theluckycountry wrote:So a small town basically, yet the detritus is moving in, from where? The piece doesn't say but I'd have to assume larger cities. This sounds like the "Golden Hoard", or the "Zombie Apocalypse" that many prepper/ survivalist types have been talking about for years. It's a disturbing trend for sure and things aren't even 'that bad' yet. Can you imagine a veritable flood of hungry and desperate city dwellers moving out into rural areas, this is the beginning of it.
A lot of these homeless are traveling in cars and I don't think they are the total deadbeats we imagine them as. I have watched videos about middle-class people who were made redundant from well paying jobs and after 40 years of faithful service and normal life suddenly find themselves on the street, literally. This is the breakdown of the social contract, this is Great Depression II underway as I have read. But unlike it's predecessor in the 1930's it's not being announced, it's a stealth depression. The markets are artificially buoyed yet the wealth is gone for many, the life savings too.
Second part of your reasoning is correct - most of them are not zombies erupting from failed cities but people from working class whose jobs were destroyed by bankruptcies of major local employers, outsourcing to China, India and Bangladesh etc.
You only wait what will happen once AI is firmly established on job market.
Upon arrival of Chat GPT-6 doctors, lawyers, engineers and all sort of paper shufflers will end up very much like Appalachian miners or car makers from Detroit did.
They will also end up thrown away from homes following loss of jobs to AI and few subsequent mortgage slips.
Their homes are going to be left empty to rot because no one will have money to buy them.
Sheriff will force them out at gunpoint to leave and they will sleep on a pavement while their home is declared to be bank property and left empty to rot. No one will buy it anyway.
Blue collars are already there, but don't be mistaken - white collars will follow.
These people have no extended unemployment payments to fall back on as in previous decades (before Clinton) and the government retirement social security pension is a joke and will be inflated away more and more as prices for food and accommodation escalate. The death of the cities is the death of the rural in many ways
Long term unemployment payments are demoralizing to everyone and are to be avoided at all cost, particularly in Western economies which are crumbling and cannot afford them anyway.
Real issue is that 90% of people are far too stupid to make intelligent financial decisions and education system together with consumer mass culture is nurturing this stupidity further and makes problems intractable.
There is a solution though - at least a partial one.
These were banks who have lent money to stupid people incapable of doing a simple math and basic reasoning.
So one can argue that loans were given without due risk assessment and banks are responsible for a mess because they were acting recklessly.
OTOH we all know that these banks are already bankrupt because any bank who got bailout in 2008-2010 in reality is a bankrupt bank who got money stolen by government from general population and now exist as a zombie entity.
So lets kill these zombies.
Liquidate bankrupt banks, remove their shares from stock market to prevent someone whose name is not to be spelled from buying all of them for $1 and later making claim on collateral, eg millions of indebted homes, companies, farms and estates.
Value of these shares is fake anyway and they should not exist in current circulation - their very existence is a product of government fraudulent bailout acts.
So lets cancel them. Cut of cancer out of economy.
At this point loads of debts will just disappear because a counter party will no longer exist.
That will give a second chance to troubled population and businesses to put things right.
Lets hope that they will make wise decisions this time... or else!