[hn_throwaway_99]

As someone who remembers the 80s quite well, I think it's a giant mistake to just say this is some kind of cyclical, "Oh, it's like the 80s again" moment.

While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.

Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.