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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#451

Post by tastyfreeze »

drugstorecowboy wrote: post #334
oicU00 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forec…

> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where i…

The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. Some level of self sufficiency is a requirement for stability and resiliency. Past generations learned this lesson with some portion of the population starving. There aren't any farms within 500 miles of where I live. If we can't get shipments from outside people are going to starve. This realization of supply chain fragility is what many people have come to after seeing some items absolutely unavailable at stores. Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#452

Post by ItsMonkk »

TimPC wrote: post #339
ItsMonkk wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make the assumption that PI is 3.14, that's going to work for a good while. But eventually you are going to need to build a circle that's bigger, and 3 significant digits will not cut it, and errors will start showing up. Our economies work in the exact same way. Capitalism started out improving on what came before it, but it has now grown to the level that errors are appearing more and more. We need to be mor…

I argued for a gradual implementation of Georgist Tax Policies elsewhere in the thread so we are in agreement. I think transitioning to a LVT is a very hard problem that requires a great deal of thought and care. I'm convinced such a transition needs to be gradual because instantaneous is far too destructive. I'm also leaning towards government needing to compensate at least some of those who lose significantly in th…

I'm a huge fan of instantaneous change, as it instantly sets the incentives, but am willing to have a large transition period.

If we were to do an instant change, the best way to do that is to give everyone a tax credit equal to the value of their existing land, with retirees and others who need public support having a few more options to convert those tax credits to cash.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#453

Post by temporallobe »

No, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to obtain our status as a nearly Type I civilization (we are currently 0.73 on the Kardashev scale).

But we do have a lot of what some describe as sludge. For example, in the USA, with the awful state of healthcare, where even with a good job and "good" benefits and being in the so-called 1%, it can be a struggle to obtain certain kinds of medication, and insurance companies will absolutely fuck with you to avoid paying, giving patients the runaround and making them waste hours and days in endless phone call black holes until you give up. Doctor's offices and hospitals will and do double- and even triple-bill you, then bully you into paying by sending you to collections. God forbid you should get a catastrophic illness. There are so many similar and related examples that we could have entire threads about. There was a book recently written about this but I cannot find it right now...will update when I do.

There certainly is the sense that we are losing a lot in terms of core values, especially as technology evolves (we seem to be resembling the movie Idiocracy more and more), but this has also been the case with other, now fallen civilizations. The ancient Greeks thought that books/the written word would bring about the destruction of their society because people would lose their ability to use their memories.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#454

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

svachalek wrote: post #419
basisword wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Is it urbanisation? I've noticed this trend in the suburbs in my country too and there seem to be a couple of reasons: 1. Driving tests have gotten progressively more difficult and more complex over the last 10-20 years. 2. The cost of learning to drive is insane and getting more expe…

Hmm, I don't know what country you are in, but this doesn't sound like the US at all. There's a recent spike in the cost of driving due to gas prices and car supply, but afaik driving tests here have always been fairly trivial and still are.

Not OP, but I can confirm old country made it super hard lately. On the other hand, IL DMV seems to give away DLs like they are candy.

Anecdata only; if anyone has data, I will happily retract this statement.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#455

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

boh wrote: post #243

Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality. Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War e…

I think there is a real danger in just arguing basically "things have always been a shit show, empires collapse, pandemics rage, etc. etc." for a couple reasons:

1. While true, lets not ignore the fact that things get really, really, really bad during those periods where empires do collapse, or environmental damage causes ecosystem collapse, etc. etc. I mean, yes, you could argue "Hey, the Black Death killed a 3rd of Europe" and be correct, but I'm not sure what comfort that's supposed to give. Even if you want to argue that the post-war era up until, say, the 80s was an extremely unique period of progress and broad-based social advancement, that still doesn't make me feel any better if we're now in a "reversion to the mean."

2. Advanced technology does make "things collapsing" potentially much more catastrophic than in generations past. I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war, but things like the speed with which modern social media (and regular media) can pit people against each other is very different than, say, the yellow journalism periods of decades past.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#456

Post by crocwrestler »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #344
b112 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the 60s was far, far, far more disillusioned than this.

Everything that happened to a Baby Boomer was the most extreme ever. All other generations before Baby Boomers and since the Baby Boomers have had an easier time than the Baby Boomers. Their experiences are the Alpha and the Omega of human experience. When they die, the universe probably will cease to exist.

Well, they did have domestic terrorist groups going around setting off bombs on the regular in the 60s and 70s. I was quite surprised to read about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revol...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#457

Post by tenebrisalietum »

tamaharbor wrote: post #17
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…

Or you can just wait for the next stop and get on there.

On a burning station? That's not safe. Is a train even going to stop at a burning station?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#458

Post by msla »

swid wrote: post #372
msla wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I mean, even in your own post, you spell strong man different from strongman. Here’s a definition of the word strong for you: “possessing skills and qualities that create a likelihood of success.” Obviously this meaning is divorced from the definition of strongman you provide, so why be obtuse about it?

"Strong man" and "strongman" are identified in the meme. I'm just making that explicit.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#459

Post by confidantlake »

_gabe_ wrote: post #354
giantg2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of that? I haven't seen a lot of debate about the data (facts), but usually it's about the information (how it was formed from the data). Of course there are a small group of leaders (and/or crackpots) on either side spreading blatantly false info, but I feel that's rather small and receives outsized coverage.

I think one of the most basic facts that we can't agree on is what constitutes a man or a woman. It's a very simple problem that a 5 year old can point out, yet we somehow lost sight of this very basic fact.

To me this is a category problem, which are very complex. Because man and women are concepts like a chair is a concept. Ask a hundred people to define a chair and you are going to get a hundred different answers.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#460

Post by giantg2 »

floren wrote: post #411
mbg721 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that the definition of "assault rifle" is mainly cosmetic; to what extent is that true?

Per Wikipedia, the US army defines an assault rifle as: "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges." Selective-fire means it's not just semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull), it can also be set to fully auto (shoots as long as you pull the trigger) or burst (shoots a few rounds when you hold the trigger, then stops). These are e…

'Per Wikipedia, the US army defines an assault rifle as: "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges."'

The etymology supports this as well, going back to the first ones during WW2.

One thing to note, is that the law can define terms however they want. So places are applying their own novel definitions, largely involving cosmetic features or make/model.

Of course one other thing to point out is that the assault rifle bans are mostly a red herring given the relatively low contribution to homicides.

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