521–530 of 970 posts
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He's been wrong 100x more than he's been correct. He spends the entire day spouting random garbage, and you can cherry-pick the 10 pieces of garbage that happened to be true.
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…
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…
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Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit."
> most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s.
Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil.
I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options.
> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it
This reeks of "Bowling Alone".
Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms.
> leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports.
Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-be...
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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…
>> 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…
If true, this is a massively good thing.
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I think of it as a forest. In constant growth and decay.
That is a good way to think about a lot of aspects of society. For the forest to remain healthy old trees need to die to make room for the new trees just waiting for enough sun to sprout from seed. After a tree falls, the patch of new trees compete to be the next old tree to fill the space. As the years go on hundreds of saplings become dozens and eventually one as the slow growers get shaded out.
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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…
A lot of those very much do not sound like "things are falling apart" to me
This is an interesting manifestation of the incompleteness theorem. :)
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I can’t understand what you’re trying to convey. The terms fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning nowadays…at least to the far left.
Good god, enough with this "fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning" nonsense. Let's call it the "No true fascist fallacy". I could bring the corpse of Himmler here and some people would regurgitate the same "Bu-bu-but that's not actually fascist enough!". OP was basically quoting the definition of Ur-fascism by Umberto Eco. Is that historically accurate enough for you? Or should we check beforehand if whoever…
> "Strong men" make fascism, not good times.
They’re not even referring to any person or distinct group of people. The statement is so overly broad that it could cover BILLIONS of people.
You’re making a mockery of the atrocities committed by actual nazis and fascists. You know what those guys did right?
You would never tell an Auschwitz survivor:
“yeah, the strong males are just like the nazis!”
Imagine how fucked up that would feel from their side.
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This is dangerous bs. Easy to swallow for the uneducated masses. Putting all moral consideration aside, imagine you could totally depopulate two continents of your choosing. Why should any problem of modern economics be solved by that? The concept of depopulation is simple enough to fit in a single sentence, it leaves out the real problem and its vast complexity (our linear economies and lifestyles attached to it), c…
> The real problem is our unsustainable system, which is independent from any population count I mean it's just science that the planet can only sustain X people at Y life style (you can swap out "life style" for "level of consumption"). Like there is hard rules of physics about quantity of water, minerals, et cetra. So you can either lower X, lower Y, or try to side step the problem entirely by going to other planet…
The sustainable level of consumption is dependent on population.
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…
If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing. Understandably with added pressure from Covid, but at a rate higher even with Covid higher than all other well resourced major nations. This not because we are unable, but because those with the power are unwilling to engage fundamental issues. Covid is not the only issue for which this is the case - it was happening before covid. Multiple…
If people want to choose to live shorter and less healthy lives, is there anything we can really do?
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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…
Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?