Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Most thought the housing bubble was just rent subsidies.

Wrong.
The FHA was selling homes to illegals, using taxpayer-backed mortgages.

“I thought they were just supporting prices via the rental market… but they were actually buying homes.”

Now the market’s cracking.
Prices falling.
Layoffs rising.
Wages flat.
Americans can’t afford to buy.

“We need a sharp correction. Not 50-year mortgages to paper it over.”

And the Trump administration?
“They think they can talk their way through this. They can’t. Claiming a ‘golden age’ is backfiring.”

Ed Dowd says unless they’re honest: about what they inherited, what’s coming, and what it’ll take to fix it, they might lose the midterms.

This isn’t theory.
It’s data. It’s real.
And no one in D.C. wants to admit it.

The Lost Generation

Jacob Savage

This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.

But of course, by 2016, we were already too late.

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.

They never did.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions.

Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.

With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic's hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. “If you hired a team of white guys around you, you were putting a target on your back,” recalled the hiring editor. At The New York Times Magazine (one of the few prestige magazines with a public masthead), Jake Silverstein, a Gen-X white man, serves as editor-in-chief, and Bill Wasik, another Gen-X white man, serves as editorial director. But of nine millennial senior editors and story editors below them, there’s just one white guy—and he’s been there since 2012, effectively grandfathered in.

At the very bottom of the ladder, the picture is little different. Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.

Other pipelines dried up as well. The alt-weeklies that gave misfit young men their start have shed them entirely. There are no white men on the editorial staff of the Seattle Stranger or on the staff of Indy Week. As late as 2017, there were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland Mercury. By 2024, there was just one: the Boomer editor-in-chief.

By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else: The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that journalism was not for them.

“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?”

In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry changed. The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. Condé Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.

But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his start-up’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022 the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.

The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which stories got told. After George Floyd’s death, Andrew’s colleague Lucas was assigned a piece about why you should never call the police. “I remember having to interview one of these abolitionists for a story about how if somebody breaks into your car or your home, it’s white supremacy to call the cops—even if you need it for an insurance report,” Lucas told me. “That always made me feel gross. I think back on that with a lot of regret.”

Gold/USD vs Weimar: Are We Past the Point of No Return?

As gold and silver continue their steep climb, many precious metals investors no doubt are thinking about what their profit targets are, and when they might exit their positions in this current precious metals bull market cycle and rotate back into stocks and other investments after the crash of the Everything Bubble brings equities and real estate prices back to earth.

Using the last 2007-2009 recession as an example, silver topped first in 2011 followed by gold:



I was planning on using this same playbook for the next upcoming (imminent) recession that will surely precipitate bazooka QE followed by a spectacular run in gold & silver, and then look for signs of a top to sell my gold and silver (and miners) to finance rental property investments when real estate prices bottom out.

That was the plan… until I saw this comparison of two side-by-side charts below (from The Pareto Investor). This particular coupling of charts caught my eye, and has been nagging at me ever since.



I was intrigued by these side-by-side charts, in particular the neckline the author had drawn across the cup & handle pattern in both, which in my opinion clearly highlights the striking similarity between them.

Just for kicks, because I wanted to more closely examine the similarity between these two charts, I copied and superimposed the Weimar chart on top of a chart from goldprice.org, combining the two as shown below to obtain a more direct visual comparison:



Of course, this is not going to be an apples to apples comparison, as the time frame of the Weimar hyperinflation from 1918-1923 was very compressed compared to what is occurring right now with gold priced in USD. So when I copied the Weimar chart and overlayed it, I had to stretch the X and Y axis a bit to try and obtain the best fit to the Gold/USD chart.

However, I was truly astonished at how closely the initial curved run-up in price to the cup & handle patterns matched (almost identically), and how the peaks of the left and right edge of the cup lined up. The points of confirmation of the neckline breakouts from the cup & handle patterns differed slightly, but after the breakout we all know what happened next in Weimar…

So the question then becomes, are we past the point of no return in Gold/USD? Are we really on the verge of hyperinflation here in the United States? How could it be possible that this could happen to the most powerful country in the world, and so quickly? I had always thought hyperinflation might occur here, but that it was sometime far off in the distant future.

Doing a quick Photoshop comparison by superimposing charts is certainly not a rigorous scientific, mathematical or statistical comparison of Weimar gold prices to today’s gold in USD. However, the similarities between the two charts are clearly apparent upon visual inspection, and I am beginning to wonder if we are reaching the terminal phase for the USD as the pattern above would indicate. Perhaps this time I might rethink my plan for short-term profit taking to finance other investments, and that instead I might hold onto my gold and silver for dear life until the conclusion of this monetary reset we have all been told is coming…whatever that may look like.

. . .

Last weekend I watched a movie called A Night to Remember (1958) about the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. I recommend that all of you watch that movie, not because it has anything to do with investments, but because it is analogous to the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Many financial analysts have drawn comparisons between the anticipated upcoming crash of the Everything Bubble to the Titanic striking an iceberg. In particular, Henrik Zeberg, who is a brilliant technical analyst, has stated that his models indicate we have already hit the iceberg, and it is only a matter of time before we enter recession or worse.

What struck me about this RMS Titanic movie is the portrayal of the psychology of the passengers, even after hitting the iceberg, clinging to their belief that the Titanic was unsinkable. I can remember communicating my worries several years ago about potential hyperinflation to relatives who responded with looks that clearly said “Don’t be ridiculous, that could never happen here!”

Yet here we are, with the Weimar vs Gold/USD chart shown above, and the still shot from the movie showing Thomas Andrews, the architect of the RMS Titanic — examining the damage from the iceberg and explaining to Captain Edward John Smith that the Titanic is going to sink. After coming to terms with the harsh reality of the situation, the captain then orders the lifeboats be swung out and prepared for the women and children.

As I watched the movie, and the final terrifying plunge of the Titanic into the freezing abyss with 1500 people still aboard who tragically lost their lives, I thought about the impending financial crisis and destruction of wealth that is occurring in the form of currency debasement “first slowly, then suddenly all at once”. And my attention then turned to the Weimar chart above, and to the warnings issued by many others who have stated that gold (and silver) are the lifeboats that will save those and their families who had the foresight to recognize this impending global debt catastrophe.

I am very interested to know what other people’s thoughts are regarding where we are on the hyperinflation curve, and whether you believe that we have a couple cycles of ups and downs left to buy and sell… or if you are convinced that we are beyond the point of no return, and that this gold run will only go vertical from here. Please do share your thoughts in the comments below.

Hobson's Choice: Depression or Revolution

Both of these bubble characteristics set up our illusion of choice.

Hobson’s Choice is the illusion of choice, when the only real choice is “that or none”--”something or nothing.” We now face a Hobson’s Choice between a Bubble Economy that leads to Revolution, or we pop the Bubble Economy and get a Depression.

Put another way, there is no alternative in the status quo to a Bubble Economy which leads to Depression or Revolution.

We can choose “something”--a bubble-dependent economy--or nothing, as there is no alternative in what analyst Tim Morgan (Surplus Energy Economics) calls the Post-Capitalist Expediency (PCE) economy because it’s based not on capitalism but on monetary and policy expediencies.

If we choose the Bubble Economy, it ends in Depression or Revolution. If we choose “none”--pop the Bubble Economy--we still get Depression or Revolution, and those come as a inextricably bound pair: the only choice is which come first. So the choice between Depression or Revolution is also illusory.

The temptation here is to distract ourselves with debates that lead to quicksand: rather than illuminate the issue, they bog us down.

The temptation arises because the facts are inconvenient to the conventional narrative of Permanent Progress and Plenty for all--the three Ps.

Over the past 50 years, the share of the economy being distributed to wages has shrunk while the share distributed to capital has increased. Over these five decades, the cumulative difference now exceeds $150 trillion.

The net result is those who own capital have gained fortunes while those who depend on earnings from their labor have lost ground. The “Plenty” has been asymmetrically distributed to the benefit of capital.

At the same time, costs have risen inexorably for the essentials required to participate in the economy. These essentials have become increasingly complex and burdensome. In 1975, at the peak of labor’s share of the economy, one could function as a full participant in the economy with 1) a landline telephone, 2) a mailing address, 3) a bank checking account and 4) one credit or debit card.

The fees to maintain these essentials were modest.

To function as a full participant in the economy now requires constant expenditures on technologies and an immense amount of shadow work to manage the complexity. At the same time, the costs of essential services such as childcare, higher education and healthcare have exploded when measured in the number of hours of labor required to pay for them.

As I have repeatedly explained, this is the only valid metric of costs: the number of hours of labor required to pay rent, insurance, tuition, etc., i.e. the purchasing power of labor. Every other measure is artifice that is easily gamed to create an illusion of “Plenty.” Generating this artifice is the primary task of conventional economists.

The sources of this inexorable rise in the cost of living are many--bureaucratic bloat, the expansion of unproductive complexity, and so on--but the primary driver is the suppression of competition and transparency by monopolies and cartels: once these structures dominate a sector, they are free to increase profits by raising prices and degrading the quality and quantity of their products/services.

The rising costs of essentials is self-reinforcing: soaring healthcare costs increase the overhead costs for employers to have employees, increasing the pressure to replace workers with technology or game the system to avoid having to insure their workers, a trend that increases the precarity of the uninsured workforce.

The economy is now dominated by these self-reinforcing feedback loops of cartels and monopolies--both private-sector and state, as state agencies continually increase mandatory fees.

As I explain in Investing In Revolution, totalitarian governments and corporate monopolies are structurally identical.

Since the status quo is dominated by those who own capital, this widening asymmetry between labor and capital serves their interests remarkably well. They have no incentive to reverse it and every incentive to increase it.

If this widening asymmetry were to become painfully visible, this would threaten the stability of the status quo. And so Job #1 for the Powers That Be is to cloak this reality with 1) artificially contrived statistics, 2) credit and 3) asset bubbles.

To fill the widening gap between the purchasing power of wages and systemically rising costs of essentials, the status quo has expanded credit much like a star going supernova: credit has consumed the entire economy.

Since earnings don’t cover expenses, the “solution” is to borrow money. This is an ideal “solution” for those who own capital, as the debt is an asset that generates income.

That debt slowly impoverishes the debtors is glossed over by the artifice of “investment”: borrowing $100,000 to pay for a university degree of diminishing (or near-zero) value is an “investment,” exorbitant childcare is an “investment,” and gambling in the stock market / real estate casinos is of course an “investment.”

But there are limits are using credit to fill the widening gap between wages and essential expenses, and so the third “solution” is to inflate an asset bubble with central bank monetary stimulus and regulatory hocus-pocus.

There are two key characteristics of credit-asset bubbles:
1. They inherently favor those who already own assets and those with access to lower-cost credit, i.e. the high earning already-wealthy, and
2) They don’t actually address the fundamental problems with our asymmetric economy, they simply paper them over with a floodtide of phantom wealth.

The wealth generated by asset bubbles is phantom because the utility-value of the assets doesn’t increase; the only thing that soars is the market value within an artificially controlled monetary system: think Monetary Mouse Utopia. (Musings Report #48: Red Friday, Mouse Utopia and Model Collapse).

Simply put, the entire structure of asset bubbles--monetary manipulation / stimulus, expanding credit, the funneling of credit into expanding bubbles--is a hallucination that like AI hallucinations, is constantly reinforced by the financial system “training” its analysis on its previous hallucinations of artificial wealth.

Both of these bubble characteristics--the phantom wealth flows to the already wealthy, pushing wealth / income inequality to extremes, and the synthetic illusion that “money” can painlessly solve all structural problems--set up our illusion of choice:

1. If the bubble continues expanding, the extremes of wealth / income inequality will trigger revolution
2. If the bubble continues expanding, the extremes generate instabilities that inevitably implode the bubble.

To take but one example of many, due to the asymmetries built into bubble-dependent economies, the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending and collect 40% of all income. the top 0.1% who own a preponderance of income-producing assets collect the majority of unearned income / income from assets.

This dependence on soaring asset valuations to generate “the wealth effect” while pushing inequality to extremes is self-liquidating: it generates its own collapse.

Should the bubble pop due to its own extremes and instability, the resulting collapse in consumption and the reversal of ‘the wealth effect” will crush the economy as jobs will be shed in a self-reinforcing feedback loop: as consumption plummets, job losses mount, reducing household income which then further reduces consumption.

Since the state (dominated by those who own assets) has papered over these asymmetries by borrowing tens of trillions of dollars, the state’s ability to “print our way to prosperity” is limited.

Those claiming that the “solution” is to eliminate paying interest on state debt and just print as much money as we need to keep things glued together--Modern Monetary Theory--have fallen into the “money solves every problem” trap: the fundamental sources of the self-liquidating asymmetries are not resolved by distributing freshly printed money.

“Money” doesn’t solve structural, systemic asymmetries, it simply enables their further expansion. “Money” in whatever form we choose doesn’t reverse moral decay, either, as those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid will quickly gain control of the new “money” and use it to their own advantage.

If the bubble continues expanding, this will eventually trigger a social revolution that disrupts the hallucination of monetary stimulus / credit / asset bubbles, crashing the economy into Depression.

So take your pick, but the results will be the same: Depression or Revolution. the only “choice” is which comes first.

1 in 7 College Grads Earn Less Than the Poverty Threshold
Last Updated: April 4, 2022

Majority of College Grads Do Not Work in Their Field of Study

In addition to dealing with financial insecurity, only 46% of college grads surveyed say they currently work in their field of study. 29% report working in a different field, while 16% of those under age 54 (and therefore not likely retired) say they are currently unemployed.

48% of College Grads Live Paycheck to Paycheck

Although one of the assumed benefits of going to college is at least some degree of financial stability, 21% of respondents say they live paycheck to paycheck most of the time, while an additional 27% say they live paycheck to paycheck all of the time.

14% of College Grads Currently Make Below the Federal Poverty Threshold

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one person under the age of 65 with no children meets the poverty threshold when making less than $14,097 per year. Of the total 1,000 respondents we surveyed, approximately one in seven reports making under $15,000 per year in personal income.

The United States of Fraud
From shoplifting to gamifying returns, America's consumers are turning into cheaters.

By Emily Stewart
Dec 14, 2025, 3:27 AM CT

I always get a kick out of people's reactions when I bring up what I've come to think of as "mini crimes" against big businesses — small acts of deviance that average shoppers commit without really even thinking about it. At first, there's usually denial: "No, I would never engage in the slightest level of fraud." But pretty quickly, the confessions start to roll in. "OK, I sometimes ring up my organic apples as regular at the grocery store, and sure, I've returned an item after wearing it a time or two. Honestly, I'd forgotten sneaking snacks into the movie theater was a no-no."

Ask whether people feel guilty about it, and the answer is generally, not really. It's tough to lose sleep over a bit of rule-bending amid the state of corporate power and inequality in America.

Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy — AI — promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.

Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see — or at least excuse — these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn.

A 2024 PwC survey on trust in US business found that while 90% of business executives believe customers highly trust their companies, just 30% actually do.

This breakdown in the social contract leads many Americans to feel that everyone is trying to pull one over on them, so why not return the favor? When everything seems like a scam, it's easier to justify becoming a scammer.

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Dec 03, 2025 11:07 am ...failed name brand equipment that is less than 3 years old that a few decades ago would have been trouble free for 10 or 20 years...

Do you want to know
8:18
what today in 2025 the workforce
8:20
participation of people of Somali uh
8:23
diaspora in the United States is? It's
8:26
something like 35%
8:28
which means that somewhere in the
8:29
neighborhood of 60s something % of them
8:32
are unemployed. They're literally they
8:35
are being subsidized for no practical
8:38
reason, for no discernable reason by the
8:41
American taxpayer. And the worst part is
8:43
that a fairly decent chunk of that money
8:45
that they're receiving from the taxpayer
8:47
isn't even going to the beneficiary
8:50
himself. It's going back to the global
8:52
south. It'sing ridiculous. This was in
8:56
the '90s. Most of them had jobs. They
8:58
were making something like $10 an hour.
9:01
Most of them don't have jobs now. they
9:03
they just sort of subsist on on welfare
9:06
and this kind of thing. So the meat
9:07
packing industry is like they don't
9:09
really even do that anymore. Uh meat
9:12
packing centers certainly are not in
9:14
major major metros and most Somali have
9:16
moved out of these tiny little towns at
9:19
this point to the point where now
9:20
there's about 200,000 of them centered
9:23
in the Twin Cities metro. They're
9:25
they're they're urban people. They're
9:27
not really in these in these small towns
9:29
anymore.
9:30
Uh most of them are unemployed and yeah
9:33
they'reing bums primarily. They're
9:34
they're unemployed.

Stephen Miller Says Somali Fraud Scandal Could Create Unprecedented Milestone In US History

Harold Hutchison
Media Reporter

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller told Fox News host Laura Ingraham Friday that the welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota centered around Somali immigrants could make for the “greatest financial fraud” in the history of the United States.

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is surging into the Minneapolis area to target illegal immigrants from Somalia after revelations into at least $1 billion in fraud, prompting a probe by the Treasury Department into allegations that some of the stolen funds went to the radical Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Miller observed during an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” that almost all of the Somalis who immigrated to Minnesota were on welfare programs. (RELATED: Stephen Miller Says CNN Refusing To Book Him On Their Airwaves)

“The Somali community have been engaged in systematic defrauding of the government for years,” Miller told Ingraham. “We’re going to discover, ultimately, we are in the throes right now of a full-throated, all-hands-on-deck federal investigation, is that the scope, scale, size and sheer magnitude of the fraud eclipses anybody’s worst nightmare.”

“According to official government records, 90% of Somali households with children are on federal welfare. The real number is probably 100% because federal records always undercount,” Miller said. “You’re talking about a population that has been imported into Minnesota in which virtually every single member of the population is receiving welfare from the federal government. This could very well end up, Laura, being the greatest financial fraud scandal in American history.”

State employees accused Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota of engaging in “systemic” retaliation against whistleblowers who warned of the fraud schemes as the Justice Department prosecutes multiple federal cases. Walz admitted during a Nov. 30 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the state “attracts criminals,” but he also demanded that Somali residents not be demonized.

Walz also attacked Trump Friday for highlighting the fraud, claiming the president was “indiscriminately targeting immigrants.” Trump announced he would end “Temporary Protected Status” for Somalis in Minneapolis in response to the allegations and also said that the influx of refugees had “destroyed our country.”

The 10 biggest threats facing humanity, according to Bill Gates

The world’s unpreparedness for the next pandemic

Gates is giving us some scary odds for the next great biological catastrophe. He estimates the chance of a natural pandemic hitting is “somewhere between 10 and 15 percent” in the next four years.

Despite the horrors of COVID-19—which killed an estimated 7 million people, though WHO estimates put the actual toll at 20 million or more—Gates says, “We’re absolutely not ready.” The pandemic also wiped out over $10 trillion from the global economy, according to Health Policy Watch, underscoring the high stakes of unpreparedness.

Gates points out that political division, rather than a lack of tools, is the core problem preventing the consensus needed for better monitoring and rapid vaccine research. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoes this, calling the next health crisis an “epidemiological certainty” that requires urgent attention.

The terrifying reality of manufactured bio-terrorism

While pandemics are natural, Gates considers bioterrorism to be the “most frightening” acute, man-made threat facing us. He once chillingly warned that an engineered attack could kill 30 million people in a single year.

This risk is amplified because the technology needed to create biological weapons is becoming increasingly accessible and affordable, making detection incredibly difficult. The danger centers on “dual-use” technologies, where the same innovations used to cure diseases can also be repurposed for weapons.

The sheer scale of the potential loss is why Gates focuses on this. He stated during an interview with the Wall Street Journal on November 27, 2010, that bioterrorism and pandemics are the only threats he foresees that “can kill over a billion people.”

The dangerous AI investment bubble

Gates maintains an optimistic long-term view of AI, calling it the “biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime.” He even believes AI could streamline society enough to lead to a two-day workweek.

However, he cautions that the immediate market is experiencing a financial frenzy, comparing it to the risky dot-com bubble. He predicts “a ton of these investments that will be dead ends” because companies are rushing to commit to expensive data centers without clear returns.

The immediate threat is profound economic waste: an MIT study found that 95% of organizations are getting zero return on their Generative AI investments, despite pouring billions into the sector. This misallocated capital represents funds that could have been invested in immediate poverty or health initiatives.