Something's wrong with the economy and it can't be fixed

 I'm not an economist, but this is something that's been bothering me.

If a company can build a business on issuing debt and buying bitcoin and create millions in wealth for its shareholders, what is the incentive for someone to deploy capital in building and running a factory?

Because of fed policy, pension funds have been driven into stocks.  Therefore, pension funds will become insolvent if the stock market stays flat or goes down over any extended period of time.  So if the stock market is guaranteed to go up, they why deploy capital building and running a factory or any other kind of business where you have to deal with the day to day stress of running the business including labor and legal issues?

Already most of the brightest students aren't seeking careers in medicine, engineering, research, or teaching.  They prefer to become quant traders or work for private equity firms.  This means we simply don't even have the talent to advance the technology as much as other countries do.  What is the incentive for someone to spend half a million on medical school when they can get a job as a realtor after high school and make as much as a primary care doctor?  Unless your earnings are indexed to asset prices (realtor, trader, etc.), your income is probably not keeping up with inflation and your standard of living is falling.  As an engineer or accountant, you struggle to get a raise.  If, on the other hand, your income is indexed to assets which have been inflating then you have made a killing.  So as a realtor, asset manager, private equity banker, etc. life has been great. 

Couple that with a broken medical system and the cost of labor for regular jobs is unaffordable for most businesses.  The medical system cannot be fixed without collapsing the whole economy and the stock market.

I can't think of a way out of this.  As a country, I often hear we will "inflate our way out of this".  But we can't do that because our unfunded liabilities (especially the cost of medical care) is going up much faster than the rate of inflation.

The broken web

 This post is a summary of broken systems and how it's darn near impossible to get them fixed.  It's important to keep these in mind as we try to automate more and more of our lives.  Because of issues like this, I dread the day of widespread AI adoption because it means WAY more inconvenience for customers and patients.

• 3/19/25 - It's 2025, and Gmail still puts a ton of legitimate email from technical mailing lists and from the customer service responses of various vendors in my spam box, while allowing spam and phishing messages in my inbox.  Unfortunately there is no way to disable the spam filter.  This has been going on for many years.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from customer support of a prominent organization (AAA) where the "from" address was my email address.  In other words the from and to addresses were the same and there was no way to respond to them to tell them the address was wrong.  My mail app even showed as if the message were from me!  When I used the form to get in touch with them, the rep at the other end had no idea what I was talking about.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from a merchant (a small olive oil vendor) with "do not reply" (and thus no way to respond to the message) notifying me that a certain product which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago had just shipped.  The product was already delivered several days ago, but there was no easy way to contact the merchant.  They do not even list an email address on their website.  I used the contact form, and interestingly when I got a response, it ended up in my spam folder on Gmail!
• 3/19/25 - I received a text notification from Doordash that my order was dropped off approximately 5 hours after it had been dropped off.
• 3/19/25 - My brokerage has been sending me 2 expiration notices for trades that didn't go through during the trading day.  This has been going on for many months and happened today as well.  The first one arrives at the close of trading at around 1 pm pacific time.  The second one arrives at the end of the business day at 5 pm pacific time.  When I contacted the brokerage about this, they suggested that I change the email address that I use for these notifications!
• 4/2/25 - I received an email from AT&T with a link to review my account.  I click the link and there's a flash of the screen but no web page opens, as if a web page opened and then closed immediately.
• 5/4/2025 - I noticed a product I bought from Nordstrom previously got merged with a cheaper product.  When I pointed this out to customer service, they insisted the pricing and description was correct.  Basically you had the cheaper product being sold at the price of the more expensive (the EVA product whose normal price is $54.95 was being sold at the price of a leather product at $200).  No amount of going back and forth with their customer service could fix this.
• 5/6/2025 - I searched for sandals on the Nordstrom site and filtered by Men & Sandals.  Yet I had a bunch of boots and boat shoes show up in the search results.  Next, I order something and ask for it to be shipped to store.  A day later I get a text message from DHL asking me to authorize delivery (to the store) without signature!  It is also impossible to send an email to Nordstrom customer service.

Numerology for names

Here are the numbers for each letter from Cheiro's Book of Numbers.  If the name adds to a single digit, those are covered in separate chapters starting at page 38.  If the name adds to double digits, those are covered starting on page 80.  Many folks that utilize numerology will change the spelling of their name to one that adds up to a more fortunate number.  You can use this page to run the computation for your name.

1 - A, I, J, Q, Y

2 - B, K, R

3 - C, G, L, S

4 - D, M, T

5 - E, H, N, X

6 - U, V, W

7 - O, Z

8 - F, P