Is everything falling apart? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#71

Post by hotpotamus » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

jaqalopes wrote: post #7

I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point…

Curious - you say you are a young single person - do you count yourself as on the train (or at least able to run fast enough to get on?).

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#72

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.'

That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering.

To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#73

Post by namelessoracle » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

The elephant in the room is that the Industrial world wanted alot of people, and the post Industrial world does not. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of having a livable environment for everyone.

So what happens to what are now "excess" people? The answer to that question is gonna define pretty much everything.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#74

Post by rank0 » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #56

zozbot234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an endless cycle. As the saying goes... Hard times make strong men Strong men make good times Good times make weak men And weak men make hard times.

this saying is often used to demean men that don't fit a very narrow definition of "strong"

It’s a comment about the cyclical nature of prosperity. It’s not an attack on the non masculine.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#75

Post by Izkata » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

DaltonCoffee wrote: post #52

goodpoint wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the saying is BS.

Care to elaborate?

It's the meme version of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

The "Defining a generation" section is fairly short and describes the theory, and the "Timing of generations and turnings" section maps the theory onto the past ~500 years.

(Edit: got the indentation wrong, I thought the comment I was replying to was on the quote, not the "it's BS" reply. I don't think this is BS, at least not completely.)

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#76

Post by goatlover » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

aldarion wrote: post #21

Nothing lasts forever, and we have been on the downturn of the civilization for the last hundred years or so. This is merely the time when we started running out of the reserves that our ancestors had secured us, and thus problems started becoming apparent.

Nothing lasts forever, but some things last a really long time. Like life on this planet (several billion years). Or possibly advanced alien civilizations out there. Question would be why can't humans find a way to last a really long time?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#77

Post by 4ggr0 » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #67

techdragon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you lived in the parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity… it’s important to remember peace and prosperity are regional phenomena that are not shared around the globe equally.

Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread. Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes. Most of the "developing world" developed. Marginalized groups gained new civil rights. China and India rose to become great powers even as their former colonial masters, though declining, still enjoyed peace and prosperity. Recognizing that there is s…

> Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made

And recognizing that we've made process shouldn't make us believe that we've done enough. Recognize what we've (or they've) achieved, be proud about it but never loose focus on making "it" even better.

(I'm just adding to your comment, not disagreeing)

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#78

Post by giraffe_lady » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #65

giraffe_lady wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every generation thinks the world is ending but eventually one will be correct.

Do you think there can't be any civilizations in the universe which exist indefinitely? For the past millions or even billions of years? If humans get past the next couple of centuries and start spreading out into the solar system and possibly beyond, what would cause us to have a last generation?

This gets straight into realms of like eschatology and the sources of and constraints on life, areas in which I hold deeply unpopular beliefs compared to the norm here.

The most neutral way I can phrase this is that I think life is a planetary expression, more or less fundamentally inseparable from the planet on which it emerges. We may eventually be able to break those bonds but I don't think we're anywhere near as close to that as we think we are, nor do I think we should even try.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#79

Post by hotpotamus » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

Shaddox wrote: post #46

I hope I am not being too inflammatory by saying this but it's ... quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country. Bosnia was about to be destroyed and more recently, attempted to be divided by neighbors and they're still fine. Look at anywhere that's not Americas or Western Europe.

America has a history of political tensions posing a danger to it. For a few years it maybe wasn't one country and quite a significant percentage of the population died sorting that out.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#80

Post by 4ggr0 » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

trey-jones wrote: post #37

I feel generally that everything is falling apart. I also have an article still pulled up from earlier this week titled Why Pessimism Sounds Smart . It seems pessimists are sometimes wrong! But sometimes they are right too - especially in the last couple of years I have observed incompetence seemingly everywhere I go. But is this the changing world, or my changing perspective? It's really difficult to pin down. At th…

I think the question shouldn't necessarily be who started the fire, but if it is a good idea to just let the fire burn, even though you weren't the one igniting it.