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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#311

Post by dfgdghdf »

XorNot wrote: post #261
BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.

So, how rich is your dad? Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die. The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy. One prob…

Perhaps there's another way to put this. In an ineffective public healthcare system, people are denied treatment because the public body has determined it is not worth the cost. In an ineffective private healthcare system, people are denied treatment because they cannot afford to pay.

> Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.

Is it? I am fortunate enough to not be in this position, but I'm not sure how much I would care about the reasons why if I were.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#312

Post by fakedang »

simonh wrote: post #270
vagrantJin wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money. EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So…

So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad. Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?

If you can forget the divide in the wealth gap in the US, sure the US has been very successful at recovering from '08.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#313

Post by natmaka »

SirHound wrote: post #168
jb_gericke wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…

And just imagine all the tribal wars. Talk about forgetting your history

I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.

Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.

If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#314

Post by A12-B »

joe_the_user wrote: post #38
helios_invictus wrote: post #31

Reading the 3 categories the judge put together, I'd have to say that the win does go to Sales. Economic Collapse: Kelly, the "economy" is doing just fine if you're in an upper percentile. For most people the economy is not working for them. Global Environmental Disaster: Sales, many signs point to more chaotic and worse environmental conditions to come. The War Between Rich and Poor: Much like question one this one…

The problem with the broad trend prediction format is you wind-up with binaries and predicting a 1 or a 0 is easy. Economy - "Good or bad" Environment - "Good or bad" Wealth distribution - "Good or bad". If you're betting, someone has to get 2 or more out of 3. But that could be anyone, including complete idiots. So this doesn't by itself tell you anything. Most of the "bad" would be vaguely "left" positions but they…

The environment getting worse is a matter of fact, not ideology. You can argue in bad faith about the meaning of the word 'worse' if you want, trying to claim it's too subjective, but I think we all have roughly the same idea of 'worse' and know that that's what the environment is getting.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#315

Post by nickthemagicman »

swarnie_ wrote: post #218
yesenadam wrote: post #216

> Has Tech Destroyed Society? I recently watched the documentary The Man Who Saved the World [0], about Stanislav Petrov, who one day in 1983 made the decision to ignore the early warning system computers telling him the USA had fired 5 missiles at the USSR.[1] It seems had he followed orders, a report to his superiors would have resulted in mass retaliation. The decision was in his hands. In the movie, as well as a…

> in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+. This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the damage each one of these devices can do why do you need so many. Lets presume you're in fact a genocidal maniac (i didn't say the roleplaying would be difficult America) 1 bomb per enemy military installation and 1 bomb per population centre over 100k population…

Russia invented the largest nuke ever and are still innovating in the space with the new Satan 2 missile that can pretty much wipe out the eastern seaboard. So America isn't the only homicidal maniac. Putin gives us a run for our money.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#316

Post by nickthemagicman »

kumarvvr wrote: post #73

It destroyed the average Joe's faith in the average Joe. Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.

I don't think nukes did that. The news media did that.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#317

Post by gregw2 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #97

Without ending up on an FBI watchlist, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Sales and "Uncle Ted" were on the right track about technology inevitably leading toward psychic isolation and environmental devastation, that corporations are finding ways to turn each human interaction into a commodity, that we're well beyond carrying capacity for the planet and have likely screwed up the ecology for the next mill…

For a fictional exploration of the "doomed to recreate it all" phenomena, there's a nice novel called "Canticle for Leibowitz" where post-nuclear-armageddon scientists are in part blamed for the nuclear war and knowledge is explicitly culturally rejected... but then slowly crawls back into the picture.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#318

Post by pdimitar »

The whole debate boils down to:

Shall we conflate "technological progress" with "predatory capitalism"?

If your answer is "yes" then Sale is right. If your answer is "no" then Kelly is right.

---

Technology by itself never "destroys" anything except certain ways of life, perhaps, and even then many people opt not to have their way of life destroyed or disrupted (assuming they have the choice, which not all do). Case in point: a chunk of the modern people no longer want to live in the cities and start living in more rural areas again (I don't keep around the link for the study though).

Many people described technology as a weapon: it can be used for a number of purposes.

Can it be argued that the more advanced technology has made it easier for the bad guys and thus their predatory capitalism is destroying society? Sure, I would agree with that. But it made it easier for the good guys, too. Arms races will always exist, it seems.

But I can't deny things started grim lately. Not sure what the answer is but it surely isn't destroying all tech.

We do however have to stand up to some corporations, that much seems clear.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#319

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

olau wrote: post #294
simonh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of u…

How do you know that was because of their job market? As far as I'm aware, that was because they printed tons of money. Money was printed in the EU too, but stopped much sooner - far too soon. As if people forgot about Keynes. And actually I think you have some of this backwards. If you have a good social security net, you don't have to protect workers as much. Likewise, health care is an investment in human capital.…

Well the British recovery was almost certainly slowed by the introduction of austerity following the return of the Conservatives to power.

The European (i.e Eurozone/EU) recovery was knocked back by the raising of interest rates by the ECB in 2011.

And finally, the US did recover better because they put a lot more proportionally into stimulus (even though it wasn't enough, as later events showed).

I'm not sure that you can suggest that the flexible labour market was a cause of that (and indeed, one would have expected the UK to recover quicker than the rest of Europe then, as they have more flexible labour laws).

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#320

Post by tomjen3 »

graeme wrote: post #306
serpix wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute madness, you and your enemy will be dead anyway from the fallout and nuclear winter.

Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks. Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946. People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irration…

> And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.

But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone would have cared about the cost?

Even if it is, say, twice the cost to shoot down a missile as to launch it the US can afford more than twice the cost the Russians and much more than North Korea.

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