How the hell are the democrats the party of enriching the wealthy when compared to the fucking R’s??

glances at the Obama administration unprecedented market bull run while foreclosures were rampant and low-income poverty surged

The Americans, in typical capitalist extravagance, insist on having two right-wing parties instead of one.

I mean fucking hell have any of you ever read a book or even glanced at historic and current R policy?

Democrats sow, Republicans reap. But the line only ever consistently goes up for the already wealthy. Passive income dominates wage growth. Assets prices outrun revenues thanks to our investor-friendly monetary policies. And the Piketty R > G math, with ®ate of investment return > (g)ross domestic profit yield, leads to a steady consolidation of property in the hands of a shrinking ultra-wealthy minority under both parties.

Yes, democrats do periodically have to save capitalism from itself - for which the bourgeois are perpetually aggrieved. But what did Obama do when he was handed half the financial sector on a platter by the outgoing Bush Administration? Did he properly title homeowners who had already paid in mortgage several multiples of the face value of their homes? Did he cancel a bunch of outstanding student loan debt, so that college students weren’t perpetually hobbled by interest payments on debt? Did he universalize Medicaid or even deliver on a public option to evade insurance company graft?

No. He gave the bankers their crooked banks back for a vanishingly tiny ROI. He forgave the debts of major lenders, bailed out executives, propped up stock prices of major hedge funds and corporate institutions, subsidized private insurance to the benefit of the insurers, downsized Medicaid during the Government Shutdown fight, increased school privatization at the primary level, and did literally nothing for his most zealous base of supporters - educated professionals.

And then his party got absolutely washed in the subsequent three election cycles, culminating in the nation’s most incestuous pedophile taking the White House in 2016.

And that was Obama, the closest thing to a progressive the party has produced since LBJ. Carter, Clinton, and Biden were even worse.

You need to extend the graph beyond January. The US has been riding an enormous localized wave that crested shortly after Trump’s inauguration. American securities (particularly the MAG7) are enormously overvalued, with revenue that is dwarfed by their stock price.

This is a much-needed market correction, not a regional stock performance split from within the US.

Not even suggesting Trump isn’t shit. Its very obvious that he’s popped the irrational optimism bubble we’ve been gliding on since even before COVID hit. But we were in a bubble. DOW 43k, never even mind the absurd NASDAQ run up, is not representative of the functional economic capacity of the nation as a whole. Without unlimited free money from the Fed to keep inflating asset prices, we were going to enter a downturn sooner or later.

The real question is whether the DOGE Team will kick the knees out from under our Treasury/Fed countercyclical spending system on the way back to earth and cause us to land harder than necessary.

if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world.

Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren’t going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There’s too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn’t (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).

Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there’s so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.

In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn’t have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.

It becomes a game of “Who Is The Werewolf?”, which strategically favors the werewolves.

Reddit was never FOSS.

Reddit went full open-source in 2008 with a Github repo, did a (possibly deliberately) poor job of maintaining the repo despite this source code resulting in a plethora of 3rd party site enhancements and feature suites, then ultimately close its code nine years later.

Linux is still going stong, even with vested financial interests.

RedHat did Linux extremely dirty, and they’re hardly the first. It also has a significantly larger, more skilled, and more international userbase.

Most importantly, wie have already made the decision to leave traditional social media and build something better.

That’s a beautiful lie. Lemmy’s federation has been its pioneering feature, but it continues to backslide into Reddit-with-Extra-Steps. If anyone could claim they were building something truly novel, it was Mastadon. But that complexity and novelty has been an albatross around their necks since day one.

If worst comes to wiorst, we’ll find each other again.

:-/

It absolutely won’t. What we will get is a bunch of kids profiled and harassed by an administration that sees “Suspected School Shooter!!! ALERT!! ALERT!!” popping up based on vague suspicions and poorly conceived correlations.

The argument I saw one fascist use on a Facebook thread some years back was “If you were handed a bowl of M&Ms and you were told one of the brown ones was poisoned, how many would you leave in your bowl?” That’s the logic behind these algorithmic surveillance programs. Just grab known data points and draw a line through them. And the data points they lean into - age, race, gender, zip code - are what the system can grab rather than what might conceivably inform you of a person’s psychological state.

Its not just a matter of shipping. You need dealerships and licensing and the like. England is notorious for its long line of middlemen who make everything more expensive. So no surprise BYD can’t get a competitive vehicle into a state that hates foreign competition and loves rent-seeking at every turn.

Maybe if they make the virus weakened or figure out some way to deactivate it?

How will that serve the interests of the eugenicists who believe disease is a powerful tool of ethnic cleansing and of purging people with disabilities?

human beings know who is the reasonable one

I remember people saying that about Julian Assange and Edward Snowden twenty years ago. It didn’t take long for popular opinion to turn on them, though. Just call the whistleblowers allies of the opposition party or props of an evil foreign government. Americans hate that. And the American public soured on them rapidly, as a result.

Lemmy’s security is largely in its obscurity. If the community ever gains the degree of popularity or prominence as Reddit, it will succumb to all the same socio-economic pressures.

Hell, Reddit’s origin story isn’t far off from Lemmy’s. A left-wing FOSS guy pioneers a novel means of aggregating information in a relatively decentralized and community-oriented way. But then the capitalists move in, he’s arrested, the administration of the site is auctioned off to VCs, and the site is slowly mutated into an echo chamber for neoliberal propagandists and reactionary agitators to scream at one another, drowning everything else out.

Lemmyites want to believe they’ve engineered a technical solution to what is ultimately a socio-economic problem. The human labor that makes Lemmy work can be attacked and replaced, the communities that form alienated from one another and censored by moderators and dispersed, and the popularity monetized here just like has happened elsewhere.

This isn’t a safe social media space. Its just a lingering redoubt in an internet that’s been under siege for decades.

But because it’s not capable of sustaining the elderly, a 401k is a primary method to pay the gap.

Less than half of the US participates in 401ks. It is not the primary method for paying.

This whole discussion is that gap, and is why in this discussion about 401k bringing up social security is moot.

Its very difficult to take seriously the idea that a five year bull market is leaving a gap in private investment. The gap isn’t the result of a short-term downturn in a record high equities market, its with the vast disparity between equities gains and working incomes.

The appeal of Social Security, and the reason why it forms the foundation of virtually every retirement plan in the US, has to do with its relative accessibility and guaranteed return. This is in sharp contrast to 401ks (which have outperformed lifetime SS returns thanks to a long term upward market trend) that over half the country isn’t eligible to join.

I am not the one who put social security on the chopping block, Elon Musk is.

Elon isn’t putting SS on the chopping block, he’s just trying to deny people payments through blatantly illegal means. You’ve bought into the theory that SS simply won’t be there, in large part, by the people who are trying to shut it down. Might as well take a bank robber at his word that you should open the door and let him into the vault because the cash box will be empty by the end of the day.

Saruman just seems too… competent.

A guy who spent his early years claiming to be Leader of the Good Guys, while secretly poisoning the brains of the elderly, embracing all the worst forms of anti-environmental industrialization, and building a personality cult of Ivy League freaks does kinda feel like neoconservativism in a nutshell.

Yeah, you look competent in the early years. But when you’re trying to negotiate terms of surrender from the top of your half-flooded Ivory Tower and your next big move is to flee to a small mayorship in the hinterlands to do low rent fascism, until you get stabbed in the back by one of your most weasley sycophants?

Say what you will about the tenants of National Sauronism, but they put Mordor on the map. Saruman reeks of squandered opportunity driven by fear of failure.

I am saying that in a discussion about the risk to the 401k, mentioning social security is irrelevant.

If you’ve ever had to answer the question (or known someone who has to answer the question) “at what point do I begin to draw down from my 401k/IRA/whatever?”, the questions “When am I eligible for SS? When do I receive the maximum SS benefit?” looms large. Social Security is an economic backstop for the elder that prevents a downturn in the market from forcing them to divest from their retirement positions at a disadvantage, precisely because it makes up such a large share of their retirement income.

If you are going to obliterate (or even just privatize) SS entirely, you’re eliminating that counter-cyclical cushion. Now there is no baseline of income that elderly people can rely on. There is no guaranteed future income to borrow against, destroying the credit worthiness of the elderly. That’s both immediately consequential during a downturn (market goes down, guaranteeing an equivalent drop in retiree spending) and historically consequential (apartments/retirement communities can’t admit new elderly residents without assuming high risk of non-payment, credit agencies and mid-term lenders don’t want to do business with the elderly, elderly residents are at increased risk of eviction/repo, etc) that make life for elderly people much harder.

that does not cover the growing gap the 401k needs to cover.

When the NASDAQ, led by the MAG7, has seen a historic 150% increase in a mere five years, it is extremely premature to talk about 401ks failing to cover basic needs due to a 15% downturn (off a post-inauguration spike). What kind of growth does a 401k need if the last five years isn’t covering it? You’re not describing a problem of market volatility, at that point. You’re just saying 401ks suck as a vehicle for guaranteeing long term retirement needs.

And that brings us back to alternatives, like Social Security, that both already exist and are pivotal in propping up retirement income when 401ks fail.

He’s not even hurting them. They’re still up for the year. They’re historically up for the last ten years, in the face of enormous economic headwinds.

Trump stepped in, the market surged, and now its floated back down to December 2024 baseline.

And these losers are screaming like stick pigs because Big Line doesn’t always go up forever.

Even past that, the market has been on a historic bull run. The NASDAQ is up around 150% over five years. Unprecedented gains, even with the COVID dip.

What kind of whiny bullshit is this about a 15% decline? You’re holding equity with a 100+ p/e. You took a bunch of leveraged risk and came out ahead, but you’re still not happy because… you’re not a trillionaire like Daddy Musk yet? Take your fucking profits and back away from the roulette wheel, you degenerates.

You would have the tax payers pay even more of the burden now

Tax revenues have been decoupled from government spending for nearly a century. You don’t need to change the tax rate at all.

But if you really did want to, I’d recommend simply uncapping the SS Tax and collecting on income above $176k. That, alone, gets us back into surplus. It even raises the prospect of boosting COLA to match the real inflated cost of living.

That’s not a permanent solution on top of that!

It’s how we’ve been funding virtually every federal program - from the courts to the Pentagon - since the nation’s founding. How much more permanent do you need?

Just needs to remember they have social security is dismissive and not relevant.

Dismissing 40% of retirement income streams as “not relevant” is a great way to get a senior citizen putting a brick through your window.

They are going to have to change something either raise the retirement age or lower the payments

Or just pay directly out of the general fund, which they can do with a simple vote in Congress and which they already do for Medicare/caid.

The fact that social security is not tied to the market is super irrelevant

It is the primary argument both for and against the program. Investors kick and scream about the benefits of compound interest, right up until a big market nosedive and bankruptcy spree. Meanwhile, it’s the benchmark for guaranteed basic income that progressives love to reference.

Decoupling income from economic growth isn’t irrelevant. It’s the program’s entire raison d’etre.

Wrapping Mayor Adams in a big cocoon and dangling him from a lightpost would be such a vibe right now

Social security is not enough to live off of.

Nevertheless, it is 40% of retirement income. And none of it comes from the stock market.

projected to be unobtainable for future generations

Projected by advocacy groups trying to abolish social security.

Too much trade between the states. We need to rip up the Interstate Commerce Clause

All of everyone’s retirement accounts are invested in the market.

Americans not willing to recognize that Social Security exists is such a fucking capitalist vibe