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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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What we really need is a worker sink.

What we have now suffices. More prolonged and more useless "education" and "training", more sinecures and bullshit jobs, more generous disability, more early retirement, in extremis even universal basic income. No need for upturning whole society.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

When this was the case, priests and monastics were tiny part of population, recruited from elite classes, not from losers and rejects.

Classic article

The Clerical Population of Medieval England

If the total population was about 2,200,000 in 1377, the combined numbers of the

religious (10,600) and seculars (24,900) should have been about 35,500 or 1.6 per

cent of the total population. Omitting the nuns, the total is about 33,500 men

or about three per cent of the male population.

...

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

This will provide jobs for few highly skilled and well paid professionals, equivalents of today deep sea divers and offshore oil platform workers.

You do not want on space station someone who was fired from minimum wage McDonald job because robot can flip burgers cheaper and better.