty, rescuing 1+ billion people from slums, and solving climate change so we don't all die down here on earth.When billionaires evade taxes and block economic reform, they not only impoverish the masses, but misallocate humanity's funds to ends that aren't aimed at widest-spread wellbeing.Billionaires are like black holes that warp the proportions of civil society.We need to change the system so that they simply cease to exist:We need a better pre-distribution of ownership. We should give tax breaks to companies where workers own 50+% of the stock, and put heavier taxes on those that don't. If this was the case for Tesla, all 70,000 employees would be multi-millionaires.We need to make the minimum wage a true living wage and index it to real inflation. (FYI: I define a true living wage as the ability for a single-income family to affordably own a home within thirty minutes of their job.)We need a hard ceiling on unlimited wealth accumulation. Because billionaires no longer trigger income tax, dividends tax, or capital gains tax, they've left us with no other choice: We have to introduce a wealth tax.Thankfully, Musk is inadvertently helping these efforts along.Elon is the spark“Her inordinate dissipations called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, led herself to the guillotine. I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.” — Thomas JeffersonAt the end of the day, Elon Musk might be the best thing that's ever happened to America.Imagine what will happen if he keeps up this nonsense.Imagine if and when he gets worse.If he starts meddling in politics like the Koch Brothers…If he starts a cryptocurrency…If he becomes a trillionaire while tens of millions of working Americans go hungry and lose their homes…The whole nation is going to hate him.And nothing unites like a common enemy.So keep it up, Elon.Keep insulting members of Congress, fighting taxation, and protecting your “rights.”It might be just the thing that ensures we get some real economic reform in this country.Because “Don't tax billionaires” is our generation's “Let them eat cake.”It's time to guillotine billionaire wealthWe all know how the story ends for my Aunt Maria: The working poor chopped off her head and tossed it on a pile with all the other out-of-touch aristocrats.She was the last dictator-queen of France.That was more than two centuries ago now. Since then, we've seen the fall of most monarchies and aristocracies, but in their place, we've seen the rise of robber barons, multinational monopolies, and the predator billionaire class. Even still, the working masses struggle just to stay alive, despite the fact that they create 100% of the wealth in society through their work and their spending.Thankfully, we don't guillotine our elites anymore. I'd like to think that the working masses have matured over the centuries. We've done some self-improvement. We've educated ourselves. Become more understanding of the world, more compassionate to the plight of others.I'd like to think that we've changed.But clearly, the elites haven't. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Author's note: Today is my 36th birthday! If you're curious to see what I read and drink (or you're in the mood to spoil the crankiest author on the Internet) here's my book wishlist and my scotch wishlist. (Sad fact: Due to supply chain challenges, scotch is expected to triple in price later this year, so now is the time!)Capitalism is evolving from corporations owning the means of production to also owning the products themselves.We used to have the option to buy movies — now, in order to legally enjoy a movie forever, you have to pay Netflix a monthly fee for the rest of your life.Document processors like Word and editing suites like Adobe used to be purchasable — now I will have to pay $4,800 over the next forty years to submit books to my publishers, and my wife will have to sacrifice more than $25,000 to a $313 billion company just so she can keep her job.It's all part of corporate America's rapid shift to subscription serfdom.And Toyota just dipped their claws in the pond.The scam of the centuryToyota was founded in 1937.Today it's a $295 billion corporation.They netted over $3.1 billion in the past year.And they're desperate to get their hands on that sweet recurring revenue.They're not the first automaker to milk their customers:BMW tried it with Apple CarPlay.Tesla tried it with Internet Connectivity.Mercedes tried it with EQS rear-wheel steering.(Imagine having to pay for steering.)Now, Toyota wants its customers to pay a monthly fee to start their own cars.Since at least 2010, Toyotas have had the option to include remote start if you pay for the right key FOB.Not anymore.Now you have to get their Remote Connect subscription.But here's the really twisted thing: The key FOB uses radio waves to connect to the car — it doesn't require Toyota's Remote Connect servers at all.The really scandalous thing? The fee will be charged to all vehicles built after November 12, 2018.In other words, people are paying for a product that they once got for free, but if they don't continue to pay for the product they've already paid for, they don't get to use the product they've already paid for.Imagine if you paid $50/year for a Medium subscription, and suddenly Medium emailed you and said, “Hey, we know you already paid to read Jared A. Brock's articles this year, but if you want to keep reading Jared A. Brock's articles, you're going to have to pay another $80/year.”How is this even legal?Consumers didn't ask for thisBut corporations don't care, because they don't work for consumers.They're anti-human eternal entities whose legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the commons and deliver it to elite shareholders.Their poverty-making model is simple:The elite shareholder class impoverished the contributive masses via systemic inflation and purposeful wage stagnation.Second, they got us hooked on monthly payment plans for the things we wanted and needed but couldn't afford to buy lump-sum anyway. (When was the last time you paid cash for a car or even a piece of furniture?)Now, corporate elites are working on a new scheme to steal our time, impoverish our lives, and ram us back into serfdom once and for all:The end of ownership.I have argued for some time that streamers like Netflix and Prime are illegal monopolies — by keeping their products exclusively rent-by-the-month and never making them available to purchase anywhere else, they are systemically excluding people from participating in culture. There are tens of millions of people who can't get approved for credit cards or can't afford a $100+ annual fee for life just to watch a movie every once in a while.But the real danger happens once any human necessity is commodified as an investment — it's eventually sold to the highest bidder, which is always an extractive, tax-evading, anti-human, multinational investment corporation.A mattress might sell for $600 today, but when it can make an investor $99/month on a 36-month lease, that mattress is suddenly “worth” $3,600.Now imagine what it's going to do to house prices.Don't forget the game plan for subscription serfdom:We do all the productive work.We do all the purchasing that keeps the economy going.They get all the profits.They own all the products.A societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to toil for rich elites just to survive already has a name: It's called feudalism.And remember: The end of ownership for the masses is just the beginning of ownership for the elites. They ultimately want to own the same thing that their feudal ancestors owned:They want to own us.Calls to actionFirst: Publicly refuse to do business with any product-selling company that switches to a recurring revenue model and won't let you purchase their products at a reasonable cost. Refuse to give your hard-earned money to any business that won't outright sell you the things you want and need.I hope word spreads and no one on earth buys a Toyota ever again, that the company goes bankrupt and sends a message that terrifies every corporation on earth: Don't participate in subscription serfdom or we serfs will end your business.So please join me in boycotting Toyota.Second: To avoid wasting years of your life paying to rent cheaper-quality versions in the future, acquire buy-it-for-life-quality possessions now.Third: Get into politics (or bankroll candidates and new parties to do so) and pass a law called the Right to Own Act.Fourth: Start counter-companies that sell one-time services and fully-owned, buy-it-for-life products.We need to make some radical changes to the direction of society, my friends.Otherwise, pretty soon, we won't be allowed to own cars at all, never mind key FOBs. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Coca-Cola is bad AF.Not only are they a giant sugar monopoly that has devoured over 400 of their competitors, but they're partly responsible for hundreds of millions of cases of diabetes around the globe in their 135-year history.When I visited North Korea, I only saw two Western brands — BMW, and Coca-Cola.Last week, the Senate passed a bill called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.Unanimously.(That's a gigantic deal in America.)For those unaware of the situation, Ch!na has been genociding a people group in a western province called Xinjiang. While several million Uyghurs have already been sent to concentration camps or placed under Orwellian surveillance, we have no idea how bad things could ultimately get. Looking back fifty years from now, it may very well be our generation's Rwanda or even a Holocaust-level ethnocide.Despite Republicans and Democrats all agreeing to ban imported products from the region, Coca-cola, Nike, and Apple decided to lobby against the bill.………We need to have a conversation about corporations.Implausible deniabilityThe reason that Coke, Apple, Nike, and others oppose the bill is that they all source products from the area. They say the protections are “too broad” and might slow or halt their ability to turn a profit off the backs of cheap overseas labor. (Okay, they didn't say that last bit out loud, but we all know that's exactly why they make shoes in Asia and not Connecticut.)Nike, of course, denies that they use Uyghur slave labor, but this is a rotten company that's been saying this for four decades while regularly getting busted for using sweatshops, child labor, inhumane conditions, extremely underpaid workers, environmental poisoning, abusing women, and other human rights abuses. (TLDR: Don't buy Nike products, ever.)If Nike isn't involved in any abusive behaviors, it really makes you wonder why “A factory in eastern Ch!na that manufactures shoes for U.S. company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes.”And this is just one company at the tip of the iceberg.Abuse for everyone“We have found no evidence of any forced labour on Apple production lines and we plan to continue monitoring.” — Apple PR (Spoiler alert: There is evidence.)At least 82 companies have been implicated in using Uyghur slave labor, including Apple, Google, BMW, GM, Mercedes, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Adidas, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, HP, Land Rover, Nintendo, Oculus, Victoria's Secret, and Volkswagen.After being busted for using Uyghur labor, Nike posted a statement on their website swearing they no longer rent slaves, but a follow-up investigation by the Washington Post showed it simply wasn't true.This is problem #1 for multinational corporations:They cannot be trusted.Every corporation's sole legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the planet, workers, and consumers, in order to return profits to private shareholders. How could we possibly trust their word when they say they're doing no harm?Worse still, even the “best” and most “ethical” multinationals have supply chains that are so complex that they often don't even know they have abusive practices in their supply chain… and their incentive is to keep it that way.Just look how easy it is to look the other way and profit from the abuse of human beings:Vile, right?Do you know who doesn't have any slave-related sourcing worries?The local organic farmer's market where I buy my vegetables. I can literally see the field behind the cash register.When businesses are local, you don't need to trust them — you can just verify with your own eyes.Guilty until proven innocentPeople are innocent until proven guilty.But if your legal fiduciary reason for existing is to create private profits for private shareholders, then the public has the right to declare corporations guilty until proven innocent.We don't want to trust corporations.We want to verify them.How? Make them monitor every step of the production process with real-time video feeds, from soil to sale counter.Too expensive or unwieldy? Then maybe it's time to shut it down and let local producers create products without widespread abuse.No company should be able to turn a cent of profit until they fulfill humanity's fiduciary obligation:To do no harm.Better safe than sufferingIt doesn't matter that three-trillion-dollar companies like Apple think the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is “too broad” for their liking.Their private profits don't matter more than human lives.Ch!na is a nation rife with human rights abuses and Xinjiang province is specifically known for its widespread exploitation of our precious brothers and sisters.If temporarily black-balling an entire foreign province is what it takes to wake up American corporations (and the CCP) to the fact that we're done with slavery, so be it.Plus, it's better to be safe than allow suffering. (No one needs Nikes anyway.)Imagine if your son or daughter or brother or sister or spouse was trapped in that region. Would you say, “Well hey, we can't possibly risk corporate shareholders losing a dime per shoe by moving production to a verified facility in, say, France or Kentucky. Better keep things humming in Xinjiang and hope for the best.”No.You'd want your government to make a strong statement that American citizens refuse to enjoy products made in any place where the slightest possibility of slavery exists.People are worth any amount of sacrifice.Corporations on noticeFriends:Please stop buying slave-made goods, and please stop voting for corporate-captured parties and their corporate-captured politicians. Buy local, buy verified, start new parties, support new candidates.This is our country.This is our world.Corporations: you are temporary guests that play by our rules and live and die by our will.Enough is enough.We're done with slavery.And if your company is not, then we're done with you.There's the old saying, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?”That's the biggest problem with corporations.They aren't humans.And they certainly don't care about our souls.*This article was written on a seven-year-old Macbook Air that was purposefully purchased used so as not to create first-order demand for slave-made products. The author also does not own a cell phone of any kind and does not buy Nike products. He does own a used Volkswagen, but does not own products from any of the other brands listed, including using DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Last week, I published an article entitled A Stock Market Crash Is Coming and Everyone Knows It. Rather than acknowledging that this market bubble is a giant scam and everyone is still trying to find ways to profit from it, my horribly greedy little readers all just asked the same question:“So where should we invest our money, then?”Obviously, not all my readers are horribly greedy little people.Just 98% of you. ;)We can't help ourselves, can we? We're so enculturated into this commodified, consumerist, individualist anti-culture that we can't even fathom simply not playing the extraction game.Yes, self-preservation is in our nature, but for most investors, the motive isn't to protect truly-earned wealth — it's to make an easy killing, even if it means a hard living for someone else.Passive investors aside, I do sympathize with the hundreds of millions of people who are going to suffer in the next three years. Either the market will crash and wipe out half the market, or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.Probably both.When the bubble does burst — and it always bursts — tens of millions will lose homes. Tens of millions will lose jobs. Millions will go bankrupt. Thousands will commit suicide. Millions will never recover.So where should we ethically and morally invest our money now, simply to protect it from the coming crash?First, let's start with what won't work for people who are committed to longest-term widest-spread wellbeing for Earth and its inhabitants:GoldThe gold standard was once useful, but as we enter the digital-first age, gold will play a smaller and smaller role in international finance until it's as arcane an investment as seashells and beaver pelts. Plus, it costs money to store and protect gold, it isn't easily tradeable, it doesn't have a lot of real-world usefulness, the government can confiscate it at any time, it's no longer a true hedge against inflation, and it's not a productive asset.But none of this matters to ethical people.They avoid investing in shiny metal because gold is disastrous for the earth, it's horrible for people, and it's a pyramid scheme that only makes you rich if you can sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.So gold is out.BondsBonds are garbage and basically pay negative yields versus real inflation.But that doesn't matter to ethical people.They avoid bonds (and all other forms of debt) because they don't want to play any part in the system of interest/usury that all major religions have unanimously been telling to ban for thousands of years.They understand that interest wrecks lifelong havoc on societies because of the magic money multiplier effect, and they can't make themselves complicit with a system that's mathematically designed to enrich the rich and bankrupt the poor.So bonds are out.CommoditiesCommodities prices have been soaring lately, but there are serious volatility issues, and as recently bankrupted British natural gas companies can attest, looming trade wars and supply chain challenges make this an extremely risky investment category.But that doesn't matter to ethical people.They understand that human necessities like water and food and energy and heat shouldn't be commodified in the first place. If the price of rice doubles because investors bid up the price, thousands of children literally starve to death. Commodities need to be de-commodified, because lives hang in the balance, and the market doesn't care who lives and dies, so long as shareholders reap an ever-rising profit.So commodities are out.Real EstateResidential real estate in most cities is probably 40–60% overpriced right now.But that doesn't matter to ethical people.As with commodities, they understand that human shelter shouldn't be commodified. Despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to hoard houses, become a land-lorder, and hop on predator apps like Airbnb, ethical people see that we're at the start of a global shelter crisis that will only worsen if they decide to steal homeownership from others.So real estate is out.Pyramid schemesThe cryptocurrency and NFT markets have been on a $3 trillion tear these past two years, but they may have topped out, and you certainly need a huge stomach to handle the volatility.But that doesn't matter to ethical people.They understand that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, that all coins are $#itcoins, and that most NFTs are blatant fraud. They can't in good conscience invest in an “asset” class that relies solely on eventually selling their digital files to someone for more than they paid, knowing that when the market crashes, those people are going to lose trillions of dollars.So pyramid schemes are out.StocksMost stocks are probably at least 200% overpriced right now.But that doesn't matter to ethical people.Almost every publically-traded company is deeply problematic and is doing something that seriously hurts the planet or the poor. I want to be able to look my son in the eyes and say that I did no harm.And on a macro level, ethical people are willing to be adults and admit the truth that every investor knows deep down in their bowels… that there's no such thing as “putting your money to work for you.” You're just using your capital (or credit) advantage to put someone else to work for you, flaying a profit off the back of someone else's time, talent, energy, and effort.This, of course, breaks the Golden Rule. Ethical people don't want to be parasites on a living host. They want to actively contribute, not passively extract.So stocks are out.A quick recapSo far, we've established that a moral or ethical person can't likely invest in:GoldBondsReal estatePyramid schemesStocksOut, out, out, out, out.But they still need to protect their money from institutional theft.So unless I'm missing something, that basically leaves us with just three major investment options:1. Pay down debtsI can hear the howls already:“But debt is good if your interest rate is less than inflation!”Look, I understand that millions of people are taking advantage of their corrupt government's decision to devalue their currency by slow-paying their mortgage, but if growing wealthy by cratering the spending power of the poor is your idea of honoring mankind, Surviving Tomorrow probably just isn't the right fit for you.Ethical people understand that there are things that are more important than getting the absolute top return on investment — and the faster we pay off our debts, the sooner we are free. Freedom allows you to sleep better at night. To never worry about a rate hike, or job loss, or any accident or surprise that could make you lose your house.The first good investment most people can make is to pay off their credit cards —saving 18.95% interest is the same thing as earning a 25+% ROI. Once you've killed your highest-bearing interest debts, work your way down until you don't owe anyone anything except a debt of love.2. Invest in your homesteadIt's time to stop thinking of our houses as boxes to sell to others, leaving us rich and the buyer with a lifetime of debt.Instead, think of a house as a home, a citadel, and a homestead.The goal here is economic self-sufficiency. Invest in insulation and water-saving technologies. Invest in solar. Invest in a micro-wind turbine if you live on a hill. Invest in micro-hydro if you have a creek or brook. Invest in geothermal. Build a rentable unit in your attic, basement, garden, garage, or backyard as a way to add housing stock to your city. Put in a garden or greenhouse or polytunnel. If you can work from home, ditch the city and buy a reasonably affordable yield-producing piece of land where you can have a rural farm, intentional community, and/or a sustainable timber forest.Take your time. Start small — with high-ROI projects — and re-invest in your homestead until it pays for itself.3. Invest in yourselfThere are three ways you can attack this investment:The first is to upgrade your education, get trained in a new skillset, find yourself a mentor, and start a sole proprietorship.The second option is to invest in your community — IE, start a family business, co-operative, community-owned company, not-for-profit, for-benefit, or partnership with one or more competent entrepreneurs with complementary skillsets.Together, build a truly great company that has zero debt, great cash flows, and large reserves so you can expand during a crash.Do you know what we desperately need right now?Local, sustainable, organic food producers.Local, sustainable, organic hemp clothing manufacturers.Geothermal, mini-wind turbine, and micro-hydro installers.House renovators to transform aging units into ultra-efficient eco-homes.Builders of owner-occupier-only houses, neighborhoods, and cities. (We need to build 750+ million houses in the next 28 years or three billion people will be living in slums in our lifetime.)Experienced political operatives to fundraise and start new, pro-democracy, pro-sustainability, anti-corporate political parties.Thirdly, investors can seek and acquire an already-established profit-producing small business that can survive a crash in the next 3–5 years. With so many Boomers retiring every single day, there are literally millions of opportunities to take over car mechanics, barbershops, restaurants, bakeries, greenhouses, and more. Many of them will even be willing to hold part of the loan.The reality is that we need a generation to build companies that give instead of take, that contribute instead of extract, that cement communal stability instead of undermining its foundations.Sadly, instead of living in a contribution economy, we now live in an extraction economy, where the wealthiest in society are those who contribute the very least — bankers, land-lorders, insurance brokers, corporate insiders, middle-man monopolists like Airbnb and Amazon and Uber, crypto speculators, Millennial grifters on Robinhood, and the elite shareholders who wield their capital advantage to siphon wealth away from the real builders of civilization. This is what happens when you let rent-seekers take over the global economy.To turn things around, we must patently reject the powerful temptation to make any investment that profits from extraction.In conclusionWill the person who avoids unethical investments and only participates in commons-honoring investments end up wealthier in the end?Almost certainly not.But moral people don't have any other choice. Their spirits and souls compel them to do what is right, regardless of what the unthinking (or uncaring) masses do.It takes a person of deep character to look at their investments honestly and holistically, and do what is best not for themselves but for the world.In the end, if everyone acted this way — if we invested in ourselves and each other in the right ways — we might all end up with a little less stuff, but we'll have become more.And the whole world would be richer for it. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

It is unlikely that the American stock market will crash in 2022.Consumer spending is ramping back up, inflation is soaring, credit's cheap and easy, and politicians are so desperate to keep this hot potato from dropping on their watch that they'll go to nearly any length to avoid a crash.That said, there's no excuse not to be vigilant and extremely wary in these economically absurd times.We can only be certain about one thing: Uncertainty.With that in mind, let's look at ten of the most likely surprises that could crash the stock market despite all attempts to keep the house of cards rising ever higher.1. No more free moneyThe Biden administration has signaled its intention to stop printing as many stimulus trillions this year as they did last year. This is a good thing for the economy, but passive market extractors don't like it one bit.If the Dems fully shut down the printing press, it could trigger a market crash. But they won't. They'll slow it down for a bit, watch the markets totter, then fire it back up again and say, “Well hey, we tried.”Can you blame them? Wouldn't you print free money if you owned the money printer and could use it to get yourself re-elected?2. SnowpocalypseAll that is necessary to extinguish the human race is for winter to blow a little colder, a little longer.No, I'm not talking about a Day After Tomorrow situation.More of a Texas energy fiasco, which left 4.5 million without power and water, cost tens of billions, left thousands with crippling debt, and saw more than 200 people (including a baby) freeze to death.Anti-human corporations rarely let a good crisis go to waste, and several energy companies made billions off the two-week emergency, with some companies jacking prices 180X. (I'm of the opinion that corporatists should go to prison for putting profit over people, but “the free market is always right,” remember?)Don't pretend this can't and won't happen again.In fact, natural gas prices in Europe have already spiked 10+X this winter and the heavy snow hasn't even arrived yet.It's the same for New England.With all the accidental and purposeful supply chain shortages — and, let's be honest, corporations price-testing consumers who've been saving for the past year — if we have a particularly cold or long winter, it could be economically disastrous for millions of people.The problems are many and obvious: Most houses are poorly insulated and bleed heat; they don't have woodstoves; they don't have grid-independent backup generators; they don't provide occupants with a way to survive without reliance on faraway fossil fuel corporations. That's the whole point.If winter hits hard and long and the cost of heating spikes 100+X for the duration, millions of people will be forced into bankruptcy, which will almost certainly crash the stock market.3. Rising interest ratesThe Feds are desperate to slow down this “transitory” inflation. (Don't tell your Congressperson, but words actually have meanings. Transitory means brief, momentary, fleeting. If this yearlong inflation is just a passing cloud, then why are they so worked up about trying to fix it?)If politicians cared about the masses — which they do not — all they'd need to do is aggressively tax corporate profits and billionaire wealth, but such things are unthinkable in hyper-individualist America.That understood, their go-to mechanism is raising interest rates. But as Data-Driven Investor points out, a 1% interest rate hike could scythe 30–40% off the stock market. I don't expect them to do so, but if house, stock, and food prices jump another 30% in the year ahead, it's crazy to think that they'd rather crash the markets than tax the billionaires who benefit from all these outrageous price increases in the first place.4. COVID-22Sometimes I forget that we're still in the middle of a global pandemic and a quarter of the American population refuses to understand that vaccines aren't the hill to die on.But with any luck, Omicron will burn through the global population with minimal carnage and give us enough immunity to get back to normal-ish life.That said, another mutation could create a significantly more deadly variant that could make the Bubonic plague look like the man flu.(The big philosophical question I keep asking myself is: If COVID-19 had a 90+% infection rate and a 90+% kill rate, would there be any anti-vaxxers left or would they drop the charade and get serious about their health?)If a hyper-deadly coronavirus emerges this year, we'd likely see a stock market crash.5. Petty politiciansThere's obviously a huge amount of anti-vax hysteria on the far right, but there's also an outrageous amount of hysteria on the far left as well.All the social isolation has gone to our heads, with social media turning our brains to mush, causing a mental health crisis that could take a whole generation to flush from our collective system.Human beings are generally control freaks who love to tell others what to do, and in the year ahead, we may see totalitarian-leaning “progressives” try to lock down their populations once again.If they do so, expect riots in the streets as people reach a breaking point… followed by a market crash.6. Ch!na and/or RussiaThere's no telling what could happen to the markets if Putin does, indeed, decide to invade Ukraine this year.Same if Ch!na makes a play for the Taiwan Strait.Or if the US-Ch!na world continues to bifurcate and makes the rest of the world choose sides, essentially creating a two-economy Earth.7. Real estateThe Ch!nese housing bubble could implode at any moment.Same for Canada.And the United Kingdom.And much of the developed and developing world.Shelter prices have risen to lethal heights on the backs of lifetime debt for the masses, Airbnb's colonization of former family homes, and the hyper-financed institutional land-lorders who are turning the contributive working class into lifetime subscription serfs.But if one domestic real estate market falls, it could set off a chain reaction that could take down the stock market as well.8. CryptoBitcoin and his/her/brrr buddies are now a $3 trillion Ponzi scheme, and if something (or someone) spooks the markets bad enough, it could cause a sell-off that crashes the real market.(Think: The Fed announcing crypto is now illegal and anyone caught holding $BTC faces a $250,000 fine or five years in prison.)You never know, but I don't think this is going to happen quite yet — but once the Feds release their own dystopian surveillance currency, expect the digital dollar war to begin in earnest.9. Extreme weather eventsDang it, climate change, why can't you just be fake?2021 saw record fires out west and record flooding out east, plus hellish heat domes over Canada and Russia, and we can only expect such events to get worse in the year ahead.The question is: How much can the markets handle?As in, how much can speculators afford to gamble that the meme stock known as Tesla will tick a few points higher while they rack up credit card debt to pay for 24/7 air conditioning, more expensive food, and flood and/or fire insurance?If next summer's fires reach LA, or a bad drought scorches Midwest crops, or rains pummel Manhattan and flood the subway system, or the Texas oil refineries get wiped out by a hurricane, it could set off a chain reaction that crashes the market.Or Yellowstone could finally just put America out of its misery.10. A major cyberattackCyber attacks happen literally thousands of times every single day, but if an army of foreign hackers managed to hijack one of America's three power grids and keep it down for a week or more, there's a good chance we'd see a major market plunge.(Though, honestly hackers, the world would be a far better place if war criminal Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook went down forever. Just saying.)In conclusionThere's good news, dear reader: The stock market isn't everything.In fact, I sometimes wish we could get rid of grow-forever corporations and move forward solely with local/regional companies and partnerships and co-ops and for-benefits.Sure, multinational corporatism has proven wildly profitable for the hyper-elites (and brutally punishing on the working class and the environment), but there comes a point when you realize that capitalism has reached an inflection point and doesn't deliver the widest-spread wellbeing it promised.At some point, stability for the masses must take precedence over one more digital zero on the net worths of the spoiled few. The idea that an economy can grow forever inside a finite ecological system is not only dangerous and stupid but scientifically impossible.An added bonus? A tanking stock market gets rid of price inflation.In reality, the stock market won't even really be “crashing” — it'll just be resetting to temporary sanity… before blasting off to the moon again, leaving tens of millions of hard-working Americans burned and suffering in its wake.The modern global economy simply isn't designed to promote human flourishing. It exists to extract wealth from people and the planet, enslave the working class, and steal our time.This year, our work as common serfs is to build the world in which we want to live — a world free of unsustainable, anti-democratic, monopolistic, tax-evading multinational corporations.In other words, a world where stock market crashes simply don't matter to us, and don't affect us, because we no longer need them. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." —Ludwig von MisesThe stock market is going to crash in the next three years and wipe out half the market.Either that or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.For tens of millions of zero-asset Americans, and those with the means and discipline to save for the future, these punishing scenarios amount to six of one, half-dozen of the other.But the grifters who've profited wildly from the debt-fueled rise in real estate, stock, and crypto prices don't care.Because they're all in on the scam.Pretty much everyone agreesYou know the market is a fraud when share prices double or triple despite profits getting crushed by a global pandemic.A crash is coming, it's just a matter of when and how large.The Economist's Intelligence Unit thinks a bubble burst is highly probable.Jon Wolfenbarger, of the Mises Institute, thinks this crash will be worse than 2008, dropping at least 60%.Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) thinks we're in a massive bubble and the looming crash will be the worst in history.Approximately 50% of Wall Street strategists think the S&P 500 will end the year below current levels. (Bank of America thinks -10%, Morgan Stanley thinks -20%.)Investor John Hussman (who predicted the dot-com bubble burst) thinks the market will crash 66%.Jeremy Grantham thinks we're in a bubble the size of 2008 or 1929.The European Securities and Markets Authority thinks we're in a bubble.Mega-criminal Warren Buffett thinks a crash is coming and has over $140 billion ready to deploy.The top 15 non-financial companies (including Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook) think a crash is coming and have stockpiled more than $1 trillion to go shopping when it does.Here are five reasons why we're in this bubble, and why it's going to burst:1. Insane new investorsKids these days.Boomers robbed them of their future, so instead of even bothering with futile attempts to build real, productive, contributive businesses in the face of government-controlling tax-evading multinational monopolies, they decided to passively play the markets instead.Enter commission-free predator apps like Robinhood. In the past two years, millions of young people have jumped onto these platforms and are treating the stock market like the casino it is.Unlike traditional value investors who pore over thousands of pages of documents in order to make sound decisions about stock purchases, young people essentially trade the news, or even mere tweets. Just look at who's run Tesla up to a trillion dollars, even though it's not worth 1/20th that much:But you'll never convince a bitboy or a Tesla maniac that meme-stonking isn't a risky house of cards that's bound to collapse.After all, everyone's an expert during a hysterics-fueled bull run.Joe Kennedy, the infamous father of President JFK, managed to dodge the 1929 crash after having an epiphany while getting his shoes shined on Wall Street, saying:“When even shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips, it's time to sell.”But rents and food prices are going up, and when this bubble does pop, all these young people won't have jobs or free Internet money.2. Borrow-to-investWhy hasn't the world learned our lesson by now?If you let millions of people borrow money to buy the same stock…The stock price will go up…Which allows stockholders to borrow more money…So they can buy more stock…And create massive market bubbles that eventually burst and destroy millions of lives.Easy credit is what caused the Great Depression, people.I'll say what no corporate-captured political party will ever tell you:It should be illegal to invest on margin.Especially for crypto. Thanks to DeFi, perhaps no market is as hyper-leveraged as the $3 trillion crypto market, which may have less than 10% real wealth behind it. But when people need to withdraw to pay real bills — or when the US starts heavily regulating the space — trillions will get wiped out.3. Wild valuationsThe price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is considered the benchmark number for comparing one company's stock price to another. The ratio is based on the current stock price divided by the trailing 12-month earnings per share. If a stock price is $10/share, and the P/E ratio is 10, it means that company is earning $1 per share. If you buy a $10 share with a P/E of 20, it'll roughly take you 20 years to break even.Warren Buffett likes to buy stocks with a P/E of around 12.The S&P 500's long-term median P/E ratio is around 15.The S&P 500's current P/E ratio is around 29 — nearly double its century-long average — despite the pandemic. (#Bubble)Apple's P/E is typically around 30.Amazon's P/E hovers around 60.Tesla's P/E ratio is currently over 330.That's $1 worth of earnings for every $330 invested.Would you really buy a business with an ROI of 0.3%? Would you acquire a company that would take over three centuries to break even?4. InflationWhen governments print trillions of dollars out of thin air and loan it to investors to pump into asset bubbles, the price of everything rises.[Learn how to calculate your personal inflation rate here.]When prices rise rapidly, people starve, freeze, go bankrupt, or take to the streets demanding change. That's how Hitler came to power in Germany.When inflation soars due to price rises due to money printing, governments have two choices:A. Raise interest rates and likely trigger panic and a crash that lobs 50+% off the market in the next five years.B. Print more money out of thin air to keep the bubble inflating, but in doing so, robbing the poor of 50+% of their purchasing power in the next five years.So far, corporate-controlled governments have chosen option B, but are now signaling that they desperately need to raise rates to slow down inflation.However, there's no way their banker bosses will let them raise rates nearly as much as is needed to save the currency from depreciating.But if they keep robbing the poor via inflation, there will soon be mobs in the streets. Which also tends to crash markets…5. Everything elseThere are a ton of other factors that could lead to a huge market crash:A worsening USA-Ch!na relationshipA terrorist attackNew Covid variants (and over-responses from increasingly authoritarian governments)A major cyber-attackSocial unrest and protestsSupply chain disruptionsExtreme weather eventsContested elections and capitol battles on a scale we haven't seen since 1812Typically, one of these factors will set off a chain reaction that takes down the whole market.Remember: The dot-com bubble shaved 49% off of people's investments, and the S&P 500 dropped 57% in 2008 and millions lost their jobs and homes. The next crash will almost certainly be far worse, by many trillions.But the average house, stock, and crypto investor already knows all this… and they still don't care.Hot potatoThe game is simple.The birthday boy or girl starts with a beanbag or a balloon or a ball or — if you want a visit from child protection services — an actual piping hot potato.Mom or dad hits play on the music and the kids toss the scalding object around the circle, hoping not to be holding the tuber when the music stops.The music stops. Rory the fat kid gingerly holds the burning potato. All the other kids scream with delight as he's eliminated. This repeats until one kid is left and gets a grab-bag of sugar for his or her efforts.Adult speculators are the same way.They all know that houses, stocks, and crypto are overpriced. They know we're in a hysteria-driven bubble. They're holding on as long as they can, trying to squeeze as much unearned wealth out of society as possible. But unlike 2008, they think they'll be smart enough to sell right before the crash this time.But they won't (and mathematically can't.)Only one kid will be left with the spoils.And it won't be you.Just like hot potato, the vast majority will get burned and end up with nothing in the end. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Happy New Year, my friends.I like to think we do a decent job of forecasting the future over here at Surviving Tomorrow headquarters.Only time will tell.This article is written in declaratives, but of course, it's simply speculative.Circle back in a year and see how our predictions fared!Let's start with the good news first:1. We don't all die in a global nuclear warNukes are for Boomers.Thank heavens for mutually-assured destruction on a planetary scale. There are more than 15,000+ nuclear warheads on planet Earth, but clear through the end of 2022, the nine nuclear nations will continue their good work of keeping planet-destroying weapons out of the hands of rogue actors… for now.This is where we cut to a banger of a quote from Albert Einstein that only a small percentage of the population will understand:“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”Luckily, WWIII won't happen in 2022.2. The stock market doesn't crashThat's 2023's job.We'll see moderate growth in the stock price of vampire corporations and the corrupted real estate market — though certainly not in real, productive, contributive growth.While the Great Quit and the booming union negotiations will provide some temporary relief for union members, overall there will be no meaningful rise in workers' real wages when you factor in crushing inflation.3. Bitcoin hits seventeen billion trillion dollarsJust kidding.The crypto crackdown will continue as:a.) Central banks see the real threat it now poses to their corrupt money monopoly.b.) They get serious about launching their dystopian surveillance coins.Also, bafflingly, Tether will continue to keep its fraud alive (and likely won't get indicted as a $60+ billion crime until after the greater market crashes.)4. The metaverse is a flop**For now.Adults just don't want to “live” in virtual reality, or have the virtual world invade their lives via augmented reality.From a historical perspective, the pornography industry typically innovates first. (Think: pop-ups, pop-downs, pop-unders, secure payments, age verification.) And even porn hasn't seen widespread VR uptake. Plus Google glasses were a huge bust and Oculus isn't winning over the 35-plussers (basically, people with real lives.)Accordingly, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc will have to keep doing what it's been doing for years to create markets for its life-threatening products:Target children.5. Inflation doesn't go awayYay money printing, overpopulation, and resource depletion.Real inflation including assets has already exceeded 10% for the past two years in a row, and it will continue through 2022.If you need it, buy it now, because it will be more expensive tomorrow.Also: “Transitory” enters the lexicon as a joke word. (Think: “My girlfriend and I didn't break up, our relationship is just transitory.”)Surviving Tomorrow encourages all readers to ignore the fake government numbers and calculate their own personalized inflation numbers.6. Supply chain challenges continue to plague humanityAnd some of them will be straight-up manufactured by Ch!na as they test their ability to constrict supply flows in order to extract wealth from the West.They're pure geniuses, folks — practicing monopoly-capitalism abroad to enforce fake communism at home.The tiniest of silver linings?There's a microscopic opportunity for localism to make a reemergence if ya'll would stop shopping at Walmart.7. Republicans win the mid-termsNot by the usual landslide, but enough to freak the deluded Dems.(The GOP is also going to take the Presidency in 2024, whether they win or not.)8. More predator corporations move to the Subscription Serfdom ModelToyota recently began retroactively charging customers $8/month to start their own cars, and we'll see more companies dip their claws into the not-for-sale model in 2022.Under subscription serfdom, it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to afford a house, car, or mattress.9. Airbnb continues to ruin families and communitiesThanks to its unsustainable grow-forever business model, Airbnb hosts will continue to outbid working families for residential homes, which will make sale prices rise, rentals disappear, and the few remaining rentals skyrocket in price.We won't see the widespread smashing of windows and torching of Airbnbs quite yet, but it will eventually be the thing to do, like it was with Jehovah's Witness buildings in the seventies.Over on CNN+, their soon-to-be #1 host, Scott Galloway — despite his genuine care for the next generation — will remain publicly silent about one of his favorite companies. But late at night, while cuddling his adorable dog, he'll quietly start to realize what we already know:That Airbnb is a global threat to affordable homeownership and rentership.10. No more lockdownsMultinational corporations made a multi-trillion-dollar killing during the lockdowns, but even their rented politicians and privatized media corporations won't be able to muster up enough fear to keep everyone indoors for another year.We're already seeing revolt in Australia and within Boris Johnson's UK Conservative party, and if any government is stupid enough to try to place its citizens on house arrest over an infectious-but-mild variant, there will be revolts in the street.Sadly, even without lockdowns…11. Loneliness and depression increaseBecause we're engineering our society for loneliness.After all, it's far more profitable to divide and conquer your customers so they all stay home and spend online. No one makes money from a walk in the wild.Between the loss of restaurants, cinemas, shopping, outdoor play, mass gatherings, and human-to-human sex, we're seeing a long-term decline in face-to-face human interaction.Soon, being together will be a radical act.12. Social media continues to destroy societyCongress will do nothing meaningful to stop Facebook.War criminal Mark Zuckerberg will make some basic tweaks to his algorithm in the wake of Frances Haugen's important disclosures, knowing full-well his must-make-more-profits algorithm stands at odds with civil discourse and democracy.Expect social media to continue to divide society as the machine generates more extremists on both sides of the political aisle.13. Ch!na continues to dominate AmericaAmerica and Ch!na are already at war, but one side doesn't know it yet.Though they'll have to spend a lot of 2022 shoring up their crumbling foundations (IE massive debt and a real estate bubble that's ready to explode), expect Ch!nese global domination to keep more or less on schedule, with additional port purchases, debt traps, surveillance rollouts, and economic colonization of developing countries.Maybe they deserve to run the world…14. The climate crisis continues to worsenManhattan won't be underwater by the end of 2022, but we'll continue to:Spew heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.Poison our rivers.Fill the oceans with microplastics.Frack the foundations of our landmasses and ocean beds.Deforest tens of millions of acres (roughly the size of Panama.)Rape the soil another half-inch, leaving us with just a few dozen more natural harvests before we have to move to synthetic food production.The world's largest polluters will, of course, continue to play their massive game of misdirection by shaming the middle class into not eating meat, using plastic straws, heating with woodstoves, driving fast, or taking baths.But at least three more people will wise up to their con.15. Debt increasesAnd not just Federal debt, which is a given.We're talking about personal consumer debt.In 2022, people will burn through their Covid savings runway and get back to tapping their credit cards as they return to semi-normal commercial life.After the Republicans win the mid-terms there will be no more free handouts, which will force many people back to work, which will cue corporations to push back against unions and resist real wage increases.16. Global democracy remains in decline for the sixteenth consecutive yearFreedom House will release its annual report and it will contain more of the same — increasing authoritarianism across the planet.Yet, sheeplike citizens will keep voting for corporate-captured mainstream parties instead of defunding the corporations who bankroll the sociopathic politicians that execute the will of private interests.Weep for us, Athens, for we held your dream in the palm of our hand and smothered it to death.17. The rich get richerWhile elites won't add another $5.5 trillion to their net worth in the year ahead, they will likely add $2+ trillion as the markets continue to ride a wave of inflation, rising consumer prices, and the last of 2021's printed money.America will go yet another year without a democratic wealth tax, with groveling billionaire sycophants continuing to scream that anything less than unlimited wealth accumulation is socialism.18. The poor get poorerLast year, the British National Health Service (NHS) got a 1% pay raise.But real inflation was 10+%, so they actually got a 9% pay cut.In 2022, food, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise, and while many people will receive the tiniest of pay raises, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.Several million people will also fall out of the job market due to automation, monopolization, and financialization — made economically inefficient — never to return to the workforce for the rest of their lives. As a knock-on effect of permanent poverty, American drug addiction will continue to claim more lives than 2021, as will suicide.19. Governments desperately try to stave off a crashAfter temporarily slowing down the money printer in a weak attempt to slow down inflation, the markets will react poorly (read: numbers go down) and corporations will push their rented politicians to do something.Yet, the big banks see the writing on the wall, and push a counter-narrative to their rented politicians. The result will be a mishmash of conflicting economic maneuvers, crazy risk-taking, and fiscal decisions that will baffle seasoned economists, Wall Street, and Main Street alike.If the market sees a full quarter or more of losses, expect the Fed to re-start up the money printer late in 2022, rather than doing the right thing and letting the whole house of cards burn to the ground in a reset to sanity.20. Housing becomes increasingly unaffordable for renters“Nobody gets seconds until everyone's had firsts” apparently doesn't apply to shelter.Thanks to Airbnb, second house-owners, land-lorders, and institutional investors, the rental market will continue to evaporate, forcing working renters to surrender a far greater portion of their hard-earned wealth to passive extractors.And that's for the “lucky” renters who can find any places to rent in their area.For the bottom of society, it simply means hundreds of thousands more people will end up on the streets while former family homes sit empty for much of the year. Wealthy people will continue to leave homeless-filled cities like Los Angeles, pretending “not to understand” exactly why there are more people on the streets now than at any point since the Great Depression.21. Homeownership becomes increasingly unaffordable without massive debtHouse prices won't rise as quickly as they did during the Covid flight to the suburbs, but the same purchasers who are outbidding renters will continue to dominate middle-class working folks.Out of desperation, millions of young-ish families will try to pole-vault the massive chasm into homeownership, loading themselves with multi-six-figure debt, effectively wage-enslaving themselves for forty years to a bank that simply printed digital credit into their bank accounts.22. Most people find a way to carry onBecause every human being is a miracle.I met a woman when I was in Transnistria — the dystopian half-nation between Moldova and Ukraine that's controlled by the Russians — who showed me the scar on her chest where her husband tried to stab her in the heart before burning their house down and abandoning her and their two children. She still had the fortitude to smile.I've been to North Korea, where I witnessed malnourished children drawing water by hand from mud wells. I didn't see a single piece of wildlife in five days — no birds, nor rabbits, nor squirrels, nor rodents — because they've all been eaten. Yet our Korean brothers and sisters soldier on.I've visited the largest garbage dump in Africa, where thousands of men, women, and children spend their entire lives digging through the trash for anything of value. Do they know how precious and strong they are?It's awe-inspiring how resilient human beings can be.It's also scary when you realize that predator corporations know it, too.They know how much more life can still be pressed out of the middle class.On a personal note…Baby Concord will take his first steps, and his first spoken phrase will be either “corporate corruption” or “sic semper tyrannis.”Surviving Tomorrow, which grew to 15,000 followers in this its first year, will grow to 50,000+ followers as its wonderful and intelligent readers consistently and purposefully clap, share, and strongly insist that all their friends and family join the conversation and follow along.In conclusionTrajectory is everything, my dear friends.Insanity, as you know, is doing the same things and expecting different results.As long as we keep buying products from the same corporations, incinerating our time on the same extremist-creating social media sites, and voting for the same corporate-captured political parties, we'll keep going where we're already headed:Democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance.Thanks for reading Surviving Tomorrow.All my love,Jared A. Brock Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” — Jean-Jacques RousseauQueen Elizabeth II thinks she owns over 2,195,866,240 acres of land plus half of the UK's foreshore and most of its seabed.Think about that for a second.In the twenty-first century — with all our human rights, technological advances, scientific breakthroughs, and philosophical machinations — there is an elite British family that still plays dress-up and thinks they own a significant percentage of all the dry and damp land on planet Earth.And 62% of their nation believes them.Talk about mass insanity.Imagine the amount of media control one would need to muster in order to maintain such a collective delusion.Or…After all their centuries under serfdom, maybe the British masses just understand history better than we do in the New World.Maybe they understand that humans aren't naturally free.Normally, we're just slaves.Democracy under siegeDemocracy has been in decline for fifteen straight years.Anti-human corporatism and ideological fundamentalism continue to tear down the human rights and freedoms so hard-won by the sacrifice of tens of millions of lives in World War II.The elites should be ashamed of themselves.(So should their mothers.)Instead of seeking widest-spread wellbeing for our global family and our host planet, private interests grapple for unchecked power in order to advance their anti-commons agendas.But of course, using the word “democracy” to describe varying degrees of oligarchy and corporatocracy doesn't do the word justice. America, nor ancient Athens, nor the United Kingdom, nor any other nation on earth, has ever been a democracy, not for one minute. The elites would never allow a real democracy to last for long.But maybe we don't need to worry about the inevitable disappearance of democracy. Maybe it's our fate.After all, we've been here before.Planet freedom?The first civilizations in Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley were ruled by priest-kings and rife with slavery and subjugation.The Roman world started as a monarchy, then became a republic ruled by wildly-corrupt aristocratic senators and consuls, before falling to the tyrannical Caesars.Africa was ruled by pharaohs and tribal chieftains, the eastern dynasties have been ruled by hyper-violent warlords from 2070 BC to this very day, and France and Britain have been dominated by outrageously abusive monarchs for most of their histories.Some people will argue this wasn't the case during our hunter-gatherer days, but it's quite clear that humans have always had a tendency to lord our might, strength, and advantages over others. If you don't believe tyranny can't exist in a society as small as two, you've obviously never seen two children play in a sandbox, or known a woman with an abusive spouse.All of human history is a story of dictators, tyrants, warlords, priests, popes, kings, queens, emperors, caesars, czars, tsars, autocrats, führers, duces, chairmen, rajas, khans, sultans, shahs, pharaohs, witch doctors, chiefs, bullies, and abusers, all practicing their own form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.We just got lucky.There is nothing new under the sunFreedom, of course, is a sliding scale. When choice and control erode, there comes a point where people are pushed over the Rubicon from free to not free. We're currently crossing over.Last night on our star-saunter, my wife and I passed a delivery driver who works for an Amazon affiliate. He was deep in the bowels of his van, desperately searching in the 9PM dark for a package to deliver to one of the dozens of Airbnbs that pock our neighborhood like skin cancer. It was late, and freezing cold, and we felt sick to our stomachs.Because we know this man.He's mentally challenged and physically handicapped, earns minimum wage in a costly area plagued with land-lorders and Airbnbs and no other jobs available, his car is constantly in the shop for repairs, and he works like a dog from sunup to nearly midnight and will continue to do so until Amazon automates his job and he dies homeless.How is this man not a slave by another name?He will never be free.It's the same for tens of millions of Americans that have been permanently left behind.It's the same for the two billion people who will move into slums in our lifetime.Mean reversionMean reversion: A theory that suggests that prices eventually revert to the long-run average level of the entire dataset.What if we aren't currently witnessing a loss of freedom?What if this is just a reversion to the mean?We've had 6,500 years of documented subjugation and oppression for the masses, blended with a few centuries of moderate freedom for a tiny subset of the Western population.And now we're reverting back to the long-term average.Think about all the macroeconomic factors that are currently coalescing to strip your freedom, rob your wealth, and destroy your future:Average house prices skyrocketing to $10 million.The end of ownership, leading to subscription serfdom.Job automation leading to economic irrelevance for billions.Democracy in irreversible decline.Global surveillance, restricted movement, social credit systems, and digital surveillance currencies on the rise.The cost of living soaring as real inflation devours purchasing power.Runaway environmental destruction, species collapse, and soil extinction.Corporatization taking over governments and their judiciaries.Clearly, freedom and democracy's best days are in the past.And if we can't protect it, maybe we don't deserve it.Rule BritanniaMaybe that Brit biologist Darwin was right.Maybe this is a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, losers-can-go-die-quietly world in which most of us were born to be subjects, servants, serfs, and slaves.After all, fewer than a fifth of all people on planet Earth live in a nation that is considered fully free, and this is the best it's ever been.Sadly, that freedom is diminishing everywhere and I honestly don't see how things will ever turn around without a widespread revival.The United Kingdom, for its part, never gave up on aristocratic rule. Sure, it temporarily put on the sheen of democracy, but a quick leaf through the House of Commons and the House of Lords reveals a tight-knit club of kissing cousins who all went to Eton and Oxford and call each other by made-up titles like Duke, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Knight, and Lord.It's adorable, but frightening. After all…Less than 1% of Brits own half the country's landmass.The 600 aristocratic families and landed gentry still own a third.Just six families own all of central London.The monarchy believes it owns the British Parliament itself.Meanwhile, tens of millions of hard-laboring contributors work themselves to the bone to pay heavy taxes and astronomical rents just to keep the extractive elites afloat.And, despite the fact that the monarchy is little more than a 7,936-property land-lording operation made wealthy through ten centuries of bloodshed, war, slavery, and genocide, British taxpayers are still forced to support the lecherous institution to the tune of $109 million per year.At least the British public knows they're getting screwed: According to a new poll released last week, just 5% of voters said British politicians were in office for the welfare of their country.And do you know what?Those 5% are wrong.It's every man for himself now.(And if you don't like it, then it's time for you to make a radical change.) 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“ATH! ATH! ATH! ATH!” — Every bitcoiner in the world right nowBitcoin's having a good week — if you consider a several trillion dollars in future losses for the middle class a good thing.All-time highs certainly make the Bitcoin cult high, alright.Right now, Twitter is a-flutter with bitboys in rapturous ecstasy, declaring total economic victory — as if the ballooning price of a Ponzi scheme somehow confers legitimacy — spouting fake words and phrases like “supercycle,” “hypercycle,” “parabolic,” and “the exponential age.”It's all hogwash.While I'm just as happy as the next guy to see the $USD, $CAD, and £GBP crash and burn and die forever, just because $BTC is experiencing a pump doesn't mean it won't end terribly for thousands of young speculators.Bitcoin will almost certainly never be the global reserve currency, and there are some intriguing historic precedents worth considering before an entire generation gambles away their life savings on a bunch of digital files.Let's go visit ancient Greece and Rome.Thucydides trapThe year is 432 BC.The entitled and decadent city-state of Athens is on the rise.The violent and brutal city-state of Sparta is in decline.The Athenian military general Thucydides sizes up the situation and realizes something inevitable is about to occur:War.And a bloody war at that.For more than a generation, the two city-states went at it with all the cruelty and brutality they could muster. Huge amounts of the countryside were destroyed, entire cities leveled, whole cultures made extinct, with tens of thousands killed by sword and spear and starvation and plague and fire.When it was all over thirty years later, Thucydides penned his official history of the bloodbath, entitled The History of the Peloponnesian War, and concluded:“It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”Pyrrhic victoryThe year is 279 BC.Pyrrhus, king of Epirus and one of the greatest generals of his era, refuses to accept Roman rule in his part of Greece.At the battles of Heraclea in 280 BC and the battle of Asculum in 279 BC, Pyrrhus and his army defeated the Romans… but suffered irreplaceable casualties in doing so.As Plutarch reports in the Life of Pyrrhus:The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” This was because he lost a great part of the forces he had brought to Italy, and almost all his particular friends and most of his principal commanders. He could not call up more men from home and his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.So, too, was the case with Athens and Sparta 150 years earlier.In the end, Sparta won — nominally — but when their three-decade war was over, both nations lay in ruin; economies shattered, a generation of young boys dead, their cities undefended, leaving all of Greece vulnerable to invasion from the east.Decentralization vs centralizationThis will be the economic battle of our time.Bitcoin and its mob are the rising Athens — decadent and demanding; brilliant, yet entitled.Government fiat is the bitter, savage, violent, and ancient Sparta; the ugly, backward, and corrupted status quo.Perhaps the greatest and most baffling cognitive dissonance amount bitcoiners right now is how, on one hand, they hate “fedcoins” and insist the whole Federal Reserve system is a corrupt institution run by lying criminals (which it is), and yet when it comes to the matter of whether or not the Fed will eventually try to kill Bitcoin and launch its own digital surveillance currency, they're the first group to defend the Fed and say it will never happen because people at the Fed have promised they won't shut Bitcoin down.Do they have a split personality?Just go on Twitter. Bitboys absolutely rail against the Fed, but also insist that the Fed's going to do the “right thing,” stick to their word, and roll over for Bitcoin.Even Tim Denning (who, to be clear, is not an outrageous bitcoiner) has drunk the Kool-aid, saying:Does anyone really believe this policy decision will hold forever?That the nation with the biggest military in human history is simply going to give up its ability to control and manipulate the global economy just because some genius coder created an accountable and unmanipulatable digital currency?Zero chance.There's simply too much wealth to be extracted by controlling money.War between Athens and Sparta is inevitable.Here's what's likely going to happenAmerica will continue to let Bitcoin chug along until it becomes an actual and major threat to the real American economy. Which it most certainly will do. As more nations pull an El Salvador and ditch the US Dollar, as more people start evading taxes because it's so easy to do with Bitcoin, and as tens of millions ditch the USD because it's so inflationary, there will come a mathematical breaking point when it's in the best interests of the American state to launch its counter-attack.America will launch a digital surveillance currency. Just another fiat currency, but this time, it's a fully traceable, trackable, deletable, weaponizable panopticoin.America will make Bitcoin illegal.Would you buy, hold, spend, or accept Bitcoin if getting caught in possession of it came with a ten-year jail sentence or a $250,000 fine? Most people wouldn't. And most vendors certainly wouldn't accept Bitcoin for transactions, which will essentially end the long-term domestic market for Bitcoin.America and Bitcoiners will go to war.The likes of Michael Saylor and Robert Breedlove will move to Bitcoin-friendly nations and invest accordingly, and many location-independent folks will follow, but all will face sanctions and seizures of domestic assets. America will then enlist its allies to join in a federation that bans Bitcoin — after all, each of these nations will also be suffering from cratered tax revenues thanks to Bitcoin — making geoarbitrage increasingly difficult even for highly-mobile Bitcoiners.America will eventually win.But only in the same way that Sparta beat Athens. Bitcoin will still exist, of course, though likely only as a currency in marginal nations like El Salvador. America, too, will still exist, but the battle for monetary supremacy will have taken its Pyrrhic toll on the economy, leaving America and the rest of Western civilization vulnerable to economic subjugation from the east.China sweeps in like the Romans and Persians.When weakened decentralized powers break down, all it takes is one somewhat-strong centralized power to sweep in. In the case of the city-states of Athens and Sparta (and Thebes and Corinth and hundreds of others), it was Alexander who put all of Greece under his rule and reign.The Chinese Dream, as laid out in Xi Jinping's book, is simple: To make China the center of the economic universe. A single, united Han bloodline, rich in resources and mighty in power and strength, essentially ruling the rest of the world via client nations, vassal states, and good old-fashioned colonialism.They already own the biggest pork producer in America.They already own the biggest dairy producer in Canada.They already own most of the toll highways in Africa.They're debt-trapping half the globe with their Belt and Road Initiative.They even own the ancient Athenian port that Sparta attacked 2,400 years ago.Why not also go for control of the global reserve currency?The economic war between $BTC and the $USD is a Thucydidean trap that will end in a Pyrrhic victory for America.But the economic war that follows could be the end of Western civilization as we know it. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

“Conservative: A statesman who is enamored with existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with other evils.” — Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's DictionaryI rail against liberals plenty, so today I'm going to set my sights on the other side of the aisle and say what most people already know deep down:Most conservatives today are fake conservatives.They don't care about fair business.They don't care about balanced budgets.They don't care about shared freedom.They aren't actually pro-life.They don't care about family values.They don't care about the future.Just so long as the red team wins and they get to shrink government until it magically ushers in a corporate-controlled libertarian paradise.Which, of course, isn't conservatism at all.Calm yourselves, leftiesYou're the kind, warm-hearted, open-to-newness people, remember?No need to get hopped up because someone's having a civil discussion about a chunk of the political spectrum that you loathe to the core of your fair trade organic vegan knickers.It's important to start by pointing out what conservatism is not:It's not the Republican party.It's not the Tea Party or the Capitol Hill rioters.It's not Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, etc.It's not future president Donald Trump.So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.In other words, don't act exactly like the people you hate.The Core Principles of ConservatismConservatism, like all ideologies, is full of flaws. But perhaps no set of political values has been re-interpreted and lived out as poorly as by today's Republicans:Individual FreedomIronically, today's conservatives conflate the word “freedom” with the word “autonomy.” The ancient Greeks and Romans defined freedom as the ability to do right in any circumstance, whereas Americans today simply think freedom means “do whatever I want, others be damned.”Limited GovernmentWhich is ironic, because Republicans are in favor of a massive military and are the ones that got Citizen's United passed, which allows for unlimited campaign finance.OrderWhich is ironic, because they're also chaotic and anti-institutional, and can't seem to find a way to reconcile this dichotomy within their ranks.Fiscal ResponsibilityIt's quite sad that for many people, fiscal responsibility is more important than the responsibility we have to take care of each other. It's also ironic, because there's never been a fiscally-responsible Republican president. (After all, they're the party of massive corporate socialism.)Free MarketsWhich is ironic, because rules-free markets are just black markets that always end in monopoly.The Rule of LawWhich is ironic, because the judicial branch is not supposed to rule the roost — yet Republicans have stacked the bench and passed horrible pro-corporate decisions like Citizen's United, sending anti-corporatists to prison, gerrymandering districts, and using it to rig elections.Human DignityWhich is ironic, because they're against sensible gun laws, raising wages, elevating workers' rights, ending wars, or providing healthcare to all.VarietyWhich is ironic, because they're one of the most homogenous (and racist) voting blocs in history.As you can see, there probably isn't a Trumper, Tea Partier, Fox News commentator, or QAnon believer who actually believes and lives out these flawed conservative values.The Republican Party… is a total disaster.It's filled with gun-toting preppers.It's filled with rabid anti-vaxxers.It's filled with delusional QAnoners.It's jam-packed with racists.Most Republicans aren't even pro-life — they're just anti-abortion, but more than happy to carry a weapon, keep the nukes, send thousands of young people off to fight endless wars, and let tens of thousands die each year due to lack of medical coverage.Most Republicans aren't in favor of small government — if they were, they'd start with the military.And let's not pretend for a moment that most Republicans believe (or even understand) the rules-free-market or fiscal responsibility. No, the Republican party is bought-and-paid-for with corporate dollars, and contains an unfathomable number of monopoly defenders, corporate socialists, and billionaire sycophants.Modern conservatism is, above all, just political corporatism.That said: The Republican Party also contains millions of kind-hearted, hard-working, fair-minded, pro-science, utterly-sensible people who hate what their party has become, but rightly see the swamplike corruption on the other side and continue to vote for the devil they know.If only there was another option…Introducing Commons ConservatismI know a number of people who aren't extreme right or extreme left. There's no political party for them, but they all tend to believe in a common set of progressive conservative-ish ideals:Good GovernanceWe don't need big government or small government, we need good government — filled with capable public servants who are transparent, accountable, and absolutely terrified of those they represent.Fiscal ResponsibilityThis means delivering services to customer-citizens in an effective and accountable manner. If we get taxed, we want to see an itemized receipt.Fair-Rules Market Commons conservatives are equally opposed to the tyranny of the centralized state (ie socialism/communism) and the corporatized state (ie multinational monopolies.) This is achieved not by eliminating regulation, or by authoritarianism, but by enacting democratically-decided fair rules for how the economy will run.Family Values Yes, family matters. But not in the nuclear one-dad-one-mom-two-and-a-half-kids-white-picket-fence kind of way. No, we're talking about the family unit we had for thousands and thousands of years; the one that included support for children, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Commons conservatives look at where our economy is heading and realize that a full-family structure is essentially inevitable when childcare, education, and eldercare costs become impossible for the middle class to pay. At the same time, they also believe in structuring society so that one-income families can thrive — which is more important than ever, now that single parenthood is at an all-time high.Proportional FreedomThey don't conflate it with idiotic libertarian autonomy. Commons conservatives understand that we all share one freedom, and that the only sensible path forward is pluralism — that “people of different beliefs, backgrounds, and lifestyles can coexist in the same society and participate equally in the political process” — so long as no one party is able to tell everyone else what to do.Genuinely Pro-lifeCommons conservatives still believe that abortion is murder, but they're willing to invest heavily in unwanted pregnancy prevention and step up to adopt babies from women willing to carry their infants to full-term. They're also 360-degree pro-life: In favor of sensible gun laws, against war, anti-nuke, anti-drone, anti-robot soldiers, anti-chemical weapon, and in favor of ending any corporate practice that harms nature and sickens people.Sensible Land StewardshipIt's hard to believe, but the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all came to life under Nixon. Without clean land, air, and water, we literally have no future. Millions of commons conservatives — especially farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen — fundamentally understand that sustainability is an economic, social, and scientific imperative. Nature doesn't negotiate with terrorists.Safety and SecurityWe don't need to be “tough on crime”… we need to build a society where crime is unnecessary. This means investing heavily in crime prevention, systemic poverty elimination, and restorative justice.Commons conservatives believe we are only as safe as our most dangerous neighborhood, only as wise as our least-educated classroom, and only as rich as our poorest neighbor.Fake conservatism is deadAmerican Republicans and British Conservatives live under the delusion that their brand of fake conservatism is the future.They're out of their mind.The majority of the younger generations, specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha, cannot fathom voting for the rabid corporatists and mentally-deranged hyper-right-wingers who currently control right-leaning parties.If commons conservatives don't rise up and lead their half of the spectrum back to reasonable ground, extremists within the party will almost certainly seize total control and do whatever they need to do (legally or otherwise) to take over America and turn it into a fascist dictatorship.And isn't that the ultimate betrayal of conservative values?It's time for commons conservatives to do the right thing and break up with the Republican party. America is well-overdue to become a multi-party nation anyway.And when commons conservatives grow a backbone and do the right thing, they might discover they have some friends across the aisle.After all, most modern “liberals” are fake liberals, too. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

“I've spent more time with President Xi Jinping of China than any world leader. He firmly believes that China, before the year 2035, is going to own America because autocracies can make quick decisions.” — US President Joe BidenMy great-grandpa grew up in China and we had Chinese boarders growing up — both, weirdly, were named Lin Ding. The second one taught us his family recipes, helped my mom build a Chinese garden, and he took me to visit the fish tanks at the university where he was studying to be an ichthyologist. Ever since I was a boy, China has always been on my radar.And 71 percent of Americans are worried about a hot war between the United States and China in the next five years, so we seriously need to talk about it.For those of you who are keeping score like I am, it's clear that China is absolutely crushing America:They're investing heavily in solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and biofuels, creating five times as many eco-jobs versus the US.They're crushing us on EVs, with plans for all their cars to be electric by 2035.They're thrashing us on quantum security and have already stolen sensitive information about millions of US federal employees and contractors.They have 23,550 miles of high-speed rail.They produce 67% of the world's solar panels (versus America's 1%.)They have half as much debt as America (and 22X less external debt.)They're slaying us at GDP growth.They exported over 500 million Covid vaccine doses versus America's 110 million.They have a quarter the murder rate, eight times less burglary, 18X less gun crime, and three times less opiate usage.They have one-sixth the obesity rate.They have more university students than the EU and the US combined.They have a $283.6 billion trade surplus with the States.They've forced their money-grubbing private education institutions to go not-for-profit.They're cracking down on monopolies while America's have metastasized like cancer.They're cracking down on social media algorithms and protecting children from digital addiction.At some point it makes you wonder:Maybe China deserves to win.Obviously, China does NOT deserve to winThis is the same Han-centric nation that's ethnically cleansing and genociding the Uyghur nation.And oppressing the nation of Taiwan.And the nation of Hong Kong.And the nation of Tibet.And colonizing dozens of African countries.And debt-trapping the world via their Belt and Road Initiative.And exporting their surveillance technology to dozens of other dictatorships.So… they're basically like America, but with 4.37X more citizens.But we can still learn from ChinaIt takes a lot of humility to admit that other nations are succeeding where we're failing or falling behind.When I visited North Korea, my guide/guard told me that North Korea was the best country in the world in every single category, even though he'd never left his slave state.I told him that it's okay for each nation to be the best at something. I told him that Canada has the best waterfalls (Niagara) and mountains (Rockies), but America has the coolest canyon (Grand) and Italian food is far better than Hungarian.Here are a few of the many things America needs to learn from China:1. China has an extremely long-term mindsetIt's important to put things in perspective:America is 245 years old. China is 3,221.Is there anyone who thinks the United States will still be united in 2,976 years? (I think it'll be twelve countries within a century.)America works on a two-year time scale — election, mid-terms, election, mid-terms. It's awful, and stupid. China works on a millennia time scale. Within twenty years, China will be a two-billion person nation with the biggest economy in world history. And they're just on Chapter Four of their story.2. China invests heavily in successThey invest in their Olympic athletes. They invest in infrastructure. They're investing $1.2 trillion in sixty other countries.They understand that national success requires national investment.3. China cares about unityCulture = gathered and rootedIndividualism = uprooted and scatteredWhile America is a hyper-individualist anti-culture that's fracturing everywhere, China is a more communal place, with a higher value on family, community, and nationhood.Tomorrow's superpowerObviously, China isn't beating America in every category. We still have the most white supremacists, gun-toting preppers, Kardashians, student debt, vampire corporations, and TikTok narcissists.And we shouldn't try to join China's race to the bottom on cheap goods, human rights and freedoms, invasive surveillance, Hollywood censorship, authoritarian governance, dystopian panopticoins, kidnapping Chinese nationals who escape overseas, sentencing Canadians to death, and their horrendous social credit system.China has its eyes set on becoming the dominant culture globally, but that would leave us with a world that is significantly less free, more surveilled, less creative, and less human.Sure, they're winning, but I really hope they don't win win.Because might isn't right.Never was, never will be.What America does have going for it is some semblance of goodwill. While America has friends, China only has clients. Unfortunately, the corporations that own the Fed and Congress have leveraged the stars and stripes to run their extraction scams all over the world, building serious resentment and distrust even among our allies.America needs to clean-slate itself and have a national discussion about what universal bedrock values we want to live by and promote in the world in the centuries ahead. Right now, the only “values” that America is exporting are vapid consumerism and predatory corporatism. No wonder half the world hates America and China is laughing.But US President Joe Biden put it well:“America is unique. From all nations in the world, we're the only nation organized based on an idea — None of you get your rights from your government; you get your rights merely because you're a child of God. The government is there to protect those God-given rights. No other government has been based on that notion. No one can defeat us except us.”Sadly, American elites are hell-bent on doing just that.Remember, friends: Democracy isn't the natural state of human affairs.Dictatorship is.Will nationalism beat individualism? Will fake democracy best bona fide autocracy? Will creative culture beat conformist culture?Will centralization beat disintegration? Will coercive “unity” best coercive disunity?Will China and America learn to get along like the Brock family and the Dings, enjoying years of mutual benefit, cultural exchange, and moral growth on both sides, or will they go to war and destroy the world?These are the questions of our age. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

It's been a tough two years for most people on this planet:Stress.Anxiety.Real need.Loneliness.Depression.Mental and emotional breakdown.While the average person is ready for life to get back to normal, there's a zero percent chance that we'll ever go back to how things were before the pandemic.But it's not going to happen.In fact, it's going to be the opposite. Society is going to get more lonely as we emerge from endless curfews, lockdowns, Orwellian surveillance systems, and restrictive locational controls.Why?Because the past two years have proven wildly profitable for the predator corporations that rule America.The Great Lone-ificationCulture comes from the Latin cultus — to cultivate. Cultures form where people come together and are rooted.Individualism comes from the Latin dividere — to divide. In contrast to cultures that are together and rooted, individualists are uprooted and scattered.Individualism is an anti-culture.Over the next generation, we're going to see the mass-evaporation of cultures on a scale we haven't seen since perhaps the Roman Empire.Because there's a new mono-empire in town: Corporatism.It owns the Fed.It owns Congress.It dominates labor.It controls much of the economy.It will soon own all the houses.And eventually, it will own everything and everyone.Because a corporation's legal fiduciary reason for existing is to deliver profits to passive extractor-shareholders, it will do whatever is necessary to stay alive. If individualism proves more profitable than communalism, hundreds of trillions of dollars will be invested to ensure that individualism prevails.After all, divide and conquer is a great business model.A state of ever-emergencyWe're stuck with Covid+ forever.The Omicron variant already has thirty mutations.There will be more.We'll do our best to create vaccines against them.Some will work.People will die.Welcome to nature.Corporations and their governments will use each new surprise — be it a disease, extreme weather event, supply chain shortage, mean tweet, terrorist attack, war, or rumor of war — to pump people with anxiety, make them afraid of each other, and make them terrified to venture outside the house.If we keep on our current trajectory, here's what America's individualist-corporatist “culture” will look like in fifty years.No more restaurantsEating together is an act as old as humanity itself, but culture-making restaurants were already in trouble before Covid.Chains like Starbucks were offshoring their profits and using the proceeds to crush local coffee shops.Extractor land-lorders were draining wealth from restaurateurs via hefty commercial rents.Social anxiety rates were on the rise.Vampire companies like Uber were creating delivery apps so people could eat at home.For the next few decades, restaurant monopolies will continue to destroy the little guys, millions will go out of business as real estate costs soar to unimaginable heights, and dark kitchens will proliferate around the world.Soon, the only options will be app-ordered McDonald's cooked up by robots, or bleary-eyed delivery drivers dropping ghost kitchen meals at the doorstep of your overpriced condo rental.No more shoppingI spent my teenage life at the mall.My kids and grandkids will buy everything they want and need online and have it shipped by overworked couriers and uninterested bots.Or they'll just print it at home with a 3D printer.No more movie theatresThis goes without saying.Cinemas were dying well before Covid, as binge-worthy content proliferated on Youtube and TikTok.Plus, land-lorders will continue to drain film exhibitors of wealth via ever-rising rents; this is set against fewer and fewer people gathering in the flesh to enjoy a cinematic experience. It's only a matter of time before even WallStreetBets shorts AMC.And then there are the streamers. The CEO of Netflix says that their biggest competitor is sleep. That's funny until you realize how sad that is.The best thing that can happen to the streamers is for everyone to have an individual Netflix account, stay home, and never stop watching.And people are doing just that.No more sexOr rather, no more meaningful sex.Instead, a whole generation of children is being raised with porn in their pockets and getting wildly addicted, setting their arousal templates to pixels on a screen instead of real people.Gen Zers are already having less sex than previous generations. Just wait until VR porn really takes off — and then see what happens when sex robots get good and go mainstream.Real human bodies (and souls) just won't be able to compete.No more outdoor playFifty years from now, the world will be too hot to spend time with others outside.Or it will be too cold — climate change means greater fluctuations after all.Or there will be too much acid rain.Or too much air pollution to breathe safely.Or too much crime, thanks to poverty and a collapse in spending on policing and crime prevention.Instead, people will just stay home and play in the metaverse, Ready Player One-style.Alone.Don't get me wrong: restaurants, shopping, cinemas, and other places of culture will still exist for elites with the money to pay, but it'll be far too expensive for the serf masses.We've engineered our society for lonelinessJust take a look at all the biggest companies in the world.Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Tencent, and the banks that finance them all have a vested interest in keeping us apart from each other.They all profit from loneliness.That's why you don't hear big tech companies complaining about draconian lockdown measures. They'd rather sell surveillance tech to governments to keep people at home and spending time and money online.In the future, you'll be “connected” constantly, and “socializing” digitally, but you'll be lonelier than you've ever been. Because you'll never be about to fool your glorious, physical, homo sapien body.Your body knows that human happiness requires human togetherness.We were made for each other.And soon, practicing togetherness will be an act of resistance against the individualist-corporatist anti-culture.Want to be a revolutionary?Bring people together.Turn off your phone.Grab some friends.Cook in the park. Play soccer.Watch the moon rise.Light a campfire on the beach.Skinny dip.Sing and saunter under the stars.Grab your family and go off-grid for a week.You won't miss a thing back in the “real” world.It's quickly disappearing anyway. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

The Internet has radicalized people against their own long-term wellbeing.It's true for depressed girls who derive their self-image from Instagram.It's true for guys who seek out porn instead of real partners.It's true for boys who play video games instead of becoming useful.It's true for otherwise healthy people who become anti-vaxxers.It's true for everyday citizens who suddenly become rabid partisans.And it's especially true for the tens of millions of people who, thanks to Facebook's predatory algorithms, now believe climate change is a hoax.Every family seems to have one (or six) of them now.They don't believe in manmade climate change (and usually have a Koch Brothers-funded study to back it up.) Worst of all, they often vociferously deny that there is any possibility that humans could destroy the planet.Here's how to break through to people like this.Don't try this onlineLast week, someone on Twitter accused me of trying to incite murder.Seriously.I responded with composure and rationality, but that didn't stop him from roaring back with a second litany of lies.So I tried to take it offline:Why take of offline?Because I know for a fact that 99% of the population would never treat others the way they do online. This Twitter dude wouldn't tell me to my face over dinner that I'm trying to drum up mass murder. And if he did, we would discuss until we'd reached some sort of understanding.No one wins online.Get them highKidding.Get them drunk.Kidding again.But you get my point. Get them in the right mood first. Have a nice meal together, go for a long walk where you talk about the kids and pets, then cozy up in front of the fire with a tea and some cookies.You need to get them in a safe space before you take them well outside their comfort zone.Tell them your goal isn't to convince them of anythingAnd mean it, too.Be very upfront about your goal:Look, I know you have extremely strong opinions about climate change and how it's a total hoax, but because we're [family/friends/colleagues/inmates/etc] I would really love it if you'd give me five minutes to share my perspective. I don't need you to accept any of it, I just need you to suspend disbelief and humor me so that I can at least feel heard.Almost everyone I know will grant you this request.(If they won't, they're probably an extremely unsafe person and you need to take a big step back anyway, and let them know why.)Stop calling it global warmingGlobal-scale climate change is just too confusing for small minds.They'll say stupid stuff like, “the weather is always changing” and “we've had hot and cold periods before.”And they're right.But they're also practicing some classic third-grade misdirection and they probably don't know it.To gut them of this juvenile tactic, avoid the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.”Instead, keep it grade-school simple: Call it air pollution. That's it. Air pollution. People can deny climate change and global warming, but no sane person can say that pollution isn't real.Once you've gained that foothold, then it's simply a matter of scale.Explain how global warming actually worksTo help people understand how “air pollution” works, tell them this story or do the experiment in real-time:Imagine you have an empty fish tank or a glass cactus terrarium that's airtight and full of oxygen.Now imagine you have a heat lamp shining into the glass box. Sure, some of the heat will escape through the glass, but overall, the box and its contents are going to get hotter, right? Of course.Now, instead of oxygen (O), imagine pumping nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), and chlorofluorocarbons (aka CFCs) into the box. If you do this, the glass tank will get hotter, even though the heat lamp's temperature hasn't changed, because these particular gases trap the heat and keep it from escaping. This is called the greenhouse effect. (If you have access to a sauna, take them in and dump a load of water on the rocks to create steam. That's the greenhouse effect.)Now understand that planet Earth is literally a greenhouse. When we pump too many heat-trapping gases into our greenhouse air, we get all sorts of really neat benefits (like longer growing seasons, the ability to grow food at higher latitudes, fewer winter deaths, fewer heating costs, etc) and some truly heinous side effects (scorching temperatures, more weeds and invasive insects, torrential rainfall, more hurricanes, ocean acidification, desertification, rising cooling costs, rising sea levels, increased food costs due to irrigation needs, etc.) So you can see this comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, right? Cool.So my question to you is: Do you think it's in any way possible that humans could potentially pump so much air pollution into our global greenhouse that the negative side effects could maybe outweigh the positives?Then sit back and listen. Your goal here is simply to open their mind to the possibility that global warming could, theoretically, be possible.If your climate change deniers are like the ones in my family, this is where they'll tell you that it's pretty prideful to think that humans are so powerful that they could possibly mess up Mother Nature.This is where you acknowledge their opinion, and then step back in to offer your perspective.Help them realize how tiny planet Earth isI've been to forty countries, driven across North America five times for work, and I literally took a trip around the world for my first book, and can tell you firsthand that the world is incredibly tiny. (Back in the nineties, a commercial plane circled the whole thing in just 31 hours.)People who insist that humans can't hurt the earth simply haven't done the math:The earth is only 123 billion acres, with less than 37 billion acres of it above water.33% of that land is desert and about 24% is mountainous.Only 10.6% is considered arable.There are currently 7.91 billion people alive.Ask your climate change denier friend/uncle if they think it's theoretically possible that you could potentially wreck their half an acre of land.I know I could.I could burn it, oil it, salt it, pollute it, poison it. I could wreck it for at least a century, if not a millennia. Now add the machines of industry, the beautiful and brutal efficiency of transnational corporate capitalism, and tell me our collective consumer lifestyle couldn't possibly do the same. It's an impossible thing to deny without a huge dose of delusion.Again, your goal isn't to convince them of anything, just to open the door to the possibility that so many humans on so little a planet could theoretically do so much damage.Then show them the current scale of human impactOnce you've established that the world is comparatively small and that humans could potentially pollute the air and ruin the land, have a short discussion about the current state of human impact on nature.Be sure to mention:Residential built-up (cities, towns, villages, hamlets, neighborhoods, etc)Crop and pasturelandsGrazingOil & gas productionMining & quarryingPower generationRoadsRailwaysPowerlinesElectrical infrastructureLoggingReservoirsThis is the part where you whip out your phone or laptop and pull up Earth Engine and actually show them a map of our current impact on earth.Now get them to imagine what this map might look like if we grow to 10+ billion people and continue to grow our levels of air pollution and land pollution. Ask them how they think this could impact the world in fifty years.(Pro-tip: If they say “technology will save us,” then point out the flaw in their argument — using such a phrase admits there's a pollution problem. If there wasn't a real problem, we wouldn't need tech to save us. Which it won't.)Understand their point of viewAt this point, thank them for listening to your perspective. Let them know you really appreciate that you feel like you've been heard, and acknowledge it must've been hard for them to sit through.Then, having worked together to establish that humans could potentially do real damage to planet Earth, invite them to share their feelings on your perspective.Ask them why they still feel the need to deny global warming and climate change.Specifically, try to understand their fears.Because if there's one thing I've learned about environmental arguments, it's that it's never about the environment.It's always about politics, power, and control.Remember that your goal isn't to convince themWhen was the last time someone convinced you of something you were 100% certain of?Now you understand!This is why every human on earth (myself included) needs to work on empathy, grace, understanding, and healthy communication.Because accepting the truth is hard. And it takes time.So instead of trying to win an argument, just try to win a friendship. Instead of trying to prove global warming to a climate change denier, just aim to plant some thought seeds. If there's any chance for change in their future, those thought seeds will grow.And remember: Nature holds the trump card. Whether you believe in climate change or not, we're all going to get blasted by the negative effects.We might as well get along in the meantime. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

For nearly all of human economic history, commerce roughly functioned in the same way:Workers created value in the form of goods and services.Their products were sold to purchasers.The profits went to wealthy people who had systemic advantages over impoverished workers.But until exactly fifty years ago, things steadily improved for folks without much wealth.We went from slavery to serfdom to grueling industrial employment to believing the American Dream was actually attainable for all.Then, strange things started happening in 1971…Worker compensation flatlined:Affordability peaked:Inflation skyrocketed:National debt soared:And the number of billionaires metastasized from a literal handful — the Rockefellers, Mellons, Gettys, Hugheses, and DuPonts — to more than 2,755 billionaires worldwide today.(In case you're wondering the heck what happened in 1971, America went off the gold standard, but that's not the point of this article.)Taking control of the money supply and systematically robbing the working class via inflation was Phase One on the journey toward stuffing the middle class back into serfdom.It gets far worse from here.Phase twoFor almost all of human history, people made one-time payments and then took possession of goods and services.Not anymore.Have you noticed that everyone is pushing you into a monthly payment?Your land-lorder or mortgage lenderYour insurance companyYour heating providerYour electricity boardYour water companyYour municipality for land taxesYour phone providerYour car salesmanYour student loan gangsterYour credit card companyYour grocery delivery serviceYour razor makerAnd the fifty million apps you haven't used in two years but are too lazy to cancelSome of them make sense — if I use a variable amount of electricity over the course of a year, my energy people deserve to get paid in full in a timely manner.But now, pretty much every industry is trying to ram you into a monthly plan, whether you need or even want one: socks, tights, kid's toys, underwear, make-up, toothbrushes, meat-by-mail, veg boxes, snack boxes, pre-packaged meals, candy clubs, hot sauces, seafood, cheeses, olive oils, wine clubs, coffee blends, yoga outfits, candles, flowers, paper, art crates, Bitcoin, even outrageously wasteful things like monthly potted plants.And it makes sense.Why sell someone something once when you can keep their credit card on file and sell it to them twelve times a year forever?There's actually a name for this type of business structure: A recurring revenue model. Corporations love recurring revenue. It helps them forecast revenues, plan their spending accordingly, and most importantly, it seems to mega-boost stock prices for shareholders. It's not that we should ban all RRM businesses, it's just that we need to ensure we don't allow corporations to forever get rid of the option to own at reasonable prices.(Full disclosure: I run one RRM business — my Substack newsletter+podcast — though I've set it up so you can own a copy of every single article and episode I publish for free. And if you'd like to own a physical copy of any of my books or articles for life, please visit jaredbrock.com.)Daily consumables like food and media aside, recurring revenue models aren't actually the best thing for consumers. It would be far better if our money retained its value long-term, and we could just save up and purchase buy-it-for-life-quality goods instead of having to re-rent inferior-quality items repeatedly until the day we die broke.The poverty-making modelFirst, the elite shareholder class impoverished the contributive masses via systemic inflation and purposeful wage stagnation.Second, they got us hooked on monthly payment plans for the things we wanted and needed but couldn't afford to buy lump-sum anyway. (When was the last time you paid cash for a car or even a piece of furniture?)Now, corporate elites are working on a new scheme to steal our time, impoverish our lives, and ram us back into serfdom once and for all:The end of ownership.Phase threeAs kids, most of us used to buy movies.Physical VHS tapes, usually from Walmart. (Please don't go to Walmart.)We all owned the entire Disney collection, remember?Then Blockbuster came along and we mostly rented, but we always bought DVDs and Blu-rays of the films we knew we were going to watch again and again and again — The Godfather, Fight Club, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings.Now, if you want to watch a Netflix-produced movie or TV show, you have to pay a monthly fee. Unlike Band of Brothers or The Sopranos back in the day, there is no other legal way for you to repeatedly enjoy the content that Netflix produces unless you continue to pay for the rest of your life.We already know that people don't rent because they're broke — they're broke because they rent. Now, the shareholder class wants to extend this injustice to every facet of your life.Do you see what's happening here?Corporatism is evolving from owning the means of production to also owning the products themselves.You will own nothing and be happy, remember?This infuriates me.The perfect example is Microsoft's Word. I'm a full-time book author, and publishers bafflingly still require me to submit manuscripts in Word. But Microsoft — a $2.5 trillion company — forces me to pay $9.99 per month forever for the crappiest word processor ever created.(Interestingly, their website still uses the word “buy” on their rent button, so clearly they don't have anyone on staff with an English degree.)The same goes for my wife's Adobe editing suite — she'll have to spend more than $30,000 on it over the rest of her career. How absurd is this?First they came for my moviesWithin our lifetime, everything will become “a service,” whether we like it or not. We'll be forced to rent what we need — impoverishing us in the long run — and it will almost certainly be pitched to us as a way to “save the environment,” because the rental companies will posture like they're circular economy good guys.Think:Appliances like fridges, toasters, and washing machines (all eventually equipped with Black Mirror-style voice ID and biometric video surveillance)Furniture, including mattressesLaptops, phones, gaming chairsLiterally every physical item you ownAnd do you know what?We won't be able to afford to own anything anyway.Because once any human necessity is commodified as an investment, it's eventually sold to the highest bidder, which is always an extractive, tax-evading, anti-human, multinational investment corporation.It's already happening with houses, which are well on their way to $10 million.Cars will be completely out of reach within a decade or two.Furniture-as-a-service startups are already a thing. (Imagine paying $128/month just to sleep in a bed. Made of foam!)The hyper-elitist World Economic Forum thinks you won't even own your underwear within nine years.Think about it another way: What does a mattress cost at IKEA, maybe six or eight hundred bucks? But what is a mattress's market value to an investor if it rents for $99/month on a 36-month lease?Can you afford a $3500 mattress?A pair of shoes from Target might be fifty bucks today, but in the hands of a $9 trillion-dollar shark like Blackrock, it could cost you $500 not to be bare-foot.Now add another twenty years of inflation, wage stagnation, work gigification, and robotic automation.Friends, I'm looking at the future and I'm seeing a world where it's mathematically impossible for the masses NOT to be enslaved.You already don't have the option to buy Netflix movies. Soon, you won't have the choice or ability to purchase homes, cars, clothes, or anything else.Can you believe how insane our economy is?We do all the productive work.We do all the purchasing that keeps the economy going.They get all the profits.They own all the products.A societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to toil for rich elites just to survive already has a name: It's called feudalism.Welcome to our future.Calls to actionMoney talks. We the market can still make demands of the corporations that are working to rule our lives and press us into subscription serfdom.Here's how we can fight back:Refuse to give your hard-earned money to any business that won't outright sell you the things you want and need.Refuse to give your hard-earned money to any business that forces you onto a nearly-impossible-to-cancel monthly plan in order to access their services.Start companies that sell one-time services and fully-owned products.To avoid wasting years of your life paying to rent cheaper-quality versions in the future, acquire buy-it-for-life-quality possessions now.De-commodify your life as much as possible and accept the reality that the “free” market is a black market that always ends in monopoly.Get into politics and pass a law called the Right to Own Act.(If you have any other ideas, pop them in the comments and I'll add the best ones to this article.)What's interesting about the end of ownership for the masses is that it's just the beginning of ownership for the elites. They ultimately want to own the same thing that their feudal ancestors owned:They want to own us. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

This opening statement will immediately lose me about a quarter of the reading public, but someone has to say it:Boomers are to blame for at least half the world's current troubles.They plunged us into generational wars in the Middle East.They ditched the gold standard and skyrocketed inflation.They caused the Great Recession.They caused the current housing crisis and asset bubble.They approved and racked up $29 trillion in federal debt.They set the time bomb that is Social Security.They killed two-thirds of all wildlife on earth.They caused the climate change that's ravaging our planet.And they've been turning a profit from it the whole time.Don't believe me?Just Google any Fortune 500 and take a look at its board of directors, C-suite officers, and major shareholders.While I won't go quite so far as one author who argues compellingly that they are a generation of sociopaths who betrayed America, did you know that Boomers are statistically low on empathy? (Just wait ‘til the comments on this article roll in.) Blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that:a.) life is hard for everyone, and b.) on average, no one has had it easier.Never has a generation extracted so much from a planet and the next generation. Their behaviors and policies are unlike any generation before or after them. They live by the code of “me first and damn the consequences.” Since they took control of Congress in the eighties, they've refused to invest in research and development, education, healthcare, crime prevention, or even basic maintenance to the nation's crumbling infrastructure.A writer for CNBC says Millennials will inherit $68 trillion from Boomers in the next eight years, but evidently, the not-so-sharp reporter forgot that there's a whole other generation between Boomers and Millennials.Also, quick newsflash: Boomers aren't leaving a cent to their Gen X kids. They're in amazing shape thanks to medical advances, so they're golfing and cruising far longer, and when they do eventually slow down, they'll burn whatever's left of their runway on wildly-overpriced old folks' homes and end-of-life care, eventually relying on their kids to cover the shortfall.The Me Generation took a free trip at the planet's expense and is hellbent on taking the rest of it with them.And you're paying for it.Here are the four big mechanisms by which they're forcing future generations to bankroll their ride into the sunset:1. EducationNot that you even needed a post-secondary education (only 12% went), but when Boomers went off to university, it literally cost pennies.Now, thanks to education inflation, students “need” a six-figure master's degree just to serve coffee for minimum wage.And those degrees will literally cost them a decade or more of debt servitude to pay off. The total US student debt is now at a staggering $1.75 trillion, and it's still climbing like an American Gladiator being shot with tennis balls.Did I mention that the federal student debt program somehow loses the government over $100 billion per year? Take a guess which taxpayers will be footing the bill…2. WorkWhen Boomers left college (or high school, or even grade school), they went straight to work at union jobs that enjoyed steady wage increases for the entire duration of their careers.Now, armed with several degrees and desperate to pay off their student loans, young people are reluctantly going to work for corporate socialists, money-losing zombie disruptors, multinational tax evaders, or predatory gig companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure they never have employee rights, all to enrich the shareholders of multinational predator corporations who continue to undermine worker rights and political democracy.3. HousingIn the Carey Grant comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the protagonist goes exorbitantly over-budget and ends up building a house that cost a then-unheard-of 2.5 times his annual salary.That's Boomerdom in a nutshell.When Boomers bought their first houses, they only cost about two or three times their annual single-earner average income. Now that Boomers can't find ways to contribute to the productive economy, they've turned to real estate as a sure-fire way to extract wealth from productive young people, hoovering up Airbnbs, rental properties, and condos, enjoying skyrocketing property “values” thanks to purposefully-restricted supply.Now, as they get ready to make their exit, they expect “the kids” to pay absurd prices for crumbling housing stock, leaving the oldies cash-rich and the rest noosed for life.Meanwhile, young people are battling bloated consumer prices and crushing rent in all fifty states, forcing them to save more and for far longer, before eventually purchasing an outrageously overpriced house — fourteen times higher than what Boomers paid — by taking on a lifetime of bank debt.4. TaxesSocial Security is the biggest pyramid scheme (and ticking time bomb) in human history.Before Boomers, 32% of federal tax dollars were spent on investments. Today, forty percent of government spending gets incinerated by social insurance, retirement, health benefits, Medicare, and Medicaid. By 2030, entitlements will devour 61% of public funding, crippling the nation for generations to come.Boomer-controlled Congress forces contributing workers to pay for it mostly through payroll taxes, yet the fund is conveniently expected to run dry in 2034 when the median Boomer is dead.Guess who's going to enjoy massive, lifelong increases in taxation to fund the shortfall for Gen X, yet almost certainly end up with nothing left when it's time for them to retire at age 88?You.And even if you know how to evade taxes like a billionaire, they're already taxing you an extra 10+% another way: Through that wealth-robbing silent tax called inflation.You are their exit planIf you are under the age of forty, you are being systematically compelled to bankroll people over the age of sixty in more ways than you can imagine:You are expected to work for low wages at their companies.You are expected to hand over a huge portion of those over-taxed wages to rent their income properties.You are expected to turn a profit for the companies in their stock portfolio.You are expected to buy their overpriced houses when they decide to sell.You are expected to finance that massive purchase by paying them interest for much of your adult life.You are expected to shoulder the national debt they're so happily expanding by billions every day.You are expected to fork over a huge portion of your income as taxation to support their favored programs (including neverending wars and subsidizing their largest corporations.)You are expected to use a currency that they're constantly devaluing.You are expected to pay into the pyramid schemes to fund their retirements.No wonder Millennials are four times poorer than Boomers at their age.In all fairness…Some of the nicest people I know are Boomers. And some of Surviving Tomorrow's most committed readers are folks aged 60+ who are working hard to right the wrongs of their peers.And, sadly, there are millions of Boomers who've had genuinely horrible lives and have struggled to survive every single day of their existence. They know what it's like to be a Millennial, Gen Zer, or Gen Alpha(-er?)Life under Boomer corporatism is a hard struggle. I've witnessed it with my own grandparents and wife's grandparents. Old age care and the government literally bankrupted the four most beloved elders in my life.So I know it's not all Boomers that are to blame for exploiting the next generation. Society should have changed its systems to treat them far better, and it definitely needs to learn from the past and not repeat those same mistakes again on a 100+ million-person scale.Instead, what are Boomers leaving behind?The biggest national debt in human history, an unaddressed climate disaster, a Social Security insolvency crisis, and a nation enslaved in generational debt to multinational predator corporations. Well done, folks.Again, not everything can be blamed on Boomers — their parents invented the atomic bomb, after all. And my generation, Millennials, will have to answer for addicting a generation to hardcore pornography, time-devouring social media, and the addictive loneliness machine called the metaverse.We can fix thisAnd it's really not even that complicated:To fix education: Declare a student debt jubilee so they can spend that wasted money into the productive economy, then invest in education by extending publically-funded education through university… and reap a 13X return on investment for doing so.To fix work: Create a legit-living-wage-plus-benefits job guarantee so “the market” (aka democracy) forces predatory corporations to treat workers like human employees instead of dogs.To fix housing: Make homeownership permanently affordable by banning Airbnb, for-profit residential land-lording, and investment in residential real estate, plus smash the zoning boards and allow the private sector to construct tens of millions of affordable owner-occupied-only eco-homes.To fix taxation: Freeze tax increases and this insane money printing, get rid of almost all government services, and replace them with unconditional, asset-funded, universal basic income.But of course, none of this will happen because a literal dementia patient sits in the Oval Office, and Boomer-controlled corporations run Boomer-controlled Congress.Instead, Gen Z and Gen Alpha get to look forward to a lifetime of extreme student debt, demoralizing underpaid lifelong wage-slavery to enrich democracy-destroying corporate elites, completely out-of-reach homeownership, outrageous taxes, and wealth-destroying inflation.No wonder a growing number of young people hope older folks die miserable and impoverished— it's how they're being forced to live their entire lives. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Have you been following the situation in Ethiopia?Of course you haven't.No one has the time or mental fortitude to endure the unending amount of conflict that happens between human beings on planet earth.The only reason I keep up with Ethiopia is that's where my wife grew up.Briefly: Colonialists left Africa in a terrible state, in which various tribes were smashed together into single nations, while others sought to grab new territory in the wake of colonial retrenchment.Ethiopia is one of those latter places (but also was kinda-sorta colonized by Italy, which is why it still has such great pasta. It's complicated.)Home to five official languages and eighty different ethnic groups, Ethiopia is a powder keg for conflict with a growing population and depleting resources. One people group has already managed to splinter off: Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia came at the high price of 250,000 people dead.Now, essentially two tribes in Ethiopia — Tigray in the north, Oromo in the south — are trying to destroy each other. The Tigrayans are an ancient Spartan-style warrior tribe, and they're so desperate for self-rule that they've started killing Ethiopian citizens. Things have gotten so bad that the Prime Minister of Ethiopia has ordered all military to protect the capital from falling, and is sending in Turkish combat drones. In twenty years, we might look back on the conflict and call it the next Rwanda.It makes you wonder:Maybe Ethiopia would be better off as two, ten, or even eighty smaller nations.It's the same all over the world:Spain's arcane monarchy oppresses several distinct cultures including Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, Castile, Catalonia, Galicia, León, Navarre, Valencia, and Aran Valley.Anglophone Canada just celebrated its 150th anniversary a few years ago, but it rules over a French-speaking nation that's 400 years old.A certain 1.45 billion-person Eastern nation that cannot be named rules over at least four other countries with brutal authoritarian force.Want peace in the Middle East? Try a nine-state solution.The United Kingdom is a laughable misnomer. The Welsh hate the English. The Scottish hate the English. The Cornish hate the English. Half the Northern Irish just call themselves Irish. The United Kingdom contains at least five countries, and all are essentially colonies of the City of London Corporation. [Update: English people, stop saying this isn't true. I live in Wales and it's front-and-center every single day.]There are more than five thousand Indigenous nations across the globe, totaling nearly half a billion people.The gig is upYoung people are waking up to an obvious fact that many older folks (especially those who murdered people who carried a different team flag) simply cannot fathom:Nations are legal fictions.Just bits of paper and a bunch of people who agree to play by the paper's rules.Yes, there are some benefits to nationalism.There are also heavy costs.People are rightly starting to question the value of nation-states as they are currently arranged.What is the purpose of a nation?To preserve a unique culture?To express a political ideology?To propagate a religion?To organize an economy?At the end of the day, I believe every nation is just an experiment in what it means to live well.And currently, almost every nation on earth is on a downward trajectory, if not failing miserably.The end of big countriesLarge nations are unwieldy.The bureaucracy it takes to run a 300+ million person nation proves economically inefficient in the extreme.Democracy crumbles because it's hard to get real representation at scale.And there are so many disparate opinions that disagreements become intractable.When working together inevitably fails, one party dominates through coercion, violence, or worse.In a nuclear age where going to war will destroy everyone and everything, there's no longer a need to have a vast population to defend your borders.We just don't need big countries anymore.An introduction to Tinyism“Tinyism is a political philosophy that believes current empires and nations should be fractured, shattered, and dissolved into thousands of independent micro-states and city-states. This action would vastly improve democracy and enhance economies — recent statistics indicate small nations are usually the happiest, wealthiest, and most peaceful.” — Hank PellissierHere's my prediction:Within one hundred years, there will be at least one hundred new nations on planet earth.But there could be plenty more.After all, there are 650 major ethnic groups, about 9,800 cultural-ethno-linguistic groups, and up to 24,000 unimax groups.(Plus there are 108,000 publicly-listed corporations, all of which will be chomping for a private domain in the years ahead… though not one should get it.)Why shouldn't ethnic groups have the right to self-sovereignty, especially for the hundreds who've had their sovereignty stolen? Isn't it inherently racist for one ethnicity to impose its will on another ethnic group?After a major disruptive event — a colossal economic depression, a cyberwar or solar flare that knocks out the grid for a year or more, or a supervolcano that causes years of winter — we could see the emergence of tens of thousands of new sovereignties.And that would be a very good thing.In praise of tinyWhen you have a smaller population, you can have a smaller bureaucracy.When you have a smaller population, you can have more representation and democracy.When you have a smaller population, you can avoid getting pushed around by groups that don't share your values.When you have a smaller population, you can better preserve unique cultures, races, religions, economic systems, histories, societal structures, and experiments in what it means to live well.When you have a smaller population, you can have fewer rules, fewer laws, and more freedom.And if you don't like your tiny country, you now have far more other options to choose from.“But what about national defense?!”It's a legitimate fear, but it's worth noting that small nations are some of the safest nations on earth.And luckily, returns to violence are drastically decreasing in the digital economy. There's just less stuff to steal and fewer resources to exploit.Quite paradoxically, being more “vulnerable” makes you learn to get along. New sovereignties will do well to form an alliance with hundreds of other city-states. Like NATO, attacking one would be like attacking all. Plus, new sovereignties will move swiftly to ink trade deals with hundreds of other nations to further increase the cost of war and the value of peace.Pretty soon, everyone will get along because there's no other choice.The return of the city-stateThe world is urbanizing and power is accruing to cities. Already in America, we're seeing mayors defy state and national mandates in order to protect and defend their citizens (or just rebel for political reasons, depending on your point of view.)There's no reason to think that many cities won't eventually just become laws unto themselves.I'm excited for this to happen. After all, some of the most beautiful places on earth started out as tiny little cities, and their historic urban cores are still beautiful all these centuries later:Paris was 25 acres.Athens was 35 acres.Lille was 60 acres.Vatican City is 109 acres.Oxford was 115 acres.Old Jerusalem is 225 acres.The City of London is 330 acres.Monaco is 499 acres.Rome was 608 acres.The walls of Avila, one of the most gorgeous sights on earth, surround just 77 acres.What will become of America?Nearly half of all Americans want to secede from the union in one direction or another.And that's perfectly within their rights as human beings.Others protest loudly that the union must be preserved at all costs. But they never seem to answer the all-important question:What are we actually trying to preserve?Our lack of shared values? The sham of democracy? McDonald's and apple pie and baseball?Think long and hard about this question — no matter what conclusion you reach, you'll find that it simply doesn't resonate with the majority of Americans.And what's preferable: A few dozen independent countries, or another civil war?(31% of Americans think a civil war is likely within the next five years, with Democrats thinking it's more likely.)So why not take the bloated carcass that is the American corporatocracy and carve it up into a handful of actual democracies?With any luck, we could see some pretty amazing things come out of the USA:Washington and Oregon will become Cascadia and rebuild the rainforest.Utah will rename itself Deseret and grab a chunk of Nevada.New England will be the world's purveyor of blueberries, maple syrup, and winter skiing adventures.32% of Californians already support Calexit, which will make it the fifth-biggest economy in the world (ahead of the UK, France, Italy, India, and hundreds more.)The Plains Nation will continue to feed the world as a giant agrarian commune, likely swarmed with bitcoin-loving libertarian “sovereign individuals.”Texas (or rather, the Hispanic-majority República de Tejas) will have the eleventh largest military on earth, the tenth-largest economy, its own power grid, and enough solar and wind power to be a net clean energy exporter.Las Vegas will obviously become the American Amsterdam.Minorities will pour out of Dixie, plunging the Deep South into social chaos and economic depression — and perhaps the Confederacy will finally learn the lessons they were supposed to learn from the Civil War. (Or maybe it becomes New Afrika and all the whites head for Florida.)New York City CorpTM (12th-largest economy) will become the first city-state with skyscrapers to be fully underwater due to rising sea levels.(I'm not saying this is exactly what the American continent could look like in fifty years. It's far more likely that corporate-controlled “sovereign cities” will emerge first, in places like Nevada and Texas.)What's compelling about Tinyism is that the more experiments we run, the more we'll discover what works and doesn't work. Clearly, Sweden is better than North Korea. But is the Texan way better than the California way? With Tinyism, we'll know pretty quickly. In that sense, Tinyism is almost free-market, with the political “market” being democracy itself.Tinyism is inevitableHave you noticed that society is fracturing?Do you think that extreme left wokies are ever going to find common ground with ultra-right Q-Anoners?It's just not going to happen.There will come a day when the USA falls apart. Will it be a massive economic depression? The Yellowstone Caldera finally erupting?Donald Trump becoming President whether he's elected or not?Even without a mega-event, there's an unstoppable tide that all but guarantees a breakdown of these united states: Individualism.Individualism, by its very nature, is an anti-culture.As Russ Linton put it:“Decentralization and blockchain tech will ensure this happens. Fiat currencies will be worthless and with that, the power of a nation-state largely evaporates. DAO communities, both digitally and geographically-bound, are what the future holds.”We in the rich West have enjoyed a lifetime of unlimited selection, and this atomization mentality will eventually seep its way into politics. As the speed of change escalates, it could happen far sooner than we think.And that's okay.I believe in the unconditional right of cultural and communal (but not corporate) sovereignty, and support all independence efforts toward Tinyism, so long as the leaving party takes their fair portion of the national debt and repays all federal infrastructure investment.The key will be to have some kind of pre-agreed-upon sorting/transition process, like a peaceful version of the Hindustan breakup into India and Pakistan, followed by hopefully-less-dysfunctional EU (but without a shared currency) so the states all get along as the founding fathers intended.Will this happen?It depends.Tinyism in America may likely only work once Tinyism sets in everywhere — especially in Ch!na. We need a huge drop in returns to violence before unique cultures can become sovereign nations. Only then will smaller countries be allowed to flourish. And do you know what? It's going to seem impossible until the very moment it seems obvious. Change is a long time coming and then it happens overnight.On one hand, some corporate predator elites have a vested interest in keeping America together so they can wield its collective might overseas.On the other hand, there are hundreds of corporations with larger market caps than many countries, and corporatists are itching to free themselves from any sort of democratic governance. That's why I think Tinyism is inevitable.Corporate countries aside, Tinyism could create a great leap forward in human innovation, creativity, and culture-making, as real democracies create real diversity, reversing our long and boring descent into multinational sameness.I'm cheering for a twenty-nation America and a 10,000-nation earth.It's either that, or we become a corporate-controlled one-nation earth where everyone conforms or gets crushed.And no one wants that. 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Today I'm joined by Doomberg, one of the hottest newsletters on Substack. In this episode, we discuss:Why gas prices are soaringThe cryptocurrency pyramid bubbleWhy you should care more about miningDystopian governmental surveillance currenciesOutrageous insider trading in WashingtonWhy you should stock three months of groceries ASAPThe future of sustainable energyWhy British people could freeze to death this winter thanks to RussiaListen above or watch on Youtube, check out all of Doomberg's great insights, and please share it with anyone who might find it insightful. (And if you like this email, please hit the heart button so Substack shares it with more people!) Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Dear friends,We have a very special treat today. I'm joined by bestselling author and acclaimed idler Tom Hodgkinson. Things get pretty heavy here on Surviving Tomorrow, so Tom is an enjoyable antidote to all the troubles and challenges we're navigating in this corporate-controlled world.In this episode, we talk about idleness, lazy parenting, living in the country, ancient philosophy, the metaverse, politics, and how to design a life that you actually love.Listen above or watch the video below, and be sure to check out all of Tom's books, articles, and courses on The Idler.Enjoy the episode, and please share it with someone who will enjoy a listen. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

I grew up terrified of water shortages.Every summer, the newspapers and radio blared the dire warnings:We're in a crisis.We're running out of water.Our aquifer is nearly dry.Take shorter showers.Wash your dishes by hand.Only drink what you need.Watering your lawn is absolutely forbidden.I never once took a shower that wasn't rushed.Baths were exclusively for special occasions.(My dad, in an attempt to save money, did nothing to assuage my fears.)But it turns out the whole water-shaming gambit was a scam.While 100,000 tax-paying citizens scrimped and saved on water, Nestlé was stealing 976 million liters from our city's aquifer each year.When their contract came up for renewal, I put in a bid of $4.00 per million liters, a whopping 7.8% more than the $3.71 per million liters Nestlé was paying to drain our town dry, but our corrupt government turned me down.Nestlé now legally takes 1.3 billion liters per year just from my town, and water-shaming the public continues.There's a stretch of highway in Port Talbot, Wales, that makes me furious.The speed limit drops from 70MPH to 50MPH.It's enforced with dozens of cameras that calculate your average speed and automatically mails an outrageous fine to your house if you go over.Because of the drop in speed, traffic backs up for miles. It takes at least twenty minutes to slog through, every time.Which gives you enough time to read the mass-shaming roadside signs:Pollution kills.Slow down, save lives.Speeding causes cancer.Poor air quality kills, reduce your speed.But being stuck in traffic also gives you time to look around at the city you're supposedly helping to save from horrible respiratory diseases.It's covered in smokestacks.There's no other way to say it: Port Talbot is a Shittsburg, a refinery town that enriches a few corporate shareholders and causes thousands of deaths each year due to heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma.In fact, it's the most polluted place in the United Kingdom.But, rather than fining, regulating, or shutting down the corporations that are spewing the vast majority of the poisons that are literally murdering people, Britain pollution-shames its drivers and fines tens of thousands of middle-class drivers each year for not “doing their part.”My astute readers will know exactly where I'm going with thisThe sociopaths who run the government think it's time that the masses no longer deserve to eat meat.And there's an easy way to keep the bottom half from eating meat while enriching the anti-social elites who run the cartel:Just tax it out of our budget range.Beef prices are already up 50% since last year.Most people already can't afford filet mignon — if ground beef goes to $40/pound, almost everyone I know will save tacos for their birthday. Pretty soon, beef will be the next caviar or champagne.And in the meantime, they'll weaponize our honor-shame culture to shame us into avoiding meat.Yes, we absolutely need to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But after centuries of poisoning us for profit, corporations now want us to make lifestyle changes so they can continue to turn a profit from emitting greenhouse gases.But we know what they also know:Meat isn't the problemIn America, agriculture makes up just 10% of greenhouse gas emissions:Globally, the picture seems a bit worse at first…But that's only until you read the fine print:So, animals are responsible for somewhere in the ballpark of 19.2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Even without any offsets, it's still less than a quarter of the total.In other words: The overwhelming majority of GHGs are caused by transport, industry, and power/heat production.(And animals aren't farting nitrous oxide, CFCs, and all the other lethal poisons that we should be really worried about.)Just take a look at the leading emitter of each greenhouse gas:Notice what's not on the leading source for any single greenhouse gas?Animals.They simply aren't the main problem. (And even for the one GHG that cows emit the second most, there are tons of companies working on methane capture — I've seen two projects in action myself.)But instead of going after the corporations that are literally murdering hundreds of thousands of people each year, what do corporate-controlled governments do?Meat-shame us like it's our fault.George Monbiot rightly calls this micro-consumerist bollocks:“Tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we're doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.”If only we'd stop watering our lawns… driving so fast… and eating hamburgers?Transport: Could easily go all-electric.Industry: Could easily go all-electric.Power/heat production: Could easily go geothermal and hydro and tidal.But these are three of the strongest lobby-bribing groups in the world.Heck, Chevron would rather send people to prison than pay fines they legally owe for poisoning tens of thousands of people.Obviously, they'll keep polluting until the moment we put them out of business.Corporations could transition to 100% renewables within a year if they chose to re-allocate, but they'd rather do the thing we tell children not to do:Bully the weak.I call bull$#!tLiteral bull$#t is what keeps our soil alive.For thousands of years, hundreds of millions of ruminants sustainably roamed the plains of North America and Europe and Asia, fertilizing the soil and supplying homo sapiens with unlimited amounts of life-giving protein and fat.If the market for ruminants is systematically destroyed, it's not like the government is going to let all the Angus and Plains Bison and Longhorns just go wild and re-populate the plains.Once ruminant populations are decimated, they'll become sideshows in zoos, museums, and circuses.In other words, the #1 creator of natural soil on planet earth will simply cease to exist……leaving us more reliant on AgTech companies to produce synthetic soils and fertilizers to keep our desperate dirt producing food for a 10+ billion person world.Getting rid of meat animals is quite literally anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-future.We need way more bull$#!t, not less.There are good reasons to go vegetarian or vegan, to be sure.It's “more humane”Some people argue that it's cruel to slaughter animals to eat. I agree — in fact, after helping an organic farmer friend kill a bunch of Christmas turkeys for his clients, I went vegetarian for a whole year.But do you know what's even worse than quickly and instantly killing turkeys in an abattoir? When a coyote or fox or wolf or rat shreds one to pieces in the wild.Humans are undeniably cruel to each other, but we're nicer to animals than anything they encounter in nature.Just Google “cheetah attacks antelope” or “crocodile devours wildebeest.”Can we do better than the current monopoly model? Absolutely. Slaughterhouses are horrible. We need to return to the ancient ways of natural, sustainable meat harvesting.It's “healthier”Healthwise, there are certainly benefits to going veg/vegan versus the Standard American Diet (SAD.)But that's also true for keto, paleo, and carnivore diets. Pretty much anything beats corporate-created sugar-filled American “food.”And the longest-lived people in the world still eat meat, so that rules out the longevity argument.It's “cleaner”To be clear, modern mass-scale beef farming is horrible for the environment.Eating two feedlot burgers per week for a year creates as much greenhouse gas as heating a house for three months. Plus all the chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and deforestation are having disastrous consequences for the environment. Modern monopoly beef is bad.Consumers have demanded cheap meat, and farmers have gone to desperate measures to stay in business, which is why the Midwest is littered with horrendous mega-feedlots.But remember, homo sapiens once ate meat sustainably and ecologically for millennia.The corporatist monopolies who control BigAg are a serious problem, and there is room for lots of innovation — and returning to the ancient ways. To their credit, beef farmers globally have committed to cutting their environmental impact by 30% within eight years, which is way better than the fossil fuel industry. But ruminants aren't the ultimate problem — humans are.If we drew down the human population to a reasonable figure, and returned animals to wildland, we could eat meat sustainably forever. I respect vegetarian and vegan views and even applaud them (my sister, after all, has been a vegetarian for nearly twenty years), but that's not the point of the article-- it's not to make a judgment about the morality/immorality of eating meat or even the environmental sustainability of meat in an overpopulated world, but simple to question the financial motives behind the coercive transition. My concern is always about corporate corruption. And I see lots of it here.We need to get back to carbon-negative, soil-positive, regenerative, natural, sustainable, family-stewarded, wild meat protein production.It's not the cow, it's the how.Getting to (actual) sustainabilitySome people put forward the extremely weak argument that if everyone in the developing world ate as much meat as Westerners do, it wouldn't be sustainable.And that's absolutely true.But is that meat's fault?As history has clearly proven, eating meat is absolutely sustainable — it's the human population that's grown unsustainable.Remember: humans have eaten meat sustainably since the beginning of time.What changed: animals, or us?The real fix to the “unsustainable meat crisis” is a massive draw-down of homo sapiens, not cows.Instead of taxing beef, why not stop subsidizing childbirth?Why not incentivize having less kids?Why not streamline and incentivize fostering and adoption?No, I'm not talking about an idiotic one-child policy, force sterilizations, or any of that nonsense.People can do what they want and have as many kids as they want — so long as the rest of us don't have to pay for it.And we should definitely re-direct all that meat-shaming toward having thoughtful conversations about a.) overpopulation and b.) the real poisoners of the planet.So why are we ACTUALLY meat-shaming the masses?“I think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.” — Bill Gates (who emits 107X more carbon emissions than the average person)Cicero and the Romans asked a good question:“Cui bono?”Who profits?There are two leading contenders:1. Today's pollutersBanning meat isn't about “saving the planet” any more than my hometown cared about saving water or the UK cares about the health of people in Port Talbot — it's all about allowing the bona fide criminals to continue to pollute for a profit.Making meat unaffordable for the masses buys polluters a little more time to poison us into oblivion for short-term profits.2. Tomorrow's food manufacturersIf you follow the money, you soon realize that all this meat-shaming (including most of the popular anti-meat documentaries) are actually just another corporate ruse to conjure up a market for vegan products:Consider:Beyond Meat is already a $6 billion company, and its largest investor is Al Gore's Kleiner-Perkins.Impossible Foods is aiming for a $7 billion valuation, backed by Serena Williams.Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson are all backing a new vegan meat startup.Sadly, “saving the planet” has become a trojan horse for new industries to gain protein market share.The natural meat industry is far from perfect, and we would do well to ban feedlots and smash meat monopolies like Tyson and Cargill while supporting the family farm like never before, but getting rid of hundreds of millions of soil-producing animals will have disastrous long-term consequences for planet earth.Oh, and also jobs.The American meat industry alone contains more than 5.4 million jobs — synthetic vegan “food,” on the other hand, is already being mass-produced in automated factories.Trust natureCall me old-fashioned, but I don't want to eat factory-engineered synthetic foods made by corporations with massive conflicts of interest.And don't tell me beef can't be sustainable.I get my grass-fed beef from the multi-generational farm beside my wife's office, from animals reared on commons land that has been sustainably feeding cows and humans for at least 5,000 years.It takes a galling amount of hubris to think that indoor-manufactured factory vegan “food” is better than nature's way, and that cows are the problem when clearly it's humans that are overpopulated.The historic facts are undeniable: Homo sapiens adapted to natural, outdoor, organic food over an untold number of generations, and I don't for a second buy the notion that tomorrow's fake factory foods won't have dire outcomes for our fragile species.All this false food is and will lead to further systemic malnutrition — which is, of course, perfectly acceptable to private medicine, Big Pharma, and the politicians they sponsor.We need to trust nature again, not “the market.”There is zero doubt in my mind that weaning homo sapiens off of the traditional protein sources that have sustainably sustained our species for millennia in favor of factory-created synthetic foods will not be positive for the long-term wellbeing of our global family.But hey, at least another billionaire will get rich. 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Everybody loves billionaire Warren Buffett.Heck, even I love Warren Buffett.All that cute aww-shucks Midwest yokelism.All those adorable grandfatherly folksy words of wisdom.All those video clips of him slurping Coke, chomping McDonald's breakfast sandwiches, and spooning Dairy Queen sundaes like a six-year-old.Just your everyday pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps country boy (whose dad happened to be a stockbroker-turned-four-term libertarian Republican Congressman at a time when insider trading was legal for legislators and who got his buddies to bankroll his son's investment business.)Living humbly in his “modest” itty-bitty tiny little 6,570 square foot mansion.Jet-setting around on his multi-million-dollar private plane which he named “The Indefensible” (isn't that clever?)Amassing a personal fortune of more than $100,000,000,000.With polls regularly saying he's one of the most trusted men in America.Because he's a “good billionaire,” remember?……Why do we fall for such cockamamie PR campaigns?Death Inc.For more than fifty years, Warren Buffett has grown rich from his stakes in:Chevron, a company that has destroyed habitat and lives for more than a century and just last week became the first corporation to send a man to prison.Coca-Cola, a brutal monopoly that has subsumed more than 400 competitor brands, stolen water rights from millions, lobbied against ending Xinjiang forced labor, and is contributing greatly to the global diabetes crisis.Wells-Fargo, possibly the most rotten bank in American history, which is embroiled in unending criminal activities including racketeering, creating millions of fake accounts without customer consent, and practicing straight-up organizational racism.Visa, Mastercard, and Amex, predatory companies that have debt-trapped hundreds of millions of people and are leading contributors to the unsustainable economy that is bankrupting families and destroying society.Apple, a company that knowingly used child labor for years (and probably still does), engages in massive amounts of illegal anti-competitive activity, and has offshored more than $250 billion, withholding taxation from the communities they profit from.Johnson & Johnson, nicknamed a “kingpin” company for selling billions of dollars worth of opioids.Moody's Corporation, one of the crooked ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to highly-toxic CDOs, setting off the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and causing the bankruptcy and eviction of millions of families.Suncor, the sixth-largest polluter in Canada, known for polluting the Athabasca River, falsifying records, and poisoning children.You get the point.The list goes on and on and on.Literally hundreds of subsidiaries and thousands of crimes.We used to have a term for people who made their money by destroying the planet, abusing women and minorities, and benefiting from thousands of global-scale crimes against humanity:Inmates.And then there are his taxes — or lack thereofConsidering how much wealth Warren Buffett has extracted from society, he doesn't come anywhere close to contributing his fair share to the nation.Over a five year period, Buffett grew his wealth by $24.3 billion but paid just 0.10% tax on it:Even by “standard” tax accounting ($23.7M / $125M income), he's paying just 18.9% income tax… far less than the average working family.Sure, Buffett admits that the tax system needs fixing.But pushing words out of your mouth isn't nearly enough to create actual equality in society — not when billionaires and their corporations control the very Congress that's supposed to tax and regulate them.Warren Buffett has, in fact, popularized a new tax evasion model by which most billionaires now avoid paying the costs of civilization:“Buffett has famously held onto his stock in the company he founded, Berkshire Hathaway. That has allowed Buffett to largely avoid transforming his wealth into income. Berkshire does not pay a dividend, [which has enabled him to avoid] hundreds of millions in taxes each year.Many Silicon Valley and infotech companies have emulated Buffett's model, eschewing stock dividends… companies like Microsoft and Oracle offered shareholders rocketing growth and profits but did not pay dividends. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla do not pay dividends.”The end result?More than half of all American billionaire wealth is now permanently held as unrealized gains — totally untaxable by the public, yet billionaires can borrow cheaply against their wealth to fund their absurdly lavish lifestyles and weaponize their wealth to amass ever more power and control of the global economy.Whether billionaire sycophants like it or not, we clearly need a billionaire wealth tax because elites no longer trigger income tax, dividends tax, and capital gains tax.But he's giving all his money to charity!No, friends, he's not.True charity directly helps the poorest people in society.Philanthrocapitalism isn't charity.It's an expression of power that leads to a transfer of power to the elites.Philanthrocapitalism is a means by which billionaire elites evade taxation, retain their family wealth perpetually, and control the fates of millions of others by shaping public policy. (Buffett's business partner, in fact, is currently building a dystopian college dorm that doesn't have windows.)The vast majority of Buffett's wealth will end up in the hands of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is the same institution that's lobbying hard for Orwellian digital surveillance Covid passports (paper ones will do, Bill), gives billions in grants to private companies, wants us all to eat lab-grown synthetic meat, and plans to geoengineer the planet by blotting out the stars.Let's face it, billionaire charity is just another rich-person swindle — a desperate attempt to salve the masses and keep them from demanding a real social safety net. We don't need their peanuts in charity; we need them to pay their taxes.And remember: for every “decent” philanthropic billionaire, there are ten Saudi dictators, libertarian surveillance-loving anarcho-capitalists like Peter Thiel, and oil magnates like Charles Koch, whose foundations rammed through Citizens United — the horrendous democracy-destroying Supreme Court ruling that make corporations human beings in the eyes of the law.So much for “charity.”We need a new global economic system“Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system. The [current] system is a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity…” — Anand Giridharadas, The New York TimesEvery honest person knows there's no such thing as “putting your money to work for you.” You're just weaponizing your capital to put others to work for you.This raises an interesting question:What, exactly, has Warren Buffett contributed to society that warrants his $100+ billion net worth?The answer: Rich people gave him their money, he used it to purchase extraction machines (called corporations), and then used the profits to buy more extraction machines.That's it.By comparison, the average worker in one of the companies Buffett controls (you know, the active contributors who create 100% of the value of the stock) making $20 per hour, would have to work full-time for 2.5 million years to actually earn the wealth Buffett possesses.(Conversely, if Berkshire Hathaway was equally owned by its 360,000 employees, every single one would be a millionaire.)Clearly, our system isn't working for achieving any sense of fairness, care for the planet, dignity for the productive contributor workers, or widest-spread wellbeing.And that's the real goal, isn't it?Forget this dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all-loser-dies-in-poverty nonsense.We're a literal family, and we need to start acting like it.LegacyDespite the actual facts surrounding Warren Buffett's life work, I still can't find a way to dislike him.He's just too cute.His hagiographers have created an aura that seems almost impenetrable.It's the most dangerous kind of marketing in the world.The kind that makes us believe billionaires are somehow moral and good, even when the literal math shows they are extractive, exploitative, anti-human criminals.And the whole world seems to have fallen for it. 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Blame Warren Buffett.He's the one who popularized the new tax evasion scheme by which thousands of billionaires are now scamming the public out of hundreds of billions in lost taxation to pay for the civilizations they so happily exploit for profit.It's really simple.I'm going to teach you exactly how you, too, can evade taxes like a billionaire.Got a pen and paper ready?Let's go.Step OneFind a boring industry. (IE. book retailing, taxi cabs, or holiday rentals.)Start a corporation that's a basic middle man broker with zero inventory, but has a super slick app and website. (IE. Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb.)Take on as much investor money as humanly possible.Burn that investor cash like a Nazi book rally.No really, spend that money as fast as you possibly can— specifically, on eviscerating your competition with underpricing, and making your “not employees” into wage slaves. It doesn't matter that you aren't making a real profit. That might come later — but only after you've put hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs. Get to work.When you do start to turn a small profit, take on more investor money, and borrow vast amounts of cheap cash from the banks, and use all three money sources to absolutely shatter your competition. Sit back and watch your stock price rise as investors silently realize your company is a scam and get in on the action.Get your PR machine to convince Millennial addicts on Robinhood that your company's stock price (but certainly not real profits) can grow infinitely larger forever. (Think: Tesla, which hasn't made an annual profit in 17 years.)Once you've gained an iron grip monopoly on your industry, start lobby-bribing Congress for tax breaks, labor concessions, anti-competition legislation that favors your business, etc.Oh, also, buy media assets so you can further undermine democracy.Step two: Wait, nevermind, you don't need step oneDon't bother building another “disruptor” in the Vampire Economy.You can just buy stock in one of the already-existing money-losing zombie predator corporations.And never sell it.Just borrow hyper-cheap debt to fund your lifestyle, backed by your stocks, like all the billionaires do.That way, you never have any income to tax.Think about it: If you're borrowing lifestyle cash at 5%, but your stocks are going up by 10%, you'd be crazy to claim income and pay income tax. So long as debt stays cheap and stock prices rise, you can borrow an unlimited amount of money to upgrade your lifestyle, buy more stock, wash, rinse, repeat. Let the good times roll!In fact, you should probably buy all that stock on margin.Gotta boost your alpha, bro.$1000 leveraged up and re-invested perpetually in Tesla/Uber/Bitcoin/etc ten years ago is now worth $1234567890, remember?This is Buffet's faultConsidering how much money death-profiting Warren Buffett has extracted from society, he hasn't come anywhere close to contributing his fair share to the world.Over a five year period, Buffett grew his wealth by $24.3 billion but paid just 0.10% tax on it:Even by “standard” tax accounting ($23.7M / $125M income), he's paying just 18.9% income tax… far less than the average working family. And he's evading tax on 95% of his wealth.Sure, Buffett admits that the tax system needs fixing. But pushing words out of your mouth-hole isn't nearly enough to create actual equality in society — not when billionaires and their corporations control the very Congress that's supposed to tax and regulate them.ProPublica:“Buffett has famously held onto his stock in the company he founded, Berkshire Hathaway. That has allowed Buffett to largely avoid transforming his wealth into income. Berkshire does not pay a dividend, [which has enabled him to avoid] hundreds of millions in taxes each year.Many Silicon Valley and infotech companies have emulated Buffett's model, eschewing stock dividends… companies like Microsoft and Oracle offered shareholders rocketing growth and profits but did not pay dividends. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla do not pay dividends.”The end result?More than half of all American billionaire wealth is now permanently held hostage as unrealized gains — totally untaxable by the public… yet billionaires can borrow cheaply against their wealth to fund their absurdly lavish lifestyles and weaponize their wealth to amass ever more power and control of the global economy.If we keep on our current trajectory, they'll own the whole world within our lifetime.Now it's Elon Musk's turn to scam the massesElon clearly knows the billionaire tax evasion scheme:He currently has at least 88 million shares pledged as collateral on personal debts.Elon also knows $TSLA has become an outrageously and dangerously overpriced story stock.As the great Concoda puts it:“I see all-time highs, I take profits.”Elon knows the end (of the corporatist business cycle) is nigh, and this is a great chance to pay off his personal debts with overpriced stocks.Elon also knows that we know about the billionaire tax evasion scam:See what he did there?Elon's about to reap $30+ billion in hard cash thanks to his sucker-speculators, and come out looking like the “good guy” for actually paying his taxes — you know, the thing that everyone is supposed to do to keep civilization afloat. What a nice guy.Elon's tax bill on all this free money will be a maximum $4 billion — significantly less than you and I pay by percentage. But I'm sure his accountants are working on another tax evasion strategy.So now billionaires get to play it both ways.In conclusionWhether billionaire sycophants like it or not, we clearly need a billionaire wealth tax because elites no longer trigger income tax, dividends tax, and capital gains tax.Billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion to their net worth during the pandemic — that's enough to build a $75,000 health/education/house trust fund for every single child in America (all 72 million of them) and still leave billionaires $100 billion richer.But obviously, corporate-controlled Congress won't do a thing about tax evasion, because most of them are inside traders anyway.There's only one thing to do:Get the whole nation to evade taxes like a billionaire.Thousands of meme-stonkers, crypto-speculators, and Robinhood addicts are already doing it:Buy vast amounts of stock on leverage.Borrow hyper-cheap debt to fund your lavish lifestyle and buy more stock.Pray to God the house of cards doesn't fall apart like it's done every other time in history.Yes, if everyone acts like a billionaire the market bubble will hyper-inflate, tax-funded services will disappear, and the nation will collapse. But that's what's already happening anyway. Might as well get in on the action.Welcome to the new global economy.It's every man for himself, now. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Backpacking through Central America changed my life.It exposed me to poverty and made me loathe corporatism.It exposed me to environmental destruction and made me love nature.One of my life's greatest collection of memories comes from my months of volunteering at eco-villages in Costa Rica.The rich coast.Swimming in hot rivers, warmed by volcanic heatDiscovering glow-in-the-dark mushroomsListening to howler monkeys in the hillsCooking organic food in an open-air kitchen without insects due to mindful plantingWatching red-hot lava flow down a volcano at nightThe land was so verdant that even the fence posts blossomed with flowers.Costa Rica is one of the most sustainable nations on earth. It's a place filled with beautiful and warm people. It's chocked full of stunning views and breathtaking scenery.And now, thanks to the recent invention of a new type of corporation, it will all be owned by a hedge fund.Natural Asset CompaniesIt's technically a new type of publicly tradeable security.Like a stock (or NFT), but for nature.Trees Inc.Rivers Inc.Mountains Inc.Water Springs Inc.Rainforest Inc.Oceans Inc.In September, the New York Stock Exchange (of course) announced the new security, as a “nature-based solution to unlock the value of natural resources.”That definitely sounds pretty based.An NAC is basically a real estate agent for Mother Nature. It picks a piece of nature, assigns a price tag, wrangles the rights out of the commons, and sells slices of that lake/ocean/volcano/mountain/etc to institutional shareholders, specifically, the multinational corporations who fund the NAC in the first place.Did I mention that NACs were invented by a company backed by the Inter-American Development Bank, Aberdare Ventures, the New York Stock Exchange itself, and — wait for it — the oil-funded Rockefeller Foundation?Take a guess what country's natural assets they're going to sell off first:My beloved Costa Rica.Everything has its price“NACs will attempt to assign value to services — such as carbon retention, freshwater generation, pest control, groundwater storage and erosion prevention — intrinsically provided by natural resources.” 1So once they've assigned a price to every atom in the atmosphere, then what?“Proceeds from an NAC initial public offering (IPO) will be used to manage the specific natural asset and potentially acquire additional natural assets or return value to the owners.” 2Potentially?Please.They'll maximize profits and acquire additional natural resources.The elites won't stop until they wring a profit from every living inch of planet earth.The great battle of our age“This new nature-based solution provides another tool for governments to work with the private sector to promote sustainability, while providing financial returns.” 3Just two quick thoughts on this gem:Whenever you hear “governments” and “private sector” in the same sentence, it's the same thing as saying “corporations are colluding with corrupt politicians again.”In the battle of sustainability versus profit, the former has never won against the latter. There's simply no track record that suggests we can trust corporations to do what's right for people and our planet.Call this what it is: robbery“According to initial calculations, NACs will unlock $4 quadrillion [that's four million billion dollars] in assets as a new feeding ground for Wall Street investors to buy the rights to clean water and clean air and trout streams and bass-laden lakes and gorgeous picturesque waterfalls and lagoons, an entire forest, or maybe eventually extend into the oceans. Who knows the range of possibilities once nature is transacted on Wall Street.” 4A democracy would never allow NACs to exist.Two-thirds of Americans think we should do more on climate change.90% support planting a trillion trees.84% support carbon capture tax credits.73% support taxing corporate emissions.Saving the environment would be an easy lay-up for a democracy.But, of course, there isn't a single democratic nation on planet earth.We've got a handful of dictatorships, and a whole bunch of corporatocracies.In the same way that African dictators have looted their nations to fill their personal bank accounts in London and Geneva, corporate-captures politicians are now allowing their backers to ransack the nations they've sworn to serve.Let's cut the crapIf corporations were serious about protecting the environment and promoting sustainability, they wouldn't take a giant gun and sticker a price tag on every piece of nature.They'd donate a share of their corporate profits for a not-for-profit whose sole reason for existing was to protect the ecosystem.But that's not why corporations exist.Corporations are anti-human extraction machines whose sole legal purpose for existing is to extract profits from anyone and anything for the private benefit of its shareholders.The for-profit corporation is the fiduciary enemy of humanity and nature, and perhaps none more so than a Natural Asset Company.Maybe the best way to protect nature is just to get rid of the institutions that do it the most harm?How to actually protect natureMaybe I'm old-fashioned, but I still happen to think that some things are priceless. (That includes much of nature, and humans, too.) We don't need to rely on private capital to “protect” nature.Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure something as temporary as a homo sapien doesn't have the right or ability to “own” something as permanent as a mountain.The ecosystem will definitely allow us to use and abuse it, but there will come a point where we muck up the chemistry so badly that it destroys us. It's not personal, it's just science. At the end of the day, nature is sovereign over mankind.Maybe we need to delete the word ownership from our vocabulary and certainly from our legal contracts and sales agreements and land deeds. Instead, let's use the word stewardship — and introduce a raft of legislation that defines stewardship as “leaving something better than you found it.”Steward it or lose it.At the very least, it's time that we give at least some pieces of nature legal self-sovereignty, including:The oceanThe polar ice capsAll the rivers and lakesEvery inch of mountain above 14,000 feetThere's already a river in New Zealand that has the same legal rights as a human being.Same for Mount Taranaki and a national park.India granted human rights to the Ganges and Yahuna rivers.Please don't roll your eyes and write this off as a silly idea.After all, the democracy-destroying Citizens United ruling made corporations people in the eyes of the law. If a fully lifeless corporation can be a “human,” then surely nature itself — that vital, living, breathing being that sustains every moment of our sorry little lives — can be equally so.Everything's just a legal fiction anyway. 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They call it the Amazonian Chernobyl.In 1964, the multinational corporation Texaco — one of the planet-destroying giants spawned from John D. Rockefeller's colossal illegal monopoly — began drilling in Ecuador.For nearly thirty years, Texaco turned tens of billions in profits while illegally dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste, destroying habitats, livelihoods, and lives — all to save roughly $3 per barrel in proper waste treatment costs.When Chevron was eventually busted by the Ecuadorians, the company spent a microscopic $40 million on “cleaning” the area and negotiated an agreement with corrupt officials, saying the clean-up was “complete,” even though a domestic science team deemed the areas wildly unsafe.In 2003, American attorney Steven Donziger visited the South American nation and described it as “an apocalyptic disaster.”Children walked barefoot along oil-covered roads.Jungle lakes were covered in oil.Local tribes suffered from stomach cancer, respiratory illnesses, miscarriages, and birth defects.Donzinger helped 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians file a $28 billion lawsuit for making them sick and poisoning the Amazon with eighteen billion gallons of toxic water.After an eight-year court battle, the locals won a groundbreaking $9.5 billion to help offset some of their losses, roughly three weeks of Chevron's revenue. It was the first time in history that an indigenous group had successfully beaten a multinational corporation.Chevron refused to pay the fine.Instead, they decided to destroy Steven Donzinger's life.American “Justice”There is no depth to which some people will go to make money.Especially multinational corporations — after all, they're anti-human alien fictions that live forever, have more rights than humans, and legally exist for the sole purpose of extracting wealth from the commons to deliver to elite shareholders.According to a leaked internal Chevron memo, “Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger.”So far, with a legal team of hundreds, they've:Sued him for $60 billion (the most against any individual in American legal history)Got him disbarred as a lawyerFrozen his bank accountsCrushed him with millions in finesNot allowed him a juryGot a court to force him to wear a 24-hour ankle monitor for the past two yearsImposed a lien on his homeDestroyed his ability to earn a livingPlaced him under house arrest for the past 800 days (not only has the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights ruled it illegal, and twenty-nine Nobel laureates called “judicial harassment,” but it's four times longer than the maximum sentence allowed for this charge)And as of last week, Steven Donzinger is now in prison.Do not go gentle into that good nightI hope you're furious.Raging.Shaking.Weeping.You should be.This is the first time a multinational corporation has prosecuted an individual.A good man.This is what happens when corporations take control of your Congress.When a nation allows the unlimited accumulation of wealth and power.When your inequality is worse than the Roman Empire.We need to help StevenI encourage you to stuff your fury into the furnace of action:Watch Steven's goodbye message sent just hours before going to prison.Follow Steven on Twitter and Instagram, and share his story on social media (be sure to tag the President and Justice Department)Watch the documentary Crude on Youtube.Sign the petition demanding the President and AG release him immediately.Read up on intimidation lawsuitsIf you or someone you know works at Chevron, whistleblowAsk the New York Times why they won't cover the storyThis will continue to happen until we fix this foreverFirst, here's how not to fix this absurd injustice:Don't bother calling your corporate-sponsored Congressman.Don't bother getting pepper-sprayed by corporate-directed cops at a rally.Don't bother hacking or stalking the board of directors and end up in the cell beside Steven.There's only one weapon that can bring monster corporations to heel:Money.We need folks like WallStreetBets, meme-stonkers, and especially activist shareholders to buy enough stock to seize control of the company (just like what's currently happening at Exxon), run an internal investigation to oust every single person involved in persecuting Donzinger, make restitution to Donzinger, then publish the internal documents and press for the imprisonment of the cruel and inhumane individuals who continue to put profit before people.Clearly, Chevron has ruined Donzinger's life to make a statement — that if you mess with our ability to make profits, human lives be damned, we will ruin yours.It's time we put multinational corporations on notice.This earth belongs to we the people — legal fictions live and die by our will.And while we wait for the courts to send all these criminals to jail, let's all stop buying Chevron products.Spread the word. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

The elites hate you.It's not personal.They just do.Elites hated your ancestors, too.Whether your ancestors were African slaves in the New World (especially in Brazil), or serfs under the British aristocracy, or peasants under the Russian Tsars, or slaves under the Chinese dynasties, elites have extracted time and wealth from your family since before recorded history.Until essentially the end of World War I, elites owned everything.Take, for instance, the East India Company. A staff of 35 people controlled the fate of more than 100 million Indians from a five-window office in London.Lack of ownership for the masses — that was the problem.Whenever elites own everything, everyone else is shackled to horrible jobs just to survive, while the elites live in obscene luxury with no thought to the misery and suffering of the masses.Sound familiar?In the wake of the global pandemic, today's elites are taking back the planet they believe rightfully belongs to them, and putting the rest of us back where they believe we belong:In economic chains.The Great ResetIn January 2021, the hyper-elitist World Economic Forum — hosted by Prince Charles and sponsored by glowing anti-democratic monopolists including Blackrock and JPMorgan — held its 50th annual meeting from the Alpine slopes of Davos, Switzerland.The theme was The Great Reset, a proposal to rebuild the economy “sustainably” in the wake of COVID-19.Right.Even billionaire-obsessed Forbes Magazine had to admit their agenda was “another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful.”In the WEF video 8 Predictions For The World In 2030, the very first prediction is:“You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy.”As the WEF explained on its website:[By 2030] all products will have become services. “I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.” Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two.Notice the implicit threat towards the end?Play ball or suffer.And if the elites have their way, you won't own your own underwear in nine years or less.Slavery by another nameThis, of course, begs the question:If we won't own anything… who will?The answer is obvious: The elites will.And they'll rent it back to us for top dollar.Whatever “the market” can bear.But obviously, what the market can bear and what the people can bear are two different things entirely.Interestingly, a societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to work for elites just to stay alive already has a name:It's called feudalism.Our serf ancestors worked to enrich a lord. Now we work to enrich land-lords and bankers. Feudalism 2.0Have you noticed that the economy is rapidly shape-shifting?During the pandemic, billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion to their net worth.If you chart the trajectory and do the math, you'll discover elites will control the entire global economy within our lifetime.Sadly, the goal of today's elites is the same as their ancestors:To enslave the world in order to extract the maximum amount of time and wealth from every living being.Ownership mattersWithout ownership, America's 115,656,681 renters are at the whims of cruel land-lorders and Airbnb takeovers.Without ownership, all of Tesla's 70,000 employees miss out on their $14 million stake in the company they created, while Elon Musk makes $36 billion in a single day.Without ownership, millions of Walmart employees struggle to feed their families, while the billionaire Walton family enjoys corporate socialism on an unprecedented scale.Without ownership, people pay ever-increasing gas prices to get to work, the bottom billion go to bed hungry because of the slightest increase in grain prices, women and children prostitute their bodies to make ends meet, and a million people globally move into slums every single day.Without ownership, we don't get to own stuff. Not our houses, cars, clothes, music, movies, furniture, appliances, or books. Everything becomes pay-per-use. And if you can't pay, you don't get to use it. No matter what it is.Without ownership, every single one of us lives and dies by the market:When the price of energy spikes 180X during a Texas blizzard, you can either freeze to death or take on a lifetime of debt.When the price of housing rises to $10 million in our lifetime, you can live on the streets or work three underpaid jobs just to keep a rotting roof over your head.When your child develops a life-threatening condition and private health insurance denies part or all of your claim, you can let your kid die or declare bankruptcy along with hundreds of thousands of other American families every single year.When the market price of water moves beyond what you can afford (due to systemic inequalities beyond your control) the CEO of Nestlé thinks you don't deserve to drink water.Without ownership, people don't have stakes in the game. They aren't invested. They become rogue actors, prone to dissent and violence and chaos.And why not?They didn't sign up to play real-life monopoly.Why not smash the board and shatter the pieces?The end gameYou're probably wondering…What's the point of Feudalism 2.0?Is it really worth the hassle of re-taking total ownership of the global economy and forcing the masses back into serfdom?It's not like it'll win you friends, make you happy, or let you live forever.So why bother?Because elites are sad, broken, and delusional. They think that adding extra zeroes on their net worth will somehow give them peace of mind, contentment, true friendship, love, respect, and life purpose.And because owning the world can't and won't satisfy, once the masses are crushed, elites will continue their bloody game of thrones until the day they die.In a winner-take-all world, only one person can win.It's time to go to war with the elitesThere are three things we can do to resist the great reset.And remember, we have less than nine years.1. Vote with your time and moneyThe polls can't and won't save you from the corporations that control Congress.We have to bankrupt them.The only way to do that is to stop giving them your money. No more shopping, no more banking, no more enriching predator corporations.Go local and independent.(You can also join the national strike that's currently underway, refusing to contribute your time and talent to enriching multinational extractors.)2. Amass owned assets, help others do the same, and never sellI'm talking productive businesses, houses, land, building supplies, water sources, power generation, renewable lumber, animals, seeds. Real wealth.While you're at it, download every movie and song that you ever hope to watch/listen to more than twice.Otherwise, you'll be forced to rent these things for top dollar, and in doing so, further enrich the most corrupt institutions and people on earth.3. Get offline and build real relationships with real peopleWe need more friends.We need to build resilient micro-societies.And entirely new anti-corporate, pro-commons sovereignties.And offline communities of people who really care for each other and know each other.When Feudalism 2.0 takes over the economy, we serfs are going to need each other. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Every Sunday morning for several years, my friends and I used to gather at Locke Street Bakery on Locke Street in Hamilton.The bagels were amazing.Literally handmade.Boiled and fire-baked right before our eyes.Slathered with homemade cream cheese, smoked salmon, the works.Served by women in their forties and fifties who we knew by name.LSB was a blue-collar institution in a run-down neighborhood, and for decades it faithfully served its equally faithful clientele.LSB was so good, in fact, that it started attracting other local businesses.A funky hair salon opened across the street.A butcher shop did the same.A bookshop.A florist.And then, one day — once all the signs suggested this neighborhood was about to pop — Starbucks moved into the neighborhood.It was all downhill from there.Corporations can't create culture.Corporations aren't real.They're just legal fictions; anti-human institutions that live forever, have more rights than people, and exist solely to extract wealth from employees, suppliers, consumers, and taxpayers.Corporations can't and don't create culture because culture is natural, organic, biological, creative.It's why people use Airbnb/steal real family homes instead of staying at hotels. Marriott can't fake home.It's why all the top restaurants in the world aren't chains. Real human chefs surprise and delight patrons with new and living flavors. McDonald's and Starbucks, on the other hand, are continually “innovating,” but it all tastes roughly the same because the bottom line goal isn't creative expression, it's profit.If you've ever been to a corporate “community event” or witnessed a corporate-created “grassroots campaign,” you know exactly what I mean. Everything's a bit sanitized and clean and proper and nice and… off.That's because corporations aren't relational — they're transactional.They can't give freely and creatively.Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take.And human beings can smell it from a mile away.The Corporate Colonization CycleBecause corporations can't create culture, they have to play succubus to a living host, hoovering resources out of fledgling local ecosystems.To put it another way, corporations have to find real culture creators who are building meaningful neighborhoods, and then slip in their stores to get in on the action before the culture-creators get pushed out and move elsewhere.Unlike one-of-a-kind local businesses that keep 100% of their profits spinning in their neighborhood and attract outside money, multinationals do the opposite: They siphon money from local communities to faraway elite shareholders, and make everywhere so similar and boring that it drives people away from once-thriving pockets of real culture.In the case of Starbucks and hundreds of other multinational monster brands, they literally have teams of people who research up-and-coming areas to determine the best place to install their wealth-extracting hoses.The corporate colonization cycle happens all over the world:Ernest Hemingway shops at a bookstore, and suddenly Shakespeare and Co. is a lifeless global brand.Mennonites create St. Jacob's Farmer's Market, then Walmart builds just feet across the county line to benefit from all the visitors.A trunkmaker named Louis Vuitton crafted high-quality bags, now a hyper-capitalist billionaire leverages the name to buy out seventy competitor brands.Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre chatted philosophy at a run-down restaurant, now Café de Flores is overrun by celebrities and narcissistic Instagramers.Two centuries ago, Vincent Van Gogh used a certain sketchbook made of moleskin, and in 1997 an Italian papermaker created an overpriced knock-off version that's now owned by a Belgian glass repair company.The corporate colonization cycle is simple and heartbreaking:People create culture → Corporations kill culture.After Starbucks moved to Locke Street, everything changed.House prices tripled, driving out the working poor.Antique shops bloomed like mold on week-old bread.Airbnbs popped up like brain tumors.The streets got cleaner, safer, more sanitized.Surveillance cameras showed up in shop windows.Pretty soon, crowds of aging female shoppers arrived, all looking to be part of this exciting new “neighborhood.”Little did the tourists know as they ordered their flat whites at Starbucks, but Locke Street had already died.All the real culture-creators had moved to James Street and Ottawa Street and Cannon Street.And, after serving as the neighborhood's beating heart and soul for decades, Locke Street Bakery closed.It got bought out by a capitalist couple who moved the bakery to a lifeless warehouse in the suburbs and tried to make LSB a brand to sell in stores.All those sweet bagel-serving women were fired. (I miss you, Sue.)When the capitalists eventually realized that no one was interested in frozen bagels, they turned the former storefront into a lifeless vegan cafe staffed with why-are-you-even-talking-to-me Millennials.Ironically, they called the restaurant Democracy. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Congrats to Dylan Mobley, winner of a book and $100 free Cardano! Stay tuned for more giveaways in the future. Also: One of my books is free on Amazon this week!Last week, someone offered to pay me $500 to write a short Medium article about their new NFT startup.That's a lot of money for someone with a brand new baby at home.The company “sends” its “community” on a different digital “travel experience” each month.One month everyone will digitally attend Coachella or Burning Man, another time they'll go to the Superbowl or the NBA Finals.It's a really cool idea, until you think about it for like four seconds.I wrote back:“Dear [so and so]. Sorry to say I can't support your project. It's anti-human. If you've read much of Surviving Tomorrow, you know that I'm deeply pro-human. Biological. Offline. Together. [Your company] separates people. It keeps them from going on real adventures to real places to spend real offline time with real people. My post-college volunteering trip through Central America changed my life and made me friends for life. [Your company] is the opposite of what human beings need. I hope you'll seriously re-think this business.”It was the easiest $500 I've never made.New name, same gameFacebook is changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc.It's stupid, I know.But then again, so is wasting 2.39 years of waking life on Facebook, so can the average user really judge them?As most of my long-time readers know, I'm not a fan of the highly-addictive, extremist-breeding, time-devouring, money-gobbling, democracy-smashing, depression-inducing, hatred-boosting sludgefest that is Facebook.Now, in an attempt to distance Facebook from its endless crimes and scandals, kid billionaire/Sith lord Mark Zuckerberg has decided that burning 76,450,684 years of human life each year in two dimensions is no longer enough.No, in his profit-focused mind, it's time for Facebook's 1.908 billion daily active users to enter the Metaverse — in other words, he wants to further separate us from each other, but this time, in virtual reality.In order to create “connection.”In order words, the lie that built Facebook is about to go exponential.The trillion-dollar visionFacebook is built on an extremely simple and profound promise:That if we will all spend more time alone staring at a screen, freely hand over our identities, and let an algorithm change our beliefs and behaviors, Facebook will deliver connection.And guess what?Facebook delivered.Extremely well:Old classmates who'd lost touch (for a reason) suddenly knew what each other were up to.Grandparents got to see their faraway grandbabies.Former colleagues got to argue about who stole the election from whom.During lockdown, everyone got to see how bored everyone else was.Oh, and millions of couples had affairs, with 20% of divorce cases now involving Facebook.So yes, we connected.But there's a fundamental problem with Facebook's unique selling proposition:There's a massive difference between connection and communion.Facebook promises connection and hopes we won't realize that connection isn't actually what we want, need, or crave.In the same way that Americans conflate autonomy with freedom, Mark Zuckerberg conflates connection with communion.Humans don't “connect.”We aren't USB keys.We aren't wifi signals.We aren't prongs that plug into outlets.Machines connect.Humans commune.CommunionI don't know anyone who's logged off of Facebook feeling euphoric, content, or fulfilled.Statistically speaking, most users log off either more depressed or more enraged.Facebook is like McDonald's — it's temporarily satisfying because of the saccharine sugar hit, but it ultimately leaves you hungry within hours, craving another hit.Communion, on the other hand, is different.When people meet face to face, magic happens.We smell each other. Hear each other without compression. We breathe in each other's pheromones. Our breathing syncs. Our heart rates rise.Our faces flush.We really communicate.We can sense nuance, subtlety, jest.We subconsciously see each other's pupils dilate.We touch each other, hold each other, feel each other.We know and are known.And not one advertiser, including Russian trolls and conspiracy theorists, can pay to plant 36 thoughts in our heads.More of the same“The metaverse is the next frontier… From now on, we're going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.” — Mark ZuckerbergThe metaverse is wildly overrated.It's basically highly-addictive social media in virtual or augmented reality.That's right — either we'll spend our hours inside Facebook's digital world, or Facebook will invade our physical world.Either way, its algorithms will continue to get to know us better than our family, bombarding us with ads whether we're aware of them or not, manipulating our behavior for the betterment not of ourselves and our communities, but for the bottom-line profits of elite shareholders on the hunt for more and more Zuckerbucks.You thought Facebook wars on comment walls were bad?Now people will be able to see and scream at each other in digital town halls.Sorry, MarkyZ.We are homo sapiens, not homo digitalis.We are proudly biological, offline, and physical.We were made to be together, in the flesh.We were not made to sit sedentarily and stare at a small square of light all day.And we definitely weren't designed to strap a screen to our face and “live” inside an ad-filled world created by a sociopath.Let's never forget that Facebook (and VR/AR/the metaverse) was created not to improve human life and achieve widest-spread wellbeing.It was and will always be about shareholder profits.Leaked documents have proved conclusively that Mark Zuckerberg does not care about the widest-spread wellbeing of our global family.Like all of us, Mark cares above all for himself.As trust in Facebook Inc. continues to sink lower and lower, the Chief Exploitation Officer thinks he can rebrand as Meta Platforms Inc. and double down on a thesis that never worked in the first place.Facebook is built on the false promise that spending more time alone on screens will somehow deliver the human communion we want, need, and crave.It hasn't, won't, can't, and never will. 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November 2020The president's lawyer creates a six-step plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, called the Eastman Memo.November 7, 2020Joseph R. Biden is elected President of the United States.Pence and enough Republicans decide against executing the Eastman coup d'etat.Donald Trump's team begins working to ensure it won't happen again.Jan 2021 — Oct 2022With two-thirds of Republicans still believing the election was stolen, Donald Trump systematically purges the Republican party of anyone who didn't back him in his coup attempt or publicly state that the 2020 election was stolen from him.He also purges the ten Republican members of Congress who voted for his impeachment.November 8, 2022Republicans retake key governorships and the House because Democrats don't bother to show up at the mid-term polls as always.Republican state legislatures immediately start changing election laws:Further gerrymandering districtsMaking it harder for Democrat-likely voters to voteAllowing Republican-held chambers to certify the election results instead of independent bodiesJanuary 7, 2023Donald Trump's Facebook ban expires. Zuckerberg does the “right” thing (for shareholders) and re-instates the former POTUS, who immediately announces he'll run for President in 2024.Winter-Spring 2024Donald Trump hosts huge, maskless rallies across the country while the Democrats still do most of theirs online.One base gets fired up and ready for war.March 5, 2024Super Tuesday.Donald Trump already has his Republican party nomination on lock and is cruising to an easy victory. All other candidates are simply angling for a seat at his table.Summer 2024Democrats once again block real contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and put forward another corporate-captured middling candidate at their “Democratic” National Convention. It does not matter who they put forward because that person will not win.Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination.Fall 2024The Dems run a Dem-standard campaign, filling their little bellies with stress, but hoping and believing (but not praying) the polls giving them a slight edge will actually prove true on election night.November 5, 2024Election Day.Donald Trump loses the election by the narrowest of margins.November 6, 2024Donald Trump announces he won the election and calls his state attorneys general to throw out Democrat votes, find a few extra Republican votes, and pick sympathetic fake electors to certify the election in his favor.Facebook does “the right thing” and re-bans Trump, swearing this time it's for good.December 16, 2024The electors gather in their respective state capitals to vote for President and Vice President.Several states have voted Democrat, but their Republican-held legislatures send bogus electors who swing the election to Trump.January 6, 2025The electoral votes are formally counted before a joint session of Congress.The President of the Senate, Kamala Harris, faces the same choice faced by Mike Pence: Whether or not to throw out phony election results.And she does.Because they are.January 7, 2025Hundreds of thousands of Republicans flood into Washington with more anger and weaponry than last time.Protests, demonstrations, and Antifa-versus-the-Tea-Party battles break out in major cities across the nation.The economy spasms and the stock market freaks.January 19, 2025Joe Biden faces enormous pressure to call in the National Guard to quell the coup before he is no longer in charge of the military.January 20, 2025Inauguration Day.Two presumptive presidents show up to be sworn in as the 47th President of a United States that hasn't been so divided since the Civil War.A call to actionThis is what happens when you let a republic turn into a corporatist oligarchy instead of a real democracy.It doesn't matter who wins if you have a democracy because there are zero politicians.Instead, both parties practice non-stop gerrymandering, partisan politics, insider trading, and dark money campaign finance — all for the benefit of private corporate interests, not widest-spread wellbeing.I've said it before and I'll say it until the day I die:Democracy is too precious a thing to entrust to politicians.And there's only one way out of this mess:Stop voting for corporate-captured Democrats and Republicans and start voting with your dollars.We've got twelve fiscal quarters to bankrupt the corporate powers who (s)elect the people who lead the United States of America.Spread the word. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Tesla just hit a trillion-dollar market cap.Trillion with a capital T.$1,000,000,000,000.00Things are so crazy right now that Elon Musk's net worth grew by $36 billion in a single day.If the company was a cooperative, each of Tesla's 70,000+ employees would be sitting on a $14 million fortune.But, of course, Tesla isn't a co-op — and it isn't worth a trillion dollars.It isn't worth a tenth that much.What is $TSLA actually worth?To Tesla's credit — and unlike its past four years — the company actually made a small profit in 2020… derived almost exclusively from Bitcoin and corporate socialism.The thing is, a measly $3.4 billion in not-selling-real-products profits doesn't remotely justify a trilly market cap.We need some context:The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is considered the benchmark number for comparing one company's stock price to another. The ratio is based on the current stock price divided by the trailing 12-month earnings per share. If a stock price is $10/share, and the P/E ratio is 10, it means that company is earning $1 per share. If you buy a $10 share with a P/E of 20, it'll roughly take you 20 years to break even.Warren Buffett likes to buy stocks with a P/E of around 12.The S&P 500's long-term median P/E ratio is around 15.The S&P 500's current P/E ratio is around 29 — nearly double its century-long average — despite the pandemic. (#Bubble)Apple's P/E is typically around 30.Amazon's P/E hovers around 60.Tesla's P/E ratio is currently over 330.That's $1 worth of earnings for every $330 invested.Would you really buy a business with an ROI of 0.3%?Would you acquire a company that would take over three centuries to break even?Cue the irrational fanboys:“But Tesla's future potential is huge!”Sure.**But not compared to its current price.To fall in line with the S&P's historical averages and provide a reasonable rate of real return, Tesla would need to 22X its earnings to nearly $75 billion, nearly four times Amazon's profits last year.To provide a 10% annual return at a trillion-dollar market cap, Tesla would need to 29X its current profits.Versus last year's profit margins, that's well over $3 trillion in annual revenue.That's nearly 6X more revenue than the largest revenue-earning company on earth.It's just not going to happen.Double bubble troubleObjectively, Tesla is wildly overpriced even compared to the overall market bubble.But it's a double bubble: the overall market bubble + the Musk fanboy story stock bubble.Tesla may very well be 11Xs better than the average S&P company right now, but that just means Tesla's price bubble is that much more inflated once you scrub out all the irrational exuberance.Let's run a back-of-the-napkin comparative analysis:If Tesla traded at the same P/E as Amazon — arguably one of the strongest companies on earth — Tesla's market cap drops to $178 billion.If Tesla traded at the same P/E as Volkswagen Group — which includes Audi, Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Ducati, and Porsche — Tesla's market cap drops to $25 billion.If you compare Tesla to Apple, which is fair comparison and a far more rational P/E, Tesla's market cap drops to $90 billion.Now pop the overall asset bubble, and Tesla's true market cap is realistically somewhere less than $50 billion… about a 20th of what it's trading for right now.Gamblers in a dangerous timeAs a sound investment, $TSLA is one of the worst stock picks in the world.As a fun gamble, it's one of the best.And, just like Bitcoin, small investors are going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars when the price bubble pops.Because let's face it: Tesla is a meme stock.Just look who's buying shares:And they're probably buying most of it on margin.Either way, Tesla stock is clearly being pumped by unsophisticated investors who haven't done their due diligence regarding the company's actual long-term worth.Nor do they care.The end result?Tens of thousands of Tesla speculators will lose their life savings.In conclusionIn no rational world is Tesla worth $1,000,000,000,000.But, of course, we don't live in a rational world anymore.Because the productive economy is completely dead, the only way to make big money without doing any real work is to play the extraction game, getting in on Ponzi schemes like real estate, the stock market, and cryptocurrency, desperately hoping you can sell at the top before the whole house of cards falls apart.And it will fall apart.When it does, there will be riots and protests, there will be suicides, and millions of people will lose their jobs and homes and suffer untold hardship.As usual, the elites will pick through the wreckage and scoop up cheap assets at firesale prices.We saw it in 2008, and we will see it again, but on a bigger scale.The rich will do what they want, and the poor will suffer what they must.Thanks for listening to Surviving Tomorrow. Please share this episode by email and social media so we can grow our community of resisters.We are listener-supported, so if you'd like to get involved, please visit jaredbrock.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.Superpowers aren't impressive.Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Egypt, Britain, Spain, Portugal; they've all ruled the world for a time before sliding back to just regular-ol'-nation status.Now it's America's turn.The United States is going to collapse.This isn't a fear-mongering statement.Just a fact.Everyone knows it.Whether in five years or fifty, the days of America-as-global-superpower are numbered.In the same way that Rome pulled back its troops from Alexandria in Egypt and the Scottish borders in Britain, the American military-industrial complex will continue the work started in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw its 800 global military bases in order to make a last-ditch effort to enslave its own people in a soft-totalitarian panopticon surveillance state.And then it will collapse.Diehard nationalists insist it could never happen, but the signs of American collapse are obvious:1. Wealth inequalityAmerican income inequality is growing, too.Higher than the Roman Empire's, in fact.The stats on wealth inequality are crazy. Please read them all.Nevermind the Gilded Age of corporate tyrants like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller — today's billionaires control more wealth and political power than the monopolists of the past could ever have dreamed.And while extreme right-wingers are quick to shout “Communism! Socialism!” they fail to realize we're not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That's what billionaires are working on.2. DebtThe numbers are staggering:America has nearly $29 trillion in federal debt.Total consumer debt sits at $14.9 trillion.Half a million American families are systemically forced into bankruptcy every year.Don't listen to those nutty Modern Monetary Theory boosters who think we can pile up debt forever and it will never destroy our society.The bell will toll, and it will toll for us.Don't get me wrong, the MMTers are technically right — we can print money forever. But every unbacked printed dollar erodes trust and purchasing power.When society is built on a literal lie, it's only a matter of time before it falls.3. Economic InstabilityBecause of how hyper-elites have structured the economy, we're stuck with permanent economic instability — insane asset bubbles, followed by massive crashes that hurt those who a.) didn't benefit in the good times, and b.) suffer most in the bad times.While it's never occurred to the corporations who control our countries, people want to live in economically stable places.Because America refuses to deliver on true, long-term economic stability for the majority, it's no wonder we're currently seeing a national strike, and why many of us with the power to do so have already moved overseas.4. Homeownership in CrisisRentership, too.I've been sounding the alarm on this one for a while — people have no idea the tidal wave that's about to shatter the American middle class once and for all.House prices are going to $10 million in our lifetime, and if we don't ban for-profit residential real estate investment and overthrow the corrupt zoning boards that keep young families from building homes they can afford, we will see a houselessness crisis never witnessed before in human history.5. Crony Corporate PoliticsDemocracy, of course, has never existed in America, but the corporate oligarchy now owns Congress lock, stock, and barrel.There's honestly no point in voting unless it's with your money.6. Environmental InstabilityWhen I was younger, my wife and I visited Tikal in Guatemala, the New York City of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization.They destroyed their environment, and then it destroyed them.It's really simple: Nations that don't protect people, wildlife, soil, water, and air eventually go extinct.It's not personal, it's science.As commenter Nikos Papakonstantinou put it:You can't eat, drink, or breathe money.It takes 1,000 years for nature to grow 3cm of topsoil, and America has managed to burn through several feet in the past century.Now, America only has sixty harvests left.(An excellent book on the topic is Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization.)7. The Vampire EconomyLet's face it, the American productive economy is dead.Most of the major brands are zombie companies that burn cash and have never been profitable a day in their short-lived corporate lives.Rather than producing products and services of real value, corporate America is just a giant game of extractivism, a dung pile of rent-seeking skimmers who blood-suck time and wealth from the productive poor while contributing nothing of real value:LandlordsBankersStock investorsCrypto speculators who would rather treat Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme instead of freedom money to stave off abhorrent central bank surveillance currencies.When a nation stops creating real value and starts eating itself like a snake, its days are mathematically numbered.8. Mass HysteriaLooking at you, anti-vaxxers.And Q-Anoners.And cancel culturists.And people who vote for Republicans and Democrats.America is now filled with conspiracy theorists and people who draw the line and refuse to dialogue with people outside of their own box. This signals a total breakdown in personal understanding, civic goodwill, institutional trust, and national unity.9. Screen AddictionThe invention of the smartphone will surely go down in history as one of the most destructive pieces of technology ever invented.Homo sapiens are in no way adapted for the super-stimulus of digital outputs.Between social media, streaming, porn, gaming, and shopping addictions, we're breaking our necks, frying our eyes, and shattering any sense of offline meaning or belonging.Just wait until Gen Z and Gen Alpha are in charge.10. IndividualismAmerica is a culture (from the Latin cultus, where we derive the word “cult”) built on the myth of rugged individualism, of “one for me, and all for me.”It's a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, loser-dies-in-poverty cult where the rich prey on the poor and the masses suffer so the elites can live a little better a little longer.America is a piece of glass that has been shattered into 331 million shards, each stabbing the next in a frantic fight for survival.Only a hard fire can forge the pieces back together.There are those who believe a Canadian living in Europe shouldn't have the right to comment on America at all, but of course, those people are usually nationalists who fail to see we live in a hyper-connected world where everyone's choices affect everyone else. The failure to understand this is yet another symptom of hyper-individualism.America is a fractured, atomized nation, with each member so hell-bent on self-actualization, obsessed with concocting a singularly unique identity, and blinded by the idea that autonomy and freedom are the same thing.Because the nation cannot fathom it shares one common freedom, it simply cannot surrender any amount of selfhood to the collective, despite the fact that human togetherness is the #1 thing correlated to human happiness.The end isn't the endAll empires fall. It's a non-negotiable. It's just a matter of when, how, and how hard.Collapse doesn't mean disappearance.And it doesn't necessarily mean a total dystopian hellscape like the Book of Eli.But it does mean a loss of global superpower status and all the unfair advantages that came along with it, like currency supremacy and cheap goods. It means a country seriously diminished, greatly impoverished, wracked with crime and disease and exploitation, and subject to the whims of foreign corporatists hell-bent on extraction.You know, like much of the rest of the world.Normally, my articles outline a challenge facing society and offer some proposals for how to fix it. This is one of those rare posts that just points out the macro factors that will lead to the inevitable fall of America.Collapse shouldn't sit well with readers.Everyone needs to be working on solutions. (And yes, peacefully turning the American landmass into a dozen or so new nations is highly preferable to a bloody second civil war.)The goal, of course, shouldn't be to maintain a hyper-violent military empire and coercive global economic grasp on others. It's time for new ideas, and ancient ideas, and real servant-hearted leadership, and working together.We shouldn't mourn the loss of corporate-controlled America as the global superpower. It's a monstrous menace to global freedom and widest-spread wellbeing.Now, does that mean this is China's century?Maybe.They already own America's largest pork producer, and Canada's largest dairy farm, but a third of their domestic economy is a giant real estate bubble that could seriously slow their growth.China's rise to global super-power will all depend on their continued colonization of Africa and their ability to debt-trap the world via their Belt and Road Initiative — practicing capitalism abroad to enforce fake communism at home.Clearly, the world doesn't need or want a conformist culture to dictate global policy. People often say that America is still the world's “best hope for freedom.” But as billions of people who've endured the heavy hammer of the American military-industrial complex can attest, it's simply not true.Modern corporate America doesn't equal hope. No self-centered human institution can ever deliver the freedom that people truly need.Don't worry, America itself isn't going anywhereAfter all, Rome's as gorgeous as ever.And Athens is amazing, albeit under-maintained.America the superpower is waning, but that doesn't mean Concord won't always be a gorgeous place to visit.Texas will probably always be the BBQ capital of the world (or at least until the radical left bans meat or the radical right makes beef-raising an environmental impossibility.)Maybe Canada or Mexico will annex America and finally provide free healthcare to the poor?And if the fifty states decide to split up, which they almost certainly will in time, you never know if a united Maine and New Hampshire might rule a world in desperate need of lumber and freshwater.Or maybe we just don't need superpowers anymore.Maybe it's time for Tinyism and a million little democracies.Either way, the United States of America won't be around to see it happen. 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Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.I grew up in a pretty little granola town in Ontario, Canada.For many years, the good folk of our town fought against those corporate invaders from Bentonville, Arkansas, in hopes of protecting our local businesses, consumers, the environment, and democracy.My childhood mind is imprinted with images of signs and protestors all telling Walmart to shove off.Walmart, of course, eventually shoved its way into town by lobby-bribing our city councilors and provincial legislators.After all, this is the same company that rammed a superstore into the shadow of a millennia-old Mexican pyramid.My city's Walmart was installed at the northern edge of town, set way back off the road, behind the Woodlawn Cemetery.Twenty years later, when Walmart opened a second store in a prime location right beside the mall, no one made a sound.The corporate colonizers had taken control.99 problemsWalmart is horrible for society.Or, as the kids say, it's problematic.And not problematic in the sense of offending a delicate teenager's feelings.We're talking actual, major, global, systemic problems:1. Walmart savages local economiesWalmart is so big that it runs a trade deficit with China, and that deficit is so big that over a five-year period, it drained an estimated 200,000 American jobs.2. Walmart treats its employees like garbageHonestly, the Walton family probably treats their dogs better.(This is the same company, after all, that tried to turn a profit off its deceased employees by buying dead peasants insurance.)But even the living ones are suffering:70% of Walmart employees leave in the first year.The company has engaged in all sorts of illegal union-busting actions.They have more employees on food stamps than almost any company in history.3. Walmart costs communities a boatload of tax dollarsObviously, Walmart lobby-bribe politicians for all the tax breaks and shady benefits they can extract, just like every other major corporation, but Walmart's incessant cost-cutting also means they shunt their security costs to local police forces, who have to respond to an absurd amount of calls.In just four counties, police departments logged over 16,800 calls to Walmart locations in just one year.In other words, taxpayers are not only funding Walmart employees' breakfasts, lunches, and suppers, but we're also paying the company's security bill.4. Walmart destroys local competitionNevermind quality, service, humanity, or net planetary benefit, in the world of winner-take-all corporatism, whoever has the deepest pockets survives.Much like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and Jeff Bezos's Amazon, the Walton family's Walmart practices predatory under-pricing to drive local businesses to bankruptcy.In fact, it will often open two stores if it knows it can kill competition quicker, eventually abandoning one of the locations once they're in control, thereafter making shoppers drive further for the things they want and need. (They've abandoned more than 25 million square feet of stores so far, some of which have been torn down at the taxpayer's expense.)5. Walmart enriches authoritarian regimesWe all know it.The biggest big box store in America is one of the least American things in America.Walmart estimates that over 70% of its suppliers are based in China.Now, it's starting to pivot to Modi's India for cheap products made by exploited laborers with few environmental protections.Walmart's overseas law-arbitrage has led to hundreds of deaths, child slavery, the abuse of women, disability discrimination, and thousands of other human rights abuses.Oh, and they also have at least $76 billion stashed away in 15 tax havens, doing everything in their power to avoid paying any of the costs of civilization while extracting as much profit as possible.People over profitsNot to get too philosophical, but now that you're aware of all these facts, consciously continuing to shop at Walmart is an immoral act.That's what happened to me.I learned the truth.After that, I couldn't in good conscience continue to enrich them.Walmart is, like all multinational corporations, a predator alien species that should not be kept alive any longer.I say we kill it.Because Walmart is deeply anti-human… and entirely stoppable.The fix is frightfully simpleJust stop shopping at Walmart.It's really that straightforward.Over a decade ago, I watched Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices and I decided to actually do something about it.People spent more than half a trillion at Walmart last year, but the corrupt company didn't get one dollar from me.After all, I know how the game actually works:Everyone (except minorities, prisoners, and whoever else Mitch McConnell doesn't like) gets one vote every four years, to participate in the charade of democracy while corporations (they're people, remember?) funnel billions in dark money to (s)elect the false dichotomy Repub-Dem candidates of their choosing.Meantime, those of us who are actually awake don't bother wasting any time at a ballot box and invest vote 20,000–50,000+ times per year with a voting currency that actually matters and makes a difference: With our dollars.When Walmart's the only optionI'm not saying it's easy to stop shopping at Walmart if you're legitimately poor.Not cheap… poor.After all, Walmart perfected the race-to-the-bottom, and desperate people in dire straights can barely afford to shop anywhere else.But that's the point, isn't it?The entire point of multinational corporations is to shatter local resilience and self-reliance, disconnecting people from land and place and generational skillsets, creating a system of utter corporate dependence.From that perspective, almost no sacrifice is too great in order to re-gain communal sovereignty.For all those of us who are a shade above destitute, we must start paying the price for those who genuinely can't.As commenter Russ Linton put it:“We need to starve these megastore beasts as much as possible. Deprive them of profit, of workers, and reclaim our lives.”It's the only way we'll all ever be able to become free.Go local. Seriously, just make the choice and do it.For the past ten years, I've been putting my money where my mouth is.The first step was to become a horrible corporate citizen and just radically scale back my consumption. In addition to simply not shopping — I don't own a phone and in the past three years I've only purchased five pairs of socks and one pair of jeans — my localization efforts include:Only going to local restaurants 99% of the time. (There's only one chain restaurant in my town, so this one is admittedly easy.) My favorite is a Mexican place run by my friend Laura.Getting my grass-fed beef and lamb from Robert and his parents, who own a farm beside my wife's office.Walking to a local farm shop to buy organic vegetables and sourdough bread from Laluna and the other hippie-types who dig them from the ground.Collecting organic milk from my doorstep every Monday morning from Gerwin. (Yes, we have a milkman; it's extremely affordable and amazing.)Popping in to see Katherine and her amazing team at our local corner shop for organic eggs.Seeing Marie at the Tuesday market for honey and jam and apple juice.(Full disclosure: I still haven't kicked my Amazon habit, but I mostly buy my books used from third-party sellers located within a few hundred-mile radius.)But as you can see, much of our shopping is human-scale and relational.It's not as “easy” as popping over for a giant shop at a Walmart, but it's easier on the economy, the planet, and my community.It's also easier on the future.Plus, it's fun.Money and time well-spent.And it allows me to vote for the kind of world I actually want to live in.You know… one without Walmarts. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.Jeff Bezos controls Amazon. And Whole Foods. And The Washington Post. And IMDB, Zappos, Souq, Blue Origin, Kiva Systems, Alexa, DPReview, Fabric.com, Woot, Goodreads, Twitch, Audible, Elemental, Quidsi, Annapurna Labels, Accept, Living Social, Twilio, HomeGrocer, Bill Me Later, eZiba, BankBazaar, Kozmo, Ionic, Songza, and Wine.com. Plus he has VC stakes in Lookout, Juno, Grail, Workday, Vessel, Domo, Fundbox, Stack Overflow, Everfi, Remitly, Rethink Robotics, General Fusion, MakerBot, Unity Biotech, General Assembly, Business Insider, Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter. And he's working on acquiring MGM. Plus he owns at least eight mansions and 100,000+ acres, a bunch of penis-shaped rockets, and a $500,000,000 hyper-yacht.Bernard Arnault controls LVMH, which has swallowed more than seventy of its competitors, including Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Dom Pérignon, Loius Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loro Piana, Princess Yachts, Bulgari, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co.Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns massive chunks of nearly fifty companies including Apple, Amazon, Amex, Bank of America, Chevron, Kraft, Mastercard, Sirius, Visa, Wells Fargo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, GM, Merck, T-Mobile, GEICO, and Coca-Cola, which itself has eaten more than 400 competing drink companies.Blackrock, which owns a piece of 5,480 companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, JP Morgan, Paypal, Home Depot, Disney, Exxon, Pfizer, Pepsi, AT&T, Nike, Walmart, McDonald's, Costco, and Netflix, just bought Reese Witherspoon's media company for $900 million, adding to its $9 trillion Smaug-like horde.It makes you wonder when monopolists will stop growing larger and larger.And then one day it occurs to you…They will not stop until they are stopped.The factsThere are now 2,755 billionaires on the planet, not including “royalty” and dictators.In the year 2000, they controlled less than $1 trillion.Today, they control more than $13.1 trillion.13.5X in a generation.And they've grown their wealth by $5.5 trillion during the pandemic so far.The world's richest eight men now own more than the bottom 4 billion.On the flip side, there's never been so many people experiencing suffering and deprivation in human history:Systemic inequality pushed 200+ million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020.690 million people go to bed hungry every night (and the number is rising by 16 million per year.)5.5 million people are moving into slums per month.2.3 million children die from malnutritionment every year.Clearly, there is no limit to the depth of poverty and deprivation to which our global society will allow humans to fall — never forget that millions of children are still trafficked for rape annually and that nine million people die from starvation each year — yet somehow elite individuals are allowed to amass unlimited plenty in a world of deprivation?It begs the question: Is it moral and right for us to allow individuals to hoard extreme wealth in the face of overwhelming widespread poverty, documented democratic subversion, and environmental catastrophe?If humanity saw itself as the global family that it truly is, it would be morally impossible to not limit the amount that one family member could control while another suffered and died.“Earned” wealthIt is impossible for an individual to legitimately earn a billion dollars.If someone earned $100 per hour — more than enough for anyone to live in luxurious comfort — in order to truly earn a billion dollars, they'd have to work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for five thousand years.So how is a billion dollars actually amassed?By skimming a profit off the backs of untold others:off the workers they employoff the suppliers they squeezeoff the carcasses of the competitors they destroy with monopolyoff the planet they unsustainably extract fromoff the governments from which they gain subsidies and advantagesoff the stable societies they sell to while evading taxationoff the democracies whose rules they change at willoff the shareholders they dupeHow is the ability to skim achieved? Through unfair advantage and privilege.It is impossible to “work hard, save, and invest” your way to a billion dollars.Let's be crystal clear: billionaires don't “create jobs.” They extract value — time, talent, creativity, effort — from others at an industrial scale.Decentralize everythingHere's a short thought experiment.Which is better: 2,755 billionaires and their $13.1 trillion, each monopolizing roughly one industry apiece and subverting democracy, or 131,000 centa-millionaires in competition?How about 1,310,000 deca-millionaires?Or 13,100,000 millionaires?13.1 million millionaires would do far more for the economy in terms of spending, hiring, diffusing power, avoiding democratic destruction, increasing competition, and sparking innovation.Are there truly enough benefits to the global population to merit supporting the costs of maintaining billionaires? Surely not. No rational person can make the argument that 2,755 billionaires are globally preferable to having 13.1 million more millionaires, or 131 million more workers each controlling a $100K stake in the businesses wherein they constitute all of the wealth-creation.“But those poor billionaires are just rich on paper!”Sychophants for the ultra-elite are quick to cry out that most billionaires don't actually have $1,000,000,000+ sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-style vault. Their wealth is usually tied up in shares of the companies they almost always undemocratically control.But these people don't understand how billionaires work.Billionaires borrow colossal amounts of cheap debt against those paper shares, and let inflation devalue that debt over time.So you and I — the real taxpayers in society — end up footing the bill as the money-printing machine devalues our actual-earned money.We need a more equitable pre-distribution of ownership, wealth, and opportunity.Mathematical doomI believe — as do most of the working masses and the desperate poor — that it is morally wrong and utterly inhumane to be a billionaire whilst millions starve and billions suffer.Full stop.To paraphrase the Bible: “The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us.”The world and planet can't afford to support billionaires anymore.Corporatism is a gross inefficiency and major source of economic inequality; it is anti-democracy; it is ecological unsustainability.We should replace it with an economy of sole proprietors, partnerships, cooperatives, not-for-profits, and for-benefits — all the wealth to all the workers — massively diverse, all competing and cooperating and innovating within a body of economic law that enforces ecological sustainability (as defined by biology) and economic fairness (as defined by real democracy.)If we don't, we're mathematically doomed.Charting our trajectory to zeroWhen will billionaires stop amassing more wealth?The answer is clear:They won't.Our total global wealth is currently $431 trillion.In the past twenty years, billionaires have grown their wealth by 13.5X, to $13.1 trillion, far outpacing the poor and total growth in global wealth.At their current pace, billionaires will control $176 trillion in twenty years and $2.3 quadrillion in forty.You read that right: If we do not stop them, billionaires will control the entire globe's resources within our lifetime.From there, it's simply a game of thrones to determine which few families will survive.In the winner-take-all economy, elites will not stop until they are stopped.Why can't voter-shoppers fathom this fact?The solution is frightfully simpleIt's a radical idea that will be common sense to future generations:Individual private wealth must be limited.That's right: No more billionaires.Every dollar over $1 billion in net worth will be taxed at 100% or placed in a commons trust.As one Redditor put it:Once you reach $999,999,999 we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you.A global Billionaire Ban will have wonderful implications for protecting democracy and making the economy more robust and fair. Obviously, democracy can argue over the exact number for our new global limit — 10 million, 100 million, even 1 billion — so long as we agree on the underlying fundamental that private wealth must have an upper limit.Older right-leaning white men will now scream “Communism! Socialism!” while failing to realize this piece is not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That's what billionaires are working on.We need to reform our economic system. We need a more equitable pre-distribution of ownership, wealth, and opportunity, and we desperately need democratic limits to protect against monopoly and wealth hoarding.This isn't optional for the survival of our species: it's now required for the survival of all species.We need to move quickly.In the time it took you to read this article, the world's billionaires gained $62 million while sixty people moved into slums and thirty children died of hunger.How many more people must suffer and die before we re-structure the global economy for widest-spread well-being? Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.I'm your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we're going to discuss why the average house will cost $10 million within 50 years.But first, a personal update: I have a son! His name is Concord Thoreau Brock. Concord means “peace,” and Thoreau means “strength.” Concord is our favorite revolutionary town in America — home to the Alcotts (of Little Women fame), Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Hawthornes, and Henry David Thoreau, the father of environmentalism and philosopher whose pacifist writings inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Michelle was in labor for a brutal 38 hours, 11 of which were spent at a pub. (It's a long and extremely British story.) She saw 28 medical personnel over 5 wards and 3 shift changes, and I recorded over 400 60+ second contractions recorded. In the end, we had one 8.0 pound baby boy, the first male of eleven grandbabies in the family, and the first boy born to our church in twelve years! We are now accepting offers for a pre-arranged marriage. I'm feeling extremely grateful for this gorgeous little gift, and absolutely astounded by the physical strength and spiritual fortitude of Michelle to endure the whole glorious ordeal. But I'm greatly troubled by the world Concord will grow up in. If we keep in our insane trajectory…He'll have to compete with robots for work.He'll have to navigate totalitarian social credit systems and surveillance currencies.He'll face resource shortages, extreme weather events, species collapses, and massive societal strains caused by climate change refugees.He'll witness the complete privatization of public services in the hands of the corporatocracy, and the cessation of the charade of democracy as the world descends into corporate oligarchy.Of course, his Daddy and many others are doing their best to fight against all of these corruptions and injustices, but there simply aren't enough leaders who understand the challenges that predator elites pose to human life and widespread flourishing.In that sense, having a child amidst this corrupt corporatocracy is part of our act of resistance. It's our declaration of hope against chance.One of Concord's biggest challenges will be affordable shelter. House prices are currently at an all-time high, but we are not in a real estate bubble — we're in a pricing paradigm shift.The old paradigm: A house's price is the maximum amount that an area's average local buyer can afford to mortgage over 25–40 years. But because wages have flatlined and purchasing parity is the same as in 1978, the only rational explanation for this current price explosion is a giant debt bubble… right?Wrong.The new paradigm: A house's value is now the maximum amount of annual rental income that can be extracted from it by a global investor, multiplied by maximal institutional leverage.It's the biggest paradigm shift in the history of human shelter, and it's the reason why the vast majority will never own a house in the future.Because our family homes are just future hedge fund investments.In 50 years, the average house will cost $10+ million.Most people think that's impossible, but I'll show you the exact math on how it's going to play out.Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they'll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elites. Even with temporary price drops, expect overall prices to continue hard up-and-to-the-right for nine major reasons.1. Population is growingOur global family currently contains almost 7.9 billion, headed to 10.5 billion within fifty years. That's a 33% increase in the number of people who need to be housed. While this doesn't mean house prices will automatically increase by 33%, population growth does create more demand, which will certainly increase prices significantly.2. People are moving to citiesThe overall population will “only” rise by 33%, but look at the stats on where everyone is moving: Cities. 4 billion people currently live in urban areas, but that number is set to jump to 7 billion within 30 years and will hit 8 billion in fifty. So essentially housing demand where most people live will double. What will the average house cost when twice as many people are bidding on it?3. More people are living aloneMy grandma was raised in a farmhouse with a mom, dad, and a half-dozen siblings. My father-in-law was one of nine kids. Today, both of those homes probably contain less than four people. In major urban centers like New York, it's less than 2.4 people per unit and falling. As more people live alone, we'll need far more housing units. When there's more demand without adequate supply, prices increase.4. Multiple house ownershipLooking at you, small-time landlords and non-resident Airbnb hosts. More than 23 million American landlords own more than one house. That might seem like a lot, but what it actually means is that 115 million Americans don't get to own a home because a wealth-extractor owns two.“Airbnb-type models altered the market irreversibly by proving on a large scale that short term rentals were more lucrative than stable long-term residents.” — Valerie Kittell5. Housing construction isn't keeping upNot even close. The US housing supply has been underbuilt for over a decade, and we're building just six houses for every ten new households.Now add the fact that…6. Building costs are soaring amidst material shortagesLumber, paint, concrete, glass, labor, land… all rising faster than average wages. We live on a finite planet with limited resources, and those resources are becoming more expensive to extract. Accordingly, constructing new houses will continue to cost more and more.7. Real inflation is soaringIt's almost certainly 10+% per year. And real estate always tracks with inflation. These days, in fact, shelter prices are outpacing inflation; in Canada, real estate prices are up 40% since last year. Asset inflation in America is over 30% this year across the stock market and real estate market.Even without any of the other price-rise factors on this list, if rampant real estate inflation averages 7.5% for the next fifty years, inflation alone will send the average house price over $10 million.8. The monopolists are hereWhen you allow speculation and investment in residential real estate, you end up where every other capitalist sector ends up — with a handful of monopolists owning all the assets in the industry.If you study history, you see this happen with steel (Carnegie), railroads (Vanderbilt), oil (Rockefeller), banking (JP Morgan), online retail (Jeff Bezos), luxury goods (Bernard Arnault), web search (Google+Youtube's Larry Page and Sergey Brin), and so on.Monopolists will not stop until they are stopped.Obviously, up until this point in history, real estate has been a far harder market to corner because of the high upfront investment costs, but that's changed since the invention of…9. Outrageous leverage“A privileged class of investors are allowed to utilize the Fed and private banking system to print nearly infinite quantities of money via leverage, and use that money to out-bid first-time homebuyers who had to work for years to earn their money.” — Throop VonThis is where things get truly ugly. Once monopolies form, they utilize the power of financialization to drop an economic atomic bomb on their competition.Let's say a condo is for sale right now.A first-time buyer can afford maybe $1,200/month, so they're able to bid up to $250,000.A landlord can squeeze $1,250/month in rent from a long-term tenant. If they're expecting half their revenue to go to costs and want a 2.5% ROI. plus appreciation, they're willing to pay up to $300,000.A non-resident Airbnb host can fetch $2,500/month in nightly rent, double the long-term landlord. So they're willing to pay up to $600,000.A predacious hedge fund, like all monopolies, will shave those profit margins to near-nil to destroy competition. (Amazon's profit margin was negative for seven years while they killed off competitors.) So the hedge fund is willing to pay up to $1,200,000 to turn your house into a vacation property, nearly five times what the average person can afford.But here's the really insidious move: The monopoly will partner with banks that — thanks to a corporate-controlled government that constantly prints ultra-cheap money and lets them create credit out of thin air — allow them to leverage their positions to an absurd degree. The monopoly won't be paying $1.2 million for that house — they'll be betting

Non-wealth-backed, debt-based, government-printed paper money is the greatest scam of all time.America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is owned by private banks including Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs; predatory corporations who actually pay some of their bankers to go work for the Fed. Additionally, the major banks sponsor political candidates and lobby them hard once they're in Congress, leading to a dangerous political situation called regulatory capture. It's the same in most countries — essentially, rabid foxes now rule our global henhouse.Because America is bank-captured, the richest people in history get to monopolize legal tender and pillage your wealth whenever they please. And they do. If you haven't noticed, they're absolutely out of control right now, having printing 80% of all American M1 money stock in existence in the past 18 months alone:All this debt-based money printing has created a tidal wave of negative consequences in our lives, and we haven't even felt the effects of the past two years of crazy printing yet:They've dangerously inflated house prices.They've wildly inflated stock prices.They've put the world $300 trillion in debt.They've devalued our purchasing power by debasing our legal tender. Not only does this straight-up steal money from everyone holding cash, but it discourages savings — making people less antifragile and more dependent on the state while creating an instant-gratification culture instead of one that plans for tomorrow.They've locked us in an unsustainable debt+interest death spiral that requires all of us to compete against each other, and by pure mathematical necessity, heartbreakingly bankrupts more than 3,000 families per day for thirty years straight.They use their money power to set the agenda for the whole nation, spending on unending wars, toppling foreign governments, extracting wealth from poorer nations and sacrifice from their own citizens, stealing trillions of hours of human life. In total, this crime against humanity has pillaged several quadrillion dollars in real wealth from active societal contributors.Let's not mince words: The corporate-controlled central banking money-printing scam is the biggest sin and crime in human history.Challenger moneyGiven the utterly corrupt state of modern money, you can see why smart people who actually care about the sustainable long-term wellbeing of humanity started looking for a solution.One such person was Satoshi Nakamoto.We don't know if Satoshi is a man, woman, group, or an AI, and we don't know if he/she/they/it is even still alive.Satoshi invented a new form of digital currency that could be sent peer-to-peer, even anonymously. The system can be trusted because all transactions are automatically verified by its decentralized network and recorded in a blockchain, which is essentially a giant decentralized cryptographic spreadsheet.On January 9th, 2009, Bitcoin was born.And then greed set inOur total global wealth is currently valued at around USD$400 trillion.There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins.In early 2017, savvy speculators did the math.If Bitcoin eventually became the global currency, each Bitcoin would be worth twenty million bucks.That's when things went crazy.People started buying and hoarding coins.As supply constricted, the coin price rose.More people saw what was happening and jumped on board, bidding coin prices higher and higher and higher.Other people wanted to get in on the goldrush, and started making their own inferior versions of Bitcoin. Today, there are over 12,000 cryptocurrencies on the market.Then the pandemic hit and corrupt elites sent the money-printer into overdrive. As house and stock prices ballooned outrageously high, people like Michael Saylor realized they needed to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing $USD, but couldn't rationally buy wildly overpriced assets either.So they turned to Bitcoin as a speculative asset, further jacking the price, attracting more speculators in search of a quick buck in hard times. As greed and FOMO set in — and all those government stimulus checks arrived — prices soared even higher.Today, Bitcoins that cost a few cents worth of electricity are now “worth” around $50,000. The total Bitcoin market cap now hovers around $1 trillion.So… should we invest?As my newsletter disclaimer makes crystal clear, nothing I write is financial, legal, or tax advice. Blah blah blah, you're an adult, do what you want to do.But I don't think anyone should invest in Bitcoin for four major reasons:First:It has no intrinsic value. You can't eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it.It is not a productive asset. It isn't a factory that produces an item. It's not a field that produces a crop. It's not a firm that offers a service.It has zero underlying value. It's not backed by land or commodities or any other form of real useable wealth.Bitcoin is just a bunch of computer files.Its value is derived solely from the trust that people place in it — namely, that the price will continue to rise indefinitely and that there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones. On that standard of belief, the evidence is crystal clear (and don't trust any online bitboy who tells you otherwise): Bitcoin is currently being treated like a Ponzi scheme.So if your motivation for buying Bitcoin is to buy and hoard it until the price goes up, this is deeply unethical, because someone will eventually get hurt. Currency is meant to be spent, given, or invested in producing real wealth for the world. Not hoarded.Second: Speculating in Bitcoin is a massive risk right now. Just remember what you're actually doing when you decide to “invest” in crypto: You're betting against the established powers. A bet on crypto is a bet against centralized violence-backed money. It's a noble act, but an extremely risky investment strategy.There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that many governments will make crypto illegal once they introduce their own totalitarian surveillance coins. (See last week's Panopticoin episode for more.)Third: We shouldn't seek to passively skim profits off the backs of others without contributing anything of real value to the world.I have a friend who owns 36 full Bitcoins. He fully expects them to be worth $10 million apiece within a decade or two. But has he contributed $360 million in value to the world? Not at all. All he did was buy a few thousand dollars worth of digital files and waited for other people's greed and fear to pad his bank account. Shouldn't we want to use our money to make a real contribution?Four: When (not if) the next recession comes — when house prices plummet, the stock market crashes, and millions lose their jobs — people will need to pull money out of assets in order to fund fiat liabilities like mortgage payments and daily expenses. What's the most liquid asset most people have? Crypto. When millions of crypto holders desperately need fiat cash to stay afloat, expect them to reluctantly pull tens of billions from the exchanges and sink prices, if not crash questionable coins like Tether and house-of-cards operations like the DeFi and NFT markets. Wouldn't it just be better to be generous to the poor instead of gambling in an online casino?All told, it seems to me that investing in Bitcoin is an extremely unwise and likely unethical thing to do.That said, it doesn't mean we still shouldn't buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.After much research and deep introspection, I have come to the conclusion that if the only two realistic options are an unfortunately hyper-individualist libertarian currency called Bitcoin versus the dystopian nightmare that is totalitarian surveillance currency, the inevitable decision for rational people is to side with the former. Humanity stands a better chance of achieving widest-spread well-being when we the people create our own money.So what should we do with crypto?Satoshi Nakamoto made a huge mistake when launching Bitcoin.He mined about one million coins — which would sell for about $50 billion today — but he never used them. Just like the bitboy Ponzi speculators in the current market who dream of the day when Bitcoin is the world currency and they all get rich for doing nothing, Satoshi hoarded his coins instead. He just sat on them back in 2009, and all these years later, they're still just sitting there to this very day.So what should we do with cryptocurrency?I think we should do the same thing we do with every other currency:1. We should spend it.We need to spend crypto like crazy. Every day we treat it like a Ponzi scheme brings the whole thing nearer to the end, as corrupt governments rapidly build their own Orwellian competitor coins.We need widespread global crypto adoption as fast as possible; where every man, woman, and child on earth is spending crypto daily, and businesses are transacting in hundreds of trust-based coins, ridding the economy of trillions in toxic debt-based money.Crypto needs to be so widespread that governments should be absolutely terrified to take it away from us. That's why we need to make crypto cheap and plentiful, spreading those satoshis as far and wide as digitally possible.2. We should create our own cryptocurrenciesWe have the opportunity to create sound money that can be a blessing to the planet and the poor, but most people are just interested in buying coins that are “going to the moon.”We could create coins that are stable, free from thieving inflation, backed by real value, that are fair and trust-based instead of violence-backed, that can serve as a secure means of payment even when governments try to exclude us from the global economy.On a personal note, if you know any technologists or investors, please send them this episode and get them to contact me via jaredbrock.com, as there's a group of us who would love to get a pro-human coin off the ground.3. We should give it away.Imagine, if instead of hoarding his coins, Satoshi had sent the following text to millions of people:Hey,Here's a free Bitcoin.Spend it.Smooches,Satoshi.You would've heard about crypto ten years ago if millions of people had immediately started using it in 2009.We would've had a ten-year jump on corrupt governments to reach global crypto adoption.Just look at El Salvador. When they made Bitcoin legal tender, they gave everyone $30 in free Bitcoin to get started, and 25% of the population jumped on board in the first two weeks.(On the sinister flipside, China is doing the exact same thing to induce people into using its horrific social credit system-linked surveillance currency.)We need to be generous with our money, be it dollars, pounds, euros, pesos, or Bitcoin.We need to be very wise with our wealth. That's why I encourage all my listeners not to invest in any currency. Currency is meant to be spent, invested, and given. And when it comes to cryptocurrency, we need to do it now, before money is out of our control forever.If you think the Surviving Tomorrow conversation is important, the best thing you can do is email this podcast to your friends right now.I publish more than 150,000 words of free content each year, and it's the radical generosity of supporters like you who keep it free. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Hello friends, welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about navigating life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, now available for free on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube!I'm your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we're going to discuss one of the most dangerous pieces of technology that has ever been invented.But first, I wanted to let you know that I'm running a giveaway! One lucky winner will get a free copy of a book called The Bitcoin Standard, which is a great introduction to cryptocurrency, plus I'm going to send the winner $100 in free Bitcoin to spend. If you'd like to enter for free, click here.Okay, let's dig in:“The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.” — Jeremy BenthamAt some point between 1785 and 1786, while visiting his dictator-serving brother in Russia, the now-stuffed utilitarian social engineer Jeremy Bentham started asking himself a series of questions that two centuries later are about to yield disastrous consequences for your freedom, privacy, and personal autonomy:What if there was a way to design a prison that would allow one person to oversee the activities of thousands of inmates?What if the watcher couldn't be seen by the inmates, and therefore not even need be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched?What if the surveilled inmates were coerced into working in their cells in order to stay alive?What if the prison was named after Panoptes, a mythical Greek giant who possessed a hundred eyes?The result was the Panopticon.The Panopticon prison design was devilishly brilliant. The inmate cells lined the outer circular wall, with a surveillance tower in the center. The watcher could see all cells at all times and even speak to the inmates through a network of “conversation tubes,” but the inmates could never see the watcher.Bentham declared his invention was a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”Only a dozen or so Panopticons were ever constructed — Fidel Castro was once imprisoned in one — but unfortunately, it created an insidious panopticon paradigm that lasts to this very day.Because a panopticon is no longer just a physical building; ultimately, it's a system of totalitarian control.Panopticon PowerPatrick Henry said, “give me liberty or give me death,” and he wasn't being hyperbolic.He understood that humans without freedom are just inmates in a panopticon prison — without free will, we're just dead people walking.Panopticons derive their ultimate power by creating a state of conscious visibility, assuring automatic obedience through coercive and anonymous power.Under the panopticon eye, people wither and die.Panopticon TodayWe already live in a panopticon.Anyone who owns a smartphone is being surveilled at all times.Every word spoken… Every sentence typed…Every photo and video taken…Every item purchased…Every relational connection forged…Every movement made…All tracked.The only difference between today and Bentham's poor prisoners is that:a.) most people aren't punished for wrongthink, wrongspeak, and wrongaction, andb.) most people aren't conscious they're being watched.Yet.Panopticon Tomorrow“All data is credit data, we just don't know how to use it yet.” — Douglas Merrill, GoogleNearly all the other pieces necessary for a modern panopticon society are already in place:CCTVFacial recognitionVoice recognitionDigital fingerprintingIoT surveillance (via your fridge, car, etc.)DNA bankingGPS trackingCredit scoringNon-anonymized consumer data harvestingBiometric under-the-skin trackingHeart rate and body heat monitoringWe've literally never been more surveilled at any point in human history.Social coolingPanopticon culture is already changing our behavior and policing our free speech.We're becoming more risk-averse.We're self-censoring constantly.There's even a term for it: Social cooling.Have you ever not said something because you thought it would hurt your reputation? Have you ever avoided posting something online for fear of reprisal at work? Have you ever hesitated to click on a link, watch a video on Youtube, or buy a book on Amazon for fear it might be tracked and come back to bite you in the future?That's social cooling.When we let elite-controlled algorithms change our behavior in any way, we become less human.And now there's a piece of technology coming on the market that will make everything monumentally worse:Digital surveillance currencies.PanopticoinPanopticoin: A digital currency that allows totalitarians to surveil and completely control the economic activity of their subjects.Imagine a world in which all money is digitally controlled and monitored by corporate-corrupted national governments.Yes, we already have digital $USD, but this is something else.Imagine a government-issued cryptocurrency — a digital file created from nothing by the most dangerous power-seeking sociopaths on the planet — that can be completely controlled.They can create it at will — inflating prices, crushing purchasing power, draining wealth from productive workers to those closest to the money printer.They can surveil every transaction — knowing exactly how you spend, where you spend, and who you know.They can destroy it at will — if you fall out-of-bounds of the powers that be, they can delete your money, impoverishing or bankrupting you instantly.They can exclude you from the global economy — in fact, economic exclusion is an eventuality predicted in the Bible nearly 2,000 years ago.In a hyper-monetized global economy, there is nothing more dangerous than a surveillance currency that can be tracked, traced, devalued, or deleted at will.Sure, countries are letting bitboys have their Ponzi-like casino fun with cryptocurrencies for now, but the whole cryptoverse experiment allows them to silently watch and learn.When governments launch their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) — as some have already done — expect them to fully ban cryptocurrency and pair their CBDCs with Orwellian social credit systems and under-the-skin surveillance.Believe in a better tomorrowAt the end of the day, it all comes down to what we believe.I believe the United Nations should enshrine into international law the illegality of social credit systems and surveillance currencies as an egregious invasion of the human right to privacy.I believe in the old-fashioned notion that everyone is legally innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their homo sapien peers.I believe that conformity culture is anti-cultural.I believe in a future without mass surveillance.I believe in the right to make mistakes.I believe in the right to be unperfect.I believe in the right to be human.In conclusionWe don't need to live in a panopticoin world.In fact, we can go in the exact opposite direction, toward a coinified future where there are thousands of non-coercive trust-based currencies, all non-surveilled and even completely private.To get there, we need to do two major things:1. We need to vote out of office every single sociopathic corporate-captured politician who's ever taken a single dollar in dark money. We must absolutely resist digital surveillance currencies.Maybe that means you need to run for office.2. Instead of hoarding cryptocurrency and hoping for a price spike like it's a Ponzi scheme, we need to buy, spend, and give coins as far and wide as possible.(To put my digital money where my mouth is, I'm giving away $100 in free Bitcoin right now.)If we can revolutionize the new global economy before the surveillance coins get to market, we have a far better chance of securing our future economic freedom.Otherwise, the panopticoin is coming. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.Today we're going to discuss the silent and growing pandemic of pornography addiction. So buckle up!Several years ago, my wife and I traveled to ten countries to make a documentary about human trafficking, followed by a 150-city LIVE tour and TV broadcasts in fourteen countries. During our film trip, we met former traffickers, formerly enslaved children, politicians, undercover pimp busters, all sorts.Two strange things kept popping up:Cops told us they often find video camera equipment when they raid brothels.Formerly prostituted women told us that men often came into their brothels with cell phones, showed them porn clips, and said they wanted to replicate certain acts.As people who cared a lot about preventing human trafficking, we knew we needed to go upstream and make a documentary about pornography addiction.So we did.We traveled all over America to interview some of the nation's top porn stars and former porn stars, neuroscientists, pro-porn industry advocates, former sex offenders, addiction therapists, politicians, elite researchers, child addicts, and more.The result was Over 18: A Documentary About Pornography.First exposureI first saw porn when I was ten years old.I was babysitting for a couple in our church. The kid was asleep, it was stormy outside, and I was watching the NBA All-Star game. Lightning must've hit a cable box somewhere because suddenly I was watching the Playboy Channel — and they didn't have the Playboy Channel.I turned it off and rushed to the front door to make sure no one was around. Coast clear, I returned and put on the TV, watching with fascination and confusion. About ten minutes later, it popped back to the All-Star game. I didn't see porn again until I moved out of home and got my own computer, but by then, I had the tools to protect myself from addiction.The simple scienceAccording to the neuroscientists we interviewed for our documentary, the science behind porn addiction is pretty basic. You aren't technically getting addicted to porn or food or gambling, it's the dopamine that your brain's after.When you watch porn, you get a nice little ~200% dopamine spike to your nucleus accumbens, your brain's reward center. It's roughly equivalent to a shot of morphine. It feels really nice.But here's the problem: the neuroscientists explained that the cerebral cortex — that forward-thinking, future-planning, self-defending bit of brain mush — doesn't fully develop in boys until their early to mid-twenties.The average boy first sees porn at age eleven, but his cerebral cortex won't fully form for another ten or more years, meaning he has no way to protect himself from addiction for more than a decade.So what do we do?We stuff a smartphone in a kid's pocket and tell them not to look at porn. It's worse than giving them a pack of cigarettes and telling them not to smoke.Porn todayPorn has always existed, but the commercial porn industry is just… wait for it… 69 years old.The first legal piece of porn in America was the inaugural issue of Playboy back in December 1953. It contained a few topless pinups.Today's average porn scene involves multiple men pounding a woman orally, vaginally, and anally before ejaculating on her face.And 93% of boys and 62% of girls see this before age eighteen.Not only is it illegal to show porn to children, but it's deeply harmful:The majority of porn scenes depict physical, verbal, or sexual aggression or violence toward women, desensitizing viewers to violence and normalizing subservient behavior.Some children take it offline. We've met a number of parents and have heard countless stories of children assaulting other children.Tens of millions of children have started sending and requesting sexts from their classmates, pressuring others while inadvertently creating and distributing child pornography.Sexual templating imprints attractions on young brains that can be hard to shake. The top number-specified porn search is age 13 — and when boys are imprinting their brains to sexualized images of children, some will continue to seek out those visuals when they're over the age of eighteen. (On a personal note, I've now met three men who've served jail time for past child porn offenses; all are now living in victory and recovery. But what of the victimized children?)When your brain is trained to love pixels on a screen, it can lead to serious offline challenges, including porn-induced erectile dysfunction — there are literally tens of thousands of young men who've lost the ability to perform with a real-world partner because their brains only activate an erection or orgasm to screen-based images.I've never seen porn on a cell phone… because I don't own a cell phone. But if my parents had foolishly given me a smartphone at age ten or thirteen, there's no way I wouldn't be addicted to porn today. Pornography is wildly addictive, and the draw is understandably strong for all of us. What will the future look like if we continue to allow porn addiction to secretly rule our societies?Where we go from hereWhile the DSM-5 doesn't yet officially consider porn addiction or sex addiction as true disorders — but it's a bit like the economist who's so deep into the data that they forget about money and how it affects people in real life. The millions of children and teens who are experiencing overwhelming cravings know the reality of porn's true power. Our best guess is that unbiased scientific research in the nascent field of addiction will almost certainly confirm the truth in the years ahead.In the meantime, there are three necessary components to ridding our society of the blight of commercialized screen-based pornography:Age verificationFirst things first: We need meaningful age verification. Even the porn stars we interviewed agreed that clicking the “Are you over 18?” button isn't enough. You can't buy alcohol or cigarettes or drive a car without real age verification, so why should children be allowed to addict themselves to hardcore sexual violence?No, this isn't a violation of free speech. But this doesn't have to be a privacy-violating nightmare where the government suddenly knows who all's looking at what.Interestingly, Mindgeek — the shadowy offshore monopoly that rules the world of pornography — has already invented a technology to safely and securely verify adults without compromising privacy. Every nation needs to mandate meaningful age verification immediately if we care at all for our children's mental health and long-term sexual wellbeing.EducationCurrent addicts, parents, and children deserve to know what they're up against. Porn, sexting, age verification, and addiction prevention should be a part of school curricula, regularly addressed in order to protect our children from a world of pain and regret.Cultural transformationWhat kind of a world do we want to live in?Clearly, homo sapiens are not adapted for screen technology and shouldn't center life around it, nor are we any match for the addiction algorithms that rule the Internet, or the buzzy dopamine hit that porn provides.Do we really want to raise a generation with such a low view of sex and humanity? Aren't we more than just sexual objects?Eventually, society will wake up to the realization that the pornography industry is just another capitalist trick, a way of commodifying the human body and hijacking our nervous systems for a quick profit.We'll also realize that pornography is deeply harmful to civil society and our children. Instead of being active and embodied people who enjoy a real, physical offline sexuality, we're becoming passive voyeurs — spectators in our own life stories.If you want to help grow the Surviving Tomorrow community, the best thing you can do is email this podcast to your friends.We are listener-supported, so if you'd like to become a patron or want to watch our documentary on pornography addiction, please visit jaredbrock.com. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.I've been avoiding publishing any articles on vaccines because it's an absurdly contentious subject that wins you no friends and makes you quite a few enemies.It's an issue plagued with political ideologies, conflicts of interests, bad faith arguments, issue conflation, terrible research, and appallingly stupid false dichotomies.But alas, my inbox has been flooded with good folks asking me my perspective, so hopefully, I can lay it all out in one post and never have to discuss it again.Lucky me.Let's start at the beginning“A very good place to start.” — Maria von Trapp in The Sound of MusicThere are a lot of people out there who think vaccines are “inherently dangerous because there is no long-term safety data.”These people have never read a history book.Let's go back in time…The year is 1774. Smallpox is ravaging the world. Sore throats, headaches, and difficulty breathing are the nice symptoms. Instead, disfiguring rashes cover most infected people's faces, feet, throat, and lungs with pus-filled pustules. A third of adults infected will die. Eight in ten infants will die. At least 400,000 people will die per year for decades, and survivors will be marred with blindness and lifelong scars, driving some to suicide.Here's what that looks like in real life:People tried everything to halt smallpox outbreaks — hot rooms, cold rooms, avoiding melons, wearing the color red, drinking twelve beers per day. None of it worked, of course, but there was one genuine cure — an ancient practice from Africa called “variolation” an early form of inoculation. (We even know the name of the African slave who brought the life-saving practice to North America.)Variolation is pretty horrific by today's standards: People who take pus from someone suffering from smallpox and scratch it into the skin of healthy folks. During the American Civil War, people would take the dried scabs of smallpox survivors, grind them into powder, then sniff it up the nose or drink it in tea.Variolation worked… ish. People would usually get a mild case of smallpox and survive, thanks to their well-prepped immune systems. Some people still got full-blown smallpox and died, but variolation increased your chances of survival.Over in rural England, one class of person seemed completely immune to smallpox: milkmaids. The women occasionally suffered from a cattle disease called cowpox, but they usually survived with little scarring. In 1774, as a smallpox epidemic once again swept his nation, farmer Benjamin Jesty decided to scratch some cow pus into his family's skin.None of them got smallpox.The science is simple: The cowpox pus — vaccinia — could create antibodies and genetic memory that would trigger the human body to create immunity against life-threatening pathogens.Ben Jesty renovated his garden cottage into a “Temple of Vaccinia” and invited locals to visit after church for their life-saving doses. For his generosity, he was labeled inhuman, “hooted at, reviled, and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighborhood,” with some neighbors even worrying he'd turn them into horned beasts.Because of a lack of widespread and effective vaccination, 300 million people died in the 20th century from smallpox alone.A resounding successWe now have nearly 250 years of data and it all says the same thing: Vaccination decreases your chances of getting and dying from deadly pathogens.We no longer have regular rolling rounds of smallpox, whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, hib, cholera, and other deadly diseases that have killed tens of millions of people across time.Since 1962 alone, 4.5 billion virus cases have been averted thanks to modern vaccinations.Tetanus mortality has been reduced by 96% since 1988.17.1 million lives have been saved from measles since 2000.Smallpox has been completely eradicated.To be anti-vaccination is the same as saying you're anti-medicine.Thankfully, the vast majority of the world understands that vaccination is medicine. 9 out of 10 people in the world think that vaccinating children is important.But there's a small but vociferously vocal minority — typically white, right-leaning, poorly-educated Westerners who are addicted to social media and have never lost a child to a life-threatening pathogen — who would rather risk their family's life and safety than give them this particular form of medicine.They have their reasons, but none of them are Socratically sound:Therapeutics aren't a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapySome of our more earthy brothers and hippie sisters think we should stop playing God and just let nature do its thing, building our immune systems naturally.Which is exactly what vaccines do.Innoculation comes from the Middle English word “inoculaten,” which means “grafting a plant part to another plant.” When we get a vaccine, we're essentially grafting some of the enemy pathogens into our immune system, but in a way that teaches our body to do the miraculous work of defending itself when the real pathogen shows up.Most football coaches don't let their teams go onto the field until they've analyzed the competition for weaknesses. Most militaries don't send their soldiers into battle until they know their enemy's setup. I hate to use computer terms for something as gloriously biological as a homo sapiens, but human bodies are old hardware in need of constant software updates.Some people think our updates should only come from therapeutics and not inoculations.They're forgetting Brock's Rule: Avoid false dichotomies.When given two bad options, choose neither.When given two good options, choose both.Don't fall prey to the false dichotomy that it's one or the other, therapeutics versus vaccinations.Clearly, governments should have instituted a two-year ban on fast food, high fructose corn syrup, added sugars, processed foods, and everything non-organic, then sent everyone to the woods and beaches for exercise and sunlight while scientists worked on a vaccine.And if you're so inclined, go ahead and take therapeutics — eat all the essential oils and Ivermectin and vitamins to try to build a killer immune system, and also get the vaccine… which is just another natural immune booster. And we know for certain that the vaccine boosts our immunity response to Covid-19: Over a vaccine test group of nearly 28,000 participants — half vaccinated, half placebo — the unvaccinated group had sixteen times as many Covid-19 cases.If our rationale for therapeutics is truly to boost our natural immunity, then vaccines are the #1 weapon in our arsenal for doing so. The Cambridge dictionary defines a therapeutic as anything “tending to make a person healthier.” Vaccinations are therapeutic.Big Pharma profits aren't a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapyBig Pharma is awful.Life-saving medicine shouldn't be a money-making industry.There should be zero for-profit vaccines.Pfizer and the other drug cartels are making billions off Covid, and it's not right.I wonder how many more anti-vaxxers would take vaccine therapy if it was owned and administered by democratic governments, not-for-profits, and charities. Imagine how many more people would get vaccinated if the Red Cross did the deed at their local church.But alas, here we are.The question we need to ask, just like Cicero and the ancient Romans: Cui bono? Who profits?Clearly, Big Pharma is reaping a waterfall of cash from their vaccine. That's a huge issue we must address.But it doesn't mean vaccines are any less effective.What's interesting is that many anti-vaxxers are happy to take all sorts of other purchased products — literally anything under the sun, including anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine and a mostly Chinese-producedlice medication (and horse de-wormer) called Ivermectin.Who do they think is paying for all the marketing and social media posts they're reading about these products?Who do they think profits from every single therapeutic purchase they make?It's just shadow Big Pharma.(Ironically, one of Ivermectin's biggest manufacturers… is also a vaccine maker.)There are profit motives on both sides — clearly, Big Pharma's profits are far larger because they have so many unfair advantages — but it doesn't mean vaccines are any less effective. Vaccines don't care who makes money off them; they simply decrease our chances of getting and dying from deadly pathogens.Economic re-engineering isn't a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapyCorporate elites have used this pandemic as an excuse to enrich themselves to the tune of $5.5 trillion and growing.We clearly have to deal with this.We need a wealth tax, a global minimum corporate tax, and a robot tax.And thousands of Wall Streeters probably need to go to jail.But wealth inequality also has nothing to do with vaccination efficacy.Vaccines decrease our chances of death, regardless of who dominates the economy and tries to grind the middle class to dust.The risk of a superbug isn't a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapyThere's also the very bad argument that taking vaccines will eventually create some sort of vaccine-resistant superbug. While the odds of such a pathogen eventually existing is extremely high, the argument itself is extremely poor for two big reasons:First, it forces the anti-vaxxer to admit that vaccines up until this point have, indeed, worked.Second, when that vaccine-resistant pathogen arrives, millions of people will die and no vaccine will help — and neither will the immune systems of millions of anti-vaxxers. There's no evidence that says people who've avoided vaccines their whole lives will magically be granted immunity from the superbugs.I've met people who literally believe no one should take vaccines and we should risk the loss of millions of lives in an effort to boost our collective immune system. This, frankly, is unacceptable in a pro-human society. Sure, it would be great if our immune systems naturally adapted as fast as viruses do, but they don't. We can't in good faith permit millions of deaths when we have a suboptimal but effective immune-training technology in our possession. That would be like withholding a life-preserver from a drowning person today because there might be a tsunami in the future.We cannot allow the delusional perfect to be the enemy of the concrete good.Covid passports aren't a good enough reason to reject vaccine therapyThis is the big one, isn't it?It's certainly the thing everyone keeps emailing and calling me about.“Aren't Covid passports just the tip of the spear for government surveillance?”No, they're not.We're way past that.A vaccine passport is a joke compared to your smartphone, your digital bank, your social media, your Internet usage history, and especially the coming central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and social credit systems.Don't lose the plot, friends. Vaccines aren't the “tip of the spear” whatsoever. That weapon belongs to the private monopoly control of money-creation. Everything else is secondary.And here's a big thing a lot of non-travelers have forgotten:We've already had vaccine passports for years.My wife and I have traveled to plenty of risky countries including North Korea, Transnistria, Honduras, Ethiopia, and even West Texas. Tourists who only go to Florida and Hawaii and Caribbean all-inclusives may not realize it, but much of the world has required proof of vaccination for decades.As any missionary kid knows, you can't get into many countries without showing your doctor-stamped visa that proves you've had your yellow fever shots. 124 nations require you to show a yellow fever vaccine visa to get across their borders. We've shown ours many times. (We've also never had yellow fever, which still kills 30,000 people per year because vaccination gives people 99% immunity 30 days after injection.)Yes, future vaccine visas will likely be logged on the blockchain and movement will be automatically restricted by robots and algorithms. This is anti-human and should absolutely be outlawed. But avoiding vaccination itself won't change this. It's the wrong hill to die on.Tyranny isn't defeated by leaving your immune system under-educated.Why vaccines are so politicalIf Covid had a 100% transmission rate and a 100% kill rate, we wouldn't be having this conversation.If any disease spread to everyone and killed everyone, everyone except suicidal sociopaths would be in favor of mandated vaccination and proven containment measures.Conversely, if a disease had a 0% kill rate and a 0% transmission rate, no one would be in favor of any vaccination and any containment measures.Clearly, it's just a sliding scale, based on personal risk tolerance.So the question is: Who gets to decide when we should mandate vaccines and when to implement containment measures?Ebola has a 50+% kill rate. The Ebola vaccine is effective 97.5% of the time. If it had a 90% transmission rate by simply breathing in public, would you mandate a vaccine and/or try to implement containment measures? Even though we live in a troublingly individualist anti-culture, most people would say yes.(If it were solely up to me, vaccines would be mandatory for any contagious disease with an R-nought of more than 1.27 and/or an Infection Fatality Rate of more than 0.038%. If someone doesn't like it, they can move to Arkansas.)But it's not up to me.And it's not up to you.Because we can all infect each other, it's only fair that we all get to decide.Vaccine regulation is democracy's job.And people are furious because they don't live in a democracy.Let's be honest about what this is really all about:This is allabout trust.People don't trust Big Pharma.Nor should they — if it were up to them, we'd all die unless we could pay top “free”-market dollar for their wares. They already do this in unregulated nations in Africa.People don't trust Big Medicine.Nor should they — the American for-profit healthcare system is the biggest scam in global health.People don't trust Big Government.Nor should they — we live in an undemocratic corporatocracy ruled by private interests with anti-commons agendas.But this has nothing to do with vaccine therapy.We need to think clearly about the big picture: We're rapidly approaching the age of the panopticon surveillance state.So long as we continue to buy from giant corporations and vote for their corporate-captured political parties and candidates, social credit systems are coming, with or without a vaccine passport.Regardless of mandates or economics or passports, I would've gotten the Covid vaccine anyway. Why? Because I believe in vaccination therapy's ability to help train my immune system to be awesome, and because this vaccine is proven to significantly decrease my chance of death by Covid.That's it.Vaccines just aren't political for me, at all. I can't fathom why anyone makes them political — vaccines are medicine that trains your body to fight pathogens, pure and simple. Sadly, ours is an age of outrageous conflation.Rather than thinking clearly and tackling the real problems of tyranny, we endanger our children because we think it's magically “creating change.”My track record shows that I'm extremely anti-partisan, anti-politician, and anti-corporatocracy, and I'm not going to let any tyrannical institution weaponize my own health against me.You shouldn't either.We need to stay strong so we can take them down. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Welcome to Surviving Tomorrow, a podcast, newsletter, and publication that helps you navigate life in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for FREE on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, and Youtube.Athens wasn't a democracy.Women couldn't vote.Slaves couldn't vote.Metoikoi (permanent residents) couldn't vote.Only male citizens over the age of twenty.10–20%, max 30% of the population, by most estimates.It was a step in the right direction away from one-man tyranny and the ignoble “nobility”, but it certainly wasn't democracy.America isn't a democracy.It wasn't a democracy when it considered blacks to be three-fifths of a white.It wasn't a democracy when it didn't let the female half vote.It's not a democracy with all this ongoing voter disenfranchisement. (Looking at you, Georgia.)It's not a democracy while the electoral college exists.It's not a democracy when corporations are considered people.It's not a democracy while folks like Jeff Bezos can set new lobbying records by flooding Congress with money and muscle.Or when one person (Mitch McConnell) can block all legislation he doesn't like for several years.Ironically, we're nearing a situation where fewer men will rule America than in ancient Athens.Democracy is too precious a thing to entrust to politicians.They're easily purchased with campaign donations, board seats, and stock options when they retire.Americans call it lobbying. Other countries call it bribery.While some versions are certainly better than others, in any form of so-called representational government —electoral college, first-past-the-post, proportional, ranked ballots, liquid — people lose their voice.We need direct democracy.One voice, one vote.Kids included; with their vote delegated to their legal guardian until they reach voting age.A rule of (all) the people by (all) the people for (all) the people.With a strong judiciary to protect the individual and a swift administration comprised of real experts to execute the will of the people.“But knowing all the issues is hard!”No, it's not. Especially if kids are well-educated. Especially if false news media are held accountable. Especially if we focus on the most important issues and sideline all the private-interest distractions.And we can make it easier by having one Democracy Day each quarter where everyone gets a day off to learn about the issues and then votes via blockchain technology from the comfort of their own homes.Call it an investment in the survival of our species.Sure, it's slightly more complicated, but who cares? Teslas are better than Model Ts.We've never tried democracy because it terrifies the hyper-elites.It also terrifies us commoners.Humans are highly risk-averse.We hate change.We especially hate the unknown.But as our population explodes, the environment collapses, and the economy consolidates into a few dozen grasping hands, we're heading for a world of utter chaos or total tyranny if we go back to a system that's already failed.We tried fascism. It killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others.We tried communism. It killed 38 million Chinese.We tried socialism. It killed 67 million Russians.We tried dictatorship. Queen Elizabeth II lives in a castle once occupied by a war criminal who murdered 57,000 people during his reign.We tried “free” market capitalism. It enslaved 17 million Africans, collapsed the planet, and is currently driving one million people per day into slums.When you put elites in charge of education, they cripple education. Our kids don't learn history. Now pair that with a deep and rightful distaste for corporatocracy masquerading as democracy, and it's no wonder nearly 50% of Millennials and Gen Z take a favorable view of socialism.They've never had a voice.And if we're not careful, they never will.I say we give real democracy a shot.It's certainly a better option than anything else we've ever tried. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe

Dear founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, board members Angela Ahrendts, Ken Chenault, Belinda Johnson, Jeff Jordan, Alfred Lin, and Ann Mather, and all investors, hosts, and guests;I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion's share of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators instead of oppressors, and you and your family's physical safety.Brian, Joe, Nathan; you started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn't afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment, so you bought some air mattresses and served breakfast to your guests. Brilliant.But things of changed since then. Now you control an $80 billion company that has devoured millions of housing units, evicted countless families, and turned their homes into full-time clerkless hotels, with a promise in your IPO documents to fight democracies in court for as long as you can afford to do so.To be clear, renting out spare rooms, attics, basements, and backyards in owner-occupied properties isn't the problem. It's when an investor outbids a family for a second property and turns it into a full-time Airbnb. Or worse, when a holiday rental company does so. Or worse, when a highly-leveraged hedge fund buys a swath of holiday rental companies. Or worse, when a sovereign wealth fund buys a portfolio of hedge funds. It's why the average house will cost $10+ million within 50 years.Picture the future and do the math. Your company's mandate is to grow exponentially forever. If new housing construction doesn't keep up — and it hasn't for more than a decade — it's mathematically impossible that your company won't take hundreds of millions of houses away from real families in the decades ahead. Do you think this will end well for you?As it stands, you have set your company on a path that can only lead to ruin — for millions of houseless families, and eventually, your leadership team and your investors.But it doesn't have to be this way.1. Start with transparencyAs far as we're aware, only 8% of Airbnb hosts are renting a room in a single house, and that number is falling fast. How many million houses has Airbnb taken off the market so far, and how many more are being stolen each month?It's only fair that the commons knows what we're up against. If you want to build real public trust, your company needs to allow independent auditors to track how many of your hosts are actually owners who rent rooms in houses they occupy full-time, versus how many investors have taken a housing unit off the market and turned it into an unregulated clerkless hotel.2. Ensure all your hosts are owner-occupiers onlyYou must revert to your original model. When an owner occupies a house, they take care of it. They know their neighbors. They keep the noise down. They shop locally. They keep the local schools open by sending their kids. They set down roots.Absentee landlords kill communities. They don't have roots. They don't care about noise or safety or cleanliness. They don't care about schools. They don't care about neighbors. All they care about is extracting wealth.Worst of all, the huge proliferation of holiday investors is skyrocketing house prices beyond all affordable values. This means that the real societal contributors — productive workers — have to relocate to less desirable locations further away from their places of work. This is already robbing millions of people of billions of hours of life due to extra commuting, and the environmental toll of all that pollution is yours to bear.All of this could be ameliorated by ensuring that every single one of your hosts is only renting out space in a housing unit that they own and live in full-time.3. Limit the number of rental nights to 14/yearObviously, high year-round commercial availability removes a house from the residential market. The average American gets two weeks of vacation per year. As such, it seems reasonable to limit the number of rental nights to the number of vacation days of the average owner-occupier. Many cities have already started to put such a limit in place, but if your company truly cares about the commons, you'll pre-empt them all by ensuring your hosts are good citizens first, and hosts seconds.In a word, there must be no more full-time Airbnbs in residential homes.4. Stop suing democraciesI realize that part of your business plan includes building a war chest to fight 100,000+ cities in court. But is this really how you want to make your money? By fighting democracy? How will your children and grandchildren look at you when they learn the truth of your actions? Is this how you want history to remember you?Airbnb's fight-the-public-forever model is going to cost you a ton of money, and it's going to cost the commons even more. But do you expect us to just roll over and die? When millions of us don't have a place to live, what will you expect us to do instead?5. Stop bribing CongressLet's face it, the rest of the world calls corporate lobbying what it actually is: bribing. Why do you have 13 lobbying firms in Congress? Why did you hire a PR firm to meet with Scottish delegates on 28 occasions? Why did you fund more than 400 fake grassroots organizations?Instead of bribing corporate-captured puppet politicians to make laws that oppress the commons, why not build a company that doesn't require the overthrow of democracy instead?6. Start building clerkless hotelsClearly, there is a huge market for your business.People don't love the hassle of hotel check-ins and check-outs.They like paying online.They like having kitchens.They like having unique and interesting spaces.If you build it, they will come.Seriously — as more people start to travel regularly, there's likely a market for more than a billion Airbnb hotel units globally. Airbnb could earn (actually earn) a real profit by revolutionizing the hotel industry.You've been bleeding investor cash for nearly a decade, so why not make a profit for a change?7. Start an AirbnbankNow, of course, the sheer brilliance of extraction economy companies is that you take a massive cut of the profits without shouldering any of the risks and costs, shunting all those pesky expenses onto the backs of your army of hosts.So why not continue to pass the buck by giving your hosts an opportunity to invest in full-time commercially-zoned vacation space?Start a bank, give hosts mortgages, and allow them to buy units in Airbnb towers in properly zoned commercial areas. This would allow hosts to skim passive profits off tourists, allow you to make your hefty Airbnb fee, and earn interest like a fat cat Wall Street banker.You could also control maintenance and cleaning and security on these buildings, extracting further fees from your hosts. You could also rent ground-level space to restaurants, fitness centers, food shops, pubs, barbershops, and spas. Heck, you could even save a few floors for office share space and destroy WeWork for good. Best of all, you'd never have to take another residential unit away from a family ever again.Because even one house taken off the residential market to be used as a holiday house is one too many.Like it or not, your company is now the tip of the spear in a movement that is rapidly commodifying global residential real estate. You're leading the charge in turning a human necessity into a tradeable commodity. Access to affordable shelter is a universal human right, and you're devastating real people.A word of warningNow obviously, your full-time job is simply to boost Airbnb's stock price, so I don't expect you'll heed any of these suggestions; in which case, all that's left to say is: Enjoy it while it lasts. Because they're coming for you, and when they do, there will be blood. You thought Occupy Wall Street had a big turnout? Wait until hundreds of millions of evicted renters smash your empire. Rule number one of business: Never back desperate people into a corner. Pretty soon, the listings on your website will just become a hit list.Expect thousands of municipal lawsuits from city councils. Expect class-action lawsuits from evicted renters and priced-out buyers. Expect pitchforks in the streets.Expect bricks through windows and fires in listed properties.Expect homeless mobs climbing the walls of your gated mansions.If you continue on your current course, you will pay reparations one way or the other — so either get a good insurance policy or get back to your original business model so the world may call you blessed.A personal noteMy wife and I are having our first baby in late September. Our house lease expires in March, and our landlord is turning our home into an Airbnb. There isn't a single house to rent at any price within a half-hour drive. We have to leave the village we've come to love these past few years. We want to raise our child in a real home, but let's be honest — our landlords will extract way more money by renting our house out nightly instead of monthly.Our whole village is the same way. Nearly every property that comes up for sale is snapped up in days by a holiday rental company for far more money than any local family can afford to pay. If the trajectory continues — and there's no indication that it won't — there's a good chance our local school will close before our child has a chance to attend.I can't describe to you the sinking feeling I get in my stomach every time a sixty-year-old suburban woman stops in front of our place and says to her husband, “oh, that one would be cute,” or worse, when a holiday rental company van pulls up and snaps a photo of our home.There's a ticking clock that hangs over our heads, counting down the days until we'll inevitably have to move to a less desirable location, into likely a much smaller place, and still pay way more money, thanks to the commodification of real estate in the hands of Airbnb land-lorders.Calls to actionThere is much to be done in this world, and much of it is an undoing.Airbnb investors and board members: For the sake of long-term societal safety and short-term societal affordability, I call on you to divest of Airbnb stock in the same way you would of fossil fuels and weapons of war, or at the very least, become activist members that force the board to abandon its non-owner-occupied position.Airbnb hosts: I encourage you to only rent out rooms or units on your primary residential property, and sell any properties that you have stolen from the commons.Airbnb guests: I encourage you to stay in hotels, resorts, regulated bed and breakfasts, and in real commercially-zoned vacation rental properties, not in residential neighborhoods. If you want to use Airbnb in an ethical manner, do your due diligence to ensure that the property you're renting is a bona fide owner-occupied unit and not a unit that has been taken away from a family. It's deeply troubling to enjoy family vacation time in a space when you know another family has lost theirs — it's time to make the Golden Rule popular again.Citizens: Lobby your city councilors, county clerks, state representatives, and Congresspeople to ban all commercial activity and investment in residential real estate. Whether they include a 500% second house premium, a cost-prohibitive landlording license, or an outright ban on non-owner-occupied clerkless hotel rentals, we simply must drive investors out of the residential real estate market.Please sign this petition to save my village.Please spread the word and raise awareness about Airbnb.If you'd like to write to any of Airbnb's board members or executive management, their email is [first name].[last name]@ airbnb.comBrian, Joe, Nathan: You started Airbnb with the best of intentions. You couldn't afford to make rent on your San Francisco apartment. Today, your company has made it nearly impossible for people like your former selves to live in San Francisco, Paris, New York, London, or nearly any other desirable place on earth, including my little village.Houses are supposed to be homes. You've extended the capitalist script by turning houses into abusive investments, extractive commodities to be sold to the highest bidder. Please go back to your roots before society burns your whole empire to the ground. Get full access to Surviving Tomorrow at www.surviving-tomorrow.com/subscribe