Social Mobility measures both people going up and down in social class, and its relative rather than absolute - it’s a measure of movement between social classes in society, not about children being wealthier than their parents.

Your entire line of argumentation to deny it (one wonders what’s your motivation to do so) is completely wrong because you don’t even know what it actually means.

Rather than a wall of text of denialism, how about you provide an alternative explanation for the status of modern America compared to the days when a single white collar worker could earn enough to feed a family of 5 and have a car and a nice house.

Or is it your whole point that America is just fine and has never been better?!

What I’m talking about here is the massive social, political and economic trends of the life-cycle of an Empire.

So keep on Zooming Back your perspective.

Here is an historic graphic of Social Mobility in the US.

Here is the Gini Coeficient that measures inequality (the higher the more unequal), which actually understates the reality because it’s not that great at reflecting internal inequality in the top quintile (i.e. things like how the top 1% are now way much richer than the top 10% than before).

So all the way back in the 1970s, America started changing from the “Land Of Opportunity” were “everybody has a chance” as shown by it’s massive social mobility back then to the equivalent of a feudal system - a zero-merit environment where the rich are rich because their parents were rich and those born into poverty are unable to rise up from poverty - AND on top of that the richer were getting richer and the rest were getting poorer.

For most of the population that meant more povert and less opportunity hence less hope. From that you get more discontent.

So, how do the elites pillaging a society deal with such increase in discontent due to the activities of said elites?

Deceive the masses (for example: more and more lying in Politics, Press capture and subversion into a Propaganda machine and in present day psychological manipulation via Social Media), increase oppression (for example: ever more murderous policing, criminalization of “no victim” activities and harsher punishements) and in the case of a Democracy subvert the systems by which the citizens chose who will manage the nation (for example: political corruption, Gerrymandering, taking the vote away from felons - which typically hail from the poor - and, specifically in the barelly-Democratic US system, internal capture of the two parties in the duopoly of power that rules the country as illustrated by how the DNC gave the nomination to Hillary Clinton some years ago).

So the entire system was pillaged by local elites and then when the discontent caused by that pillaging grew, it was corrupted by those very same elites to redirect or suppress the consequences for those elites.

Foreign interference in present day America, is like maggots in a zombie - they’re not what made it a zombie and there would be no maggots in it if had not already been turned into a zombie.

Go check who owns most of the Press in America - it ain’t foreigners.

Go check who owns most of the Social Media in America - it ain’t foreigners.

The rot not only predates Social Media, but the very Social Media that accelerated it is American-owned.

I’m sorry but you’re just being a useful idiot when you parrot the very deflection propaganda of the local power elites that I mentioned in my last post.

After the 1974 revolution that overthrew Fascism Portugal had a couple of decades of being quite Leftwing during which it massivelly invested in Education, including tertiary education, so the generations now in their 50s and younger almost universally learned English language at a school and include a large proportion of people with higher degrees.

There was also a period in the 80s/90s with some investment in adult education and that coincided with the fast growth of personal computing around here.

Then add to that that fixed Internet is quite cheap (a TV + unlimited 200Mb fibre + fixed phone line monthly packets costs around €45 and recently some even cheaper and faster providers have entered the local market, so for example I pay €15/month for 1 Gbps fibre) and almost universally fibre, possibly because unlike in countries like the UK the incumbent telecom operator in Portugal for whatever reason didn’t really manage to or tried to block the replacement of older internet access technologies with Fiber (I was living abroad at the time, so I don’t know for sure, but the period with maybe the only half-way decent non-crooked government - led by the guy who now heads the UN - kinda overlaps with the time with fixed Internet started spreading, so maybe they actually did some proper, Northern-Europe quality legislation around data access infrastructure which yielded a far more competitive market than you see in places like the UK).

I suspect some or all of these things explain why in this specific domain Portugal looks a lot more like smaller Northern European countries than it’s tradition of being a Chunk Of South-America in Europe would lead one to expect.

That a sleazy criminal crook like Trump got elected and that he gets away with doing what he does is 100% the fault of the American system, the American elites and the American people.

No amount of foreign interference would be able to even wobble this building if it wasn’t already rotten from the inside down to its foundations.

Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and if it wasn’t him, it would sooner or later be somebody else like him.

So please stop parroting the Neoliberal version of the “blame the foreigners” self-excusing nationalist propaganda that deflects from the 100% local people who are most to blame for what’s happenning, the deserved punishment for their actions at the hands of the common citizens - this shit would never have happenned without decades of pillaging by insiders, subversion of the guardians of Democracy like Courts and the Press, widespread ridiculous amounts of Nationalism switching of people’s critical thinking about their country and the purposeful stupidification of the populace.

Next to the sleazy greedy assholes and a culture normalizing and even applauding sleaze and greed in America, the impact of even the most influencial of foreign states - Israel - is tiny.

From the very start the entire purpose of the gig economy was to evade employment legislation and thus treat workers the same as they were treated in the 19th century before they fought for and got legally enshrined worker rights in the 20th century.

If Trump’s America invades Heard Island (the penguin island he imposed tariffs on) it might even get a win.

Then again, it would probably piss of Australia.

Trump seems to be speed-running the “overextend yourself militarily” part of the late stage in the collapse of empires.

Consume American media and media hosted by American companies, get fed pure propaganda.

The old Soviet joke of “There is no pravda (truth) in Pravda, there’s no isvestia (news) in the Isvestia” also applies to the American (and British, Australian and possibly Canadian) Press and other modern means of “opinion forming”.

Most countries in Europe aren’t quite as bad, but even here at least some of the Press is very biased and even Propagandistic (Germany what from what I’ve heard is especially bad, Britain I know from personal experience is horrible in that sense, possibly worse than the US)

Enshittification is the product of high-barriers to entry in markets, especially monopolies.

As it so happens, the entirety of Intellectual Property legislation purposefully and artificially creates monopolies where they would naturally never exist and give said monopolies to specific people, supposedly the creators of intellectual works and inventions, but in practice it’s to companies.

So, unsurprisingly, it’s in the domains were Intellectual Property dominates - were monopolies are not just common but actually the norm - that the most enshittification happens.

So yeah, Patents, anything to do with Music or Video distribution, Software and because of things like anti-circunvention legislation (which is supposed to block unautorized copy of copyrighted materials) in general any form of digital content since for-profit companies invariably place digital content under some form of access control exactly because they can use anti-circumvention legislation to block their customers from moving to better products and services without incurring significant inconvenience.

IMHO, tearing down Intellectual Property legislation (or at least have it include forced interoperability as well as make consumer data be owned by the actual consumers with company-bankrupting fines for abuse) would reverse most enshittification, at least in the digital world (were anti-circumvention legislation is especially bad in terms of destroying even the smallest element of a Free Market).

Remember the Greenland thing?

Europe remembers!

Iran has already offered all countries the out of kicking out the US and Israel embassadors so that their ships are allowed to pass the Straight.

Further, my impression is that at least in Europe and especially after the Greenland affair, most of the public opinion thinks Trump is an untrustworthy liar AND because they attacked Iran unprovoked, America and Israel are the ones to blame for the increase in fuel and gas prices they’re already feeling.

(There’s enough independent press in most of Europe that the “blame Iran” messaging is far from dominant)

The idea of sending European ships into Trump’s war is incredibly unpopular and whilst I don’t think we’re quite yet at the stage were kicking out the American embassador would be popular, the more fuel and gas prices go up the more acceptable it looks.

Then the whole Epstein files thing throws suspicion in people’s minds on any European politician that’s a little too eager to do what America or Israel wants.

At the very least the offer from Iran introduces doubt and confusion making it far harder for blackmailed European politicians to find a way to justify the incredibly unpopular idea of putting European ships and military at risk because of a war of pure aggression started by America and Israel.

Alternatively, the UK can kick out the US and Israeli ambassadors and its oil will be allowed to pass the Strait.

The end of the AI and Realestate bubbles and, even better, the Reserve status of the USD, would be wonderful things.

Sure, it would be painful, but it’s like pulling a rotten tooth, a short sharp pain now to save us from continued paid that will turn into something much worse in the future.

The list of babies 1 year or younger killed by Israel in Gaza just in the first 3 months of the Genocide (so, before Israel destroyed the hospitals so that the Authorities in Gaza couldn’t officially count the deaths) is 17 pages long.

Good luck finding cocoa powder or baking chocolate which is pure rather than mainly sugar.

The current insane prices for most of the hardware that would need to be bought to rebuild them just makes this even more effective.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

If nothing happens that society and its practices will never change and the pain will continue.

If the whole castle of cards collapses due to this, whilst it’s a small consolation for the current slaves given the pain they’ll endure, it’s way more pain spared for would be future slaves.

Further, the scumbags will definitelly lose if the whole slave-using realestate-bubble empire whose value supports their wealth collapses back to nomads camel fucking in the desert.

If you’re hosting some other country’s military bases you’re either its Ally or its Vassal.

I can understand why they do it, but none the less there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Shouldn’t have been an ally of the US and Israel.