#great depression

[firstoccupier]

What People Remember When the System Fails

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS NewsBaybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 2, 2026 — 17:35 The Great Recession of 2007–2008 was not the Great Depression of 1929. That much is clear from the absence of breadlines and mass starvation in developed economies. But if the comparison is based on what was lost, rather than what was visible, the gap narrows. Homes disappeared.…

What People Remember When the System Fails

[scholarofgloom]

[allwhoponder]

In conversations about Generative WI, I have heard time and time again how "We will survive, we always have" in regards to the economic impact AI is already having on the world. Not only is this survivorship bias on a massive scale, but this is woefully ignorant of history.

In the 1910s and 1920s, tractor-pulled combine harvesters became the widespread new commodity in agricultural America. With these new machines, farmers could plow and harvest fields many times faster than they could before. I'm sure at the time, people were amazed at how much more affordable food would become, and how this leap could solve world hunger.

But at the time, 21% of America's labor force was in Agriculture. One in 5 Americans had their job eliminated by this innovation, and while I'm sure at the time everybody involved echoed the same arguments we hear today ("They'll find other jobs", "they could go back to school", "we'll survive, we always have"), anybody who knows American History knows that the 1930s were not a good time in America. Many of those employees didnt find jobs, many of them lived in Hoovervilles and shanty towns, many died of starvation or exposure when they couldnt afford food or housing. The Great Depression was a long period of suffering and hardship, a period we only pulled through due to a combination of two World Wars and the New Deal policies (which many would accurately describe as "Socialism" and demonize today).

And that was a single, massive industry. AI has the potential to effect almost every industry in existence, all at once. Are we prepared for the world we are creating? Or are those in power so blinded by the pursuit of easy profit that they dont care or dont see the widespread suffering that will be caused by this?

Ultimately, I agree with Demis Hassabis (CEO of Google's Deepmind) that AI will usher in an age of "Radical Abundance", but just like how the people of it's time believed the combine harvester had the potential to solve world hunger, I am keen to know who exactly will benefit from this Radical Abundance. It's my personal opinion that while we may have at our fingertips the tools we need to build a utopic society, I am unsure if we are socially and morally advanced enough to use that power wisely. I sincerely hope that we can rise to the moral challenge, but only time will tell.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[what-marsha-eats]

[scholarofgloom]

[rmelster]

so there’s this photo that has been circulating or a woman named Lucille Chalifoux who, during the Great Depression, had to sell her four young children (three daughters and a son, the youngest aged two, the oldest aged about six) because her husband had lost his employment; the children were adopted by three different families and the child she was carrying then was also given up too. And the comments where filled with “don’t breed if you can’t feed 😡” or “and then she had the gall of REMARRYING and having more children, if I was one of those children, I would have NEVER forgiven her”, “she must have been mentally ill, that why she sold them”, “she should have fought to see her children instead of, ugh, remarrying and having more ☹️”… Emotional intelligence and reading comprehension of a cabbage. Contraceptives weren’t widespread, marital rape was common, women mostly depended economically on their husbands and the Great Depression oversaw the economical ruin and misery of not only the rich, but most notably the working class and the already poor. They should really make a license for people to comment at this point

[joe-england]