Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2024 7:58 pm She asked me what I thought of AI. I said the first thing that comes to mind with regard to any new technology is whether you believe the civilization is on the ascent or the decline. If you believe the civilization is on the ascent, and you are right about that, then AI will probably on net be a positive and force for good. However, if you believe that the civilization is on the decline...at which point she interjected, "Oh, definitely!"...and then I finished my thought.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says U.S.-China AI race poses "toughest dilemma"
Face the Nation and CBS News

We begin with the stunning news from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Saturday that he is urging a slowdown when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence. It was a pronouncement that his chief competitor Open AI CEO Sam Altmann and Elon Musk quickly agreed with. Our Jo Ling Kent sat down with Dario Amodei yesterday. He explained the thinking behind his decision.

"What we're building is essentially intelligence. When something's very powerful, then of course it can be used well and it can also be used for ill and and so I am worried about what we've seen..."

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) looks at how common fatigue is among adults age 18 and older. Fatigue was measured by asking people how often they felt very tired or exhausted in the past three months; feeling very tired or exhausted most days or every day during the three-month period was considered "frequent fatigue." The report uses data collected in the 2024 National Health Interview Survey.

Quick summary of the findings

Nearly 3 in 4 U.S. adults felt very tired or exhausted at least some days in the past three months.

28.5% never felt very tired or exhausted.
54.9% felt very tired or exhausted "some days."
10.7% felt very tired or exhausted "most days."
5.9% felt very tired or exhausted "every day."

About 1 in 6 adults experienced frequent fatigue, defined as feeling very tired or exhausted "most days" or "every day."
Who is most likely to experience frequent fatigue

Women were more likely than men to report frequent fatigue (20% vs. 13%).
American Indian and Alaska Native adults had the highest rate of frequent fatigue (25.5%), followed by White adults (18%), Black adults (17.3%), and Hispanic adults (12.9%), with Asian adults having the lowest rate of frequent fatigue (9.1%).
Younger adults were more likely to report frequent fatigue: frequent fatigue was highest among those ages 18–34 years (19.5%) and the lowest rate among adults ages 65 and older (12.9%).

Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026. Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”

Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal.

Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.

Why are Americans so tired? CDC report highlights who’s feeling it most

Fatigue is one of the most common concerns reported in primary care visits, yet not much attention is given to how often adults in the U.S. are coping with it.

Sept. 13, 2026, 9:00 AM CDT
By Gina Vivinetto

The cost of healthcare. Economic uncertainties. Fears of AI-associated end times. It’s enough to exhaust anyone.

About 71.5% of adults in the United States say they experienced fatigue on multiple days over the past three months, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Women and younger adults are more likely to report frequent fatigue, meaning most days or every day, than men are.

Sociologist Natalie A.E. Young, lead author of the report, said fatigue is “one of the most frequently reported health concerns in primary care visits in the U.S.” It’s the first study about general fatigue from NCHS, which surveyed about 27,000 adults ages 18 and older in 2024 about their health and daily lives.

People with fatigue “are at higher risk of activity limitations and disability, including permanent work disability. Yet there hadn’t been much attention to the frequency of general fatigue symptoms in the U.S. adult population,” Young said.

Fatigue isn’t ordinary sleepiness. It’s “physical or mental tiredness or exhaustion that does not improve with additional sleep or rest,” the researchers said.

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 11:14 am Here in the US, The 97th Percentile has been running the rest of the population harder and harder on the hamster wheel for decades to stay in place, and I think the population is exhausted.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Sep 11, 2026 10:49 pm For example:

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Sep 09, 2026 12:09 pm In dark age theory, I've said many times that late 2011 represented a cut point where the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bankers established the certainty of a new dark age by their actions.

and we see on the list:

Fractional-reserve banking and bills of exchange: Medieval Italian and Dutch merchants created credit networks and paper bills to transfer money without moving heavy physical gold. This vastly increased the fluidity of global capital.

What I mean by that is, foundationally speaking, it's important to understand how and why these systems came into being, what rules for their operation were established, what things should never be done so as to not undermine the system, and whether the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bankers by their actions in 2011 crossed lines that never should be crossed.

Bernanke Policies At Fed Broke His Own Rules Of Central Banking

Thomas L. Hogan And Linh Le06:26 PM ET 02/07/2014

As Ben Bernanke's tenure at the Federal Reserve drew to a close, many wondered how history will remember this controversial chairman. Although he is widely respected as an academic, economists are divided regarding Bernanke's actions during the 2008 financial crisis.

Some think the Fed did everything by the book, while others contend its bank bailouts were unprecedented, possibly bordering on illegal. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, for example, said the Fed's actions "extend to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers, transcending certain long-embedded principles and practices."

Did Bernanke save us from another Great Depression, or did he sell out to Wall Street by bailing out the big banks?

One way to evaluate his performance is to ask what course of action most economists recommend in a crisis and see if Bernanke followed their advice. In fact, Bernanke himself has proposed exactly that. He claims to have followed the standard playbook for financial crises: the rules for a classical lender of last resort set forth by 19th-century economist Walter Bagehot.

Bagehot's rules are considered the most effective guidelines for central bankers in times of panic. In his famous book "Lombard Street," Bagehot proposed a course of action for the Bank of England in response to banking crises.

Bagehot was not an advocate of central banking, but given the role taken on by the Bank of England as a central banker, he believed that the bank should act as the lender of last resort in times of panic. Bagehot had four rules for a lender of last resort:

1. The central bank should lend freely to solvent banks. As long as they are backed by sound collateral, there should be no limit on the loan amounts.

2.The central bank should only provide last-resort loans at a high rate of interest. This penalty rate serves as a self-selection mechanism so only the banks that are truly in need of funds seek them.

3. The central bank should only lend to illiquid but fundamentally solvent institutions. During a crisis, the central banker is under pressure because many banks are short on liquidity. However, the central bank should only make loans that it expects to be repaid in the future.

4.The central bank should announce its policies before any crisis takes place. This creates an expectation that the central bank will help to stabilize the banking system in future financial crises.

It is clear that the Fed's bailouts deviated significantly from Bagehot's recommendations. The Fed did not charge a high penalty rate of interest on its loans to at-risk banks. To the contrary, the Fed lowered its lending rates during the crisis.

Nor did the Fed deal only in good securities. Rather, it freely accepted risky assets such as mortgage-backed securities in order to get these toxic assets off banks' balance sheets and replace them with safe, liquid assets.

Did the Fed announce its policy in advance? Hardly. It bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers fail, and then bailed out everyone else.

Perhaps the most important deviation from Bagehot's rules is the Fed's bailout of insolvent financial institutions.

Who lauded Bernanke?

AI Overview

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been widely lauded by a variety of world leaders, major institutions, and prominent economists for his academic insights and his aggressive management of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The primary figures and institutions who have praised him include:

U.S. Presidents

Barack Obama: When nominating Bernanke for a second term in 2009, President Obama strongly lauded him for his "calm and wisdom," "bold action," and "outside-the-box thinking," famously stating that Bernanke's guidance helped prevent a second Great Depression.
George W. Bush: When appointing Bernanke to replace Alan Greenspan in 2005, President Bush lauded his intellect, noting his speeches for their "keen insight and clear, simple language."

Global Institutions & Committees

The Nobel Prize Committee: In 2022, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Bernanke the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (alongside Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig). The committee praised his groundbreaking 1983 historical research into the Great Depression, which proved that bank failures propagate and worsen economic meltdowns rather than just being a side effect of them.
Time Magazine: The publication named Bernanke its 2009 Person of the Year, lauding him as the most important driver behind the containment of the global economic free fall.
The BBVA Foundation: In 2021, they presented Bernanke with the prestigious Frontiers of Knowledge Award for demonstrating how financial market flaws amplify macroeconomic recessions.

Academic Peers and Economists

Simon Johnson (MIT): The prominent economist and author noted that Bernanke deserved immense praise for his "improvisation" during the crisis, pointing out that Bernanke's ideas fundamentally shifted how the policy world responds to banks to prevent collapse.
John Hassler (Nobel Committee Economist): Stated that Bernanke's once-radical views on proactive central bank intervention during financial crises "have become the conventional wisdom."
His Peer Institutions: Academic leaders at Princeton University (where he chaired the economics department) and MIT (his alma mater) have heavily praised him for successfully bridging high-level academic theory with real-world crisis management.

(Note: While Bernanke has received extensive praise, his policies—such as implementing multi-trillion-dollar quantitative easing and Wall Street bailouts—also drew strong criticism from some members of Congress and free-market economists who argued his interventions set dangerous precedents.)

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 2:49 pm

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Sep 11, 2026 10:49 pm The only reason I want to study this list a bit is to have a filter to better understand, as current events unfold, what the forces of destruction that have already been unleashed will target further to undermine the foundations of the industrial revolution...as the new dark age tightens its grip.

In addition to the Magna Carta, gunpowder revolution and printing press, list the pre year 1500 foundational social technologies that made the industrial revolution possible

Double-entry bookkeeping: Developed in 14th-century Italy and formalized by Luca Pacioli in 1494, this system allowed businesses to accurately track profits, debts, and capital, forming the bedrock of modern corporate accounting.

The foundational idea is to be transparent and accurate, not opaque and obfuscatory.

33:23 There's considerably more debt and much more exposure and the question is who is exposed? You know, we've been noticing lately that private credit institutions
33:32 have just popped up from nowhere. These are guys who set up companies uh the purpose of which is not understood.
33:41 The aims of which are a bit like the South Sea bubble and we know they've been lending out huge quantities. I think it's about 3
33:50 trillion, 1 to 3 trillion you know huge quantities of money relative to the whole of the US um economy or the global
33:58 economy but nevertheless we don't know where that money has gone and and the ability of those borrowers to repay so
34:05 that's one area but there's quite there's the shadow banking system as well because what's happened is the banking the banking sector has
34:13 evolved to actually operate beyond the reach of government regulators of central banks and so on. So they operate
34:21 in what I call the sort of stratosphere where we really don't know what they're doing basically who they're lending to, whether and at what rates and whether or
34:30 not you know and and whether they're using our pensions for that lending. You know these are institutions like Black Rockck which you sort of
34:38 scoop up people's savings and have all this cash and need to invest it in something in order for their for it to be interest bearing for
34:47 it to be revenue bearing. So they lend out this all this cash that they've collected to god knows whom you know in order to get some interest back on it.
34:57 Um so so I I think it's extremely worrying um because of the quantities and because of how much of it you know
35:05 is linked to so you know it's it's not just does black rock go bust it's what happens what happens to all the kind of
35:13 streams around which the money has flowed really.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2026 2:49 pm In these recent posts, I'm spelling out what makes my mind work differently and I have at times brought these things up sporadically, pointing out that fundamental building blocks of Western Civilization are being dismantled (I will find and repost one of these discussions).

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Oct 14, 2017 4:02 pm Next, I will discuss a company called Appliance Warehouse of America that I rented a washer/dryer from.

Like State Farm and Dell, the overall experience was positive but it still showed that an understanding of the basic principles upon which Western Civilization was founded and built is now seriously lacking. This provides continuing confirmation to me that we have entered a Dark Age, even though day to day things are still functioning.

I called the company to schedule a pickup. The woman who answered the phone was very professional and had a great telephone voice. I complimented her on that and she greatly appreciated it.

The pickup was scheduled and the driver called me during the scheduled two hour time slot, which was posted on their website as promised. When the driver showed up, it was evident that he was an African man (born in Africa). He handed me a piece of paper to sign. He was in an unmarked truck that did not bear the name of the company. I signed the form and handed it back to him.

I was aware that the company should have provided me with a receipt verifying the serial numbers of the appliances being the same ones I rented, but I didn't bother asking for it. The reason I didn't is I knew there was nothing they could do if he hauled the appliances off and never returned them to the company.

A few days later I got a bill in the mail that was printed up 3 days before the pickup. In the next 3 weeks, I got no other correspondence from the company indicating the appliances were received or the account was closed. I called to ask if we were square and got the same woman. She said their records showed the appliances were returned and my account was closed.

I kind of doubt most Millennials would have any thought that this transaction was not done according to the basic business principles upon which Western Civilization was founded and thrived for 5 centuries because they have probably never seen a transaction like this done correctly.