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Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#591

Post by kansface »

ok_dad wrote: post #121
keiferski wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A society is made up of people. The way people act, dress, talk, or do anything else has a pretty direct impact on other people in that society. Unless your definition of society is an extremely disconnected one, comprised of alienated individuals that have no interaction with each other, yes, it does affect other people.

It only affects people who care about what other people wear, and those people shouldn’t have any sort of societal influence because that’s stupid. Name literally one reason that wearing pajamas in public will cause another person actual harm and I’ll take back this statement.

Are oversized billboards harmful? Do advertisements on every surface of public space cause physical harm? Is a yard full of non-toxic junk poisonous to its neighbors? Do parking lots lining every Main Street cause anyone direct physical harm? Is the person cutting the queue an assault? Does litter harm your being? Do gas powered leaf blowers? We’ll, probably, but that’s not why we hate them!

All these acts belie any notion that maintaining our shared spaces is a personal responsibility and that those spaces could hame some function beyond selling or maximizing immediate personal utility - whether that be inspiring wonder, awe, tranquility, community or contemplation. Consider the public spaces we actually choose to visit, or why we built them in the first place.

I don’t wish to enforce a dress code on anyone. All the same, wearing pajamas in public doesn’t read as a defiant act of personal expression to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#592

Post by bitcurious »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #329
Tool_of_Society wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because income inequality is at an all time high in the USA. When 1% of the population has +60% of all wealth.... What's gumming up the works are the billionaires who have more money than whole countries using that power to get favorable laws and treatment. Once you reach a certain level of money you can just print more basically by manipulating the systems in place.

There's not a fixed amount of goods in the world. Middle class people today are far wealthier than they were 100 years ago.

There’s a fixed amount of real estate however. Rent and housing prices have doubled over the past few years in my market of interest. the wealthy have been buying up second and third homes, landlords have been outsourcing collusion to black box ML models, mega-investors have been gobbling up land, housing starts have been trending down while the population has been growing.

I can't sleep on in a macbook.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#593

Post by klarstrup »

phonescreen_man wrote: post #169
lamp987 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supposed late stage of capitalism is something used to call contemporary state of affairs for some 100 years now. Two more weeks until RoP goes to 0! Trust the plan!

What’s r0p?

Rate of Profit (which has a tendency to fall)

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#594

Post by LAC-Tech »

Gigachad wrote: post #576
LAC-Tech wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No it's completely right, it's called "outsider perspective". It's hard for OP to realize they are not making an accurate observation. If you want to really work out if things are in decline, instead of finding some vague feeling of what it used to be like vs now, actually measure something? Loud motorbikes weren't invented last year, and crime isn't higher today than it was 20 years ago.

I think it's harder for other people to accept that certain things can and will decline, or that history has ebbs and flows for any dimension you care to measure, and is not just linearly getting better.

"You're just imagining it bro" is a rationalisation that lets people cling on to the Eternal Progress narrative.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#595

Post by cazum »

>General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go people seem aggravated I would dare to check my order and point out they didn't put in the ketchup i asked for, or the napkins, or whatever. Or when I dine in the tables are dirty. Or the gym is filthy, the cleaner just drags the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing. But in many instances they keep asking for more tips.

I don't think I'm off base in asserting that _this_ attitude is a major contributing factor to why the world feels "in decline" to you.

Perhaps if you went through life with a little more empathy for people who are almost certainly living in or around poverty, you'd feel a little more of a sense of community and less hostility toward strangers.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#596

Post by LAC-Tech »

Zircom wrote: post #67
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #25

> People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained. > Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly danger…

>being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public I'm with you about all the other things but people wearing whatever clothes they want to affects you in literally no way shape or form.

Seeing ugliness everywhere you look absolutely effects you. If you can reason about noise pollution, then surely visual pollution is not too great a jump.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#597

Post by underdeserver »

hezralig wrote: post #511
vladimirralev wrote: post #95

The economy is just increasingly fake or rewarding foolish scummy behaviour instead of honest cooperative work. People coasted for 10+ years now on "passive income" from printed money along with almost no enforcement action against scams. That gave rise to a chain reaction of people trying to scam each other in a general revenge. Take for example a big slice of the economy - real estate. Honest real estate agents who…

I commented elsewhere but I studied Econ in college because it was a particular interest of mine. I hated it. I also wanted to understand it, so that I could know why it rubbed me the wrong way and live intentionally to push against it. There was this moment when I was in a grad course and the professor was talking about self-optimizing markets. That's when it hit me. I literally stood up in the class, interrupted ev…

That's the cold, hard truth of capitalism: It converges on the rich-get-richer, economies-of-scale winner-takes-all endgames.

Used to be you needed lots of skilled workers to get anything done. You had to pay them. Now with automation and tech and specialization due to global free trade, you only need skilled workers in a handful of professions, the value of doing anything else steadily decreases.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#598

Post by throwaway2048 »

matt_o wrote: post #158
qbasic_forever wrote: post #17

Read Karl Marx, what we're seeing is basically what he described as the end state of capitalism. Everything gets shittier and shittier as costs go up and profits shrink. People and businesses are getting more desperate to prop up profit or make a buck. Everything suffers--worse products as costs are cut, worse service as wages stagnate to cut costs, people are more angry and stressed as their standard of living decli…

That's somewhat of a misrepresentation of what Marx wrote. When Marx lived in 19th century England, he saw first hand the effects of laissez faire capitalism: workers working themselves to death, workers dying by the score in industrial accidents, children working and dying in mines, etc. He predicted with certainty that this trend would continue and lead to a revolution of the many (workers) against the few (capital…

At a certain point this kind of stuff becomes unfalsifiable, but the steady erosion of hard won worker rights and laws, as well as wages still fits in pretty nicely with his theories about end stage capitalism.

He certainly did not foresee the rise of the welfare state, but that doesn't mean the end of capitalism is going to be much different, its pretty easy to see how things are following the same trajectory in the end.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#599

Post by [deleted] »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #327
Zircom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public I'm with you about all the other things but people wearing whatever clothes they want to affects you in literally no way shape or form.

> whatever X they want to affects you in literally no way shape or form. Replaced "clothes" with "X" to point out a pattern. This has been said a lot, and I'm not sure it's true. It's true on a case by case basis that individual freedom does not affect us perceptibly. But I'm pretty sure it's not true in aggregate. Maybe the PJs don't matter, maybe yelling in the stairwell at an apartment once a year does'nt matter.…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#600

Post by LAC-Tech »

simonh wrote: post #403
keiferski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that don’t cause “actual harm” (which is itself a very narrow and short-sighted metric to exclusively focus on) but are probably important to worry about. Clearly people care about “cultural things” even if you personally don’t care.

That’s the thing, I do care. I care that people should have freedom of self expression. My daughters are 18 and 19. Some day soon I’ll be the parent their boyfriends will come home to meet. I hope they feel they have the freedom to wear what they’re comfortable in and that represents their genuine identity. So yes of course context matters, we are social beings, but expectations of what is acceptable changes. I’ve se…

Some day soon I’ll be the parent their boyfriends will come home to meet. I hope they feel they have the freedom to wear what they’re comfortable in and that represents their genuine identity.

Really? My hope is that I don't raise my daughter so poorly she ends up with a slob who wears pyjama in public.

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