It's a multifactorial problem. The decline of heavy manufacturing was one cause of economic stagnation in Detroit. But the failed progressive social policies and lack of effective law enforcement didn't help either. Businesses are hesitant to expand in areas where they can't find reliable employees and where their property isn't secure.

Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country.

Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.

I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.

I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.

Tricky when the super intelligent robots that'll make stuff don't exist yet.

Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.

Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession

There is some recent stuff on that website https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/17/wrke-s17.html

>Sanders and the trade union bureaucracy join hands with the fascist right

>The question of who controls AI can be resolved only through the establishment of social ownership and democratic control over the technology by the working class, internationally.

the article also doesn't have much concrete plans for the Oracle workers.

You should want to read both sides and generate your own view of it.

You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis.

I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet.

The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.

What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts.

Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.

I don't think a sacrificial generation is necessary. There should be ways to sort things that are positive over all.

There's no reason we need to and there's every reason to believe that the people and companies foisting this technology on society will accrue the benefits and dump the fallout on everyone else.

>We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

Who is "We" here?

I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A.

Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market.

Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times.

Millenials went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it.

/rant

I think that there are a lot of people who would be unwilling to sacrifice their life.

There is absolutely no reason to have that being forced at full speed on the entire world without consent, no. That’s a completely insane thing to say

"need to"? why?