Stephen Kaledecker was psyched when he was promoted in December to regional manager at the hotel chain where he works – but his enthusiasm cratered when gas prices started to skyrocket after the US-Israeli conflict with Iran began earlier this year.
It is going to be very funny (read: horrifying) watching the American economy entirely grind to a halt, due to our car centric design of everything just completely imploding as ICE vehicle commuting itself becomes a luxury.
We’re so fucking delusional about this.
Cars are unaffordable.
Gas is unaffordable.
Public transit basically doesn’t exist outside of some major cities, but not even close to all.
If it costs more to go to work and be able to go to work, than you are paid for working, it is imminently rational to not go to work.
Just most people in general will completely lose their minds as this gets worse.
Fire anyone who’s not essential. Poor people don’t have any money to spend anyway, firing them will not have big impact on the economy
With less workers you can transform free office space into dorms. Employees will be able to rent them for a small price.
Unemployed people don’t have money to buy food so it doesn’t matter if they can drive to the store or not, another problem solved
Put up military style camps with tents and bunk beds next to factories. Workers will be able to rent those beds and get basic food rations for a % of their salaries. No commute needed.
I mean yeah, neo/techno-feudalism is the timeline we’ve collectively chosen here in the US.
But that still runs into the problem of capitalism collapsing significantly when it destroys its own demand via destroying its consumer base.
And it still means that a whole lot of people are basically just going to go literally insane, as the fabled promised bullshit of ‘work hard and follow the rules and you’ll be a billionaire too!’ is more and more obviously exposed as a fantastic lie.
The cognitive dissonance will get worse and worse.
Some will actually conclude that everything they know is wrong… many others will not be able to do this, or manage that realization well, and they will become psychotic.
There is another wrinkle to what you’re describing though.
Office space could have started to get transformed into residential space since covid made it obvious remote work is a viable paradigm, and thus commerical office space itself is significantly overvalued.
But they didn’t let that happen. Partly because managers and C Suite are narcissistic sociopaths who need to live a life where they get to neg their employees in person.
Partly because if you revalue downtown office space property values, well, a whole lot of rich people become significantly less rich.
So what I am trying to say is… they wont let those property values dive, to the greatest extent possible, and they can literally just do cartel style price fixing to do this.
So it’ll be they’ll all just keep acting like their inner downtown core properties are absurdly valuable, and you’ll be offered an indentured servitude contract where your downtown accommodations are fixed and rising, but your pay is variable and performance dependant.
No one who agrees to anything like that will ever get promoted to any substantially important position (barring an occasional selected token exception that proves the rule)… though they’ll create an entire internal and external ‘company culture’ that incredibly strongly implies that they will, reinforced with app kinds of propoganda, media, social media, etc.
… things like this will just keep occuring and get worse untill the proles basically kill these kinds of people. Otherwise, they’ll just keep churning through the proles.
The very small group of people with “important” positions in corporations will still be allowed participate in the wealth and drive demand. Everyone else will be forced to buy basic products like food and water at crazy prices basically giving away all income back to the corporation. Some tariffs, couple of wars and annexations will make sure they are not losing money.
You’re right about the office space property values. They will most likely not convert it into apartments. Better solution is to just allow workers to sleep under their desks. You get to keep your office space and workers don’t have to drive. You wold obviously have to charge them some rent to cover the energy use during night but it wouldn’t be that high. At first.
I think we’re both basically seeing the same kind of likely future, just from slightly different angles, or via slightly different extrapolated examples.
For me this was always the future presented in many American SF movies and shows. Couple of nice office building in the center, elites living the American dream and slums full of wage slaves everywhere else. Running Man, Bladerunner, Robocop, In Time, Corporate, Altered Carbon … They all nailed it.
Basically same, I guess I was just a fool to think that people would interperet those as pointed warnings and criticisms, not fucking instruction manuals.
Or just can’t afford to buy a new vehicle, ironically enough. I would love little more than to get rid of my car for an EV right now but I was barely staying afloat before gas prices started to surge, now it’s just even more precarious.
The problem in the US is that everything is to far from everything else thanks to low density, sprawling suburbs. Public transport works best in high density neighborhoods where they constantly have enough passengers that allows for a bus every 5 minutes.
The other difference is that in my city you don’t get any free parking, because the land value is insane and parking garages charge something like $10/h or so. This means for me driving into the city would be expensive, inconvenient and slow because of the traffic lights on every corner, so bus or tram wins every time over the car.
Apparently motorcycles are selling really well. Ebikes are gonna be big winners in town too. Transit ridership appears to.be slightly up but lots of cuties are still below pre pandemic levels due to cuts
I would LOVE a motorcycle, but the reality is that if anything hits you, even a tiny car, you’re going to get smeared. Best case scenario, you just destroy one leg if you fall over.
I have literally had dreams about riding a motorcycle, but I just can’t balance the risk on that one. If the rider makes a small mistake, dead. If there is a foreign object in the road that you hit and go flying, dead. If a deer pops out in front of you, dead. If some crazy person in a tiny car gets mad at you, dead. If some crazy person in a big truck gets mad at you, dead.
There are so many ways to be dead and so little between you and a lot of big immovable objects. Our little meaty bodies are not meant to sustain the forces that happen in a motorcycle crash. Yeah, you should wear a good helmet and all the riding gear, but at most, it will just serve to contain the meat paste that your body will be transformed into if you get hit hard.
I sold my bike after getting into a head on collision in my car when some guy playing with his phone decided to smooch his headlights with mine, had I been on two wheels I’d be dead. Get a dirtbike and go off road, just as fun to twist the throttle without the traffic and road rage.
Yeah I lost a friend to one in college in a rather horrific crash and I’m not nearly as athletic or coordinated as he was, decided I’d always stay away from them after that happened.
But at the same time, using mopeds and motorcycles is extremely common in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa.
And many of those places have road infrastrucure as bad quality as ours.
Yeah, if 10% of US drivers just switched instantly from cars to motorcycles, that’d be quite dangerous, because most American car drivers are idiots who shouldn’t own cars or be able to drive them.
But… if 10 or 20 or 30% of US car drivers just… stop driving, full stop… and then more people switch to motorbikes…
I don’t want to justify the use of cars, but the reality is that it’s a big place here. Also, much of the place has winter. A motorcycle is more of a toy than transportation unlike other countries. A lot of people can’t afford a car and a motorcycle–hell, they can barely afford the car.
It is going to be very funny (read: horrifying) watching the American economy entirely grind to a halt, due to our car centric design of everything just completely imploding as ICE vehicle commuting itself becomes a luxury.
We’re so fucking delusional about this.
Cars are unaffordable.
Gas is unaffordable.
Public transit basically doesn’t exist outside of some major cities, but not even close to all.
If it costs more to go to work and be able to go to work, than you are paid for working, it is imminently rational to not go to work.
Just most people in general will completely lose their minds as this gets worse.
What will win?
Just get an EV or Hybrid or Motorcycle or E Bike…
Or…
No, cuz that’s gay/stupid/‘unreasonable’… ?
There’s simple solutions for all of that:
I mean yeah, neo/techno-feudalism is the timeline we’ve collectively chosen here in the US.
But that still runs into the problem of capitalism collapsing significantly when it destroys its own demand via destroying its consumer base.
And it still means that a whole lot of people are basically just going to go literally insane, as the fabled promised bullshit of ‘work hard and follow the rules and you’ll be a billionaire too!’ is more and more obviously exposed as a fantastic lie.
The cognitive dissonance will get worse and worse.
Some will actually conclude that everything they know is wrong… many others will not be able to do this, or manage that realization well, and they will become psychotic.
There is another wrinkle to what you’re describing though.
Office space could have started to get transformed into residential space since covid made it obvious remote work is a viable paradigm, and thus commerical office space itself is significantly overvalued.
But they didn’t let that happen. Partly because managers and C Suite are narcissistic sociopaths who need to live a life where they get to neg their employees in person.
Partly because if you revalue downtown office space property values, well, a whole lot of rich people become significantly less rich.
So what I am trying to say is… they wont let those property values dive, to the greatest extent possible, and they can literally just do cartel style price fixing to do this.
So it’ll be they’ll all just keep acting like their inner downtown core properties are absurdly valuable, and you’ll be offered an indentured servitude contract where your downtown accommodations are fixed and rising, but your pay is variable and performance dependant.
No one who agrees to anything like that will ever get promoted to any substantially important position (barring an occasional selected token exception that proves the rule)… though they’ll create an entire internal and external ‘company culture’ that incredibly strongly implies that they will, reinforced with app kinds of propoganda, media, social media, etc.
… things like this will just keep occuring and get worse untill the proles basically kill these kinds of people. Otherwise, they’ll just keep churning through the proles.
The city is the plantation now.
First, they are already solving the demand problem:
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earners-make-up-half-of-us-retail-spending
The very small group of people with “important” positions in corporations will still be allowed participate in the wealth and drive demand. Everyone else will be forced to buy basic products like food and water at crazy prices basically giving away all income back to the corporation. Some tariffs, couple of wars and annexations will make sure they are not losing money.
You’re right about the office space property values. They will most likely not convert it into apartments. Better solution is to just allow workers to sleep under their desks. You get to keep your office space and workers don’t have to drive. You wold obviously have to charge them some rent to cover the energy use during night but it wouldn’t be that high. At first.
Yes you bring up good points!
I think we’re both basically seeing the same kind of likely future, just from slightly different angles, or via slightly different extrapolated examples.
Yeah.
Yeah shit’s lookin pretty bleak right now.
For me this was always the future presented in many American SF movies and shows. Couple of nice office building in the center, elites living the American dream and slums full of wage slaves everywhere else. Running Man, Bladerunner, Robocop, In Time, Corporate, Altered Carbon … They all nailed it.
Basically same, I guess I was just a fool to think that people would interperet those as pointed warnings and criticisms, not fucking instruction manuals.
Or just can’t afford to buy a new vehicle, ironically enough. I would love little more than to get rid of my car for an EV right now but I was barely staying afloat before gas prices started to surge, now it’s just even more precarious.
I guess you could put it like this:
How do we improve traffic?
Raise gas prices, dramatically.
Anybody who cannot just stop driving will tell you the many many ways why that’s a terrible idea without like 15 other things done first
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The problem in the US is that everything is to far from everything else thanks to low density, sprawling suburbs. Public transport works best in high density neighborhoods where they constantly have enough passengers that allows for a bus every 5 minutes. The other difference is that in my city you don’t get any free parking, because the land value is insane and parking garages charge something like $10/h or so. This means for me driving into the city would be expensive, inconvenient and slow because of the traffic lights on every corner, so bus or tram wins every time over the car.
Apparently motorcycles are selling really well. Ebikes are gonna be big winners in town too. Transit ridership appears to.be slightly up but lots of cuties are still below pre pandemic levels due to cuts
I would LOVE a motorcycle, but the reality is that if anything hits you, even a tiny car, you’re going to get smeared. Best case scenario, you just destroy one leg if you fall over.
I have literally had dreams about riding a motorcycle, but I just can’t balance the risk on that one. If the rider makes a small mistake, dead. If there is a foreign object in the road that you hit and go flying, dead. If a deer pops out in front of you, dead. If some crazy person in a tiny car gets mad at you, dead. If some crazy person in a big truck gets mad at you, dead.
There are so many ways to be dead and so little between you and a lot of big immovable objects. Our little meaty bodies are not meant to sustain the forces that happen in a motorcycle crash. Yeah, you should wear a good helmet and all the riding gear, but at most, it will just serve to contain the meat paste that your body will be transformed into if you get hit hard.
So depressing. It looks like so much fun.
I sold my bike after getting into a head on collision in my car when some guy playing with his phone decided to smooch his headlights with mine, had I been on two wheels I’d be dead. Get a dirtbike and go off road, just as fun to twist the throttle without the traffic and road rage.
Yeah I lost a friend to one in college in a rather horrific crash and I’m not nearly as athletic or coordinated as he was, decided I’d always stay away from them after that happened.
But at the same time, using mopeds and motorcycles is extremely common in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa.
And many of those places have road infrastrucure as bad quality as ours.
Yeah, if 10% of US drivers just switched instantly from cars to motorcycles, that’d be quite dangerous, because most American car drivers are idiots who shouldn’t own cars or be able to drive them.
But… if 10 or 20 or 30% of US car drivers just… stop driving, full stop… and then more people switch to motorbikes…
Might be less of a blood bath?
I don’t want to justify the use of cars, but the reality is that it’s a big place here. Also, much of the place has winter. A motorcycle is more of a toy than transportation unlike other countries. A lot of people can’t afford a car and a motorcycle–hell, they can barely afford the car.
Now our obsession with big trucks is just stupid.
Won’t be as great for road death stats though.
San Diego is about to increase fares and reduce service. They seem to think they have a captive audience in the poors, the disabled, the old.
Yet there are so many deaths on motorcycles. This week alone there has been at least one death a day where I live. I used to want to buy a bike. Nope.