As an aside, the cover illustration would serve as perfect art for a proper Cannon Fodder remake.
The Poison We Pick
171–180 of 218 posts
Re: The Poison We Pick
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The global economy already produces enough for every man, woman and child. The surplus increases every year. Every year, fewer and fewer people need to work full-time in mind-numbingly boring jobs to produce what the population needs. So why do we keep up the fiction that everyone needs to waste their lives doing unnecessary work? It's time to imagine how we could achieve a post-work society where more people could r…
>The global economy already produces enough for every man, woman and child. But does it produce enough for every man, woman and child in a sustainable manner, and will it be able to keep up with the Malthusian population growth that would continue unabated if every person on earth was perpetually guaranteed to get "enough"? The answer to both of those is no. While there is certainly a lot of inefficient busy work amo…
Malthus was wrong: access to birth control correlates with wealth
Re: The Poison We Pick
#173I've been talking with my brother a lot about this recently, especially as a function of the overall decrease of 'meaning' in the world. I think it goes back even further, to the advent of postmodernism in the throes of World War I. They were the first lost generation, but I don't think they were the last. The death of modernism and the accompanying assault on the bastions of objective meaning (as discussed in the ar…
I'll be the one to bring up Jordan Peterson, I guess. To attempt to synthesize his views: 1. Even if you start from a position of complete nihilism, you can recognize that pain (both physical and psychological) is real and that you don't like it. 2. You can observe that people who perceive their life as meaningful are more likely to be capable of persevering in the face of extreme pain and suffering. So in a sense me…
Are you being downvoted only because you mentioned Peterson? What you are writing here, and attributing to Peterson, was first described in depth by Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning[0]. In that book he describes how prisoners in Nazi concentration camps who didn't find meaning to their suffering would quickly die by illness or suicide while those that ascribed meaning to their suffering (such as staying alive to take care of someone or to reunite with their wives in another camp) would survive. He synthesized these lessons into Logotherapy. I highly recommend that book.
[0] https://archive.org/details/MansSearchForMeaning-English
Re: The Poison We Pick
#174Sullivan starts out highlighting how America is exceptionally afflicted by opioid abuse, but goes on to unconvincingly weave a bunch of unexceptional factors into his explanation. Smartphones, TV, video games, online porn: they're in every developed country. They can't be the explanation for what's different about America. Decline of religiously-derived meaning? Most developed countries' populations place less import…
Sullivan is a conservative, gay, catholic, British expat; so his conclusions come through that lens
Re: The Poison We Pick
#175Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for economic output. I've heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can't be so hard to see that the productivi…
The third option is protests of various forms. The most polite one is throwing a brick trough the window of society by electing some loose-cannon politician. The brick went obviously unheeded, and I’m worried of what will follow. Capitalism has succeeded in its primary goal - amassing resources for capital-intensive projects. We’re done, we have so much capital companies sits on hundreds of billions of dollars. Somet…
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Re: The Poison We Pick
#176Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for economic output. I've heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can't be so hard to see that the productivi…
The third option is protests of various forms. The most polite one is throwing a brick trough the window of society by electing some loose-cannon politician. The brick went obviously unheeded, and I’m worried of what will follow. Capitalism has succeeded in its primary goal - amassing resources for capital-intensive projects. We’re done, we have so much capital companies sits on hundreds of billions of dollars. Somet…
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Re: The Poison We Pick
#177I read this article the other day, and it presents a convincing possible avenue for explaining the current uptick in opioid abuse.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/02/14/dear-cdc-what-will-you-...
Re: The Poison We Pick
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the pay is more equal in Europe. I have finished multiple studies and work as a software developer, but I only make about 15% more than a friend who did not finish an academic study and works in logistics. If you're a bartender, Europe is a better place to be ;)
As someone who has to figure out what rates to pay people doing the same jobs across Europe and the USA I can say you're probably right. Our European employees make considerably less base salaries in general except for the Swiss employees who make on average typical base salaries as our USA employees.
Swiss people are - almost without exception - filthy rich ;)
Re: The Poison We Pick
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps UBI can set people free to live as they see fit, cultivate themselves spiritually, artistically, and communally without needing to consume nearly as useless garbage.
Maybe! Or maybe it creates an enormous, permanent underclass living hand to mouth on what are effectively ration cards, lacking even the power to deny the machine their labor. Then, is that actually as bad as it sounds? A walk around LA's skid row is a strong case it's not. For me, it's eyebrow raising that a lot of the momentum behind UBI seems (anecdotally) to come from people who don't expect to have to rely on it…
There's no such thing as post-scarcity. Scarcity is imposed by physics, not a lack of technology.
What changes is our expectations, beyond basic survival. Most people living below the federal poverty line have one or more televisions with active cable, a smartphone, and air conditioning; nearly all of them, in the high 99.x percents, have refrigerators, which implies that nearly all of them are housed as well, and effectively none go without food and sufficient warmth to sleep by circumstance.
In the sense of survival, the United States is effectively post-scarcity. What you're talking about is more "post-ambition".
Scarce is the opposite of proximate, not the opposite of plentiful.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#180Really brilliant and well-written article. The analysis of the uniqueness of American society is really well-done as well. American hyper-individualism, work ethic, and atomic self-oriented lifestyle leads people to seek their own meanings, which leads to tremendous suffering when community network is destroyed and when there's no available work to do.