The number of overdoses in 2014? 47,055 of which at least 29,467 are attributable to opiates. ... Suicide is up as well. ... Both suicide and addiction speak to a larger question of despair.

This is a despair that sticks when there's no-one around who cares about you. ... Another joke: any obituary under fifty years and under fifty words is drug overdose or suicide. Are you laughing yet?

And yet this isn't seen as a crisis, except by statisticians and public health workers. Unlike the AIDS crisis, there's no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There's no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There's no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is "dirtybutts." Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.

Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!

... If I still don't have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump...

Guy Standing believed that the Precariat heralded a new age of xenophobic nationalism and reaction, but at the same time hoped that something like Occupy ... would lead to social and economic changes needed to ameliorate their plight.

... I am of two minds. On the one hand, Trumpism is unspeakable. On the other hand the status quo is silence and death. ... For the unnecessariat, what is to be done?

AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian - Guardian

Harari calls it "the rise of the useless class" and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition.

... Harari, it turns out, has a specific definition of useless. "I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint," he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.