Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We’ve de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
That’s before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
Idk if we’ve won. I get the feeling that we’re all living on borrowed time, and we’ve actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
The only country that did similar things was USSR.
The USSR by all accounts decreasingly relied on prison labor after WW2 and Stalinism ended. By the 60s, forced labor was anecdotic, and the conditions of people in the gulag system (which shifted from forced labor during Stalinism to mostly reeducation afterwards) were better than those in normal prisons to the point of prison being a punishment to rebellious gulag workers.
![The US is Politically to the Right of [Other] Democracies](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/21301eb3-0348-4db4-9f02-82fd35987e02.jpeg){kind=link}
Can we? So much of our modern standard of living comes from extractionary industry.
We pollute our waterways with our mining and drilling. We increasingly rely on prison labor for everything from agriculture to fire fighting. We’ve de-industrialized the Rust Belt so we could exploit low wage workers abroad. Our biggest sectors are Finance (which creates nothing material) and Tech (which increasingly focuses on Crypto and LLMs). Our airline industry is failing. Our semiconductor industry is failing. Our steel industry is being sold off to Japan.
That’s before you get into how natural disasters routinely shut down major urban centers for days or weeks at a time. And how flooding is obliterating enormous chunks of our housing stock. And how our roads and bridges are decades past their expiration date.
Idk if we’ve won. I get the feeling that we’re all living on borrowed time, and we’ve actually lost big relative to what we could have enjoyed.
Only USA does. The only country that did similar things was USSR. It was. Now USA the only is.
Even EU has better standards of living AND not use slave labour of prisoners.
Assuming you are from USA, your semiconductor industry is just fine.
Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.
I would think that’s North Korea, but that’s kinda a given.
The USSR by all accounts decreasingly relied on prison labor after WW2 and Stalinism ended. By the 60s, forced labor was anecdotic, and the conditions of people in the gulag system (which shifted from forced labor during Stalinism to mostly reeducation afterwards) were better than those in normal prisons to the point of prison being a punishment to rebellious gulag workers.