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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#151

Post by orangepurple »

greenonions wrote: post #98
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.

As an American, I tend to think we have a sort of permanent linguistic hyperinflation. Everything here is always bigger, huger. Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. Part of the strength of the nation, however, is that everything is a big deal, all the time. This causes things to (eventually) get dealt with.

In the USA things appear to be big or are getting bigger but really they are not.

Residential structures are made from ever lower quality materials that are thinner than ever and with shorter lifespan (accelerated aging, necessitating sooner replacement).

Foods are being stuffed with ever larger quantities of fillers such as corn, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and air to make the package look big even though there is nearly nothing nutritious inside.

It's a mirage.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#152

Post by fristechill »

rob74 wrote: post #18
xwowsersx wrote: post #10

> The framing begins with appreciating how closely intertwined the divisive and unifying effects of information technology can be. The author speaks as if "unifying", as opposed to dividing, is the redemptive quality of information technology. I don't see it as an unmitigated good and, somewhat ironically, the story of the tower of Babel is about how their single-purposedness (?) was the source of the problem altoget…

If you ask me, humanity could really use some unifying influence right about now, for example to help tackle the issue of climate change...

The issue of climate change, among other issues, is being used to promote unity and one world government. But it doesn't follow that this approach is best to climate change or anything else. We need variation in policies and technologies in order to select the best approach (and not get locked in to a sub-optimal approach).

One world government is bad because it will attract evil elements who use it to place all peoples under their control/taxation/exploitation, with no recourse or escape. All in the name of helping people and fighting for .

By analogy, it might seem more efficient if families were to live in communal dormitories instead of their separate houses. In reality it would create stultification and at worst mass suffering when individuals took control over all aspects of other families' lives.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#153

Post by jaqalopes »

thaway2839 wrote: post #93
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…

White collar careers outside of tech are not as stable as you're indicating.

That's definitely possible, I'm only going from people I know personally. Lots of insurance and finance and consulting types whose lives seem obscenely easy with their regular raises and functioning health insurance (grass is of course always greener). And as for tech, while the industry isn't going anywhere I think any single tech job is not necessarily super stable either. I guess by white collar jobs I was specifically thinking of jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#154

Post by javert »

ativzzz wrote: post #127
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.

Makes sense. Strength is useless during peace times, so strong men find themselves out of a job with nothing to channel their strength into. "Weakness" which in this case means classically feminine traits are useless during war times but are far preferred during peace times. We don't need strong men during good times and we don't need weak men during bad times. Although now we are in neither a good nor bad time. What…

The quote is about moral strength and virtue, not muscles.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#155

Post by aisengard »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #107

We were getting close to a fairly positive future. There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods: - capital - labour - energy There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other wor…

> So a crisis was invented.

Are you saying that the millions upon millions who died (not to mention the untold millions who are suffering long-term health problems), didn't actually die? Or that what they died from (a highly contagious and infectious novel virus) was engineered?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#156

Post by ansible »

jl6 wrote: post #129
leereeves wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters. Many of the world’s most conflict-stricken areas today are ex-colonies sti…

> While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters.

What is this "peace" you speak of? I think you want to take a closer look at the oppression that was endemic to colonization and occupation of foreign lands. One of the worse examples is Belgium's colonization of the Congo:

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/feb5/belgian-king...

If an African laborer didn't produce rubber (for example), it was common to chop off a hand (his own or a family member's) to encourage him to work harder.

Congo may be on the worse end of the spectrum of colonization, but it is hardly a singular example.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#157

Post by david927 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #149
david927 wrote: post #139

I think there are two intersecting issues. The first is the dwindling of easy resources. The second half of the 20th century was so easy it was wasteful, and we don't want to give that up -- that abundance of resources, readily available and on the cheap. But the bigger issue right now is the end of the US/NATO empire. It matches with the end of other empires like Rome: the spending, the inflation, the corruption and…

This is not what the article is about at all.

The article seems to be blaming the division of society on the Like button. I'm saying it was going to happen with or without that for the reasons I listed.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#158

Post by msla »

zozbot234 wrote: post #39
leereeves wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nations rise. ... Sometimes there's peace. In short: sometimes things aren't falling apart. For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.

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 is utter nonsense. Strong men make bad times, as anyone who's lived under a strongman can tell you, and strongman regimes are extremely weak in terms of human development, technological progress, and military power, as evidenced by the utter failures of North Korea and Nazi Germany and the USSR. Whining about how they did some notable things is missing the point: They couldn't sustain, they had no staying power, they achieved some victories and then either got pounded into nothing or stagnated while the rest of the world moved on.

You can see in modern Russia what decades of strongman rule, first in the USSR and then under Putin, looks like: Idiot conscripts hyped up on moronic propaganda getting blasted by an actual military fielded by a so-called "decadent" Western nation, with their ships being sunk by land-based weapons (and if you don't get why that's pathetic, you're not worth talking to) and their economy being destroyed by those "decadent" nations deciding to not buy from them anymore.

Strongmen create good times? Briefly, maybe, but get out before the piper demands to be paid, if anyone will have you.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#159

Post by NoGravitas »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95
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…

The US is a culture of authoritarian narcissism, and while it feels good - to some people - it's simply not sustainable. In the US it's more important to be rich than to be moral or right. But you can't deny mutuality, interdependence, and rational modelling of collective consequences without getting into some very broken places and bad outcomes.

I like the cut of your jib. Do you have a newsletter?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#160

Post by Geonode »

NationalPark wrote: post #140
ravenstine wrote: post #111

Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…

We have some relatively recent public polling data on this phenomenon: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/20/republicans... For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well.

Polls are good measures of the kind of people who willingly talk to pollsters.
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