This year’s job market has been bleak, to say the least. Layoffs hit the highest level in 14 years; job openings are barely budging; and quits figures are plummeting. It’s no wonder people feel stuck and discouraged—especially as many candidates have been on the job hunt for a year.
But some mid-career professionals are working with the cards they’ve been dealt by going back to school. Many are turning to data analytics, cybersecurity, AI-focused courses, health care, MBA programs, or trade certifications for an “immediate impact on their careers,” Metaintro CEO Lacey Kaelani told Fortune.
But while grad school can certainly offer the opportunity to level-up your career once you’ve completed a program, it comes with financial and personal sacrifices, like time. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, one year of grad school, on average, costs about $43,000 in tuition. That’s nearly 70% of the average salary in the U.S.
This is the bigger picture:
… we are not all going to survive the great unraveling, even if we had benevolent geniuses in charge.
With corpos and fascists in charge?
Gonna be even worse.
Oh yes i know the W3 model and the Club Of Rome (i think they made that diagram?) in the context of the paper Limits to Growth.
The thing is, it’s outdated. That study was done when renewable energy was inconceivable. Things have changed since then. The study was literally done in i think 1970 (first version) and then updates every couple years (significant update was done in 2004).
In fact, until very recently, people couldn’t imagine that renewable energy would actually become a big thing. Solar energy somehow became the cheapest source of (technically useful) energy (!) in human history (says the IEA), and they’re gonna know it since they’re literally an oil and gas analysis organization so if even they admit it, it’s not “green propaganda” but solid facts.
This changes the picture dramatically, because under capitalism companies continue to seek the cheapest power possible, and that’s simply solar energy today. This leads to an exponential increase in solar power production ever since 2020.
And that changes the picture. The end of the fucking world is off, we’re all saved, we have enough energy to sustain our way of life and there’s no “heavy culling” when the fossil fuels run out.
The graph I showed was from a recalibration of the W3 model, done in 2023, primary difference being that instead of using a bunch of complex metrics to capture all kinds of pollution… they just went with CO2… but the whole thing has more or less been reworked as a python lib, which has been getting tweaked over the last ~15 years.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
You may notice that energy production itself is not a primary variable on display in the graph I originally posted.
I hear what you’re saying that renewable energy is … renewable… but, there are tons and tons of natural resources that are not renewable, that are still needed for all kinds of economic processes, which we’ve already extracted all the stuff that is easy to extract, thus costs rise if you want to keep extracting the stuff that’s harder to get to.
Its not just the energy sources. Its … everything non renewable, every input material resource. Probably the biggest one is industrialized agriculture.
Sure, we could go back to not using the soil as a sponge + nitrate fixing fertilizers, and go back to crop rotation that fixes those nutrients naturally.
… and then 4 billion people can’t afford food, and starve to death.
No amount of cheap solar energy solves the problem of agricultural input costs going up and up, and more and more arable land becoming nonarable due to climate change and increasing amounts of increasingly severe adverse weather events and climate driven disasters.
According to Jim Hansen and Paul Beckworth, we’re looking at +1.7C by 2027, +2.0C by 2030-32.
We’re now in the stage of the climate crisis where half the IPCC identified tipping points start tipping each other and compounding, within roughly the next 5 to 10 years.
We already blew past 1.5C, and the world is now more geopolitically unstable than it was 10 or 20 years ago, not less.