Think

Greetings citizen Bystander, had a curious conversation with a millenial last night that served as proof of concept that not only has nothing 'changed' but nothing is going to either.

Constant reader knows one of the central themes behind ASP is the core issue of 'How will I live?', a question each and every one of us faces on a daily basis...if not moment by moment.

Cue the capitalist refrain.

What? Don't know what I'm talking about?

You got this...let me 'refresh' your feeble memory.

"Tough old world out there."

There was a 'twist' in last night's bitch session that didn't exist back in the bulletproof days of the Sixties when I was a 'yute'.

My maturing youngster has realized the 'funniness' of money. He was actually upset that raising the minimum wage wasn't going to do anything but make prices, which are already horrendous, worse.

So I shared the tale of what happened during the Carter administration when my pay inexplicably doubled, followed by prices quadrupling.

Remember the EVERYTHING shortage? Only us old folks 'remember' although few of us understood it even to this day.

Um, cruel as it might seem, thinking isn't something humans excel at.

What's the 'take away' from wages doubling and prices quadrupling?

Do we start with the failure of market regulation, which literally means the markets failed to regulate prices because there is not 'check' on greed. The planet minted it's first Billionaire just six years earlier and now we have 3,000 of them, with the top twenty percent having multiple billions.

Can YOU say 'criminal'?

But I digress.

What did we miss?

Talk about elephants in the room, how can you enjoy prosperity if money doesn't retain value?

More on this later, but for now I want that kick in the nethers to sink in. [Can you chant the refrain for me, children? (how f'n DUMB are you?)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner