Americans' credit card debt hits a record $1 trillion | CNN Business
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Americans’ credit card debt levels have just notched a new, but undesirable, milestone: For the first time ever, they’ve surpassed $1 trillion, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Americans’ credit card debt levels have just notched a new, but undesirable, milestone: For the first time ever, they’ve surpassed $1 trillion, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

  • flossdaily@lemmy.world
    60·
    2 years ago

    A single income used to afford a house, and family, a car or two, vacations, and retirement savings.

    Then we needed families to have two incomes to have that lifestyle.

    Then we held on to that system, but had that lifestyle, WITHOUT the building up of any savings, and without the vacations.

    Then we needed two incomes just to be able to LEASE that watered-down lifestyle.

    And then we needed two incomes and good credit to juggle that watered-down lifestyle, and deferring debt to some point down the road when we assumed we’d be high-income earners.

    Now we are in stunningly dangerous territory. We’ve largely given up any luxuries, and we struggle to find the CREDIT to LEASE basic essentials like housing, food and medicine. Often we fail to do so.

    Inflation has hit us incredibly hard, but when student loan payments start up in mere weeks from now, it’s going to be CRIPPLING, not just to those with debt, but EVERY business that needs those people to buy their goods and services.

    We’ve been robbed of our future by corporate greed and the psychopathic cruelty of the boomer-run government.

    … And just in the past 6 months we’ve seen the invention of the first artificial general intelligence. Even if it never got any better than it is today, it would still decimate the workforce. But it is getting better. At a staggering rate. We are headed for a jobs crisis the likes of which has never been seen in all of human history.

    Add to that the rise of fascism in a global scale.

    Add to that the hundreds of millions of anticipated climate change refugees, and potentially catastrophic failures of the ecosystems which sustain various crops.

    Add to that that all of human experience and evolution has left us WILDLY unprepared to understand let alone solve problems of this pace and magnitude.

    It is difficult to see how we survive this.

      • flossdaily@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 years ago

        GPT4 absolutely is the foundational block of the first AGI.

        I’ve been working with it exhaustively since it was released. I’ve built frameworks around it to give it a memory and other supplements. I have ZERO doubt that this is the first AGI, or at least it’s the engine that powers real AGI.

        If you haven’t read this paper, you should: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

        That was researchers using gpt4 before it had guardrails put on its behavior, but also without any supplements to it’s functionally.

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 years ago

        Hard definition to fit because it all depends on what you define as ‘general’. Its not great but tbh you can ask it a question about anything and it will give an answer, so I’d argue that’s general enough

    • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 years ago

      “It is difficult to see how we survive this.”

      We probably wont.

      Rome always falls in the end. The law of entropy is absolute. Like so many empires before us, the sociopathic greed/glut/power lust by the “winners” will be our end. Our height was WWII, I see no shame in that. We did a good thing after centuries of committing enslavement and genocide, then we declined into the sunset for the next empire to write about in its history books.

      When the system has become this exploitative, some sharp short/medium term pain is better than limping along for another generation or two when we’ll have to collapse or revolt and do the work of rebuilding we already need to do anyway.

      Reminder: being comfortable passing the buck of consequences to future generations is why we’re here.